The Secret Flower. Jane Tyson Clement
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A CERTAIN VILLAGE that lay on the banks of a river in the midlands of old England, there lived three brothers. The oldest was the ferryman, the next the miller, and the third the forester of the lord’s forest, which bordered the village on the north. So they were all men of some consequence and importance, and were prosperous for those times, having plenty to eat, steady work, tidy houses, and a degree of independence. But the ferryman never sang at his work, as ferrymen are supposed to do; and the miller was not the jolly miller the songs tell us of, so that it was no pleasure to take one’s grain to be ground; and the forester tended the beautiful woods with an unseeing and uncaring heart. None had wives to cheer their days, nor dogs to keep them company, nor even a cat to purr on the hearth of a winter evening.
The lord of the fief was a just and temperate man who never taxed unfairly and who lived at peace with his neighbors. But since he was away at the king’s court most of the year, he saw to it that he had trustworthy men as bailiff and steward and warden of his lands. He knew the three brothers and trusted them each one to treat all fairly – the ferryman to charge a fair toll and guard the fishing rights on the river, the miller to keep the fair amount of grain for the lord’s granaries and to return the just amount to the people, and the forester to guard the forest well, both timber and wildlife, and to deal with poachers with firmness yet with humanity.
So the life of the village went on for a long time, and the three brothers lived from day to day and year to year; their hair grayed a bit and their shoulders grew a little stooped, but they were still hale and strong and did not feel the dampness knotting their knee joints nor their breath growing short when they worked. They never thought about the future or the past but took each day as it came. Once a week on Sundays and on feast days the forester would leave his hut and travel to the mill, and together he and the miller would go by the path along the river to the ferryman, and together the three of them would go wordlessly to church, and after that to the inn to sit in silence over venison pie and a flagon of ale; and then they would go off again, parting with the ferryman first, and then back along the river, where the forester would leave the miller and go on to his solitary, snug hut on the forest’s edge.
So it went on, and might have gone on to the end of their days. But they, all unwitting, had not been forgotten, and they, unseeking, yet were being sought for.
For there was a night toward the end of harvest one year when the great storm came. For three days the air had been heavy and dark, and strange white seabirds were seen over the inland meadows, and nights were hushed and dull, the lively crickets silent and the leaves hanging still. The boys who were accustomed to romp on the common hung about their own cottages, and the little lads and lasses clung to their mothers’ skirts in a feeling of nameless fear.
On the third night the tempest descended, first with a whirling of clouds in the upper air, and a soughing in the tree tops, so all fled indoors. And then with the dark came the full fury of wind and rain. The blackness was utter and complete, and each man, no matter how strong, felt his own puniness, and a clutch of fear before the unknown.
Now the forester, during those storm-haunted days, walked through his woods and marked in his mind the dead and dying trees that might topple in a great wind, and he noted how still the beasts were, and how hidden and silent all the birds. He noted the soundness of his little, low, snug hut huddled at the edge of the forest, and was glad that he had built it of stone; but he regretted that he had not long since felled a great dead beech that stood a hundred yards from his door.
So it was that the night the storm broke he sat within, the dim glow of the embers on his hearth and the light of one candle on the table throwing shadows that veered and flickered on the walls. He crouched in fear and dread, listening to the tumult without; and he thought of his trees, and the beasts of the forest who would find little shelter, and he thought of his brothers and how they were faring, and at length he thought of the people of his village, in their flimsy cottages, with their meager harvest unprotected. A little surge of pity crept into his heart; and in that instant he heard the child crying.
At first he did not know what it was he heard, over the howling of the wind and the pounding of the rain. But then it came again, faint and clear – the crying of a child. He rose and went to the door and stood with his hand on the latch.
“I cannot go out there,” he thought. “I would be blown away, or crushed beneath a falling limb. I am an old man. And what child would be abroad now? Have I lost my wits?”
But even as he whispered to himself, the cry came again; and after it there was a great crash, the long, thundering roar of a tree falling, and he knew the great beech had gone. He waited, frozen, straining his ears, but no further cry came. Then he waited no longer, but flung open the door, pulling it to behind him, and plunged into the tempest in the direction of the fallen tree; through the raging dark he went, gasping and struggling, until he ran into the sprawling branches. Then on his knees he crawled, feeling with his hands along the ground, under the great prostrate trunk, and calling, “Little one, little one! Where are you? I am here to help! Little one, answer me!”
After an agony of searching, his hands felt a small, wet face, and his palm felt the fluttering beat of a small heart. The child lay pinned under a limb. He began to pull and tug at the limb, and taking his knife from his belt he began to hack away, gently easing the little body free as he worked. It was as if a strange glow surrounded him, for he could see in the dark; and as he slid the little one free and gathered him up in his arms, the path lay clear before him, and the wind seemed to still and the rain to slacken before his feet.
So he carried the child home in safety, and once within doors, he laid him by the hearth, hastening to blow on the embers and freshen the fire. He stripped the wet boy, wrapped him in his cloak, and he chafed his cold hands and feet. He looked him all over tenderly for any broken bones, and carefully wiped the blood away from a long scratch that lay across his brow. At length the child sighed and woke; he stirred and looked about him, and then smiled into the face of the forester. And with that smile the wind seemed to die away, the drumming of the rain ceased, and a peace fell on the world.
Then the child turned over and snuggled on his side in the old cloak, and fell asleep. The forester watched by him, gazing on the small, still face, the tangled hair, and the little brown hands, until in exhaustion of body and soul he too slumbered.
He awoke to a blaze of sunlight and the singing of birds; his door was flung wide and the cool morning wind flowed in. The hearth was empty, save for his old cloak and the bloodstained rag. The little tattered clothes that had been hung to dry were gone, and the child had vanished. He rushed to the door, calling out into the new morning: “Little one, little one! Where are you?” But it was the birds that answered, and the squirrels running about on the fallen trees, and the rabbits leaping in the grass.
Then he looked on the devastation of his forest, and he thought of his brothers and the people of his village, and a great pity surged into his heart, and a joy that he was still alive to help them. And he rushed off down the path.
Now the miller had worked in a fever during those dark days to gather in the grain, till all the lord’s harvest was stored safely in the great stone mill. The night the storm descended he climbed into his bed early, pulled the cover over his head to shut out the noise of the tempest and the raging river, prayed that the tiles would not fly off his roof, and sank into a restless slumber. Then he dreamed he was a boy again, playing in the meadow with his brothers, and he dreamed that in anger he struck his younger brother and flung him in the grass, where he lay in a heap and cried pitifully. And in his dream he felt in his heart a tinge of remorse for the loveless blow he had dealt his small brother. And in that instant he awoke, and heard indeed a child crying, over the tumult of the storm.
He lay huddled in his warm bed listening, and a tumult arose in his heart. What was he, an old man, to do? Risk his limbs in such a storm? And what child would be abroad in such a night? Had he lost his wits? But then the crying came again, pitiful and weak, and smote his heart anew. So he rose and rushed to his door. The wind buffeted against it and the rain poured in torrents, but he pushed it open and let it slam to behind him. Then in the wild dark he listened for the cry, and it came again, down the path; and on his knees so that he could feel his way he crawled, calling out, “Little one, little