The Waters of Edera | Page 2

old one had been in such duels before and the young one never. The
young one thought he had but to rush in, head downward, to conquer;
the old one knew that this was not enough to secure victory. The young
one was blind with ardour and impatience for the fray; the old one was
cool and shrewd and could parry and wait.
After three rounds, the two combatants met in a final shock; the elder
ram butted furiously, the younger staggered and failed to return the
blow, his frontal bone was split, and he fell to the ground; the elder
struck him once, twice, thrice, amidst the uproarious applause of his
backers; a stream of blood poured from his skull, which was pounded
to splinters; a terrible convulsion shook his body and his limbs; he
stretched his tongue out as if he tried to lap water; the men who had
their money on him cursed him with every curse they knew; they did
not cut his throat, for they knew he was as good as dead.
"This is a vile thing you have done," said a little beggar girl who had
been passing, and had been arrested by the horrible fascination of the
combat, and forced against her will to stand and watch its issue. The
shepherds jeered; those who had backed the victor were sponging his
wounds beside a runlet of water which was close at hand; those who
had lost were flinging stones on the vanquished. The girl knelt down by
the dying ram to save him from the shower of stones; she lifted his
head gently upward, and tried to pour water through his jaws from a
little wooden cup which she had on her, and which she had filled at the
river. But he could not swallow; his beautiful opaline eyes were
covered with film, he gasped painfully, a foam of blood on his lips and
a stream of blood coursing down his face; a quiver passed over him
again; then his head rested lifeless on his knees. She touched his
shattered horns, his clotted wool, tenderly.
"Why did you set him to fight?" she said with an indignation which
choked her voice. "It was vile. He was younger than the other, and
knew less."
Those who had won laughed. Those who had lost cursed him again; he
had disgraced his branca. They would flay him, and put him in the
cauldron over the wood fire, and would curse him even whilst they

picked his bones for a white-livered spawn of cowards; a son of a
thrice-damned ewe.
The girl knew that was what they do. She laid his battered head gently
down upon the turf, and poured the water out of her cup; her eyes were
blind with tears; she could not give him back his young life, his zest in
his pastoral pleasures, his joy in cropping the herbage, his rude loves,
his merry gambols, his sound sleep, his odorous breath.
He had died to amuse and excite the ugly passions of men, as, if he had
lived longer, he would, in the end, have died to satisfy their ugly
appetites.
She looked at his corpse with compassion, the tears standing in her
eyes; then she turned away, and as she went saw that her poor ragged
clothes were splashed here and there with blood, and that her arms and
hands were red with blood: she had not thought of that before; she had
thought only of him. The shepherds did not notice her; they were
quarrelling violently in dispute over what had been lost and won,
thrusting their fingers in each other's faces, and defiling the fair calm of
the day with filthy oaths.
The girl shrank away into the heather with the silent swiftness of a hare;
now that she had lost the stimulus of indignant pity she was afraid of
these brutes; if the whim entered into them they would be as brutal to
her as to their flock.
Out of fear of them she did not descend at once to the river, but pushed
her way through the sweet-smelling, bee-haunted, cross-leaved heaths;
she could hear the sound of the water on her right all the time as she
went. She knew little of this country, but she had seen the Edera, and
had crossed it farther up its course on one of its rough tree-bridges.
When, as well as she could judge, she had got half a mile away from
the scene of the rams' combat, she changed her course and went to the
right, directed by the murmur of the river. It was slow walking through
the heath and gorse which grew above her head, and were closely
woven together, but in time she reached shelving ground, and heard