"Baron de Boteler," replied Edith, with a look and a tone that seemed to gain fresh energy from the kind of menace with which the interrogatories were put, "I do not accuse your keeper. He had an honest father, and he has himself ever been a man of good repute. But I do say," she added in a wild and high tone, and elevating her right hand and rivetting her flashing eyes on Calverley"I do say, the charge as regards my son is a base and traitorous plot."
ONE:It was like a muddled dreampeople seemed to have no reason for what they did or shouted; they just ebbed and flowed, jostled and jambed, ran hither and thither, sang and laughed and swore. Rose looked round her to see if she could recognise anyone; now and then a face glowed on her in the torch-light, then died away, once she thought she saw the back of a tradesman's daughter whom she knewbut her chief feeling was of[Pg 309] an utter isolation with her loved one, as if he and she stood alone on some sea-pounded island against which the tides of the world roared in vain.They stood on the hillside and looked down at Reuben. He had felled five trees, and was now getting his axe into the sixth. They watched him in silence, and Naomi found herself remembering the way he had looked at her at dinner.
ONE:The day had slipped by, and twilight was settling down on the Fair. The stalls flared up, a red glow streamed into the sky, and patched the shagginess of Boarzell's firs with crimson shreds. The dancing had become more disorderly, the decent folk had retired, and left the madder element to its revels. The mass of the dancers was blurred, confused in the grey smeeth. It seemed to invite Joe and Caro, for now in the thick of it one could give and take surreptitious kisses; some of the kisses were not even surreptitiousthe love-making was becoming nearly as open as in the days when Reuben and Naomi had danced together. Caro was no longer shocked at the "goings-on," which had used to scandalise her in earlier years when she knew them scarcely more than by hearsay. Her very innocence had made her easier to corrupt, and she now joined in the revel with a delight scarcely less abandoned, if more na?ve, than that of the cottage wantons who bumped round her. It was all so new, and yet so natural, this kicking and capering to a jigging tune. Who would have imagined that the lonely bitter Caro, enviously watching the fun in earlier years, should now have both a partner and a lover? She laughed like a child at the thought.
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TWO:That night she dreamed that her new baby was born, and that Reuben had taken away Fanny and given her to Beatup. Beatup was carrying her down to the pond to drown her as he drowned the kittens, and Naomi stood in the garden with immovable weights on every limb listening to the despairing shrieks of her little girl. They were dreadful shrieks, not like a baby's at all.
THREE:The Moor was on the eastern edge of the parish, five miles from Rye. Heaving suddenly swart out of the green water-meadows by Socknersh, it piled itself towards the sunrise, dipping to Leasan House. It was hummocked and tussocked with coarse grasshere and there a spread of heather, growing, like all southern heather, almost arboreally. In places the naked soil gaped in sores made by coney-warrens or uprooted bushes. Stones and roots, sharn, shards, and lumps of marl, mixed themselves into the wealden clay, which oozed in red streaks of potential fruitfulness through their sterility.
THREE:Early in May he found a visit to Cheat Land forced upon him. Jury wanted to buy a cow of his, but one of the sudden chills to which he was liable kept him indoors. Reuben was anxious to sell the animal, and, there being one or two weak points about her, would trust nobody but himself with the negotiations. However, the visit would be quite safe, for he was not likely to see Alice alone, indeed it was probable that he might not see her at all.After the children were in bed she changed her dress, putting on the best she hada washing silk with pansies sewn over it, one of her wedding gowns. She frowned at it as she had frowned at the babies' dressesit was so old-fashioned, and worn in places. She suddenly found herself wishing that she loved Reuben so much as not to mind wearing old clothes for his sake. For the first time she could visualise such a state of affairs, for she had met the man for whom she would have worn rags. If only that man had been Reuben, her lawful husband, instead of another! "But I'll be true to him! I'll be true to him!" she murmured, and found comfort in the words till she realised that it was the first time that she had ever glimpsed the possibility of not being true.
"Aren't five boys enough for you?""Yes, my servant.""Oh, Rose, I can't tell himI daren't. Why, he turned away Handshut because of you."Manure was his great idea at that moment. He had carefully tilled and turned the soil, and he fed it with manure as one crams chickens. It was of poor quality marl, mostly lime on the high ground, with a larger proportion of clay beside the ditch. Reuben's plan was to fatten it well before he sowed his seed. Complaints of his night-soil came all the way from Grandturzel; Vennal, humorously inclined, sent him a bag of rotten fish; on the rare occasions his work allowed him to meet other farmers at the Cocks, his talk was all of lime, guano, and rape-cake, with digressions on the possibilities of seaweed. He was manure mad.
