“A grand day, Nancy! It’s good to see you about again. Have you ought i’ your poke you want to sell?”
“You haven’t money enough to buy, Albert,” she replied readily.
“Is that so?” he went on with affected astonishment. “These pedigree pups does cost a sight o’ brass, I know!”
She smiled and passed on; but the words in their careless humour had struck her heart like a blow. “These pedigree pups!” What was her child’s pedigree? “By James Inman ex Nancy Clegg!” The burden she was carrying that had been so light a moment or so before grew suddenly heavy, and she was conscious of an aching arm. The sunshine that had shed its radiance upon her spirits was blotted out by this leaden cloud, and she was conscious of an aching heart. The wild grandeur of nature, the wind-swept hills that she had thought to look upon with so much pleasure, mocked her with a sense of harshness and stony indifference. They were old—hoary with age: of what concern to them were the sorrows of the puny mortals who came and went in the grey hamlet that sheltered at their feet, and who were soon buried in the earth and forgotten? With what fervent heat she had loved them! how cold they were to her!
Mechanically she drew the knitted wrap further across the sleeping child’s face—in order to protect it from the frost the action said; but as her heart told her, so that she might not see her husband’s features reproduced on a smaller scale.
Her heart spoke and she listened. Immediately there came a revulsion of feeling as sudden and tempestuous as the gales that leap full-grown from the secret places of the mountains, and she pulled the wrap back and raised the little head to her lips.
“My precious!” she said.
He opened his eyes and smiled into hers, gurgling his appreciation of the light that shone there and the comfort of her arms; and not a shadow lingered on her face. All the optimism of mother-love, all the brave predictions that a woman associates with her first-born boy helped to drive the black mood back. The child was her one comfort: the bow God’s mercy had set in the cloud to show that her sinful folly had not doomed her to utter despair. He was hers to mould and train as she would, for her husband cared nothing for him,—she could almost thank God that it was so—and they two would be companions in the days that lay ahead, roaming the wild moors together and climbing to the very summits of the mountains. She laughed aloud as in fancy she heard his laugh—the laugh of the agile lad who makes fun of his mother’s tardiness; she lived in a paradise of the future: a paradise ready-made on those bleak, grey uplands, which were no longer frosty and heartless and old, but young and bright as the spring-time....
She had gone far enough along the Tarn road—too far, indeed, for her strength—and she turned back. The baby river, a good distance below, seemed to her unusually loud and boisterous. The noise of its roaring echoed strangely from the sides of old Cawden on whose lower slopes the path she was treading ran. She would have noticed it more if her forehead had not been buried so often against the soft flesh of her baby’s neck. It was not until she reached the point where the Tarn road joins that from Gordel that she became aware that the sound of rushing water came not from the river below but from the hill above.
I have said already that the neighbourhood of Mawm is famous for its natural curiosities; but of all the phenomena connected with it there is none more remarkable than that which is associated with the hamlet’s guardian hill.