He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
morning like this, and would never draw there any more. "I've seen
him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
But he was too clever to bide here any longer--a small sleepy place
like this!"
A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning
was a little foggy, and the boy's breathing unfurled itself as
a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were
interrupted by a sudden outcry: "Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!"
It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly
waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
stood--nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
of Marygreen.
It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it
was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched
and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,
hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it
a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
warranted to last five years.
II
Slender as was Jude Fawley's frame he bore the two brimming
house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door
was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted
in yellow letters, "Drusilla Fawley, Baker." Within the little lead
panes of the window--this being one of the few old houses left--were
five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow
pattern.