Читать книгу: «The Making of William Edwards; or, The Story of the Bridge of Beauty», страница 5

CHAPTER IX.
THE BAFFLED AGENT

Mr. Pryse mounted his horse and trotted away from the farm, biting his long nails as he went in sheer vexation. His survey had not been as satisfactory to himself as he had anticipated. The land was in good cultivation, and every one was at work upon it. In one brown field lime lay in round, white heaps; compost, from the farmyard, showed in dark patches, ready for distribution on the grass land. In one field Evan was sowing oats; in another plot, where the spade had turned over the ground in well-defined furrows, Rhys was dibbling holes for planting, and Davy followed, dropping in something he carried in a small basket, which would have baffled the sharp optics of the observer, had he not come across Ales, besides a heap of seed potatoes, cutting them up into pieces where the eyes were beginning to shoot, and seen Davy bring his empty basket for a fresh supply.

'Mrs. Edwards do be in the house, sir,' said the young woman, as a hint that his inquisitorial observation was unpleasant; and, after a sneer at what he called 'experimental farming,' the hint had been taken.

He had already been on to the moorlands to inspect sheep and goats, and put the shepherd through the fine sieve, and had come back over newly-sown crops, or springing shoots of green ones, heedless where the hoofs of his horse might fall. Had he been lord of the land in full possession, he could scarcely have been more indifferent; had he been tenant, he might have been more careful. As he neared the homestead, and saw barn and outbuildings in good repair, where he had expected dilapidation, he pressed his thin lips close together, but when he came upon the newly-erected sties, the thin lips spread, and made an abortive attempt to curl.

'So that is how you propose to carry on your farm, is it? Aping the gentry!' he said, with a sneer, addressing Mrs. Edwards as he dismounted, the sound of hoof-beats having brought her to the dairy door. 'Do you imagine it will pay you to house your hogs? You will be for putting your goats into limbo next.'

''Deed, and I wish I could,' was her response. 'They do so much damage to the trees and thatch.'

'Ugh! And pray where did you see hogs so accommodated? Not in the Vale of Glamorgan, I know. We don't house pigs as snugly as our labourers.'

'Sure, sir, it was in England, when I was in service there. And at Castella and Llantwit. But, perhaps, sir, you will be coming in and have a glass of cider and a bite of bread and cheese?'

He looked snappish enough to take a bite at her – or her farm – as he answered: 'England, indeed! Surely Welsh ways are best for Welsh people. You will not find English ones prosper here.'

Nevertheless, he followed her into the house, noticing as he went that the dairy had been enclosed and partitioned off close to the jamb of the outer door, and was shut in by its own door on the left, so as to preserve it from the dust of traffic across, and from the open storage on the right.

'Is that another of your English ways?' he asked, as he passed on.

'Yes, sir.'

'Humph! And your wheel, and your glass windows, and your potatoes? You will not find many imitators, Mrs. Edwards.'

''Deed, sir, and I don't be looking for imitators, whatever; unless, perhaps, my children and my servants may be for teaching theirs, as I do be teaching them.'

She had spread a clean, homespun linen cloth on the table under the cheese and the jug of cider, even though she disliked the agent and suspected his errand. Private feeling must not interfere with hospitality.

He, for his part, accepted her attentions as a right, making as free with the cheese and bread and cider as if they had been ordered at an inn, with the relishing consciousness they would not have to be paid for.

'Perhaps,' said he, after a good draught of the cider, 'you learned to make that in England too?' the old ugly smile on his thin lips.

'Partly, sir. In Herefordshire.'

Narrowed as were the slits between his eyelids, nothing escaped his roving eyes.

'What's that?' he ejaculated, pointing with his riding whip, as he rose to depart, to a rudely-constructed tower William was raising on the oak chest with his stone chips. The boy had backed into a corner in front of his sister Jonet, as if he recognised a foe in the stranger. Shyness he had none.

His mother explained. 'Willem's building a Tower of Babil.'

'Humph! If he can do that, he might be set to something useful. There,' said Mr. Pryse, 'that will find him employment,' and, with a stroke of his whip, he swept down the boy's tower, a malicious chuckle shaking his skinny throat as he strode out of the kitchen to mount his horse.

As he rode away he heard a boy's passionate scream behind him, and felt the sharp pelting of a couple of small stones between his shoulders. He turned round in his saddle, and shook his whip-hand at the child, who, with face aflame, cried after him —

'You bad man! bad man, you!'

But he only chuckled, as if the incident amused him.

