Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (813 page)

‘“De Aquila, does thou mock him?” Rahere jingled from one to another, and the old man smiled.

‘“By the Bones of the Saints, not I,” said our Lord of Pevensey. “I know how dooms near he broke us at Santlache.”

‘“Sir Hugh, you are excused the question. But you, valiant, loyal, honourable, and devout barons, Lords of Man’s justice in your own bounds, do you mock my fool?”

‘He shook his bauble in the very faces of those two barons whose names I have forgotten. “Na — Na!” they said, and waved him back foolishly enough.

‘He hies him across to staring, nodding Harold, and speaks from behind his chair.

‘“No man mocks thee, Who here judges this man? Henry of England — Nigel — De Aquila! On your souls, swift with the answer!” he cried.

‘None answered. We were all — the King not least — over-borne by that terrible scarlet-and-black wizard-jester.

‘“Well for your souls,” he said, wiping his brow. Next, shrill like a woman: “Oh, come to me!” and Hugh ran forward to hold Harold, that had slidden down in the chair.

‘“Hearken,” said Rahere, his arm round Harold’s neck. “The King — his bishops — the knights — all the world’s crazy chessboard neither mock nor judge thee. Take that comfort with thee, Harold of England!”

‘Hugh heaved the old man up and he smiled.

‘“Good comfort,” said Harold. “Tell me again! I have been somewhat punished.” ‘Rahere hallooed it once more into his ear as the head rolled. We heard him sigh, and Nigel of Ely stood forth, praying aloud.

‘“Out! I will have no Norman!” Harold said as clearly as I speak now, and he refuged himself on Hugh’s sound shoulder, and stretched out, and lay all still.’

‘Dead?’ said Una, turning up a white face in the dusk.

‘That was his good fortune. To die in the King’s presence, and on the breast of the most gentlest, truest knight of his own house. Some of us envied him,’ said Sir Richard, and fell back to take Swallow’s bridle.

‘Turn left here,’ Puck called ahead of them from under an oak. They ducked down a narrow path through close ash plantation.

The children hurried forward, but cutting a corner charged full-abreast into the thorn-faggot that old Hobden was carrying home on his back. ‘My! My!’ said he. ‘Have you scratted your face, Miss Una?’

‘Sorry! It’s all right,’ said Una, rubbing her nose. ‘How many rabbits did you get today?’

‘That’s tellin’!’ the old man grinned as he re-hoisted his faggot. ‘I reckon Mus’ Ridley he’ve got rheumatism along o’ lyin’ in the dik to see I didn’t snap up any. Think o’ that now!’

They laughed a good deal while he told them the tale.

‘An’ just as he crawled away I heard some one hollerin’ to the hounds in our woods,’ said he. ‘Didn’t you hear? You must ha’ been asleep sure-ly.’

‘Oh, what about the sleeper you promised to show us?’ Dan cried.

‘‘Ere he be — house an’ all!’ Hobden dived into the prickly heart of the faggot and took out a dormouse’s wonderfully woven nest of grass and leaves. His blunt fingers parted it as if it had been precious lace, and tilting it toward the last of the light he showed the little, red, furry chap curled up inside, his tail between his eyes that were shut for their winter sleep.

‘Let’s take him home. Don’t breathe on him,’ said Una. ‘It’ll make him warm and he’ll wake up and die straight off. Won’t he, Hobby?’

‘Dat’s a heap better by my reckonin’ than wakin’ up and findin’ himself in a cage for life. No! We’ll lay him into the bottom o’ this hedge. Dat’s jus’ right! No more trouble for him till come Spring. An’ now we’ll go home.’

FRIENDLY BROOK

The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow’s length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week’s November rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she proclaimed it aloud.

Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings. They stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and forth, and looked at each other.

‘I reckon she’s about two rod thick,’ said Jabez the younger, ‘an’ she hasn’t felt iron since — when has she, Jesse?’

‘Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an’ you won’t be far out.’

‘Umm!’ Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve. ‘She ain’t a hedge. She’s all manner o’ trees. We’ll just about have to — ’ He paused, as professional etiquette required.

