Ninety times; and the scythe was busy in the grass, and the corn would soon turn colour yet once more.
Peggy was dead too—nut-brown Peggy, with her sloe-black eyes, retroussé nose, and mischievous mouth, who had reaped and gleaned and garnered her master’s evil passion among convolvulus and poppy. Sweet Peggy, cast aside like the threshed-out straw, crushed, and broken, the light gone out in her eye, had forgotten her misery now the yew dropped its red berries on her resting-place. Fifty guineas, a heavy bribe in those days, the bailiff took to marry her. What a ghastly farce was celebrated that morn before God’s holy altar! But the vicar’s bulbous lips, that uttered those solemn words and jested, shall dip no more in the rosy wine they loved. He broke his neck when his horse fell at the double mound; but Andrew lives still. Peggy’s boy, chained to the plough like a born serf, but full of his real father’s fiery spirit, poached and stole, and worse, and at last laid his bones in the Australian gold rush.
Ninety times; and yet once more the wheat came on apace.
And Annica, Andrew’s wife, cursed and beaten and bruised; and Andrew the younger, his lawful son, and Alice his wife, who were treated as dogs, and wore out their lives up at the farmstead farther in the hills: in Millbourne churchyard the moss has grown over their names graven on the sides of the great square tomb. May, their child, alone lived, a blithe and gentle creature, dreading her grim grandfather, only breathing freely when she could get away down to Greene Ferne, yet trying and schooling herself to love him; but hating Jane, the old snuff-taking housekeeper, as intensely as so affectionate a nature could hate anything.
Yet once more the swallows were wheeling in the summer air.
On the keystone of the porch was chiselled Anno 15—; the other figures effaced, but cut some time in the century that saw the Armada. A vast, rambling, many-gabled, red-tiled building, with vines and cherries trained against the grey walls, and honeysuckle creeping about the porch. The steep Downs rose behind, barely a gunshot distant; from Andrew’s window there was an open view of the vale. The pool almost surrounded the garden—part moat, part fishpond, part mill-pool—and was crossed by a wooden bridge. There the moorhens swam and threw up their white-marked tails as they thrust their beaks under water; the timid dabchick, which no familiarity with man can reassure, dived at the faintest footstep; the pike basked in the sunshine warming his cold blood, and the sturdy perch with tremulous tail faced the slow stream. By the stones of the sluice dark-green ferns flourished exceedingly. The sheep crept along the steep coombe-side cropping the short sweet grass; the shepherd sat on the edge and cut his own and his sweetheart’s name in the turf. Time was when Andrew could run up the hill there light as a hare. Now his slow walk, hard bearing on blackthorn staff, in summer went no farther than the green before the porch, where the sundial stood with the motto on its brazen face, bidding men to number none but the happy hours, and to forget the dark and shadowy—a bitter mockery at fourscore and ten. In winter he crept twice or thrice a day across the courtyard to the barn, where, despite steam, he kept three old men at work on the threshing-floor—not for charity, but because he liked to listen to the knock-knock of the flails.
Ever round and round, without haste and without rest, went the massive wheel in the mill—ceaseless as the revolving firmament—to the clack of the noisy hopper and creak of the iron gudgeons, and the flousing splash of the millrace. Hard as his own nether millstone was the heart of Andrew Fisher: does time soften the gnarled stem of the oak?
So he sat by the open window in his beehive chair that summer afternoon drowsily listening to the mill. In the window was the escutcheon of his family in coloured glass, and the name “Fischere” in old-fashioned letters. Fishere of the Warren was fined one hundred pounds as a noted malignant in the days of fear and trembling that followed Worcester fight.
The shadow stole forward on the dial, and there came the dull hollow sound of horse’s hoofs passing over the wooden bridge. Presently Jane the housekeeper, who, by virtue of her necessity to him in his infirmities, used no ceremony nor courtesy of speech, came in.
“There be a paason wants to see thee,” said she.
No answer.
“Dost hear?”
A grunt.
“Wake up!”—shaking him.
He struck at her with his blackthorn that ever lay between his knees.
“Thee nistn’t hoopy at I—I can hyar as well as thee,” he growled.
“A paason wants to see thee.”
“Axe un in.”
“Come in, you!” shouted the old hag, without going to the door. “Shall I put thee jug away?” This to Andrew, and meaning the jug of weak gin-and-water which he kept constantly by him to sip.
“Let un bide.”
Felix St. Bees came into the room. He had ridden up to ask for the hand of May, his darling. It was not a reception to encourage a lover.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said Felix.
“Arternoon to ee.”
