A score of times I
must have travelled to and fro between the hut and the stream before
I had the cistern filled. Then I fell-to upon the foul walls within,
slushing and brooming them. Bats dropped from the roof and flew
blundering against me: I drove them forth from the window. The mud
floor became a quag: I seized a spade and shovelled it clean, mud and
slime and worse filth together. And still as I toiled a song kept
liddening (as we say in Cornwall) through my head: a song with two
refrains, whereof the first was the old nursery jingle--"Mud won't
daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone, stone
won't edge axe, axe won't cut rod, rod won't make a gad, a gad to
hang Manachar who has eaten my raspberries every one." (So ran the
rigmarole with which Mrs. Nance had beguiled my infancy.) The second
refrain echoed poor Nat's cry, "She needs help, needs help, and you
could not see! Blind, blind, that you could not see!"
How should she need help? Little cared I though she needed it, and
sorely! But how had the notion taken hold of Nat?
Weakness? Delirium? No: he had been running to get help for her
when they shot him down.
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