II
The men had come to work punctually and Phemy herself found so much to do that she had no time to give the pony an apple. She cleared the kitchen once and for all of the pails, guns, harness, and implements that so hampered its domestic intention, and there were abundant signs elsewhere of a new impulse at work in the establishment. She did not know at what hour to expect the prisoner so she often went to the garden gate and glanced up the road. The night had been wild with windy rain, but morn was sparklingly clear though breezy still. Crisp leaves rustled about the road where the polished chestnuts beside the parted husks lay in numbers, mixed with coral buds of the yews. The sycamore leaves were black rags, but the delicate elm foliage fluttered down like yellow stars. There was a brown field neatly adorned with white coned heaps of turnips, behind it a small upland of deeply green lucerne, behind that nothing but blue sky and rolling cloud. The turnips, washed by the rain, were creamy polished globes.
When at last he appeared she scarcely knew him. Glas Weetman was a big, though not fleshy, man of thirty with a large boyish face and a flat bald head. Now he had a thick dark beard. He was hungry, but his first desire was to be shaved. He stood before the kitchen mirror, first clipping the beard away with scissors, and as he lathered the remainder he said:
“Well, it’s a bad state of things, this, my sister dead and my mother gone to America. What shall us do!”
He perceived in the glass that she was smiling.
“There’s naught funny in it, my comic gal,” he bawled indignantly, “what are you laughing at!”
“I wer’n’t laughing. It’s your mother that’s dead.”
“My mother that’s dead, I know.”
“And Miss Alice that’s gone to America.”
“To America, I know, I know, so you can stop making your bullock’s eyes and get me something to eat. What’s been going on here?”
She gave him an outline of affairs. He looked at her sternly when he asked her about his sweetheart.
“Has Rosa Beauchamp been along here?”
“No,” said Phemy, and he was silent. She was surprised at the question. The Beauchamps were such respectable high-up people that to Phemy’s simple mind they could not possibly favour an alliance, now, with a man that had been in prison; it was absurd, but she did not say so to him. And she was bewildered to find that her conviction was wrong, for Rosa came along later in the day and everything between her master and his sweetheart was just as before; Phemy had not divined so much love and forgiveness in high-up people.
It was the same with everything else. The old harsh rushing life was resumed, Weetman turned to his farm with an accelerated vigour to make up for the lost time and the girl’s golden week or two of ease became an unforgotten dream. The pails, the guns, the harness, crept back into the kitchen. Spiders, cockroaches, and mice were more noticeable than ever before, and Weetman himself seemed embittered, harsher. Time alone could never still him, there was a force in his frame, a buzzing in his blood. But there was a difference between them now; Phemy no longer feared him. She obeyed him, it is true, with eagerness, she worked in the house like a woman and in the fields like a man. They ate their meals together, and from this dissonant comradeship the girl in a dumb kind of way began to love him.
One April evening on coming in from the fields he found her lying on the couch beneath the window, dead plumb fast asleep, with no meal ready at all. He flung his bundle of harness to the flags and bawled angrily to her. To his surprise she did not stir. He was somewhat abashed, he stepped over to look at her. She was lying on her side. There was a large rent in her bodice between sleeve and shoulder; her flesh looked soft and agreeable to him. Her shoes had slipped off to the floor; her lips were folded in a sleepy pout.
“Why, she’s quite a pretty cob,” he murmured. “She’s all right, she’s just tired, the Lord above knows what for.”
But he could not rouse the sluggard. Then a fancy moved him to lift her in his arms; he carried her from the kitchen and staggering up the stairs laid the sleeping girl on her own bed. He then went downstairs and ate pie and drank beer in the candle-light, guffawing once or twice, “A pretty cob, rather.” As he stretched himself after the meal a new notion amused him: he put a plate-ful of food upon a tray together with a mug of beer and the candle. Doffing his heavy boots and leggings he carried the tray into Phemy’s room. And he stopped there.
III
The new circumstance that thus slipped into her life did not effect any noticeable alteration of its general contour and progress, Weetman did not charge towards her. Phemy accepted his mastership not alone because she loved him but because her powerful sense of loyalty covered all the possible opprobrium. She did not seem to mind his continued relations with Rosa.
Towards midsummer one evening Glastonbury came in in the late dusk. Phemy was there in the darkened kitchen. “Master,” she said immediately he entered. He stopped before her. She continued: “Something’s happened.”
“Huh, while the world goes popping round something shall always happen.”
“It’s me–I’m took–a baby, master,” she said. He stood stock-still. His back was to the light, she could not see the expression on his face, perhaps he wanted to embrace her.
“Let’s have a light, sharp,” he said in his brusque way. “The supper smells good but I can’t see what I’m smelling, and I can only fancy what I be looking at.”
She lit the candles and they ate supper in silence. Afterwards he sat away from the table with his legs outstretched and crossed, hands sunk into pockets, pondering while the girl cleared the table. Soon he put his powerful arm around her waist and drew her to sit on his knees.
“Are ye sure o’ that?” he demanded.
She was sure.
“Quite?”
She was quite sure.
“Ah, well then,” he sighed conclusively, “we’ll be married.”
The girl sprang to her feet. “No, no, no–how can you be married –you don’t mean that–not married–there’s Miss Beauchamp!” She paused and added, a little unsteadily: “She’s your true love, master.”
“Ay, but I’ll not wed her,” he cried sternly. “If there’s no gainsaying this that’s come on you, I’ll stand to my guns. It’s right and proper for we to have a marriage.”
His great thick-fingered hands rested upon his knees; the candles threw a wash of light upon his polished leggings; he stared into the fireless grate.
“But we do not want to do that,” said the girl, dully and doubtfully. “You have given your ring to her, you’ve given her your word. I don’t want you to do this for me. It’s all right, master, it’s all right.”
“Are ye daft?” he cried. “I tell you we’ll wed. Don’t keep clacking about Rosa. . . . I’ll stand to my guns.” He paused before adding: “She’d gimme the rightabout, fine now–don’t you see, stupid–but I’ll not give her the chance.”
Her eyes were lowered. “She’s your true love, master.”
“What would become of you and your child? Ye couldn’t bide here!”
“No,” said the trembling girl.
“I’m telling you what we must do, modest and proper; there’s naught else to be done, and I’m middling glad of it, I am. Life’s a see-saw affair. I’m middling glad of this.”
So, soon, without a warning to any one, least of all to Rosa Beauchamp, they were married by the registrar. The change in her domestic status produced no other change; in marrying Weetman she but married all his ardour, she was swept into its current. She helped to milk cows, she boiled nauseating messes for pigs, chopped mangolds, mixed meal, and sometimes drove a harrow in his windy fields. Though they slept together she was still his servant. Sometimes he called her his “pretty little cob” and then she knew he was fond of her. But in general his custom was disillusioning. His way with her was his way with his beasts; he knew what he wanted, it was easy to get. If for a brief space a little romantic flower began to bud in her breast it was frozen as a bud, and the vague longing disappeared at length from her eyes. And she became aware that Rosa Beauchamp was not yet done with; somewhere in the darkness of the fields Glastonbury still met her. Phemy did not mind.
In the new year she bore him a son that died as it came to life. Glas was angry at that, as angry as if he had lost a horse. He felt that he had been duped, that the marriage had been a stupid sacrifice, and in this he was savagely supported by Rosa. And yet Phemy did not mind; the farm had got its grip upon her, it was consuming her body and blood.