His apprenticeship lasted a year and
six months, and all this while he lived with the Jolls,
walking home every Sunday morning and returning every
Sunday night, rain or shine. He carried his deftness
of hand into his new trade, and it was Mendarva who
begged and obtained an extension of the time agreed
on, “Rather than lose the boy I’ll tache
en for love.” So Taffy stayed on for
another six months. He was now in his seventeenth
year a boy no longer. One evening,
as he blew up his smithy fire, the glow of it fell
on the form of a woman standing just outside the window
and watching him. He had no silly fears of ghosts:
but the thought of the buried woman flashed across
his mind and he dropped his pincers with a clatter.
“’Tis only me,”
said the woman. “You needn’t to be
afeard.” And he saw it was the girl Lizzie.
She stepped inside the forge and seated
herself on the Dane’s anvil.
“I was walking back from prayer-meeting,”
she said. “’Tis nigher this way, but
I don’t ever dare to come. Might, I dessay,
if I’d somebody to see me home.”
“Ghosts?” asked Taffy,
picking up the pincers and thrusting the bar back
into the hot cinders.
“I dunno: I gets frightened
o’ the very shadows on the road sometimes.
I suppose, now, you never walks out that way?”
“Which way?”
“Why, towards where your home is. That’s
the way I comes.”
“No, I don’t.”
Taffy blew at the cinders until they glowed again.
“It’s only on Sundays I go over there.”
“That’s a pity,”
said Lizzie candidly. “I’m kept in,
Sunday evenings, to look after the children while
farmer and mis’ess goes to Chapel. That’s
the agreement I came ’pon.”
Taffy nodded.
“It would be nice now, wouldn’t
it ” She broke off, clasping her
knees and staring at the blaze.
“What would be nice?”
Lizzie laughed confusedly. “Aw,
you make me say’t. I can’t abear
any of the young men up to the Chapel. If me
and you ”
Taffy ceased blowing. The fire
died down, and in the darkness he could hear her breathing
hard.
“They’re so rough,”
she went on, “and t’other night I met young
Squire Vyell riding along the road, and he stopped
me and wanted to kiss me.”
“George Vyell? Surely
he didn’t?” Taffy blew up the fire again.
“Iss he did. I don’t see why not,
neither.”
“Why he shouldn’t kiss you?”
“Why he shouldn’t want to.”
Taffy frowned, carried the white hot
bar to his anvil, and began to hammer. He despised
girls, as a rule, and their ways. Decidedly
Lizzie annoyed him; and yet as he worked he could not
help glancing at her now and then, as she sat and
watched him. By-and-by he saw that her eyes
were full of tears.
“What’s the matter?” he asked abruptly.
“I I can’t
walk home alone. I’m afeard!” He
tossed his hammer aside, raked out the fire, and reached
his coat off its peg. As he swung round in the
darkness to put it on, he blundered against Lizzie
or Lizzie blundered against him. She clutched
at him nervously.
“Clumsy! can’t you see
the doorway?” She passed out, and he followed
and locked the door. As they crossed the turf
to the high-road, she slipped her arm into his.
“I feel safe, that way. Let it stay, co!”
After a few paces, she added, “You’re
different from the others that’s
why I like you.”
“How?”
“I dunno; but you be
diff’rent. You don’t think about
girls, for one thing.”
Taffy did not answer. He felt
angry, ashamed, uncomfortable. He did not turn
once to look at her face, dimly visible by the light
of the young moon the hunter’s moon now
sinking over the slope of the hill. Thick dust too
thick for the heavy dew to lay covered the
cart-track down to the farm, muffling their footsteps.
Lizzie paused by the gate.
“Best go in separate,”
she said; paused again and whispered, “You may
if you like.”
“May do what?”
“What what young Squire Vyell wanted.”
They were face to face now.
She held up her lips, and as she did so they parted
in an amorous little laugh. The moonlight was
on her face. Taffy bent swiftly and kissed her.
“Oh, you hurt!” With another
little laugh she slipped up the garden path and into
the house.
Ten minutes later Taffy followed, hating himself.
For the next fortnight he avoided
her; and then, late one evening she came again.
He was prepared for this, and had locked the door
of the smithy and let down the shutter while, he worked.
She tapped upon the outside of the shutter with her
knuckles.
“Let me in!”
“Can’t you leave me alone?”
he answered pettishly. “I want to work,
and you interrupt.”
“I don’t want no love-making I
don’t indeed. I’ll sit quiet as a
mouse. But I’m afeard, out here.”
“Nonsense!”
