"Lofts, Norah - The Devil in Clevely" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lofts Norah)
'Ah,' said Fuller, now provoked past caution, 'thass just it. Same as things was in the beginning so they must be for evermore, amen. Thass why Clevely lags behind so; thass why us who would get on hev to be hobbled to the old ways that even them old monks knew was backward in their time when they put a fence round Flocky.'
Sir Charles let go the rein and planted both his plump hands on his knees, sitting forward as though in a chair. The red colour deepened in his face and invaded the whites of his eyes.
'That'll do,' he said sharply. 'I can tell which way the wind blows. You're hankering after enclosure like all the other selfish cantankerous fools. I happen to remember when Greston was enclosed; Mr Montague, the parson, and half a dozen farmers did very well out of it, and forty decent poor men were thrown on the parish. That is not going to happen here!'
The enclosure of the neighbouring village of Greston-- which had been mismanaged--was his stock argument against the innovation which he detested; and he used it so much, always quoting the forty poor decent men who had become paupers, that unwittingly and unintentionally he was building himself a posthumous reputation as the poor man's friend.
'Forty idle fellows at Greston what had just kept going grubbing half a crop out of gardens and keeping a few half-starved beasts on the common lost their rights and now go out to work by the day for wages,' retorted Fuller hotly. 'And whether that be bad or a good thing is a matter of opinion.'
'Then here's something that ain't. Your notice. Fuller. I shall not renew with you next Lady Day!'
The farmer's thin face took on a grey dirty look as it whitened under the lingering summer tan, but his eyes did not meeken or waver.
'All right then,' he said. 'Sack me! Sack all but the lazy and the lickspittles! It'll come, just the same. You can't hold back the tide!'
Good-humoured again now that he had shot his bolt, Sir Charles said, 'I never thought of trying. But I can keep fellows like you from putting pigs in bed-chambers! I shall be by on Tuesday. Good day, Fuller. Come up, Bobby.'
He rode briskly out of the yard and turned back towards the main road. The interview had ruffled him a little, but only a little. He'd half known that there was going to be trouble with Fuller; now it had come, and the way he had dealt with it would put a stop to all that nonsense. It was a relief to have it over and done with; and, besides, he had got his way.
Fuller, who had not got his way--had got, in fact, notice instead--stood for a moment breathing as though he had been running, and then turned, stumbled back through the straw and leaned against the manger while sobs racked his stringy body and a few difficult tears brimmed his eyes and lost themselves in the harsh lines of his face. He wouldn't easily find another farm to hire-- the French war and the corn prices which offered such opportunities to men who could go ahead had at the same time put a premium on any sort of land. In the far north and west, they said, the ploughs were out on heaths and moorlands that had never felt the touch of the share before. Sod and blast the stubborn old devil, Fuller thought. He gave himself a shake, brushed his horny hand over his eyes and jumped back into the manger. Ignoring the threat of Tuesday's inspection, he went on hammering at the rack as though nothing had happened. The turnips had to be stored somewhere. ... Tuesday's row couldn't be worse than this; you couldn't be sacked twice.
Sir Charles clattered over the Stone Bridge, an ancient structure only just wide enough to take wheeled traffic, but built with nooks in its walls to allow foot passengers to step back into safety. Immediately upon its other side he was riding alongside a high wall built of the same pleasant red brick as his own house and lodge cottage. The wall and the house which it encircled had been built at the same time as the Manor, and by the same hands, for the house had been, until fifty years ago, the Dower House of the family. Sir Charles's father, like many of his neighbours, had come a cropper at the time of the South Sea Bubble and in 1721 had been obliged to sell the Dower House, Bridge Farm and several hundred acres of land. The experience had taught him nothing, he had remained a gambler, both in investments and at cards, until the end of his life; but it had its effect upon Charles, who had never invested a penny in any stock or share and had made it an inflexible rule to rise from table the moment he had lost two guineas. This habit, once the subject of disgusted comment among his 'deep-playing' neighbours, had, as he grew to be old, come to be regarded as one more endearing eccentricity, and when anyone in the six parishes said that something had cost or was worth
'a Shelmadine' everyone knew that it meant two guineas.
