Читать книгу Marcella - Mrs. Humphry Ward - Страница 15

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The fire sank, and Mrs. Hurd made no haste to light her lamp. Soon the old people were dim chattering shapes in a red darkness. Mrs. Hurd still plaited, silent and upright, lifting her head every now and then at each sound upon the road.

At last there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Hurd ran to open it.

"Mother, I'm going your way," said a strident voice. "I'll help you home if you've a mind."

On the threshold stood Mrs. Jellison's daughter, Mrs. Westall, with her little boy beside her, the woman's broad shoulders and harsh striking head standing out against the pale sky behind. Marcella noticed that she greeted none of the old people, nor they her. And as for Mrs. Hurd, as soon as she saw the keeper's wife, she turned her back abruptly on her visitor, and walked to the other end of the kitchen.

"Are you comin', mother?" repeated Isabella.

Mrs. Jellison grumbled, gibed at her, and made long leave-takings, while the daughter stood silent, waiting, and every now and then peering at Marcella, who had never seen her before.

"I don' know where yur manners is," said Mrs. Jellison sharply to her, as though she had been a child of ten, "that you don't say good evenin' to the young lady."

Mrs. Westall curtsied low, and hoped she might be excused, as it had grown so dark. Her tone was smooth and servile, and Marcella disliked her as she shook hands with her.

The other old people, including Mrs. Brunt, departed a minute or two after the mother and daughter, and Marcella was left an instant with Mrs. Hurd.

"Oh, thank you, thank you kindly, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, raising her apron to her eyes to staunch some irrepressible tears, as Marcella showed her the advertisement which it might possibly be worth Hurd's while to answer. "He'll try, you may be sure. But I can't think as how anythink 'ull come ov it."

And then suddenly, as though something unexplained had upset her self-control, the poor patient creature utterly broke down. Leaning against the bare shelves which held their few pots and pans, she threw her apron over her head and burst into the forlornest weeping. "I wish I was dead; I wish I was dead, an' the chillen too!"

Marcella hung over her, one flame of passionate pity, comforting, soothing, promising help. Mrs. Hurd presently recovered enough to tell her that Hurd had gone off that morning before it was light to a farm near Thame, where it had been told him he might possibly find a job.

"But he'll not find it, miss, he'll not find it," she said, twisting her hands in a sort of restless misery; "there's nothing good happens to such as us. An' he wor allus a one to work if he could get it."

There was a sound outside. Mrs. Hurd flew to the door, and a short, deformed man, with a large head and red hair, stumbled in blindly, splashed with mud up to his waist, and evidently spent with long walking.

He stopped on the threshold, straining his eyes to see through the fire-lit gloom.

"It's Miss Boyce, Jim," said his wife. "Did you hear of anythink?"

"They're turnin' off hands instead of takin' ov 'em on," he said briefly, and fell into a chair by the grate.

He had hardly greeted Marcella, who had certainly looked to be greeted. Ever since her arrival in August, as she had told Aldous Raeburn, she had taken a warm interest in this man and his family. There was something about them which marked them out a bit from their fellows—whether it was the husband's strange but not repulsive deformity, contrasted with the touch of plaintive grace in the wife, or the charm of the elfish children, with their tiny stick-like arms and legs, and the glancing wildness of their blue eyes, under the frizzle of red hair, which shone round their little sickly faces. Very soon she had begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort. She soon discovered or imagined that Hurd had more education than his neighbours. At any rate, he would sit listening to her—and smoking, as she made him do—while she talked politics and socialism to him; and though he said little in return, she made the most of it, and was sure anyway that he was glad to see her come in, and must some time read the labour newspapers and Venturist leaflets she brought him, for they were always well thumbed before they came back to her.

But to-night his sullen weariness would make no effort, and the hunted restless glances he threw from side to side as he sat crouching over the fire—the large mouth tight shut, the nostrils working—showed her that he would be glad when she went away.

