Читать книгу Still Glides the Stream - Flora Jane Thompson - Страница 4

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The cottage where she had been born and had lived as a child with her parents was the first on the right hand side when coming into the village, and stood at the point where the narrow, tree-shaded lane which led to the crossroads widened into the village street. Between the house and the road a brown path zigzagged over a stretch of rough turf and, to reach the gate, the brook which ran below the garden hedge had to be crossed by way of a plank bridge with a handrail. In summer this small stream was so choked with willow-herb and water-mint that its gentle murmur could barely be heard above the humming of the hive-bees. After the autumn rains, on quiet winter days, pauses in the conversation within-doors were filled by the sound of running water. Even in the hottest summer the stream never dried up, and this, she was told, was because it was fed by well-springs. Charity's father called the house their castle and the brook their moat and laughed when a neighbour asked him how he could a-bear to live in such a lonesome old place, adding that to live there would have made him feel unked.

At that time village houses had no numbers or names, the names of the occupants being sufficient distinction, and Charity's home was usually spoken of as 'Finch's', though some of the older inhabitants persisted in calling it 'Gaspar's'. Tradition said that a white wizard of that name had once lived there and that he had made a fortune by charming away illnesses, finding lost things, and telling people their lucky days. He had either died suddenly or disappeared, and was supposed to have left his hoard hidden beneath the thatch or under the floor-boards. But although Charity searched hopefully, she never found anything of more value than a coil of wire, a pewter spoon, and a King George III penny. When she found the penny her father laughed and told her to take care of it, for it was the first coin that had ever come into their family without hard labour.

He must have intended that as a joke, for he was the last man in the world to make hard labour of his work. To him his craft was his pleasure as well as his means of livelihood. He was the village carpenter and had a workshop at the back of the cottage. On some days he worked there, making doors and window-frames and mantelpieces, or making or mending furniture; on other days he went out to mend gates and fences and to build sheds for the farmers. The farm work was known as rough carpentry, and he preferred the smoother, workshop kind; but, as he said, you had to take rough and smooth as it came to make a living in a small place like Restharrow. Before Charity was born he had made for her a wooden cradle with a carved hood and sides and with rockers he had guaranteed to outlast three lifetimes, no matter how hard or how often the cradle was rocked. Charity had put her doll or her kitten to bed in it until her mother had given it to a very poor family, who, after their last baby had outgrown it, had used it as a washtub and left it out in the rain. Her mother would have preferred one of the more fashionable wickerwork cradles, lined with pink glazed calico covered with spotted muslin.

The cottage was an old-fashioned, countrified place standing in a garden crammed with fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, and lavender bushes. Inside, it had none of the conveniences now considered essential to comfort. Water had to be drawn up with a long hooked pole from a well in the garden; paraffin lamps and candles lighted the hours of darkness, and the sanitation was primitive. There were red-tiled floors in the downstair rooms, and the only fireplace besides the small oven grate in the kitchen was the parlour grate, of the high, bow-barred, basket-shaped kind under a high mantelpiece now seen only in old prints. But the unenlightened Finches found their house comfortable enough; indeed, they rather prided themselves upon living in one of the most commodious cottages in the village, with a parlour and three bedrooms, whereas most of their neighbours had but one room downstairs and two, at most, upstairs. The tiled floors were made warm and comfortable with home-made rugs and long strips of red and brown matting, and the low price of coals made it possible to keep up roaring great fires in cold weather. 'I'm going to make this house as warm and snug as a chaffinch's nest,' her mother had said one day, while spreading out on the floor a handsome new black-and-scarlet rug she had been making, and that idea had pleased her small daughter, for weren't they themselves Finches, and was not the cottage their nest? She liked the idea of a nest better than that of a castle, for a castle she had never seen, and there were nests in every hedgerow.

People in the neighbouring villages, speaking from the superior standpoint of those living one, two, or three miles nearer a town, used to say that the Restharrow folks were a rum lot, and it may be that, secluded as they were from outside influence, they had lagged behind in the march of progress. Many of the old country customs, dead or dying out elsewhere, were still honoured at Restharrow. There were the Christmas mummers, the May Day garland; broad beans were planted in gardens on Candlemas Day. Candlemas Day, stick beans in the clay. Throw candle and candlestick right away, they would quote. But they no longer heeded the second admonition; they lighted their paraffin lamps and stayed up until nine or ten. If a lamp burned low or smoked, the older ones would say, ''Pon my soul, this lamp's no better than a farthing rushlight!' and describe to their grandchildren how their own mothers had dipped and dipped and dipped a rush from the brook in melted fat to form the tiny, twinkling candles of their childhood. 'You young uns be a lucky little lot,' they would say. 'You'll never know life in the rough with all these wonderful inventions.'

