No sooner had the whim tickled Richard’s sensibilities for romance than he was off at a trot down the bridle-track, seeing the Queen’s Circle sink down on his left below the slope of the open moor. The sun came slanting through and through as Richard wound through the solemn thickets, where the dead bracken glowed under the purple shade, and whin, whortleberries, and heather tangled each knoll and dell. There was a beckoning awe about the place, a brooding mystery that lured on and on.
Now Bess had wandered out, while old Ursula was taking a nap in the ingle-nook, to search for certain herbs that the old lady needed. She had thrown her red cloak over her shoulders, taken a rush-basket and a stout thorn stick. Three weeks or more had passed since the scrimmage in the pine thicket, and young David, fearing Dan’s wrath, had fled the hamlet, tramped down to Portsmouth, and been “pressed” for the king’s navy. Isaac Grimshaw had had the news from a Jew peddler who had come through by Chichester, and had seen young David dragged out of a tavern by the press men, and hauled off with others to the harbor. The Jew peddler knew all the forest-folk by name and face, having sold his wares to them and obliged Isaac in many ways, year in, year out. There had been hot words between old Isaac and his son, and hot words between Isaac and Dame Ursula. Bess had called Black Dan a coward and a bully to his face. But since the mischief was done, and young David on the seas, Isaac calmed the contentions of his flock, and mollified the women as best he could.
Dan Grimshaw had followed Bess from the hamlet that day with sullen fire in his red-brown eyes. There had been words between them in the morning, and the girl had treated the giant to a picturesque display of scorn. Dan Grimshaw was ugly enough, but it did not please him to hear the truth from Miss Bess’s petulant lips. He had blundered home to his cottage in bovine wrath, inflamed by the girl’s comeliness, and by her passionate taunts. Sly and savage he had watched her take the path that led up through the woods to Beacon Rock, and had followed at a distance, clinching his great fists as he saw her red cloak flit amid the trees.
Jeffray, riding down White Hind walk where the hamlet path crossed the sleek grass that seemed to run like a river amid the trees, was edified by beholding a tall wench belaboring a forester with a stick. The man was dodging from side to side, cursing and taking the blows upon his forearms. A basket half filled with sprouting weeds lay tossed aside under a tree. So busy were these two Pevensel savages with their stick-wielding and their dodging that neither of them noticed Richard’s approach.