Janet halted on the threshold before following Nicholas indoors.
"Ay, even such as he can call me liar," she muttered, looking out across the heath as if for guidance. "Sorrow of women, why must we always stoop to feints and trickeries? Why cannot we fight as men fight——"
The peewits were wheeling over the sky-rimmed moor, and Janet, watching them, bethought her once again how they had used the self-same trickery to save their unhatched young. Instinctively she felt their world was hers, their teaching hers, and what was right for the wild things of the heath was right for her.
"And I have saved Wayne of Marsh. God be thanked for it," she cried with sudden fervour, and went to bring the Lean Man the cup which was to pledge her mother-wit.
CHAPTER XVI
HOW WAYNE OF MARSH RODE UP TO BENTS
The sun was nearing the top of his climb, and his rays were kindly with Mistress Wayne as she sat by the waterside in Hazel Dene and filled her lap with flowers and green lush grasses. Here a clump of primroses nestled close to the water's edge, and there a hazel-bush waved its catkins finger-like over the peat-brown water, dusting the wavelets with finest saffron pollen. Above, in the sloping fields, lambs bleated after the wethers, and kine chewed lazily the cud of sweet new grass. All was tender frolic, as if a month ago no snow had filled the hollows of the trees where now were nests, as if no bitter wind had whistled downward from the moor, chilling the bud within its sheath and the sap in well-turned limbs of ash and oak.
Mistress Wayne ceased playing with her flowers, and fell to dreaming. She was the one still thing among all the quivering eagerness of leaves and water, birds and hovering flies and glancing fish. For the storms that had chilled and frightened her were over, and with the spring her mind seemed to be loosing, one by one, its winter bonds. Old memories stirred in her and clamoured for release; new desires awakened, and with them a fresh load of doubts and fears; she sat, helpless and inert, and strove with all her might to unravel the threads which one night's tragedy had tangled.
"Ah, it is sweet—sweet," she murmured. "I was a child once—a child—and they gave me love—both hands they gave me full of love—and it was always spring, I think, with warmth like this and song of birds. But I'm old now; older than anybody knows, and sad. I think it is because I did some one a great wrong. What was it? Down in the meadows, when he came and tried to kill me with his hard grey eyes—the eyes that stared at me afterward from the bier. Nay, he could not forgive me, even in death—I think he knew that I had never loved him."
For a moment longer she struggled with memory; then her face grew empty as of old, and she picked up her flowers and fell to talking babe-talk to them. But her witless moods held lighter sway nowadays; reason was coming slowly back, and day by day her mind returned more often from childishness into the piteous strife of sanity. She got to her feet soon, and threw the flowers from her, and looked with troubled eyes toward Marshcotes.