THE NEW INMATE.
The rain was still coming down with steady persistence when, two hours
later, Evan Evans lifted the great wooden latch of Brookside Farm, and
entered the large kitchen with a 'God save you' for greeting.
Ales, who was giving the last stir to something bubbling in an iron pot
on the fire, whence came a steaming savour of leeks, turned round
sharply to see what sort of a young fellow had come into the house as an
inmate, and seeing, returned his salutation, as did the two lads waiting
for their supper.
What she saw was a strong-limbed young man, about three or four and
twenty, with a good-humoured smile upon his face, as if a drenched coat
and muddy nether garments were quite minor discomforts. He carried a
lighted lanthorn in one hand, and a bundle slung on a stick over his
shoulder.
'If you're Evan Evans,' said she, 'you'd best take off your coat, and
sit down by the fire to get dry,' a corresponding smile on her face
sufficing for a welcome, and indicating her content with the sample as
presented.
As if to ensure her good graces, his first act was to step across the
floor, and with one strong brown hand lift from the chimney-hook the
heavy broth-pot, on the handle of which the girl had just laid both of
hers.
'Good for you, Evan Evans; may you be always as ready,' said she,
showing her firm white teeth, and hastening to ladle out the broth the
boiled beef had supplied.
'Always ready for a good supper,' was the prompt reply. 'One does not
always get broth every day.'
Meat was not often boiled for broth then on small farms. Indeed, was
never cooked except on rare occasions.
At that moment Mrs. Edwards came in from what we may call the 'dairy' in
the rear.
'I did not expect you to-night,' said she, 'but it is well you are
here.'
'Sure and indeed, ma'am, you would not have me come on a Friday, and I
was not myself like to come on a Saturday, and I thought you would want
me before the Monday, look you.'
'Why not Saturday?' interrupted Rhys, waiting impatiently for his broth.
'Sure and "Saturday's flitting is a short sitting" my Irish grandmother
was used to say, and she was a wise woman,' answered the young man
gravely.
Superstition was so widespread and general, that no one uttered a word
of doubt or dissent to either proposition, but Mrs. Edwards remarked,
''Deed and it's quite as well you came. We have lost a week, and it's
time some of the roots was out of the ground. It will be soft for the
digging after the rain.'
'Do you be having any potatoes among your crops?' he asked then over his
steaming bowl of thick broth.
''Deed, no; Edwards' (a sigh) 'said they was only for the gentry to grow
in their gardens.'
'Then I would have you try them next year. The head man at Castella says
they was the most profitable crop he had on the land. They was good for
the cows and the hogs if he had any to spare from the family table. He
was be going to plough half an acre of ground for them.'
'Plough? What's that?' questioned Rhys, to whom the very word was
unknown.
Evan explained to more than one attentive listener.
'Ah, well,' said Mrs. Edwards, when he had done. 'Where I was in
England, every farmer did plough his fields. And my own father used to
be saying that the laws King Howel the Good did be making nearly eight
hundred years ago, would not allow any man to be a farmer unless he
could make his own plough, as well as guide it. But there did be only
wooden ploughs in those days, and they did get knocked to bits on the
stony ground among the mountains of wild Wales, and they did get out of
use, whatever. I did want to have a good strong plough here, but Edwards
was always be saying the spade was good enough for him. His father and
his grandfather before him had dug every rood of the land with the
spade, and what was good enough for them was good enough for him.'
'Good enough's all very well where there's never a better,' thrust in
go-ahead Ales, with the freedom of the time. 'You didn't be thinking
your grandmother's distaff good enough for you when you bought that
spinning-wheel.'
Both Evan and Rhys looked up from their half-empty bowls across the
table at Ales, as if struck by her pertinent shrewdness.
'Indeed, Ales, I did not; nor did I think holes that let in the wind and
weather along with the light good enough. But till the grandfather did
die of rheumatics there could be no glass windows. And I did not think
it good for the pigs to run loose, rooting up my garden and destroying
what they could not eat, but there has never been a sty built to this
day.'
'And what's a sty?' asked Rhys.
'A house for the hogs.'
