Meantime, whilst he reviewed his future with his eyes on a blue cloud of tobacco smoke, Martin passed Phoebe Lyddon farther down the valley. Him she recognised as a stranger; but he, with his eyes engaged in no more than unconscious guarding of his footsteps, his mind buried in the fascinating problems of early British castramentation, did not look at her or mark a sorrowful young face still stained with tears.
Into the gorge Phoebe had wandered after reading her sweetheart’s letter. There, to the secret ear of the great Mother, instinct had drawn her and her grief; and now the earliest shock was over; a dull, numb pain of mind followed the first sorrow; unwonted exercise had made her weary; and physical hunger, not to be stayed by mental suffering, forced her to turn homewards. Red-eyed and unhappy she passed beside the river, a very picture of a woful lover.
The sound of Phoebe’s steps fell on John Grimbal’s ear as he lay upon his back with crossed knees and his hands behind his head. He partly rose therefore, thrust his face above the fern, saw the wayfarer, and then sprang to his feet. The cause of her tearful expression and listless demeanour was known to him, but he ignored them and greeted her cheerily.
“Can’t catch anything big enough to keep, and sha’n’t until the rain comes,” he said; “so I’ll walk along with you, if you’re going home.”
He offered his hand; then, after Phoebe had shaken it, moved beside her and put up his rod as he went.
“Saw your father this morning, and mighty glad I was to find him so blooming. To my eye he looks younger than my memory picture of him. But that’s because I’ve grown from boy to man, as you have from child to woman.”
“So I have, and ’t is a pity my faither doan’t knaw it,” answered Phoebe, smarting under her wrongs, and willing to chronicle them in a friendly ear. “If I ban’t full woman, who is? Yet I’m treated like a baaby, as if I’d got no ’pinions an’ feelings, and wasn’t—wasn’t auld enough to knaw what love meant.”
Grimbal’s eyes glowed at the picture of the girl’s indignation, and he longed to put his arms round her and comfort her.
“You must be wise and dutiful, Phoebe,” he said. “Will Blauchard’s a plucky fellow to go off and face the world. And perhaps he’ll be one of the lucky ones, like I was.”
“He will be, for certain, and so you’d say if you knawed him same as I do. But the cruel waitin’—years and years and years—’t is enough to break a body’s heart.”