While Nedda sat, long past midnight,
writing her heart out in her little, white, lilac-curtained
room of the old house above the Spaniard’s Road,
Derek, of whom she wrote, was walking along the Malvern
hills, hurrying upward in the darkness. The stars
were his companions; though he was no poet, having
rather the fervid temper of the born swordsman, that
expresses itself in physical ecstasies. He had
come straight out from a stormy midnight talk with
Sheila. What was he doing had been
the burden of her cry falling in love just
at this moment when they wanted all their wits and
all their time and strength for this struggle with
the Mallorings? It was foolish, it was weak;
and with a sweet, soft sort of girl who could be no
use. Hotly he had answered: What business
was it of hers? As if one fell in love when one
wished! She didn’t know her blood
didn’t run fast enough! Sheila had retorted,
“I’ve more blood in my big toe than Nedda
in all her body! A lot of use you’ll be,
with your heart mooning up in London!” And crouched
together on the end of her bed, gazing fixedly up at
him through her hair, she had chanted mockingly:
“Here we go gathering wool and stars wool
and stars wool and stars!”
He had not deigned to answer, but
had gone out, furious with her, striding over the
dark fields, scrambling his way through the hedges
toward the high loom of the hills. Up on the short
grass in the cooler air, with nothing between him
and those swarming stars, he lost his rage. It
never lasted long hers was more enduring.
With the innate lordliness of a brother he already
put it down to jealousy. Sheila was hurt that
he should want any one but her; as if his love for
Nedda would make any difference to their resolution
to get justice for Tryst and the Gaunts, and show
those landed tyrants once for all that they could not
ride roughshod.
Nedda! with her dark eyes, so quick
and clear, so loving when they looked at him!
Nedda, soft and innocent, the touch of whose lips had
turned his heart to something strange within him, and
wakened such feelings of chivalry! Nedda!
To see whom for half a minute he felt he would walk
a hundred miles.
This boy’s education had been
administered solely by his mother till he was fourteen,
and she had brought him up on mathematics, French,
and heroism. His extensive reading of history
had been focussed on the personality of heroes, chiefly
knights errant, and revolutionaries. He had carried
the worship of them to the Agricultural College, where
he had spent four years; and a rather rough time there
had not succeeded in knocking romance out of him.
He had found that you could not have such beliefs
comfortably without fighting for them, and though he
ended his career with the reputation of a rebel and
a champion of the weak, he had had to earn it.
To this day he still fed himself on stories of rebellions
and fine deeds. The figures of Spartacus, Montrose,
Hofer, Garibaldi, Hampden, and John Nicholson, were
more real to him than the people among whom he lived,
though he had learned never to mention especially
not to the matter-of-fact Sheila his encompassing
cloud of heroes; but, when he was alone, he pranced
a bit with them, and promised himself that he too
would reach the stars. So you may sometimes see
a little, grave boy walking through a field, unwatched
as he believes, suddenly fling his feet and his head
every which way. An active nature, romantic,
without being dreamy and book-loving, is not too prone
to the attacks of love; such a one is likely to survive
unscathed to a maturer age. But Nedda had seduced
him, partly by the appeal of her touchingly manifest
love and admiration, and chiefly by her eyes, through
which he seemed to see such a loyal, and loving little
soul looking. She had that indefinable something
which lovers know that they can never throw away.
And he had at once made of her, secretly, the crown
of his active romanticism the lady waiting
for the spoils of his lance. Queer is the heart
of a boy strange its blending of reality
and idealism!
Climbing at a great pace, he reached
Malvern Beacon just as it came dawn, and stood there
on the top, watching. He had not much aesthetic
sense; but he had enough to be impressed by the slow
paling of the stars over space that seemed infinite,
so little were its dreamy confines visible in the
May morning haze, where the quivering crimson flags
and spears of sunrise were forging up in a march upon
the sky. That vision of the English land at dawn,
wide and mysterious, hardly tallied with Mr. Cuthcott’s
view of a future dedicate to Park and Garden City.
While Derek stood there gazing, the first lark soared
up and began its ecstatic praise. Save for that
song, silence possessed all the driven dark, right
out to the Severn and the sea, and the fastnesses of
the Welsh hills, and the Wrekin, away in the north,
a black point in the gray. For a moment dark
and light hovered and clung together. Would victory
wing back into night or on into day? Then, as
a town is taken, all was over in one overmastering
rush, and light proclaimed. Derek tightened his
belt and took a bee-line down over the slippery grass.
