at his face and her own drooped again. “Surely to goodness you’ve
never been going over yon? Things is right enough now—as right as
rain.”
“Ay, but they’re spoilt a bit for us, all the same.” His voice had
dropped back into the bitter tone. “I still feel sort o’ shamed about
the job, and I reckon you’re none so bright about it yourself. And
yet, if it come back over again, I’d do same as afore.”
“I don’t see as we could ha’ done different,” Agnes said, and sighed.
“I did say as I’d come if you couldn’t fix nowt else, but I doubt we
wouldn’t ha’ made much out in the end.”
“It’d ha’ been hell for both on us afore so long.” He began to walk
restlessly up and down behind her back, the old angry resentment
blurring and troubling his face. “What beats me about it all is what
come over you just then. You’d been right enough afore, and you’re
suited well enough now. What, for the land’s sake made you act so
strange?”
“Nay, I don’t know, I’m sure. I’m fair puzzled about it myself.” She
laughed, but there were regretful tears behind the laugh. “Seems
to me women don’t always know exactly what they’re at. Folks don’t
always see their road clear in front o’ their feet. There’s a time
for everything, I reckon, that’s what it is, and it hadn’t come just
then for you and me.”
“Anyway, it’s come now, thanks be!” he said in a sudden burst, and
he stopped his angry pacing and came to her side. “But all the same,”
he persisted, “I’d ha’ liked it perfect all through. There’s things
as hurt to look back on more than a deal. There’s times I’ve heard
her rating the poor old chap, I’ve felt that bad I could ha’ shot
myself right out. ’Twas summat like as if he’d been clapped in jail;
as if you an’ me had gone and put him in quod.”
She put her hands on his shoulders, her eyes filling with tears.
“Nay, now—don’t—don’t! You make me feel that bad.”
“And him so kind,” he went on, as if unable to stop. “Ay, it makes
you feel bad enough to swear.”
“It’s over ... it’s by wi’ ... we’ll make it up to him, you’ll see!”
He put his arms about her, and her hands went up around his neck.
“You’ll not be keeping a grudge agen me all our lives?”
“Nay, it’s myself I’m sore with, not you. I should ha’ done my duty
by the old chap, and trusted you’d come to me in the end. But I
wasn’t for taking the risk. I was over feared. And now I doubt I’ll
always feel sort o’ shamed.”
“Things’ll sort themselves out, don’t you fret. They’ll right
themselves sure as a bobbin, after a bit.”
“Likely they will.”
“It’ll make a sight o’ difference, once he’s back. You’ll never think
twice o’ yon weary time no more.”
“Likely I waint.”
“And you’ll not throw it up at me when you’re mad?” she begged.
“You’ll not forget just how it come about?”
“I tell you I blame myself,” he repeated, “and nobody else. Happen I
wanted you that bad I’d to pay a bigger price than most. Or happen we
were both on us driven, and couldn’t help ourselves at all. But like
enough it’ll all come right, as you say, and it’s nobbut fools as
frets themselves, looking back.”
“We’ve come out a deal better than we deserve!” She smiled and drew
away from him, looking happy again. “We took a deal o’ risk, you
an’ me, but we’ve bit on our feet, I reckon, after all....” She
drifted back to the table, as to an altar on which their sacrifice
of thanksgiving was set. “What can ha’ come to the trap, Thomas?
Father’ll be wearied out afore they land.... I mind you said he liked
a bit o’ ham to his tea. You said Marget wasn’t for giving him ham if
she could help.”
“She’d ha’ given him nowt,” Thomas growled, “if it wasn’t she was
feared o’ finishing him off. Brass she was getting for him was over
good to lose. He never eat what I give her, I’ll be bound.... Ay,
he’d always a fancy-like for ham, and when he’d finished he’d gang
outside for his smoke. There’s a new pipe I bought him, somewheres.
Marget took t’other off him, Bob said.... Ay, an’ there’s some of his
pet bacca in a tin.”
“Have you finished yon seat you were making for him under t’hedge?”
“Ay, it’s finished right enough. A gradely seat it is an’ all—a sight
better than t’other as used to be by t’door. If you’ll stop fidging
over yon table you might take a look for yourself.”
