Marden Fee

CHAPTER 1 COWMAN SHELLETT’S MYTH, AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY, IS SEEN TO BE FLOURISHING

On one of a milliard spinning spheres, and perhaps on one alone, a small bright cone of consciousness thrusts its few inches above the vast rubble of Dark and Void. It has endured for but a moment in the cosmic scale, but that moment is the history of life, and for ourselves it is as full of matter, and as unimaginably long, as for a sentient atom would be a moment of ours, who, standing midway between these immensities, and compounding them, stars and atoms, into one metaphysical brew, make our small doomed selves the measure of all things. In Marden Fee the clock of our century records a new quarter; and Time, in that fraction of a moment, has been busy at his work: graving new lines on the faces of men and women, writing his story beat by beat in their hearts, and bringing to birth, for an extension of the chronicle, new souls, new worlds, a living palimpsest. Man too, in whom the wolf ravings and the peacock struts, is more of darkness than of light; but in his apprehension of time he cannot but excel his brother beasts; and his memories, though brief, are at least more enduring than theirs. In this, and perhaps in a certain cunning, Cowman Shellett, for example, differs from the cattle he has care of. A jest will make him slowly grin, if it be broad and gross enough; a bit of horseplay may even make him laugh aloud; and the proximity of his wife, Tisha, may rouse his appetite at any season, and will unless another appetite happen to distract him. In these activities he differs conspicuously from the beasts of the field. He is now in his fifty-eighth year: cadaverous, hungry-eyed, and habitually stooping. No greater contrast to him can be imagined than his host at this moment, for Mr Bailey is now a hale old man, white-haired, genially self-important, comfortably rotund, yet with a look, sometimes, of wistful expectancy in his eye. He has never thought very highly of his son-in-law, and often wishes he could be fonder of his numerous grandchildren; but neighbourly is neighbourly, as they say in Marden Fee, and Shellett is an honest fellow and has made an honest woman of Tisha: an honest woman and a very weary woman, hard put to it to keep a vestige of her handsomeness and a spark of her former good temper. Seth Shellett, her eldest, is here now, taking his mug of ale with the rest. (He is Squire Marden’s gamekeeper, and though Tisha rejoices in his good fortune, she often wishes he were back at home in her overcrowded cottage instead of at Maiden Holt.) Old Mykelborne is here, a venerable white-bearded figure still ready to invoke the authority of Postle Paul. But brisk Farmer Broome is dead these many years; Roger Peakod was taken by the press gang on his nineteenth birthday and has not been seen since; and Gipsy Noke, now a substantial patriarch, comes to this tavern no more, having, with his flocks and herds, his sons and daughter, and his wife Jenny, established himself firmly in the valley region called Nightingale Roughs, which lies on the further side of Glatting Wood and well beyond the parish border. Noke of Roughs, indeed, is so prosperous, so remote in spirit from his former neighbours, that he has become already something of a legend; and the story of how he was once rough-handled for taking Jenny Mykelborne to bed before he had taken her to church, is one that gets little credit from the younger men. And it makes the improbable boast no easier to swallow that Cowman Shellett, when loquacious in drink, will vouch for the truth of it, and add how he himself, with more impunity, got his mistus with young Seth a full fi’ month afore the wedden. In his younger days he formed the habit of talking about it. ‘Ay neighbours,’ he would say, ‘I tuk un to the rutten-plain a full fi’ month afore, and got my Seth.’ ‘Ah,’ say the youngsters, ‘you was a countable good wencher them times, Tahm.’ ‘So I was,’ says Tom, grinning bashfully into his beer-mug. ‘And naun so slow these days, tellee.’ In such talk, less by Tom Shellett’s design than by happy chance, was born years ago a myth highly congenial to his self-esteem. And today that myth flourishes.

Time had done his work so cunningly that few of these folk were aware of what he was at, or paused to consider his ravages upon their persons. They felt themselves to be much the same as ever: that is, neither young nor old in any intimate sense. Such terms were applicable to other people, but hardly to oneself; and one did not notice how the point from which age is measured had insensibly shifted with every passing year, so that, whereas to Seth Shellett a man of thirty was middle-aged and a man of forty almost an old man, to Richard Mykelborne the state of being seventy seemed the only natural and normal state, and all other ages in man a matter for some surprise. Mykelborne was only just beginning to observe changes in himself. ‘Every year,’ said he, ‘do tell the tale, Tahm Shellett. Every year past senty. Three score and ten, as Postle Paul do put un. I can’t make a coffin the way I could. Nor dig a grave nuther.’

‘And what call have you to goo diggen, Mus Mykelborne, when Eddie Green be sexton?’

‘I’ll tell thee, Tahm Shellett. The way of it be this way. Sexton Green’ll dig you a pretty grave, so’s you’d not wish a better, when he’s a mind to. But he ha’nt gotten his heart in his work. And whatsumdever thy hand findeth to do, do it willen and hearty, says Postle Paul. Gird up thy loins and run to ut, and Devil take the hindermost, says he. Up betimes, Tahm Shellett, is up betimes. And lyen abed be no sech thing. Tis uncivil, says I, in man or boy, to keep a carpse waken, the same as Sexton Green ud do, did I leave he to his sinful marnen slumbers. For a dunnamany times I’ve taken the spade from his hands, in a figure of speaken, and fashioned so snug and sleek a grave as you’d be blithe and proud to lay in, and many a better man wud be.’

‘And if Parson were late for the burial,’ put in old Mr Bailey, ‘I wager you’d preach as good a service as any, Dick, let alone make the coffin and dig the grave.’

‘You may say so, Mus Bailey,’ agreed Mykelborne. ‘You may say so in sperrit and in truth. For didn’t it fall out so t’other day, as near as no matter? Ten or fifteen year agoo, when they small pox carried young Nat Broome away, and Parson come sidling up the High Street along of us, yawnen and rubben the sleep out of’s eyes, and who’ve you got in there, says Parson, with a nudge. Where, says I. In the hearse, says he. Who should us have there but the carpse, says I. Plague take ye, says Parson, what be carpse’s name, says he. Well, Reverence, he’ve done wi’ names, says I, nuther marriage nor giving in marriage, I says, but Nat Broome was his name afore a died, and Nat Broome he’ll be buried by. Nat Broome, says Parson; why, I dint knaw a was dead. Dead or not, says I, we be agwain to putt he in. And it’s a dunnamany times crossed my mind to wonder, Mus Bailey, what poor Nat thought of ut up in heaven, and whether he took and had a good laugh with the Lord about ut. And if you ask me what do us poor miserable sinners know of heaven, I’ll tell ye I’ve been there, and I’ve been there twice.’ His eyes opened wide with wonder and self-importance and he paused weightily, that his words might take full effect on the audience.

The door opened and the summer evening flowed in, mellow and golden and warm. From where he stood Mr Bailey could see the shining road, the tall church, rolling hills, and a patch of luminous green sky; and it seemed to him to be a picture of the happiness he had never had and was forever foolishly expecting. He wondered whether death might bring him to his heart’s desire, but had no mind to go by that gate; for though old he was vigorous and full of health, still able to enjoy a fireside talk with his cronies, still liking to think himself a thinker, and still capable of turning out a couplet or two in which to crystallize his thoughts. Since his wife’s death, five years ago, there had been more time for such indulgences. There had sometimes, indeed, seemed to be too much time. The house was a strangely quiet place nowadays: it contained, no matter what noise you made, a continuing silence: a backcloth for the queer unexpected drama of memory. Mr Bailey had Tisha’s twins, his two dull grand-daughters Mary and Kate, to look after him and the house, and to help in the taproom when necessary: an arrangement as convenient to himself as to their harassed mother. They were quiet and devoted girls, and so ludicrously alike that young Hugh Marden, the Squire’s son, had once remarked, in his impudent fashion, that if you tumbled the one twas even chances the other would be brought to bed of your bastard. Mr Bailey himself had signalized the occasion with a gentler jest, and following his example most patrons of the inn addressed each of the girls as Mary-Kate. The folk of Marden Fee were fond of their joke, no matter how small and slight a thing it might be; and the more often they heard it the better they liked it. This one, already mellow with age, seemed to hold for them an inexhaustible treasure. Anyhow they were good girls, mused Mr Bailey, and staring at that distant country of the sky he thought of heaven and wondered if poor Sarah were indeed up there, bustling about with a broom and setting everything to rights. But his musing was interrupted by the entry of an old man, who had paused for an instant, a black silhouette, in the glimmering rectangle of the doorway: a small human figure sketched in, vivid and dark, against Mr Bailey’s vision of the world beyond.

‘God-a-mercy,’ said Coachy Timms.

A chorus of genial grunts made him welcome, and into the inn with him he brought an ageless gaiety of heart that infected everyone. Most of all did it infect the old ones, Bailey, Mykelborne, Shellett, who, if not often aware of being old, were always, in the presence of Coachy Timms, aware of being made young again: whether by force of contrast with his vast age or because new-kindled by his quenchless spirit, they did not pause to consider. Here he was, the wily old sinner, with his slim body and large head, his ripe rosy cheeks and candid blue eyes, and the topheavy air that made one marvel to see him balanced so featly on his pins. He was so old that no one knew his age; and he talked so much gammon that no one troubled to call him a liar when he spoke of bygone centuries with the air of having lived in them. He was a rare old fellow, they said, and that contented them; and they could see for themselves, the elder folk, that but for an extra wrinkle or two round mouth and eyes, and sometimes an enhanced remoteness of manner as though this world of children fatigued him, Coachy Timms seemed not a day older than he had been at any time during these past twenty years. Sometimes they would ask him his age. ‘You’ll be long in years now, Coachy, I’ll ’low. Getten on to a hundred, bainta?’ ‘Hundred?’ says Coachy, with a boy’s shy smile, ‘Ay, I be a hundred right nough.’ ‘And a bit besides haply?’ they suggest. ‘A bit besides, shoont wonder,’ says Coachy. ‘I were that or more the day Master Hugh’s granfer fell into carp pond farty year agoo. Parple in face a was when they dragged un out, and his poor wife, Master Jack’s mother that was, was all bewildered to see un.’ There was clearly nothing material to be got out of a man who dealt like that with a plain question; and the catechism always ended in sagacious sighs and happy laughter at the thought of old Squire Marden and his purple face. So Coachy, for all they knew or cared, was as old as the earth and as enduring: indeed, though reason might have suggested that he must be near his end, nothing would so much have astonished Marden Fee as to be told that he had at last paid the inevitable debt.

And so with good heart Mr Bailey returned him his greeting. ‘God-a-mercy indeed, old friend. You’ll be taking a pint of mild, I’ll ’low?’

‘Ay,’ said Coachy. ‘A pint’ll do to start wi’, Mus Bailey.’ He winked and smiled and contrived to look innocently anxious. ‘Tis not the last pint you’ve got, be ut?’

This joke was as old and mild as the ale itself, and hardly less to the general taste. Mykelborne told it to Shellett, and Shellett repeated it to Seth, so that everybody in the company enjoyed it three times over. Mr Bailey and Coachy himself, having tasted it in silence, exchanged a smile that testified to its unimpaired flavour. And finally, to make all safe, the old man summed the matter up.

‘Nay, not the last, God send. Twould be a martacious sad thing to drink up he.’

When this, too, had gone the rounds, Mykelborne resumed his story as though it had never been interrupted, ‘Yes, neighbours, I’ve been to heaven twice, tellee . . .’

‘And I’ve been three times,’ said Coachy, not to be outdone.

‘The first time tis in a manner of dream I goo,’ said Mykelborne. ‘And the second time tis a sart of swoond or trance same as Postle Paul did suffer on the road to some place or t’other, as it might be Glatting City. The first time tis in the church-litten, and I be setten on a toomy-stone, same as you, Coachy Timms, be a-setten on that bench. And while I be setten there and thinken of this and that, of the folks lyen dead abroad me and of whose turn twill be next to be putt in, there coom a trumpet blowen in the sky, a long shinen trumpet from here to Glatting City, and a man’s head begin poken up out of the grave I was setten by, and then the shoulders of un, and the broad hams and kicken legs. How do Dick Mykelborne, says he. And he do stand up in his bare body bright as a warmen-pan, and start picken the marl off his thighs and shanks. Seems he’ve grown a great head of yellow hair in the grave, and a bright beard bristlen out of him, so’s he do look like The Rising Sun at Medlock. But he bain’t no Rising Sun, neighbours. He be old Jaanathan Tribe, that twisted old scrap of a fellow that was almost my first carpse, and there he be standen straight on his legs and tossen the hair out of his eyes like a lion in the Holy Book.’

‘Never old Cobbler Tribe!’ exclaimed Mr Bailey in wonderment.

‘The same,’ said Mykelborne firmly. ‘And how’s Mus Tribe, I says. Seems us be dead, says he, and in heaven. And the next I do knaw, us be floaten across the grass, and there a-front of us, setten on our green downs, neighbours, be a parcel of blessed angels. Hugy gurt baastards they be, twenny feet or more from crown to anklebone, and some of ’em as black as a coal. They sets there on they downs, never sayen a word to no one, a long row on ’em stretchen away round the sky, from here, as it might be, to Squire Hewlett’s at Dyking Corner . . .’

‘Black?’ said Mr Bailey. ‘I never heard before of black angels.’

‘Black,’ insisted Mykelborne. ‘You’ve haply never heard tell of sech, Mus Bailey, because you be an ignorant sinful man same as I were till I did goo to heaven and take a look at un . . .’

‘When I did goo to heaven,’ said Coachy Timms reflectively, ‘twas on Lubin’s back I went. A rare young colt were that one, with some pretty mischief in’s eyeball. A took me along a winden road and brung me to a green valley the very spet of Hinchley Bottom, but it worn’t Hinchley Bottom; and as like as two hedgyhogs to Nightingale Roughs, but it worn’t Nightingale Roughs nuther. What place be this, Lubin? This be heaven, says Lubin, and us be in ut, says he. And with that he ups on his front legs and canted me into the grass, and so I set quiet thinken ut over, when what should I see but a young woman standing t’other side of a liddle river. Slim and brown she were, and bright as a marigold, and never a stitch on her; and she smiled across at me cool and quiet as you please. Eh, Tahm Shellett, you may cackle, my geek, but I dint think a thought of bawdry that time . . .’

