The tree of the garden

Front matter

I

Class T^ ZlS Book ~B<o4 S> t g>

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II I

V ISITORS of consequence are expected at Whinsett. More than six years have passed since the landlord of Suddaby’s farm died of a seizure in Hunmouth. The Plumpton publican remembers the property when it was for sale, close on twenty years ago, and recalls having seen John Openshaw drive by on his first visit of inspection, along with the old Beatonthorpe lawyer, White Lattimer—two big men sitting shoulder to shoulder in Abram Blockley’s chaise. To¬ day John Openshaw’s widow is to bring her only son to Whinsett for his health’s sake. Rumour says he has had his chest sounded by two different doctors, one of whom shook his head, and is to have an egg beaten up in milk, and sweetened, every forenoon without fail. Mrs. Openshaw is coming in person on purpose to explain to Mrs. Suddaby the proper care of him—the mother of a family of seven, all living, being much less versed in the requirements of youth than the mother of a unit. It is known that a two-sheet letter of instructions came through the post this morning, of which Helen Suddaby had read as far as the third page when the postman took his leave; and there are those who assert already that the seat of the lad’s ailment is not so much in his. chest as in his mother.

At any time after three o’clock the visitors may be expected, for the Hunmouth train is due in Dimmlesea at twenty min¬ utes to the hour. Mrs. Openshaw, though the bearer of a well known name, has never been seen in this portion of the world before, and the district is prepared. There are outposts along the road as far as Plumpton, where the joiner’s wife sits sewing by her open door, threading her needle when necessary in the Dimmlesea direction. Mrs. Bulson, in a black cap and a gray plaid shawl, who celebrated her eightieth birthday the week before last, and despite bronchitis and a beard is still a woman, has been propped up by the next-door neighbors to replace the looking-glass in the front bedroom, with her brow impressing its furrows from time to time against the pane. Her interest is as keen as any, albeit her memory plays tricks with her. The Plumpton blacksmith—who is a man of iron and one of Mrs. Openshaw’s pre-judges (saying he would soon make a man of her son if he had the handling of him)—is under promise to shout to his wife from the smithy as soon as he hears the rumble of Blockley’s chaise. He is a gaunt strong man of wisdom and experience, who exudes axle-grease from his pores in lieu of perspiration, and can never offer a hand on week-days but he must first wipe it clean across his brow. He knows the click of every shoe upon the road, and whose forge it comes from, and will detect strange shoeings a mile away in calm weather.

A while later he lifts up his head and cries:

“Thoo can be coming to yard-end any time, noo, missus”— and proceeds to blow up the forge with deific unconcern, as if the doings of mortals and the trumpery interests of the inferior world disturbed him not at all. But he comes to the smithydoor for all that when the chaise goes by, cooling a piece of cherry-red iron in his long pincers, as if for no other purpose than to rebuke the folly of his wife.

His wife, fortified with thirty years’ experience of her hus¬ band’s character, pays no heed to his reproaches, but remarks amiably: “She seems an oldish woman, by looks of her, Adam.”

“Oldish woman? Aye!” retorts the blacksmith with such fine dismissiveness that to all intents and purposes he appears to be done with this topic and back at his forge.

“Lad looks delicate,” his wife reflects serenely, coming to the smithy door. She is a placid amiable soul of innumerable vir¬ tues, as the blacksmith is aware; deeply and ingenuously in¬ terested in the doings of her fellows, and for ever perusing the pages of the outer world through bespectacled eyes of bland and rapt absorption, as if it were a novelette; fresh of skin, friendly of countenance, and corporeally solid.

“Delicate!” Her husband derides the adjective, heaping cinders of contumely over it with his forge rake and blowing it to white heat of intoleration, as if the fire were his own anger. “Syke lads stands need to be delicate,” he says. “They get ower mich mothering at home. I’ll awander yon fellow’s lapped up i’ his mother’s flannel petticoat most part of his time. Nobbut I had hod of him for a week or two he wouldn’t be delicate. Aye! that’s it, missus! Stand fair i’ doorway and take all light there is. I mud be sure thoo would.”

