Chapter XVI: Sunday

Jerry and his sweetheart wandered together along the lane from Buckland on an afternoon when Jane had been visiting the Withycombes. The sun beat down through the trees and even in the shade it was too hot to tempt the lovers far.

"We'll climb up the Beacon a little ways and quott down in the fern," said Jerry, "and I'll smoke in your face and keep the flies off."

Jane, however, objected.

"I'm going to Hazel Tor I reckon, and then to Cousin Joe's for tea. We'll meet John at Hazel Tor. Shall we tell him our secret plans, Jerry?"

"I don't care who knows it. If you feel there's no more need to hide up what we've ordained to do, then tell everybody."

"There's every need to hide up for that matter. Only Johnny's different from others. Me and Johnny are pretty close pals and always were. He won't mind us having a shop in a town. I've often told him I was set on the thought of a shop."

"The doubt will lie with me," said Jerry. "I know very well my father and Melindy and everybody will say I ban't the sort of man to shine at a shop."

"There's shops and shops," answered Jane, "and it's a very difficult question indeed to decide what to sell. If we sold some things you'd be a lot more useful than if we sold others. But there's a lot of things I wouldn't care about selling."

They had already debated this matter many times, and never failed to find it attractive.

"There's certain goods ruled out, I know," he said. "You don't hold with butching, nor yet a fish shop."

"Nothing like that. I won't handle dead things," declared Jane. "It lies in my mind between three shops now. I've brought 'em down to three. There's a shop for children's toys, which I'd very much like, because new toys be clean and bright and interesting to me; but you wouldn't be much use in that."

"I should not," admitted Jerry.

"Then," continued Jane, "there's a green-grocer's; and there's a great deal to be said for that, because we should have father behind us in a manner of speaking, and he'd let us have tons of fruit and vegetables at a very small price, or no price at all I dare say."

"Only if he comes round, Jenny. You grant yourself he'll little like to hear you be going to spend your capital on a shop."

"He'll come round when he sees I'm in earnest. And it might help him to come round if we took a green-grocer's. But I'm not saying I'd specially like a green-grocer's myself, because I shouldn't. 'Tis always a smelly place, and I hate smells."

"All shops have their smells," answered Jerry. "Even a linen draper to my nose have a smell, though I couldn't describe it in words."

"They have," admitted she. "And the smell I'd like best to live in be tobacco. If I'd only got myself to think for, it would be a tobacco shop, because there you get all your stuff advanced on the cheap, I believe, and if you once have a good rally to the shop, they bring their friends. And it's quite as much a man's job as a woman's."

"My head spins when I think of it, however," confessed Jerry. "The only shop I see myself in is the green-grocer's, and only there for the cabbages and potatoes and such like. The higher goods, such as grapes and fine fruits, would be your care."

Jane shook her head.

"Half the battle is to feel a call to a thing," she said, "same as I felt a call to you. And as I'll be shopwoman most of the time, it's more important as I shall be suited than you."

"Certainly."

"There's more money moving among men than women: you must remember that too," continued Jane. "Men have bigger views and don't haggle over halfpennies like women. A green-grocer's be a terrible shop for haggling; but with tobacco and pipes and cigars, the price is marked once for all, and only men buy 'em, and the clever shop women often just turn the scales and sell the goods. I've watched these things when I've been in Ashburton along with father, or Johnny; and I've seen how a pleasant, nice-spoken woman behind the counter, especially if she's good-looking, have a great power. Then, again, the bettermost sort of men go into a tobacconist; but never into a green-grocer. Buying vegetables be woman's work."

"I can see you incline your heart to tobacco," said Jerry. "And so, no doubt, it will be tobacco; but I must work, and if there's no work for me in our shop, then I'll have to find it outside our shop. Lots of women keep a shop and their men do something else."

"Why not?"

"Us may say the lot's pretty well cast for tobacco then. Shall us tell Johnny to-day and get his opinion?"

"I'll see what sort of frame he's in," replied Jane. "He's been dark lately, because he's getting slowly and surely to know that Dinah Waycott ain't going back on her word. It makes me dance with rage sometimes to think that John can want her still, and would forgive the woman to-morrow if she offered to take up with him again."

