No young woman of education would have paid any attention
to such a vulgar superstition, but Loveday had no learning other than
what her elders had let fall in her hearing, both when she was supposed
to be listening for her betterment, and when it was thought she would
not understand the drift of their speech. And that a single magpie means
sorrow was one of the few solid facts Loveday had gleaned by following
the garnered sheaves of her elders.
Now, as she stepped over the topmost ledge of the granite stile, there
was a fanlike flutter of black and white in her very face, and she stood
a moment watching the ill-omened bird wheel and dip behind the thick
blossom of the hawthorn hedge.
"There goes my white riband," thought the ignorant girl, and yet even
with the quick fear there welled a fresh and fierce determination in her
undisciplined heart.
Her egotism, if not her superstition, was reproved when she reached
the farmhouse, and old Madgy, the midwife, coming to the pump for more
water, met her with news of what had happened not half an hour earlier.
The shallow creek of Upper Farm had been invaded by a violent and dark
tide, on whose ebb two lives had been borne away. Loveday, staring up
at Primrose's room, saw the withered hand of old Mrs. Lear draw the
curtains across the window behind which lay a dead mother and a babe
that had never lived.
CHAPTER X: IN WHICH LOVEDAY DOES NOT
ATTEND A FUNERAL
Chapter X
IN WHICH LOVEDAY DOES NOT ATTEND A FUNERAL
"A couple of months too soon her pains took her," said Madgy; "she has
been fretting and wisht these weeks past, with her husband always after
some young faggot up country and herself sick with envy at the girls
that could still dance with the chaps.
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