At Restharrow sprigs of oak leaves were worn on 29 May to commemorate the escape from his enemies of King Charles II in the Boscobel Oak. That day had become known as Shigshag Day, and on it no child or young person dared to appear in public without their oak-sprig, for, had they done so, every wearer of one would have rushed to them and trodden on their toes. Many Prayer Books still in use contained the service formerly used in church on the day devoted to the memory of King Charles I—'King Charles the Martyr'. On Easter Sunday something new had to be worn, if only a bootlace; on Whit-Sunday, something white: if these observances were neglected the birds of the air would drop their little messes on the offender. Nobody would open an umbrella indoors, even to dry it, for that was certain to bring bad luck, or eat one single blackberry after Michaelmas Day, for then the devil dragged his tail over those left on the bushes. But the observance of such customs and superstitions was not as yet so singular as to mark the participants as rum. That reputation was probably founded on a certain untamedness, a closer-to-earth earthiness, a hanging together in clans and regarding outsiders as potential enemies, shown by the older inhabitants.

As was then usual in small country places where little happened to crowd out of village memory the events of former years, old traditions were cherished and old stories re-told. Village memory was long, very long. In the eighteen-eighties an aged man told Charity that his great-great-grandfather, when what he described as 'a girt, lolloping lad', sat on a field gate on a Sunday morning and looked on at the Battle of Edgehill—a family tradition which may or may not have been founded on fact. Charity, after working it out on paper, decided that there should have been at least one more 'great' in it; on the other hand, the correct day of the week gave a circumstantial touch to the story. Another aged man remembered the arrival in this country of the news of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and the bonfires lighted to celebrate our victory. Everybody over sixty remembered Queen Victoria's Coronation, and the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny were spoken of by many as if they had happened but yesterday.

The village families had intermarried for generations and three surnames served for quite half the population. Relationships were involved; there were first, second and third cousins and, after that, those who were known as 'a sort o' cousin'. A gossiping woman could spend a diverting if not very profitable morning determining the exact degree of affinity of some about-to-be-married couple. 'His aunt what brought him up,' she would say, ticking her off on her finger, 'she's his aunt on his mother's side, but on his dad's she's his step-grandmother. And, to her', meaning the bride, 'he's a full cousin on his mother's side and a sort o' cousin on his dad's. But it's all right', she would conclude authoritatively, 'there's no blood relation, for I've puzzled it out in the Prayer Book.'

In past times these mixed marriages had produced a wild, lawless race of sheep-stealers, poachers, and fighting and drinking men. Stories were still told of pitched battles with gamekeepers, or the men of neighbouring villages, in which knives and bludgeons had figured. There were stories of murder, almost openly committed, for which no one had been brought to trial, for none would give information lest by doing so they brought down upon themselves and their families the vengeance of the murderer's relatives. The most horrifying of these was that of a man who was said to have murdered his stepson, a boy of five. The charred remains of the poor child had been found in the big bread-baking oven in the wash-house wall of his mother's cottage. It had never been actually proved how he had got there, but his stepfather had been known to dislike the child and to have treated him badly and all in the village were convinced that he was responsible for the crime. At the inquest the man, when asked how he supposed the boy had got into the oven, had said he supposed he must have climbed into it to hide and have accidentally banged to the door, which could only be opened from the outside, and when it was pointed out to him that even a child of five should have known better than climb into a hot oven, he had said that anybody might have thought so, but young Amos was a stubborn sort of child and if he once made up his mind to do a thing he'd do it, if only to aggravate. Though the Coroner and his jury must have had their suspicions, there was no evidence upon which the man could be sent for trial, and a verdict of accidental death was returned. But the villagers were convinced of his guilt and, from that time on, he was an outcast among them. After a time he left the village—some said that he had taken to the road as a tramp—and nothing was ever heard about him afterwards. But for forty years the story survived, and a piece of broken wall, half buried in nettles, where his cottage had stood was avoided by most people after nightfall. Strange noises were said to have been heard there for years; then, about the time when the stepfather might have been expected to die of old age, they had ceased. 'For why? The wretch had gone to his account,' they told their children.

The more certain perpetrators of lesser crimes had usually escaped punishment. One old woman told Charity that when she had been left a young widow, forty years previously, a neighbour who had so far appeared well disposed towards her had taken her late husband's tools from a shed at the side of the house and pushed them off on a wheelbarrow in broad daylight. She had watched his proceedings from an upstairs window and, although indignant, she had not gone out to remonstrate, because, she said, he might have blackened her character by telling folks lies about her. That was the woman who once described the Restharrow of her youth as a regular little rogues' harbour.

That was long before Charity's time. In her childhood there was an occasional bout of fisticuffs outside the inn after closing time on a Saturday night; one man was known to do a little mild poaching, and fruit sometimes vanished from trees and vegetables from gardens after dark, but nothing worse happened, and, on the whole, Restharrow was as peaceable and law-abiding a place as any in the county. Peaceful and law-abiding; though, as they said of themselves, its inhabitants were not all cut to the same pattern. The State had taken in hand and was educating and smoothing out oddities in the younger generation, but many of the older people had been born too soon to have come under its equalizing influence, and among these there were individuals of the kind then described as 'cards', or 'characters'.

About half a dozen old men who, having become too infirm for fieldwork, had yet managed to keep out of the workhouse, made their headquarters on the bench provided by the landlord for more paying customers beneath the swinging signboard of the Magpie. When one of them happened to be in funds, a pot of beer would be called for and passed from hand to hand; when, as more frequently happened, not one of the company had (as they said) a couple of coppers to rub together, they cut chunks off their rolls of twist tobacco and chewed. When there was a horse to be held or a message to carry, the more active among them would spring up spryly, for on such casual earnings they depended for their pocket money. Twopence was the usual reward for such small services; if there was a garden hedge to be trimmed or a path to be weeded the pay might be sixpence. Between whiles they discussed life in general.

