She has tied a knot with her tongue that she'll not undo with her
teeth.
Caulderwell Farm is built on the edge of the "flats". All round it, in
the days of which I write, was unreclaimed land--broad salt marshes,
where the water crept slowly up at high tide, oozing between the rank
grass and the sand banks, where the wild ducks nested and the frogs
croaked. Fresh-water springs there were too, making tender green
splotches in the midst of the redder salt-fed vegetation, and deep black
pools, that only the wind and the rain and the shy water-birds visited
from one year's end to the other.
From the windows that face south the silver streak of salt water could
be seen five miles as the crow flies across the marshes,--a lonely sea
breaking on no cheerful child-haunted beach, but rolling in in long grey
waves over the soft reed-tufted sand, where the rime clung in crusted
serpentine ridges, and where bits of timber and shells got caught among
the weeds, till the waves carried them back again.
A lonely country, whose lover's salt kisses left her the more barren.
The grey walls of the solitary house stood sturdily square to every wind
that blew; the bit of cultivated ground was dyked all round, and the one
road across the marsh led straight to the house door, and there
stopped, for beyond the farm was no man's land.
The Thorpes had lived here from generation to generation. They boasted
that the marsh ague never touched them, and that their cattle never got
lost in the "mosses". They had always been noted for a particular breed
of horses, for which they got a sale at the annual horse fair at N----;
for the gift of "bone setting," which had appeared in the family again
and again; and for a certain obstinate originality, a "way of their
own," which the first Thorpe had exemplified in his choice of a home.
That good man was popularly supposed to have had a hard tussle with the
marsh devil (who was peculiar to the soil, and was an unclean spirit
with a head like a horse), over the building of the house. Apparently he
had worsted his adversary thoroughly; for Caulderwell Farm still stands,
and was three hundred years old when Margaret--who had been Margaret
Deane--first made its acquaintance. Daughters had been scarce in the
farm. In that respect also the Thorpe family had showed a decided
peculiarity. Of the children born to it by far the larger proportion had
been boys; and the few girls who had had the temerity to open their eyes
in that wind-circled house had generally died before maturity.
Barnabas Thorpe's father had had no sisters, and his wife had brought
him sons only.
He had been ambitious as a young man, separated as he was from the
people about him by his new-fangled ideas, his greater education, and
the touch of something that appeared very like genius in his youth, and
like madness in his old age; the "something" that had been always
cropping up afresh in each succeeding generation.
It seemed likely that his sons might be sent to college, and rise to the
level of gentlefolk; but nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary,
the family fortunes fell back; a sort of melancholy blight seemed to
have infected the man; he lost interest and energy; the tide of his
ambition turned and ebbed, as that quiet creeping sea turned and ebbed
from the pools outside.
People said that the two calamities of his life had soured him, that he
had never been the same after the death of his wife, and that the
accident that had made his first-born, his favourite son, grow up
deformed in body, had given a morbid twist to the father's mind.
It may have been so; but it is more probable that the "twist" was there
before,--born with him as surely as the colour of his eyes, and the
shape of his head, and that it was only accentuated by circumstances.
His wife had died in childbirth; and, out of his passionate and extreme
grief, grew, hardly controllable, an aversion for the innocent cause of
it.
Tom Thorpe "fathered" his brother to the best of his ability, and kept
him out of his real father's sight. Barnabas grew up sturdy and strong;
a lover of "out-of-door" pursuits; a hater of books; a child possessed
of immense animal spirits, noisy, and rather unruly, who played truant
from school whenever he could, and took the consequent thrashings
carelessly; a lad with a violent temper and a kind heart; who never
puzzled his brains about anything, and was popular in spite of being
slightly overbearing and obstinate, as all his forbears had been; a man
who became a wanderer on the face of the earth, and startled every one
who had known him by the suddenness and power of his "conversion".
He had been fifteen years in that service, to which he had given heart
and life, when Margaret first saw him.
During that time he had come back to the farm at intervals, drawn by an
overmastering longing for his native marshes; and, possibly, by a
strong though undemonstrative affection for Tom. He had always returned,
as he had gone, alone; until the night when he had brought home his
wife.
It was late October. In the south, the trees still clung to their red
and gold glories, and there was mellowness in the air, the afterglow of
departing summer; but here, in the north, winter had already claimed
possession, and had cut short brusquely the tender leave-takings of the
warm weather.
The few trees that there were, little gnarled stunted specimens, had
been violently bereft of their leaves, and leaned to one side, adapting
themselves to the constant bullying of the gales, that swept through
their thin knotted branches, and dashed against Caulderwell Farm, as if
in hopes of, at last, laying that stern and sturdy old building low.