Her young exacting temper was piqued. She had been for some time trying to arrange their lives for them. So, in spite of his dumb resistance, she lingered on, questioning and suggesting. As to the advertisement she had brought down, he put it aside almost without looking at it. "There ud be a hun'erd men after it before ever he could get there," was all he would say to it. Then she inquired if he had been to ask the steward of the Maxwell Court estate for work. He did not answer, but Mrs. Hurd said timidly that she heard tell a new drive was to be made that winter for the sake of giving employment. But their own men on the estate would come first, and there were plenty of them out of work.

"Well, but there is the game," persisted Marcella. "Isn't it possible they might want some extra men now the pheasant shooting has begun. I might go and inquire of Westall—I know him a little."

The wife made a startled movement, and Hurd raised his misshapen form with a jerk.

"Thank yer, miss, but I'll not trouble yer. I don't want nothing to do with Westall."

And taking up a bit of half-burnt wood which lay on the hearth, he threw it violently back into the grate. Marcella looked from one to the other with surprise. Mrs. Hurd's expression was one of miserable discomfort, and she kept twisting her apron in her gnarled hands.

"Yes, I shall tell, Jim!" she broke out. "I shall. I know Miss Boyce is one as ull understand—"

Hurd turned round and looked at his wife full. But she persisted.

"You see, miss, they don't speak, don't Jim and George Westall. When Jim was quite a lad he was employed at Mellor, under old Westall, George's father as was. Jim was 'watcher,' and young George he was assistant. That was in Mr. Robert's days, you understand, miss—when Master Harold was alive; and they took a deal o' trouble about the game. An' George Westall, he was allays leading the others a life—tale-bearing an' spyin', an' settin' his father against any of 'em as didn't give in to him. An', oh, he behaved fearful to Jim! Jim ull tell you. Now, Jim, what's wrong with you—why shouldn't I tell?"

For Hurd had risen, and as he and his wife looked at each other a sort of mute conversation seemed to pass between them. Then he turned angrily, and went out of the cottage by the back door into the garden.

The wife sat in some agitation a moment, then she resumed. "He can't bear no talk about Westall—it seems to drive him silly. But I say as how people should know."

Her wavering eye seemed to interrogate her companion. Marcella was puzzled by her manner—it was so far from simple.

"But that was long ago, surely," she said.

"Yes, it wor long ago, but you don't forget them things, miss! An' Westall, he's just the same sort as he was then, so folks say," she added hurriedly. "You see Jim, miss, how he's made? His back was twisted that way when he was a little un. His father was a good old man—everybody spoke well of 'im—but his mother, she was a queer mad body, with red hair, just like Jim and the children, and a temper! my word. They do say she was an Irish girl, out of a gang as used to work near here—an' she let him drop one day when she was in liquor, an' never took no trouble about him afterwards. He was a poor sickly lad, he was! you'd wonder how he grew up at all. And oh! George Westall he treated him cruel. He'd kick and swear at him; then he'd dare him to fight, an' thrash him till the others came in, an' got him away. Then he'd carry tales to his father, and one day old Westall beat Jim within an inch of 'is life, with a strap end, because of a lie George told 'im. The poor chap lay in a ditch under Disley Wood all day, because he was that knocked about he couldn't walk, and at night he crawled home on his hands and knees. He's shown me the place many a time! Then he told his father, and next morning he told me, as he couldn't stand it no longer, an' he never went back no more."

"And he told no one else?—he never complained?" asked Marcella, indignantly.