The spirits of the little assembly depended mainly upon funds. Over a pint of beer the conversation grew lively. On beerless days rheumatism, lumbago, bad weather, and the deterioration of the world since their own young days were the staple topics. The married old men, told to be home at certain time, would frequently drag their old-fashioned turnip witches from their trouser pockets; the lone widowers had only to consult their own inclinations. When the talk became lively one old man of a timid nature would glance over his shoulder and the others would rally him, 'No, she beant a comin' and she can't hear us neither,' they would say. Poor old Ben had a regular tartar of a wife. Once Charity, passing by on the roadway, saw her, a big, sour-looking old woman in an enormous pink print apron, steal silently up to the back of the bench and seize old Ben by the shoulder. 'Off you go and clean them winders,' she shouted. 'I'll larn 'ee to set here gossiping while I work me fingers to the bone!' and Ben followed her meekly.

But that pair was an exception; most of the poor old men and their poor old wives lived together in quiet decency. A few in affectionate intimacy. Old Ambrose Moss paid but a short morning visit to the benchers, and when he thought his wife had had time to make all snug at home he returned to his own fireside, only crossing the road once more towards nightfall with a jug for their supper porter. Mrs. Moss was a tall, thin old woman with a dark upper lip who strode in her walk like a man. Both of the couple were slightly deaf and at seasons when doors and windows stood open their conversation could be heard by any passer-by on the road. Charity, standing on a neighbouring doorstep waiting for her basket to be filled with damsons for jam-making, once heard Ambrose exclaim: 'You doant remember Aaron? Him what married the pub at Asbury with th' landlady thrown in as a makeweight—'ooman wi' a face like a pickling cabbage, weighted sixteen stun if her did an ounce. You surely can't've forgot the two of 'um!' and Judy roared back that, though she could not call the couple to mind, she was glad that the young feller got a good makeweight, and they sat by their fire guffawing over their stout like two jolly old men.

These had all been landworkers. They had known all their lives that in their old age parish relief and any help that their children could give them were all that would stand between themselves and the workhouse. There was another old man in the parish, not one of the benchers, who had earned good wages as a craftsman and had in his time saved money and yet in old age was incomparably worse off than the poorest of them. Thomas Hearne was a native of Restharrow, a stonemason, who, after spending his active years working for a firm of builders in a distant part of the county, had in his old age drifted back to the home of his childhood. Hearne had in his day been a first-class workman with experience, skill, and that something beyond skill which is a compound of taste and imagination. His firm had valued his services. When there had been a difficult or a delicate job to be done, it had been given to Hearne as a matter of course. Specimens of his workmanship stood, and some must still be standing, all over that countryside, in the renovated stonework of restored churches, the arches of bridges, stone piers at entrance gates, and on the façades of mansions. He had in his day instructed two generations of apprentices.

But by the eighteen-eighties Hearne's day was over. Physically he was past his prime, though still hale and hearty and capable of a full day's work at his bench in the shop, or of walking, toolbag on shoulder, three or four miles or more to an outside job. But times and ideas had changed and his fastidious, painstaking methods were out of date. Speed had become more important than craftsmanship and the artistry which aimed at nothing less than perfection was little esteemed. The more important jobs were being given to younger men, smart fellows who knew all the latest dodges for saving time and materials. Young workmen, apprentices but yesterday, would take upon themselves to instruct him in his craft. It had been all very well in his day, they told him, to go in for all this undercutting and finishing, but who was going to wait or to pay for it now? and the kindly disposed would bring their mallets and chisels over to Hearne's bench and show him what they called the tricks of the trade.

But Hearne had no use for tricks. He preferred to work as he had been taught to work, leisurely and lovingly, striving always to approach as nearly as possible his own vision of perfection. For a few more years he continued to use the bench which for more than a quarter of a century had been known as 'Hearne's', working steadily at such jobs as were given him, consulted by others less often than formerly and respected less, but never abating his own self-respect. In his home village he was liked and respected as a man with a good trade in his hands, who had a good wife and a pleasant, cheerful cottage, and there were some there who envied him those blessings, for it was a poor agricultural neighbourhood.

This state of things might have lasted until his working life had ended in the natural way had not his old employer, the head of the firm, died and his son, a young man with modern ideas and a determination to increase his business, come into possession. The firm was reorganized, the latest and cheapest methods were instituted, and in the new scheme there was no place for Hearne as leading mason. He was called into the office and told that a younger and smarter man was to have his bench in the shop. The young builder was about to add that he had no idea of cutting adrift an old servant like Hearne, that as long as he was able to work there would still be a job in the yard for him, an old man's job with an old man's wages, but, before he could speak further, Hearne took him up sharply. 'Is anything wrong with my work?' he demanded. His young employer hummed and hawed, for he had no wish to hurt Hearne's feelings. 'Well, since you ask me,' he said, 'I'll say that you're a bit too finicking. You put in too much time on a job to justify your wage in these competitive times.'