He meant to reach the cottage of the laborer Tryst
before that early bird was away to the fields.
He meditated as he went. Bob Tryst was all right!
If they only had a dozen or two like him! A dozen
or two whom they could trust, and who would trust
each other and stand firm to form the nucleus of a
strike, which could be timed for hay harvest.
What slaves these laborers still were! If only
they could be relied on, if only they would stand
together! Slavery! It was slavery; so
long as they could be turned out of their homes at
will in this fashion. His rebellion against the
conditions of their lives, above all against the manifold
petty tyrannies that he knew they underwent, came
from use of his eyes and ears in daily contact with
a class among whom he had been more or less brought
up. In sympathy with, and yet not of them, he
had the queer privilege of feeling their slights as
if they were his own, together with feelings of protection,
and even of contempt that they should let themselves
be slighted. He was near enough to understand
how they must feel; not near enough to understand
why, feeling as they did, they did not act as he would
have acted. In truth, he knew them no better
than he should.
He found Tryst washing at his pump.
In the early morning light the big laborer’s
square, stubborn face, with its strange, dog-like eyes,
had a sodden, hungry, lost look. Cutting short
ablutions that certainly were never protracted, he
welcomed Derek, and motioned him to pass into the
kitchen. The young man went in, and perched himself
on the window-sill beside a pot of Bridal Wreath.
The cottage was one of the Mallorings’, and
recently repaired. A little fire was burning,
and a teapot of stewed tea sat there beside it.
Four cups and spoons and some sugar were put out on
a deal table, for Tryst was, in fact, brewing the morning
draught of himself and children, who still lay abed
up-stairs. The sight made Derek shiver and his
eyes darken. He knew the full significance of
what he saw.
“Did you ask him again, Bob?”
“Yes, I asked ’im.”
“What did he say?”
“Said as orders was plain.
‘So long as you lives there,’ he says,
’along of yourself alone, you can’t have
her come back.’”
“Did you say the children wanted
looking after badly? Did you make it clear?
Did you say Mrs. Tryst wished it, before she ”
“I said that.”
“What did he say then?”
“‘Sorry for you, m’lad,
but them’s m’lady’s orders, an’
I can’t go contrary. I don’t wish
to go into things,’ he says; ’you know
better’n I how far ’tis gone when she
was ‘ere before; but seein’ as m’lady
don’t never give in to deceased wife’s
sister marryin’, if she come back ’tis
certain to be the other thing. So, as that won’t
do neither, you go elsewhere,’ he says.”
Having spoken thus at length, Tryst
lifted the teapot and poured out the dark tea into
the three cups.
“Will ’ee have some, sir?”
Derek shook his head.
Taking the cups, Tryst departed up
the narrow stairway. And Derek remained motionless,
staring at the Bridal Wreath, till the big man came
down again and, retiring into a far corner, sat sipping
at his own cup.
“Bob,” said the boy suddenly,
“do you like being a dog; put to what company
your master wishes?”
Tryst set his cup down, stood up,
and crossed his thick arms the swift movement
from that stolid creature had in it something sinister;
but he did not speak.
“Do you like it, Bob?”
“I’ll not say what I feels,
Mr. Derek; that’s for me. What I does’ll
be for others, p’raps.”
And he lifted his strange, lowering
eyes to Derek’s. For a full minute the
two stared, then Derek said:
“Look out, then; be ready!”
and, getting off the sill, he went out.
On the bright, slimy surface of the
pond three ducks were quietly revelling in that hour
before man and his damned soul, the dog, rose to put
the fear of God into them. In the sunlight, against
the green duckweed, their whiteness was truly marvellous;
difficult to believe that they were not white all
through. Passing the three cottages, in the last
of which the Gaunts lived, he came next to his own
home, but did not turn in, and made on toward the
church. It was a very little one, very old, and
had for him a curious fascination, never confessed
to man or beast. To his mother, and Sheila, more
intolerant, as became women, that little, lichened,
gray stone building was the very emblem of hypocrisy,
of a creed preached, not practised; to his father it
was nothing, for it was not alive, and any tramp,
dog, bird, or fruit-tree meant far more. But
in Derek it roused a peculiar feeling, such as a man
might have gazing at the shores of a native country,
out of which he had been thrown for no fault of his
own a yearning deeply muffled up in pride
and resentment. Not infrequently he would come
and sit brooding on the grassy hillock just above
the churchyard. Church-going, with its pageantry,
its tradition, dogma, and demand for blind devotion,
would have suited him very well, if only blind devotion
to his mother had not stood across that threshold;
he could not bring himself to bow to that which viewed
his rebellious mother as lost. And yet the deep
fibres of heredity from her papistic Highland ancestors,
and from old pious Moretóns, drew him constantly
to this spot at times when no one would be about.
