Читать книгу The Golden Arrow - Mary Webb - Страница 11

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Suddenly there was a clatter of hoofs, a voice shouting ‘Yo-ho!’ to the calves round the door, and Joe—crimson, breathless, cheery from his mad ride—knocked the mud from his boots and walked into the passage.

‘He’ll see your chemise,’ said Eli indifferently, when he heard Joe first; Lily’s eyes flickered. Sex, a surface thing with her, but the strongest influence she knew, awoke again and overcame her madness. She fled through the door into the box-staircase, taking the rifle with her. Eli sat unmoved as he had been throughout. Joe had meanwhile fallen over the milk-pails and was in a sad plight for a knight-errant. He opened the parlour door and came in accompanied by a stream of milk.

‘Where’s Lil?’ he asked.

‘You’re in my debt for all that good milk,’ said Eli. ‘Even unto the skirts of his raiment,’ he added, with sour amusement.

‘Where’s Lil?’ Joe repeated.

‘Tittivating most likely.’

‘There’s no light upstairs,’ said Joe.

Eli was surprised at his acuteness.

‘Maybe she’s gone to bed,’ he amended.

‘Well, I want to see her.’

‘What for?’

‘Mr. Huntbatch! You’re her dad, and so I try to be jutiful,’ said Joe, with some dignity; ‘but when I come to tell her something—I tells her. I don’t mouth it to other folk first.’

‘What d’you want, then? Me to call her?’ Eli began to feel that Providence was not looking after him in its usual efficient way.

‘Aye,’ said Joe; ‘now.’

Eli called up the stairs. There was no reply.

‘Lil!’ called Joe, and in his rough voice dwelt an amazing tenderness.

There was a movement above, and Lily’s voice, striving to be as usual, replied ‘Coming.’

In a few minutes she came—tear-stained and limp, without the rifle and in her working dress. At sight of her face Joe opened his mouth to exclaim ‘Laws me!’ but closed it again sharply, having suddenly grown from a hobbledehoy to manhood. He stood looking from Lily to Eli with bent brows.

Then he turned to Eli and told the only successful lie of his life with the utmost frankness.

‘They want to know,’ he said, nodding in the direction of High Leasowes, ‘if you can spare Lil to go hilling to-morrow. Mother’s agreed with the higgler for a big lot and we’m shorthanded. I was to take Lil back to-night if so be she’ll come.’

‘Oh! you was, was you?’ Eli was at a loss for once. He perfectly saw through Joe, and at last began to respect him as almost an equal—though grudgingly. ‘Well, o’ course, if your mother wants her—when the ladies ask—’ he began.

‘Lil! Put your hat on and come along of me,’ said Joe. ‘Your father says so. You mun obey him.’ Slow satire pointed the words.

They went out.

‘Jump up behind me,’ said Joe. ‘And, Eli!’ he called back, ‘there’s a bit of plaster gone from the wall just above your chair. I’d see to it if I was you.’

Lily clung to him like a frightened kitten.

‘Quiet, now, little lass!’ he said. ‘I heerd the shot. Which of you was it?’

‘Me,’ said Lily faintly, and they were silent.

So they came over Bitterley, trotting down the moonlit track through dark cloud-shadows to the Ardens’ door. They passed the Batch Stone, a boundary mark intended to be imperishable, but worn down by the rubbing of the cattle against it until the chiselled words were obliterated. So the ‘thou shalt nots’ of man are erased; only the great affirmatives stand unscarred, and it seems hardly worth while to spend time on negations.

Whitefoot made no sound on the turf. The grouse slept in the deep, arched glooms of the heather forest. From the spinney on the left, just before they came out of Hilltop Road into the western part of the Arden sheepwalk, there smote across them a tide of larch resin and a frothy scent from the elder-trees that stood witchlike round the wood. Out in the Far Leasowes—two large enclosures—there was a new tide of fragrance. It came from the young bracken, wild thyme, burnt grass, heather and cloudberry bushes. With them was the austere fragrance drawn from the rock all day by the sun, and now hanselled delicately by moonlight and dew. The cattle crowded up, snuffing, very much at ease—like all animals and primitive people when nothing intervenes between them and immensity. To the west immeasurably lofty in the flat moonlight which washed all unevenness from the ridges, stood the Devil’s Chair—silvered ebony. From very far off, like the complaint of a denizen of some other world, came the cry of a sheep somewhere in the complex cwms or flats beyond the Little Wood.

As they neared the cottage a stout lamb with a very tightly curled and close-fitting coat caracoled up with heavy mirth and a long-drawn deep bass ‘baa!’ It looked so absurd, with its middle-aged figure, bulging forehead and awkward babyishness, that Joe burst into a guffaw. He never, as a rule, saw either humour or pathos in the things that were his daily life. They were just ‘ship,’ ‘them steers,’ ‘old Whitefoot.’ But to-night he was strung to his highest pitch. His nerves were at last existent; he had attained in minute measure the sad distinction of the poet—who enjoys because he suffers. The lamb grunted and made off at Joe’s ‘Haw-haw!’

