Читать книгу Secret Bread - F. Tennyson Jesse - Страница 15

As Ishmael went along he picked a large bunch of the wayside flowers as an offering to Phoebe—purple knapweed and betony, the plumy dead-pink heads of hemp-agrimony, and tufts of strong yellow fleabane, all squeezed together in his hot little hand. The air seemed alive with butterflies and moths, white and brown and red, and clouds of the "blue skippers" that look like periwinkles blown to life. A bee shot past him so quickly that the thrum of it sounded short as a twanged string, and the next moment a late foxglove spire, naked save for its topmost bell, quivered beneath the onslaught of the arched brown and yellow body. The heat haze shimmered on the distant horizon like an insect's wing, but was tempered on the moorland height by the capricious wind, and Ishmael kept doggedly on.

He was a wiry little boy, thin and brown, with dark hair that grew in a point on the nape of his neck, and hazel eyes set rather deeply under straight, sulky-looking brows. The lower part of his face was small and pointed for the breadth across forehead and cheek bones, and, with his outstanding ears, combined to give him something the look of a piskie's changeling. Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away, and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved, if at all, in the malleable years between fifteen and twenty was as yet far ahead. Nevertheless, Parson Boase was not wrong in scenting the idealist in Ishmael, and he wondered how far the determined but excitable child, with the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether, after all, he might not so build up resisting power as to make a fair thing of his life. A no more distant future than the next hour held Ishmael's mind at the moment, and attracted by a strong smell of peppermint from the marsh, the child turned that way, to add the pale purple blossoms to his fast-wilting bunch.

A man in a black cassock, looped up for convenience in walking by a shabby cincture, was wandering among the brambles and gorse bushes, peering short-sightedly here and there, and as Ishmael appeared the man's hand closed suddenly over some object on a leaf. Ishmael had hardly recognised the Parson before he himself was seen.

"Come and look at what I've got here," shouted Boase, straightening his long back and holding his curved-out hands aloft. Ishmael ran towards him, the tussocks, dry from long drought, swaying and sagging beneath him. As he drew near he caught a whirring sound, so strong as to seem metallic, and saw a big green and yellow dragon-fly fighting in the Parson's hands. Boase took hold of it carefully but firmly by the wings, and the creature stared angrily at Ishmael with its huge glassy green eyes, opening its oddly-fleshy mouth and wagging its fawn-coloured lips like an evil infant cockatrice.

Suddenly the Parson launched it in the air again, raising two fingers in whimsical blessing, then he looked down at Ishmael with a queer expression in his eyes. That was Ishmael's fate, of which he was as yet unconscious—no one looked at him absolutely naturally. His mother saw him with aversion, Archelaus with resentment, and the younger brothers and the little sister took their cue from their elders. The neighbouring gentry treated him with an embarrassed kindness when they met him with Parson Boase, and solved the problem by leaving him alone on other occasions; the farmers looked at him as though he embodied a huge joke, and their wives mothered him surreptitiously, giving him saffron-cake, which he loved, and quick, hard kisses, which he detested. Even Boase looked at him not only as a child whom he loved, but as the incarnation of a hope, a theory—in short, as an Experiment. Nevertheless, it was the Parson to whom Ishmael came with his pleasures, and for all the intuition which told him the child went to no one in his griefs Boase had not quite enough of the feminine in him to realise the importance of the omission.

"Where are you off to, my son?" asked Boase, sticking his hand in the pocket of his shabby old cassock. He knew better than to pat a boy's head or thump him between the shoulder-blades with the hearty manner peculiar to men who have forgotten their own boyhood.

"Oh, I'm just gwain to see if the mill-wheel's workin' down along," said Ishmael—not for worlds would he have admitted Phoebe Lenine as the object of his visit. The Parson's eyes twinkled as they rested on the bouquet.

"Going, not 'gwain,'" he corrected gently.

"Going," repeated Ishmael, with his deceptive docility in little things.

