The Freelands Part 21

"No, sir; Auntie's in."

"Ask your auntie to come and speak to me."

The mother-child vanished up the narrow stairs, and the agent sighed. A strong-built, leathery-skinned man in a brown suit and leggings, with a bristly little moustache and yellow whites to his eyes, he did not, as he had said to his wife that morning, 'like the job a little bit.' And while he stood there waiting, Susie and Billy emerged from the kitchen and came to stare at him. The agent returned that stare till a voice behind him said: "Yes, sir?"

'That woman' was certainly no great shakes to look at: a fresh, decent, faithful sort of body! And he said gruffly: "Mornin', miss. Sorry to say my orders are to make a clearance here. I suppose Tryst didn't think we should act on it, but I'm afraid I've got to put his things out, you know. Now, where are you all going; that's the point?"

"I shall go home, I suppose; but Tryst and the children--we don't know."

The agent tapped his leggings with a riding-cane. "So you've been expecting it!" he said with relief. "That's right." And, staring down at the mother-child, he added: "Well, what d'you say, my dear; you look full of sense, you do!"

Biddy answered: "I'll go and tell Mr. Freeland, sir."

"Ah! You're a bright maid. He'll know where to put you for the time bein'. Have you had your dinner?"

"No, sir; it's just ready."

"Better have it--better have it first. No hurry. What've you got in the pot that smells so good?"

"Bubble and squeak, sir."

"Bubble and squeak! Ah!" And with those words the agent withdrew to where, in a farm wagon drawn up by the side of the road, three men were solemnly pulling at their pipes. He moved away from them a little, for, as he expressed it to his wife afterward: "Look bad, you know, look bad--anybody seeing me! Those three little children--that's where it is!

If our friends at the Hall had to do these jobs for themselves, there wouldn't be any to do!"

Presently, from his discreet distance, he saw the mother-child going down the road toward Tod's, in her blue 'pinny' and corn-colored hair.

Nice little thing! Pretty little thing, too! Pity, great pity! And he went back to the cottage. On his way a thought struck him so that he well-nigh s.h.i.+vered. Suppose the little thing brought back that Mrs.

Freeland, the lady who always went about in blue, without a hat! Phew!

Mr. Freeland--he was another sort; a bit off, certainly--harmless, quite harmless! But that lady! And he entered the cottage. The woman was was.h.i.+ng up; seemed a sensible body. When the two kids cleared off to school he could go to work and get it over; the sooner the better, before people came hanging round. A job of this kind sometimes made nasty blood! His yellowish eyes took in the nature of the task before him. Funny jam-up they did get about them, to be sure! Every blessed little thing they'd ever bought, and more, too! Have to take precious good care nothing got smashed, or the law would be on the other leg! And he said to the woman:

"Now, miss, can I begin?"

"I can't stop you, sir."

'No,' he thought, 'you can't stop me, and I blamed well wish you could!'

But he said: "Got an old wagon out here. Thought I'd save him damage by weather or anything; we'll put everything in that, and run it up into the empty barn at Marrow and leave it. And there they'll be for him when he wants 'em."

The woman answered: "You're very kind, I'm sure."

Perceiving that she meant no irony, the agent produced a sound from somewhere deep and went out to summon his men.

With the best intentions, however, it is not possible, even in villages so scattered that they cannot be said to exist, to do anything without every one's knowing; and the work of 'putting out' the household goods of the Tryst family, and placing them within the wagon, was not an hour in progress before the road in front of the cottage contained its knot of watchers. Old Gaunt first, alone--for the rogue-girl had gone to Mr.

Cuthcott's and Tom Gaunt was at work. The old man had seen evictions in his time, and looked on silently, with a faint, sardonic grin. Four children, so small that not even school had any use for them as yet, soon gathered round his legs, followed by mothers coming to retrieve them, and there was no longer silence. Then came two laborers, on their way to a job, a stone-breaker, and two more women. It was through this little throng that the mother-child and Kirsteen pa.s.sed into the fast-being-gutted cottage.

The agent was standing by Tryst's bed, keeping up a stream of comment to two of his men, who were taking that aged bed to pieces. It was his habit to feel less when he talked more; but no one could have fallen into a more perfect taciturnity than he when he saw Kirsteen coming up those narrow stairs. In so small a s.p.a.ce as this room, where his head nearly touched the ceiling, was it fair to be confronted by that lady--he put it to his wife that same evening--"Was it fair?" He had seen a mother wild duck look like that when you took away its young--snaky fierce about the neck, and its dark eye! He had seen a mare, going to bite, look not half so vicious! "There she stood, and--let me have it?--not a bit! Too much the lady for that, you know!--Just looked at me, and said very quiet: 'Ah! Mr. Simmons, and are you really doing this?' and put her hand on that little girl of his. 'Orders are orders, ma'am!' What could I say? 'Ah!' she said, 'yes, orders are orders, but they needn't be obeyed.' 'As to that, ma'am,' I said--mind you, she's a lady; you can't help feeling that 'I'm a working man, the same as Tryst here; got to earn my living.' 'So have slave-drivers, Mr. Simmons.' 'Every profession,' I said, 'has got its dirty jobs, ma'am. And that's a fact.' 'And will have,' she said, 'so long as professional men consent to do the dirty work of their employers.' 'And where should I be, I should like to know,' I said, 'if I went on that lay? I've got to take the rough with the smooth.' 'Well,'

she said, 'Mr. Freeland and I will take Tryst and the little ones in at present.' Good-hearted people, do a lot for the laborers, in their way.

