Unknown (58 page)

Crummie expressed the complete identity of her opinions with those just expressed. Her eyes lingered for a moment, clinging timidly to Sam's, like a goldfinch to a thistle-head, and then, dropping her soft eyelashes till they nearly rested upon her cheek, she looked down at her hands which were clasped very tight upon her lap. She began wondering if there would be any possible chance that lie might offer to take her home that night. None of her family was here. She prayed to God that there might be thunder and lightning, so that it would seem a monstrous thing for her to have to go alone! How lucky that Sally Jones lived in the opposite direction and that there was indeed no one here who came from her end of the town! “If he only thinks of it, or if his father thinks of it I believe he will!” But she had no sooner begun to imagine what it would be like walking in the darkness at Sam's side or clinging to his arm amid terrific claps of thunder, than she was seized with a fit of shivering; not violent shivering but a constant recurrence of that sensation of cold shivering which is described as “a goose walking over your gra\e.” Crum-mie became afraid lest Sam would notice thai this queer irresistible shudder kept running through her body. To herself it seemed so terribly apparent that she was intensely grateful to old Weatherwax for not waiting to be seated but commencing his ditty from the middle of the floor between the fireplace and the table. There was a really intense stillness round that candlelit disordered table covered with half-empty cups and wine glasses and with orange skins and nut shells as the great perspiring countenance of the satyrish gardener composed itself into what he felt to be his singing expression. Mr. Weatherwax's singing expression was as a matter of fact little short of maudlin. What might be called a radiant imbecility beamed from that great face, the eyes of which were tightly closed.

In the silence that awaited his first note, Sam Dekker, whose ears were as sharp as the ears of a fox, caught distinctly the sound, from some room on the landing above, of a low-pitched miserable weeping. Sam had been all that evening aware of many things that had been unnoticed even by his father. He alone among them all had not been oblivious of that insubstantial shadow forming in the moonlight, melting away in the moonlight, and then reshaping itself there; swaying and hovering above the Glastonbury roofs, in vaporous convulsed movements, as if the atmosphere of that-night contained an element that could gather itself up, condense itself, solidify itself, and take the form of the beams of a vast cross upon which that shadowy figure was hung. But Sam's consciousness of this vaporous shadow, twisting and turning in pain up there, now began to be blent and confused in his mind with a definite human suffering that was going on, below the roof of the Vicarage but above the ceiling of the museum. Old Weather wax's rumbling bass voice singing the following stave seemed to his ears to be a fit symbol of the world's attitude to both these griefs.

"The Brewer, the Malster, the Miller and I Had a heifer, had a filly, had a Ding-Dong; When Daffadowndillies look up at the sky; Pass along boys! Pass along!

"The Brewer, the Malster, the Miller and I Lost a heifer, lost a filly, lost a Ding-Dong: When oak-leaves do fall and when swallows do fly; Pass along boys! Pass along!

"The Brewer, the Malster, the Miller and me

Found a heifer, found a filly, found a Ding-Dong; They weren't the same pretties, but what's that to we? Pass along boys! Pass along!

“The Brewer, the Malster, the Miller and I Left a heifer, left a filly, left a Ding-Dong; Down in a grassy green grave for to lie; ¦ Pass along boys! Pass along!”

Many of the older men present seemed to know this ditty well. They must have often heard the old man humming it in the bar of St. Michael's Inn. Several voices therefore joined in that rather brutal chorus of “Pass along, boys! Pass along!”

Mat Dekker, who himself was so congenitally ignorant of music that he could not distinguish “God Save the King” from “The British Grenadiers,” kept swaying his rugged grey head from side to side, not retaining any sort of time, but with a general idea of helping matters forward by this token. Crummie kept a sly, sideways watch upon Sam's face; and when she saw that he had begun to work the muscles of his chin up and down, and to lower his head over his plate and over the mutilated joint of bacon in front of him, she too allowed her expression to assume an air of weary melancholy; and instead of looking at old Weatherwax she looked with tender sympathy at the pathetically wagging head of the master of the house at the end of the table. The close of the gardener's song was greeted with resounding applause. “Hen-cor! Hen-cor!” screamed Mrs. Robinson in a shrill voice. “Give us another, Mister!” cried the Nietzschean young man from Wollop's. Old Weatherwax cleared his throat, passed his hand over his brow, straddled his gaitered legs more widely, planted his leather boots more firmly, turned his head to wink at the square form of Penny Pitches which was now blocking up the door into the passage, shut his eyes tightly once more, lifted his chin a little, and began:—

"With backside and so 'gainst they bars, Peggee, With backside and so 'gainst they bars. With a flagon o' Zomerset ale in me hand. There baint none as merry as we in the land, Beneath they twinklin' stars, Peggee, Beneath they twinklin' stars. Hips and haws: and up and down dale! And the Devil may fill the wold Roman's pail!

