Astrangefate awaited this renewal of passion. Over the border in Wales, where many dark and violent things are born, a sultry flame had been kindled about this time in the heart of a Wesleyan local preacher named Evan Hughes. He was a Montgomery peasant, a carpenter by trade, on whom, brooding over the historical sanctity of his calling, an inspiration had fallen. He preached in the chapel Bethesda, in the hamlet Llandewi Waterdine. He spoke in the dialect of his fellow-workmen; his words were ludicrous and pathetic; but the fire that scorched his heart was in them, so that men and women rode over the mountains on their ponies to hear him and many professed themselves converted. Why, or to what they were converted it would be hard to say, unless it were that the isolation of their lives laid them open to long broodings on sin and on salvation, and that knowing, as all men know, that they were sinful, they could not be happy in solitude till they were saved.
The unconverted said maliciously that Evan Hughes had been shocked into sanctity by proceedings of affiliation and a maintenance order. However this may have been, his preaching was on chastity of the body, and more particularly of the bodies of women, a doctrine that was acceptable, for the most obvious reasons, to married men with wives younger than themselves, and on sentimental grounds to young unmarried girls. The flame spread quickly through these green shoots, and the dry, withered twigs went up with a crackle. Women of sixty years and older stood up on the chapel floor and prayed God to grant them continence. Evan Hughes, with a singular lack of humour, hailed them as souls plucked from hell and greeted them as sisters. Thus, having cleansed the Kerry Hills and the borders of Clun, he set his eyes, like any spiritual freebooter, on the English border, cursing the fatness and laxness of the Teme valley so violently and with such freequotations from the prophet Jeremiah, that the local circuit invited him to conduct a revival from their pulpits.
First he came to Chapel Green, and naturally enough converted old Mrs Malpas, who was always on the side of the angels. She sat under him with tears streaming from her eyes for the sins of her friends, and afterward had the honour of putting him up at the Buffalo in spite of his prejudices against the licensed trade. On this, the first Sunday of the revival, the Chapel Green Methodists achieved the authentic shiver, and the vicar of Mainstone, who had heard all about it, made a reconnaissance of his parish, shaking his head and warning his people against the influence of unhealthy fanatics.
‘It’s a crime,’ he said, ‘putting such ideas into young people’s minds. We don’t want that sort of thing in the country. Mainstone is a clean parish. Apart from that unfortunate young Mrs Malpas at Wolfpits there is scarcely an . . . unsavoury household in it.’
In spite of this official discouragement, Evan Hughes increased. The revival, unlike those epidemics of disease which afflict the body, spread steadily eastward. Chapel Green with its sober, bucolic population, had made the mildest of beginnings. At Mainstone half the vicar’s congregation thronged the chapel. People walked over from Lesswardine on the Sunday evening in little laughing groups and returned in silence with a Roman segregation of the sexes. Those who scoffed had such a bad time of it that they held their tongues.
Among the victims of this collective exaltation was Susie Hind. No doubt the violence of her renewed passion for Abner had thrown her into an emotional state. Abner was now absorbed in it, and content to be absorbed, seeing that in this way he purchased forgetfulness; but Susie had to run the risk of discovery or worse until her nerves were all on edge.
At first Abner could not make out what was the matter with her. One Sunday night she cried and cried in his arms and would not tell him why. For the rest of the week she brooded on the extremity ofher sin; then, with the same queer directness that had driven her to confront Mary Malpas some time before, she sought an interview with the evangelist and laid her confession before him. He turned away from her.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘I cannot hear these things. My ears are full of them. “Go and sin no more!” and remember me when you pray.’
She went home burning but humiliated, and gave herself up to an ecstasy of self-abasement in prayer. When the men joked with her in the bar at night she would not listen to them. Next Sunday she went again to the chapel and wept. She knew that after dark that night Abner would come and call her. She loved him, but it seemed to her that her immortal soul was more precious than mortal love, and here were two souls to be saved. She lay stiff in bed waiting for his signal, compelling herself to be cold. A clod struck the window-pane. She clasped her hands in an attitude of prayer and lay like a stone. Again he signalled to her. She dared not lie there any longer for fear he should become impatient and waken her father. She slipped on some clothes and came to the door.
‘I can’t see you, Abner,’ she whispered hurriedly. ‘I can’t let you in. I can’t . . . don’t ask me.’
He thought she had taken leave of her senses. ‘What the devil’s up with you?’ he said.
She shook her head and would have closed the door on him, but he put his foot in it. ‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘Oh, don’t!’
He had no intention of being put off like this. He tried to kiss her, but she kept him at arm’s length, and when he had done his best with persuasions and still could get no sense from her, he became angry and raised his voice. Now genuine fear was added to her other emotions, and in order that he should not awaken her father she consented at last to follow him out into the lane. He was on the point of agreeing when it flashed into his mind that this was only a ruse to get him away from the door so that she might lock it in his face.
The only explanation that suggested itself to him was that she might be expecting another lover. ‘No,you don’t my girl!’ he said. ‘You’ll come along with me.’
He waited for her, and in another moment they had crossed the road under the shadow of the poplar. From that point she could see the roof of the cottage where the evangelist was staying. The gable rose up high like a symbol of the power she was obeying. ‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘We might be seen.’ He helped her over the gate, taking her down in his arms. She stiffened beneath his touch. A heavy dew had come out on the grass that washed her ankles as she walked, for she had not pulled on her stockings. Owls were hunting in the misty starlight. One floated before them along the hedgerow—ghostly on quiet wings. He caught her up in his arms.
‘Now what’s it all about?’ he said.
She hurried to tell him before it grew more difficult, stammering with haste; but when she came to the story of her conversion and her interview with Evan Hughes she felt the weight of his ridicule overbearing her. She hadn’t humbled herself enough to bear the indignity of being laughed at, and least of all by Abner. She stopped suddenly.
‘Let me go back!’ she said, trying to free herself. ‘Let me go back!’
He only held her closer.
‘What’s all this havering?’ he said. ‘What’s up with you, eh? Give us a kiss!’
She put her hands up to his mouth, struggling. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t!’
‘What do you want then?’
She took her plunge. ‘Abner, why don’t you marry me?’ she said.
‘Marry you? Marry?’ he cried. He laughed out loud at the idea.
Then it came to him in a flash that there must be some urgent reason for her request. People in his class and in that part of the country rarely married unless they were obliged to in accordance with the local custom. He had been caught in the same way as nine out of ten of his married mates. It was like his cursed luck! He wouldn’t believe it. His first feeling was one of bitterrage. He saw himself tied hand and foot, helplessly handed over to the commonest of fates, another fool caught in the web that women spun for a free man’s undoing. He saw in front of him an endless dull routine of life at Mainstone. He saw himself finished, and the idea of paternity gave no consolation to his bitterness. Then, in the same swift vision, he saw the little household at Wolfpits that depended on him for support, and among them the wan, devoted face of Mary Malpas.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he said at last. ‘How do you know you’re like that?’
