Then a question from Margery as to where Tom Bates might be was answered by the sudden appearance of that youth, and Mrs. Loveys, with a mind somewhat overwrought, found outlet for emotion in an attack upon him.
"Doan't 'e knaw the hour for eatin', you ugly li'l twoad?" she demanded sharply. "An' to come to the table in such a jakes of a mess tu! You ought to be shamed."
But the boy paid no heed. He returned breathless with a comforting discovery, and now cried it aloud to his companions of the morning.
"'Tis all right," he said; "no call for no upstore nor trouble at all. That theer white bastey I mean. I followed un half a mile to the furze meadows down-long to make sartain, then I lost un, an' presently if I didn't see un again—wi' a young rabbit he'd catched! Nought but that baggerin' auld ram cat as they've got to Creber Farm!"
"Quiet! you young fule!" said Mr. Cramphorn roughly; "shut your mouth, will 'e? or I'll scat 'e awver the ear-hole! You to pit your green brains against our ripe wans! A man be dead, an' so 'tis sartain us seed what us seed."
"Sartain as doom us seed what us seed," echoed Gaffer Ash, "for a man be dead."
CHAPTER XVI.
A SHELF OF SLATE
A blackbird, with sleepy notes and sad, warbled in a green larch at dawn; and the pathos proper to his immemorial song was well suited to the scene. For the larch raised her lovely foliage, begemmed with rubies, above many graves in the burying-place of Little Silver; and a streamlet also murmured there, uttering a sort of purring harmony that mingled with the contralto of the bird. From an ivy-tod, at hand in the grave-yard hedge, bright eyes peeped and the mother, with head and tail alone visible and sooty-brown body pressed close upon four eggs, listened to her lord. Elsewhere a man also heard the music, but heeded it not. He stood at his house door, yawned and sniffed the morning; while his whitewashed walls that faced the east were warmed into a glowing melon colour, and sunshine wove golden threads along the ancient straw of the thatch above.
Noah Brimblecombe, the sexton, was a man of middle age, with grey whiskers, clean-shaved lips and chin, a strong mouth, and a reflective forehead. His back had grown rounded by digging of graves from early manhood, and the nature of his life's labours appeared in a tinge of gloom that marked his views. He passed through the world with an almost morbid severity in his disparagement of all mundane concerns, triumphs or possessions. The man now stood and fixed his small grey eyes upon the church, but little more than a hundred yards distant. Then, bearing great keys in one hand, an inch or two of candle in the other, he proceeded to the burying-ground upon an errand connected with his calling.