The fires of the “foreigners,” that had burnt so gaily in the hollow, had all fallen to embers; the moon rode across an inky blue sky where the afterglow had so late been warm; the camp was dead silent.
Martin rose from the straw within his hut and came out into the night, for he was restless and could not sleep. He stood outside trying to take comfort in a pipe, and looking up at the eastern sky where the windmill still made the huge black cross on the blue. The stars were coming out, but the moon’s light was fitful and the marsh-land beyond the hop-fields was gloomy save where the stream was touched now and then into the brightness of a glistening snake. A little dyke divided the stubble-field from the meadow beyond it, where a white horse strayed in the dusk. Martin thought he heard the wailing of an infant, and then the dull crooning of a woman’s singing come from among the willows, and then he saw a girl’s figure pacing up and down with a little bundle in her arms. Presently the girl crossed over to the last hut in the camp, which he knew to be Jenny’s, deposited the bundle within, came out again, and, stretching her tired arms above her head, stood leaning a moment against the straw.
He felt his heart stir; what did it mean? And he crossed the field at once that he might know.
Yet he was not sure that he wanted to speak to her, and it struck him that the sound of his footsteps crushing the stubble would arouse her. But she stood neither seeing nor hearing, with her eyes fixed on the sombre marsh-land yonder till a woman’s voice sounded in thick accents calling down the field.
“Jenny,” it said, “Jenny, girl, where ’ve ye got to?”
Then she started, and placed herself quickly before the door of the hut, and he as quickly withdrew behind it.
The woman shuffled over the stubble, catching her feet in it, and reeling slightly as she walked.
“Give me the child,” said she indistinctly when she got close to the girl. “I dursen’t let ye ’ave it no longer.”
Martin started now, for he saw that the woman was Mrs. Barnes.
“Dursen’t,” repeated Jenny savagely! “Ain’t I fitter to mind a child than you? Yes—though you be his mother! A nice state ye’re in to-night to mind a sick brat!”