Collected works of j s f.., p.147
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 147
Rhoda had neglected the contents of the clothes baskets ever since Perris began to talk. She was leaning over the table at which he had eaten his supper, her knuckles resting on the ledge, her body bent slightly forward as if she wanted to meet every word that came from him. Her eyes, hard, cold, questioning, never left his face.
“Where’s the five hundred pound you said you had when we got married two year ago?” she demanded suddenly.
Perris looked up quickly, and as quickly looked away again. He shuffled his feet uneasily on the stone floor.
“Why, why, my lass!” he answered deprecatingly. “Five hundred pounds is none so much to start housekeepin’ and farmin’ on. There were furniture to buy and stock to buy, and there’s been rent to pay, and—”
“Then it’s all gone?” she said. “There’s naught in the bank?”
“Aw, there’s naught in t’ bank,” he admitted. “At least, nowt much — not beyond a pound or two. Ye see, I’ve made nowt o’ this farm. What I’ve scratted out on it’s just about kept us, my lass.”
“Fine keeping!” she exclaimed scornfully. She turned to the clothes-basket again, and began to sort out the garments with nervous, spasmodic movements. “And what’s to come if you don’t pay that rent next week?” she demanded again, pausing in her work. “What’s going to happen, I say?”
Perris shook his head.
“Nay!” he replied. “I don’t know, my lass. T’ steward’s none over friendly inclined, as it is. Last time he were round this way he threw out some hints about me not having over and above much amount o’ stock. Happen he’ll sell us up. There’s about enough on t’ place to pay t’ rent, anyway.”
“And we should go out on the road — beggars!” said Rhoda.
Perris rubbed the end of his chin and stared about him.
“It’s a poor game, bein’ a little farmer,” he observed. “I never had enough capital, as they call it. If I had a hundred pound now I could pull things round. But as mi Uncle George and our John William says—”
“I want to hear naught about your Uncle George nor your John William neither!” said Rhoda. “What’s going to be done! You sit there, and do naught but talk.”
“Happen I could persuade t’ steward to wait a piece,” suggested Perris. “He’s given other men time to pay. I can happen talk him round.”
“And happen you can’t! He knows as well as you do that there’s naught about the place,” said Rhoda. “Where he does give time to pay, it’s where a man has something to show. You’ve naught to show.”
Perris hung his head and blinked at the fire.
“I can sell t’ beasts and t’ pigs,” he said. “That ‘ud make summat towards t’ rent.”
“And leave the place barer than what it is! You’ll not do aught of the sort. What’s wanted,” Rhoda continued, “isn’t taking stuff off this place, but putting stuff on.”
“I could soon put some stuff on if I’d brass to do it with,” said Perris. “But I’ve never had no luck. I expect ye haven’t a bit o’ money put aside out o’ them cocks and hens, my lass?”
Rhoda darted a look at him which made him shrink instinctively into his chair. She vouchsafed no answer to his question, but went on mechanically folding and wrapping. Suddenly she turned on Perris and snapped out a command.
“Off you get to bed!” she said. “If all’s as bad as you say it is, you’ll have to stir yourself to-morrow, so you may as well get your rest. It’s past nine o’clock now.”
Perris obeyed this order at once. He slipped off his boots and lumbered heavily up the chamber stairs. Hours after he had gone his wife worked at her task, her face clouded and her eyes sombre with thought. It was near midnight when she turned out the lamp, wrapped herself up, fully dressed, in an old rug, and lying down on the settle, fell instantly fast asleep.
III
RHODA WASTED NO words on her husband next morning until he had finished his breakfast, which meal he took in company with Pippany Webster, sitting at the same table, and making no distinction or difference between his man and himself. But that over, she drove Pippany out of the house-place with a look and a word, and turned on Perris, who, if she had not been between himself and the door, would have slipped away and escaped her for the rest of the morning.
“Now, then, what’re you going to do?” she demanded.
Perris looked at her furtively.
