Doomsday. Warwick Deeping

chilly, dear lady?"

      She assured him that she felt quite warm, and was suddenly and horribly afraid that he was about to do something foolish. She felt it in the air, a quivering of his sandy eyelashes over eyes that were suffused and tender. O, bother the men; he was going to be as troublesome as poor Coode! And then the Jamieson children extracted her from this delicate situation.

      Giggles, and the sound of a mouth making a smacking sound on the back of a fat red hand! Colonel Sykes, looking round sharply, saw the two faces and the pennies. He glared. The two heads disappeared, and there were sounds of joy behind the fence.

      He lingered a moment, very stiff and proper, keeping that brave circle of crystal glued into his red face.

      "Damn those infernal children! That's what comes of selling land to such people."

      Mary lay relaxed, eyes half closed, watching Furze and her father.

      3

      Under her rug lay a bunch of primroses. He had brought them wrapped up and hidden in a clean handkerchief. "We have lots of these. I thought you might like a few." He had stood holding them with an air of grave shyness until she had put out a hand and taken them, and thanked him, not looking at his face but at the flowers. She had heard his voice going on. "They came out of Gore Wood. Masses of them there since I had some oaks felled and the underwood cut over. Same with other flowers. Bluebells later, like a bit of blue sky fallen down on the ground. And then—foxgloves. I hope you are better?"

      A bunch of primroses, that was Colonel Sykes' imaginary bill, concealed from the conquering eye-glass, lying snugly somewhere near her bosom. She lay and watched the two over yonder, the strong man with the spade, and poor old Hesketh with his egg-shaped head looking too heavy for his thin neck, and his long legs flopping about as though neither quite knew what the other was doing. She heard Furze speaking to her father, and his voice had a gentleness.

      She felt warmed, and yet curiously alert and afraid. He disturbed her. He appeared to her as deliberate as the seasons, a vernal equinox of a man, part of the inevitable purpose of the soil. And he was no fool. Cinder Town was full of fools, nice and otherwise, and there were times when she grasped the implication of their foolish ineffectualness. That was why Cinder Town was. His chousing of Colonel Toby had impressed her. So wisely done, and yet so naturally! To go off with her father and get a spade and to start digging! She had known at once that his spade would outlast and out-talk Colonel Sykes' tongue. Doomsday! No, assuredly he was not to be hustled out of his opportunity, having made it and seized it, or—perhaps planted it.

      She knew that presently he would come back to her and stand beside her chair. She was both afraid and excited. His eyes looked at you as though you were a piece of land that he wanted and meant to have, not arrogantly, but with profound conviction. She neither accepted her liking of him nor repelled it. He was just there, to be looked at and wondered about, something new and strange, an open doorway in her dull life.

      The work was over. He had put on his coat. He came towards her with her father, still carrying the spade. He stood beside her with a kind of glowing silence, looking at her figure, for an impulse that was feminine had made her slip the rug back so that the bunch of primroses showed. She did not mean all that he thought she meant.

      "I am so glad you are better."

      He glanced at old Hesketh.

      "It was good of you, sir, to let me—Yes, I must be getting back now. Work is never done on a farm."

      He raised his hat, and the glow of him seemed to envelop her.

      "You have saved my back," said her father. "Mary, Mr. Furze ought to have had tea with us."

      She found her voice.

      "Oh—another day—perhaps."

      CHAPTER VI

       Table of Contents

      1

      For Arnold Furze, life, that spring, renewed all its strangeness and its mystery. It began with the singing of birds in the greyness of the dawn, a chant such as it seemed to him he had never heard before, the whole earth waking suddenly into exultation. Pipings in the orchard and in the hedgerows. But there were other volumes of song, a massed chorus that came from Gore Wood, and another and fainter thrilling that trembled across the meadows from Rushy. A blackbird in the "Doomsday" orchard led off the chant each morning, and a thrush ended it, piping "Awake—awake" to the blossom that slumbered. Furze never drew a curtain, for daylight found him stirring, and in the long light evenings he was about till dusk sent him to bed. The rising sun looked in at the orchard window, and lit up the rosy lips of the apple blossom, and turned the young green of the pear leaves to gold. Masses of white cloud floated brilliantly above the dim blue woods. And on rainy mornings even the rain sang a song to him. Murmuring upon the great, spreading roof of the cow-house, it joined its soft moist music to the purr of the milk into the milking pail.

      About half-past five was his usual hour for rising, but this spring he rose at five, adding those extra minutes to the day's labour of mystery. Those still and secret hours of the dawn, with the yellow sunlight stealing through, and dew everywhere, and the stillness and the solitude, how he loved them. Each dawn came with a sense of adventure. He would put a match to some kindling and hang the kettle over it, and go out and up the lane as far as Six Firs, Bobbo at his heels—and as grey as the dew-covered grass. He would climb the mound, and stand for a moment looking towards the little red and white and green and brown houses. Cinderella Town! They were asleep down there. They had nothing to get them out of bed, no clamorous crops, and no cows with swelling udders, and all the essential urgency of the soil. But she—she would be up earlier than most of them, mysteriously busy about mysteriously simple things, lighting fires and sweeping rooms. The distant contemplation of her labours fascinated him, for they were coming to have a personal meaning for him, a glamour, a tenderness. The man in him reached out to the imagined woman in her. He saw her at "Doomsday," moving about the house, more happily busy perhaps than she could be down yonder.

      Wandering back with his face to the dawn he would see his old house as a symbol, raising its chimneys above the young green of the larches. The flames of the wood fire would be licking the black kettle. That early cup of tea and slice of bread and butter had the flavour of a sacrament. Then followed his half-hour of service. Chicken coops had been banished from Mrs. Damaris' garden; he had scythed the grass, and collected some flagstones and made a path, and now he was at work digging a border under the grey wall and two beds—one on either side of the path. He had begged, bought, or scrounged plants, sweet-williams, Canterbury bells, white pinks, snapdragons. He was sowing annuals, larkspur, correopsis, candytuft, marigold, flax, Virginia stock, mignonette, nasturtiums. My Lady's garden should be dressed and perfumed after all these years. Flowers for Cinderella.

      For she had taken his primroses.

      His large simplicity moved to the new measure. Never had he felt so strong or so tireless, and yet he seemed to have more time to think and to feel. The days had lost all sense of effort. Driving the milk cans to Melhurst station, or harrowing his wheat, or rolling the meadows, or milking, or hoeing his bean field, he felt life moving easily, like a young man well mounted setting out upon an adventure. His love for the old place increased. He would wander out in the dusk, with the birds singing their vespers, and the woods growing a greyish blue, and a faint mist spreading over the Long Meadow. Perhaps he would wander in among the oaks of Gore Wood, where the young oak foliage was the colour of gold above the pale faces of the last primroses. Wild hyacinths were beginning to make a blueness there.

      Why should he not ask her to come and see them?

      Yes, he wanted her to see it all, to be able to spread it before her in its beauty as he saw it, the fading gorse and the yellow broom of the Wilderness, and the young bracken like shepherds' crooks, and the golden spikes of the beeches bursting with an incredible