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      The Peace of Mowsle Barton

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      Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease, an ease alike of body and soul, in the little patch of ground, half-orchard and half-garden, that abutted on the farmyard at Mowsle Barton. After the stress and noise of long years of city life, the repose and peace of the hill-begirt homestead struck on his senses with an almost dramatic intensity. Time and space seemed to lose their meaning and their abruptness; the minutes slid away into hours, and the meadows and fallows sloped away into middle distance, softly and imperceptibly. Wild weeds of the hedgerow straggled into the flower-garden, and wallflowers and garden bushes made counter-raids into farmyard and lane. Sleepy-looking hens and solemn preoccupied ducks were equally at home in yard, orchard, or roadway; nothing seemed to belong definitely to anywhere; even the gates were not necessarily to be found on their hinges. And over the whole scene brooded the sense of a peace that had almost a quality of magic in it. In the afternoon you felt that it had always been afternoon, and must always remain afternoon; in the twilight you knew that it could never have been anything else but twilight. Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease in the rustic seat beneath an old medlar tree, and decided that here was the life-anchorage that his mind had so fondly pictured and that latterly his tired and jarred senses had so often pined for. He would make a permanent lodging-place among these simple friendly people, gradually increasing the modest comforts with which he would like to surround himself, but falling in as much as possible with their manner of living.

      As he slowly matured this resolution in his mind an elderly woman came hobbling with uncertain gait through the orchard. He recognized her as a member of the farm household, the mother or possibly the mother-inlaw of Mrs. Spurfield, his present landlady, and hastily formulated some pleasant remark to make to her. She forestalled him.

      “There’s a bit of writing chalked up on the door over yonder. What is it?”

      She spoke in a dull impersonal manner, as though the question had been on her lips for years and had best be got rid of. Her eyes, however, looked impatiently over Crefton’s head at the door of a small barn which formed the outpost of a straggling line of farm buildings.

      “Martha Pillamon is an old witch” was the announcement that met Crefton’s inquiring scrutiny, and he hesitated a moment before giving the statement wider publicity. For all he knew to the contrary, it might be Martha herself to whom he was speaking. It was possible that Mrs. Spurfield’s maiden name had been Pillamon. And the gaunt, withered old dame at his side might certainly fulfil local conditions as to the outward aspect of a witch.

      “It’s something about some one called Martha Pillamon,” he explained cautiously.

      “What does it say?”

      “It’s very disrespectful,” said Crefton; “it says she’s a witch. Such things ought not to be written up.”

      “It’s true, every word of it,” said his listener with considerable satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive note of her own, “the old toad.”

      And as she hobbled away through the farmyard she shrilled out in her cracked voice, “Martha Pillamon is an old witch!”

      “Did you hear what she said?” mumbled a weak, angry voice somewhere behind Crefton’s shoulder. Turning hastily, he beheld another old crone, thin and yellow and wrinkled, and evidently in a high state of displeasure. Obviously this was Martha Pillamon in person. The orchard seemed to be a favourite promenade for the aged women of the neighbourhood.

      “’Tis lies, ’tis sinful lies,” the weak voice went on. “’Tis Betsy Croot is the old witch. She an’ her daughter, the dirty rat. I’ll put a spell on ’em, the old nuisances.”

      As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk inscription on the barn door.

      “What’s written up there?” she demanded, wheeling round on Crefton.

      “Vote for Soarker,” he responded, with the craven boldness of the practised peacemaker.

      The old woman grunted, and her mutterings and her faded red shawl lost themselves gradually among the tree-trunks. Crefton rose presently and made his way towards the farm-house. Somehow a good deal of the peace seemed to have slipped out of the atmosphere.

      The cheery bustle of tea-time in the old farm kitchen, which Crefton had found so agreeable on previous afternoons, seemed to have soured today into a certain uneasy melancholy. There was a dull, dragging silence around the board, and the tea itself, when Crefton came to taste it, was a flat, lukewarm concoction that would have driven the spirit of revelry out of a carnival.

      “It’s no use complaining of the tea,” said Mrs. Spurfield hastily, as her guest stared with an air of polite inquiry at his cup. “The kettle won’t boil, that’s the truth of it.”

      Crefton turned to the hearth, where an unusually fierce fire was banked up under a big black kettle, which sent a thin wreath of steam from its spout, but seemed otherwise to ignore the action of the roaring blaze beneath it.

      “It’s been there more than an hour, an’ boil it won’t,” said Mrs. Spurfield, adding, by way of complete explanation, “we’re bewitched.”

      “It’s Martha Pillamon as has done it,” chimed in the old mother; “I’ll be even with the old toad. I’ll put a spell on her.”

      “It must boil in time,” protested Crefton, ignoring the suggestions of foul influences. “Perhaps the coal is damp.”

      “It СКАЧАТЬ