The lonely house looked cold and desolate enough from outside; but the
heart of it, the cheerful kitchen where Mr. Thorpe and his son sat, was
warm, even hot, on the coldest of nights.
The man who planned the farm had made the kitchen the noblest room in
it. The prim "best parlour," and even the dining-room which no one ever
used, but which boasted a curiously blazoned ceiling, were nothing in
comparison.
The kitchen was oak-panelled, wide and essentially comfortable, with red
brick floor and huge fireplace fitted with corner seats.
Candles, smoked hams, and rows of onions hung from the rafters. The
china, genuine old willow, was piled on the oak dresser; pewter pots
gleamed cheerfully in the firelight, though they were muddled up with
pipes and fishing tackle in a way that would have made a good
housewife's heart sink; and the rubicund face of an "old toby" beamed
from among them,--a sort of presiding genius.
Two tallow candles stood on the square wooden table in the middle of the
room. The remains of a meal were shoved together at one corner of the
table, and books littered the other side. The candles cast deep eerie
shadows, but never flickered; though the wind was tossing against the
lozenge-shaped windows in angry gusts. The thick walls of the farm were
quite draught-proof, let the storm shriek as it would.
Mr. Thorpe was walking with long uneven steps up and down the room. His
hands--thin narrow hands--were clasped behind his back, his head poked
forward a little.
He was a loose-limbed, gaunt man; big-boned, though he stooped so that
it was difficult to guess his real height; his chest seemed to have sunk
in, and his shoulders to have become permanently rounded.
His clothes hung on him as if they had been put on with a pitchfork, and
his silky black beard straggled untidily over his old-fashioned flowered
waistcoat.
His eyes were deep-set, blue, like his younger son's; but here the
resemblance ended, for Mr. Thorpe was olive-complexioned, and his
features were fine and clear cut. His was a more refined face than the
preacher's. Evidently, Barnabas had inherited from his mother's side his
fair skin and curly hair; also, probably, his incapacity for learning
and his splendid health.
Tom Thorpe sat at the table with a pile of books in front of him; his
shadow danced in the firelight, as if cruelly caricaturing the reality.
He was deformed, hunchbacked, and slightly crippled as well, one leg
being oddly twisted inwards.
He had an odd face too, with a very big forehead, and rough jet black
hair. He might have been taken for any age, having the sort of
countenance that looks as if it had never been young, and yet is slow to
grow old. In reality he was nearly forty.
His eyes were a greenish hazel, with curiously big pupils--very
expressive eyes, that could be as soft as a woman's, though "softness"
was not Tom's ordinary characteristic.
The mouth showed signs of pain endured silently and frequently; the
lines about it were deep, and the lips closed very tightly when he was
not talking.
Seated at the other end of the table, engaged in eating her supper,
which she did with a kind of injured air, as if every mouthful were pain
and grief to her, was a prim middle-aged woman, with an appearance of
fretful, would-be gentility.
When she had finished, she rose with a stifled sob and seemed about to
clear away, but Tom jumped, or rather hopped up, shut his book with a
bang of suppressed irritation, limped round the table with surprising
celerity, and took the plates out of her hands.
"If you are sartain you don't want more, _I'll_ put 'em by," he said.
"I couldn't eat! not with you reading all the time, and Cousin Thorpe
walking up and down like a wild beast in a cage," she murmured, with a
quiver in her voice. "It takes all the heart out of one's meal!"
"But, my good soul, _you_ ain't obliged to read," said Tom, "and I'm
sure you are welcome to be as many hours over your supper as you like.
If you've done, I'll put 'em off the table."
The corners of her mouth twitched downwards. "It never was cast up at me
before that I take longer than is fitting over my food," she said; "but
to see a person reading the whole of supper, with not a word to throw
at one, and never caring what he's eating, no more than if it was dust
and ashes, does break one's spirit; but if you think I consume more than
I am entitled to, Tom, or if----"
"Look 'ee here!" cried Tom, "I never said nothing of the sort. Do you
think I count your mouthfuls? If you dare hint such a thing again, I'll
make you finish the ham before you go to bed." He caught it up by the
bone as he spoke, and waved it aloft. Mrs. Tremnell looked terrified;
she was always rather afraid of Tom, and could not have seen a joke to
save her life. She retreated hastily from the combat to a far-off
corner, where she produced a black silk workbag, and solaced her soul
with tatting.
Tom put away the dishes, unwashed, with wonderful celerity, and buried
himself again in his studies.
