The Delectable Duchy | Page 7

its white walls,
and the whole building shone against the burnt hillside. It was too far
away for me to spy Mrs. Bolverson's blue print gown within the kitchen
window, but I knew that she stood there yet.
The sound of a footstep made me turn. A woman was coming round the

corner of the cottage, with a bundle of mint in her hand.
She looked at me, shook off a bee that had blundered against her apron,
and looked at me again--a brown woman, lean and strongly made, with
jet-black eyes set deep and glistening in an ugly face.
"You want to know your way?" she asked.
"No. I came to see you, if your name is Sarah Gedye."
"Sarah Ann Gedye is my name. What 'st want?"
I took a sudden resolution to tell the exact truth.
"Mrs. Gedye, the fact is I am curious about an old charm that was
practised in these parts, as I know, till recently. The charm is
this--When a woman guesses her lover to be faithless to her, she buries
a suit of his old clothes to fetch him back to her. Mrs. Bolverson, up at
Sheba yonder--"
The old woman had opened her mouth (as I know now) to curse me.
But as Mrs. Bolverson's name escaped me, she turned her back, and
walked straight to her door and into the kitchen. Her manner told me
that I was expected to follow.
But I was not prepared for the face she turned on me in the shadow of
the kitchen. It was grey as wood-ash, and the black eyes shrank into it
like hot specks of fire.
"She--she set you on to ask me that?" She caught me by the coat and
hissed out: "Come back from the door--don't let her see." Then she
lifted up her fist, with the mint tightly clutched in it, and shook it at the
warm patch of Sheba buildings across the valley.
"May God burn her bones, as He has smitten her body barren!"
"What do you know of this?" she cried, turning upon me again.
"I know nothing. That I have offered you some insult is clear: but--"

"Nay, you don't know--you don't know. No man would be such a hound.
You don't know; but, by the Lord, you shall hear, here where you'm
standin', an' shall jedge betwix' me an' that pale 'ooman up yonder.
Stand there an' list to me.
"He was my lover more'n five-an'-thirty years agone. Who? That
'ooman's wedded man, Seth Bolverson. We warn't married"--this with a
short laugh. "Wife or less than wife, he found me to his mind. She--she
that egged you on to come an' flout me--was a pale-haired girl o'
seventeen or so i' those times--a church-goin' mincin' strip of a girl--the
sort you men-folk bow the knee to for saints. Her father owned Sheba
Farm, an' she look'd across on my man, an' had envy on 'en, an' set her
eyes to draw 'en. Oh, a saint she was! An' he, the poor shammick, went.
'Twas a good girl, you understand, that wished for to marry an' reform
'en. She had money, too. I? I'd ha' poured out my blood for 'en: that's all
I cud do. So he went.
"As the place shines this day, it shone then. Like a moth it drew 'en.
Late o' summer evenin's its windeys shone when down below here
'twas chill i' the hill's shadow. An' late at night the candles burned up
there as he courted her. Purity and cosiness, you understand, an' down
here--he forgot about down here. Before he'd missed to speak to me for
a month, I'd hear 'en whistlin' up the hill, so merry as a grig. Well, he
married her.
"They was married three months, an' 'twas harvest time come round, an'
I in his vield a-gleanin'. For I was suffered near to that extent, seem'
that the cottage here had been my fathers', an' was mine, an' out o't they
culdn' turn me. One o' the hands, as they was pitchin', passes me an
empty keg, an' says, 'Run you to the farm-place an' get it filled.' So with
it I went to th' kitchen, and while I waited outside I sees his coat an'
wesket 'pon a peg i' the passage. Well I knew the coat; an' a madness
takin' me for all my loss, I unhitched it an' flung it behind the door, an',
the keg bein' filled, picked it up agen and ran down home-along.
"No thought had I but to win Seth back. 'Twas the charm you spoke
about: an' that same midnight I delved a hole by the dreshold an' buried
the coat, whisperin', 'Man, come back, come back to me!' as Aun'

Lesnewth had a-taught me, times