"With a doxy like thee on me knees, Peggee,

With a doxy like thee on me knees And his Lordship"s plumpest bird i' me pot,

And a Sedgemoor-peat-fire to baste 'un hot. There be luck in the barrel's lees, Peggee,

There be luck in the barrel's lees. Hips and haws, and up and down dale! And the Devil may fill the wold 'ooman's pail!"

Like the crafty comedian that he was, Isaac Weatherwax paused at the end of this second verse in order to enjoy to the full the exquisite savour of rich response to which he knew himself entitled.

It was at this point that Sam, under cover of the beating of heels on the ground, the knocking of knife-handles on the table, the clapping of hands, the well-satisfied chuckles, the boisterous “bravos” and “hear-hears,” got up from Crummie's side and began making his way to his father's end of the table. Crummie followed him with a gaze of intense concern; but she discreetly kept her place, and indeed moved up a little closer to Grandmother Cole, whose seat was on the further edge of Sam's empty place. She saw him ask some question of his father and caught a surprised look on the older man's face. This look was followed, however, by a grave nod, as if he said—“Do what you please, but I cannot see any good that can come of it!”

Sam paused at the top of the stairs to ascertain from which of the rooms that sound of crying proceeded—had his father let them take the girl into his mother's room, the one he always kept unused?—and, as he stood there listening, he became conscious once more, as he had been intermittently conscious all that night, of that vast, outraged shadow, hovering there in the moonlight above the roofs of the town. He also became conscious —as if it were the executioners themselves, at that official assassination, bawling out some bawdy ditty from the Suburra of Rome— of the thick-lhroated gardener's finale:—

"There be Gammer Death at the sill, Peggee! There be Gammer Death at the sill! And the Lord, his wone self, be a-hanging for we; And Leviathan be coming up out of the sea; And Behemoth over the hill, Peggee, And Behemoth over the hill! Hips and haws, and up and down dale;

But the Devil may have we for wold 'ooman's pail!"

No, it was not from his mother's room; it was from the spare-room that the sound was coming. It was not the sound of crying now, either; it was the sound of several voices, some of them raised quite high. He strode down the passage, knocked sharply at the spare-room door and entered without awaiting a reply.

Tossie Stickles was lying on the great four-poster bed under the curtained canopy. She had not disturbed the embroidered counterpane. She had not disturbed the carefully folded ends of the curtains whose fringes, matching the valances that touched the floor, lay at the outer edges of the two pillows. This bed had come from their ancestral home in the Quantocks. William of Orange had been one of those who had slept under that canopy. Perhaps that wise and indulgent ruler had been, in his hour, as careful as Tossie herself not to disturb those elegantly folded fringes.

“Mr. Dekker said as ye was all to clear out and leave I with 'er and none body else!” was what Sam heard Sally Jones saying as he opened the door. Sally's blue eyes were flashing with indignation on behalf of her friend; but standing immovably before her, not budging an inch, was—or had been until Sam entered— the slender and virginal figure of Lily Rogers. Lily's melancholy gusto for romantic situations, her almost maniacal penchant for seduced maidens, as long as their seducers belonged to the class known as gentlefolk, were emotions that had been satisfied this evening as they had never been satisfied in all Lily's conscious life. The fact that the general gossip of the town pointed its finger at Mr. Barter as the Villain in the case was a coincidence that heightened Lily's excitement to fever-pitch. She herself had been kissed more than once by the dissolute East Anglian: and it had been much more the propinquity of Louie—who also liked him —than any ice-cold resistance in herself that had kept her relations with this gentleman at such a discreet point.

