He was quite closeshe could hear the thud of his step on the soft earth. Her hands grasped the two gate-posts, and she leaned forward over the gate, so that her face caught the faint radiance that still lingered in the zenith. He had stopped singing, but she could see him now distinctlya tall, loosely-built figure, with dark face, and woolly hair like a nigger's, while his seaman's earrings caught the starlight.
"No, no," interrupted the lady, "it was Holgrave who stole my child, although the monk, perhaps, counselled the deed. At all events, he knows of the bondman's flight."Chapter 3"May be you have; but that matters little; I know you are an honest man, and were I even your enemy, you would not betray me."
FORE:But her mind was too dim even for regrets. Instead, she seemed to see herself dancing with Reuben at Boarzell Fair, when the dusk had been full of strange whirling lights, whispers, and kisses.The Fair had moved still further with the times. The merrygo-round organ played "Bluebell," "Dolly Grey," and "The Absent-Minded Beggar," the chief target in the shooting-gallery was Kruger, with Cronje and De Wet as subordinates, and the Panorama showed[Pg 429] Queen Victoria's funeral. The fighting booth was hidden away still further, and dancing now only started at nightfall. There were some new shows, too. The old-fashioned thimble-rigging had given place to a modern swindle with tickets and a dial; instead of the bearded woman or the pig-faced boy, one put a penny in the slot and saw a lady undressto a certain point. There was a nigger in a fur-lined coat lecturing on a patent medicine, while the stalls themselves were of a more utilitarian nature, selling whips and trousers and balls of string, instead of the ribbon and gingerbread fairings bought by lovers in days of old.
FORE:She could never guess what that child meant to Reuben. It meant a fellow labourer on his farm, a fellow fighter on Boarzell, and after he was dead a Man to carry on his work and his battle. At last he would have someone to share his ambitionthat child should be trained up in the atmosphere of enterprise; as other fathers taught their children to love and serve God, so Reuben would teach this son to love and serve Odiam. He would no longer strive alone, he would have a comrade, a soldier with him. And after this boy there would be other boys, all growing up in the love of Odiam, to live for it.
THREE:"I hope that's enough to satisfy you. Because there won't be any more She's dying.""Why we are thus up in arms?" said Leicester, without circumlocution, as the herald proclaimed the king's interrogatory,"why, because those who should command are thought nothing of, and those who do command ought to have their heads struck off."
FORE:
Calverley had beheld the group as they entered the court, and instantly averting his eyes from the mother and son, he fixed them upon Margaret.Only once she dared look up, and that was when they were walking solemnly from the communion table to the vestrythen she suddenly looked up and saw Reuben's great strong shoulder towering above her own, his face rather flushed under its sunburn, and his hair unusually sleek and shining with some oil.The baron was standing apart from the other nobles, scanning, with a gloomy countenance, the dark undulating mass below. Once he could have sworn that Stephen Holgrave stood upon the verge of the ditch before him, but if it was he, he stood but an instant, and then was lost amidst the multitude. This circumstance gave a new turn to De Boteler's meditations; he thought too of the monk of Winchcombe Abbeythis John Ball, who was styled the prophet; and it seemed to be no less true than strange, that the germ of all this wide-spreading disorder had sprung from his own soil. So much, in fact, was he absorbed in these ideas, that he actually started when his page, who had been for the space of a minute endeavouring to draw his attention by repeated obeisances, ventured to pronounce his name in rather a high key, as he presented to him an arrow which had been found sticking in the door-post of the building in which father John was confined. "And this was shot from the river?" asked De Boteler, as he received the arrow and unrolled a parchment wrapped round it.Reuben was indifferent to the popular voice. The Realfs cleared out bag and baggage the following month. No one knew their destination, but it was believed they were to separate. Afterwards it transpired that Realf had been given work on a farm near Lurgashall, while Tilly became housekeeper to a clergyman, taking with her the boy she would rather have seen dead than at Odiam. Nothing was heard of the daughters, and local rumour had it that they went on the streets; but this pleasing idea was shattered a year or two later by young Alce, the publican's son, coming back from a visit to Chichester and saying he had found both the girls in service in a Canon's house, doing well, and one engaged to marry the butler.
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