HER past was tightly packed away behind her--packed as remorselessly,
as perfectly, as she had corded her boxes; with much effort and
expenditure of strength, but with a perfect regard to safety. She was
out of London. Never again would she let her eyes of anguish light on
the prison.
She was driving with Jasper along the dusty Sussex road, which barely a
week before she had trudged wearily and with many misgivings. The
prosperity and ease and promise of her new life struck at her, soothed
her, with many minute details--the soft carriage-rug, the sleek coat of
the mare, the polished harness. She had a passion for ease, for pretty
things, for worldly status.
Folly Corner became her home--her sheltered home. Time passed. As the
weeks wore on her face grew mobile and careless, dull pink begun to
timidly bloom on her skin, her eyes brightened. She was happy,
occupied, free from anxiety. Above all, she had plenty of pence, need
never deny herself a penny pleasure--and she was one of those mercurial
women who can be made happy by a bar of French chocolate, and miserable
by a shabby hat. Once she said, with a bitter-sweet laugh, to Jethro:
“I was never made for responsibility. I ought to live in a harem. A
bon-bon, a pat on the head from my master, would make me absolutely
content.”
He seemed amused at first, then he looked puzzled, and then displeased.
He had decided already in his serious, practical way, that she was to
be his wife, and whimsicality struck him as unorthodox--nearly as bad
as dissent. The Jaynes had always been stanch churchmen, and never
spoke without first weighing every word.
Sometimes, in spite of herself, she gave a backward thought. Sometimes
the hunted, tragic gleam lighted its taper in her happy eyes. Some
shadow of the old grief, some touch of the old delirious joy and
misery, stirred her. Rain against the window, a rumble of thunder, a
shrieking wind, or a harsh voice was enough to frighten her. She felt a
gnawing uncertainty. Would this peace, this ease, continue?
When these uncomfortable thoughts assailed her she plunged fiercely
into work, clicking her needle and thimble through new calico, or
darting about the rambling house with a duster. She was pathetically
anxious to earn her salary, to be absolutely independent of Jethro’s
charity. She had not yet decided whether her torn heart would allow her
to marry him when the time came.
One morning he strolled down the weedy gravel path of the oblong
kitchen-garden, with the holly hedge as wall on all four sides, and the
holly arch as postern at the entrance. There were grass paths between
the beds: they wanted mowing and leveling. The wide herbaceous borders
were full of weeds. The gravel path going straight from one end to the
other was a harmony in green and yellow.
There was a gardener at Folly Corner, but Gainah made him clean boots,
chop wood, and carry buckets; while Jethro made him drive and groom the
horses, and pressed him into service when he was short of hands on the
farm. Consequently the garden was unattended. Scarlet pimpernel was
vivid on the dry ground, bindweed bound round the cabbage-stalks, and
wild clumps of blazing corn marigold bloomed unheeded.
Pamela was loitering in an archway of dead scarlet-runners, collecting
seed, by Gainah’s orders. Gainah was mistress of the garden. Jethro
came along the alley in his thick brown boots. His hands were in his
breeches pockets; a Michaelmas daisy, which he had pulled from the
border as he strolled, was in his mouth. He looked at Pamela, half
tenderly, half quizzically--a look which always set her pulses
throbbing. She could never forget, when she was alone with him, the
piquant circumstances which had brought her under his roof. Sometimes
when Gainah imposed distasteful tasks her neck would swell, and she
told herself proudly that by next autumn she could, if she chose, be
mistress of Folly Corner.
Her basket was three parts full of seed-pods--like the fingers of
dainty gloves stretched over bones. As she moved the seeds made a
dice-like rattle. Jethro took the basket from her and begun to pull the
pods off the dry yellow stalks himself.
“You shouldn’t be at this work,” he said, lifting her white hand with
his free one. “Why can’t Daborn do it?”
“Gainah likes to see to these things herself.”
“You must be mistress over Gainah.”
“Not yet,” she broke out involuntarily, and then flushed.
Jethro laughed.
“I’m glad you put it that way. Evidently we are of the same mind.
Suppose we say six months instead of a year, Cousin Pamela.”
“No, no! A year, as we decided.”
She looked vaguely through the wasted tendrils of the dead beans as
they clung to the sticks--looked in the direction of London. Jethro had
once said carelessly London was that way, jerking his broad brown thumb
widely. After that, she looked across the common whenever that chill
thought of the prison stole in and numbed her brain.
