Mrs. Bilby was anxious that the girl should marry and so be out of the house. One day she said, ‘What shall we ever do with your Doll? There’s not a man in the town that would marry her.’ Mr. Bilby said that every unmarried man in the town would be glad to get her. Mrs. Bilby said, ‘You mean they would be glad to get a slice off your meadows.’ He said he would box her ears for her. She said Doll would be lucky if she got herself a vagabond, or a widowed man, or an old man of eighty. Mr. Bilby boxed her ears and went down to the tavern. Then he told Deacon Thumb that, although it broke his heart even to think of parting with his treasure, yet was marriage the one and only proper state for woman, and he would put her happiness even before his own. Moreover, his wife still hated the girl, even more than she had the night she first saw her, and although a good woman (and very handsome), yet she was hard. He said he had just boxed her ears and suggested that he was now willing to talk of the marriage settlement. He would do something very handsome by Doll. ‘For God knows,’ he said, ‘she is dear to me.’
4
In spite of the Warnings of his Better Nature a young man looks covetously to Bilby’s Doll.
On certain days the men of the two farms combined their labours, then Doll brought to her foster father his midday dinner. To suit his fancy she would bring food for herself also. This food she would eat quickly and without speaking to any one, keeping close to Mr. Bilby. On those harvest days, when the sun was bright on the stubble and heat shimmered in the air, the shade beneath the oaks was grateful. Doll Bilby, in the bright dresses her foster father bought for her, looked as fresh within this shade as one of those little summer flowers that go down before the scythes of harvesters. This Titus noticed, and he knew, although never a word had been spoken to him, that his father wished the match and his mother opposed it.
Also he noticed that the young woman, although so small, was made in a neat and most pleasing manner. She was more dainty, more finicky in her cut than the big English girls. He often thought, as he stretched himself to rest upon the earth, that to the eye of a man of rare discernment such delicacy and small perfection might give more pleasure than more opulent charms, yet he never went so far as to say that he himself was that discerning man. Likewise it pleased him that she was shy before him, for he had been over-courted. When he would stretch his body along the ground close to where she sat, she would gaze unsmilingly at him out of her wild, troubled eyes, and something in that gaze—some necromancy—stirred his blood, so that at nights he felt desire for her, and often dreamed impossible things of her.
During all that year of harvest he had no thought for another one but only of Bilby’s wicked Doll. He knew the stories of her—for his mother was forever at his elbow whispering things. He knew of her foreign birth, how she had once blasted an unborn child, how she and Goody Greene had afflicted Mrs. Bilby some years ago, making her vomit pins and fur (for to such proportions had the story of the woman’s illness already grown), and he could see for himself how she bewitched her foster father out of his seven senses.
As he gazed upon her sometimes the marrow grew cold in his bones. He thought if he were a wise and Christian man, he would have none of her in spite of his own father’s cupidity. In his heart he, like his mother, feared her. He could not understand the power she, without effort, had over him, for the very sight of her coming across the hot fields of noon threw him into a cold, dismal, unnatural sweat. Now was his heart set towards this marriage, but he looked with dread as well as joy to that day which should unite her to him. He believed that whatever her secret might be she should deliver it up to him on her bridal. Half he was persuaded that he would find that she, like Sara in the Book of Tobit, had a demon lover, who would strangle any bridegroom, nor had he an angel or a fish’s liver, with which to protect himself.
5
A malignant black Bull leads all astray. Young Thumb fears Doll and suspects the creature is her Familiar.
The Thumbs had a young black bull, which, with other neat cattle and quick stock, they had out from England on the ship Fawnley. This bull was a wanderer, breaking stout fences, and seeking out his own pleasure among his neighbours’ corn fields, cabbage plots, and herds.