“Well, death is but death, let it come how it will.”
“But hunger is a bad death; and besides, are you not in constant danger of being taken up, and losing your life for a witch? Why, this bird that you keep, and your words and ways, will surely bring you to the stake one of these days.”
“Let the day come, if it is to come; and as to dying of hunger, where, think you, do the foxes die? and where do the birds of the air die? Why, they that escape the hounds die in their holes; and they that the bird-bolt misses find a dying place in some nest or corner. Go your way, young master! I am no tame rabbit, to be kept in a town hutch, and tormented by children. I don’t want to be led to church, and hear the parson’s jabber about my old soul.”
“Do not utter such wickedness, unhappy woman. It were charity to think you crazed, and take you into safe keeping against your will.”
At this the old woman gave a shriek of passion, fitful as that of a thwarted child, and then, suddenly overcome by fear, fell upon her aged knees, and lifted and joined her withered hands, and implored Cuthbert, with wild earnestness, never to have her moved.
“Look you, young master, winter and summer, here I have watched and waked these many years. It’s a small matter of meal that makes my porridge;—some give it for pity, and some give it for fear. There’s no lack of rotten sticks to keep me warm: yonder spring is never dry; and it’s free I am to go and to come, and nothing here to flout or to fret me: the deer and the kine take no count of me—the pretty creatures don’t fear me; and it’s not all the world calling me witch that will make them. That place is best we think best. Oh, for the love of God, master, let me alone—let me rot where I am.”
Cuthbert’s mind was in an agony of prayer; but his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. He would have said much; but he could speak nothing. He gave her alms; and telling her that he would do nothing against her will—nothing to make her unhappy, but that he would come and see her again—he raised her from her knees, and went upon his way homewards.
“My father would not thus have left her,” was his first thought. “He would have found some way to break into her heart. Strange world—strange thing this human life! This old solitary miserable has been wrapped in swaddling clothes, even as others—has been suckled at a human breast—has grasped, with tiny hand, a father’s finger—and been kissed, and muched; and now, she has survived all kindred—lost all defence of strength or money—hath none of wisdom, and because her back is crooked, and nose and chin have come well nigh together, she has been hunted from her kind, and dwells apart. As God is love,—and that he is I cannot doubt and live,—this is a mystery! It’s a skein so much entangled that my poor wit can not unwind it.”