Rhys laughed. 'Why, mother, who ever did see pigs with a house of their
own? All pigs run loose in the woods. Lewis did say to me he never saw
any but ours shut up in a fold like sheep.'
'Never mind Lewis. He has never gone far from Eglwysilan. If he had been
in England as I was before I married, he would have been seeing
pig-styes on every farm. But there be plenty in Wales, and Evan will set
up one here very soon.'
'Yes, indeed,' was the man's hearty response.
There was some further talk over work to be done, and how it was to be
done, before Evan followed Rhys to bed, neither having a word to say
against overcrowding, although David was there before them.
And then Mrs. Edwards and Ales, comparing notes, agreed that she had
hired a very capable man.
It might have been said with equal propriety that the widow had shown
her own capability in the choice of a farm-servant who would live in
close companionship with her fatherless sons.
Over the board set forth with funeral meats she had named her want among
the assembled relatives, and then had ensued a warm controversy on the
merits of various men likely to be at the Caerphilly hirings.
Some one had named Evan Evans. Thereupon arose a general outcry that he
would ruin the farm with the notions he had picked up at Castella, where
there was an English farm-bailiff. It was admitted that he was
hard-working, honest, sober, and religious, but all these were as dust
in the balance compared with the crime of departing from the old ways,
and preferring new methods of husbandry.
She had listened, making no comments. But she had hired the young fellow
the more readily for those very detractions. She had not found the old
ways pleasant or profitable. She meant to show Mr. Pryse what good
farming could do for but indifferent land. And she counted on Evan's
religious principles as warrants for the example he would set before her
growing boys.
The hiring was for the year, and could only be terminated by mutual
agreement. At the same time it was renewable from year to year, and
sometimes both men and maids remained with the same master or mistress
half their lives. If any breach of contract occurred, the law was very
strict and severe. A prison awaited the servant absent without leave, or
wilfully refractory, and heavy fines the masters who ill-treated the
servants so hired. Such cases were not frequent, but they did occur at
intervals.
Though the sky was clear, the rain was still dripping from the eaves,
and had worn little runnels in the soil and between the grey stones on
its way down hill to swell the noisy woodland brook, when Evan and the
boys turned out of their close and darkened bedroom in the morning, and
Rhys volunteered to show the former over the farm before the others were
up.
''Deed, no,' said the man, 'that do be your mother's place. She might
not be liking us to make so free, whatever. We can make up the fire, and
set on the porridge-pot for Ales, to lose no time. Where are the
fire-balls kept?'
This was a check to the boy's newly-born importance. Not choosing to
wait upon the man, he ordered Davy to fetch the fire-balls, and marched
out at the back in some dudgeon. Meanwhile, bidable Davy brought the
fire-balls. Evan, all unconscious of the young master's wounded
dignity, fanned the smouldering peat on the hearth to a glow, and had a
clear fire under the black pot when Ales and her mistress came upon the
scene, leaving Jonet and William still asleep.
The morning ablutions of Evan and the two elder boys were performed in
the open air, at a spring which gushed from the stony mountain-side into
a natural water-worn basin; Mrs. Edwards and Ales in the nondescript
apartment in the rear, there being little time or ceremony wasted in the
operation.
The rough-and-ready toilette completed, Ales went back to the kitchen;
and the sun having just risen above the mountain-top to waken up bird
and beast, and turn the lingering rain-drops into fairy gems, Mrs.
Edwards herself led Evan over the primitive homestead, from the rude
stabling and cowshed, where the fowls roosted overhead, to the
dilapidated thing they called a barn, and the sodden farmyard, where a
huge sow and her brood of piglings lay wallowing in the mire.
Two years earlier the young man would have looked on all with
complacency as the common state of things; but then he could only shake
his head and coincide with his new mistress that there was room for
improvements that would require time, energy, and some outlay. They had
looked into the orchard, and at the stone fences, and, the survey over,
came in at the front, where Mrs. Edwards had done her ineffectual best
to copy an English garden for herbs and flowers, and to keep out pigs,
poultry, and goats.