He rightly felt that if a woman were once allowed to have a hand in
their extremely untidy domestic arrangements, she would never rest till
she had revolutionised everything.
"Dad an' I'd be tidied out o' the kitchen before we knew where we were,"
he reflected; and poor Cousin Tremnell's desire after usefulness was
vigorously snubbed whenever it durst show itself.
She sniffed over her work every now and then, and Tom glanced up
irritably, yet with a suspicion of a smile at the corners of his lips.
He was just opening his mouth to speak, this time with overtures of
peace, when there was a thundering knock at the outer door.
"Who ever can it be at this time of night?" cried Mrs. Tremnell. And Mr.
Thorpe paused in his restless walk.
"It's Barnabas!" cried Tom, his face lighting up. And he caught up his
sticks, and was in the hall unbolting the massive door before the others
had recovered from their surprise.
They heard his joyful, "Why, lad, I thought it was you!" and then a
smothered exclamation of surprise. And then Barnabas came in, bringing a
whiff of icy air with him.
The moisture was hanging from his beard, and dripping from his hat,
making little pools on the red bricks. But not even Mrs. Tremnell
noticed that; both she and Mr. Thorpe were staring in utter astonishment
at a third figure,--a slight pale woman, with hair cut short, and big
sad eyes, who followed him into the room silently.
"Father, this is my wife," said Barnabas Thorpe. "I wrote you a letter
about her, but I doubt you never got it. It's a dirty night, and she's a
bit weary."
There was a moment's silence; then the old farmer drew himself up, and
held out his hand to the stranger with a gentle dignity that would have
done credit to the finest gentleman in the land.
"You are welcome, ma'am," he said. "Will you come to the fire and rest?
The storm's bad outside."
He demanded no explanation then. It was his house, and she his guest--on
a night too when he wouldn't have shut out a dog,--that was enough for
the present. All the rest could wait.
Cousin Tremnell burnt with curiosity; and so did the hunchback, who
looked dismayed as well; but neither of them durst ask anything.
Cousin Tremnell, indeed, was too much "taken aback," as she would have
expressed it, to move; but Tom hopped across the room with the kettle,
and cast furtive glances at the woman who stood on the hearth slowly
unwinding a heavy shawl, which she let fall at last in a heap at her
feet. She was rather uncanny--like a spirit, or like one of the elves,
with golden hair and no backs to them, who dance on the marsh to the
destruction of the unwary, he thought.
At the second glance he revised that impression: his shrewd eyes told
him that there was nothing of the temptress about this girl; she did not
look bad; she had never inveigled any one; but, good Lord! what a queer
wife to have! How tiny her hands were, and how still she stood; not
blushing, nor rolling her fingers in her apron, nor doing any of the
things women generally do when they are nervous; but only looking
gravely into the fire, and waiting patiently. He made the tea and cut
thick slices of bread and ham, and then addressed himself directly to
the stranger, being filled with great curiosity to hear her voice.
"Will 'ee sit down with us?" he said; and looked inquiringly at his
brother, as though to ask whether this strange wife of his ate or drank
like ordinary mortals.
Barnabas sat down with good appetite; his wife took her place beside
him, and Mr. Thorpe drew his chair to the table as a mark of respect to
his unexpected guest: he had had his own supper long before.
Mrs. Tremnell brought her sewing up to the light, though she was too
flustered to work; and Tom hopped round the table offering Barnabas'
wife everything he could think of.
On the whole, and considering the startling way in which Margaret had
been introduced into their midst, it was wonderful how well the Thorpes
behaved.
Meg's own father could not have shown finer courtesy than did the
preacher's.
She ate her supper with outward composure, if with some inward tremor.
Meg had seen so many strange scenes, and found herself in so many
strange places, since the day when she had shut the door for ever on the
old life, that she was not now so completely overcome by the position as
she might once have been.
The preacher was too indifferent to other people's opinions to suffer
from embarrassment; and, though deeply attached to his home, he had, for
many a long year, held himself quite independent in the ordering of his
life.
Meg noticed that he met his brother's eyes with the reassuring glance
that told of mutual understanding; but that he and his father had
apparently little in common.
The old man's sharply chiselled and refined features, as well as his
gentler accent, surprised her; and she looked up gratefully when he
asked her about their journey.
"You clip your words like a Londoner," he remarked smiling; but he
thought to himself that she was a pretty spoken lass anyhow.
"I have always lived in London part of the year," said Meg. "We went out
of town in July."
"Why?" asked Tom abruptly.
Meg looked confused, and silence fell on them.
