Читать книгу Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor - S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould - Страница 16

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Anthony remained at Willsworthy. He had behaved exceedingly badly, had wounded the good lady of the house where most susceptible to pain, and so acutely that she had fallen into unconsciousness; yet he remained on. He was accustomed to consult his own wishes, not those of others, and to put on one side all considerations of expediency and good feeling, where his own caprice was concerned.

Urith and the servant wench had carried Madame Malvine to her room, and Solomon Gibbs had dashed off to the stables to get his horse, so as to summon the surgeon from Tavistock.

Anthony was alone in the little hall, and he leaned his elbows on the window-sill and looked out. There was nothing for him to see; nothing to interest him in the barn wall opposite, which was all that was commanded by the window; so he turned his eyes on a peacock butterfly that had hybernated in the hall, and now, with return of spring, shook off sleep and fluttered against the leaded panes, bruising its wings in its efforts to escape into the outer air. There were no flowers in the window; nothing at all save some dead flies and a pair of lady's riding-gloves folded together.

Anthony looked round the hall. It was low, not above seven feet high, unceiled, with black oak unmoulded rafters. There was a large granite fireplace, no sculptured oak mantelpiece over it; nothing save a plain shelf; and above it some arms, a couple of pistols, a sword, a pike or two, and a crossbow. The walls were not panelled save only by the window, where was the table, and where the family dined. The walls elsewhere were plainly white-washed, and had not even that decoration that was affected at the tavern—ballads with quaint woodcuts pasted against them. There was no deer park attached to the house; there never had been even a paddock for deer, consequently there were no antlers in the hall.

Near the window was a recess in the wall over a granite pan or bowl partly built into the wall. At first sight it might be taken as a basin in which to wash the hands; but it had no pipe from it to convey the fouled water away. Such pans are found in many old western farmhouses and manor halls, and their purport is almost forgotten. They were formerly employed for the scalding of the milk and the making of clouted cream. Red-hot charcoal was placed in these basins, and the pans of milk planted on the cinders. The pans remained there, the coals being fanned by the kitchen maid, till the cream was formed on the surface, and in this cream-coat the ring of the bottom of the pan indicated itself on the surface. This was the token that the milk had yielded up all its quotient of fatty matter. Thereupon the pan was removed to the cool dairy. The presence of the granite cream-producer showed that the hall served a double purpose: it was not only a sitting- and dining-room, but one in which some of the dairy processes were carried on. Moreover, near the entrance-door was what was called the "well-room," entered from the hall. This was a small lean-to apartment on one side of the porch, paved with cobble-stones, in which was a stone trough always brimming with crystal moorland water, conducted into it from outside, and, running off, was carried away outside again. As this was the sole source whence all the water-supply required for the house was obtained—for dairy, for kitchen, and for table—it may be imagined that the hall was a passage-room, traversed all day long by the servant-wenches with pails, and pans, and jugs.

Such an arrangement was suitable enough in the time before the Wars of the Roses, when Willsworthy was built; but its inconvenience became apparent with the improved social conditions of the Tudor reigns, and in the time of Elizabeth an addition had been made to the house, so that it now possessed two small parlours looking into the garden at the back; but these Anthony had not seen. In these some attempt was made at ornament. A manor house before the Tudor epoch rarely consisted of more than a hall, a lady's bower, kitchen, and cellars, on the ground-floor; Willsworthy had been enlarged by the addition of a second parlour, with the object of abandoning the Hall, to become a sort of second kitchen.

But the family had been poor, and continued in its ancestral mode of life. The second parlour had its shutters shut, and was never used, and Madame Malvine sat, as had her husband, and the owners of Willsworthy before them, in the Hall, and endured the traffic through it, and the slops on the stone floor from the overflowing pails.

The paving of the Hall was of granite blocks, rudely fitted together, and was strewn with dry brown bracken. We marvel at the discomfort of ancient chairs, because the seats are so high from the ground. We forget that the footstool was an attendant inseparable from the chair, when ladies sat in these stone-floored halls. They were necessary adjuncts, holding their feet out of the draught, and off the stone.