By this time Ales and offended Rhys were back from milking, the two
little ones were washed and dressed, and the porridge was ready for
pouring out, quiet Davy having lent a hand wherever needed, without any
fuss or assumption. He was always ready to fetch and carry at any one's
bidding, and was seldom allowed to sit still. It was he who had brought
water from the spring to wash the younger ones, and emptied it when
used; he who had laid wooden bowls and spoons on the table and brought
in the great brown pitcher of milk, and was lifting William to his seat
at the table when his mother and Evan came in at the door. Just docile
Davy, of whom nobody made much account either to praise or blame.
Rhys, who had not yet recovered his composure, had already taken his
seat at the table in silent displeasure, and took no note of their
entrance, but both Jonet and William stared hard at the strange man, the
former shyly, the latter with open-mouthed wonder, which he put into
words.
'Who's 'oo?' he wanted to know when Evan drew his stool to the table
beside him.
Being answered pleasantly, he rained childish questions thick and fast
on the 'strange man,' all relative to his presence there, and was barely
silenced when grace was said over the hot porridge. There had been so
many strange men coming and going in the past week that he wondered if
Evan had been left behind. His queries only ceased with a scalded mouth.
'If you want to learn farming, Rhys, you had better come with Evan and
me. We are going over the fields to settle what is best to be done,'
said his mother when breakfast was over.
Had his mother asked him to go along with _her_ to settle what had best
to be done, and how, he would have risen with alacrity to share her
cares and counsels, but much as he had professed his desire to learn he
did not want Evan Evans for a teacher. Had not his interest and
curiosity been excited overnight, he might have lingered behind, so sore
was he from the morning's rebuff. As it was he rose but sullenly to
obey.
'May I come?' asked Davy.
''Deed, no. You will be wanted here. Get your knitting and mind Jonet
and Willem.'
The peremptory reply served for both Davy and Jonet, though the latter
did put a pouting finger to her lips. But William had ideas and a will
of his own.
'Me go with 'oo!' 'Me must go!' 'Me _will_ go!' 'Man, take me!' were his
persistent iterations, while his sturdy bare legs and feet went
pattering after his elders over the rain-washed stones, and he struggled
with all his little might against the attempts of Rhys to force him
back.
Their wills were equally strong, but their strength was not. No doubt
Rhys clutched the tender arms too tightly, for William screamed and
cried out--
''Oo hurt me; 'oo hurt me.'
Evan, who had reached the gateway with Mrs. Edwards, turned back,
saying pitifully, 'Don't be hurting the little man. If your mother do be
willing to let him go, I will carry him on my shoulders, look you.'
In another minute, triumphantly, masterful William was mounted on the
low stone wall, on his way to the big man's shoulders, his mother
smiling a passive consent, whilst Rhys bit his under lip and clenched
his hands tightly in ill-concealed chagrin.
It was the second time that morning Evan Evans, the hired man, had
thwarted him, his father's first-born. Rhys, in his own opinion, had
ceased to be a boy. He had quite decided that he was to be his mother's
right-hand man, and that they would manage the farm between them, with
underlings of course, and here was this great interloper come and
thrusting him into the background.
[Illustration: MOUNTED ON THE LOW WALL, ON HIS WAY TO EVAN'S
SHOULDERS.--_See page 66._]
It was with no good will he followed over grass land and arable, over
the fallow and on to the high moorland, where the cows ruminated among
the tall grasses, and the sheep nibbled close to the ground the sweet
morsels the cows had left, and the omnivorous goats browsed on heather
or anything else in the way of vegetation. He heard them talk of the
carrots and other roots to be dug up and housed at once, of the lime and
farm manure to be laid on this field or that, and the suitable crops to
be raised; but though he had a crude perception that Evan was a better
farmer than his father, he sullenly resented the change in
contemplation. All the more, perhaps, because his mother called for his
attention, with 'You hear this, Rhys?' 'Yes, Rhys; indeed, that will
be best.'
He gloomed, whilst William, released from his perch, ran hither and
thither in high glee, chasing away the rooks and water-wagtails that
were, unsuspectedly, doing the farmer good service.