“Come a little way along the road. If Gainah sees us she’ll call you
in,” he said almost pleadingly. “I never get you to myself.”
He pulled out his turnip-like silver watch, which had been his
grandfather’s, and added that he had ten minutes. Daborn was grooming
the roan mare, ready to drive him in the dogcart to Liddleshorn.
“You might come too,” he said.
“No. Gainah would be angry.”
“You mustn’t think too much of her. After all, she’s a paid servant.”
“So am I.”
Her face, under the brim of her Panama hat, was arch and mournful at
the same moment.
They went along the gravel path. Jethro took out his pocket-knife and
cut off the head of a great plantain.
“The place wants seeing to,” he said with dissatisfaction, looking at
the weeds in the bed. “It wants a mistress. You should see the garden
at Turle House. Nancy manages that. Nancy in some sort of way must be
your cousin. We are all relations.”
It was the last day of September, and there had been a frost early in
the morning. The blackened marrow plants straggled on their mound.
Daborn had clamped the beet the day before, and the broken leaves, with
their wine-colored stems, were scattered. The plumy foliage of the
carrots had died down. The sparkling parsnip leaves were yellow, and
dew glittered on the crinkled, bluish leaves of the savoys with their
tight hearts. The sun shone brightly, but the air was crisp. Everything
was ominous of winter. Pamela shivered as she looked at the solid
chimney stacks of Folly Corner, and pictured an iron winter in the
fastness of that old house, with Gainah as grim companion.
They went through the yard into the road. Daborn had the dogcart out.
Pamela stopped by the wall of the granary, her foot twined in a bit of
trailing periwinkle.
“Give me the basket,” she said, “and good-by.”
Jethro looked at her.
“You’d better come too,” he said. “Jump in.”
“No. My dress; no gloves.”
“Tuck your hands under the rug. At Liddleshorn we’ll buy gloves. Jump
up. We shan’t want you, Daborn. Here’s the basket. Miss Crisp will hold
the reins.”
Pamela still hesitated, looking back at the house, and remembering she
had promised Gainah that she would mark some pillow-slips. But it was
such a magic morning, with an intensely blue sky--a March sky almost,
with a spice of frost lurking behind the hot sun. There were long
trails of red bryony berries on the hedges; glittering gossamer webs
were woven across the clumps of broom on the common. Jethro looked so
strong and masterful--such a man! She believed that in the end she
would marry him whether she wanted to or not. He had a rough manner of
command with women--savage, yet tender. Pamela, like a woman, loved it.
She lifted her foot, swung up to the blue cushion, and a moment later
they were bowling smoothly along the road.
He didn’t speak. He flicked at the mare with a tinge of pettishness.
Pamela sat well back. She felt a person of some importance; every small
girl they met bobbed her little skirts into the dust, and the
heavy-footed laboring men lifted a finger to their hair as Jethro
bowled by in the flashing sunshine.
He pulled up at the gate of a small farm, and asked Pamela to hold the
mare while he went in. The farmer had a farrowing sow for sale.
She just clasped the slack reins. The farmhouse was so overgrown with
fruit-trees and ivy that the mellow bricks were shrouded. By and by
Jethro came swinging down the path, with a weak old man hobbling
behind him. They went and leaned over the piggeries, which were on the
left of the gate. She caught a word or two here and there; it was Greek
to her. Jethro surveyed the huge black sow keenly before he closed the
bargain. Then he swung open the gate in his familiar impetuous way, and
just before he got up into the cart he turned to the old man and said
with a kind of careless authority:
“You ought to get out of this. Sell up and go into lodgings. It isn’t
good for a man to live alone.”
To Pamela he added in a bluff aside:
“Mansell has lost his missus.”
She leaned toward the straggling, shambling figure, and threw a faint
smile of sympathy. He was a foolish-looking old man, with a face made
more imbecile by a loose, slobbering lip and the short silvery spikes
of a week-old beard. He began to pour out his misery and loneliness,
perhaps because she, like his dead wife, was a woman.
“Missis died six months ago,” he said tremulously, as he twisted his
dirty hands and gave his watery smile. “She was a good missis. But,”
with a crowing cackle of laughter, “I was good, too. I never knocked
her down, nor give her a black eye. I didn’t offen even scold her. Step
inside.” His face and voice were eager. “I’d like you to have a look
round.”
