Chris Jennifer was too busy a man to worry his slow brain greatly over
other people’s affairs, for when a man farms for the children who shall
come after him he can give all the daylight to the land, and trudge home
to feed and sleep without much communion with the philosophers and
poets. There is always work upon a farm, save for those who have sore
heels and a chronic thorn in the forefinger. For these autumn and winter
months ploughing, hedging, ditching, carting fagots and stacking them
for the winter, spreading the muck abroad, taking odd carpentering jobs
in hand, to say nothing of the feeding and tending of sheep and cattle,
the fattening of pigs and bullocks for Christmas, the trapping of
vermin, and the netting of the accursed cony. Chris Jennifer’s most
luminous moment was after a rat-hunt about the barns and out-houses. To
take by the tail the carcasses of sundry strapping rats and heap them in
a funeral pile was an act that made Mr. Jennifer feel that Satan can be
confounded in this world and his imps punished for stealing a farmer’s
com. For if Chris Jennifer hated anything it was a rat, and next to the
rat he hated couch-grass, while the purple-polled thistle came in a bad
third.
When Mrs. Winnie’s husband went to bed he slept the deep, sonorous sleep
of a round-headed peasant whose lungs had been breathing in clean air
all the day. And not even the facts that John Gore had borrowed his best
rope and that his wife was dabbling her hands in affairs that did not
concern her could keep Master Christopher awake and talking. All he had
deigned to hope was that “us be not goin’ agen the law,” and that “this
fine gentleman ben’t feedin’ on hot pie-crust.” Then he drew his
nightcap down, turned on his right side, and went to sleep with the ease
of a dog.
Mrs. Winnie, being a woman, and more impressionable and imaginative,
remained very wakeful all that night, thinking of all manner of strange
adventures, and not a little afraid of John Gore’s neck. She had banked
the kitchen hearth up with logs, left some supper on the table, and the
door unbarred, so that there should be some welcome for him if he came
home after bedtime. Yet in spite of all this satisfying forethought she
kept awake to listen, and even when she dropped away toward
Christopher’s oblivion Mrs. Winnie came to with a start, thinking that
she had heard sounds.
Daylight came, with a west wind swishing in the beech-trees and making a
low murmur in the chimney, and the adventurer had not returned. Mrs.
Winnie jerked an elbow into her man’s back, rose up, and began to dress.
She was down and at work in the kitchen getting the fire alight before
Chris Jennifer got a very stout pair of legs out of the bed.
Mrs. Winnie had piled up the fire, lit the dry brushwood under it, and
was kneeling to help the blaze with the bellows, when the door swung
open, and John Gore walked in. He looked muddy as to the boots and
breeches, and rather white about the face, like a man who has been out
long in the cold, though his eyes had a quiet steadfastness that proved
he had no pallor at the heart.
Winnie Jennifer twisted round on her knees.
“Body of me, sir, you are here at last! I’ve been kep’ awake most of the
night through thinking of ye, and listening.”
He smiled down at her, and when he smiled the mystery that was in him
seemed to glow and to exult in a way that made Mrs. Winnie hanker after
her own days of being courted.
“You should not have troubled your head about me, Mrs. Jennifer.”
The fire was blazing now, making a brave crackle, and John Gore looked
at it as though he were cold and empty and dead tired. Mrs. Winnie was
up and bustling in an instant.
“Sit you down, sir. Why, bless my heart, you must be cold and damp as a
dish-clout! I’ll fetch Chris down to see to your horse.”
“I have seen to him myself, Mrs. Winnie.”
She pushed forward the great box of a chair that was padded with
horsehair and leather, and had been polished to a rare sheen by her
husband’s breeches.
“Just you pull off your boots, sir, and rub yourself dry. I’ll have
something hot in ten minutes, and a dish of bacon and some eggs.”
She was bustling with curiosity as well as with good-will, for there was
something in the man’s manner that told of mystery and of strange things
accomplished, and perhaps of looking deep into other eyes. He sat down
obediently before the fire, and, pulling off his boots, spread himself
to the blaze. Overhead they could hear the stumping of Chris Jennifer’s
feet as he tumbled into his clothes with decent circumlocutions.
