THE ELDER CHILDREN
§ 1.
For some time after Naomi's death Reuben was sick with grief. Her going
had been so cruel, so unexpected--and he could not forget how they had
found her, her eyelashes wetted with tears.
He also missed her in the house--her soft pale face and gentle ways. He
forgot the sallowness and the peevishness of later years, and pictured
her always with creamy roseal skin and timid voice. He was the only one
who missed her. Mrs. Backfield's softer feelings seemed to have been
atrophied by hard work--she grew daily more and more like a machine; the
children were too young to care much, and Harry was incapable of regret.
However, the strange thing about Harry was that he did indeed seem to
miss someone, but not Naomi. For the first time since little Fanny's
death he began to ask for her, and search for her about the
house--"Where's the pretty baby?--oh, save the pretty baby!" he would
wail--"she's gone, she's gone--the pretty baby's gone."
Reuben, as was usual with him, tried to drown sorrow in hard work. He
spent his whole day either in the yard or in the fields or out on
Boarzell. He was digging a ditch round his new land, to let off the
winter rain, and throughout the cool November damps he was on the Moor,
watching the sunset's fiery glow behind the gorse, seeing the red clay
squash and crumble thickly under his spade--spouting out drops of
blood. In time all this fire and blood brought him back into his old
purpose. Gradually the lust of conquest drove away regret. He had no
more cause for self-reproach than an officer who loses a good soldier in
battle. It is the fortune of war. And Naomi had not died without
accomplishing her work and giving him men to help him in the fight.
The young Backfields were beginning to grow into individualities.
Albert, the eldest, was eight, and showed certain tokens of a wilful
nature, which had not much chance where his father was concerned.
Strange fits of dreaminess alternated with vigorous fits of passion. He
was a difficult child to manage, for in addition to his own moods he had
a certain corrupting influence over his more docile brothers. Reuben
already kept him at work most of the day--either at the village school,
or scaring birds from the orchard or the grain fields.
Robert and Peter also did their share, feeding fowls, weeding
vegetables. Robert was a stolid, well-behaved child, a trifle
uninteresting, but hard-working and obedient. Pete was Reuben's
delight--a wonderfully sturdy little fellow, who often amazed his father
and Beatup by his precocious feats of strength. To amuse them he would
sometimes shoulder Beatup's tools, or pick up a bag of chicken-meal with
his teeth--he could even put his back against a young calf and prevent
it entering a gate or reaching its stall. Reuben was careful not to let
him strain himself, but he loved to handle his son's arms and shoulders,
feeling the swell of the muscles under the skin. He even taught him the
rudiments of boxing; he had had some practice himself as a boy in the
Fair sparring booth, and though of late years he had been too busy to
keep it up, he was a good teacher for little Pete, who could soon lick
all his brothers and even deliver respectable punishment on Beatup's
nether limbs. Richard at the age of six was not of any great
agricultural value, but at the village school he outshone the elder
boys. Sometimes he gave Reuben anxious moments, for the smell of the
midden now and then made him sick, which was scarcely a hopeful sign.
The younger children were to their father so many bundles--meek and
mute, but good to count as they sat at table with porridge bowls and
staring eyes. It never occurred to him to pick any of them up and caress
them. Indeed they had no very distinct personalities apart from Odiam,
though Tilly sometimes looked uncomfortably like Naomi.
§ 2.
Towards the end of '53, Reuben bought a pedigree bull at Rye market. He
knew that he could increase his importance and effectiveness in the
neighbourhood if he started as a cattle-breeder, and there was also a
sound profit to be made by the animal's hiring fees. The next year he
bought ten acres more of Boarzell for grass.
He had now spent the whole of Naomi's dowry, and knew that he was not
likely to get anything more out of old Gasson, whose housekeeper had
during the last year smartly married him. However, he felt that the
money had been laid out to the very best advantage, for Odiam was paying
its way, and had, besides, of late become the most important farm in the
neighbourhood except Grandturzel. Reuben watched Grandturzel jealously,
though he was careful to hide his feelings. It had the advantage of
forty acres of Boarzell, granted by the commissioners. Luckily old Realf
was not very enterprising.
In spite of the farm's new activities, he found that he could still
manage without engaging fresh labour. The odds and ends of work which
his boys took off him and Beatup left them free to attack the bigger
enterprises. And as Odiam grew the children would grow. Even now they
were all impressed for service, except little George, who was delicate
and, moreover, subject to fits. Their work was varied--they scared birds
from the crops, fed the poultry, collected the eggs, drove the cows to
and from pasture, fed the pigs, ran errands to the neighbouring farms.
In course of time Albert learned milking, and could saddle old Crump the
roan, or put him into the gig.
Then, in the house, the little girls were useful. Mrs. Backfield was not
so energetic as she used to be. She had never been a robust woman, and
though her husband's care had kept her well and strong, her frame was
not equal to Reuben's demands; after fourteen years' hard labour, she
suffered from rheumatism, which though seldom acute, was inclined to
make her stiff and slow. It was here that Caro and Tilly came in, and
Reuben began to appreciate his girls. After all, girls were needed in a
house--and as for young men and marriage, their father could easily see
that such follies did not spoil their usefulness or take them from him.
Caro and Tilly helped their grandmother in all sorts of ways--they
dusted, they watched pots, they shelled peas and peeled potatoes, they
darned house-linen, they could even make a bed between them.
Needless to say there was not much playtime at Odiam.
§ 3.
During the next ten years the farm went forward by strides. Reuben
bought seven more acres of Boarzell in '59, and fourteen in '60. He also
bought a horse-rake, and threshed by machinery. He was now a topic in
every public-house from Northiam to Rye. His success and the scant
trouble he took to conciliate those about him had made him disliked.
Unprosperous farmers spoke windily of "spoiling his liddle game." Ditch
and Ginner even suggested to Vennal that they should club together and
buy thirty acres or so of the Moor themselves, just to spite him.
However, money was too precious to throw away even on such an object,
especially as everyone felt sure that Backfield would sooner or later
"bust himself" in his dealings with Boarzell.
After all, he had only fifty-six acres out of a possible three hundred,
and had not made much profit out of them, judging by the austerity of
ways at Odiam. Horse-rakes and steam-threshers could not blind his
neighbours to the absence of muslin curtains and butcher's meat. "And
the way he's working them pore childer, too ... all of 'em hard at it
from mornun till evenun, surelye ... enough to make their mother turn in
her grave, pore girl ... not but wot she hadn't every reason to expect
it, considering the way he treated her," etc. etc.
At Flightshot Manor comment was more enlightened.
"I can't understand, papa," said Anne Bardon, "how you can go on selling
land to that odious Backfield."
"Well, my dear, he pays me good money for it, and I'm in precious need
of that just now."
"But in time the whole Moor will fall into his hands--see if it doesn't.
