Isaac Bawcombe's family—The youngest son—Caleb goes to seek David at Wilton sheep-fair—Martha, the eldest daughter—Her beauty—She marries Shepherd Ierat—The name of Ierat—Story of Ellen Ierat—The Ierats go to Somerset—Martha and the lady of the manor—Martha's travels—Her mistress dies—Return to Winterbourne Bishop—Shepherd Ierat's end
Caleb was one of five, the middle one, with a brother and sister older and a brother and sister younger than himself—a symmetrical family. I have already written incidentally of the elder brother and the youngest sister, and in this chapter will complete the history of Isaac's children by giving an account of the eldest sister and youngest brother.
The brother was David, the hot-tempered young shepherd who killed his dog Monk, and who afterwards followed his brother to Warminster. In spite of his temper and "want of sense" Caleb was deeply attached to him, and when as an old man his shepherding days were finished he followed his wife to their new home, he grieved at being so far removed from his favourite brother. For some time he managed to make the journey to visit him once a year. Not to his home near Warminster, but to Wilton, at the time of the great annual sheep-fair held on 12th September. From his cottage he would go by the carrier's cart to the nearest town, and thence by rail with one or two changes by Salisbury to Wilton.
After I became acquainted with Caleb he was ill and not likely to recover, and for over two years could not get about. During all this time he spoke often to me of his brother and wished he could see him. I wondered why he did not write; but he would not, nor would the other. These people of the older generation do not write to each other; years are allowed to pass without tidings, and they wonder and wish and talk of this and that absent member of the family, trusting it is well with them, but to write a letter never enters into their minds.
At last Caleb began to mend and determined to go again to Wilton sheep-fair to look for his beloved brother; to Warminster he could not go; it was too far. September the 12th saw him once more at the old meeting-place, painfully making his slow way to that part of the ground where Shepherd David Bawcombe was accustomed to put his sheep. But he was not there. "I be here too soon," said Caleb, and sat himself patiently down to wait, but hours passed and David did not appear, so he got up and made his way about the fair in search of him, but couldn't find 'n. Returning to the old spot he got into conversation with two young shepherds and told them he was waiting for his brother who always put his sheep in that part. "What be his name?" they asked, and when he gave it they looked at one another and were silent. Then one of them said, "Be you Shepherd Caleb Bawcombe?" and when he had answered them the other said, "You'll not see your brother at Wilton to-day. We've come from Doveton, and knew he. You'll not see your brother no more. He be dead these two years."
Caleb thanked them for telling him, and got up and went his way very quietly, and got back that night to his cottage. He was very tired, said his wife; he wouldn't eat and he wouldn't talk. Many days passed and he still sat in his corner and brooded, until the wife was angry and said she never knowed a man make so great a trouble over losing a brother. 'Twas not like losing a wife or a son, she said; but he answered not a word, and it was many weeks before that dreadful sadness began to wear off, and he could talk cheerfully once more of his old life in the village.
Of the sister, Martha, there is much more to say; her life was an eventful one as lives go in this quiet downland country, and she was, moreover, distinguished above the others of the family by her beauty and vivacity. I only knew her when her age was over eighty, in her native village where her life ended some time ago, but even at that age there was something of her beauty left and a good deal of her charm. She had a good figure still and was of a good height; and had dark, fine eyes, clear, dark, unwrinkled skin, a finely shaped face, and her grey hair, once black, was very abundant. Her manner, too, was very engaging. At the age of twenty-five she married a shepherd named Thomas Ierat—a surname I had not heard before and which made me wonder where were the Ierats in Wiltshire that in all my rambles among the downland villages I had never come across them, not even in the churchyards. Nobody knew—there were no Ierats except Martha Ierat, the widow, of Winterbourne Bishop and her son—nobody had ever heard of any other family of the name. I began to doubt that there ever had been such a name until quite recently when, on going over an old downland village church, the rector took me out to show me "a strange name" on a tablet let into the wall of the building outside. The name was Ierat and the date the seventeenth century. He had never seen the name excepting on that tablet. Who, then, was Martha's husband? It was a queer story which she would never have told me, but I had it from her brother and his wife.
