The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

She turned to Mary.

"'Ee'd have a mighty lot to do for 'eeself," she had said--"If 'ee come, 'twould be no grand lodging. 'Ee'd be one of us."

What better, she had thought. To be one of them was to be one with everything about them, the fruit trees in the orchards, the dead leaves and the new. Even then, although she never knew it clearly, the fruitful scents of the earth had entered and for long were to linger in her nostrils.

It was not that she had any knowledge of the soil, or could have explained to herself how one crop should follow another. She knew nothing of the laws a farmer lives by, the servant of Nature that he is, or the very earth he grows to be a part of and learns to finger as it were the very ingredient of his being.

She had not been trained to reason. All that she felt of the attraction of that place did not suggest itself in the direct progression of purposes to her mind. There were the odors of life in the air. She took them in through her senses alone. Through her senses alone she knew their fecundity. That fruitfulness it was which filtered like drops of some magic elixir into her blood.

It had been two years since she went that day to Yarningdale Farm, yet the odors still lingered, calling some sense and purpose in her soul which, until the sermon at that Christmas-time and following her meeting with Liddiard, had been all vague, illusive and intangible.

Now, with more assurance, she knew. In that old farmhouse, if they would have her, she was going to bring her child into the world. There, in what seemed not the long but the speedy months to her, she was going to breathe in the scents of the earth, absorbing the clean purposes of life as they are set forth in the tilling of the soil, the sowing of the seed, the reaping of the harvest.

It was to be close to the very earth itself she needed. There is no clear line of argument to trace in a woman's mind. Her marriage bed had been the heathered moors. The scent of the earth had been all about her as she lay in Liddiard's arms. No soft or spotless pillows had there been for her head to rest on. In no garments had she decked herself for his embrace. No ceremony had there been, no formalities observed. There was nothing that had happened to associate it in her mind with the conventional wedding night, blessed by the church, approved of by all.

If blessing there had been, and truly she felt there had, then the stars had blessed them, the soft wind from off the sea across the heather roots had touched her with its fingers; the dark night with all its silence had been full approval in her heart.

And he who was to come out of such a union as that, what else could he be but a wild, uncultivated thing? A seed falling from the tree, not sowed by the hand of man in exotic places; a young shoot finding its soil in the rotting fibers of earth that only Nature had prepared; a green bough that Nature only in her wildest could train, fighting its way upwards through the forest shades to the clear brilliance of the eternal light.