“‘Holy melancholy’ and ‘lost souls,’” said Joan. “I know not why it is that those words together sound to me so foolish.—Doth it help anything when I am sad?”
“‘—Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet,
Locksley and Maid Marian—’”
“Stop, child!” said old Roger. “I’m in earnest and so must you be. Look you, Joan! you’re all I’ve got, and folk will be fanciful about all they’ve got and try to guard it all around. And it came into my head while Goodman Cole was talking—and it was he who put it there, talking of your looks, and saying that you had better go mim-mouth to church, and that you had a strange way of looking straight at a body when you spoke, which didn’t become a woman, who ought always to go with a downcast look—it came into my head, I say, that we’re poor and without any protector and fairly strange here now, and how evil tongues are as common as grass, and I said to myself that I’d give you a good cautioning—”
“Mim-mouth and downcast look and go to heaven so!” said Joan. “I wonder what that heaven’s like!”
“You mustn’t talk that way,” said old Heron. “No, I know, you don’t do so when others are by, but you’ll forget sometime. Mistress Borrow at the castle said that you were a very pagan, though an innocent one! That came into my head, too, while he talked. And another thing came that sounds fanciful—but a myriad of women and girls have found it no fancy! Listen to me, Joan. Since we got our new King, and since the land has grown so zealous and finds Satan at any neighbour’s hearth, there’s been a growing ferreting out and hanging of witches. In Scotland it’s a fever and a running fire and we’re not as far as the antipodes from Scotland. Now I’m not denying that there are witches; the Bible says there are, and so, of course, there must be. But it knocks at my head that many a silly old woman and many a young maid has been called a witch that was none! And it came to me that Hawthorn’s not the castle and the castle wood, and that if Mistress Borrow called you pagan and said that you stepped and spoke too freely for a woman, it’s like that some here might take it on themselves to think pure ill—”
“I see not how they could,” said Joan. “There is no ill to think.—Do you mean that I am not to sing about Robin Hood and Maid Marian?”
“I like to hear you,” said old Roger; “but aren’t there godly hymns? Use your own good sense, my girl.”
Joan at the window looked out upon the flowering trees and the springing grass and robin redbreast carolling in the pear tree. When she turned her eyes were misty. “I like to sing what I feel like singing. If it chances to be a hymn, well and good—but a forced hymn, meseems, is a fearful thing! I like to go free, and I like not a mim-mouth and a downward look. But I like not to bring trouble on you, and I do not like either to have them set upon me for ungodliness, nor to have some fool cry upon me for a witch! So I’ll be careful. I promise you.” She laid the trenchers upon the table and turned out from its pan a warm and fragrant loaf. “I’ll be careful—oh, careful!—And now when are we going to get our beehives from the forester’s wife?”