Phoebe Lyddon and her lover, having given the others some vantage of ground, followed them to their destination—Mr. Lyddon’s famous orchard in Teign valley. The girl’s dreary task of late had been to tell herself that she would surely love John Grimbal presently—love him as such a good man deserved to be loved. Only under the silence and in the loneliness of long nights, only in the small hours of day, when sleep would not come and pulses were weak, did Phoebe confess that contact with him hurt her, that his kisses made her giddy to sickness, that all his gifts put together were less to her than one treasure she was too weak to destroy—the last letter Will had written. Once or twice, not to her future husband, but to the miller, Phoebe had ventured faintly to question still the promise of this great step; but Mr. Lyddon quickly overruled all doubts, and assisted John Grimbal in his efforts to hasten the ceremony. Upon this day, Old Christmas Eve, the wedding-day lay not a month distant and, afterwards the husband designed to take his wife abroad for a trip to South Africa. Thus he would combine business and pleasure, and return in the spring to witness the completion of his house. Chagford highly approved the match, congratulated Phoebe on her fortune, and felt secretly gratified that a personage grown so important as John Grimbal should have chosen his life’s partner from among the maidens of his native village.
Now the pair walked over the snow; and silent and stealthy as the vanished fox, a grey figure followed after them. Dim as some moon-spirit against the brightness, this shape stole forward under the rough hedge that formed a bank and threw a shadow between meadow and stream. In repose the grey man, for a man it was, looked far less substantial than the stationary outlines of fences and trees; and when he moved it had needed a keen eye to see him at all. He mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain of shape, magically changed as to their relations by the unfamiliar carpet now spread between them.
The grey figure kept Phoebe in sight, but followed a path of his own choosing. When she entered the woods he drew a little nearer, and thus followed, passing from shadow to shadow, scarce fifty yards behind.
Meanwhile the main procession approached the scene of its labours. Martin Grimbal, attracted by the prospect of reading this page from an old Devonian superstition, was of the company. He walked with Billy Blee and Gaffer Lezzard; and these high priests, well pleased at their junior’s attitude towards the ceremony, opened their hearts to him upon it.
“’T is an ancient rite, auld as cider—maybe auld as Scripture, to, for anything I’ve heard to the contrary,” said Mr. Lezzard.
“Ay, so ’t is,” declared Billy Blee, “an’ a custom to little observed nowadays. But us might have better blooth in springtime an’ braaver apples come autumn if the trees was christened more regular. You doan’t see no gert stock of sizable apples best o’ years now—li’l scrubbly auld things most times.”
“An’ the cider from ’em—poor roapy muck, awnly fit to make ’e thirst for better drink,” criticised Gaffer Lezzard.
“’Tis this way: theer’s gert virtue in cider put to apple-tree roots on this particular night, accordin’ to the planets and such hidden things. Why so, I can’t tell ’e, any more ’n anybody could tell ’e why the moon sails higher up the sky in winter than her do in summer; but so ’t is. An’ facts be facts. Why, theer’s the auld ‘Sam’s Crab’ tree in this very orchard we’m walkin’ to. I knawed that tree three year ago to give a hogshead an’ a half as near as damn it. That wan tree, mind, with no more than a few baskets of ‘Redstreaks’ added.”
“An’ a shy bearer most times, tu,” added Mr. Lezzard.
“Just so; then come next year, by some mischance, me being indoors, if they didn’t forget to christen un! An’, burnish it all! theer wasn’t fruit enough on the tree to fill your pockets!”