She flushed in the dark, with an involuntary affectation of modesty.
‘How dare you?’ she cried. ‘How dare you? I’m not. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Then what the hell is all this talk of marrying about?’ he cried. ‘What d’you take me for? I’m not that soft?’
He laughed out loud in the suddenness of his relief. It stung her pride to think that he was laughing at her. Anger boiled up in her, and she forgot all her pietistic resolves as she freed herself in abuse. In a single second the penitent had been turned into a virago mad with jealousy, letting fly at him a spate of foul words that she had learned in the taproom. She didn’t stop to think what she was saying. The words swept over her mind in a flood and made her deaf. Then she saw Abner shaking with laughter at her performance and pulled herself together.
‘I’ve finished with you, you great beast!’ she said. ‘A dirty chap that goes running all over the country after women! I’m not going to take turn and turn about with a married woman, so don’t you think it! You and that great stick of a Condover as George Malpas got sick and tired of in three year . . . you and your Mary!’
‘Here, drop that?’ said Abner darkly. ‘Shut your mouth!’
‘Drop it?’ she cried. ‘You’re not going to shut my mouth when the whole village is disgusted with you and your goings on . . . and her putting on a face as innocent as a saint and taking the children out forwalks, poor little devils! You wait till George comes back and then she’ll show you the back door quick enough. I don’t know what you want taking up with a piece of muck like that. You’re a dirty hypocrite, and as for her . . .’
Abner stopped her mouth, but she fought and struggled.
‘Next time you’d better go farther off than Redlake,’ she spluttered. ‘You dirty, rotten swine!’
It was lucky for her that she wrenched herself away from him, for Abner’s blood was in his head. She went running like a madwoman over the ghostly field. If she had stayed he could have murdered her. Slowly following, he came to himself, and wondered what the devil he was doing in that damp field in the middle of the night. He cursed all women as he saw them in her violent image, but when he set his feet on the high road, his anger had subsided and he began to realise how blind he had been. He knew that Susie had probably spoken no less than the truth about the local scandals. Looking backward he found that he could explain the smiles and winks and sidelong glances of his mates. Fine friends they were, who made sport of a man and never told him why! And it dawned on him, still stupidly incredulous, that this trouble and nothing else was the cause of the change in Mary’s behaviour, the thing that had snatched her so violently away from him. No doubt it had come to her ears through Mrs Mamble. All women were spiteful by nature, and could not resist the pleasant temptation of giving pain to others of their kind. They had let her know in some covert way what folk were saying, and she, too proud to confide in him, was protecting herself as best she could. He knew her pride . . . he wished to God she were not so proud, and yet, since that was her nature, he must be patient with her.
He was not built for patience. Walking home to Wolfpits with the high road beneath him, and the mild humming of telegraph wires that stretched away to the ends of the earth above, he felt once more the restlessness with which his spirit was so familiar: the desire that had come over him in fierce gusts from time totime ever since the days of his childhood, the will to be free, to cut all coils and launch out into the life to which he had a right. Ever since his boyhood he had been as much a prisoner as George Malpas, and for even less reason. Breaking free from Mawne and reaching out over these hills, he had merely passed from one prison to another. The only periods of freedom he had known had been those dimly-remembered days with his father before Alice came to Hackett’s Cottages, and the week of his travels on the road with Mick Connor. Always, somehow or other, a woman had been at the bottom of his slavery. Women were the curse of his existence. It pleased him fiercely to think that in his breach with Susie he had shorn through one of these shackles. He hated women, and yet, in his heart, he could not remember Mary without tenderness, and knew that, however loudly he might protest, he was going back along the road to Wolfpits of his own free will, and whatever it might cost him, must stay there until George Malpas returned.
That night he was too late to see Mary; but next morning, when he arrived at the work, he tackled Munn on the subject of the Redlake scandal.
‘What do they say about me and Mrs Malpas, Joe?’ he asked.
Munn stammered. ‘Nowt as I know, Ab,’ he said.
‘Drop that, kid! Don’t you come that over me!’ he said. ‘Spit it out!’
‘Naught out of the way,’ Munn said at last. ‘They say as you and her is pretty thick.’
‘Oh, they do, do they?’ said Abner. ‘And what do you think about it, eh?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ said Munn doggedly.
‘No more it is, my son,’ Abner laughed. ‘Get on with it!’
‘They said you’d been caught out over at Redlake.’
‘Then it’s that bleeder Badger!’ said Abner. ‘Wait till I see the sod! That all?’
‘I didn’t hear no more,’ said Munn.
‘Well, kid,’ said Abner. ‘You keep clear of the women! Don’t you have naught to do with them!’
‘No fear,’ said Munn, with a smirk of his hare-lip.
Abner had meant to have the matter out with Mary, but when he thought it over he saw that nothing was to be gained by this. He understood her awkwardness, and, knowing the delicacy of her temper, left well alone. She, on her part, would have suffered an agony of shame in showing him George’s letter. After his final interview with Susie she noticed a change in him and wondered what had caused it. He began to spend his evenings again at Wolfpits, going out to talk in the stables with old Drew, picking baskets of fruit from the walled garden and working, more rarely, in their own tilled plot. She was curious to know what had happened, but kept her thoughts to herself, and was grateful at least for his forbearance.
She had heard no more of George, and though she had lived in fear of seeing old Mrs Malpas ever since Susie’s visit had told her that the new scandal was abroad, the weeks passed by and no outside intelligence penetrated the remoteness of Wolfpits. At times, when she saw Abner moving quietly about the heavy work of the house she was overwhelmed with a sensation which she persuaded herself was gratitude, and longed to burst through the convention of silence or commonplace that bound them. It would have been fairer, she thought, to open her heart to him, to stand face to face without a veil between. But she did not know what her own heart contained, or what the veil concealed, and her courage always failed her. Not only would her confession involve an abasement, a sacrifice of pride that she could not face, but Heaven only knew where it might lead. And yet, in spite of these things, they were almost happy.
One Wednesday evening early in August, just before the gang knocked off for the day, the clerk of the works came walking gingerly among the scattered culverts to the trench in which Abner and Munn were working. He carried a paper in his hand which he consulted with short-sighted eyes before he addressed them.
‘Fellows and Munn, isn’t it?’ he mumbled. ‘Munn and Fellows. Yes.’
‘That’s us!’ said Abner, throwing down his shovel.
‘I’ve a letter from the boss,’ said the clerk, ‘ordersto cut down the wage-bill on this job. We’ve got to sack all supernumerary hands—those that aren’t regular, that is—so we shan’t need you two after Saturday week. That gives you ten clear days’ warning to look about you.’
‘Right you are, gaffer!’ said Abner.
The clerk went blundering on to another trench, having ticked off two names on his list.
‘Well, Joe,’ said Abner. ‘What about it, my son?’
