IT was the first of May. The Mockery cliff was white with the daisies that the ignorant and simple-minded will always admire—leaving the Roddites unnoticed.
Though the sun had shone sometimes since Miss Ogle had visited the village, soft rain-clouds had, more often than the sun, covered Mockery in a sweet warm garment that now gave a fine greenness to the grass and opened the daisies.
Mrs. Pattimore was so taken with the morning and with the pleasant thought that cowslips were abroad, that she couldn’t help looking into the dining-room—where Mr. Pattimore always wrote his sermons in order to be near to the Dean—to see how busy he was, as she often used to.
He was busy, for his text‚ written large upon a page of foolscap—‘But this I say, brethren, the time is short; it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none’—would, she felt, as she closed the door again without speaking, keep him so for many an hour. Mrs. Pattimore went out with a sigh.
Mrs. Pattimore wore a grey knitted coat, and when she stood in front of the Mockery vicarage—a pretty creature who longed for her mate—she felt the sun warm and press her like a god on fire. In the lane the sun was still warmer. Mrs. Pattimore looked over a gate at Farmer Cheney’s barns and meadows.
A white cock with shining, fluttering wings, intent upon amorous adventure, chased a pretty black hen; and a bull and a ram in the same field were both busy and playful.
Mrs. Pattimore knelt upon the soft grass of the bank and smelt a daisy. She wished that she had never been taken out of the laurel bush in Norfolk and had continued all her life thinking about the frog. She now knew that she couldn’t dream any more, but could only long.
All Mockery was there, and all Mockery was intent upon doing something or other.
James Pring, the mender of the Mockery roads, was standing with his spade over his shoulder before his cottage door. He was looking at the address upon an envelope that he had taken out of his pocket, evidently intending to carry the letter to its proper destination, though not at once, for he put it into his pocket again.
There came a scream from Mr. Cheney’s rick-yard, and Rebecca Pring, the girl who worked as a daily servant at the vicarage, ran round one haystack and then round another, followed by the gay Simon, whose coat fluttered and shone like the cock’s wing in the sun.
Dorcas Pattimore saw all Mockery happy and gay, and she couldn’t help trembling, because she wished so much to be happy too.
The larks sang, the magpies chattered, and the little wrens hopped about in the ivy without saying a word about the nest hidden in that very bank.
Mary Gulliver came by with her father’s lunch; she was exactly the proper fair, pretty maid to be there—‘and no doubt Simon runs after her too,’ thought Mrs. Pattimore, ‘and Mr. Caddy had mentioned a petticoat, and Mary wore white stockings.’ There was plenty of roundness about Mary, plenty of young girlhood to take hold of in the sight of the sun. Mary wore no hat, and the sun lit up her hair that tended to gold, so that Mrs. Pattimore, with her heart so dreadfully set on fire, wished that she were either Mary Gulliver or at the worst a ewe or a hen. And Mr. Caddy had told her nothing.
Mary passed demurely. She knew as much as Mrs. Pattimore did about the attic, the wedding bed deserted by the stern man, and about the little garments in the wardrobe.
Mary looked at Mrs. Pattimore with pity as she went by.
Others came by too—the Mockery children out to play; they were chasing the rooks, that fortunately were out of their reach, and were shouting as they went by, ‘The Nellie-bird do live in fisherman’s hut; ’e be a-come; thik nasty thing be a-come!’
The heart of Dorcas beat violently, partly because of the rude noise that the children were making, and partly because she had meant that very morning to go down to the sea.
She started to go a little hesitatingly, not knowing what the children had meant by their strange shout, and remembering too how Miss Pink had spoken about the beast and the Nellie-bird.
Going beside Mrs. Pottle’s cottage—the nearest way to the sea—Mrs. Pattimore saw that lady surrounded by a litter of kittens, who raised their blind heads and squirmed in the path while Mrs. Pottle stood over them like a fierce giant.
The mother cat had escaped the children who had chased it some days before, and had safely produced its young that Mrs. Pottle had now strewed in the path after shutting up the mother in her wood-shed.
The blind kittens raised their heads in order to ask pity from a world that to them was a mere place of murder, with the murderess Mrs. Pottle standing above and ready to beat them to death with a great stick.
‘You be Mrs. Pring,’ she shouted, beginning to lay about her with the stick. And when she hit a kitten she yelled the louder—for Mrs. Pring’s cottage was so near—‘You be Mrs. Pring that I be killing.’
As soon as Mrs. Pottle had killed them all, she smiled at Mrs. Pattimore, who had looked on horrified at the slaughter. Mrs. Pottle’s smile—a reddened one, for the blood of a kitten had spotted her cheek—was but meant to hold Mrs. Pattimore a moment.
Dorcas looked at her in horror when she said in a loud, angry tone, ‘Bain’t we got a marble clock wi’ hands that go round and round after they figures?’
Mrs. Pottle looked across at the Prings’ cottage with the scorn of one who has a possession worth all her enemies.
‘What have they Prings got?’ she shouted, looking fiercely at Dorcas, who was trembling again.
Mrs. Pattimore, who was cowed by the woman, really thought that she wished to know; and so she replied, harmlessly enough: ‘Mrs. Pring has a lame cow, a few black hens, and a pig that has some—’ Mrs. Pattimore hesitated and blushed—‘little baby ones.’
Mrs. Pottle looked down at the path. ‘Bain’t we got cats and kittens?’ she exclaimed angrily.
Mrs. Pattimore looked at the kittens; there was a little life still in one of them, that Mrs. Pottle was now kind enough to squash out of it with her heavy heel. ‘One of they Prings,’ she said as she did so.