"What ud ha been the good o' that, miss?" Mrs. Hurd said, wondering. "Nobody ud ha taken his word agen old Westall's. But he come and told me. I was housemaid at Lady Leven's then, an' he and his father were old friends of ourn. And I knew George Westall too. He used to walk out with me of a Sunday, just as civil as could be, and give my mother rabbits now and again, and do anything I'd ask him. An' I up and told him he was a brute to go ill-treatin' a sickly fellow as couldn't pay him back. That made him as cross as vinegar, an' when Jim began to be about with me ov a Sunday sometimes, instead of him, he got madder and madder. An' Jim asked me to marry him—he begged of me—an' I didn't know what to say. For Westall had asked me twice; an' I was afeard of Jim's health, an' the low wages he'd get, an' of not bein' strong myself. But one day I was going up a lane into Tudley End woods, an' I heard George Westall on tother side of the hedge with a young dog he was training. Somethin' crossed him, an' he flew into a passion with it. It turned me sick. I ran away and I took against him there and then. I was frightened of him. I duresn't trust myself, and I said to Jim I'd take him. So you can understan', miss, can't you, as Jim don't want to have nothing to do with Westall? Thank you kindly, all the same," she added, breaking off her narrative with the same uncertainty of manner, the same timid scrutiny of her visitor that Marcella had noticed before.

Marcella replied that she could certainly understand.

"But I suppose they've not got in each other's way of late years," she said as she rose to go.

"Oh! no, miss, no," said Mrs. Hurd as she went hurriedly to fetch a fur tippet which her visitor had laid down on the dresser.

"There is one person I can speak to," said Marcella, as she put on the wrap. "And I will." Against her will she reddened a little; but she had not been able to help throwing out the promise. "And now, you won't despair, will you? You'll trust me? I could always do something."

She took Mrs. Hurd's hand with a sweet look and gesture. Standing there in her tall vigorous youth, her furs wrapped about her, she had the air of protecting and guiding this poverty that could not help itself. The mother and wife felt herself shy, intimidated. The tears came back to her brown eyes.

* * * * *

When Miss Boyce had gone, Minta Hurd went to the fire and put it together, sighing all the time, her face still red and miserable.

The door opened and her husband came in. He carried some potatoes in his great earth-stained hands.

"You're goin' to put that bit of hare on? Well, mak' eëaste, do, for I'm starvin'. What did she want to stay all that time for? You go and get it. I'll blow the fire up—damn these sticks!—they're as wet as Dugnall pond."

Nevertheless, as she sadly came and went, preparing the supper, she saw that he was appeased, in a better temper than before.

"What did you tell 'er?" he asked abruptly.

"What do you spose I'd tell her? I acted for the best. I'm always thinkin' for you!" she said as though with a little cry, "or we'd soon be in trouble—worse trouble than we are!" she added miserably.

He stopped working the old bellows for a moment, and, holding his long chin, stared into the flames. With his deformity, his earth-stains, his blue eyes, his brown wrinkled skin, and his shock of red hair, he had the look of some strange gnome crouching there.

"I don't know what you're at, I'll swear," he said after a pause. "I ain't in any pertickler trouble just now—if yer wouldn't send a fellow stumpin' the country for nothink. If you'll just let me alone I'll get a livin' for you and the chillen right enough. Don't you trouble yourself—an' hold your tongue!"

She threw down her apron with a gesture of despair as she stood beside him, in front of the fire, watching the pan.

"What am I to do, Jim, an' them chillen—when you're took to prison?" she asked him vehemently.

"I shan't get took to prison, I tell yer. All the same, Westall got holt o' me this mornin'. I thought praps you'd better know."

Her exclamation of terror, her wild look at him, were exactly what he had expected; nevertheless, he flinched before them. His brutality was mostly assumed. He had adopted it as a mask for more than a year past, because he must go his way, and she worried him.

"Now look here," he said resolutely, "it don't matter. I'm not goin' to be took by Westall. I'd kill him or myself first. But he caught me lookin' at a snare this mornin'—it wor misty, and I didn't see no one comin'. It wor close to the footpath, and it worn't my snare."

"'Jim, my chap,' says he, mockin', 'I'm sorry for it, but I'm going to search yer, so take it quietly,' says he. He had young Dynes with him—so I didn't say nought—I kep' as still as a mouse, an' sure enough he put his ugly han's into all my pockets. An' what do yer think he foun'?"

"What?" she said breathlessly.

