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Robert and Peter also did their share, feeding fowls, weeding vegetables. Robert was a stolid, well-behaved child, a trifle uninteresting, but hard-working and obedient. Pete was Reuben's delighta wonderfully sturdy little fellow, who often amazed his father and Beatup by his precocious feats of strength. To amuse them he would sometimes shoulder Beatup's tools, or pick up a bag of chicken-meal with his teethhe could even put his back against a young calf and prevent it entering a gate or reaching its stall. Reuben was careful not to let him strain himself, but he loved to handle his son's arms and shoulders, feeling the swell of the muscles under the skin. He even taught him the rudiments of boxing; he had had some practice himself as a boy in the Fair sparring booth, and though of late years he had been too busy to keep it up, he was a good teacher for little Pete, who could soon lick all his brothers and even deliver respectable punishment on Beatup's[Pg 122] nether limbs. Richard at the age of six was not of any great agricultural value, but at the village school he outshone the elder boys. Sometimes he gave Reuben anxious moments, for the smell of the midden now and then made him sick, which was scarcely a hopeful sign.Holgrave, thinking that Wells was averse to being reminded of an unpleasant circumstance, spoke no more of the day when the orphan boy had gone forth into a strange world; but, counting upon the sympathy of the galleyman, he began to recount his mother's fate.Reuben slunk away, angry and miserable."And thus they could serve the Lord's anointed!" said Turner, compassionately, as he looked on the livid and swollen face and trembling limbs of him, whom he had ever, till now, seen with the beauty of holiness giving dignity to his fine countenance, and with the vigour of manhood exhibited in every motion of his muscular form. "Hark!" added the smith, starting"there is a scuffle outside! Tom Merritt will have enough of them." For an instant he paused, and then, snatching up one of the cords that had tied the monk, he severed it with his axe from the ring in the wall, and passing one end round the monk's arm, fastened the other round his own waist. "Now you will have no trouble in holding by mekeep close. Here, father, could you not hold this? it might keep off some scurvy knave," drawing a sharp wood-knife from his belt, and placing it in the monk's tremulous hand. Turner then ordering the few who were with him to cover the retreat, to keep compact as they followed, and to strike at all within reach, with a keen-edged battle-axe in his right hand, and a formidable club, pointed with steel and firmly bound with iron, in his left, he hurried from the dungeon.Thus the days dragged on wretchedly for everyone except Rose, and in time they grew wretched for her too. She began to tire of the cracklings of the flame she had kindled, of Reuben's continued distrust and suspicion, of Caro's goggle-eyed disapproval, of Peter's spying contempt. The time of her lying-in drew nearer, she had to give up her gay doings, and felt frightened and alone. Everyone was against her, everyone disapproved of her. She began to wish that she had not found her love for Handshut to be an illusion, to wish that the kiss beside the Glotten brook had been in reality what she had dreamed it.... After all, is it not better to embrace the god and die than to go through the unhappy days in darkness?
