“I never seen anything like it!” Grendon said to Gregory.
Nor had Gregory seen the taciturn farmer so excited. He took the young man by the arm and marched him into the barn.
There lay Trix, the nannie goat. Against her flank huddled three little brown and white kids, while a fourth stood nearby, wobbling on its spindly legs.
“Four on ‘em! Have you ever heard of a goat throwing off four kids? You better write to the papers in London about this.
Gregory! But just you come down to the pig sties.”
The squealing from the sties was louder than usual. As they marched down the path towards them, Gregory looked up at the great elms, their outlines dusted in green, and thought he detected something sinister in the noises, something hysterical that was perhaps matched by an element in Grendon’s own bearing.
The Grendon pigs were mixed breeds, with a preponderance of Large Blacks. They usually gave litters of something like ten piglets. Now there was not a litter without fourteen in it; and one enormous black sow had eighteen small pigs swarming about her. The noise was tremendous and, standing looking down on this swarming life, Gregory told himself that he was foolish to imagine anything uncanny in it; he knew so little about farm life. After he had eaten with Grendon and the men Mrs. Grendon and Nancy had driven to town in the trap-Gregory went by himself to look about the farm, still with a deep and (he told himself) unreasoning sense of disturbance inside him.
A pale sunshine filled the afternoon. It could not penetrate far down into the water of the pond. But as Gregory stood by the horse trough staring at the expanse of water, he saw that it teemed with young tadpoles and frogs. He went closer. What he had regarded as a sheet of rather stagnant water was alive with small swimming things. As he looked, a great beetle surged out of the depths and seized a tadpole. The tadpoles were also providing food for two ducks that, with their young, were swimming by the reeds on the far side of the pond. And how many young did the ducks have? An armada of chicks was there, parading in and out of the rushes.
For a minute, he stood uncertainly, then began to walk slowly back the way he had come. Crossing the yard, Gregory went over to the stable and saddled Daisy. He swung himself up and rode away without bidding goodbye to anyone.
Riding into Cottersall, he went straight to the market place.
He saw the Grendon trap, with Nancy’s little pony, Hetty, between the shafts, standing outside the grocer’s shop. Mrs.
Grendon and Nancy were just coming out. Jumping to the ground, Gregory led Daisy over to them and bid them good day.
“We are going to call on my friend Mrs. Edwards and her daughters,” Mrs. Grendon said.
“If you would be so kind, Mrs. Grendon, I would be very obliged if I might speak privately with Nancy. My landlady, Mrs. Fenn, has a little downstairs parlor at the back of the shop, and I know she would let us speak there. It would be quite respectable.”
“Drat respectable! Let people think what they will, I say.”
All the same, she stood for some time in meditation. Nancy remained by her mother with her eyes on the ground. Gregory looked at her and seemed to see her anew. Under her blue coat, fur-trimmed, she wore her orange-and-brown squared gingham dress; she had a bonnet on her head. Her complexion was pure and blemishless, her skin as firm and delicate as a plum, and her dark eyes were hidden under long lashes. Her lips were steady, pale, and clearly defined, with appealing tucks at each corner.
He felt almost like a thief, stealing a sight of her beauty while she was not regarding him.
“I’m going on to Mrs. Edwards,” Marjorie Grendon declared at last. “I don’t care what you two do so long as you behavebut I shall, mind, if you aren’t with me in a half-hour, Nancy, do you hear?”
“Yes, Mother.”
The baker’s shop was in the next street. Gregory and Nancy walked there in silence. Gregory shut Daisy in the stable and they went together into the parlor through the back door. At this time of day, Mr. Fenn was resting upstairs and his wife looking after the shop, so the little room was empty.