In such wise the Plumpton blacksmith is willing to converse with all who will parley with him (as his wife knows well), for though a hard man by profession and outward seeming, and a contemner of the indolences, he is at heart a great human and a born lover of the sound of tongues. By flouting truth to her face and expressing scorn of speech in public he ac¬ quires a knowledge of the world’s motion as deep as that of the most egregious babblers—whom he will take good care to milk dry of all their communicable gossip before dismissing them with obloquy. In Plumpton and the district round he passes for a “strange droll fellow,” and there are still those who believe he is a hater of the amenities; but these are not of the elect. Nor are they who hold that the blacksmith will go to heaven when his time comes, holding the hammer in one hand and the tongs in the other—a saying figurative of his indus¬ try. It is true his hands are black till bedtime, and are even reputed to have been seen going up the narrow stairway after supper, where history loses sight of them. Generations of grim smith-lore lurk in those terrible finger-ends, and he practises the traditional waggeries of his trade with the grimness of an Elijah: drops bars of excruciating iron on obtruding toes, blows burning embers and showers of fiery metal over the incautious, rasps knuckles with the horse-file, and tenders to the unwary hot shoes to hold that have no appreciable action on his callous hands, deriding the droppers of them with wrath.

All masculine Plumpton is taken in due course to Adam Rodwell’s forge to receive its baptism of fire; to be measured under the great wooden arms of the bellows that drops with a resounding crack on unsuspecting skulls; or to enter its novi¬ tiate through some other painful graduation. Hard by the anvil, engrossed in the intricacies of his craft, the blacksmith seems to have no consciousness of the circle of human satellites whose faces light up like harvest moons under the radiance of the forge.

We have paused a while at the blacksmith’s because here¬ abouts he is a man to know, and in this uncertain world fate does not always bring us by the same door twice. Moreover, Abram Blockley’s chaise has still two miles of roadway to traverse.

Abram does not drive to-day. But he has twice raised his hat to Mrs. Openshaw at the Dimmlesea station, and carefully passed his knobbed fingers over all the straps and buckles of the horse’s trappings, and assured Mrs. Openshaw she may dis¬ pense with fear. She is driving (he tells her in a gust of con¬ fidence) behind the quietest mare in his stables; that is to say, the only one available. And she is being driven by the most steady and reliable of all his lads—which means the younger and lesser of the two—the older and bigger being away with a wagonette party at Merensea. He is a frail and insub¬ stantial youth of the height of six pennyworth of coppers, who has read his fare’s distrust of him in her dubious regard of his stature, and lays himself out to vindicate experience by reck¬ less proofs of intimacy with the equine species; cries “Hod up!” in a manufactured voice three times the size of himself; slaps the mare behind her flinching knees and picks up her fore¬ leg with the nonchalance for a ham-bone; passes to and fro beneath her stomach, and never goes by her muzzle but that he butts it with his head. On the box he is diminished almost to invisibility by conjunction with the convex-lidded trunk; siti7 ting sideways, after the adult model, the better to hear what his fares are saying, and to impart information when required, screwing intercalary “kts” out of alternate corners of his mouth—an act that causes his ears to wag and brings the pucker in his lips on either side within an inch of them. Mrs. Openshaw is privately concerned with the contraction of his shoulders, being distressed to note how their driver stoops over his narrow chest in a posture that causes all the boy’s incon¬ sequential vertebrae and his breeches buttons to protrude through his jacket. She decides that driving must be a per¬ nicious exercise for youth, and ever drawing lessons for her son from all she sees, bids the latter anxiously, “Sit up, dear.”

It was an afternoon in mid June, warm and humid. The corn was in milk, and all the air seemed softened with balmy fragrance of fattening grain. Everywhere one felt the sense of flowing sap that freshens and subdues the face of nature like the blood behind a girl’s cheek. Now and again the fleshwarm fragrance that floated from ripening pith and juicy stalk rose up in a sudden access of sweetness to the ravishing breath of honeyed clover, that supreme, ineffable sweetness as though perfume were on the poignant borderline of the sense allotted to her, and must next moment burst through every limitation into the empire of the other senses and become sweet sound and swooning sight, tremulous music and a passionate white body. Last night’s rain had cleansed the corn and washed away the dust from the drowsy hedgerows. Thunder threatened, not ominously, but with the distant hint of majesty that lent a grandeur to the brow of day and gave it a deeper, stronger character than that conferred by cloudless skies alone. Mutterings troubled the west as though gods communed. The sun still struggled with masses of rebellious clouds piled up against the sky in mighty contours of purple, blackening the waters of the Hun. All along the roadway as the chaise moved forward thrushes and blackbirds sang, their bills still drenched with last night’s rain; swallows, speeding their forked flight in front of them, dipped and dived; the corn bunting turned his creaking lock, and—now near, now far—as though the very spirit of June herself, plaintively vocalised, wandered over this green world, the cuckoo’s haunting notes were heard.

