The Sheep-Stealers

by Violet Jacob

It is doubtful whether five people out of every ten who contemplate marrying do so from devotion pure and absolute, so in this George was no worse than many of his neighbours. He certainly was not in love with Mary, for he could hardly tell whether he would be glad or sorry if she refused him, but he was inclined to think, sorry. His main reason, which swallowed up any other, was pity—pity and the longing to protect a stricken creature. The type of theorist perfect in all points except discrimination in human nature would have smiled deprecatingly and assured him that he was a fool, that what had happened once must inevitably happen twice, and that he would be like the man in Æsop’s fable who had warmed a frozen viper on his hearth and been bitten for his pains. But he knew better. That Mary was not a light woman he could see easily—so easily indeed that he had never given the matter the consideration of a moment. He merely knew it. Also there lurked in him an odd feeling which one might almost call an economical one; they had both made a terrible muddle of their lives and gone the wrong ways to their own undoing, and if they could but convert their two mistakes into one success, it would be a distinct gain. He was a lonely man too, and the presence of a young and comely woman in his home would be very pleasant to him. He wondered whether she liked him much—he did not for an instant fancy that she loved him, for he knew that her heart was dead inside her, and he was quite unconscious that one thing that drew him to her was his complete understanding of her. It is a kindness we do when we really understand another human being—given a not ignoble one—and the doing of a kindness produces affection more surely than the receiving of one. The chief drawback to his plan was his bondage to the Pig-driver, for until that was over he could not marry; but he was putting by little sums earned with his hedging and ditching and other journeyman work, and on these he hoped they might start their married life when he had served his time with Bumpett. Could he make money enough to pay his debts to his taskmaster he would break with him at once, knowing that the old man in exposing his thefts would have to expose his own also. But his earnings were so small that all these were only forlorn hopes.

Rhys came up through the trap-door under the sacks. As he appeared in the doorway of the partition George saw that he had a stick in his hand.

“You’re not thinking to go out, surely?” he remarked.

“I am,” was the short reply.

“But the light’s not gone yet; you’ll be collared one of these days,” said Williams, more as a sop to his own conscience than from any interest.

“If I don’t care, you needn’t.”

“I don’t—not a damn,” replied Williams; “you can get clapped into prison any day you like.”

Walters left the house in so reckless a humour that he scarce bestowed a precautionary glance on his surroundings when he crossed the plank, and as the old cart-road led only to the most carefully avoided place within, possibly, a hundred miles, he was the less inclined to thwart his mood. Though the dusk had barely begun to confuse distant outlines, he strolled carelessly up the hillside, his mind full of irritated contempt for George. It was hard to him that a man of his intelligence and standing should have to tolerate the society of a clown, one whose sole merit of brute strength was unillumined by any ray of good feeling or geniality. When he arrived at the bit of scrubby ground by the Pedlar’s Stone, he turned and looked down the track he had ascended towards the valley.

On either side lay the slope, unbroken except by ragged bushes and briers; out of one of these which clothed a bank stuck the Pedlar’s Stone. It looked sinister enough thrusting its black form through the thorns. A little way beyond was the rock under which the Pig-driver had made so snug a larder, and two or three slabs not unlike it were scattered round. He sat down upon one of them; there were limits to his imprudence, and he did not mean to venture farther away until the light had completely gone. Night outside had of late become as familiar to him as day, the sleeping world as important as the waking one; he felt almost like a man endued with an extra sense, for that half of life which for the healthy sleepers of the earth is simply cut out, was a living reality to him. The gulf of oblivion which divides one day from another for most people was ceasing to exist, and in its place was a time with its own aspects and divisions, its own set of active living creatures whose spheres of work belonged properly to the darkness and stillness. He had a feeling of double life. Eastern ascetics whose existences are spent in lonely places, in vigils, in silence, in the fastnesses of strange hills, know this. To the Western mind, so curiously incapable of understanding anything which does not assail it through its body, and which has such a strange pride in its own limitations, such things are folly. But the double life is there, the pulsations of knowledge which can be dimly heard through that receptiveness of mind born of long silence, and though Rhys knew it as little as do most of his nation, he had a dim consciousness of change. That the quietness of night soothed him was all he understood or ever would understand; he longed for it to come as he sat looking over the fading landscape. And it was coming—coming as surely as that other influence of which he did not dream, but which even then stood behind him.

A sound aroused him; he turned with dismay and saw that he was not alone. He sprang up and found himself face to face with a woman. A glance showed him that she was a stranger, and though he was dismayed at the consequences of his rashness, it was reassuring to see from her manner that she was entirely occupied with her own affairs.