‘I dunno, Ab,’ said Munn dolefully. ‘Back to bleedin’ old Brum, I reckon. That’s about the ticket. I wouldn’t have had this happen not for a bit! I shall never find another lodge like old Mrs Taylor’s. She’s been a mother to me, that woman! What are you going to do?’
‘Stay on here, Joe,’ said Abner. ‘Pick up another job somewhere.’
‘That’s right enough for you,’ said Munn. ‘I can’t go farmerin’ an’ all.’
‘Right enough is it?’ Abner laughed. ‘You wait and see!’
The siren sounded, and Connor came along the trench whistling jauntily as he always did when he was up against it.
‘Got the boot, Mick?’ Abner asked.
Mick nodded. ‘It breaks the heart in me to think I’m afther leavin’ all them pheasants,’ he said. ‘Off on the touch again: that’s what it’s come to. Ireland’s the only place to live in, and I’ll knock down enough for a double at Punchestown if it’s only hawking of dead Roses of Jericho round the basements of Merrion Square. Shure, an’ you’ll come along wud me!’
Abner shook his head.
‘God help you, you couldn’t be worse if you was married’ said Mick, with a leer.
Abner laughed. He knew Mick Connor too well to take his tongue seriously.
That night when he went home he did not tell Mary what had happened, for it seemed to him his news would only disturb her needlessly. At the same time he knew that something must be done, and after tea he went down to the bridge to wait for old Drew’s return.
The labourer looked at him and scratched his head. ‘That’s the worst of they casual jobs,’ he said. ‘Money? Yes . . . but you never get knowed, and there’s nothing permanent to them.’
Abner asked how he should set about finding a job in the district, and the old man looked solemn.
‘I rackon you’ll find it easy enough for a month or maybe six week with the harvest coming. They be glad of any help they can get in they times. After that you can whistle for it.’
‘Anything ‘ll do for me,’ said Abner.
‘Now mark ’ee, ’tis like this,’ the old man explained, ‘this country, when fust I know’d ’en, were a tarrable place for barley and wheat, but now, like the vules they be, they’ve a’ given it up and gone in for this dairyin’. Proper women’s work, I call it; and women be cheap in these parts, as they ought to be. I don’t say as there ban’t the apples as well.’
Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. Abner knew now that he could not look beyond the harvest for regular work, but harvest labour, being rare, was well paid, and by working overtime he might easily amass a little store of money. More than that, he might even prolong his employment, if he made good friends, by helping to pick the yellow apples from which thin Shropshire cider is made, but on this, he knew well, he could not count with any certainty, as the orchards were alien and few. He begged old Drew not to mention his quest to any one at Wolfpits, and the old man blinked his assent.
Next Sunday evening he said good-bye to the friends who shared in his dismissal. Munn, who had scraped together a little money, was going to Ludlow, where he would catch a train for Dulston. Mick Connor, being sick of England, as he said, was tramping north to Holyhead. Abner walked with him to the crest of hills above Clun.
‘If you’re ever in the city of Dublin,’ Mick said, ‘all you’ve got to do is to go into Nagle’s Back. Ask for the devil they call Kerry Mick, used to lodge with Mother Muldoon, and the grocer’s curate ‘ll give you a naggn’ for the love on him.’
Abner watched him swing away down the hill, with his loose-jointed, loping stride. He returned home late at night. Mary, contrary to her custom, was sitting up for him.
She sat at the table reading, and he quickly tumbled to her reason for doing so. In the midst of his farewells he had forgotten to give her his week’s wages the night before. She would not ask him for money; but she was hoping that her unusual presence would make him realise what he had forgotten. Seeing this he was tempted, for a moment, to withhold it; to wait and see what she would do, to force her into a spiritual submission; but then he remembered that the shock which he was being forced to give her would be quite enough.
‘Here’s the brass,’ he said, placing it on the table in front of her.
‘Thank you, Abner,’ she said.
‘I reckon it’s got to go a long way this week. I’ve kept none back.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘It’s going to be the last, far as I can see.’
For a second she thought that the moment had come; that her coldness had actually forced him into leaving her. Remorse, mingled with cold fear for the future, overwhelmed her; but he saw her bewilderment and told her simply what had happened.
‘I’ve got to look out for work,’ he said. ‘It may come along any day, only the harvest’s late.’
‘We shall have to manage,’ she said calmly. ‘You can trust me to do the best I can.’ She stood waiting as if she wanted to say something more, but at the last her courage failed her. ‘I have a few shillings put by,’ she said. ‘I always thought something might happen.’
‘Well, yo’m a marvel and no mistake!’ he cried.
During his first week of idleness Abner went out every day visiting the farms of the neighbourhood in search of a promise of harvest work. It was a lean year: the drought of the summer had stunted the straw; a couple of violent thunderstorms had done more harm than good, and the farmers were now hanging on aslong as they dared, gambling on the chance of rain that was due. Wherever Abner went they shook their heads.
‘Can’t say when we’ll be cutting,’ they said. ‘Next week, or week after, or three weeks’ time. It depends on the weather, and the damned stuff’s that poor it isn’t worth reaping. Worse than the hay . . . and that’s saying something!’
At night, when he came home, Mary looked anxiously for his news, but he could tell her nothing. He made casts farther afield. He did not care how far he went if only he could find work; but down in the plains, although he could see for himself that the ears were fuller, he was met by the same evasive replies. He came to hate the sight of these sour, prosperous farmers. It seemed to him that they all had the same callous faces as the distant Mr Cookson who had killed his dog; but he knew better than to let Spider follow him on these visits.
‘You might try Mr Prosser of The Dyke,’ said old Drew one evening. ‘That be a fine big farm, and they say he do go in for barley.’
Next day Abner visited The Dyke. It was a farm that he had missed in his former expeditions, a house buried in beechwoods that stood, unappropriately, high and dry on a lofty ridge south of the main road between Mainstone and Lesswardine. It lay five miles from Wolfpits as the crow flies, and nearly seven by road. A green drive bordered by hazels and sheltered by smooth beeches in which squirrels were playing, brought him to the house: a melancholy edifice, built four-square, and covered with plaster that had once been painted white but was now streaked with green. He knocked at the back door, but could make nobody hear. A dog flew out of a kennel near the yard gate, tugging at his chain, and inside the house two others, excited by the sound, came pattering along the passage and scraped at the lower edge of the door with their paws.
Abner gave it up. Evidently nobody was at home. He took a drink of cold water at the pump and set off home through the green lane. Half-way down it he heard a sound of muffled hoofs, and a dog-cart, of the sturdy kind that farmers use, came swinging roundthe corner. The driver was a woman of twenty-five to thirty years of age, swarthy, with a rich autumnal colouring, and gray eyes. Another, younger girl, with her hair in a pigtail, sat beside her. They passed Abner at a trot, but twenty yards later the driver pulled up and looked back.
‘Have you been up to The Dyke?’ she called.
‘Yes, miss,’ said Abner, taking off his cap, and approaching.