Such a day it was as those who pluck their first impressions with the eager solicitude for flowers, that nothing of their delicacy may be bruised or fragrance lost, might choose for entering this Yorkshire world of ours, where the massy clouds, thrusting up their architectural systems in the sky, compensate for flat horizons and the lack of hills, and the plain features of the homely landscape draw beauty from the summer miracle of leaf and stalk, greenness and growth, sweet scent and sound, like some simple face irradiated by happy memories of child¬ hood.

But to Mrs. Openshaw, on the brink of confiding all that she held most dear to the guardianship of this strange and untried soil, there seemed little comfort in the day, or reas¬ suring beauty in what she saw. These ineffable scents and sounds did but serve to quicken the mother in her and make more terrible the thought of separation. The sweetness of the clover and the bean, that at another time she would have drawn into her bosom with a pious rapture as if it were the breath of God, stabbed her like a sharpened knife. The cuckoo’s notes were a knell; the music of the thrush a mockery. Through her timorous maternal eye she took stock of this new environment distrustingly, doubtful if its virtues could ever vie with a mother’s love or replace a mother’s care, and regret¬ ting already her rash acceptance of any counsel not sanctioned by her own heart. She drew surreptitious breaths of air to test whether, after all, it was so strengthening as the doctor would have her believe. Were the drooping shoulders of the fragile driver any testimonial to its properties? What was his age, she wondered—and put her wonder into words. It was (he answered) fourteen years. Fourteen years! Had she entrusted the precious person of her only son to the immaturity of fourteen years? Why these fourteen years contrasted mis¬ erably with her son’s thirteen. Where in them was evident i9 the vaunted virtue of the country? And these red and white cows, up to their dewlaps in sorrel and buttercup, or cumbent in the long grass, with their great immobile horns thrust up like candelabra into the sunlight, chewing the interminable cud beneath unthinking eyes—was their milk so much superior to a mother’s kindness? And these fields, brimming up to the hedgerows on all sides of them in an odorous lattice of wild roses—could they truly supersede her ministrations and give to her son more than his mother’s love could do ? She doubted. She gravely doubted. Since the death of her dear husband, indeed, she had done little else.

All this while the chaise, drawn by the plodding mare— about whose patient head the voracious flies of mid-June made a nebular—crawled slowly southward on the narrow road. Dimmlesea lighthouse, like an obelisk of alabaster, lay in the hollow of the travellers’ backs; Spraith lighthouse, hidden by the upland, pricked the sky before them. On the summit of the Plumpton hill the driver pointed southward with his whip to where a patch of dark arboreal green detached itself from the tender hues of corn and clover and ripening meadow-grass.

“Yon’s Whinsett,” he said.

Whinsett—or Suddaby’s farm, which is the only part of it which counts to-day—has been on the simmer of expectation since the postman’s call this morning. All the front windows are hermetically closed, and the blinds funereally lowered to a level of mathematical exactitude. Flowerpots have been redded; floors scrubbed; grates polished; the dog hasped up in his kennel to guard against the calamity of a paw-print on the white doorsteps. Mrs. Suddaby, after a titanic bake in honour of the visitors, proposes to struggle into her black com¬ pany dress. Suddaby, with a due sense of the magnitude of issues hanging on this visit, is to-day ordering his work near home, to be at hand when needed, and so not to keep the company waiting; but he has emphatically declined to don his Sunday trousers or submit to the hard-starched collar with the front attached, which his daughters fasten on him like a buckler when he goes to market and is the first thing of which he asks them to divest him on return—a visit to Hunmouth being invariably recorded by a weal of crimson round his neck.