‘How so?’ asked Tom Shellett. ‘Not a stitch on her, saista? I’ll ’low she were game for ee.’

‘Not a thought of sech did I think,’ repeated Coachy, ‘no more than when a man do watch a flight of swallows or a filly nuzzlen her dam. Come here, my coney, I says; come here, my dimple. But nay, quod she; you maun cross the water to find me. So in I goo splash . . . and then I were back in my bed.’

Intent on Coachy, the company had no attention to spare for Seth Shellett; and he, as became his years, which numbered but twenty-four, kept a bashful silence. Nor could he indeed have told his thoughts, which were, at this moment, tinged with a perplexing radiance. He was tall, fair, awkward, and rather sullen-looking. His mind moved slowly. But, slowly or not, it was moving now in an unexplored country. Coachy’s tale, with its chance allusion to Nightingale Roughs, fired a train of bright images in him. And the sudden splendour made him so lose touch with his surroundings that he even forgot to drink his ale.

CHAPTER 2 NIGHTINGALE ROUGHS, AND OTHER MATTERS, INCLUDING THE BIRTH OF CHARITY

Harry Noke was both tough and in his fashion gentle. As a young man he had been more ready to take hard knocks than to give them, and in the matter of love he had always been indolent and easy rather than voracious. Whatever came his road, whether a fine day or a willing woman, he took and rejoiced in, and thought no worse of himself for it. Indeed it was not his habit to think badly of himself. People liked him, and on the whole he agreed with them, in so far as he thought of the matter at all. Resourceful and vain and energetic, he was also generous and thoughtless and very ready to let the morrow take care of itself. But the morrow would not, it seemed, take care of two pregnant young women without his help; and Marden Fee, as we have seen, was not slow to express its dissent from his too sanguine philosophy of life. This dissent found a various and a forcible expression. Threats, blows, a ducking, the pillory, a shouting mob pelting him with offal, and a dead cat tied round his neck: these were cogent arguments, and their general drift was not to be mistaken. He saw that he had made a mistake about his fellow-men and that friendliness was a fool’s policy. Released from the stocks, he dragged himself back home and lay down to rest; and after a long terror-haunted sleep he rose in the early dawn, and began dismantling the hut that had sheltered him for five years and the smaller hut that had sheltered his horse. An hour or two later, having loaded the wagon with his goods and chattels and the wreckage of his home, he drove off. Since the road he intended to follow must take him through the High Street, scene of his humiliation, he carried in the wagon, within easy reach of his hand, a loaded fowling-piece, which he was resolved to use against any man that offered to oppose him. He was a little mad, and more than a little murderous; and, though this first fury burned less fiercely as the days went by, it was never extinguished; for from that moment he counted every man his enemy and every woman easy and treacherous. It is hardly too much to say that six hours in the stocks had made a new man of Harry Noke: punishment had achieved its sublime purpose.

So in the bleak beginning of that cold January day this new-made man came to his journey’s end. Nightingale Roughs was as wild as its name: an unfrequented wilderness sloping down from Glatting Wood and up to the strip of level heath that skirted the northern flank of the little rural town called Glatting City. It was a region deserted and all but forgotten; primitively wild, full of rank growth; a no man’s land between Marden and Glatting that had never, within living memory, suffered taming by sickle or plough, though rumour said it had once been used as a sheepwalk. Lying a full two miles from the track between Fee and City, it now lived its secret life unmolested by man. In effect, though not geographically, it was remote from both places, and the outcast therefore chose it for his own. Here a man could hide his face and nurse his hatred and grow proud in his isolation, always provided he did not perish of cold. Harry Noke had no intention of perishing, and it was perhaps his good fortune that the business of keeping alive occupied him to the exclusion of revengeful dreams. Nature was an enemy more to be feared, and more worthy of battle, than those pesty villagers, whose malice, he knew, had varied directly with their envy of his amorous pleasures. What would they have done in my place, he grumbled to himself. But there were many more urgent questions to be answered. How to keep the cold out of his belly: that was his first concern. He had brought a store of food with him, and some horse-fodder; and he had, to begin with, a sufficient supply of firing. He contrived, as he had done before on Dyking Common, to get some sort of shack over his head before nightfall; and, weary though he was, did not neglect to set half a dozen rabbit-snares before turning in. The horse must share his house till warmer weather came; but, even so, this was the coldest and loneliest night he had ever known, and, being what he was, he could not fail to recall having heard a queer account of this desolate region: how in a past century a murder had been done here, and how at midnight a dismembered ghost came haunting the scene of its impious enlargement: a bodiless head with wide eyes and streaming hair. And another death was still all too fresh in his memory; for the ill-favoured rogue that had shot the dog Roger was but a few days in his grave. That memory, having been obscured by more recent distresses, now returned with a fresh vividness. Lying cold and wakeful in his dark cubby-hole, with the wind moaning outside and whistling in at a score of cracks, he saw again the staring face of the dead man in the grass: evil, distorted by anger, a livid-grey face with a black ball of tongue pointing out at him; and it flashed into his mind that perhaps all the evil that had befallen him since had been that dead man’s doing. His thoughts addressed themselves to this infernal avenger. You coon’t get me strung up, so this is what you done. Tain’t fair dealing, mate. Tain’t fair, tellee. You’ve no call to come worritten me. I can’t fight wi’ ghostses, can I now? Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways . . . But the magic of prayer did not avail, for he could not believe himself in favour with heaven. The evil vision stayed; the eyes stared; the tongue pointed. Go to bed, blast you, and lea’ me to mine. God rot ye and hell take ye . . . But curses were no better; and not till he remembered the dog Roger did he get relief from the vile obsession. Good Roger. At ’im, Roger. Bite the baastard, Roger. Ghost against ghost: twas a rare notion. He laughed at his own cunning. And the dead man rose from the grass and slunk away, with Roger snapping savagely at his heels.

Noke had settled himself snugly at the bottom of the valley, within sight and hearing of a stream. Hills sheltered him on three sides from the worst of the wind’s violence; and the trees and scrub immediately surrounding him afforded a nearer shelter. The whole region formed a great natural bowl, broken only on its southern sector by a wedge of open sky. But though the hurricane rushed past him high overhead, many a minor wind came moaning and swirling round the bottom of the bowl to work what havoc it could. Dank was a more dangerous foe, and the exile’s first task, after building his shanty, was to dike and drain the small terrace of land on which, following his own precedent, he had chosen to place it. February was a drear month, but the prospect of spring heartened him to endure its asperities. In the long evenings, when darkness drove him indoors, he thought often of his dog Roger. At nights the horse’s presence was something of a comfort, but the horse was not Roger. Pride forbade him to wish for a human companion. Already his hair was long and tangled, his face covered with black beard: he had forsaken mankind and was resolved to end his days in the wilderness. March came in like a lion, but his blood was still warm with anger and he went on fighting for his life. In April, despite the imminence of floods that might destroy all his work, he counted the battle won, and then a new ambition was born in him. He had kept alive, but that was not enough. He wanted to prove himself more than master. He wanted to grow rich and powerful. He had already-reclaimed and subdued an acre of this wilderness, but that was far from contenting him. With horse and wagon, and all the money he possessed, he went to Glatting City: a strange and rather sinister-looking man, and as different as can be imagined from the shy, blarneying, soft-speaking young fellow who had come to Marden Fee five years before. He asked many questions and answered none, or answered only with lies; and before nightfall he was back at his clearing, and grimly satisfied with the day’s work, for he had acquired, partly by simple theft and partly by purchase, a horse-plough, a hoe, a scythe, a bushel or two of seed potatoes, wheat and barley for sowing, and a pair of household scissors. Among these articles there was enough stolen property to hang him ten times over, five shillings being the degree in theft at which a thief’s life became forfeit to the law. But this did not dismay him: it was a small necessary risk and he took it in his stride.

It was about a week later, just as dusk was falling, that he saw, for the first time, a human creature wandering across his kingdom. His first impulse was to shoot; his second, more sober, was to hide himself. But, the figure coming nearer, he recognized it for a woman’s, and conflict began raging in his bosom. Was this his chance of vengeance? He stepped from his shelter and strode forward, empty-handed. The woman saw him, threw up her arms, and screamed. She began running, but he was with her in a moment and had seized her. She screamed again.

‘Eh, Jenny Mykelborne. What be you a-doen these parts?’ His voice was cruel.

She became limp and quiet in his arms. He released her contemptuously, and she fell to staring at him.

‘I din knaw twas you, Harry, in that great beard. You look fair wild, you do.’

He regretted the beard; for he read in her eyes that by his neglect he had made himself an ill-favoured and terrifying spectacle; and, being resolved to hate her, for her part in his downfall, he was angry to be seen at a disadvantage. ‘Nemmind beards, my pigeon. What you doen these parts? Tis late for a good girl the likes of thee to be from home, bainta?’

‘I came seeken you, Harry Noke,’ she answered. And it was true. She had run away from sound of her scolding mother and from sight of her father’s reproachfulness. Being desperate, and because no other man would look at her, she was resolved to devote herself to Noke, could she but find him. And so, when a chance rumour came——

‘Howdee knaw I were here?’ demanded Noke suspiciously.

‘Folks said.’

He grunted, perplexed and angry. ‘And whad you want wi’ me?’ He eyed her pitilessly, taking note of her shape. To have turned her away would have been a hearty meal for that hungry pride in him. He played with the idea.

‘Be you liven here always, Harry? Tis a wild spot.’ She faced his question. ‘I get a middlin dish of tongues every minute of the day from Mother. And Father be always putten the eye on me. So I thought haply you’d let me rest along you. I could work for ee and all manner.’

In spite of his resolve her humility touched him. And that she came in suppliant mood suited his proud fancy. But he did not trust her. ‘What should you be stayen for? Nay, doon’t start snivellen. Ye’re none so handsome without that, tellee.’ She turned her back on him and began moving away. ‘Eh, you be a bag of fancy tricks, Jenny Mykelborne. Gwain now, bainta? Gwain where?’ He knew she had no intention of going anywhere. Nor would he now have let her go, for the idea of human companionship was suddenly a secret bliss to him. He must have someone to talk to, and Jenny would do as well as another.

She turned to him with that rueful large-eyed look with which, as a child, she had so often wheedled her father into obedience. ‘If so be you daun’t want me any more, Harry, I maun goo home again.’

‘Wantee? Why for should I wantee? But I want what you’ve got in y’r belly, darlen. And that be a son of mine? bainta?’ He had need of sons: lusty lads by whose labour, and by his own, he would make himself great. ‘When be your time comen, girl?’

Yes, he had need of sons; and when Jenny’s firstborn proved to be a girl he was sorely disappointed, and remembered, with raging bitterness, how, five months earlier, Tisha Shellett had borne his son for another man to play father to. He cursed this unwanted female child; he cursed the mother; he cursed the midwife he had lured with bribes and threats from Glatting City. And with these curses something of the devil went out of him. By now he had built another and a larger hut, leaving the old one to serve as a stable; and before Charity was two years old he was the father of a son and the master of twenty well-cultivated acres. No one challenged his ownership; no one wished to compete with the madman who had secretly set himself the gigantic task of taming this wilderness. He knew in his heart that not till the whole of Nightingale Roughs was yielding profit would he relax his gargantuan efforts; so year after year he went on, adding acres to acres and son to son (two branches of one endeavour), and sparing neither himself nor his wife. After five years of it he hired a lad from Glatting to help him, paying a shilling a day in winter and spring, one and twopence in haytime, and one and sixpence at harvest, with a reasonable allowance of small beer at all seasons. This modest outlay brought him a generous return; the farm increased more quickly than ever. He employed others and bought more stock. And with every day that passed he grew more cunning in his farmcraft; for he gave the whole of his quick mind to it. By keeping eyes and ears open he learned many a new device, so that before long he was spreading his land with a mixture of marl and dung, broadcasting seed by means of a newly invented machine instead of by hand, and taking care never to sow turnips before four in the afternoon lest they should suffer drythe. By the time Roger his eldest son was ready to take a share in the work, more than half the wilderness had been conquered; and, besides valuable grain and root crops, there was pasture for cows, grazing for a hundred head of sheep, a five-acre field of burnet and clover, and of sainfoin a fourteen-acre of which every unit could be counted on to yield three tuns of good hay. Noke was relentless in his industry, suffering nothing to daunt or delay him. In a certain time of disaster when he found himself short of horses, he harnessed a pair of bullocks to the plough, and laughed at the gaping astonishment he provoked: such a crazy thing, they said, had never happened in Sussex before. He was married to his farm and thought of nothing else. His sons to him were so much man-power; his wife was their mother; his daughter, for he had but one, was a useful milking and butter-making wench. He hardly noticed, and certainly gave it no thought, that Charity, in her late teens, possessed the same kind of plump seductiveness, and the same willingness to make use of it, as her mother had exercised upon himself two decades ago. But when she reached her middle twenties a fantastic idea flowered from the darkness within him. He began looking at his sons with new eyes. Manpower for the farm they were—but they were more than that. For he now entertained consciously a thought that must always have lain hidden in him somewhere: that these sons of his were in a sense, and a profoundly satisfying sense, extensions of his own being. He, Harry Noke, the man who had been reviled and pilloried by a pack of villagers twenty-five years ago, had so increased his substance, had waxed so great, that he was now more than a man: he was six men. Those five sons were each a living proof of him: he looked upon them with a sudden fierce satisfaction. But five was not enough. They had all been born in the first eight years, and then—no more. Why? He suspected Jenny of cheating him; and cursed her for it, knowing her to be now past child-bearing. He was crazy to prove himself further, to beget a numerous progeny. Why not let Charity take a turn, said his demon. The thought was quickly repudiated. He shrank from it, and for a moment hated the man his mirror shewed him: a lean, hungry-eyed, crafty old fellow, with a sharp nose, broad mobile nostrils, and a spade of black beard. But it returned at intervals, causing him a twinge of shame. Despite his angry and continuous endeavours, the gentler instincts of his youth were not yet utterly destroyed; and he raged inwardly, being at war with himself.