"I'll come to the mill with you," said the Parson briskly, and Ishmael set off by his side without a word, but presently lagged behind a moment to drop his carefully-prepared offering between two gorse-bushes. Boase smiled, then sighed, wondering where such an abnormal dread of ridicule as Ishmael's would lead; it was a result of the Parson's calling that he should feel anxiety as to the ultimate trend of things.

The two trudged on in silence; their friendship was so tried, and the understanding between them so complete, that they sometimes spent an hour or more together with hardly a remark. Finally Ishmael broke silence.

"You coming to Cry the Neck this evening, Da Boase?" he asked.

"I'm going to look in before supper," replied the Parson; and unconsciously his lips took on a sterner line. He was building much on that evening's "Crying the Neck," which for the first time Ishmael was to attend, and at the succeeding supper Boase meant him to take his place at the head of the table, as future master of Cloom. "Crying the Neck" was a moribund custom in the eighteen-fifties, and it was the Parson, with an eye to its possibilities, who had encouraged what proved to be its last revival.

"Mr. Lenine's coming," remarked Ishmael presently.

"Ah! Is he coming alone?" asked Boase carelessly.

"Happen he will, or maybe they'll all come, but Mrs. Lenine always says she must stay in of an evening when others are trapesing," replied Ishmael, with equal carelessness. For they were Cornishmen, these two, and the Parson would no more have asked outright "Is Phoebe coming?" than Ishmael would have given a direct answer.

Lenine's mill, known as Vellan-Clowse, which means "The Mill by the Wood," nestled in a valley below the Cloon moor where the leet ran along built-up banks to the dam and then down a succession of wooden troughs to the crest of the wheel. Facing the mill was the great cluster of elms that headed the valley, and behind only a tiny little yard divided it from the steepness of the hillside. The trees were the biggest for miles in that wind-swept district, and the bed of the valley showed green and lush with its marshy pastures, where the ugly red and white cows were tearing at the grass. The wheel was standing dumb, as harvest was not yet garnered, and Boase and Ishmael passed the mill door and went on to the house. There the door stood open, as did the further one at the end of the cool, straight passage that looked dark by contrast with the yard beyond, where, under the blazing sun, a little girl was feeding some fowls. The whole scene, set in the black oblong of the doorway, was compact of blue and flame colour—the blue of the frock and the shadows and the pale flame of the gravel where the shadows lay and the deeper flame fowls clustered. The man and the boy looked through for a moment in silence, then Phoebe turned and saw them.

Phoebe Lenine, being a woman of some eight years old, shook the remains of the corn off her small blue lap with no signs of haste or discomposure, and, turning her back, called to a hidden corner of the yard.

"Faëther! Faëther! Passon's come to see you!"

"How d'you know I haven't called to see you, Miss Phoebe?" asked Boase, stepping into the passage. She ran and seized him by the knees, flinging back her head so that her dark curls hung away from her softly-rounded face. Her pouting mouth, always slightly open to show a hint of two little front teeth, laughed up at him, her dove's eyes narrowed with her mirth. Of Ishmael she took no more notice than if he had not been there, and he leant against the doorpost, scraping the earth with the toe of his hard little boot, his thumbs stuck in his belt.

"I be gwain to help cry the Neck over to Cloom!" announced Phoebe—to the Parson and at Ishmael—"and I be gwain to stay to th' supper, and maybe I'll dance wi' a chap. There's Maister Jacka's John-Willy would be proud to dance wi' I!"

"So you're fond of dancing, Phoebe?" asked the Parson.

"Sure 'nough! Dancen' and singen'—that's life, that is. Ef you can't dance and sing I don't see no good in liven'! I don't hold wi' chaps who think of nawthen but wanten' to be saved. Time 'nough for that when gettin' on for thirty!"

Ishmael winced at the hit, and the Parson laughed as he tied two of

Phoebe's ringlets into a bow under her chin.

"There are ways and ways of remembering the Creator in the days of your youth, Phoebe," he said, "and one of them's by dancing and singing—if it's with the right kind of chap. I don't think much of Jacka's John-Willy; if you really want to be a great lady to-night you must get Ishmael to dance with you. He's going to be master of the feast, and perhaps if you ask him very nicely he'll dance with you just once."