A generation before that of Martha, at a farm in the village of Bower Chalk on the Ebble, there was a girl named Ellen Ierat employed as a dairymaid. She was not a native of the village, and if her parentage and place of birth were ever known they have long passed out of memory. She was a good-looking, nice-tempered girl, and was much liked by her master and mistress, so that after she had been about two years in their service it came as a great shock to find that she was in the family way. The shock was all the greater when the fresh discovery was made one day that another unmarried woman in the house, who was also a valued servant, was in the same condition. The two unhappy women had kept their secret from every one except from each other until it could be kept no longer, and they consulted together and determined to confess it to their mistress and abide the consequences.
Who were the men? was the first question asked There was only one—Robert Coombe, the shepherd, who lived at the farm-house, a slow, silent, almost inarticulate man, with a round head and flaxen hair; a bachelor of whom people were accustomed to say that he would never marry because no woman would have such a stolid, dull-witted fellow for a husband. But he was a good shepherd and had been many years on the farm, and it was altogether a terrible business. Forthwith the farmer got out his horse and rode to the downs to have it out with the unconscionable wretch who had brought that shame and trouble on them. He found him sitting on the turf eating his midday bread and bacon, with a can of cold tea at his side, and getting off his horse he went up to him and damned him for a scoundrel and abused him until he had no words left, then told his shepherd that he must choose between the two women and marry at once, so as to make an honest woman of one of the two poor fools; either he must do that or quit the farm forthwith.
Coombe heard in silence and without a change in his countenance, masticating his food the while and washing it down with an occasional draught from his can, until he had finished his meal; then taking his crook he got up, and remarking that he would "think of it" went after his flock.
The farmer rode back cursing him for a clod; and in the evening Coombe, after folding his flock, came in to give his decision, and said he had thought of it and would take Jane to wife. She was a good deal older than Ellen and not so good-looking, but she belonged to the village and her people were there, and everybody knowed who Jane was, an' she was an old servant an' would be wanted on the farm. Ellen was a stranger among them, and being only a dairymaid was of less account than the other one.
So it was settled, and on the following morning Ellen, the rejected, was told to take up her traps and walk.
What was she to do in her condition, no longer to be concealed, alone and friendless in the world? She thought of Mrs. Poole, an elderly woman of Winterbourne Bishop, whose children were grown up and away from home, who when staying at Bower Chalk some months before had taken a great liking for Ellen, and when parting with her had kissed her and said: "My dear, I lived among strangers too when I were a girl and had no one of my own, and know what 'tis." That was all; but there was nobody else, and she resolved to go to Mrs. Poole, and so laden with her few belongings she set out to walk the long miles over the downs to Winterbourne Bishop where she had never been. It was far to walk in hot August weather when she went that sad journey, and she rested at intervals in the hot shade of a furze-bush, haunted all day by the miserable fear that the woman she sought, of whom she knew so little, would probably harden her heart and close her door against her. But the good woman took compassion on her and gave her shelter in her poor cottage, and kept her till her child was born, in spite of all the women's bitter tongues. And in the village where she had found refuge she remained to the end of her life, without a home of her own, but always in a room or two with her boy in some poor person's cottage. Her life was hard but not unpeaceful, and the old people, all dead and gone now, remembered Ellen as a very quiet, staid woman who worked hard for a living, sometimes at the wash-tub, but mostly in the fields, haymaking and harvesting and at other times weeding, or collecting flints, or with a spud or sickle extirpating thistles in the pasture-land. She worked alone or with other poor women, but with the men she had no friendships; the sharpest women's eyes in the village could see no fault in her in this respect; if it had not been so, if she had talked pleasantly with them and smiled when addressed by them, her life would have been made a burden to her. She would have been often asked who her brat's father was. The dreadful experience of that day, when she had been cast out and was alone in the world, when, burdened with her unborn child, she had walked over the downs in the hot August weather, in anguish of apprehension, had sunk into her soul. Her very nature was changed, and in a man's presence her blood seemed frozen, and if spoken to she answered in monosyllables with her eyes on the earth. This was noted, with the result that all the village women were her good friends; they never reminded her of her fall, and when she died still young they grieved for her and befriended the little orphan boy she had left on their hands.