'But look at my work!' cried Hearne. 'Look at that east window tracery in Tisley Church, and the new keystone I let into the Norman arch at Bradbury, and that bridge over the Ouse at Biddingfold; masterpieces all of 'em, though I says it as shouldn't. Other jobs, too. You've only got to take a walk in the cool of the evening and use your eyes and wherever you go in any direction you'll find summat worth seein' with my mark 'pon it,' and this he said, not pleadingly, but rather by way of a challenge, and as he spoke he stretched out his arms as though to call the whole neighbourhood as witness.

The young builder was in a difficult position. 'I know all that,' he said. 'I'm not denying you've been a good mason, a first-rate man in your day. But those were the days of my father and grandfather and those times have gone, the world's on the move, and the truth of the matter, though I'm sorry to say it, is that you do your work too well. You take too much time over it, and that doesn't pay in these days. We've been out of pocket by you for years.'

Hearne's fine dark eyes flamed and his long, thin old figure shook with rage. 'Too much time over it!' he shouted. 'Too much time! And how d'ee think good work's allus been done? By hurrying? By scamping? By begrudging a stroke here or a moment there? Look at the churches round here. Bloxham for length, Adderbury for strength, and Kings Sutton for beauty! Think they grew out o' th' ground like mushrooms? Or were flung together by slick youngsters such as yourn? Let me tell yer, young feller-me-lad, I learnt my craft from them as made a craft o't, not a come day go day means o' puttin a bit o' bread in their mouths, and I ain't goin' to alter my ways and disgrace my upbringin' for nobody. I'll make up my timesheet and you can put one o' your slick youngsters at my bench, for I've done with th' firm. And this I'll say before I've done with you for ever: th' work of my hands'll be standin' to bear witness for me when you and your like be frizzlin' in the spot old Nick keeps specially hotted for bad workmen!'

Old Hearne neither starved nor entered the workhouse. For some years longer he made a poor livelihood by replacing roof tiles, building pigsties, setting grates, repairing walls, sweeping chimneys, or any other odd job which could be regarded, however remotely, as included in his own trade. When his wife died he left the village near the town where he had worked and returned to his native Restharrow, where he still owned the cottage in which he had been born, and there carried on his humble occupation of jobbing mason. On chimney-sweeping days he was grimy, but, at other times, he went about his work in the immemorial garb of his craft, corduroy trousers scrubbed white, or whitish, white apron girded up round the waist for walking, billycock hat and nondescript coat powdered with stone and mortar dust. He had become, as they said, as thin as a rake, and his fine dark eyes, into which the fire of fanaticism was creeping, had become so sunken that his forehead looked like that of a skull. By the time Charity first remembered him, he had become queer in his ways. Harvesters going to the fields at daybreak would meet him far from his home, wild-eyed and wild-haired and dew-soaked. When asked where he had been he would whisper confidentially that he had been out all night, guarding some church or other building, but who had set him to guard them or what they were to be guarded against he would not say. Otherwise he talked more freely than he had been used to do and with many a 'he sez' and 'sez I' he would relate the story of his last interview with his former employer to anyone he could buttonhole. Everybody in the parish had heard that story, though few with sympathy, for it seemed to most of his listeners but an instance of a man throwing away a good job in a fit of temper, and, to save themselves from a third or fourth recital, when they saw Hearne in the distance they would turn aside to avoid a meeting. The more kindly spoke of him as 'poor old Tom Hearne', the less kindly as 'that tiresome old fool', and the children would tease him by calling after him, 'Tom! you're slow! You're too slow for a funeral! Old Slowcoach! Old Slowcoach!'

But there were still a few who respected him, craftsmen who, though compelled by changed conditions to modify their own methods, had not entirely lost the ideals of former days. Charity's father was one of these. He would listen patiently to Hearne's rambling talk, fill his tobacco pouch or ask him in for a drink, and once when his wife remarked that a fat lot of good the old man's fine workmanship seemed to have done him, he said quite angrily that money was not everything, there was the satisfaction of knowing you'd turned out a good job. Charity, upon whom Hearne's story had made a deep impression, concluded that his best friend in that house was her father, and that her mother disliked him and only did him the few little kindnesses she could because, to her, kindness came naturally.

Then, one Sunday morning when her father was hearing her repeat her Catechism in readiness for Sunday School and her mother was stuffing a fowl at the table, Hearne passed their house with a mob of teasing boys at his heels. People used to take the law into their own hands in those days, and George Finch ran out and dispersed the ringleaders with a cuff or two. 'That'll larn 'em!' he said when he returned. 'Now Charity, get on, "My duty towards my neighbour"?' 'My duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself and to do unto all men as I would they should do unto me——' Charity was fairly launched when her mother heaved a prodigious sigh. 'Aye, there's my bosom snake!' she exclaimed. 'To do unto all men.' 'Just hark at the woman!' said her husband. 'You'd think she was the chief of sinners! Your bosom snake, my girl, if you've got one, must be about the size of a cheese mite!'

'It's that poor old Hearne,' said his wife. 'I think and I think about him, living all alone with nobody to do as much as a hand's turn for him, and us with that good attic and a crust we should never miss.'