She laughed and went out with him into the porch. Their figures
divided the sun as they stood, so that they looked like swimmers deep
in the streaming gold. Their heads leaned together as they nodded
approval at the seat, a wooden bench in the arms of a well-laid
fence. It was a grand seat, Agnes said, and a grand evening for
anybody wanting to sit out. They pictured the old man sitting there,
warming himself in the last of the sun. They were excited and full of
plans again, like children preparing for a treat. She had her hand on
his arm, peering across him round the porch, when the trap suddenly
lumbered into sight. It might have been dumped out of space on the
straight-ruled road, a languid object jolting over the flat. Thomas,
meditating proudly upon the seat, turned about to a hasty prod.
“There it be, Thomas—there it be! Trap, I mean, man—look ye—can’t ye
see? Be off now as smart as you can. They’ll be here afore you’ve
made shift to start.”
She tried to push him out of the porch, deaf to his protest that the
trap had a fairish piece to cover yet. “A bonny time it’ll take an’
all,” he added, “wi’ yon bag o’ bones atween the shafts. Seems like
it meant liggin’ down for a bit of a nap.”
“Best be soon than late,” she urged. “Nay, now, be off, do!”—and he
allowed himself to be shoved on to the path, grinning at her eager
face. “I’ll have kettle singing by you’re back,” she went on, “and
then there’ll be nowt to keep us from setting to, right off. Bob’ll
have a bite o’ summat, likely, afore he makes off. Eh, but I’m right
fain to see the old man’s face when he passes t’door.”
“He’ll find summat better than Marget to look at, and that’s sure!”
he teased her, lingering, and she stamped her foot at him and cried:
“Get on, you gert soft!”
And he answered, “I _is_ getting on!” and stood like a stock.
The farm, full of the evening sun, and with smiling figures at its
door, made a gay enough welcome for the exile that was drawing
towards it over the marsh. Thomas received a final wave of mingled
speeding and threat, and then the blue gown vanished through the
porch. “We mun do what we can,” he heard her call from within, “but
if we don’t suit him better than Marget, I’ll shut up house!”
Then he was gone at last, his broad figure dwindling as he went,
until the high hedges hid him and the wild roses closed above his
head. Away on the road, coming to meet him, the trundling speck grew
and grew in size. As he dwindled and disappeared, so it enlarged and
sharpened into sight. There was something fateful, indeed, about its
slow yet determined approach. One knew, without dreaming of asking,
that its errand was for the farm. In spite of its slow and clumsy
advance it reminded Agnes of a sailing-boat she had seen, coming on
high water across the glancing bay. It had seemed to come straight
from the village under the hill to the farm that stood alone on
the edge of the sand. Wind and tide were both at its back, driving
it on a flowing path that seemed to have no possible end except in
the house itself. She had watched it from that upstairs room upon
which she had been at work so long, and had seen it heaving towards
her, purposeful and direct. As it drew nearer the shore without
slackening its speed, she began to feel almost afraid. The tilted
bowsprit seemed ruled to the last inch on the window of the room.
It was like a racer, nearing the post, leaping ahead along the last
stretch. It was like a child, hurrying to be home, heedless of any
obstacle in the way. She could not see the man in charge for the
sail, so that the boat seemed like a thing by itself, a toy launched
by the impetus of some mighty hand. She felt certain it meant to try
to sail to her in the room, and would dash itself on the sea-wall
just below. There was even a moment when she leaned from the window
to scream, because it looked as though nothing could stop it now
it was so near. And then, just as it seemed that the bow was over
the hedge, it had swung on its heel and forgotten and gone away....
Like swinging a reel on a thread, she thought to herself; as easy as
turning the handle of a door. Now it was leaning over, beating into
the wind, and she could see a figure in the sheets. Quickly, though
more slowly than it had come, it went away, fretting and fuming where
it had been smoothly intent, and fighting where it had almost seemed
to fly. She watched it beating back and forth for a time, hoping it
might return, but always it threshed away into the wind, and dwindled
and lost meaning and never looked back. And it had never come since,
however high the tide, in that spirit of leaping joy directed at the
farm.
Of course there was nothing like it about the trap, heavy and
crawling and jolting along the road. But it, too, seemed headed
towards her as she stood, as if it saw what was coming and couldn’t
by any chance be stopped. And if Bob wouldn’t come in to share the
evening meal, the trap, like the boat, would never reach the farm.