“Why, there’s a bit o’ fencin’ wants attendin’ to away i’ yon five-acre,” he answered. “I were thinking that you could happen give as a bit o’ dinner to carry along wi’ us, and then we’d make a full day’s job on it.”
“You’ll get your dinner here, and at the proper time,” said Rhoda. “And you answer my question. I say — what’re you going to do?”
“Do about what, then?” Perris asked sullenly.
“This rent. You’re got to do something,” she said. “I’m not going to be turned out like a beggar, if you are!”
“There’s nowt that I can do,” replied Perris, scratching his head. “Leastways, not to-day. I might sell them beasts and pigs to-morrow when I go to market, but—”
“You’ll sell neither beasts nor yet pigs,” declared Rhoda. “You’re the sort that ‘ud sell fifty pounds of stuff for twenty. You don’t take a thing off this place!”
Perris muttered, and scratched his head again.
“Have it yer own way!” he said. “Have it yer own way, my lass!”
“I wish I had had it my own way!” she retorted. “We shouldn’t have been in this mess. Just you listen to me, Abel Perris! As like as not, the steward ‘ll be turning up here on Monday morning, first thing, just as he did last year. What’s this place look like for him to peep and spy about in? Now then, you and that there Pippany set to work and put things to rights, and if you want your dinners at noon, and your suppers at six o’clock, mind you’ve something to show for ’em! I know what wants doing, and I know how much two of you can do, and if you haven’t done what you ought to have done by twelve o’clock there’ll be no dinner on this table. So now you know.”
Perris shambled out, muttering comments on his own folly in telling his affairs to a woman.
“You can grumble and chunter as much as you like,” Rhoda called after him, “but there ‘ll be neither bite nor sup, when dinner-time comes, if all them buildings aren’t straight and this fold tidied up. There ‘ll be plenty for you to do to earn your supper after that.”
Perris murmured, but made instant preparation for obedience. He knew that Rhoda would be as good as her word; he also knew that she was right in what she said. The steward had a nasty habit of descending upon the smaller tenants when he came on his half-yearly visits, and when he did make such a descent the poked his long nose into every corner of farmstead and field. Perris felt himself to be an inject of suspicion already, and he knew that the steward would have no mercy upon him if he found things going to rack and ruin. He summoned Pippany from a lazy contemplation of the pigs, and entered unwillingly upon a day of hard work. By noon the buildings had been tidied up and made presentable; Rhoda came out from her ironing and looked them over; her approval was manifested in the fact that she gave each man a pint of ale with his dinner of boiled bacon. Experience had taught her to preserve the key of the barrel in her own possession, and Perris had known all the morning that there would be no beer unless her commands were obeyed. Similar conclusions made him and Pippany toil hard all the afternoon. By supper-time a great change had come over the place: Perris, indulging a certain foolish optimisim which was ingrained in him, felt it to be a pity that the steward could not drive up at that moment.
Rhoda, having accomplished a long day’s ironing, gave master and man their suppers and disappeared upstairs. When she came down again she was wearing her Sunday finery, and Perris, stretching his legs before the fire, stared at her.
“Aw, where ‘re ye goin’, mi lass?” he inquired.
“Going? — I’m going to chapel, of course,” answered Rhoda. “Isn’t it the monthly week-night service?”
“Nay, I didn’t know,” said Perris. “Well, I weern’t offer to accompany yer, my lass — I’ll just bide at home and smoke mi pipe. I’m over tired to go chappillin’ when I’ve done mi day’s labour but of course them ‘at’s religious is different.”
Rhoda made no reply. She opened the top drawer of the old bureau which stood in one corner of the house-place and took out a hymn-book and a handkerchief. From a gaily-decorated bottle she sprinkled a few drops of cheap scent on the handkerchief; carrying it and the hymn-book in her left hand, and taking her ivory-handled umbrella in her right, she went off without further word to her husband. The key of the beer-barrel was in her pocket; the last drop of whisky had been wasted in restoring Pippany Webster to consciousness; she had made herself assured that Perris had no money on him, and therefore could not visit the Dancing Bear. Accordingly, he could come to little harm during her absence at the religious exercises which she made a point of never missing.
