John Powys - Ducdame

“Go home!” shouted Rook, and began to stride along even more quickly than before.

But the voice continued at his elbow; for the boy found no difficulty at all in keeping up with him.

“If you’ll take I to see the half beasties, Squire,” cried Binnory as he ran, “I’ll show ’ee where ’tis said Witch Nancy were bedded when they two was born! ’Tis a dry pond up High Mead way, near-along where you be going to eat and drink present. I’ve a-seed ’un when I were little. ’Twas Granfer Dick showed ’un to I; and he’d a-say how wonderful it were that them things should be born’d, ’long wi’ frogs and toads and hedge-pricklies what have their own lawful nature!”

Rook stopped and turned round upon the idiot, furious with a blind anger. He raised his stick as if to strike him a blow. Binnory seemed not the least disturbed by this gesture; indeed, he grinned in his face and did nothing but just skip back out of arm’s reach.

Rook went so far as actually to pursue the boy for a stone’s-throw or two, in the direction of his home; but when he came close up to him a great wave of weariness and disgust fell upon his spirit and made it impossible for him to lift a finger.

“Go home, I tell you!” was all he could say. But he might have been addressing his words to the elm trees in the hedge for all the effect they had. Whether Binnory had the wit to detect an artificial note in his threats, or whether he trusted in his own obstinate tenacity to get what he wanted in spite of the Squire’s anger, his next move was a masterpiece of strategy.

He scrambled up the bank and pushed himself through the hedge into the wood. Once in the wood, he waited till Rook turned to go on again; and then proceeded to run parallel with his victim’s advance, keeping the thickset hedge between them.

Under the smooth branches of the newly leafed beech trees he ran; under the darker foliage of the sycamores; under the stinging twigs of the green hazels; over dog-mercury, over pink campion, over the soft unbudded whitish-green spikes of foxglove and mullein. Feeble-winged currant moths flapped against his face as he ran. Greenish-coloured pollen from the stamens of entangled parasitic plants clung to his cap and to his hair. Swathes of pith twine tripped him up. The oozy stalks of half-dead bluebells bent and broke beneath his boots, staining them, with sticky vegetable juice. Rook heard him groan now and again as the thorns pricked him or the twigs stung his cheeks; but he no longer uttered any words. All his energy seemed taken up in the effort of keeping pace with his unsympathetic companion.

At last the man could endure the situation no longer. It had begun to touch the limit both of his patience and of his sense of humour.

“Come here, you rascal!” he shouted. “Come here, Binnory, you rogue! If you can run like that over there, you’d better come back into the lane. I’ll take you with me! You shall see your gippoos!”

He had hardly finished speaking when, like a rabbit from its burrow, pushing aside the prickly thickness of a holly tree in the hedge, the boy came tumbling and scuffling down the bank.

Rook moderated his pace after that; and the two curiously assorted companions, having made up their quarrel, proceeded on their way down that sweet-scented lane, amicably discussing the weasels, squirrels, and rabbits that kept crossing their path and the various bird notes that reached them from the wood.

They came at last to the grassy clearing, where the lane associated with the mysterious name of Gorm branched off from the other; and there, straight in front of them, under the hedge, was Betsy Cooper’s caravan.

The old woman had erected a clothes-line as a sort of extempore tent; and behind a row of vividly coloured garments hanging between two posts the forms of the unfortunate “partners” were visible, seated opposite each other on the ground, their laps full of moon daisies and quaking grass.

Rook could see Betsy herself, a few hundred yards or so down the road, digging up dandelion roots with a knife.

He went straight toward her, leaving his companion to stare at the “half beasties” to his heart’s content.

“Ay, Squire! So ’ee be come to I, then; so ’ee be come to Auntie Betsy, same as she told ’ee ’ee would. ’Tis good hearing to me wold ears to catch the sound of thee tongue and see thee wicked smiling eyes again! Thou’rt always welcome, Squire Ashover. Thou’rt always welcome.”

“I’ve brought the money, Betsy,” said Rook quietly, manifesting little tendency to respond to her familiar garrulousness. “And now I hope you’ll keep your promise and move away.”

He put his hand in his pocket as he spoke and produced the two five-pound notes. The old lady’s countenance assumed a time-battered expression of senile imbecility, out of the depths of which, like the gaze of a snake peering through a sheep’s skull, shone her tiny yellowish eyes.

“Come to cart, Squire Ashover; come to cart. I’ve got summat to show ’ee afore us puts thik bit of paper across wood and across iron.”

Rook replaced the notes in his pocket and followed her submissively to her wheeled house. His chief anxiety now was to get his business done before Mr. Twiney’s conveyance, bringing the rest of the party, should appear upon the scene.

The old woman manifested no surprise at seeing Binnory, who was now seated on the grass at a cautious distance from the dwarfs, regarding their infantile play with a mixture of suspicion and fascination.

“He be an innocent, same as they be,” she chuckled, glancing furtively at Rook. “Dilly Drool should have come to I for a sip o’ tiger-root when she were heavy. My Nancy never missed a morning without taking of it; and ’twould have given her as healthy a babe as maid could wish; only her old man couldn’t keep his hands off her because of the drink.”

Rook moved aside to let the woman go up the caravan steps in front of him. She turned her head as she reached the top.

“Thee Ashovers be sweet-spoken gents and I don’t care who hears me say it; but ye be queer ones with the maids; and ’tis that what brings the thwartings and blightings upon ’ee; for ’tis a sure thing that them as handles ploughs when rye be green and goose-pods be sour finds nothink in meadow when ‘a do come to harvest-time save toadstools and devils-bit!”

“What do you mean by ‘goose-pods,’ Betsy?” her guest enquired, mounting the steps behind her.

“I mean them things in pond-water what ain’t water-lilies nor ain’t long purples. But come ’ee in, Squire Ashover, come ’ee in; I’ve a-got summat to show ’ee!”

The old woman made him sit down on the narrow bed which was covered now by a patchwork quilt. She pulled the white curtains across the window, so that the hot afternoon light that poured into that small interior was softened and mellowed.

Then she placed a wooden table in front of him and on the table a curiously woven very old mat, of an unusual and enigmatical pattern.

Rook wondered vaguely what the preparations meant; but his thoughts wandered off to his fixed idea of his bad treatment of Netta and they only returned to his present surroundings when the sound of the steady trotting of Mr. Twiney’s mare broke upon that summer stillness.

He listened intently, his face toward the door; but the dogcart passed by without stopping, its occupants apparently undisturbed by the sight of the dwarfs and Binnory.

Betsy Cooper gave no sign that she had even heard the quick trotting of the mare, as Lady Ann speeded it up with rein and whip. What she did now was to place upon the table a perfectly round clear crystal, about the size of a large apple, and so smooth and globular that it was only by putting it down with the utmost gentleness that she rendered it immobile.