The hills in the east were revealed against the grey sky. A light breeze drifted the smoke from the toll-house in the direction of Litton village, and the glow shone luridly on the rolling masses. A cock gave a rousing call, and was answered from farm to farm throughout the grey dale. “Barnaby Bright, langest day an’ shortest night,” a farmer muttered; and russet frets appeared over the hills. The fire burned down, and the embers glowed through a white ash. The Rebeccas were gathered together for departure; and Harriet Stubbs, a grimy, ungainly figure, in a short under-petticoat that revealed her sharp tibias, stood a little apart and watched a man in a woman’s attire who led a horse with a figure upon it quietly round by a wall and down a pasture to the open northward road. Farmer Butler was cursing here and there, and shouting, “Harriet! Harriet Stubbs!”
The high hills to the east showed a vast and mysterious shape, with an edge that burned. The two figures on the mare waved their hands to Harriet, and disappeared down the road. For many minutes she stood gazing after them; the birds twittered loudly; and then she laughed her short hard laugh.
“A Lad-lass to some purpose!” she muttered. “An’ his cheek were agen mine. O my love!—De’il tak’ me, I’m whinin’ again! Get thy face washed, Harriet Stubbs, an’ seek a house an’ mak’ a decent woman o’ thyself, an’ cover them shallacky ankles, for thou’s a offald thing i’ th’ dayleet. Speed ye, Harry! Happen he’ll call th’ bairn Harriet—or Harry—th’ Lad-lass wad serve for auther—an’ ’tis better nor calling mine Bessie.—Now I’ll find Henry.”
The sky flamed in hues of amber and coral, and she turned again to where the last of the Rebeccas were departing from the ruins of the toll-house.
THE FAIRWAY.
EXCEPT that he called the gipsies the “Johnnie Faws,” there was little of the rustic in his speech; and as he told the tale we seemed to see them, these Johnnie Faws, coming down the hill on that wild January forenoon. They did not come by the Portsannet road—it would have passed mortal eyes to find a road in the whirl and scurry and drift of white he described—but spread out like pheasant-beaters, crying one to another in the Romany, sometimes flung forward by the tempest, sometimes huddled down and covered over almost entirely by the snow. Perhaps the fact that he had been a schoolmaster accounted for an occasional positiveness in his manner,—it seems to remain with schoolmasters to the end of their days,—and he was an old man, who must be let talk after his own fashion. He told us how the wind swept out the tracks of the Johnny Faws behind them, and how the South Ness women looked compassionately on their wilder sisters, who did not cover their breasts once in ten years, but who had sought refuge from the storm, as the hares and foxes had done before them; and then he wandered off again, schoolmaster-wise, to tell us how the footprints of a fox over the snow made but a single line, and how a hare would lie at form, and what sort of tracks a robin made.... By and by he took up his tale again.
“——So we knew it was bad when the Johnnie Faws came down. Queer people—dark, whipcord-looking fellows, and one singularly handsome woman, very swarthy and black-eyed. I remember our women looked at her as if—as if—but our women lived in houses, you see.... Well, first of all we asked them about the Lizzie Martin; but they’d never heard of her. Was she a South Ness boat? they asked. Next we asked them if there was much snow on the Heights; and they answered, No; the Heights were swept clean, but a man could not stand upright there for the wind. No snow was falling, they told us; all was being whirled up from the ground again, dry and powdery. There was one fellow they called Nunan. He carried a knife and wore gold earrings and talked in a shrill, eager voice; and he told us how up there the white world and the pale apple-green sky was one brilliant intermingling that spun and sparkled in the cold sunlight and smoked.... We asked them where they had left their horses. It seemed they’d dug a way for them under what looked like the lee of an old quarry, in an immense drift: they would weather it as best they could, as sheep do.
“The Johnnie Faws moved restlessly up and down the village; but most of them gathered at the ‘Dotterel,’ though they drank nothing. The greater part of the time they were silent, but occasionally they all talked at once in their own tongue; and I dare say we shouldn’t have had any tidings of Portsannet at all if the group about the door of the ‘Dotterel’ hadn’t quarrelled, or seemed to. It was something about a slipper-brake. It appeared that one of their men, Osa Couper, had turned down into Portsannet earlier in the day, before the storm had got quite so bad, to get a new hook or rivet for this brake. He had promised to overtake them; but (they said) somewhere over yonder—over the Heights—a man with a pair of long wooden runners on his feet (it was Andrews, we learned afterwards, mate of an old Norwegian timber-barque, turned farmer)—Andrews—had suddenly appeared among them from nowhere in particular,—just dropped in on them from out of the smothering white, and had advised them to avoid the shelter of the hollows: the hollows, you see, were drifted, but the short brown grass showed on the tops. Then Andrews had reported that a tall, Egyptian-looking fellow had flung himself into the Portsannet boat as she had put forth for the second time that morning; and then all at once the Johnnie Faws had missed him. He had seemed to vanish while they had all thought he was talking to Osa Couper’s woman yonder.... Of course we asked again if it was the Lizzie Martin they had put out for; but they didn’t know.
“You know what South Ness is like,—houses at all levels, and how you can step from the door of Broadwood’s house yonder almost on to the ‘Dotterel’ chimneys. Well, if the Heights were swept, we had the sweepings. We were blocked with snow up to the chamber windows,—the bedroom windows,—and there was right of way through anybody’s yard or passage or kitchen that was convenient. I remember it interested me (perhaps it won’t interest you) the way the wind seemed to have been deflected from the houses in a sort of backwash. It had made great scoops and trenches, ten foot high and clean-cut at the edges, as if shaped in marble; and men and women passed up and down these trenches. These cliffs, as you might call them, darkened the interiors of the cottages; and the wind hooted in the chimneys just as lads blow across the barrel of a key. Farmers with shovels, frozen over white as snow men, returned from digging out their cattle, but the fishermen idled moodily. The cobles and smacks tossed down in the harbour; but the wind drowned most noises except that of the surf away out on the Spit, and that was like continuous explosions. This was only midday, you know, but you could see nothing but white—white; bits of ice like diamonds on your lashes; and here and there a bit of blue or apple-green sky, all tossed together. I thought I had never seen anything so wild and beautiful; but then, I hadn’t a Lizzie Martin out....”
“Lizzie Martin—the woman, not the boat—kept the ‘Dotterel.’ She was a pleasant body, plump (when she was twelve or thirteen she had one of these creases round her neck that means a double chin later on), and she was very honest and comfortable and motherly, though she hadn’t a child—just then. About two o’clock three of the gipsies had come into the ‘Dotterel,’—four, if you reckon the babe at the handsome woman’s breast,—and they sat over by the snowed-up window. There would be a dozen or so men round the hearth; but nobody was drinking, and nobody said anything in Lizzie’s presence about what we’d heard of this Osa Couper and the Portsannet boat, you understand. Now and then the child gave a little throaty cry, and once or twice Willie Harverson—he was a young giant, and his curly head always looked too little for his shoulders when he’d got his two or three winter ganseys on,—Willie had told her to bring the child nearer the fire. But she had only shaken her head and pointed behind her at the window. The panes had warmed a little, and the snow had peeled a couple of inches from them and then frozen again. Except for that narrow gleam of cold light, you’d have thought it was evening, for the candles were lighted, and they swealed and guttered every time the door opened. The gipsy woman had opened her breast again,—a sort of sling to carry the babe passed across it,—and she looked straight before her, like a handsome statue, a beautiful animal—like everything, else in nature except this self-conscious creature man.... I can’t tell you; never mind....