grand Rachel would think of him. She herself was
fond of George in her cool way, for he had always been
kind to her, despite the fact that he often disapproved her
naughtiness and openly sided, in their frequent disputes,
against her and with the aunts.
The aunts had always loved the gentle, quiet boy, and
on more than one occasion Miss Flora had transplanted
herself to the Vicarage, to nurse him through one of his
childish illnesses. Once, when, at the age of twelve, he
was deep in Cowper's translation of the Iliad, Miss Flora,
to soothe a feverish night, had read to him, hour after
hour, out of some old book of fairy-tales. He endured it
very patiently and never told her how bored he was, and
after that, of course, he loved her all the better. So the
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lad felt towards the small, black-haired child at Rose-
roofs much as he would have felt towards a naughty little
sister, and her aunts were doubtless dearer to him than
they were to her.
He looked at her now with mildly critical eyes as she
peacocked with the green umbrella.
"Are you being good to the aunts, Kiddy?" he asked
suddenly.
"Yes. What are you reading, Doad?"
"Keats."
"What is a Keat, George?"
But he caught the gleam in her downcast eyes, refused
to be drawn and went on, "What are you studying
now?"
"Oh, it's Aunt Flora's turn at me, so I'm busy with
embroidery and the piano. I don't like them much, but
they're better than Euclid and Ancient History," she
returned, indifferently, "Aunt Effie was dreadful this time
with the Romans. I hate Romans."
"I see. What about literature?"
Cuckoo laughed. "Oh, that's better. Wordsworth,
and Coleridge and Mrs. Hemans. Mrs. Hemans," she
commented, "goes splendidly with fuchsias in silk !"
After a pause she continued in a different voice, "Do
you know, George, Rachel thought Troy was in Egypt;
she told me so ! She had a perfectly splendid governess,
a Frenchwoman, such a darling! They never had any
lessons at all!"
"Splendid governess, indeed! Well, are you off?"
"Yes, the Vicar asked me to stay to lunch, but there's
curried mutton at the Vicarage, and we're having Choco-
late Puff-up-and-Busts, so I said I'd come back after
lunch."
Thus clearly explaining her reasons for refusing the
hospitality of the Vicarage, she went her way along the
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slope, twirling and swinging the sunshade and pausing
every now and then to admire it.
Young Loxley watched her for a while and then re-
turned to his book. He had two roast beef sandwiches in
his pocket and was not going home to lunch.
The coming of Rachel had distracted him, but only as
it had disturbed his grandfather ; he was too young, nearly
nineteen though he was, to have experienced any pleas-
anter kind of emotion over the arrival in the Vicarage of
a pretty girl.
Very young he was, and very young he looked, as he
sat there in the sun for he was a chilly creature his
pale, long face bent over old Howell's delightful let-
ters.
Lady Rachel Poole stayed at Widdybank the greater
part of the summer, and she and Cuckoo were during
the whole of the time inseparable, except during the hours
when Cuckoo was with Miss Flora, undergoing the proc-
ess of education. Miss Flora was very conscientious about
this education; she had not forgotten her promise to
Blundell and to the best of her powers she was fulfilling
it. Cuckoo could embroider, though she had no particu-
lar liking for it ; she played the piano in an old-fashioned,
high-fingered little way ; she knew miles of verse by heart.
Aunt Flora's lessons were at least less irksome than Aunt
Effie's, she thought.
In the first flow of their friendship the two girls tried
to work together, but this plan was soon given up.
Rachel was lazy, luxurious, and grown-up in ways in
which Cuckoo was still a child, and Wordsworth bored
her to extinction, though she derived some entertainment
from an old volume of Byron that she found in the study,
and her clumsiness with a needle was too much for even
Miss Flora's long-suffering.
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
"I feel that you hurt the silk, jerking it that way,"
Miss Flora burst out one day, in her highest voice. "I
can't bear to see it "
So Cuckoo's lessons, after a very short interval of
companionship, went on as before, alone with her instruc-
tress.
Rachel, although as vain as are most pretty girls with
no brains to speak of, had a kind of adoration for her
new friend, for Cuckoo was bold and brave and never
changed her mind, whereas Rachel's was a fluid, unstable
character, changing under every influence. She could,
however, beat Cuckoo in many varieties of grown-upness
and in the matter of belongings her superiority was
crushing.
Rachel had a necklet of small pearls, and two pretty
rings; she had delicate, filmy under-linen, tucked and
belaced; she had soft, kid slippers with soles so flexible
that they could be bent double ; and sashes that were satin
on one side and silk on the other ; she had hats gay and
delightful with flowers exactly like real ones, and long,
wrinkly gloves, whose fingers really reached to the roots
of her fingers instead of stopping half-way between them
and the second joint. Lucky Rachel!
