“No.... When I speak to you, am I to say, ‘Giles’?”
“Aye,—aye, John.”
“Do you think they will not know that I am a woman?”
He looked at her critically for the first time. “You have height and a right frame. Your voice is deeper than most women’s. Now that your hair is cut, I have seen youths with locks so worn and of that colour and thickness. You are pale from prison and unhappiness, but the sun will tan your cheeks. You have mind and will, and all that you do you do with a just art. Discovery may come, but it need not come—”
Gervaise reappeared. “It’s all right! The old people will not blab, and their two daughters and the ploughman have propitiously gone to a fair! Now, Master Allen, and your brother, and good George Dragon—” They moved toward the house. Gervaise jerked his thumb toward a barn that showed beyond. “Good straw—good, warm, dusk corner to lie perdu in, back of the eaves! I’ll bring food, bread and milk. So you’ll have your rest to-day, and to-night we’ll cover as many miles as may be.—This way! We’ll not go through the house. Say we’re taken, I’d rather not drag the good folk in more than ankle-deep.”
The barn was dim and wholesome-smelling. The piled straw in the loft felt good beneath aching frames. They made with bundles of it a chance-seeming barrier, behind which in a fragrant hollow they prepared to rest. Close overhead was the brown roof that, beyond their niche, sloped steeply upward a great distance. A square had been cut for light and air; through it poured vagrant, scented breezes, and in and out flew the swallows. The light was thick and brown; it would take keen eyes to see aught but straw, rudely heaped. Gervaise brought a basket filled with homely, country fare, and then a great jug of spring water. They ate and drank, and then set watches—one to watch while the others slept. Humphrey Lantern took the first.
Rest was sweet, sleep was sweet.... Joan woke sometime in the early afternoon. There in a hollow of his own sat Gervaise, succeeded to Lantern’s watch. He sat, blue-eyed and meditative, chewing a straw. Lantern sprawled at a little distance, in sleep back, perhaps, in the old wars. Nearer lay Aderhold, his arm thrown across his eyes, profoundly sleeping. At first Joan was bewildered and did not know where she was; then the whole surged back. She lay quite still, and memory painted for her picture after picture.
Presently Gervaise, glancing her way, saw that her eyes were open. He nodded to her and crept over the straw until they were close neighbours, when he seated himself Turk fashion and asked if she had slept.
She laughed. “Unless I was dead, I was asleep.”
“He has not moved. Prison life’s a hard life, and then I understand that before that he was up day and night with the plague.... Well, and what do you think of the wide world before you?”