"Eh, you and your thoughts . . ." cried the petulant old mother, quoting better than she knew, "they'll have to be your man and your childer, too."
Senath, the idealist, was well content that it should be so, and when her mother's death left her her own mistress, she went to live in a tiny cottage up on the moors with no companions but those thoughts—the thoughts at once crude and vague, but strangely penetrating—of an untaught mind whose natural vigour has been neither guided nor cramped by education.
Her cottage, that stood four-square in the eye of the wind, was set where the moorland began, some few fields away from the high road. At the back was the tiny garden where Senath coaxed some potatoes and beans from out the grudging earth; and two apple trees, in an ecstasy of contortion, supported the clothes-line from which great sheets, golden-white in the sun, bellied like sails, or enigmatic garments of faded pinks and blues proclaimed the fact that Senath "took in washing."
On the moor in front of the cottage stood nineteen stones, breast-high, set in a huge circle. Within this circle the grass, for some reason, was of a more vivid green than on the rest of the moor, and against it the stones on the nearer curve showed a pale grey, while the further ones stood up dark against the sky, for beyond them the moor sloped slightly to the cliffs and the sea.
These stones were known as the "Nineteen Merry Maidens," and legend had it that once they were living, breathing girls, who had come up to that deserted spot to dance upon a Sunday. As they twirled this way and that in their sinful gyrations, the doom of petrification descended on them, as it did on the merry-makers of old when Perseus dangled the Gorgon's head aloft. So the nineteen maidens stand to this day, a huge fairy-ring of stone, like those smaller ones of fragile fungi that also enclose a circle of greener grass in the radius of their stems. Two luckless men, whom the maidens had beguiled to pipe for them, turned and fled, but they, too, were overtaken by judgment in a field further on along the road, and stand there to this day, a warning against the profanation of the Sabbath.
When Senath was asked why she had taken such a lonely cottage, she replied that it was on account of the Merry Maidens—they were such company for her. Often, of an evening, she would wander round the circle, talking aloud after the fashion of those who live alone. She had given each of the stones a name, and every one of them seemed, to her starved fancy, to have a personality of its own. Senath Lear, what with the mixed strains of blood that were her Cornish heritage, and the added influence of isolation, was fast becoming an old maid, and a wisht one at that, when something happened which set the forces of development moving in another direction. Senath herself connected it with her first visit to the Pipers, whom hitherto, on account of their sex, she had neglected for the Merry Maidens.
One market day—Thursday—Senath set off to a neighbouring farm to buy herself a little bit of butter. The way there, along the high road, lay past the field where the Pipers stood in their perpetual penance, and Senath could see them sticking up gaunt against the luminous sky for some time before she came up with them. For, as was only fitting, the Pipers were much taller than the Maidens, being, indeed, some twelve feet high.
Senath walked briskly along, a sturdy, full-chested figure, making, in her black clothes (Sunday-best, "come down"), the only dark note in the pale colours of early spring that held land and air. The young grass showed tender, the intricate webs made by the twisted twigs of the bare thorn-trees gleamed silvery. On the pale lopped branches of the elders, the first crumpled leaves were just beginning to unfold. The long grass in an orchard shone with the drifted stars of thousands of narcissi, which a faint breeze woke to a tremulous twinkling. The road was thick with velvety white dust, for it was some time since rain had fallen, and the black of Senath's skirt was soon powdered into greyness. As she went, she wondered what it was that gave the air such a tang of summer, until she suddenly realized it was the subtle but unmistakable smell of the dust that brought to her mind long, sunny days, when such a smell was as much part of the atmosphere as the foliage or the heat. Now there was still a chill in the air, but she hardly felt it in the force of that suggestiveness.
"Sim' me I'm naught but a bit of stone like they Pipers," she said to herself, as she paused to look up at them, towering above her. Then a whimsical thought struck her. "I'll lave the Maidens be for a while and take my walk to the Pipers," she thought, "tes becoming enough in a woman o' my years, I should think."