The world was too gay and warm for Pamela’s blank misery. The hot sun darted into her strained eyes like needles. She went round the house, hugging the lichened wall, her head down, the woolly leaves and spiral tendrils of the vine touching her dull hair. At the garden door she met Gainah, with a flush on her wasted face and a gleam of the old industry and importance in her cold eyes. She was attired in a loose garment of unbleached calico, cut like an antiquated bathing garment. Her skirts were bunched under it. She had a battered straw hat, round which was firmly fixed a veil of green net. A pair of old stockings were pulled over her hands and arms. She carried a tin frying-pan, which she constantly beat with a long iron skimmer.
The air was hot and noisy. There seemed an unusual commotion along the line of beehives which were set by the south wall. They were straw skeps, which in winter were covered with turf to keep out the cold. Pamela, who had read up bee-keeping, with other branches of country life, had long decided to have bar-frame hives when she was mistress of Folly Corner. But her knowledge of bees was only theoretical. She was very frightened of them, and the deft, fearless way in which Gainah would take a swarm excited her admiration and made her grudgingly admit that it might be a point of superiority.
The angry buzzing grew louder, the monotonous tom-tom beating of the frying-pan and skimmer more persistent.
“There’s a swarm over there in the crab-tree,” Gainah said excitedly, forgetting for the time all party feeling. “I must go and take it. They know me. They’ve been talking all the morning; I knew we should have a flitting by dinner-time.”
Pamela languidly turned her head. A dark, pear-shaped mass hung from the lower branch of the crab tree in the oat-field.
“They know I’m coming,” Gainah said, advancing and still beating, “they know everything. These are fierce—I crossed them with an Italian queen ten years ago—but they never sting me. They have more sense and feeling than half the folk about. When old Bert Hone died and young Bert took the bees from his mother, they didn’t flourish. He hadn’t acted fair and they knew it. When there’s a swarm in the thatch none of the girls in a house ever get married. All Len Daborn’s girls are maids still.”
She strode on, a spare distorted figure in her calico wrapper, with the green veil tucked safely down in her scraggy throat. Pamela watched her vanish and reappear beyond the fruit-bushes. On any other day she might have asserted herself—given a wise homily on bee-keeping up to date, or deprecated old-world superstitions.
She went under the low door with the wooden hood and sat down in the dull dining-parlor, her eyes vaguely looking out of the window at the space between the casement and the yew. Nancy’s flame-colored hair and thick scarlet lips seemed to stand out in relief from the curled somber leaves.
Gainah’s work, just as she had thrown it down when the bees swarmed, was huddled on the floor, and the blue cambric hearts which she had cut ready for patching on the white dimity were dotted like huge pale turquoises on the narrow oak table.
Pamela looked at the half-made quilt. Gainah had told her once, in a moment of expansiveness, that the blue cambric and white dimity had been her mother’s wedding petticoat and gown. It was a dainty quilt, all white groundwork, with blue bordering and bands and carefully cut hearts and leaves. The stitches were small and regular. Gainah sat at patchwork from breakfast until supper, now that the garden and the house were no longer under her control. In the lower drawer of her chest she already had five quilts folded neatly away in camphor.