‘For the time being. She was agin it at first but I talked her round and she’s willing for me to hev a try.’
‘Well, I ain’t. So you can clear all that nonsensical rubbish out, my good man. I shall be by on Tuesday, and I shall want to see that kitchen just as I always have seen it.’
‘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 bedchambers! 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.