Chapter VIII
IN WHICH LOVEDAY CONTINUES HER QUEST AND ACHIEVES TENPENCE
Loveday ran down the path to the Vicarage gate so fast that the tears she had not been able to restrain blew off her cheeks as she went. Thus it came about that she did not see Miss Letitia until she had all but knocked her down in the urgency of her flight.
Letitia Veale was no sylph such as Miss Le Pettit, however, and she caught hold of Loveday like the good-natured, rather romping, young lady that she was. Mrs. Veale always said of her that she would "fine down," but persons less well disposed to her than her own mother, and who were the mothers of daughters themselves, said that Letitia Veale was a sad hoyden. She had ever a merry nod or word for Loveday, and dazed with anger as that ill-balanced maid was, Letitia's smile won her to comparative calm again, though it was a calm with which cunning intermingled. For:—
"Oh, miss," cried Loveday, "I do beg your pardon ..." Then, seeing by the young lady's pleasant face that she had not offended by her clumsiness—"but I was so sick with misery I didn't rightly see where I was going."
"Why, whatever is the matter, Loveday?" asked the lively girl.
"Miss, I can't tell you, not now, but oh, miss, you've always been good to me, will you do something for me? I've never asked you for nothing before, have I?"
"Why, no, you have not, Loveday. What is it?"
"Have you such a thing as an old white sash you could let me have, miss? I just can't rightly tell you how I want it. It don't matter how old, so I can wash and iron it. Oh, miss...?"
Letitia thought for a moment, then shook her brown ringlets.
"I'm so sorry, Loveday, since you want it so much, but the only white sash I have is my new one for Flora Day. I have an old black one I could let you have though."
"Black! Oh, Miss Letitia, that's no good. Couldn't you let me have the white one? I'll work and work to make the money to buy you another, and your mother'd get you a new one for the Flora."
"Loveday, you know I couldn't. Mamma would insist on knowing what I'd done with it, you know she would."
"You couldn't—you couldn't say you'd lost it, miss?" asked Loveday, even her tongue faltering at the suggestion.
But though Letitia might be a romp, she was not a deceitful girl, and she respected her mother.
"Oh, Loveday, how can you suggest such a thing? It would be telling mamma a lie. Besides, she would never believe me."
At this moment Mrs. Veale, hearing voices, opened the door and looked out.
"Letitia! Come in at once, and do not speak again to Loveday Strick."
Letitia made round eyes at Loveday and sped up the path. Loveday pushed open the gate and went out.
She went along the white dusty road, between the hedgerows of elder whose crumpled green leaves were unfolding in the sunny April weather, and her tears were the only rain that smiling country-side had seen for many a day, and they, to match the month, were already drying, for the fire burnt too high in Loveday for tears to hold her long. She fled along the road at first blindly, then more slowly as the exhaustion that follows on such rage as hers overcame her, and as she paused at last to sink against a mossy bank and rest, a horseman overtook her.
It was Mr. Constantine on his white cob, looking a very dapper gentleman, but Loveday heeded him not, only raising her great black eyes unseeingly at the sound of the hoofs. Yet that so sombre gaze arrested Mr. Constantine, for it seemed to him an unwonted look in that land of buxom maids. He drew rein beside her.
"Are you a gipsy, my girl?" he asked her kindly.
Loveday shook her head.
"Come, you have a tongue as well as that handsome pair of eyes, I suppose? No?"
"My tongue's wisht, it brings ill-luck," said Loveday.
Mr. Constantine studied her more attentively.
"If all women thought that, there'd be more happy marriages," he said, slipping his hand into his pocket. "You've wisdom on your tongue, whether it's lucky or no. You say you're not a gipsy?"
By this time it had dawned on Loveday what, in her absorption, she had not at first noticed, that she was speaking to one of the gentry, and to no less a one than Mr. Constantine, of Constantine. She stood up and dropped her curtsey out of habit, but sullenly. Oddly enough, it was the sullenness and not the curtsey that took Mr. Constantine's fancy.
"No, sir," said Loveday. "I'm not a gipsy. I'm Loveday Strick."
"Loveday ..." said the gentleman. "Loveday ... That's a beautiful name. No—it's more than a name, it's a phrase. A very beautiful phrase."
Loveday raised her eyes at this strange talk. Mr. Constantine took his hand out of his pocket and held out a silver sixpence.
"Gipsy or no, take that for your gipsy eyes, my dear," he said. Loveday stood hesitant. Even she, who had just begged of Miss Letitia, felt shame at taking a coin in charity. Yet she did so, for before her eyes she saw, not a silver sixpence, but the beginning of a length of white satin riband unrolling towards her through futurity. Perhaps, unknown to herself, her foreign blood prompted her to that sad Jesuitry which teaches all means are justifiable to the desired end. Perhaps she saw nothing beyond the beginning of her riband, but she held out her hand. Mr. Constantine dropped the sixpence into it, touched his cob with his heel and rode on. Loveday stayed in the hedge, the sixpence in her palm and hope once more in her soul. That hope was to faint and fall during the days that followed and saw her quest no nearer its fulfilment.
For who wished to employ the strange, dark girl that had always been aloof and distrusted? And who could credit this violent conversion to the ordered ways of domesticity? Who had the money to squander on help from without, when, within, if there were not enough hands for the work, then the work itself, like an unanswered letter, slipped into that dead place of unremembered things where nothing matters any more? Last week's cleaning left undone adds nothing appreciable to this week's dirt that next week's exertions may not remedy as easily together as singly—or so argued the slovenly housewife, while for the industrious no hands save their own could have scrubbed and polished to their liking.
Here and there Loveday earned a few odd pence, for a few hand's turns done when necessity or charity called in her vagrant services, but the Flora Dance of Bugletown was held upon the eighth of May, and when May Day dawned she had but tenpence for all her store—and the riband would cost as many shillings. Despair settled in her heart for the first time; often before it had knocked but been refused more than a glance within, but now her enfeebled arms could hold the door no longer, and that most dread of all visitors took possession of his own—for is not the human heart Despair's only habitation, without which he is but a homeless wanderer?
CHAPTER IX: IN WHICH LOVEDAY SEES ONE MAGPIE