CHAPTER 3 SETH SHELLETT DISCOVERS A NEW WORLD, AND AN AXE IS FOUND

Seth Shellett, waking on Midsummer Day, thought first of Noke’s daughter, Charity; and not for several seconds did he remember that today it was his duty and pleasure to tie a green ribbon in his hat, and cut a stick of hazel, and take his part in the year’s high festival In this he differed from most of his neighbours, who for weeks had talked of little else than the coming celebrations. For on Midsummer Day, each year, the folk of Marden Fee made festival. Work was abandoned; authority, with its own consent, was set aside; and the day was dedicated to feasting and the night to saturnalia. Until noon, however, everything was done according to rule and tradition, and of this tradition the Marden Club was the faithful guardian. The club had been founded by Bertram Marden, the first squire of the Fee (of whom only the incorrigible Coachy professed a personal knowledge); but the midsummer ritual it was so zealous in practising was of immemorial antiquity. No one knew, or inquired, when or by whom it was first ordained that on a chosen day of each year the men of that parish, led by a banner-bearer and each carrying a peeled hazel wand cut from the hedges, must assemble at The Nick of Time, and thence, having answered to their names, march up the High Street in the wake of seven white-veiled maidens, and so to church, where the priest awaited them. Lightly screened by a veil, even the plainest girl looked a little enticing, as the men were not slow to notice; and there was always a good deal of giggling among the vestals. But by the time the procession reached the church, the women’s demeanour was as modest as the men’s was solemn. There were wardens at each door to see that no clubfellow escaped his duty; and few attempted to do so, for the pleasure of defaulting was not worth the risk of forfeiting one’s seat at the club dinner. For the most part they sat through the service with a good grace and thought of the feast that was to come, though today there were not wanting those who spared at least enough attention to the admonition to entitle them to say, afterwards, that Parson Hockley were no match for old Parson Croup. ‘A good sarment, but he do beat the devil round the gooseberry bush so much, tis all a body can do to keep waken.’ Parson Croup had died ten years ago, and his successor, a foreigner from Kent, had the inevitable faults of a novice. ‘A middlin raw discourse,’ said Mykelborne. ‘But I say naun to that, for you can’t expect better, seeing he be so new to ut. Festival’s not what it was, neighbours. Parson Croup, when he’d a mind to’t, would send ye to dinner so full of God’s fear as liddle shart of fi’ pints would drive un away. A laamentable pretty preacher was Parson Croup on club days.’

But in spite of Mr Hockley’s inadequacy, the men who reassembled at The Nick of Time for dinner shewed no reluctance for their meal. Food and drink was provided on a lavish scale, a pound of beef and several gallons of beer being apportioned to each man. The three casks—two thirty-sixes and an eighteen—made a brave show; and the company responded with a vast blare of applause when Mr Secretary Bailey climbed on to one of them, and, fortifying his precarious balance by resting his right hand on the head of Mr Warden Mykelborne and his left on that of Mr Warden Sweet, with a modest preliminary hem called for silence. When the uproar had subsided, and the orator’s mouth was seen to be filling with the first word of his speech, Mr Bellman Growcock, the blacksmith, rang his bell fiercely and shouted: ‘Silence, gennelmen, for Mus Sikkitary!’ At this the applause was renewed, and Mr Bailey had to wait again. But, during this chant of praise, those who were most eager for their meal began shouting for order; Mr Growcock rang his bell a second time; and silence was at last restored. ‘Gentlemen and fellow clubfellows,’ said Mr Bailey, ‘we are all assembled together once again. Another year has rolled past, season following season in its appointed turn. Last year is gone, and this year is with us, and our club is the same as ever. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to tell you that we have had a year giving great satisfaction to all. George Mew broke his leg and received club pay for a period of seventeen calendar weeks. Our old friend and pensioner Willy Brown, his gout has gone from bad to worse. We buried old Mr Thorpe with club money last Michaelmas, and his grateful and refined widow followed him before the year’s end. These, gentlemen, are the only outgoings of consequence that I have to report. So we will now fall to, with such inclination as has been vouchsafed to us. And may I remind you, gentlemen, that spitting while at table is against the club rules, and that the practice of throwing bits of fat and gristle at your opposite neighbours is one that has led to a great deal of unpleasantness in the past, such playful sallies being not always received in the right spirit, especially by persons who are a little consarned in liquor. And now, fellow clubfellows,

Thank you, gentlemen, for your kind attention.’ But he was not yet suffered to descend from the eminence of his barrel. For, first, Bellman Growcock must draw a pint, and offer it to him with the ceremonial words: ‘Mus Sikkitary, sir!’ No one was permitted to drink until Mr Secretary had begun. ‘And do pitysake drink a sup with no more words, Mus Bailey,’ added Growcock, in a hoarse hurried whisper, ‘for tis all I can do to keep ’em off it, tellee. Like a parcel of snorten lions they be.’

With this request Mr Bailey hastily complied, and the chained lions were let loose. A roar filled the room, for these hearty fellows somehow contrived to shovel food into their mouths, and gnaw it and swallow it, and yet maintain a continuous and noisy conversation. Mr Bailey came in for a little criticism for not having mentioned that old Jarge Mew, that had bruk his leg, had for many years been the club bannerman, a very high and responsible office, his duty being no less (and no more) than to carry the banner at the head of the procession from tavern to church. The appointment of a successor to Jarge had been the occasion of many an anxious conference among the seven elders of the club: the secretary, the two wardens, the bellman, and three other committeemen. ‘We maun get a steady man,’ said Mykelborne, ‘and a God-fearer. Tis a bright and costly bauble, our banner; and twould never do to trust he to the hands of a blaspheemious rogue the like of Bellman Growcock here, or some such another, nor yet to a gummut the like of Tahm Shellett.’ They had all, including Growcock himself, wagged their heads in solemn agreement; and these conferences had borne good fruit, for it was agreed now, by connoisseurs of the art of banner-bearing, that the man on whom their choice had fallen was making a very fair job of the business. ‘What say you, young Seth Shellett?’ But this was mere banter, a rhetorical question; for it was notorious that Seth, sitting mumchance at the feast, would never let himself be coaxed into expressing an opinion on anything. Yet he was no fool, they said, or Squire Marden would never have him for gamekeeper.

‘How be they birds of yourn, Seth?’

‘Middlin bad. They’ve got the spasms, most on ’em.’

‘Ah, have ’em? And what says Squire to that?’

‘Squire dunnaw everything,’ said Seth, without a smile.

‘Ah, Squire dunnaw everything, daun’t a?’

‘No, a daun’t.’

In Marden Fee old jokes are best. Seth’s interlocutor winked at his neighbour. ‘Hearkee what Seth do say? Squire dunnaw everything, a says.’

Delighted chuckles from all sides.

‘And what of Parson, Seth?’

‘He dunnaw everything nuther.’

Roars of laughter.

From down the table a fresh voice joined in. ‘What daun’t a know, Seth?’

‘What daun’t who know, Mus Thatcher?’

‘What daun’t Squire know, Seth?’

Seth munched on in silence for a minute and a half. The conversation went on without him. Then he said: ‘I dunnaw what tis Squire dunnaw.’ After a pause he added: ‘But a dunnaw everything, stands to sense.’

Laughter was renewed. Growcock the blacksmith then took the matter up. ‘I know one thing Squire dunnaw. He dunnaw the games young Master Hugh be at wi’ Noke’s darter.’

‘And what be they?’ asked someone, with a sly grin.

Seth stared at his plate. His face slowly reddened. The things he heard moved him with a strange variety of passions. But they did not shake his resolve to go to Glatting Wood after drinking his fill; nor, when he had effected that much of his purpose, and was waiting by the tree where Charity Noke had promised to meet him, did their recollection diminish the ardour of his expectancy. That was talk, but this was real. Hugh Marden might or might not have done this or that: it mattered little. What mattered was that soon, unless she intended falsely by him, Charity would be in his sight and hearing. And what else? He attempted no conjecture. Late afternoon sunlight was sprinkled thriftily about the wood, amid masses of warm-smelling shadow. He took little enough notice of that, but it cheered and helped to excite him. Nothing as yet had passed between him and Charity beyond a few shy words and glances. Nothing to the point had been said. But she had agreed, as though casually, to meet him in this lonely intimate place; and ever since then, at intervals, his dreaming senses had foretasted the sweetness of her. She was more like a woman, more to be desired, than any other girl he had seen: that was all he knew, and even that was a dumb instinct rather than a conviction. He did not think far ahead. Being unread, and in the main unfanciful, the word love, and the conventional vocabulary of love, played no part in his thoughts. He wanted to see and touch her: that was enough.

He heard the sound of breaking twigs and trodden undergrowth, and went forward to meet the sound.

‘Hullo. You’m come then?’

‘Hullo.’

He did not speak her name, nor she his. The encounter was impersonal: male with female. She stared at him, her big bovine eyes wide with wonder and amorously mournful, her ripe mouth childishly pouted, the poise of her lush body languid and feline. She was bareheaded, and a clustering mass of black hair framed her plumpness with a suggestion of mystery. After that one word she said no more, but seemed content to stare and wait. The silence worked in him. The shyness he had felt at her first coming vanished away, leaving him free of all constraint, free to escape from himself into the bright sensual world that was opening before him. With a certain deliberation, as if doubting of her real existence, he put an arm about her shoulders. She smiled up at him and stroked his face, so that all his nerves vibrated with delight, and he became radiant with lust, a bright innocent animal. With a little growl he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the nearest covert, where, drenched in green shadow, they lay for a long while, wordless and passionate.

Dreams came crowding. Sometimes Seth caught himself absent in mind from the woman in whose arms he lay, and had no time to be astonished that this glory, in the moment of achievement, could be so painlessly, and in so rich an oblivion, lost to him. A little scrap of tune came murmuring in his head; a field of ripe corn floated into his vision. Sheep-bells tinkled on the green downs; and presently he was driving a plough along the base of a steep hill. The sun beat down on his bare arms with pulsing vigour. The broad buttocks of the mare swayed and plunged; the muscles of her thighs rippled and swelled; her tail lashed ceaselessly at the swarm of following flies. From such dreams he emerged from time to time into a waking life that was itself as dreamlike as any of them: woke to find two large eyes, brimming with dark light, shining upon him, and a blood-red amorous mouth near his own. The world and all its meaning lay within the circle of this small cool private place, this sun-freckled green. But with every kiss he tasted again of the lotus, and at last sank into the deep slumber of fulfilment.

When next he woke, he had travelled so far in sleep that he stared with dull eyes, wondering where he was, and at first could hardly believe the tale his memory pieced together. The woman, too, seemed stupid with sleep; and even at each other these lovers gazed blankly. They moved apart, and sat up. The silence between them persisted. Since their first greeting, neither had uttered an articulate word. Nor did this silence bring constraint: the artifice of speech was still something less than second nature to them.

It was she who spoke first. ‘You be Cowman Shellett’s son, bainta?’

‘Yes,’ said Seth. ‘Father be Squire Marden’s cowman sure enough.’ After a long pause, he added: ‘And I be gamekeeper.’

These things were common knowledge, and Seth could not imagine her to be ignorant of them. But he was proud of his position and glad to talk of it. He was not in general a vain man, but he could not help knowing that he was accounted a likelier fellow than dull Tom Shellett. And now he was eager to cut a fine figure in the eyes of Charity. For his attitude to Charity had changed. Suddenly, as it seemed, from being merely desirable, she had become significant, a person. An hour or two ago she had been to him merely woman: now she was his woman. He stole a glance at her, and remembered that tavern talk, and became savagely possessive. He flung an arm about her and clutched her shoulder. ‘You and me,’ he began. But he broke off, at a loss for words.

She wriggled herself free and rubbed her shoulder ruefully. ‘Adone do. Rackon you’ve give me a bruise.’

‘Nemmind bruises. You be my girl. See?’

She giggled, making big mocking eyes at him.

He scowled. ‘You be my girl. Dauntee forget. If anyone else come round you, I’ll murder un, and all manner.’

‘Oh, do adone!’ She grinned with delight. ‘I seen your father, Seth Shellett, up along Glatting one time.’

Seth grunted. He was not interested in his father. ‘Gamekeeper I be. Head man.’

‘Fancy!’ said Charity.

‘Used to be ploughman, I did. But I be gamekeeper now.’

‘That be tarrible pretty work for ee, I’ll ’low.’

‘I caught a feller after they birds t’other day. Rackon a won’t come again along me.’ With his stout hazel wand he began idly prodding at the ground, and the soft leaf-mould yielded to his assault as readily as Charity herself had yielded. It gave him a vague unconscious pleasure to see the hole growing bigger; but his thoughts were still with himself and his woman, for he was waiting for her to ask how he had dealt with the poacher, being very ready to tell her of the fine drubbing he had given that rascal, and how the drubbing was a kindness to him, and a martacious long sight better than the treatment he might have received at the hands of the law. But Charity had quite other thoughts. She liked Seth; she wanted him; she was resolved to keep him for her own; and her remarks were not idle.

But now she was ready to talk of other things than Cowman Shellett.

‘Whad you diggen a hole for?’

‘Eh?’ He was a little cross. He had hardly noticed that he was digging a hole. And, anyhow, it seemed a foolish question, because it was not the question he had hoped for. ‘Rackon a won’t come round along me again,’ he repeated perseveringly.

‘What a tarrible gurt stone you’m got there,’ she said, pointing to the hole at his feet.

He grunted illhumouredly; but, undiscouraged, she leaned forward and plunged her hand into the moist earth.

‘Tis a funny shape, annut?’ she said, shewing him her foundle.

Seth stared. In spite of himself the thing stirred a faint curiosity in him. He took it from her and turned it over in his hand: a broad shapely piece of flint about eight inches long. One end was broad and flat, the other sharp like an axe. Seth stared, not knowing at first what it was that attracted him; and even when he did know, he hardly knew how to express his thought. There was workmanship in this flint, and workmanship was something that Seth, for all his slowmindedness, seldom failed to recognise.

‘Do ee want ut?’ he asked.