He was then about eleven years old, and was a stout little fellow with a round head and flaxen hair like his father; but he was not so stolid and not like him in character; at all events his old widow in speaking of him to me said that never in all his life did he do one unkind or unjust thing. He came from a long line of shepherds, and shepherding was perhaps almost instinctive in him; from his earliest boyhood the tremulous bleating of the sheep and half-muffled clink of the copper bells and the sharp bark of the sheep-dog had a strange attraction for him. He was always ready when a boy was wanted to take charge of a flock during a temporary absence of the shepherd, and eventually, when only about fifteen, he was engaged as under-shepherd, and for the rest of his life shepherding was his trade.
His marriage to Martha Bawcombe came as a surprise to the village, for though no one had any fault to find with Tommy Ierat there was a slur on him, and Martha, who was the finest girl in the place, might, it was thought, have looked for some one better. But Martha had always liked Tommy; they were of the same age and had been playmates in their childhood; growing up together their childish affection had turned to love, and after they had waited some years and Tommy had a cottage and seven shillings a week, Isaac and his wife gave their consent and they were married. Still they felt hurt at being discussed in this way by the villagers, so that when Ierat was offered a place as shepherd at a distance from home, where his family history was not known, he was glad to take it and his wife to go with him, about a month after her child was born.
The new place was in Somerset, thirty-five to forty miles from their native village, and Ierat as shepherd at the manor-house farm on a large estate would have better wages than he had ever had before and a nice cottage to live in. Martha was delighted with her new home—the cottage, the entire village, the great park and mansion close by, all made it seem like paradise to her. Better than everything was the pleasant welcome she received from the villagers, who looked in to make her acquaintance and seemed very much taken with her appearance and nice, friendly manner. They were all eager to tell her about the squire and his lady, who were young, and of how great an interest they took in their people and how much they did for them and how they were loved by everybody on the estate.
It happens, oddly enough, that I became acquainted with this same man, the squire, over fifty years after the events I am relating, when he was past eighty. This acquaintance came about by means of a letter he wrote me in reference to the habits of a bird or some such small matter, a way in which I have become acquainted with scores—perhaps I should say hundreds—of persons in many parts of the country. He was a very fine man, the head of an old and distinguished county family; an ideal squire, and one of the few large landowners I have had the happiness to meet who was not devoted to that utterly selfish and degraded form of sport which consists in the annual rearing and subsequent slaughter of a host of pheasants.
Now when Martha was entertaining half a dozen of her new neighbours who had come in to see her, and exhibited her baby to them and then proceeded to suckle it, they looked at one another and laughed, and one said, "Just you wait till the lady at the mansion sees 'ee—she'll soon want 'ee to nurse her little one."
What did they mean? They told her that the great lady was a mother too, and had a little sickly baby and wanted a nurse for it, but couldn't find a woman to please her.
Martha fired up at that. Did they imagine, she asked, that any great lady in the world with all her gold could tempt her to leave her own darling to nurse another woman's? She would not do such a thing—she would rather leave the place than submit to it. But she didn't believe it—they had only said that to tease and frighten her!
They laughed again, looking admiringly at her as she stood before them with sparkling eyes, flushed cheeks, and fine full bust, and only answered, "Just you wait, my dear, till she sees 'ee."
And very soon the lady did see her. The people at the manor were strict in their religious observances, and it had been impressed on Martha that she had better attend at morning service on her first Sunday, and a girl was found by one of her neighbours to look after the baby in the meantime. And so when Sunday came she dressed herself in her best clothes and went to church with the others. The service over, the squire and his wife came out first and were standing in the path exchanging greetings with their friends; then as the others came out with Martha in the midst of the crowd the lady turned and fixed her eyes on her, and suddenly stepping out from the group she stopped Martha and said, "Who are you?—I don't remember your face."
"No, ma'am," said Martha, blushing and curtsying. "I be the new shepherd's wife at the manor-house farm—we've only been here a few days."
The other then said she had heard of her and that she was nursing her child, and she then told Martha to go to the mansion that afternoon as she had something to say to her.
The poor young mother went in fear and trembling, trying to stiffen herself against the expected blandishments.