"Nothink!" he laughed out. "Nary an end o' string, nor a kink o' wire—nothink. I'd hidden the two rabbits I got las' night, and all my bits o' things in a ditch far enough out o' his way. I just laughed at the look ov 'im. 'I'll have the law on yer for assault an' battery, yer damned miscalculatin' brute!' says I to him—'why don't yer get that boy there to teach yer your business?' An' off I walked. Don't you be afeared—'ee'll never lay hands on me!"

But Minta was sore afraid, and went on talking and lamenting while she made the tea. He took little heed of her. He sat by the fire quivering and thinking. In a public-house two nights before this one, overtures had been made to him on behalf of a well-known gang of poachers with head-quarters in a neighbouring county town, who had their eyes on the pheasant preserves in Westall's particular beat—the Tudley End beat—and wanted a local watcher and accomplice. He had thought the matter at first too dangerous to touch. Moreover, he was at that moment in a period of transition, pestered by Minta to give up "the poachin'," and yet drawn back to it after his spring and summer of field work by instincts only recently revived, after long dormancy, but now hard to resist.

Presently he turned with anger upon one of Minta's wails which happened to reach him.

"Look 'ere!" said he to her, "where ud you an' the chillen be this night if I 'adn't done it? 'Adn't we got rid of every stick o' stuff we iver 'ad? 'Ere's a well-furnished place for a chap to sit in!"—he glanced bitterly round the bare kitchen, which had none of the little properties of the country poor, no chest, no set of mahogany drawers, no comfortable chair, nothing, but the dresser and the few rush chairs and the table, and a few odds and ends of crockery and household stuff—"wouldn't we all a bin on the parish, if we 'adn't starved fust—wouldn't we?—jes' answer me that! Didn't we sit here an' starve, till the bones was comin' through the chillen's skin?—didn't we?"

That he could still argue the point with her showed the inner vulnerableness, the inner need of her affection and of peace with her, which he still felt, far as certain new habits were beginning to sweep him from her.

"It's Westall or Jenkins (Jenkins was the village policeman) havin' the law on yer, Jim," she said with emphasis, putting down a cup and looking at him—it's the thought of that makes me cold in my back. None o' my people was ever in prison—an' if it 'appened to you I should just die of shame!"

"Then yer'd better take and read them papers there as she brought," he said impatiently, first jerking his finger over his shoulder in the direction of Mellor to indicate Miss Boyce, and then pointing to a heap of newspapers which lay on the floor in a corner, "they'd tell yer summat about the shame o' makin' them game-laws—not o' breakin' ov 'em. But I'm sick o' this! Where's them chillen? Why do yer let that boy out so late?"

And opening the door he stood on the threshold looking up and down the village street, while Minta once more gave up the struggle, dried her eyes, and told herself to be cheerful. But it was hard. She was far better born and better educated than her husband. Her father had been a small master chair-maker in Wycombe, and her mother, a lackadaisical silly woman, had given her her "fine" name by way of additional proof that she and her children were something out of the common. Moreover, she had the conforming law-abiding instincts of the well-treated domestic servant, who has lived on kindly terms with the gentry and shared their standards. And for years after their marriage Hurd had allowed her to govern him. He had been so patient, so hard-working, such a kind husband and father, so full of a dumb wish to show her he was grateful to her for marrying such a fellow as he. The quarrel with Westall seemed to have sunk out of his mind. He never spoke to or of him. Low wages, the burden of quick-coming children, the bad sanitary conditions of their wretched cottage, and poor health, had made their lives one long and sordid struggle. But for years he had borne his load with extraordinary patience. He and his could just exist, and the man who had been in youth the lonely victim of his neighbours' scorn had found a woman to give him all herself and children to love. Hence years of submission, a hidden flowering time for both of them.

Till that last awful winter!—the winter before Richard Boyce's succession to Mellor—when the farmers had been mostly ruined, and half the able-bodied men of Mellor had tramped "up into the smoke," as the village put it, in search of London work—then, out of actual sheer starvation—that very rare excuse of the poacher!—Hurd had gone one night and snared a hare on the Mellor land. Would the wife and mother ever forget the pure animal satisfaction of that meal, or the fearful joy of the next night, when he got three shillings from a local publican for a hare and two rabbits?

