THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSOR
WHEN the Pig-driver heard from Rhys that George had gone, apparently
for good and all, his rage was great; his tight little lips had only
one movement with which to express anything he felt, and they grew yet
tighter in a grin as he sat on a log in the underground room and heard
the story. His mouth had the appearance of being embedded in his round
face. He was angry with Walters for his part in ridding him of such a
servant as he could hardly hope to replace, but he did not venture to
give his anger the rein, being too much aware of the loneliness of
their position. He was a cautious man, and contented himself with
laughing immoderately as Rhys told him of his privations, and making
some very unseasonable jokes.
"How we do come down i' the world," he said sympathetically, taking
off his hat and turning it critically round in his hands. "Well, well,
to be sure, who would a' thought, when ye were such a fine figger of a
feller at Great Masterhouse, that ye'd come to this?" His eyes
twinkled as he spread out his fingers on his knees.
"Little did I think," he continued, "when I were settin' down to the
fire last night wi' my drop o' cider an' my bit o' cold goose, that
you was starvin' here like a beggar man, an' would be thankful to me
for any crust o' bread I could spare ye."
It was rather a surprise to Bumpett when he saw how willing Rhys
Walters was to remain in George's place, and to do George's work. He
proposed the scheme with considerable caution, expecting an indignant
refusal, but the other took it quietly enough, and agreed to serve him
as George had done, and to receive his daily food in return and the
use of the miserable roof under which they sat.
"Ye bean't thinking to leave the country then?" said the Pig-driver
with some curiosity.
"Not yet," said Rhys curtly, reddening as he spoke.
The old man looked shrewdly at him out of his pig-eyes.
"Ye've got some game o' your own, I'll be bound," he said, with one
foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. "Well, it's nowt to do wi' me,
though I am your master now," he added, as he disappeared safely
through the trap-door.
Rhys now cared neither how he existed nor what he did so long as he
could see Isoline Ridgeway, and time, for him, was measured merely by
the interval between one meeting and another. He snatched at Bumpett's
proposal, which would open the road to all he lived for and give him
an occupation he liked. He had grown perfectly reckless, looking no
farther than the actual present; his old identity, his old interests
and possessions were lost, and no new life, however prosperous, could
make up to him for a final parting with Isoline. He was like a man
upon whom the sun bursts from behind some dismal pack of clouds,
dazzling his eyes, heart, brain and imagination till he can no longer
clearly see the objects around. He was blinded, overpowered; his
self-important soul was humbled by the perfections with which he had
invested his queen.
His very face had altered since the days before the Rebecca riots, for
the clear tan of his skin was changed to a sort of pallor due to his
indoor life. His roamings in the dusk and during the dark hours of
night kept him in health, and his limbs had long ago recovered their
strength, but he no longer wore the expression of self-centred
carelessness which had characterized him a few months before. His keen
eyes had a look of pre-occupation, the look of a man whose soul
inhabits one place while his body lives in another. All his life his
adaptability had been so great that, from every new change and
experience, he had gathered some surface difference. Now, for the
first time, a thing had happened which had gone down deep and reached
the real man. It could not change him altogether, but it had raised
the best flower which had ever sprung up from the poor and untilled
ground of his nature.
James Bumpett was scarcely the man to let a debtor slip through his
fingers as George had done, and he cast about on every hand to find
out what had become of the truant. Williams, who was working among the
cabbage-beds of the garden at Great Masterhouse, glanced over the
fence one day to see the rubicund face and tall hat of the Pig-driver
on the other side of it. The two men looked at each other, and
Bumpett's mouth made itself into a slit; he was so small that he could
only just see over the high green boards.
"Well, to be sure!" he exclaimed, chuckling. "Well, well, I never
did!"
The other met his eyes with a sullen calmness. "I've left you," he
said.
"Name o' goodness! Have ye, now? Well, ye might say I suspected it."
The old man came nearer to the fence, and, taking hold of the pointed
boards of the top, drew himself up, till his hat had risen about a
foot over it. Dignity was one of the few things he did not understand.
"Mind yourself; there's nails," said George.
"I suppose," remarked Bumpett, "that ye thought ye'd seen the last o'
me."
Williams resumed his work, and went on turning over the earth which he
was preparing for vegetable seeds. He determined to take no more
notice of the Pig-driver, who had found in the fence a suitable cranny
in which to insert his foot, and showed no signs of departure. His
horse and cart were standing a little way off.
