“I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
The words reached Williams where he stood under the yew-tree, and something swelled up in his heart; abstract things struck him all at once as real. Life was real—death very real—to die fighting like Vaughan had died was real—certainly more real than stealing sheep. He stood thinking, hardly definitely, but in that semi-consciousness of thought which comes at times to most people, and from which they awake knowing a little more than they knew before. Whether they make their knowledge of use to them is another matter.
The Burial Service ran on to the end, and the people dispersed in twos and threes. Some gentlemen, whose horses were waiting at the smith’s shop close by, mounted and rode away after a few civil words with the Vicar; the labourers and their wives vanished quickly, the former hurrying off to their interrupted work, and the latter clustering and whispering among themselves. Soon the churchyard was empty, and nothing was left to show what had taken place but the gaping grave and the planks lying round it.
George remained a few minutes at his post under the tree before emerging and going out by the same gate as the mourners, but, when he did so, he saw that the girl had returned again and was sitting by the mound of upturned earth. His impulse was to go back, respecting her solitude, but Mary had heard his step and looked round at him. Their eyes met. He had never seen the toll-keeper’s daughter before, and her beauty and the despair written on her face touched him deeply in the stirred-up state of his mind. Remembering that he must shortly go back to Rhys, the man by whose fault he believed her to be sitting where she was, and share his roof with him for days to come, his soul recoiled. And yet, the truth was worse than he knew.
[CHAPTER X
FORGET-ME-NOTS]
HEREFORD town is one of those slumbrous cities, guiltless of any bait with which to lure the sight-seer, but possessing both a cathedral and an individuality of its own. It is a town which seems to have acquired no suburbs, to have grown up in its proper area out of the flat fields which lie around. But on the night of which I am speaking an unwonted stir was going on, a rumbling of vehicles through streets usually silent, and a great noise of voices and hoofs in the different inn yards. The Green Dragon, that stronghold of county respectability, was crowded from garret to basement, as the lights in every window proclaimed. Inside, chambermaids ran up and down-stairs, men-servants shouted orders from landings, and prim ladies-maids went in and out of bedrooms with the guarded demeanour of those who know, but may not reveal, the mysteries which these contain. The eyes of citizens were constantly gratified by the sight of chariots driven by massive coachmen whose weight seemed likely to break down their vehicles in front if unbalanced by rumbles behind. Into these last the smaller youth of the town deemed it a pride and a pleasure to ascend, when they could do so unnoticed, and to taste all the joys of so exalted a state until the vulgar “Whip behind” of some envious friend made the position untenable.
The cause of this uncommon activity in both town and urchins was that the officers of the Hereford Yeomanry were giving a ball, and from the remotest parts of the county people were flocking to it. The landlords thought well of such events, for innkeeping, like hop-growing, is a trade in which the speculator may compensate himself by one good harvest for several lean years.
From the assembly rooms a flood of light streamed over the pavement, and across it moved the uniformed figures of the hosts, resplendent in blue and silver, and congregating near the door—some to watch with solemn looks for consignments of their own relations, some, with lighter aspect, for those of other people.
The ball had not actually begun, but in Herefordshire, where such festivities were few, people liked to get as much of them as possible, and carriages were already arriving to disgorge be-feathered old ladies and be-wreathed young ones at the foot of the red-carpeted steps. The band began to tune up, and a general feeling of expectation pervaded the building. Harry Fenton was talking to his brother Llewellyn, who had been dining with him, and who was, with apparent difficulty, drawing on a pair of white kid gloves. More carriages rolled up, the doorway was getting crowded, the bandmaster raised his bâton; then the band slid into a mazurka—much in vogue at the time—and the colonel offered his arm to the county member’s wife. The floor filled rapidly.