Then followed the fateful interview. The lady was satisfied that she had got hold of the right person at last—the one in the world who would be able to save her precious little one "from to die," the poor pining infant on whose frail little life so much depended! She would feed it from her full, healthy breasts and give it something of her own abounding, splendid life. Martha's own baby would do very well—there was nothing the matter with it, and it would flourish on "the bottle" or anything else, no matter what. All she had to do was to go back to her cottage and make the necessary arrangements, then come to stay at the mansion.
Martha refused, and the other smiled; then Martha pleaded and cried and said she would never never leave her own child, and as all that had no effect she was angry, and it came into her mind that if the lady would get angry too she would be ordered out and all would be over. But the lady wouldn't get angry, for when Martha stormed she grew more gentle and spoke tenderly and sweetly, but would still have it her own way, until the poor young mother could stand it no longer, and so rushed away in a great state of agitation to tell her husband and ask him to help her against her enemy. But Tommy took the lady's side, and his young wife hated him for it, and was in despair and ready to snatch up her child and run away from them all, when all at once a carriage appeared at the cottage, and the great lady herself, followed by a nurse with the sickly baby in her arms, came in. She had come, she said very gently, almost pleadingly, to ask Martha to feed her child once, and Martha was flattered and pleased at the request, and took and fondled the infant in her arms, then gave it suck at her beautiful breast. And when she had fed the child, acting very tenderly towards it like a mother, her visitor suddenly burst into tears, and taking Martha in her arms she kissed her and pleaded with her again until she could resist no more; and it was settled that she was to live at the mansion and come once every day to the village to feed her own child from the breast.
Martha's connexion with the people at the mansion did not end when she had safely reared the sickly child. The lady had become attached to her and wanted to have her always, although Martha could not act again as wet nurse, for she had no more children herself. And by and by when her mistress lost her health after the birth of a third child and was ordered abroad, she took Martha with her, and she passed a whole year with her on the Continent, residing in France and Italy. They came home again, but as the lady continued to decline in health she travelled again, still taking Martha with her, and they visited India and other distant countries, including the Holy Land; but travel and wealth and all that the greatest physicians in the world could do for her, and the tender care of a husband who worshipped her, availed not, and she came home in the end to die; and Martha went back to her Tommy and the boy, to be separated no more while their lives lasted.
The great house was shut up and remained so for years. The squire was the last man in England to shirk his duties as landlord and to his people whom he loved, and who loved him as few great landowners are loved in England, but his grief was too great for even his great strength to bear up against, and it was long feared by his friends that he would never recover from his loss. But he was healed in time, and ten years later married again and returned to his home, to live there until nigh upon his ninetieth year. Long before this the Ierats had returned to their native village. When I last saw Martha, then in her eighty-second year, she gave me the following account of her Tommy's end.
He continued shepherding up to the age of seventy-eight. One Sunday, early in the afternoon, when she was ill with an attack of influenza, he came home, and putting aside his crook said, "I've done work."
"It's early," she replied, "but maybe you got the boy to mind the sheep for you."
"I don't mean I've done work for the day," he returned. "I've done for good—I'll not go with the flock no more."
"What be saying?" she cried in sudden alarm. "Be you feeling bad—what be the matter?"
"No, I'm not bad," he said. "I'm perfectly well, but I've done work;" and more than that he would not say.
She watched him anxiously but could see nothing wrong with him; his appetite was good, he smoked his pipe, and was cheerful.
Three days later she noticed that he had some difficulty in pulling on a stocking when dressing in the morning, and went to his assistance. He laughed and said, "Here's a funny thing! You be ill and I be well, and you've got to help me put on a stocking!" and he laughed again.
After dinner that day he said he wanted a drink and would have a glass of beer. There was no beer in the house, and she asked him if he would have a cup of tea.
"Oh, yes, that'll do very well," he said, and she made it for him.
After drinking his cup of tea he got a footstool, and placing it at her feet sat down on it and rested his head on her knees; he remained a long time in this position so perfectly still that she at length bent over and felt and examined his face, only to discover that he was dead.
And that was the end of Tommy Ierat, the son of Ellen. He died, she said, like a baby that has been fed and falls asleep on its mother's breast.