The Misses Suddaby (Ada and Helen) carry their hair screwed up in papers like the tail of a boy’s kite. Lartle (little) Jessie began the day with a toothache that only abated after school-time, when (the clock striking nine) she obtained an instant measure of relief, and was able to partake of a green apple knocked from her particular tree in the orchard with a clothes-prop. This afternoon, while her sisters take turns at holding their ears to the gauze-square in the dairy window, or running out to the cart-shed end to peer under their hands at the distant roadway where, across the fields, it climbs into visibility over the Plumpton hill, she has been absolved from school attendance for the special duty of keeping watch by the “street” gate, and giving Mrs. Openshaw admission when the time arrives.

“Think on thoo looks alive an’ all,” her father has admon¬ ished her, “an’ dizzent keep trap waiting. Nobbut thoo lets Mrs. Openshaw see how smart thoo can be, an’ hods gate well back, she mud very like gi’e thee sixpence. I know very well she’s got it to spare.”

Stimulated by which laudable ambition the erstwhile invalid has maintained a vigilant watch upon the roadway from the orchard, whereby she can kill two birds with one stone; keep outlook for the attended guests and shake down green and acid-looking apples into the long grass. She has refused to submit to the degradation of a pinafore on such a day, but wears her last year’s anniversary frock with a lace yoke, and her last new shoes with patent leather caps, bought through the carrier in Hunmouth by guesswork, which pinch her feet so painfully that she cannot walk to Sunday School in them; but on an occasion like this—no matter.

Herculean efforts have been, and still are, in progress behind the stiff-curtained windows, but at Whinsett the days seem never long enough for the work to be accomplished in them (for all they begin before sunrise) and are irreconcilably at odds with the clock. Somebody unnamed has left the oven door open so that its cooking temperature has fallen; another culpable has removed the pan of water from the chimney-crook and set it on the boiler side; the pot-washing is delayed; the bake gets out of hand. Mrs. Suddaby stifles her accusing conscience with the cry: “Lawks-a-massye! yon clock’s never right!” when it buzzes three at her

Overhead the floorboards are astrain with invisible struggles: thuds of stocking heels, rustle of garments, fall of shoes, bed¬ steads creaking beneath the violent exertions of those who sit on them to buckle Sunday footwear.

In the midst of which prodigious preparations Mrs. Openshaw arrives. Lartle Jessie, a deserter from her post in an evil moment of assurance, hears too late the sound of wheels, petrified by the orchard pump with a half-bitten apple in one hand and the clothes-prop in the other. The sight of Blockley’s boy and Mrs. Openshaw’s hat drives her incontinently to the kitchen, where she cries the news. It takes everybody by storm.

As though imbued with the spirit of the occasion, the sun— sometime a struggler behind clouds—burst through the ranks of his fleecy foes and gave Mrs. Openshaw her first sight of Whinsett under gold. She saw the farm illuminated against a pall of sable velvet on the summit of a green field screened by an orchard from the dust of the high road—at this point no better than a laneway—to which it was tethered by a narrow occupation track passing under a five-barred gate and splitting against the angle of the garden walls into a Y that held the farmstead in its fork. The house, she noted, was a simple building of red brick, its upper windows perched in the branches of wall-trained plum and pear; its tiles deepened to bronze by the lichen that lined their furrows; its chimneys weathered and irregular, attached to the sky by one silken strand of smoke. Walls prolonged the building east and west, clasping a garden in their outstretched arms as a child might hold out flowers in her frock, and over the white-painted palissade of wood, broken in its centre by a wicket, that formed the garden’s lower boundary, a laburnum tree hung its tassels in a shower of suspended gold. Away to the south Mrs. Openshaw perceived the unbroken country slant in a sweep of variegated green to the very waters of the Hun. Four miles aw~ay, Sunfleet was visible as a fringe of trees surmounted by a gray church tower, their silvery profile scintillating against the blinding beams of sunlight spilled upon the river’s flood.

The sails of the Beachington mill gleamed white and motionless beyond the Fothom Bank, embedded like enamel in the sky. The gilded church-vane that had scarcely veered since daybreak in the corn-scented heaviness of air shone beatifically above the bleached finials. And in a sweeping semicircle Spraith’s sunlit peninsula curled round the distant estuary; a giant forearm bent defensively about the waterway to keep its channel smooth and shelter great ships against the noisy waves and windy buffets of the open sea. To Mrs. Openshaw this vision of the great river broadened and tranquillised came upon her unexpectedly with a knock at the heart. Viewed thus, lit by sun and softened by sentiment, it looked no man-kept watercourse for the grimy passage of worldly merchandise, but a true and living river of God. The light upon it, she thought, poured straight from His brow. These silent steamers that met and passed like dreams, fading when the light left them, were spiritual vessels cargoed with souls; their port Heaven. Up such a river surely did her husband voyage those years ago; past such a lighthouse, sheltered by such a promontoried arm. And this pasture where the cows were grazing had been his; this ruddy farmhouse with its comfortable skirt of bricky outbuildings and the pale, almost limpid smoke loitering above its chimneys; this shady orchard filled with green dimness and long grass and starred with discs of gleaming gold. She impressed the significance of what she saw upon her son, with a gentle tightening of her fingers over his, that he might be prompted to regard this place with due reverence for the father it so fittingly memorialised.

