Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor
and yet for ever know myself unworthy. Unless themselves should fill
with love, which is the spring of all things. And so I could not answer
her, but was overcome with thinking and feeling and confusion. Neither
could I look again; only waited for the melody which made every word
like a poem to me, the melody of her voice. But she had not the least
idea of what was going on with me, any more than I myself had.
“I think, Master Ridd, you cannot know,” she said, with her eyes taken
from me, “what the dangers of this place are, and the nature of the
people.”
“Yes, I know enough of that; and I am frightened greatly, all the time,
when I do not look at you.”
She was too young to answer me in the style some maidens would have
used; the manner, I mean, which now we call from a foreign word
“coquettish.” And more than that, she was trembling from real fear of
violence, lest strong hands might be laid on me, and a miserable end
of it. And to tell the truth, I grew afraid; perhaps from a kind of
sympathy, and because I knew that evil comes more readily than good to
us.
Therefore, without more ado, or taking any advantage--although I would
have been glad at heart, if needs had been, to kiss her (without any
thought of rudeness)--it struck me that I had better go, and have no
more to say to her until next time of coming. So would she look the more
for me and think the more about me, and not grow weary of my words and
the want of change there is in me. For, of course, I knew what a churl I
was compared to her birth and appearance; but meanwhile I might improve
myself and learn a musical instrument. “The wind hath a draw after
flying straw” is a saying we have in Devonshire, made, peradventure, by
somebody who had seen the ways of women.
“Mistress Lorna, I will depart”--mark you, I thought that a powerful
word--“in fear of causing disquiet. If any rogue shot me it would grieve
you; I make bold to say it, and it would be the death of mother. Few
mothers have such a son as me. Try to think of me now and then, and I
will bring you some new-laid eggs, for our young blue hen is beginning.”
“I thank you heartily,” said Lorna; “but you need not come to see me.
You can put them in my little bower, where I am almost always--I mean
whither daily I repair to read and to be away from them.”
“Only show me where it is. Thrice a day I will come and stop--”
“Nay, Master Ridd, I would never show thee--never, because of
peril--only that so happens it thou hast found the way already.”
And she smiled with a light that made me care to cry out for no other
way, except to her dear heart. But only to myself I cried for anything
at all, having enough of man in me to be bashful with young maidens. So
I touched her white hand softly when she gave it to me, and (fancying
that she had sighed) was touched at heart about it, and resolved to
yield her all my goods, although my mother was living; and then grew
angry with myself (for a mile or more of walking) to think she would
condescend so; and then, for the rest of the homeward road, was mad with
every man in the world who would dare to think of having her.
CHAPTER XVII
JOHN IS BEWITCHED
To forget one's luck of life, to forget the cark of care and withering
of young fingers; not to feel, or not be moved by, all the change of
thought and heart, from large young heat to the sinewy lines and dry
bones of old age--this is what I have to do ere ever I can make you
know (even as a dream is known) how I loved my Lorna. I myself can never
know; never can conceive, or treat it as a thing of reason, never can
behold myself dwelling in the midst of it, and think that this was I;
neither can I wander far from perpetual thought of it. Perhaps I have
two farrows of pigs ready for the chapman; perhaps I have ten stones
of wool waiting for the factor. It is all the same. I look at both, and
what I say to myself is this: “Which would Lorna choose of them?” Of
course, I am a fool for this; any man may call me so, and I will not
quarrel with him, unless he guess my secret. Of course, I fetch my wit,
if it be worth the fetching, back again to business. But there my heart
is and must be; and all who like to try can cheat me, except upon parish
matters.
That week I could do little more than dream and dream and rove about,
seeking by perpetual change to find the way back to myself. I cared
not for the people round me, neither took delight in victuals; but made
believe to eat and drink and blushed at any questions. And being called
the master now, head-farmer, and chief yeoman, it irked me much that any
one should take advantage of me; yet everybody did so as soon as ever it
was known that my wits were gone moon-raking. For that was the way
they looked at it, not being able to comprehend the greatness and the
loftiness. Neither do I blame them much; for the wisest thing is to
laugh at people when we cannot understand them. I, for my part, took no
notice; but in my heart despised them as beings of a lesser nature, who
never had seen Lorna. Yet I was vexed, and rubbed myself, when John Fry
spread all over the farm, and even at the shoeing forge, that a mad dog
had come and bitten me, from the other side of Mallond.
This seems little to me now; and so it might to any one; but, at the
time, it worked me up to a fever of indignity. To make a mad dog of
Lorna, to compare all my imaginings (which were strange, I do assure
you--the faculty not being apt to work), to count the raising of my soul
no more than hydrophobia! All this acted on me so, that I gave John Fry
the soundest threshing that ever a sheaf of good corn deserved, or a
bundle of tares was blessed with. Afterwards he went home, too tired
to tell his wife the meaning of it; but it proved of service to both of
them, and an example for their children.