Sam was not by any means a virtuoso in the delicate entanglements of female quarrels, so that all he did at this moment was to continue holding the door wide open as if he took for granted that Lily would retire. But Lily—who had known c*young Master Sam“ a good many years and wTas several years older than lie was—showed no sign of retiring. ”Penny thought Fd better come up to see-------“ she began. But Sam cut her short. ”My father told me to amuse these young ladies till he could leave the table.'* he said. “I wish you'd tell Penny, Lily, not to forget those boxes of sweets that I bought for dessert. Please run down now and tell her—there's a good girl!”

Lily cast a final gloating look at the youthful sufferer stretched out on William the Third's bed, a lool' ihat was replied to by a glare of fury from the blubbered face auid brown eyes of Tossie. She then gave her graceful head a delicate little toss and went off. Sam came straight over and sat down on the edge of the bed, motioning to Sally to subside into a stately Louis Quatorze chair, wrhose gilded arms and embroidered roses had hitherto kept this slum-born niece of Number Two at a respectful distance. “Don't 'ee cry about it, little girl,” he said tenderly, laying his hand on one of the plump knees of the prostrate victim of East Anglian incontinence. “Dad'll be up to see you soon. Won't he, Sally? And as long as I've known Dad's ways, and that's as long as I've known the difference between girls and boys, I've never known him not to make everything easy for anyone who's in your trouble.”

“I be 'shamed to look 'ee in the face, Mr. Dekker, and that's the truth and Sal do know it. I never thought 'twould come out about me at choir-supper, making a reproach to all present and the singing and speeching scarce begun and all. I never thought 'twould be like it be or I never would-------” And the corners of Tossie's mouth dropped into the threat of another burst of crying.

“ 'Twere Lily what upset she, Master Sam,'* threw in Sally spitefully. ”Her had stopped yallering and were nigh sweet-asleep, when Penny and Lily came in. Emma Sly sent *em all away, and told I to go and tell the Master; but Lily Rogers, she come hack again, soon as Emma's back were turned; and 'twas more than Toss could bide, being as she be, to see thik white-faced ninny starin' at she out of her girt owl-eyes."

“Don't you cry, kid,” said Sam, quietly patting the plump hands which were now folded in the very style of one of Greuze's ambiguous Innocents, “don't cry, there's a brave girl! Dad'll do everything for you. And what's more hell not let Miss Fell or Miss Drew or Lily Rogers, or anyone else, say one single nasty thing about you.”

“Toss do say what worries she worst nor any think, be lest your Dad want she to tell on the gent she's kept company with. Be I right, Tossie; or baint I right?”

Tossie snatched her hands away from under Sam's and covered her face. “I won't tell a thing . . . not if I goes to prison for it! I won't! I won't! I won't!” The girl flung out these words so passionately that both Sam and Sally looked nervously at the door.

“That's all right, little one,” said the former soothingly. “Dad doesn't believe in telling tales.”

“He ain't so rich as they all say he be! He baint looked after at all. He baint got no girl to be nice to he, 'cept me—and now he'll have no one, he'll have no one . . . never no more . . . when I be in workhouse!” The bitter crying that had disturbed Sam's peace in the room below began again now, under those white, short, plump fingers.

“Listen, Tossie Stickles, listen to what I say,” quoth Sam sternly. “Take your hands from your face and stop that now! Do you hear? Stop that now, and listen to me!”

Sally Jones was so astonished at this unexpected tone of severity that she found the courage to lay her sticky fingers on the gilded arms of her Louis Quatorze chair as she leaned forward. Tossie permitted Sam to remove her hands from her face and swallowed down her sobs.

“That's right,” he said. “Now listen. No one's going to put you in the workhouse. No one's going to separate you from your friend. Dad's not one for forcing people to marry each other when they don't want to, though! You must get that clearly into your head. Hell ask Miss Crow to keep you jusi as vou are; and you can go to the hospital here when your time comes: and then well see what's to be done.”

“I don't want to go to no horse-pital!” wailed Tossie, beginning to cry again.

“Well! You don't have to . . . yet . . . child,'” Sam responded with something like a faint smile. “You're going to be all right, anyhow. No one's going to say a word; and you must go on being a good, hard-working girl at Miss Crow's, like you've always been.”

“What will I tell Auntie, out to Greylands?” murmured the figure on the big bed.