His satisfaction was but temporary, and before he had well reached the level he began biting his nails with vexation, for he saw only signs of improved husbandry, nothing on which he could pounce as betokening ruin.

After a few days came a more welcome visitor to the farm, in the guise of a travelling packman, with his string of mules, on his rounds to collect the stockings, flannels, blankets, and linseys, knitted and woven in the farms and cottages scattered among the mountains or grouped in villages. For these he was willing to pay in coin, but he preferred to exchange for the English goods with which his beasts were laden, not so much of ribbon and laces, gaily-coloured gown-pieces, or cheap trinkets, as of useful hardware, knives, forks, spoons, crockery, pots and pans, needles, pins, tapes, and buttons; such goods as were in general demand for household use. Very rarely did he display any more gorgeous drapery than a silken neckerchief, or a bright ribbon for a bow. The Welsh still clung to their national costume, and, with few exceptions, were clothed entirely in woollen of native growth and manufacture. Still he carried hats with him, and the flannels or duffle collected in one part he could dispose of elsewhere.

The jingling bells on his leading mule proclaimed his arrival. There was a general rush to surround him and inspect his wares, the children crowding in with the rest, and the clack of tongues was indescribable.

His periodical visits were the great events of the year. The first duty was that of hospitality. Oaten bread and cheese and milk were set before him, and the winter's pile of knitted stockings and mittens brought out whilst he refreshed. These, as the man knew of old, had to be examined, priced, and paid for before Mrs. Edwards would allow one of his packs or panniers to be unloaded. Then ensued the bargaining for bright-coloured mugs and bowls; there was no need of teacups and saucers, for no one drank tea. It was almost an unknown luxury there. Jonet and William were favoured with a mug apiece, adorned with waves of bright blue on a yellow ground. Rhys had a new hat. Davy plucked at his mother's skirts and reminded her that he was to be finally breeched when the packman came round, and he was not disappointed.

Something was wanted and bought for house and everybody.

Ales, who had smartened herself up of late, invested in a bright-coloured cotton kerchief or shawl to be worn crossed over her short jacket, and a stout comb to keep her tangled locks in order; the need for which she learned by surveying her own good looks in a red-framed looking-glass Evan had given to her – a glass not larger than his own right hand, but it was better as a mirror than the broken water under the spring, and might be taken as an earnest of his especial goodwill.

The ensuing rent was paid duly; and, in spite of prophecies and forecasts, it was as duly paid in succeeding years.

But Mr. Pryse grew no more civil; indeed, he seemed ever on the watch for some pretext to turn the widow and her children off the farm she had done so much to improve. He had never forgiven Edwards for saying of him, 'he was too grasping to be altogether honest,' and, when the farmer was drowned, rejoiced as only an evil-minded curmudgeon could do.

It was no satisfaction to him, as years went by, to see one whitewashed cottage after another stand out like a pearl among emerald fields and foliage, and know whose house had been the model. Nor could he hear of Owen Griffith and others venturing on a potato crop without a sneer. And he positively snarled when he heard the prices the widow's piglings and bacon brought in the market. Not that he ascribed the prosperity of Mrs. Edwards to her own good management. No; he set that down to Evan Evans and his previous initiation on the Castella estate. He owed the farm-servant a grudge accordingly. He rejoiced when he heard that Rhys regarded Evans as an interloper, and never missed an opportunity, by subtle sneer or insinuation, to fan the supposed antagonism into an active flame.

As years rolled on, and he saw the down of incipient manhood darken on the lip of Rhys, ever his mother's escort on rent-days, his innuendoes became broader and stronger. There was an air of self-sustained mastership about the sturdy young fellow that suggested ripe soil for his weeds.

'Humph!' said he, when Rhys was about eighteen; 'I should have thought a stout chap like you might have saved your mother the cost of a head man.'

At a later date: 'Well, young man, I never expected your father's son to submit to a servant's rule so long.'

Had there been any submission in the case, Rhys would have taken fire at once. No hints would have been needed to provoke rebellion that would have led to the ousting of Evan. But the latter had never presumed to give orders, and, of late, had deferred to Rhys as his 'young master.'

Whatever suggestions he made in farming matters were made to Mrs. Edwards. Command rested with her.

Then Rhys had conceived a mortal antipathy to the agent that first rent-paying day, and he suspected a sinister motive in every word that fell from the ill-natured, thin lips.

