CHAPTER III

A GIRL ON HORSEBACK—CONVERSATION

The sluggish day began to break. Even its position terrestrially is one

of the elements of a new interest, and for no particular reason save

that the incident of the night had occurred there Oak went again into

the plantation. Lingering and musing here, he heard the steps of a

horse at the foot of the hill, and soon there appeared in view an

auburn pony with a girl on its back, ascending by the path leading past

the cattle-shed. She was the young woman of the night before. Gabriel

instantly thought of the hat she had mentioned as having lost in the

wind; possibly she had come to look for it. He hastily scanned the

ditch and after walking about ten yards along it found the hat among

the leaves. Gabriel took it in his hand and returned to his hut. Here

he ensconced himself, and peeped through the loophole in the direction

of the rider’s approach.

She came up and looked around—then on the other side of the hedge.

Gabriel was about to advance and restore the missing article when an

unexpected performance induced him to suspend the action for the

present. The path, after passing the cowshed, bisected the plantation.

It was not a bridle-path—merely a pedestrian’s track, and the boughs

spread horizontally at a height not greater than seven feet above the

ground, which made it impossible to ride erect beneath them. The girl,

who wore no riding-habit, looked around for a moment, as if to assure

herself that all humanity was out of view, then dexterously dropped

backwards flat upon the pony’s back, her head over its tail, her feet

against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky. The rapidity of her

glide into this position was that of a kingfisher—its noiselessness

that of a hawk. Gabriel’s eyes had scarcely been able to follow her.

The tall lank pony seemed used to such doings, and ambled along

unconcerned. Thus she passed under the level boughs.

The performer seemed quite at home anywhere between a horse’s head and

its tail, and the necessity for this abnormal attitude having ceased

with the passage of the plantation, she began to adopt another, even

more obviously convenient than the first. She had no side-saddle, and

it was very apparent that a firm seat upon the smooth leather beneath

her was unattainable sideways. Springing to her accustomed

perpendicular like a bowed sapling, and satisfying herself that nobody

was in sight, she seated herself in the manner demanded by the saddle,

though hardly expected of the woman, and trotted off in the direction

of Tewnell Mill.

Oak was amused, perhaps a little astonished, and hanging up the hat in

his hut, went again among his ewes. An hour passed, the girl returned,

properly seated now, with a bag of bran in front of her. On nearing the

cattle-shed she was met by a boy bringing a milking-pail, who held the

reins of the pony whilst she slid off. The boy led away the horse,

leaving the pail with the young woman.

Soon soft spirts alternating with loud spirts came in regular

succession from within the shed, the obvious sounds of a person milking

a cow. Gabriel took the lost hat in his hand, and waited beside the

path she would follow in leaving the hill.

She came, the pail in one hand, hanging against her knee. The left arm

was extended as a balance, enough of it being shown bare to make Oak

wish that the event had happened in the summer, when the whole would

have been revealed. There was a bright air and manner about her now, by

which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could

not be questioned; and this rather saucy assumption failed in being

offensive because a beholder felt it to be, upon the whole, true. Like

exceptional emphasis in the tone of a genius, that which would have

made mediocrity ridiculous was an addition to recognised power. It was

with some surprise that she saw Gabriel’s face rising like the moon

behind the hedge.

The adjustment of the farmer’s hazy conceptions of her charms to the

portrait of herself she now presented him with was less a diminution

than a difference. The starting-point selected by the judgment was her

height. She seemed tall, but the pail was a small one, and the hedge

diminutive; hence, making allowance for error by comparison with these,

she could have been not above the height to be chosen by women as best.

All features of consequence were severe and regular. It may have been

observed by persons who go about the shires with eyes for beauty, that

in Englishwoman a classically-formed face is seldom found to be united

with a figure of the same pattern, the highly-finished features being

generally too large for the remainder of the frame; that a graceful and

proportionate figure of eight heads usually goes off into random facial

curves. Without throwing a Nymphean tissue over a milkmaid, let it be

said that here criticism checked itself as out of place, and looked at

her proportions with a long consciousness of pleasure. From the

contours of her figure in its upper part, she must have had a beautiful

neck and shoulders; but since her infancy nobody had ever seen them.

Had she been put into a low dress she would have run and thrust her

head into a bush. Yet she was not a shy girl by any means; it was

merely her instinct to draw the line dividing the seen from the unseen

higher than they do it in towns.

