THE SCYTHE OF TIME.
‘MY papa! my darling papa!’ Eve burst into her father’s room. ‘I want
you much to do something for me. Mr. Jasper is so kind. He has promised
to have a game of bowls with me this evening on the lawn, and the grass
is not mown.’
‘Well, dear, get it mown,’ said Mr. Jordan dreamily.
‘But there is no man about, and old Davy is in bed. What am I to do?’
‘Wait till to-morrow.’
‘I cannot; I shall die of impatience. I have set my heart on a game of
bowls. Do you not see, papa, that the weather may change in the night
and spoil play for to-morrow?’
‘Then what do you wish?’
‘Oh! my dear papa,’ Eve nestled into his arms, ‘I don’t want much, only
that you would cut the grass for me. It really will not take you ten
minutes. I will promise to sweep up what is cut.’
‘I am engaged, Eve, on a very delicate test.’
‘So am I, papa.’
Mr. Ignatius Jordan looked up at her with dull surprise in his eyes.
‘I mean, papa, that if you really love me you will jump up and mow the
grass. If you don’t love me you will go on muddling with those minerals
and chemicals.’
The gaunt old man stood up. Eve knew her power over him. She could make
him obey her slightest caprice. She ran before him to the gardener’s
tool-house and brought him the scythe.
In the quadrangle was a grass plat, and on this Eve had decided to play
her game.
‘All the balls are here except the Jack,’ said she. ‘I shall have to
rummage everywhere for the black-a-moor; I can’t think where he can
be.’ Then she ran into the house in quest of the missing ball.
The grass had been left to grow all spring and had not been cut at
all, so that it was rank. Mr. Jordan did not well know how to wield a
scythe. He tried and met with so little success that he suspected the
blade was blunt. Accordingly he went to the tool-house for the hone,
and, standing the scythe up with the handle on the swath, tried to
sharpen the blade.
The grass was of the worst possible quality. The quadrangle was much
in shadow. The plots were so exhausted that little grew except daisy
and buttercup. Jasper had already told Barbara to have the wood-ashes
thrown on the plots, and had promised to see that they were limed in
winter. Whilst Mr. Jordan was honing the scythe slowly and clumsily
Barbara came to him. She was surprised to see him thus engaged. Lean,
haggard, with deep-sunken eyes, and hollow cheeks, he lacked but the
hour-glass to make him stand as the personification of Time. He was
in an ill-humour at having been disturbed and set to an uncongenial
task, though his ill-humour was not directed towards Eve. Barbara was
always puzzled by her father. That he suffered, she saw, but she could
not make out of what and where he suffered, and he resented inquiry.
There were times when his usually dazed look was exchanged for one
of keenness, when his eyes glittered with a feverish anxiety, and he
seemed to be watching and expecting with eye and ear something or
some person that never came. At table he was without conversation; he
sat morose, lost in his own thoughts till roused by an observation
addressed to him. His temper was uncertain. Often, as he observed
nothing, he took offence at nothing; but occasionally small matters
roused and unreasonably irritated him. An uneasy apprehension in
Barbara’s mind would not be set at rest. She feared that her father’s
brain was disturbed, and that at any time, without warning, he might
break out into some wild, unreasonable, possibly dreadful, act,
proclaiming to everyone that what she dreaded in secret had come
to pass—total derangement. Of late his humour had been especially
changeful, but his eldest daughter sought to convince herself that this
could be accounted for by distress at the loss of Eve’s dowry.
Barbara asked her father why he was mowing the grass plot, and when he
told her that Eve had asked him to do so that she might play bowls that
evening on it, she remonstrated, ‘Whom is she to play with?’
‘Jasper Babb has promised her a game. I suppose you and I will be
dragged out to make up a party.’
‘O papa, there is no necessity for your mowing! You do not understand a
scythe. Now you are honing the wrong way, blunting, not sharpening, the
blade.’
‘Of course I am wrong. I never do right in your eyes.’
‘My dear father,’ said Barbara, hurt at the injustice of the remark,
‘that is not true.’
‘Then why are you always watching me? I cannot walk in the garden,
I cannot go out of the door, I cannot eat a meal, but your eyes are
on me. Is there anything very frightful about me? Anything very
extraordinary? No—it is not that. I can read the thoughts in your head.