And it had been made a condition, by the shrewd widow, that Rhys should bridle his tongue, and allow nothing said by Mr. Pryse to provoke hasty reply, or she must take Evan in his stead as witness. Yet it was hard sometimes for either to listen quietly to the agent's coarse and insulting speeches, of which his noble employer had no suspicion.

Some of his sharpest bullets were fired from a double-barrelled gun. 'Well, Mrs. Edwards, I hear you and Evan Evans are about to make a match of it at last. How soon is this fine young man of yours to have a step-father?'

A frown darkened the brow of Rhys, and an indignant retort was on his tongue, but, before a second word was uttered, the frown changed to a significant smile at a look from his mother.

It was an open secret at the farm that Ales and Evan were courting, and only waited until they had saved enough money to set up housekeeping and farming for themselves, as husband and wife.

Had Mr. Pryse but known it, there was an element of disquiet and rebellion at Brookside Farm, of which he might have taken advantage.

But he never gave a second thought to the boy whose walls he had levelled so wantonly. He had not seen that same boy, his passion over, pick up every scattered bit of stone, and patiently raise his walls once more.

He had no suspicion how the strong will and pertinacity of that three years child would come later into collision with the mastership of his eldest brother, or the important part these stone chips would play in William's life, or how they might affect the welfare of the whole county, or make an enduring name when his own was forgotten.

CHAPTER X.
FRIENDS AND BROTHERS

There was no necessity for Mr. Pryse to suggest 'employment' for little William. In the last century, and far into this, children were set to work and expected to earn their own living at a wofully early age, and that long before machinery came into use and drove them into factories to be the slaves of brutal overseers, who scored their six and eight year old backs with weals from whip or stick on the slightest provocation. William Hutton, the historian, tells how he, a small child of seven years, was apprenticed, in 1730, to an overseer of Lombe's silk mill, in Derby, how he had to wear high pattens to reach the machine, had to rise at five in the depth of winter and hurry to work, slipping down on the ice as he ran, and how he was beaten till his back was all festering sores. And this was no uncommon case. I, who write this, can remember when the little barefooted children went to the cotton factories and print works at five in the morning, and worked till seven or eight at night.

The boys and girls of this generation have no conception how children were trained and treated a few generations back. Not the poor only. The children of even rich parents had to endure painful punishments both at school and at home, and were fed sparely on coarse food for their health's sake. The late noble Lord Shaftesbury related how he and a sister were well-nigh starved in their childhood through the negligence of parents and servants.

History and biography teem with such instances. So that when I state that William Edwards and Jonet were sent into their mother's fields to weed, and pick up stones, and scare the birds away from newly-sown lands before the boy was six years old, I cast no reflection on his mother, who had no experience of a different state of things.

Nay, for her time, she was enlightened, and being a woman with good natural feeling, she was careful they were not taxed beyond their strength, as she and her husband had been; but that children should spend their hours in play, when they were old enough to be of use, had never dawned on her imagination. She considered she was doing her duty by them in setting them early to work, especially as she was careful they should be taught to read also.

Davy worked in field and farm, alongside Rhys, without a murmur of hardship. And when Jonet was first set to feed the chickens, or to look for the eggs of hens that laid away, to pull peas or beans, or to shell the latter for the pot (peas were boiled in the pod), imitative William, always at her heels, and wanting to show his own cleverness, set himself to do likewise.

And so long as he set himself voluntarily to work to assist Jonet, he was busy as a bee, and proud of his doings. Or when his mother or Ales sent him hither or thither to fetch or carry, or directed him to perform small services, he was as willing and amenable to order as most boys of his age. But no sooner did Rhys take advantage of his precocious industry, and exercise an assumed right to command, and bid him do this or that, than William began to rebel.

He was docile enough to his brother as a teacher. He was more eager to learn to read than Rhys was to instruct. Davy and Jonet took their spelling and reading lessons as compulsory tasks – Davy placidly, and Jonet with uneasy disfavour – but William with an absolute desire to know.

He no sooner discovered that the Ten Commandments painted up in the church, and the inscriptions on the upright gravestones in the churchyard, were just made up of the alphabetical characters on his painted battledore, and that the big Bible his mother read aloud to them was all a mixture of the same letters, than a craving to penetrate the mystery of these combinations seized him. He felt he had achieved something when he made his first grand discovery on a headstone taller than himself; but when, at his request, Evan read out the inscription, his perplexity and curiosity increased.

It was singular to see the little fellow – he was short for his age – Sunday by Sunday tracing letter or word, with tiny finger, on some grey old slab, while his seniors were gossiping all around.

