The Peace of Mowsle Barton

Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease, an ease alike of body and soul, in the little patch of ground, half-orchard and half-garden, that abutted on the farmyard at Mowsle Barton. After the stress and noise of long years of city life, the repose and peace of the hillbegirt homestead struck on his senses with an almost dramatic intensity. Time and space seemed to lose their meaning and their abruptness; the minutes slid away into hours, and the meadows and fallows sloped away into middle distance, softly and imperceptibly. Wild weeds of the hedgerow straggled into the flowergarden, and wallflowers and garden bushes made counter-raids into farmyard and lane. Sleepy-looking hens and solemn preoccupied ducks were equally at home in yard, orchard, or roadway; nothing seemed to belong definitely to anywhere; even the gates were not necessarily to be found on their hinges. And over the whole scene brooded the sense of a peace that had almost a quality of magic in it. In the afternoon you felt that it had always been afternoon, and must always remain afternoon; in the twilight you knew that it could never have been anything else but twilight. Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease in the rustic seat beneath an old medlar tree, and decided that here was the life-anchorage that his mind had so fondly pictured and that latterly his tired and jarred senses had so often pined for. He would make a permanent lodging-place among these simple friendly people, gradually increasing the modest comforts with which he would like to surround himself, but falling in as much as possible with their manner of living.

As he slowly matured this resolution in his mind an elderly woman came hobbling with uncertain gait through the orchard. He recognised her as a member of the farm household, the mother or possibly the mother-in-law of Mrs Spurfield, his present landlady, and hastily formulated some pleasant remark to make to her. She forestalled him.

‘There’s a bit of writing chalked up on the door over yonder. What is it?’

She spoke in a dull impersonal manner, as though the question had been on her lips for years and has best be got rid of. Her eyes, however, looked impatiently over Crefton’s head at the door of a small barn which formed the outpost of a straggling line of farm buildings.

‘Martha Pillamon is an old witch’ was the announcement that met Crefton’s inquiring scrutiny, and he hesitated a moment before giving the statement wider publicity. For all he knew to the contrary, it might be Martha herself to whom he was speaking. It was possible that Mrs Spurfield’s maiden name had been Pillamon. And the gaunt, withered old dame at his side might certainly fulfil local conditions as to the outward aspect of a witch.

‘It’s something about some one called Martha Pillamon,’ he explained cautiously.

‘What does it say?’

‘It’s very disrespectful,’ said Crefton; ‘it says she’s a witch. Such things ought not to be written up.’

‘It’s true, every word of it,’ said his listener with considerable satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive note of her own, ‘the old toad.’

And as she hobbled away through the farmyard she shrilled out in her cracked voice, ‘Martha Pillamon is an old witch!’

‘Did you hear what she said?’ mumbled a weak, angry voice somewhere behind Crefton’s shoulder. Turning hastily, he beheld another old crone, thin and yellow and wrinkled, and evidently in a high state of displeasure. Obviously this was Martha Pillamon in person. The orchard seemed to be a favourite promenade for the aged women of the neighbourhood.

‘’Tis lies, ’tis sinful lies,’ the weak voice went on ‘’Tis Betsy Croot is the old witch. She and her daughter, the dirty rat. I’ll put a spell on ’em, the old nuisances.’

As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk inscription on the barn door.