Chapter XVII: Book VII: The End in Sight (1)

§ 1.

The next five years were comparatively uneventful. All that stood out of them was the steady progress of the farm. It fattened, it grew, it crept up Boarzell as the slow tides softly flood a rock.

Reuben was now alone at Odiam with his two small children and Harry. David and Bill, unlike their predecessors, did not start their career as farm-hands till well past babyhood. Reuben no longer economised in labour--he had nearly a dozen men in regular employ, to say nothing of casuals. Sometimes he thought regretfully of the stalwart sons who were to have worked for him, to have run the farm without any outside help ... but that dream belonged to bygone days, and he resolutely put it from him. After all, his posse of farm-hands was the envy of the neighbourhood; no one in Peasmarsh employed so many.

Reuben himself was still able for a great deal of work. Though over sixty, he still had much of the vigour, as he had all the straightness, of his youth. Work had not bent him and crippled him, as it had crippled Beatup, his junior by several years. The furnace of his pride and resolution seemed to have dried the damps steamed up by the earth from her revengeful wounds, so that rheumatism--the plague of the labourer on the soil--had done no worse for him than shooting pains in the winter with a slight thickening of his joints.

His hair had been grey for years, and as he grew older it did not whiten, but stayed the colour of polished iron, straight, shining, and thick as a boy's. He had lost two back teeth, and made a tremendous fuss about them, saying it was all the fault of the dentist in Rye, who preferred a shilling extraction to a threepenny lotion--but the rest of his teeth were as good as ever, though at last a trifle discoloured by smoking.

His face was a network of wrinkles. He was not the sort of countryman whose skin old age stretches smoothly over the bones and reddens benignly as a sun-warmed apple. On the contrary, he had grown swarthier with the years, the ruddy tints had been hardened into the brown, and from everywhere, from the corners of his eyes, of his mouth, of his nose, across his forehead, along his cheeks, under his chin, spread a web of lines, some mere hair-tracery on the surface, others wrinkled deep, others ploughed in like the furrows of his own fields.

Harry had not aged so successfully. He was terribly bent, and some of his joints were swollen grotesquely, though he had not had so much truck as Reuben with the earth and her vapours. He was so thin that he amounted to little more than shrivelled yellow skin over some twisted bones, and yet he was wiry and clung desperately to life. Reuben was sorry for this--his brother annoyed him. Harry grew more irritating with old age. He still played his fiddle, though he had now forgotten every semblance of a tune, and if it were taken away from him by some desperate person he would raise such an outcry that it would soon be restored as a lesser evil. He hardly ever spoke to anyone, but muttered to himself. "Salvation's got me!" he would croak, for his mind had been inexplicably stamped by Pete's outrage, and he forgot all about that perpetual wedding which had puzzled him for so many years. "Salvation's got me!" he would yell, suddenly waking in the middle of the night--keeping the memory of the last traitor always green.

But it was for other reasons that Reuben most wished that Harry would die. Harry was a false note, a discord in his now harmonious scheme. He was a continual reminder of the power of Boarzell, and would occasionally sweep Reuben's thoughts away from those fat corn-fields licking at the crest to that earliest little patch down by Totease, where the Moor had drunk up its first blood. He called himself a fool, but he could not help seeing something sinister and fateful in Harry, scraping tunelessly at his fiddle, or repeating over and over again some wandering echo from the outside world which had managed to reach his dungeoned brain. Reuben wished he would die, and so did the farm-boy who slept with him, and the dairy-woman who fed him at meals.

The only people who would have been sorry if he had died were the children. Harry was popular with them, as he had been with baby Fanny long ago, because he made funny faces and emitted strange, unexpected sounds. He was unlike the accepted variety of grown-up people, who were seldom amusing or surprising, and one could take liberties with him, such as one could not take with fäather or Maude. Also, being blind, one could play on him the most fascinating tricks.

These tricks were never unkind, for David and William were the most benevolent little boys. They saw life through a golden mist, it smelt of milk and apples, it was full of soft lowings and bleatings and cheepings, of gentle noses to stroke and little downy things to hold. For the first time since it became Reuben's, Odiam made children happy. The farm which had been a galley and a prison to those before them, was an enchanted land of adventure to these two. Old Beatup, who remembered earlier things, would sometimes smile when he saw them trotting hand in hand about the yard, playing long hours in the orchard, and now and then pleading as a special favour to be allowed to feed the chickens, or help fetch the cows home. He seemed to see the farm peopled by little ghosts who had never dared trot about aimlessly, or had time to play, and had fed the fowls and fetched the cows not as a treat and an adventure, but as a dreary part of the day's grind ... he reflected that "the mäaster had learned summat by the others, surelye."

Of course, one reason why David and Billy were so free was because of the growing prosperity of the farm, which no longer made it necessary to save and scrape. But on the other hand, it was a fact that the mäaster had learned summat by the others. He was resolved that, come what might, he would keep these boys. They should not leave him like their brothers; and since harshness had failed to keep those at home, he would now try a slacker rule. He was growing old, and he wanted to think that at his death Odiam would pass into loyal and loving hands, he wanted to think of its great traditions being carried on in all their glory. Sometimes he would have terrible dreams of Odiam being divided at his death, split up into allotments and small-holdings, scrapped into building plots. Such dreams made him look with hungry tenderness at the two little figures trotting hand in hand about the orchard and the barns.

