"And here wur I all this time guessing as it wur[Pg 79] cabbages acause of the leaves," old Ginner would finish, not to be outdone in badinage.Bessie was now thirty, and looked older, for she had lost a front tooth and her pretty hair had faded: but she was as confident of Robert's love as ever. He had[Pg 334] written to her by every mail, she told Caro, and they had both saved and scraped and waited and counted the days till they could consummate the love born in those fields eternally fixed in twilight by their memory. There had been no intercourse between Odiam and Eggs Hole, so, as Robert had never written to his family, Caro heard for the first time of the sheep-farm in Queensland and its success. He had done badly at first, Bessie said, what with the drought and many other things against him, but now he was well established, and she would be far better off and more comfortable as the felon's wife than she had ever been as the daughter of honest parents.It was very gallant of him to do so, for it meant venturing still further into new spheres of thought. None of the Backfields had been to church for years, though Reuben prided himself on being a good churchman, and Pete was rather at a loss what to do in a[Pg 370] ghostly crisis such as this. However, on one thing he was resolvedthat he would not go through another night like the last, and he credited a parson with mysterious cabalistic powers which would miraculously soothe the invalid and assure him of sleep in future.Father John read aloud as follows:"May be not so, entirely, yet I am sure you are as sinless as woman can bebut listen to me, Lucyyou know that I am a bondman's sonthat I fled from bondageand that ten years of roving freedom, had not made me free. All this you know, but you do not know that I am the Genoese galleyman who cheated the chapman's dame at the fair of Winchcombe."Then in winter came the lambing, which is the shepherd's Lent. Richard and the old man from Doozes kept long vigils in the lambing hut, and those nights and days were to young Backfield dreams of red, fuggy solitude, the stillness broken only by the slip of coals in the brazier, or the faint bleating of the ewes outsidewhile sometimes mad Harry's fiddle wept down the silences of Boarzell.His new occupation, however, gave him undreamed-of opportunities. One of the advantages of shepherding was that it alternated periods of strenuous work with others of comparative idleness. During these Richard would pore over his "hic, h?c, hoc," and parse and analyse on[Pg 131] bits of waste paper. He learned very quickly, and was soon casting about for means to buy a Greek grammar. He felt that his father could not possibly keep him at the farm if he knew both Latin and Greek.
