It was necessary, though, to tide over the momentary reciprocity—the
slight exchange of consciousnesses that, if indulged, must have ended in a climax—with a show of stiffness; a little pretence that we were a lady and gentleman taking a walk, otherwise undescribed. When the doctor relinquished Sally's hand, he felt bound to ignore the fact that hers went on ringing like a bell in the palm of his, and sending musical messages up his arm; and to talk about dewponds. They occur on the tops of downs, and are very scientific. High service and no rate are the terms of their water-supply. Dr. Conrad knew all about them, and was aware that one they passed was also a relic of prehistoric man, who had dug it, and didn't live long enough, poor fellow! to know it was a dewpond, or prehistoric. Sally was interested. A little bird with very long legs didn't seem to care, and walked away without undue hurry, but amazingly quickly, for all that.
"What a little darling!" Sally said. "Did you hear that delicious little noise he made? Isn't he a water-ouzel?" Sally took the first name that she thought sounded probable. She really was making talk, to contribute her share to the fiction about the lady and gentleman. So was her companion. He reflected for a moment whether he could say anything about Grallæ and Scolopacidæ, or such like, but decided against heaping up instructive matter on the top of the recent dewponds. He gave it up, and harked back quite suddenly to congenial personalities.
"What was it you wished I wouldn't, Miss Sally?"
Our Sally had it on her lips to say, "Why, do that—call me Miss Sally, of course! I can't tell you how I hate it." But, this time, she was seized with a sudden fit of shyness. She could have said it quite easily before that trivial hand-occurrence, and the momentary stiffness that followed it. Now she backed out in the meanest way, and even sought to fortify the lady and gentleman pretext. She looked back over the panorama they were leaving behind, and discerned that that was Jeremiah and her maternal parent coming through the clover-field. But it wasn't, palpably. Nevertheless, Sally held tight to her groundless opinion long enough for the previous question to be droppable, without effrontery. Then her incorrigible candour bubbled up, and she refused to take advantage of her own subterfuge.
"Never mind, Dr. Conrad; I'll tell you presently. I've a bone to pick with you. Wait till we've seen the little churchy-wurchy—there
it is, over there, with a big weathercock—and then we can quarrel and go home separate."
Even Agur, the son of Jakeh, would have seen, at this point, the way that this particular maid, in addressing this particular man, was exaggerating a certain spirit of bravado; and if he had been accompanying them unseen from St. Sennans, would certainly have deserved his own self-censure if he had failed to trace this spirit to its source—the hand-incident. We believe it was only affectation in Agur, and that he knew all about the subject, men, maids, and every other sort; only he didn't think any of the female sorts worth his Oriental consideration. It was a far cry to the dawn of Browning in those days.
Down the hill to the flatlands was a steep pathway, where talk paused naturally. When you travel in single file on a narrow footway with a grass slide to right or left of you, which it does not do to tread on with shoe-soles well polished on two miles of previous grass, you don't talk—especially if you have come to some point in talk where silence is not unwelcome. Sally and the doctor said scarcely a dozen words on the way down to the little village that owned the name and the church of Chalke. When they arrived in its seclusion they found, for purposes of information and reference, no human creatures visible except some absolutely brown, white-haired ones whose existence dated back only a very few years—not enough to learn English in. So, when addressed, they remained a speechless group, too unaccustomed to man to be able to say where keys of churches were to be had, or anything else. But the eldest, a very little girl in a flexible blue bonnet, murmured what Sally, with insight, interpreted into a reference.
"Yes, dear, that's right. You go and tell moarther t' whoam that a lady and gentleman want to see inside the church, and ask for the key." Whereupon the little maid departs down a passage into a smell of wallflowers, and is heard afar rendering her message as a long narrative—so long that Dr. Conrad says the child cannot have understood right, and they had better prosecute inquiry further. Sally thinks otherwise, and says men are impatient fidgets.