Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard by Eleanor Farjeon (best new books to read txt) 📕

"I was only once near Combe Ivy," said Young Gerard, "when I took you there five years ago the night you were lost on these hills."

"Oh, I remember," she said with a faint smile. "How they did scold me. Is your cherry-tree in flower yet, Shepherd?"

"No, mistress," said Young Gerard.

"I want to see it," she said suddenly.

Young Gerard left his flock to the dog, and walked with her along the hillbrow.

"I have run away," she told him as they went. "I had to get up very early while they were asleep. I shall be scolded again. But travelers come who talk of the lakes, and I wanted to see them, and to swim in them."

"I wouldn't do that," said Young Gerard, hiding a smile. "It's dangerous to swim in the April floods. And it would be rather cold."

"What lies beyond?" she asked.

"I'm not able to know," said Young Gerard.

"Some day I mean to know, shepherd."

"Yes, mistress," he said, "you'll be free to."

She looked at him quickly and reddened a little, it might have been from shame or pity, Young Gerard did not know which. And her shyness once more enveloped her; it always came over her unexpectedly, taking her breath away like a breaking wave. So she said no more, and they walked together, she looking at the ground, he at the soft brown hair blowing over the curve of her young cheek. She was fine and delicate in every line, and in her color, and in the touch of her too, Young Gerard knew. He wanted to touch her cheek with his finger as he would have touched the petal of a flower. Her neck, the back of it especially, was one of the loveliest bits of her, like a primrose stalk. He fell a step behind so that he could look at it. They did not speak as they went. He did not want to, and she did not know what to say.

When they reached the shed she lingered a moment by the tree, tracing a bare branch with her finger, and he waited, content, till she should speak or act, to watch her. At last she said with her faint smile, "I am very thirsty." Then he went into the shed and came out with his wooden cup filled with milk. She drank and said, "Thank you, shepherd. How pretty the violets are in your copse."

"Would you like some?" he asked.

"Not now," she said. "Perhaps another day. I must go now." She gave him back his cup and went away, slowly at first, but when she was at some distance he saw her begin to run like a fawn.

She did not come again that spring. And so the stark lives of the boy and the tree went forward for another year. But one evening in the following April, when the green was quivering on wood and hedgerow, he came to the door of the shed and saw her bending like a flower at the edge of the copse, filling her little basket and singing to herself. She looked up soon and said:

"Good evening, shepherd. How does your cherry-tree?"

"As usual, Mistress Thea."

"So I see. What a lazy tree it is. Have you some milk for me?"

He brought her his cup and she drank of it for the third time, and left him before he had had time to realize that she had come and gone, but only how greatly her delicate beauty had increased in the last year.

However, before the summer was over she came again--to swim in the river, she told him, as she passed him on the hills, without lingering. And in the autumn she came to gather blackberries, and he showed her the best place to find them. Any of these things she might have done as easily nearer Combe Ivy, but it seemed she must always offer him some reason for her small truancies--whether to gather berries or flowers, or to swim in the river. He knew that her chief delight lay in escaping from her father's manor.

Winter closed her visits; but Young Gerard was as patient as the earth, and did not begin to look for her till April. As surely as it brought leaves to the trees and flowers to the grass, it would, he knew, bring his little mistress's question, half shy, half smiling, "Is your cherry-tree in blossom, shepherd?" And later her request, smiling and shy, for milk.

They seldom exchanged more than a few words at any time. Sometimes they did not speak at all. For he, who was her father's servant, never spoke first; and she, growing in years and loveliness, grew also in timidity, so that it seemed to cost her more and more to address her greeting or her question even to her father's servant. The sweet quick reddening of her cheek was one of Young Gerard's chief remembrances of her.

But after a while, when they met by those sly chances which she could control and he could not; and when she did not speak, but glanced and hesitated and passed on; or glanced and passed without hesitation; or passed without a glance; he came to know that she would not mind if he arose and walked with her, if he could control the pretext, which she could not. And he did so quietly, having always something to show her.

He showed her his most secret nests and his greatest treasures of flowers, his because he loved them so much. He would have been jealous of showing these things to any one but her. In a great water-meadow in the valley, he had once shown her kingcups making sheets of gold, enameled with every green grass ever seen in spring-- thousands of kingcups and a myriad of milkmaids in between, dancing attendance in all their faint shades of silver-white and rosy-mauve. When a breeze blew, this world of milkmaids swayed and curtsied above the kings' daughters in their glory. Then Gerard and Thea looked at each other