The Harringtons of Highcroft farm

Chapter XXII List Of Illustrations

“They made a Picturesque Pair, These Two”

Frontispiece

“ Never was there such an Incentive to

Labour as that Mill” .... To face p t 4

“ ‘ Gerard ! It’s — It’s Your Uncle Richard ! ’ ” ,, 50

“ I had to Listen to a Long and Serious

Lecture from Aunt Sophia ” „ 140

“‘Talk to Him,’ whispered Sylvia”. . ,, 168 ^

“ Andalusia continued to Pluck at the

“The Sexton was Coming Out of the

Norman Porch as we Passed the Church’’ „ 288

“‘Five Hundred— that’s what Benjamin

Harri’ton Owes Me’” .... „ 322 /

Highcroft Farm.

Chapter I. Uncle Benjamin

A June morning ; a long, narrow, upland field, wherein the first green of the wheat showed itself in straight, monotonous lines ; in the middle of the field myself, plodding steadily along, hoe in hand, clearing the wheat of weeds, which too often had a beauty not given to the smooth green blades that rose vigorously from the red earth at the bidding of the masterful sun.

I can look back across the long gap of intervening years to that particular morning, and see the growing wheat and the dew that still lingered on the shady sides of the rapidly swelling blades, and the red Mother Earth herself — good wife to the sun, and faithful sister to the snows and rains — and the hedgerows, gay with June roses, and the dwarf oaks standing like sentinels above them. The Ten- Acre lay on the topmost part of the highest ground in the parish ; each time that I gained its western extremity, after hoeing my way steadily from the eastern, I came to a fence over which I could look down into a valley lying two hundred feet below me. But, near as it was, this valley was no part of my country. In the opposite direction, at a mile’s distance from the Ten- Acre, the square tower of a village church rose above a ring of elm and ash. Here and

B

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there, where there was a break in that ring, the high gable of a barn or a granary showed itself ; here and there the sun smote warmly on the red-tiled roof of a farmhouse or on the gilded vane of a dovecote. All that meant the village — the centre of my small world.

It was matter of common repute that one could obtain an extensive prospect from the Ten- Acre. That depended upon the clearness of the atmosphere. On a day of proper conditions, one could see, looking in different directions, the flash of sunlight on the Humber, the towers of York Minster, and the Abbey Church of Selby, the long, low undulations of the Wolds, and the bolder outline of the Pennine Range. But such days were rare.

This was not one of them. As is often the case in June, there had been a heavy dew in the early morning — my thick boots were soaked with it, for there is nothing whereto the dew so clings as it does to growing wheat — and it had been succeeded by a hot sun. And so the horizon was wrapped in steamy clouds which took prismatic colours as they strayed about the edges of the deep woods.

It was very quiet there in the Ten- Acre. Now and then, when I paused — perhaps from weariness, perhaps from unconscious imitation of older labourers, who are given to resting ten minutes after working for five — when I paused, I say, and looked about me I saw nothing of human life anywhere. I knew where it was to be found by the occasional appearance of a red-tiled roof here and there in the landscape, and by the spirals of smoke which rose from behind a covert or a plantation. But there was no one but myself working in that particular part of the parish just then, and since entering the Ten- Acre at seven o’clock in the morning I had not seen a human face or heard a human voice.

Not that this little patch of God’s earth was a solitude of silence. There was a thick covert, or spinney, at one corner of the Ten- Acre, and in it the birds were singing as if they could never exhaust their store of melody. High above me, mere fluttering specks in the blue, the skylarks essayed the sunward path, not silently, but with the rapturous song of a great desire. And as I neared the great hedgerows at either end of the field I heard, long before I could smell the may-blossom that still lingered in them, and the delicate wild roses which had only just come, and were still as pink as an infant’s palm, the humming and buzzing of the myriad insects which haunted the undergrowth or wove fantastic dances in the sunlight. Now and then, too, I caught the faint bleating of sheep from some field in the valley, and at times the barking of dogs far off across the land.

Men and women who work in solitude in the fields are quick to make a companion of something, even of an inanimate — or so-called inanimate — object. A particular tree, a particular hawthorn bush in a hedgerow, an old gate, a rock or stone jutting out of the wayside — these things, to the lonely, may become more than close friends. I had many such friends in Various parts of the parish, and could talk to them much more freely than to men or women. They had the gift of sympathy, and at least could say nothing cruel or unkind. And they spoke eloquently enough to me, as all things of Nature did. Such human beings as I knew thought me mad if they found me staring abstractedly at a common flower, or listening by the hour together — looking vacant enough, no

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doubt — to a thrush in the holly-hedge. I could sit underneath a favourite tree, or on some grey rock, or by some well for a whole day, and feel that the tree, and the rock, and the well understood — besides, they carried their parts through the world with such sublime patience. The tree bore the buffeting of all the winds ; the rock was always firm, immovable ; the well was ever cheerful — if ill-fortune disturbed or muddied it, how quickly its face cleared again !