And then, her wonderful toilet things! Scented soap
she had, and lots of sponges, and tooth-paste that
squeedged out of the tubes in jolly white worms, instead
of nasty, scratchy, precipitated chalk; and elder-flower
water for her skin, and glycerine-and-honey jelly for
her hands ; and heavenly skin-food that smelt of roses for
her face at night ; and purple crystal things that turned
her bath into a dream of delight.
And of these wonderful, desirable things, Cuckoo had
none.
George, though silent and ordinarily dreamy, was not
without observation and, knowing Cuckoo, he watched her
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closely during the first fortnight of his cousin's visit for
signs of envy.
He watched in vain and the reason is this: at first
Rachel's belongings seemed to Cuckoo miraculous ; then
she saw that they were merely luxurious; and very soon
she realized them to be not really luxurious, but merely
necessities, sheer necessities of life.
And whereas she herself could never have hoped to
attain to the miraculous, and barely to the luxurious, she
knew that to life's necessities she could and would attain.
She, Cuckoo, must, and would, have all the things Rachel
already so carelessly possessed.
This conviction, not arrived at by determination
but by a kind of inward evolution, brought with it com-
plete lack of envy and a kind of high peace.
Not only would she one day have all that Rachel had,
but when her time came she would improve on Rachel's
things. Orange-flower water, for instance, instead of
elder-flower; her gloves should all be pale tan, instead of
gray; and scent that smelt of real violets, whereas Ra-
chel's Violette de Parme smelt of vanilla. Oh, yes, she
would improve on Rachel, when not if, there was no if
in her mind her time came!
Meantime, Miss Effie and Miss Flora were both moved
to admiration at what they considered their niece's sin-
gular lack of envy.
Cuckoo's almost abnormal acquisitiveness had always
troubled them, although they had never directly discussed
it, and they had both feared that her lust of possession
would have been violently stirred by her new friend's mag-
nificent belongings.
And when they perceived her serenity, even when con-
fronted by a new embroidered muslin frock that the con-
ceited Rachel, so to speak, brandished under her very nose,
Miss Effie couldn't resist commenting on it.
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
"I am pleased with Cuckoo, Flora," she said. "In spite
of all Rachel's beautiful things she is as satisfied as ever
with her own simple ones "
"Yes, I'm so pleased you noticed that, Effie." Miss
Flora gave her little nervous laugh. "I was a little
afraid "
"H'm! Yes, so was I. However, we were both wrong."
Miss Flora's laugh melted into her odd, fixed smile that
looked so nearly vacant. "Yes, we were wrong; I am so
glad you noticed it, too."
Miss Effie straightened herself in her chair. "I know
what you mean, Flora. You always think I'm hard on the
child and perhaps I may be. I have reasons of which
you do not know, but I hope I am never unfair, even
though I happen to have sharp eyes," she said, austerely.
Rachel "adored" Aunt Flora, whom she called quaint
and delicious; Aunt Effie she disliked and said so. "I
really don't like her, you know," she said to Cuckoo, "and
I can't help telling you so. I'm frightfully frank," she
added, "really horribly downright, and always say wnat
I think."
Cuckoo listened to these self-interpretations, not being
downright enough herself to disagree audibly with them.
The affair of pretty Agnes Watlass and her two suitors
greatly interested the girls, and they spent hours dis-
cussing it, particularly after one evening when, walking
for a wonder in silence across the grass on the uplands,
they came on Agnes and Chris Greening wrapped in each
other's arms as they said good-night.
"My word," gasped Cuckoo, when the lovers, without
seeing them, had separated and gone beyond earshot, "I
thought they were never going to stop."
She laughed, the easy, unembarrassed laugh of a child.
Rachel did not laugh. "They really love each other,
you see," she explained with some loftiness. "It reminded
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me of 'a man had given all other something or other
for this,
'To waste his whole life in one kiss
Upon those perfect lips, ' "
Cuckoo grew round-eyed. "My goodness, Ray," she
exclaimed, "poor Agnes' lips aren't perfect. But I know
that thing. It's Tennyson. I always wondered what it
meant."
Rachel sighed, with an "I-could-an-I-would" manner.
"You are a baby, Nicky ! Of course I know more than
you, for I've a married sister. Although," she added,
"poor Phil is, of course, a hopeless outsider."
"Mr. Brinkley is?" Cuckoo asked briskly; "then why
did Rosamund marry him?"
"She married him for sixty thousand pounds a year,
my child."