That the girl’s thoughts hovered about her face and form as soon as she

caught Oak’s eyes conning the same page was natural, and almost

certain. The self-consciousness shown would have been vanity if a

little more pronounced, dignity if a little less. Rays of male vision

seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts;

she brushed hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been irritating its

pink surface by actual touch, and the free air of her previous

movements was reduced at the same time to a chastened phase of itself.

Yet it was the man who blushed, the maid not at all.

“I found a hat,” said Oak.

“It is mine,” said she, and, from a sense of proportion, kept down to a

small smile an inclination to laugh distinctly: “it flew away last

night.”

“One o’clock this morning?”

“Well—it was.” She was surprised. “How did you know?” she said.

“I was here.”

“You are Farmer Oak, are you not?”

“That or thereabouts. I’m lately come to this place.”

“A large farm?” she inquired, casting her eyes round, and swinging back

her hair, which was black in the shaded hollows of its mass; but it

being now an hour past sunrise the rays touched its prominent curves

with a colour of their own.

“No; not large. About a hundred.” (In speaking of farms the word

“acres” is omitted by the natives, by analogy to such old expressions

as “a stag of ten.”)

“I wanted my hat this morning,” she went on. “I had to ride to Tewnell

Mill.”

“Yes you had.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw you.”

“Where?” she inquired, a misgiving bringing every muscle of her

lineaments and frame to a standstill.

“Here—going through the plantation, and all down the hill,” said Farmer

Oak, with an aspect excessively knowing with regard to some matter in

his mind, as he gazed at a remote point in the direction named, and

then turned back to meet his colloquist’s eyes.

A perception caused him to withdraw his own eyes from hers as suddenly

as if he had been caught in a theft. Recollection of the strange antics

she had indulged in when passing through the trees was succeeded in the

girl by a nettled palpitation, and that by a hot face. It was a time to

see a woman redden who was not given to reddening as a rule; not a

point in the milkmaid but was of the deepest rose-colour. From the

Maiden’s Blush, through all varieties of the Provence down to the

Crimson Tuscany, the countenance of Oak’s acquaintance quickly

graduated; whereupon he, in considerateness, turned away his head.

The sympathetic man still looked the other way, and wondered when she

would recover coolness sufficient to justify him in facing her again.

He heard what seemed to be the flitting of a dead leaf upon the breeze,

and looked. She had gone away.

With an air between that of Tragedy and Comedy Gabriel returned to his

work.

Five mornings and evenings passed. The young woman came regularly to

milk the healthy cow or to attend to the sick one, but never allowed

her vision to stray in the direction of Oak’s person. His want of tact

had deeply offended her—not by seeing what he could not help, but by

letting her know that he had seen it. For, as without law there is no

sin, without eyes there is no indecorum; and she appeared to feel that

Gabriel’s espial had made her an indecorous woman without her own

connivance. It was food for great regret with him; it was also a

_contretemps_ which touched into life a latent heat he had experienced

in that direction.

The acquaintanceship might, however, have ended in a slow forgetting,

but for an incident which occurred at the end of the same week. One

afternoon it began to freeze, and the frost increased with evening,

which drew on like a stealthy tightening of bonds. It was a time when

in cottages the breath of the sleepers freezes to the sheets; when

round the drawing-room fire of a thick-walled mansion the sitters’

backs are cold, even whilst their faces are all aglow. Many a small

bird went to bed supperless that night among the bare boughs.

As the milking-hour drew near, Oak kept his usual watch upon the

cowshed. At last he felt cold, and shaking an extra quantity of bedding

round the yearling ewes he entered the hut and heaped more fuel upon

the stove. The wind came in at the bottom of the door, and to prevent

it Oak laid a sack there and wheeled the cot round a little more to the

south. Then the wind spouted in at a ventilating hole—of which there

was one on each side of the hut.

Gabriel had always known that when the fire was lighted and the door

closed one of these must be kept open—that chosen being always on the

side away from the wind. Closing the slide to windward, he turned to

open the other; on second thoughts the farmer considered that he would

first sit down leaving both closed for a minute or two, till the

temperature of the hut was a little raised. He sat down.

His head began to ache in an unwonted manner, and, fancying himself

weary by reason of the broken rests of the preceding nights, Oak

decided to get up, open the slide, and then allow himself to fall

asleep. He fell asleep, however, without having performed the necessary

preliminary.

How long he remained unconscious Gabriel never knew. During the first

stages of his return to perception peculiar deeds seemed to be in

course of enactment. His dog was howling, his head was aching

fearfully—somebody was pulling him about, hands were loosening his

neckerchief.

