The Green Bough Part 21

"Thank you, ma'am," said he, when he had always called her "Miss"

before. This was the hedge, the boundary of that tilled and cultivated field his mind had placed her in. Beyond that limit, as Mrs. Peverell had said, he would not understand. With a childish simplicity he had accepted all that his wife had told him. She had appeased his need for understanding. Perfectly satisfied, he asked for no more.

"Are you going to give me work to do?" she asked as they walked back together to the house. "Real work, I mean. I can work and I'm so interested."

"Work won't be easy for the likes of you," said he.

"No, but there are things I could do. Things that aren't quite so laborious as others. I could milk the cows, couldn't I? If once I got the trick of it, it would be easy enough, wouldn't it?"

"Women beant bad milkers," he agreed with encouragement. "There's no harm in 'ee tryin'."

"When could I begin?"

"'Ee could try a hand this evenin' when our lad brings the cows in.

They be fair easy--them's we've got now. Easy quarters they all of them have and they stand quiet enough wi' a bit of coaxin'. I dessay 'ee could coax 'em well enough. 'Ee've a softy voice to listen to when 'ee's wantin' a thing and means to get it."

She laughed.

"I didn't know I had," she said.

"No? Women doant know nawthin', seems to me. 'Mazin' 'tis to me how well they manages along."

She went into the cow sheds that evening and had her first lesson. It was tiring and trying and unsuccessful and her back ached. But in the last few minutes, just when she was giving up all hope of ever being able to do it and the strain of trying had relaxed in her fingers, a stream of milk shot forth from the quarter she held in response to the simplest pressure of her hand.

"That's it! That's it!" exclaimed the boy.

"Doant 'ee get into the way of strippin' 'em with 'ee's fingers, not till they've got to be stripped and 'twon't come t'other way."

She rose the next morning early when through her window she heard the cows coming into the yard and slipping on her clothes without thought of how she looked, she went down to the shed and tried again.

In three days' time she had mastered it and gave an exhibition of her skill to Mr. Peverell who stood by with smiles suffusing his face.

"That'll do," said he. "The lad couldn't do no better'n that."

"Well, can't I look after the cows altogether?" she begged. "Drive them in and out and feed and milk them? Then you can have the boy for other work."

"It's a samesome job," he warned her. "There's clockwork inside them cows' udders and 'tain't always convenient to a lady like yourself to go by it."

"Can't you believe me," she exclaimed, "when I tell you I don't consider myself a lady, any more than Mrs. Peverell wastes her time in doing?

I'm just a woman like she is and I want to work, not spasmodically, not just here and there, but all the time. Do you remember what you said about helping?"

"I've no recollection," he replied.

"Well, you said it wasn't help was wanted in a hay-field, 'twas work. I want to make something of myself while I'm here. I don't just want to think I'm making something. Can't you trust me to do it?"

Mr. Peverell looked with a smile at his wife who had come out to witness the exhibition.

"What do you think, mother?" said he.

"I think women knows a lot more'n what you understand, Mr. Peverell.

You can understand all what you can handle and if you could handle her mind, you'd know well enough she could do it."

"So be," said he obediently and he turned to the boy. "You can take cartin' that gra.s.s out 'long them hedges this afternoon," he said.

"There woant be no cows for 'ee to spend 'ee time milkin'. We've got a milkmaid come to Yarningdale. They'll think I be doin' mighty well with my crops come I tell 'em next market I've got a milkmaid well as a boy."

III

The life of Mary Throgmorton during those months while she worked at Yarningdale Farm was a succession of days so full of peace, so instinct with the real beauties which enter the blood, suffuse the heart, and beat through all the veins, that her soul, as she had meant it should be, was attuned by them to minister to its purpose.

At six every morning she descended from her little room beneath the thatched eaves. At that hour the air was still. The chill of the dew that had fallen was yet in it. The gra.s.s as she walked through the meadows was always wet underfoot. Mist of heat on the fine days was lingering over the fields. Out of it the cows lifted their heads in a welcome following their curiosity as she came to drive them back into the farm.

When once they had come to know her voice, when once they had come to recognize that straight figure in the cotton frocks she wore, no further need there was for her but to reach the gate and open it, calling a name she knew one by. They ceased their grazing at once and turned towards her. One by one they trooped through into the lane that led to the farm. One after another, she had a name to murmur as they went by.

No moment in all that labor there was but had its freedom for contemplation. As she walked through the meadows to gather them; as she followed them down the lanes; as against the flanks of them she leant her cheek, cool with that morning air, stealing their warmth, there ever was opportunity for her thoughts.