"Love's like that, I dare say," guessed Jerry. "It'll sink to pretty well anything."

"Well, I hate to see it--a fine man like my brother. He comes and goes, and they've made it up and are going to be friends; at least, father thinks so--as if anything could ever make up a job like that. If I was a man, and a woman jilted me, I know when I'd make it up. I'd hate her to my dying day, and through eternity too."

"You oughtn't to say things like that, Jane."

"It ain't over yet," she continued. "I shouldn't wonder much if there was an upstore before long. Dinah can't keep secrets and she's shameless. There's another in her eye as I have told you--talk of the devil!"

They were abreast of Falcon Farm and a man descended from it by a path to the main road as Jane spoke. Maynard was on his way to Buckland. He met them and gave them "good day" pleasantly enough. Jerry responded and praised the weather, but his sweetheart did not speak.

"Your brother be coming up to tea at the farm," said Lawrence.

"I know that," was all Jane answered, and he went his way without more words.

"There!" she exclaimed, when he was out of earshot.

"Why did you say 'talk of the devil'?" asked Jerry. "Surely nobody have a quarrel with that chap? My father says he's a very proper sort and a lot cleverer than you might think."

"I dare say he is a lot cleverer than some people," answered Jane; "but he ain't a lot cleverer than me. He's a tricky beast, that's what he is, and us'll know it presently."

Jerry was much astonished.

"I never! You're the first person as I've heard tell against him. Joe Stockman thinks the world of him. What have he done to you? If you have got any fair thing against the man, I'll damn soon be upsides with him."

"I'll tell you this," she replied. "I believe Dinah's hanging on at home and letting father have his way, not because she cares two straws for father really. She's a heartless thing under all her pretence. But she's on that man's track, and she's too big a fool to hide it from me. And him that would look at her, after what she done to Johnny, must be a beast. And I hope you see that if you're not blind."

Jerry scratched his head and stared at her.

"I'm sure I trust you be wrong, Jenny. That would be a very ill-convenient thing to happen, because Farmer Stockman would be thrown very bad."

"What does he matter? Can't you see the insult to John? And can't you see that, if they be after each other on the quiet, it must have been Maynard that kindiddled Dinah away from John in the first place? What I believe is that he came between Dinah and John, and got round her, and made her give John up."

"For God's sake don't say such things," begged Jerry. "Don't you rush in like that, or you'll very likely wish you hadn't. 'Tis too fearful, and you can't tell what far-reaching trouble you might make if you was to tell John such a thing. Him being what he is, you might land him--Lord knows where!"

She considered this.

"You're right so far I suppose; all the same I've had it on the tip of my tongue to whisper this to John and bid him watch them."

"Don't then--for the Lord's love, don't," implored Withycombe. "It would be playing with fire. If she's given over John once for all, then let him think no more about the woman. 'Tis no good spying, nor nothing like that. It ain't your business; and for that matter, it might be the best thing to happen for somebody to get hold of Dinah, and marry her, and take her far ways off. John have got to come to it, and when he found she loved somebody else, surely that would show him 'twas wasting his time to grizzle any more about her."

"I'll thank you to look at it different, Jerry," said Jane sharply. "If I hate a man, for very good reasons, then you ought to do the same. I can see into things a lot deeper than what you can, as you've always granted, and I can see into Maynard. He's the silent, shifty sort, deep as a well--and I won't have you sticking up for him against me, so now then."

Jerry whistled.

"I've nothing for, or against him," he answered slowly. "I scarcely know the man, but there's my father and others speak well of him; and I'm always wishful to think well of everybody, unless there's a reason against."

"I'm the reason against then," she declared, "and you've got to put me and my opinions first, I should hope. I'm a kindly creature enough, God knows, and ban't quick to think evil."

"Certainly not," admitted Jerry.

"But I look to you to pay me the respect due," she continued, "and if I tell you a man's doubtful, then 'tis for you to believe me and act according."

"I will," he promised. "We'm all doubtful for that matter. Us will speak and think of the man as we find him. We needn't go out of the way to make trouble."

"I ban't one to make trouble," she retorted; "but, next to you, John's more to me than anybody, and I won't stand by and see him wronged by that hateful woman, nor yet by that man, if I can stop it."