Pamela, oddly touched, said gently to Jethro:
“Let me go. You come too.”
They tied the mare to the gatepost, and went up the path to the
brooding house in its tangle of ivy and its unpruned jungle of ancient
plum-trees. The widower went first, chattering volubly all the time,
his back bent, his hand heavy on the polished knob of his stick.
They went into the low-pitched living-room. The fusty smell turned
Pamela faint. The old man seemed to divine her nausea.
“You should ha’ seen how missis kept it,” he said deprecatingly. “But,
Lord bless you, I am a helpless old man, seventy-nine come October, and
I can’t clean. I’m alone. Missis and the children dead. But I aint
afraid.” He gave an apprehensive glance at the shadows of the murky
room. “Why should I be? What I always says is this”--he kept peppering
his platitudes with the silly laugh that went to the girl’s
heart--“God, who made me, aint a-goin’ to kill me.”
Pamela looked round the room. Everything, inside and out of the farm,
had gone to pieces for the lack of a capable woman.
“I did used to keep the garden terrible nice,” the old man said, seeing
her gray eyes look through the door into the sunny wilderness. “But
there! missis is gone! I’ll show you her earrings.”
He hobbled away into the adjoining room. Pamela heard him jingling
metal and scrooping wooden furniture over the flag floor. Presently he
came out with a card-board box shaking in his hand. He took the lid off
reverently and held out the open box. A pair of earrings, of very pale
gold, such as you can buy at fairs for a trifle, were on a bed of
tissue paper.
“Very pretty,” the girl said lamely.
Jethro had gone outside. He was viewing the neglected fruit-trees
severely.
“And there’s one more thing I must show you.”
Mansell hobbled away, up the crazy stairs this time, and came back with
a snow-white smock, which he thrust into her hands.
“Missis made this for me to be married in.” He stuck his foolish red
face forward and grinned more widely. “She put her best work into it.
Lord bless you, when I was but a boy--I’m seventy-nine come October--we
used to go to church on Sundays, every man in his clean smock. Missis
did it. She was a rare one at her needle.”
Pamela looked at the exquisite, delicate stitching. The whole heart of
that dead woman was woven into the diamonds and honeycombs and lattices
of the wedding smock.
“Very pretty,” she said lamely again.
“I must get to Liddleshorn before ten,” Jethro cried out from the
garden.
She stepped into the sun, Mansell behind her. He followed them to the
gate, seeming pathetically anxious to hold on to human companionship as
long as he could. A sheep-dog came running out from the barn. Pamela,
who was distrustful of dogs, felt glad that she was in the cart.
“He won’t bite, bless you; he’s too old. But when he was young he _was_
s’ savage. Missis used to set one side of the fire winter nights, and I
used to set the other. And she, just for fun, used to say to me, ‘Oh,
dear,’ and I used to say, ‘Oh, dear.’ You should have heard him growl.
He was s’ savage you durstn’t move or speak.”
Jethro gathered the reins with an air of business.
“You must get out of this,” he advised, with curt good nature.
“I suppose I must. Yet I’d like to stop on. Yet since missis died
everything’s gone to pieces. I used to get such good living--fresh
butter and new-laid eggs. I can churn myself, but no one seems to care
for my butter. Don’t know why; there was a great call for missis’s.”
“Well, good-by to you,” said Jethro, with masculine intolerance of his
whimpering garrulity.
“Good-by and God bless you. Take care of yourselves. Come and see me
again.” His bleared blue eyes were turned pleadingly on Pamela. “And,
Master Jayne”--he looked from one to the other, and his shrill voice
quavered childishly--“when you gets a missis may you never lose her. A
man’s no good without a missis.”
The cart moved on. Presently Pamela said softly, “Poor old thing! he
made me feel quite miserable.”
“He’s not quite right in his head. But--you heard what he said, Cousin
Pamela? A man’s no good without a missis.”
The strong brown hand in the worn driving-glove plunged under the
holland carriage-rug and took her bare fingers significantly.
“It’s true enough,” Jethro said thoughtfully, after a bit. “I’m worried
about Folly Corner. Something’s wanting. The food’s all right----”
“Now, the food isn’t right,” she put in briskly. “Plenty of it--yes.
But the serving! Who ever heard of a meat pudding brought to table in
its basin! Fancy cheese on the breakfast-table! White sugar should be
grated over the tarts and--oh, many things. Some of them I couldn’t
mention to you: it wouldn’t be nice.”