'I tell you what,' said Rhys to him one Sunday when so employed, 'you might have been born in a stone quarry. I'm sure you ought to live in one, you do be so fond of the dirty rubbish.'

'What's a stone quarry?' put in William, with wide-open eyes.

'Oh, bother! It's a place where stone grows,' was the impatient reply.

'Grows like trees?' and the wondering eyes of the six years old querist opened still wider.

'Oh, what a plague you do be! No, grows like coal;' and away strode Rhys to avoid further questioning – a common but very unsatisfactory way of dealing with an inquiring child.

'I'll be asking Robert Jones, he will tell me,' said William to himself. 'Rhys do be caring more for Cate Griffith than for me, whatever,' his aggrieved looks following his well-grown brother as he strode over the grassy mound to join the weaver's wife and daughter under the patriarchal yew-tree, with all the importance of incipient manhood.

The following day William was missing from the farm, but as this was not uncommon, only slight uneasiness was felt until evening.

The boy had long before struck up a strange friendship with the red-haired peat-cutter, who, in fulfilment of his early promise, had taken him on his ass when bound to a colliery across the river for culm, and there let him see the horse plodding round and round in a circle to wind up coal and grimy colliers from the dark, deep pit-shaft, and let down the empty tubs to be refilled. There the child had looked round in wonder at the great black heaps of coal, and at the half-naked children sent down the terrible dark hole, to work in the bowels of the mine, as Robert Jones explained to him.

Later he had taken the little fellow to see how peat was cut with long, narrow, flat shovels, 'shaped like a marrow-spoon,' from the boggy top of Eglwysilan Mountain. And when his sled was loaded, he had placed the child before him on the end of the sled, and gone sliding down the steep mountain-side with him swiftly and securely, to the youngster's infinite delight. He was too young to dream of danger, and to the man, long practice had made the perilous descent safe and easy, swift as was the downward motion, and sharp as was the jerk at the bottom. And many a ride on the turf-cutter's sled did William have after that.

The man had no children of his own, and, perhaps, that was the reason he took so kindly to the lad; answering his strange questions to the best of his untutored ability, and frequently giving him a mount on one of his patient beasts between tubs or panniers when going for loads, or carrying them for sale not too far away. To him the child could open all his wondering heart, fearing neither repulse nor ridicule, of which he had too much at home; and so their friendship grew.

On that particular Monday morning, Robert Jones had started on a long round, and nothing remained for the young inquirer, who had sought him at his ordinary haunts, but to limp homeward in the afternoon, hungry, footsore, and disappointed.

Cate Griffith, returning from the brook with a pitcher of water on her head and another in her hand, caught sight of him as he was passing her father's door.

'Name o' goodness!' she cried, 'what brings you here this time o' day? Look you, father, here's little Willem Edwards!'

The weaver, then changing his shuttle, looked out from his casement window, and in two minutes was at the door questioning the wanderer.

Without any shyness or reservation the boy told where he had been, and for what; his brother's initiative remarks with the rest.

Cate, now a rosy-cheeked, buxom lass on the borderland of womanhood, began to laugh outright, as she had often laughed before when Rhys amused her with some story of William's out-of-the-way questions.

Her father checked her sternly. 'What do you be laughing at?'

''Deed, he do be so queer. Rhys do say he be always at play with bits of stones. And now he asks if they do grow like trees. Oh, Willem, you are droll!'

Again her laugh broke out. William, child though he was, crimsoned to the roots of his brown hair. He seemed to comprehend that Rhys had made a jest of him, and no one is more sensitive to ridicule than a child of tender years.

'Carry your pitchers into the house, and stay there!' cried her father. Then turning to the boy, who hesitated whether to linger or walk on, he said kindly —

'Never mind Cate, my little man, she talks foolishness. Come and sit on this bench beside me. I'll try to serve instead of Robert Jones.'

William's face lit up. He climbed to a seat by the weaver's side, content to find he was no longer laughed at. And very intently he listened to Owen's simple explanation that the mountain was nearly all stone, and that a quarry was the place where strong men broke away the stone for building walls and houses, and that the mountains had been there ever since God created the world, so that he did not think stone grew. And if Owen's was not a learned geological definition, it was all the better adapted to juvenile comprehension. But, simple as it was, a shower of whys and hows were rained on the exponent during its course.

Then William rose to depart, but something in his face, or in his lagging gait, or a casual word, caused the weaver to interrogate the boy. This elicited the admission that he had strayed away from home in the morning, and that no one knew, and, moreover, that he was very hungry.