Jerry felt this attitude unreasonable, but decided the subject had better be dropped.

"If wrong's done, I'll help to right it, that I'll swear," he promised.

"I'd right it myself," she said. "If I could prove the man had stole her from my brother, I'd lie behind a hedge for him!"

"Do shut up and stop telling such dreadful things," he answered roughly. "'Tis hateful to hear such words from your mouth--Sunday and all. I won't have it, Jane. What the hell's the matter with you?"

They were silent for a time; then having reached Hazel Tor, Jerry helped his sweetheart to climb the great rocks. Soon they were perched high on the granite, and Jane opened a white and blue parasol, while he stretched his vast limbs at her feet and smoked his pipe. His elephantine playfulness and ideas on the tobacco shop won Jane's smiles presently, and at heart Jerry regretted the moment when his future brother-in-law ascended through the pine-trees from the river and joined them.

The fret and sting of his hopeless quest had marked John Bamsey, and now he was come to the knowledge that no hope remained. His dream dissolved. Until now he had defied reason and lived on shadows spun of desire. He had sunk beneath his old pride and returned to Dinah's hand. He had not grovelled; but he assumed an attitude, after the passing of the first storm, that astonished his family. And Dinah it astonished also, filling her with fresh pain. He had hung on; he had asked her to forgive his words upon the bridge; he had returned into the atmosphere of her and gone and come from home as before. Dominated by his own passion, he had endured even the wonder in his mother's eyes, the doubt in Jane's. Dinah could not be explicit to him, since he had been careful not to give her any opportunity for the present. But, under his humility, he had bullied her. The very humility was a sort of bullying, and she felt first distracted and then indignant that he should persist. To him she could not speak, but to Faith Bamsey and Jane she could speak; and to the former she did.

Mrs. Bamsey therefore knew that Dinah was not going to marry John, and in her heart she was thankful for it; while none the less indignant that John's perfections should have failed of fruition for Dinah. She resented Dinah's blindness and obstinacy, and felt thankful, for John's sake, that the girl would never be his wife. As for Jane she had never shared her brother's whispered hope that Dinah would return to him. She hated Dinah, and while hot with sympathy for her brother, rejoiced that, sooner or later, her father's foster-daughter must disappear and never be linked to a Bamsey.

Johnny's present attitude, however, she did not know; and it was left for this hour amid the tree girt rocks of Hazel Tor to teach her. She longed to learn what he would say if any other man were hinted of in connection with Dinah. She much wanted Johnny to share her opinion of Dinah, and now, ripened for mischief by the recent sight of Maynard, she prepared to sound Johnny. Jerry suspected what was in her mind and hoped that she would change it. They spoke first of their own secret, and informed John, after exacting from him promises of silence.

He was moody and his expression had changed. Care had come into his face and its confidence had abated. He had always liked to talk, and possessed with his own wrongs, of late, began to weary other ears. To his few intimate friends he had already spoken unwisely and salved the wounds of pride by assuring them that the rupture was not permanent. He had even hinted that he was responsible for it--to give the woman he designed to wed a lesson. He had affected confidence in the future; and now this was not the least of his annoyances, that when the truth came in sight, certain people would laugh behind his back. Upon such a temper it was easy to see how any mention of another man in connection with Dinah must fall; and had Jane really known all that was tormenting her brother's mind, at the moment when it began to feel the truth, even she might have hesitated; but she did not.

John considered their dreams of a shop without much sympathy and doubted their wisdom.

"You're a woodman and only a woodman--bred to it," he declared. "What the mischief should you make messing about among shops and houses in a town? You know you'd hate it, just so much as I should myself, and you know well he would, if he don't, Jane."

"You forget his feeling for me, Johnny," explained his sister. "It wouldn't be natural to him I grant; but there's me; and what's my good be Jerry's good when we'm married."

"You ought to think of his good, too, however. I shouldn't hide this up. You'd do well to talk to mother before you do anything."

"You don't think father will change about the five hundred pound?" asked Jane. "'Twas fear of that kept us quiet."

"No; he won't change. I was to have had the same."

"And so you will have," she said. "'Tis only a question of time."

"You'll get one as feels for you, same as Jane feels for me, presently," ventured Jerry.