She was thinking of a thrifty trick of Gainah’s: the unhatched eggs
found in a hen that had been killed were used for cakes. She thought it
perfectly horrid, and her town squeamishness made her feel that there
was a certain indelicacy involved in the proceeding. At all events she
couldn’t mention such a thing to Jethro.
“And the other day,” she continued, broodingly, “a pig was killed.
Gainah was in the kitchen all day. She made me go out, too. The things
they did with that pig! The savory horrors she turned out!”
Jethro gave a great jolly laugh.
“Chitterling and fagots and scraps,” he cried. “I like them. You are
not a farmer’s wife--yet. Gainah is a splendid housekeeper. It isn’t
the housekeeping. It is the--the--difference. You know what I mean.
Flowers in the vases; the dinner-table dainty, not solid. Foolish
things--but they make a difference.”
“They are important things. They certainly make a difference--all the
difference. You’ve been dominated too long by that old woman. The place
has the wrong tone. Do you understand what I mean? It looks a farmer’s
house. It ought to look a gentleman’s.”
“But I _am_ a farmer--and proud of it.”
“Of course. It is the fashion to farm nowadays. It is quite genteel
if--if you lose money over it.”
He seemed puzzled at her pert extravagance, and said stolidly that he
was glad that his farming paid--every Jayne was a good farmer; it was
in the blood.
“Well,” said Pamela, with a shrug and a droll smile, “you can get the
effect anyhow. We must put up with prosperity. There are many things
I’ll do, if you’ll let me. The housemaid must wear a cap with lappets
in the afternoons. She should wait at table, and bring your newspaper
in on a tray; letters, too, when there are any. I’ll train her. Of
course, Gainah does not know how; she will be grateful to me for hints.
You are very slow down here in Sussex. Did I tell you that I lived for
six months in a boarding-house?” There was the faintest quiver of her
heavy lids. “I carved and kept accounts. Things were done very well
there. I have moved about the world and kept my eyes open.”
While she was making this smug little speech Jethro looked at her with
satisfaction. She was a woman of wit, of knowledge. Her glib tongue was
refreshing and piquant after the demure monosyllables and faint
opinions--always watered by Mamma--of the Liddleshorn damsels.
They were smoothly clattering down the High Street.
“Furniture.” Pamela pointed to the upholsterer’s. “There should be oak
in the dining-room.”
“There is oak at Folly Corner.”
“Is that oak?” She opened her big eyes and arched her faint dun brows.
“Then it is different. We had a beautiful carved dinner-wagon at the
boarding-house.”
“It was my father’s grandfather’s furniture, and his grandfather’s
before him,” Jethro said conservatively.
Pamela ran on:
“And cushions. There should be lots of cushions with frills.” She threw
a longing glance at the draper’s.
Jethro looked too. One window was full of down cushions--big, square,
and with frills deeper than the cushions themselves.
“They would look lovely on the settle,” Pamela said gloatingly.
Every woman has her pet weakness. Hers had always been _carte blanche_
at the Oriental shop. There was a spatter of Oriental fripperies in a
side window at the Liddleshorn draper’s; it was an up-to-date shop.
“And embroidered mats,” she added, “and big bowls to stand flower-pots
in; and those green specimen glasses for the table; and a bit or two of
that Benares brass; and--it’s really a very good assortment--one of
those guitars to hang on the wall with ribbons. You should have
fretwork ornaments and some lacquered brackets, on which to stand
plates or little blue tear-bottles.”
Jethro beckoned to a small boy on the curb, and threw him the reins.
“We’ll go in,” he said, jumping down and holding out his hand to
Pamela.
“I must get some gloves first of all,” she said, as her foot touched
the pavement.
When she had bought them, she led Jethro captive through the Oriental
department. He told her carelessly to buy what she chose, and she moved
eagerly from one counter to another. She chose some gaudy rugs to toss
about the oak floors. She bought brass bowls and trays, a few grotesque
ornaments for the shelves, mats, a guitar, a Chinese woman’s shoe, a
mandarin’s petticoat to throw over an armchair, a bundle of peacock’s
feathers, a few bits of coarsely-printed china, various embroidered
table-covers--all the vividly-colored, alluring rubbish that she
fancied.
