But, coming to a hog-backed stile, breaking the hedge and leading, by a narrow right-of-way over some clayey wheatlands, where the first faint green blush of the young corn lay in the more sheltered hollows, together with a powdering of fine unmelted snow, his bent brows relaxed, and the shadow that darkened his handsome sunbrowned face vanished. He whistled again as he threw a long blue leg, with a white stripe down the side of the tight trouser strapped down over the spurred Wellington boot, across the iron-bound log. For on the high bleak ridge of the sixty-acre upland, stood his mother’s farm, facing away from him to the west; where the fall of the clay-lands upon the other side sloped to the deep and muddy Drowse, spanned by an ancient stone bridge that had rude carvings of tilting knights in plate-armor, upon some of the coping-stones of its parapet. The bridge crossed, a mile of country road dotted with farmhouses and cottages led to the small and sleepy borough-town of Market Drowsing, in the shadow of whose square Anglo-Norman church-tower many tall Horrotians had moldered into dust....
The sight of the low, irregular brown-and-red-tiled roof of the old home building, with its paled-in patch of garden at the southern gable-end, its great thatched barn sheltering it on the north side, and its rows of beehive-shaped ricks, each topped with a neatly plaited ball of grass, tarred to resist weather and impaled upon a wooden spike, warmed the man’s heart, not for the reason that a somewhat cheerless boyhood had been passed beneath those mossy-green, lichen-yellowed, old red tiles, but because they sheltered Nelly.
“I wonder if she sees me?” he questioned with himself, as the path took a curve and the great church-shaped barn reared up its gray and ancient bulk between him and the homestead. “The little dairy-window at the house-back—this being about the time o’ day she’s drawing off the skimmings for the pigs—ought, if so be as she’s on the look-out, to have given her a view”—his smile broadened—“of the approaching enemy.”
Of course it had, long happy minutes back.... Even as the image of her rose smiling in his mind, she came running down the pathway straight into his arms, and with the joyful shock and the warm contact of her, vexations fled away, and he snatched her, not at all objecting, to his beating heart, and they took a long, sweet kiss—rather an experienced kiss, if one may say it, and more suggestive of the full-orbed sweetness of the honeymoon than of the wooing-time that goes before.
“Now, do ’e give over, Josh!” she said at last, and emerged all rosy with love and happiness from his strong embrace, and straightened her pink quilted sunbonnet, pouting a little. “Bain’t you ashamed?”
“I’d like to see myself!” declared Josh stoutly, and had another kiss of her upon the strength of it, and then held her off at arm’s length for a long, satisfying look.
She was very pretty, this Nelly, orphan daughter of a small freehold farmer named John Pover, who had borrowed money upon a mortgage from the great Thompson Jowell, and had, unhappy wretch, once the suckers of that greedy octopus were fairly fastened on him, been drained dry by means of extortionate interest, until he cut his throat—an absurd thing to do, seeing how little blood was left in him—leaving his freehold, farm, and stock to be gulped down, and his girl to take service as dairymaid with that grim Samaritaness, Sarah Horrotian.
She had sweet, soft, shy, dark eyes, had Nelly, and a sweet round face, the tops of its rosy cheeks dusted with golden freckles. There were some more on her little nose, a feature of no known order of facial architecture, but yet distracting to male wits, taken in conjunction with the rest; and a powdering of yet more freckles was on her darling upper lip, and the underlip pouted, as though it were jealous at having been overlooked. Her dark hair had a gleam of yellow gold on the edges of the curls that had escaped the control of the sunbonnet that now hung back upon her shoulders; and she had the round neck and plump breast of a dove, or of a lovely young woman, full of the vigor of fresh life and the glow of young hope, and the joy and the promise and the palpitating, passionate fulfillment of Love, without a bitter drop in the cup—until you came to Sarah Horrotian.
Josh came to Sarah, when the first edge had been taken off his appetite for kisses. He asked, unconsciously dropping back into his broad native accent, as he stood under the lee-side of the big barn, with his strong arm round Nelly’s yielding waist, and her curls scattered on the broad breast covered by the tight blue jacket:
“Well, and how be mother?”