uestions, the answers buzzed, bringing out facts with damning clearness,
yet leaving the real story of that early morning as hidden as if the
court and all were but gibbering figures of air. The real story of
Tryst, heavy and distraught, rising and turning out from habit into the
early haze on the fields, where his daily work had lain, of Tryst
brooding, with the slow, the wrathful incoherence that centuries of
silence in those lonely fields had passed into the blood of his forebears
and himself. Brooding, in the dangerous disproportion that enforced
continence brings to certain natures, loading the brain with violence
till the storm bursts and there leap out the lurid, dark insanities of
crime. Brooding, while in the air flies chased each other, insects
crawled together in the grass, and the first principle of nature worked
everywhere its sane fulfilment. They might talk and take evidence as
they would, be shrewd and sharp with all the petty sharpness of the Law;
but the secret springs would still lie undisclosed, too natural and true
to bear the light of day. The probings and eloquence of justice would
never paint the picture of that moment of maniacal relief, when, with jaw
hanging loose, eyes bulging in exultation of revenge, he had struck those
matches with his hairy hands and let them flare in the straw, till the
little red flames ran and licked, rustled and licked, and there was
nothing to do but watch them lick and burn. Nor of that sudden wildness
of dumb fear that rushed into the heart of the crouching creature,
changing the madness of his face to palsy. Nor of the recoil from the
burning stack; those moments empty with terror. Nor of how terror,
through habit of inarticulate, emotionless existence, gave place again to
brute stolidity. And so, heavily back across the dewy fields, under the
larks' songs, the cooings of pigeons, the hum of wings, and all the
unconscious rhythm of ageless Nature. No! The probings of Justice could
never reach the whole truth. And even Justice quailed at its own
probings when the mother-child was passed up from Tod's side into the
witness-box and the big laborer was seen to look at her and she at him.
She seemed to have grown taller; her pensive little face and beautifully
fluffed-out corn-brown hair had an eerie beauty, perched up there in the
arid witness-box, as of some small figure from the brush of Botticelli.

"Your name, my dear?"

"Biddy Tryst."

"How old?"