Chapter IX

It was when John came to the age of eleven that Mary first learnt the pangs of jealousy.

A neighboring farm came into the market one Michaelmas and was bought by a young farmer bringing a wife and three children to the house that lay in the trees at the bottom of the Highfield meadow. No one knew why it was called Highfield, that meadow. It had been so called for centuries, yet it lay low. A brook ran through it. Some winters it lay under water. A kind of rush grew thick in the grass in one corner under the poplar trees. Every year it was put down for hay. Every year, so damp the soil, it grew a generous crop.

Farms so close together as Mr. Kemp's and Mr. Peverell's lend each other a helping hand. There is only a friendly rivalry between those whose hearts are in the soil. The spirit of giving maintains if it does not rule. Mr. Peverell's crops were generally better to his way of thinking than any one else's. But he loved the sight of a well grown field nevertheless. He wished no harm but the best to any man who tilled and cleansed his land.

"Cultivation," he said, "that's taking side wi' Nature. Weeds is folly and Nature can't abide that. A field run fallow makes my stomach turn."

It was at the haymaking in the Highfield meadow, when the womenfolk, and at lifting time the men as well, came in to help, that John first met Lucy Kemp.

She was a year younger than he; dark haired with solemn, wondering eyes that gazed with steady glances at the world.

In the midst of his frolics in the new cut hay, John came suddenly before those eyes, not knowing what he saw, ceased from his antics in a swift arrest.

"What are you looking at?" he asked with unceremonious directness.

"Looking at you," said she.

He glanced down at his clothes to see if anything was wrong.

"What's the matter with me?" he inquired.

"I like you," she replied.

"Why?"

"Cos you can stop playing all quick, like this, when you play."

She must have had some vague conception of what she meant. He must have had some vague conception of what he understood. It was the first time it had ever been made apparent to him that any one could like him as well as his mother.

"Aren't you going to play?" he asked.

"I've got a headache," she replied.

"What's that?"

"A pain--all over here!" She laid her hands across her forehead.

"Does it hurt?"

He gave sympathy in his voice at once.

"Keeps on frobbing," said she.

"Let God feel it frob and come and play," he suggested with greater wisdom than he knew.

That had to be explained to her. They sat down in the hay, the first man in him explaining the mysteries of life to the first woman in her. Mary found them, fast friends, sitting together behind a high cock of hay.

"I thought I'd lost you, John," she said, and when he did not look up on the instant, knew she had indeed lost something of him she could never find again. No longer was she the only woman in his world. In a strange and unexpected moment he had found some one he could turn to to hide his pain if she became quite still like the moles.

They met often after that day. In a little while they became inseparable.

"Young things must have young things to play with," Mary told herself. It was Nature. They never reared young calves alone on the farm. Always they had companions.

"They grows better," said Mr. Peverell. "Young and young. It comes that way."

So she stilled her heart from painful beating. But one day Mrs. Peverell pointed out those two together in the fields and said--

"A love child they say takes easy to love. If that doant please 'ee, 'ee must stop it soon."

"Why shouldn't it please me?" she asked and her heart was trembling in swift flutterings that were not pulses in her breast, but were like wings beating, disturbing the air she breathed.

"Well, she be just an ordinary child, like one of us, and if John stays on the farm and one day takes it after Mr. Peverell, as I doant mind tellin' 'ee Mr. Peverell means 'en to take it if he likes the work, then he'll wed wi' her, you mark my words for it."

Mary took the hand with its knuckles far more knotted now and held it for comfort against her breast.

"You have been good to me," she muttered thickly. "I have never thought till now he could mean to leave the farm to John."

"His name's in the Bible," said Mrs. Peverell.

"Yes, yes, my dear, I know what that means to you. But I never thought you meant it so practically as that. If John does take on the farm, why shouldn't he marry Lucy? Wouldn't that be right? Wouldn't that be the very best?"

"I thought by the way 'ee looked at them 'ee mind was all against it. I thought 'ee'd got greater prospects for him than that. She's only an ordinary child, I says, and that's all she is. I thought it 'ud upset 'ee plans for 'en."

"My plans," said Mary. "They're only for his happiness and the best that's in him. I can't have him always, can I? Not always to myself?" She turned her eyes across the field to where they stood together.

"She's come--with her big eyes," she whispered and she walked away.

PHASE V