§ 2.

It was about that time that the great Lewin case came on at the Old Bailey. The papers were full of it, and Reuben could not suppress a glow of pride when Maude the dairy-woman read out the name of Richard Backfield as junior counsel for the defence. But his pride was to be still further exalted. The senior counsel collapsed with some serious illness on the very eve of the trial, and Richard stepped into his shoes. The papers were now full of his name, it was on everyone's lips throughout the kingdom, and especially in the public-houses between Rye and the Kent border. Men stopped drinking at the Cocks when Reuben came in, and women ran down to their garden gates when he passed by. Reuben himself did not say much, but he now regularly took in a daily paper, and being able to recognise the name of Backfield in print, sat chasing the magic word through dark labyrinths of type, counting the number of its appearances and registering them on the back of his corn accounts.

"How's the Lewin cäase gitting on?" someone would ask at the Cocks, and Reuben would answer:

"Valiant--my näum wur sixteen times in the päaper this mornun."

He almost taught himself to read by this means, for it was the first time he had ever studied a printed page, and he had soon picked up several words besides Backfield. Not that he took much interest in the case beyond Richard's--that is to say, Odiam's--share in it, but soon it became clear that Richard was leading it to marvellous developments. Lewin was a bank-manager accused of colossal frauds, and Richard amazed the country by dragging a couple of hitherto respected banking knights into the business. At one time it was thought he would get an acquittal by this, but Richard was a barrister, not a detective, and he brilliantly got his client acquitted on a point of law, which though it may have baffled a little the romantic enthusiasm of his newspaper admirers, made his name one to conjure with in legal circles, so that briefs were no longer matters of luck and prayer.

His fortune was made by the Lewin case. He wrote home and told his father that he had now "arrived," and was going to marry Anne Bardon.

The excitement created by his defence of Lewin was nothing to that which now raged in Rye and Peasmarsh. Reuben was besieged by the curious, who found relief for a slight alloy of envy by pointing out how unaccountable well the young man had done for himself by running away.

"Reckon you dudn't think as how it 'ud turn out lik this, or you wudn't have been in such tedious heart about it."

"I can't say as I'm pleased at his marrying Miss Bardon," Reuben would say. "She's ten year older than he if she's a day. 'Twas she who asked him, I reckon. He could have done better fur himself if he'd stayed at höame."

§ 3.

Reuben had bought thirty-five more acres of Boarzell in '81, and thirty in '84. The first piece was on the Flightshot side of the Moor, by Cheat Land, the second stretched from the new ground by Totease over to Burntbarns. Now only about fifty acres, including the Fair-place and the crest, remained to be won outside the Grandturzel inclosure. Bardon publicly announced his intention never to sell the Fair-place to Backfield. Flightshot and Odiam had not been drawn together by Richard's marriage. At first Reuben had feared that the Squire might take liberties on the strength of it, and had been stiffer than ever in his unavoidable intercourse with the Manor. But Bardon had been, if anything, stiffer still. He thoroughly disapproved of Backfield as an employer of labour--some of his men were housed, with their families, in two old barns converted into cottages at the cheapest rate--and as he was too hard up to refuse to sell him Boarzell, he could express his disgust only by his attitude. Fine shades of manner were apt to be lost on Reuben, but about the refusal to sell the Fair-place there could be no mistake.

Meantime he cast covetous and hopeful eyes on the Grandturzel inclosure. Realf was doing nothing with it, and his affairs were not so prosperous as they used to be. His abandonment of the struggle had not changed his luck, and a run of bad luck--the usual farmer's tale of poor harvests, dead cows, blighted orchards, and low prices--had plunged Grandturzel nearly as deep as Odiam had once been. Realf had shown himself without recuperative powers; he economised, but inefficiently, and Reuben foresaw that the day would come when he would be forced to part with some of his land. He was in no immediate hurry for this, as he would be all the readier to spend his money in a few years' time, but occasionally he gave himself the treat of going up to the Grandturzel inclosure and inspecting it from the fence, planning exactly what he would do with it when it was his.

More than once Realf and Tilly saw him in the distance, a tall, sinister figure, haunting their northern boundaries.

"Fäather's after our land," said Tilly, and shuddered.

§ 4.

The little boys grew big and went to school. This time it was not to the dame's school in the village, for that had collapsed before the new board-school which had risen to madden Reuben's eyes with the spectacle of an educated populace. They went to Rye Grammar School and learned Latin and Greek like gentlemen. There was something new in Reuben's attitude towards these boys, for his indulgence had deeper roots than expediency. Sometimes of an evening he would go to the bottom of the Totease lane, where it joins the Peasmarsh road, and wait there for his sons' return. They would see him afar off, and run to meet him, and they would all three walk home together, arm-in-arm perhaps.

He would have been exceedingly indignant if in bygone days anyone had ever hinted that he did not love the sons and daughters whom he had beaten, kicked out of doors, frustrated, suppressed, or driven to calamity. All the same, he acknowledged that there was a difference between his feelings towards Rose's children and Naomi's. Though Naomi was the wife more pleasant to remember, Rose's were the children he loved best. They had not grown up in the least like her, and he was glad of that, for he would have hated to confront again her careless, lovely face, or the provoking little teeth of her smile; they were Backfields, dark of hair and swarthy of skin, David with grey eyes, William with brown.

