They rode up the well-worn track into the yard of Longley Farm, and leaving the horses with his attendant, Edrupt went to find his family. Dame Lysbeth was seated in her chair by the window, spinning, and would have sent one of the maids to call the mistress of the house, but Edrupt shook his head. He said that he would go look for Barbara himself.
He found her kneeling on the turf tending a motherless lamb, and it was a good thing that the lamb had had nearly all it could drink already, for when Barbara looked up and saw who was coming the rest of the milk was spilled. She looked down, laughing and blushing, presently, at the hem of her russet gown.
“Sheep take a deal o’ mothering,” she explained, “well-nigh as much as men. Come and see the new-born lambs, Robert, will ’ee?”
Robert stroked the head of the old sheep-dog that had come up for his share of petting. “Here is a black sheep for thee to mother, sweetheart,” he said with a laugh. “He’s of a breed that is new in these parts.”
Barbara looked at the rough, unkempt young stranger, with surprise but no unkindness in her eyes. She was not easily upset, and however wild he looked, the new-comer had been brought by Robert, and that was all that concerned her. “Where did tha find him, and what’s his name?” she inquired.
Edrupt laughed again, in proud satisfaction this time; he might have known that Barbara would behave just in that way. He explained, and Cimarron was forthwith shown a corner of a loft where he might sleep, and introduced to Don the collie as a shepherd in good standing. He and the sheep-dog seemed to understand each other almost at once, and though one was almost as silent as the other, they became excellent comrades.
Besides the sheep, Cimarron seemed interested in but one thing on the farm, and that was the old loom which had belonged to Dame Garland and still stood in the weaving-chamber, where he slept. Dame Lysbeth, rummaging there for some flax that she wanted, found the boy sitting on the bench with one bare foot on the treadle, studying the workings of the clumsy machine. It was a “high-warp” loom, in which the web is vertical, and in the loom-chamber where Barbara’s maids spun and wove, Edrupt had set up a Flemish “low-warp” loom with all the latest fittings. Into that place the herd-boy had never ventured. But Dame Lysbeth saw with surprise that he seemed to understand this loom quite well. When he was asked, he said that he had seen weaving done on such a loom in his country.
“Robert will be surprised,” said Barbara thoughtfully. “Who ever saw a lad like that who cared about weaving?”
But Edrupt was not as mystified as the women were. He thought it quite possible that the dark young stranger might have come of some Eastern race which had made weaving an art beyond anything the West could do. “I think,” he said one morning, “that I will take him to London and let him try what he can do in Cornelys Bat’s factory.”
Cornelys Bat was a Flemish weaver who had come to London some months before and set up his looms in an old wool-storeroom outside London Wall. He was a very skillful workman, but Flanders had weavers enough to supply half Europe with clothing, and his own town of Arras was already known for its tapestries. The Lowlands were overcrowded, and there was not bread enough to go around. Edrupt, whom he had known for several years, helped him to settle himself in England, and he had met with almost immediate success. Now he had with him not only his old parents, a younger brother and sister and an aunt with her two children, but three neighbors who also found life hard in populous Flanders. He felt that he had done well in following Edrupt’s advice, “When the wool won’t come to you, go where the wool is.” He was a square-built, placid, light-haired man with a stolid expression that sometimes misled people. When Edrupt came to him with a strange new apprentice, he readily consented to give the boy a chance. It was the only chance that there was, for the Weavers’ Guild would not have had him.