Mrs. Winnie came to hang the kettle on the chain, and while she was
bending forward with the firelight on her face John Gore sat forward in
his chair and laid a hand upon her shoulder.
“I am giving you a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Jennifer,” he said.
“Dear life, no, sir.”
“Can I ask you to do something more for me?”
She knelt and looked around at him, her honest, comely face perfectly
trustful.
“To be sure, sir.”
“Then I must make my terms with you.”
“You can talk of them, sir, though I may not be for listening to them
when you have told me what you wish.”
John Gore sat back in the chair again, his eyes on the fire.
“Mrs. Jennifer, I want some one whom I can trust. I want to bring her to
you here, away from people who wish her out of the world.”
Mrs. Winnie took up the poker and made a thrust or two at the fire.
“It’s good of you, sir, to give me the honor—”
“There shall be no danger to you or yours, I can promise that.”
“There, sir, I was not thinking of any such thing! We are only farming
folk, and the lady may have prettier notions than—”
He bent forward suddenly and looked into her face.
“She would bless you, Mrs. Winnie, as I should, for the very warmth of a
fire. She has not felt the warmth of a fire this month or more, and she
is half starved into the bargain.”
Mrs. Jennifer opened her eyes with indignation.
“What! not a stick of fire! Who be they who have the caring for her? And
no victuals!”
“Then you will let me bring her here—if I can?”
“Dear heart, sir, yes. I’ll have my best blankets out, and make cakes
and pasties. And perhaps she would like a nice young pullet, sir. We
will put her in the parlor ingle-nook, and melt her heart, and give her
stuff to make the color come.”
John Gore held out a hand.
“You do not know how I thank you for this. But there are my terms to be
considered.”
“Oh, get along, sir.”
“I shall pass over to you three gold pieces a week.”
Mrs. Winnie looked ready to scoff and laugh.
“Three sixpences would be nearer the mark, sir. Why, Jem and Sam and
Nicholas, our men, wouldn’t eat and drink a third of that in seven whole
days.”
“Never mind your men, Mrs. Jennifer.”
“Not mind them! And where should we be in six months, the lazy loons!
No, I tell you, sir.”
John Gore tried her on another quarter.
“Very well, Mrs. Winnie, take the money and put it in a stocking for
your boy.”
“But, sir—”
“Take it, or turn me out of the door. I hold to your good-will and your
trust with all my heart, but live on you I will not, just because I
happened to pull the youngster out of the pond.”
The woman gave the fire three more pokes.
“I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, sir.”
“Then you will put the money aside for the child’s sake.”
Mr. Christopher Jennifer had had great faith in his wife’s wisdom ever
since she had elected to marry him in preference to a gay sprig of a
harness-maker at Lewes, a gallant who could write verses after the
fashion of a gentleman, and had deigned to dazzle both with dress and
address. Chris Jennifer in his courting days and season of rivalry had
fallen violently foul of this same harness man for the love of Mrs.
Winnie. Chris, who had never been a quarrelsome man, had put his
bristles up at last under the provocation of his rival’s genteel and
foppish impertinence. He had led the harness man by the ear into the
back-yard of Mrs. Winnie’s father’s house, and there had smitten him,
and in the smiting had won his way to Winnie’s heart. For she was a
woman who must have strength of a kind in a man, and silence and shrewd
sense, nor could she abide a ranter or a puff-bag, nor a fellow who was
always talking big about the gentry, and telling how he had dined at the
justice’s table. Men with long tongues were not after her fancy, seeing
that length of tongue generally goes with a league of silly vanity and
boasting, and that men who talk much are still talking while your quiet
man has ploughed his furrow.
Therefore, when Mrs. Winnie threw out a downright hint to her man that
Gentleman John was likely to bring his lady-loveto Furze Farm, and
insisted upon putting sundry gold pieces into son William’s pocket, Mr.