Evening talks—On the construction of sheep-folds—Making hurdles—Devil's guts—Character in sheep-dogs—Sally the spiteful dog—Dyke the lost dog who returned—Strange recovery of a lost dog—Badger the playful dog—Badger shepherds the fowls—A ghost story—A Sunday-evening talk—Parsons and ministers—Noisy religion—The shepherd's love of his calling—Mark Dick and the giddy sheep—Conclusion
During our frequent evening talks, often continued till a late hour, it was borne in on Caleb Bawcombe that his anecdotes of wild creatures interested me more than anything else he had to tell; but in spite of this, or because he could not always bear it in mind, the conversation almost invariably drifted back to the old subject of sheep, of which he was never tired. Even in his sleep he does not forget them; his dreams, he says, are always about sheep; he is with the flock, shifting the hurdles, or following it out on the down. A troubled dream when he is ill or uneasy in his sleep is invariably about some difficulty with the flock; it gets out of his control, and the dog cannot understand him or refuses to obey when everything depends on his instant action. The subject was so much to him, so important above all others, that he would not spare the listener even the minutest details of the shepherd's life and work. His "hints on the construction of sheep-folds" would have filled a volume; and if any farmer had purchased the book he would not have found the title a misleading one and that he had been defrauded of his money. But with his singular fawn-like face and clear eyes on his listener it was impossible to fall asleep, or even to let the attention wander; and incidentally even in his driest discourse there were little bright touches which one would not willingly have missed.
About hurdles he explained that it was common for the downland shepherds to repair the broken and worn-out ones with the long woody stems of the bithywind from the hedges; and when I asked what the plant was he described the wild clematis or traveller's-joy; but those names he did not know—to him the plant had always been known asbithywindor elseDevil's guts. It struck me that bithywind might have come by the transposition of two letters from withybind, as if one should say flutterby for butterfly, or flagondry for dragonfly. Withybind is one of the numerous vernacular names of the common convolvulus. Lilybind is another. But what would old Gerarde, who invented the pretty name of traveller's-joy for that ornament of the wayside hedges, have said to such a name as Devil's guts?
There was, said Caleb, an old farmer in the parish of Bishop who had a peculiar fondness for this plant, and if a shepherd pulled any of it out of one of his hedges after leafing-time he would be very much put out; he would shout at him, "Just you leave my Devil's guts alone or I'll not keep you on the farm." And the shepherds in revenge gave him the unpleasant nickname of "Old Devil's Guts," by which he was known in that part of the country.
As a rule, talk about sheep, or any subject connected with sheep, would suggest something about sheepdogs individual dogs he had known or possessed, and who always had their own character and peculiarities, like human beings. They were good and bad and indifferent; a really bad dog was a rarity; but a fairly good dog might have some trick or vice or weakness. There was Sally, for example, a stump-tail bitch, as good a dog with sheep as he ever possessed, but you had to consider her feelings. She would keenly resent any injustice from her master. If he spoke too sharply to her, or rebuked her unnecessarily for going a little out of her way just to smell at a rabbit burrow, she would nurse her anger until an opportunity came of inflicting a bite on some erring sheep. Punishing her would have made matters worse: the only way was to treat her as a reasonable being and never to speak to her as a dog—a mere slave.
Dyke was another dog he remembered well. He belonged to old Shepherd Matthew Titt, who was head-shepherd at a farm near Warminster, adjacent to the one where Caleb worked. Old Mat and his wife lived alone in their cottage out of the village, all their children having long grown up and gone away to a distance from home, and being so lonely "by their two selves" they loved their dog just as others love their relations. But Dyke deserved it, for he was a very good dog. One year Mat was sent by his master with lambs to Weyhill, the little village near Andover, where a great sheep-fair is held in October every year. It was distant over thirty miles, but Mat though old was a strong man still and greatly trusted by his master. From this journey he returned with a sad heart, for he had lost Dyke. He had disappeared one night while they were at Weyhill. Old Mrs. Titt cried for him as she would have cried for a lost son, and for many a long day they went about with heavy hearts.
