Page:Mehalah 1920.djvu/197

Rh eyes flamed. She would have struck him; but was suddenly assailed from behind by the farmer's wife. "Now then, hussy, what are you up to?"

The girl could not answer; her anger choked the words in her throat. "She's that wench of Rebow's, you know," said the farmer. "I guess it is cat and dog in that house." "Get you gone," shouted the woman; "go out of my premises, hussy! I don't want my place to be frequented by such as you. Get you gone at once, or I will loose the mastiff." Mehalah retired with bowed head, and her arms folded on her bosom. She halted on the bridge, and kicked fragments of frozen earth and gravel into the water. A woman going by looked at her. "Where is the parson?" asked Mehalah. "Yonder; you go over the marsh by the hill with the windmill on it, and you come to a road, you'll find a blacksmith's shop, and you must ask there. He's the curate, there's no rector hereabouts. They keep away because of the ague." Mehalah crossed the fen indicated, passed beside the windmill and the blacksmith's shop, and found the cottage occupied by the curate, a poor man, married to a woman of a low class, with a family of fourteen children, packed in the house wherever they could be stowed away. The curate was a crushed man, his ideas stunned in his head by the uproar in which he dwelt. His old scholarship remained to him in his brain like fossils in the chalk, to be picked out, dead morsels. There was nothing living in the petrified white matter that filled his skull. Mehalah knocked at the door. The parson opened it, and admitted her into his kitchen. As soon as the wife heard a female voice, she rushed out of the back kitchen with her arms covered with soap suds, and stood in the doorway. A little-minded woman, she lived on her jealousy, and would never allow her husband to speak with another woman if she could help it. "What do you want, my dear?" asked the curate. "Ahem!" coughed the wife. "Dear, indeed! Pray, who are you, miss?"