The high wall was broken at one point by a pair of wrought-iron gates, similar in pattern to, though of less impressive size than, those of the Manor, and when he reached them Sir Charles slowed down and sat for a moment staring through at the neglected, moss-grown drive which cut through the tangled, overgrown laurels and lilacs of the shrubbery and past the ill-shaven lawn to the house whose canopied door and window-sills and shutters were all in sad need of paint. He was saddened by what he saw. Still, it was no business of his. The Dower House had been sold to a seafaring man, a Captain Parsons, who was reputed to have made a fortune in the slave trade. He had one daughter, and a good many young men from families like the Shelmadines, recently impoverished, had made a bid for her hand. Charles Shelmadine himself had 'taken a shot at her', was in fact dancing with her at a ball in the Assembly Rooms at Baildon, with old Captain Parsons beaming his approval, when he fell in love, at first sight, across the width of the ballroom, with the beautiful, crazy creature whom he had married and with whom he had spent three enchanting, terrible years. The shames, the shocks, the anxieties, the delights and ecstasies of that brief married life, and its appalling end, would have left a mark on many men to the end of their days, but Charles Shelmadine had possessed then the rudiments of the art which in later years he perfected, of shutting out of his mind anything unpleasant about which he could not take positive action. In quite a short time he was able to think that it was a blessing that Felicity had died before his attempts to indulge her whims and demands had ruined the estate all over again. As it was, she had, in bearing the son in whom he had so much delighted, sown the seed for a bitter harvest.
Now, halted by the gate of the Dower House, all these memories merely brushed the fringe of his mind, which was focused upon the question of whether or not to call upon Miss Amelia this afternoon. It had until recently been his habit to call once, at least, in a month; often he paid an extra visit. She had never married, despite her many chances; like others with her advantages, she had been very choosy and hard to please. With the passing of time she had grown domineering and sharp of tongue, but Sir Charles had derived considerable pleasure from his visits to her. She listened intelligently and sympathetically, and he had once or twice found himself telling her things which he had never told anyone else; and she understood the value of money as few women did. Lately she seemed to have grown miserly; for the last three years the house and grounds had deteriorated, and when, on a recent visit, he had exercised the privilege of an old friend and tried to bring the talk round to her personal financial problems she had been very evasive--so much so that she sounded vague and rambling. And she had offered him, instead of the Madeira which he expected in that house and considered his due, some very inferior Marsala-- without a word of apology.
No, he would not visit her this afternoon. The rumpus with Fuller was quite enough. When he had administered the well-merited prod to Greenway he'd ride on and visit the little hunchback, Jacky Fenn, and hear how he was getting on with his fiddle-playing. That would put him in perfect good humour again.
'Come up, Bobby,' he said, and they jogged along to the end of the red wall.
At this point the highway made a boundary between Clevely and the neighbouring parish of Minsham All Saints. The latter had been enclosed farther back than even Sir Charles could remember, and now, on his left hand as he rode, the hawthorn hedges were high enough to shut out the view; but on the right hand there was view enough, for on that side of the road lay Clevely Waste, a vast open space of commonland, uncultivated save for the little patches of garden and orchard lying near the hovels which fringed its edge nearest the highway. Here lived those of the Clevely villagers who enjoyed rights on the Waste but had no share in the open fields or common pasture. Here lived the self-employed, the oddjobbers
and the merely idle.
In appearance the cottages presented a sharp contrast to those in the main part of the village, where Sir Charles was very particular about the whitewashing of walls and the mending of thatch. Like all other landlords, he was often forced to choose between doing indoor or outdoor repair; and invariably he did the latter, giving reason that one must keep property weather-proof. The owners of the Waste Cottages seemed not to mind about weather; one or two of the structures were fairly soundly built, but most of them looked as though, long ago, they had grown from the soil and were gradually sinking back into it. Many of them, according to legend, had been built in bygone times under an ancient licence known as 'Squatters' Rights' by which any man was entitled to his freehold if he could, between dusk and dawn, rear four walls, slap on a roof and have smoke rising from a chimney in the morning. They gave evidence of their hasty and makeshift origin. Sir Charles, since he felt no responsibility for them, did not find even the most tumble-down of them offensive to the eye; they crouched low and fitted in with the background of nibbled grass and gorse and bracken and stunted hawthorns which was the Waste. And in the same way, he thought, their inhabitants fitted in with the pattern of village life.
Fuller just showed his pig-headed ignorance when he spoke of all Waste-dwellers as idle fellows. In many ways they were useful and sometimes they were industrious. Amos Greenway, though he frittered away a good deal of time, still made and mended boots and shoes and clogs and all kinds of harness; Matt Ashpole went twice a week into Baildon with his bony old horse and ramshackle cart and was available for any odd carrying job and did a bit of dealing as well; Bert Sadler dug all the graves; old Widow Hayward took in washing, acted as midwife at one end of life and layer-out at the other, and had somehow managed to rear three sturdy sons who had all gone soldiering; Matt Juby was idle and a drunkard to boot, and Spitty Palfrey was much the same, but neither of them ever refused a casual job--mole- and rat-catching, emptying privies, work at hay and harvest time. Somebody had to do these things, and it was foolish to say that enclosure, by forcing them into regular work, would benefit the village; it was simply because they still had their Waste and could support themselves for part of the year with their geese and goats and pigs and scrawny cows that they were available when they were needed.
