Читать книгу Joanna Godden - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 24

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Her tears were dry by the time she reached home, but in the night they flowed again, accompanied by angry sobs, which she choked in her pillow, for fear of waking little Ellen.

She cried because she was humbled in her own eyes. It was as if a veil had been torn from the last two years, and she saw her motives at last. For two years she had endured an ignorant, inefficient servant simply because his strength and good looks had enslaved her susceptible womanhood. …

Her father would never have acted as she had done; he would not have kept Socknersh a single month; he would not have engaged him at all—both Relf of Honeychild and Day of Slinches were more experienced men, with better recommendations; and yet she had chosen Socknersh—because his brown eyes had held and drowned her judgment, as surely as they had held her image, so dwindled and wan, when she looked into them that evening, between the setting sun and the rising moon.

Then, after she had engaged him, he had shown just enough natural capacity for her to blind herself with—his curious affinity with the animals he tended had helped her to forget the many occasions on which he had failed to rise above them in intelligence. It had been left to another to point out to her that a man might be good with sheep simply because he was no better than a sheep himself.

And now she was humbled—in her own eyes, and also in the eyes of her neighbours. She would have to confess herself in the wrong. Everyone knew that she had just raised Socknersh's wages, so there would be no good pretending that she had known his shortcomings from the first, but had put up with them as long as she could. Everyone would guess that something had happened to make her change her mind about him … there would be some terrible talk at the Woolpack.

And there was Socknersh himself, poor fellow—the martyr of her impulses. She thrust her face deep into the pillow when she thought of him. She had given him as sharp a blow as his thick hide would ever let him suffer. She would never forget that last look on his face. …

Then she began wondering why this should have come upon her. Why should she have made a fool of herself over Socknersh, when she had borne unmoved the courtship of Arthur Alce for seven years? Was it just because Alce had red whiskers and red hands and red hair on his hands, while Socknersh was dark and sweet of face and limb? It was terrible to think that mere youth and comeliness and virility should blind her judgment and strip her of common sense. Yet this was obviously the lesson she must learn from to-day's disgrace.

Hot and tear-stained, she climbed out of bed, and paced across the dark room to the grey blot of the window. She forgot her distrust of the night air in all her misery of throbbing head and heart, and flung back the casement, so that the soft marsh wind came in, with rain upon it, and her tears were mingled with the tears of the night.

"Oh God!" she mourned to herself—"why didn't you make me a man?"