"There's a sight o' sludge in that garden," he remarked at last,
smiling agreeably.
Many excelled George in speech, but silence was rather a gift of his.
His spade went on vigorously. Bumpett began to hum as he looked at the
bare branches of the pear-tree trained against one end of the farm
wall.
"Don't you be afeard to speak up, George Williams," he said
reassuringly, when he had finished his tune.
It was a chilly morning, and the wind which swept over the plateau to
Great Masterhouse was beginning to touch up the old man's hands in a
disagreeable way; his knuckles looked blue as he grasped the fence.
The thud of the spade going into the earth was the only response.
"Ye'll have something to say when I take the law on ye for that
rent-money," he called out as he slipped down to the ground and
climbed into his cart.
Mrs. Walters soon discovered that, in doing well for Williams, she had
also done well for herself. Her new servant worked harder than any one
on the farm, and was so quiet and orderly that he gave trouble to
neither mistress nor men. Although she despised flowers for mere
ornament's sake, she had some practical knowledge of gardening as far
as the useful part of it went, and, her father having been a seedsman,
she was learned in planting and the treatment of parsley and carrots
and everything that contributed to the household table. Under her
management George worked in the garden; he mended gates and fences,
pumped water, and turned his hand to anything. She exacted from him a
promise to go to chapel every Sunday, and looked upon him with that
proprietary feeling that a man may have for a dog which he has
personally saved from drowning. Sometimes she spoke to him of his
soul, which abashed him terribly.
Although she wore a black silk dress on Sundays, as befitted a woman
of her means, she was up and out early on week-days, walking through
cow-house and poultry-yard, and appearing now and then in places in
which she was not expected, to the great confusion of the idle.
She was just to her men, and, according to her lights, just to her
maids. To the latter she was pitiless on the discovery that any one of
them had so much as the ghost of a love-affair. Such things were
intolerable to her, a shame and a hissing. For a money trouble she
would open her purse, having had experience of poverty in the days
before her parents grew prosperous; for a love trouble she had nothing
but a self-satisfied contempt, and, for a sister who had loved too
much--from whatever reason--she had a feeling which would have made
her draw in her skirts with a sneer, should she pass such an one in
the street. To her, the woman who had staked her all upon one man and
lost it was the same as another who made a profession of such lapses;
she had excellent theories of life, but she had seen nothing of it.
She was, however, true to them, true to herself and true in her
speech, though, in her mind, there was but one point of view to be
taken by all decent people, and that was her own. Her leniency to
Williams, who could look back on past dishonesty, was one of those
contradictions which come, now and then, even to the consistent, and,
for once in her life, she was ready to believe that a back-slider
might yet retrace his steps. Besides, George was a man, and she had
the idea, curiously common to good women, that, though a man's sins
might possibly be condoned, a woman's were unpardonable.
While George went on with his work so quietly, his mind was anything
but quiet. He knew his late master well enough to be sure that his
threat was no idle one, and that, if the money he had owed him for so
long was not produced, Bumpett would never rest until he had him
safely by the heels in jail. He had lately been assured in chapel that
the way of the transgressor was hard, but it struck him, as he delved
on, that the way of the transgressor trying to reform was even harder.
"Who was that climbing upon the fence?" called the voice of Mrs.
Walters.
He looked up to see her standing at an open window with an expression
of some displeasure upon her face.
"It was Mr. Bumpett, ma'am--the Pig-driver at Abergavenny."
"Why was he shouting in that way into my garden? I heard him say
something about 'the law.'"
"'Twas at me," replied Williams, feeling rather foolish.
He drove his spade into the earth with a blow, and went up to the
window, mopping his forehead.
"I'm sorry," he began, "but I'm afeard I'll have to go."
"To go? And why?"
"Ah, 'tis no choice o' mine."
"Where are you going, Williams?"
"'Tis very like to be to the jail. I owe Mr. Bumpett a sight o' money,
and I can't pay him, ma'am."
She looked at him in astonishment as he stood hanging his head.
"Come into the kitchen," she said, turning from the window.
It was perhaps the first time that any one had ever wished to confide
in Mrs. Walters, and, sorely as he longed to do so, it was impossible
for George to tell her the whole history of his trouble. But his
simplicity and evident belief in her sympathy touched her as they
might not have touched a more expansive heart, accustomed to the near
contact of other lives. She sat upright on the kitchen settle while he
poured out the tale of his debt; it was a common story, badly told,
and it had to end just where he would have liked to begin. He felt as
if the confession of his past doings would have taken pounds from that
weight of shame which he had carried about with him ever since his
acceptance of Bumpett's terms. His only comfort was in the fact that
his mother had never suspected the life to which he had pledged
himself for her sake. He had not known the sympathy of a woman since
her death.