‘I don’t suppose you’d find any one in,’ she said. ‘Dad’s gone to Ludlow, and the girl’s out. What do you want?’
‘I came to ask if Mr Prosser wants any outside help for harvest.’
She looked at him steadily. Their eyes met. ‘I don’t know. What’s your name?’
‘Fellows. Abner Fellows.’
‘Where do you live? You don’t belong to these parts?’
‘Wolfpits.’
‘Wolfpits?’ She examined him more closely, repeating the word with an accent of surprise. She put a brown-gloved finger to her lip. ‘I think dad will want some one: they’re beginning the barley on Monday,’ she said slowly. ‘Tell you what . . . you’d better look up here to-morrow morning. I’ll tell dad you’re coming. So long!’
She touched up the horse and the dog-cart shot forward. Abner went on his way encouraged.
‘Where did you try to-day?’ Mary asked him. She was doing her utmost to appear interested in his quest. Indeed she could not well do less.
‘Up to The Dyke . . . Prosser’s place.’
Mary blushed. ‘Did you see any one there?’
‘The place was all shut up,’ he said, ‘but I met a young lady as I took to be Mr Prosser’s daughter in the drive just after I turned back.’
‘What age was she?’
‘Summat about yourn.’
‘Dark?’
‘Ah, darkish. There was a young ’un along with her.’
‘How was she dressed?’
‘Now you’m asking things out of reason,’ Abner laughed. ‘Them’s the sort of things a man don’t notice.’
‘It must have been Marion,’ she said, and later in the evening she explained to him that Mr Prosser’s elder daughter was an old schoolfellow of hers, and rather more than a schoolfellow, for they had once been great friends. Mary’s father, the unfortunate Condover, had been something of a crank on the subject of education and had sent her to a school in Ludlow, where she had mixed with all sorts of people who were, in fact, her social superiors. ‘But that’s all ages ago,’ she said. ‘I expect that she’s forgotten me by now. Mr Prosser lost his wife five or six years ago, and Marion’s had charge of the house ever since then. A great big place, The Dyke! She’s a queer girl, I’ll give you my word for that.’
Next day Abner went up early to the farm. In the yard he found the younger of the two girls. She was dressed in a holland overall and a big straw hat and was watching a hatch of ducklings that an anxious hen had mothered, learning to swim in an iron bath. When she saw Abner she ran into the house calling: ‘Marion! Marion!’
The elder came to the door. Abner scarcely recognised her, for she had changed her tweeds and her sporting hat for an overall like that of her sister, and her dark hair was bound in thick plaits about her head. She greeted him frankly, smiling and showing between her parted lips a set of beautiful teeth.
‘I’ve told dad about you,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone over to have a look at the bull and ’ll be back in a minute. Have a glass of cider?’
Abner thanked her. She returned brightly with a mug of cider and a plate of scones hot from the girdle.
Five minutes later Mr Prosser came into the yard with his ploughman Harris. The farmer was a tall, fair man, with golden whiskers and a moustache that almost hid the weakness of his mouth.
‘H’m, you’re the young man, are you?’ he said, looking Abner up and down with more curiosity than he could have been expected to show for a casual labourer. ‘What is it you want? Eh?’
Abner repeated his request, and the farmer, with a little less than the usual surliness of his kind, said: ‘Well, yes, I dare say we can do with you so long as you’re not afraid of work. But it’s a short job, I warn you!’
The younger girl, who had been listening dreamily to their conversation, turned and uttered a shrill cry. ‘Dad! Dad!’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve drowned one of them!’ She ran forward with an inanimate piece of yellow fluff in her hand. ‘Oh, what a shame!’
‘That’s like you, Ethel,’ the father grumbled. ‘Take it in to Marion.’
But by this time the elder sister had appeared and was holding the duckling to her breast as though she would have liked to nurse it back to life. Ethel stood watching her with tears in her eyes.
‘You’ll never make a farmer’s wife, Ethel,’ said Mr Prosser, teasing her. ‘Come here! Give us a kiss!’ He held the child’s face in his hands and kissed her noisily. Marion had carried the duckling into the house. He turned to Abner.
‘Day after to-morrow,’ he said. ‘Come up early . . . about five o’clock.’
Sincethe time of her Ludlow schooldays and her friendship with Mary Condover, Marion Prosser’s horizon had widened to an extent that might easily have explained the distance which now separated them. From Ludlow she had been sent on to finish her education at a Cheltenham college; for her mother had social ambitions and knew that the nearest way to the homes of her superiors lay through the schools that their daughters frequented. She always taught Marion to speak of her father as a ‘gentleman-farmer,’ a description which Mr Prosser accepted under more protest than he usually offered to anything that his wife dictated. For all that, he was proud of the fact that The Dyke had belonged to his family for six generations, and when he walked round his fields on a Sunday evening and surveyed their richness from the crumbled earthwork of Offa’s Dyke, which gave the farm its name, could even be sentimental on the subject.
Marion went to Cheltenham when her sister Ethel was a baby two years old. She made many friends, for she was good at games and a creature of unusual spirit; but the principal feature of her life was a sudden and passionate friendship for one of her mistresses, a languid pre-Raphaelite young woman with a phthisical tendency who made her read a good deal of romantic literature of a sentimental kind. Miss Randall’s literary heroes were Parsifal and Galahad, and her fetish personal purity, the shame-faced purity of impotence. She was not fond of men, she said, although she allowed herself the licence of a spiritual flirtation with an advanced young priest of the Church of England, to whom she opened her soul.
In due course Marion’s adoration of her mistress went the way of all such passions; but her taste for letters remained. In her eighteenth year her mother suddenly died, and she returned to The Dyke to look after her father and her baby sister. Even in theexcitement of her new activities she rebelled, feeling herself isolated, alien, condemned to an infinity of small-talk.
She became the hostess of her father’s friends; farmers of every age and type, who made love to her with varying degrees of rustic clumsiness but seemed to Mr Prosser the most desirable of suitors. Usually they drove up to The Dyke on Sunday evenings or after Ludlow market. Some, by their liquorish assumption of an easy conquest, offended her and caught the rough side of her tongue; but she soon found that with them her genteel shades of irony were so much waste of time, since they were not even understood.
The young men retired puzzled, and their sisters sympathised with them. ‘She isn’t natural,’ they said, ‘and you can’t go against nature like that. I never could think what you saw in her.’ In this way Marion Prosser got a reputation for shrewishness and conceit. The young men of the neighbourhood felt that even the possession of The Dyke would be a small compensation for that of such a difficult wife. They began to treat her with the instinctive respect of the terrier for the hedge-hog, leaving her to her books and to her fancies.
With these, for some years, she was content. The walls of her bedroom at the Dyke showed evidences of culture in as many strata as can be found in the coloured ribbon along the edge of a geological map of England. They ranged from the primary Rossettis of her Cheltenham period to reproductions of late impressionist pictures. Among books she groped her way determinedly. In Ludlow she found a branch of one of the London circulating libraries. Every week she would drive there in her pony trap and bring back the books that she had ordered, to the amazement of the stationer who kept the shop. Her father laughed at her tastes. Among his friends she gained the reputation of a bluestocking, which was enough to make any young man think twice before he spoke to her. And the years went by.
