The Green Bough Part 27

"Does it hurt?"

He gave sympathy in his voice at once.

"Keeps on frobbing," said she.

"Let G.o.d feel it frob and come and play," he suggested with greater wisdom than he knew.

That had to be explained to her. They sat down in the hay, the first man in him explaining the mysteries of life to the first woman in her.

Mary found them, fast friends, sitting together behind a high c.o.c.k of hay.

"I thought I'd lost you, John," she said, and when he did not look up on the instant, knew she had indeed lost something of him she could never find again. No longer was she the only woman in his world. In a strange and unexpected moment he had found some one he could turn to to hide his pain if she became quite still like the moles.

They met often after that day. In a little while they became inseparable.

"Young things must have young things to play with," Mary told herself.

It was Nature. They never reared young calves alone on the farm.

Always they had companions.

"They grows better," said Mr. Peverell. "Young and young. It comes that way."

So she stilled her heart from painful beating. But one day Mrs.

Peverell pointed out those two together in the fields and said--

"A love child they say takes easy to love. If that doant please 'ee, 'ee must stop it soon."

"Why shouldn't it please me?" she asked and her heart was trembling in swift flutterings that were not pulses in her breast, but were like wings beating, disturbing the air she breathed.

"Well, she be just an ordinary child, like one of us, and if John stays on the farm and one day takes it after Mr. Peverell, as I doant mind tellin' 'ee Mr. Peverell means 'en to take it if he likes the work, then he'll wed wi' her, you mark my words for it."

Mary took the hand with its knuckles far more knotted now and held it for comfort against her breast.

"You have been good to me," she muttered thickly. "I have never thought till now he could mean to leave the farm to John."

"His name's in the Bible," said Mrs. Peverell.

"Yes, yes, my dear, I know what that means to you. But I never thought you meant it so practically as that. If John does take on the farm, why shouldn't he marry Lucy? Wouldn't that be right? Wouldn't that be the very best?"

"I thought by the way 'ee looked at them 'ee mind was all against it. I thought 'ee'd got greater prospects for him than that. She's only an ordinary child, I says, and that's all she is. I thought it 'ud upset 'ee plans for 'en."

"My plans," said Mary. "They're only for his happiness and the best that's in him. I can't have him always, can I? Not always to myself?"

She turned her eyes across the field to where they stood together.

"She's come--with her big eyes," she whispered and she walked away.

PHASE V

I

It was a still hot day at the end of the month of July in the following year. Vast mountain ranges of c.u.mulus clouds too heavy on the horizon to sweep across the sky with the storm they promised hung sullen and low in ma.s.ses of pale purple rimmed with golden pink. Rain was sadly wanted all the country round. Only the Highfield meadow at Yarningdale was lush and green. The cows were there grazing on the aftermath.

With her sewing, Mary had come down to the field an hour or more before there was need to drive them in. John was playing with Lucy down the stream. She could hear their voices in and out of the willows. They were like dryad and faun, laughing together. His voice was as a lute to Mary.

She listened to it and to the very words he said, as she would have listened to a faun playing on his pipe, half bewitched by it, half tricked to laughter and to joy that was scarcely of this world.

"If I'm the captain," she heard him saying, "you have to dance whether you like it or not."

Claude Duval and Treasure Island! Both flung together in the melting pot of his fancy.

She peered down the field through the trunks of the pollarded willows and saw a dryad dancing before a faun sitting cross-legged in the gra.s.s.

A fay-looking sight it was in the hazy mist of that suns.h.i.+ne. With unsteady balance, Lucy swayed in and out of the tree shadows, alternately a thing of darkness and a thing of light. And there below her in the gra.s.s he sat, with his mop of hair and his profile cut sharp against the dark trunk of a willow tree, looking to Mary who saw him with the mist in his eyes like pagan Nature, back to the times of Pan.

Herself as well, as there she watched, she felt she could have danced for him.

Was that what love was--the thing that she had never known? Could this be it, this G.o.dlike power that Nature lent to man to make a woman dance for him, and, as she danced, trick all his senses till he was no more than man, when Nature s.n.a.t.c.hed her loan away and with Pan's laughter caught the woman in her arms and vanished in the trees and hid herself?

That moment then she seemed to see it so and with a later vision beheld the woman stepping out from underneath the shadows of the wood, leading a faun, so young his feet seemed scarcely touching the gra.s.s he walked upon.

Her sewing fluttered to her lap. In that midsummer heat, her eyes half closed, then opened, startled at the sound of solid footsteps by her side. She looked up and there stood Liddiard, his hat in his hand, a nervous smile upon his lips. She was too taken unawares to fathom them.

"Am I dreaming?" she muttered.

"You were asleep," said he.

"But this isn't dreaming?"

"No--you're awake now."

"Why--? What is it? Why have you come here?"

"To see you."

"After all these years?"

"Twelve of them."

He sat down on the gra.s.s a little apart from her, watching her face.

"You look very little older, Mary. There isn't a gray hair in your head. I've plenty."

"My hair's nondescript," she replied, still in an amaze. "It takes a long time to go gray. Why have you come here? Did they tell you at Bridnorth where I was?"

"Yes."

"Then why have you come?"