Chapter II: Trespass

The hour the porter had set as the one beyond towards Narrowfields and Cherrydale--places which Polly must not transgress, was creeping so near, yet far from each other. Narrowfields could not wholly hide the beauty of the gleaming Cherrydale!

Cherrydale, at this hour of transition, oozed sweetness from its pores, turning into a great, dark flower, palpitating between silence and the few sounds of the autumn night.

Adam Wild’s upland field of wheat, valued by the farmers around as worth forty English sovereigns, became an altar of mystery. The wind whispered over it of primal beauty, primal pain, primal gladness. Bread of life! Life that was so beautiful, holding things like Adam Wild’s perseverance against terrible odds; holding Susan Thorpe, with her quiet eyes and heart of country faith; holding Polly Cherry, with her baby ways and baby habit of clutching at things, without knowing whether or not they would hurt. But when the dark shadows went over the field, and the wind felt chill, and the faithless swallows made their crave for the south--the wheatfield, food for the bodies that hold the souls of men, said that life held also sordid things like the mortgagee of the Wilds’ farm, weak things like Adam’s father, who had given way to inertia since his wife died--inertia that is said to mark men with the sign of the ape.

The swaying field of wheat became a pæan of life--wherein many voices battled with each other, with the issue yet indistinct.

A black gate at the top of the field showed its five bars against a sky filling with silver as the west filled with fire of gold. Between east and west rolled broken country, with few trees, saving those seven beeches that made sooty blurs against that spreading silver that would soon take definite shape as a moon, an impatient moon that Adams had made to refect his haste to gather in the wheat, whenever he saw her like a sickle bending down towards it. To the left of his field was a great bump of hill like that of a dromedary humped under bronze velvet. Down below this, lay the Narrowfields’ road.

At the foot of his field was the round stone that had taken his fancy as a step to his stile. He had carried it half a mile and laid it down proudly as any woman adds something to her house comfort. Before he had ventured into wheat growing in a grass-county as a last throw of the dice against that townster who held the mortgage deeds, lovers had found this stone very convenient to climb up to sit on the stile; a high, uncertain, involved country stile enough. Since the wheat growing, there was ever a man prowling in the field--a fanatical man whose old hat the scarecrow had worn when the wheat was green, a man whom Cherrydale said was gifted with a wonderful head-piece, had the perseverance his whole family could have done with dividing up between them, but withal a man who couldn’t see for looking--meaning Susan Thorpe.

On the other side the stile were the three steps leading down upon the road that ran glimmeringly, now, between holly hedges.

To the left from the stile, this road ran to the village, which only showed now a church spire, gleaming with some reflection from the light of the fire of gold in the west. The right of it led to Narrowfields--as did that upper road now hidden beyond the top-most glory of Adam’s triumphant field of wheat, that paragon standing exultant over the shaven fields around.

Men’s voices sounded from the heart of its glory--its forty pounds, that was to put confusion into that dried soul of the yellow-faced man who said this was to be his--his, by divine right of paper deeds as against Adam’s willingness to spill his blood to keep it.

A sudden blaze from an uplifted lantern showed the crest of an old billycock hat with hawksbit and purple scabious thrust through a slit in the side--then, a ruddy, credulous country face and a pair of squat shoulders, whilst alongside was the taller form of a young man, without hat, the shadow making his eye-sockets deep caverns, his brow a cloud, and accentuating the horizontal line running down the deep upper lip--the lip that according to Cherrydalers stamped a man as of the old yeomanry, the “potato-faces.”

“It’s a seet for sore e’en,” said the voice of the older man. “I couldn’t ha’ thowt it could be done, hereabouts. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’ Ay. A good motta. Though my Aunt Bethsheba----” He broke off suddenly. “By th’ Mass, I nearly went then,” he added. He had stumbled.

“Better let me go in front,” said the young farmer.

There was a wincing tone in the voice as if he had felt human pain for the wheat touched by his godfather’s hobnailed boots.

