So with quick, springing step, her whole young soul aflame with indignation, she was off breasting the hill, leaving the hollows behind her, wishing with all her heart that she could have carried the dead baby with her. To call it accursed! To count it unbaptized! The darling lying there so peaceful, so still, so waxen, so like the lilies. Ah! if she could only take it away from all the sordid thoughts, what burial would not her fingers compass there on the bosom of the kindly earth! For it and for the lilies. How soft it should lie, how flower-decked! Yes, the great white petals should shield the little white face from the touch of the close, damp earth, and it should sleep--sleep--sleep!
The tears ran down her cheeks silently as, almost at the limit of her young and vigorous pace, she passed on, passed upwards, pursued by the one overmastering impulse to get away, to find some safe resting-place for what she would fain have carried.
But, by degrees, her thoughts became calmer; she began to see the whole pitiful story and put her finger intuitively on the points of offence; for she had seen little of the world, and knew still less of its ways. She thought of the lowing heifer and its bull-calf, of the second brood of young blackbirds over whose first flight she had but that morning seen the parents so excited, and then she thought of the fatherless unsought child whose only worth was the bringing of two-and-sixpence a week to its grandmother!
Truly her grandfather was right. Money was a curse.
But so were other things. The religion, for instance, which told poor Gwen that her child was accursed, that its death was a punishment. Poor Gwen seated in her threadbare black, with her apron over her head, so unlike the girl in a blue cotton dress who used to tumble about on the thyme banks with her boisterous, rosy-cheeked baby.
It was pitiful. That cry Beth n'ai! Beth n'ai! Gwae fi! beth n'ai! rang in Aura's ears as she sat down at last among the rocks of a sheep-shelter on the crest of a hill. Here in winter the south-west winds howled and swept the bare braes, wasting their force against the lichen-set boulders behind which even the shearling lambs could lie snugly, but in this early autumn the sun baked into the close-cropped turf, and mushrooms grew in clusters where the lambs had lain.
It was a favourite outlook of Aura's, for it gave over the widening estuary and the sea beyond. Beyond that again the setting sun; for it was growing late, and the autumn days began to close in.
She sat there on the wild thyme thinking, making up--as the young do almost unconsciously--her mind about many things, reaching forward to the future vaguely with certain new thoughts regarding it in her mind, and all the while watching the great pageant of the Death of Day enact itself out in the West.
It was a lurid sunset; full of flames, of deep, purple-stained clouds. It was a pageant of passion, self-existent, self-destroying.
Yet it was beautiful! She would sit and watch it to the end, she would see the anger and the threat of it pass into grey calm when the sun had gone.