After that he called me into the yard to receive instructions as to various details about the sending out of the vans, and he gave Bob Kingsman "what for," because he had been so long saddling Dapple.
I can see him now as he rode away. Though a heavy man he rode well, and in fact never looked so well as when on horseback. I can remember, too, that my mother was at an upper window, my bedroom, in fact, whither she had gone to "put things in some sort of order."
My father waved his hand to her, with a more gracious gesture than I had ever before seen him use. I answered with my cap. For my mother, as I think, was so taken aback that she withdrew into the house, with something of the instinctive shyness of a girl who peeps at her sweetheart from behind the curtain.
Perhaps it was as well. She kept the little love token to herself. It was hers, to get out of it what dreary comfort she could, in the terror and suspense of the days that followed.
*****
Longtown, to the Tryst or Fair of which my father set out, was about fourteen miles over the moors—quite, indeed, on the other side of the Cheviots. It had thriven because it formed a convenient meeting place for Scotch drovers and cattle rearers with the buyers from the big Midland towns, and even from London. Little more than a village in itself, it contained large auction marts for lamb sales, horse markets, and the general traffic of an agricultural district. The country folk went there of a Wednesday, which was its market day. My father's road lay plainly enough marked across the Common, then by Brom Moor and the Drovers' Slap, a pass through the high, green Cheviots, with a little brook running over slaty stones at the bottom—ice-crusted now at the edges, and the water creeping like a slow black snake between the snow-dusted banks.
We waited up long for my father that night, mother and I. Bob had gone down to the village—to do some shopping, he said. But I could easily have told in what shop to find him—the one in which they don't, as a general rule, do up the goods with string and brown paper.
Then in the slow night, I with a book and she with her stocking, my mother and I sat and waited. It would have been nothing very unusual if father had not returned at all that night. He sometimes did this, when business kept him at East Dene or Thorsby. On such occasions his orders were that we should lock up at eleven and go quietly to bed. Mother mostly let the maid, Grace Rigley, go home to her father's house at the other end of the village. Indeed, we were always glad when she did, for it let us have the house to ourselves, a pleasure which people who keep servants all the time never know.
We gave father till twelve that night—why, I do not know—except that the hill road was an unusual one for him to travel. And what with the sloughs and quags, the peat-faces and green, shaking bogs, it was not at all a canny country after dark.
I had to keep mother up, too.