“She came again in the wood to-day.” Or he’d say—“Look ye! There she
is, drawing in to the caus’y. There! Now she’s coming up the caus’y,
dripping wet. There! Now she’s gone.”
Once he said she beckoned from the boat. But it was always out of doors
he saw her, so the house was a kind of refuge, and when he suffered that
strange fear, in he’d come, and be more himself. I was glad he never saw
anything in the house. I was glad, too, that he never heard anything. It
was like as if, being smitten to the heart with the sight of her in the
water, he’d lost the power to choose what he _saw_, but could still
choose what he heard. And then, at the beginning of August-month, when
the corn was just on ripe, he came in and said she’d been singing _Green
Gravel_ across the water.
“The sound comes in here,” he said, anxious. So I shut the window.
“Best put some wool in your ears,” I said. For indeed it was pitiful to
see a man like Gideon trembling at a gleam of white in the hedge or an
echo across the water. So he put wool in his ears and we got on pretty
well through the first part of August. Then, it was the evening afore
the fair at Sarn Mere, and many of the booths were already set up. We
sat down early to our supper because there had come a letter from Miss
Dorabella, brought by one of their men, with news in it about Beguildy.
So I opened the letter and read it to Gideon, and he took the wool out
of his ears to hear; and what it said was that they’d let Beguildy off
light, because he’d had great provocation on account of his daughter.
“Domm!” says Gideon. The blazing hate in him burnt up afresh at hearing
of the light sentence, and I almost thought it might cure him of seeing
things. But in a little while he fell into his melancholy again, and
said he’d seen Mother in the oakwood, where the pigs were.
“Now, dear to goodness,” I said, “it was nobody in the world but
Miller’s Polly. She’s getting a big girl for her age, and Mother was but
little.”
“No,” he said. “It was Mother. They bother me, Prue.”
“There, there!” I said, patting him on shoulder like a child. For indeed
when he spoke of his haunting, he seemed as weak and full of fear as a
child in the dark.
“Now see, it’ll all come right,” I said. “You must be well plucked and
not mind. You was used to be so fond of _Conquer_. Well, now you must
play _Conquer_ with your own thoughts.”