The Delectable Duchy | Page 6

intelligence out of their faces as soon as I began to hint at it. Such is the
way of them. They were my good friends, but had no mind to help me
in this. Nobody who has not lived long with them can divine the
number of small incommunicable mysteries and racial secrets
chambered in their inner hearts and guarded by their hospitable faces.
These alone the Celt withholds from the Saxon, and when he dies they
are buried with him.
A chance word or two of my old nurse, by chance caught in some
cranny of a child's memory and recovered after many days, told me that
the charm was still practised by the woman-folk, or had been practised
not long before her death. So I began to hunt for it, and, almost as soon,
to believe the search hopeless. The new generation of girls, with their
smart frocks, in fashion not more than six months behind London, their
Board School notions, and their consuming ambition to "look like a
lady"--were these likely to cherish a local custom as rude and primitive
as the long-stone circles on the tors above? But they were Cornish; and
of that race it is unwise to judge rashly. For years I had never a clue:

and then, by Sheba Farm, in a forsaken angle of the coast, surprised the
secret.
Sheba Farm stands high above Ruan sands, over which its windows
flame at sunset. And I sat in the farm kitchen drinking cider and eating
potato-cake, while the farmer's wife, Mrs. Bolverson, obligingly
attended to my coat, which had just been soaked by a thunder-shower.
It was August, and already the sun beat out again, fierce and strong.
The bright drops that gemmed the tamarisk-bushes above the wall of
the town-place were already fading under its heat; and I heard the
voices of the harvesters up the lane, as they returned to the oat-field
whence the storm had routed them. A bright parallelogram stretched
from the window across the white kitchen-table, and reached the dim
hollow of the open fire-place. Mrs. Bolverson drew the towel-horse, on
which my coat was stretched, between it and the wood fire, which (as
she held) the sunshine would put out.
"It's uncommonly kind of you, Mrs. Bolverson," said I, as she turned
one sleeve of the coat towards the heat. "To be sure, if the women in
these parts would speak out, some of them have done more than that for
the men with an old coat."
She dropped the sleeve, faced round, and eyed me.
"What do you know of that?" she asked slowly, and as if her chest
tightened over the words. She was a woman of fifty and more, of fine
figure but a worn face. Her chief surviving beauty was a pile of light
golden hair, still lustrous as a girl's. But her blue eyes--though now they
narrowed on me suspiciously--must have looked out magnificently in
their day.
"I fancy," said I, meeting them frankly enough, "that what you know
and I don't on that matter would make a good deal."
She laughed harshly, almost savagely.
"You'd better ask Sarah Gedye, across the coombe. She buried a man's
clothes one time, and--it might be worth your while to ask her what

came o't."
If you can imagine a glint of moonlight running up the blade of a rapier,
you may know the chill flame of spite and despite that flickered in her
eyes then as she spoke.
"I take my oath," I muttered to myself, "I'll act on the invitation."
The woman stood straight upright, with her hands clasped behind her,
before the deal table. She gazed, under lowered brows, straight out of
window; and following that gaze, I saw across the coombe a mean mud
hut, with a wall around it, that looked on Sheba Farm with the
obtrusive humility of a poor relation.
"Does she--does Sarah Gedye--live down yonder?"
"What is that to you?" she enquired fiercely, and then was silent for a
moment, and added, with another short laugh--
"I reckon I'd like the question put to her: but I doubt you've got the
pluck."
"You shall see," said I; and taking my coat off the towel-horse, I
slipped it on.
She did not turn, did not even move her head, when I thanked her for
the shelter and walked out of the house.
I could feel those steel-blue eyes working like gimlets into my back as I
strode down the hill and passed the wooden plank that lay across the
stream at its foot. A climb of less than a minute brought me to the green
gate in the wall of Sarah Gedye's garden patch; and here I took a look
backwards and upwards at Sheba. The sun lay warm on