Just a year had gone by when one night the old woman was roused from sleep by loud knocks on the window-pane of the living-room below. "Mat! Mat!" she cried, shaking him vigorously, "wake up—old Dyke has come back to us!" "What be you talking about?" growled the old shepherd. "Lie down and go to sleep—you've been dreaming." "'Tain't no dream; 'tis Dyke—I know his knock," she cried, and getting up she opened the window and put her head well out, and there sure enough was Dyke, standing up against the wall and gazing up at her, and knocking with his paw against the window below.
Then Mat jumped up, and going together downstairs they unbarred the door and embraced the dog with joy, and the rest of the night was spent in feeding and caressing him, and asking him a hundred questions, which he could only answer by licking their hands and wagging his tail.
It was supposed that he had been stolen at the fair, probably by one of the wild, little, lawless men called "general dealers," who go flying about the country in a trap drawn by a fast-trotting pony; that he had been thrown, muffled up, into the cart and carried many a mile away, and sold to some shepherd, and that he had lost his sense of direction. But after serving a stranger a full year he had been taken with sheep to Weyhill Fair once more, and once there he knew where he was, and had remembered the road leading to his old home and master, and making his escape had travelled the thirty long miles back to Warminster.
The account of Dyke's return reminded me of an equally good story of the recovery of a lost dog which I heard from a shepherd on the Avon. He had been lost over a year, when one day the shepherd, being out on the down with his flock, stood watching two drovers travelling with a flock on the turnpike road below, nearly a mile away, and by and by hearing one of their dogs bark he knew at that distance that it was his dog. "I haven't a doubt," he said to himself, "and if I know his bark he'll know my whistle." With that he thrust two fingers in his mouth and blew his shrillest and longest whistle, then waited the result. Presently he spied a dog, still at a great distance, coming swiftly towards him; it was his own dog, mad with joy at finding his old master.
Did ever two friends, long sundered by unhappy chance, recognize each other's voices at such a distance and so come together once more!
Whether the drovers had seen him desert them or not, they did not follow to recover him, nor did the shepherd go to them to find out how they had got possession of him; it was enough that he had got his dog back.
No doubt in this case the dog had recognized his old home when taken by it, but he was in another man's hands now, and the habits and discipline of a life made it impossible for him to desert until that old, familiar, and imperative call reached his ears and he could not disobey.
Then (to go on with Caleb's reminiscences) there was Badger, owned by a farmer and worked for some years by Caleb—the very best stump-tail he ever had to help him. This dog differed from others in his vivacious temper and ceaseless activity. When the sheep were feeding quietly and there was little or nothing to do for hours at a time, he would not lie down and go to sleep like any other sheep-dog, but would spend his vacant time "amusing of hisself" on some smooth slope where he could roll over and over; then run back and roll over again and again, playing by himself just like a child. Or he would chase a butterfly or scamper about over the down hunting for large white flints, which he would bring one by one and deposit them at his master's feet, pretending they were something of value and greatly enjoying the game. This dog, Caleb said, would make him laugh every day with his games and capers.
When Badger got old his sight and hearing failed; yet when he was very nearly blind and so deaf that he could not hear a word of command, even when it was shouted out quite close to him, he was still kept with the flock because he was so intelligent and willing. But he was too old at last; it was time for him to be put out of the way. The farmer, however, who owned him, would not consent to have him shot, and so the wistful old dog was ordered to keep at home at the farm-house. Still he refused to be superannuated, and not allowed to go to the flock he took to shepherding the fowls. In the morning he would drive them out to their run and keep them there in a flock, going round and round them by the hour, and furiously hunting back the poor hens that tried to steal off to lay their eggs in some secret place. This could not be allowed, and so poor old Badger, who would have been too miserable if tied up, had to be shot after all.
These were always his best stories—his recollections of sheep-dogs, for of all creatures, sheep alone excepted, he knew and loved them best. Yet for one whose life had been spent in that small isolated village and on the bare down about it, his range was pretty wide, and it even included one memory of a visitor from the other world. Let him tell it in his own words.