They had it packed up and stowed in the dogcart. She carried the china
gingerly on her knee for fear of breakage. Her eyes danced. After years
of poverty, this careless throwing away of money was delightful.
When they reached home she made Daborn take everything out and carry it
into the dining-room--the dining-parlor, as Gainah persisted in calling
it. There was a strong smell of raw onion from the kitchen; it was
being packed away in wide-mouthed bottles, with alternate slices of
beet and a savory bath of spiced vinegar. Gainah came in, her hands
dyed with onion juice.
Pamela was excitedly unswathing her treasures from yards of tissue
paper.
“We’ve bought a few things,” she said pleasantly. “Sit down and look
at them. That is an Indian god.” She held out an abominable brown
figure. “Jethro was saying that the place wanted improving--bringing up
to date. Of course, you never hear of the newest things down here. How
should you? I got these cushions for the settle, and this--isn’t the
embroidery lovely?--for the piano. A piano should never have its back
against the wall. It is an ugly piece of furniture; its form is all
against it. I told Jethro that there should have been a grand in that
big room. That is the only endurable form of piano.”
She was chattering the artistic jargon of a belated æsthete who had
boarded at the house in Bloomsbury. Gainah hardly seemed to hear her.
She had toppled down into one of the high-backed, rush-seated chairs,
and was nervously moving her stained hands on her lap.
“Don’t you like these rugs?” Pamela cut the string with one of the
heavy buck-handled knives which was on the dinner-table. “They are to
be thrown down in odd corners--anywhere. You can’t have too much color
in a room. I must go and take my hat off.” She glanced at the waiting
dinner-table and stacked her purchases carefully on the horsehair sofa.
“I’ll arrange everything this afternoon. By tea-time you will hardly
recognize the place. Cousin Jethro is so kind; he says that if I
haven’t thought of everything he will drive me into Liddleshorn again
to-morrow. These green glasses are for flowers. I must arrange them
every day for dinner in schemes of color. There! That is one thing I
forgot--an embroidered centerpiece. And we might have candle-shades,
too. Those candlesticks,” she glanced at some heavy ones of Sheffield
plate on the oak sideboard, “are the rage in London just now.”
She ran out of the room. Gainah did not stir from her chair by the
yawning hearth on which the first fire of the season smoldered. She
gazed fixedly in her vacant way at the trash on the sofa. Only one
thing that Pamela had said worked in her slow brain: “Jethro was saying
that the place wanted improving.”
She looked at the gaudy plates and jars; then thought of the delicate
family china which was locked away in the little closet leading out of
the keeping-room. She looked at the red and yellow brackets, the
ornaments, and then looked round at the distempered walls, against
which stood the beautiful golden oak, every piece of which she had
tended as if it were a child. Every week she had rubbed that oak with
beeswax and turpentine. Every week she had washed the china bowls and
figures on the shelf. Every week for more than thirty years! She knew
now that the landmarks of those years were going to be swept away. Her
face grew harsh and vindictive--the face of a worn old panther--worn,
old, feeble, but still with claws. Pamela, who meant everything in the
kindest spirit possible, and who never doubted that her efforts would
be received with gratitude, was breeding tragedy. Gainah, in the
upright chair, her mournful eyes roving sluggishly round the
ancestral furniture that she loved, was working up to a climax.
Why should this girl--this pert jade, this strange cousin on the
mother’s side--ruin the lives of her elders? Why should she sneer at
rustic customs which were old enough to be as sacred as the Bible?
Gainah’s mental attitude changed from injury to rebellion. She began to
ask herself stupidly, with an agonized questioning of her slow brain,
if Pamela could not be got rid of, banished from Folly Corner. How
should she lift from the farm the shadow thrown across it? She only
wanted to serve her master in her old faithful way, according to her
own lights. She had brought him up from his birth. She almost believed
that she was his mother. She had even chosen his wife for him. Nancy
Turle wouldn’t have taken the housekeeping keys. She clutched at them
as they weighed down her apron pocket. Pamela should never take them
either. Nancy Turle would never have spent money like water at
Liddleshorn. She glowered at the brightly colored stuffs and crockery.
Only to go on serving him until the end. Wasn’t that a simple thing to
ask? Just to be allowed to save and screw, to manage the farmhouse and
to manage him in her hectoring way, which was all tenderness and
devotion at bottom. She got up, turned her back on the new purchases,
and ran her hand along the heavy sideboard lovingly, as if it were
alive.