Chris Jennifer was too busy a man to worry his slow brain greatly over other people’s affairs, for when a man farms for the children who shall come after him he can give all the daylight to the land, and trudge home to feed and sleep without much communion with the philosophers and poets. There is always work upon a farm, save for those who have sore heels and a chronic thorn in the forefinger. For these autumn and winter months ploughing, hedging, ditching, carting fagots and stacking them for the winter, spreading the muck abroad, taking odd carpentering jobs in hand, to say nothing of the feeding and tending of sheep and cattle, the fattening of pigs and bullocks for Christmas, the trapping of vermin, and the netting of the accursed cony. Chris Jennifer’s most luminous moment was after a rat-hunt about the barns and out-houses. To take by the tail the carcasses of sundry strapping rats and heap them in a funeral pile was an act that made Mr. Jennifer feel that Satan can be confounded in this world and his imps punished for stealing a farmer’s com. For if Chris Jennifer hated anything it was a rat, and next to the rat he hated couch-grass, while the purple-polled thistle came in a bad third.
When Mrs. Winnie’s husband went to bed he slept the deep, sonorous sleep of a round-headed peasant whose lungs had been breathing in clean air all the day. And not even the facts that John Gore had borrowed his best rope and that his wife was dabbling her hands in affairs that did not concern her could keep Master Christopher awake and talking. All he had deigned to hope was that “us be not goin’ agen the law,” and that “this fine gentleman ben’t feedin’ on hot pie-crust.” Then he drew his nightcap down, turned on his right side, and went to sleep with the ease of a dog.
Mrs. Winnie, being a woman, and more impressionable and imaginative, remained very wakeful all that night, thinking of all manner of strange adventures, and not a little afraid of John Gore’s neck. She had banked the kitchen hearth up with logs, left some supper on the table, and the door unbarred, so that there should be some welcome for him if he came home after bedtime. Yet in spite of all this satisfying forethought she kept awake to listen, and even when she dropped away toward Christopher’s oblivion Mrs. Winnie came to with a start, thinking that she had heard sounds.
Daylight came, with a west wind swishing in the beech-trees and making a low murmur in the chimney, and the adventurer had not returned. Mrs. Winnie jerked an elbow into her man’s back, rose up, and began to dress. She was down and at work in the kitchen getting the fire alight before Chris Jennifer got a very stout pair of legs out of the bed.
Mrs. Winnie had piled up the fire, lit the dry brushwood under it, and was kneeling to help the blaze with the bellows, when the door swung open, and John Gore walked in. He looked muddy as to the boots and breeches, and rather white about the face, like a man who has been out long in the cold, though his eyes had a quiet steadfastness that proved he had no pallor at the heart.
Winnie Jennifer twisted round on her knees.
“Body of me, sir, you are here at last! I’ve been kep’ awake most of the night through thinking of ye, and listening.”
He smiled down at her, and when he smiled the mystery that was in him seemed to glow and to exult in a way that made Mrs. Winnie hanker after her own days of being courted.
“You should not have troubled your head about me, Mrs. Jennifer.”
The fire was blazing now, making a brave crackle, and John Gore looked at it as though he were cold and empty and dead tired. Mrs. Winnie was up and bustling in an instant.