A Dozen Ways Of Love, Lily Dougall [best book club books of all time txt] 📗

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She took the largest and thickest bit and thrust it into his hand, very much as a mother would feed her child with the portion she considered its fair share.

''Ere, ye may 'ev that, fur I shan't want it.'

'You are very kind,' he said, with a touch of sarcasm too fine for her.

It appeared that, having taken out the food, she thought well to make her own meal, for she went a few steps farther on, and, sitting down on the grass with her back to the paling, began to eat. A large tuft of weeds grew midway between him and her. Truly we can foresee consequences but a very little way in our dealings with a fellow-creature, and this man, as he stood munching his bread, uncertain how to proceed in winning favour from the bold beauty, was hardly pleased with the result of his encounter. His dog went and laid its head upon her knee, and she fed it with crumbs; its master, after watching them a minute, stepped out on the road with the intention of sitting down between them and the weeds. As he did so he caught sight, as he thought, of a man seated in the very place he intended to occupy. So strong was the impression that he started and stared; but again, as before, there was no one to be seen. The sunshine was bright upon all things; the palings were so far apart that he could see everything in the fields behind; there was no one far or near but the ploughman at half a field's distance, and they two, and the dog.

The woman turned coolly round and looked through the paling, as if she supposed he had seen something behind her. 'Was't a haer?' she asked, eyeing him with interest; 'ye ain't feared o' the like o' that?'

'No, it was not a hare; I did not see a hare.'

'What was't ye seed then?' she asked, looking at him with bold determination.

'What did I see?' he repeated vaguely, 'I saw nothing.'

'Thought ye looked as if ye'd seed something',' she remarked incredulously, and then went on eating and feeding the dog, as indifferent to his presence as she was to the presence of the weeds.

'Are you going far to-night?' he asked at length, thinking he would make more progress toward friendship before he sat down.

'To th' town.'

'Indeed, as far as that! Which town, may I ask?' he said, with mechanical politeness, for his mind was running on what he had seen.

'Yer a fool and noae mistake,' she replied with emphasis. 'There's but one town wi'in a walk.'

'On the contrary, I am considered a man of great learning,' he replied, with more eager self-assertion than he could hitherto have believed possible under the circumstances.

'Is't larning ye've got?' she asked, with much greater interest than she had before evinced.

'Yes; I am a man who spends his life seeking for knowledge.'

'Are ye wiser ner parson?'

'Very much wiser,' replied the man of science, with honest conviction.

She looked much more impressed than he had hoped; and thinking that he had made himself sufficiently interesting, he began to speak about her own affairs, supposing they would please her better.

'You are not a married woman?' he said, looking at her ringless hand.

'Married or no,' she replied, 'it's nowt to you.'

'I beg your pardon; everything which concerns such a beautiful woman must be of interest to me.'

At that she laughed outright in hard derision, and went on eating her bread and meat.

'But won't you tell me if you are married or not?' he pleaded, pursuing a subject which he thought must interest her. He was surprised to see the sudden expression of womanly sorrow that came over her face, giving her eyes new depth and light. She answered him sadly, looking past him into the sunny distance--

'No, nor like to be.'

'I must disagree with you there. If you are not married yet, I am sure you will be very soon. I never saw a more likely lassie than yourself.'

Manlike, he was quite unconscious of the consummate impertinence of the form this compliment had taken; but afterwards he realised it when his idle words recurred to his mind.

She turned her eyes full upon him, and said with energy: 'Ye know nowt at all about it;' and then added more meditatively, 'neither do parson.'

She had been so absorbed in her thoughts for a few minutes that she had ceased to stroke the dog, and, resenting this, it raised its silky head from her lap and laid it upon her breast. Thus reminded, she smiled down into the eyes of the dog and caressed it, pressing its head closer against her bosom. The man stood a few paces away, watching these two beautiful creatures as they sat in the hazy autumn sunlight, with their background of weeds and moss-grown paling. He felt baffled and perplexed, for he knew that he stood apart, excluded from their companionship by something he could not define. So intolerable did this feeling become that he resolved to break through it, and made a hasty movement to sit down beside them; but, as he stepped forward, he was suddenly aware that there was another man in the place he would have taken, embracing and protecting the girl. He swore a loud oath, and flung himself backwards to stand by the hedge on the opposite side of the road, that he might the better review the situation. It was all as it had been before--that quiet autumn landscape--only the woman appeared much interested in his sudden movements.