He looked down at the earth on his boots as he spoke, for he had
forgotten, when he came in, to clean them on the heap of bracken by
the doorstep. He was afraid that Mrs. Walters was looking at it too.
But her eyes seemed fixed on something far off as she rose, slim and
straight, from the settle. What she saw was a man little younger than
the one before her, who had brought disgrace and shame upon her and
her house. She could not understand it at all. What earthly temptation
could there have been to have made him act as he had acted? Her mouth
tightened. How was it that this stranger, this rude labourer, should
trust her as her own son had never done? She stared out of the window
to where the Twmpa reared its great shoulder, unconscious that she was
looking at places nightly trodden by Rhys' feet, and, as her
bitterness against him increased, so did her sympathy for the other
deepen.
"I will pay Mr. Bumpett," she said suddenly, her back still turned
"and your debt will be to me."
The young man stammered some confused words; he would have liked to
say many things, but his tongue failed him in the emergency, as it
usually did. But he felt as if the gates of heaven were opening in his
face.
"Go on with your work, Williams," said Anne, turning round and waving
him out of the room. "I have no more time to talk to you just now."
When he had gone she left the kitchen and went up the wooden staircase
leading to the tower; the room that her husband had lived in was kept
locked, and had been used for some years as a kind of storehouse for
boxes. As she turned the key it screeched in the lock, and she
determined to tell Nannie to have the thing oiled; she had not crossed
the threshold since Rhys had left Great Masterhouse before the riot. A
couple of old bridles were hanging on nails against the wall, for he
had used the place to keep odd bits of harness in, and, in obedience
to her mistress's orders, Nannie had laid away his clothes in a
cupboard at the end of the room. Mrs. Walters paused in front of it;
standing in this spot which cried to her of an uncongenial past, she
had an impulse to open it and look at the familiar things. She had no
love for them and they could but bring back to her mind what it was
her daily endeavour to forget, but she was in that experimental humour
in which people long to assail their own feelings in the vain hope of
finding them a little more impervious than they supposed. So she
looked for the key only to see that it was gone, the old woman having
carefully carried it away when she had given the garments to Bumpett,
and passed on unknowing that the shelves were almost empty.
Some of Eli's possessions also remained, and she went over to the
mantel-piece to see the things she had come up to look at--two little
daguerreotypes belonging to her late husband, one of the child who was
dead, and one of the son who was living. They were framed in cheap
brass, beaten out thin and ornamented with a florid, embossed pattern,
and they had little rings behind them, to hang them to the wall.
Between them was a similar portrait of herself as a young woman.
She took them up, one in each hand, her lips pressed close together as
she carried them to the light. Rhys' bold face looked out at her, the
black shadows of the imperfect process giving it an unpleasant
harshness. He was standing, his hand on a chair, with the usual
looped-up curtain at his back; Eli had been very proud of the picture.
The other frame contained the figure of a boy of six. Mrs. Walters
could not look at it.
She replaced the two on the mantel-shelf and went out, locking the
door. The wound she had carried for years was no harder--not a whit.
She went into the parlour, a grim, uninviting room in which she sat
when she was at leisure, or when she received any one whose position
demanded more than the kitchen, and sitting down at the table, opened
a Bible. It was a large book, and she propped it against a Manual of
Practical Bee-keeping, turning to one of the chapters set apart by
custom as particularly suited to the bereaved. She forced herself to
read. It was the orthodox way with religious people of overcoming
trouble, and the sect to which she belonged applied the words of
Scripture to all circumstances and cases. But though she went through
the lines steadily, moving her lips, they gave her no sensation of any
kind, and seemed no more applicable to the tumult in her than if they
had come from the book of bee-keeping which supported them. She glued
her attention to the page, reading on and pausing after each verse.
Presently her lips ceased to move and were still. A large tear rolled
slowly out of each eye and ran down her cheek, falling on the red
cloth of the table. The muscles of her face were rigid, never moving;
one would not have supposed that she was crying, but for the drops.
She took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes, and the act had the
air of a concession awkwardly made; she shut the book and clasped her
hands together. Then she opened it again in the Old Testament, and,
beginning at one of the denunciatory psalms, read it through to the
end.