She leaned forward and gave him a large loud kiss. ‘You shall have ut, darlen, for a keepsake,’ she said, half-mockingly, as though humouring a child.

‘He do want naun but a handle,’ said Seth. . . . But he did not finish speaking his thought; for Charity was waiting for more kisses. Idly dropping Ogo’s axe-head into his jacket pocket, he turned to her eagerly, and the drums of ancient warfare began beating again in his blood.

CHAPTER 4 MR BAILEY CONSULTS HIS HEART AND HEARS OF SOMETHING TO HIS ADVANTAGE

Mr Bailey, on this Midsummer Day, experienced unwonted difficulty in remembering where he was and what was demanded of him. Club Day was an occasion which he, no less than the humbler members, anticipated with eagerness. To be ‘Mr Secretary,’ to exercise unchallenged authority, to be deferred to and made much of, to receive confidences and give sententious counsel, these things gratified alike his vanity and his affection. More than ever now, he was a friendly soul; the years had mellowed him, ripening such humour as he had and weaning him from the worst of his nonsense. He was less greedy of notice, less expectant; but he was no less lonely. Indeed he was more than ever lonely in spite of the crowd of memories that companioned him. The sight or thought of beauty—and now all things external were apt to be translated into thought—had all its old power to trouble him with a vague hunger; but he no longer entertained any worldly ambition, and no longer regretted the chances—disasters, as he had once called them—that had made an innkeeper out of a smart self-important young schoolmaster. Marden Fee, to which he came as a foreigner, had accepted him at last. These villagers trusted him and liked him; looked up to him as an educated man, yet counted him one of themselves; and nowadays, fully realising his good fortune, he found this friendliness a matter not only for gratitude but even for surprise. So Club Day, when old friends, originally of the Fee, flocked in from all parts of the country (some from as far as Medlock, a good twelve miles), meant much to Mr Bailey. He took a paternal interest in these folks, making it his business to know where they lived and how they lived, whether their wives were kindly or shrewish, the number of their children, and the date of their last illness. It pleased him mightily, after years of self-induced difficulty, to find himself at ease with these men and of use to them. When Charley Grampound, an octogenarian, came to him from Dyking with complaints about old Mrs Grampound—‘My wife be sech a tarrible tarker, Mus Bailey, I doon’t lay wud ’er nowdays’—he was by no means at a loss. And when today, after dinner, his own club wardens, Mykelborne and Sweet, being (as the phrase goes) much concerned in drink, came near to bloodshed in a dispute about the true remedy for the ague, it was Mr Bailey who put the matter right and prevented a brawl that would certainly have become a riot. ‘Now tis this way, Mus Bailey. Old Johnny Ague, he’ve bin a-runnen his fingers down my back, and that be for why I carry this liddle nutshell round my neck. I’ve got a spider curled up in he, and old Johnny daun’t like spiders, tellee. Now this gurt booby Dick Mykelborne, he do say a man must swaller the spider. Roll un up in a caabweb and swaller un like he was a pill, says Dick Mykelborne, him and his old Postle Paul.’ Giving judgement, Mr Bailey ruled that both methods were good, each in its own way, arguing very plausibly that while some kinds of spider might prove curative taken as a pill (gratification of Mykelborne), others, less edible on account of their size and general aspect, had best be worn dangling, as a preventive charm (‘Whaddid I tellee, Dick!’ cried Sweet, in genial triumph.) And finally he thanked God that there were no spiders of any kind in his beer today, and if the clubfellows would do him the kindness to fill their glasses again he would venture to propose to them another toast: ‘Our trusty wardens, gentlemen. Those two devoted officers of this club who watch your old secretary day and night to secure that he do not abscond with the funds. Which same funds, gentlemen, are in safe keeping, and ready to be drawn upon for the benefit and assistance of any clubfellow that stands or shall stand in need of pecuniary aid. Sickness truly vouched for, injuries honestly come by, these we need not fear to confess, gentlemen. Our club is behind us. But if any man here choose to break his head in a quarrel, tis with his own money he must mend it, for not a groat shall he get from the funds while Erasmus Bailey is your secretary. Our trusty wardens, gentlemen—we’ll drink to ’em!’

From all parts of the room there was much ‘allowing’ that Mr Secretary had shewn his customary skill in handling an awkward situation. But for the rest he was quieter than usual. He seemed absent from them, and the youngsters among them told each other that he was getting old. Had rumour of such talk reached Mr Bailey’s own ears, he would have smiled at it with a certain degree of self-satisfaction. For indeed, though he had entered his seventies, it was not age that made him pensive today. The truth is he was listening: listening to a strange and charming tale that his heart was busy telling him: a tale that had all the summer in it except summer’s wild lustihood, all the warmth and colour, the green and gold, trees rustling like the sea on shingle, and those mellow evenings of amber and musk that seem to hold eternity itself in their stillness. And the subject of this tale, the beginning and end of it, was Elizabeth Lavender, the comely and comfortable widow who, with the help of a middle-aged daughter, kept the one small shop in the Fee. Mr Bailey smiled benignly on his company, responded to their jocularities and applauded their songs. And when he caught his attention straying, he half-blushed for his thoughts. What nonsense, and at my age! But his heart answered quietly that the only nonsense in the affair was to pretend that age was so important; and with this encouragement he began thinking how he could contrive to slip away for an hour or so and go adventuring.

Mrs Lavender would never, as they say, see fifty again, nor yet fifty-five. But she did not let the fact distress her. She had the incomparable gift of taking life easily, and, fortune having been kind to her, but for that curmudgeonly snatching away of a husband of whom she had been very fond, she had roses as well as wrinkles in her face, had lost nothing of her original plumpness, and was not unaware that her white hair suited her. She confessed to being elderly, but she had never played into the enemy’s hands by thinking herself an old lady, although it sometimes pleased her whim to pretend that she did. Her chief disappointment was that her only daughter, Patience, was forty and still unmarried; she could not help thinking that it must be largely the girl’s own fault. But now she had hopes even of Patience, for it was something new for that sober drudging woman to go gallivanting out with a neighbour, as she had done this afternoon, to watch the ladies play stool-ball in the Vicarage paddock. She had urged her mother to come too, but Mrs Lavender, besides thinking that Patience could do with a holiday from daughterliness, had reasons of her own for wishing to stay at home this Midsummer Day, She sat in her parlour placidly crocheting, glancing now and again through the window at the sunlit and empty High Street, and telling herself from time to time that if he didn’t come it made no matter: twas all one to Lizzie, birthday or no birthday. She glanced now at the clock, which told her that it was two minutes to four. Last time she had looked, it had been five minutes to four.

As the hour struck, her quick ear caught the sound of footsteps coming up the street. At once she became very intent on her crochet-work. The steps came nearer, nearer, and stopped. Someone tapped on the window-pane. Now whoever could that be? And what’s the world coming to that they can’t knock at a body’s front door like Christian people!

‘Mrs Lavender!’ said the expected voice.

She got out of her chair and moved to the window. ‘Why, tis Mr Bailey. How come you to be paying visits on Club Day, Mr Bailey?’

‘I’ve come to see you, Mrs Lavender,’ said Mr Bailey. He was rosy with a sense of the occasion. ‘I’ve come to wish you many happy returns of the day, ma’am.’

‘Well, that’s kind in ye, Mr Bailey, to remember an old woman on her birthday. I’m all alone, today.’

‘So much the better,’ said he boldly. Then, as if abashed, he added: ‘Not that twouldn’t be a pleasure and privilege to say how-d’ye-do to your amiable daughter, Mrs Lavender. But it happens I want a word with yourself.’

‘Then you’d haply best come in and say ut.’

She eyed him with humorous severity, and the same mischievous gleam shone in her blue eyes when, a moment later, she opened the door to him. He took her hand and bowed over it with much ceremony. Then, with a somewhat schoolboyish air of casualness, he fished a bottle from his pocket, placed it on the table, and contrived to look as though he didn’t know it was there.

‘And what be this?’ asked Mrs Lavender.

‘Oh that?’ said Mr Bailey, glancing at the bottle first in surprise, as though he were seeing it for the first time, and then with a certain careless disdain. ‘That’s nothing. Nothing at all. In point of fact I believe it’s a bottle of sherry-wine.’

Mrs Lavender crinkled up her face with pride and pleasure. ‘It’s . . . it’s never for me, surely?’

Indeed it is,’ said Mr Bailey smiling. ‘For your birthday, dear Mrs Lavender, with my best respects and humble duty. Ah, but I’ve something else here. A copy of verses specially written in your honour.’

‘Ah Mr Bailey, I never had no head for pottery.’ She stared nervously at the manuscript he proffered her. ‘I’ll ’low tis very elegant verses. And all by your own hand.’ The man’s erudition intimidated her. ‘Please to tell me how it reads,’ she begged him.

‘With pleasure, madam,’ said Mr Bailey. Holding the manuscript at arm’s length, he declaimed, not without pomp but with manifest sincerity, a poetical effusion of which some fragments are already known to us:

Mr Bailey, not venturing as yet to face his charmer, folded the manuscript and placed it on the table without a word. His self-confidence had suddenly deserted him; he wondered if he seemed to Mrs Lavender as foolish as he felt. But when at last he ventured a glance in her direction he was both heartened and touched by what he saw. She was regarding him with shy admiration, and with something of wistfulness. He doubted whether she understood what in his verses he had tried to tell her; or it may be that she took it to be no more than a piece of playful gallantry on the part of one elderly person to another. Sitting there with her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes gravely wondering at him, she looked lonely, courageous, and curiously young. It was almost as if his florid praises had awakened a young girl in her; and though she knew his nonsense to be nonsense she wished it might be true. Elderly and wise she was, but would fain have been young and credulous.

‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, after a long silence—and for a moment she thought he was about to take his leave. ‘Well, my dear—what do you say to that?’

‘Tis wondrous, I’m sure,’ she answered, with a smile. ‘It do fair terrify me how you think of such things, Mr Bailey.’

It was so sweet a smile, so delicate and fragrant, and for all its youthfulness so richly mellowed by the years that had gone to its making, that Mr Bailey forgot himself and his embarrassment and became a lover.

‘You’re a very distracting creature, Mrs Lavender my dear, and you must please marry me. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. When you smile like that, I can’t bear the thought of leaving you even for a minute. Bless my soul, I’m in love with ee, old as I am. And that’s the sense of the matter. Come,’ he said urgently—for she was staring in silence at the floor—‘make up your mind to it, my dear. For I won’t leave this house till you say yes, so I warn you.’

It was evident by the way she looked up at him now that she was in no mood to say No. But, before surrendering to the happily inevitable, she must make her protest. ‘Tis nonsense, Mr Bailey. I’m too old for marrying and such. You’d better go find a young woman to wed.’

‘That’s what I’m doing this minute, ma’am,’ said Mr Bailey. ‘That’s what I’m doing and that’s what I’ve done. You’re all the young woman I want. I could have fathered you pretty near, if I’d been quick. You’ll be foolish, I’ll ’low, to take an old fellow like me, a young woman in your prime as you are, and I’m not saying I deserve you. But don’t talk to me of younger women, for if you’ll not have me I’ll have none.’

He gazed at her crossly: so crossly that she was provoked to mischief. ‘Won’t you? Don’t be in haste, Mr Bailey. There’s many a likely one that ud have you. My darter Patience now. She’s but turned farty a month since. She’d make a good wife, I bluv.’

She was laughing at him, and Mr Bailey knew that there is but one answer to that. So he bent over her and took her by surprise (or so he flattered himself) and gave her a hearty kiss. ‘Jump up, my dear, and let me sit down.’ He lifted her out of her chair, sat himself in it, and pulled her on to his knees. ‘Now I’ll have no more fandangle from you, mistus!’ said Mr Bailey, holding her very tight.

She nestled comfortably against him. ‘What a stonishment twill be for Patience,’ she murmured, half to herself. ‘Her own mother and nigh sixty. Tis a shame for you, and so they’ll all say. But there be one good thing—Patience must have my shop, but I’ll bring ee a well-filled stocking, Mr Bailey.’

‘I hope and trust,’ said Mr Bailey naughtily, ‘that you’ll bring me two, my dear.’

‘Mercy, what a style to talk!’ she protested. ‘Tis a stockingful of money I do mean.’

‘But I’ll ’low you’ve a fine womanly pair of legs,’ he cried, dropping joyously into the vernacular. ‘And them’s all I look to find in stockings, mistus.’

She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked down at him with mischievous solemnity, pretending to be offended by his freedom. The next moment they were laughing together; and when they had enjoyed their joke to the full he announced his resolve that they should be church-cried the very next Sunday. ‘What d’ye say to that?’

She nodded; her eyes shone; her cheeks marvellously dimpled.

‘Why, you’re nothing but a bit of a girl after all.’ cried Mr Bailey in delight. And with a smile that matched her own, in its bantering tenderness, ‘I’d haply do better to look round for a grown woman,’ he added.