This view of Ishmael as a person of importance was a new one to

Phoebe, and she looked at him as though appraising him afresh.

"I don't ask no chaps to dance wi' I," she announced loftily. "Faëther's just comen' to see you, Da Boase."

She wriggled her sleek little otter-like head under his arm and slipped past him as she spoke. Then:

"Like to see the pigs?" she asked Ishmael carelessly. "Da ringed 'en the marnen'."

"Don't mind if I do," answered Ishmael, still scraping the gravel.

"Naden't come ef 'ee don't want to more'n thet!" retorted Phoebe, "and I could have shown 'ee where the old pig was killed. There's been a dark place on the stones ever since. I saw it killed, I did, Ishmael Ruan. I saw Da stick in the knife and the blood come all out, I ded!"

"So 'a ded, my 'andsome, so 'a ded!" applauded the miller, whose big form, powdery white, had appeared in the passage.

The Parson felt decidedly sick. He was country-born himself, and, being no mere dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe. Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the boy, the lack of which had shocked him in Phoebe. He knew Ishmael had a horror of blood and disagreeable sights, and the thought of how often the boy would have to encounter them struck at his heart.

"I won't see it," said Ishmael, pressing himself back against the house wall; "I won't see where no pig was killed." Then, afraid lest Phoebe should taunt him with his fear: "But I'll come and see the pigs, though I don't s'pose they're as fine as ours. They were ringed yesterday was a week, and even the piggy-widden's bigger than most pigs."

"Ours is bigger, ours is bigger!" cried Phoebe indignantly, "and you'm nawthen but a gëat coward, Ishmael Ruan. I don't want my pigs to set eyes on 'ee!"

She sauntered away across the yard, but turned her head as she reached the far end, and glanced back at Ishmael. He hesitated, pride fighting with longing; then he also began to saunter—aimlessly at first; then, giving up the struggle, he frankly followed her. Lenine chuckled softly.

"Talk o' the way o' a man wi' a maid—'tes nawthen to the way o' a maid wi' a man, is it, Passon? She'll be one for the chaps, she will!"

Boase assented, laughing, then his eyes saddened, as he watched the two little figures, side by side now, disappear round the corner of the pig-styes. It suddenly struck him as rather horrible that anything so innocent as Ishmael still was should develop into a man, even a healthy, clean-living man; such a pity that the instinct that was the cause of charming play with Phoebe should ever become desire. It was a feeling that a mother might have had, and Boase smiled at it even as he gave a sigh to the pity of inexorable things.

"So you're bringing Phoebe over to Cry the Neck, Sam?" he asked casually. Sam Lenine nodded.

"Gwain be there, Passon?"

"Maybe. Fact is, Sam, I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit that boy at the head of the table—"

Lenine nodded again, but waited in silence.

"You're an influential man," continued Boase, "and the way you speak of him and treat things generally would rather give the lead to the people round here."

For the third time the miller nodded, then started a little as he caught sight of Ishmael and Phoebe reappearing from the pig-stye, and his eyes lightened suddenly. He dropped his thickly-veined lids to hide them.

"Happen I can do a little, Passon," he said; "I'll think on et."

"Do," said Boase heartily. Then he too started slightly and looked at the miller a little suspiciously, and, though he said nothing, his face darkened. Already the cords of intrigue were beginning to close round Ishmael Ruan, and the Parson longed to break them with one clean stroke, even while he realised the futility of the wish. He called rather sharply to the children.

"Ishmael! You must come back with me now; there are things I want you to do at the vicarage. Come."

Ishmael recognised the tone of authority. He was an obedient child simply because he was so proud he would not fight a losing battle. Sooner than be conquered he obeyed as though he were doing the thing commanded merely because he himself wished to, and for the same reason if he could forestall a command by his own action he did. He came to the Parson's side.

"Must be going, Phoebe," he remarked carelessly; "I've a heap of things to do for to-night, you see. Morning, Mr. Lenine!"

And he set off again, with his thumbs in his belt.