The cobbler's cottage stood at the far end of the strung-out line, and it was one of the more solidly built ones. In time past it had been cared for, with flowers beside the door, a step white with hearthstone, and a neat potato patch at the side. Even now recent neglect had not quite reduced it to the general level. Julie Greenway, when she married Amos, had been a very superior sort of woman, daughter of a small yeoman farmer at Notley, and herself apprenticed to the dressmaking. An old unmarried aunt of Sir Charles had lived at the Manor until her death and Julie Greenway had made all her dresses, and once she had come to do a fitting and had heard that a dairymaid was ill and had offered to make the butter, saying that it would be a treat to get her hands on a churn once more. Damned good butter it was too. If Julie had married a farmer she'd have been another Mrs Fuller, or another Mrs Clopton--Mrs Abram, of course, not Mrs Fred with all that pianoforte nonsense! But it had been easy-- twenty-three years ago--to see why she married a cobbler. A good-looking, merry, devil-may-care young scamp he'd been before the Methodists got hold of him.
At that time, had Amos been one of his tenants Sir Charles would have given him notice; for next to, if not equally with, progressive farming the Squire abhorred Dissent. But the cobbler was a freeholder, so Sir Charles had shown his complete disapproval in the one way open to him: he took away his custom. Whether Amos noticed was doubtful; Sir Charles did, for it seemed that no cobbler in any nearby village could make a decent pair of boots, and even when he transferred his custom to Bail-don be never attained a really easy fit. And then, one
evening, Amos Greenway, trudging home through Layer Wood from one of his Methodist meetings, had seen a light, a flickering blaze, and gone towards it to find a lonely keeper's cottage all aflame. The keeper was out doing his duty, and his wife, with a child in her arms, was at the foot-square bedroom window screaming into the lonely night. Amos had yelled, 'Push him through. I'll catch him,' and had done so. Then, laying the child aside, he had fought his way in and dragged out the woman.
Amos, all blistered and hairless and plastered with old Widow Hayward's herb poultices, had said simply, 'It will be welcome, sir.' Then he added something about having often preached about brands snatched from the burning and now knowing what they felt like.
Since then Sir Charles's boots had fitted better, but there was no denying that Greenway became more and more dilatory as time went on and Methodism encroached upon his time. Once he had left his work, which included stitching a stirrup leather for his Squire, and gone sixty miles to hear John Wesley preach, walking every step of the way. Now he was late with this last job, and Sir Charles intended to take no excuses.
Between the road and the cottage wall was a little bed of marigolds, almost past flowering. The door to the room which Amos used for his work was half open, and just inside a large cat, almost the colour of the marigolds, lay basking in the last of the sun's warmth. Sir Charles leaned sideways and rapped smartly on the door with the handle of his crop. The cat sprang up in an offended manner and backed into the flowerbed, where it stood glaring at him with its yellow eyes, moving its tail from side to side.
The door opened wide, revealing, not the angular figure and dreamy countenance of the cobbler, but the small neat figure of a girl, who made her bob, and then looked up at him with a timid, wavering smile. He prided himself upon knowing the name, as well as the history, of every living soul in Clevely, and liked to prove it by using the names freely, surprising young people, particularly when he caught them up to mischief, by saying, 'You're Samuel Thomas Jarvey, ain't you? Samuel John is the one with bow legs.' It irked him this afternoon that he had to wait a perceptible moment before bringing this girl's name to mind. It was out of the Bible, he remembered that much, but not a girl's name at all. Something ridiculous like Jordan or Galilee I Ah, he had it.
'Good day, Damascus. Y'father about?'
'No, sir; I'm sorry. He's over to Nettleton.'
'Well, I hope he finished off my boots before he went galloping about the countryside. Methodist business again, I'll be bound.'
He spoke sternly and was not surprised or displeased to see an expression of acute distress come into the girl's face. He was, however, surprised when, after a second during which it looked as though her eyes might jump out of her head, she said quietly:
'Oh yes, sir, he finished them and he was going to deliver them either on his way there or back.'
'Ah, that's all right then,' said Sir Charles, softening immediately. 'You're busy,' he added, looking at the broom in her hand.
'I try to clear up a bit when I get home, sir. Mother can't do much nowadays.'