And he's a Tory, a reactionary. It would be a dreadful thing for the
parish if he became a big landowner."
Anne's politics were the most vigorous in the family.
"My dear, if anyone else would buy the Moor, I'd be only too pleased to
sell it to them. But so far there hasn't been a nibble. Backfield's the
only man who has the temerity to think he could make anything out of a
desert like Boarzell, and I must say I admire his pluck."
"It's only because he has no imagination. He's a thick-skinned brute,
and I hate the idea of a man like that becoming powerful. Why don't you
give the land back to the parish? Acknowledge that grandpapa's
inclosure has failed, and let the people have their common again."
"It's all very well for you to talk, Anne," said her brother Ralph, "you
have your godmamma's fortune, and don't need to think of money. But papa
and I have to think of it, and after all we're making a little, a very
little, out of Boarzell--just enough to keep up the Village Institute.
As time goes on, and Backfield gets richer and more ambitious, we shall
sell larger pieces at higher rates, and then we'll be able to repair
those wretched cottages at Socknersh, and do a lot more besides."
"I think it would be better if you gave up the Institute and let the
cottages tumble down. It's no good trying to raise the people if you
leave a man like Backfield loose among them."
"I think you exaggerate his importance, and fail to realise that of the
improvements we are making in Peasmarsh. I can't help thinking, as most
of the people round here think, that Backfield will, as they call it,
'bust himself' over the Moor. After all he's not educated, and an
uneducated man is hampered even in the least intellectual undertakings."
"I do not agree with you, papa."
Anne turned away from her father and brother, and walked towards the
window. She disliked arguing, she thought it undignified. She was a tall
woman, about twenty-eight years old, severely yet rather imposingly
dressed, with a clear complexion, grey eyes, and a nose which was called
by her friends aquiline, by her enemies hooked. She despised the Squire
in his truck with Odiam, yet she was too fair-minded not to see the
considerations that weighed him. And even she, as she gazed from the
window, at the southward heap of Boarzell--stony, gorsy,
heather-shagged, and fir-crowned--could not withhold a certain
admiration from the man who expected of his own arm and tool to subdue
it.
§ 4.
The Crimean War had meant the stoppage for a time of Russian grain
supplies, and Reuben had taken every advantage of this. He had some
forty acres under grain cultivation, mostly oats, but also some good
kinds of wheat and barley. In rotation with these were peas and clover,
turnips and mangolds. He also had twenty acres of hops--the rest was
pasture for his neat Dutch and Jersey cows, which, with the orchard and
poultry yard, were still the most profitable if not the most glorious of
his exploits. The bull had not proved so splendid an investment as he
had hoped; the farmers of the district could not afford big hiring fees,
and at present his space was too limited for extensive breeding of his
own stock. However, he exhibited Alfriston King at Lewes Agricultural
Show, and won a first prize for him. The next year he sold him to a big
cattle breeder down Horeham way, and bought a cheaper but more
serviceable animal for his own business.
His sons were now growing up--Albert was nearly eighteen, and Peter,
though a year younger, looked a full-grown man, with his immense build
and dark hairy skin. Pete was still the most satisfactory of Reuben's
children, he had a huge and glad capacity for work, and took a real
interest in Odiam's progress, though it was not his life, as it was his
father's. It was strange, Reuben thought, that none of the other boys
seemed to have a glimmer of enthusiasm. Though they had grown up under
the shadow of Boarzell, and from their earliest childhood taken part in
the struggle, they seemed still to think more about the ordinary things
of young men's lives than the great victory before them. It was
disappointing. Of course one expected it of girls, but Reuben's heart
ached a little because the men children on whom he had set such hope and
store cared so little about what was life itself to him. It is true
that Robert worked well, nearly as well as Pete, but that was only
because he was of a docile, tractable nature. He did not share his
father's dreams--Boarzell to him was only a piece of waste ground with
some trees on it.
As for Albert and Richard, they did not even work well, and they
grumbled and shirked as much as they dared. They had ambitions, but so
utterly at variance with Odiam's as to be worse than none. Albert wanted
to be a poet and Richard to be a gentleman.
What there was in either Reuben or Naomi to make a poet of their eldest
son would be hard to say. Perhaps it was the glow of their young love,
so golden and romantic during the first year of their marriage. If so,
there was something of bitter irony in this survival and transmutation
of it. Odiam was no place for poets, and Reuben tried by every means in
his power to knock the poetry out of Albert. It was not the actual
poetry he objected to so much as the vices which went with
it--forgetfulness, unpracticalness, negligence. Albert would sometimes
lose quite half an hour's work by falling into a dream, he also played
truant on occasions, and would disappear for hours, indeed now and then
for a day or more, wandering in the fields and spinneys, tasting the
sharp sweetness of the dawn and the earth-flavoured sleep of the night.
For though he did not care for Odiam he loved the country round it, and
made a wonderland and a dreamland of it. He did not see in Boarzell
Robert's tree-capped waste, though neither did he see his father's enemy
and heart's delight. He saw instead a kind of enchanted ground, full of
mysteries of sun and moon, full of secrets that were sometimes
beautiful, sometimes terrifying. It seemed to have a soul and a voice, a
low voice, hoarse yet sweet; and its soul was not the soul of a man or
of a beast, but the soul of a fetch, some country sprite, that clumped,
and yet could skip ... he used to feel it skipping with him in the
evening wind when the dusk made the heather misty round his knees ...
but he knew that it danced heavy-footed round the farm at night,
clumping, clumping, like a clod.
Reuben had no sympathy with these fancies when they took his son out of
hard-working common sense into idle-handed, wander-footed dreams, or
when perhaps he found them scribbled on the back of his corn accounts.
He did not spare the rod, but Albert had all the rather futile obstinacy
of weak-willed people, and could be neither persuaded nor frightened out
of his dreams.
However, though he was a great trouble to his father, he was not so
irritating as Richard. He had the advantage that one could lay hands on
him and vent one's fury in blows, but Richard had an extraordinary knack
of keeping just on the safe side of vengeance. For one thing he was the
best educated of all Reuben's children, and the result of education had
been not so much to fill his mind as to sharpen his wits to a formidable
extent. For another, he loathed to be beaten, and used all his ingenuity
to avoid it. Reuben could flog Albert for going off to the Moor when he
was told to clean out the pigsties, but he could not flog Richard for
being sick at his first spadeful. As a matter of fact he did actually
perpetrate this cruelty when Richard's squeamishness caused him any
gross inconvenience, but there was no denying that the boy was on the
whole successful in avoiding his dues.
Richard had been the brightest light in the Misses Harmans' school. His
teachers had often praised him, and on one occasion suggested in their
ignorance that he should take up a more intellectual trade than farming.
