Timothy met the third party to that unfolding drama as he proceeded on to the Moor. Then came John Aggett with an anxious face looking out upon the world above his pale beard. The labourer stopped Tim, and in broken sentences—like a child that wrestles to describe new things within his experience but beyond his vocabulary—strove clumsily to express a mental upheaval which he lacked words to display. He made it clear, however, that he was in a great turmoil of mind and much driven by fear of appearances in connection with Gammer Gurney’s predictions of the previous night.
“I be just come from speech with the old woman, and can’t say as ’twas sense or yet nonsense I got out of her. She kept a close watch on her lips, ’peared to me; but her eyes threatened bad things an’ her weern’t at ease. ‘What will happen, will happen,’ she sez to me; an’ at the fust utterance it seemed a deep sayin’, yet, come to think on’t, ’twas a thing known so well to me as she.”
“Why did you go to her?” enquired Timothy, knowing without need of answer.
“’Bout last night. Couldn’t banish it from my head what her said as to your sweetheart. So I went an’ telled her how you met my Sarah an’ axed if that comed in the spell, seein’ the girl were tokened to another man. An’ she said as it might be or might not be, because the spoken word remained an’ was no more to be called back again than last year’s primrosen. Then I axed her what her view of it might be, an’ she up an’ said what I told ’e; ‘What will happen, will happen.’ Arter that I grew hot an’ said any fule knowed so much, an’ she turned round ’pon me like a dog you’ve trod on by mistake, an’ her eyes glinted like shinin’ steel, an’ I reckoned she was gwaine to awverlook me theer an’ then. So I cleared out of it.”
“What happens, happens, because it must. That’s all right enough, John. And things won’t fall out differently because we take thought and pine about ’em.”
“I be keepin’ comp’ny, an’ it may be a sort o’ state as blinds the eyes,” said Aggett, humbly. “I trust ’e in this thing—you’m a gen’leman, an’ wiser’n me, as be a mere zawk for brains alongside you. But theer ’tis, she’m my awn maid, an’ if the ’mazin’ butivul looks of her have fired ’e, then, as you’m a gude man, so I pray you’ll be at trouble not to see her no more. ’Tis very well to say what must fall, must; but the future did ought to be a man’s sarvant, I reckon, not his master.”