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Page 23
She stood by the window, tall and straight and queenly, dreamily gazing
out into the summer twilight, whilst he and her uncle sat over their
business. When he rose to go, she glanced at him with quick curiosity;
he hurried away, muttering a sheepish good night.
The next time that he saw her was in church on Sunday. He watched her
shyly, with a hesitating, reverential discretion: her beauty seemed to
him wonderful, distant, enigmatic. In the afternoon, young Mrs. Forsyth,
from Longscale, dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother, and the two
set off gossiping of Rosa Blencarn, speaking of her freely, in tones of
acrimonious contempt. For a long while he sat silent, puffing at his
pipe; but at last, when his mother concluded with, 'She looks t' me fair
stuck-oop, full o' toonish airs an' graces,' despite himself, he burst
out: 'Ye're jest wastin' yer breath wi' that cackle. I reckon Miss
Blencarn's o' a different clay to us folks.' Young Mrs. Forsyth tittered
immoderately, and the next week it was rumoured about the valley that
'Tony Garstin was gone luny over t' parson's niece.'
But of all this he knew nothing--keeping to himself, as was his wont,
and being, besides, very busy with the hay harvest--until one day, at
dinner-time, Henry Sisson asked if he'd started his courting; Jacob
Sowerby cried that Tony'd been too slow in getting to work, for that the
girl had been seen spooning in Crosby Shaws with Curbison the
auctioneer, and the others (there were half-a-dozen of them lounging
round the hay-waggon) burst into a boisterous guffaw. Anthony flushed
dully, looking hesitatingly from the one to the other; then slowly put
down his beer-can, and of a sudden, seizing Jacob by the neck, swung him
heavily on the grass. He fell against the waggon-wheel, and when he rose
the blood was streaming from an ugly cut in his forehead. And
henceforward Tony Garstin's courtship was the common jest of all the
parish.
As yet, however, he had scarcely spoken to her, though twice he had
passed her in the lane that led up to the vicarage. She had given him a
frank, friendly smile; but he had not found the resolution to do more
than lift his hat. He and Henry Sisson stacked the hay in the yard
behind the house; there was no further mention made of Rosa Blencarn;
but all day long Anthony, as he knelt thatching the rick, brooded over
the strange sweetness of her face, and on the fell-top, while he tramped
after the ewes over the dry, crackling heather, and as he jogged along
the narrow, rickety road, driving his cartload of lambs into the auction
mart.
Thus, as the weeks slipped by, he was content with blunt, wistful
ruminations upon her indistinct image. Jacob Sowerby's accusation, and
several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly
incredulous; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant; but from
the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering
conception of her difference from the ruck of her sex.
But one evening, as he passed the vicarage on his way down from the
fells, she called to him, and with a childish, confiding familiarity
asked for advice concerning the feeding of the poultry. In his eagerness
to answer her as best he could, he forgot his customary embarrassment,
and grew, for the moment, almost voluble, and quite at his ease in her
presence. Directly her flow of questions ceased, however, the returning
perception of her rosy, hesitating smile, and of her large, deep eyes
looking straight into his face, perturbed him strangely, and, reddening,
he remembered the quarrel in the hay-field and the tale of Crosby Shaws.
After this, the poultry became a link between them--a link which he
regarded in all seriousness, blindly unconscious that there was aught
else to bring them together, only feeling himself in awe of her, because
of her schooling, her townish manners, her ladylike mode of dress. And
soon, he came to take a sturdy, secret pride in her friendly familiarity
towards him. Several times a week he would meet her in the lane, and
they would loiter a moment together; she would admire his dogs, though
he assured her earnestly that they were but sorry curs; and once,
laughing at his staidness, she nick-named him 'Mr. Churchwarden'.
That the girl was not liked in the valley he suspected, curtly
attributing her unpopularity to the women's senseless jealousy. Of
gossip concerning her he heard no further hint; but instinctively, and
partly from that rugged, natural reserve of his, shrank from mentioning
her name, even incidentally, to his mother.
Now, on Sunday evenings, he often strolled up to the vicarage, each time
quitting his mother with the same awkward affectation of casualness;
and, on his return, becoming vaguely conscious of how she refrained from
any comment on his absence, and appeared oddly oblivious of the
existence of parson Blencarn's niece.
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