Page:The Heart of England.djvu/199

 knees were bent as he cursed out "Jimmy," his face still moulded and unmoulded by faint-hearted lust, vexation, fear, perplexed by the home where his eleven children were, with his pigs and his fledgling magpies.

His wife was near, but almost invisible, and as it were a wraith of pitiful maternity, neither bitter nor glad, but bearing her burdens, one still beneath her girdle, one in her arms, and others demanding her anxiety, winning her tenderness, on this side and on that.

The gamekeeper stood, with smoking gun barrels, and a cloud of jay's feathers still in the air and among the May foliage about him. Pride, stupidity, servility clouded his face as in his days of nature, and above him in the oaks innumerable jays laughed because beauty, like folly, was immortal there.

The squire, more faint, and whether to his joy or not I could not discern, was standing under a bough on which hung white owls, wood owls, falcons, crows, magpies, cats, hedgehogs, stoats, weasels, some bloody, some with gaping stomachs, some dismembered or crushed, some fleshless, some heaving like boiling fat, and on them and him the sun shone hot.

The red-faced man sat drinking ale, and with him it seemed always evening, and his stomach fathomless.

Five boys—four of them with blackened faces and sticks or swords, and one of them dressed as a woman and carrying a bag—played the Pace-Egging Play in blue Easter weather in a daffodil lane before a ripe grey farmhouse.

A little girl nursed something musingly, whether a mole or a cluster of rags I could not tell.