Then when the Curate-in-Charge had inspected the school he had been
struck by Richard's clever, thoughtful answers, and had, for some months
after his leaving, lent him books. Reuben on discovering this, had gone
over at once to the parsonage, and with all the respect due to a
Minister of the Established Church, had informed Mr. Munk that he didn't
want no nonsense put into his boy's head, and spades and spuds were for
Richard's hands, not books.
"I'm going to mäake a farmer of un, your reverence."
"But he says he doesn't want to be a farmer."
"That's why I've got to _mäake_ un one, surelye."
§ 5.
Reuben had sold Alfriston King for two hundred pounds, and this new
capital made possible another enterprise--he bought twenty head of
sheep. For some time he had considered the advantages of keeping sheep.
It was quite likely that his new land on Boarzell would be mostly
pasture, at all events for some time to come, and sheep, properly
managed, ought to be a good source of revenue as well as a hall-mark of
progress. He did not want Odiam to be a farm of one idea; his father had
kept it ambitionlessly to grass, but Reuben saw grain-growing,
dairy-keeping, cattle-breeding, sheep-rearing, hops, and fruit, and
poultry as branches of its greatness.
He decided that the sheep should be Richard's special charge--they, at
all events, could not make him sick; and if he was kept hard at work at
something definite and important it would clear his mind of gentility
nonsense. Reuben also had rather a pathetic hope that it might stir up
his ambition.
Richard grumbled of course, but discreetly. His brothers were inclined
to envy him--Albert saw more romance and freedom in keeping sheep than
in digging roots or cleaning stables, Pete was jealous of an honour the
recipient did not appreciate, Robert and Jemmy would have liked a new
interest in their humdrum lives. Richard was initiated into the
mysteries of his art by a superannuated shepherd from Doozes, only too
glad of a little ill-paid casual labour.
None of the Backfield boys was ever paid a penny of wages. Reuben's idea
in employing them was to save money, besides he feared that his young
men with full pockets might grow independent. It was essential to his
plan that he should keep them absolutely dependent on him, otherwise
they might leave home, marry without his consent, or at best fritter
away their--or rather his--time by running after girls or drinking at
pubs. It is true that now and then stalwart Pete made a few shillings in
the sparring-booth at the Fair, but Reuben could trust Pete in a way he
could not trust the other boys, so he did not offer much objection.
Pete had once given a shilling to Richard, who had bought with it a
second-hand Latin grammar, which he kept carefully hidden under his
pillow by night, and in his pocket by day. He had an idea that the
mastery of its obscurities would give him a key to freedom, but he had
had so far little opportunity of studying it, as he worked and slept
with his brothers. Richard did not extort the same sympathy for his
rebellion as Albert. Albert had a certain influence over Pete and Jemmy,
which he maintained partly by a definite charm of personality, partly by
telling them tales after they were in bed at night. They had never
betrayed his copy of Byron, also bought with a shilling from Pete, but
Richard dared not trust them with his Lilly. Some day he would manage to
irritate them--show his contempt for their bearish manners, scoff at
their talk, or otherwise insult them--and they would deliver him over,
grammar and all, into his father's hands.
His new occupation, however, gave him undreamed-of opportunities. One of
the advantages of shepherding was that it alternated periods of
strenuous work with others of comparative idleness. During these Richard
would pore over his "hic, hæc, hoc," and parse and analyse on bits of
waste paper. He learned very quickly, and was soon casting about for
means to buy a Greek grammar. He felt that his father could not possibly
keep him at the farm if he knew both Latin and Greek.
Thus Richard lived through the feasts and fasts of the Shepherd's Year.
In spring there were hazy, drowsy days when he sat with his book under
the hedge--some hole close by where he could stuff it if Reuben came
that way--now and then lifting an eye to the timid, foolish faces buried
in the sun-stained meadow-grass. Then later came the dipping, the collie
Havelock barking and blustering at one end of the bath, while old
Comfort poked the animals through it with his crook, and Richard
received them terrified and evil-smelling at the other side. He grew
furious because his hands were all sore and blistered with the dip.
Reuben laughed at him grossly--"Yur granny shall mäake you a complexion
wash, surelye!"
Then came the shearing, that queen of feasts. The local band of shearers
called at Odiam for the first time, and were given an inaugural welcome.
Richard sulked at the honour paid him as shepherd--he felt it was indeed
a case of King among Sweepers. However, in point of fact, he enjoyed the
actual shearing well enough. It was a warm July day, the air full of the
scent of hayseed; the sheep came hustling and panting into the
shearing-pens, and the shearers stripped them with songs and jokes and
shouts of "Shear close, boys!" There was also ale in buckets, brought
out by a girl hired for the occasion, who was stout and pretty and
smiled at Richard. And it was good to watch the yellowish piles of
fleece grow at one's knees, and comical to see the poor shorn sheep
stagger up from the ground, all naked and confused, hardly knowing
themselves, it seemed.
When the shearing was done there was supper in the kitchen at Odiam,
with huge drinks of "black ram," and sheep-shearing songs such as "Come,
all my jolly boys," and "Here the rose-buds in June." Also the Sussex
Whistling Song:
"There was an old Farmer in Sussex did dwell,
And he had a bad wife, as many knew well."
But Richard did not enjoy the supper as much as the shearing, for most
of the men over-ate themselves, and all of them over-drank. Also the
pretty serving-girl forsook him for Albert, who on one occasion was
actually seen to put his arm round her waist, and hold it there till a
scowl from his father made him drop it.
Then in winter came the lambing, which is the shepherd's Lent. Richard
and the old man from Doozes kept long vigils in the lambing hut, and
those nights and days were to young Backfield dreams of red, fuggy
solitude, the stillness broken only by the slip of coals in the brazier,
or the faint bleating of the ewes outside--while sometimes mad Harry's
fiddle wept down the silences of Boarzell.
Richard began to take a new interest in his flock--hitherto they had
merely struck him as grotesque. Their pale silly eyes, their rough,
tic-ridden fleeces, their scared repulsiveness after the dipping, their
bewildered nakedness after the shearing, had filled him either with
amusement or disgust; but now, when he saw them weakly lick the backs of
their new-born lambs, while the lambs' little tails quivered, and tiny,
entreating sounds came from their mouths, he found in them a new beauty,
which he had found nowhere else in his short, hard life--the beauty of
an utterly loving, tender, and helpless thing.
He had his Lilly with him in the hut, for there were long hours of
idleness as well as of anxiety, but he was careful to hide away the book
if Reuben came to inspect; for he knew that his father would have sat
through the empty hours in concentration and expectancy, his ears
straining for the faintest sound. He would have thought of nothing but
the ewes, and he looked to everyone to think of nothing else. But
Richard studied Latin, and the old Doozes man put in plenty of light,
easily startled sleep.
§ 6.
Towards the end of February there was a period of intense cold, and some
heavy falls of snow. Snow was rare in that south-east corner, and all
farm-work was to a certain extent dislocated. Reuben would have liked to
spread blankets over his corn-fields and put shirts on his cattle.