'Well,' said her husband decisively, 'if that's your bosom snake you can scotch it, once and for all. Your duty to your neighbours begins with them nearest to you, and that's me and Charity. We should neither of us be any the better for havin' a poor old death's head like Hearne sittin' with us at table and talkin' us upstairs and downstairs and out into the garden. Ask him to dinner on Christmas Day, send him a plateful of anything tasty you've cooked any time, knit him a pair or two of socks for the winter, or anything of that sort, but don't bring him into the house for good for I couldn't stand it!' Again Mrs. Finch sighed, but this time it was a sigh of relief rather than one of regret. ''Twasn't that I wanted him here myself,' she said. 'I only thought perhaps 't would be Christian.'

'Christian or heathen,' said her husband, ''t'ldn't be natural. Now, Charity, get on with that "Duty towards my neighbour", and you, Mother, see that you put a sprig of marjoram in that stuffin', and if you've a mind to send Charity up street with a bit of dinner for Hearne when 'tis done, I've got nothin' to say against it, 'cept that she'd better have her own before she goes or she won't get any.'

Living as they did a little removed from the rest of the village, the Finches had no very near neighbours. In the house nearest to them, one of a row facing the road, lived an elderly widow who was often spoken of as peculiar; by some as 'eggcentric'. She was Mrs. Burdett, the widow of a ganger who, a few years before, had come to work on a section of a new railway which passed through the district and had met with his death in circumstances which had obliged the Company to give his widow a small life-pension. Mrs. Burdett was by birth a North Countrywoman, but she had none of the physical traits of those hardy races, being thin and frail-looking, with dark, haunting eyes in a very pale face. 'Looks as if the first puff of wind'd blow her away', was what people said of her appearance. Her peculiarity chiefly consisted of keeping herself aloof from her neighbours, of taking long, solitary walks in the fields and lanes, and of what the neighbours considered excessive letter-writing.

Her aloofness might have passed with little comment, for there were other women in the village who kept themselves to themselves, as the saying went; and the walks, though singular in a place where walking for walking's sake was unheard of, might have been excused on the ground of the want of other employment; but why she should be seen sitting in front of her window, bending over a paper, pen in hand, every time a body chanced to pass by her house, was, as the bodies said, a puzzler, 'and her without a chick or child of her own to write to, and herself not gettin' a letter once in a month o' Sundays. Besides, whoever saw her post one o' them she'd written?' The only person who could have explained that matter was Mrs. Burdett herself, and nobody cared to ask her to do so; for one thing a direct question was not 'manners', and, for another, she might have told her interrogator to mind her own business, as she had once told somebody who had asked her another question about her affairs. 'Pardon me, but that is my business,' she had said, as grand in her manner as any duchess, the neighbour had reported. With her neighbours generally, Mrs. Burdett had little to do. If she met one of them face to face in the street she would pass the time of day with them and pass on, never stopping to talk. If anyone made occasion to knock at her door, she would reply civilly to what they had to say, but never herself started a topic or asked them inside. Naturally, she was not a popular person. People said she was proud and stand-offish, though what she had to be proud of God only knew, and her with but a paltry pension of seven and sixpence a week and lookin' as if a good meal'd do her no harm, and as to her craze of strolling the fields, and at her age too, it looked to them as if her wits were going.

Charity's parents liked Mrs. Burdett. They said she was the kind of neighbour they preferred, civil but never intrusive. When Charity's father sent her a few green peas or a vegetable marrow from his garden, she accepted them courteously and even seemed pleased, and when her mother said to her one day that if ever she fell ill, or needed any other kind of help, she knew where to send for it, she thanked her with some show of feeling. But those were their nearest approach to intimacy. With Charity she was a little more communicative. Once she had met her when the child was searching for violets in a deserted green lane out in the fields and had shown her a blackbird's and a thrush's nest back to back in the same stump, and, afterwards, had lent her a book with coloured pictures of birds which, she had told her, had been written by a country clergyman named Gilbert White. But, on the whole, Mrs. Burdett appeared to be one of those reserved, self-contained natures whose only wish as far as their neighbours are concerned is to be on polite but by no means familiar terms.

Close by Mrs. Burdett lived another old widow, but a widow of a very different quality. Mrs. Sykes had lived at Restharrow all her life and knew everyone who lived and everything which happened there, including some things which happened only in her own imagination. She dressed in the old country garb of shawl and sunbonnet and, in wet weather, clacked about on pattens. She was as willing to enter into conversation with anyone as Mrs. Burdett was unwilling, and might be seen at any hour of the day having what she called 'a bit of a clack' with a few like-minded neighbours in the village street. To eke out her parish relief of three and sixpence a week, she went out washing and charing for the innkeeper's wife, or for anyone else who could afford to pay her her wages of one shilling and sixpence a day, and, in the capacity of washerwoman, she came once a fortnight to Charity's home. There, in the thick, warm, steamy atmosphere of soapsuds, she would scour and rinse and scrub down, talking all the time at the top of her voice. Her one fault as a worker was not one of the present day; far from keeping one eye on the clock towards finishing time, there was no getting rid of her without telling her directly to go. If she had been permitted to do so she would have stayed on till midnight. When, at last, she had unwillingly edged out of the door, still talking, her employer would feel almost as exhausted as if she had herself done the day's washing.

