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"Not as much as you look," she retorted then. "You look as cross as if " "What's the Pilgrim doing here?" Billy demanded suddenly and untactfully. "Who? Mr. Walland?" She went into the pantry and came back with a plate for him. "Why, nothing; he's just visiting. It's Sunday, you know." "Oh is it?" Billy bent over the basin, hiding his face from her.
"It's a kinda small burg, and at the rate the Pilgrim is swelling up over what he done, there won't be room for nobody but him in another hour. He's making me plumb nervous and afraid to be around him, he's so fatal." "We'll go at once, William. Walland is drinking a great deal more than he should, but I don't think he means to be boastful over so unfortunate an affair.
Indeed, with her plumes, her earrings, her necklace, her frills, though all were of the decent and respectable black, she faintly shocked the opinion of Walland Marsh, otherwise disposed in pity to be lenient to Joanna Godden and her ways. Owing to the absence of conversation, tea was not as long drawn-out as might have been expected from the appetites.
The wedding was fixed for May, and was to be the most wonderful wedding in the experience of the three marshes of Walland, Dunge and Romney.
He would have passed on, but she barred the way, rather an imposing figure in her bottle-green driving coat, with a fur toque pressed down over the flying chestnut of her hair. Her cheeks were not so much coloured as stained deep with the sun and wind of Walland Marsh, and though it was November, a mass of little freckles smudged and scattered over her skin.
"Are yuh going to let the Pilgrim hang around here this summer?" he demanded in his straight-from-the-shoulder fashion while he was drying the first cup. "You mean Mr. Walland? I didn't know he ever 'hung around'." Flora was not meek, and Billy realized that, as he put it mentally, he had his work cut out for him to pull through without a quarrel. "I mean the Pilgrim.
Billy, when questioned, repeated the Pilgrim's first words to him that the Swede had pulled a knife; and told the jury, on further questioning, that he had not seen any gun on the ground until after he had gone for help. Walland explained satisfactorily to the jury. He may have said knife instead of gun.
All the same he enjoyed the expeditions that they had together in her trap, driving out on some windy-skied March day, to fill the hours snatched from her activities at Ansdore and his muddlings at North Farthing, with all the sea-green sunny breadth of Walland, and still more divinely with Walland's secret places the shelter of tall reeds by the Yokes Sewer, or of a thorn thicket making a tent of white blossom and spindled shadows in the midst of the open land.
They jogged on over the winding, white ribbon of road through Brodnyx village, past the huge barn-like church which had both inspired and reproached her faith, with its black, caped tower canting over it, on to Walland Marsh, to the cross roads at the Woolpack My, how they would talk at the Woolpack!... but she would be far away by then ... where?... She didn't know, she would think of that later when she had told Ellen.
Ansdore was a manor now the largest estate not only in Brodnyx and Pedlinge, but on Walland Marsh; indeed the whole of the Three Marshes had little to beat it with. Moreover, Ellen was beginning to get her own way in the house her bedroom was no longer a compulsory bower of roses, but softly cream-coloured and purple-hung.
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