'Rheumatics bad again? Pity, great pity!' He was always downcast by any evidence of age or infirmity, but in this case he felt an almost personal concern. He had been very partial to the busy, capable little dressmaker, and had been sorry to see how, soon after Amos took up with the Methodists and began to neglect his trade, her looks and her spirits had seemed to decline; and later, when she had grown stooped and lame and twisted, he had been sorry again.
'Have you tried nettle tea?' he asked kindly. 'I swallowed gallons of it when my gout was bad, and to my
mind it did more good than all the doctor's brew! You put a good bunch of young nettles into a crock, pour boiling water over, let it stand and then strain it off.' He remembered that in its natural state nettle tea had a flat, nauseating flavour which he had disguised by the addition of lemon juice; he remembered too that lemons were not easy to come by and pretty expensive. 'Then you add the juice of a lemon, just to make it tasty. I'll send you one or two along. You make a good jorum of that and tell her I hope it'll do the trick.' 'Thank you, sir. That would be very kind.' All the time he had been speaking, looking down at the girl who stood looking up at him, he had been aware of a small, nagging feeling of annoyance. He had a very weak spot for young female creatures, particularly when they were neat, fairly comely and respectful, and was not averse from pulling a stray curl, chucking a wench under the chin, or administering a little pat on the rump; at Christmas and the Harvest Horkey he was free with his kisses--an old man's privilege. Now, having been stern and then kindly to this young female who was neat, not uncomely and very civil, he felt that the little encounter should be rounded off with some fatherly gesture, yet he could not bring himself to make it. There was an irritating primness about her, that was it. The way all that pretty would-be-curly hair was dragged back from the centre parting and clamped into those hard-looking plaits on the nape of her neck, leaving her brow so naked and so much too big for the small face; the ugly high neck of the print dress; prim, repellent. A pity. But there was something more, something more seriously wrong; and suddenly he knew what it was. Those eyes--they weren't the colour any human eyes should be; damn it, they were nearly yellow--were in fact almost the colour of the cat's, not quite yellow but a cloudy, greenish amber. Most unusual and most disturbing.
As he stared the cat made a delicate, graceful bound through the air and landed on the girl's shoulder, thrusting its soft head under her chin and curving its sinuous body so that its plumy tail went behind her head. Now, with the ugly collar, the unbecoming slaty colour of the print dress hidden and with the prim expression melting into affection, she was almost beautiful. Sir Charles was happily able to give her a little pat on the shoulder not occupied by the cat and to say with his full geniality:
'Good day, m'dear.'
'Good afternoon, sir,' she said.
The Greenways' bit of garden lay to the side of the house; a potato patch, some gooseberry and currant bushes and a fruit tree or two. The potato patch was thick with weeds and Sir Charles remembered that it was always Julie who in the past had been seen at work there; if this year she had been too much disabled to raise a crop they'd feel the pinch during the winter. And a little hunger might do Amos no harm; bring him to his senses a bit.
Where the garden ended he turned right to follow the foot-and-bridle path which ran between the Waste and Layer Wood and then on between Layer Field and the wood.
Damascus Greenway, whose name had been shortened to Damask so long ago that the full name on Sir Charles's lips had sounded unfamiliar, set the cat down on the step, went in and closed the door, propped the broom in a corner and stood still, spasmodically clasping and unclasping her hands. She had just told a deliberate lie, and told it for worldly profit--the very worst kind of lie I
There they stood on the work-bench; a pair of top boots finished save for the fixing of the yellowy-brown cuffs which would complete them. The tops lay near, awaiting the thirty minutes or so of steady stitching needed to round off a good job. And why hadn't she been honest and said that they weren't quite ready, but that they would be finished and delivered by nightfall. That was all she had to say; that was what Father would have said. And instead she'd gone and told a lie. And it wasn't as though she didn't know better. She knew exactly what
every lie did; it knocked another nail in the cross upon which Jesus had died; it added another spike to the crown of thorns. She'd done that, Damask Greenway, who loved Him ... and she'd done it simply to prevent Sir Charles saying that Father neglected his work for his Methodism.
Now she stood, and the voices began. The grave, grieved voice of God saying man shall not live by bread alone; saying betrayal, thirty pieces of silver; saying he who denies me I will deny; saying a lie, Damask Green-way, a tribute to Satan who is called the Father of Lies; saying another nail, another thorn.
And the voice of the Devil, who could, if he wished, make himself so clearly heard, so plausible, saying how sensible not to offend Sir Charles, how clever to hide Father's lapse, with winter coming on and all the potatoes to buy this year and Mother not able to take in any sewing.
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