Worge knew nearly as soon as the Shop, for Nell, running down after breakfast to buy tobacco for her father, found the blinds still drawn. The door was unlocked, however, so she went in and called her sister-in-law. There was no answer, and, vaguely alarmed, she went upstairs, to find Thyrza sitting on the unmade bed, still wearing the print wrapper she had slipped on when the shop-bell rang during her dressing.

“I must go and tell his mother,” she kept repeating, when Nell had read the telegram, and had set about, with true female instinct, to make her a cup of tea.

“Don’t you worry over that, dear—I’ll tell her.”

“Reckon he’d sooner I did.”

“No—no; it would be such a strain for you. I’ll go when I’ve made your tea.”

At that moment little Will woke up, and cried for his breakfast—his mother had forgotten him for the first time since he was born. Nell welcomed the distraction, though her heart tightened as she saw Thyrza’s arms sweep to the child, and quiver while she held him with his little cool tear-dabbled cheek against her own so tearless and so dry. Nell left her with the boy at her breast, a big yellow hank of hair adrift upon her shoulder, and her eyes staring from under the tangle, fixed, strangely dark, strangely bright, as if their grief were both a shadow and an illumination.

She herself ran back on her self-inflicted errand, all her being merged into the one pain of knowing that in ten minutes she would have turned a jogging peace to bitterness, and bankrupted her mother’s life of its chief treasure. She saw herself as a flame leaping from one burning house to set another light.

Mrs. Beatup’s reception of the news held both the expected and the unexpected.

[269]

“I knew it,” she said stonily—“I felt it—I felt it in my boans. And I toald him, too—I told him, poor soul, as he’d never come back, and now he’ll never come, surelye.” Then she said suddenly—“I mun go to her.”

“Go to whom, mother dear?”

“Thyrza. He’d want it ... and reckon she feels it even wuss than me.”

Nothing could dissuade her, and off she went, to comfort the woman with whom she had so long played tug-of-war for her son.

Nell stayed behind in the dreary house, where it seemed as if things slunk and crept. It was holiday-time, so Zacky was at home, sobbing in a corner of the haystack, crying on and on monotonously till he scarcely knew what he cried for, then suddenly charmed out of his grief by a big rat that popped out of the straw and ran across his legs. Elphick and Juglery mumbled and grumbled together in the barn, and talked of the shame of a yeoman dying out of his bed, and cast deprecating eyes on the indecency of Harry, dark against the sky on the ribbed swell of the Street field, making his late sowings with the new boy at his heels. Up and down the furrows went Harry, with his head hung low, in his ears the mutter of the guns, so faint on the windless April noon that he sometimes thought they were just the sorrowful beating of his own heart—up and down, scattering seed into the earth, leaving his token of life in the fields he loved before he was himself taken up and cast, vital and insignificant as a seed, into the furrows of Aceldama or the Field of Blood....

Mus’ Beatup sat crouched over the fire, the tears every now and then welling up in his eyes, and sometimes overflowing on his cheeks, whence he wiped them away with the back of his hand. “’Tis enough to maake a man taake to drink,” he muttered to himself—“this is wot [270] drives men to drink, surelye.” Every now and then he looked up at the clock.

The clock struck twelve, and the Rifle Volunteer called over the fields:

“Come, farmer, and have a pot with me. You’ve lost a son in your War—there were no sons lost in mine, but pots of beer are good for joy or sorrow. Come and forget that boy for five minutes, how he looked and what he said to you, forget this War through which good yeomen die out of their beds, and drink with the Volunteer, who drilled and marched and camped and did every other warlike thing save fighting, and died between his sheets.”

Mus’ Beatup groped for his stick. Then he shook his head rather sadly. “The boy’s scarce cold in his grave. Reckon I mun wait a day or two before I disremember his last words to me.”

Mrs. Beatup did not come home till after suppe............