CHAPTER NINE.

GLEANING.

Once more Andrew Fisher, aged ninety years, sat in his beehive chair facing the western window in Warren House. The sun was sinking, and seemed to hang over the distant vale, towards which the old man's countenance was turned. Once more the sickle had done its work, and the golden grain was garnered. For the shadow of the days had gone forward upon the dial, whose ancient graven circles, dimmed with green rust, timed the equinox and the march of the firmament. The merry barley was laid low; and the acorns--first green, then faintly yellow--were ripening brown in their cups upon the oaks.

On the ledge of the chimney, where the level rays came warmest, and stone and tile radiated heat, the last lingering swallows twittered a long farewell. For the oxen had already felt the drag of the heavy plough. The ivy flowered on the wall, blossoming for winter, and there was a buzz of flies gathering on the pane towards the sun. As a ripe pear that waited but the rude shock of the wind, the full year was bending to its fall. Overhead the rooks were floating idly home down towards Thorpe Wood. The long files of the black army streaked the sky with streaming thousands far as the eye could see, and filled the air with the strange rush and creaking of their wings and the goblin chuckle of the noisy jackdaws. The feathery heads of the reeds by the mill-pool bowed mournfully; and in the hush of the dying day came the monotonous chaunt of the mill-wheel, ever round and round, without haste and without rest; and with it mingled the sounding rush of the race, of its foam and bubble and spray as of human life.

The sunbeam on the chamber-wall--stained azure and purple by the painted escutcheon of "Fischere" on the pane--travelled slowly as the sun sank lower. There was a picture almost opposite the beehive chair--a picture old and darkened by the thickening of the oil and varnish. It was the portrait by a rude hand of a st.u.r.dy boy in breeches and buckles, and with bare head, fishing in the brook. The portrait was that of Andrew himself in his boyhood, painted to please a doting mother. Was there a tear in his dull eyeball at the thought of her--heartbroken by his evil so many, many weary years ago? Was he wiser, happier, now in the fullness of his days, than when, with peeled white willow wand, a thread and crooked pin, he angled in the bend of the brook where the eddy scooped out a deeper hollow?

"Caer-wit! caer-weet!" It was the call of the partridge yonder, in the mead at the foot of the hill; and a distant answer came from the stubble lower down. Ah, the joy of the brown twist barrel and the eager dogs.

His sight is dull and sinews stiff; never again will Andrew Fisher mark a covey down as they skim across the uplands.

The blue-stained sunbeam moved onward, the sun declined, and the wearyful women came homeward from the gleaning and the labour of the field. Their path pa.s.sed close beneath the great window, and their stooping shadows for a moment shut out the sunshine. Such paths used by the workers, and going right through the grounds of the house, may be found still, where the ancient usage has not yet succ.u.mbed to modern privacy, and were once the general custom. It was the season of the harvest, the time of joy and gladness. Do you suppose these women moved in rhythmic measures to Baccha.n.a.lian song and pastoral pipe, as the women came home from the field with corn and grape:

In Tempe and the dales of Arcady?

Do you suppose their brows were wreathed with the honeysuckle's second autumn bloom, with streaked convolvulus and bronzed ears of wheat?

Their backs were bowed beneath great bundles of gleanings, or f.a.ggots of dead sticks carefully sought for fuel, and they carried weary infants, restless and fretful. Their forms had lost all semblance to the graceful curve of woman; their faces were hard, wrinkled, and angular, drawn with pain and labour. Save by their garments none could distinguish them from men. Yet they were not penned in narrow walls, but all things green and lovely were spread around them. The fresh breezes filled their nostrils in the spring with the delicate odour of the flowering bean-field and the clover scent; the very ground was gilded with sunshine beneath their feet. But the magic of it touched them not, for their hearts were pinched with poverty. These are they to whom the old, old promise bears its full significance: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

They trooped past the window, and saw the old man sitting in his chair; and one said to another, "Thur be thuck ould varmint. He never done nought all his time, and have got more vittels than a' can yeat. Thaay says a' drinks a' main drop of gin moast days. He wur a bad un, he wur, time ago. What be the matter with thuck you? How he do howl--it sounds main unkid!"

"Come on, you," said another; "I be terrable tired, bean't you? Wonder how long it wull be to the Judgment Daay?"

So they went by the window, and each as she pa.s.sed dropped a lowly curtsey to "Measter" in the beehive chair. Then at last the great blood-red rim of the sun went down, and a wondrous glory of light rushed over the earth. A fiery blaze surged up into the sky, shooting from the west to the zenith, and thence to the east in the twinkling of an eye; like the glow of a grand aurora, but ninefold more brilliant, a deep-tinted crimson. Men stayed and looked up, amazed at the beauty and the awe of it; for the world was changed, as if it were on fire, and the flames like a flood sweeping up from the western edge. Into the chamber came the reflection--as of the last conflagration that we dare not think of, when the sky shall roll away as parchment--and the place was filled with a luminous glamour. Listen! faintly up from the silence of the ages comes the chaunt of the monks:

Dies irae, dies illa, Solvet saeclum in favilla.