The chaise stopped. Abram Blockley’s lad looped up the reins, crying “Noo, hoss!” in a ferocious voice, as near as possible the counterpart of that his master used when an animal so far forgot itself as to sneeze or yawn or shake its headgear in public, for the mare strayed at once with amplified nostrils towards the tantalising fringe of grass. The running figure of Suddaby burst with genial abruptness through the garden gate and took Mrs. Openshaw’s emotion by surprise. “Noo, marm! I’se glad to see you, you may depend.” She murmured, “Mr. Suddaby?” on a gentle note of interrogation, and tendered a gloved hand. Suddaby surveyed his own with momentary misgiving.

But not to keep the gloved hand impolitely waiting, he gave the horny palm a hurried polish on his trousers, and without further inspection committed it to Mrs. Openshaw’s fingers. He was less diffident with Master Guy, whose hand came forward at the introduction, “My son, Mr. Suddaby,” insti¬ gated by a gentle circuit of the maternal arm. “Anybody could see that, marm,” the farmer told her—a remark so grateful to Mrs. Openshaw’s hearing as to bring a sudden wetness upon her lashes. “And here comes missus, Marm,” he said. “You’ll ’a to excuse her being a bit latish to welcome you; but she only started to get breakfast ready,” a pleasantry that introduced the farmer’s wife, who, having hurriedly scraped the adherent strings of paste from her wrists and fingers, and flung them back into the bowl, came hastening down the garden trod, wiping her hands on her apron in preparation for amenities.

Mrs. Openshaw’s interest, torn relentlessly from her son, to whom alone in this last hour it sought to cling, was whirled in a vortex of welcomes and regrets; greetings smothered in apologies, and pardon sought for hospitable shortcomings as yet, on her part, utterly unperceived. She must suffer the history of the belated bake and the chilled oven, and the unexpectedness of her arrival. There were so many things to do and say that it seemed as if anything in the nature of a beginning could never be made with them. Suddaby, dis¬ tracted between the luggage and his desire to show Mrs. Openshaw instantly round the farm, in one breath rebuked his wife for keeping their visitor on foot, and himself involved her in a long account of the sad mortality among his lambs. His wife had not less harrowing recitals of kitchen and poultry yard, during which—the trunks being now dismounted and laid upon the grass before the palissade for subsequent con¬ veyance to the house—the visitors passed up the garden ; Mrs. Suddaby politely depreciative and apologetic; Suddaby brimful of hospitable enthusiasm, with a disposition to pour out at one helping all the riches of the farm into Mrs. Openshaw’s embarrassed lap. “You’ll ’a to look round place before you go, marm.”

Within doors, Mrs. Openshaw entered more familiar terri¬ tory. From the little entrance hall with its grained staircase she was ushered into the best sitting-room, under the impres¬ sion that a seat would there be offered her, conducing to the disclosure of all the vital matters protesting to be told. But, no! As many conflicting interests arose on every hand about her here as in the garden. The room smelt like a haber¬ dasher’s shop from a profusion of antimacassars denied the sun, and pegged mats and starched curtains, all kept in sacred seclusion behind the half-drawn yellow blind. Geraniums in vivid red pots that vied with their own blooms, and a hanging basket of Stars of Bethlehem, still further subdued the light and conspired with the opulently patterned curtains to resist the sun and plunge the chamber into a golden gloom, but the paint-work was fresh and joyous in white and two shades of blue, and the oilcloth which served in lieu of a carpet was florid with purple foxgloves and red roses. Everything ap¬ peared to be antimacassared—the portly Bible on the polished loo table, all the chairs, the pictures, and even the fireplaces— and the antimacassars in turn were caught up with the brightest shades of ribbon, remnants of sashes and hair-lengths that had at one time zoned waists and bedecked the tresses of the Misses Suddaby and flashed resplendent at kissing rings and anniversary teas. Touched in spirit by the manifold evidences of domestic toil and devotion, Mrs. Openshaw murmured admiring “Beautifuls” that fluttered about her lips like butter¬ flies; but she found the room close and the atmosphere stag¬ nant, and resolved to mention that her son must be allowed a plenitude of fresh air.