“Ay. It’d happen be better, Addy,” said the other. “I’m not seein’ so weel these days. We noan on us mend wi’ keepin’.”

Adam Wild did not answer.

The lantern rays flashed once across his countenance, as he led the way along the narrow path through his wheat.

It was smiling.

It had all the kindly tolerance of a man who does not come of a talking-stock, being entertained by the childish frankness of a man who would talk till the cows came up. He might have stood as the type of the old yeomanry, with their strong bodies, and equally strong, if narrow minds. Short, dark hair almost stood erect as he walked against the wind.

“I’d like to hear thee courtin’ a lass, Addy,” said his companion, droll humour in his voice.

“How’s that, Uncle Nat,” he asked, and laughed.

His laughter was whole-hearted.

“Thy words might be tuppence apiece,” said the other. “But then--tha wert born in th’ neet, an’ them as is born in th’ neet is mostly o’ that mak. An’ thy mother went out without sayin’ a word!”

In the way of the north country he referred to death as a light going out.

Silence fell again--through which came the sea-like sighing of the wheat.

“Tha’ll shake thysel’ free o’ yon chap wi’ th’ papers,” said Uncle Nat, with faith. “Eh, it’s bonnie wheat. What put it in thy heyd to try grow wheat on grassland? Eh, ay, it’ll be a rare lift to ’art thy gettin’ free. For I’ll never believe ’at th’ Wilds ’at as lived on that land a hundred and fifty years,--to my grandfather’s countin’,--is goin’ to be pushed off it by a chap as yellow as his own papers, an’ e’en like he stops up a’ neet.”

Silence fell once more.

“Tha’rt fain o’ thy wheat, aren’t ta?” asked Nat.

“Ay,” answered Adam.

“Well, happen tha’rt reight not to brag on it,” said the old man. “For we never know what’s comin’ next, in this world, as my Aunt Bethsheba said. Eh, she were a queer un, my Aunt Bethsheba. But--tha didn’t tell me what made thee think to grow wheat on grassland.”

“There’s bin wheat grown there before,” said Adam. “Ay, before the Wilds had it. I read it in an old book.”

“To think a chap like thee, wi’ a’ that in thy heyd, should be content to muck fields,” said Nat, in innocent wonder.

“I’ll pay the mortgage off out of th’ land itself,” said the young man, in a tone of almost fanatical fervour. “I’ll tear our freedom up out o’ the ground where it was lost. Look out, Uncle Nat--the stone.”

They had reached the stile, the stone acting as a step up to it. Down below was the road.

Uncle Nat squeezed himself through the stile.

“Three steps down,” Adam warned him.

“Ay, I know there’s three,” said Uncle Nat. “There were allus three. I daresay, Adam, tha’s often wondered why I took an interest in thee. Well, I’ll tell thee. Forty year sin’, to-neet, I axed thy mother if she thought she could fancy me--at this stile. And she said ‘No--a.’ She’d a reight on it, lad. But I think she made a mistake a’ th’ same. Safely down, now, Addy. Lad, if I were thee I’d not trust that wheat long afore gettin’ it in. My bunion says ‘rain.’ Eh. Ay, she told me ‘No-a’ reight enough. An’ I felt sure she’d made a mistake. But it weren’t for me to point it out to her. Not likely. An’ tha’rt as like her as if she’d spit thee out o’ her mouth. An’ _tha’rt_ goin’ to mak a mistake.”

They were walking along the road now.

“How’s that, Uncle Nat?”

Adam’s query was in a tone that said he guessed what track Uncle Nat was on. Though, to be sure, his mind had never been so impudently broad before.

“Work’s a good thing, Adam,” said the other. “An’ I can understand thee bein’ ta’en up in this feight to keep th’ old farm. But, lad, tha’d feight a’ th’ better--for not lettin’ luv go a-beggin’. It’s a sad thing to turn luv a-beggin’, Adam. My Aunt Bethsheba, she said we were born for it, an’ a chap ’at hadn’t bin made miserable ower a woman didn’t know he were born, an’ a woman--well, she said she’d no right to be born if she were goin’ through life like a statoo, for it were a waste o’ good blood, an’ she might as weel ha’ ban made o’ plaister o’ Paris.”

