Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/15

Rh The word, rising a note, startles me, half-thrills me. Anne is at the foot of the ladder.

Up she steps: shoves the door open altogether, and at once begins:

'Lor', Master Bertie, why you look as if you'd bin seein' a ghost out in the graveyard, you do. Gracious alive, the eyes of him! Did you ever now?…'

'What do you want?' I ask. 'If you want me for tea, I'm not coming. Tell Mrs. Purchis so.'

Anne urges that Mrs. Purchis is in such a bad temper this evening. And it being his last night too, eh? And it isn't good for him to drop off his victuals like that, and he going away to school to-morrow, and hasn't eat anything to speak of this week,—considerin'.

I take to my old attitude, with my knee upon the white-painted window-sill, now faint and dim, and look through the dark rook-trees into the darkening fields. Anne continues: 'Which she does hope he doesn't bear any malice. Master Bertie, and him going away tomorrow, to school, and might never see her again, but they both be dead and buried before then; and, if it wasn't that … (Then, sharply): But she always did say, and we'd see who was right or not, that that boy would come to no'

I leap to her. 'I will throw you down the ladder,' I say, catching her by the arm, 'if you don't go …'

She, rather frightened, goes.

All that evening I sat on the sill, looking out across the churchyard to the hedge and the rook-trees. The black shadows grew broader and deeper. There was no moon. A light wind was singing through a crack in the lead-work, close by my ear. And at last Timothy Goodwin, the sexton, came limping along the London Road with a lantern: unlocked the gates, locked them again, carefully, after him: limped to old Mr. Atkin's grave, and began cutting the grass on it with a clinking shears, having put down the lantern by him. I watched him and thought about things.

Presently he lifted up his light: put it down again and began on another patch. Then he took up his