Adverse weather conditions never failed to stir up his inborn
combativeness to its fiercest. His sons trembled as his brain raged with
body-racking plans for fighting this new move of nature's. Richard was
glad to be away from farmyard exertions, most of which struck him as
absurd. He was now busy with the last of his lambing, the snow blew
against the hut from the north-east, piling itself till nothing was to
be seen from that quarter but a white lump. Inside was a crimson
stuffiness, as the fumes of the brazier found their way slowly out of
the little tin chimney. Sometimes before the brazier a motherless lamb
would lie.
There was a lamb there on the last evening in February, its tiny body
and long, weak legs all rosed over with the glow. Above it Richard
crouched, grammar in hand. There had been a lull in the snowstorm during
the afternoon, but now once more the wind was piping and screaming over
the fields and the whiteness heaping itself against the wall.
Suddenly he heard a knock at the door, and before he could answer, it
flew open, and the icy blast, laden with snow, rushed in, and whirled
round the hut, fluttering the pages of Lilly's grammar and the fleece of
the lamb.
"Shut that door!" cried Richard angrily, and then realised that he was
speaking to a lady.
She had shut the door, and stood against it, a tall, rather commanding
figure, in spite of her snow-covered garments and dishevelled hair.
"Oh--ma'am!" said Richard, rising to his feet, and recognising Miss Anne
Bardon.
"I trust I'm not in the way," she said rather coldly, "but the storm is
so violent, and the drifts are forming so fast, that I hope you will not
mind my sheltering here."
Richard was embarrassed. Her fine words disconcerted him. He had often
watched Miss Bardon from a respectful distance, but had never spoken to
her before.
"You're welcome, ma'am," he replied awkwardly, and offered her his
chair.
She sat down and held her feet to the brazier. He noticed that her shoes
were pulped with wet, and the water was pouring off her skirts to the
floor. He did not dare speak, and she evidently did not want to. He felt
the colour mounting to his face; he knew that he was dirty and unkempt,
for he had been hours in the hut--his hands were grimed from the
brazier, and he wore an old crumpled slop. She probably despised him.
Suddenly he noticed that the wet of her garments was dropping on the
lamb. He hastily gathered it up in his arms.
"What a dear little creature!"
She spoke quite graciously, and Richard felt his spirits revive.
"His mother's dead, and I have to be looking after him, surelye."
"Poor little thing!"
She asked him a few questions about the lambing, then:
"You're one of Mr. Backfield's sons, are you not?"
"Yes, ma'am. I'm Richard."
"I've seen you before--in church, I think. Are you your father's
shepherd?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Again I hope I am not in your way. I've been over to see the carter's
widow at Socknersh--he died two days ago, you know, and she hasn't a
penny to go on with. Then when I saw the storm coming I thought I would
take a short cut home across the fields; I was caught after all--and
here I am!"
She smiled suddenly as she finished speaking. It was a sweet smile,
rather aloof, but lighting up the whole of her face with a sudden flash
of youth and kindness. Richard gazed at her, half fascinated, and
mumbled lamely--"you're welcome, ma'am."
She suddenly caught sight of his Latin grammar.
"That's a strange thing to see in a shepherd's hand."
He felt encouraged, for he had wanted her to see the difference between
him and an ordinary shepherd, but had been too awkward to show her.
"I've had it three months--I can construe a bit of Horace now."
"Acquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem," said Anne.
"Onmes eodem cogimen," said Richard, and blushed.
There was silence, but not of the former discouraging sort. Richard was
even bold enough to break it:
"I never knew ladies cud speak Latin."
"Some can. I was educated with my brother, you know, and when we
construed Horace I was always five or six pages ahead. What made you
want to learn Latin?"
"I want to git out o' this."
"Out of your farm duties, you mean?"
"Yes."
"But surely your father would let you adopt some other profession if he
knew you did not like this one?"
Richard shook his head.
"He wants justabout all of us--we've got to push on the farm."
"Yes--I know he is ambitious, but surely he doesn't want unwilling
helpers."
"Oh, he döan't mind who it is, so long as the work's done."
"And don't you care about the farm?"
"I, ma'am?--no. I want to be a gentleman."
Anne was growing interested. This farm boy was gloriously unlike others
of his kind that she had met.
"And you think that if you learn Latin, it'll help you be a gentleman
someday?"
"Yes--and Greek, when I've adone wud the Latin."
"Have you many books?"
"No--only this one."
"Then I must lend you some books."
Richard flushed with pleasure. After all he was not acquitting himself
so badly with this fine lady. They talked together for a few more
minutes, the boy trying to clip his speech like hers. He noticed how
much shorter and crisper it was than his--while he said "döan't," she
could say "don't" twice.
They were interrupted by the entrance of the Doozes shepherd,
accompanied by a swirl of flakeless wind. The old man was astonished and
rather scandalised to find Anne Bardon. She looked positively rakish
sitting there in her steaming clothes, her hat over one ear, her hair in
wisps, and her face more animated and girlish than any of his kind had
ever seen it.
Old Comfort scraped and mumbled, and fussed over the lamb, which the two
Latinists had entirely forgotten. Then Richard, seeing himself free and
the sky clear, offered to help her through the drifts to Flightshot. She
let him accompany her as far as the edge of the Manor estate, where the
going was no longer dangerous.
"Your servant, ma'am," he said, as he opened the gate; and she answered
classically:
"Vale!"
§ 7.
On the whole, the most unsatisfactory of Reuben's sons was Albert.
Richard might be more irritating, but Albert had that knack of public
sinning which gives a certain spectacular offensiveness to the most
trivial faults. Any trouble between Reuben and his eldest son invariably
spread itself into the gossip of ten farms; the covert misdoings of and
private reckonings with the other boys gave place to tempestuous
scandals, windy stormings, in which Albert contrived to grab the general
sympathy, and give a decorative impression of martyrdom.
At the same time he tantalised Reuben with vague hints of enthusiasm,
sometimes almost making him think that, undependable and careless as he
was, he had in him certain germs of understanding. But these were mere
promises that were never fulfilled. Albert would whet Reuben's hopes by
asking him questions about the country round: Why was such and such a
farm called Stilliand's Tower or Puddingcake? Why were there about six
places called Iden Green within a square of twenty miles? Was there any
story to account for the names of Mockbeggar, Golden Compasses,
Castweasel, or Gablehook? But directly Reuben digressed from these
general questions to the holy particulars of Odiam and Boarzell, he
would lose his interest and at last even his attention, escaping into
some far-wandering dream.
Reuben could not understand how his sons could care so little about that
which was all things to him. He had brought them up to his
ambitions--they were not like Naomi, thrust into them in later,
less-impressionable years. He had not been weak with them, and not been
cruel--yet only Pete was at all satisfactory. However, he was not the
man to sit down and despair before his obstacles. He made the best of
things as they were--ground work out of his lads, since he could not
grind enthusiasm, and trusted to the future to stir up a greater hope.
