No.  XI

THE WISE WOMAN OF WALNA

I

When farmer Badge died, his widow kept on at Walna, and some people thought the world of her, same as I always did, but some was a bit frightened, because of her great gifts.  Charity Badge certainly did know a terrible lot more than every-day folk, which was natural in the daughter of a white witch; but she weren’t no witch herself—­neither black nor white—­and, as she often said to me:  “’Tis only my way of putting two and two together that makes the difference between me and the other women round about these parts.”

Walna was a poor little bit of a place up the Wallabrook Valley, and when Charity died it all went to pieces, for there was none to take it again.  Tramps slept there till the roof fell in, and then the hawks and owls took it over; but fifty years agone she flourished and did pretty well there, one way and another, though ’twas more by the people that visited her for her wisdom than anything she made out of the tumble-down farm.  More’n a cow or two she never had no cattle, and the last sheep to Walna went to pay for farmer Badge’s coffin.

I was a maiden then and worked for Mrs. Badge, so I comed to see a lot about her and marked her manner of life.  Half the things she did was thought to be miracles by the Postbridge people, yet if you saw the workings of ’em from inside, you found that, after all, they was only built on common sense.  Still, I’ll grant you that common sense itself is a miracle.  ’Tis only one in a million ever shows it; and that one’s pretty near sure to be a woman.

Charity was a thin, brown creature—­birdlike in her ways, with quick movements, quick hands, and quick eyes.  She never had no childer, and never wanted none.  In fact, she was pretty well alone in the world after her husband died.  There was a lot of Badges, of course, and still are; but she never had no use for them, nor them for her.

And now I’ll tell the story of Sarah White and Mary Tuckett and Peter Hacker, the master of Bellaford.

Sarah was a lone creature up fifty year old, and she come along to Mrs. Badge one fine day with a proper peck of troubles.  She crept down the path to Walna from Merripit Hill, like a snail with a backache, and weren’t in no case at all for merriment; yet the first thing she heard as she come in was laughter; and the first thing she seed was pretty Mary Tuckett sitting on Mrs. Badge’s kitchen table, swinging her legs, and eating bits of raw rhubarb out of a pie as my mistress was trying to make.

Mary was a beauty, and a bit too fond of No. 1, like most of that sort.

“’Tis too bad,” she said to the new-comer, “ban’t it too bad, Mrs. White?  Here’s Charity, well known for the cleverest woman ’pon Dartymoor, won’t tell me my fortune or look in her crystal for me, though I be offering her a two-shilling piece to do so.”