Small and mean as the manor house would appear in one's eyes now, yet it was of sufficient consequence in early days to have its chapel, a privilege only accorded to the greater houses, and wealthiest gentry. The chapel was now in ruins. It had not been used since the Reformation.

Anthony became impatient of waiting. He would not leave, and he was vexed, because he was kept loitering at the window without some one to speak to.

He was tired of looking at the butterfly battering its wings to pieces, so he took up the gloves and unrolled them—a pretty pair of fine leather ladies' gloves, reaching to the elbow, and laced with silk ribbon and silver tags. Elegant gloves; more handsome, Anthony thought, than suited the usual style of Urith's dress. He had nothing else to do but turn them inside out, unfold, and refold them.

As he was thus engaged, he thought over an interview he had had that morning with his father. With all his faults, and they were many, the young man was open and direct, and he had told his father what he had done the night before.

To his surprise, directly old Cleverdon heard that he had pulled up Richard Malvine's head-post, and thrown it on the tavern table before the topers, he burst into an exultant laugh, and rubbed his hands together gleefully.

When, moreover, Anthony expressed his intention of going to Willsworthy to offer an apology, the old man had vehemently and boisterously dissuaded him from so doing.

"What are the Malvines?" he had said; "a raggle-taggle, beggarly crew. I won't have it said that a son of mine veiled his bonnet to them. That was a fair estate once, but first one portion and then another portion has been sold away, and now there is but enough to starve on left. Pshaw! let them endure and pocket the affront. If they try to resent it, and prosecute you in court of law, I will throw in my money-bag against their moleskin purse, and see which cause then has most weight in the scales of justice."

The intemperance of his father's conduct and words had on young Anthony precisely the opposite effect to that intended. It opened the young man's eyes to the gravity of his conduct. Without answering his father he went to Willsworthy, leaving the old man satisfied that he had overborne his son's resolution to make amend for his offence. Whether this would have happened had not Urith produced so strong an impression on his heart the previous day, and enlisted him on her side, may well be questioned; for the visit of apology involved an acknowledgment of wrong-doing which was not readily made by Anthony. He was thinking over, and wondering at, his father's conduct, when Urith entered the hall, and expressed surprise at seeing him.

"I tarried," said he, "to know how it fared with your mother."

Urith replied, somewhat stiffly, "The shock of hearing what you have done has given her a fit."

"She has had them before."

"Oh, yes. She cannot endure violent emotion, and your behaviour——"

"I have said I am sorry; what can I do more? Tell me, and I will do it. The stake was rotten, and broke off. If you will, I will have a stone slab placed on the grave at my own cost."

Urith flushed dark.

"That I refuse in my mother's name and in mine. We will not be beholden to you—to any stranger—in such a matter; and after what has been done, certainly not to you."

Anthony stamped with impatience.

"I have told you I am sorry. I never made an apology to any one in my life before. I supposed that an apology offered was at once frankly accepted. I have told you it was all a mistake. I intended no ill. It was a pitch-black night—I could not see what I laid hold of. My act was, if you will, an act of folly—but have you never committed acts of folly? You ran away from home yesterday. Did not that trouble your mother, and occasion greater perturbation of feeling?"

Urith looked down. "Yes," she said, "one foolery followed another. First came mine, then yours. The two combined were too much for my mother to endure."

"We are a couple of fools; be it so," said Anthony. "Now that is settled. Young folks' brains are not ripened, but are like the pith in early hazel nuts. It is not their fault if they act foolishly. That is settled. You believed my account. I never lie, though I be a fool."

"Yes, I have accepted your account, and I, in part, forgive you."

"In part! By Heaven, that is a motley forgiveness—a fool's forgiveness. I must have a complete one. Come here. Come to this window. Why should I shout across the hall to you, and you stand with your back turned to me, as though we were on opposite sides of the Cleave?" He spoke with as much imperiousness as if he were in his own house, commanded her as though he expected of her as ready submission as was accorded him by his sister.

"What do you want with me? I do not care to go near a man subject to such outbreaks of folly."

"You are one to declaim!" said Anthony, scornfully. "You who run away, and bite your knuckles till they are raw."