Cuckoo drew a deep breath. "Oh, well, there," she
returned, with conviction, "of course!"
Rachel looked at her in some surprise. "How funnily
you said that! It really is awful, Nicky. Once, in the
beginning, he actually called poor mamma 'your lady-
ship.' "
There was a pause, and then Cuckoo remarked tensely,
"I shouldn't care if he called her 'ma-am,' if he had sixty
thousand pounds a year."
They had reached the road leading along the top of the
Edge, and paused, struck, despite their young egotism
and curiosities, by the beauty of the scene.
The sky to westward looked like liquid gold, and round
about them the high moorland, violet patched with deep
purple, gradually warmed, blossomed* as it seemed, in
the light.
Immediately below where they stood the hill was devas-
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
tated and torn by an ancient deserted lead-mine. It
gaped, all rough heaps of stone and ugly dark holes, like
a gigantic, half-healed wound. "The Cold Comfort
Mine," Cuckoo explained, in answer to her friend's ques-
tion. "An old Roman lead mine."
"How hideous it is!"
Cuckoo nodded. "Yes. Only it makes the sky and
the moorland look all the more splendid. Like like
like Mr. Brinkley's manners and his sixty thousand
pounds a year!"
"You are a queer thing, Nicky ! I believe you are really
and truly mercenary."
"I am."
"It's awfully funny, when you're so young" but how-
ever interesting Cuckoo's peculiarities might be, Rachel's
own personality was far more engrossing to Rachel and
she went on, "I'm not mercenary, I mean. We're fear-
fully poor, of course, and I'd love to be rich, but I
wouldn't have married Phil Brinkley if he'd had a million
a year."
Cuckoo looked at her shrewdly. "Love in a cottage
for you, I suppose?"
The elder girl gave a sentimental little laugh.
"Oh, I'd prefer a big house, of course, but if I loved a
poor man I'd marry him. I suppose I'm a fool but I
would. I should love to work for him, I'd even cook I
couldn't marry a man I didn't love "
These mature reflections were interrupted ruthlessly
by Miss Blundell, who, pausing at the top of the path by
the Green Bench, made her declaration of faith.
"I," she said slowly, speaking rather to the listening
iciale than to Rachel, "would marry anyone who had plenty
of money. I'd marry the ugliest, beastliest, vulgarest
man in the world if he was rich enough."
Rachel's disapproval, however, was not unmixed with
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
admiration. "You wouldn't, Nicky," she cried. "Think
of breakfast every day. Think," she went on, with a
quick glance round, "of him in bed."
Cuckoo's eyes, dulling as was their way in her moments
of deep feeling, were fixed on the beautiful rose-colored
roofs in the trees below them. "I shouldn't mind a bit,"
she answered slowly, obviously missing the elder girl's
point, "not one bit. If he was rich enough. I'd marry a
black man if he was."
Beaten and abashed by this splendid determination,
Rachel gave up, openly, however, declaring for romance.
"Well," she said, "I wouldn't. You are too young,
I s'pose, to understand about love, but I "
"Oh, bosh, Ray! What do you know about it, with
your hair still down! Come along, I'll race you to the
gate "
But at the gate, Rachel, as she sat on the grass saying
good-night, reverted to the subject.
"Suppose your rich man was unfaithful to you?"
Cuckoo chewed a blade of grass and then spat it out
unblushingly. "How d'you mean?"
"Well, some men are, and it's horrid. It's awful, Nicky
darling !"
"Oh, you mean running away?" commented Cuckoo
coldly. "I know. The draper's wife at Upshaw ran away
with a commercial traveler. She left the children behind."
Rachel shuddered. "Evy Rainsford left her baby
and it died. She bolted with Pelly Janeways. Oh, Nicky,"
she continued in a voice of rapture, "now there's a man !"
"He's old," answered Cuckoo, indifferently. "I know
him, and he's years older than my father "
Rachel gave a little scream of excitement. "No,
Cuckoo! You can't mean it. That you actually know
him? Why, he's the most fascinating man in the world.
He's been three times in the divorce court he married
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
two of them he's called the Magnificent from some old
Italian, Lorenzo something or other he's really Italian,
you know. Isn't he a pet, and aren't his eyes too won-
derful?"
Cuckoo laughed. "He promised me a pony and never
gave it to me," she said. "I thought him an old pig, if
you ask me!"
As the two girls kissed each other good-night, Rachel
promised to continue the story of Sir Peregrine Janeways
the next day.
"He's wonderful, whatever you may say," she declared.
"And he owns the most wonderful jewels. Did you ever
hear about the Bag of Saffron?"