I had a good friend in close proximity to the Ten- Acre. Two fields’ space away, at the far edge of the high ground which overtopped the valley, stood the village mill, a high, cone-shaped structure, for all the world like a sugar-loaf, surmounted by a quaint wooden weathercock, and furnished with four great sails. Never was there such an incentive to labour as that mill. The sails went round as if they could never tire ; to fix your eyes steadily on one of them was to learn all the secrets of life. For now it was pointing straight to heaven, and now it was half-way between heaven and earth, and now it was gazing on earth itself, and now half-way again between earth and heaven, and now once more looking on the high sun and the eternal blue. And its rhythmic motion voiced itself into two words : “ Go on — go on — go on — go on ! ”

He is the best friend who spurs his friend to ceaseless endeavour. That was why the mill was a good friend to me, hoeing wheat on a hot June morning in the Ten-Acre. It was no easy thing for a lad of fifteen to hoe wheat from seven to twelve, and again from one till five in weather like that. I had got rid of my coat before eight o’clock, and of my waistcoat before ten — now I was working in nothing

AS THAT MILL.”

(/»• 4 -)

but shirt and trousers, and the sweat was running off me in rivulets. But I was used to that, and to a hot sun, and to days spent out in a heavy rain, and deep snow, and to all the vagaries of the weather, and minded nothing of any. Yet of all forms of farm labour, I cared least for hoeing of wheat or turnips. There was a certain amount of interest in shepherding, and a vast amount of skill in ploughing, but hoeing was a veritable monotony. Up the field in a straight line, down the field in another straight line, only a foot or so away. It needed several hours’ work before you had appreciably moved away from the point where you had started. It used to make me think of a beetle which I had once seen crawling up and down the bars of a gridiron.

All the same, there was so much to be done, and the only way to do it was to follow the advice of the creaking sails of the old mill. Go on, go on, go on! Nothing but going on would do the task that must be accomplished ere evening fell.

I heard the clock in the village church strike eleven as I came to that end of the Ten- Acre which overlooked the valley. There, in a quiet nook beneath the sheltering hedgerow, lay my coat, my waistcoat, and my dinner basket. A vision of what lay hidden within the basket crossed my mind as I caught sight of it. There was a pasty of meat and another of fruit, and a hunch of bread and cheese, together with a bottle of small ale and another of cold tea — a capital assuager of thirst if you keep the milk out of it and sweeten it but slightly. Just then I thought little of the food — a hot June sun is no appetiser — but I suddenly discovered that I was thirsty. And for the first time since I had entered

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the field at seven o’clock I sat down at the foot of the hedgerow and got out the bottle of cold tea and drank. That was when I fell away from strict duty. If I set out to do a thing there was a certain stubborn doggedness in me that made me do it — I had meant to go on hoeing until noon without a break. But as I was putting the bottle back into the basket I caught sight of a book which I had slipped in with the food just before leaving my grandmother’s farmhouse. It was one of a small collection of books that had once belonged to my father — an old, worm-eaten, leather-bound treatise on some dry-as-dust subject which had been printed in London in Charles the Second’s time. I do not suppose I understood very much of it, but anything printed had always had a sacred value to me, and I was nearly as fond of books as of Nature.

I had no other thought than just to peep into this old, musty duodecimo. I had never opened it before, so it was a new world. Perhaps its first page was very dry and sleep provoking, perhaps four hours of continuous labour in the hot sun had made me drowsy — at any rate, I fell asleep. And in those days I could sleep soundly.

Stretched out there on the bank under the hedgerow I heard nothing, knew nothing, until a sudden sharp, stinging pain on the fleshy part of my bare arm brought me to my feet and to consciousness. I rubbed my eyes, blinking in the sunlight. And as I did so I was aware of laughter — the malicious, spiteful laughter of children — and of a man’s voice, foolishly jeering.