Adam walked steadily on.

The old man cast sly glances at his face, but the lantern-bearer manœuvered to keep the darkness on his own face, the light full on his “Uncle” Nat’s. Though the only feeling Adam’s face showed was a shrinking embarrassment at what he rightly judged the old man was leading up to.

“I don’t know aught sweeter than freedom, an’ th’ earth,” he avowed, sincerely. “An’ I don’t want to, Uncle Nat. I’m a mean man. I’d liefer buy oats an’ rye an’ barley to put into th’ ground, than spend money buyin’ bonnets. You should look on me as wedded--to th’ Earth. She’s a splendid, bride. Worth dressin’. No, Uncle Nat.” It was as if he jestingly pushed away an unwanted article.

“She could buy her own bonnets!” declared Uncle Nat.

Whereupon Adam groaned inwardly.

He was sure now that it was Susan Uncle Nat meant.

“Her mother heard her a-prayin’ for thy field o’ wheat, Addy. Tha could fare to th’ ends o’ the yeth, an’ tha’d not find a tenderer, lovinger, purer heart than our little Susan’s got. An’ th’ right mate for a farmer. What is there she can’t do? Eh, Addy--tha’rt makin’ a mistake. She’ll be snapped up in no time.”

Adam Wild walked steadily on.

“Come--Adam,” asked Nat, as if asking him to bid for something under the hammer.

“Do--do you mean to say--that--Sue--likes me?” queried a voice out of the darkness.

Had he not been so eager to delude himself Uncle Nat would have heard the naked horror in the tones.

“She were prayin’ for thy wheat,” answered Uncle Nat in a voice that said that was enough for anybody. “In the middle o’ th’ neet when she thought everybody were asleep. Coom--Adam.”

“There’s a shrew mouse,” cried Adam, eagerly.

He lifted up his lantern, following the flight of the little creature into the grasses edging a ditch. The light blazed on an autumn hedge, with scarlet hips flashing amidst the gold of fading leaves. Uncle Nat noticed that Adam’s ear-tips were almost as red as the hips. He took this for a good sign.

“Gone,” said the young man, alluding to the shrew mouse.

“What says ta, Adam?” went on Uncle Nat as though the shrew mouse had not been trailed across his path.

“I never thought on it before,” confessed Adam. “An’ I’m sure I’ve never given reason----”

“There’s no reason in it,” laughed Uncle Nat. “Now--tha’s hit the nail on th’ head, there, lad. But--she’s a nice lass, isn’t she, lad?”

“Very,” said Adam with sincerity. Then, “I think women haven’t as much wit as hens, Uncle Nat. An’ you’ve kept hens.”

The hard gaiety of his tone had an under-current of perplexity.

“She’s as much common sense as a policeman, our Susan,” said Uncle Nat, indignantly. “Anyhow--I can drop her mother a hint as tha’rt not smitten. Tha can’t ha’ a young woman prayin’ for thy wheat, on false pretences.”

Which upset Adam’s gravity at the situation arising.

His laughter rolled out into the night, waking the echoes.

After a short pause, Uncle Nat joined in it, though uneasily at first.

They had reached a long, uneven wall, dry-built, and with blacker patches in its darkness showing where the sheep-gaps were. Nat’s hand touched a gate. The barking of dogs arose.

“Comin’ in, Addy?” asked Uncle Nat.

Before the man could reply a thin thread of light widened into a flood. A farmhouse door had opened, with a black figure like a fat marionette’s stuck out against the light, with something decisive in it, even though it was two fields’ distance away.

“She’s sin thee,” said Uncle Nat, blithely, as if that settled the question of Adam’s going in to supper.

“Now then. Don’t let him go. He only wants pressin’,” came a voice anything but marionette-like. Withal the voice of an elderly female it had a hearty lustiness, and even the distance could not steal away altogether the humorous double-meaning the speaker insinuated into the word ‘pressin’.

