“Bread and milk,” he said softly. “It will be like life to him. But how queer it seems that I should be worrying myself nearly to death, giving up my clothes to make him comfortable, playing doctor and nurse, and nearly starving myself, for a boy for whom I never cared a bit. I couldn’t have done any more for him if he had been my brother. Why, when I used to hear him speak it jarred upon me, he seemed so coarse and common. It’s human nature, I suppose, and I’m not going to doubt that poor girl again. She looks common and simple too—a Spanish peasant, I suppose, who had come to milk and see to the goats after perhaps being frightened away by the firing. A girl of seventeen or eighteen, I should say. Well, Spanish girls would be just as tender-hearted as ours at home. Of course; and she did just the same as one of them would have done. She looked sorry for poor Punch, and I saw one tear trickle and fall. “There, Punch, boy, we shall be all right now if the French don’t come.”
Pen stepped out in the open and seated himself upon a piece of mossy rock where he could gaze in the direction where he had last seen his visitor. But it was all dull and misty now. There was the distant murmur of the great fall, the sharp, sibilant chirrup of crickets. The great planet which had seemed like a friend to him before had risen from behind the distant mountain, and there was a peculiar sweet, warm perfume in the air that made him feel drowsy and content.
“Ah,” he sighed, “they say that when things are at their worst they begin to mend. They are mending now, and this valley never felt, never looked, so beautiful before. How one seems to breathe in the sweet, soft, dewy night air! It’s lovely. I don’t think I ever felt so truly happy. There, it’s of no use for me to watch that patch of wood, for I could not see our visitor unless she was coming with a lantern; and perhaps she has miles to go. Well, watching the spot is doing no good, and if she’s coming she will find her way, and she is more likely not to lose heart if I’m in the hut, for I might scare her away. Here, let’s go in and see how poor old Punch is getting on! But I never thought—I never could have imagined—when I was getting up my ‘lessons for to-morrow morning’ that the time would come when I should be waiting and watching in a Spanish peasant’s hut for someone to come and bring me in for a wounded comrade a cake of black-bread to keep us both alive.”
Inspiration: Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White, Old Man & The Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, The Street, by Ann Petry
Written by Roi Hude
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