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But in Wensdale itself there was only a handful of thatched cottages scattered about here and there round the vicarage. Life was so regular and quiet there that you might almost tell the time without looking at the clock. When you heard cling, clang, from the blacksmith's forge, and quack, quack, from the army of ducks waddling down to the river, it was five o'clock.
"You live at the parson's house in Wensdale, don't yer, dearie?" she said coaxingly. "Yes," said Mary. She wondered how the woman knew. "But you're not the parson's child," continued the woman. "Give me your hand." She bent, muttering over it: "No, no, not the parson's child you belong to dark people, for all so white and fair you are." Was the woman a witch?
This attention consoled Mary a little, and she managed to bear up, but a dulness had fallen over the whole party; Fraulein was still tearful, and Rice cross, so that none of the children were sorry when the wagonette arrived to take them back to Wensdale. To Mary it was the greatest possible relief; she never never wished to see Maskells again.
Now he was passing close, close to her hiding-place; if she sprang out now she could stop him. But no, she could not; in another minute it was too late, the cob had turned briskly into the Wensdale Road, and the sound of his hoofs soon became faint in the distance.
Mary was vain, too, as well as wilful; but this was not astonishing, for from a very little child she had heard the most open remarks about her beauty. Wensdale was a small place, but there were not wanting unwise people in it, who imagined that their nods and winks and whispers of admiration were unnoticed by the child. A great mistake.
Then another thought came, and she drooped her head mournfully. "If I do that they will claim me for their child. `Not all the parsons and all the squires as ever was could prevent it, Seraminta had said. What would happen then? I should have to go away from Wensdale, from father and mother, from Jackie, and all of them at the White House.
And yet, though her earliest recollections were of these, she did not in truth belong to them; they were not her people, and sunny Wensdale was not her place; Maggie was her mother, and cold, grey Haworth on the hillside was her real home. It was, as Jackie had said, a most puzzling thing, and the important question arose would Mary have to go away?
But the day came when, matters being at last arranged, the children were told all about it, and this is what they heard: Mary was to spend a year with her real mother at Haworth, and a year with Mrs Vallance at Wensdale, alternately, until she was eighteen years old. On her eighteenth birthday she might choose at which of these two homes she would live altogether.
Mrs Vallance cast a glance of triumph at her husband, but forebore to say anything, in consideration of his depressed condition; then she rushed hurriedly upstairs to see the new wonder. And thus began baby's life in her third home, and she brought nothing of her own to it except her one little clog. The village of Wensdale was snugly shut in from the rest of the world in a narrow valley.
For to belong to poor people would have seemed dreadful to Mary's proud spirit. As it could not, however, she remained in ignorance of her real condition, and even in her dreams no remembrance of her real mother, or of the gypsies and her playfellows Bennie and Mossy, ever came to visit her. Things at Wensdale had not altered much since Mary had been left there as a child of two years old.
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