But after the first relief Minta had gone in fear and trembling. For the old woodcraft revived in Hurd, and the old passion for the fields and their chances which he had felt as a lad before his "watcher's" place had been made intolerable to him by George Westall's bullying. He became excited, unmanageable. Very soon he was no longer content with Mellor, where, since the death of young Harold, the heir, the keepers had been dismissed, and what remained of a once numerous head of game lay open to the wiles of all the bold spirits of the neighbourhood. He must needs go on to those woods of Lord Maxwell's, which girdled the Mellor estate on three sides. And here he came once more across his enemy. For George Westall was now in the far better-paid service of the Court—and a very clever keeper, with designs on the head keeper's post whenever it might be vacant. In the case of a poacher he had the scent of one of his own hares. It was known to him in an incredibly short time that that "low caselty fellow Hurd" was attacking "his" game.

Hurd, notwithstanding, was cunning itself, and Westall lay in wait for him in vain. Meanwhile, all the old hatred between the two men revived. Hurd drank this winter more than he had ever drunk yet. It was necessary to keep on good terms with one or two publicans who acted as "receivers" of the poached game of the neighbourhood. And it seemed to him that Westall pursued him into these low dens. The keeper—big, burly, prosperous—would speak to him with insolent patronage, watching him all the time, or with the old brutality, which Hurd dared not resent. Only in his excitable dwarf's sense hate grew and throve, very soon to monstrous proportions. Westall's menacing figure darkened all his sky for him. His poaching, besides a means of livelihood, became more and more a silent duel between him and his boyhood's tyrant.

And now, after seven months of regular field-work and respectable living, it was all to begin again with the new winter! The same shudders and terrors, the same shames before the gentry and Mr. Harden!—the soft, timid woman with her conscience could not endure the prospect. For some weeks after the harvest was over she struggled. He had begun to go out again at nights. But she drove him to look for employment, and lived in tears when he failed.

As for him, she knew that he was glad to fail; there was a certain ease and jauntiness in his air to-night as he stood calling the children:

"Will!—you come in at once! Daisy!—Nellie!"

Two little figures came pattering up the street in the moist October dusk, a third, panted behind. The girls ran in to their mother chattering and laughing. Hurd lifted the boy in his arm.

"Where you bin, Will? What were yo out for in this nasty damp? I've brought yo a whole pocket full o' chestnuts, and summat else too."

He carried him in to the fire and sat him on his knees. The little emaciated creature, flushed with the pleasure of his father's company, played contentedly in the intervals of coughing with the shining chestnuts, or ate his slice of the fine pear—the gift of a friend in Thame—which proved to be the "summat else" of promise. The curtains were close-drawn; the paraffin lamp flared on the table, and as the savoury smell of the hare and onions on the fire filled the kitchen, the whole family gathered round watching for the moment of eating. The fire played on the thin legs and pinched faces of the children; on the baby's cradle in the further corner; on the mother, red-eyed still, but able to smile and talk again; on the strange Celtic face and matted hair of the dwarf. Family affection—and the satisfaction of the simpler physical needs—these things make the happiness of the poor. For this hour, to-night, the Hurds were happy.

Meanwhile, in the lane outside, Marcella, as she walked home, passed a tall broad-shouldered man in a velveteen suit and gaiters, his gun over his shoulder and two dogs behind him, his pockets bulging on either side. He walked with a kind of military air, and touched his cap to her as he passed.

Marcella barely nodded.

"Tyrant and bully!" she thought to herself with Mrs. Hurd's story in her mind. "Yet no doubt he is a valuable keeper; Lord Maxwell would be sorry to lose him! It is the system makes such men—and must have them."

The clatter of a pony carriage disturbed her thoughts. A small, elderly lady, in a very large mushroom hat, drove past her in the dusk and bowed stiffly. Marcella was so taken by surprise that she barely returned the bow. Then she looked after the carriage. That was Miss Raeburn.

To-morrow!