Wintry Peacock | Page 4

it beastly, I call it mean, to take a girl in like that."
"Nay," I said. "Probably he hasn't taken her in at all. Do you think those French girls are such poor innocent things? I guess she's a great deal more downy than he."
"Oh, he's one of the biggest fools that ever walked," she cried.
"There you are!" said I.
"But it's his child right enough," she said.
"I don't think so," said I.
"I'm sure of it."
"Oh well," I said--"if you prefer to think that way."
"What other reason has she for writing like that----?"
I went out into the road and looked at the cattle.
"Who is this driving the cows?" I said. She too came out.
"It's the boy from the next farm," she said.
"Oh well," said I, "those Belgian girls! You never know where their letters will end.--And after all, it's his affair--you needn't bother."
"Oh----!" she cried, with rough scorn--"it's not me that bothers. But it's the nasty meanness of it. Me writing him such loving letters"--she put her hands before her face and laughed malevolently--"and sending him nice little cakes and bits I thought he'd fancy all the time. You bet he fed that gurrl on my things--I know he did. It's just like him.--I'll bet they laughed together over my letters. I'll bet anything they did----"
"Nay," said I. "He'd burn your letters for fear they'd give him away."
There was a black look on her yellow face. Suddenly a voice was heard calling. She poked her head out of the shed, and answered coolly:
"All right!" Then, turning to me: "That's his mother looking after me."
She laughed into my face, witch-like, and we turned down the road.
When I awoke, the morning after this episode, I found the house darkened with deep, soft snow, which had blown against the large west windows, covering them with a screen. I went outside, and saw the valley all white and ghastly below me, the trees beneath black and thin looking like wire, the rock-faces dark between the glistening shroud, and the sky above sombre, heavy, yellowish-dark, much too heavy for the world below of hollow bluey whiteness figured with black. I felt I was in a valley of the dead. And I sensed I was a prisoner, for the snow was everywhere deep, and drifted in places. So all the morning I remained indoors, looking up the drive at the shrubs so heavily plumed with snow, at the gateposts raised high with a foot or more of extra whiteness. Or I looked down into the white-and-black valley, that was utterly motionless and beyond life, a hollow sarcophagus.
Nothing stirred the whole day--no plume fell off the shrubs, the valley was as abstracted as a grove of death. I looked over at the tiny, half-buried farms away on the bare uplands beyond the valley hollow, and I thought of Tible in the snow, of the black, witch-like little Mrs. Goyte. And the snow seemed to lay me bare to influences I wanted to escape.
In the faint glow of half-clear light that came about four o'clock in the afternoon, I was roused to see a motion in the snow away below, near where the thorn-trees stood very black and dwarfed, like a little savage group, in the dismal white. I watched closely. Yes, there was a flapping and a struggle--a big bird, it must be, labouring in the snow. I wondered. Our biggest birds, in the valley, were the large hawks that often hung flickering opposite my windows, level with me, but high above some prey on the steep valley-side. This was much too big for a hawk--too big for any known bird. I searched in my mind for the largest English wild birds--geese, buzzards.
Still it laboured and strove, then was still, a dark spot, then struggled again. I went out of the house and down the steep slope, at risk of breaking my leg between the rocks. I knew the ground so well--and yet I got well shaken before I drew near the thorn-trees.
Yes, it was a bird. It was Joey. It was the grey-brown peacock with a blue neck. He was snow-wet and spent.
"Joey--Joey de-urr!" I said, staggering unevenly towards him. He looked so pathetic, rowing and struggling in the snow, too spent to rise, his blue neck stretching out and lying sometimes on the snow, his eyes closing and opening quickly, his crest all battered.
"Joey dee-urr! Dee-urr!" I said caressingly to him. And at last he lay still, blinking, in the surged and furrowed snow, whilst I came near and touched him, stroked him, gathered him under my arm. He stretched his long, wetted neck away from me as I held him, none the less he was quiet in my arm, too tired, perhaps, to struggle. Still he held his poor, crested head away from me, and seemed