CHAPTER 5 CHARITY, ARMED WITH A NEW WEAPON, RETURNS TO THE HOUSE OF NOKE

A little before dusk, Noke’s daughter went home from Glatting Wood feeling highly satisfied with her day’s work. She had lived so long in the shadow of her parents and their unremitting industry that this new life, the life of personal conquest, was exhilarating beyond anything she had ever dreamed. She was intoxicated with a sudden sense of her own beauty and power, and scornful of those dullards at home who had never noticed this queen moving among them. Others had lightly flattered her, and some had gone further than flattery; but it had been left to Seth Shellett to awaken, and in the same moment fulfil, the woman in her, the wolf of hunger and the lion of pride. Hugh Marden had been well enough in his way, and at first she had thought him wonderful. A gentleman, the Squire’s own son, with elegant manners and a flow of fine talk, he at least provided a very pretty feather for her cap. But, after all, he was little more than a boy, younger than herself by years. Moreover he was only amusing himself: a girl who had sharpened her wits against Harry Noke’s could not fail to see that this young gentleman would never lose his heart to her, however ardently, in fits and starts of enthusiasm, he might court her favours. She had indeed learned much from Master Hugh and her pride had suffered not a little at his hands. The growing realization that he held her cheap, something between a passion and a plaything, had filled her with dismay, with resentment, and finally with a lust to find someone who would admire her as much as she admired herself. And now she had Seth and was enchanted with him: with his strength, his taciturnity, his unexpectedness: and above all with the woman she saw in his eyes. For, however much he might be lacking in the airs and graces of gentility, he was (she vowed) a man to make two of Master Hugh, with whom, moreover, she always felt inferior. Seth was slow and sudden and surprising. His tongue-tied sheepish pleasure in her and his dullness of mind, and then the sudden masterful desire that could make a god of him: these, by their contrast and alternation, kept her in a continual delight and terror. By his silences, and by his rough impetuous handling of her, he told her what she wished to be told with an eloquence that Master Hugh, with his half-playful audacities of speech, could never hope to command. The worship in his face enraptured her; his flame of animal exultation shone out upon her and burned her hunger away. And if he was so different from Master Hugh, he was more different still from her dour industrious brothers. That he was perhaps himself ‘a sort of brother’—for Harry Noke made no secret of having begotten him—made this differentness of his all the more enticing. The relationship, or its possibility, did not dismay or deter her, except when she thought of her father, of whom she had good reason to be afraid. A month ago, Seth Shellett had been a stranger to her; now he was a lover. He had never been a brother, and she could not regard him as a brother now. The tale her father told of him was probably no more than a trick for making her mother angry, a mere parcel of lies; and, if not, tis no consarn of mine, thought Charity.

Not till she came within sight of home, and saw the red gabled roofs of the farmstead grouped harmoniously in the valley below her, did she remember that she had broken her father’s law, blasphemed his gods, by absenting herself from the farm without having obtained, or even so much as asked, his leave to do so. Until now that knowledge, that guilt, had lain coiled and asleep in her mind. To a heart less burdened by misgiving, Noke’s Farm would have seemed at this moment a spacious, comely, and heartening spectacle. This region was still called the Roughs, and to the outside world was still an almost legendary land; but of its original wildness nothing now remained. Charity, breathless with running, hurried down the great hillside between a field of good grazing, scattered with sheep, and a five-acre crop of beans whose warm sweetness came breathing into her nostrils. On the hill opposite her, the hill that slanted up to the broad heath of Glatting, she could see the haymakers at work; and in the valley fields that lay between, corn was springing. It was a farm well-tended, and cunningly worked: a picture of bounty which revealed to the eye no hint of the sweat and drudgery, the mad industry and ruthless coercion, that had gone to its making. Only we who can remember what Nightingale Roughs once was, and who know that this change has been accomplished by but one human will controlling seven lives besides its own, can gauge or surmise at what expense of blood and spirit the miracle has been accomplished. That is a tale that cannot be told, nor needs to be. It is enough that in Harry Noke, or in the demon of undeviating energy that rode him, Nature had met her match. Her match and her mate; for the union between Noke and his farm was like a marriage of proud antagonists, strength with stubbornness, creative anger with grudging fertility: a marriage marked by resistance and rape, yet, despite all quarrels, fruitful, intimate, and exultant. Of this tumult, this amorous warfare between man and earth, the tranquil scene told nothing. It was serene and beautiful, a harmony of quiet colours, mellowed by the summer evening, sweetened and subtly quickened by summer’s scents and sounds: the savour of bedewed grass, the chirpings and rustlings of belated birds. The farm and the farm-buildings draw the eye to the centre of the picture, where it is content to rest. Not yet old, but weathered by sun and rain and received of them, and so already made one with their surroundings, they body forth, in their extent Noke’s power, in their grouping and design his singleness of purpose. Built for utility, at the behest of a man who has had a mortal quarrel with beauty, they have the austere grace of their own integrity. Here, if anywhere in the world, is an untroubled peace.

But to the hurrying girl this familiar world wore a different aspect. The sight of the haymakers accused her. They were still at work, and at this late hour—the whole family of them, her parents and five brothers. As she reached the yard she met them returning, her father last of all. That meant that they had finished the tedding without her; for, though dusk was fast gathering now, the light would have served for a while yet, had there been work left still to do in the hayfield; and it was not Noke’s way to make an end before he must. The youngest and favourite of her brothers, a lad of seventeen, came sidling up to her.

‘You’d do best to goo to bed afore he catches ee, Cis. He be in a fair taking, I’ll ’low.’

The advice was well-meant but impracticable. There was no time for escape. Noke had already seen her, and so, frightened though she was, she made shift to put on a semblance of courage. And by acting courage she seemed to acquire it, for she suddenly felt powerful and cunning, and a sly secret smile lay curled like a cat at one corner of her velvet mouth. She became bold in the knowledge of her beauty. I’ll soon wheedle un to a good temper: twon’t be the first time. Bythen I’ve done with him he’ll be soft as a lamb with me.

He came and stood before her and stared with dumb menace, like a dog ready to spring. The boys lingered near the house door in an uneasy group: she could hear the occasional scrabble of their boots on the stone step. Her mother, still and watchful, stood a few paces in the rear of her husband.

Charity met her father’s stare unfalteringly. But the smile left her lips, and her eyes grew big and mournful and childish. She was a picture of lovely forlornness.

‘Well!’ His voice was curt and quiet. ‘Where you bin all day?’

‘I be tarrible sorry, father.’

‘Where you bin?’

She was conscious that her mouth was turning down at the corners in a way that in earlier and happier days had seldom failed to disarm his anger. She was on the point of tears. ‘I only bin for a walk, father. Tis Festical Day in the Fee.’

Noke spat on the ground. ‘A pox take it! What’s the Fee to you?’

She did not answer. Her tears were postponed. She had expected a scolding, perhaps a clout or two, but not a catechism. She was unprepared for searching questions.

‘Where you bin?’ asked Noke again. ‘Where?’

‘I bin to Glatten Wood.’ Surely, said her eyes, Glatting Wood is harmless enough. ‘For a walk, that’s all.’

‘For a walk, hey?’ he sneered. ‘A walk on your back? I reckon. Who’s bin wud ye then?’

The shock of this insult made the girl drop her childish airs. She was now a world away from tears. She was a woman, proud and indignant. Her face flushed deeply; her eyes narrowed, shining with hate; and there was contempt in the curve of her set lips. She offered no answer.

Noke came nearer and repeated the question. He spoke in a lowered voice, suppressing a fury that must sooner or later find vent in violence. This quietness in him was terrifying to the girl, but she concealed her terror.

‘D’ye hear me, girl! Who’s bin wud ye, I say?’

Her nostrils dilated with excitement; her breasts were fluttering. And the sight of his daughter’s ripe charms seemed to feed the man’s rage. ‘Answer me, you sly slut!’ he roared, with dreadful suddenness. Charity was now speechless with fear; her resolve not to answer was fortified by incapacity. He came a step nearer, and stretched out twitching hands towards her. ‘Get inside and upstairs wud ye, by God! I’ll have the skin off your back!’

For a moment, after this outburst, both father and daughter stood rigid, as though a judgement was suddenly come upon them. A new voice spoke, Jenny Noke’s, unwontedly bold and caustic.

‘That’s enough o’ that tark. Thrash the girl, willee? Ay twould please ye, sure enough. And strip she first, I’ll ’low. Nay, Harry Noke, tis me that’ll bannick my darter when she do need ut. You leave her be.’

With an oath he turned on this obtrusive woman and made as if to strike her. But she faced him squarely, and he hesitated. His arm dropped slowly to his side. ‘Ay, you’d stand up for ’er, I bluv, She’ve a bly of her mother about her, that’s sartain sure.’ But he spoke with his gaze on the ground, for an obscure guilt troubled him, and the ugly satirical gleam he had seen in Jenny’s eye was the eye of his own conscience. His speech died down to a grumble of oaths, and shrugging his shoulders he strode into the house, his sons shuffling aside into two groups to make way for him.

Charity stared and gasped: gasped for relief and stared her astonishment. The world was overturned; for never before had she known her mother rebuke their lord with impunity. With her admiration of this exploit mingled a small complacency, for she vaguely felt, without in the least understanding the sensation, that she herself had somehow contributed to her father’s defeat. Me and mother can manage un, she thought. That sly smile curled back into its corner, and her heart gushed with sudden warmth for her mother.

‘I’m tarrible sorry, mother,’ she began coaxingly——

But Jenny was in no mood for soft words.

‘I’ll mind you, madam, there be a dunnamany cows want milken afore you takes bite or sup. Better goo fetch they in.’

The five sons of Noke stood watching and listening. Not one of them had uttered a word since their father’s accost of Charity. And now, still silent, they filed like wooden men across the cobbled yard, and, reaching the further side, scattered in search of more work: all but the youngest, who paused by the cowsheds, thinking to serve his sister. The cows had crowded to the yard gate, and were massed there, like looming shapes of fantasy, with their horns branching black against a banner of green sky. As the sound of his sons’ steps dissolved into the shadowy distance, Noke emerged from the house carrying a storm-lantern, and went stamping in their wake, sparing no glance for his women. He too became gradually merged in the surrounding gloom. The echo of him faded in the ear like a vanishing memory; but the passage of the lantern through that quiet cool place seemed to have brought darkness where formerly there had been only a gossamer dusk; and the women’s faces grew vague to each other and their voices unearthly. ‘Whad you standen there for?’ said Jenny Noke. ‘I’ll give you a middlin bunt prensley, if you daun’t look sharp. Get away along then, and leave y’r father be.’

CHAPTER 6 OF THE NOTHING THAT HUGH MARDEN BROUGHT HOME WITH HIM, AND WHAT BROTHER RAPHE MADE OF IT

Hugh Marden, having stabled his horse and washed the blood from his face, strolled thoughtfully, and a little furtively, across the garden of Maiden Holt, towards the spot he most favoured: a lower lawn hidden from the house by trees and commanding on its west side a sweeping view of downs and sky. His upper lip was swollen and bleeding, and at every five or six paces he stopped in his walk to dab at the wound with a handkerchief. He was in some little pain, and his head buzzed, but he was too angry and confused in mind to pay much heed to his physical condition. On any less equivocal occasion he would perhaps have allowed his mother to lave the bruised lip, and she, as she had done a hundred times in his childhood, would have scolded him (but without conviction) for running into danger yet again. But he could not face, at this moment, either her kindness or her inevitable questions. And, until he had had time to invent an explanation, his sisters were even more to be avoided. The elder, Ann, being his friend, would perhaps be hurt if he refused her his confidence; and this was emphatically a story he did not wish her to hear, despite her proved capacity for keeping a secret. As for Clare, she was a mere child to him, being but seventeen, and his junior by four years. So, anxious not to be intercepted or called back, he hurried out of sight of the house and made for the lower lawn, and in particular for the little arbour his father had had built there ten years ago. He had all but entered this place when he observed that it was already occupied. Lying back in the chair, with eyes closed and features seraphically at rest, was old Brother Raphe. A book lay on the small rustic table within reach of his hand should he elect to sit up; and a dove, which for the last few weeks had adopted him for companion whenever he was outside the house, sat perched on his shoulder. Man and bird, in such a setting, presented a spectacle almost fantastically serene to the startled eyes of this young man, who half-smiled at the irony of the contrast it suggested to him. There was a momentary bitterness in his smile, but the bitterness quickly passed, leaving only wonder and affection, tinged delicately, as always, with amusement. No one could see Brother Raphe without an impulse to smile: it was not that he was a figure of fun—though if you chose to see him so he would have led the laughter—but that when he was most happy he had the air of sharing his happiness with you as though it had been an exquisite and beatific joke, as perhaps it is; and even in moments of gravity or grief the light in him burned steadfastly. He was now nearing his eightieth year, and made no secret of enjoying the fact that at last, after years of suspicion and disfavour, all the village was his friend. The new vicar, unlike Parson Croup, found nothing to disapprove of in him, and much to be grateful for; and these two, despite a great disparity in years, and despite their being in opposite ecclesiastical camps, were often together, quarrelling amiably on points of doctrine, playing chess, capping each other’s quotations from the ancients, and discussing local politics. Until recent years he had been much seen in the village, but now he was grown feeble and never went beyond the confines of Maiden Holt.

But the young man wasted no time in contemplating the sight before him. He gave one glance, made an alarmed grimace (which hurt him confoundedly), and turned away. His steps were noiseless on the grass.

‘Well, Hugh?’

Young Marden hesitated. He was in no mood for talk, as we know, and for an instant he entertained the notion of pretending not to have heard that suave voice. But his posture, his pause, had betrayed him.

He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Hullo, sir! You awake? Hope I didn’t wake you.’ He waved airily and was for going on his way.

‘I wasn’t asleep, my boy. Or, if I was, twas only a cat-sleep. Come, don’t run away. You’re not in a hurry, are you?’

Seeing no help for it, Hugh now turned fairly round; but still he thought to keep ten feet of greensward between himself and this genial inquisitor, hoping that so, perhaps, his swollen face would escape notice.

‘Well . . .’ he said, as if nicely considering this question whether or not he were in a hurry. ‘Well, I had thought, as a matter of fact, of putting in an hour’s pistol practice. But . . . anything I can do for you first, sir?’

‘No, Hugh, no. Except tell me how you came by that bruise of yours.’

Hugh went very red, but seeing no chance of escape he resolved to submit with as good a grace as he could muster. He forced a laugh, and came within a more sociable distance of his companion. ‘Oh, that’s nothing. Like a fool I walked into a tree, and got the worst of the encounter. Where’s my father, sir, that he’s not with you?’ Before Brother Raphe could speak—his articulation was slow nowadays and a little painful—Hugh had rattled on, answering his own question and asking another. ‘Why, of course, he’s attending the Court Leet this morning, aint he? I wonder he has the patience to listen to all those fellows, upon my word I do: with their talk of crops and rotations and who shall have this strip of commons and what Farmer So-and-so shall be permitted to grow on that one. Twould put me out of humour in ten minutes, I promise you. But my father seems to enjoy it, for he gives more time to such matters every year; and they’re saying in the village that he’s himself the best farmer for fifty miles round. Do you think tis true, sir, or no more than a toothsome dish for the Squire’s son to sup of?’