It was his enemy, this little church, the fold of all
the instincts and all the qualities against which
he had been brought up to rebel; the very home of
patronage and property and superiority; the school
where his friends the laborers were taught their place!
And yet it had that queer, ironical attraction for
him. In some such sort had his pet hero Montrose
rebelled, and then been drawn despite himself once
more to the side of that against which he had taken
arms.
While he leaned against the rail,
gazing at that ancient edifice, he saw a girl walk
into the churchyard at the far end, sit down on a
gravestone, and begin digging a little hole in the
grass with the toe of her boot. She did not seem
to see him, and at his ease he studied her face, one
of those broad, bright English country faces with deep-set
rogue eyes and red, thick, soft lips, smiling on little
provocation. In spite of her disgrace, in spite
of the fact that she was sitting on her mother’s
grave, she did not look depressed. And Derek thought:
’Wilmet Gaunt is the jolliest of them all!
She isn’t a bit a bad girl, as they say; it’s
only that she must have fun. If they drive her
out of here, she’ll still want fun wherever
she is; she’ll go to a town and end up like
those girls I saw in Bristol.’ And the memory
of those night girls, with their rouged faces and
cringing boldness, came back to him with horror.
He went across the grass toward her.
She looked round as he came, and her face livened.
“Well, Wilmet?”
“You’re an early bird, Mr. Derek.”
“Haven’t been to bed.”
“Oh!”
“Been up Malvern Beacon to see the sun rise.”
“You’re tired, I expect!”
“No.”
“Must be fine up there.
You’d see a long ways from there; near to London
I should think. Do you know London, Mr. Derek?”
“No.”
“They say ’tis a funny
place, too.” Her rogue eyes gleamed from
under a heavy frown. “It’d not be
all ‘Do this’ an’ ‘Do that’;
an’ ’You bad girl’ an’ ‘You
little hussy!’ in London. They say there’s
room for more’n one sort of girl there.”
“All towns are beastly places, Wilmet.”
Again her rogue’s eyes gleamed.
“I don’ know so much about that, Mr. Derek.
I’m going where I won’t be chivied about
and pointed at, like what I am here.”
“Your dad’s stuck to you; you ought to
stick to him.”
“Ah, Dad! He’s losin’
his place for me, but that don’t stop his tongue
at home. ’Tis no use to nag me nag
me. Suppose one of m’lady’s daughters
had a bit of fun they say there’s
lots as do I’ve heard tales there’d
be none comin’ to chase her out of her home.
’No, my girl, you can’t live here no more,
endangerin’ the young men. You go away.
Best for you’s where they’ll teach you
to be’ave. Go on! Out with you!
I don’t care where you go; but you just go!’
’Tis as if girls were all pats o’ butter same
square, same pattern on it, same weight, an’
all.”
Derek had come closer; he put his
hand down and gripped her arm. Her eloquence
dried up before the intentness of his face, and she
just stared up at him.
“Now, look here, Wilmet; you
promise me not to scoot without letting us know.
We’ll get you a place to go to. Promise.”
A little sheepishly the rogue-girl answered:
“I promise; only, I’m goin’.”
Suddenly she dimpled and broke into her broad smile.
“Mr. Derek, d’you know
what they say they say you’re in love.
You was seen in th’ orchard. Ah! ’tis
all right for you and her! But if any one kiss
and hug me, I got to go!”
Derek drew back among the graves, as if he had been
struck with a whip.
She looked up at him with coaxing sweetness.
“Don’t you mind me, Mr.
Derek, and don’t you stay here neither.
If they saw you here with me, they’d say:
‘Aw look! Endangerin’ another
young man poor young man!’ Good mornin’,
Mr. Derek!”
The rogue eyes followed him gravely,
then once more began examining the grass, and the
toe of her boot again began kicking a little hole.
But Derek did not look back.