Читать «Cup of Gold (Золотая чаша)» онлайн - страница 15

There was surely something monstrous about him, for he could not distinguish between desire and disgust.

And then, she could embarrass him so easily.

No, certainly, he would not go to her. Where had Merlin- where had any one-caught the idea that he cared a farthing for her, the daughter of a poor tenant? Not worth bothering about!

Footsteps were coming down the path behind him, loud clashes in the quiet night, and soon a quick, thin figure came up with him.

"Might it be William?" Henry asked politely, while the road-mender stopped in the path and shifted his pick from one shoulder to the other.

"It's William right enough. And what are you doing on the path, and the dark come?"

"I've been to see Merlin and to hear him talk."

"Peston him! That's all he ever does now. Once he made songs-good, sweet songs as I could repeat to you if I'd a mind to-but now he roosts up on that Crag-top like an old molted eagle. Once when I was going past I spoke to him about it, too, as I can prove by him. I'm not a man to be holding my tongue when I've been thinking.

"Why are you making no more songs?' I said to him in a tone like that. 'Why are you making no more songs?'

'I have grown to be a man,' he answered, 'and there be no songs in a man. Only children make songs-children and idiots.'Pest on him! It's an idiot himself, is the thought is on me. But what did he say to you, the old whitebeard?"

"Why, you see, I'm going to the Indies and-"

"The Indies, and are you? Ah, well-I was at London once. And all the people at London are thieves, dirty thieves. There was a man with a board and little flat sticks on it. 'Try your skill, friend?' he says.

'What stick has a black mark on the underside of it?'

'That one,' says I; and so it was. But the next time-Ah, well, he was a thief, too; all of them thieves.

"People there are at London, and they do nothing but drive about and about in carriages, up one street and down another, bowing to each other, while good men sweat out their lives in the fields and the mines to keep them bowing there. What chance have I or you, say, with all the fine, soft places taken up by robbers? And can you tell me the thieving price of an egg at London?"

"I must take this road now," said Henry. "I must go home."

"Indies." The road-mender sighed with longing. Then he spat in the trail. "Ah, well-I'll stake it's all thieves there, too."

The night was very black when Henry came at last to the poor hut where Elizabeth lived. There was a fire in the middle of the floor, he knew, and the smoke drifted up and tried to get out at a small hole in the thatch. The house had no flooring, but only rushes strewn on the packed ground, and when the family slept they wrapped themselves in sheepskins and lay in a circle with their feet to the fire.

The windows were not glazed nor curtained. Henry could see old black-browed Twym and his thin, nervous wife, moving about inside. He watched for Elizabeth to pass the window, and when at last she did, he whistled a shrill bird-call. The girl stopped and looked out, but Henry was quiet in the dark.