They looked a long time, but could not find it; and, full of their direful object, did not heed sounds of laughter on the other side of the hedge they were searching, till they got through a gap and jumped into the midst of a group of haymakers resting for lunch. The old men had got a little way apart by themselves, for they wanted to eat like Pan. All the women were together in a “gaggle,” a semicircle of them sitting round a young girl who lounged on a heap of mown grass, with a huge labourer lying full length at her feet. She had a piece of honey suckle in her hand, and he had a black wooden “bottle” near him.
There was a courting going on between these two, and all the other women, married and single, collected round them, to aid in the business with jokes and innuendoes.
Bevis and Mark instantly recognised in the girl the one who at “Calais” had shown them the road home, and in the man at her feet the fellow who was asleep on the flint heap.
Her large eyes, like black cherries—for black eyes and black cherries have a faint tint of red behind them—were immediately bent full on Bevis as she rose and curtseyed to him. Her dress at the throat had come unhooked, and showed the line to which the sun had browned her, and where the sweet clear whiteness of the untouched skin began. The soft roundness of the swelling plum as it ripens filled her common print, torn by briars, with graceful contours. In the shadow of the oak her large black eyes shone larger, loving and untaught.
Bevis did not speak. He and Mark were a little taken aback, having jumped through the gap so suddenly from savagery into haymaking. They hastened through a gateway into another field.
“How you do keep a-staring arter they!” said the huge young labourer to the girl. “Yen you seen he afore? It’s onely our young measter.”
“I knows,” said the girl, sitting down as Bevis and Mark disappeared through the gateway. “He put a bough on you to keep the flies off while you were sleeping.”
“Did a’? Then why didn’t you axe ’un for a quart?”
She had slipped along the fields by the road that day, and had seen Bevis put the bough over her lover’s face as he slept on the flint heap—where she left him. The grateful labourer’s immediate idea was to ask Bevis for some beer.
Behind the hedge Bevis and Mark continued their search for deadly poison. They took some “gix,” but were not certain that it was the true hemlock.