Nat nudged him slyly.

“Did ta hear her?” he asked with droll pride. “She said tha’ only wanted _pressin’_.”

His laughter rang out.

Adam did not answer him directly.

“Not this time, Aunt Sarah,” shouted Adam, genially.

His shoulders made a resolute square of blackness.

“Neet, Adam,” said Uncle Nat, stung at last, “I reckon tha’ll go through t’ wood an’ through t’ wood an’ get a crooked stick at th’ finish----”

But Adam had already taken some paces away.

He was restlessly eager to get away from that farm--uneasily afraid of that cherry-lipped damsel who might be peering out towards them from behind her mother--little Susan Thorpe, laughing, industrious, modest as a daisy, who played Ludo with Uncle Nat, till she almost fell off her chair asleep, and for whom Uncle Nat had never lost a chance of putting in a good word. Little Susan--little Susan, who, according to the village gossips, would one day have a pot of money and wear silk every day.

“Good-night, Uncle Nat,” he called.

Uncle Nat walked on in grim silence, never turning his head, for quite half a dozen paces.

Then he came back to the gate to which Adam had also returned.

“Tak’ no gaum o’ my gruntlin’, Addy,” asked Uncle Nat. “I get like a bear wi’ a sore back. We noan on us mend wi’ keepin’. An’--next to havin’ had thy mother say ‘Ay’ to me, I’d have chosen thee to have our Susan. But--tak’ no heed on me, lad. Tha’rt not mad, arta?”

There was so tender an anxiety in the question, so noble a lack of pride, so much revelation of the way the rat-catching old bachelor clung to the approval of this son of his soul, that Adam felt ashamed of having been mentally setting the old man down as a meddling old fool who was getting him, Adam Wild, into an awkward corner.

He gave Uncle Nat a slap on the shoulder that made him cry out.

“There’s naught could come between you an’ me, Uncle Nat,” he said with earnest conviction.

Then he added, feeling the old man’s gaze upon him, expectantly, “I’ll drop in an’ have a game at Ludo with you before you go back to Ashdale. By th’ way, not a word of this.”

For quite suddenly it had struck him, that to definitely say that Susan Thorpe would never be Mrs. Wild, was to be unnecessarily insulting. There was something flattering in the thought of her praying for his field of wheat. The picture haunted him. Susan was pretty. Moreover--he had remembered the pot of money that could purchase the freedom of Sagg Farm, if the worst came to the worst.

“Not a word, lad,” said Uncle Nat, laying his finger across his nose; as if that was the usual way of taking solemn oath.

The silence that fell between them had something guilty in it.

“Good-neet, lad,” called Uncle Nat, blithely, when half-way across the field.

But Adam was already out of earshot.

Whilst as Nat’s shoes made a soft “prop-plop” over the ground between him and his youngest sister’s farm, he was telling himself that it was impossible for any young man who was right in his head to go on seeing his niece as often as Adam did--all the modest, innocent ways, and sitting in that house of cleanly pride, and even walking home from church with the quiet-eyed young creature with one little hand holding her prayer-book, the other dangling at her side, a Sabbath look in her eyes--without falling in love with her. So that when he got inside, and Susan poured out his porridge and blue milk, and set his slippers in the fender, the oath of the finger across the nose clean went out of his head. He believed that he spoke the truth, as he heard himself say that Adam had literally torn himself away--that they had been having a very important conversation--his knowing look bringing a pleased light to his sister’s eye, a blush to the little Susan’s, and a laugh from the gawky man who was sitting scraping manure from great boots so that it fell on a sheet of newspaper spread inside the fender. Which method of self-delusion is not unknown to men in higher walks of life than Uncle Nat’s, more clever meddlers in other people’s destinies.