"No. You put saffron in puddings, don't you?"
But this bag of saffron, it seemed, was a wonderful
jewel on a diamond chain. "Mamma once saw it his
mother used to wear it when mamma was a little girl
good-night, darling," concluded Rachel, with a last kiss.
"I'll tell you all about it tomorrow."
CHAPTER IX
THERE was, however, no time for talk about Sir
Peregrine Janeways' jewels the next day, for this
was the day of Agnes and Chris. It was a very
marvelous adventure, the affair of Agnes and Chris.
Early in the morning Cuckoo waked, conscious that
she had just heard a strange noise. It was very early,
but her little room, which faced the east, was already
filled with a clear light of extreme purity that made the
white-washed walls look luminous. The young girl, sit-
ting up in bed facing the window, her thin shoulders and
arms covered by an ample and unadorned nightgown,
gazed round her. What could .the noise have been? She
was not afraid; she was expectant; of what, she didn't
know, but she was so constituted that any event was to
her preferable to monotony. Her little clock told her
that it was only half-past four, and even old Esther
Oughtenshaw, she knew, would not be up until six. Yet
someone in the house was afoot. When, after a mo-
ment's tense waiting, she heard a sound in the hall down-
stairs, she rose, and, without pausing to put on her dress-
ing-gown, went quietly down. The very fact of being
awake at such an hour was in a way an adventure, and
being up and about was a thing not to be described in its
delightful strangeness. The clock's tick seemed heavy
with mystery, and the pale glow coming in through the
fanlight had an odd effect on the shabby old hall.
Very quickly Cuckoo went down the passage and
opened the kitchen door.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, disappointedly, "it's only you!"
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
But to Agnes it was not only she. She Agnes was
at that moment the very center of the universe. She
started violently, the tea-kettle in her hand, and stood
staring at the intruder, who, whatever Agnes might be
doing, certainly had no business in the kitchen at such an
hour.
"Miss Coocoo," she faltered, setting the kettle on the
tiny grate in the middle of the stove and drawing back.
Cuckoo sat down in a high-backed wooden chair and
held her hands up to the delicate, fleeting fire that the
elder girl had made with a few twigs.
"I know what you are up to, Agnes," she said severely.
"You are going to run away with Chris Greening."
Agnes turned pale, her poor, swollen eyes full of amaze-
ment and horror.
"Oh, Miss Coocoo "
"Yes, you are. But," added Cuckoo, thoroughly en-
joying herself, "you mustn't."
"You don't know what you're saying, Miss Coocoo
and you'd better go back to your bed. Your aunties
would be very angry if they knew you were up so early."
"My aunties would be very angry if they knew what a
silly thing you were going to do. And the kettle's boiling.
I'll have some tea, too, Agnes."
Agnes made the tea and cut some bread and butter,
presenting it to her young mistress in spite of her men-
tal torment, with perfect decency on a tray.
"I was up on the Edge last night," Cuckoo observed,
her eyes glinting in the strengthening light. "I saw you
and Chris, I saw you kiss each other."
"Oh, Lord!" murmured Agnes. "I told him he
mustn't "
"You can't have told him very hard. Well, so now
you're going to sneak out and marry him! Is that it?"
The elder girl stared at her. There was something
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
singularly unyouthful in her lack of tenderness towards
romance and Agnes felt it.
"Ye don't understand," she retorted dreamily, "you're
too young, I suppose. But it isn't sneaking. It's it's
just t'contrary to sneaking."
"How is it? What do you mean?" insisted the un-
invited judge, not allowing her zest to interfere with her
appetite. "Cut me some more bread and butter, please.
What d'you mean?"
The loaf pressed to her shapely breast, the knife working
its way through the bread, Agnes tried to explain enough
without explaining too much.
"He's going to marry me," she murmured, "he's a
good fellow, not like some, and we're going to be mar-
ried."
Cuckoo frowned impatiently.
"Of course you're going to be married," she returned,
"I know that or you think you are. But you can't be
married today, you know. Where are you going?"
"To Maggie Watlass's her mother was my mother's
cousin. He's told her and she will let me stay there.
Only you mustn't tell, Miss Coocoo, or my uncle and my
brother will come there and make a fuss promise you
won't tell !"
Agnes' bonny face, restored to its natural color by the
fire and the tea and bread and butter, was turned anx-
iously to Cuckoo.
Cuckoo was silent for a moment.
"Chris is a farm-laborer, isn't he?" she asked.
"Aye. He works for William Christy "
"What wages does he get?"
