With a heave and a snort Cushy, Barbara's favourite cow, got up. She feared! she did not know what she feared; but perhaps in those days when the earth was new-made and cataclysms were frequent occurrences, her forbears had learnt to dread the sounds of a rising flood. She stirred the other beasts into restlessness, although they had borne the thunder and lightning with timid resignation.
Jan Straw sat motionless. He had stopped muttering, and his eyes were half-closed. His hands were cold as ice. The flame of life was burning very low. To him had come a presentiment that death was on his way to put it out. Once he had seen a play acted upon the village green in which Death came by with all his bones a-jangling, and the memory of it had not faded. His intellect was too beclouded to fear. The dogged stolidity, that had made him an unrepining drudge through manhood to old age, now made him a placid watcher for the fleshless form that would extinguish his little candle.
Lucy heard the trampling and snorting of the beasts, and she came to the cow-house door. Peter Fleming was with her, for he had reached Greystones just in time to take shelter there. The sudden change from the brightly lit kitchen, where the candles were burning, to the dimness of this place at first bewildered him; he could not distinguish anything clearly—the cattle looked like ungainly shadows, and their horns like the bare and twisted branches of trees. Then one by one the forms took shape, and his eyes fell upon the old man.
"Hulloa," he cried, laying his hand on Jan's bent shoulder, "What ho, Jan! how goes thyself? Why! I believe you've been asleep in the midst of all this racket. It's loud enough to waken the dead."
The old man roused himself from his lethargy, gathered his scattered wits, and looked at the countenance bending over him for some moments without replying.
At last he asked in a voice that trembled away into silence:
"Will it waken her?"
Peter knew of whom he was thinking.
"Nay," he said kindly, "her bed is a bed of peace."
The grey face fell, and the young man saw that he had not anticipated Jan's desire.