As she passed the porch she stopped with a new curiosity to read the notices, in the past she had so often written them herself, but the notice which caught her eye brought back all her apprehensions:
NOTICE
Owing to the continued indisposition of the vicar, arrangements have been made for morning service to be held every Sunday by the Reverend J. Grasstalk and the Reverend the Honourable F. H. G. L. à Court Delariver, alternately, until further notice.
| F. Lambert H. Bottle | } | Churchwardens. |
“That means that father will lose his living unless I can persuade him.... I shall have to write to the Bishop. Perhaps if he took a holiday....” Anne hurried on and her spirits rose, for the worst had not happened. She had feared that she would find an inhibition. She opened the lychgate and went out on to the green, passing beneath the elms. There was the little stream, and there lay the old monument and the maze, but her thoughts of her father were dispersed by catching sight of a jumble of yellow derricks, of caravans and steam engines on the green.
“Dry Coulter feast!” she exclaimed in astonishment. “Why, it must begin to-morrow! Here are the swing-boats and the roundabouts; here are the showmen and the gipsies.” She hurried forward, excited and yet annoyed that her home-coming had chanced to be on the eve of so momentous an occasion as the village feast. “Timed to fall between the hay-making and the harvest,” she said to herself. “Richard would tell me that the feast is as much a pagan custom as Plough Monday or May-day. Each of the villages about here has its feast, and they come one after another in the height of summer. They are feasts at which there is little feasting, only a roundabout and swing-boats on the green, but to-morrow the village girls will dance and the men roll up their shirtsleeves and try their strength and run in hurdle races, or win coconuts or a cup and saucer.”
Under the elms and the beeches the canvas booths were already standing, five or six men were working hard to put up the swings, women were carrying pails of water, and the horses, still in their harness, were roaming over the green and cropping the grass. All the travelling people and even their children were working hard; they shouted to each other as they ran to and fro without sparing a glance for the groups of village children, the boys following them and getting in their way, the girls standing and gazing, or sitting close by in the grass. Among one of the groups, sitting and lying on the grass, Anne recognized a friend as she drew nearer.
“Rachel,” she called, and the little girl looked up at once, but she hesitated for a moment before rising to her feet and, though she came to meet her, Anne noticed that she walked slowly where a few months before she would have run. The child’s shyness caused a like shyness in Anne herself, and they stood facing each other without kissing or shaking hands.
“Thank you very much for the postcards you sent me, Mrs. Grandison,” said Rachel. “Richard gave me all the postcards you and Mr. Grandison sent him and I have put them all in my album.”
“I wish you could have seen some of the places we went to, Rachel. A great river, the Rhone, rushes down between the vineyards, and there are castles and wonderful old towns,” said Anne, and for a little while she chattered of what she had seen abroad, but ended by saying: “I see they are getting ready for the feast. We went to a wonderful circus at Avignon. I thought of you, Rachel, when I saw it. Grandison won a live pigeon as a prize, for which we had no home, so we let it fly from the bridge over the river. It beat its wings and flew crazily this way and that, but at last it lifted itself and disappeared over the battlements into the town. Have you been to any circuses since we went to Linton Fair together?”