4
In spite of the Warnings of his Better Nature a young man looks covetously to Bilby’s Doll.
On certain days the men of the two farms combined their labours, then Doll brought to her foster father his midday dinner. To suit his fancy she would bring food for herself also. This food she would eat quickly and without speaking to any one, keeping close to Mr. Bilby. On those harvest days, when the sun was bright on the stubble and heat shimmered in the air, the shade beneath the oaks was grateful. Doll Bilby, in the bright dresses her foster father bought for her, looked as fresh within this shade as one of those little summer flowers that go down before the scythes of harvesters. This Titus noticed, and he knew, although never a word had been spoken to him, that his father wished the match and his mother opposed it.
Also he noticed that the young woman, although so small, was made in a neat and most pleasing manner. She was more dainty, more finicky in her cut than the big English girls. He often thought, as he stretched himself to rest upon the earth, that to the eye of a man of rare discernment such delicacy and small perfection might give more pleasure than more opulent charms, yet he never went so far as to say that he himself was that discerning man. Likewise it pleased him that she was shy before him, for he had been over-courted. When he would stretch his body along the ground close to where she sat, she would gaze unsmilingly at him out of her wild, troubled eyes, and something in that gaze—some necromancy—stirred his blood, so that at nights he felt desire for her, and often dreamed impossible things of her.
During all that year of harvest he had no thought for another one but only of Bilby’s wicked Doll. He knew the stories of her—for his mother was forever at his elbow whispering things. He knew of her foreign birth, how she had once blasted an unborn child, how she and Goody Greene had afflicted Mrs. Bilby some years ago, making her vomit pins and fur (for to such proportions had the story of the woman’s illness already grown), and he could see for himself how she bewitched her foster father out of his seven senses.
As he gazed upon her sometimes the marrow grew cold in his bones. He thought if he were a wise and Christian man, he would have none of her in spite of his own father’s cupidity. In his heart he, like his mother, feared her. He could not understand the power she, without effort, had over him, for the very sight of her coming across the hot fields of noon threw him into a cold, dismal, unnatural sweat. Now was his heart set towards this marriage, but he looked with dread as well as joy to that day which should unite her to him. He believed that whatever her secret might be she should deliver it up to him on her bridal. Half he was persuaded that he would find that she, like Sara in the Book of Tobit, had a demon lover, who would strangle any bridegroom, nor had he an angel or a fish’s liver, with which to protect himself.