If it could have been taken in moderation, much of her conversation would have been entertaining, for she knew everyone in the village and all that had happened there for the previous fifty years, and had the history of each family and all the ramifications of the involved relationships by heart. When, after Mrs. Sykes had gone, Mrs. Finch complained to her husband of having been talked to death, he would laugh and say that, exhausted or not exhausted, she seemed to have picked up a lot of information. Which she had; she could not help doing so when all that had happened or was thought to have happened in the village since the last wash-day had been related, with copious illustrations drawn from the happenings of other days, and with nothing lost in the telling.

Mrs. Sykes was superstitious and believed not only in charms and omens, the meaning of dreams and the telling of fortunes from tea-leaves, but even more firmly in witchcraft and ghosts. And she was not at all choice in her language. Mrs. Finch had often to S-s-s-sh! her when Charity was by, and afterwards to excuse her by saying that in Mrs. Sykes's young days countryfolks were an ignorant, broad-spoken lot; and, taking her all in all, she would add, she was a cheery, good-natured old soul and an excellent washerwoman.

She might not have thought so well of her had she heard some of the stories Mrs. Sykes told her small daughter when she happened to be alone with her for a few minutes. After hearing some of these tales, Charity could not sleep at night for thinking of the sheep-stealer on the gibbet, calling aloud all night to his mother to save him, Mother! Oh, Mother! or of the woman, laid out for dead, who came downstairs in her graveclothes. Mrs. Sykes had a ghoulish mind. Once, after a child had died in the village, herself sitting, fat and rosy, at the kitchen table having what she called her 'bavour' of bread and cheese and beer while Mrs. Finch hung out the clothes to dry in the garden, she said meditatively: 'Six weeks to-day since little Anna Parminter died. Poor little lamb! six weeks in the pitty-hole! By this time th' worms've gnawed at her; you'd never know little Anna if you seed her now. When I wer' a little gal, like you, I once seed a bone ole Clerk Moss'd turned up, diggin' a new grave——' Fortunately, at that moment Mrs. Finch came in, but Charity had already heard enough to give her some nightmarish evenings in bed that winter.

The then Vicar of the parish, Mr. Penpethy, was said to be, and no doubt was, a very learned man, and he had all the queer, absent-minded ways popularly associated with learning. Often, in cold or wet weather, he would be seen walking in the fields and lanes in his old library cassock and slippers, having forgotten to put on his coat and boots before leaving home. On such walks he would talk aloud to himself, checking off what may have been the feet of verse on his fingers; or he would stand silent, gazing at the earth at his feet, apparently lost in meditation. At such times he would fail to respond to the greetings of his parishioners, not from ill-will or disdain, but because he did not observe the bobbed curtsy or the pulled forelock. He would forget that he had to conduct any but the regular Sunday services, and wedding and funeral parties would have to wait in the church porch until he had been found and reminded of his appointment. He once christened a child by an entirely different name than that given by the godparents. At that time the upper servants in big houses were called, not by their Christian, but by their surnames, and the mother of the child had had a favourite fellow servant named Veness, after whom she wished to name her new baby, but this was pronounced at the font Venus, and the clergyman, after shaking his head and whispering, No! No!, declared loudly, 'Mary, I baptize thee——' He told the mother afterwards that the name she had chosen was unsuitable for a Christian child. 'Perhaps you do not know that Venus was a heathen goddess!' he suggested. 'Oh, no, sir, she wasn't,' the mother said tartly. 'She was the cook at Finchingfield House, for I knowed her!'

Mr. Penpethy was said to be poor—'as poor as a crow' was the village expression—and he lived alone in his big, silent Vicarage without any other attendance than that of the parish clerk, who, officially his gardener, was actually his man-of-all-work. Except for one small plot in what had once been the kitchen garden, kept cleared by Clerk Savings for the growing of vegetables, the Vicarage garden was a jungle of weeds and thistles and untended shrubs and fruit trees. Grass grew on the carriage drive which led to the locked and barred front door. The villagers when they wished to put up their banns of marriage or had to arrange for a funeral went to the back door, and Mr. Penpethy's only other known visitor was one of the neighbouring clergy who was said to have been with him at college. The Vicar, indeed, was as near being a recluse as is possible for a parish priest. He was a small, nervous man, prematurely grey, and with a habit of pausing in mid-speech and gazing into the distance, as though he had lost the thread of his discourse and was seeking it there. But, when once his attention was attracted, he was not unkindly and the villagers rather took a pride in his oddities than resented them, feeling that to have a parson so very unlike other parsons, one who never interfered or bothered people about going to church, and could speak Greek and Latin (as they said) like a native and read old books written, very likely, before Noah's flood, conferred distinction on the whole community.

Of course, no coal or blankets or soup in winter, or little delicacies for invalids, could be expected from that quarter. For these the Restharrow poor had to look to the lady of the Manor House, and even from thence such bounties came in a trickle, rather than in the steady, generous stream known in more fortunate villages. 'Poor and proud' was the local description of the Manor House family, which family at that date consisted of Mrs. Maitland herself and one son, away at school, and afterwards at Oxford. Her daughters had married and gone to live in other counties.