His godson, meanwhile, was standing looking down on the broad stream that flowed under the old, one-railed wishing-bridge. He held the lantern so that the light trembled down upon the water--showing with the fantasy of a will-o’-th’-wisp, now a great stone fringed with foam, ghostly branches of willow and their shadows in some illumined stone-locked pool, whilst, conscious of the beauty of the whole, his eye was seeking out any new detail since he had passed a few days ago. He discovered the appearance of a herb that made a splendid autumn-cup, according to old Culpepper, and had an impulse to clamber down the bank, and gather it by the light of his lantern. The impulse passed as suddenly as it had come. The thought of Susan Thorpe--in love with him--had come upon him, bewildering him into unhappy despondence.

He passed slowly forwards, missing the holes made by rain-rot, his hand feeling the chill dews on the shaky rail with an intense delight for the soil in which he had grown. Whilst the thought that before giving that up, he would be glad to marry old Mother Green Teeth herself, throbbed in his brain.

From a small knoll that met the bridge he looked upwards at a black blotch against the sky--Sagg Farm, its two illumined windows and the chink of light escaping from its hollowed threshold giving it a subtle resemblance to a square-jowled ebon face with two wide-open fiery eyes, a thin mouth spitting flame. As he looked, the only passion of his rational life threw its spell over him. His father had given up the ghost so far as the old place went, when Ellen Wild went out without a word. Adam knew that even now his father would be stretched on the settle, mumbling drunken incoherencies. As for him--it was as though the indomitable soul of the silent mother who had died seven years ago had passed into him. In all the world nothing mattered except that Bob, Sary, and he should not be driven forth from the place that had sheltered four generations of Wilds.

He brooded on the last interview with the man who held the deeds--and walked fiercely into two gelder-rose bushes. They dashed a baptism of dews on his stormy young face. As he disentangled himself he caught a sight of the moon, that topaz tenderness a magic now.

At this moment, whilst freeing his coat from the innumerable invisible fingers that seemed to cling to him out of the bushes, he heard an echo--laughter, ghostlike, from the old Narrowfields road. Such laughter was common to it on a Saturday night.

The thought that Uncle Nat had not closed the gate at the top of the field haunted him. He became an irritable Fear, lamp in hand, listening, the scorn he had of these town fools glowering from his brow.

The laughter throbbed unashamedly upon the air, nearer, yet nearer, as he listened.

In that quiet place it had an unholy sound.

It was the town, come for sport, into the unobserved country places.

Adam’s head was up like a dog on the scent now.

With an unintelligible jumble of words he re-crossed the bridge.

Once upon the road he raced along--whilst ever the laughter met him. In a lull, once, he heard voices, and could distinguish above the rest a feminine one which even affectation could not make hideous. It broke into a snatch of song, whereupon the affectation was shed immediately, and it became only the fresh voice of youth, singing under the moon, because the world was so fair, and to walk through the dews with a white dress rustling and one’s hair up for the very first time, sub rosa, too, demands some escape for the joy of the heart.

Adam was intent on that voice.

He found it useful to locate the intruders by.

The race had become a set one, between that voice and the young farmer’s fear.

Even as his feet touched that round stone Nat had stumbled over, he heard the bang of his gate. It always gave a long-drawn-out groan, like the thunder-notes in “Judas Maccabeus.”

_They were in the field!_

Yet they must have noticed the trespass-board.

Stealthily he crept along, the lantern blussed by his coat, his free hands touching the stalks of the wheat to guide himself along the sinuous path.

Silence had fallen on the intruders as they entered the wheat-field. A girlish giggle trickled somewhat nervously once, followed by a girlish voice wondering what time it was. To which a youth’s voice answered that it was too early for two pretty girls to go home.

Townsters!

The man creeping along muttered the word as some faint expression of his scorn, his prejudice of the clan to whom belonged the yellow-faced man who held the deeds of Sagg Farm.

Even as it left his lips he caught the flash of a girl’s white hat--then a white bust, and around the waist a black sleeve. There was a jumble of other figures behind these two. But it was on this first couple that the antipathy of his gaze turned itself.

The wheat was swaying to and fro before their progress.