From this secluded sanctuary, just as she deemed the moment opportune to put her fingers together with a terminative: “And now, Mrs. Suddaby, with regard to my son . . she was inveigled into the parlour where Guy would hence¬ forth take his meals—a somewhat darker room on the other side of the hall, though less antimacassary and with more patent evidences of occupation. An old oak corner-cupboard filled the angle between the window and the door, crowded with crockery and rustic table-ware. A torpid grandfather’s clock tick-tacked laboriously from a second corner in the manner that the Carrier counts his change, with an occasional hiccough of dubiety as though a sixpence were in question. Facing the window along the inner wall an aged sofa, covered with horsehair and suffering from an internal complaint, spread its length as far as the second door leading into the kitchen, which closed spasmodically at the moment of Mrs. Openshaw’s introduction. Nevertheless, the kitchen showed empty when the advancing company came into it—though the air, to Mrs. Suddaby’s practised senses, betrayed a state of commotion as if but recently disturbed. A great wood fire blazed busily up the deep breasted chimney, whose flames licked the furred velvet sides of a fat cast-iron kettle suspended from a crook, and beginning to purr already with soft complacent puffs of steam. The sun fell in hot assault upon the drawn kitchen blind, between which and the burning panes buzzed innumer¬ able captive bees, protracting pantomimic shadows on the calico. A vast assemblage of cooking pots and cake tins cumbered the central table; rows of cheese cakes and sweet buns w T ere set out in regiments before the window, in front of which, from a hook in the ceiling-joist, swung a rotund straining cloth, twisting slowly on its cord, filled with wrecked sections and broken honeycomb from the hive, taken by Suddaby this morning, and dropping great tears of gold into a pancheon. “For bee-drink,” Mrs. Suddaby explained.

Dried herbs hung in little bundles from the rafters, and some blouses and white petticoats were set out in folded order to air on the wooden rack that ran the ceiling’s width before the fire. Immediately by the door stood the painted settle that the postman sits down on to sort his letters on arrival and say “Thank you” to a proffer of refreshment, which he never declines.

The door was open. Outside, indefatigable hens were peck¬ ing the burnt crusts from the interior of a pie-dish, laid out for the purpose, which they rattled noisily over the cobbles. Beyond them, on the foldyard wall, a gray cat lay extended in sunny slumber, burning hot. Mrs. Openshaw perceived the handle of the pump and part of the swill-tub. The farmer’s wife cried “Sh-h-h!” and clapped her hands at a band of inquisitive geese, from whose white backs and snowy necks a visible reflection was cast into the kitchen. Mrs. Openshaw must scrutinise the oven, intolerably hot, and yet not hot enough—a new range being insinuated. Her attention was drawn to the state of the fire-bricks. She was invited to remark the doorstep, trodden concave beneath innumerable hobnails, admitting draughts in winter and mice after harvest. Led by her guide, she passed from the kitchen heat into the cool dimness of the dairy, made pleasantly subacid with the scent of cream, displayed in shallow bowls on shelves around the churn, and peeped—at Mrs. Suddaby’s invitation—through the puze pane to see the cows slashing their tails in the tree-shadowed coolness about the cart-shed, and the ducks sleeping on the greensward by the muddy well. The larder was thrown open to her gaze, replete with fruit pies and cheese cakes, with hams swinging from the ceiling hooks, and great jars exhaling the refreshful pungency of vinegar. On the red-tiled floor, beneath the egg-shelf, Dibner had flung the rabbit fallen to his prowess overnight. It lay, showing its white underside; its large eye glazed, its muzzle glued to the tile with a clot of blood. Mrs. Openshaw had no enthusiasm for Dibner’s venery. She learned with dismay that Dibner was but fifteen—no more than two years older than her son. And to be entrusted, single handed, with a firearm. Her prudence recoiled.