All the same, she's a bit of a vixen. Picture of a woman, too, standin'

there; shows blood, mind you! Once said, all over--no nagging. She took the little girl off with her. And pretty small I felt, knowing I'd got to finish that job, and the folk outside gettin' nastier all the time--not sayin' much, of course, but lookin' a lot!" The agent paused in his recital and gazed fixedly at a bluebottle crawling up the windowpane. Stretching out his thumb and finger, he nipped it suddenly and threw it in the grate. "Blest if that fellow himself didn't turn up just as I was finis.h.i.+ng. I was sorry for the man, you know. There was his home turned out-o'-doors. Big man, too! 'You blanky-blank!' he says; 'if I'd been here you shouldn't ha' done this!' Thought he was goin' to hit me. 'Come, Tryst!' I said, 'it's not my doing, you know!' 'Ah!' he said, 'I know that; and it'll be blanky well the worse for THEM!' Rough tongue; no cla.s.s of man at all, he is! 'Yes,' he said, 'let 'em look out; I'll be even with 'em yet!' 'None o' that!' I told him; 'you know which side the law's b.u.t.tered. I'm making it easy for you, too, keeping your things in the wagon, ready to s.h.i.+ft any time!' He gave me a look--he's got very queer eyes, swimmin', sad sort of eyes, like a man in liquor--and he said: 'I've been here twenty years,' he said. 'My wife died here.' And all of a sudden he went as dumb as a fish. Never let his eyes off us, though, while we finished up the last of it; made me feel funny, seein' him glowering like that all the time. He'll savage something over this, you mark my words!" Again the agent paused, and remained as though transfixed, holding that face of his, whose yellow had run into the whites of the eyes, as still as wood. "He's got some feeling for the place, I suppose," he said suddenly; "or maybe they've put it into him about his rights; there's plenty of 'em like that. Well, anyhow, n.o.body likes his private affairs turned inside out for every one to gape at. I wouldn't myself." And with that deeply felt remark the agent put out his leathery-yellow thumb and finger and nipped a second bluebottle....

While the agent was thus recounting to his wife the day's doings, the evicted Tryst sat on the end of his bed in a ground-floor room of Tod's cottage. He had taken off his heavy boots, and his feet, in their thick, soiled socks, were thrust into a pair of Tod's carpet slippers. He sat without moving, precisely as if some one had struck him a blow in the centre of the forehead, and over and over again he turned the heavy thought: 'They've turned me out o' there--I done nothing, and they turned me out o' there! Blast them--they turned me out o' there!'...

In the orchard Tod sat with a grave and puzzled face, surrounded by the three little Trysts. And at the wicket gate Kirsteen, awaiting the arrival of Derek and Sheila--summoned home by telegram--stood in the evening glow, her blue-clad figure still as that of any wors.h.i.+pper at the muezzin-call.

CHAPTER XIX

"A fire, causing the destruction of several ricks and an empty cowshed, occurred in the early morning of Thursday on the home farm of Sir Gerald Malloring's estate in Worcesters.h.i.+re. Grave suspicions of arson are entertained, but up to the present no arrest has been made. The authorities are in doubt whether the occurrence has any relation with recent similar outbreaks in the eastern counties."

So Stanley read at breakfast, in his favorite paper; and the little leader thereon:

"The outbreak of fire on Sir Gerald Malloring's Worcesters.h.i.+re property may or may not have any significance as a symptom of agrarian unrest. We shall watch the upshot with some anxiety. Certain it is that unless the authorities are prepared to deal sharply with arson, or other cases of deliberate damage to the property of landlords, we may bid good-by to any hope of ameliorating the lot of the laborer"

--and so on.

If Stanley had risen and paced the room there would have been a good deal to be said for him; for, though he did not know as much as Felix of the nature and sentiments of Tod's children, he knew enough to make any but an Englishman uneasy. The fact that he went on eating ham, and said to Clara, "Half a cup!" was proof positive of that mysterious quality called phlegm which had long enabled his country to enjoy the peace of a weedy duck-pond.