Agnes faltered. "Only ten shillings a week yet, and
his lodgings, but he's a good worker, an' "
"Once a farm-laborer, always a farm-laborer," inter*
rupted Cuckoo trenchantly. "Has he a cottage?"
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
Agnes set down her cup. "No-o, Miss Coocoo, but "
"Have you a cottage?"
"Oh, Miss Coocoo,"
"Be quiet, Agnes, and answer what I ask you." (There
is no use in trying to hide the horrid fact that Miss Coocoo
was thoroughly enjoying, and as thoroughly appreciating,
herself. )
"Has Chris any money? His father may have left
him some,"
Agnes was silent. She knew, and she knew that her
inquisitor knew, that poor old Anty Greening had died
in the workhouse at Warcop.
"Perhaps, then," Cuckoo went on, putting some coals
softly on the waning fire, "you have the money? Just a
little, say fifty pounds, or so, to furnish a cottage with?"
And she watched Agnes, utterly down-hearted, burst
into tears, crying unrestrainedly, her mouth screwed up
like a child's.
"Why do you make me so miserable?'' she moaned.
"You like to hurt me, of course you do! It's crool of
you, Miss Coocoo! As if things wasn't bad enough
already "
Cuckoo shook her head. "No, I don't like to, Agnes.
I like you, and I don't want you to be miserable all your
life."
"Miserable!" wailed the other girl, searching wildly in
her pockets for a handkerchief; "if you knew how miser-
able I've been ever since "
She blew her nose with violence, her wet eyes suddenly
filled with fear.
"I know you are miserable, I've often seen you crying.
But think what it would be if you were married! You'd
have to live in a two-room cottage, you couldn't keep a
cow, you'd have no pigs for bacon, Chris would be away
all day working, and you'd have to work so hard yourself
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
that you'd be old and ugly in a year and then Chris
wouldn't love you any more."
After this lurid forecast Cuckoo rose and opened the
door, letting in a flood of warm light for the pale sun
had been gathering gold as they talked and a great gust
of earth and flower-scented air.
Agnes was silent and quite still for a moment, and
finally Cuckoo turned from the view and looked back into
the kitchen, in whose furthest recesses the night still
seemed to linger.
Agnes stood by the table, her hands tight-clasped before
her, her face suddenly set and white.
"Ah know Ah know all them things," she said, in a
whisper. "Me an' him has said 'em often and often. But
Ah can't help it, Miss Coocoo. Ah must do it. He's a
good lad, Chris. He'd never throw it in my face,"
"Throw what in your face? He loves you, doesn't
he?"
Agnes was only twenty herself, but at that moment she
felt twenty years older than the fifteen-year-old girl who
didn't understand.
"A-aye, he looves me and all but," she faltered and
twisted her brown hands as if she were trying to pull the
fingers off. "Ah, Miss Coocoo," she burst out presently,
"go back to your bed. I must go he's waiting for me,
poor lad, I must go. I've thought and thought, and
there's nowt else to be done."
And then came Cuckoo's great moment.
Going slowly to the other girl, she reached up and put
her hands on the broad, strong shoulders in the black
jacket.
"There ** owt to be done," she declared, speaking pur-
posely in Agnes' own language; "you can marry Isaac
Vosper."
Agnes started, horror in her eyes. "Owd Vosper? Me
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THE BAG OF SAFFRON
marry him? No, never, rich as he is, not even if "
She broke off and gathered up her few belongings pre-
paratory to going.
"Not even if what? He is rich, very rich. He'd
give you all the brass you want and servants, and you'd
have horses and cows and pigs. Don't be an idiot, Agnes.
Marry him!"
Chris Greening, his silly young heart full of rapture
and trouble, was waiting for his sweetheart at the may-
tree by the short cut leading to the Middleton Road, on
its way to where, at Canty Bridge, lived the kind Maggie
^Watlass.
The poor lad had begged a day off from work and had
come to meet his sweetheart dressed in his best; in his
coat he had stuck a bunch of ragged white pinks, and his
curly hair was oiled and smelt of cinnamon.
He was a comely young fellow, even in his unbeautifying
Sunday glory of attire, and the pallor that underlay his
tan gave his clear-cut face an odd look of having been
powdered.
Agnes had promised to join him at five. At half-past
he began to feel anxious, and his round blue eyes were
fixed on the path as it rose towards Roseroofs. He never
knew how near he had come that morning to a life of
miserable grinding poverty with the girl he honestly
loved ; by how small a margin he missed a year of rapture
and a later life out of which the glow of romance had
died. His was a predicament as old as the world itself;
either way he stood to win and to lose and he lost and
won.
For, just as she reached the door to go to him, Agnes