Lily awoke from a half-doze, irritated.

‘Whatever be you laughing at, you great gom—’ she began. No, she must not call Joe a gomeril. This was a different Joe. She was frightened of him. Also a faint and very unusual sense of gratitude dwelt in her.

The great keen air, like an eagre, not coming in several breezes, but in one soundless and indivisible force, smote on Lily’s shorn head.

‘Oh, Joe!’ she whispered. ‘I canna be seen! My hair — ’

Joe pulled his red handkerchief from his pocket and tied it under her chin.

‘Theer! There’s not a tidier wench in England,’ he said, with an admiration that was balm to her. She closed her eyes. Tears crept slowly down her cheeks.

Inside the house Mrs. Arden awoke.

‘Somebody laughed out in the pasture, John,’ she said; ‘maybe it’s the Dark Riders! Put up a prayer.’

‘Now, mother! you’re too given up to them wold, unrighteous tales.’

‘But there is some one. Harkye! They’re taboring on the door. Maybe it’s a call for me.’ She was up and at the window in a moment, flinging on a skirt and shawl.

‘Mother!’ said Joe’s voice, strained yet authoritative; ‘come down, ’oot.’

‘What’s come o’er the lad?’

‘Best go down, mother,’ said John, beginning to dress; ‘and a quiet tongue is the healer.’

Mrs. Arden went down.

‘Here’s Lil, mother; can she sleep along of our Deb?’ asked Joe.

Lily stood at the door, white, with the scarlet handkerchief bound round her small head, her dress only half fastened in her haste. She blinked at the candle in a helpless way, like a young barn-owl.

Mrs. Arden looked over her spectacles first at Lily with solicitude, then at Joe with severe morality, tempered by primitive charity.

‘Joe, lad,’ she asked, ‘is it —? Have you —?’

‘No. It inna, and I hanna,’ snapped Joe crossly. ‘You’re allus harping on one string, mother.’

‘Well, Joe,’ said Mrs. Arden apologetically, ‘if a shepherd dunna mind his own sheepwalk, there’s none’ll mind it for him. But come you in, Lily, my dear.’

She raked the fire and threw dry wood on, then hung the kettle over the blaze. The place was full of resinous fragrance and warm light. Joe surveyed the scene, standing just outside the door with his head bent to look in, his broad shoulders touching the jambs. He felt rather like he did on Fair days, when the long tramp behind the sheep was over, and they given up to their new owner, so that he could go, untrammelled and lonely, about the fair. The pride of responsibility, the stress of a necessary and difficult job were gone. He was just Joe Arden again. He took Whitefoot round to the stable.

‘Well, Joe,’ said his father, matter-of-factly, ‘what about a bit of supper?’

‘I dunno as I want any, father.’

Deb appeared on the stairs with the little lamp that always burned by her room at night—lit by her father.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘Nought,’ said Joe. ‘Mother’ll tell you,’ he added, with sublime faith.

Soon there was a comfortable scent of tea. Rover had never known such doings out of lambing time. He was not pleased. The light from the 1s. 11½d. ‘alabaster’ lamp fell gently on poor Lily, sipping thankfully from the best china. Joe, embarrassed but not apologetic, consumed bread and cheese with the enormous appetite of those that come from spiritual heights. John talked of common things in reassuring tones—not understanding the circumstances, but seeing deeper, into the infinities. Deb, her straight hair falling in sweet disarray over her old shawl, sat protectingly by Lily, and Mrs. Arden, chatty, intent as a field-marshal deploying before battle, poured tea and buttered bread with the thrill of unusual excitement with which she met her many sleepless nights—a thrill which quite made up for her quiet life and her lost rest.

‘There, Lil,’ she said, ‘don’t you werret. Deb, you take her up now, and to-morrow we’ll go hillin’ and Lil ’ll tell us all about it.’

Her crushed curiosity spoke the ‘all’ with relish.

Lil looked at Deb’s long hair, remembered how she had once despised it, and burst into a storm of sobs.

Joe looked round accusingly.

‘Nay, nay,’ said John, ‘don’t take on, little ’un, we’m all friends here.’

‘Well, Mr. Arden,’ said Lil, gasping, ‘and Joe and Mrs. Arden’—(she left Deb out—her hair was so long, so heart-breakingly intact)—‘I’m sure I’m very much obliged and—and I’ll never forget it. No, I won’t that.’

Joe gazed at her over his large cup, with love, the white everlasting that grows in simple places, flowering in his face. He did not know that to such as Lily the snapping of flowers—even everlastings—was a matter of course. They were things to pick, use, fling away: only blossoms, not necessary to anyone, like vegetables and meat. So the gospel of the grey-hearted had sunk into Lily’s soul, which was meant to be a thing of colour and fragrance, but had been so frozen and stunted that only a poor little empty crevasse remained.