‘I have no knowledge of your fine sour-wine drinks, Dick. For certain the hot ale be far wholesomer,’ urged Anne, who clung to tradition as surely as Meadowes.
So to please her hot ale he drank, sitting by the wide cottage fireplace listening to the driving storm. The candle, which had been low in its socket, burned lower; then Anne put it out, and still they sat silently in the pleasant fire-lit room and heard the storm rave on outside. They were sitting side by side on the settle by the fire, Meadowes had his arm round Anne’s shoulder in his kindly caressing fashion, but though Anne permitted the endearment she did not respond to it in any way.
‘You are very quiet to-night?’ said Meadowes at last. Anne shivered, and bent forward to stir up the fire for answer.
‘What ails you, Anne? Has aught distressed you through the day?’ he asked.
Anne turned round and looked at him; her eyes had a curiously wild, frightened expression.
‘ ’Tis like great guns,’ she said. ‘There, there. O Lord, I can’t a-bear to hear it—guns and guns a-thundering on, and when it cometh round the corner o’ the house ’tis for all the world like the shrieks of dying men.’
Meadowes was mystified by her words. He had never seen Anne fanciful before.
‘Well, what of it?—’tis not unlike heavy firing, as you say,’ he admitted. ‘But you are safe enough here, my girl, in all truth.’
‘Eh, Dick! don’t you understand?’ cried Anne. ‘Battles, and guns, and all. . . . I do seem to hear from over seas, from Flanders, bringing to my mind all I’ve a mind to forget. I’ve sat all this day a-hearing of them guns, and times I’d stop my ears.—O Lord! there be the screams again.’ And Anne, turning to the only helper she had, held out her hands to him with a trembling, childish gesture.
‘Dick, Dick,’ she said, ‘you be quick to feel all things, and kind too, more nor I deserve, I that have married you, and my heart turning back to another.’