When he saw them running along the lane from school, or tramping the fields together--they were always together--or helping with the hops or the hay, his heart would stir with a warm, unwonted sense of fatherhood, not just the proud paternal impulse which had visited him when he held his new-born babies in his arms, but something belonging more to the future than the present, to the days when they should carry on Odiam after his death. For the first time he had sons whom he looked upon not merely as labourers to help him in his work, but as men created in his own image to inherit that work and reap its fruits when he was gone.

He was pleased to see their evident love of the farm. They begged him not to keep them too long at school, for they wanted to come home and work on Odiam. So he took David away when he was sixteen, and William when he was fifteen the next year.

Meantime it seemed as if in spite of his absorption in his new family he was not to be entirely cut off from the old. In the summer of '87, just after the Jubilee, he had a letter from Richard, announcing that he and his wife were coming for a week or so to Rye. Reuben had not heard of Richard for some years, and had not seen him since he left Odiam--he had been asked to the wedding, but had refused to go. Now Richard expressed the hope that he would soon see his father. His was a nature that mellows and softens in prosperity, and though he had not forgotten the miseries of his youth, he was too happy to let them stand between him and Reuben now that they were only memories.

Anne was not so disposed to forgive--she had her brother's score as well as her husband's to settle, and concealed from no one that she thought her father-in-law a brutal and conscienceless old slave-driver whose success was a slur on the methods of Providence. She refused to accompany Richard on his first visit to Odiam, but spent the afternoon at Flightshot, while he tramped with Reuben over the land that had once been so hateful to him.

Reuben, though he would not have confessed it, was much taken with his son's appearance. Richard looked taller, which was probably because he held himself better, more proudly erect; his face seemed also subtly changed; he had almost a legal profile, due partly no doubt to a gold-rimmed pince-nez. He looked astonishingly clean-shaven, he wore good clothes, and his hands were slim and white, not a trace of uncongenial work remaining. He had quite lost his Sussex accent, and Reuben vaguely felt that he was a credit to him.

Their attitude, at first constrained, soon became more cordial than either would have thought possible in earlier days. Richard made no tactless references to his brothers and sisters, and admired and praised everything, even the pigsties that had used to make him sick. They went out into the fields and inspected the late lambs, Richard showing that he had lost every trace of shepherd-lore that had ever been his. His remarks on shearing gave Reuben a very bad opinion of the English Bar; however, they parted in a riot of mutual civility, and Richard asked his father to dine with him at the Mermaid in a couple of days.

Anne was furious when she heard of the invitation.

"You know I don't want to meet your father--and I'm sure he'll disgrace us."

"He's more likely to amuse us," said Richard; "he's a character, and I shall enjoy studying him for the first time from an unbiassed view-point."

"It won't be unbiassed if he disgraces us."

However, Reuben did not disgrace them. On the contrary, more than one admiring glance drifted to the Backfields' table, and remarks were overheard about "that picturesque old man." Reuben had dressed himself with care in a suit of dark grey cloth and the flowered waistcoat he had bought when he married Rose. His collar was so high and stiff that he could hardly get his chin over it, his hair was brushed and oiled till its grey thickness shone like the sides of a man-o'-war, and his hands looked quite clean by artificial light.

Richard had invited his young half-brothers too, for they had been at school when he visited Odiam. They struck him as quite ordinary-looking boys, dressed in modern reach-me-downs, and only partially inheriting their father's good looks. As for them, they were cowed and abashed past all words. It seemed incredible that this resplendent being in the white shirt-front and gold-rimmed eye-glasses was their brother, and the lady with the hooked nose and the diamonds their sister-in-law. They scarcely ventured to speak, and were appalled by the knives and forks and glasses that lay between them and their dinner.

Reuben too was appalled by them, but would not for worlds have shown it. He attacked the knives and forks with such vigour that he did not get really involved in them till the joint, and as he refused no drink the waiter offered he soon had all his glasses harmlessly occupied. Nor was he at a loss for conversation. He was resolved that neither Richard nor Anne should ignore the greatness of his farm; if only he could stir up a spark of home-sickness in his son's white-shirted breast, his triumph would be complete.

"I reckon I'm through wud my bad luck now--Odiam's doing valiant. I'm shut of all the lazy-bones, Grandturzel's beat, and I've naun to stand agäunst me."

"What about Nature?" asked Richard, readjusting his pince-nez and thrusting forward his chin, whereby it was always known in court that he meant to "draw out" the witness.

"Nature!" snorted Reuben--"wot's Nature, I'd lik to know?"

"The last word on most subjects," said Richard.

"Well, is it? I reckon it äun't the last word on your wife."

"I beg your pardon!"--Anne's chin came forward so like Richard's that one might gather he had borrowed the trick from her.

"Well, 'carding to Nature, ma'am, and saving your presence, you're forty-five year if you're a day. I remember the very 'casion you wur born. Well, if I may be so bold, you döan't look past thirty. How's that? Just because you know some dodges worth two of Nature's, you've a way of gitting even wud her. Now if a lady can bust Nature at her dressing-täable, I reckon I can bust her on my farm."