In addition to her charm of face and figure, Perris’s young wife possessed a fine voice, of the quality of which she was by no means unconscious. If she had been less gifted she would have attended the parish church, but the church possessed a surpliced choir of men and boys, and had no need for a particularly strong soprano; and, moreover, anything beyond the most modest congregational singing was not much desired by its authorities. This sent Rhoda, who had no idea of allowing her talents to go unused, to the Methodists. These good people, a little time before the coming of Perris and his wife to Cherry-trees, had bought a second-hand American organ for their chapel, and had consequently turned their attention to something better in the way of music than they had previously attempted. They welcomed Rhoda with great enthusiasm, and immediately installed her as leader of the choir. It would have been difficult, indeed, to make her anything else, for her voice was strong and clear, and she led and controlled the hymn-singing in more senses than one. On summer evenings, when the doors of the chapel stood open, her powerful notes were heard far across the meadows outside, and the non-religious part of the surrounding population lounged over garden gates, or sat on the edge of the causeway, to listen with surprise and pleasure.
Whatever might be going on at home, Rhoda never missed any of the chapel services or the weekly choir-practices. She had come to be sovereign mistress of the young men, maidens, and children who sat with her in the singing-pew beneath the pulpit, and though the ministers and preachers chose the hymns, it was Rhoda who settled upon the particular tunes to which they should be sung. Consequently she was something of a power, and had already begun to consider the chapel in the same light in which an opera-house is viewed by a prima-donna who sings in it season after season. The heads of the little congregation deferred to her in everything relating to the musical part of the services; the young man who walked out from the market-town to play the American organ, and who cultivated his hair after the fashion of a plaster cast of Beethoven which he had purchased from an itinerant vendor of busts, worshipped her, and presented her every Sunday afternoon with a paper of strong mint lozenges, to be consumed during the sermon. These attendances at the chapel were therefore Rhoda’s sole diversion in an otherwise grey and colourless life; she would not have missed one of them for any reason whatever, and she was always in her place winter and summer, fair weather or foul.
But on this particular evening Rhoda had an additional reason for going down to the chapel. On one night of the month one of the regular ministers came to preach; the minister for that night was an old man who had a reputation for prudence and sagacity; she wanted to ask his counsel and advice on the difficulty in which Perris by his incompetence had placed his wife and himself. All through the service she was scheming and planning as to what might be done; of the sermon she heard nothing; she sang the hymns mechanically. And when the service was over and the congregation had departed she curtly dismissed the organist, who usually walked with her as far as the Dancing Bear on their homeward way, and following the old minister into the little vestry, she asked for an interview with him. With a plainness and directness which made him regard her as an eminently business-like and practical young woman, she put the situation before him.
“You see, Mr. Marriner,” she concluded, “it’s this way. Abel, he’s not a bad farmer, but he’s weak and shiftless, and if things begin going wrong he loses heart and then he goes from bad to worse. I’m sorry to say I’ve little good opinion of him as a manager for himself. But I know what I can do. If I’d a bit of money I’d manage that place myself, and I’d make him work. I’d manage it, and I’d manage him — I’ve managed him to-day to some purpose, I’ll warrant you, Mr. Marriner! I’m none going to stand by and see everything go to naught but failure if I can help it. But the thing is — where am I to find the money? My poor father’s a big family of his own, and it’s all he can do to keep it — he can’t do aught for me. What would you advise, now, Mr. Marriner?”
The old minister, who had a sufficient knowledge of Abel Perris to make him aware that in this case the grey mare was much the better horse, considered matters for a few minutes.
“Well, Mrs. Perris,” he said at last. “I dare say there are plenty of people who would lend you money in preference to lending it to your husband. Now, supposing you could get money and pull things round, do you think you could manage him?”
