Ay, 'tis better to stay by the land, as the Lard said, till time
comes to lie under it." I looked away across the field where the
hot air throbbed and quivered, and the fallen grass, robbed already
of its freshness, lay prone at the feet of its upstanding fellows.
It is quite useless to argue with old Dodden; he only shakes his
head and says firmly, "An old man, seventy-five come Martinmass
knows more o' life than a young chap, stands ter reason"; besides,
his epitome of the town life he knows nothing of was a just one as
far as it went; and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn
crossing, and many other things that he should not be; but that is
the parson's secret and mine.
We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still
hours into the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set a Gloria
to the psalm of another working day. Only a third of the field lay
mown, for we were not skilled labourers to cut our acre a day; I
saw it again that night under the moonlight and the starlight,
wrapped in a shroud of summer's mist.
The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the
air was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass. One of them walked
apart from the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her
face, sealed and impassive, was aged beyond the vigour of her
years. I knew the woman by sight, and her history by hearsay. We
have a code of morals here--not indeed peculiar to this place or
people--that a wedding is 'respectable' if it precedes child-birth
by a bare month, tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed
the same by less than a year (provided the pair are not living in
the same village); but the child that has never been 'fathered' and
the wife without a ring are 'anathema,' and such in one was
Elizabeth Banks.
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