Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor
argument; but melting over it, if you left her, as stinging soap, left
along in a basin, spreads all abroad without bubbling.
But all this is beyond the children, and beyond me too for that matter,
even now in ripe experience; for I never did know what women mean, and
never shall except when they tell me, if that be in their power. Now let
that question pass. For although I am now in a place of some authority,
I have observed that no one ever listens to me, when I attempt to lay
down the law; but all are waiting with open ears until I do enforce it.
And so methinks he who reads a history cares not much for the wisdom or
folly of the writer (knowing well that the former is far less than his
own, and the latter vastly greater), but hurries to know what the people
did, and how they got on about it. And this I can tell, if any one can,
having been myself in the thick of it.
The fright I had taken that night in Glen Doone satisfied me for a long
time thereafter; and I took good care not to venture even in the fields
and woods of the outer farm, without John Fry for company. John was
greatly surprised and pleased at the value I now set upon him; until,
what betwixt the desire to vaunt and the longing to talk things over,
I gradually laid bare to him nearly all that had befallen me; except,
indeed, about Lorna, whom a sort of shame kept me from mentioning. Not
that I did not think of her, and wish very often to see her again; but
of course I was only a boy as yet, and therefore inclined to despise
young girls, as being unable to do anything, and only meant to listen to
orders. And when I got along with the other boys, that was how we always
spoke of them, if we deigned to speak at all, as beings of a lower
order, only good enough to run errands for us, and to nurse boy-babies.
And yet my sister Annie was in truth a great deal more to me than all
the boys of the parish, and of Brendon, and Countisbury, put together;
although at the time I never dreamed it, and would have laughed if told
so. Annie was of a pleasing face, and very gentle manner, almost like
a lady some people said; but without any airs whatever, only trying to
give satisfaction. And if she failed, she would go and weep, without
letting any one know it, believing the fault to be all her own, when
mostly it was of others. But if she succeeded in pleasing you, it was
beautiful to see her smile, and stroke her soft chin in a way of her
own, which she always used when taking note how to do the right thing
again for you. And then her cheeks had a bright clear pink, and her eyes
were as blue as the sky in spring, and she stood as upright as a young
apple-tree, and no one could help but smile at her, and pat her brown
curls approvingly; whereupon she always curtseyed. For she never tried
to look away when honest people gazed at her; and even in the court-yard
she would come and help to take your saddle, and tell (without your
asking her) what there was for dinner.
And afterwards she grew up to be a very comely maiden, tall, and with a
well-built neck, and very fair white shoulders, under a bright cloud
of curling hair. Alas! poor Annie, like most of the gentle maidens--but
tush, I am not come to that yet; and for the present she seemed to me
little to look at, after the beauty of Lorna Doone.
CHAPTER X
A BRAVE RESCUE AND A ROUGH RIDE
It happened upon a November evening (when I was about fifteen years old,
and out-growing my strength very rapidly, my sister Annie being turned
thirteen, and a deal of rain having fallen, and all the troughs in the
yard being flooded, and the bark from the wood-ricks washed down the
gutters, and even our water-shoot going brown) that the ducks in the
court made a terrible quacking, instead of marching off to their pen,
one behind another. Thereupon Annie and I ran out to see what might be
the sense of it. There were thirteen ducks, and ten lily-white (as the
fashion then of ducks was), not I mean twenty-three in all, but ten
white and three brown-striped ones; and without being nice about their
colour, they all quacked very movingly. They pushed their gold-coloured
bills here and there (yet dirty, as gold is apt to be), and they jumped
on the triangles of their feet, and sounded out of their nostrils; and
some of the over-excited ones ran along low on the ground, quacking
grievously with their bills snapping and bending, and the roof of their
mouths exhibited.
Annie began to cry “Dilly, dilly, einy, einy, ducksey,” according to
the burden of a tune they seem to have accepted as the national duck's
anthem; but instead of being soothed by it, they only quacked three
times as hard, and ran round till we were giddy. And then they shook
their tails together, and looked grave, and went round and round
again. Now I am uncommonly fond of ducks, both roasted and roasting and
roystering; and it is a fine sight to behold them walk, poddling one
after other, with their toes out, like soldiers drilling, and their
little eyes cocked all ways at once, and the way that they dib with
their bills, and dabble, and throw up their heads and enjoy something,
and then tell the others about it. Therefore I knew at once, by the way
they were carrying on, that there must be something or other gone wholly
amiss in the duck-world. Sister Annie perceived it too, but with a
greater quickness; for she counted them like a good duck-wife, and could
only tell thirteen of them, when she knew there ought to be fourteen.