"This is most interesting," said Anne icily, raising her lorgnette and looking at Reuben as if he were a bad smell.

"He means to be complimentary," said Richard.

"Reckon I do!" cried Reuben genially, warmed by various liquors--"naun shall say I döan't know a fine woman when I see one. And I reckon as me and my darter-in-law are out after the säum thing--and that's the beating of Nature, wot you seem to set such a store by, Richard."

"Well, she'll have you both in the end, anyhow."

"She! no--she wöan't git me."

"She'll get you when you die."

"Oh, I döan't count that--that's going to good earth."

"Perhaps she'll get you before then."

Reuben banged the table with his fist.

"I'm hemmed if she does. She'd have got me long ago if she'd ever been going to--when I wur young and my own hot blood wur lik to betray me. But I settled her then, and I'll settle her to the end of time. Mark my words, Richard my boy, there's always some way of gitting even wud her. Wot's nature?--nature's a thing; and a man's a--why he's a man, and he can always go one better than a thing. Nature mäakes potato-blight, so man mäakes Bordeaux spray; nature mäakes calf-husk, so man mäakes linseed oil; nature mäakes lice, so man mäakes lice-killer. Man's the better of nature all along, and I döan't mind proving it."

Having thus delivered himself under the combined fire of the lorgnette and the pince-nez, Reuben poured himself out half a tumblerful of _crème de menthe_ and drank the healths of them both with their children, whereat Anne rose quickly from the table and sought refuge in the drawing-room.

It was after ten o'clock when her father-in-law and his two silent boys climbed into their trap and started homewards over the clattering cobbles of Mermaid Street. In the trap the two silent boys found their tongues, and fell to discussing their brother Richard in awestruck voices. They whispered about his dinner, his wife, his hands, his eye-glasses, his voice, while old Dorrington picked his way up Playden Hill in the white starshine. Reuben heard them as if in a dream as he leaned forward over the reins, his eyes fixed on Capella, bright and cold above Bannister's Town. He had drunk more liberally and more variously than he had ever drunk in his life, but he carried his liquor well, and all he was conscious of was a slight exaltation, a feeling of triumph, as if all these huddled woods, lightless farms, and cold winking stars were in some strange way his by conquest, the tokens of his honour. The wind lapped round him, baffing at his neck--it sighed in the woods, and rocked them gently towards the east. In the south Orion hung above Stonelink, with Sirius at the end of his sword ... the constellation of the Ram was high....

Then suddenly his sons' voices floated up to him in his dream.

"I wish I could be like Richard, Bill."

"So do I--but I reckon we never shall."

"Not if we stick to the farm. Did you notice that ring on his little finger?"

"Yes, quite a plain one, but it looked justabout fine."

"And he had a gold watch-chain across his waistcoat."

"I reckon he's done well fur himself by running away."

"Yes, if he'd stayed he'd never have married Miss Bardon and had his name in all the papers."

"We'll never do anything fur ourselves if we stay at Odiam."

"No--but we'll have to stay. Fäather will make us."

"He couldn't make Richard stay."

Reuben listened as if in a nightmare--the blood in his veins seemed to turn to ice. He could hardly believe his ears.

"Richard's made his fortune by quitting Odiam. 'Tis a good place, but he'd never have done half so valiant for himself if he'd stayed."

Reuben pulled himself together, and swinging round cuffed both speakers unaccustomedly.

"Döan't let me hear another word of that hemmed nonsense. If you think as Richard's bettered himself by running away from Odiam, you're unaccountable mistaken. Wot's a dirty lawyer compared wud a farmer as farms three hundred acres, and owns 'em into the bargain? All my boys have busted and ruined them selves by running away--Richard's the only one that's done anything wotsumdever ... and if he's done well, there's one as has done better, and that's his fäather wot stayed at home."

§ 5.

About three years later Sir Ralph Bardon died. He died of typhus caught on one of Reuben's insanitary cottages, where he had been nursing a sick boy. The village was inclined to look upon him as a martyr and Reuben as his murderer, but Reuben himself preserved a contemptuous attitude. "If I'd wanted anything as much as he wanted them houses o' mine, I'm hemmed if I wudn't have had 'em," he said, "and all he could do wur to die of 'em"--and he spat.

Sir Ralph had never married and there was no direct heir; Anne was about as likely to produce offspring as a Latin grammar, and the property went to a distant cousin, Eustace Fleet. The very name of Bardon was now extinct. For two hundred years it had been coupled with Flightshot and Whig politics and the idea of a gentleman, till the last had finally been the downfall of the other two. The race of Bardon had died of its own virtues.

Reuben's hopes of the Fair-place now revived, and he at once approached the new Squire with a view to purchase; but Sir Eustace turned out to be quite as wrong-headed as Sir Ralph on the matter of popular rights.

"Of course I know the Fair has no legal title to this ground, but one must respect public feeling. I will sell you the forty acres adjoining the crest with pleasure, Mr. Backfield, they are no use to me, and you certainly seem to do wonders with the land when you get it--but the Place itself must be preserved for the people. I'm sure you understand."

Reuben didn't, nor pretended that he did.

