CHAPTER XI.
THE WHITE RAM.
he secret of Fairy’s parentage died with Dame Hursey, and for the next two or three years she lived quietly on with the Shelleys, nothing more remarkable than the finding of some rare bird, or an occasional tiff with Jack, the Lewes carnival on the fifth of November, and the sheep washing and shearing every June, occurring to vary the monotony of her happy life. She was naturally a bright, happy little creature, not much given to thinking, and if she sometimes wondered who she was and where she came from, she never allowed the matter to distress her; she had the Shelleys, and they all worshipped her, and if she wanted other friends she was always welcome at the Rectory, where she still continued to go every day for her lessons. As to the future, it is doubtful if she ever gave it a thought; she lived as all children do, for the present, at least, as far as this world is concerned, though neither she nor any one else could have been brought up by good John Shelley without learning that life here is but a preparation for the life to come. Ignorant as the shepherd was in many things, he was by no means ignorant in things spiritual, and his knowledge of the Bible, large portions of which he knew by heart, would have put many an educated man and woman to shame. It was a favourite amusement of Fairy’s and the boys on long Sunday winter evenings, when there was no service at church, and after John had read the evening service to them, as he invariably did, to start him off in some chapter and see how long he would go on without stopping, saying it by rote. He always carried a small Bible in his pocket, and during his long days with the sheep, he had plenty of opportunities of studying it; and he studied it to some purpose, for he was a fine character. Faults he may have had, but you might have known him a long time before you discovered them. Mrs. Shelley, who had better opportunities of judging than anyone else, would have said he liked his own way too much; and that, for such a wise man as he was, it was surprising how easily he allowed a little thing like Fairy, whom he always had spoilt, to get over him; but it is doubtful whether in her heart of hearts she considered either of these faults.
If he had any pride in his composition it was entirely professional, and when one May evening, sixteen years after Fairy first was brought to Lewes, he announced to his family that he had been elected captain of the Lewes shearing company, his face certainly glowed with an honest pride, for he had then obtained the highest honour which could be conferred on a shepherd, and realised his fondest dreams of earthly happiness.
In those days it was the custom for shearers to form themselves into companies, called after the district in which they lived, and to go round to the various farms in the district in the shearing season, which begins in the middle of June, shearing the different flocks. The shearers in those days were generally shepherds, and each band had a lieutenant and a captain, the former distinguished by a silver band round his cap and a badge, the latter by a gold band and badge to match. They were chosen according to their proficiency in shearing, and for the good character they bore. John Shelley had been a lieutenant for some years, but he was now elected captain, owing to the death of the captain of the Lewes band, an old man over seventy; and with this honour some new duties devolved upon him, for at the captain’s house was held the shearing feast, called the White Ram. This feast lasted throughout the shearing week, and consisted of a supper after the day’s work was over; first, a good, substantial meal, in which the Sussex dish of beefsteak pudding, the crust made of flour and water, played an important part, and then ending with cakes and ale, during the consumption of which shearing songs were sung and many pipes were smoked till late in the long summer evening, when the men dispersed—sometimes not before midnight—to their various homes.
These bands are now a thing of the past, though the shearing is still done by men who go round for the purpose, but no lambs are shorn nowadays, so the work is very much lessened.
“There is plenty of work for you, Polly; you’ll have to get someone in to help you; we shall have to have the White Ram here for the future,” said John.
“Oh, what fun!” exclaimed Fairy; “now I shall see it all, and hear the shearing songs. Mother, you must let me help; John says no one can make plum heavies, not even you, mother, like me: can they, John?”
“No, but I am thinking those little white fingers of yours are not fit for that sort of work, my pretty one,” said John.
“Stuff! white fingers can work as well as red ones—better, I daresay, if the truth were known. And may I help to wait on you?” asked Fairy.
“No, certainly not,” growled Jack; “you listen outside to the shearing songs with me, but you are not going inside to wait on a lot of rough men, who will, perhaps, take more beer than they ought.”
“No, Jack; I’ll have none of that; it shall never be said that John Shelley’s White Ram is disgraced by drunkenness. But you must come to the feast, even if Fairy does not, for you must go round shearing this year; it is time you began, if, as I hope, one of these days you are to take my place of captain.”
“There’s an honour for you, Captain Jack. Don’t you wish you may ever get it?” laughed Fairy.
But Jack neither laughed nor wished for the honour; hitherto he had always managed to escape going round with the shearers, but this year he saw he must go, since he had not the heart to throw a shadow over his father’s innocent joy by refusing; so he said with the best grace he could, “Very well, father, I’ll go shearing, but Fairy can’t be left out in the cold, I shall have to stay with her during the supper.”