On opening his eyes he found that evening had sunk to dusk in a strange

manner of unexpectedness. The young girl with the remarkably pleasant

lips and white teeth was beside him. More than this—astonishingly

more—his head was upon her lap, his face and neck were disagreeably

wet, and her fingers were unbuttoning his collar.

“Whatever is the matter?” said Oak, vacantly.

She seemed to experience mirth, but of too insignificant a kind to

start enjoyment.

“Nothing now,” she answered, “since you are not dead. It is a wonder

you were not suffocated in this hut of yours.”

“Ah, the hut!” murmured Gabriel. “I gave ten pounds for that hut. But

I’ll sell it, and sit under thatched hurdles as they did in old times,

and curl up to sleep in a lock of straw! It played me nearly the same

trick the other day!” Gabriel, by way of emphasis, brought down his

fist upon the floor.

“It was not exactly the fault of the hut,” she observed in a tone which

showed her to be that novelty among women—one who finished a thought

before beginning the sentence which was to convey it. “You should, I

think, have considered, and not have been so foolish as to leave the

slides closed.”

“Yes I suppose I should,” said Oak, absently. He was endeavouring to

catch and appreciate the sensation of being thus with her, his head

upon her dress, before the event passed on into the heap of bygone

things. He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have

thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the

intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he

remained silent.

She made him sit up, and then Oak began wiping his face and shaking

himself like a Samson. “How can I thank ’ee?” he said at last,

gratefully, some of the natural rusty red having returned to his face.

“Oh, never mind that,” said the girl, smiling, and allowing her smile

to hold good for Gabriel’s next remark, whatever that might prove to

be.

“How did you find me?”

“I heard your dog howling and scratching at the door of the hut when I

came to the milking (it was so lucky, Daisy’s milking is almost over

for the season, and I shall not come here after this week or the next).

The dog saw me, and jumped over to me, and laid hold of my skirt. I

came across and looked round the hut the very first thing to see if the

slides were closed. My uncle has a hut like this one, and I have heard

him tell his shepherd not to go to sleep without leaving a slide open.

I opened the door, and there you were like dead. I threw the milk over

you, as there was no water, forgetting it was warm, and no use.”

“I wonder if I should have died?” Gabriel said, in a low voice, which

was rather meant to travel back to himself than to her.

“Oh no!” the girl replied. She seemed to prefer a less tragic

probability; to have saved a man from death involved talk that should

harmonise with the dignity of such a deed—and she shunned it.

“I believe you saved my life, Miss—I don’t know your name. I know your

aunt’s, but not yours.”

“I would just as soon not tell it—rather not. There is no reason either

why I should, as you probably will never have much to do with me.”

“Still, I should like to know.”

“You can inquire at my aunt’s—she will tell you.”

“My name is Gabriel Oak.”

“And mine isn’t. You seem fond of yours in speaking it so decisively,

Gabriel Oak.”

“You see, it is the only one I shall ever have, and I must make the

most of it.”

“I always think mine sounds odd and disagreeable.”

“I should think you might soon get a new one.”

“Mercy!—how many opinions you keep about you concerning other people,

Gabriel Oak.”

“Well, Miss—excuse the words—I thought you would like them. But I can’t

match you, I know, in mapping out my mind upon my tongue. I never was

very clever in my inside. But I thank you. Come, give me your hand.”

She hesitated, somewhat disconcerted at Oak’s old-fashioned earnest

conclusion to a dialogue lightly carried on. “Very well,” she said, and

gave him her hand, compressing her lips to a demure impassivity. He

held it but an instant, and in his fear of being too demonstrative,

swerved to the opposite extreme, touching her fingers with the

lightness of a small-hearted person.

“I am sorry,” he said the instant after.

“What for?”

“Letting your hand go so quick.”

“You may have it again if you like; there it is.” She gave him her hand

again.

Oak held it longer this time—indeed, curiously long. “How soft it

is—being winter time, too—not chapped or rough or anything!” he said.

“There—that’s long enough,” said she, though without pulling it away.

“But I suppose you are thinking you would like to kiss it? You may if

you want to.”

“I wasn’t thinking of any such thing,” said Gabriel, simply; “but I

will—”

“That you won’t!” She snatched back her hand.

Gabriel felt himself guilty of another want of tact.

“Now find out my name,” she said, teasingly; and withdrew.