He started licking his forty acres into shape, with many inward vows that he would have the rest of them soon, he was hemmed if he didn't. He was on the high ground now, he could throw a stone into the clump of firs which still mocked his endeavours. The soil was all hard and flinty, matted with heather roots and the fibres of gorse. Reuben's men grumbled and cursed as the earth crumbled and rattled against their spades, which sometimes broke on the big flints and bits of limestone. They scoffed incredulously when old Beatup told them that the lower pastures and the Totease oatfields had once been like this.

Boarzell was almost unrecognisable now. When one climbed the Forstal Hill behind Peasmarsh and looked southward, one no longer saw a great roughness of Moor couching like something wild and untrapped in the midst of the tame fields and domestic cottages. The fields had licked up its sides till all they had left was the brown and golden crest with its central clump of firs. Behind this to the north was the Grandturzel inclosure, but Reuben's land was nibbling round the edge of it, and everyone knew that Grandturzel would not be able to hold out much longer.

Opinion in Peasmarsh was divided. There was a general grudging admiration of the man who seemed able, in defiance of the Scriptures, to make Leviathan his servant. No one could deny that Backfield had performed a job which the neighbourhood from the first had declared to be impossible. He was disliked--not because anyone particularly envied him the land he bought so eagerly and so strenuously shaped, but because of his utter disregard of what other men prized and his willingness to sacrifice it for the sake of what they did not prize at all. He was a living insult to their hearths, their homes, their wives, their children, their harmless recreations, the delights of their flesh, all those things which he had so readily set aside to win his great ambition. It was not for what he wanted that they hated him so much as for the things he did not want.

However, everyone viewed with dislike and suspicion his covetous eye cast on the Fair-place. He might have the rest of Boarzell and welcome, for no other man had any use for flints, but the Fair was sacred to them through the generations, and they gauged his sacrilegious desire to rob them of it for his own ends. He might have the Grandturzel inclosure, though all the village sympathised with the beaten Realf--beaten, they said, because he hadn't it in him to be as hard-hearted as the old Gorilla, and sacrifice his wife and children to his farm--but they would far rather see Grandturzel swallowed up than Boarzell Fair.

When his failure to buy the crest became known there were great rejoicings throughout Peasmarsh. The Fair that year was more than usually crowded, and the merriment was increased by the sight of Reuben stalking among the booths, and glaring at them as if he wished them all at blazes.

§ 6.

The boys were now sixteen and eighteen, fine, manly young fellows, working cheerfully on Odiam and rejoicing their father's heart. Reuben watched over them sometimes with an odd kind of anxiety--they were so satisfactory that he felt it could not last. He remembered that conversation he had overheard in the trap on the way home from Rye, and though nothing had happened since to remind him of it or cause him fresh alarm, he could never quite shake off the cold thrills it had given him.

Besides, David and William had come to a dangerous age, they were beginning to form opinions and ideas of their own, they were beginning to choose their own friends and pastimes. But what Reuben distrusted most was their affection for each other, it was more fundamental to his anxieties than any outside independence. From childhood they had been inseparable, but in past years he had put this down to the common interests of their play, for there were few boys of their own age on the neighbouring farms. But now they were grown up the devotion persisted--they still did everything together, work or play. Reuben knew that they had secrets from him, their union gave him a sense of isolation. They were fond of him, but he was not to them what they were to each other, and his remoteness seemed to grow with the years.

In his alarm he made plans to separate them. He discovered that the big attic they slept in was not healthy, and moved their beds to two rooms divided by his own. He now felt that he had put an end to those bedtime conferences which must have done so much to unite the brothers and set him at a distance.

His vigilance increased when their first love affairs began. At first they would gabble innocently to him about pretty girls they had seen in Rye, but they soon found out such conversation was most unwelcome. Reuben looked upon love as the biggest curse and snare of life; if David and William fell in love they would lose interest in Odiam, they would do something silly like Robert, or mad like Caro, or bad like Rose. Love was the enemy of Odiam, and Reuben having trodden it down himself was not going to see it rise and stamp on his boys. He gave them the benefit of his experience in no measured terms:

"If you fall in love wud a gal you can't say no to her, and she'll find it out lamentable soon. When either of you boys finds a nice strong, sensible gal, wud a bit o' money, and not self-willed, such as 'ull be a good darter-in-law' to me, I shan't have nothing to say agäunst it. But döan't you go running after petticoats and mäake fools of yourselves and disgrace Odiam, and call it being in love. Love mäakes you soft, and if you're soft you might just as well be buried fur all the good you're likely to do yourself."

David and William seemed much impressed, and Reuben congratulated himself. Two days later he went into the dairy to give an order, and saw one of the dairy girls bending over a pan of cream. Something in her attitude and in the soft curly down on the nape of her neck reminded him of Naomi and that early courting scene, now nearly fifty years ago; but before he had time to recall it, David came in by another door, not seeing his father, and running lightly up to the dairymaid suddenly kissed the back of her neck and ran away. She turned round with a scream, just in time to see him disappearing through one door, while in the other stood Reuben with grimly folded arms. He gave her a week's wages and sent her away.

"Where's Agnes?" asked David with laboured carelessness a day or two later.

"She wasted her time," said Reuben, "so I got shut of her."

"She's gone!"

"Yes--back to her parents at Tonbridge"--and Reuben grinned.