“No, you need not, we will take it by turns; I can stop with Fairy sometimes,” said Charlie, a remark by no means calculated to soothe Jack, whose love and jealousy had grown greatly in the last few years; but Mrs. Shelley wisely stopped the discussion by remarking that there was plenty of time to settle the details, as the sheep-washing was not begun yet.
“It begins to-morrow though; Jack and I are off with half our flock at daybreak to-morrow. Charlie, you must follow the rest for a day or two; I must have Jack with me to-morrow,” said the shepherd.
“And I shall come too. If mother can’t take me, I shall get the Leslies to come. I always go to see our sheep washed every year,” said Fairy.
Accordingly, early next morning the shepherd and his son were up at dawn, driving their sheep to the brook in which the sheep-washing took place. For some days previously, preparations had been made for this washing, which lasts two or three weeks, as all the sheep for miles round are brought to this spot. These preparations consisted of pens made of hurdles by the side of the river for the sheep; in the stream itself, opposite to each other, were erected two rough pulpits or deal boxes, in which stand the sheep-washers. When Jack and his father arrived, it was so early that no one was there, not even the washers; but at ten o’clock, when Mrs. Shelley and Fairy went, the scene was a most lively one.
Hundreds of sheep were in the pens, some white and clean, their agonies over; others still dirty, with their tortures to come. On the neighbouring bridge stood or leant every child in the village, thoroughly enjoying the sight. On the roadside were some stragglers of all grades, watching the performance, one or two farmers on horseback who had a lively interest in the washing of their flocks, and on the banks several shepherds, among them Jack and his father, all armed with large, toothless wooden rakes, with which they push the sheep about, holding them under water when necessary, and steering them from pulpit to pulpit.
What with the laughter and screams of delight from the children, the shouts of the shepherds, and the coughing of the sheep and jingling of their bells, the scene is a very noisy one; but, noisy as it is, Fairy thoroughly enjoys it, and declares she must stay till the last of John’s red-ringed flock are finished. It is such fun to see the poor sheep tumbled into the water and then rolled over on its back and rubbed from head to foot in the bright, clear stream, first by one washer in his pulpit, and then, after sundry pushes and thumps from the toothless rakes, to be seized by the other washer and subjected to another vigorous rubbing and scrubbing, and splashing and dashing, and finally to be pushed off to scramble or swim as best it might out of the river.
Poor, patient sheep! They take their sufferings in very good part, and submit meekly enough to the inevitable ordeal, basing a protest as feeble as it is useless, the older and wiser ones knowing that this washing is but a preliminary to the still more disagreeable ceremony of shearing to be performed a fortnight hence, as soon as the wool is dry. And Fairy, fascinated by the picturesque scene, could not be persuaded to move when Mrs. Shelley was forced to go home to prepare some dinner—a useless labour, Fairy declared, since there would be no one to eat it, for Charlie had taken his with him, and John and Jack were too busy to stop for dinner, and she herself was not hungry, and had no intention of going home till all John’s sheep were washed. But Mrs. Shelley had no idea of leaving a pretty young girl like Fairy alone among a crowd of people, so she proposed they should both go home and fetch some dinner and share it out in the field with John and Jack, a proposal Fairy jumped at; and an hour later the four were sitting on a bank under a hedge of blackthorn, with a carpet of buttercups and daisies at their feet, eating their simple meal as happy as it was possible for four people to be.
And then, while the shepherd smoked his pipe, Jack gave Fairy a lesson in the notes of the different birds which were singing around them, and Mrs. Shelley listened with pride to her eldest and darling son, and wondered whether Fairy would ever care for him in the way he evidently cared for her, and thought what a handsome couple they would make.
“Oh, Jack, how clever you are; you know everything; but there, I do know one thing—I am right this time at least—there is a skylark singing up over our heads. Look,” cried Fairy, who had been making various wrong guesses at the names of the different songsters around them.
“Poor little Fairy! you are wrong again; it is a woodlark; the skylark mounts up straight in a succession of springs, and then hovers, singing; the woodlark flies round and round in circles, singing all the while, as this bird is doing,” said Jack.
“Oh, I give it up; I know nothing; but as long as I have you to tell me, what does it matter? I shall go and look for a wheatear’s nest in that fence,” said Fairy, rising and shaking back her long golden hair, which she still wore down her back, and which added greatly to her childish appearance.
