“That sixpence went to the chapel Sunday School Treat,” said Richard. “Paganism has been made respectable.”
“What will Rachel wear as the May Queen?”
“She speaks of a wreath of pansies if there are enough of them out to make it; her companions will have chaplets of forget-me-nots, and they will carry the bower while she carries an armful of tulips. She did not speak of her dress, but of course it will be a white one, and they will wear black worsted stockings and solid little hobnailed boots laced high up the leg.”
“Rachel doesn’t worry about her boots,” said Anne at once, and her thoughts flew back to Mr. Yockney, then she looked round the studio thinking that the rent was paid out of the grocer’s shop at home. “I think Rachel’s perfectly happy. I think all your family are,” she said.
“So they ought to be,” said Richard, laughing. “See what a good son I am. I give my father an object in life, which is more than any of you do. He is very happy and proud of me. In the old days of course,” Richard went on, “the first of May was a great affair, with a maypole set up and a Jack of the Green. The May Queen was not a little girl in those days. You would have been chosen instead of Rachel and, having been kissed by all the boys in the village, you would have got rid of your obsession about never getting to know anyone.”
Anne blushed uncomfortably, and looked at Grandison, who must, she thought, have repeated what she had said while he was seeing her home. “An obsession about never getting to know anyone!” and she wondered if Richard had summed her up for ever in these unkind words.
“I expect the maze was laid out on a May-day,” said Richard, “and the monument is nothing more than a stone maypole, or something with the same signification.”
“I can tell you about the monument,” said Anne. “It commemorates the restoration of Charles II, and was put up by a young man of nineteen, who must have come back from France with the King and recovered his sequestered estate:—a small enough one, I should guess, and the Old Hall. I suppose the maze might have been cut on a May-day, and no doubt they had a maypole on the green again: they had been put down under the Commonwealth, but I doubt if there were many to dance. All the better people had served in Cromwell’s regiments. Except in Huntingdon itself, they were all Puritans.”
“Then we must imagine your young cavalier setting up a maypole on the green and dancing with gypsy girls and all the riff-raff he could assemble, while the village people held aloof under the elm trees round the edges of the green and prayed for a thunderstorm,” said Richard.
“There were oak trees in those days, not elms,” said Anne.