David said no more, but for the rest of the day he seemed glum and abstracted. In the evening Reuben found him sitting at the corn accounts, staring through the open window into the dusk.

"Wot's fretting you, boy?" he asked.

"Naun--I'm thinking."

Once or twice Reuben caught him in the same mood, and questioned him. But David still answered:

"I'm thinking."

§ 7.

That autumn David and William went to Newhaven to see the Rye Football Club play the West Sussex United. They had more than once gone on such jaunts together, and on this occasion, trains being difficult, they put up for the night at a small hotel near the port. It was the first time they had spent a night away from Odiam, and a certain thrill attached to it.

When the match was over they went for a stroll on the parade. There was not much daylight left, but the evening was warm, and the parade was crowded with saunterers. The young men were glad to think that there was no homeward train to be caught, or account of the day's doings to be given to their father. He always asked minutely how they spent their time, and it annoyed them a little.

To-night they would walk and sit on the parade till supper time, then go to some coffee-house, and wind up at a music-hall. It was a gay programme and they discussed it happily, glanced at the passers-by, inspected the empty bandstand, and finally sat down on one of the seats to watch the fishing-boats trim their lamps in the amethyst fog of the sea. For some time they talked about the terrible licking the United had given Rye, arguing about this or that player, and speculating as to what would be the Club's fate at Hythe next week.

It was David who drew William's attention to the woman sitting at the other end of their seat. David piqued himself on his knowledge of the world.

"She's a--you know," he said.

William peeped round his brother's shoulder.

"How can you tell?"

"Why, you kid, it's as plain as the nose on your face--look at her paint."

Bill looked, his eyes opening wider than ever. She certainly was a disreputable female, or there was no judging by appearances. She wore a big frowsy hat trimmed with roses and ears of corn, under which her thick black hair was held up by several tawdry pins; her face was more lavishly than artistically adorned with rouge and _blanc de perle_, and she pulled a cape of lavender velvet closely round her shoulders as if she were cold--which might well have been, for, as far as they could see, her bodice consisted almost entirely of lace.

"It's early for her to be prowling," said the man of the world. "I reckon she's having just a breath of fresh air before she starts work."

"Where'll she go then?" asked Billy.

"Oh, to the more crowded streets, round about the pubs and that."

"I wonder how much she mäakes at it."

"Not much, I reckon. She's a very low-class sort, and not at all young."

"Täake care--she might hear you."

"Oh, don't you worry," said the lady blandly; "I like listening to you, and I was only waiting till you'd stopped before I introduced myself."

Bill gasped, and David forgot that he was a man of the world, and sidled against his brother.

"Don't you know me?" continued the siren, tilting her hat back from her face.

"No-o-o."

"Ever heard of your sister Caro?"

Both boys started, and stared at her in utter blankness.

"Well, it wasn't to be expected as you'd recognise me. You were only little boys, and I've changed a bit. Maybe I shouldn't have spoken to you--got no decent feelings, some people would say; but I justabout couldn't help it. I heard you call each other David and Bill, and talk about Odiam and that, so I'd have known you even if you hadn't been the dead spit of your father."

The boys still didn't seem to have much to say, so she continued:

"I heard of your brother Pete the other day--never knew he'd left home till I saw his name down to preach at Piddinghoe Mission Hall last month. He's called Salvation Pete now, as I daresay you know, and I half thought of going to hear him, only times are so bad I couldn't afford an evening off. When did he leave Odiam?--I should like some news of home."

"He quitted years ago, when we were little chaps. Salvation got him."

"I reckon that must have come hard on fäather--he always was unaccountable set on Pete. Heard anything of Tilly lately?"

"No, nothing particular. But fäather's going to buy the Grandturzel inclosure."

"And Rose?"

"Who's Rose?"

"Your mother, my precious innocents. But look here, you shall ask me to supper--it'll only be doing the decent thing by me--and you shall tell me about them all at Odiam--as used to be at Odiam, rather, for I reckon there's nobody but yourselves there now."

David and William looked at each other uneasily; however, there was nothing else to be done, and also a certain excitement and curiosity inspired them. So they set out with Caro to an eating-house chosen by herself in a small fish-smelling back street. They were much too embarrassed to order supper, so Caro good-naturedly did this for them--fish and chips, and three bottles of six ale.

"I don't often come here," she said--"this is a bit too classy for me. I go mostly to the coffee stalls down by the harbour. You mustn't think as I'm coining money at this, you know. I work mostly among the fishermen, and they're a seedy lot. I started up town, but I'm not so young as I was, and sometimes even at the harbour I find it unaccountable hard to git off."

With the gas-light flaring on her raddled face, showing up mercilessly the tawdriness and shoddiness of her clothes, which reeked of a cheap scent, the boys did not find it hard to believe that she often had a struggle to "git off "--indeed, it was a mystery how any man, however unfastidious, however fuddled, could kiss or take kisses from this bundle of rags and bones and paint. Caro seemed to notice the disparaging look.