Quite suddenly the girl began to sing again.

She was singing “He shall feed His flock,” her head flung back. There was no thought of faith, or religious fervour in the way she sang. Had she sung a rag-time she would have sung it with the same fine quality of ecstasy. The wheat-field had suggested it to her irresponsible mind. The wheat-field took on a new significance as she sang--and as she sang her feet trampled it thoughtlessly down. Through the surging sea of the wheat she sang--as though she were the only person the globe had been made for. The wheat tossed stormily as she endeavoured to free herself from the thralldom of that black sleeve. She stopped suddenly in the middle of a bar, with an almost peevish, “Let go, Peter! I can’t bear to be held--when I’m singing.”

“Amen. Sister Becky will go round with the hat,” said the voice that had previously said the hour was early for two pretty girls.

Adam, creeping up, his underlip bitten, perceived by the motion of the wheat a movement on the girl’s part to shake off the arm.

Quite suddenly, a flapperish scream arose, the two young men guffawed, and the unmusical laughter of another girl rang out. The group had come to a standstill, the wheat tossing all about them. This was town horse-play.

“Becky!” called the girl in the white dress, imploringly.

“Kiss her, Peter. Kiss her! She told me herself. Sweet seventeen, an’ never been kissed. I’ll hold her----”

Whereupon the flapper’s scream arose once more, and the wheat made a great murmur.

“Stop that!” said Adam, springing up, and flashing his lantern on the group, hypnotised into stillness by his sudden appearance.

The first movement came from a little wiry girl with dark eyes, assisting a youth with receding chin and weak, blue eyes, to hold the girl, whilst a handsome lad, with a dare-devil countenance not without some nobility in it, was trying to kiss the girl--her face now partly revealed through a veil of yellow hair, blue eyes full of baby tears, a mouth that trembled.

Even as she attempted a nervous twisting of her hair into decency, she caught the menacing look of the wrathful farmer fixed on Peter.

Peter, with an adventurous nonchalance, advanced a step to meet him.

They were facing each other on the narrow path, town wit and country wit.

Whilst all about was the trampled wheat.

“You’re trespassing!” Adam told them.

The cool temper of the voice deceived all but Peter.

He had noticed the clenched fury of the hand that did not hold the lantern.

“Well--what about it?” asked the youth.

“Trespassers will be prosecuted,” quoted Adam.

The cool temper became in itself a menace now.

He was speaking with the ease of one who has the law on his side, and will use its machinery to the utmost.

“Well, then--prosecute us,” said Peter, cheekily.

But he had given a quick side-glance at the youth of the weak chin--then, at Becky, his face more easy as he caught her dark eye.

Becky had understood.

They were going to dodge out of this mess, somehow.

“Look at _that_,” said Adam, flashing his lantern over the way they had come.

All the human feeling Uncle Nat had thought he lacked flashed from his eyes, throbbed in his voice.

“And for what?” he added, scornfully.

His contempt included the girls, now.

Becky stood it unmoved.

Her companion blushed.

“We were cutting off a mile of rough road,” said Peter.

His voice had as much of explanation in it as was logical with his contempt for this clodhopper.

“You didn’t seem in any particular hurry,” retorted the farmer. “Name, please.”

The two girls had slunk together.

Becky was whispering to Polly, advocating some policy.

With his eye on Peter, the farmer was conscious of this by-play. He kept his feet gripping the ground that blocked their flight.

“John Grimes--” began Peter, with a cunning semblance of giving in to a bad business.

“Won’t come off,” said Adam.

“If you don’t get out of the way, I’ll make you eat your earth,” blazed Peter.

At that moment the nobility in him blazed up in full flame, over the attempt his clothes made at smartness, the hint of dissipation that would submerge him. It was the reckless courage that had discovered continents, and founded empires--the fighting spirit for which the town had no room. Peter ready for a scrap, was a different Peter from Peter the mud-lark, Peter the pierrot, Peter trying to dodge girls he had tired of.

