Reuben struggled untiringlyhe tried manure as in his first enterprising days, and a horrible stink of guano told traffic on the road it was passing through Odiam territory. Spades and ploughshares and harrows scored and pulped the earth. Sometimes with breaking back and aching head, the sweat streaming over his skin, he would lift himself stiffly from the plough-handles, and shake his fist at the desert round him. He had never had such a tussle before, and put it down to the fact that he was now for the first time on the high ground, on the hard and sterile scab of the marl, where it seemed as if only gorse would grow. He felt as if now for the first time he was fighting against odds, his earlier struggles were tame compared with this.
Chapter 11Reuben was going through a new experience. For the first time in his life he had fallen under the dominion of a personality. From his boyhood he had been enslaved by an idea, but people, in anything except their relation to that idea, had never influenced him. Now for the first time he had a life outside Boarzell, an interest, a set of thoughts, which were not only apart from Boarzell but antagonistic to it."Poor little thing!"
ONE:Twenty brawny hands grasped successively that of the spokesman, and an applauding murmur ran through the meeting.When the yeoman had returned to the castle, and presented the box to Isabella, the evidences it contained, in the dress and crucifix, were so conclusive, that the Earl of Oxford gave a kiss of welcome to the little Ralph.
Soon afterwards a letter came from Albert, asking for money, but again Reuben forbade any notice to be taken of it. For one thing he could not afford to help anyone, for another he would not even in years of plenty have helped a renegade like Albert. His blood still boiled when he remembered the boy's share in his political humiliation. He had shamed his father and his father's farm. Let him rot!"Of course you did. II gave myself away. I pleaded with you.""Cudn't spare one hand to fetch over fifteenthat's a valiant idea. Now d?an't go loitering; fetch out your cattle afore they're roast beef, git out the horses and all the stockand souse them ricks wot ?un't burning yit.""His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.