Stanley, a man of some intelligence--witness his grasp of the secret of successful plough-making (none for the home market!)--had often considered this important proposition of phlegm. People said England was becoming degenerate and hysterical, growing soft, and nervous, and towny, and all the rest of it. In his view there was a good deal of bosh about that! "Look," he would say, "at the weight that chauffeurs put on! Look at the House of Commons, and the size of the upper cla.s.ses!" If there were growing up little shrill types of working men and Socialists, and new women, and half-penny papers, and a rather larger crop of professors and long-haired chaps--all the better for the rest of the country! The flesh all these skimpy ones had lost, solid people had put on. The country might be suffering a bit from officialism, and the tendency of modern thought, but the breed was not changing. John Bull was there all right under his moustache. Take it off and clap on little side-whiskers, and you had as many Bulls as you liked, any day. There would be no social upheaval so long as the climate was what it was! And with this simple formula, and a kind of very deep-down throaty chuckle, he would pa.s.s to a subject of more immediate importance. There was something, indeed, rather masterly in his grasp of the fact that rain might be trusted to put out any fire--give it time. And he kept a special vessel in a special corner which recorded for him faithfully the number of inches that fell; and now and again he wrote to his paper to say that there were more inches in his vessel than there had been "for thirty years." His conviction that the country was in a bad way was nothing but a skin affection, causing him local irritation rather than affecting the deeper organs of his substantial body.

He did not readily confide in Clara concerning his own family, having in a marked degree the truly domestic quality of thinking it superior to his wife's. She had been a Tomson, not one of THE Tomsons, and it was quite a question whether he or she were trying to forget that fact the faster. But he did say to her as he was getting into the car:

"It's just possible I might go round by Tod's on my way home. I want a run."

She answered: "Be careful what you say to that woman. I don't want her here by any chance. The young ones were quite bad enough."

And when he had put in his day at the works he did turn the nose of his car toward Tod's. Travelling along gra.s.s-bordered roads, the beauty of this England struck his not too sensitive spirit and made him almost gasp. It was that moment of the year when the countryside seems to faint from its own loveliness, from the intoxication of its scents and sounds.

Creamy-white may, splashed here and there with crimson, flooded the hedges in breaking waves of flower-foam; the fields were all b.u.t.tercup glory; every tree had its cuckoo, calling; every bush its blackbird or thrush in full even-song. Swallows were flying rather low, and the sky, whose moods they watch, had the slumberous, surcharged beauty of a long, fine day, with showers not far away. Some orchards were still in blossom, and the great wild bees, hunting over flowers and gra.s.ses warm to their touch, kept the air deeply murmurous. Movement, light, color, song, scent, the warm air, and the fluttering leaves were confused, till one had almost become the other.

And Stanley thought, for he was not rhapsodic 'Wonderful pretty country!

The way everything's looked after--you never see it abroad!'

But the car, a creature with little patience for natural beauty, had brought him to the crossroads and stood, panting slightly, under the cliff-bank whereon grew Tod's cottage, so loaded now with lilac, wistaria, and roses that from the road nothing but a peak or two of the thatched roof could be seen.

Stanley was distinctly nervous. It was not a weakness his face and figure were very capable of showing, but he felt that dryness of mouth and quivering of chest which precede adventures of the soul. Advancing up the steps and pebbled path, which Clara had trodden once, just nineteen years ago, and he himself but three times as yet in all, he cleared his throat and said to himself: 'Easy, old man! What is it, after all? She won't bite!' And in the very doorway he came upon her.

What there was about this woman to produce in a man of common sense such peculiar sensations, he no more knew after seeing her than before.

Felix, on returning from his visit, had said, "She's like a Song of the Hebrides sung in the middle of a programme of English ballads." The remark, as any literary man's might, had conveyed nothing to Stanley, and that in a far-fetched way. Still, when she said: "Will you come in?"

he felt heavier and thicker than he had ever remembered feeling; as a gla.s.s of stout might feel coming across a gla.s.s of claret. It was, perhaps, the gaze of her eyes, whose color he could not determine, under eyebrows that waved in the middle and twitched faintly, or a dress that was blue, with the queerest effect of another color at the back of it, or perhaps the feeling of a torrent flowing there under a coat of ice, that might give way in little holes, so that your leg went in but not the whole of you. Something, anyway, made him feel both small and heavy--that awkward combination for a man accustomed to a.s.sociate himself with cheerful but solid dignity. In seating himself by request at a table, in what seemed to be a sort of kitchen, he experienced a singular sensation in the legs, and heard her say, as it might be to the air:

"Biddy, dear, take Susie and Billy out."

And thereupon a little girl with a sad and motherly face came crawling out from underneath the table, and dropped him a little courtesy. Then another still smaller girl came out, and a very small boy, staring with all his eyes.

All these things were against Stanley, and he felt that if he did not make it quite clear that he was there he would soon not know where he was.

"I came," he said, "to talk about this business up at Malloring's." And, encouraged by having begun, he added: "Whose kids were those?"