It, too, the moment it had arrived, would turn its back on the place,
and go away....
A sense of loneliness came upon her in the sunny room, and the house
that had been so full of expectation and content grew still and
listened for old voices and called again upon its hidden ghosts. She
wished now that she had gone with Thomas to the gate, to share in the
home-coming from the first. Indeed, she started to run down the path
and through the gate, and found herself out in the meadow before she
scolded herself and returned with a laugh. This was Thomas’s father,
not hers, who was coming to-day. Her own had been dead for ever so
many years. She was only the son’s wife, and her place was to welcome
him at the door. She remembered the kettle, too, as she hurried back,
and was glad she had had the sense to turn in time. She couldn’t
help wishing, however, that she might have been there. She would
have known, in that first moment, whether her conscience might be at
ease....
Back in the kitchen, she filled the kettle and set it on the fire,
struggling with the temptation to take another peep at the room
upstairs. She argued with herself that she wanted to make sure
nothing had been missed, knowing all the while that she had been
perfectly sure for hours. It could not be long now before she ushered
the old man in, and surely she could manage to wait till then? The
room would be all the fresher if she could bring herself to wait,
would look to her something of what it looked to him.... Thomas’s
reparation was through outward things, she thought—shelter and
physical ease and a decent burying at the last; but hers was through
things more subtle, touches that eased the heart.... More than
comfort and look went to that carpet on the stairs.
She wondered, looking round, which of the changes would strike him
first. Which of the new things would catch his eye—the range, the
padded chair, the spoons, or the new pots? There was a shelf with
reading of some sort, mostly about farming, she believed; and a
gate-leg table, left her by an aunt, on which he could lay his fiddle
if he chose. In the parlour, of course, there were treasures without
price, wedding-presents and suchlike and sudden fancies at sales; but
Sunday, she thought, would be time enough for those. They would have
to be careful not to worrit the old man. The kitchen alone would be
enough for to-night—that and the other surprises up above.
She had been puzzled to find in herself this sudden passion for a
house. She had been willing and busy enough at home, but she had
always been glad to get finished and go out. Now, when she went out,
she had almost to tear herself away; her household gods might play
her false while she was gone. All the inanimate things that made her
work—furniture and pots and pans and the rest—they seemed strangely
alive to her now, and capable of mischief if she left them too long
alone. Even in church she thought of fire and moths, of dry-rot and
damp and water-spouts gone wrong. When once the hay was in she felt
sure she would never go out at all, but would spend her days watching
for the first thread of smoke. There was that fire at Crookfield,
only last year, when the dogs had awakened the folk in the pouring
dark. They had pulled the furniture out into the yard, and set the
pillows and beds along the wall. You did not want to do that every
year with your best beds, and there was a wardrobe or so that never
got out at all. Then, on the marsh, there was a further terror to
fear—floods that swam into your rooms and left them damp for years.
She could see she would fret herself thin before she was through!
Of course the possessive fury would die down after a while, but she
did not want it to die too soon. The new passion fretted her, but it
braced her as well; made her feel strong and capable and rich and
proud....
And just as she had not known of this feeling for a house, so she had
not known that a man could count for so much. She puzzled sometimes,
staring at Thomas, and thinking how strange it was that eyes should
so alter their point of view. Why, there were things she loved about
him now for which she had laughed at him before! He was still only
the Thomas whom she had flouted so long, and from whom she had parted
without a pang; yet now, when he turned his back, she had a sense of
fear, as if he had left her straying in some lonely place.... But
even now she did not know why she had ever rebelled, could find no
clue, however vexed for the missed years. It could only be that it
wasn’t the right time, as she had said. And, after all, Thomas was
not the man she had known. She would never see that Thomas of hers
again. The strange thing was that she sometimes wanted that Thomas
back—angry and sullen, or awkward and afraid.
Sometimes she held her breath, remembering how narrowly her fortune
had been reaped. Thomas had never asked her again after that dogged
appeal for his father in the lane. He stayed at hand, it was true, he
spoke when they met, and they danced together as before, but he had
never again asked her to be his wife. And perhaps his drawing-back
had worked the miracle at last, for it was certainly about that time
that she had begun to change. Perhaps it was just the natural impulse
to want the thing out of reach, or maybe she had a vision of life, of
the part that burdens may bear in it and be sweet. Just possibly it
was Marget who was the real factor in the change, setting the levers
pity and jealousy to work.
