Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: and a sick heart is
but too apt to be a peevish one. So there were fits of despondency, jars,
mutual recriminations. "If I had not taken your advice, I should not have
been here." "If I had not loved you so well, I might have been very
differently off,"--and so forth. The words were wiped away the next hour,
perhaps the next minute, by sacred kisses; but they had been said, and
would be recollected, and perhaps said again.
Then, again, the "merry greenwood" was merry enough in the summer tide,
when shaughs were green, and
"The woodwele sang, and would not cease,
Sitting upon the spray.
So loud, it wakened Robin Hood
In the greenwood where he lay."
But it was a sad place enough, when the autumn fog crawled round the
gorse, and dripped off the hollies, and choked alike the breath and the
eyesight; when the air sickened with the graveyard smell of rotting
leaves, and the rain-water stood in the clay holes over the poached and
sloppy lawns.
It was merry enough, too, when they were in winter quarters in friendly
farm-houses, as long as the bright sharp frosts lasted, and they tracked
the hares and deer merrily over the frozen snows; but it was doleful
enough in those same farm-houses in the howling wet weather, when wind and
rain lashed in through unglazed window, and ill-made roof, and there were
coughs and colds and rheumatisms, and Torfrida ached from head to foot,
and once could not stand upright for a whole month together, and every
cranny was stuffed up with bits of board and rags, keeping out light and
air as well as wind and water; and there was little difference between the
short day and the long night; and the men gambled and wrangled amid clouds
of peat-reek, over draughtboards and chessmen which they had carved for
themselves, and Torfrida sat stitching and sewing, making and mending, her
eyes bleared with peat-smoke, her hands sore and coarse from continual
labor, her cheek bronzed, her face thin and hollow, and all her beauty
worn away for very trouble.
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