The Witch. Mary Johnston

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      JOAN

      It was May three years since Joan had smelled the apple tree in blossom by the well, or had marked the heartsease amid the grass. She drew her bucket of water, flashing, dripping, and cold, rested it upon the well-stone, and regarded with grey eyes the cottage and its handbreadth of garden.

      She sighed. There had been much of advantage in that long sojourn with her uncle the huntsman, in his better house than this, a mile in the castle wood, above the town so much greater than Hawthorn Village! There had been the town to walk to, the bright things to see, the bustle in the streets, the music in the church, the occasional processions and pageants, the fairs and feast days. For the castle itself, the great family was not often there, but the housekeeper had been friendly to her, and she had been let to roam as she pleased through the place, half-mediæval stronghold, half new walls and chambers echoing Tudor luxury. Four times in the three years the family had been in residence, and then there were other things to watch, though at a most respectful distance!... Once there had been a masque in the park, and, as many figures were needed, there had come an order from the countess. A page had brought it, and had explained in detail, what was wanted. There was to be a whole pageant of scenes from the mythology. She was to enact a virgin who had been very swift of foot—she was to run swiftly from north to south across the great pleasaunce—a young gentleman, who would be running likewise, would throw before her, one after the other, three yellow apples. She would stoop and pick them up while he ran on. She nodded. “Yes, I know. Atalanta.” The page, who was younger than herself but comely and court-bred, evinced surprise. “Wherever, Phyllis, didst get that learning?” She said that her father was clerkly and talked to her of things in books.... The masque! It was a world to remember, the masque! How beautiful all things had been, and everybody—and kind! But there had never been but the one masque, and soon the family had gone away.

      She was thinking, as she stood by the well, that now perhaps they would come back this May and she would not be there. She drew a long sigh, and missed the castle, the park and the wood, the town and the sight of the river and the bridge, over which something was always passing. She missed, too, her uncle the huntsman, who had died; missed his larger house and the greater coming and going; missed her room, where, standing at her window, she saw the moon rise behind the Black Tower. And now her uncle was dead who had been a single man, and who had kept them from month to month and year to year with his loud protest each time they talked of lifting a burden and going back to Hawthorn Forest.... But he was dead, and his house passed to the new huntsman. Joan and her father loaded their clothes and such matters upon a cart, mounted it themselves, and with some farewells to castle neighbours took the road to their own small cottage, miles away.

      She sighed, but then, with her eyes upon the heartsease, determined to make the best of it. It was not as though she did not love the cottage and the garden, where presently all the flowers would bloom again, and Hawthorn Forest, where she had wandered freely from childhood. She did love them, she had a warm love for them; and sometimes at her uncle’s she had pleased herself with being pensive and missing them sadly. She loved her father, too; the old clerk and she were good friends, so good friends, in an age of parental severity and filial awe, as to have scandalized the housekeeper at the castle. Moreover, though they were poor and had always lived so retired, and though the country hereabouts afforded few neighbours, and though she had never known many people in the village, having been but a young maid when she went away, there were those whom she remembered, and she looked forward to a renewal of acquaintance. And the day was very rich and fair, and a robin singing, and waves of fragrance blowing from the fruit trees, and she was young and strong and innately joyous. She broke a branch of apple blossom and stuck it into the well water; she stooped and plucked a knot of heartsease and fastened it at her bodice throat. Then she lifted the bucket to her head, and moved with it, tall and steady, over the worn stones of the path to the cottage door.

      Arrived within, she fell to her baking, in a clean kitchen with doors and windows wide. She was a notable cook, her mother having trained her before she died. Moreover, what she touched she touched like an artist. She made no useless steps or movements, she neither dallied nor hurried; all went with a fine assurance, an easy “Long ago I knew how—but if you ask me how I know—!” She sang as she worked, a brave young carolling of Allan-à-Dale and John-à-Green and Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

      The good odour of the bread arose and floated out to mingle with the maytime of the little garden. Old Roger Heron, short, ruddy, and hale for all he was so clerkly, came in from his spading. “That smells finely!” he said. He dipped a cup into the well water and drank.

      “Aye, and it is going to taste finely!” answered Joan.

      “‘I have heard talk of bold Robin Hood,

      And of brave Little John,

      Of Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet,

      Locksley and Maid Marian—’”

      Her father put down the cup, moved to the settle, and sitting deliberately down, began with deliberation one of his talks of a thinking man. “Look you, Joan! Goodman Cole and I have been discoursing. We were talking of religion.”

      “Aye?” said Joan. She spread a white cloth upon the table and set in the midst a bow-pot of cherry bloom. “Religion. Well?”

      “You should say the word with a heavier tone,” said old Roger. “‘Religion.’—Things aren’t here as they were at your uncle’s—rest his soul! Modesty in religion and a decent mirth seemed right enough, seeing that the earl was minded that way and on the whole the town as well. So the old games and songs and ways went somehow on—though everything was stiffening, even there, and not like it was when I was young and the learned were talking of the Greeks. But times have changed! It seems the Lord wishes gloom, or the minister says he does. If it was begun to be felt in the castle and the town, and it was,—your uncle and I often talked about it,—it shows ten times more here. Aye, it showed three years ago, but Goodman Cole says it grows day by day, and that now if you appear not with a holy melancholy you are little else than a lost soul!”

      “‘Holy melancholy’ and ‘lost souls,’” said Joan. “I know not why it is that those words together sound to me so foolish.—Doth it help anything when I am sad?”

      “‘—Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet,

      Locksley and Maid Marian—’”

      “Stop, child!” said old Roger. “I’m in earnest and so must you be. Look you, Joan! you’re all I’ve got, and folk will be fanciful about all they’ve got and try to guard it all around. And it came into my head while Goodman Cole was talking—and it was he who put it there, talking of your looks, and saying that you had better go mim-mouth to church, and that you had a strange way of looking straight at a body when you spoke, which didn’t become a woman, who ought always to go with a downcast look—it came into my head, I say, that we’re poor and without any protector and fairly strange here now, and how evil tongues are as common as grass, and I said to myself that I’d give you a good cautioning—”

      “Mim-mouth and downcast look and go to heaven so!” said Joan. “I wonder what that heaven’s like!”

      “You mustn’t talk that way,” said old Heron. “No, I know, you don’t do so when others are by, but you’ll forget sometime. Mistress Borrow at the castle said that you were a very pagan, though an innocent one! That came into my head, too, while he talked. And another thing came that sounds fanciful—but a myriad of women and girls have found it no fancy! Listen to me, Joan. Since we got our new King, and since the land has grown so zealous and finds Satan at any neighbour’s hearth, there’s been a growing ferreting out and hanging of witches. СКАЧАТЬ