The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes Read Free Book Online

But now, with his rent paid up for three months, there were only very few (ill-gotten) yellowbacks left in his wad with the (equally ill-gotten) greenbacks; and no one would give you a job—he’d rightly or wrongly been told—if you couldn’t show papers and looked such an obvious alien.
    In short there seemed nothing else to be done but to sit here and wait for the end. Of course, when the blow did fall.... Well, Gilbert would certainly go up in smoke. Even Mary: how would she take it? And all his civilized friends.... Just imagine Douglas’s moue when he heard of Augustine in jail for resisting arrest with violence! Even young Jeremy’s wry “Old Augustine to think he’s a he-man and start knocking coastguards about: can’t he ever grow up?”
    But that wasn’t all, for now he’d a friend over here to consider as well—that innocent child....
    Soon after parting with Ree at the pool, Augustine had feared he might never again see this “nearest approach to a friend he had made since he landed.” However, he needn’t have worried: the very next morning he’d come on her mooching around on her own (and quite near to his shack, as it chanced). Since then, he and Ree had become fast cronies: her company solaced the lonely present although it couldn’t expunge the past, and they spent nearly all their time in each other’s company. Ree at least seemed quite unaware of their difference in age. Age-groups are largely conventional placings in terms of society, scarcely apparent (it can be) between two people alone by themselves; and these two only met tête-à-tête. Like a closed “binary system”—a star-couple floating in space—they would flit in and out of each other’s lives as if neither had other attachments, and never saw each other against a background of company.
    Each for their separate reasons, meeting with nobody suited them both. So they seldom went near the village, and even then they were careful to keep out of sight like a couple of redskin spies. Indeed they seldom came out into open country at all, but stuck to the woods where the going being so slow disguised the fact that Ree had never been used like him to regular pounding mile after mile—for even exploring the woods they tried to avoid frequented buggy-roads. Ree indeed showed such a marked predilection for lonely and hidden places to take him that mostly they probed the deepest and darkest thickets they could, worming their way by overgrown paths where the trees in some inaccessible gully had never been cut or cleared since the Dawn of Time: primeval haunts where the foot didn’t even touch ground, but sunk thigh-deep through leaves and rotting or rotted wood....
    Ree seemed to adore to creep into caves and cracks in the outcrops of rock, where together they’d squeeze in some secret hole like a couple of badgers setting up home. Although she was nimble most times as a monkey, at others she seemed to go strangely helpless and asked to be lifted over or out of things—not that Augustine minded those times, for it gave him a kind of “motherly” feeling towards her.... And as for talking—nineteen-to-the-dozen they talked! So what about Ree, when she found that the hand she’d so trustingly held belonged to a wanted criminal? Not very nice if she happened to see him arrested....
    Next morning, to drive so sorry a picture out of his mind as well as to ease his nostalgia, Augustine started at last on a cautiously-worded new letter home:
    â€œ Dear Mary ,” he wrote: “ This village stands at a cross-roads ....”
8
    The “cross-roads” Augustine wrote of were really only cross-buggy-roads, woodland trails that had never been metalled or oiled. Hardly anything used them today, apart from some local flivver or summer-girl on a saddle-horse—or sometimes, even, still a horse-buggy or two. You were five good