‘Just about have to side her up an’ see what she’ll bear. But hadn’t we best — ?’ Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists and equals.

‘Get some kind o’ line to go by.’ Jabez ranged up and down till he found a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on the bank till it should be faggoted.

By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly which no woodman touches without orders.

‘Now we’ve a witness-board to go by!’ said Jesse at last.

‘She won’t be as easy as this all along,’ Jabez answered. ‘She’ll need plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.’

‘Well, ain’t we plenty?’ Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog. ‘I lay there’s a cord an’ a half o’ firewood, let alone faggots, ‘fore we get anywheres anigh the brook.’

‘The brook’s got up a piece since morning,’ said Jabez. ‘Sounds like’s if she was over Wickenden’s door-stones.’

Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook’s roar as though she worried something hard.

‘Yes. She’s over Wickenden’s door-stones,’ he replied. ‘Now she’ll flood acrost Alder Bay an’ that’ll ease her.’

‘She won’t ease Jim Wickenden’s hay none if she do,’ Jabez grunted. ‘I told Jim he’d set that liddle hay-stack o’ his too low down in the medder. I
told
him so when he was drawin’ the bottom for it.’

‘I told him so, too,’ said Jesse. ‘I told him ‘fore ever you did. I told him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.’ He pointed uphill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned past continually. ‘A tarred road, she shoots every drop o’ water into a valley same’s a slate roof. ‘Tisn’t as ‘twas in the old days, when the waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o’ nature. It rooshes off they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to descend into the valley. And there’s tar roads both two sides this valley for ten mile. That’s what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred the roads last year. But he’s a valley-man. He don’t hardly ever journey uphill.’

‘What did he say when you told him that?’ Jabez demanded, with a little change of voice.

‘Why? What did he say to you when
you
told him?’ was the answer.

‘What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.’

‘Then, you don’t need me to say it over again, Jabez.’

‘Well, let be how ‘twill, what was he gettin’
after
when he said what he said to me?’ Jabez insisted.

‘I dunno; unless you tell me what manner o’ words he said to
you
.’

Jabez drew back from the hedge — all hedges are nests of treachery and eavesdropping — and moved to an open cattle-lodge in the centre of the field.

‘No need to go ferretin’ around,’ said Jesse. ‘None can’t see us here ‘fore we see them.’

‘What was Jim Wickenden gettin’ at when I said he’d set his stack too near anigh the brook?’ Jabez dropped his voice. ‘He was in his mind.’

‘He ain’t never been out of it yet to my knowledge,’ Jesse drawled, and uncorked his tea-bottle.

‘But then Jim says: “I ain’t goin’ to shift my stack a yard,” he says. “The Brook’s been good friends to me, and if she be minded,” he says, “to take a snatch at my hay, I ain’t settin’ out to withstand her.” That’s what Jim Wickenden says to me last — last June-end ‘twas,’ said Jabez.

‘Nor he hasn’t shifted his stack, neither,’ Jesse replied. ‘An’ if there’s more rain, the brook she’ll shift it for him.’

‘No need tell
me
! But I want to know what Jim was gettin’
at
?’

Jabez opened his clasp-knife very deliberately; Jesse as carefully opened his. They unfolded the newspapers that wrapped their dinners, coiled away and pocketed the string that bound the packages, and sat down on the edge of the lodge manger. The rain began to fall again through the fog, and the brook’s voice rose.

‘But I always allowed Mary was his lawful child, like,’ said Jabez, after Jesse had spoken for a while.

‘‘Tain’t so.... Jim Wickenden’s woman she never made nothing. She come out o’ Lewes with her stockin’s round her heels, an’ she never made nor mended aught till she died.
He
had to light fire an’ get breakfast every mornin’ except Sundays, while she sowed it abed. Then she took an’ died, sixteen, seventeen, year back; but she never had no childern.’