At one time the Maitlands had owned the greater part of the parish; but, farm by farm, then field by field, they had had to sell their property, until only the house and grounds, some of the village cottages, and a few acres of what had been the home farm remained. It was said that by that time all would have gone had not the late squire, Mrs. Maitland's husband, met with a comparatively early death in the hunting field, leaving their baby son and the shrunken remains of the family estate to the able, determined management of his widow. Now, it was thought, she had so far retrieved the situation that her son, when he came of age, would be able in a modest way to maintain the establishment. Charity had sometimes seen the young squire when home for his school holidays and, later, from Oxford, riding his pony, or carrying his gun or fishing tackle, a tall, slender youth with smooth dark hair and friendly brown eyes. He had always a smile for the children playing in the road and a cheerful greeting for the old men and women, and he had once given a huge pike he had caught to Mrs. Taverner, who had a family of twelve, including herself and her husband. It was Master Roger, too, who had got old Bowden's thatched roof repaired. At first Mrs. Maitland had said that as the Bowdens paid but a shilling a week rent and were six months behind with that, she could do nothing, even if they did have to fix up an umbrella over their bed. Then, according to the parlourmaid at the Manor House, Master Roger had offered to pay for the work with his pocket-money, and his mother had said of course he must not; that she herself was sorry about the rain coming through on their bed, but an active old fellow like Bowden could, if he liked, borrow a ladder and repair the thatch; he was a lazy old scamp, old Bowden. However, she would give orders that the work should be done at her own expense.

When Charity first remembered her, Mrs. Maitland was a tall, tight-lipped, aristocratic-looking, middle-aged woman. Her son, Mr. Roger, was the youngest of her family, a latecomer after a long interval. Although she was what the village called 'near' in money matters, her own dress was of the richest description, of dark-coloured silks and velvets with real lace at the neck and wrists and with skirts of a length to trail slightly. In summer weather she carried a parasol with a long carved ivory handle which she held between her thumb and first finger with the air of a queen holding her sceptre. Her carriage was majestic, her ideas were feudal, and her heart, if she had one, was deeply hidden. No one in the village had ever seen her moved or excited. She lived in her grand house, removed, as it seemed, from the trials and vexations of lesser humanity. Although she had entertained little during her stewardship, she had kept up her county connexions, and any fine afternoon might be seen driving out in her old-fashioned carriage to pay calls. Twice a week she went to the village school to examine the girls' needlework and to hear the younger children repeat the catechism. She visited regularly the poorer cottagers and was said to be very good to the sick and aged.

She had never been to Charity's home, for the Finches belonged to the class then known as the comfortable poor, and, as such, were supposed to have no need of her ministrations. Perhaps, too, she felt some degree of personal distaste for that particular family. George Finch, called in to repair some floorboards in the Manor House drawing-room, had told her frankly that patching would be of no use, for dry rot had set in and a new floor and wainscoting were necessary. 'I'll patch up the planks if you wish, Ma'am,' he had said, 'but if you take my advice you'll make a complete clearance.'

At that the lady had, as he had expressed it, reared up: 'You will please do the work I have ordered,' she commanded. 'But when once this here dry rot sets in——' he had begun, his craftsman's soul troubled by the ruin he envisaged, but he was talking to an empty room; the lady had gone and he heard the silken rustle of her skirts on the stairs.

He had felt his experience slighted and had taken offence. It did not occur to him that the lady, quite probably, had gone to her bedroom to face in privacy what may have been to her an appalling expense. Or that her pride and hauteur might have been a shield and the woman behind it as vulnerable as anything human. It must have been gall and wormwood to her pride to feel herself hated by her maids for her frugal housekeeping and to imagine the comments of the villagers when her bounty did not come up to their Big House standard. Like many elderly ladies of her day, she no longer attempted to keep up with the changing fashions, and her rich clothes may have seen long service, for such materials as she favoured would with care last a lifetime, and her furs and real lace were probably family possessions. But her gallant stand to save her son's inheritance was outside the range of village sympathy. The real poor cannot be expected to sympathize with the difficulties of the poor-rich, and the general view of her economies was expressed when they said she was one of them who'd skin a flint for a farthing, if she spoilt a good knife over the job.

Pride and poverty had soured Mrs. Maitland. The more typical country lady of her age and social position was, if somewhat masterful, kindly, and often showed genuine affection for her poorer neighbours. Once in her childhood Charity had an opportunity of studying one of these ladies closely. Restharrow stood in the midst of good hunting country; hounds often met near the village and the hunt in full cry over fields and hedges was a familiar sight to its inhabitants. One mild, misty December morning a middle-aged lady had taken a toss in a field near the Finch's cottage and had been brought there to rest while her carriage was fetched to take her to her own home in a distant village. She had escaped injury, but felt, as she said, a little shaken. 'Not as young as I once was,' she told Mrs. Finch. 'Ten years ago I should have taken that fence like a bird. But I mustn't grumble, I've had forty-five years with the best pack in the county and enjoyed every run. I'm now sixty-two and it's time I gave up the huntin' and stayed by the fireside makin' flannel petticoats for my old women.'

'Excuse me, my lady, but I can't see you sitting indoors sewing on a hunting morning. It doesn't seem natural, somehow,' said Mrs. Finch, who, down on her knees on the hearthrug, had been pulling off the lady's hunting boots and now slipped on her feet a brand new pair of carpet slippers she had in readiness for her husband's birthday. As she rose, the lady looked her full in the face. 'By all that's holy, it's Alice!' she exclaimed, seizing her hand, and from the conversation which followed Charity soon gathered that the lady sitting in her father's armchair with the skirt of her habit turned up over her knees and her feet on the fender was no lesser person than the great Lady Travers who reigned over the distant village which had been her own mother's birthplace.