You are finding fault with me. I am not doing useful work. I am wasting
valuable hours over empty pursuits. I am eating what disagrees with me,
too much, or too little. Understand this, once for all. I hate to be
watched. Here is a case in point, a proof if one were needed. I came
out here to cut this grass, and at once you are after me. You have
spied my proceedings. I must not do this. If I sharpen the scythe I am
all in the wrong, blunting the blade.’
The tears filled Barbara’s eyes.
‘I am told nothing,’ continued Mr. Jordan. ‘Everything I ought to know
is kept concealed from me, and you whisper about me behind my back to
Jasper and Mr. Coyshe.’
‘Indeed, indeed, dear papa——’
‘It is true. I have seen you talking to Jasper, and I know it was about
me. What were you trying to worm out of him about me? And so with the
doctor. You rode with him all the way from Tavistock to the Down the
other day; my left ear was burning that afternoon. What did it burn
for? Because I was being discussed. I object to being made the topic of
discussion. Then, when you parted with the doctor, Jasper Babb ran out
to meet you, that you might learn from him how I had behaved, what I
had done, whilst you were away. I have no rest in my own house because
of your prying eyes. Will you go now, and leave me.’
‘I will go now, certainly,’ said Barbara, with a gulp in her throat,
and swimming eyes.
‘Stay!’ he said, as she turned. He stood leaning his elbow on the
head of the scythe, balancing it awkwardly. ‘I was told nothing of
your visit to Buckfastleigh. You told Eve, and you told Jasper—but I
who am most concerned only heard about it by a side-wind. You brought
Jasper his fiddle, and when I asked how he had got it, Eve told me. You
visited his father. Well! am I nobody that I am to be kept in the dark?’
‘I have nothing of importance to tell,’ said Barbara. ‘It is true I saw
Mr. Babb, but he would not let me inside his house.’
‘Tell me, what did that man say about the money?’
‘I do not think there is any chance of his paying unless he be
compelled. He has satisfied his conscience. He put the money away for
you, and as it did not reach you the loss is yours, and you must bear
it.’
‘But good heavens! that is no excuse at all. The base hypocrite! He
is a worse thief than the man who stole the money. He should sell the
fields he bought with my loan.’
‘They were fields useful to him for the stretching of the cloth he wove
in his factory.’
‘Are you trying to justify him for withholding payment?’ asked Mr.
Jordan. ‘He is a hypocrite. What was he to cry out against the strange
blood, and to curse it?—he, Ezekiel Babb, in whose veins ran fraud and
guile?’
Barbara looked wonderingly at him through the veil of tears that
obscured her sight. What did he mean?
‘He is an old man, papa, but hard as iron. He has white hair, but none
of the reverence which clings to age attaches to him.’
‘White hair!’ Mr. Jordan turned the scythe, and with the point aimed
at, missed, aimed at again, and cut down a white-seeded dandelion in
the grass. ‘That is white, but the neck is soft, even if the head be
hard,’ said Mr. Jordan, pointing to the dandelion. ‘I wish that were
his head, and I had cut through his neck. But then——’ he seemed to fall
into a bewildered state—’the blood should run red—run, run, dribble
over the edge, red. This is milky, but acrid.’ He recovered himself. ‘I
have only cut down a head of dandelion.’ He reversed the scythe again,
and stood leaning his arm on the back of the blade, and staying the
handle against his knee.
‘My dear father, had you not better put the scythe away?’
‘Why should I do that? I have done no harm with it. No one can set on
me for what I have cut with it—only a white old head of dandelion with
a soft neck. Think—if it had been Ezekiel Babb’s head sticking out of
the grass, with the white hair about it, and the sloe-black wicked
eyes, and with one cut of the scythe—swish, it had tumbled over, with
the stalk upwards, bleeding, bleeding, and the eyes were in the grass,
and winking because the daisies teased them and made them water.’
Barbara was distressed. She must change the current of his thoughts. To
do this she caught at the first thing that came into her head.
‘Papa! I will tell you what Mr. Coyshe was talking to me about. It is
quite right, as you say, that you should know all; it is proper that
nothing should be kept from you.’