“I wouldn’t touch any of you town mongrels with a six-foot pole,” said Adam.

The countryman’s superior scorn of them was epigrammatic.

Whereupon Polly stepped forward and tried to talk nicely to Adam. To the little foolish attempts to talk him round, to make sheep’s eyes at him, the farmer returned a smile that said he was woman-proof.

A gust of wind blew one of her blue ribbons in his eyes as she said they were sorry. He drew back, with so strong a look of contempt, that Polly shrunk.

“Your names,” he said, rock-like.

Quite unexpectedly, Becky sprang forwards.

She pushed the big fair girl so violently that she was hurled upon Adam’s great chest, a shrieking, scented, beribboned bundle of flapperdom, from which he strove to disentangle himself as from an asp. His hands got tangled in her hair, which had caught round his coat-buttons. Whilst the thought that the others were escaping made him ejaculate savage little words at her. His lantern dropped. He could hear the beat of her foolish heart.

“Becky! You cat! Oh--you cat!” she sobbed.

With a desperate movement she twitched away from him.

He heard the little, tearing sound made by the hair that had caught on his buttons.

Then he was after the youths.

Blind blows were rained amidst the wheat, then the townsters got free. He followed them, though out-distanced. His trembling of rage had been against him. He was not used to rage. It got into his head and bewildered his feet. The laughter of Peter came up to him from the road.

They had trampled lawless paths through the middle of his field--and he had followed them--and they were gone.

Some vial snapped within him, and overspilled its bitterness, such revengeful bitterness as he had never known.

“You God-forsaken town devils,” he called suddenly. “Get back to your town hell-holes. Why do you come here? Get back.”

Then--he heard girlish sobbing, saw the ghostly gleam of a white dress.

The old Hebrew thirst for revenge was upon him.

Only--he did not want an eye for an eye, but twenty eyes for one.

He plunged through the wheat.

“Becky!” came sobbingly.

The girl had perceived him and was trying to run.

“Now--” he said, as he reached her, grasping her shoulder.

She made no answer, save terrified gasps.

The dark fear of her eyes shone through the gloom. She was biting her underlip in a childish attempt at restraint. It struck him that this time she was too scared to scream.

“I’m going to trespass,” was his brief warning.

“Beck----” she began.

Then he was kissing her, in that raging passion of scorn and revenge against the tramplers of his temple, the heretics from the town. Each kiss was given as he would have dealt a man a blow--with the same steady desire to crush, to leave behind a scar. He was making the girl’s vanity the scapegoat for the vandalism of her companions. Sacrilege for sacrilege.

Justice was satisfied at length.

“Now--get out o’ my field,” he said, thunderingly, and placing both his hands on her sob-shaken shoulders, thrust her out, till her feet were on the path, made her keep to it, then let her go, and watched her humiliated struggle up the round stone, over the stile.

Sex-proud tiller of the calm, silent earth he had grown to be like, he knew that she was on the verge of hysterics.

“Three steps down,” he told her, with polite sarcasm.

She found her voice then.

It struggled up through tears, thin, feminine, with a thread of feminine viciousness.

“If there was only a man an’ a monkey on th’ earth,” she told him, “an’ you were th’ man, I’d take the monkey.”

She tried to laugh.

Her voice shook like Uncle Nat’s fiddle-string, when he played “Annie Laurie.”

“Get out o’ my field,” said the contemptuous, masculine bass.

“Wait till my grandmother, Betty Harker, comes to tell your dad--” she said with a childishness that made him smile.

Her voice was retreating.

Perhaps that gave it its forlorn sound.

The fact that it was Betty Harker’s grand-daughter he had kissed, that the girl knew him, was staggering, but he had presence of mind to call a counter-threat.

“Wait till I see Betty Harker!”

Only silence answered.

She was gone.

He turned, found his lantern, re-lit it, and surveyed the damage to his field. His rage died away in impotent despair. He had found a clue to the names of the intruders. But--Betty Harker had lent his father twenty pounds last quarter towards paying off the mortgage.