Now the climate of this country is--so far as I can make of it--to throw
no man into extremes; and if he throw himself so far, to pluck him
back by change of weather and the need of looking after things. Lest we
should be like the Southerns, for whom the sky does everything, and men
sit under a wall and watch both food and fruit come beckoning. Their sky
is a mother to them; but ours a good stepmother to us--fearing to
hurt by indulgence, and knowing that severity and change of mood are
wholesome.
The spring being now too forward, a check to it was needful; and in the
early part of March there came a change of weather. All the young growth
was arrested by a dry wind from the east, which made both face
and fingers burn when a man was doing ditching. The lilacs and the
woodbines, just crowding forth in little tufts, close kernelling their
blossom, were ruffled back, like a sleeve turned up, and nicked with
brown at the corners. In the hedges any man, unless his eyes were very
dull, could see the mischief doing. The russet of the young elm-bloom
was fain to be in its scale again; but having pushed forth, there must
be, and turn to a tawny colour. The hangers of the hazel, too, having
shed their dust to make the nuts, did not spread their little combs and
dry them, as they ought to do; but shrivelled at the base and fell, as
if a knife had cut them. And more than all to notice was (at least about
the hedges) the shuddering of everything and the shivering sound among
them toward the feeble sun; such as we make to a poor fireplace when
several doors are open. Sometimes I put my face to warm against the
soft, rough maple-stem, which feels like the foot of a red deer; but the
pitiless east wind came through all, and took and shook the caved
hedge aback till its knees were knocking together, and nothing could
be shelter. Then would any one having blood, and trying to keep at home
with it, run to a sturdy tree and hope to eat his food behind it, and
look for a little sun to come and warm his feet in the shelter. And if
it did he might strike his breast, and try to think he was warmer.
But when a man came home at night, after long day's labour, knowing
that the days increased, and so his care should multiply; still he found
enough of light to show him what the day had done against him in
his garden. Every ridge of new-turned earth looked like an old man's
muscles, honeycombed, and standing out void of spring, and powdery.
Every plant that had rejoiced in passing such a winter now was cowering,
turned away, unfit to meet the consequence. Flowing sap had stopped its
course; fluted lines showed want of food, and if you pinched the topmost
spray, there was no rebound or firmness.
We think a good deal, in a quiet way, when people ask us about them--of
some fine, upstanding pear-trees, grafted by my grandfather, who had
been very greatly respected. And he got those grafts by sheltering a
poor Italian soldier, in the time of James the First, a man who never
could do enough to show his grateful memories. How he came to our place
is a very difficult story, which I never understood rightly, having
heard it from my mother. At any rate, there the pear-trees were, and
there they are to this very day; and I wish every one could taste their
fruit, old as they are, and rugged.
Now these fine trees had taken advantage of the west winds, and the
moisture, and the promise of the spring time, so as to fill the tips of
the spray-wood and the rowels all up the branches with a crowd of eager
blossom. Not that they were yet in bloom, nor even showing whiteness,
only that some of the cones were opening at the side of the cap which
pinched them; and there you might count perhaps, a dozen nobs, like very
little buttons, but grooved, and lined, and huddling close, to make room
for one another. And among these buds were gray-green blades, scarce
bigger than a hair almost, yet curving so as if their purpose was to
shield the blossom.
Other of the spur-points, standing on the older wood where the sap was
not so eager, had not burst their tunic yet, but were flayed and flaked
with light, casting off the husk of brown in three-cornered patches, as
I have seen a Scotchman's plaid, or as his legs shows through it. These
buds, at a distance, looked as if the sky had been raining cream upon
them.
Now all this fair delight to the eyes, and good promise to the palate,
was marred and baffled by the wind and cutting of the night-frosts. The
opening cones were struck with brown, in between the button buds, and
on the scapes that shielded them; while the foot part of the cover hung
like rags, peeled back, and quivering. And there the little stalk of
each, which might have been a pear, God willing, had a ring around its
base, and sought a chance to drop and die. The others which had not
opened comb, but only prepared to do it, were a little better off, but
still very brown and unkid, and shrivelling in doubt of health, and
neither peart nor lusty.
Now this I have not told because I know the way to do it, for that I do
not, neither yet have seen a man who did know. It is wonderful how
we look at things, and never think to notice them; and I am as bad as
anybody, unless the thing to be observed is a dog, or a horse, or a
maiden. And the last of those three I look at, somehow, without knowing
that I take notice, and greatly afraid to do it, only I knew afterwards
(when the time of life was in me), not indeed, what the maiden was like,
but how she differed from others.
Yet I have spoken about the spring, and the failure of fair promise,
because I took it to my heart as token of what would come to me in the
budding of my years and hope. And even then, being much possessed, and
full of a foolish melancholy, I felt a sad delight at being doomed to
blight and loneliness; not but that I managed still (when mother