“My pretty one, wheatears don’t build in fences,” cried John Shelley, as she ran lightly past him.
“She is doing it on purpose; she knows as well as you and I wheatears build in rabbit-holes or chalk-pits; she only wants me to scold her,” said Jack.
“It is time we were at work again, Jack, or we shan’t get our eight hundred washed to-day,” said John, who saw Jack showed signs of going after Fairy, and wisely thought he would not see him back in a hurry if he once let him go.
So the sheep-washing began again, and Mrs. Shelley, who had brought some work with her, promised Fairy to remain till tea-time, on condition that she then accompanied her home.
“I do enjoy it so, mother,” said Fairy; “it would be wicked to spend such a bright warm sunny day as this shut up in a house; it is so delicious out in this field. I wonder how much they pay those washers; it must be dreadfully hard work; they ought to pay them well.”
“They give them half-a-crown for every hundred sheep, and they can wash a thousand sheep a day, but these men won’t do more than finish John’s eight hundred to-day.”
“That leaves nearly eight hundred more for to-morrow. Oh! do let us come and have another day like this. Will you, mother?” pleaded Fairy.
Mrs. Shelley looked at the fair little face, with its great brown eyes, its dainty pink and white complexion, and the long wavy hair which veiled the slight girlish figure, and smiled and sighed—the smile was for Fairy, and the sigh for Jack—as she promised to do so if the weather were fine.
THE SHEEP-WASHING.
And so it came to pass that that sheep-washing was long remembered by Jack as two of the happiest days in his life, though, alas! they came to an end, as all days, however happy, must only too soon; and then came a fortnight of preparation for the great event of the shepherds’ year—the sheep-shearing and the Feast of the White Ram. Jack had not much to do with the preparations, for he was upon the downs with his washed flock, but little else was talked of when he came home in the evening, and it was a very busy time for Mrs. Shelley, who had to provide supper for twelve men for five nights, the shearing beginning on the Tuesday, and ending on the Saturday, when the money earned was divided among the company. It had been a source of much anxiety to Mrs. Shelley to know where the supper was to be held. To have these twelve men in the kitchen in which she had to cook it all would be very inconvenient, and she was by no means inclined to lend the little sitting-room, which Fairy had made so pretty, for the purpose; but at last Jack suggested borrowing a tent and pitching it in the field near the house, a plan which was at once adopted. The shearing itself took place outside a barn belonging to the farmer who owned the sheep about to be shorn, and the company went round to the principal farmers in the neighbourhood, taking one each day of the shearing week. How Jack hated this business of shearing! He would have given anything to have got out of it, if he could only have done so without vexing his father; but as this was impossible, he was obliged to go on with it with the best grace he could, but he was in an irritable mood all the week. The work brought him into contact with other shepherds, with none of whom had he anything in common, and made him realise his lowly position, which in his lonely life on the downs, lost in his studies, he was apt to forget. He would long ago have given up his shepherd’s calling and gone to London to seek more congenial work, if it had not been for Fairy; she was the magnet which held him in her vicinity, but he was daily becoming aware that if any of his dreams were to be realised, he must go away at once, though the time he spent on the downs was by no means wasted, since he was educating himself to the best of his ability. His idea was to try and get an appointment as usher in a school, for which in those days he was fully qualified. In teaching others he would learn himself; he would have access to books of all kinds, and he would be able in his leisure hours to pursue his favourite study of natural history. He had confided this plan to Mr. Leslie, who had promised to look out for him, and when an opening occurred to give him a testimonial. Another reason which had kept Jack at home hitherto was that Charlie was barely old enough to take his place, but during this last sheep-washing Charlie had had the care of half the flock, and had shown himself quite up to his work, which, in the summer, at any rate, was just the lazy, dreamy kind of life to suit an indolent nature like his, and Jack saw he need no longer delay his departure because there was no one to take his place. On the contrary, it would solve a difficulty, for it had hitherto been rather a puzzle to know what to do with Charlie since John Shelley only required one under-shepherd, and he did not seem to have any inclination for any other kind of work. Accordingly, all through the White Ram Jack was making up his mind to tear himself away from Fairy, in the hope of eventually winning for himself a position he could ask her to share, and the thought of the coming separation did not tend to make him happier.
Every morning he started with the rest of the Lewes company of shearers, with his father at their head, for some farm, where they spent their day in shearing the sheep, pausing about twelve and again about two o’clock to “light up,” that is to sharpen their shears, eat cakes, and drink beer, the meal of the day being supper when they got back after their labours were over.
(To be continued.)