Brother Raphe fixed the young man with an ironical eye. ‘My dear Hugh, you cannot doubt I love your father dearly?’ he asked.

‘Why, no, sir. I’ve never doubted it.’

‘Then can you believe, too,’ asked Brother Raphe, ‘that, despite my love for your father, I’m far more concerned at this moment to hear about that so recently acquired bruise of yours than to talk of his farming? I’m an inquisitive fellow nowadays, but I’m old, Hugh, and you must humour me, as you’d humour a child. Indeed I insist on it.

I’ll wager you never met those lines in your reading?’

‘No, sir. Whose are they?’

‘Their author is Erasmus Bailey. He’s been a prodigious poet in his time, and the other day he did me the honour to lend me a parcel of manuscript.’

‘What! Our innkeeper?’

‘Our innkeeper, and my very good friend. I first made his acquaintance—why it must be twenty-five years ago, when his poor daughter got into trouble. But you wouldn’t remember that. You were not with us at the time.’

Hugh was delighted of a chance to keep the conversation going on neutral subjects. ‘Bailey’s daughter? That will be the cowman’s wife, won’t it? What was her trouble, sir?’

‘Well, tis over now,’ answered Brother Raphe, ‘and your bruise, my boy, is only just begun, by the look of it. You walked into a tree, I think you said?’

Hugh, reddening again, grunted a half-hearted affirmative.

‘Now that,’ said the old man meditatively, ‘is an exceedingly unusual event. And, but that I would not seem to lack compassion, I should be tempted to congratulate you on the privilege of so rare an experience.’

‘Rare?’ Hugh smiled uneasily. ‘Rare, or not, tis sufficiently tiresome.’

‘I see you are sceptical,’ said Brother Raphe. ‘But I hold to my opinion that for a man to bruise his face by walking into a tree is a comparatively rare event. You are not to be blamed if you suppose that it must often happen, since in woodland regions, copses and forests and the like, trees are to be found in great profusion, and men frequently walk among them. Nothing, on the face of it, seems more probable than do such collisions; yet I am persuaded that in fact they seldom occur. Providence, for its own inscrutable purposes, defeats our expectations. Indeed I would go so far as to say that for every case you find me of a man bruising his face against a tree, I will engage to find a hundred in which the injury is similar but the cause quite different. There are, for example, the various bruises and abrasions received in hand to hand fighting or common fisticuffs. They alone constitute a very numerous class.’

Hugh stared moodily at distance. ‘Your eyes are too sharp for me, sir,’ he said after a silence. ‘I see you’ve guessed the truth. But you don’t know the whole story, and I’ll wager you’ll find it too fantastic for belief.’

‘We shall see,’ said Brother Raphe with a smile.

‘Positively, sir,’ said Hugh, with a false air of jauntiness, ‘I’ve been involved in a brawl with one of our own servants. The fellow had the insolence to strike me, and I was forced to fight him with my own hands. As it happens I was able to thrash him, having science on my side. But it is a grossly humiliating affair: pray let us talk of something else. And you will understand, sir, that what I’ve told you is in the strictest confidence.’

‘Perfectly,’ said Brother Raphe. ‘And from that I infer that you yourself intend to be silent. You do not, for example, intend to ask your father to dismiss this insolent fellow that struck you?’

Hugh’s jauntiness collapsed, but Brother Raphe continued to gaze at him with bland innocence. ‘I see what you mean, sir. You mean I’m not being quite candid with you, and you’re right. The truth is, I owe my bruises to a woman. This fellow—he is her lover, it would seem—came suddenly upon me when I was talking with the wench, and promptly accused me of having debauched her.’

‘And you denied it?’

‘I denied it,’ agreed Hugh. ‘It was true,’ he added, turning his face away, hot with shame, ‘but I denied it.’

‘Well, well . . .’ said Brother Raphe mildly. And after an unhappy silence he went on: ‘Since I am not confessing you, I must crave pardon for my importunity. Sins of the flesh are grievous, my son, but Holy Church in her wisdom does not always hold them mortal. That you have toyed with the happiness of a woman far beneath you in station is a graver matter, a breach of trust. But let us speak of that another time, as between penitent and priest. First I will finish your story for you.’

Hugh’s face was still averted, and he made no answer.

‘In my fancy,’ said Brother Raphe, ‘it runs somewhat in this fashion. You, for the woman’s protection, deny the charge; but she, being a less ready liar, or for some darker reason of her own, betrays herself. And so you come home with a bruised face, and confide, however reluctantly, in a too inquisitive friend. Is my conjecture a good one?’

‘It is so near the truth,’ said Hugh, ‘that I begin to think you a wizard.’

‘God forbid!’ said Brother Raphe. ‘See,’ he cried, with a smile, ‘you’ve frightened my dove away.’ He sat up in his chair and peered round in search of the bird. But the effort was too much for him. He sank back again, a little wearily; and at the same moment the dove returned, alighting on the dazzling greensward, just beyond the shadow of the arbour.

‘You’re not feeling ill, sir?’ asked Hugh, in some concern.

Brother Raphe, opening his eyes, smiled reassurance. ‘A little drowsy, that’s all.’

‘Then I’ll leave you.’

Brother Raphe lifted a hand as though in benediction. The dove fluttered into the air, circled twice, and came to rest on the uplifted hand. From its beak dangled a marigold, at sight of which the old man smiled with sudden amused pleasure. ‘That’s a pretty thought, brother,’ said he. ‘And now, by your leave, I’ll take my siesta, so God be with you till I wake.’ He lowered his hand gently, and the companioning dove, dipping and curving and rising at last in flight, bore its bright flower into the sunlight and was lost to his view.

CHAPTER 7 THE HILLTOP, THE VALLEY, AND THE FIVE BROTHERS

From the hour of his first decisive meeting with Charity, love had wrought so rich a ferment in Seth Shellett that the world was now transformed for him. Not for the first time, but for the first time with conscious excitement, he saw the sky squandered above him and life springing green at his feet. He was released, in part, from the lethargy that had made him stupid; the earth of him was broken up, and the pulsing light of his being became one with the energy of all creation. He heard the thunder of the universal tides and knew them for his own: knew, not with his intellectual parts, which worked as sluggishly as ever (and so had not the skill to mud a clear emotion with sophistical invention), but with senses tempered fine by desire. This desire had once seemed simple and specific enough; but with every day that passed it grew in power and subtlety and range, as a flower, rooted in earth, discovers to sunlight the pride of colour and lyric of form that have lain secreted in her seed. He moved, at blessed intervals, in a country of new marvels and new terrors. Charity was the core of his life and the sum of its meaning; and nothing could content him now but complete and public possession of her. After the brawl with Hugh Marden—an incident that was like to have driven him from the Squire’s service and to ruin, but somehow, unexpectedly, did nothing of the kind—he had flung her fiercely away from him, thinking himself cheated. But the same jealousy that drove him from her pulled him back: he wanted her, could not withstand her, and found himself unable to endure the possibility of her finding a new lover to replace him with. So he sought her again (she was not hard to find) and wooed her again. At first she pretended she would have none of him, being eager to regain her ascendancy, and liking the taste of power that such punishing of him yielded her; but at last, fearing to resist longer, she allowed herself to be coaxed back into his arms. The rapture of this reunion—for now she gave generously, and seemed to give all her heart—was enriched by a hundred shades of feeling that had been absent, or unperceived, in the wild beginnings of intimacy; for it was an experience radiant with recognition, and quickened and complicated by the quarrel of which it made an end. This hand he touched, this warm mouth, was her hand, her mouth: her very self was in them, and her self, at the lightest contact, flowed out like liquid fire to join with his.

And so, inevitably, his mind turned towards marriage. This was ambitious in him, and only the extreme of love would have encouraged him to cherish such a scheme; for though in his humble way he was a likely fellow, and had had the luck, while still young, to step into the shoes of an older man, he could not think himself good enough, by worldly standards, for the daughter of Farmer Noke of the Roughs, a man notoriously rich and powerful, and of a proud and ugly temper. Seth did not flatter himself that his suit would meet with favour in that quarter; but, though the fact disquieted and baffled him, he did not for a moment allow it to shake his purpose. Far more grievous an obstacle, in his estimation, was Charity’s evasion of the question, and her discomfort when his persistence made evasion impossible. The merest mention of marriage was enough to make her unhappy and petulant. Yet Seth was for ever mentioning it; and she knew, and he knew she knew, that the moody silences into which he not infrequently lapsed were filled with this obsession of his. Sometimes when she had begged him, with anger or with tears, not to worrit her no more about it, he would sit for half an hour without speaking: not vengefully, or to punish her, but because his mind could not leave its one idea, and, if he must not speak of that, only silence was left to him.

Now, once again, he began. ‘When’ll us get married, lovey?’

‘I dunnaw,’ said Charity.

They were in Glatting Wood again, sitting side by side in the green bower they had made their own. This was now their regular resort; and neither of them saw any reason for changing it. Charity had told Seth next to nothing of her father’s outburst against her, being by nature secretive, and with him deliberately so. Since that night of storm a brooding silence had settled upon Noke’s Farm. There was a queerness in the air, and a problem. But Charity gave no thought to it, having more immediate problems to engage her attention. She was resolved not to lose her rich prize: whether by deception, or by open revolt against a tyranny too long endured, she must keep Seth for herself and see him as often as might be. In the event, she had encountered fewer obstacles than there had been reason to expect. But for the lamentable episode of Hugh Marden, the way had been made easy for her. Noke made no allusion to the affair of Midsummer Day, though it was clear that she was unforgiven. He avoided looking at her; and never spoke to her except to command, and that but rarely. Charity, partly as a matter of policy, but more from industrious habit, was as zealous and thorough in her work as she was casual and impudent in her absences. Jenny by her silent acquiescence encouraged the new freedom: it may be that she liked the house better when Charity was not there to share it with her. And Noke, nursing an obscure grievance, bided his time.

Noke bided his time and laid his plans; and madness crouched in him, ready to spring. This evening he was in the smaller of his two hayfields, loading and hauling. The bulk of his hay had been harvested a fortnight since, but, bad weather intervening, and other affairs pressing for attention, this field had been left over. Three of his sons were with him, but the youngest was elsewhere, and the eldest, for the third night in succession, was climbing the slope that led up to Glatting Wood. Noke, in the valley, gave as yet no upward glance: nor, had he looked, could he have easily discerned the figure of his emissary moving in the shadow of the hedge. All four men seemed lost in their work: the father on the wagon, loading; the sons leading the horse round the field, from heap to heap, and with their pitchforks plying him like hodmen with great faggots of hay.

‘Dauntee want to get married then?’ asked Seth plaintively.

‘What boots wanten?’ parried the girl. ‘If us can’t, us can’t.’

‘But why can’t us? I be getten good money, good enough. And there be the old gamekeeper’s cottage waiten and ready. It’s bin empty ever sen a took and died.’ He put his arm coaxingly round her shoulders. ‘I knaw Squire ud let me have un, did I but tell him I want to be married. He be countable good to me, be Squire.’

‘Not after what you done to Master Hugh, he won’t.’ At this wanton renewal of an old and bitter dispute he became angry, and she eager to mollify him. ‘Nemmind, Seth. Marry or not, tis all one to us, bainta? I do love ee eversmuch.’

As always, he found her coaxing irresistible. She was adept in this art of hurting and healing, and so by amorous provocation escaping from an argument. Now, with Seth’s arms about her, and Seth’s kiss on her mouth, she forgave, and he forgot, his tedious talk of marriage, and both became lost in a region beyond time. There they remained for a long while at peace, and Noke, glancing up from the valley, saw the figure of his spy emerging from the wood. He grunted, and shaded his eyes that he might watch the more closely. The fellow was hurrying, but what else? Ah, now he stopped, and thrust a hand into his pocket. The next moment he was waving a red scarf. A sharp exclamation escaped Noke, half anger, half exultation. He called his sons. ‘Come along then, and sharply.’ The wagon was half-loaded: it was inconceivable that work must stop: the men looked at their father with blank faces. ‘Leave that, tellee.’ What of the hay? ‘Leave that.’ What of Dinah the mare? ‘Leave Dinah, blast ye! Come wud me.’ He was already striding away in the direction of the red sign. The three sons trailed at his heels, and their young brother, looking over the stable-wall and seeing them go, snatched up a sharp-bladed shovel and raced out of the yard.

Unminded of her father, Charity was examining with admiration the new toy that Seth had contrived for himself. To the flint axe-head, which they had found in this very spot on the first day of their love, he had attached a wooden handle. The work had occupied many a spare minute during the past few days, and he took a boyish pleasure in the result. The handle was about two feet long and curved slightly at the grip end. It had been lopped off a stout stake, stripped of its bark, planed and rubbed smooth with sand, and finally oiled; and it was bound securely to the axe-head with thongs of leather. Altogether it was a job that any boy might have been proud of. ‘You gurt baby,’ said Charity fondly. Then she kissed him and asked what use it was, when there were a dunnamany good axes already at Squire’s, and he confessed, with a diffident grin, that it wasn’t much use at all: yet could not forbear to add, in defence of his whim: ‘But he do cut owdacious sharp, lovey, seeing he be only a bit of stone.’ In witness whereof he jumped up, and led her from the covert, and bade her watch; and swinging his axe made a murderous slash at the trunk of the nearest tree. The bladed flint bit laterally into the wood and lodged there, so that his grip slackened. ‘Lookee there,’ said Seth proudly. ‘Dang me if tain’t stuck in the tree and all manner!’ Here was triumph indeed. He let the axe stay, and went back to Charity’s side.

His arm about her, they stood without speaking, and seemed to listen to their own chiming thoughts. They were done for a while with kissing and embracing; the intoxication of touch was spent; and now, perhaps more intimately than ever before, they were turned towards each other. Man’s greed and woman’s trickery were for a moment of small account: the hour was golden, and the spirit of the hour was beauty. The day was ebbing about them, and dusk, though scarcely perceptible as yet, was beginning to fall. Nothing of sunlight remained in the wood but a spray of bronze on the higher branches, and a spattering of rust on the ground. The warm hum of summer, which had brimmed this sylvan world all day with a luminous and dazzling sound, was now diminished; and the lovers, when they had finished speaking, became suddenly aware of the gathering silence.