He somehow could not believe that his boys could go through all their
lives not caring for Odiam.
Albert continued weakly and picturesquely to offend. He was now nearly
twenty-one, and had begun to run after girls in a stupid way. Reuben,
remembering how sternly he had deprived himself of pleasures of this
kind, ruthlessly spoiled his son's philanderings ... but the crime he
could not forgive, which set the keystone on his and the boy's
antagonism, was the publication of some verses by Albert in the _Rye
Advertiser_.
To begin with, it was a Liberal paper, and though the verses were of a
strictly non-political kind, dealing chiefly with Amelia's eyes, it
seemed to Reuben shockingly unprincipled to defile oneself in any way
with Radical print. But even without that the thing was criminal and
offensive.
"I wöan't have no hemmed poetry in my family!" stormed Reuben, for
Albert had as usual stage-managed a "scene." "You've got your work to
do, and you'll justabout do it."
"But fäather, it didn't täake up any of my time, writing that poem. I
wrote it at my breakfast one mornun two months ago----"
"Yes, that's it--instead of spending twenty minnut at your breakfast,
you spend forty. You idle away my time wud your hemmed tricks, and I
wöan't have it, I tell you, I wöan't have it. Lord! when I wur your age,
I wur running the whole of this farm alone--every ströak of work, I did
it. I didn't go wasting time over my meals, and writing rubbidge fur
low-down Gladstone päapers. Now döan't you go sassing me back, you young
good-fur-nothing, or I'll flay you, surelye!"
Albert could not help a grudging admiration of his father. Reuben could
be angry and fling threats, and yet keep at the same time a certain
splendour, which no violence or vulgarity could dim. The boy, in spite
of his verses, which were execrable enough, had a poet's eye for the
splendid, and he could not be blind to the qualities of his father's
tyranny, even though that tyranny crushed him at times. Reuben was now
forty-three; a trifle heavier in build, perhaps, but otherwise as fine
and straight a man as he had been at twenty. His clear brown skin, keen
eyes, thick coal-black hair, his height, his strength, his dauntless
spirit, could not fail to impress one in whom the sense of life and
beauty was developing. Albert even once began a poem to his father:
"You march across the mangold field,
And all our limbs do shake...."
But somehow found the subject more difficult to grapple than the
fascinations of Amelia.
With Richard things were different. He despised Reuben as bestial, and
sometimes jeopardised his skin by nearly showing his contempt. He now
had a peculiar friendship with Anne Bardon. They had met accidentally a
second time, and deliberately half a dozen more. In Richard Anne had
made a discovery--he appealed to her imagination, which ran on severe
lines. She sympathised with his ambition to break free from the grind
and grossness of Odiam, and resolved to help him as much as she could.
She lent him books, and guided him with her superior knowledge and
education.
Their meetings were secret, from her family as well as his. But they
were dignified--there was no scurrying like rabbits. Richard's work kept
him mostly on the Flightshot borders of Odiam, and often the grave Anne
would walk down to the hedge, and help him construe Tacitus or parse
from Ovid. There was an old tree by the boundary fence, in the hollow of
which she put new books for him to find, and into which he would return
those he had finished. She was very careful to maintain the right
attitude towards him; he was always her humble servant, he never forgot
to call her "ma'am."
But the disciple of Anne Bardon could aspire to be master among other
men. Richard began to startle and amuse his family by strange new ways.
He took to washing his neck every morning, and neatly combed his hair.
He cut up an old shirt into pocket-handkerchiefs. He began to model his
speech on Miss Bardon's--clipping it, and purging it ridiculously.
Reuben would roar with laughter.
"'Pray am I to remove this dirt?'--Did you ever hear such präaperness
and denticalness?--all short and soft lik the Squire himself. You wash
out all that mucky sharn, my lad, if that's wot you mean."
§ 8.
Robert Backfield was a member of Peasmarsh choir. He had a good, ringing
bass voice, which had attracted the clerk's notice, and though Reuben
disapproved of his son's having any interests outside Odiam, he realised
that as a good Tory he ought to support the Church--especially as the
hours of the practices did not clash with Robert's more important
engagements.
Peasmarsh choir consisted of about eighteen boys and girls, with an
accompaniment of cornets, flutes, and a bass viol--the last played by an
immensely aged drover from Coldblow, who, having only three fingers on
his left hand, had to compromise, not always tunefully, with the score.
The singing was erratic. Eighteen fresh young voices could not fail to
give a certain pleasure, but various members had idiosyncrasies which
did not make for the common weal--such as young Ditch, who never knew
till he had begun to sing whether his voice would be bass or alto, all
intermediary pitches being somehow unattainable--or Rosie Hubble from
Barline, who was always four bars behind the rest--or even young Robert
himself, who in crises of enthusiasm was wont to sing so loud that his
voice drowned everyone else's, or in a wild game of follow-my-leader led
the whole anthem to destruction.
Robert loved these choir practices and church singings. Though he never
complained of his hard work, he was unconsciously glad of a change from
the materialism of Odiam. The psalms with their outbreathings of a
clearer life did much to purge even his uncultured soul of its
muddlings, the hymns with their sentimental farawayness opened views
into which he would gaze enchanted as into a promised land. He would
come in tired and throbbing from the fields, scrape as much mud as
possible off his boots, put on his Sunday coat, and tramp through the
dusk to the clerk's house ... the little golden window gleaming to him
across Peasmarsh street and pond was the foretaste of the evening's
sweetness.
The practices were held in the clerk's kitchen, into which the
choristers would crush and huddle. On full attendance nights all elbows
touched, and occasionally old Spodgram's bow would be jolted out of his
hand, or someone would complain that Leacher was blowing his trumpet
down his neck. Afterwards the choristers would wander home in clusters
through the fields; the clusters generally split into small groups, and
then the groups into couples. The couples would scatter widely, and vex
their homes with late returnings.
Robert was first of all part of a cluster which included young Coalbran
from Doozes, Tom Sheane from Dinglesden, the two Morfees from Edzell,
Emily Ditch, and Bessie Lamb from Eggs Hole. Then in time the company
reduced itself to Robert, Emily, and Bessie--and one wonderful night he
found himself with Bessie alone. How they had chosen each other he could
not say. All he knew was that for sometime she had become woven with the
music into his thoughts. She was a poor labourer's daughter, living in
a crumbled, rickety cottage on Eggs Hole Farm, helping her mother look
after eight young children. She was only seventeen herself, sturdy yet
soft, with a mass of hay-coloured hair, and rather a broad face with
wistful eyes. Robert thought she was beautiful--but Robert thought that
old Spodgram's playing and the choir's singing were beautiful.