They were dull years, and for very boredom she tried to identify herself with the work of the farm. She threw herself violently into these new interests to theamazement of her father. Although he was still more than a little afraid of her, he could not help respecting her capability. During the lifetime of her mother he had been so infused with the spirit of this active woman that he had appeared to be a man of some determination. Her death annihilated him: he had relapsed into nonentity, caring nothing, as it seemed, for his crops or his herds, driving in regularly every week to Ludlow market like an automaton, driving back in the evening, morose and fuddled, with no clear idea of what he had been about. On these occasions he would talk piteously of his motherless girls, and his large, sentimental eyes would fill with tears. He confided to his friends that he himself was not long for this world, though, physically, he was as strong as a horse.
Marion’s determination changed all that. Subtly, without his knowledge, she pulled him together and made a man of him again, and, never having known the subjection with which her mother had entered the estate of marriage, she did what she liked with him, sometimes wounding his pride with her rather brutal frankness. Yet, even when he was wounded, he submitted to her; for she flattered him by pretending that he was the real head of the household. At root he was a lazy man, and dared not quarrel with his comforts. He realised, too, that the knowledge of practical farming, that was as deeply rooted in him as an instinct, was more essential to the success of their partnership than Marion’s acute and active mind.
He prospered, and in moments of exaltation would tell himself that she was only a girl after all and that he was the man who counted. He made a startling recovery of his self-possession and talked no more of death; but his greatest happiness he still found in the society of his younger daughter Ethel, a child whose nature was nearer to his own. Some day, he decided, Ethel should marry a solid husband of his choosing, some big man with many lowland acres, and when the grandchildren began to come along, he would pass a quiet old age among them. Marion should have The Dyke. Even if she were not the elder she had earned it. It seemed unlikely that she would ever marry, being so hard to please.
Now, at the age of twenty-eight, Marion found herself lonely. The farm work had become so intimate a part of her life that it served no longer to distract her. Life was slipping away from her. Ten years had passed almost without her knowing it. In another ten she would be nearly forty. A hidden fear possessed her that by separating herself from her own class and kind she had sacrificed the chance of living. Life was the thing that mattered, and she had exchanged her heritage for a few pitiful shreds of culture. The motherly cares that she lavished on Ethel were a poor substitute for veritable maternity, and she knew it. She began to see that by refusing all commerce with the men of her own class in the hope of realising a problematical grand passion she had sacrificed all opportunity of passion whatever.
For some years after leaving Cheltenham she had exchanged letters with a number of her college friends, but little by little this correspondence had grown more slender and at length it had ceased. In her growing apprehension she made an attempt to revive several of these ancient friendships. The result filled her with despair and vague envies. Most of her girl friends were married: many of them sent her photographs of their husbands and children. She alone, it seemed, of all their company was left alone. It was her own fault. She knew it was her own fault, for her mirror told her that she did not show her age and that she was still desirable. All things seemed to conspire in fostering her unrest. The sights and sounds of the great farm around her were full of insistence on the cycle of birth, fruitfulness, and decay. Her books helped her no more. Her old æsthetic idols had long since been broken, and her latest passion, Whitman, whom she had discovered through the anthologies, swamped her mind with an endless adoration of the body’s pride, the splendour of the flower no less than that of the fruiting.
In this distressful and desirous state, two incidents moved her deeply. The first was the dismissal of one of the farm girls who had been seduced by a clogger and had gone into the workhouse to have her baby. She was a puny, undesirable creature, withneither beauty nor health, yet she had found a lover. The second was the scandal of Mary Malpas, her old school friend, and the young lodger at Wolfpits, rehearsed with many winks by Mr Williams, whom her father had brought in for a glass of whisky on a Sunday evening.
‘A well set-up chap, that Fellows!’ said Williams to her father. ‘It’s no great wonder she’s took a fancy to him.’
‘Well, well, ’tis the way of the world!’ said Mr Prosser comfortably. ‘Fill Mr Williams’s glass, Marion!’
She did so, and then, furiously blushing, left the room.
‘What’s up with your maid?’ Williams asked. ‘I reckon I’ve shocked her. Did I say anything out of the way?’
‘Not you! She’s a rum ’un is Marion,’ Mr Prosser laughed.
And a few days later she had met Abner returning from his fruitless visit to The Dyke.
She had looked at him standing bare-headed in the level sunshine, and seen that he was well-favoured, but when she pulled up her horse and emerged from the dream state into which the rhythm of trotting hoofs had thrown her she had not thought that this meeting would be different from any other with a labourer out of work. She liked Abner’s face, and for this reason had taken the trouble to ask him where he lived. Then came the word ‘Wolfpits,’ and a sudden realisation that Fellows was the name that Mr Williams had mentioned in his scandalous tale. It thrilled her to find herself face to face with Mary’s lover. She lowered her eyes, not daring to look at him, and all the time her soul was consumed with a curiosity to see more of him, to find out what he was like. She knew that this curiosity was dangerous, that she was deliberately courting temptation, but she had had enough of prudence and felt that she was old enough to look after herself. And yet she knew that she had done a momentous thing when she told him to call next morning at The Dyke, and feared that trouble, indefinite trouble, might come of it.
Abner had not been working three days on the farmwhen Harris, his principal labourer, told Mr Prosser who the new workman was: ‘Young Mrs Malpas’s fancy man,’ he called him; and Mr Prosser, who set great store on the respectability of his farm, felt that he had made a mistake in employing him. The matter had been settled by Marion. No doubt if she had known all the circumstances of the case she would not have taken him on.
‘Do you know who this young chap is, Marion?’ he asked.
‘Yes. He comes from Wolfpits.’
‘Do you realise that he’s the chap Williams was talking about, the one that’s living with Mary Malpas?’
‘Yes, I do. Mr Williams himself said he didn’t blame her.’
‘I thought you yourself were put out a bit by his mentioning it.’
‘Put out? Of course I wasn’t. Why should I be put out?’
‘I think it’s bringing the scandal rather near home having him here.’
‘He’s a good workman, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him that way.’
‘Well, that’s all you want to know.’
‘Harris doesn’t speak well of him.’
‘Harris is jealous of every one who sets foot in the place. You’d think he owned it.’
‘And what’ll the vicar say?’ he joked.
‘I don’t know nor care. But I’m sure we’re doing right to employ him. I don’t know what would happen to poor Mary with that good-for-nothing Malpas in jail and this man out of work.’
‘Well, I suppose you know best,’ said Mr Prosser. He had not expected Marion to take the matter up so warmly. And Abner stayed.
He was not long in finding out who was the real ruler of The Dyke and that Mr Prosser, for all his commanding figure, stood for nothing. When the men knocked off for their dinner at midday and the two girls came down the field carrying ‘baggins’ of bread and cheese and great jugs of harvest beer, they would wink at each other and say: ‘Here comes the boss!’