CHAPTER 8 HOW ONE MAN AND FOUR MEN FOUGHT IN GLATTING WOOD, AND OF THE DARKNESS THAT CAME UPON THEM

We are the children of Koor and of others innumerable; divided from them only in illusion, by a trick of time; joined, with them and with each other, not by metaphor, but by an unbroken physical continuity. On the stream of our common blood, the lusts and terrors and aspiring dreams of Koor are carried into us. His impulses lurk and prowl among our labouring thoughts; his ignorance defeats our little knowledge; his cruelties, fruit of his fear, distort the face of our wisdom; and his gods, though we repudiate them or miscall them by comfortable names, loom on our dark horizons. He and all who came before him, and all who have followed him, are no more than cells in a vast multiple organism, the copious fermentation which is Man. They are lives generating from one immortal sperm.

Here, for an instant, we see three atoms of that life joined in conflict. The lovers stood quietly hand in hand; and Noke was with them before they had time even to take alarm from the noise of his coming. Charity gave a little shriek, and Seth stared in dumb astonishment at the strange creature confronting him: its sharp bright eyes, bristling beard, sneering mouth, and its posture rigid, like a stretched bow, with the tension of a controlled fury.

From this nightmare apparition there issued a voice startlingly quiet.

‘So I’ve found ee, have I? Come you here, girl.’

Charity clung in terror to her lover.

‘D’ye hear, miss I Come to y’r father.’

Seth flung a protecting arm round the girl and wished for a weapon. He had courage and strength, but the ugly and sudden force of Noke’s personality shocked him. This adversary had an air of madness; his malice was coiled like a snake ready to strike; and in the smoothness of his speech was treachery. And now, all too visibly, dusk was invading the wood.

‘Come you ’ere,’ said Noke again. ‘And you, boy—take y’r hands off her. Me and darter want a liddle tark together, daun’tus, deary?’

Charity, at sound of this endearment, raised her head and looked uncertainly at her father. He grinned with hatred, and she despaired of charming that hatred out of him. Her eyes widened to make room for the welling terror of her heart. Dared she risk all by flinging herself at her father and entreating his mercy? Would the softness of her arms about his neck, and the throbbing anguish of her young bosom, wean him from his anger? Unable to answer these questions, she clung to Seth still, her strong faithful Seth. He would not let this ogre kill her.

‘I be waiten, darter,’ said Noke, in a kind of whisper.

Seth broke into troubled speech.

‘You ha’nt no call to be wild with her, Mus Noke. Me and Cis wanta get married, sir. I’ll treat her praaper, gogzoons I will, Mus Noke.’

Noke came a step nearer. His right hand held a cudgel.

‘Come you here, Charity Noke. I’ll not ask again, mindee.’

The movement fired in Seth a train of fear. ‘Draap that!’ He unfastened the girl’s grip on his shoulder and pushed himself in front of her. ‘Us daun’t want a belvering then, do us?’ He spoke mildly, in a tone of friendly persuasion.

Noke, snarling, came at him with the cudgel. But the boy’s stillness seemed to disconcert him; for he did not strike. ‘You’d best get outa my road while you may,’ said he. ‘I’ll have a word wi’ me darter first, I bluv. And settle with you prensley, me fine lubber.’ But, seeing the young man standing his ground solid and stupid, he raised his cudgel again and struck out savagely. But the target moved and the violence of his assault pitched him forward; and Seth, having stepped aside, drove at him with a fury equal to his own. The blow caught him on the ear and filled his head with a thunder that presently dissolved into a monotonous singing; his fall was heavy, and when he angrily tried to raise himself there came so sharp a pain in his left ankle that he sank back again and in a loud voice cried curses on the world. There was dew already fallen, and the freshened earth gave out a rich smell. His hands were sticky with sap from the bruised grass. The world rocked about him. There was thunder again, and voices speaking in the thunder; there was a crack in the sky, a zigzag scarlet crack from which, as he watched, blood came dropping down, and he shut his eyes and felt its warm plash upon his sweating face. He was lying alone in a dark hut, and the thunder was the thunder of galloping hooves, and the voice the voice of a horseman. A dead face stared at him from the grass. He fell on his knees; a wooden yoke was made fast about his neck; and there, at a little distance, the eyes and lips of a young girl mocked and allured him. And when presently he came to himself, and to Glatting Wood, and to the memory of all that had befallen, he wondered what had become of his daughter Charity, for whom he had set this snare tonight. He raised himself cautiously on one elbow and took careful stock of his surroundings. Not knowing that all his phantasmagoria had flashed past in an instant, he was astonished to see the young man still within a yard of him. To be powerless, and at this young man’s mercy, even for a moment, made him choke and cough and spend himself in curses. But the young man paid no heed to him. He, too, was looking to see where Charity had hid herself. And at that moment he saw, not Charity indeed, but a man creeping towards him from the shadows. A man stalking him; and there, another. Having no weapon, he turned to run. Two other faces confronted him. He was surrounded by the sons of Noke.

In this extremity there flashed into his mind the thought of Ogo’s axe. Two paces brought him to the tree; and his hand sought and found the projecting handle. His enemies were in no hurry: they approached with a stealthy relentlessness. He heard Noke yelling: ‘Catch un, lads! Catch ’em both, and truss ’em up.’ And the eldest of the sons closed in upon him. The sudden rush took him by surprise; and, having no room in which to swing his axe, he thrust it savagely at the hostile face. The clutching hands relaxed their grip, and the man staggered back with a scream. Two others were within a yard of Seth, but now he was shouting with the madness of battle and his weapon had free play. A third man leaped upon his back, caught at his throat, and struggled to disarm him. The two fell backwards; other bodies came hurtling upon them. A writhing mass of bodies, a many-headed monster, heaved and plunged upon the ground, kicking with its ten legs and growling with all its mouths. But even in this tangle of ferocity Seth somehow retained his weapon; and presently, as it seemed by a miracle, he had wriggled free of the mass and was running this way and that, uncertain of his ground. He was victorious so far, but he had still to find Charity; and now they were at him again. The foremost man came recklessly, blind with animal rage. Seth’s axe caught him on the jaw. ‘Lay hold on un, can’t ye!’ cried Noke. ‘By cripes, if I’d a pair of legs I’d shew ye!’ But the man with the smashed jaw fell and lay moaning in the grass, within a few yards of his wounded brother; and the two that remained standing seemed for a moment daunted, unwilling to come within reach of that murderous axe. Seth, now swollen with the gross pride of his victory, was ready and eager for them. ‘Come on then,’ he cried. ‘Come and take un who can. Come on then, my brave cockies, and daun’t be so countable shy. Rackon tis wenches you’d rather be fighten.’ His slow, loud, mocking drawl had more than a hint of Noke in its quality; and Noke, even in the height of his impotent anger, pricked up his ears, recognizing a kinship of spirit. For an instant he came near to admiration of this young crowing fighter, and lusted the more bitterly for his defeat. Again he urged his sons to it, but they still hung back, muttering and grumbling. ‘Better see to y’r father,’ drawled Seth contemptuously. ‘I rackon he’ve catched hurt. And y’r brothers too, seemingly. Go along then,’ he added, more friendly. ‘I’ll not bite ye again till ye beg for un.’ But now, having time for reflection, his mind was busy with wondering where Charity was. To find her: that was the next thing. With all his heart, his angry exultant heart, he wished she were at his side, to crown and share his triumph. She was his prize; he had fairly won her; and now he was resolved that nothing should cheat him of possessing her for his own. No one could stop him: not her father, not her brothers, not all the world. The world indeed would be with him, for these Noke men were notoriously queer: savage, industrious, secret in their ways, regarding all their neighbours with suspicion. To snatch the girl from such a home—and a fine sweet girl, as anyone could see—would be held a right and gallant thing; and her father’s opposition would count for nothing. She was old enough to choose, and she would choose him, Seth Shellett: he made no doubt of that. She was in his blood, and he in hers: they were already mated, and lacked only that blessing of the church which Parson Hockley would gladly pronounce, and Squire Marden benevolently approve (for Seth knew himself to be something of a favourite with both). Fighting had roused all that was masterful and sanguine in his spirit: he was a different man from the slow-minded ineffectual fellow who had been pleading with Charity only a few hours before. He was glad that his love had been discovered, so that henceforth he could move openly and irresistibly to his heart’s desire. ‘Ay, you daun’t trust me then, be that ut?’ He was feeling much friendlier now, ready to forgive everybody; and in this new mood it hurt him a little to see that while one of the unwounded sons was bending over his fallen comrades, the other still warily watched their dangerous quarry, as if expecting a new attack. Seth, returning the stare, said no more. He had something to say yet, to the old man: but twould be time enough for that when he had Charity safe. He ached now for the sight and touch of her.

A boy’s clear voice rang out behind him.

‘Lookee here, Seth Shellett!’ Seth, startled though he was, turned but half-way. So there was yet another on ’em, was there? He suspected some new trick.

‘What now then?’ he asked, truculently, over his shoulder.

On Harry Noke, who still lay wincing and watching in the grass, the effect of this interruption was dynamic. An old and disregarded memory began stammering in his mind, and a forgotten woman sprang into life. Seth Shellett, the lad had said. For an instant he became deaf and blind to his surroundings, and thoughts crowded intimately upon him. Tisha Bailey’s son, Seth Shellett. He struggled into a sitting posture, and called upon his daughter in a new voice.

‘Lookeehere, Seth Shellett,’ repeated the youngest son, disregarding his father’s outcry. ‘I baint frouden of you. And I daun’t mean ee no harm. ‘If you ’tend right by Cis, we can call cousins together, me and you. But I baint frouden of you, so you maun’t think ut.’

Seth, in a quick glance (for he dared not trust a fellow that dared not trust him), saw, standing five yards behind him, the youth from whom these bold ingenuous words proceeded. Slim and slight, a mere boy, he stood bravely, with his shovel held firmly in both hands ready for battle. His features were indistinguishable in the dim light, but his general aspect, no less than his speech, was heartening.

‘Good boy!’ said Seth. ‘That be talken sense, I’ll ’low.’ He lowered his own weapon and moved sideways towards this unexpected ally. When he came near the boy, and could see his young stern face, he felt a quick friendliness stir in him and was moved to speak his heart. ‘I ’tend right by her, boy. Gogzoons I do. I be gwain marry her, tellee. We’ll have a laamentable pretty cottage to live in, and all manner.’

‘Then you’d best take she away drackly-minute,’ answered the youngest son, friend to friend. ‘Father’ll kill un if he gets un home.’

‘Ay,’ said Seth, in low urgent tones. ‘And you too, haply. Come away along o’ me and I’ll hide the both of ye.’

The boy’s eyes lit with pleasure, but there was no more chance of talk; for now Noke called again upon his daughter, and with such urgency, in a tone that seemed so innocent of menace, that Charity at last came out of hiding. During the past few minutes she had suffered a hundred pains of fear, indecision, and divided loyalty. She had seen her father and two brothers struck down, and, though at first she had welcomed it, the sight terrified her. She was distraught, and drawn by a revulsion of feeling, a flood of childish associations, towards her own men: especially towards the man who had fathered and sheltered her. Yet even now she exulted in the possession of Seth, and could not bear to think him lost to her. In the violence of this conflict within her, this bewildering riot of irreconcilables, she all but lost sense of the secret she dreaded to hear told. She came slowly back, with sulky drooping head, to where her father awaited her. And at sight of her, the young brother sprang forward and placed himself protectively at her side.

‘Ah!’ said Harry Noke. With difficulty and pain he at last struggled to his feet. But his ankle failed him and he staggered, and the boy jumped forward to his support. ‘That’s right, sonny. Gimme y’r shoulder. Now, Charity Noke. What be atwixt you and Seth Shellett then? Tell me that.’ The girl did not answer. ‘Hi, Shellett, come you here. We maun get this straight.’

They stood in a group together: the lovers and their father.

‘What be atwixt you and y’r sister then, hey?’

Seth scowled uncomprehendingly. ‘Sister! I daun’t rightly unnerstand you, Mus Noke.’

‘Oh, dauntee?’ said Noke. ‘Well, hearkee here. What be atwixt you and my darter Charity?’

‘Us wanta get married, Mus Noke. That be all.’

Noke eyed him with shrewd hatred. ‘Have ye got her with child then?’

Seth glanced at the woman; then at his questioner; then at the ground. ‘I dunnaw,’ said he. ‘But we’ll wed, whether or no.’

The question was answered. In Noke the storm gathered, shook him body and mind, and found vent at last in a peal of angry laughter. Grinning and roaring, he stared at his new-found son, with love and hate, pride and shame, blazing out of his eyes. Oaths came tumbling with his laughter, and hate rose ascendant. This fellow and his daughter! Murderous jealousy woke again from its uneasy slumber, and now there was new venom in its sting. But with a mighty effort, perhaps the mightiest he had ever made, he controlled his fury that he might say, quietly, and so with the more deadly effect:

‘You be Tisha Bailey’s son, I’ll ’low?’

‘Ay. Tisha Shellett’s son.’

‘She were Tisha Bailey right enough when I got ye. How do, son?’

Seth stared at him in discomfort, thinking him crazy.

‘D’ye hear me?’ cried Noke. ‘Twas I that fathered ye, I’m saying. And this sly slut’s y’r sister. Likes to keep her courten in the family, I rackon.’

Seth found his tongue. ‘That be a countable stupid tale, Mus Noke.’

‘Ha! You daun’t believe me, hey? Then ask this pretty punk o’ yourn. She’ll tell ee.’

‘Tis true enough, Shellett,’ said one of the brothers. ‘Them’s bin maken a gurt fool of ye if ye dunnaw that.’

Seth had heard often enough—too often—the tale that Tom Shellett had been at pains to set going: how he, Seth, came near to being born out of wedlock, owing to Tom’s exceptional talent for seduction. And now this boast recurred to his mind, glittering with falsehood. But it was in Charity’s face that he read his doom: Charity’s face that burned with shame, but shewed no trace of disbelief or astonishment.