Agnes had known Bob’s wife from a child, and needed no telling how
Kit would fare at her hands. They had been at school together first,
though Marget was much the elder of the two, and afterwards they had
been rivals or friends as things had happened to run. But Marget had
married early and grown old soon, or rather had reached the vinegary
age and there remained. Agnes had tried to keep up the acquaintance
for a while, but it was not long before her visits ceased. Marget
had grown into a shrew as mushrooms grow between showers, and of
a subtle variety before which Agnes shrank. She had known shrews
before, and found them human enough, with hearts that were more or
less kindly under their fretted nerves. They were not like Marget,
venomous all through. She remembered something in Marget, as a child,
that had given her even then a kind of power, something inhuman,
implacable and cold, that edged her words and barbed the look in
her eyes. It had won her a sort of distinction as a girl, so that
others had wanted her as well as Bob, but time had soon shown it as
merely the passion of a cold woman for riding others down. Agnes,
warm-hearted, tolerant and gay, was frankly afraid of Marget by
the end. Marget liked to talk of Thomas and hint and jeer, and if
the other gave battle in his defence she was terrible indeed. In
spite of her idleness and slovenly ways, she still contrived to be
terrible and a power. Her methods made Agnes shiver in her chair—thin
and insidious and trickling at the first, and then, at the point
of contact, bursting forth. She was like an iceberg, chilling you
from afar, and crushing and riving and blinding you when you struck.
You felt her icy paralysis as you sank; you heard her shrill-voiced
grindings as you drowned. Agnes fled from the combat and did not
return, and the reports of her one-time rival worsened with the
years. Yet it was up to this arctic terror she had delivered Kit.
But at the end of everything she had married Thomas just for himself,
and not for his father or anybody else at all. The finish had come
about at Appleton Hall, one of those old homes that, changing from
manor-house to farm, have yet contrived to keep their dignity intact.
Both she and Thomas were helping as usual at the boon-clip, which
fell that year on the hottest day in June. It was always a long day
and often hot, but this was the longest and finest she had ever
known. Afterwards she divided her life into—life, and then “the
clip.” If it was true that she had had to wait for the right time,
the right time came royally enough on a day so splendid that it
seemed bound to affect some destiny before it passed.
She went up to the farm early, before the heat, and was in time to
see the sheep coming down from the fells. There was still a haze over
the tops, and through it the complaining voices drove and dropped,
reaching her long before she saw the flock. When they came out of the
haze at last, with their heavy fleeces trailing to the ground, they
had the effect of a drifting, woolly cloud. Slim, ghostly dogs darted
in and out of the cloud, and behind them the slender silhouette
of a horseman shaped itself through the mist. He had a lamb slung
before him when he rode into the yard, a tiny, black-faced thing with
dangling hoofs.
Other girls joined her as she went in through the arch, all of them
splashes of cool colour in their fresh print gowns. The arch stood
twenty feet high in the monster courtyard wall, and topping the wall
was a crown of grass and fern. Fern and the dark velvet of old moss
were so much a part of the wall that it might have been fashioned
of them from the start. At present the yard was in deep shadow, and
the house a mere breath of a house, a huddle of formless grey. The
covered stone passage was lost and dark that ran along its side. The
tall arched windows showed nothing but pools of gloom behind their
diamond panes. In spite of voices through its rooms and clatter on
its flags, the place seemed barely alive, an embryo slowly evolving
with the day. But when the sun, in the wake of the woolly cloud, had
climbed the fell and was full above the yard, the house would alter
and gain body and stand up firm. Its thick walls would grow solid
to the eye, and the lines of them spring out sharp and straight.
Its roots would go down deep, and its chimneys would be massed like
towers. Colour would come into the grey, and the weight of centuries
lie heavy on its roof. Its vagueness would take on meaning and the
unchanging speech of form, together with the aloof dignity of those
whose times are other than man’s.