'What was't ye seed; was't a snaike?' she inquired loudly, at the same time moving her skirts to look for that dangerous reptile.

'No,' he shouted, putting his whole energy into the word.

'What was't ye seed, cutting them capers as if ye was shot, an' saying o' words neyther fit fur heaven above nor earth beneath?'

So loudly did she ask, and so resolutely did she wait for an answer, that he was forced into speech. 'I don't know,' he said, with another oath, milder than the first.

'Well, sure enow,' she said, still speaking loudly, ''ere's somethin' awful queer, ye says yer a man that's got larning more ner parson, an' ye sees somethin', an' can't tell what ye's seed. That's twice this short while; are ye often took bad the like o' that?'

The bold derision of this speech fell without effect upon its object, because he perceived a gleam of mischievous intelligence in her eyes which she had intended to conceal, but she was no adept in the art of concealment. The conviction that the woman knew perfectly what he had seen and did not in reality despise him for his conduct, took the sting from her jeers but did not make his position pleasanter. The repeated shock to his nerves had produced a chilly feeling of depression and almost fear, which he could not immediately shake off, and he stood back against the opposite hedge, with his half-eaten bread in his hand, conscious that he looked and felt more like a whipped schoolboy than, as he had fondly imagined when he first stopped the woman, the hero of a rural love scene. That was nothing; he was, as he had described himself, a man who devoted his life to the search for knowledge, and personal consciousness was almost lost in the intense curiosity which the circumstances had aroused in him. With the trained mind of one accustomed to investigation, he instantly perceived that his only clue to the explanation of the phenomenon lay in the personality of the woman. His one eager desire was to probe her thought through and through, but how was he to approach the interior portals of a mind guarded by a will as free and strong as his own? He would fain have bound down her will with strong cords and analysed the secrets of her mind with ruthless vivisection. But how? His tact, trained by all the subtleties of a life cast in cultured social relations, was unequal to the occasion, and, fearing to lose ground by a false step, he remained silent.

The woman finished eating and shook herself free of the crumbs. He supposed, almost with a sense of desperation, that she was about to leave him before he could begin his inquiry, but instead of moving she motioned him to come near, and he went, and stood on the road in front of her.

'Ye says yer a man o' larning, an' I b'lieves ye, she began.

He was about to reply that he was only a seeker after truth, but he was checked by the knowledge that she would accept no answer she could not understand. He fell back on the truth as it was to her, and said simply, 'Yes.'

'I wants to ask ye two questions; will ye answer like an honest man?'

She had laid aside all her loud rudeness, and was speaking with intense earnestness--an earnestness that won his entire respect.

'I will indeed answer you honestly, if I can answer.'

'Then tell me this--What's the soael o' a man?'

He stood with lips sealed, partly by surprise at the question, and partly by self-acknowledged ignorance of the answer.

'The soael o' a man,' she repeated more distinctly, 'ye knows what I mean surely?'

Yes, he knew what she meant, but he knew also that his own most honest convictions hovered between a materialist philosophy and faith in the spiritual unseen. If at that moment he could have decided between the two he would gladly have done so, for the sake of the eager woman sitting at his feet, but he knew that he did not know which was the truth.

She, still labouring under the impression that she had not made her meaning plain, endeavoured to explain. 'Ye knows when a man dies, there's two parts to him; one they buries, and one goes--' she pointed upward with her thumb, not irreverently, but as merely wishing to indicate a fact without the expense of words.

'Yes, I understand what you mean,' he said slowly, 'and under that theory, the soul----'

'Under what?' she said sharply.

'I mean that if you say the soul is divided from the body at death----'

'But it is--ain't it?' she interrupted.

'Yes, it is,' he said, feeling that it was better to perjure himself than to shake her faith.

'Go on,' she said, 'for parson says the soael is the thing inside that thinks; but when a man's luny, ye knows--off his head like--has he no soael then? I've looked i' the Catechis', an' i' Bible, an' i' Prayer-book, an' fur the life o' me, I doaen't know.'

'I don't wonder at that,' he said, with mechanical compassion, casting about in his mind for some possible motive for her extraordinary vehemence.

He felt as certain, standing there, that this was a true woman, true to all the highest attributes of her nature, as if he had been able to weigh all the acts of her life and find none of them wanting. In the midst of his perplexity he found time to ask himself whence he had this knowledge. Did he read it in the lines of her face, or was it some unseen influence of her mind upon his own? He had only time to question, not to answer, for she looked up in his face with the trust and expectation of