“I be crazed, surely,” said the poor woman, sitting down again. “There be more gigs than one in the world, and folk often stops to ask their way of the maester.”
These travellers were a long time about the putting of such a simple question, especially as the night was not a pleasant one to linger out in. The murmur of voices, too, which the woman overheard, betokened a close conversation, in which the familiar drawl of the windmiller’s dialect blended audibly with that kind of clean-clipt speaking peculiar to gentlefolk.
“He’ve been talking to master’s five minute an’ more,” muttered the miller’s wife. “What can ’ee want with un?” The talking ceased as she spoke, and the windmiller appeared, followed by a woman carrying a young baby in her arms.
He was a ruddy man for his age at any time, but there was an extra flush on his cheeks just now, and some excitement in his manner, making him look as his wife was not wont to see him more than once a year, after the Foresters’ dinner at the Heart of Oak. There was a difference, too. A little too much drink made the windmiller peevish and pompous, but just now he spoke in a kindly, almost conciliating tone.
“See, missus! Let this good lady dry herself a bit, and get warm, and the little un too.”
A woman—ill-favored, though there was no positive fault to be found with her features, except that the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower one very large—came forward with the child, and began to take off its wraps, and the miller’s wife, giving her face a hasty wipe, went hospitably to help her.
“Tst! tst! little love!” she cried, gulping down a sob, due to her own sad memories, and moving the cloak more tenderly than the woman in whose arms the child lay. “What a pair of dark eyes, then! Is’t a boy or girl, m’m?”
“A boy,” said a voice from the door, and the miller’s wife, with a suppressed shriek of timidity, became aware of a man whose entrance she had not perceived, and to whom she dropped a hasty courtesy.
He was a man slightly above the middle height, whose slenderness made him seem taller. An old cloak, intended as much to disguise as to protect him, did not quite conceal a faultlessness of costume beneath it, after the fashion of the day. Waistcoats of three kinds, one within the other, a frilled shirt, and a well-adjusted stock, were to be seen, though he held the ends of the old cloak tightly across him, as the wind would have caught them in the doorway. He wore a countryman’s hat, which seemed to suit him as little as the cloak, and from beneath the brim his dark eyes glared with a restless, dissatisfied look, and were so dark and so fierce and bright that one could hardly see any other details of his face, unless it were his smooth chin, which, either from habit or from the stiffness of his stock, he carried strangely up in the air.
“Indeed, sir,” said the windmiller’s wife, courtesying, and setting a chair, with her eyes wandering back by a kind of fascination to those of the stranger; “be pleased to take a seat, sir.”