Heriot's Choice Part 49

The great house was blazing in the sunshine; Ethel's doves were cooing from the tower; through the trees Mildred could see the glimmer of a white gown; the basket-work chair was in its old place, under her favourite acacia tree; the hills looked blue and misty in the distance.

Ethel turned very pale when she saw her friend, and there was visible constraint in her manner.

'I did not expect you; you should not have come out in all this heat, Mildred.'

'I knew you would scold me; but I have not seen you for nearly a week, so I came through the tropics to look after you,' returned Mildred, playfully. 'You are under my care now. Richard begged me to be good to you,' she continued, more seriously.

A painful flush crossed Ethel's face; her eyelids dropped.

'You must not let this come between us, Ethel; it will make him more unhappy than he is, and I fear,' speaking still more gravely, 'that though he says so little about himself, that he must be very unhappy.'

Ethel tried ineffectually to control her emotion.

'I could not help it. You have no right to blame me, Mildred,' she said in a low voice.

'No, you could not help it! Who blames you, dear?--not I, nor Richard.

It was not your fault, my poor Ethel, that you could not love your old playmate. It is your misfortune and his, that is all.'

'I know how good he is,' returned Ethel, with downcast eyes. Yes, it was her misfortune, she knew; was he not brave and n.o.ble, her knight, _sans peur_ and _sans reproche_, her lion-hearted Richard? Could any man be more worthy of a woman's love?--and yet she had said him 'nay.' 'I know he is good, too good,' she said, with a little spasm of fury against her own hardness of heart, 'and I was a churl to refuse his love.'

'Hush; how could you help it? we cannot control these things, we women,'

returned Mildred, still anxious to soothe. She looked at the pale girl before her with a feeling of tender awe, not unmixed with envy, that she should have inspired such pa.s.sionate devotion, and yet remained untouched by it. This was a puzzle to gentle Mildred. 'You must try to put it all out of your mind, and come to us again,' she finished, with an unconscious sigh. 'Richard wished it; that is why he has gone away.'

'Has he gone away?' asked Ethel with a startled glance, and Mildred's brief resentment vanished when she saw how heavy the once brilliant eyes looked. Richard would have been grieved as well as comforted if he had known how many tears Ethel's hardness of heart had caused her. She had been thinking very tenderly of him until Mildred came between her and the sunshine; she was sorry and yet relieved to hear he was gone; the pain of meeting him again would be so great, she thought.

'It was wise of him to go, was it not?' returned Mildred. 'It was just like his kind consideration. Oh, you do not know Richard.'

'No, I do not know him,' replied Ethel, humbly. 'When he came and spoke to me, I would not believe it was he, himself; it seemed another Richard, so different. Oh, Mildred, tell me that you do not hate me for being so hard, not as I hate myself.'

'No, no, my poor child,' returned Mildred fondly. Ethel had thrown herself on the gra.s.s beside her friend, and was looking up in her face with great pathetic eyes. With her white gown and pale cheeks she looked very young and fair. Mildred was thankful Richard could not see her.

'No, whatever happens, we shall always be the same to each other. I shall only love you a little more because Richard loves you.'

There was not much talk after that. Ethel's shyness was not easily to be overcome. The sweet dreamy look had come back to her eyes. Mildred had forgiven her; she would not let this pain come between them; she might still be with her friends at the vicarage; and as she thought of this she blessed Richard in her heart for his generosity.

But Mildred went back a little sadly down the croft, and through the path with the great white daisies. The inequality of things oppressed her; the surface of their little world seemed troubled and disturbed as though with some impending changes. They were girls and boys no longer, but men and women, with full-grown capacities for joy and sorrow, with youthful desires stretching hither and thither.

'Most men work out their lot in life. After all, Cardie may get his heart's desire; it is only women who must wait till their fate comes to them, sometimes with empty hands,' thought Mildred, a little rebelliously, looking over the long level of sunshine that lay before her; and then she shook off the thought as though it stung her, and hummed a little tune as she filled her basket with roses. 'Roses and sunshine; a golden paradise hiding somewhere behind the low blue hills; the earth, radiant under the Divine glittering smile; a fragrant wind sweeping over the sea of gra.s.s, till it rippled with green light; "and G.o.d saw that it was good," this beautiful earth that He had made, yes, it is good; it is only we who cloud and mar its brightness with our repinings,' thought Mildred, preaching to herself softly, as she laid the white buds among her ferns. 'A jarring note, a missing chord, and we are out of harmony with it all; and though the sun shines, the midges trouble us.'

It was arranged that on the next day Mr. Marsden was to escort Mildred and her nieces to Wharton Hall, that the young curate might have an opportunity of witnessing a Westmorland clipping.