Though they were technically a Couple, they never spoke of love. They
never even kissed or held each other's hands, however tenderly the
velvet darkness called. He told her about his work at Odiam--about the
little calf that was born that day, or the trouble he had had, patching
the rent in the pigsty, or how the poultry had not taken well to their
new food, but preferred something with more sharps in it. She in her
turn would tell him how she had washed little Georgie's shirt--taking
advantage of a warm day when he could run about naked--how her mother
had lamentable hard pains all down her back, how her father had got
drunk at the harvest supper and tried to beat her.
Sometimes they looked in the hedges for birds' nests, or watched the
rabbits skipping in the dusk. They would gape up at the stars together
and call the constellations by names of their own--Orion was "the gurt
tree," and Cassiopeia was "the sheep trough," and Pegasus was "the
square meadow."
It was all very wonderful and sweet to Robert, and when at last he crept
under the sheets in the apple-smelling garret he would dream of him and
Bessie wandering in the Peasmarsh fields--or sometimes in those starry
meadows where the hedges shone and twinkled with the fruit of
constellations, and Charles drove his waggon along a golden road, and
sheep ate from a flickering trough under a great tree of lamps.
§ 9.
Bessie tinted the world for Robert like a sunrise. All through the day
he carried memories of lightless woods, of fields hushed in the swale,
of the smudge of her old purple cotton beside him--of, perhaps, some dim
divine moment when his hand had touched hers hanging at her side.
Then winter came, with carol-singing, and the choristers tramped round,
lantern-led, from farm to farm. There in the fluttering light outside
Kitchenhour, Old Turk, Ellenwhorne, or Edzell, Robert would watch
Bessie's chicory-flower eyes under her hood, while the steam of their
breath mingled in the frosty air, and they drooped their heads together,
singing to each other, only to each other, "Good King Wenceslas," "As
Joseph was a-walking," or "In the Fields with their Flocks."
As they were both simple souls, their love only made the words more
real. Sometimes it seemed almost as if they could see up in the white
glistering field behind the barn, the manger with the baby in it, the
mother watching near, and the ox and the ass standing meekly beside them
in the straw. Bessie said she felt sure that the shepherds watched their
flocks by night in the little old meadow at the corner of Totease ...
she once thought she had heard them singing. But she would not go and
look.
As the year climbed up again into spring, a tender pity for Bessie
mingled with Robert's love. It was not the pity which begets love, but
the sweeter kind which is begotten of it. Robert forgot all about his
own hard life, the monotonous ruthless grind of work, the absence of all
softness, homeliness, or sympathy, the denial of all gaiety and sport.
He thought only of Bessie's troubles, and would have given the world to
lighten them. He longed to give her some little treat, or a present.
But he had no money. For the first time he inwardly rebelled against the
system which kept him penniless. None of the boys had any money, except
Pete on Fair days--not even Albert, for the _Rye Advertiser_ did not pay
its poets. For the first time Robert saw this as unjust.
March blew some warm twilights to Peasmarsh, and the choristers began
their summer lingering. Bessie and Robert often took the longer way home
by Ellenwhorne--he would not leave her now till they were at her cottage
door, and often he would run home hare-footed from Eggs Hole, afraid
that he might be shut out of Odiam, and perhaps his precious comradeship
discovered and put under the tyrant's ban.
Then came an evening in April, when the air smelled of primroses and
young leaves. The choir practice was early, and rifts of sunshine sloped
up the clerk's kitchen, linking in one golden slant Robert's dark
healthy face just under the ceiling, Bessie's shoulders pressed against
his arm, the frail old hands of Joe Hearsfield on his flute, and the
warm plum-brown of the bass viol close to the floor. To Robert it was
all a dream of holiness and harmony. Old Spodgram confined himself
almost entirely to two notes, Miss Hubble insisted on her four bars of
arrears, young Ditch extemporised an alto of surprising reediness, and
Robert bellowed the last lines of the last verse just as the other
choristers were loudly taking in breath preparatory to line three--but
the whole thing was to him a foretaste of Paradise and the angels
singing ever world without end.
When the practice was over it was still light, and Robert and Bessie
turned inevitably along the little bostal that trickles through the
fields towards Ramstile. As usual they did not speak, but in each glowed
the thought that they had a full two hours to live through together in
the mystery of these sorrowless fields.
The sun set as they came to Ellenwhorne. They stood and watched it dip
behind the little cluster of roofs and oast-houses in the west. The
turrets of the oasts stood out black against the crimson, then suddenly
they purpled, faded into their background of night-washed cloud.
The fields were very dark in their low corners, only their high sweeps
shimmered in the ghostly lemon glow. Out of the rabbit-warrens along the
hedges, from the rims of the woods, ran the rabbits to scuttle and play.
Bessie and Robert saw the bob of their white tails through the dusk, and
now and then a little long-eared shape.
The boy and girl were still silent. But in the consciousness each had of
the other, kindled and spread a strange dear poignancy. They walked side
by side through the dusk, now faintly cold. Dew began to tremble and
shine on the grass, to pearl the brambles and glimmer on the twigs.
Robert looked sideways at Bessie. She was colourless in the dark, or
rather coloured all over with the same soft grey, which gathered up into
itself the purple of her gown and the pale web of her hair. In her eyes
was a quiver of starlight.
Their feet splashed on the soaking grass, and suddenly Bessie stopped
and lifted her shoe:
"It's justabout wet, Robby."
He looked.
"So it be--I shudn't have brought you through all this damp grass. We
shud have gone by the lane, I reckon."
"Oh, no," she breathed, and her voice and the half-seen glimmer of her
eyes troubled him strangely.
"Lookee, I'll carry you--you mustn't git wet."
She opened her lips to protest, but the sound died on them, for he
stooped and swept her up in his arms. She slipped her hand to his neck
to steady herself, and they went forward again towards the south.
Bessie was a sturdily built little person, but the weight of her was a
rich delight, and if his arms strained, they strained with tenderness as
well as with effort. Under them her frock crushed and gave out a
fragrance of crumpled cotton, her hand was warm against his neck, and on
his cheek tickled her soft hair. The shadows ran towards them from the
corners of the field, slipping like ghosts over the grass, and one or
two pale stars kindled before them, where the sky dropped into the
woods.... An owl lifted his note of sadness, which wandered away over
the fields to Ellenwhorne....
Her young face bowed to his neck, and suddenly his lips crept round and
lay against the coolness of her cheek. She did not move, and he still
walked on, the grass splashing under his feet, the rabbits scampering
round him, showing their little cotton-tails in the dark.
Then his mouth stole downwards and groped for hers. Their lips fluttered
together like moths. Then suddenly she put her arms round his neck, and
strained his head to her, and kissed him and kissed him, with queer
little sobs in her throat....
He still walked on through the deepening night and skipping rabbits. He
never paused, just carried her and kissed her; and she kissed him,
stroking his face with her hands--and all without a word.
