In the morning he breakfasted without seeing her, but as he had business in the world that gave him just an hour longer at the Inn before he left it for good and all, he went into the smoke-room and found her. She greeted him with curious gaze, but merrily enough, for there were other men there now, farmers, a butcher, a registrar, an old, old man. The hour passed, but not these men, and at length he donned his coat, took up his stick, and said good-bye. Her shining glances followed him to the door, and from the window as far as they could view him.
WEEP NOT MY WANTON
WEEP NOT MY WANTON
Air and light on Sack Down at summer sunset were soft as ointment and sweet as milk; at least, that is the notion the down might give to a mind that bloomed within its calm horizons, some happy victim of romance it might be, watching the silken barley moving in its lower fields with the slow movement of summer sea, reaching no harbour, having no end. The toilers had mostly given over; their ploughs and harrows were left to the abandoned fields; they had taken their wages and gone, or were going, home; but at the crown of the hill a black barn stood by the roadside, and in its yard, amid sounds of anguish, a score of young boar pigs were being gelded by two brown lads and a gipsy fellow. Not half a mile of distance here could enclose you the compass of their cries. If a man desired peace he would step fast down the hill towards Arwall with finger in ear until he came to quiet at a bank overlooking slopes of barley, and could perceive the fogs of June being born in the standing grass beyond.
Four figures, a labourer and his family, travelled slowly up the road proceeding across the hill, a sound mingling dully with their steps—the voice of the man. You could not tell if it were noise of voice or of footsteps that first came into your ear, but it could be defined on their advance as the voice of a man upbraiding his little son.
“You’re a naughty, naughty—you’re a vurry, vurry naughty boy! Oi can’t think what’s comen tyeh!”
The father towered above the tiny figure shuffling under his elbow, and kept his eyes stupidly fixed upon him. He saw a thin boy, a spare boy, a very shrunken boy of seven or eight years, crying quietly. He let no grief out of his lips, but his white face was streaming with dirty tears. He wore a man’s cap, an unclean sailor jacket, large knickerbockers that made a mockery of his lean joints, a pair of women’s button boots, and he looked straight ahead.
“The idear! To go and lose a sixpence like that then! Where d’ye think yer’ll land yerself, ay? Where’d I be if I kept on losing sixpences, ay? A creature like you, ay!” and lifting his heavy hand the man struck the boy a blow behind with shock enough to disturb a heifer. They went on, the child with sobs that you could feel rather than hear. As they passed the black barn the gipsy bawled encouragingly: “S’elp me, father, that’s a good ’un, wallop his trousers!”