IT WAS ALL vain my remonstrating. She vowed that by crossing the stepping-stones close by she could, by a short cut, reach the house, and return with my pencils and block-book in a quarter of an hour. Away then, with many a jump and fling, scampered Milly’s queer white stockings and navvy boots across the irregular and precarious stepping-stones, over which I dared not follow her; so I was fain to return to the stone so “pure and flat,” on which I sat, enjoying the grand sylvan solitude, the dark background and the grey bridge mid-way, so tall and slim, across whose ruins a sunbeam glimmered, and the gigantic forest trees that slumbered round, opening here and there in dusky vistas, and breaking in front into detached and solemn groups. It was the setting of a dream of romance.
It would have been the very spot in which to read a volume of German folk-lore, and the darkening colonnades and silent nooks of the forest seemed already haunted with the voices and shadows of those charming elves and goblins.
As I sat here enjoying the solitude and my fancies among the low branches of the wood, at my right I heard a crashing, and saw a squat broad figure in a stained and tattered military coat, and loose short trousers, one limb of which flapped about a wooden leg. He was forcing himself through. His face was rugged and wrinkled, and tanned to the tint of old oak; his eyes black, beadlike, and fierce, and a shock of sooty hair escaped from under his battered wide-awake nearly to his shoulders. This forbidding-looking person came stumping and jerking along toward me, whisking his stick now and then viciously in the air, and giving his fell of hair a short shake, like a wild bull preparing to attack.
I stood up involuntarily with a sense of fear and surprise, almost fancying I saw in that wooden-legged old soldier, the forest demon who haunted Der Freischütz.
So he approached shouting —
“Hollo! you — how came you here? Dost ‘eer?”
And he drew near panting, and sometimes tugging angrily in his haste at his wooden leg, which sunk now and then deeper than was convenient in the sod. This exertion helped to anger him, and when he halted before me, his dark face smirched with smoke and dust, and the nostrils of his flat drooping nose expanded and quivered as he panted, like the gills of a fish; an angrier or uglier face it would not be easy to fancy.
“Ye’ll all come when ye like, will ye? and do nout but what pleases yourselves, won’t you? And who’rt thou? Dost ‘eer — who are ye, I say; and what the deil seek ye in the woods here? Come, bestir thee!”
If his wide mouth and great tobacco-stained teeth, his scowl, and loud discordant tones were intimidating, they were also extremely irritating. The moment my spirit was roused, my courage came.
“I am Miss Ruthyn of Knowl, and Mr. Silas Ruthyn, your master, is my uncle.”
“Hoo!” he exclaimed more gently, “an’ if Silas be thy uncle thou’t be come to live wi’ him, and thou’rt she as come overnight — eh?”
I made no answer, but I believe I looked both angrily and disdainfully.
“And what make ye alone here? and how was I to know’t, an’ Milly not wi’ ye, nor no one? But Maud or no Maud, I wouldn’t let the Dooke hisself set foot inside the palin’ without Silas said let him. And you may tell Silas them’s the words o’ Dickon Hawkes, and I’ll stick to ‘m — and what’s more I’ll tell him myself — I will; I’ll tell him there be no use o’ my striving and straining here, day an’ night and night and day, watchin’ again poachers, and thieves, and gipsies, and they robbing lads, if rules won’t be kep, and folk do jist as they pleases. Dang it, lass, thou’rt in luck I didn’t heave a brick at thee when I saw thee first.”
“I’ll complain of you to my uncle,” I replied.
“So do, and and ‘appen thou’lt find thyself in the wrong box, lass; thou canst na’ say I set the dogs arter thee, nor cau’d thee so much as a wry name, nor heave a stone at thee — did I? Well? and where’s the complaint then?”
I simply answered, rather fiercely,
“Be good enough to leave me.”
“Well, I make no objections, mind. I’m takin’ thy word — thou’rt Maud Ruthyn —‘appen thou be’st and ‘appen thou baint. I’m not aweer on’t, but I takes thy word, and all I want to know’s just this, did Meg open the gate to thee?”
I made him no answer, and to my great relief I saw Milly striding and skipping across the unequal stepping-stones.
“Hallo, Pegtop! what are you after now?” she cried, as she drew near.
“This man has been extremely impertinent. You know him, Milly?” I said.
“Why that’s Pegtop Dickon. Dirty old Hawkes that never was washed. I tell you, lad, ye’ll see what the Governor thinks o’t — a-ha! He’ll talk to you.”
“I done or said nout — not but I should, and there’s the fack — she can’t deny’t; she hadn’t a hard word from I; and I don’t care the top o’ that thistle what no one says — not I. But I tell thee, Milly, I stopped some o’ thy pranks, and I’ll stop more. Ye’ll be shying no more stones at the cattle.”
“Tell your tales, and welcome,” cried Milly. “I wish I was here when you jawed cousin. If Winny was here she’d catch you by the timber toe and put you on your back.”
“Ay, she’ll be a good un yet if she takes arter thee,” retorted the old man with a fierce sneer.
“drop it, and get away wi’ ye,” cried she, “or maybe I’d call Winny to smash your timber leg for you.”
“A-ha! there’s more on’t. She’s a sweet un. Isn’t she?” he replied sardonically.
“You did not like it last Easter, when Winny broke it with a kick.”
“’Twas the kick o’ a horse,” he growled with a glance at me.
“’Twas no such thing —’twas Winny did it — and he laid on his back for a week while carpenter made him a new one.” And Milly laughed hilariously.
“I’ll fool no more wi’ ye, losing my time; I won’t; but mind ye, I’ll speak wi’ Silas.” And going away he put his hand to his crumpled wide-awake, and said to me with a surly indifference —
“Good evening, Miss Ruthyn — good evening, ma’am — and ye’ll please remember, I did not mean nout to vex thee.”
And so he swaggered away, jerking and waddling over the sward, and was soon lost in the wood.
“It’s well he’s a little bit frightened — I never saw him so angry, I think; he is awful mad.”
“Perhaps he really is not aware how very rude he is,” I suggested.
“I hate him. We were twice as pleasant with poor Tom Driver — he never meddled with any one, and was always in liquor; Old Gin was the name he went by. But this brute — I do hate him — he comes from Wigan, I think, and he’s always spoiling sport — and he whops Meg — that’s Beauty, you know, and I don’t think she’d be half as bad only for him. Listen to him whistlin’.”
“I did hear him whistling at some distance among the trees.”
“I declare if he isn’t callin’ the dogs! Climb up here, I tell ye,” and we climbed up the slanting trunk of a great walnut tree, and strained our eyes in the direction from which we expected the onset of Pegtop’s vicious pack.
But it was a false alarm.
“Well, I don’t think he would do that, after all — hardly; but he is a brute, sure!”
“And that dark girl who would not let us through, is his daughter, is she?”
“Yes, that’s Meg — Beauty, I christened her, when I called him Beast; but I call him Pegtop now, and she’s Beauty still, and that’s the way o’t.”
“Come, sit down now, an’ make your picture,” she resumed so soon as we had dismounted from our position of security.
“I’m afraid I’m hardly in the vein. I don’t think I could draw a straight line. My hand trembles.”
“I wish you could, Maud,” said Milly, with a look so wistful and entreating, that considering the excursion she had made for the pencils, I could not bear to disappoint her.
“Well, Milly, we must only try; and if we fail we can’t help it. Sit you down beside me and I’ll tell you why I begin with one part an............