It was an intensely hot afternoon, but neither Polly nor Chriss were willing to give up the expedition. So as Mildred was too good-natured to plead a headache as an excuse, and as Olive was always ready to enact the part of a martyr on an emergency, neither of them owned how greatly they dreaded the hot, shadeless roads.

'It is a long lane that has no turning,' gasped Hugh, as they reached the little gate that bounded the Wharton Hall property. 'It is a mercy we have escaped sunstroke.'

'Providence is kinder than you deserve, you see,' observed a quiet voice behind him.

And there was Dr. Heriot leading his horse over the turf.

'Miss Lambert, have you taken leave of your usual good sense, or have you forgotten to consult your thermometer?'

'I was unwilling to disappoint the girls, that was all,' returned Mildred; 'they were so anxious that Mr. Marsden should be initiated into the mysteries of sheep-clipping. Mrs. Colby has promised us some tea, and we shall have a long rest, and return in the cool of the evening.'

'I think I shall get an invitation for tea too. My mare has lamed herself, and I wanted Michael Colby's head man to see her; he is a handy fellow. I was here yesterday on business; they were clipping then.'

'Mr. Marsden ought to have been here two years ago,' interposed Polly eagerly. 'Mr. Colby got up a regular old-fashioned clipping for Aunt Milly. Oh, it was such fun.'

'What! are there fashions in sheep-shearing?' asked Hugh, in an amused tone. They were still standing by the little gate, under the shade of some trees; before them were the farm-buildings and outhouses; and the great ivied gateway, which led to the courtyard and house. Under the gray walls were some small Scotch oxen; a peac.o.c.k trailed its feathers lazily in the dust. The air was resonant with the bleating of sheep and lambs; the girls in their white dresses and broad-brimmed hats made a pretty picture under the old elms. Mildred looked like a soft gray shadow behind them.

'There are clippings and clippings,' returned Dr. Heriot, sententiously, in answer to Hugh's half-amused and half-contemptuous question. 'This is a very ordinary affair compared with that to which Polly refers.'

'How so?' asked Hugh, curiously.

'Owners of large stocks, I have been told, often have their sheep clipped in sections, employ a certain number of men from day to day, and provide a certain number of sheep, each clipper turning off seven or eight sheep an hour.'

'Well, and the old-fashioned clipping?'

'Oh, that was another affair, and involved feasting and revelry. The owner of a farm like this, for example, sets apart a special day, and bids his friends and neighbours for miles round to a.s.sist him in the work. It is generally considered that a man should clip threescore and ten sheep in a day, a good clipper fourscore.'

'I thought the sheep-washing last month a very amusing sight.'

'Ah, Sowerby tells me that sheep improve more between washing and clipping than at any other period of equal length. Have you ever seen Best's _Farming Book_, two hundred years old? If you can master the old spelling, it is very curious to read. It says there "that a man should always forbear clipping his sheep till such time as he find their wool indifferently well risen from the skin; and that for divers reasons."'

'Give us the reasons,' laughed Hugh. 'I believe if I were not in holy orders I should prefer farming to any other calling.' And Dr. Heriot drew out a thick notebook.

'I was struck with the quaintness, and copied the extract out verbatim.

This is what old Best says:--

'"I. When the wool is well risen from the skin the fleece is as it were walked together on the top, and underneath it is but lightly fastened to the undergrowth; and when a fleece is thus it is called a mattrice coat.

'"II. When wool is thus risen there is no waste, for it comes wholly off without any bits or locks.

'"III. Fleeces, when they are thus, are far more easy to wind up, and also more easy for the clippers, for a man may almost pull them off without any clipping at all.

'"IV. Sheep that have their wool thus risen have, without question, a good undergrowth, whereby they will be better able to endure a storm than those that have all taken away to the very skin."

'You will notice, Marsden, as I did when I first came here, that the sheep are not so clearly shorn as in the south. They have a rough, almost untidy look; but perhaps the keener climate necessitates it. An old proverb says:--

"The man that is about to clip his sheepe Must pray for two faire dayes and one faire weeke."'

'That needs translation, Dr. Heriot. Chriss looks puzzled.'

'I must annotate Best, then. And here Michael Sowerby is my informant.

Don't you see, farmers like a fine day beforehand, that the wool may be dry--the day he clips, and the ensuing week--that the sheep may be hardened, and their wool somewhat grown before a storm comes.'

'They shear earlier in the south,' observed Hugh. He was curiously interested in the whole thing.

'According to Best it used to be here in the middle of June, but it is rarely earlier than the end of June or beginning of July. There is an old saying, and a very quaint one, that you should not clip your sheep till you see the "gra.s.shopper sweat," and it depends on the nature of the season--whether early or late--when this phenomenon appears in the pastures.'

'I see no sort of information comes amiss to Dr. Heriot,' was Hugh's admiring aside to Olive.