Rhoda drew her fine eyebrows together, and screwed up her eyes, and Mr. Marriner gained a new impression of her. He laughed softly, nodding his head.
“I see — I see!” he said. “Well, now, aren’t there any of your neighbours that would help? I understand that some of the big farmers hereabouts are pretty well to do — some of them very well to do. Can’t you think of one of them?”
A sudden hot flush burned into Rhoda’s cheeks. She was quick to make excuse for it.
“I don’t like the idea of going cap in hand, as they say, to neighbours, Mr. Marriner,” she said. “I’ve never been used to asking favours, though I came of poor folks. And I don’t know any of the big farmers hereabouts; they look upon us little farmers as so much dirt beneath their feet! I’ve never spoken to one of them — except to Mr. Taffendale.”
“Why, Mr. Taffendale’s the very man!” said the old minister. “I know him to be a wealthy man. He’s on a committee of which I’m a member, so I meet him now and then. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mrs. Perris, if you like. I’ll write him a note, saying that you’ve told me your troubles, and that I’m sure he won’t be disappointed if he helps you. How would that be?”
“Thanking you kindly, Mr. Marriner, it would be a good help,” Rhoda answered. “I should feel less what you might call ashamed and frightened about it if I had some writing of yours to show.”
“All right, all right!” said the old man. “I’ll write it now. I think you’ll find Mr. Taffendale a likely man to apply to. Tell him all you’ve told me; let him see you mean business. He’ll see then, I’m sure, that you know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I know what I’m talking about, Mr. Marriner!” said Rhoda, with quiet confidence. “I don’t talk for talking’s sake. And I know what I can do if I set out to do it.”
Ten minutes later, when the old minister had mounted his horse and ridden away, Rhoda, holding the note which he had given her, stood in the darkness outside the chapel, thinking. Once she turned in the homeward direction, only to pause before she had taken many steps. And after the pause she suddenly turned in the other direction and began to walk rapidly down the village street, already deserted and quiet.
“Since it’s got to be done, I’ll do it now,” she muttered to herself. “I’ll do it, and get it over.”
Martinsthorpe was a long, straggling village lying in a valley which ran from east to west. It was divided into two halves by a high-road running north and south, and transecting the one street at the point where the Dancing Bear looked down from his swinging sign upon the cross-roads formed by the intersection. In the western half of the village stood the church, the school, the principal farmsteads, and the great house of the place; in the eastern there was nothing more pretentious in the way of human habitation than the smithy, the carpenter’s shop, a general store kept by an old woman, various clusters of labourers’ cottages, and the little chapel. Beyond lay open and uninhabited country which stretched, wood, meadow and arable land, for many a mile before the next village showed itself through its ring of ash and elm. But just beyond the chapel a footpath ran across the valley and up the hillside in the direction of the Limepits, Taffendale’s place on the uplands, and this Rhoda took, and followed with swift steps. Having made up her mind on the question which — in spite of her silence upon it during her conversation with the old minister — had been agitating it all day, she was resolved on a plan of action, and she went with firmness and resolution to its first beginnings.
The great stretch of flat land on which the Lime-pits Farm stood like some giant ship in the midst of an otherwise lonely sea, was silent almost to oppression as Rhoda passed across it in the dusky night. Long before she reached it she saw the gaunt farmstead outlined against the stars. Something in its vast solidity, its bulky mass of house and outhouse, barn and granary gave her a curious sense of power, wealth, security — it seemed to typify Taffendale and his money. And as she drew nearer the sense deepened, for opposite the farm lay the famous limepits, from which the bulk of that money was drawn, and from the burning pits a dull glow of fiery red was rising to the night. She stood for a moment between the two sources of wealth which were in this one man’s control, and she felt the glow of the burning pits play over her face, and caught the pungent odour of the lime in her nostrils. Then, with a quick catching of her breath she turned boldly to the farmhouse and knocked firmly at its door.