Owen looked grave. He called for Cate to bring some bread and a cup of milk, and began to read the boy a lesson on the inconsiderate wrong he had done, and the anxiety he would cause his mother.

'You should never leave home without permission, Willem. Your poor mother will be fretting and crying for fear lest you have fallen over the rocks, or got into the river and been drowned, or lost your way on the mountain as you did four years ago, when Evan found you asleep under the Druids' rocking-stone. It is very cruel and wicked for a child to stray from home without leave.'

William hung his head. 'I did not mean any harm,' he began; 'but,' in a changed tone, 'what's the Druids?' —

'Oh, you're here, are you? A fine hunt you have given us all, you young plague,' came in an angry shout from Rhys, who had crossed the brook and was advancing at a run.

William's question died away unanswered. He got down from his stone seat inclined to be penitent for his misbehaviour. Owen Griffith had shown him that he had done wrong. He might have gone home and told his mother he was sorry. But Rhys, who had been as much alarmed at his absence as the rest, now he was found, caught him by the shoulder and shook him roughly.

'Look you, if you do be running off again, I shall give you a good thrashing.'

''Deed you won't,' was thrown back at him defiantly by William, whose penitence was at an end.

'Won't I? You'll see. Sure, I've half a mind to do it now.'

'Nay, nay,' interposed Griffith. 'Willem is sorry. He did not know he was doing wrong.'

'Then he will have to learn. It's quite time he made himself useful. Jonet did before she was his age. And so did I. We can have no idlers on our farm, whatever. Ah, Cate, is that you?' His voice had brought the girl to the open window. She leaned out, blushing like a peony. He joined her, and said something which made her giggle and provoked reply. Then ensued some whispering and laughter. Rhys apparently forgot all about William and his mother's anxiety whilst occupied so pleasantly, for there was no doubt Cate had more than a third-cousinly attraction for him, and chance opportunities for seeing her except on Sundays were not frequent.

When his errand recurred to him, William had disappeared, and notwithstanding Rhys' longer legs, the fatigue of the small ones, the gathering dusk, and the steepness of the ascending path to the farm, the truant crossed the threshold first.

At once uneasiness resolved itself into displeasure. He was scolded on all sides, and threatened with the loss of a supper if ever he ventured to give them such a fright again.

'I wanted Robert Jones,' was all the excuse he made. The scolding was received with stolid silence, which was called sullenness.

Yet he had not forgotten Owen's picture of his mother's distress, or his grave reproof for straying away, and had he been differently received, he might have been contrite and sued for pardon.

It is a difficult matter, even in these analytic days, to search out the inner workings of the child-mind, or to understand all that influences wayward moods. How were those rudely-cultivated farmers to penetrate beneath the surface, to see the undeveloped oak in the immature acorn?

'Robert Jones do be spoiling that boy,' said Mrs. Edwards, when the child was in bed. 'I wonder what he wanted with the man?'

'Wanted? Sure, he wanted to ask if stones do grow like trees,' said Rhys, in a tone of impatient scorn. 'It was only last week he did be asking me if the trees made the wind, because it was always windy when the trees tossed about.'

'Well, don't they?' queried stolid Davy, amidst a roar of laughter, in which even the mother joined.

'Now, don't you be as silly as Willem. I never before knew you ask such a foolish question,' said Rhys dogmatically.

'No, Davy,' explained his mother, without stopping her busy wheel, 'it is the wind that blows the trees about,' – an answer which sufficed for him. He was not curious to learn what caused the winds, or whence they came, as William had been. He accepted facts as they were, untroubled by vain speculations.

Undoubtedly William – the father's namesake, her youngest born – was the mother's darling, in spite of his odd ways. And however cross she might have been overnight, in the morning, when the others had dispersed, she took him to task for straying away without leave; not angrily, but sadly, showing him the trouble he was likely to cause, and the anxiety she had had, remembering the time when he was lost before.

It was a very effectual supplement to Owen Griffith's lecture; the sensitive boy's feelings were touched. He threw his arms around her neck, begged forgiveness, and promised the best of behaviour for the future.

Alas, for a child's promises! William went to work beside Jonet like a little man, helped in seed-time and harvest, and won commendations from Ales and Evan. But he had his dreamy hours; he continued to pile up stones in odd corners, and was alternately ridiculed and rebuked by Rhys, whose interference he resented.

This went on for about two years, trying the patience of both, and then came a more serious outbreak.