"The upper circles vacate town at the close of the opera," said Cousin
Tremnell. She was privately wondering whether the stranger had been in
service, and rather hoped she had. She herself, driven by stress of
circumstances, had been maid in a very "good family" for some months.
She knew that the Thorpes looked down on her for it; and, while she felt
herself their superior in gentility and manners, she was yet not
strong-minded enough for her self-respect to be unruffled by their
opinion.
"We've naught to do wi' upper circles, and doan't want to have," said
Tom. "I'm going to see about your room. Will 'ee come, lad?"
He limped off with marvellous quickness.
Barnabas pushed back his chair, and followed him.
Mr. Thorpe got up too; and resumed the restless pace up and down that
had been broken into by his new daughter-in-law's advent. She sat
twisting the ring on her thin finger, and wondering whether the preacher
was telling the whole story now, and what his brother thought of it. As
it happened, she was not left long in doubt on that score.
The tap of Tom's sticks sounded again along the stone passage; he was
talking eagerly; when he almost reached the door, she heard his final
dictum: "E--eh, lad! Now, I doan't know on my soul which was th' biggest
fule, you or she!"
* * * * *
So Meg was brought to Barnabas Thorpe's kin; and, sitting alone in her
room, looked over the wide marshes that were to become familiar to her;
and knew herself a stranger in a strange land.
It was two months since she had become his wife in name; and the two
months' experience had made its mark on her,--a mark so deep that she
believed herself to be hardly recognisable--a different woman
altogether.
Her face had sharpened in outline, and deepened in expression; the
girlish beauty of colour had faded, and she had cut off her abundant
soft hair.
They had travelled from village to village, the girl sometimes walking,
sometimes getting a lift in passing carts, never owning to weariness, or
pain, or discomfort; but living, apparently, on the preacher's
preaching.
Her zeal had outstripped his, burning like a devouring flame. She had
sung at meetings; she had gone with him everywhere unshrinkingly; she
had given away the very food she should have eaten. And the man had
watched her; first with amazement, then with an overgrowing sense of
uneasiness; never quite understanding what revelations of good and evil
he had brought her face to face with, or how desperately she was
clinging to her religious faith, as a child, frightened in the dark,
clings to its father's hand.
Meg had been not only innocent, but more ignorant of some phases of evil
than would have been possible in a woman of the preacher's own class.
Her brain had nearly reeled with the shock of new experiences; her
horror at much she had seen and heard had often kept her awake when her
body was tired out; and when she slept, her sleep had been haunted with
dreams that exhausted her as much as wakefulness. The supernatural grew
very real to her then; she was happy only when Barnabas was praying or
preaching; she was feverishly eager, growing bigger eyed and thinner day
by day.
As for her companion, he had made up his mind to do his best for the
lass, who was his wife in name only, and whom he had thought to take
through the world, guarding her as he would have guarded a younger
sister; but, as day followed day, and week succeeded week, the "doing
for her" cost him more--both in heart and mind; and, even in pocket!
He was a clever workman; and, though nothing would have induced him to
take money for his faith healing, he had fewer scruples where his knack
of bone setting was concerned.
He gave Margaret every comfort he could think of, but became more and
more uneasily conscious with the flight of time that the physical
hardships of her life were telling on her, and that he did not know how
to prevent it; that there was something unnatural about her fervour,
but that that, too, was beyond him.
He had got into a habit of watching her, and of taking note of her ways,
silently as a rule, because, being accustomed to solitude, he was a
silent man in ordinary intercourse.
For any thought he took for her she thanked him, with a gentle
graciousness that was inherited from her father; but which seemed to her
companion to belong only to this girl, and to have the curious quality
of making his heart beat faster.
He was disconcerted when she cut off her hair; and she was surprised
that he should even notice the loss. She was apt to be surprised in
those days if Barnabas behaved like an ordinary mortal.
Then a change had come over them both--a strain in their relations, ever
tightening, impossible to break through, impalpable, and, finally,
unbearable.
The woman was aware of it first, and tried to ignore it. She sang, and
prayed, and worked with even increased ardour. She was over-taxing her
poor body, that was so unequally yoked; and she knew, and rather
rejoiced at the fact.
Possibly, at the bottom of her heart, she felt that _that_ was one way
of escape from a difficulty that lay in wait for her, unfaced as yet,
and "impossible".
It had been in the evening, after a long day's walk, that the difficulty
had stalked boldly out of its corner.
They had arrived late at an inn; and Meg, too tired to eat, had exerted
herself to amuse a fretful child, who was sitting beside her on a bench.