“There, I thought that would touch my young gentleman up ! ”

The sleep was out of my eyes by that time. I looked round me. It was, of course, Uncle Benjamin Harrington. He had driven his smart dog-cart along the soft earth of the headland, and finding me asleep under the hedge had awakened me with a flip of his knotted whip-lash. He looked at me now with the sneer of the ignorant bully that he was.

I looked back at him. I daresay that a third person — of any power of observation — had he been present at this and similar interviews between myself and Uncle Benjamin, would have said that here were two people who hated each other with a very cordial hatred, and who were perpetually on their guard against each other. Nor would he have been wrong.

I gave Uncle Benjamin a good long stare, putting into my eyes, I daresay, all the hatred and contempt I felt for him. Then I looked slowly at his companions. By his side sat his wife, whose mean, secretive character had written itself too plainly on her face ; on the back seat of the dog-cart sat his daughter, my cousin Bertha, a girl of my own age; between me and the dog-cart, hands in pockets and laughing, as they all were, stood his son, my cousin Thomas, a boy of twelve. And I saw why he had got out of the trap — it was to secure my book, which Uncle Benjamin was now turning over.

I looked down at my bare arm. Where the knot at the end of the whip-lash had caught it there was a dull red mark which was fast deepening in colour. I looked from it to the woman. She flushed a little and stirred uneasily in her seat.

Even then I had a certain command over a temper that had been sorely tried. Without a word I picked up my hoe and made to pass the front of the mare.

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With a jerk of his reins Uncle Benjamin forced the beast across the path.

“ Here, you, sir ! ” he said. “ What are you going to do ? "

“ Going on with my work,” I replied, in a steadier voice than his.

“ And I should think you were ! ” he sneered. “ Don’t you think it’s a nice thing, now, that I came here, expecting to find you at work, as you ought to be, and instead of that, find you asleep in the hedge-bottom with a book at your side, you idle young dog ? Eh?”

I leaned my hands on the top of the hoe, and resting my chin on my hands stared at him in silence for a moment. Then I smiled.

“ If you’ll see what I’ve done,” I said slowly, “ as you easily can by turning your head, you’ll know that I’ve finished more than a morning’s work already — a good deal more than any man you’ve got on the farm would have done. I do my work honestly — I don’t hoe for five minutes and idle for ten. There’s some difference between me and your other men.”

“ Oh, there’s some difference between them and you, is there ? ” he sneered uglily. “ And what difference may there be, Master Cockril ? ”

“ More than one,” said I. “ But one in particular.”

“ Oh, one in particular, is there ? ” he retorted. “ Dear-y me ! And you can give it a fine name, no doubt.”

“ It doesn’t need one,” I answered. “ It’s merely that you pay them and you don’t pay me. That’s perhaps why I’m more conscientious than they are. It helps me to think that I’m working more for work’s sake than for you.”

That fetched the blood into his face and the passion to his lips.

“You infernal young scoundrel!” he burst out. “ Pay you ! — you’re paid only too well ! Who finds you house-room ? Who finds you your meat ? Who finds you in clothes ? Who ”

I suddenly burst into laughter. I think it cannot have been pleasant laughter to hear, for the woman stirred restlessly in her seat again, and the two children became curiously grave. And laughing, I threw down the hoe and picked up my old jacket — a thing which had been patched up so often that it was now scarcely possible to say which was the original cloth. I held it up. My cousin Thomas’s suit of fine blue serge suddenly assumed a shining splendour.

“ Clothes ? ” I said. “ There’s a better coat than that on the scarecrow in Spinks’s field yonder. A beggar wouldn’t wear that. But it’s good enough to work in.”

“ And what are you but a beggar ? ” he demanded fiercely. “ Haven’t I had to keep you for years. Did your father ever do anything for you — a poor, shiftless ”

“ He was my father,” I said very steadily, “ and my mother was your sister.”

“ And as poor a couple of mortals as ever lived ! ” he said, with the same ugly sneer. “ Your father never did anything but moon over his books, and your mother was as helpless as a doll. They were naught but a couple of children — couldn’t pay their way ”

“ Can you ? ” I said, staring him straight in the face and smiling a little.

Those two words produced a strange effect. Uncle Benjamin’s face, which had been red with

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anger, suddenly paled. He had been leaning forward in the trap ; he pulled himself erect with a quick jerk, and at the same time his wife turned towards him with a look in which more than one emotion was blended.

I was young and cruel. I had hit him in a tender spot, and before he had time to retort I hit him again — harder — in the same place.

“ How did you get the money to pay Brewster for the posts and rails ? ” I asked, smiling at him.

