“’Bout last night. Couldn’t banish it from my head what her said as to your sweetheart. So I went an’ telled her how you met my Sarah an’ axed if that comed in the spell, seein’ the girl were tokened to another man. An’ she said as it might be or might not be, because the spoken word remained an’ was no more to be called back again than last year’s primrosen. Then I axed her what her view of it might be, an’ she up an’ said what I told ’e; ‘What will happen, will happen.’ Arter that I grew hot an’ said any fule knowed so much, an’ she turned round ’pon me like a dog you’ve trod on by mistake, an’ her eyes glinted like shinin’ steel, an’ I reckoned she was gwaine to awverlook me theer an’ then. So I cleared out of it.”
“What happens, happens, because it must. That’s all right enough, John. And things won’t fall out differently because we take thought and pine about ’em.”
“I be keepin’ comp’ny, an’ it may be a sort o’ state as blinds the eyes,” said Aggett, humbly. “I trust ’e in this thing—you’m a gen’leman, an’ wiser’n me, as be a mere zawk for brains alongside you. But theer ’tis, she’m my awn maid, an’ if the ’mazin’ butivul looks of her have fired ’e, then, as you’m a gude man, so I pray you’ll be at trouble not to see her no more. ’Tis very well to say what must fall, must; but the future did ought to be a man’s sarvant, I reckon, not his master.”
“That’s not philosophic, John.”
“Anyway, if theer’s danger in my maid to you, then turn your back upon her. I sez it wi’ all respects as man to master; an’ as man to man, I’ll say more, an’ bid you be a man an’ look any way but that. Ess fay, I sez it, though not worthy to hold a cannel to ’e. An’ what’s more, I trust ’e.”
To Timothy’s relief John did not delay for an answer to his exhortation, but proceeded upon his way. So they parted, by curious chance, at that spot where to-day there rise the mound and aged thorn. The Moor was of a uniform and sullen iron colour under a sky of like hue but paler shade. The north wind still blew, but the clouds were lower, denser and heavy with snow. Even as Aggett went down the hill and his rival proceeded upward, there came fluttering out of the grey the first scattered flakes of a long-delayed downfall. They floated singly, wide-scattered on the wind; others followed; here a monstrous fragment, undulating like a feather, capsized in the invisible currents of the air. Then the swarm thickened and hurried horizontally in puffs and handfuls. The clean black edges of the distant Moor were now swept and softened with a mist of falling snow; aloft, thicker and faster, came the flakes, huddling and leaping out of nothingness and appearing as dark grey specks against the lighter sky. Presently indication of change marked the world, and a glimmer of virgin white under on-coming gloom outlined sheep tracks and made ghostly the grey boulders of the Moor. By nightfall the great snow had fairly begun, and blinding blizzards were screaming over the Moor on the wings of a gale of wind.
CHAPTER V
Before the snows melted and the first month of the new year had passed by, John Aggett and his master’s son were friends no more.
Of Timothy it may be recorded that he fought fiercely, then with waning strength, and finally succumbed and lost his battle. By slow degrees his intimacy with Sarah grew. Neither sought the other; but love dragged them together. The man hid it from his small world, or fancied that he did so; the girl blushed in secret and knew that what she had mistaken for love was mere attachment—an emotion as far removed from her affection for Timothy as the bloodless moonbeams from the flush of a rosy sunrise. A time came, and that quickly, when she could deceive herself no longer, and she knew that her life hung on her lover, while the other man was no more than a sad cloud upon the horizon of the future.
Frosts temporarily retarded the thaw, and Timothy and Sarah walked together at evening time in a great pine wood. A footpath, ribbed and fretted with snakelike roots, extended here, and moving along it they sighed, while the breath of the great trees bore their suspirations aloft into the scented silence. One band of orange light hung across the west and the evening star twinkled diamond-bright upon it, while perpendicularly against the splendour sprang the lines of pine trunks, dimmed aloft with network of broken and naked boughs, merging above into a sombre crown of accumulated foliage. Cushions of dead needles were crisp under foot and the whisper of growing ice tinkled on the ear.