At last they reached the lane by Eggs Hole Cottage, which with
shimmering star-washed front looked towards the south. He stopped, and
she slid to the ground. Then suddenly the words came.
"Oh, my liddle thing! My dear liddle thing ... my sweet liddle thing!"
"Robby, Robby...."
They kissed each other again and again, eagerly like children, but with
the tears of men and women in their eyes.
"Robby ... I love you ... I love you so!"
"Oh, you liddle thing!"
They were hungry ... their arms wound about each other and their faces
pressed close, now cheek to cheek, now with lips fluttering together in
those sweet kisses of youth which have so much of shyness in their
passion.
Suddenly a light kindled in the little house. Bessie slipped from him,
and ran up the pathway into the dark gape of the door.
§ 10.
In August Reuben bought ten more acres of Boarzell, and the yoke
tightened on Odiam. All had now been pressed into service, even the
epileptic George. From morning till night feet tramped, hoofs stamped,
wheels rolled, backs bent, arms swung. Reuben himself worked hardest of
all, for to his actual labour must be added long tramps from one part of
the farm to the other to superintend his sons' work. Besides, he would
allow nothing really important to be undertaken without him. He must be
present when the first scythe swept into the hay, when his wonderful
horse-reaper took its first step along the side of the cornfield, he
must himself see to the spreading of the hops over the drying furnaces
in the oasts, or rise in the cold twinkling hour after midnight to find
out how Buttercup was doing with her calf.
Pete made an able and keen lieutenant, but the other boys were still
disappointing. It is true that Benjamin worked well and was often smart
enough, but he had a roving disposition, which was more dangerous than
Albert's, since it led him invariably down to the muddy Rother banks at
Rye, where the great ships stood in the water, filling the air with good
smells of fish and tar. Jemmy would loaf for hours round the capstans
and building-stocks, and the piles of muddy rope that smelled of ooze,
and he would talk to the sailormen and fishermen about voyages to the
Azores and the Cape or to the wild seas south of the Horn, and would
come home prating of sails and smoke-stacks, charts and logs, and other
vain things that had nothing to do with Odiam. Reuben remembered that
the boy's mother came of a family of ship-builders and sailormen, and he
would tremble for Jemmy's allegiance, and punish his truancies twice as
severely as Albert's.
Another trial to him now was that Robert seemed half-hearted. Hitherto
he had always worked conscientiously and well, even though he had never
been smart or particularly keen; but now he seemed to loaf and slack--he
dawdled, slipped clear of what he could, and once he actually asked
Reuben for wages! This was unheard-of--not one of Reuben's sons had ever
dreamed of such a thing before.
"Wages!--wot are you wanting wages fur, young räascal? You're working to
save money, not to earn it. You wait till all yon Moor is mine, and
Odiam's the biggest farm in Sussex, before you ask fur wages."
Up till then Robert had never troubled much about money. He did not want
to buy books like Albert and Richard, neither did he care for drinking
in Rye pubs with fishermen like Jemmy. But now everything was changed.
He wanted money for Bessie. He wanted to marry her, and he must have
money for that, no matter how meanly they started; and also he wanted to
give her treats and presents, to cheer the dullness of her life. Reuben
had indeed been wise in trying to keep the girls away from his sons!
There are no two such things for sharpening human wits as fullness of
love and shortness of cash. Robert's brain was essentially placid and
lumbering, but under this double spur it began to work wonders. After
much pondering he thought of a plan. It was part of his duties to snare
rabbits on Boarzell. Every evening he went round and inspected the
traps, killed any little squealing prisoners that were in them, and sold
them on market days at Rye. It was after all an easy thing to report and
hand over the money for ten rabbits a week, while keeping the price of,
say, three more, and any other man would have thought of it sooner.
In this way he managed to do a few little things to brighten Bessie's
grey life--and his own too, though he did not know it was grey. Every
week he put aside a shilling or two towards the lump sum which was at
last to make their marriage possible. It was Reuben's fight for Boarzell
on an insignificant scale--though Robert, who had not so much iron in
him as his father, could not resist spending money from time to time on
unnecessary trifles that would give Bessie happiness. For one thing he
discovered that she had never been to the Fair. She had never known the
delights of riding on the merry-go-round, throwing balls at Aunt Sally,
watching the shooting or the panorama. Robert resolved to take her that
autumn, and bought her a pair of white cotton gloves in preparation for
the day.
Unluckily, however, he was not made for a career of prolonged fraud, and
he ingloriously foundered in that sea of practical details through which
the cunning man must steer his schemes. He fixed the number of rabbits
to be sold at Rye as ten a week, pocketing the surplus whether it were
one or six. This was a pretty fair average, but its invariable
occurrence for seven or eight weeks could not fail to strike Reuben,
whose brain was not placid and slow-moving like his son's.
The one thing against the idea that Robert was swindling him was that he
thought Robert utterly incapable of so much contrivance. However, he had
noticed several changes in the boy of late, and he resolved to wait
another two weeks, keeping his eyes open and his tongue still. Each week
ten rabbits were reported sold at Rye and the money handed over to him.
On the morning of the next market day, when Robert's cart, piled with
eggs, fruit, vegetables, and poultry, was at the door, Reuben came out
and inspected it.
"Let's see your conies," he said briefly.
It was as if someone had suddenly laid a cold hand on Robert's heart.
He guessed that his father suspected him. His ears turned crimson, and
his hands trembled and fumbled as he opened the back of the cart and
took out his string of properly skinned and gutted conies.
Reuben counted them--ten. Then he pushed them aside, and began rummaging
in the cart among cabbages and bags of apples. In a second or two he had
dragged out five more rabbits. Robert stood with hanging head, flushed
cheeks, and quivering hands, till his father fulfilled his expectations
by knocking him down.
"So that's the way you queer me, you young villain. You steal, you hide,
you try to bust the farm. It's luck you're even a bigger fool than you
are scamp, and I've caught you justabout purty."
He kicked Robert, and called up Richard to drive the cart over to Rye.
An hour later the whole of the boy's plans, and worse still his sinews
of war, were in the enemy's possession. Reuben ransacked his son's mind
as easily as he ransacked his pockets and the careful obvious little
hiding-place under his mattress where lay the twenty-two shillings of
which he had defrauded Odiam. His love for Bessie, his degraded and
treacherous hopes, filled the father with shame. Had he then lived so
meanly that such mean ambitions should inspire his son?
"A cowman's girl!" he groaned, "at Eggs Hole, too, where they döan't
know plums from damsons! Marry her! I'd sooner have Albert and his
wenches."
"I love her," faltered Robert.
"Well, you'll justabout have to stop loving her, that's all. I'm not
going to have my place upset by love. Love's all very well when there's
something wud it or when there's nothing in it. But marrying cowmen's
girls wudout a penny in their pockets, we can't afford to kip that sort
o' love at Odiam."
"Fäather," pleaded Robert, "you loved my mother."