If my first question had produced a storm, the second, by comparison, produced a cyclone. For a moment Uncle Benjamin gazed at me with eyes in which passion was mingled with incredulousness and fear — he looked as if he could not believe his ears. Then with an inarticulate growl he suddenly threw the reins into his wife’s lap, and snatching the whip from its socket made as if he would leap out of the trap — to fall upon me. His wife seized his arm.

“ Don’t, Benjamin ! ” I heard her say. “ Don’t you see, the lad ”

“ Let go ! ” he panted. “ Let ”

But a sudden diversion interrupted this scene. My cousin Thomas, a boy of singularly mischievous and malicious ingenuity, had for the last moment or two been hovering in my rear. There was a briar bush in the hedgerow close behind me, and he had stealthily broken off a shoot which was well furnished with sharp thorns, and now, as I stood with hands clasped behind my back, facing his father, he stole up behind me and drew it, saw-fashion, across my knuckles. I felt the blood squirt, warm and sticky, simultaneously with the fire-like bite of the thorns.

UNCLE BENJAMIN. n

I was quick on my feet in those days, and I swung round ere the lad could leap away, and smacked him so hard across his face that he reeled round like a top and fell head over heels into the briar bush. And from its depths he set up a howl that almost did justice to the sufferings which he doubtless experienced. Uncle Benjamin’s wife was one of those women who, cold to everything and to everybody outside their own interests and their own family, are capable of cherishing a fatuous affection for their own flesh and blood. As the cries of her pet lamb fell upon her ears she uttered an exclamation which almost rose into a shriek.

“ You wicked, good-for-nothing boy ! ” she cried. “ To strike a child not half your own size ! Why, there’s blood on his face ! ”

“ My blood,” I said quietly, holding up my lacerated hand. “ My blood.”

“ You deserve a good sound thrashing ! ” she went on. “ You great, ruffianly coward — a good sound thrashing — that’s what you want.”

“And he shall have it,” said Uncle Benjamin, who was almost choking with rage. “ Hold those reins, mother, and give me that ash-plant, you, Bertha, and I’ll thrash him till I can’t stand over him. I’ll show him who’s master here.”

But I was much too subtle for Uncle Benjamin. I had kept an eye upon him from the moment wherein I smacked Master Thomas across his shining, pastryfed face. He was a big, heavy man, and slow in his movements ; hard work on the land had made me active and agile. Before Uncle Benjamin had possessed himself of the ash-plant which Bertha obligingly drew from under the back seat I had dodged

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round the dog-cart and snatched the whip from its socket.

Now I had them at my mercy! I shall never forget the wild feeling of delight with which I sprang back from the trap and swung the long curling lash into the air. I think I let out a yell or scream of defiance — certain it is that Uncle Benjamin swore and threatened, that his wife shrieked, that Bertha howled, that Thomas, escaped from the briar bush, forgot his pain and stood open-mouthed.

“ Put that whip down, you young scoundrel ! ” stormed Uncle Benjamin.

I laughed, and lifted the whip still higher, brandishing it a little. And then —

Swish it fell across the mare’s flanks — swish it fell across the mare’s shoulders — swish again about the mare’s legs !

The mare had blood in her — Uncle Benjamin always drove good cattle — and the least touch of a whip was as repellant to her as the sting of a hornet. She gave one startled snort of indignation and astonishment, rose up on her hind legs, fought madly with her feet, and then with one wild plunge set off down the Ten-Acre in the maddest gallop I ever saw, with Uncle Benjamin tearing at the reins, the women clinging to the trap and the trap rocking and swaying like a ship in a storm.

There was a low hedge at the foot of the Ten- Acre — they went through it as if it had been paper, and plunged into the Twenty-Acre on the other side. I clambered up a tree in the hedgerow to watch them. The mare took them twice round the Twenty- Acre before she tried the low hedge again, and in trying it the second time she fell. From the way in which all three occupants of the trap were soon on their feet and bustling about it and the mare, I assured myself that they were not injured. And presently Uncle Benjamin led mare and trap into the lane.

I descended to earth. My cousin Thomas, horrorstricken and trembling, shrank away from me as I advanced upon him. He gazed at me as if he were fascinated.

“ Well, you miserable brat ! ” I said, cracking the whip. “ Have you had enough punishment for your cowardly trick, or do you want some more ? No more ? — then off you run, and there’s something to speed you.”

I gave him a smart cut round his legs and sent him off howling. In a few minutes Uncle Benjamin and his family were out of sight.

