The case was called and Tryst brought in.  Derek had once more to undergo the torture of those tragic eyes fixed on him.  Round that heavy figure, that mournful, half-brutal, and half-yearning face, the pleadings, the questions, the answers buzzed, bringing out facts with damning clearness, yet leaving the real story of that early morning as hidden as if the court and all were but gibbering figures of air.  The real story of Tryst, heavy and distraught, rising and turning out from habit into the early haze on the fields, where his daily work had lain, of Tryst brooding, with the slow, the wrathful incoherence that centuries of silence in those lonely fields had passed into the blood of his forebears and himself.  Brooding, in the dangerous disproportion that enforced continence brings to certain natures, loading the brain with violence till the storm bursts and there leap out the lurid, dark insanities of crime.  Brooding, while in the air flies chased each other, insects crawled together in the grass, and the first principle of nature worked everywhere its sane fulfilment.  They might talk and take evidence as they would, be shrewd and sharp with all the petty sharpness of the Law; but the secret springs would still lie undisclosed, too natural and true to bear the light of day.  The probings and eloquence of justice would never paint the picture of that moment of maniacal relief, when, with jaw hanging loose, eyes bulging in exultation of revenge, he had struck those matches with his hairy hands and let them flare in the straw, till the little red flames ran and licked, rustled and licked, and there was nothing to do but watch them lick and burn.  Nor of that sudden wildness of dumb fear that rushed into the heart of the crouching creature, changing the madness of his face to palsy.  Nor of the recoil from the burning stack; those moments empty with terror.  Nor of how terror, through habit of inarticulate, emotionless existence, gave place again to brute stolidity.  And so, heavily back across the dewy fields, under the larks’ songs, the cooings of pigeons, the hum of wings, and all the unconscious rhythm of ageless Nature.  No!  The probings of Justice could never reach the whole truth.  And even Justice quailed at its own probings when the mother-child was passed up from Tod’s side into the witness-box and the big laborer was seen to look at her and she at him.  She seemed to have grown taller; her pensive little face and beautifully fluffed-out corn-brown hair had an eerie beauty, perched up there in the arid witness-box, as of some small figure from the brush of Botticelli.

“Your name, my dear?”

“Biddy Tryst.”

“How old?”

“Ten next month, please.”

“Do you remember going to live at Mr. Freeland’s cottage?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do you remember the first night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did you sleep, Biddy?”

“Please, sir, we slept in a big room with a screen.  Billy and
Susie and me; and father behind the screen.”