Part 18

“She’s dead,” she said at last. “She fell down suddenly in the cart and died. I took her out and dragged her so that no one should run over her, but it made me so tired that I must have fallen asleep.”

The poor little woman put her arm round the dead pony’s neck, and began to caress it. I saw that it was hopeless to get her home without help, and went on up the road towards the nearest farmhouse, telling her to stay where she was till I came back. There was no need to tell her: she neither could nor would have moved.

I had not gone far when by good luck I met a waggon returning empty to our village. I stopped the driver, whom I knew, told him what had happened, and got him to undertake to carry both Selina and her pony home in his waggon. I felt sure she would not leave her Fan to the mercy of any one who came by; and indeed I would not have left her there myself. Fan had so long been one of us that I shuddered to think of what nocturnal creatures might find her out in the night. There was a horrible story of a tramp who had passed a night in a barn not half a mile from this very spot, and had been attacked by rats in his sleep.

When we reached the cart, Selina was again fast asleep. Gently we raised her from the pony’s side, and I had to almost use force to unfasten the grip of her arm on its neck. I whispered to her that we were going to take Fan and Elimelech too, and she made no more resistance, but lay down quietly on some straw in a corner of the waggon. It was hard work to get poor Fan in after her; but she was so small and thin that at last we managed it. Elimelech perched himself upon his friend’s motionless body, and so we set off, a strange funeral procession.

Arrived at the village, I roused the neighbours, and Selina, now almost unconscious, was put to bed by kindly hands. Fan we deposited in her old hovel, and Elimelech, subdued and puzzled, was left there too.

Next morning Selina was unable to get out of her bed, though she struggled hard to do so; fatigue and exposure on the wet grass had brought her very low, and the doctor thought she would hardly get over it. We had to tell her that she would see Fan no more. She only sighed, and asked for Elimelech.

I went down to the hovel; the men were come to take the poor old pony away. Elimelech was there, not upon poor Fan’s body, but upon a rafter; and when the pony was taken out, he followed, and evaded all my efforts to catch him. I saw the cart with its burden turn the corner of the street, with the bird perched on the edge of it, fluttering his wings, as if he were expostulating with the ruthless driver.

I returned to Selina. “Elimelech is gone to see the last of poor Fan,” I said; “but we shall see him back here before long.”

“He loves me,” answered she; “but he loves Fan better, and I don’t think he’ll come back.” And Elimelech did not return that day.

But the next morning I found him sitting on her bed. She told me that he must have come back to the hovel, and when he found that shut, have come in by the front door and made his way upstairs. “And now poor Fan is gone, he loves me better than any one,” she said.

Selina is still alive, as I said at the beginning of this tale; she still finds work to do, and does it with all her might. All her animals are gone now—cats, fowls, ducks, and pony; Elimelech alone remains; he has never been unfaithful to her. But they are both growing old—too old to last much longer; and all we can hope is that Elimelech will be the survivor.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

“Bessie, my lassie,” exclaimed the Poet, as they entered their new garden for the first time together, “what a time we shall have!”

When the Poet called his wife “lassie” she knew he was in a happy frame of mind, and was happy herself. It was long since she had heard the word; illness, overwork, and the dull surroundings of a London suburban villa, had taken all the spring out of his body, and all its natural joyousness from his mind. I call him Poet because it was the name by which his best friends knew him; I cannot be sure that he ever wrote poetry, and certainly he never published any; but they called him Poet because he was dreamy, and hated the fag and the noise of London, and pined for the country, and loved to talk of his old Yorkshire home and its plants and animals, and its beck curling under heathery banks on the edge of the moor. He was indeed only a London clerk, released at last from long years of drudgery by a happy stroke of good fortune.

They had just arrived from London to take possession of their cottage and garden in the country. It was a frosty evening early in March, and the sun was just setting as they went up the garden together; it lit up the bare boughs of a tree which stood just in front of the cottage.

“Look here, Bessie,” said the Poet; “that is a rowan tree, and it was the sight of that rowan that fixed me. The cottage was snug, the garden was good, but the rowans—there are three of them—were irresistible. There were three just outside our garden in Yorkshire, and every August the berries turned orange-red and made a glory before my window. Next August you shall see them, and you’ll see nothing quite so good till then.”

Bessie, London born and bred, was glad to get into the house, and make herself snug before the fire, where the kettle was singing an invitation to tea. She too was ready to welcome the slow and gentle ways of the country, and to be rid of perpetual bell-ringing, and postmen’s knocks, and piano-practising next door, and the rattle of carts and cabs; but I doubt if the rowans would have decided her choice. I think she thought more of the useful fruits of the garden—of the currants and gooseberries of which good store of jam should be made in the summer, of the vegetables they would grow for themselves, and the strawberries they would invite their London friends to come and share.

