She opened a door and pushed her into a tiny room in which the flicker from the kitchen fire showed the outline of a mattress on the floor. Susannah bade her lie down while she fetched a covering and she obeyed; she would have liked to rebel, but her fatigue was too great. When the elder woman left her she lay still for a space, her one thought of escape. Then she slept, worn out; to-morrow—somehow—she would begin the world for herself.
[CHAPTER III
TALGWYNNE FAIR]
ON the second morning after Heber and Catherine disturbed the sleeping house, Talgwynne was also shaken out of its accustomed quiet by its half-yearly horse-fair. But for the usual market this was the little town’s one explosion of business and pleasure; sheep and cattle changed hands every week within sound of the clock on the square church tower in larger or smaller quantities, but it was only in spring and autumn that mountain ponies, hackneys, and carthorses enlivened the place by their transitory presence.
On these occasions the west side of the town was by far its most cheerful point, for the road sprawled out into the country, and, for a flat quarter of a mile, was set apart as a show-ground by those who had horses to sell. A rough fringe of grass on either side of the way was the rallying place of the solid, who came to buy; the idle, who came to look on; and the light-minded, who would assemble to jeer and to goad unskilful horsemen with taunts and advice. After mid-day the roadsides would be strewn with hats, wisps of straw, broken clay pipes and the persons of those who had already succumbed to the pleasures of the fair.
To Heber’s father, crippled by rheumatism and well on in years, this gathering was not a thing to be missed, for it was his one link with the world as he had known it all the days of his life. The stream on which he had plied in youth and manhood had taken an outward bend, as it does for the very aged, and had left him on that sad, isolated piece of shore which is the last resting-place for their living feet. But Talgwynne fair could still give him the faces of a few old cronies and the wry pleasure he could still experience at the sight of younger men compulsorily parting company with their saddles.
He sat on a log, sheltered from the fresh wind by the hedge at his back, with Susannah, to whom both horses and riders were interesting, beside him. Though old Moorhouse was remarkable by reason of his stature, which years and rheumatism had only slightly disguised, and his niece, because of a vivid, indefinable something, which arrested both male and female eyes, the couple was too ordinary a sight to attract notice from regular haunters of the fair, and only a few strangers let their minds wander from business to glance at them. The interest of most people appeared to be centred in a prosperous-looking man whose face was unfamiliar to Susannah, as he loitered with a knot of farmers standing by their gigs on the grass. So many glances followed him that she remarked on it to a lad who was watching him with a half-curious grin and an elbow which jogged the ribs of a neighbouring friend.
“That’s him—Charles Saunders,” replied the young fellow; “come to look for ’is wench, a’ s’pose. You be a bit behind the times, missus.”