white walls of the farmhouse were hot and blinding to look upon in the sunlight, and the row of scoured dairy-pans and vessels that leaned against them blazed in spots like the sun himself. The hills across the narrow Dale quivered in the June afternoon as if seen over a furnace of charcoal, and no sounds were heard but the soft clucking of poultry and the heavy droning of the bees as they spun in and out of the bass-hives. The sky was of a bleached blue; the dripping from the spout of the pump dried where it fell on the baked earth; the smell of hay and hot dust filled the air; and in the grey limestone village lower down the valley not a soul was to be seen abroad.
Harriet Stubbs stood in her dairy at an upright churn. The lime-washed walls glowed with imprisoned sunlight, and only a narrow strip of shade lay without the door. She was six-and-thirty, too tall, too thin, too quick-moving. Rusty freckles gathered thickly over the bridge of her nose and spread over a face that was of the hue of washleather. Her lips had no red; the lower one was dented with an old frost-bite, now healed; and over the upper one a few straggling hairs showed. Her arms as she churned were sinewy as those of a man; and her bluntly-lidded grey eyes were searching and shrewish.
A rank whiff of tobacco came on the hot air, and a man of fifty crossed the bright yard and entered the dairy. She did not stop churning.
“Put that pipe out, Henry Butler; I'll ha' no reek i' my dairy,” she cried; “I had a kern o' butter as rank as owd hippins last week wi' one o' yon gormless wenches settin' a stinkin' cheese o' th' shelf; th' De'il himself couldna watch some o' ye.—An' what brings ye up fro' th' Cotes?”
“I put a owd apron ower th' horse's head an' rade up,” said the farmer, mopping his brow with an old snuff-handkerchief; “it's blistering hot!”
“If ye cam' thro' th' Cotes to tell me that I'm obliged to ye, but I kenned it, thank ye.”
“Nay, I come for a bit crack wi' ye, Harriet, aboot yon lad o' mine.”
“Ay?—Tak' a turn at th' kern, for ye could wring my shift.”
The farmer took the poss-stick in his knotted hands, and she mopped her freckled brow with her apron; then she sat a-straddle on the corner of the stone table and said: “what's wrang wi' Harry?”
“Wrang?” said the farmer, making the churn rock with his energy. “And what should be wrang wi' short o' ane-and-twenty but ye perdition women?”
“Ay,” said Harriet composedly, “we're winsome things, an' ye canna resist us; not that I've seen ye sweat overmuch wi' trying. Is't?”
“Ay, is't: yon black-haired besom, Bessie Wyatt; but th' sullen trash is packing to-neet.”
“Packin'! An' what's Harry say?”
Farmer Butler scowled out over the hot stackyard.
“'Tis what I cam' to talk to ye aboot.—Now i' one word, Harriet: wad ye ha' him?”
A little blood came into her dry cheeks.
“Ha' him? Dost mean wed him?”
“Ay, and join the farms—there wadna be another property like it this side o' Pateley Brigg.”
“He's not sent thee?—Not he,” she said sourly; “I'd liefer he did his own courtin'.”
The farmer churned angrily, and she watched him keenly.
“Then by , he shall,” he cried, “or I'll sell out and build a !”
“Th' Butlers'll build a lot o' kirks,” she remarked drily. “Wad I ha' him? Well, I'll answer him that when he asks me; but I'll answer ye this now, Henry: They say th' De'il likes to muck o' a gurt lump, an' th' twa farms wad mak' a pretty property; but a bonnie thing 'twad be to hear th' love he'd whisper to th' flawpin' Lad-lass Harriet Stubbs! 'My own four-hundred acre! My darlin' twenty-score head o' beasts! My lovely farm an' house an' first mortgage o' three rows o' cottages i' Pateley Town!' A bonnie wooin'!—When he whispered 'Bessie!' at th' side o' me at neet I'd say: '’Tisna Bessie, love; 'tis thy precious ninety pund a year i' th' bank; kiss thy owd Skipton market; kiss thy butter an' eggs; kiss thy bit o' horse-trade!' A pretty wooin'!—Happen I'd see him lookin' yonderly-like i' th' chimley-corner, thinkin' why I didna bring him a bairn; I'd say, 'There's young blood an' bairns enow; we'll adopt one, an' thou can call it Bessie.'—Tch!—'Tis naughbut ye owd nontkates that thinks all women's th' same i' th' dark! Wadna I ken? Wadna I ken when I were his Bessie? Wadna I brak my heart, bein' his Bessie? Wadna I brak all three o' we'r hearts?—Not I, as it chances, for I'm any kind o' a fool but that kind, so get thy kirk built, Henry. They ha'na named me Lad-lass for naught.”
“Thou doesna ken right what thou's sayin',” said the farmer.