"Many say they don't believe there be such things as ghosties. They niver see'd 'n. An' I don't say I believe or disbelieve what I hear tell. I warn't there to see. I only know what I see'd myself: but I don't say that it were a ghostie or that it wasn't one. I was coming home late one night from the sheep; 'twere close on 'leven o'clock, a very quiet night, with moonsheen that made it a'most like day. Near th' end of the village I come to the stepping-stones, as we call 'n, where there be a gate and the road, an' just by the road the four big white stones for people going from the village to the copse an' the down on t'other side to step over the water. In winter 'twas a stream there, but the water it dried in summer, and now 'twere summer-time and there wur no water. When I git there I see'd two women, both on 'em tall, with black gowns on, an' big bonnets they used to wear; an' they were standing face to face so close that the tops o' their bonnets wur a'most touching together. Who be these women out so late? says I to myself. Why, says I, they be Mrs. Durk from up in the village an' Mrs. Gaarge Durk, the keeper's wife down by the copse. Then I thought I know'd how 'twas: Mrs. Gaarge, she'd a been to see Mrs. Durk in the village, and Mrs. Durk she were coming out a leetel way with her, so far as the stepping-stones, and they wur just having a last leetel talk before saying Good night. But mind, I hear'd no talking when I passed 'n. An' I'd hardly got past 'n before I says, Why, what a fool be I! Mrs. Durk she be dead a twelvemonth, an' I were in the churchyard and see'd her buried myself. Whatever be I thinking of? That made me stop and turn round to look at 'n agin. An' there they was just as I see'd 'n at first—Mrs. Durk, who was dead a twelvemonth, an' Mrs. Gaarge Durk from the copse, standing there with their bonnets a'most touching together. An' I couldn't hear nothing—no talking, they were so still as two posties. Then something came over me like a tarrible coldness in the blood and down my back, an' I were afraid, and turning I runned faster than I ever runned in my life, an' never stopped—not till I got to the cottage."
It was not a bad ghost story: but then such stories seldom are when coming from those who have actually seen, or believe they have seen, an immaterial being. Their principal charm is in their infinite variety; you never find two real or true ghost stories quite alike, and in this they differ from the weary inventions of the fictionist.
But invariably the principal subject was sheep.
"I did always like sheep," said Caleb. "Some did say to me that they couldn't abide shepherding because of the Sunday work. But I always said, Someone must do it; they must have food in winter and water in summer, and must be looked after, and it can't be worse for me to do it."
It was on a Sunday afternoon, and the distant sound of the church bells had set him talking on this subject. He told me how once, after a long interval, he went to the Sunday morning service in his native village, and the vicar preached a sermon about true religion. Just going to church, he said, did not make men religious. Out there on the downs there were shepherds who seldom saw the inside of a church, who were sober, righteous men and walked with God every day of their lives. Caleb said that this seemed to touch his heart because he knowed it was true.
When I asked him if he would not change the church for the chapel, now he was ill and his vicar paid him no attention, while the minister came often to see and talk to him, as I had witnessed, he shook his head and said that he would never change. He then added: "We always say that the chapel ministers are good men: some say they be better than the parsons; but all I've knowed—all them that have talked to me—have said bad things of the Church, and that's not true religion: I say that the Bible teaches different."
Caleb could not have had a very wide experience, and most of us know Dissenting ministers who are wholly free from the fault he pointed out; but in the purely rural districts, in the small villages where the small men are found, it is certainly common to hear unpleasant things said of the parish priest by his Nonconformist rival; and should the parson have some well-known fault or make a slip, the other is apt to chuckle over it with a very manifest and most unchristian delight.
The atmosphere on that Sunday afternoon was very still, and by and by through the open window floated a strain of music; it was from the brass band of the Salvationists who were marching through the next village, about two miles away. We listened, then Caleb remarked: "Somehow I never cared to go with them Army people. Many say they've done a great good, and I don't disbelieve it, but there was too much what I call—NOISE; if, sir, you can understand what I mean."
I once heard the great Dr. Parker speak the word imagination, or, as he pronounced it, im-madge-i-na-shun, with a volume of sound which filled a large building and made the quality he named seem the biggest thing in the universe. That in my experience was his loftiest oratorical feat; but I think the old shepherd rose to a greater height when, after a long pause during which he filled his lungs with air, he brought forth the tremendous word, dragging it out gratingly, so as to illustrate the sense in the prolonged harsh sound.