She seldom spoke to strangers, but, at that moment, she had experienced
a sudden and almost overpowering distaste for her surroundings. The hot,
tobacco-reeking room, the smell of food, the noise every one made in
eating, the way the men spat on the floor, and the way the woman next
her laughed, affected her with a physical loathing. She fought
desperately against the sensation, having a nervous fear that, should
she once stop talking, and let herself go, she might break down
altogether. Her cheeks flushed with the heat of the room, her eyes shone
like stars, and her tongue went faster and faster. The child stared at
her, open-mouthed; the child's mother looked at her rather
inquisitively; but the father, a young mechanic, put down his knife and
fork, and tried to draw the stranger's attention to himself.
All at once Meg was startled by the preacher's pushing back his chair
noisily, and putting a hand on her shoulder.
"If ye can't eat, there's no call for 'ee to stop here chattering. Ye'd
better go upstairs," he said.
His voice sounded a little thick, and his face was flushed, though he
never drank anything but water.
Meg turned and looked at him in utter astonishment; then rose and left
them without a word.
It had been nothing to speak of, nothing to make a fuss about, yet when
she had found herself alone in the tiny room upstairs that he had taken
for her, she had hidden her face in her hands with an indescribable
feeling of shame.
"What right had this man to speak so to her,--to look at her as if he
were jealous? He might, in his capacity of preacher, have reproved her
for breaking any law in the decalogue, and she would not have been
angry; but this was quite different."
Alas! it did not bear thinking of. She had given him "right" enough!
She had felt she could not sit still; the restlessness that had been
growing on her had made anything more bearable than the quiet of her
room. She had put on her bonnet, and gone down again almost immediately.
She had found Barnabas leaning against the porch outside; he had heard
or felt her approach, and turned the moment she had joined him. Voices
from the inn had assailed their ears, in a gust of sound with the
opening of the door; and then they had been alone, wrapped in the sweet
solemn night, and Meg's anger and shame had died. After all, they two
were pilgrims together, through a tumultuous and alien world, and she
had been foolish to have been so disturbed. It had always been
wonderfully easy to Meg to look at things from a purely spiritual point
of view.
"Are you going out again?" she had asked him; and he had answered, with
some constraint, that he was going to catch the lads coming out of the
factory in the town, pointing to where the lights of Nottingham twinkled
in the distance.
"Then I'll come too," Meg had said. "I can start the singing if you want
it; and I always like to hear you speak."
But, for the first time since she had known him, he had refused her
companionship, speaking still with the same constrained tone, and
without looking at her.
"Ye are just killing yourself, lass; I canna let you do that."
The girl had evinced much the same half-reproachful wonder that she had
shown when he had objected to the cutting off of her hair.
"If I am of any service at all," she had said, "you, of all men, should
not try to stop me." And at that, the man had stood upright with a laugh
and a quick passionate gesture, as if he would have stretched out his
arms to her.
"I, of all men! I, of all men!" he had cried. "Lass, do ye suppose I am
no' of flesh and blood, like the others? The Lord has angels enough; let
_me_ ha' the woman by my side; I of all men shouldna stay ye. Come then
an' ye want to, Margaret!" And Meg, aghast, had stood for one moment
with frightened eyes; then had turned and fled.
He had wakened her with a rough shock, and had brought her back to an
earth that was no longer only "the road to Heaven".
It was a natural thing enough that had befallen the strange pair; only
Meg, with her eyes fixed on the stars, had never dreamed of its
possibility, and her heart had sunk.
The next morning the preacher had met her with recovered self-command.
"I spoke to ye as I shouldna have," he had said gravely. "An' I am
'shamed to ha' done it; an' yet it was truth, lass, that it isna
possible to go on as we are. I canna stand by an' see ye get thinner an'
weaker afore my eyes. Will ye let me take ye to my own home an' leave ye
for a spell wi' my own people? Happen ye'll grow stronger at th' farm
an' piece on your life again."
And Meg had acquiesced. She would do as he liked, though he had fallen
from his pinnacle and was no more an inspired prophet; for what else
could she do?
"To piece on her life" would be a puzzling and difficult thing, far more
confusing than to take the kingdom of Heaven by storm, and die of
over-work and under-feeding, like a saint; but she had no choice.
While she sat at her window, her thoughts flew back over all that had
happened, till the remembrance of Tom Thorpe's remark came as a sort of
anti-climax to the painful gravity of her thoughts, and Meg laughed
softly in the darkness.
"Which _was_ the bigger fule?"
Well! if she had been that, there was no need to be a coward as well.
The girl straightened herself with a touch of pride and determination
that was a good sign. "I cut one knot--I'll untie the next," she said;
"and live it out as best I can!"