Secret Bread | Page 6

Phoebe--purple knapweed and betony, the plumy dead-pink heads of hemp-agrimony, and tufts of strong yellow fleabane, all squeezed together in his hot little hand. The air seemed alive with butterflies and moths, white and brown and red, and clouds of the "blue skippers" that look like periwinkles blown to life. A bee shot past him so quickly that the thrum of it sounded short as a twanged string, and the next moment a late foxglove spire, naked save for its topmost bell, quivered beneath the onslaught of the arched brown and yellow body. The heat haze shimmered on the distant horizon like an insect's wing, but was tempered on the moorland height by the capricious wind, and Ishmael kept doggedly on.
He was a wiry little boy, thin and brown, with dark hair that grew in a point on the nape of his neck, and hazel eyes set rather deeply under straight, sulky-looking brows. The lower part of his face was small and pointed for the breadth across forehead and cheek bones, and, with his outstanding ears, combined to give him something the look of a piskie's changeling. Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away, and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved, if at all, in the malleable years between fifteen and twenty was as yet far ahead. Nevertheless, Parson Boase was not wrong in scenting the idealist in Ishmael, and he wondered how far the determined but excitable child, with the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether, after all, he might not so build up resisting power as to make a fair thing of his life. A no more distant future than the next hour held Ishmael's mind at the moment, and attracted by a strong smell of peppermint from the marsh, the child turned that way, to add the pale purple blossoms to his fast-wilting bunch.
A man in a black cassock, looped up for convenience in walking by a shabby cincture, was wandering among the brambles and gorse bushes, peering short-sightedly here and there, and as Ishmael appeared the man's hand closed suddenly over some object on a leaf. Ishmael had hardly recognised the Parson before he himself was seen.
"Come and look at what I've got here," shouted Boase, straightening his long back and holding his curved-out hands aloft. Ishmael ran towards him, the tussocks, dry from long drought, swaying and sagging beneath him. As he drew near he caught a whirring sound, so strong as to seem metallic, and saw a big green and yellow dragon-fly fighting in the Parson's hands. Boase took hold of it carefully but firmly by the wings, and the creature stared angrily at Ishmael with its huge glassy green eyes, opening its oddly-fleshy mouth and wagging its fawn-coloured lips like an evil infant cockatrice.
Suddenly the Parson launched it in the air again, raising two fingers in whimsical blessing, then he looked down at Ishmael with a queer expression in his eyes. That was Ishmael's fate, of which he was as yet unconscious--no one looked at him absolutely naturally. His mother saw him with aversion, Archelaus with resentment, and the younger brothers and the little sister took their cue from their elders. The neighbouring gentry treated him with an embarrassed kindness when they met him with Parson Boase, and solved the problem by leaving him alone on other occasions; the farmers looked at him as though he embodied a huge joke, and their wives mothered him surreptitiously, giving him saffron-cake, which he loved, and quick, hard kisses, which he detested. Even Boase looked at him not only as a child whom he loved, but as the incarnation of a hope, a theory--in short, as an Experiment. Nevertheless, it was the Parson to whom Ishmael came with his pleasures, and for all the intuition which told him the child went to no one in his griefs Boase had not quite enough of the feminine in him to realise the importance of the omission.
"Where are you off to, my son?" asked Boase, sticking his hand in the pocket of his shabby old cassock. He knew better than to pat a boy's head or thump him between the shoulder-blades with the hearty manner peculiar to men who have forgotten their own boyhood.
"Oh, I'm just gwain to see if the mill-wheel's workin' down along," said Ishmael--not for worlds would he have admitted Phoebe Lenine as the object of his visit. The Parson's eyes twinkled as they rested on the bouquet.
"Going, not 'gwain,'" he corrected gently.
"Going," repeated Ishmael, with his deceptive docility in little things.
"I'll come to the mill with you," said the Parson briskly, and Ishmael set off by his side without a word, but presently lagged behind a