The village clock struck twelve. It was dinner-time. I sat down to my pasties and my small ale. But alas! I had no book to read. Uncle Benjamin had carried it away in that mad gallop.

Chapter II. Looking Back

Having no book to read, I turned to the pieces of newspaper in which my pasties had been wrapped, but finding them to be mere scraps of the Sicaster Signal , with nothing more entertaining than advertisements upon them, I quickly threw them aside, and found occupation in my own thoughts. That was an occupation to which I had turned at a very early period of my existence. I had been left so much to myself, had been so much obliged, by force of circumstance, to make myself my own company, that it was a second nature in me to look inward instead of outward whenever I was alone, which I generally was for the greater part of the day.

Looking back, it now seems to me a sad thing that for a boy of fifteen the encounter with Uncle Benjamin should have left me cold and emotionless. Beyond a feeling of supreme delight experienced on seeing the mare set off at racing speed, I was unmoved. There was not an extra heart-throb in me. I might have been a spectator at a play. If anything, I was slightly bored. I had gone through so many scenes with Uncle Benjamin. I should have enjoyed them more, felt them more if he had been more of a man. But for two years I had known, with a precocious child’s sure knowledge, that Uncle Benjamin, like all hectoring bullies, was an arrant coward at heart. He could cringe and fawn ; he was 14

LOOKING BACK.

as a sucking dove to folk whom he regarded as his superiors in the social scale, and his voice was bland and suave if his landlord deigned to converse with him at the rent dinner. And he was afraid of his wife. More than all — so far as I was concerned — he was afraid of me. He knew very well that I saw through him, and had a profound contempt for him. It sometimes chanced that he and I were left together for an hour or two — it might be when I helped him with his accounts or wrote letters for him, or if we went to measure a field (for he made me useful in as many ways as he could), or if we journeyed to a distant fair or market. On all these occasions, although we preserved an outward appearance of civility, we were each on guard. We were like wrestlers, circling round each other with wary eyes, neither of us anxious to attack, but each resolute upon defence. I laughed aloud as I sat in the hedge-bottom, eating my dinner and thinking these things over.

“ We’re a queer lot ! ” I said to myself. “ A queer lot, indeed ! ”

And in good truth a queer lot we were. At that time I had read very little in fiction, though it was merely for lack of opportunity; but I thought as I sat there that the Harrington family surely presented chances to any novelist who cared to aVail himself of them. And I began to think them over, not unnaturally using myself as a centre-point round which other people and things might centre.

What a marvellously interesting thing the life of a man is to the man himself, if he possesses a temperament which enables him to get clean outside himself, and to regard that life from a cold, emotionless, i6

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dispassionate standpoint! It is as if one had two lives: one, freed from the weaknesses and frailties and sad shortcomings of human nature, perpetually watching, enticing, being amused by and pitying the other, all too prone to give way to them. In the end, perhaps, this we shall find to be the truth — that there is in each of us the perfect and the imperfect, the perfect weighed down by the imperfect, and longing, yet with a great patience, to be free of it. And yet I cannot think that there is war between these two of the nature of the strife between flesh and soul of which St. Paul speaks ; to me this perfect state is that of sublime indifference, of cold unemotion. It is the cold, sunlit silence of the Arctic summer, the hush of the topmost peak of some giant amongst mountains ; in other words, it is voiceless, intangible endurance, the over-allness of a strong spirit that refuses to see the small things within the human limit, and looks with steady eyes to far-off, limitless things which are ever, however slowly, drawing nearer. Only one thing makes a man strong in this philosophy of indifference to those material things of life by which most human beings set such store — the discipline of pain. If there was a vast contempt in me at that age for those trivialities of which the people about me thought so much, it was because I had gone through more pain, physical as well as mental, than the majority of human beings ever experience in a lifetime. It had burnt something out of me that has never come back. — from childhood I have never been able to realise that life is anything but a dream, an unreality, a wearisome waiting for the lifting of that veil which is not, after all, so thick but that we can see through it dimly. Perhaps because of long

LOOKING BACK.

hours, days, nights, months, extending into years, spent in agonising physical pain, perhaps because of mental perplexities that accompanied it, I had come to a certain unchildlike stoicism of demeanour and of habit of thought. You can beat a man until there comes a stage when, though he is not unconscious, he has no more feeling left. That is how I felt at this time. It seemed to me that I stood, indifferent to almost everything about me, always looking, looking, looking into some distant future with a ceaseless desire that was redeemed from feverishness by a well-learnt patience.