‘It is hardly big enough,’ said Mr. Jordan.
‘What, papa?’
‘The dandelion. I can’t feel towards it as if it were Mr. Babb’s head.’
‘Papa,’ said Barbara, speaking rapidly, and eager to divert his mind
into another channel, ‘papa dear, do you know that the doctor is much
attached to our pet?’
‘It could not be otherwise. Everyone loves Eve; if they do not, they
deserve to die.’
‘Papa! He told me as much as that. He admires her greatly, and would
dearly like to propose for her, but, though I do not suppose he is
bashful, he is not quite sure that she cares for him.’
‘Eve shall have whom she will. If she does not like Coyshe, she shall
have anyone else.’
Then he hinted that, though he had no doubt he would make himself a
great name in his profession, and in time be very wealthy, that yet he
could not afford as he is now circumstanced to marry a wife without
means.
‘There! there!’ exclaimed Mr. Jordan, becoming again excited. ‘See how
the wrong done by Ezekiel Babb is beginning to work. There is a future,
a fine future offering for my child, but she cannot accept it. The
gate is open, but she may not pass through, because she has not the
toll-money in her hand.’
‘Are you sure, papa, that Mr. Coyshe would make Eve happy?’
‘I am sure of it. What is this place for her? She should be in the
world, be seen and received, and shine. Here she is like one hidden in
a nook. She must be brought out, she must be admired by all.’
‘I do not think Eve cares for him.’
But her father did not hear her; he went on, and as he spoke his eyes
flashed, and spots of dark red colour flared on his cheek-bones. ‘There
is no chance for poor Eve! The money is gone past recovery. Her future
is for ever blighted. I call on heaven to redress the wrong. I went
the other day to Plymouth to hear Mass, and I had but one prayer on my
lips, Avenge me on my enemy! When the choir sang “_Gloria in Excelsis,
Deo_,” I heard my heart sing a bass, “On earth a curse on the man of
ill-will.” When they sang the Hosanna! I muttered, Cursed is he that
cometh to defraud the motherless! I could not hear the Benedictus. My
heart roared out “_Imprecatus! Imprecatus sit!_” I can pray nothing
else. All my prayers turn sour in my throat, and I taste them like gall
on my tongue.’
‘O papa! this is horrible!’
Now he rested both his elbows on the back of the blade and raised his
hands, trembling with passion, as if in prayer. His long thin hair,
instead of hanging lank about his head, seemed to bristle with electric
excitement, his cheeks and lips quivered. Barbara had never seen him so
greatly moved as now, and she did not know what to do to pacify him.
She feared lest any intervention might exasperate him further.
‘I pray,’ he began, in a low, vibrating monotone, ‘I pray to the God of
justice, who protecteth the orphan and the oppressed, that He may cause
the man that sinned to suffer; that He will whet his gleaming sword,
and smite and not spare—smite and not spare the guilty.’ His voice rose
in tone and increased in volume. Barbara looked round, in hopes of
seeing Eve, trusting that the sight of her might soothe her father, and
yet afraid of her sister seeing him in this condition.
‘There was a time, seventeen years ago,’ continued Mr. Jordan, not
noticing Barbara, looking before him as if he saw something far beyond
the boundary walls of the house, ‘there was a time when he lifted up
his hand and voice to curse my child. I saw the black cross, and the
shadow of Eve against it, and he with his cruel black hands held her
there, nailed her with his black fingers to the black cross. And now I
lift my soul and my hands to God against him. I cry to Heaven to avenge
the innocent. Raise Thy arm and Thy glittering blade, O Lord, and
smite!’
Suddenly the scythe slipped from under his elbows. He uttered a sharp
cry, staggered back and fell.
As he lay on the turf, Barbara saw a dark red stain ooze from his right
side, and spread as ink on blotting-paper. The point of the scythe had
entered his side. He put his hand to the wound, and then looked at his
palm. His face turned livid. At that moment, just as Barbara sprang to
her father, having recovered from the momentary paralysis of terror,
Eve bounded from the hall-door, holding a ball over her head in both
her hands, and shouting joyously, ‘I have the Jack! I have the Jack!’