‘So tis true, is ut?’ he said, with his eyes searching her. ‘And I maun’t have ye, eh?’

Whether true or not, she believed it, and had believed it from the first. This he now knew. The corruption of that knowledge came crawling into his stomach. She had tricked and betrayed him and taken the heart out of his body. Henceforward his fellows would look askance at him, and there would be a black curse on his soul, and evil luck would follow him to the world’s end. And he could never have her. He saw her now as a false picture of delight, a painted emptiness, lovely and loathsome. But saw her so only with the eye of his dark and stricken mind; for when he looked at her in the flesh, even in this dim evening light, he saw her as he had seen her a score of times before. She was Charity Noke, a hearty handsome wench, whom he had desired for his own, and still desired. And with the knowledge of his continuing desire a great fury entered and possessed him, and jealousy, most avid of Koor’s gods, demanded its ultimate tribute.

‘So I maun’t have ye, eh?’ he repeated thickly. ‘Nor maun’t no other man, I’ll ’low.’

The blade of Ogo’s axe entered her temple, and a murderer ran raging through the wood.

CHAPTER 9 IN WHICH MR BAILEY RECEIVES A TOKEN AND COACHY TIMMS HAS THE LAST WORD

That night is far away and long ago, and the hearts that suffered it are dust. Time, that gave it birth, has now entombed it; oblivion has sealed it up; and a thousand rains have fallen in Glatting Wood. In Marden Fee it was already a legend, one part history to five parts conjecture, on that October evening, two years later, when Mr Bailey and a few of his oldest friends sat watching and waiting for the hour when his seventy-fifth birthday should begin. There were present Mykelborne the wheelwright, Growcock the smith, Sweet the cobbler, Shellett the cowherd, and Coachy Timms the oracle: to say nothing of certain supernumeraries, who, though they could not be excluded from the tavern, had not been admitted to the secret. The five initiates sat side by side, with one eye on the clock. Conversation was moribund; and Mr Bailey, after numerous failures, had at last abandoned his attempts to revive it. It still wanted twelve minutes to eight, and the tension of waiting had begun to tell on everyone, and especially on Mykelborne, who had a particular reason for his agitation. In his corner of the settle, and made conspicuous by his efforts to hide it, was a large roundish object tied up in a red handkerchief. This thing, by its mere presence, dominated the scene; the glances of the five were constantly straying towards it; and after each of such glances they would look hastily at Mr Bailey with guilt shining in their eyes: which guilt, were they so unlucky as to encounter his inquiring gaze, they were quick to replace with a look of innocent unconcern hardly to be distinguished from inanity. Then, so soon as they had stared him down, they would nudge each other and whisper: ‘He ha’n’t seen naun, have a?’ This question was always referred to Mykelborne, who thereupon, five times out of six, took a sharp look at Mr Bailey, and said: ‘Nay, he ha’n’t seen the token, I’ll ’low.’ But the sixth time, his nerves being over-wrought, he replied with indiscreet vigour: ‘And if he ha’n’t, tis no thanks to you, dannel ye! Why must you goo looken at ut every minute!’ ‘I seen you a-looken: that be for why.’ ‘I din look.’ ‘I seen you look.’ ‘Daun’t quarrel, my coneys,’ said Coachy, in high clear tones. ‘Daun’t quarrel at drinken time. Tis ungodly.’ Mr Bailey, who had been aware of the alien object ever since the moment when Mykelborne, with infinite care to be unobserved, had placed it in its corner, was as nervous as the rest; but he made a brave show of ignorance and there was some art in his acting.

‘Now, Abel Sweet,’ said Coachy Timms. ‘Bring out your voice, neighbour, and liven the waiten.’

‘Waiten!’ cried Mykelborne indignantly. ‘Who’s a-waiten?’

‘I dursn’t,’ said Sweet. ‘I just dursn’t sing, Mus Timms, seeing what time tis.’

‘Time!’ cried Coachy, smiling his cherub smile, ‘us daun’t take no account of he, bless us. ‘Bring out your voice, my coney, and let’s hear un. Twill haply ease the minutes by.’

Sweet looked at Mykelborne; both looked at the clock again. Finally Mykelborne nodded judicially. ‘Make ut shart then,’ he stipulated.

With this encouragement, Sweet rose to his feet and began:

Mykelborne lifted an imperious hand.

‘Mus Bailey,’ said Mykelborne, ‘twas at eight o’clock your mother brung ee forth, I’ll ’low?’

‘Eh?’ said Mr Bailey, over-acting his surprise a little. ‘Well, yes, I fancy you’re right.’

‘You fancy!’ said Mykelborne. ‘He fancies,’ he remarked to his neighbours with bitter sarcasm. ‘Now listee, Rasmus.’ He became a little stern. ‘You telled me, plain as plain, a week agoo today, that you was born at eight o’clock. Eight striken, says you. You was standen same as it might be there, and I was sitten as near as makes no matter where I be sitten now. At eight striken, Dick, you says, my mother brung me forth.’

‘You’re in the right of it, Dick,’ said Mr Bailey hastily. ‘Twas eight o’clock sartain sure. I remember well enough now.’

‘Ah,’ said Coachy, ‘then you’ve an owdacious good memory, Mus Bailey, young though you be.’

‘Eight o’clock striken,’ said Mykelborne with unction, ‘this day seventy-five year agoo.’

‘This very day? So tis,’ agreed Mr Bailey. ‘Bless me, how time flies, to be sure!’

‘Mus Bailey,’ said Mykelborne, half-rising,’ we’re all rough men here.’ But he broke off to explain in a confidential aside: ‘This bain’t the speech yet, Rasmus. Daun’t think ut. What I be sayen, and tis not in the speechifying way, is we’re all rough men here. But if so be your lady mistus would do us so proud as to come among us for five martal minutes, we’d take ut countable kind in she. Remember the weaker vessel to keep ut holy, as Postle Paul says. And he knawed, did old Postle.’

‘Certainly, Dick, certainly!’ Mr Bailey vanished into his private parlour, and so quickly returned with Mrs Bailey on his arm that it was clear she had needed no persuasion. She smiled radiantly on the company, and bowed in response to the gratified murmurs that welcomed her.

Mykelborne had by now possessed himself of the token, which he did his best to conceal behind his back, keeping his other hand free for such oratorical gestures as might be needed. ‘Mus Bailey and Mistus Bailey . . . What be the time, Abel Sweet?’ With this question he affirmed the importance and dignity of the occasion. Henceforward, due order must be observed, and every man perform his proper duty and no other: the spokesman was dedicated to speech, the timekeeper to observation of the clock.

‘He do want a minute yet,’ said Sweet.

That minute was the longest of the day. Bright beads appeared on the brow of the frustrated orator. Mr Bailey gazed unhappily at the floor, and Mrs Bailey’s smile grew wan. But at last, with dramatic emphasis, the hour of release struck. Eight o’clock.

Sweet counted each stroke. One . . . two . . . three . . .

‘Tis eight o’clock now, Mus Mykelborne,’ said Sweet.

‘He do knaw that, you gurt gummut!’ said Growcock. ‘He’ve a pair of ears, anta?’

‘Hush, my coneys,’ said Coachy Timms. ‘Take a deep drink, for there be the speech to come now, and no chance for swalleren.’

‘Mus Bailey and Mistus Bailey,’ said Mykelborne, ‘we be all rough folkses here and ignorant sinners, and you an owdacious eddicated man. But seeing you was born seventy-five year agoo at eight o’clock striken, as it might be this very minute——’

‘Nay, tis past the hour now, Mus Mykelborne,’ Sweet corrected him.

‘—as it might be this very minute, Abel Sweet. Might be, I said, dint I! And so, Mus Bailey, seeing you be seventy-five year old, we thine unworthy servants do bring thee humble and hearty thanks. Likewise a token. We’ve summered and wintered ye a dunnamany years now, and you’ve always and all days bin a true breencheese friend to us.’

‘So he has!’ said Growcock.

‘As sure as I sit here,’ corroborated Sweet.

‘Ay,’ said Coachy, nodding sagaciously, ‘he be a likely youngster, sure enough.’

‘And so, Mus Bailey, what with one thing and what with another thing, us have seen fit and praaper to purchase and procure a token for ee: which same token,’ said Mykelborne, suddenly, with a proud delighted smile, bringing forth his treasure, which he held dangling by the knot of the red handkerchief that covered it, ‘which same token us do now present. Do now present . . . And a countable genteel token tis, Mus Bailey, being one of they teapots same as the gentry has, to wish ee long life and happiness, because all flesh be grass, says Postle, and whatsumdever a man do sow, that same shall spring up in the day of moën and rippen . . . Here be thy token, Rasmus. Take ut and God bless.’

Mykelborne sat down, mopping his brow. He looked at Coachy, who nodded grave approval. ‘Now ut be his canter,’ said Coachy, indicating Mr Bailey with a nod. ‘God send he be brief about it. Twould be carnal folly to talk all night of teapots.’ He took a deep and pious drink of his beer.

‘My dear friends——’ began Mr Bailey.

‘Hushee!’ cried Sweet. ‘Hushee, Mus Bailey. Here be Master Hugh come amongst us.’

Hugh Marden stood hesitating in the doorway. Now he came forward. ‘Good evening, Bailey. Good evening, Mrs Bailey. My father asked me to bring you his good wishes, Bailey. You’re having a birthday, I hear.’

The Squire had sent his own son! It reminded Mr Bailey of something in the Bible: he did not remember quite what. ‘Tis a wonderful kindness in him, sir, and in yourself too, I’ll ’low. A wonderful condescension, I’m sure——’

The young man waved his protestations aside. ‘Oh, ah, and there’s this book for you, in token——’

‘Another token for ee, Mus Bailey!’ cried Sweet. ‘Tis a proud day we be maken of ut.’

With trembling hands Mr Bailey received his book: a small octavo volume, bound in marbled boards and half-leather. At its title-page he dared not look, for during the past few weeks he had heard rumours almost too beautiful for belief, and he lacked courage as yet to put his rapturous conjecture to the proof. But the words of the young gentleman fell like music on his dazed ears. ‘My father and some other gentlemen thought to gratify you by having it printed. A small edition: two hundred copies, I believe.’ So the title-page was no longer to be feared, and could no longer be resisted. Mr Bailey took one furtive peep and saw himself in all the glory that Caslon can invest a man with. The Poetical Works of Mr Erasmus Bailey. (That ‘Mr’ had been Brother Raphe’s thought, and it made all the difference.) He looked no further; one glimpse had translated him. The burden of his joy being too great for one alone to bear, his hand went seeking that of Lizzie, who stood comfortably near. Husband and wife exchanged a glance of pure happiness.

And now he must stammer his thanks to the young gentleman.

‘Sir——’

But the young gentleman was already gone.

‘He be pleased with Squire’s token, I’ll ’low,’ said Mykelborne.

‘I think a be so,’ agreed Sweet.

Mr Bailey, roused from ecstasy, remembered his guests and was suddenly ashamed for his neglect of them. ‘Neighbours,’ said he, ‘tis true that I be pleased with Squire’s token. But nothing today could have pleased me more than this elegant teapot you’ve given me. A teapot such as this teapot is a thing I’ve always hankered after——’

‘Ah,’ said Mykelborne. ‘D’ye mark that, Abel Sweet? Cobbler Sweet,’ he explained, ‘was for given ye a pair of bellowses, poor fellow.’

‘Nothing could have pleased me more,’ repeated Mr Bailey, ‘and nothing could have pleased me so much, unless twas the fine speech you made me, Dick.’

‘Ay, twas a middlin good speech, I’ll ’low,’ said Mykelborne. ‘Say, neighbours, what a mercy young Master Marden dint come five minutes sooner! Twould a been the moiderment and doom of my speech.’

‘So twould,’ agreed Mr Bailey.

But his thoughts were far away: he hardly knew what he said. He looked down the long vista of his past and wondered what his youthful fevers had portended, and by what miracle it chanced that he had lived to enjoy so rich and lingering an autumn. It was a moment of deep and tranquil beauty, and involuntarily he began seeking a phrase in which to enshrine it. Thereupon his soaring thoughts wheeled back into the small circle of here and now, and with a sudden renewal of excitement he remembered the volume his hand still clasped. His wife, watching him, knew that his fingers itched to be turning those enchanted pages. She interposed.

‘Fill up, neighbours,’ said she, ‘and make yourselves homely. And you, Rasmus—come you into my parlour for two-three minutes. They’ll give you leave, and take no hurt, seeing tis your birthday. I’ve something to shew ee, my dear.’

As the door closed upon them, Growcock rose to his feet, drank a pint in one draught, and gave a deep sigh of contentment. ‘Well, neighbours. Now speechifying be over, us can come back to comfortable talk.’ He turned to Tom Shellett. ‘I’ll ’low you never had word from that Seth of yourn after he done murder in Glatten Wood, Tahm?’

‘I never did,’ said Tom. ‘And he worn’t no son of mine nuther. That I’ll tellee.’

‘Did he do ut, d’ye think?’ asked Abel Sweet. ‘Some says yes, and some says no. A fine upstanden wench her was too. Twas a shameful thing if a did ut.’

‘A runned away, didn’t a?’ asked Growcock, challengingly.

‘A runned away sure enough,’ conceded Sweet.

‘Very well then. A did ut.’

‘No son of mine, tellee,’ cried Tom Shellett complainingly. ‘A countable fierce rogue was that one. I woon’t like to be in his shoes on Doomsday.’

‘And if you was,’ said Coachy Timms, ‘you’d be lost in ’em, Tahm, a liddle dry fellow like you. And Goddle Mighty ud never see shim of ye, I’ll ’low.’

‘Twill be a powerful great day, all said,’ remarked Mykelborne pensively, ‘when the trumpet do sound and blow us into the hand of the liven Gard, as the Book says.’

‘And a tolerable handful hell find us,’ said Coachy. ‘Kings and poor folk and sech, all cantering abroad in’s palm, as it might be in Nightingale Roughs.’

‘Doomsday——’ began Mykelborne.

‘I’ll tellee,’ said Coachy, warming to his theme, ‘I’ll tellee how tis, neighbours . . .’

We leave them talking.