‘They was valley-folk,’ said Jabez apologetically. ‘I’d no call to go in among ‘em, but I always allowed Mary — ’

‘No. Mary come out o’ one o’ those Lunnon Childern Societies. After his woman died, Jim got his mother back from his sister over to Peasmarsh, which she’d gone to house with when Jim married. His mother kept house for Jim after his woman died. They do say ‘twas his mother led him on toward adoptin’ of Mary — to furnish out the house with a child, like, and to keep him off of gettin’ a noo woman. He mostly done what his mother contrived. ‘Cardenly, twixt ‘em, they asked for a child from one o’ those Lunnon societies — same as it might ha’ been these Barnardo children — an’ Mary was sent down to ‘em, in a candle-box, I’ve heard.’

‘Then Mary is chance-born. I never knowed that,’ said Jabez. ‘Yet I must ha’ heard it some time or other ...’

‘No. She ain’t. ‘Twould ha’ been better for some folk if she had been. She come to Jim in a candle-box with all the proper papers — lawful child o’ some couple in Lunnon somewheres — mother dead, father drinkin’.
And
there was that Lunnon society’s five shillin’s a week for her. Jim’s mother she wouldn’t despise week-end money, but I never heard Jim was much of a muck-grubber. Let be how ‘twill, they two mothered up Mary no bounds, till it looked at last like they’d forgot she wasn’t their own flesh an’ blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn’t their’n by rights.’

‘That’s no new thing,’ said Jabez. ‘There’s more’n one or two in this parish wouldn’t surrender back their Bernarders. You ask Mark Copley an’ his woman an’ that Bernarder cripple-babe o’ theirs.’

‘Maybe they need the five shillin’,’ Jesse suggested.

‘It’s handy,’ said Jabez. ‘But the child’s more. “Dada” he says, an’ “Mumma” he says, with his great rollin’ head-piece all hurdled up in that iron collar.
He
won’t live long — his backbone’s rotten, like. But they Copleys do just about set store by him — five bob or no five bob.’

‘Same way with Jim an’ his mother,’ Jesse went on. ‘There was talk betwixt ‘em after a few years o’ not takin’ any more week-end money for Mary; but let alone
she
never passed a farden in the mire ‘thout longin’s, Jim didn’t care, like, to push himself forward into the Society’s remembrance. So naun came of it. The week-end money would ha’ made no odds to Jim — not after his uncle willed him they four cottages at Eastbourne
an’
money in the bank.’

‘That was true, too, then? I heard something in a scadderin’ word-o’-mouth way,’ said Jabez.

‘I’ll answer for the house property, because Jim he requested my signed name at the foot o’ some papers concernin’ it. Regardin’ the money in the bank, he nature-ally wouldn’t like such things talked about all round the parish, so he took strangers for witnesses.’

‘Then ‘twill make Mary worth seekin’ after?’

‘She’ll need it. Her Maker ain’t done much for her outside nor yet in.’

‘That ain’t no odds.’ Jabez shook his head till the water showered off his hat-brim. ‘If Mary has money, she’ll be wed before any likely pore maid. She’s cause to be grateful to Jim.’

‘She hides it middlin’ close, then,’ said Jesse. ‘It don’t sometimes look to me as if Mary has her natural rightful feelin’s. She don’t put on an apron o’ Mondays ‘thout being druv to it — in the kitchen
or
the hen-house. She’s studyin’ to be a school-teacher. She’ll make a beauty! I never knowed her show any sort o’ kindness to nobody — not even when Jim’s mother was took dumb. No! ‘Twadn’t no stroke. It stifled the old lady in the throat here. First she couldn’t shape her words no shape; then she clucked, like, an’ lastly she couldn’t more than suck down spoon-meat an’ hold her peace. Jim took her to Doctor Harding, an’ Harding he bundled her off to Brighton Hospital on a ticket, but they couldn’t make no stay to her afflictions there; and she was bundled off to Lunnon, an’ they lit a great old lamp inside her, and Jim told me they couldn’t make out nothing in no sort there; and, along o’ one thing an’ another, an’ all their spyin’s and pryin’s, she come back a hem sight worse than when she started. Jim said he’d have no more hospitalizin’, so he give her a slate, which she tied to her waist-string, and what she was minded to say she writ on it.’