Читать книгу The Golden Arrow - Mary Webb - Страница 16

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‘Your Joe’s gone off his chump, seemingly!’ said Mr. Shakeshaft to John. ‘Down at that cottage, day in, day out—missing good wages all for a wench. How bin the mighty fallen!’

‘They’ve kept company a goodish while,’ said John, primed by Patty, who did not want it to seem ‘a wedding as had to be.’ ‘It’s not a sudden-thought-of thing,’ he added anxiously. ‘Don’t go for to think that.’

‘Whoever did think it?’ said Mrs. Shakeshaft.

‘What’s Deb say to it?’

‘Oh, Deb!’ John smiled broadly. ‘Well, Deb, you see—Deb’s in—oh, I wunna to say!’

Down at Slepe the small, empty cottage echoed. Joe whitewashed, hammered, forked the garden, brought home a small recalcitrant pig, and finally went to Silverton and bought the furniture with his modest savings. Lily went with him, and they took the road past Bitterley, stopping to interview Eli.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘I give you the blessing of the Lord freely—freely. But I’ve nought else to give. Still, you wunna lack. He feedeth the young ravens that call upon Him. Get out, you fowls!—always running after me for sharps!’ Joe hoped that he and Lily would not be kept as short as Eli’s fowls. Lily went indoors, and came out with a small parcel—the severed locks. Mrs. Arden, confronted with a sobbing Lily who could only ejaculate ‘Ninepins!’—had set her wits to work, and remembered the ladies’ papers in the People’s Dining Saloon at Silverton market.

‘Why, Lil,’ she said, ‘it’s as clear as cider! You go in along of Joe when he goes after the furniture, and you take in your hair and get a switch made. It’s quite the thing. The advertisements say no lady should be without one. Then you just pin it in among them curls, and coil it round, and there you are.’

Lily, having got her parcel, set herself to work on her father’s pride, and finally squeezed thirty shillings out of him. Her small, rather forlorn heart was quite lit up by the joy of the shopping in store.

A ready-made white dress, a veil, a piece of artificial orange blossom, cotton gloves and the long-desired set of ribbon-trimmed undergarments—all these were at last stowed away in the trap, while Joe wandered from jeweller’s to jeweller’s, looking at such a multiplicity of rings that he became hopelessly confused.

‘Whoa there, lad!’ he apostrophized himself loudly, to the astonishment of the passers-by. ‘Where’s that little small one that I seed but now?’

Finally they went to choose the furniture in a whirl of haste and embarrassment, while a cool and dispassionate shop assistant yawned and wondered when it would be closing-time. Then they had tea. Joe’s ‘Tea and ham for two’ was full of the tones of love, pride and ecstasy: but Lily was surreptitiously absorbed in her ribbons, and the waitress, like Gallio, ‘cared for none of these things.’

The ostler at the ‘Drover’s Rest’ had a good deal to say as he piled things into the trap and let down the back to accommodate the iron bedstead.

‘You’re lugging home the furniture and the girl and all, seemingly,’ he said, surveying Joe’s best cap with a piece of honeysuckle stuck in at the side. ‘But I hanna seen the pram yet—no, I hanna.’

His face was convulsed with wrinkles of laughter. Joe looked at Lily out of the corner of his eye as they drove out of the cobbled yard. This was ‘Something like!’ he felt. Such things were the small change of the marriage festival, and made him realize his fortune.

‘Funny chap, eh, Lil?’ he ventured.

‘I don’t like that sort of fun.’

‘Of course not,’ said Joe, much dashed.

They spoke of where the furniture would stand, and wondered if the weather would ‘keep up,’ as they jogged home. They went through the great, golden plain of corn, set with jade-green meadows of aftermath, blue-green turnips and the black-green secrecy of woods. They had to pass through four little villages besides Slepe in the long twelve miles of quiet road. At each one, as evening drew on, the young men leaned against a wall or over a bridge, smoking, the day’s work done, and setting up a hearty cheer when the trap hove in sight.

‘Oh, dear!’ said Lily. ‘I feel all of a shake, like Quaker’s grass.’

‘Well,’ Joe replied, with what was meant for comfort, ‘it’s nothing at all to what getting married is. But never you fret, Lil—it’ll be o’er, soon or late, and you and me all by our lonesome in that there little place for good and all.’

‘Look at them Wyandottes over there!’ said Lily hastily. Joe was momentarily interested, and they fell back upon slight things until the long climb from Slepe began. Then Joe said —

‘I think you met let me kiss you now.’

‘A’ right.’

‘And I’m going to put my arm round you too, tight. For we’ll be man and wife the day after to-morrow.’

They came silently up the steep, half-obliterated track in the heather. Joe was quiet and soberly happy, Lily trepidant, very curious as to the new Joe who was appearing; she kept at arm’s length the picture of the future, as conjured by Mrs. Arden’s remarks. Mentally slipshod, she had none of the rare, sad, godlike faculty for seeing the end of a thing in its inception. Deborah possessed it in large measure.