"And Dinah Waycott will get hell," added Jane; "and I dare say it may happen to her afore so mighty long, for that matter."

Jerry shrank, for Jane's brother fastened on this.

"What d'you mean?" he asked, and she was glad he did.

"Nothing, Johnny; only I've got eyes. I ban't one to think evil; but I can't help being pretty quick where you are concerned. You're next to Jerry, and I shan't be a happy woman till you're a happy man, and you know it."

"What then, Jane?"

"We met Lawrence Maynard walking down the road a bit ago."

"And if you did?"

She dared greatly.

"I suppose you haven't ever heard his name along with hers?"

"'Hers'? D'you mean Dinah's? No, by God--nor any other man's! If I did----Out with it. What are you saying, Jane?"

To hear him swear made Jerry wonder, for John had never sworn in the past. The woodman, regarding him very anxiously, now perceived how his face and the tone of his voice had altered. That such phenomena were visible to Jerry's intelligence argued their magnitude.

"She went for a long walk with him a few weeks back," said Jane. "She made no secret about it. He took her to see a stone out Hey Tor way."

"Did he? And why didn't you tell me?"

"I was going to; but I waited to see if there was more to tell. There is no more than that--not yet."

Johnny fell silent. His mind moved quickly. Love had already begun to suffer a change, half chemical, half psychological, that would presently poison it. Such passion as he had endured for Dinah would not fade and suffer extinction in Johnny's order of mind. He came to the ordeal untried and untested. He had till now been a thief of virtue, in the sense that he was good and orderly, peace-loving and obedient by native bent and instinct. He fitted into the order of things as they were and approved them. Nothing had ever happened to make him unrestful, to incite class prejudice, or to foment discontent with his station. He had looked without sympathy on the struggle for better industrial conditions; he had despised doubt in the matter of religion. He was born good: his mother had said the Old Adam must surely be left out of him. But now came the shock, and pride prevented John from admitting his failure to anybody else; pride, indeed, had assured him that such a man as he must have his own way in the end.

He debated the past, and his self-respect tottered before his thoughts, as a stout boulder shakes upon its foundations at the impact of a flood. He stared at Jane and Jerry unseeing, and they marked the blood leap up into his face and his eyes grow bright. This idea was new to him. What Jane said acted perilously, for it excused to himself his gathering temper under defeat and justified his wrath in his own sight.

"Be careful," he said. "D'you know all it means you'm saying, Jane?"

"For God's sake, unsay it, Jenny," urged her sweetheart. "You can't know--nobody can know."

"If any other man thinks he'll have that woman----"

John said no more; but his own thoughts surged up and seemed to be bursting his head. A mountain of wrongs was toppling down upon him. He forgot his companions; then became suddenly conscious of their eyes staring into his. He looked at them as though they had been strangers, started up, went down the rocks at a pace to threaten his neck and then was gone through the trees, plunging straight ahead like a frightened animal.

Jerry Withycombe declared great alarm; Jane only felt the deepest interest.

"Now you've done it," said the man.

"So much the better," she answered. "It was bound to come. I'm glad."

Meantime Maynard, musing on Jane Bamsey's curt attitude, had reached Buckland to spend an hour or two by invitation with Enoch Withycombe.

"Time drags for you sometimes I expect," said Lawrence.

"No, I wouldn't say time drags," declared the sick man. "Time don't run more than sixty minutes to the hour with me, though I can't say it runs less, like it does for the young and hale and hearty people. Give me a new book and life don't drag. And there's always memory. I've got a very good memory--better than many who come to see me I reckon. My mind keeps clear, and I still have the power to go over my great runs with hounds. And I don't mix 'em. I can keep 'em separate and all the little things that happened. You'd think they'd get muddled up; but they do not."

"That's wonderful," said Lawrence.

"Yes, I can shut my eyes and get in a comfortable position and bring it all afore me and feel my horse pulling and my feet in the stirrups. And once or twice of late I've dreamed dreams; and that's even better, because for the moment, you're in the saddle again--living--living! When I wake up from a dream like that, I make a point of thanking God for it, Maynard. I'd sooner have a dream like that than anything man can give me now."

"They're terrible queer things--dreams," declared the younger. "I've had a few of late. They take hold of you when your mind's more than common full, I reckon."