Back again along the road, but he did not pass over the bridge and towards the barn-like kitchen lit by two candles, with Sary preparing supper in her dully patient way.

He went further along the road, took a wall-gap, and was soon climbing the slopes of a rush-singing, boggart-wild hill that was the doorstep to the moors. When he reached that dark expanse, the little pools were black save for the moon here and there, looking as if she were trying to drown herself, first in one, then in another, futilely. Ragged sheep passed like ghosts before him. The wind blew the moor-grasses erect, blew his hair erect, the dark shapes of a circle of hill rose round him as he still went up. Whilst the screams of the peewits fell down, down, down into an enchanted bowl of silence,--silence all the deeper for the thin, elfin-song of the rushes.

As he reached another hill it seemed to him that the wind gripped him, eager to help him up over the edge--into the silence, into the few stars. He went on and on, without stopping, until he reached a cold spring singing its way down through the bracken which made a little rusty accompaniment. It was Robin Hood’s spring.

He plunged his bare head into the bubbling, silver coldness of it.

He was trying to wash from his mouth the touch of that soft, babyishly round cheek, the young, cold mouth, the whole shape of that face he had trespassed over. Whilst even as he did so one of Uncle Nat’s sly hints of some weeks before insinuated itself into his reluctant, gibing mind. Uncle Nat had said that love had to tumble on some folk.

But by the time he had gone over Ashdale Pike and reached home again, he had entirely forgotten Polly Cherry.

The hotpot was quite dry.

Sary said this in her patient apologetic way as she scraped out the dish for him. He looked at his sister with a curious wonder as to whether she had ever had any of the hen-witted irresponsibility that made a girl run hazards such as Polly Cherry was running. For he had read the face of Peter.

Sary had a few grey hairs just over her temple.

“That’ll do, Sary,” he told her.

She looked at him, perceiving a human sympathy for her tiredness in his voice, this brother of hers whom she knew to think of nothing but clearing off the mortgage.

When he had gone to bed she roused her father.

He scrambled up, after much shaking, from the settle, blinking at the two candles.

Whilst he was getting his supper she looked at Adam’s shoes. Ashdale Pike soil, she could tell it by the clay there. Something was the matter. Adam only went there after big things--such as missing to pay the mortgage.

Then she set to to clear Bob’s coat away, and took up Adam’s from the chair where he had flung it.

Something gleamed goldenly in the candlelight.

She looked at it fixedly.

“Look here!” she said to her father.

She pulled out several long hairs.

Benny stared at them dazedly.

Then he said, “What are we doin’ burnin’ four cannels, Sary?” His drunken surprise had died away into drunken apathy.

“He’s ne’er made th’ bran-mash,” said Sary, suddenly.

Which startled her father for a moment.

Patiently Sary set to and covered up Adam’s omission. Then she helped her father to bed, pushing him up, stair by stair, till he was safely in that bare, moon-silver room. Her thorough-going brother of the one passion was mixed up with some woman. That meant a splitting of his untirable energy. She wondered how it was going to affect the family fortunes as she made all ready for morning, and her heart shrunk from the contemplation of the splendidly superior creature Adam must have fallen in love with. Whilst at that very moment, on the same impulse that had made the yeoman plunge his head in the spring, Polly was allowing Peter to kiss her--in childish attempt to burn away the memory of those kisses that had stabbed her vanity. Womanlike, she had chosen not water, but fire. Whilst the woman Sary feared was this hen-witted girl, irrelevant, selfish enough to share Beck’s chocolates, hide her own, and with no charm but that of a soft, blurred type of beauty that would make her at forty only a comfortable looking matron--this, a singing voice, and the very essence of youthful irresponsibility, were all the assets she had. There have been more immortal fascinators of wiser men than Adam Wild, with less obvious qualifications. And--who can read the heart of the most foolish girl who walks blind-folded on the tight-rope of life, laughing at all warnings that she may fall, and say what spells of magic, black or white, are hidden within it?