"Oh, I'm a bit off colour to-night, but I can tell you I was a fine girl when I went away with Joe--and all the time I lived with him, too, first at the Camber and then at New Romney; there was many as 'ud have been proud to git me from him. But I stuck to him faithful, I did, till one morning I woke up and found him gone, off on a voyage to Australia--wonder if he met Robert--having given me over to a pal of his for five pounds and a set of oilskins. Oh, I can tell you I took on something awful--I wasn't used to men in those days. But Joe's pal he was a decent chap--there was nothing the matter with him save that he wasn't Joe. He was unaccountable good to me, and I stayed with him three years--and then I hooked it, scarcely knew why. I got a post as barmaid in Seaford, but the landlord took up with me and his missus chucked me out. And now I'm here."

"Have--have you been here long?" stammered David, feeling he must say something.

"Three year or so. I started up town. But we've spoken enough about me. Let's hear about you, and the farm. How's Richard?"

The boys told her; they described their prosperous brother with his white shirt-front, his pince-nez, his ring, and his high-born wife. As they talked they grew more at their ease.

"Well," said Caro, "I reckon he got away in time."

"From what?"

"From Odiam, of course. I stayed too long. I stayed till I was half killed by the place. If I'd gone off as a young girl I reckon I'd have done well by myself, but I waited on till I was ready to take anything that was going, and when you're like that it's too late."

"I shouldn't think Richard was sorry he left."

"No--and mark you, nor am I. It 'ud have been worse for me if I'd stayed. I'm miserable in a different way from what I was there--somehow the life's easier. I'm not happy, but I'm jolly. I'm not good, but I'm pleasant-like. It's all a change for the better. See?"

"Then you don't wish as you wur back again?"

"Back! Back with fäather! Not me! Now let's hear some more about him--does he ever speak to you of your mother?"

For the rest of the meal they discussed the absent ones--Rose, Robert, Albert, Benjamin, Tilly, the boys hearing a great deal that had never come to their ears before. Caro ordered two more bottles of six, and in the end the party became quite convivial, and David and William, forgetting the strangeness of it all, were sorry when their sister at last stood up and announced that she must wobble off or she'd be late.

"You'll tell father you met me?" she said as they left the eating-house.

David and William looked at each other, and hesitated.

"You've no call to be ashamed of me," said Caro rather irritably.

"We--we äun't ashamed of you."

"That's right--for you've no call to be. I was driven to this, couldn't help myself. Besides, I'm no worse than a lot of women wot you call respectable--at least, I put some sort of a price on myself, if it's only five shillings. Now good night, young men, and thank you for a very pleasant evening. I don't suppose as you'll ever see me again. And mind--you tell father as, no matter the life I lead and the knocks I get, I've never once, not once, regretted the day I ran off from his old farm. Now mind--you tell him that."

§ 8.

The boys told him. Reuben listened in silence save for one ejaculation of "the dirty bitch!"

David nudged William.

"And she asked us particular to say as she'd never regretted the day she left Odiam, or wished herself back there, nuther."

"She wur purty säafe to say that--for who'd have her back, I'd lik to know? Larmentable creature she always wur, spanneling around lik a mangy cat. Always thin and always miserable--I'm glad to be shut of her. But she seemed cheery when you saw her?"

"Unaccountable cheery--and she drank three bottles of six ale."

"Um," said Reuben.

The boys had one or two secret talks about Caro. She also stimulated that habit of "thinking" which their father so thoroughly disapproved of. Somehow their encounter with her, combined with their encounter with Richard, seemed to have modified their enthusiasm for Odiam. They could not help comparing that supper at Newhaven with that dinner at Rye, and wondering if it was true what she had said about Richard having got away in time, whereas she had been too late.

"And yet she was glad she'd gone--she'd rather be free too late than not at all."

"Bill, do you think that if we stay here, Odiam 'ull' do for us wot it did for Caro?"

"I döan't think so. Fäather was much harder on Caro than he is on us."

"He's not hard on us--but he's unaccountable interfering; it maddens me sometimes."

"Seems as if he didn't trust us--seems sometimes as if he was afraid we'd go off like the others."

"Reckon he is--he saw how we envied Richard."

"Davy, it 'ud be cruel of us to go and leave him."

"I döan't say as I want to do that."

"Besides, it äun't likely as we'd do as well fur ourselves as Richard. We've no Miss Bardon to trouble about us--reckon we'd come to grief like Albert."

"Maybe we would."

§ 9.

Four years later Reuben bought the farmstead of Totease. Brazier died, and the Manor, anxious as usual for ready money, put up his farm for sale. It was a good place of about sixty acres, with some beautiful hop gardens and plenty of water. Reuben felt that it would be unwise to neglect such an opportunity for enlarging the boundaries of Odiam. He outbid one or two small farmers, put the place under repair, engaged more hands, and set to work to develop a large business in hops.

His enthusiasm was immense; he saw quicker returns from hops than from anything else, and the sheltered position of Totease made it possible to cover the whole of it with goldings and fuggles. He built a couple of new oasts with concrete roofs, and announced his intention of engaging London pickers that autumn. There was great perturbation at the Rectory--the Manor had long since abandoned social crusades--because Reuben housed these pickers indiscriminately in a barn. It was also said that he underpaid them. The rector was quite insensible to his argument that if a man were fool enough to work for two shillings a day, why should wise men lose money by preventing him? Also he compelled no one to come, so the indiscriminate sleepers were only, so to speak, volunteers--and when the rector persisted he became coarse on the subject.