Marion scarcely ever spoke to him more than a word, but her eyes were conscious of him, and he always felt that he was working under her scrutiny. Whenever they spoke together he was aware of the fact that it was she who had got him his job and that she could take it away from him as easily. When he came back from his work at night Mary would ask him questions about her old friend, but he could never satisfy her.
‘Does she know that you come from here?’ she would say.
‘Of course she knows. I told her at the first.’
‘But she’s never mentioned me? Never asked after me?’
‘We’ve never spoke ten words together.’
‘It’s funny, that! When you come to think of her and me having slept in the same bed. . . . She must know about me!’
‘She’s a rum ’un, Miss Marion. There’s no getting away from that.’
He and Mary never saw much of each other in those days, for Abner had to get up very early in the morning in time for his seven mile walk, and the harvest labour was severe. Severe, and yet pleasant, for the summer weather held and no rain fell. The sun shone pitilessly on the whitening stubbles, but the corn-fields of The Dyke were so lifted upon the back of the hills that they seemed to be part of a high cloudland and free from all heaviness. On the lower levels the whir of reaping machines might be heard, but higher up the fields were so unlevel, following the broken contour of the hills and bounded by the sloping ramparts of the dyke, that all the reaping must be done with sickles and the dry shocks carried to the head of a rough road. Abner had not the skill to wield a sickle, and so in this part of the labour he was useless. Harris, the labourer, who acted as foreman when Mr Prosser was not in the fields, resented this. Before Marion’s interest in the farm began he had been his master’s right-hand man. He had been present at the time when Abner was first employed by Mr Prosser, and knowing that the newcomer was a protégé of Miss Marion’s, was naturally jealous. When the men sat in the shade of a hedgerow for lunch he grumbled to his mates and grudged Abner his shareof the food. The two casual labourers were inclined to take Harris’s side; but old Avery, a man of sixty who had worked at The Dyke all his life, stood up for Abner.
‘I don’t know what the place is coming to,’ Harris said. ‘We don’t want no navvies here. There’s too many about as it is. ’Tis a farming man’s job, reaping. I reckon you’re one of Miss Marion’s fancies. You’d a’ better look out!’
The men laughed, and Abner asked him what the hell he meant.
Harris was a dangerous-looking customer for all his years, strong as a bull, with a low, ape-like forehead, badger-gray hair, and long, ungainly arms that seemed to have been bowed by the carrying of trusses of hay.
‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing. We don’t want no bleedin’ outsiders here, snatching the bread out of our mouths.’
Violence would surely have followed, but at the most dangerous moment the farmer and his daughters arrived. The reaping of the twelve-acre field was almost finished, a huge expanse of stubble lay gleaming under the noon-day sun, and crackled with heat. In the midst of the field a square of barley stood unreaped and shimmering, and within it cowered a secret multitude of field-mice, hares, and rabbits that the destruction of their homes had driven inwards. Mr Prosser and Marion carried guns, and Ethel was playing with three dogs that sniffed and trembled with eagerness for this annual pastime of slaughter.
‘Now, Harris, let’s get a move on!’ said the farmer.
The horses, that had stood stamping and swishing their tails and flicking flies from their ears in the shade of an elder-bush, were brought round with cries of encouragement, and the machine rolled clanking over the stubble towards the standing corn. Prosser and his daughters stayed behind in the hedgerow, the day’s work went on, and as the square diminished, narrowing with each turn of the machine, the dogs sniffed along the edge of that narrow sanctuary until the guns were ready.
‘Give Miss Marion a hand with her loading, Fellows,’ Prosser shouted. ‘Tell the men to get their sticksready, Harris, and we’ll put the dogs in on the far side.’
Abner and Marion stood together with the sun beating on their backs. The dogs ran barking into the corn. Above them, in the eye of the sun, a kestrel hovered. Three frightened rabbits bolted from the farther edge. Prosser fired two barrels and killed one. Another was wounded, and Harris ran after it with ungainly strides and stick uplifted. He brought down the stick with a savage cry and dashed out the animal’s brains. ‘I got him, the varmint!’ he shouted.
The multitude within the square of corn trembled. One by one, terror drove them out into the open. Marion fired twice and missed. Her hands shook as she gave the gun to Abner to reload. She could not see her pitiful target; she saw nothing but the young man at her side with his sun-bleached hair, his red chest and neck, and the milk-white skin above the roll of his shirt sleeves.
‘Quick! You’m missing of them!’ he cried.
She fired again, and missed. She could hit nothing.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve been too long in the sun. You’d better take the gun yourself.’
And she stood watching the sureness of his aim as he fired, knocking over the pitiful, bright-eyed, furry creatures one by one. She watched him, fascinated, conscious only of his health and strength and the perfect co-ordination of his body. She saw it as that of her friend’s lover, and in a yearning tenderness she thought of that hidden life away in Wolfpits. She could stand it no longer.
‘Give me the gun,’ she said. ‘Don’t shoot any more.’
She took the weapon from him and went over to join her sister in the hedge, where she sat watching the scene of slaughter in a dream. Then she got up suddenly, telling Ethel that the sun was too much for her, and went straight home to her bedroom. All afternoon she lay on her bed in the green light of a venetian blind. Her eyes burned and her head was splitting, but she knew that this was not altogether because of the sun. Later, when she had bathed her eyes in coldwater and done her hair, she pulled out an old album in which there was a photograph taken at the Ludlow school where Mary Malpas had been her friend. It was a group ranged round the central figures of the two precise spinsters who kept the academy. She and Mary Condover were standing side by side: two solemn, self-conscious, childish faces with eyes staring straight at the photographer. Now Mary Condover was Mary Malpas, and had this man for a lover. Over in the secrecy of Wolfpits they loved. Ethel came knocking at the door with a cup of tea. The sound of her knock made Marion jump. It was not like her to be nervous.
‘They’ve counted the rabbits,’ said Ethel. ‘Thirty-two! That’s two more than last year. Dad’s ever so pleased. Is your headache better?’
‘Yes, I’m all right,’ said Marion. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
For several days she saw next to nothing of Abner. One morning, however, her father sent him up to her with a message. She was making pastry in the kitchen; her hands and arms were white with flour and the heat of the range had flushed her face. Again she found that in his presence she lost her self-possession, and falling on an awkward silence she blurted out:
‘Well, how does it suit you?’
‘Well enough,’ he replied. ‘Thanks to you, miss.’
‘Oh, don’t thankme!’ she said, with a laugh.
He was going, but she called him back to the kitchen door.
‘Don’t you find the walk to Wolfpits rather tiring?’ she asked.
‘It’s a fair step,’ he said. ‘But I don’t take much count of it.’
‘Why don’t you stay up here till harvest’s over?’ she said. ‘You could make up some sort of a bed in the loft.’
