Read Mr. Tasker's Gods for Free Online Page B

women carried parcels, paper bags, and each held one or two heavy baskets.
    Henry soon recognized the first that moved round the corner as the innkeeper’s wife. She walked with her son, a child who ran in little darts this way and that across the road like a field mouse. After her came the gardener’s wife, a short, stout woman in a heavy black dress that made her look very toadlike in the lane. She was surrounded, almost eaten into, by three or four children,—Henry could not tell how many, as they were always getting behind her, ‘in order,’ so Henry thought, ‘to take sweets out of her basket without being seen by their mother,’ whose efforts to climb the hill were at that moment all she could manage.
    Another party, a couple, came slowly along some way behind. These two laggards were strolling along even more slowly than the woman in front of them—and they betrayed themselves. They were a man and a maid, that ancient mystery that was even beyond the wisdom of Solomon to unravel. The man wore black, the symbol of a Sabbath, or of a holiday, in the town. His bowler hat was also proper for those delights, and he flicked, as a gentleman anywhere would flick, at the knapweed by the side of the road. The man—and Solomon wisely puts him first—walked a little way ahead of his companion. She who followed at his heels was very much overloaded with parcels. She was dressed in her holiday white. Often she was so teased by the parcels—they would keep on slipping—that she placed one foot a little way up the bank and tried to rearrange them, letting them rest for a moment upon her knee. The man hardly ever took the trouble to look back at her—he had seen a girl before—but, with one hand in a pocket, he kept on flicking at the hedge. The narrow lane bore the burden of the mystery of these two.
    The sun had just departed, leaving behind it a painted cloud to show where it had once been. The road, when it reached the top, ran for a few yards upon the brow of the hill as though to give the traveller a chance to look at the village below him before he descended.
    Near this high level of road Henry was resting. When these two last from the van came by, Henry saw that the girl was his mother’s housemaid , Alice. She had seen him too and whispered his name to her companion, who turned his head disdainfully and for just a moment glanced at Henry. Henry knew him to be the son of Mr. Turnbull’s gardener, so wisely named ‘Funeral’ by the village.
    ‘Funeral’ had been married twice. His first wife he had buried, digging her grave himself. Alice’s companion from the town, an infant then, had been the cause of her death.
    Henry’s father had employed ‘Funeral’s’ son for a time in the garden, but after his own son’s return he found him a place as under-clerk in a coal merchant’s office in the town, where he took to himself all the airs of a young man who knows things. Just then this young man’s knowledge took the form of annoyance that he was seen by a clergyman’s son walking with a servant.
    Henry waited until the form of Alice, the last of the evening’s travellers, had left his vision, and then he followed the same road, descended into the village and joined his father and mother at supper, it being the habit in this clergyman’s family to devour the remains of a liberal early dinner at nine o’clock in the evening.
    The following morning Henry was awakened by a rough wind. For a moment he thought he was lying again in the log hut, until he heard the rude, sharp knock of Miss Alice against his door and a water-can merrily hitting the floor just outside. Henry’s blind had not been pulled down—it never was,—and he watched the angry summer clouds, like mad black sheep, racing each other across the heavens, and he noted the tortured movements of the green leaves of the elm tree that resented being beaten by the wind. Henry was soon downstairs waiting for his father, his mother being already in