When love-lads masken in fresh array?
How falls it, then, we no merrier be’n,
Like as others, girt in gaudy green?
Spenser, “The Shepheards Calendar.”
I
Time hung heavy on Will’s hands the first few days of his return, as heavy as the meals heaped before him by the adoring Martha. There was as much for “bever” as for breakfast, yet quantity did not suffice him. He became almost as finnicking and fractious as Cousin Caroline, not content, for example, to strain the pond-water through muslin for the larger insects, but insisting on its being boiled: indeed hinting preposterously that the mortality among his unknown brothers and sisters might have been connected with potations on which Caleb and Martha had patently flourished. He held views on the house-refuse, ignoring Caleb’s plea that “the best drain be a pig,” and by making hinges the very first evening for the lower windows to open by, he had raised such a draught in the house that it was all they could do to keep their bedroom and their kitchen air-tight, and even Martha was glad when on the Wednesday afternoon he went off to get some fishing in the Brad, and the windows could all be closed up again.
But the few dace and bull-heads that rewarded his rod left too many intervals for reflection, and in the unsettlement of his thoughts, before settling down to a judicious expenditure of his ninety pounds, he felt he needed more deadening exertion. He tried poling against the stream to that ancient faery island—somebody’s half-decked shooting punt was doing no good rusting on the bank in the off-season, he thought—but the process soon became automatic and his mind was still restless, while after the islands of the St. Lawrence this enchanted playground of his youth seemed tame and its prettiness trivial.
He fed his fancy on a salt-water expedition for the Thursday: recalled the great catches of flat-fish he and his brothers had made, the sport to be got out of the voracious if inedible “bull-rout,” but it would be a very long walk, and what if when one arrived the tide should be too low? So he walked inland around Bradmarsh Common. But though it was, he told himself, the “old haunts” that he went out for to see, he omitted to revisit that venerable landmark, Gaffer Quarles. Conscience adjured him he ought to look up the old carrier, whether for respect or reproof—and he actually did hover around Blackwater Hall—but pride forbade his entering, lest he stumble upon the new Carrier. The Hall appeared even more dwindled to him than Frog Farm as he stood surlily surveying it; even the Common—after the Canadian prairie—seemed no longer to roll towards the blue infinities. He had a strong impulse to burst in on that careless old Daniel and give him a piece of his mind, even at the risk of meeting his gadabout granddaughter; but the bleating of the goats sounded forbidding, and as he was hesitating he found himself under the gaze of another gaffer, the crown of whose battered beaver tied on to its brim with coloured strings gave him a festal grotesquerie. Will remembered this ancient, though despite his gay headgear he now seemed inexpressibly grimy in his patched corduroys, his two ragged coats, and the dirty towel wound round his throat. It was the Quarles’s nearest neighbour, “Uncle” Lilliwhyte, who lived in a cottage also on the Common; trading in cress, cherries, and mushrooms, driving home obstreperous cows and doing other odd jobs. This worthy was now exercising his equal right of gathering sticks on the Common, and the sordid association seemed to reduce Jinny to the same shrunken proportions as her cottage.
“Buy a nadder, sir?”
“Sir!” Yes, after all, his father had been a “looker,” not a mere labourer, he himself had a waistcoat lined with bank-notes and cut by Moses & Son, why should he expect a sense of dignity from a girl of so lowly a status? Let her earn her livelihood as she wished—it was not his affair, except in so far as she should have none of his custom. A cock crew lustily, and it subtly heartened him up. Yes, he would go in now, give her back her glove, professing to have just picked it up, and wash his hands of her for ever.