The day of wrath seemed nigh at hand. Away down in the vale, and yonder, over the everlasting hills, flowed the wonder of the light; but the old man's face gave no sign, dazed, maybe, by the grandeur of it.

But Felix St Bees, riding towards Warren House once more, as he reached the first slopes of the hills, was suddenly bathed in the glory, and drew rein and gazed about him. A dome of fire above reflected by the dull earth--a faint, phosphoric, shimmering rosiness among the gra.s.s blades. Upon the margin of the world a thicker vapour swelling upward with a deeper red, as of smoke tinted by the furnace under. On the sunset side of the tree-trunks a streak of crimson, and every leaf gleaming on its shiny smoothness; through the thickets a warm haze pouring, and the whiteness of the road before him reddened, as by the breath of flame. He paused, rapt in the deep marvelling which is prayer, and watched till it pa.s.sed away. Then he pushed on among the hills.

Coming slowly up a steep ascent, where on the summit, among the thorn thickets and the gnarled ashes, was a little lonely inn, he saw a dozen or more men, labouring hard and shouting by the side of the road. The highway had worn itself a gully or hollow, lessening the pull of the hill somewhat, and leaving a low but steep bank of coa.r.s.e chalky rubble.

On the sward a tinker's donkey was peacefully grazing, heedless of the excitement.

"We've got un!"

"Heave un out, you!"

"Lay on, Jim!"

"Let I try!"

"Peach un up!"

"What is it you are trying to do?" asked Felix, guiding his horse up to the group.

"Aw, I seed his toes a' sticking out," cried a plough-boy, eager lest his share of the discovery should be forgotten.

"It wur thuck heavy rain as washed the rubble away," said a man with a leathern ap.r.o.n, doubtless a blacksmith. Nothing ever happens without a blacksmith being in it.

"Mebbe a rabbit a-scratching, doan't ee zee?" said the landlord of the inn, leaning on his spade and wiping his forehead; for much ale is a shortener of the breath.

"Well, but what is it, after all--a treasure?"

"Us doan't 'zactly knaw what it be," said the man nearest the bank, pausing, after swinging his pickaxe with some effect. "But us means to zee. Jim, shove thuck pole in."

Jim picked up a long stout ash-pole, and thrust one end, as directed, into a cavity the pickaxe had made under a large sa.r.s.en boulder, the earth above which had been previously dug away.

"Zumbody be buried thur, paason," said the landlord. "Mebbe you knaws un? Thur never wur nar a church here as we heard tell on."

"Hang on, you chaps!" cried the blacksmith, throwing the weight of his body on the pole. The landlord, the plough-boy, and the tinker did the same; Jim and an aged man on the bank heaved at the great stone from above.

"Peach un up!" [i.e. lever it]

"He be goin'." Felix saw the boulder move.

"One, two, dree!"

"War out!"

They spread right and left. Felix, who did not for the instant comprehend that "war out" meant "clear away," had much ado to save his horse; for the boulder came with a rush, bringing with it half a ton of rubble, thud on the ground, which trembled.

"Aw, here a' be!"

"This be uz yod!" [head.] "Warn this be uz chine!" holding up a part of the vertebrae.

"He wur a whopper, you!"

"The gyeaunt Goliar', I'll warn," said the aged man on the bank.

"Don't disturb the skeleton!" cried Felix, anxious to make scientific notes of the interment; whether the grave was "orientated," or the knees drawn up to the chin; but in the scramble for the bones his voice was unheeded, and the skeleton was disjointed in an instant. The bones were as light as pith, ready to crumble to pieces and little better than dust, yet still retaining, as it were, a sketch of human shape.

"Drow um in this here," said the landlord, as the buzz subsided, and holding out a stable-bucket which he had fetched. So skull and femur, radius and ulna--all the relics of poor humanity--were "chucked"

indiscriminately into the stable-bucket.

"A' warn a' wur buried in th' time o' Judges," said Jim. "Um set up stwuns for memorials, doan't you mind? Thuck sa.r.s.en be all five hunderd weight."

"Mebbe a' fowght Julius Caesar," said the aged man on the bank above.

"I've heard tell as Julius wur a famous hand a' back-swording. You med see as uz skull wur cracked with a pistol-bullet--one of thaay ould vlint-locks--and here be th' trigger-guard."

From the disturbed earth above he picked up a small crooked piece of bra.s.s, which might or might not have been connected with the interment.

It pa.s.sed from hand to hand, till the landlord, rubbing it on his sleeve, found some letters.

"Paason ull tell uz what it means," said he, giving it to Felix, who spelt out slowly, as he removed the clinging particles of earth.

"G.a.u.d.e.a.m.u.s."