And so we began to search about, and the ducks ran to lead us aright,
having come that far to fetch us; and when we got down to the foot of
the court-yard where the two great ash-trees stand by the side of the
little water, we found good reason for the urgency and melancholy of the
duck-birds. Lo! the old white drake, the father of all, a bird of high
manners and chivalry, always the last to help himself from the pan of
barley-meal, and the first to show fight to a dog or cock intruding upon
his family, this fine fellow, and pillar of the state, was now in a sad
predicament, yet quacking very stoutly. For the brook, wherewith he
had been familiar from his callow childhood, and wherein he was wont to
quest for water-newts, and tadpoles, and caddis-worms, and other game,
this brook, which afforded him very often scanty space to dabble in,
and sometimes starved the cresses, was now coming down in a great brown
flood, as if the banks never belonged to it. The foaming of it, and the
noise, and the cresting of the corners, and the up and down, like a wave
of the sea, were enough to frighten any duck, though bred upon stormy
waters, which our ducks never had been.
There is always a hurdle six feet long and four and a half in depth,
swung by a chain at either end from an oak laid across the channel. And
the use of this hurdle is to keep our kine at milking time from straying
away there drinking (for in truth they are very dainty) and to fence
strange cattle, or Farmer Snowe's horses, from coming along the bed of
the brook unknown, to steal our substance. But now this hurdle, which
hung in the summer a foot above the trickle, would have been dipped more
than two feet deep but for the power against it. For the torrent came
down so vehemently that the chains at full stretch were creaking, and
the hurdle buffeted almost flat, and thatched (so to say) with the
drift-stuff, was going see-saw, with a sulky splash on the dirty red
comb of the waters. But saddest to see was between two bars, where a
fog was of rushes, and flood-wood, and wild-celery haulm, and dead
crowsfoot, who but our venerable mallard jammed in by the joint of his
shoulder, speaking aloud as he rose and fell, with his top-knot full of
water, unable to comprehend it, with his tail washed far away from him,
but often compelled to be silent, being ducked very harshly against his
will by the choking fall-to of the hurdle.
For a moment I could not help laughing, because, being borne up high and
dry by a tumult of the torrent, he gave me a look from his one little
eye (having lost one in fight with the turkey-cock), a gaze of appealing
sorrow, and then a loud quack to second it. But the quack came out of
time, I suppose, for his throat got filled with water, as the hurdle
carried him back again. And then there was scarcely the screw of his
tail to be seen until he swung up again, and left small doubt by the
way he sputtered, and failed to quack, and hung down his poor crest, but
what he must drown in another minute, and frogs triumph over his body.
Annie was crying, and wringing her hands, and I was about to rush into
the water, although I liked not the look of it, but hoped to hold on by
the hurdle, when a man on horseback came suddenly round the corner of
the great ash-hedge on the other side of the stream, and his horse's
feet were in the water.
“Ho, there,” he cried; “get thee back, boy. The flood will carry thee
down like a straw. I will do it for thee, and no trouble.”
With that he leaned forward, and spoke to his mare--she was just of the
tint of a strawberry, a young thing, very beautiful--and she arched up
her neck, as misliking the job; yet, trusting him, would attempt it. She
entered the flood, with her dainty fore-legs sloped further and further
in front of her, and her delicate ears pricked forward, and the size of
her great eyes increasing, but he kept her straight in the turbid rush,
by the pressure of his knee on her. Then she looked back, and wondered
at him, as the force of the torrent grew stronger, but he bade her go
on; and on she went, and it foamed up over her shoulders; and she tossed
up her lip and scorned it, for now her courage was waking. Then as the
rush of it swept her away, and she struck with her forefeet down the
stream, he leaned from his saddle in a manner which I never could have
thought possible, and caught up old Tom with his left hand, and set him
between his holsters, and smiled at his faint quack of gratitude. In a
moment all these were carried downstream, and the rider lay flat on his
horse, and tossed the hurdle clear from him, and made for the bend of
smooth water.
They landed some thirty or forty yards lower, in the midst of our
kitchen-garden, where the winter-cabbage was; but though Annie and I
crept in through the hedge, and were full of our thanks and admiring
him, he would answer us never a word, until he had spoken in full to the
mare, as if explaining the whole to her.
“Sweetheart, I know thou couldst have leaped it,” he said, as he patted
her cheek, being on the ground by this time, and she was nudging up to
him, with the water pattering off her; “but I had good reason, Winnie
dear, for making thee go through it.”
She answered him kindly with her soft eyes, and smiled at him very
lovingly, and they understood one another. Then he took from his
waistcoat two peppercorns, and made the old drake swallow them, and
tried him softly upon his legs, where the leading gap in the hedge was.
Old Tom stood up quite bravely, and clapped his wings, and shook off the
wet from his tail-feathers; and then away into the court-yard, and his
family gathered around him, and they all made a noise in their throats,
and stood up, and put their bills together, to thank God for this great
deliverance.
Having taken all this trouble, and watched the end of that adventure,
the gentleman turned round to us with a pleasant smile on his face, as
if he were lightly amused with himself; and we came up and looked at
him. He was rather short, about John Fry's height, or may be a little
taller, but very strongly built and springy, as his gait at every step
showed plainly, although his legs were bowed with much riding, and he