Next morning quite early the Poet threw his window wide open and looked out into his garden. It was not a trim and commonplace garden; it was an acre of good ground that had grown by degrees into a garden, as in the course of ages of village life one owner after another had turned it to his own purposes. The Poet looked over a bit of lawn, in the corner of which stood one of his favourite rowans, to an old bulging stone wall, buttressed up with supports of red brick of various shades, and covered with ivy. Over the top of it he could see the church tower, also ivy-clad, the yews of the churchyard, and the elms in the close beyond, in the tops of which the rooks were already busy and noisy. A thick and tall yew hedge separated the lawn from the village allotments, where one or two early labourers were collecting the winter’s rubbish into heaps and setting them alight; the shadow of the hedge upon the lawn was sharply marked by a silvery grey border of frost. On these things the Poet’s eye lingered with wonderful content for a while, and then wandered across the allotments over meadow and rich red ploughland to the line of hills that shut in his view to the south. There came into his mind the name he used to give to the moors above his Yorkshire dale in his young days when his mother read the Pilgrim’s Progress to her children—the Delectable Mountains.

He was suddenly recalled to his garden by a low melodious pipe, as of a bird practising its voice for better use in warmer days; it came from one of the rowans. Sometimes the notes were almost whispered; sometimes they rose for an instant into a full and mellow sweetness, and then died away again. They were never continuous—only fragments of song; as if the bird were talking in the sweetest of contralto voices to a friend whose answers were unheard. No other bird was singing, and the rooks were too far away in the elms to break harshly with their cawing on the blackbird’s quiet strain.

The Poet listened for a while enraptured, watching the dark form of the singer, and the “orange-tawny” bill from which the notes came so softly, so hesitatingly; and then drew in his head and began to dress, still keeping the window open, and repeating to himself—

“O Blackbird, sing me something well: Though all the neighbours shoot thee round, I keep smooth plats of garden ground Where thou may’st warble, eat, and dwell.

“The espaliers, and the standards, all Are thine; the range of lawn and park: The unnetted blackhearts ripen dark, All thine, against the garden wall.”

A few minutes later he was in the garden himself, scenting the dew and the fragrant earth, listening to the blackbird—his own blackbird, that meant to be his cherished guest all that spring and summer—to the singing of a skylark high above the allotment field, and to the distant murmur of the rooks. The garden was in disorder—what delicious work there would be in it!—fruit-trees to prune, vegetables to plant, a big strawberry bed to tend, borders to make gay. All this he would fain have done himself, even though he knew as little of gardening as he did of Hebrew; why not learn to do it himself, make mistakes and profit by them? So he had written to the friendly Parson of the village, who had been looking after his interests for him; but the Parson would not bear of it, and he was despotic in his own parish. He had decided that old Joseph Bates was to start the work and direct the Poet’s enthusiasm into rational channels; and after breakfast Joseph and the Poet were to meet. “A worthy old man,” the Parson had written; “you can’t do better than give him a little employment; if he gives you any trouble, send for me and I’ll settle him.”

So after breakfast—a delicious one it was, that first breakfast in the country—the Poet left his wife to her household duties, and went again into the garden to face Mr. Bates. He made his way towards his yew hedge, where he could see the old fellow busy clearing the ground beneath it of a melancholy tangle of decayed weeds. As he reached the hedge, one blackbird and then another flew out with awkward impetuosity and harsh chuckles, and the Poet stopped suddenly, sorry to have disturbed his friends.

Joseph touched his hat. “Good morning, Sir,” he said, “and welcome to your garden, if I may make so free. I’ve known it any time these fifty years and more, and my father he worked in it long afore I were born. We’d use to say as the Bateses belonged to this here bit of land years and years ago, when times was good for the poor man; but ’tis all gone from us, and here be I a working on it for hire. And ’tis powerful changed since I were a lad, and none for the better either. Look at this here yew hedge now; ’tis five and twenty year ago since I told Mr. Gale as ’twouldn’t do no good but to harbour birds, and here they be. And here they be,” he repeated, as another blackbird came scurrying out of the hedge a little further down.

At this point Joseph broke off his discourse, thrust his arm into the hedge, lifting the thick branches here and there, and pulled out a lump of fresh green moss, the first preparations for a blackbird’s nest.

“Ah, ye blackguards,” he cried, “at it already, are ye? I’ll be bound there are a dozen or two of ye somewhere or another on the premises. You see, Sir, ’tis their nater, when they’ve had it all their own way so long, and no one to look after ’em, a year come next June. They take it as the garden belongs to them; they’re like rats in a stack-yard, and you won’t have a thing to call your own by summer. But don’t you take on, Sir,” he went on, seeing the Poet’s visage lengthening; “we’ll nip ’em in the bud in no time. There’s my grandson Dan, a wonderful smart lad to find nests—you give him a sixpence, Sir, or what you please, and he’ll have every nest in the garden in an hour or two. Take it in time, Sir, as the doctor says to my wife when her rheumatics is a coming on.”

Mr. Bates chucked the unfinished nest on to a heap of weeds, thrust in his arm again, and began a fresh search. The Poet’s face grew dark: he could hardly find his voice.