‘Wimmin,’ he cried, in his fine deep voice with the violoncello quality in it, ‘wimmin? ye may live ’til crack o’ Doom, sir, and then never larn how to take ’em! “I’ll ha’ two!” sez she, only laast Saddaday, ma’am, “an’ bring another brace, Darkie,” she sez, “when ye happens along agen,”—all as nice as nice could be, sir. An’ now, soon as ’a sot eyes o’ me, ’a hups wir futt, an’—’
He turned the corner of the house, and I heard no more.
I wonder, now, how Darkie fares this weather in his Downland eyrie. It has always been a mystery in Windlecombe as to where he passes his nights. At all times, winter or summer, he is to be met with, tramping up the lane towards the Downs; using the last light of day apparently in putting himself as far as may be from the chance of a night’s lodging; and, in the early mornings, you meet him trudging down again from the heights, his basket full of odd hedgeside garnerings for sale in the town. The mystery is a mystery to me no longer, although it was quite by chance I lit upon him in his secret nook.
Coming over the Downs one winter’s morning, I saw a thin blue spiral of smoke rising from the very centre of a great patch of gorse on a hill-side; and threading my way through the wilderness, bent on elucidating this phenomenon, I came at length upon a queer little scene. At the mouth of a sort of cave cut deep into the solid green heart of the gorse thicket, burned a little fire of sticks; and over it hung a pot that gave forth a savoury steam. Behind the fire lay Darkie on a snug couch of hay and old sacking, fast asleep, with a pipe in his mouth. Evidently he had dozed off in the midst of his preparations for a meal. I took one swift look round his castle, noting various old tins, old coats, and the like hanging over his head; several sugar-boxes filled with odd lumber behind him; and a shepherd’s folding-bar—a deadly weapon, twenty pounds or so of solid iron—lying conveniently to his hand; and then I crept away, as silently as I had come. Not that I feared any violence from him. In all the years we had been acquainted, I had never known him harm a mouse. But many was the time I had turned him away from my own door, unceremoniously enough; sometimes with hard words, once or twice, indeed, with threatenings of his natural enemy, the constable. And I feared now reprisals of a kind that would hurt almost as much as the folding-bar heftily wielded—I feared to see Darkie stagger to his feet and pull off to me one of my own long-discarded caps, hear him give me generous and courtly words of welcome, and a kind look out of his mastiff’s eyes, making me as free of his snug, green-roofed dwelling as I had so often made him free of the street.
Towards the hour of sunset I went up to the little attic window again, and looked out over the drenched housetops for any sign of a break in the weather. The rain had ceased, and the western sky had lightened somewhat, taking on an indefinable warmth of hue. There was no sunshine, nor any hope of sunshine; but there was a light abroad that picked out all the browns and reds and yellows in the landscape, wondrously intensifying them, while leaving all other hues as grey and cold as ever.
Past eleven o’clock, and a cloudless night of stars, with the wood-larks singing high over the village, and the cuckoos calling in the hills as though it were broad day. Yes—the change has come: Farmer Coles is never far out in his prognostications. It will be cutting weather to-morrow; and to-morrow I must be up with the earliest of them, and away to the Hoe-field.
IV
Of summer evenings in Windlecombe, all through haying and harvest time, you see men lounging about the village, one and all obsessed by the same trance-like, serenely dilatory mood. All have pipes well alight, leaving a trail of smoke behind them on the dusky golden air. All have hands thrust deep in trouser-pockets, carry their unshaven chins high, are tired as dogs, and look as somnolently happy as noontide owls. And of all the days of the week, there are more of these placid optimists abroad, and these characteristics are most to be noted in them, on the evening of the last working day.
To-night I went up and down the green—the most uncertain of a deliberately irresolute company—half a dozen times, perhaps, before, by common but unvoiced consent, we turned our lagging footsteps towards the inn. All the while I was rejoicing in a possession, priceless indeed, yet hard-won as might be—a heart and mind filled with the spirit of the Cottar’s Saturday Night. You cannot get this chief of all country pleasures in exchange for money. It is to be had in only one way, at the cost of long laborious days in the fields; and every tired muscle, every aching joint in my body, stood then as witness that I had done my best to earn what I had of it, if it might be earned at all. The old oak window-seat, in the parlour of the Three Thatchers, was as softly welcome as the Chancellor’s woolsack: I would not have exchanged that mug of home-brewed ale for a draught of ambrosia at the feet of the gods.
The crimson sunset light streamed hot upon me, as I sat on the window-ledge half among the parlour company, and half among those congregated on the benches under the virginia creeper outside. Every moment or two some other tired haymaker strolled up, and added his solid breadth and his tobacco smoke to the throng. But we were not all field-workers in the Three Thatchers to-night, nor had only the common causes of tired limbs and sun-parched throats brought us together. Young Daniel Dray was knitting his dark brows over some papers and account-books at the trestle-table; and young Tom Clemmer sat close by, thoughtfully swinging a cricket-bat pendulum-fashion between his outstretched legs. A silence fell upon the company.