“Is it so wide?”
“That’s as you take it. It’s as wide as your vision, your taste, and your hearing.”
“I do not wish to be hanged.... It used to come and gather round me when I slept, there in the dungeon, in the prison. First the place grew large, and then it filled with people,—I could feel them in the dark,—and then I knew where the gallows was, and hands that burned me and bruised me put a rope around my neck, and in the dark the people began to laugh and curse. And then I woke up, and my hands and arms were cold and wet, and I said, ‘So it will be, and so the rope will feel, and so they will laugh!’... Over and over.... But it did not come to me here, though I was asleep. I do not believe that they will take us now.”
“Do you believe in witches and black men and Satan and his country?”
“I used to. Isn’t every little child taught it? It’s hard to rub out what they taught you when you were a child. But do I believe it now?” She laughed with a bitter mirth. “My oath, on anything you please, that I do not believe it now! I believe that some folk have more good than bad in them, and a few have far more good than bad. And that some folk have more bad than good in them, and a few have far more bad than good. And that most folk are pretty evenly mixed, and that now one having walks forth and now another. But that we are all folk.”
“That presents well enough,” said Gervaise, “my manner of thinking. But then I have lived long with Sir Richard.”
They fell silent. A bird flew in at the window. The pleasant, drowsy scent of the hay was about them, the sun-shot dusk, the murmur of the wind across the opening. “Is your watch nearly over,” asked Joan, “and were you going to wake him next? I am awake already, so give it to me.”
“Nay, nay,” said Gervaise; “neither to you nor to him! I’ll sit here for another two hours and think of the flowers I might have grown. Then Lantern will take it again. You two are to get your rest.—I like well enough to converse with you, but my advice is to shut your eyes and go back to sleep.”
Joan smiled at him and obeyed. She shut her grey eyes, and in two minutes was back at the fountain of rest for overwrought folk. She slept, slept, and Aderhold slept. When they waked the sun was hanging low in the west. They waked at a touch from Gervaise. “Best all of us open our eyes and pull our senses together! I hear the two daughters and the ploughman, and maybe company with them, coming back from the fair.”
There were heard, indeed, from the lane, not far away, voices talking freely and all together. Lantern crept to the window and with care looked forth. He came back. “Country folk—five or six, and merry from the fair.” The voices reached the farmhouse, entered it, and became muffled. The sun dropped behind the hills.