"Or your stomach--so doctor says. But that's not right. I've stuffed once or twice--greedy like--just for the hope that when I went to sleep I'd be hunting, but it never did anything but keep me awake. No, dreams hang on something we can't understand I reckon; and why the mind won't lie down and sleep with the body, sometimes, but must be off on its own, we can't tell. But there's things said about dreams that ban't true, Lawrence. I read somewhere that you never see the faces of the dead in dreams. That's false. You do see 'em. I saw my brother none so long ago--not as he was when he died, but as a little boy. And dreams be very reasonable in their unreason, you must know, for I was a little boy too. I saw his young face and flaxen hair, and heard him laugh, and we was busy as bees climbing up a fir-tree to a squirrel's dray in a wood. A thing, no doubt, we'd done in life together often enough, sixty years agone; and 'twas put into my dream, and I woke all the better for it."

"Don't you get no sad dreams?" asked Lawrence.

"They come too. They leave you a bit down-daunted, I grant. And some be lost, because you can't call 'em home when you wake up. You'll dream a proper masterpiece sometimes and wake full of it; and yet, for some mysterious working of the brain, 'tis gone, and you try to stretch after it, but never can catch it again. I woke in tears--fancy! Yes, in tears I woke once, long ago now; and for the life of me I didn't know what fetched 'em out of my eyes."

"Perhaps you'd had a cruel bout of pain while you was asleep?"

"No, no; pain don't get tear or groan out of me. I'll never know what it was."

He broke off suddenly, for a previous speech of his visitor gave him the opening he desired.

"You said just now you'd been dreaming, along of your mind, that was more than common full. Was it anything interesting in particular on your mind, or just life in general?"

"Just life as it comes along I reckon."

Enoch regarded him.

"You be looking ahead, as you've the right to do. You're a man a thought out of the common in your understanding. You don't want to work for another all your life, do you?"

"I never look much ahead. Sometimes the past blocks the future, and a man's often less ambitious at thirty than he was ten years before. I don't particular want a home of my own. A home means a lot of things I've got no use for."

"Pretty much what some of the maidens think," said Enoch with craft. "For them a home means a man; and for us it means a woman, of course, because we can't very well establish anything to be called home without one. Orphan Dinah wants badly to be off, so Ben Bamsey, her foster-father, tells me. And yet he's in a quandary; because he feels that if a happy home were in sight for her, he'd far sooner she waited for it, a year or more, than left him to go somewhere else."

"A very reasonable thought. But these things don't fall out as we want 'em to."

They fenced a little, but Lawrence was very guarded and committed himself to no opinion of Dinah until Enoch, failing in strategy, tried a direct question.

"What do you think of Orphan Dinah as a woman?" he asked.

"I like her," answered the other frankly. "Since you ask, there's no harm in saying I think she's a very fine character. She haven't shone much of late, because there was a lot of feeling about what she done; and it's been made the most of I can see by women, and some men. But she's made it clear to me and to you, I hope, that she did right. She's built on a pretty big pattern and she's had a lot to put up with, and she's been very patient about it."

"A bit out of the common you'd say?"

"I think she is."

"I may tell you, for your ear alone, Maynard, that she thinks very well of you."

Lawrence tightened his lips.

"No, no--don't you say that. She don't know me. I dare say, if she was to, she'd feel different."

"Dinah can't hide herself from her foster-father's eyes," explained Enoch. "She don't try to for that matter, and Ben sees that there's something about you that interests her; and you've told me there be something to her that interests you. And what follows? I'm only an old man speaking, and you mustn't take offence whether or no."

"There's no offence," answered Lawrence. "You'd not offend anybody. But I'd rather not have any speech about it, Mr. Withycombe."

Enoch had said all he desired to say and learned all he wanted to learn.

"And quite right and proper," he answered. "These things are very safe where they belong, and I wouldn't rush into a man's private affairs for money."

"You've been a very good friend to me and made my mind bigger," declared Lawrence. "A man that can preach patience from your bed of pain, like you do, did ought to be heard. It ain't easy I should reckon."

They talked of Enoch's books and his master, who had lately been to see him.