His temper had grown a little difficult of late years--it had never been a particularly pleasant one, but it had been fierce rather than quick. His sons felt uneasily that they were partly responsible for this--they irritated him by asserting their independence. Also he suspected them of a lack of enthusiasm. He had tried to arrange a marriage for David with the daughter of the new farmer at Kitchenhour. She was ten years older than he, and not strikingly beautiful, but she satisfied Reuben's requirements by being as strong as a horse and having a hundred a year of her own. His indignation was immense when David refused this prize.

"I can't abear the sight of her."

"You'll git used to her, lad."

"Well, I want something better than that."

"She's got a hundred a year, and that 'ud mäake our fortunes at Odiam."

"Odiam's doing splendid--you don't want no more."

"I justabout do. I shan't be satisfied till I've bought up Grandturzel säum as I've bought Totease."

"Well, I'm not going to sacrifice myself for Odiam, and you've no right to ask me, dad."

"If I haven't got a right to ask you that, wot have I, I'd lik to know?"

§ 10.

In the spring of '99 old Jury died over at Cheat Land. His wife had died a year or two earlier--Reuben had meant to go over and see Alice, but the untimely calving of a new Alderney had put the idea entirely out of his head. On this occasion, however, he attended the funeral, with the other farmers of the district, and at the churchyard gate had a few words with Alice before she went home.

She was a middle-aged woman now, but her eyes were as bright as ever, which made her look strangely young. Her hair had turned very prettily grey, she was fatter in the face, and on the whole looked well and happy, in spite of her father's death. She told him she was going to live at Rye--she had a tiny income, derived from Jury's life insurance, and she meant to do art needlework for an ecclesiastical firm. Reuben experienced a vague sense of annoyance--not that he wanted her to be unhappy, but he felt that she had no right to happiness, going out into the world, poor and alone, her parents dead, her life's love missed....

That summer the country was shaken by rumours of war, Reuben; having more leisure on his hands, spent it in the study of his daily paper. He could now read simple sentences, and considered himself quite an educated man. When war at last broke out in South Africa he was delighted. It was the best of all possible wars, organised by the best of all possible Governments, under the best of all possible ministers. Chamberlain became his hero--not that he understood or sympathised with his Imperialism, but he admired him for his attitude towards the small nations. He hated all talk about preserving the weak--such was not nature's way, the way of farms; there the weakest always went to the wall, and he could not see why different methods should obtain in the world at large. If Reuben had been a politician he would have kept alive no sick man of Europe, protected no down-trodden Balkan States. One of the chief reasons why he wanted to see the Boers wiped out was because they had muddled their colonisation, failed to establish themselves, or to make of the arid veldt what he had made of Boarzell.

"They're no good, them Boers," he announced at the Cocks; "there they've bin fur years and years, and they say as how that Transvaal's lik a desert. They've got mizzling liddle farms such as I wudn't give sixpence for--and all that gurt veldt's lik the palm of my hand, naun growing. They döan't deserve to have a country."

He expressed himself so eloquently in this fashion that the member for the Rye division of Sussex--the borough had been disenfranchised in '85--asked him to speak at a recruiting meeting at the Court Hall. Unluckily Reuben's views on recruiting were peculiar.

"Now's your chance," he announced to the assembled yokels; "corn prices is going up, and every man who wants to do well by himself had better grub his pastures and sow grain. Suppose we wur ever to fight the French--who are looking justabout as ugly at us now as they did in Boney's time--think wot it 'ud be if we had grain-stocks in the country, and cud settle our own prices. My advice to the men of Rye is the same as wot I gave in this very hall thirty-five years ago--sow grain, and grain, and more grain."

The member, the colonel of the volunteers, and others present, pointed out to Reuben afterwards that the situation was military, not agricultural; but it was characteristic of him to see all situations from the agricultural point of view. His old ideas of an agricultural combine, which had fallen miserably to pieces in '65, now revived in all their strength. He saw East Sussex as a country of organised corn-growing, Odiam at the head. His rather eclectic newspaper reading had impressed him with the idea that England was on the verge of war with one or two European Powers, notably the French, whose ribald gloatings over British disasters stirred up all the fury of the man who had been born within range of the Napoleonic wars and bred on tales of Boney and his atrocities.

He was dismayed by the lack of local enthusiasm. He dug up one or two of his own pastures and planted wheat; he even sacrificed ten acres of his precious hops, but nobody seemed inclined to follow his example. The neighbourhood was ornately patriotic, flags flew from the oast-houses at Socknersh, Union Jacks washed to delicate pastel shades by the chastening rain--while the Standard misleadingly proclaimed that the Royal Family was in residence at Burntbarns. On Odiam the boys sang:

"Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you
Though it breaks my heart to go--
Something tells me I am wanted
At the Front to drive away the foe."

Some of them in fact did go. Others remained, and sang:

"Good-bye, my Bluebell, farewell to you,
One last long look into your eyes of blue--
'Mid camp-fires gleaming, 'mid shot and shell,
I will be dreaming of my own Bluebell."

§ 11.

Quite early in the war David and William walked home in silence after seeing a troop-train off from Rye, then suddenly, when they came to Odiam, shook hands.

"It's our chance," said Bill.

"We've waited for it long enough."

"I couldn't have stood much more, and this will be a good excuse."

"The old man 'ull take on no end--wot with his corn-growing plans and that."