"What is there to her, I should like to knaw?" the lay-reader's wife demanded of her friends at a somewhat informal prayer meeting. "She'm an ontidy kind o' maid who don't knaw one end of needle from t'other. When her stockin' heels go into holes she just pulls them further under her foot, till sometimes she do have to garter half way down her leg!"
"She'm ontidy sure 'nough," agreed a widow woman of years and experience, "but she'm a rare piece o' red and white, and menfolk are feeble vessels. If a maid's a fine armful they never think on whether she won't be a fine handful. And Vashti do have a way wi' her."
That was the whole secret—Vashti had a way with her. She was a splendid slattern—showing the ancient Celtic strain in her coarse, abundant black hair, level brows, and narrow, green-blue eyes, with a trace of Jew in the hawk-like line of nose and the prominent chin curved a little upwards from her throat. A few years, and she would be lean and haggard, but now she was a fine, buoyant creature, swift and tumultuous, with a mouth like a flower. For all the slovenliness of her clothes she had a trick of putting them on which an Englishwoman never has as a birthright, and rarely achieves. Vashti could tie a ribbon so that every man she passed turned to look after her.
Perran-an-zenna is a mining village, and some of the menfolk work in the tin mines close at hand, and some in the big silver mine four miles away. James Glasson, the elder and harsher-featured of Vashti's lovers, worked in the latter, and there was every prospect of his becoming a captain, as he had a passion for mechanics and for chemistry, and was supposed to be experimenting with a new process that would cheapen the cost of extracting the silver. Willie Strick, the younger, handsomer, more happy-go-lucky of the two men, went to "bal" in the tin mines, and was disinclined to save, but then his aged grandmother, with whom he lived, had been busy saving for twenty years. Strick was an eager lover, quick to jealousy—Glasson was uncommunicative even to Vashti, and careless of her opinions. Though the jealousy irked her it flattered her too, but on the other hand, Glasson's carelessness, even while it piqued her, made her covet him all the more.
This was how matters stood one evening in late March when Vashti had gone up to the moors to fetch in the cows—not her own, no Bath had been thrifty enough for that, but belonging to the farm where she worked. As she walked along in the glowing light, the white road winking up at her through a hole in her swinging skirt, and a heavy coil of hair jerking a little lower on the nape of her neck with each vigorous stride, Vashti faced the fact that matters could continue as they were no longer. At bottom Vashti was as hard as granite, she meant to have what she wanted; her only trouble was she had not quite settled what it was she did want. Like all her race, she had a strain of fatalism in her, that prompted her to choose whichever of the two men she should next chance to meet—and the woman in her suggested that at least such a declaration on the part of fate would give her the necessary impetus towards deciding upon the other.
Lifting her eyes from the regular, pendulum-like swing of her skirt that had almost mesmerized her lulled vision, she saw, dark against the sunset, the figure of a man. She knew it to be either James or Willie because of the peculiar square set of the shoulders and the small head—for the two men were, like most people in that intermarrying district, cousins, with a superficial trick of likeness, and an almost exact similarity of voice. A prescience of impending fate weighed on Vashti; the gaunt shaft of the disused Wheal Zenna mine, that stood up between her and the approaching man, seemed like a menacing finger. The man reached it first and stood leaning up against it, one foot on the rubble of granite that was scattered around, his arm, with the miner's bag slung over it, resting across his raised knee. Vashti half thought of going back, even without the cows, but it was already time the poor beasts were milked, and curiosity lured her on. She went across the circle of greener grass surrounding the shaft, and found Glasson awaiting her.
To every woman comes a time in life when she is ripe for the decisive man; and it is often a barren hour when he fails to appear. For Vashti the hour and the man had come together, and she knew it as she met Glasson's look. Putting out his hands, ingrained with earth in the finest seams of them, he laid them heavily on her shoulders, like a yoke. His bag swung forward and hit her on the chest, but neither of them noticed it.
"Vashti, you'm got to make'n end," he said. "One way or t'other. Which es et to be?"
She shook under his gaze, her lids drooped, but she tried to pout out her full underlip with a pretence of petulance. Suddenly his grip tightened.
"So 'ee won't tell me? Then by God, I'll do the tellin'! You'm my woman, do'ee hear? Mine, and neither Will Strick nor any other chap shall come between us two."