He thanked her, but refused. ‘I find a good bit to do when I get home nights,’ he said. ‘They can’t get on in the house without me.’
‘They?’ she said, with a laugh. ‘Ah, well, it won’t be for long.’
While they were speaking together at the door Harrispassed them with his basket slung over his stooping shoulders. He touched his cap to Marion, and gave Abner a wry smile as he passed. Marion returned to the kitchen without another word, and Abner, on his way back to the field began to puzzle his head as to what she had meant by her sudden change of front when he had excused himself from sleeping at The Dyke. The scorn that she had put into her repetition of the word ‘they’ made him think that perhaps there was more justification than he had imagined in Mary’s feeling of resentment against Marion Prosser. But if she felt sore with Mary for any reason, there was no need for her to practise on him. He wasn’t going to be lugged in to any petty feminine quarrel, they might be sure of that! He had quite enough to do on his own keeping even with that leering devil Harris. Mr Harris was going to cop it one of these days, and no mistake!
He dismissed Marion Prosser from his mind. And yet, all through the hot harvest season the two of them were meeting and passing with a sense of something desired but unspoken on the part of Marion; and whenever they met there came into Abner’s mind a grudging recognition of her physical presence. He decided that he did not like this strong, dark, almost boyish creature who, without even speaking, could so thrust herself upon his consciousness. She was too secret for him. He wished that she would speak out what she had to say so that they might know where they were and be finished with it, and since she would not do so he avoided her.
Meanwhile the harvest season was drawing to a close. The later crops were marred by the long-awaited rain. From every corner of the uplands came the same story: straw so weak as to be worthless and wheat sprouting in the ear. Prosser, who could well stand these losses and many more, picked up an infection of grumbling at the Ludlow market ordinary. Not only were the standing crops ruined but the extra hands were eating their heads off. Harris echoed his lamentations, and Abner, together with the two other outsiders who had been engaged for the harvest, would have been paid off but for the intervention of Marion.
He knew nothing of this. Through all that dead, wet season, when the baked hill-sides steamed with rain and morning skies were heavy with autumnal mist, he busied himself with odd jobs about the farm. It was important for him if he were to find work in the neighbourhood when the job at The Dyke was over, that he should learn as much as he could of the farm-labourer’s craft. He learned to milk, to brush the horses and to bed them down, helped with the lifting of the main-crop potatoes and dug them into the immense buries, shaped like the barrows of the stone-men on Castel Ditches, in which they were stored for winter.
Then, sudden, unheralded, came a September summer. The mists disappeared; the drowned crops stood up golden in a hot and level sunshine; the work of the fields began again. They laboured incessantly, for the sunshine and drought were now more precious than gold. They worked so hard from the light of dawn until the stunted sheaves threw gigantic shadows, that there was no room in his mind for the foibles of Marion or the growing jealousy of Harris. Prosser and his girls came down into the fields to aid them. The sheaves ripened against time, and Prosser watched the sky and tapped his glass all day long. He held on as long as he dared; but on the eighth day of the drought the glass began to fall, and the last sheaves were carted from the fields by moonlight.
At one o’clock in the morning they knocked off, exhausted, and strangely happy in the consciousness of a work well done; but the sense of happiness departed from Abner as he walked home through the owl-haunted twilight, for he knew that the job at The Dyke was over, and he had nothing else before him. At the end of the week, he supposed, he would draw his money and be faced with a new search for employment.
Next day, in accordance with the ancient custom of The Dyke, a harvest home was held in the long kitchen of the house. All morning Marion, her sister, and Agnes the maid were busy baking cakes and boiling hams for the festival. The wives and children of the labourers were asked to share in these rejoicings, and more than twenty usually sat down to the long tableat night. Abner and the other extra hands were expected to come, but Mary Malpas was not invited.
Abner saw nothing strange or pointed in the omission, and indeed he had no time to spare for ceremonies of this kind, having been bred in a country where feudal customs had long since died away under the new and harder influence of capitalism. But to the labourers at The Dyke, and particularly to older men such as Daniel Avery, the harvest home was a feast as religious as any ancient mystery. To them it was the crown of the year and its labours, more vital and more significant than any convention of the calendar. Mr Prosser, as a member of the older generation, was himself attached to the custom. It reminded him of his boyhood, of the days when his father was master of The Dyke and his grandfather sat watching the dances from the chimney corner, and in this way it comforted him with a sense of continuity and flattered those vestiges of family pride which were the deepest elements in his nature. The day always found him in the best of spirits, and Marion, who loved to see her father made happy even by the simplest things, caught a little of his joyful infection. The house was in a stir; the servants laughed and sang about their work; the oaken dresser was spread with holiday fare. Marion caught old Avery in the yard and made him promise to sing his mole-catcher’s song.
‘If I do sing it, I mun sing it right through,’ said the old man, with a wink. ‘I can’t mind the verses without I sing them in arder.’
She laughed; for many of his verses were indecent. ‘You shall sing just what you like, Dan,’ she said. As well quarrel with the indecency of the Bible as that of Avery’s songs.
Mr Prosser had told the men to leave their work at five o’clock instead of at six, in order that they might go home to clean themselves and fetch their families. Only Hayes, the cowman, who slept on the premises, was to be left behind. Abner, old Avery, and Harris set off down the drive together. The others moved too slowly for Abner, for he had seven miles in front of him. All day long Harris had taken a malicious pleasurein letting Abner know that his time was up and that The Dyke would soon be shut of him. There had been one or two ugly moments, softened by the good humour of old Dan. Now they walked alongside in silence, Abner setting the pace.
‘Hey, you do go too fast for old bones, my son!’ said Avery.
‘Wants to get home to his missus,’ said Harris.
‘Here, you’d better drop that!’ said Abner warningly.
But Harris would not be warned. He knew, as well as the others, that Mary Malpas had not been invited to The Dyke. ‘I reckon you’m going to leave her behind to-night,’ he said.
‘I reckon you’d better mind your own business. I’ve had a damn sight too much of your lip.’
Harris laughed. ‘Stands to reason they won’t have that kind of muck in the company of decent married women and innocent childer,’ he said.
Abner did not wait to answer him. He let out with his right, catching Harris on the temple, and sent him spinning toward the ditch.
‘Steady, lad, steady!’ cried old Avery.
Harris pulled himself together and made straight for Abner with his head low down like a bull. He was the older man, and, in spite of the iron strength of his arms, Abner always had the advantage. Harris fought desperately with his hob-nailed boots as well as his fists. They fought till their faces were bloody and their clothes torn. Old Avery whined at them to give over, but they took no notice of him. At last Abner drove Harris into the ditch, where he lay spluttering blood. ‘I reckon that’ll teach you to keep your bleedin’ mouth shut!’ said Abner savagely, and left him there with the old man trembling and shedding weak tears above him.
He washed in the Folly Brook and had made himself fairly presentable by the time he reached Wolfpits.
‘I thought you were going to the harvest home,’ said Mary.
