He had been riding by a bridle-path to the watering ford, and seeing a couple trespassing beneath the oaks, dismounted from his horse to hunt them away. Not till he was quite near did he know whom he came to hunt, and then he stood still in astonishment. Lily and I drew slowly apart and looked at him. He was a short stout man, with a red face and stern grey eyes, that seemed to be starting from his head with anger. For a while he could not speak, but when he began at length the words came fast enough. All that he said I forget, but the upshot of it was that he desired to know what my business was with his daughter. I waited till he was out of breath, then answered him that Lily and I loved each other well, and were plighting our troth.
‘Is this so, daughter?’ he asked.
‘It is so, my father,’ she answered boldly.
Then he broke out swearing. ‘You light minx,’ he said, ‘you shall be whipped and kept cool on bread and water in your chamber. And for you, my half-bred Spanish cockerel, know once and for all that this maid is for your betters. How dare you come wooing my daughter, you empty pill-box, who have not two silver pennies to rattle in your pouch! Go win fortune and a name before you dare to look up to such as she.’
‘That is my desire, and I will do it, sir,’ I answered.
‘So, you apothecary’s drudge, you will win name and place, will you! Well, long before that deed is done the maid shall be safely wedded to one who has them and who is not unknown to you. Daughter, say now that you have finished with him.’
‘I cannot say that, father,’ she replied, plucking at her robe. ‘If it is not your will that I should marry Thomas here, my duty is plain and I may not wed him. But I am my own and no duty can make me marry where I will not. While Thomas lives I am sworn to him and to no other man.’
‘At the least you have courage, hussey,’ said her father. ‘But listen now, either you will marry where and when I wish, or tramp it for your bread. Ungrateful girl, did I breed you to flaunt me to my face? Now for you, pill-box. I will teach you to come kissing honest men’s daughters without their leave,’ and with a curse he rushed at me, stick aloft, to thrash me.
Then for the second time that day my quick blood boiled in me, and snatching up the Spaniard’s sword that lay upon the grass beside me, I held it at the point, for the game was changed, and I who had fought with cudgel against sword, must now fight with sword against cudgel. And had it not been that Lily with a quick cry of fear struck my arm from beneath, causing the point of the sword to pass over his shoulder, I believe truly that I should then and there have pierced her father through, and ended my days early with a noose about my neck.
‘Are you mad?’ she cried. ‘And do you think to win me by slaying my father? Throw down that sword, Thomas.’
‘As for winning you, it seems that there is small chance of it;’ I answered hotly, ‘but I tell you this, not for the sake of all the maids upon the earth will I stand to be beaten with a stick like a scullion.’
‘And there I do not blame you, lad,’ said her father, more kindly. ‘I see that you also have courage which may serve you in good stead, and it was unworthy of me to call you “pill-box” in my anger. Still, as I have said, the girl is not for you, so be gone and forget her as best you may, and if you value your life, never let me find you two kissing again. And know that to-morrow I will have a word with your father on this matter.’
‘I will go since I must go,’ I answered, ‘but, sir, I still hope to live to call your daughter wife. Lily, farewell till these storms are overpast.’
‘Farewell, Thomas,’ she said weeping. ‘Forget me not and I will never forget my oath to you.’
Then taking Lily by the arm her father led her away.
I also went away—sad, but not altogether ill-pleased. For now I knew that if I had won the father’s anger, I had also won the daughter’s unalterable love, and love lasts longer than wrath, and here or hereafter will win its way at length. When I had gone a little distance I remembered the Spaniard, who had been clean forgotten by me in all this love and war, and I turned to seek him and drag him to the stocks, the which I should have done with joy, and been glad to find some one on whom to wreak my wrongs. But when I came to the spot where I had left him, I found that fate had befriended him by the hand of a fool, for there was no Spaniard but only the village idiot, Billy Minns by name, who stood staring first at the tree to which the foreigner had been made fast, and then at a piece of silver in his hand.
‘Where is the man who was tied here, Billy?’ I asked.
‘I know not, Master Thomas,’ he answered in his Norfolk talk which I will not set down. ‘Half-way to wheresoever he was going I should say, measured by the pace at which he left when once I had set him upon his horse.’
‘You set him on his horse, fool? How long was that ago?’
‘How long! Well, it might be one hour, and it might be two. I’m no reckoner of time, that keeps its own score like an innkeeper, without my help. Lawks! how he did gallop off, working those long spurs he wore right into the ribs of the horse. And little wonder, poor man, and he daft, not being able to speak, but only to bleat sheeplike, and fallen upon by robbers on the king’s roads, and in broad daylight. But Billy cut him loose and caught his horse and set him on it, and got this piece for his good charity. Lawks! but he was glad to be gone. How he did gallop!’
‘Now you are a bigger fool even than I thought you, Billy Minns,’ I said in anger. ‘That man would have murdered me, I overcame him and made him fast, and you have let him go.’
‘He would have murdered you, Master, and you made him fast! Then why did you not stop to keep him till I came along, and we would have haled him to the stocks? That would have been sport and all. You call me fool—but if you found a man covered with blood and hurts tied to a tree, and he daft and not able to speak, had you not cut him loose? Well, he’s gone, and this alone is left of him,’ and he spun the piece into the air.
Now, seeing that there was reason in Billy’s talk, for the fault was mine, I turned away without more words, not straight homewards, for I wished to think alone awhile on all that had come about between me and Lily and her father, but down the way which runs across the lane to the crest of the Vineyard Hills. These hills are clothed with underwood, in which large oaks grow to within some two hundred yards of this house where I write, and this underwood is pierced by paths that my mother laid out, for she loved to walk here. One of these paths runs along the bottom of the hill by the edge of the pleasant river Waveney, and the other a hundred feet or more above and near the crest of the slope, or to speak more plainly, there is but one path shaped like the letter O, placed thus [symbol of O laying on its side omitted], the curved ends of the letter marking how the path turns upon the hill-side.
Now I struck the path at the end that is furthest from this house, and followed that half of it which runs down by the river bank, having the water on one side of it and the brushwood upon the other. Along this lower path I wandered, my eyes fixed upon the ground, thinking deeply as I went, now of the joy of Lily’s love, and now of the sorrow of our parting and of her father’s wrath. As I went, thus wrapped in meditation, I saw something white lying upon the grass, and pushed it aside with the point of the Spaniard’s sword, not heeding it. Still, its shape and fashioning remained in my mind, and when I had left it some three hundred paces behind me, and was drawing near to the house, the sight of it came back to me as it lay soft and white upon the grass, and I knew that it was familiar to my eyes. From the thing, whatever it might be, my mind passed to the Spaniard’s sword with which I had tossed it aside, and from the sword to the man himself. What had been his business in this parish?—an ill one surely—and why had he looked as though he feared me and fallen upon me when he learned my name?
I stood still, looking downward, and my eyes fell upon footprints stamped in the wet sand of the path. One of them was my mother’s. I could have sworn to it among a thousand, for no other woman in these parts had so delicate a foot. Close to it, as though following