Ch. 23: Isaac's Children - Page 2

gave it they looked at one another and were silent. Then one of them
said, "Be you Shepherd Caleb Bawcombe?" and when he had answered them
the other said, "You'll not see your brother at Wilton to-day. We've
come from Doveton, and knew he. You'll not see your brother no more. He
be dead these two years."

Caleb thanked them for telling him, and got up and went his way very
quietly, and got back that night to his cottage. He was very tired, said
his wife; he wouldn't eat and he wouldn't talk. Many days passed and he
still sat in his corner and brooded, until the wife was angry and said
she never knowed a man make so great a trouble over losing a brother.
'Twas not like losing a wife or a son, she said; but he answered not a
word, and it was many weeks before that dreadful sadness began to wear
off, and he could talk cheerfully once more of his old life in the
village.

Of the sister, Martha, there is much more to say; her life was an
eventful one as lives go in this quiet downland country, and she was,
moreover, distinguished above the others of the family by her beauty and
vivacity. I only knew her when her age was over eighty, in her native
village where her life ended some time ago, but even at that age there
was something of her beauty left and a good deal of her charm. She had a
good figure still and was of a good height; and had dark, fine eyes,
clear, dark, unwrinkled skin, a finely shaped face, and her grey hair,
once black, was very abundant. Her manner, too, was very engaging. At
the age of twenty-five she married a shepherd named Thomas Ierat--a
surname I had not heard before and which made me wonder where were the
Ierats in Wiltshire that in all my rambles among the downland villages I
had never come across them, not even in the churchyards. Nobody
knew--there were no Ierats except Martha Ierat, the widow, of
Winterbourne Bishop and her son--nobody had ever heard of any other
family of the name. I began to doubt that there ever had been such a
name until quite recently when, on going over an old downland village
church, the rector took me out to show me "a strange name" on a tablet
let into the wall of the building outside. The name was Ierat and the
date the seventeenth century. He had never seen the name excepting on
that tablet. Who, then, was Martha's husband? It was a queer story which
she would never have told me, but I had it from her brother and his
wife.

A generation before that of Martha, at a farm in the village of Bower
Chalk on the Ebble, there was a girl named Ellen Ierat employed as a
dairymaid. She was not a native of the village, and if her parentage and
place of birth were ever known they have long passed out of memory. She