‘Then you thought wrong,’ said Abner irritably. ‘Give us some tea.’
Neither Harris nor his family turned up at The Dyke that evening. Old Dan, who had kept his own counsel,was in the middle of his mole-catching song when one of the ploughman’s children came in with a message to say that her dad was in a fever, and the bed wringing wet under him.
‘Why didn’t your mother come?’ Prosser asked.
‘Dad wouldn’t let her,’ said the child.
Marion took her aside and gave her a piece of cake.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ Prosser grumbled. ‘Here’s Harris badly, and now Hayes tells me he’s got a poisoned finger. I don’t know what we’ll do for the milking to-morrow.’
‘There’s Fellows,’ said Marion.
‘Yes, it’s lucky we’ve got him. Why, he isn’t here either! What the devil’s the matter with them all?’
Marion said nothing. She had guessed long ago why Abner was not there. She had half suspected that he would not come to The Dyke without Mary, but her pride would not let her ask her father to invite the family from Wolfpits. In the bottom of her heart she doubted if she would dare to meet her old friend. It would be so difficult, and besides that she felt that the intuitions of the other woman might discover her own leaning toward Abner. It was too dangerous.
Next morning Abner arrived at his usual hour. During the night Dr Hendrie had been summoned to The Dyke and had found that the neglected splinter in the cowman’s finger threatened him with blood-poisoning, and the loss of his arm. At dawn Mr Prosser had driven him in to the infirmary at Shrewsbury. Marion received Abner on his arrival.
‘Why didn’t you come up last night?’ she said.
‘That sort of thing bain’t much in my line,’ he replied.
‘I wanted you to come,’ she said.
He only smiled awkwardly, and she wished that she had been more prudent. She told him that Hayes was in hospital and that Harris was laid up with influenza. It would be a convenience to them if he could take over Hayes’s work, which was the care and milking of the cows and the driving of milk-cans morning and night to Llandwlas station. He was astonished at this turn of luck, for he had expected to be dismissed with hisharvest earnings in his pocket. For all that, he didn’t mean to take the job on false pretences.
‘So Harris has caught the influenza, has he?’ he said.
‘Yes, he sent up his little girl with a message last night.’
‘Well,’ said he, ‘it wasn’t true. What Harris got was a damned good hammering from me—one that he won’t forget.’
She thrilled to hear him. In her eyes he had become a hero. She knew already that he could be gentle. It gave her a curious, almost physical pleasure to realise him as a fighting man, for every one in the district was aware of Harris’s iron strength.
‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.
‘He only got what he asked for,’ said Abner, ‘with his dirty talk about young Mrs Malpas.’
‘Mary Malpas . . .’ she said quickly. ‘Oh, I’m sick of hearing her name.’
She did not pass on to her father what Abner had told her. He came back from Shrewsbury that evening tired and depressed. ‘The doctors reckon that we were only just in time with poor Hayes,’ he said. ‘It’s a near shave for his left arm. They’ve had to open it right up to the shoulder and he’ll be lucky if he’s out of hospital by Christmas. I don’t know what we can do, with Harris ill as well.’
‘There’s Fellows,’ she said.
‘Yes, there’s Fellows,’ he repeated, thinking of other things. He stared at her vaguely, but it seemed to her that his eyes were searching her, and she left him, blushing.
Abner’s new work kept him almost exclusively on the farm premises, and for this reason he and Marion often crossed each other’s paths. They met so often that Marion lost a little of her shame in speaking with him. She handled him cleverly, so that in the end he lost a good deal of the awkwardness that she herself had created. She was frank and kind, helping him in many small things. He came to take her for granted, and even to like her. In a little time he became accustomed to the cowman’s job and took a pride in it. To all intentsand purposes he was his own master; for the dairy was Marion’s province, and Mr Prosser rarely interfered with its management.
Within a week of his hammering, Harris returned, apparently not much the worse for it. Nobody but old Avery knew what had happened, and the ploughman kept to himself a story that was hardly flattering. Abner had been prepared to treat him friendlily; but he soon saw that Harris had no intention of doing the same, maintaining a surly silence that was never to be broken, since their work now lay in different directions.
So autumn passed, the first frosts of winter whitened the upland, and the first ploughing began. Abner kept to his own work. The Prossers’ dairy was a small one, for their pasture land was limited, but he found that with the two station deliveries, the milking, and the care of the cows, his hands were pretty full. He saw less and less of Wolfpits, for it had been arranged that he should take his evening meal at the farm on his return from the station, and Mary was not altogether sorry for this, since it freed her from many embarrassing moments.
Abner was now earning a good wage, and the household was relatively prosperous. He was even able to replace the watch that had been stolen at Bran. In this peaceful interlude the only thing that really disquieted Mary’s mind was George’s letter. She had never yet dared to show it to Abner, but she had not destroyed it, and from time to time a cruel fascination compelled her to take it from the drawer where she had hidden it and to read it again. It seemed strange to her that she had received no other word from him. If he could write once he could surely write again, and though she did not dare to confide its contents to Mrs Mamble, she induced the old woman to question the wife of a policeman at Lesswardine whom she had attended in a confinement as to the conditions under which a prisoner in the county jail might receive visitors or write letters. A prisoner in George’s condition, Mrs Mamble told her, was entirely separated from the outside world for the first three months of his sentence. After that, if his conduct were good, he might write and receive one letter every month, and invite one visitor to seehim during the same period. This knowledge amazed her; for George had now been in jail more than nine months but had only written her this one, disturbing letter and had never once asked her to visit him. The fact filled her with an inexplicable pang of jealousy; but what troubled her more deeply was to know that Mrs Mamble was conscious of her humiliation.
‘The less you think about him the better,’ said the old woman stoutly. ‘He was never no good to you, and never will be.’
But Mary could not put the matter out of her mind. Once again she commissioned Mrs Mamble to make inquiries in Chapel Green and find out if old Mrs Malpas had visited George in prison. The answer was definite. Mrs Malpas had never left the village since the day of the trial, although she had received several letters from George, as the postman, who lodged with one of Mrs Mamble’s friends, could vouch.
Then Mary hardened her heart; for she guessed that George was choosing for his only visitor the widow woman from Lesswardine, whom she had seen at the trial. Re-reading George’s letter she burned with anger. What right had he to dictate to her how she should behave? Her soul was full of hatred and contempt, so that she almost wished that she had given him real cause for suspicion. In this state she allowed her memory to dwell with tenderness on the surprising moment that had come to her and Abner by the sea-crows’ pool. She felt that she had been foolish to shrink from it. And yet she dared not let Abner see what she was thinking; knowing for certain, that if she did so something violent and terrible must happen to them. For herself she had no fear; but the thought of what the children might suffer chilled her. And she released her surfeit of feeling in a more passionate devotion to these small creatures, determining, whatever might happen, to hold on for the remaining eight months of George’s imprisonment. This artificial resolution made her harden herself more than ever against Abner.