Eli, leaning over the gate, listened to the gay voice dwindling away up the valley, and then turned with a sigh.
Dawn was breaking, the mists were rolling up, the hills loomed gigantic in the half-light, studded with granite escarpments, patchworked with clumps of gorse, thorn and bracken—his battlefield.
Ortho had gone again, gone singing to try his fortune in the great world among foreign multitudes. For him the dour grapple with the wilderness—and he was glad of it. He disliked foreigners, disliked taking chances. Here was something definite, something to lock his teeth in, something to be subdued by sheer dogged tenacity. He broke the news that Ortho had gone gypsying again that evening at supper.
Teresa exploded like a charge of gun-powder. She announced her intention of starting after her son at once, dragging him home and having Pyramus arrested for kidnapping. Then she ramped up and down the kitchen, cursing everybody present for not informing her of Ortho’s intentions. When they protested that they had been as ignorant as herself, she damned them for answering her back.
Eli, who came in for most of her abuse, slipped out and over the hill to Roswarva, had a long farming talk with Penaluna and borrowed a pamphlet on the prevention of wheat diseases.
The leggy girl Mary sat in a corner sewing by the light of a pilchard chill and saying never a word. Just before Eli left she brought him a mug of cider, but beyond drinking the stuff he hardly noticed the act and even forgot to thank her. He found Teresa sitting up for him. She had her notched sticks and the two remaining money bags on the table in front of her. She looked worried.
“Here,” she growled as her younger son entered. “Count this.” Eli counted. There was a round hundred pounds in the one bag and thirty-one pounds, ten shillings and fourpence in the other. He told her.
“There was fifty,” said she. “How much have I spent then?”
“Eighteen pounds, ten shillings and eightpence.” Eli made a demonstration on his fingers.
Teresa’s black eyebrows first rose and then crumpled together ominously.