AT THE GREEN DRAGON IV
By Beatrice Hararden
THE MAKING OF THE PASTRY.
That same afternoon Mrs. Hammond put on her best things and drove in the dogcart to Minton, where Auntie Lloyd of the Tan-House Farm was giving a tea-party. Joan had refused to go. She had a profound contempt for these social gatherings, and Auntie Lloyd and she had no great love, the one for the other. Auntie Lloyd, who was regarded as the oracle of the family, summed Joan up in a few sentences:
“She’s a wayward creature, with all her fads about books and book learning. I’ve no patience with her. Fowls and butter and such things have been good enough for us; why does she want to meddle with things which don’t concern her? She’s clever at her work, and diligent too. If it weren’t for that, there’d be no abiding her.”
Joan summed Auntie Lloyd up in a few words:
“Oh, she’s Auntie Lloyd,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
So when her mother urged her to go to Minton to this tea-party, which was to be something special, Joan said:
“No, I don’t care about going. Auntie Lloyd worries me to death. And what with her, and the rum in the tea, and those horrid crumpets, I’d far rather stay at home, and make pastry and read a book.”
So she stayed. There was plenty of pastry in the larder, and there seemed no particular reason why she should add to the store. But she evidently thought differently about the matter, for she went into the kitchen and rolled up her sleeves and began her work.
“I hope this will be the best pastry I have ever made,” she said to herself, as she prepared several jam-puffs and an open tart. “I should like him to taste my pastry. An historian. I wonder what we shall write about to-morrow.”
She put the pastry into the oven, and sat lazily in the ingle, nursing her knees, and musing. She was thinking the whole time of Hieronymus, of his kind and genial manner, and his face with the iron-gray hair; she would remember him always, even if she never saw him again. Once or twice it crossed her mind that she had been foolish to speak so impatiently to him of her village life. He would just think her a silly, discontented girl, and nothing more. And yet it had seemed so natural to talk to him in that strain; she knew by instinct that he would understand, and he was the first she had ever met who would be likely to understand. The others–her father, her mother, David Ellis the exciseman, who was supposed to be fond of her, these and others in the neighborhood–what did they care about her desires to improve her mind, and widen out her life, and multiply her interests? She had been waiting for months, almost for years indeed, to speak openly to some one; she could not have let the chance go by, now that it had come to her.
The puffs meanwhile were forgotten. When at last she recollected them, she hastened to their rescue, and found she was only just in time. Two were burned; she placed the others in a dish, and threw the damaged ones on the table. As she did so the kitchen door opened, and the exciseman came in, and seeing the pastry, he exclaimed:
“Oh, Joan, making pastry! Then I’ll test it!”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” she said half angrily, as she put her hands over the dish. “I won’t have it touched. You can eat the burnt ones it you like.”
“Not I,” he answered. “I want the best. Why, Joan, what’s the matter with you? You’re downright cross to-day.”
“I’m no different from usual,” she said.
“Yes, you are,” he said; “and what’s more, you grow different every week.”
“I grow more tired of this horrid little village and every one in it, if that’s what you mean,” she answered.
He had thrown his whip on the chair, and stood facing her. He was a prosperous man, much respected, and much liked for many miles round Little Stretton. It was an open secret that he loved Joan Hammond, the only question in the village being whether Joan would have him when the time came for him to propose to her. No girl in her senses would have been likely to refuse the exciseman; but then Joan was not in her senses, so that anything might be expected of her. At least such was the verdict of Auntie Lloyd, who regarded her niece with the strictest disapproval. Joan had always been more friendly with David than with any one else; and it was no doubt this friendliness, remarkable in one who kept habitually apart from others, which had encouraged David to go on hoping to win her, not by persuasion but by patience. He loved her, indeed he had always loved her; and in the old days, when he was a schoolboy and she was a little baby child, he had left his companions to go and play with his tiny girl-friend up at the Malt-House Farm. He had no sister of his own, and he liked to nurse and pet the querulous little creature who was always quiet in his arms. He could soothe her when no one else had any influence. But the years had come and gone, and they had grown apart; not he from her, but she from him. And now he stood in the kitchen of the old farm, reading in her very manner the answer to the question which he had not yet asked her. That question was always on his lips; how many times had he not said it aloud when he rode his horse over the country? But Joan was forbidding of late months, and especially of late weeks, and the exciseman had always told himself sadly that the right moment had not yet come. And to-day, also, it was not the right moment. A great sorrow seized him, for he longed to tell her that he loved her, and that he was yearning to make her happy. She should have books of her own; books, books, books; he had already bought a few volumes to form the beginning of her library. They were not well chosen, perhaps, but there they were, locked up in his private drawer. He was not learned, but he would learn for her sake. All this flashed through his mind as he stood before her. He looked at her face, and could not trace one single expression of kindliness or encouragement.
“Then I must go on waiting,” he thought, and he stooped and picked up his whip.
“Good-bye, Joan,” he said quietly.
The kitchen door swung on its hinges, and Joan was once more alone.
“An historian,” she said to herself, as she took away the rolling-pin, and put the pastry into the larder. “I wonder what we shall write about to-morrow.”