To show him that I understood what he meant very well, I explained the philosophy of the matter as follows: He was a shepherd of the downs, who had lived always in a quiet atmosphere, a noiseless world, and from lifelong custom had become a lover of quiet. The Salvation Army was born in a very different world, in East London—the dusty, busy, crowded world of streets, where men wake at dawn to sounds that are like the opening of hell's gates, and spend their long strenuous days and their lives in that atmosphere peopled with innumerable harsh noises, until they, too, acquire the noisy habit, and come at last to think that if they have anything to say to their fellows, anything to sell or advise or recommend, from the smallest thing—from a mackerel or a cabbage or a penn'orth of milk, to a newspaper or a book or a picture or a religion—they must howl and yell it out at every passer-by. And the human voice not being sufficiently powerful, they provide themselves with bells and gongs and cymbals and trumpets and drums to help them in attracting the attention of the public.
He listened gravely to this outburst, and said he didn't know exactly 'bout that, but agreed that it was very quiet on the downs, and that he loved their quiet. "Fifty years," he said, "I've been on the downs and fields, day and night, seven days a week, and I've been told that it's a poor way to spend a life, working seven days for ten or twelve, or at most thirteen shillings. But I never seen it like that; I liked it, and I always did my best. You see, sir, I took a pride in it. I never left a place but I was asked to stay. When I left it was because of something I didn't like. I couldn't never abide cruelty to a dog or any beast. And I couldn't abide bad language. If my master swore at the sheep or the dog I wouldn't bide with he—no, not for a pound a week. I liked my work, and I liked knowing things about sheep. Not things in books, for I never had no books, but what I found out with my own sense, if you can understand me.
"I remember, when I were young, a very old shepherd on the farm; he had been more 'n forty years there, and he was called Mark Dick. He told me that when he were a young man he was once putting the sheep in the fold, and there was one that was giddy—a young ewe. She was always a-turning round and round and round, and when she got to the gate she wouldn't go in but kept on a-turning and turning, until at last he got angry and, lifting his crook, gave her a crack on the head, and down she went, and he thought he'd killed her. But in a little while up she jumps and trotted straight into the fold, and from that time she were well. Next day he told his master, and his master said, with a laugh, 'Well, now you know what to do when you gits a giddy sheep.' Some time after that Mark Dick he had another giddy one, and remembering what his master had said, he swung his stick and gave her a big crack on the skull, and down went the sheep, dead. He'd killed it this time, sure enough. When he tells of this one his master said, 'You've cured one and you've killed one; now don't you try to cure no more,' he says.
"Well, some time after that I had a giddy one in my flock. I'd been thinking of what Mark Dick had told me, so I caught the ewe to see if I could find out anything. I were always a tarrible one for examining sheep when they were ill. I found this one had a swelling at the back of her head; it were like a soft ball, bigger 'n a walnut. So I took my knife and opened it, and out ran a lot of water, quite clear; and when I let her go she ran quite straight, and got well. After that I did cure other giddy sheep with my knife, but I found out there were some I couldn't cure. They had no swelling, and was giddy because they'd got a maggot on the brain or some other trouble I couldn't find out."
Caleb could not have finished even this quiet Sunday afternoon conversation, in the course of which we had risen to lofty matters, without a return to his old favourite subjects of sheep and his shepherding life on the downs. He was long miles away from his beloved home now, lying on his back, a disabled man who would never again follow a flock on the hills nor listen to the sounds he loved best to hear—the multitudinous tremulous bleatings of the sheep, the tinklings of numerous bells, and crisp ringing bark of his dog. But his heart was there still, and the images of past scenes were more vivid in him than they can ever be in the minds of those who live in towns and read books. "I can see it now," was a favourite expression of his when relating some incident in his past life. Whenever a sudden light, a kind of smile, came into his eyes, I knew that it was at some ancient memory, a touch of quaintness or humour in some farmer or shepherd he had known in the vanished time—his father, perhaps, or old John, or Mark Dick, or Liddy, or Dan'l Burdon, the solemn seeker after buried treasure.
After our long Sunday talk we were silent for a time, and then he uttered these impressive words: "I don't say that I want to have my life again, because 'twould be sinful. We must take what is sent. But if 'twas offered to me and I was told to choose my work, I'd say, Give me my Wiltsheer Downs again and let me be a shepherd there all my life long."