Jennifer humphed and nodded, and supposed there would be no harm in it
“if t’ parson be not left out in t’ cold.” Mrs. Winnie snubbed him for
his sneaking prudery, and protested that he had no wits in him to see
when a gentleman was of clean, brave blood and the very stock of honor.
“The lad’s in love, Chris, as a lad should be, though he be past thirty
by the set of his jaw and mouth. He ben’t one of your gilliflower
gentlemen, prancing along and tweaking his chin to and fro to see how
the women fall to him. It be none of my business to spy and to
speculate, but the woman he be after, Chris, must be a woman worth
winning.”
Mr. Jennifer was heaving a couple of fagots into the wood-shed while his
wife dropped these suggestions into his ear. Son William had been sent
out with a basket to pick blackberries, and the men were down in the
fields.
“I hope it be nothing agen t’ law, Winnie.”
“Go on, you great coward!”
“Woa, my dear!”
“When ye smacked Peter Tinsel on the mouth that day for love of me, did
ye think of the law, Chris?”
He stood and looked at her with a slow, broadening grin, as though he
were proud of her cleverness and her courage.
“T’ law be damned; that were what I told Peter Tinsel.”
Mrs. Winnie stuck out her elbows as though to express the word
“exactly.” But her husband came up to her and kissed her on the mouth
with a manly vigor that swept away any sense of superiority on her part.
Mrs. Jennifer was busy over many things that day, seeing that Furze Farm
might be turned into a refuge for romance, and that she had people of
quality to cook for. Yet she found time to have a short gossip or two
with John Gore over the parlor fire, and that which struck her most was
the grim foreshadowing of something in his eyes, as though he had an
enemy to meet or a debt to wipe out in the cause of honor. Had Mrs.
Winnie been able to read his thoughts as he sat before the fire and
cleaned his pistols after sending the bullets splashing into the pond,
she would have hugged her bosom and have understood that grim look about
his eyes and mouth. For in the silence of the night, and amid the wet,
black woods where he had seen the dawn gather, John Gore had suffered a
revelation that would have made any man’s heart heavy and ashamed. He
had never greatly loved his father, nor had they ever trusted each other
with the inner intimacies of life, yet a son cannot lay bare his
begetter’s true nature without recoiling from it when he beholds
rottenness and hidden sores. The tragedy was so plain to him, so
terribly simple now that the scattered rays of his conjectures had been
gathered by the burning-glass of truth. And John Gore had ridden into
Furze Farm that morning with the cold raw air of the wet woods in his
blood and the heart numb in him but for the thought of Barbara. The
warmth of the fire and a tankard of ale had driven some of the poisonous
taste from under his tongue, but the truth galled him like a bone in the
throat, filling him with wrath and shame and pity.
Mrs. Winnie found herself called upon to provide more tools for him that
day, and after some rummaging in an oak locker in the harness-room she
found him what he needed—namely, a file and a half-inch auger. He also
borrowed the pillion on which Christopher Jennifer took his wife to
market at Battle, Hailsham, or Robertsbridge. By reason of these details
Mrs. Winnie understood that the romance was deepening to a crisis, and
though she kept her tongue to herself in the matter of asking questions,
she cordially commended John Gore in his prison-breaking, having a
hearty contempt for authority when true sentiment was threatened.
While John Gore rode through the woods when the evening mists began to
dim the splendor of the trees so that they were like shrines of gold
seen through the drift of incense, Simon Pinniger sat in the kitchen at
Thorn drinking to get his temper up and his blood hot and muddled
against the night. He would spread out his great hands before the fire
and look at them with a kind of sottish pride, keeping an uneasy eye
upon the woman Nance, who in turn kept a keen eye on him.
“What is it to be, Sim?” she asked, with the air of one who must keep a
surly dog in good temper with himself.
The man drew off a great red neckerchief that he was wearing, made a
loop, and, putting one fist through it, drew the ends tight with his
teeth and the other hand.
“That’s my trick,” he said, dropping the end from his mouth; “them
Spaniards have a liking for it, and Spaniards are particular in the
playing of such tricks.”