"Yes--but she wur a well-born lady wud a fortun. D'you think I'd have
let myself love her if she'd bin poor and a cowman's daughter? Not me,
young feller!"
"But you can't help loving, surelye."
"Well, if that's wot you think, the sooner you find out that you can
help loving the better. Did I ever hear such weak womanish slop! Help
loving? You'll help it before you're many days older. Meantime you kip
away from that girl, and all them hemmed choir-singings which are the
ruin of young people."
The colour rushed into Robert's cheeks, and something very unfamiliar
and very unmanly into his eyes.
"I'll----" he began desperately. But even Robert had the wit not to
finish his sentence.
§ 11.
For the next two or three days the boy was desperate. His manhood was in
a trap. He thought of a dozen plans for breaking free, but whichever way
he turned the steel jaws seemed to close on him. What could he do? He
was not strong and ruthless like his father, or he might have broken his
way out; he was not clever like Richard, or he might have contrived it.
Money, money--that was what lay at the bottom of his helplessness. Even
if he had a very little he could take Bessie away and marry her, and
then they could both find work together on a farm. But he had not a
penny. He tried to borrow some of Pete, but Pete showed him his empty
pockets:
"If you'd asked me after the Fair, lad, I might have been able to let
you have a shillun or two. But this time o' year, I'm as poor as you
are."
Meantime Bessie knew nothing of the darkness in her lover's life. She
was working away sturdily and patiently at Eggs Hole, looking forward to
meeting him on practice night, and going with him to the Fair a week
later.
Saturday came, the day which had always been Robert's Sabbath, with a
glimpse into Paradise. He toiled miserably with the horses, Reuben's
stern eye upon him, while hatred rose and bubbled in his heart. What
right had his father to treat him so?--to make a prisoner and a slave of
him? He vowed to himself he would break free; but how?--how?... A chink
of pence in Reuben's pocket seemed like a mocking answer.
In the evening the taskmaster disappeared, to gloat over his
wheatfields. Robert knew he would not be back till supper-time; only
Albert was working with him in the stable, and he felt that he could
persuade his brother to hold his tongue if he disappeared for an hour or
two.
"I want to go into Peasmarsh," he said to Albert; "if Fäather comes and
asks where I am, you can always tell him I've gone over to Grandturzel
about that colt, can't you now?"
"Reckon I can," said Albert good-naturedly, knowing that some day he
might want his brother to do the same for him.
So Robert put on his Sunday coat as usual and tramped away to the
village. The only drawback was that from the high wheatfield Reuben
distinctly saw him go.
He reached the clerk's house a little while after the practice had
started, and stood for a moment gazing in at the window. A terrible
homesickness rose in his heart. Must he really be cut off from all these
delights? There they stood, the boys and girls, his friends, singing
"Disposer Supreme" till the rafters rang. Perhaps after to-night he
would never sing with them again. Then his eyes fell on Bessie, and the
hunger drove him in.
He took his place beside her, but he could not fix his mind on what they
sang. In the intervals between the anthems he was able to pour out
instalments of his tragedy. Bessie was very brave, she lifted her eyes
to his, and would not let them falter, but he felt her little coarse
fingers trembling in his hand.
"I döan't know what I'm to do, my dear," he mumbled; "I think the best
thing 'ud be fur me to git work on a farm somewheres away from here, and
then maybe in time I cud put a liddle bit of money by, and you cud join
me."
"Oh, döan't leave me, Robert."
For the first time the courage dimmed in her eyes.
"Wot else am I to do?" he exclaimed wretchedly; "'täun't even as if I
cud go on seeing you here. Oh, Bessie! I can't even täake you to the
Fair on Thursday!"
"Wot does a liddle thing lik that count when it's all so miserable?"
"Disposer Supreme,
And judge of the earth,
Who choosest for thine
The weak and the poor...."
The anthem crashed gaily into their sorrow, and grasping the hymn-sheet
they sang together.
"Wöan't you be never coming here no more?" whispered Bessie in the next
pause.
"Depends on if my fäather catches me or not."
He drank in the heat and stuffiness of the little room as a man might
drink water in a desert, not knowing when the next well should be. He
loved it, even to the smoke-stains on the sagging rafters, to the faint
smell of onions that pervaded it all.
"All honour and praise,
Dominion and might,
To God, Three in One,
Eternally be,
Who round us hath shed
His own marvellous light,
And called us from darkness
His glory to see."
Young Ralph Bardon had come into the room, and stood by the door while
the last verse was being sung. He was there to give an invitation from
his father, for every year the Squire provided the choristers with a
mild debauch at Flightshot. Robert had been to several of these, and
they glittered in his memory--the laughter and games, the merry fooling,
the grand supper table gay with candles. What a joke it had been when
someone had given the salt to Rosie Hubble instead of the sugar to eat
with her apple pie, and when some other wag had pulled away Ern
Ticehurst's chair from under him....
"Thank you, sir--thank you kindly."
The invitation had been given, and the choristers were crowding towards
the door. Robert followed them mechanically. It was raining hard.
"Oh, dear, oh, dear," said Bessie, "I never brought my cloak."
"You must put on my coat."
He began taking it off when he heard someone beside them say:
"I have a great-coat here."
Robert turned round and faced Bardon, whose eyes rested approvingly on
the gleaming froth of Bessie's hair.
"I'm driving home in my gig with a rug and hood," continued the young
man, "so I've no need of a great-coat as well."
Robert opened his mouth to refuse. He was offended by the way the Squire
looked at Bessie. But on second thoughts he realised that this was no
reason for depriving her of a wrap; his own coat was too short to be
much good. After all he could see that the acquaintance went no further.
Bessie had, however, already taken the matter out of his hands by
saying--"Thank you kindly, sir."
"You see, this is my very best gown," she confided to Robert outside
the house, "and I döan't know wot I shud do if anything happened to it."
"Well, you're not to täake that coat back to Flightshot yourself. Give
it to me when we come to Eggs Hole, and I'll see that he has it."
"Very well, dear," she answered meekly.
They did not speak much on that walk home. Their minds seemed dank and
washed out as the night. Their wet fingers gripped and twined ... what
was the use of speaking? Everything seemed hopeless--no way to turn, no
plans to make, no friends to look to.
It was quite dark when they reached Eggs Hole, and parted after kisses
no longer as shy as they used to be.
On arriving at Odiam, Robert was seized by his father and flogged within
an inch of his life.
§ 12.
Reuben thought that he had efficiently broken his son's rebellion. All
the next day Robert seemed utterly cowed. He was worn out by the misery
of the last few hours, and by the blows which in the end had dulled all
the sore activities of mind and soul into one huge physical ache. Reuben
left him alone most of the day, smiling grimly to himself when he saw
him. Robert spent several hours lying on the hay in the Oast barn, his
mind as inert and bruised as his body. He had ceased to contrive or
conjecture, even to dread.