“I’m afeard o’ the
ghost. There’s something comin’ let
me in, co-o!”
Taffy unlocked the door and held it
half opened while he listened.
“Yes, there’s somebody
coming, on horseback. Now, look here it’s
no ghost, and I can’t have you about here with
people passing. I I don’t want
you here at all; so make haste and slip away home,
that’s a good girl.”
Lizzie glided like a shadow into the
dark lane as the trample of hoofs drew close, and
the rider pulled up beside the door.
“You’re working late,
I see. Is it too late to make a shoe for Aide-de-camp
here?”
It was Honoria. She dismounted
and stood at the doorway, holding her horse’s
bridle.
“No,” said Taffy:
“that is, if you don’t mind the waiting.”
With his leathern apron he wiped the
Dane’s anvil for a seat, while she hitched up
Aide-de-camp and stepped into the glow of the forge-fire.
“The hounds took us three miles
beyond Carwithiel: and there, just as they lost,
Aide-de-camp cast his off-hind shoe. I didn’t
find it out at first, and now I’ve had to walk
him all the way back. Are you alone here?”
“Yes.”
“Who was that I saw leaving as I came up?”
“You saw someone?”
“Yes.” She nodded,
looking him straight in the face. “It looked
like a woman. Who was she?”
“That was Lizzie Pezzack, the
girl who sold you her doll, once. She’s
a servant down at the farm where I lodge.”
Honoria said no more for the moment,
but seated herself on the Dane’s anvil, while
Taffy chose a bar of iron and stepped out to examine
Aide-de-camp’s hoof. He returned and in
silence began to blow up the fire.
“I dare say you were astonished
to see me,” she remarked at length.
“Yes.”
“I’m still forbidden to
speak to you. The last time I did it, grandfather
beat me.”
“The old brute!” Taffy
nipped the hot iron savagely in his pincers.
“I wonder if he’ll do
it again. Somehow I don’t think he will.”
Taffy looked at her. She had
drawn herself up, and was smiling. In her close-fitting
habit she seemed very slight, yet tall, and a woman
grown. He took the bar to the anvil and began
to beat it flat. His teeth were shut, and with
every blow he said to himself “Brute!”
“That’s beautiful,”
Honoria went on. “I stopped Mendarva the
other day, and he told me wonders about you.
He says he tried you with a hard-boiled egg, and
you swung the hammer and chipped the shell all round
without bruising the white a bit. Is that true?”
Taffy nodded.
“And your learning the
Latin and Greek, I mean; do you still go on with it?”
He nodded again, towards a volume
of Euripides that lay open on the workbench.
“And the stories you used to
tell George and me; do you go on telling them to yourself?”
He was obliged to confess that he
never did. She sat for a while watching the
sparks as they flew. Then she said, “I
should like to hear you tell one again. That
one about Aslog and Orm, who ran away by night across
the ice-fields and took a boat and came to an island
with a house on it, and found a table spread and the
fire lit, but no inhabitants anywhere You
remember? It began ’Once upon a time, not
far from the city of Drontheim, there lived a rich
man ’”
Taffy considered a moment and began
“Once upon a time, not far from the city of
Drontheim ” He paused, eyed the horse-shoe
cooling between the pincers, and shook his head.
It was no use. Apollo had been too long in
service with Admetus, and the tale would not come.
“At any rate,” Honoria
persisted, “you can tell me something out of
your books: something you have just been reading.”
So he began to tell her the story
of Ion, and managed well enough in describing the
boy and how he ministered before the shrine at Delphi,
sweeping the temple and scaring the birds away from
the precincts: but when he came to the plot of
the play and, looking up, caught Honoria’s eyes,
it suddenly occurred to him that all the rest of the
story was a sensual one, and he could not tell it to
her. He blushed, faltered, and finally broke
down.
“But it was beautiful,”
said she, “so far as it went: and it’s
just what I wanted. I shall remember that boy
Ion now, whenever I think of you helping your father
in the church at home. If the rest of the story
is not nice, I don’t want to hear it.”
How had she guessed? It was delicious, at any
rate, to know that she thought of him; and Taffy felt
how delicious it was, while he fitted and hammered
the shoe on Aide-de-camp’s hoof, she standing
by with a candle in either hand, the flame scarcely
quivering in the windless night.
When all was done, she raised a foot
for him to give her a mount. “Good-night!”
she called, shaking the reins. Half a minute
later Taffy stood by the door of the forge, listening
to the echoes of Aide-de-camp’s canter, and
the palm of his hand tingled where her foot had rested.