For some time she was at work indoors, helping to prepare the food
for the day, passing in and out of the dim rooms, each of which
seemed to have its own quality of shade, and through low doorways
with sudden steps, and up and down curving, whitened stairs. In the
high, flagged room that had once been the hall, tables were set on
trestles for the afternoon feast. The great beam of the old chimney
still showed above the hearth, and high in one of the blue-washed
walls was a niche where the fiddler would sit to play. Often and
often Agnes had seen old Kit perched aloft in the narrow place that
had the look of some ancient shrine.
The stone passage beside the house had four arches opening on to
the yard, and when the sun came they made inky frames for figures
moving and standing in blinding light, shears that shone like the
swords over Eden’s Gate, snowy fleeces and the pathetic faces of
many sheep. The whole courtyard was full, after a while, set like a
stage with the clippers on their creels. The sun beat clear upon them
as they worked, carving the sheep, as it were, from shreds of the
woolly cloud. Only under the south wall and the big horse-chestnuts
was there any shade, and here in the sudden gloom the faces looked
pale, and the cotton kytles of the men were like moths motionless
in an evening dusk. Boys tugged the unwilling sheep from the pens
and scuffled with them across the yard, or thrust them, clipped,
through the wicket in the arch, to meet the branding-iron outside.
They looked awkward and strange as they scuttled away, with the inky
letters sharp on their close wool. The lambs came up with innocent
eyes and open, wailing mouths. They reached out tentative noses,
faintly surprised, and were suddenly satisfied and still.
Across the yard was another cool cavern with the yellow slits of open
doors yawning in two of its black walls. This was the fleecing-room
where the girls were at work, rolling the fleeces and flinging them
into the loft. The lock-trimmer sat beside the door, trimming the
fleeces as they came in. The soft whiteness of them lay across his
knees, and the shears glanced and flashed and made lightnings in the
sun.
It was a boon-clip, which meant that the farmers round had come to
help, or had sent their sons or daughters or hired men, and one or
two sons of squires were at work with the shears as well. There were
certain clippers who always came, and who always sat in the same
place, just as the lock-trimmer was always the “lock,” and the man
with the tar-pot always had the tar. Thomas was one of those who
always came, and his place was under the wall of the house facing
the arch. Agnes knew why he had chosen this place, though it was
one of the hottest in the yard. When he looked out through the arch
and the steam of the tar rising misty in the air, he could see the
land rolling westward to the sea. “I like to set looking towards the
marsh,” he always said; “I don’t feel suited anywheres else,” and
though he could not see the marsh for the curving land, he knew where
it lay by the light in the sky, as all marsh-bred people know. Year
after year he had sat there at the clip, and lifted his head when
a pause came, and looked out. But to-day he had left the place for
somebody else. To-day he was in the shade by the south wall.
Agnes brought him his first drink, and he took it without so much
as a look or a word, and though she had lingered a moment after he
took up his shears, they still had not spoken nor had their glances
met. She knew well enough, of course, why he had moved; there was no
need for him to be afraid that she might ask. All these years when he
looked through the arch he had looked towards his home, and after
all the years there was a stranger in his home. There was no point
now in looking towards the place where it had been. His eye, as it
travelled, would check itself in its flight, just as his body would
stop and turn away at the door.
She thought about it all day as she went about her work, or studied
him from some corner out of sight. For the first time he was pathetic
in her eyes, forsaken, cast-off, a creature without a place. He
had a lonely look, she said to herself—poor Thomas without a home!
He was a lonely soul, to whom life was being unkind. He might have
been master, for instance, and still was only man. He might have had
father and wife as well as farm, and instead he had only his dour and
dogged self. She, too, had contracted the habit of looking towards
the marsh, and had wondered a little and put the wonder by. Now, when
she looked, she, too, had a sense of wrong in the loss of a home that
might so well have been hers. She began to think of the stranger from
her lover’s point of view, as an intruder thrusting himself into
settled lives. She felt fiercely towards him as towards a cuckoo
in the nest, forgetting that she herself had brought the position
about. The thing worked in her all the day, gradually weighting and
tilting the scale of her heart. Protective affection sprang up in
her full-grown. Thomas, successful and sure, had not been able to
win her even in years, but Thomas the failure laid hold of her in an
hour. She could not bear that his face should be turned from his own
marsh!... From one point and another she watched him all day long.