"There's one who fears not to look the truth in the face," said the huntsman. "He told me things that only I say to myself, because the rest are too tender to say them. Doctor looks them, but even he won't say them out. But master could tell me I'd soon be gone. He believes in the next world, and don't see no reason in the nature of things why there shouldn't be fox-hunting there."

Another visitor dropped in upon Mr. Withycombe. It was Arthur Chaffe in his Sunday black.

"If one's enough at a time, I'll be off," he said, "and fetch up again next Sunday."

But Enoch welcomed him.

"I'm in good fettle, Arthur, and be very willing to make hay while the sun shines."

Arthur, however, doubted.

"You'm looking so grim as a ghost, my old dear," he answered, "and so white as a dog's tooth."

Mr. Withycombe laughed.

"You be a cheerful one for a death-bed, sure enough," he answered.

"There's no death, Enoch, and you know it so well as what I do."

"And you an undertaker! Mind you deal fair and square with me, Chaffe; for death, or no death, 'tis as certain as life that I shall want some of your best seasoned elm afore very long."

But Mr. Chaffe steadied the conversation.

"You be quiet, Enoch," he said. "This is the Lord's Day and us didn't ought to be joking, like as if 'twas Monday."

The hunter took up the challenge and they went at it again, in the best of humour, till Melinda returned and gave the three men tea.

They spoke of Dinah and gave examples of her quality and difference from other young women. Mrs. Honeysett tended rather to disparage her of late, having been influenced thereto in certain quarters; but Arthur Chaffe supported Dinah, and Lawrence listened.

He presently, however, quoted.

"Long ago, before she had to break with poor Bamsey, I remember a word she said to me," he remarked. "It showed she knew a bit about human nature and was finding out that everybody couldn't be relied upon. She asked me if I was faithful. It seemed a curious question at the time."

"And you said you was, no doubt?" asked Melinda.

"We must all be faithful," declared Arthur Chaffe. "Where there's no faith, there's no progress, and the order of things would run down like a clock."

"The world goes round on trust," admitted Mr. Withycombe, "and the more man can trust man, the easier we advance and the quicker. 'Faithful' be the word used between us in business and it wasn't the one we fixed upon for nothing. 'Yours faithfully' we say."

"Yes, oftener than we mean it, God forgive us," sighed Mr. Chaffe. "'Tis often only a word and too few respect it. Us have all written so to people we hate, and would like to think was going to be found dead in their beds to-morrow. Such is the weakness of human nature."

"We must be civil even to enemies," said the sick man.

"I wonder," mused Melinda. "It's a bit mean to hide our feelings so much."

"Warner Chave was a fine example," answered Mr. Chaffe. "Foes he had a plenty, as such a straight and pushing chap must; but he never quarrelled with man or mouse. He never gave any living soul a straw to catch hold of. His simple rule was that it takes two to a quarrel, and he'd never be one; and he never was. Why! He got on with his relations even!"

"How?" asked Maynard.

"Never criticised 'em. Such was his amazing skill that he let them live their lives their own way, and treated 'em with just the same respect he showed to everybody else."

They enjoyed tea in a cheerful temper, and Arthur Chaffe had continually to remind them it was Sunday.

Then he prepared to depart and Maynard left with him. In the high road they, too, separated, for their ways were opposite.

"I laugh, but with sorrow in my heart," said Arthur, "for that dear man be going down the hill terrible fast to the experienced eye. We shall miss him--there's a lot of Christian charity to him, and I only wish to God he'd got the true Light. That's all he wants. The heart be there and the ideas; but his soul just misses the one thing needful."

"I hope not," said Maynard. "He's earned the best we can wish for."

"It may come yet," prophesied Arthur. "It may flash in upon him at the last. Where there's life, there's hope of salvation. Us must never forget that the prayers of a righteous man availeth much, Maynard."

"And the life of a righteous man availeth more, Mr. Chaffe," answered Lawrence.

"That we ain't told," replied the elder. "We can only leave the doubter to the mercy of his Maker; and there's many and many got to be left like that, for doubt's growing, worse luck. Us say 'sure and certain hope' over a lot of mortal dust, when too well our intellects tell us the hope ban't so certain nor yet sure as us would like to feel."

He perked away on his long, thin legs, like a friendly stork, and Maynard set his face upward for his home.