Читать книгу Precious Bane - Mary Webb - Страница 5

Table of Contents

IN those days there was little time for the mourners to think of their sorrow till after the funeral. There was a deal to do. There was the mourning to make, and before that, if a family hadn’t had the weaver lately, there was the cloth to weave and dye. We hadn’t had the weaver for a good while, so we were very short of stuff.

Mother told Gideon he must go and fetch the old weaver, who lived at Lullingford, by the mountains, and went out weaving by the day or the week. Gideon saddled Bendigo, Father’s horse, and picked up the riding whip with a queer kind of smile. As soon as he was gone, Mother and I began to bake. For it wasn’t only the weaver that must be fed, but the women we were going to bid to the funeral sewing-bee. They would come for love, as was the custom, but we must feed them.

It seemed lonesome that night without Gideon. He had to bait and sleep in Lullingford, but he came back in good time next day, and I heard the sound of the hoofs on the yard cobbles through my spinning. We were hard at it, getting yarn ready for the old man. He came riding after Gideon on a great white horse, very bony, which put me in mind of the rider on the white horse in the Bible. He was the oldest man you could see in a month of Sundays. He hopped about like a magpie, prying here and there over the loom, looking at his shuttle for all the world like a pie that’s pleased with some bright thing it’s found. I had to take his meals up to the attic, for he wouldna waste time leaving off for them. It was a good thing the apples were all done, so he could hop about the loft without let or hindrance. “Now you must take the bidding letters for the sewing, Prue,” Mother told me.

“Can I take one to Jancis, Mother?”

“No. We munna spend money paying for a bidding letter to Jancis. But she can come, and welcome.”

“I’ll go and tell her. She sews very nice.”

“But not so well as you, my dear. Whatsoever’s wrong, thee sews a beautiful straight seam, Prue.”

I ran off, mighty pleased with praise, which came seldom my way. I met Gideon by the lake.

“Taking the biddings?” he said.

“Ah.”

“Jancis coming?”

“Ah.”

“Well, when you be there, ask Beguildy to lend us the white oxen for the funeral, oot?”

“To lug Father to the church?”

“Ah. And when we’ve buried Father, you and me must talk a bit. There’s a deal to think of for the future. All these bidding letters, now, you met as well have written ’em and saved a crown.”

I wondered what he meant, seeing he knew I couldna write a word, but I knew he’d say in his own time, and not afore, that being his way. Nobody would have thought he was but seventeen; he seemed five-and-twenty by the way he spoke, so choppy and quick, but ever so quiet.

When I got to Plash, Jancis was sitting in the garden, spinning. She said we could borrow the beasts, that were hers by right, being a present from her Granny, though she never had the strength to control them in a waggon nor to drive plough with ’em like I had in the years after. But she got a bit of pin money by hiring them out for wakes, when Beguildy didna pocket it. They dressed up beautiful with flowers and ribbons after they’d been scrubbed.

I went in to speak to Beguildy.

“Father’s dead, Mister Beguildy,” I said.

“So, so! What’s that to me, dear soul?”

He was a very strange man, always, was Beguildy.

“Tell me what I knew not, child,” he said.

“Did you know, then?”

“Ah, I knew thy feyther was gone. Didna he go by me on a blast of air last Sunday evening, crying out, thin and spiteful, ‘You owe me a crown, Beguildy!’ Tell me summat fresh, girl—new, strange things. Now if you could say that the leaves be all fallen this day of June, and my damsons ripe for market; or that the mere hath dried; or that man lusteth no more to hurt his love; or that Jancis looketh no more at her own face in Plash Pool, there would be telling, yes! But for your dad, it is nought. I cared not for the man.”

And taking up his little hammer, he beat on a row of flints that he had, till the room was all in a charm. Every flint had its own voice, and he knew them as a shepherd the sheep, and it was his custom when the talk was not to his mind to beat out a chime upon them.

“I came to see if we could borrow the beasts for our waggon. Jancis said yes.”

“You mun pay.”

“How much, mister?”

“The same as for wakes, a penny a head. So you be taking the biddings? Now who did your mam pay to write ’em?”

“Parson wrote ’em for us, and Mother put a crown in the poor-box.”

“Dear soul! The bitter waste! I’d have wrote ’em very clear and fine for half the money. I can write the tall script and the dwarf, round or square, red or black. Parson can only do the sarmon script, and a very poor script it be.”

“I wish I could write, Mister Beguildy.”

“Oh, you!”

He laughed in a very peculiar way he had, soft and light, at the top of his head.

“It’s not for children,” he said.

But I thought about it a deal. I thought it would be a fine thing to sit by the fire, in the settle corner, and write bidding letters and love-letters and market bills, or even a verse for a tombstone, and to do the round or the square, tall or little, red or black, and sermon script too if I’d a mind. I thought when anybody like Jancis angered me by being so pretty, I’d do her letters very crabbed, and with no red at all. But I knew that was wicked of me, for poor Jancis couldna help being pretty.

Then Beguildy went off to cure an old man’s corns, and Jancis and I played lovers, but Jancis said I did it very bad, and she thought Gideon would do it a deal better.