Mrs. Finch's offer of refreshment was welcomed. 'That fool of a groom' who had taken the two mounts and gone for the carriage had carried off with him his mistress's sandwich case. So a pot of tea was quickly made and the table was spread with a modest repast to which Lady Travers did full justice. Over the meal old times and old friends were discussed. So-and-So was married and the father or mother of so many children, or had emigrated to Australia and was doing well there, or had not been heard of for years. Poor old Mark Allen had died at last, this very winter, ninety-eight. Pity he couldn't have stayed the course and made his century! Sir Thomas had intended to celebrate his hundredth birthday, with a tea-fight for the whole village, with Mark as the guest of honour and a birthday cake and whatnot, but it was not to be. 'Yes, I will have another cup, please. I know it's my third, but never take more than one cup before starting to a meet. It doesn't do with a long day on horseback before one. And I'll have another of your excellent sandwiches, if you don't mind, and you need not bother to cut the bread or the bacon too thin, I'm sharp set, as you see, sharp set! There!' as she wiped her lips with her pocket handkerchief, 'I haven't enjoyed a meal so much for an age. I must say you know how to cure a side of bacon. Ours has never been quite so good since Saunders left. Oh, yes, she's gone, pensioned off two years ago and living in that little cottage in the park where poor old Trent spent his last days. You remember Trent? He died two years last Christmas. Eighty-seven. We still miss the old fellow. Ah, Alice, we have had many changes of late. You heard about our own poor boy?'

Alice said she had read in the newspaper at the time that the Captain had been killed in the Sudan and had been sorry. 'Yes,' said the lady. 'It is always saddening to see a young life cut short. And this was one that could ill be spared—heir to an estate like ours and full of ideas for improving the property—intended to sell out and leave the Army when things quieted down again; but we must not murmur, God knows what is best for us.'

Charity, making herself scarce on the window-seat, herself unnoticed, but with the handsome, hook-nosed profile of their guest in view, was amazed to see one big tear course silently down the weather-beaten cheek. Then the lady blew her nose loudly and said in her ordinary, cheerful tone, 'Thank God he died for his Queen and country!' Then, with barely a pause, 'You've got a nice little place here. Just the kind of little place I should like myself if the time should come for me to retire. Our Dower House, as no doubt you remember, is bleak and bare and far too large for one old woman. And your girl does you credit, but why only one? Ah, yes, of course, I understand, and a nasty time you must have had, I'm sure. And you've got a good husband, I hope?' Alice said that she had the best husband in the world and was rather surprisingly told that she was lucky, for good husbands were few and far between; certainly there were not enough of them to go round.

'She's a fine-spirited one is Lady Travers,' said Charity's mother after she had gone. 'I remember once when I was a child she was out with the guns and stepped in a hole and broke her ankle. They said Sir Thomas was all of a dither and white as a sheet, but though the pain must have been awful she laughed and told him there was no need to make a fuss; she wasn't killed, only wounded. "Get me home and send for the doctor," she said. "It's certainly a bit painful, but if I can't bear a bit of pain at my time of life I'm no sportswoman." And the gentlemen carried her home, bandy, two at a time, in turns. Of course they ought to have got a hurdle or something to carry her on and have kept her foot up, but the keeper didn't like to tell 'em so, and off they went over the rough ground with her foot going dangle, dangle, and swelled to the size of vegetable marrow by the time they got her home, and not so much as a groan.'

That hunting morning, before she left the Finch's cottage, Lady Travers said lightly, 'Where's the child's money-box?' and Charity, not understanding her mother's forbidding headshake, fetched it, as she thought, merely to be inspected. Her ladyship turned up the skirt of her habit and, from some interior pocket, produced a bright half-sovereign and slipped it into the box. She knew that to have offered payment to her hostess for her hospitality would have given offence; yet she could not have brought herself to have consumed so much of Alice's excellent bacon and make no recompense, so she did what she would have called 'the right thing', gracefully and unostentatiously, talking all the time of other matters.

There were several other such gallant old ladies at that time still living about the countryside. One Lady Louisa was still riding to hounds at the age of near eighty. Keen sportswomen, good neighbours, kind though exacting employers, bounteous to the poor in their own villages, they ruled over their own small worlds as by sovereign right and, when they died, they were mourned by whole neighbourhoods. And they had their counterparts among their poorer neighbours. Women who also knew how to do the right thing in their lesser degree. Learned only in country lore and the Holy Scriptures, but keenly intelligent, they ruled over their own families, fulfilled their personal obligations, and used their spare energy in helping their neighbours. Racy of tongue, forthright in manner, firm believers in the cakes-and-ale side of life, with big, comfortable bosoms and fat sides, often shaken with laughter, they slapped life into the newly born and sped the dying with words of homely comfort. Their day has passed and they have passed with their day; there is no place for Lady Bountiful or Dame Smith in this modern world. But in their own day they served their world well. In the family vault and the unmarked grave, peace be to their ashes!