It soon became automatic that process of milking. Only at the last moment when the hot stream of milk began to be flagging in its flow, did she have to detach her thoughts from the purpose that governed her, and concentrate her mind upon the necessary measure of stripping them to the last drop.

But for these moments, her thoughts were never absent from that sacred freight she carried to its journey's end. The very occupation she had chosen all contributed to such meditation as her mind had need of. The milk she wet her fingers with as she settled down upon the stool before each patient beast, hot with the temperature of its blood, was stream of the very fountain of life her thoughts were built on. The rhythmic, sibilant note as it hissed into the pail between her knees, became motif for the melody of her contemplation.

She whispered to them sometimes as she milked. Whisperings they were that defy the capture of expression. No words could voice them as she voiced them with the murmur on her lips. Sometimes it was she whispered to the quiet beast against whose velvet flank her cheek was warming.

Sometimes she whispered to her child as though his cheek were there fast pressed against her and his lips were drawing the stream of life out of her breast.

It cannot be wondered that she thought often of these things while she was milkmaid at Yarningdale Farm. In any environment the mind of a woman at such a time must seek them out, stealing pictures of the future to feed her imagination upon. But there, in those surroundings, Mary Throgmorton was close upon her very purpose as the days turned from morn to evening and the weeks slipped by towards the hour for which she waited.

But deeper than all such thoughts as these, there had entered her soul the wider and fuller conceptions of life. Subconsciously she realized the cycle it was, the endless revolving of the circle of design that had no beginning and no end but was forever emerging from and entering into itself in its eternal revolutions, always creating some surplus of the divine essence of energy, always discharging it in thought, in word and deed; flung from it, as drops of water are flung from the speed of the mill wheel while it turns to the ceaseless flowing of the stream.

What else could she see with a heart for seeing, what else, so close to Nature as she was, could she see but this? Every day, every night, the cattle ate their fill of the gra.s.s that had grown in their pastures.

Every morning, every evening, they gave their yield of all they had consumed. It was no definite and conscious observation that brought to her eyes those vivid and luxuriant patches of green in the fields where the cows had manured the gra.s.s; it was no determined deduction that conveyed to her the realization how a field must be grazed, must be eaten away and consumed to increase it in the virtue of its bearing. It was no mechanical process of mind which led her to the understanding of how when the field was cut for hay and stacked within the yard to feed the cattle through the winter months, still it returned in its inevitable cycle to the fields to feed the flow of life.

Through the winter months the cows were stalled and kept in their pound.

In that pound they trod to manure the straw the fields had grown and back again it would come in the early spring to lie once more upon the fields that had given it; so ever and ever in its ceaseless procession, some surplus of the energy that was created would be set free. A calf would go out of the farm and be sold at the nearest market. For three days its mother would cry through the fields, hurt with her loss, grudging her milk, but in the end Nature would a.s.sert itself. She would be caught back into the impetus of the everlasting cycle of progression, fulfilling the purpose of life, contributing to the creation of that energy which was to find its expression in the sons of men.

All this without knowing it she learnt in the fields and under the thatch of Yarningdale Farm. All this, as she had meant to do, she a.s.similated into her being to feed that which she herself, in her own purpose, was creating.

So her son should live, if it were a boy she bore. So she planned for him a life that had none of the limitations of possession, but must give back again all that it took with interest compounded of n.o.blest purpose.

This alone should be his inheritance, this generosity of heart and soul and being that knew no other impulse than to give the whole and more than it had received.

Not one of these impressions came with set outline of idea to the mind of Mary Throgmorton. In the evenings as she sat in the kitchen parlor, sewing the tiny garments she would need and listening to Mr. Peverell talking as he always did about the land, it was thus she absorbed them.

Drawn in with her breath they were, as though the mere act of breathing a.s.similated them rather than a precise effort of receptivity.

The same it was in the fields where she walked, in the stalls where she milked her cows. Each breath she took was deep. It was as if the scent of those stalls, the air about the meadows, the lights of morning and evening all taught her that which she wished to learn.

Her mind was relaxed and just floating upon life those days. It is not to be understood where she learnt that this must be so. It is not to be conceived how, with her utter inexperience, she knew that no determined effort to create her child could serve the purpose that she had. In through the pores of her being, as it became the very air her lungs inhaled, she took the sensations which day by day were borne upon her.

There were times when, after the first physical consciousness of her condition, she forgot she was going to bear a child. There were times when the knowledge of it seemed so distant, that it was as though she walked and lived in a dream, a sensuous dream, where there was no pain, no suffering of mind, but things were and were not, just as they happened like clouds to pa.s.s before her vision.