On the other side of this stile, with his arms leaning upon the top stone, was Hardy the Hunchback, whistling a lively tune, and watching the lord's man as he came forward, without moving from his position till the other was close upon him. Their salutation was then soon made, and crossing the stile, the good yeoman walked on by the side of his companion, sauntering easily along through the green fields, and talking of all the little emptinesses which occupy free hearts in the early morning.
The first hour of the day, the bright first hour of a spring day I mean, appears always to me as if care and thought had nought to do with it. It seems made for those light and whirling visions--not unmingled with thanks and praise--which drive past the dreamy imagination like motes in the sunshine, partaking still, in a degree, of sleep, and having all its soft indistinctness, without losing the brightness of waking perception: thoughts, hopes, and fancies, that glitter as they go, succeeded each minute by clearer and more brilliant things, till the whole, at length, form themselves into the sterner realities of noonday life.
The two men wandered on in that dreamy hour. They listened to the sweet birds singing in the trees; and it was a time of year when the whole world was tuneful; they stopped by the side of the babbling brook, and gazed into its dancing waters; they watched the swift fish darting along the stream, and hallooed to a heron which had just caught one of the finny tribe in its bill.
"Now had we a hawk," said the peasant, "we would very soon have Master Greycoat there, as surely as foul Richard de Ashby will catch pretty Kate Greenly before he has done."
"Think you so?" said the lord's man, certainly not speaking of catching the heron. "Will she be so easily deceived, think you?"
"Ay, will she," answered the peasant. "Not that the girl wants sense or learning either, for the good priest took mighty pains with her, and she can read and write as well as any clerk in the land. Nor has she a bad heart either, though it is somewhat fierce and quick withal--like her mother's, who one day broke Tim Clough's head with a tankard, when he was somewhat boisterous to her, and then well-nigh died with grief when she found she had really cracked his skull. But this girl is as vain as a titmouse, and though I do believe she loves young Harland, the franklin's son, at the bottom, yet I have often told him that it is as great a chance she never marries him as that the river will be frozen next winter; and now I see this fellow come down again and hanging about her as he did before, I say her vanity will take her by the ears, and lead her to any market he chooses to carry her to."
"Alack and a-well-a-day!" said the lord's man, "that a gentleman like that cannot let a far off place such as this be in peace, with its quiet sunshine and good country-folks. He may find a light-o'-love easily enough in the great cities, without coming down to break a father's heart, and make a good youth miserable, and turn a gay-hearted country girl into a sorrowful harlot! I hope he may get his head broke for his pains!"
"He is like to get his neck broke for something else," replied the peasant, "If I judge rightly. But we will talk more of that anon. Let us get on."
Forward accordingly they walked, passed another field, and another, and then took their way down a narrow, sandy lane, which in the end opened out from between its high banks upon a long strip of ground covered with short grass, and old hawthorn trees, with many a bank and dingle breaking the turf, and Showing the yellow soil beneath.
"Why, you seem to live on the edge of the forest, ploughman," said the serving-man; "it must be poor ground here, I wot?"
"It's good for my sort of farming," replied the other, shooting a shrewd glance at him, along the side of his very peculiar nose; "you have a mile to go yet, Master Yeoman, and we may as well go through a bit of the woodland."
"Have with you, have with you!" replied the yeoman. "I love the forest ground as well as any man, and often, when the season comes on, I turn woodman for the occasion, and, with my lord's good leave, help his foresters to kill the deer."
"Dangerous tastes in these days, Master Yeoman," said the peasant, and there the conversation dropped again, each falling back into that train of thought which had been awakened in their minds by the reference to Kate Greenly, and her probable fate; for, although we are accustomed to consider those as ruder times--and certainly, in the arts of life, man was not so far advanced as in the present day--yet the natural affections of the heart, the sound judgment of right and wrong, and the high emotions of the immortal spirit within us, do not depend upon civilization, at least as the term is generally applied, but exist independent of a knowledge of sciences, or skill in any of man's manifold devices for increasing his pleasures and his comforts. They are rather, indeed, antagonist principles, in many respects, to very great refinement; and the advance of society in the arts of luxury is but too often accompanied by the cultivation of that exclusive selfishness which extinguishes all the finer emotions, and leaves man but as one of the machines he makes.
The mind of the stout yeoman, following the track on which it had begun to run, represented to himself what would be the feelings of the rustic lover, to find himself abandoned for a comparative stranger, and not only to know that the girl he loved was lost to him for ever, but degraded and debased--a harlot, sported with for the time, to be cast away when her freshness was gone. He had no difficulty in sympathising from his honest heart with the sensations which young Harland would experience--with the bitter disappointment--with the anger mingled with tenderness towards her who in her folly blighted her own and his happiness for ever--with the pure and unmitigated indignation against him who, in his heartless vanity, came down to blast the peace of others for the gratification of an hour. He thought of the father, too; but there, indeed, his sympathies were not so much excited, for it needed but to see good John Greenly once or twice to perceive that there was no great refinement in his virtue--that self was his first object--and, after meditating over that part of the subject for two or three hundred yards, as they walked on through the hawthorns, he said aloud, with a half laugh, "I shouldn't wonder if he would rather have her a lord's leman than a countryman's wife!"
"Not at first," answered Hardy, understanding at once what he meant; "he will take it to heart at first, but will soon get reconciled to it." And again they fell into thought, walking on over the smooth turf, upon which it was a pleasure to tread, it was so soft, so dry, and so elastic.
As they proceeded, the hawthorns became mingled with other trees; large beeches, with their long waving limbs not yet fully covered with their leaves, stood out upon the banks, here and there an oak, too, was seen, with the young leaves still brown and yellow; while patches of fern broke the surface of the grass, and large cushions of moss covered the old roots that forced their way to the surface of the ground.
The trees, however, were still scattered at many yards' distance from each other, and cast long shadows upon the velvet green of the grass, as the sun, not many degrees above the horizon, poured its bright rays between them. But when the yeoman looked through the bolls, to the northward and westward, he could see a dim mass of darker green spreading out beyond, and showing how the forest thickened, not far off; while, every now and then, some cart-way, or woody path, gave him a long vista into the very heart of the woodland, with lines of light, where the beams of day broke through the arcade of boughs, marking the distances upon the road.
That they were getting into the domain of the beasts of chase was soon very evident. More than one hare started away before their footsteps, and limped off with no very hurried pace. Every two or three yards, a squirrel was seen running from tree to tree, and swarming up the boll; and, once or twice, at a greater distance, the practised eye of the good yeoman caught the form of a dun deer, bounding away up some of the paths, to seek shelter in the thicker wood.
The way did not seem long, however, and all the thousand objects which a woodland