BOOK IV

TREACHERIES

§ 1.

Reuben's domestic catastrophes might be summed up in the statement that he had lost two farm hands. It is true that Albert had never been much good--if he had his father would probably not have turned him away--but he had been better than nothing, and now Reuben would have to hire a substitute. One would be enough, for Jemmy and George were now able to do a man's full work each. So another hand was engaged for Odiam--Piper, a melancholy, lean-jowled cowman from Moor's Cottage.

The family was forbidden to speak of the absent sons. No one ever wrote to Robert in Lewes gaol or to Albert living on London's cruel tender-mercies. The shame of them was to be starved by silence. Soon most of the children had forgotten them, and they lived solely in Tilly's unhappy thoughts or Richard's angry ones, or in certain bitter memories of their father's, sternly fought.

Reuben had learnt his first lesson from experience. Quietly but decidedly he altered his conduct. He no longer made the slightest appeal to his family's enterprise or ambition, he no longer interrupted his chidings with those pathetic calls to their enthusiasm which had mystified or irritated them in times past. On the other hand he was twice as hard, twice as fierce, twice as ruthless and masterful as he had ever been.

Old Mrs. Backfield was getting very decrepit. She could not walk without a stick, and her knotted hands were of little use either in the kitchen or the dairy. Reuben was anxious to avoid engaging anyone to help her, yet the developments of her sphere made such help most necessary. Odiam now supplied most of the neighbouring gentry with milk, butter, and eggs; the poultry-yard had grown enormously since it had been a mere by-way of Mrs. Backfield's labours, and she and the girls also had charge of the young calves and pigs, which needed constant attention, and meant a great deal of hard work. Besides this, there was all the housework to do, sweeping, dusting, cooking, baking, and mending and washing for the males.

It occurred to Reuben that Harry might be of some use to the women. Since he had given up fiddling he was entirely on the wrong side of Odiam's accounts; it would do much to justify his existence if he could help a little in the house and thus save engaging extra labour.

Unfortunately Harry's ideas of work were fantastic, and he was, besides, hindered by his blindness. Any use he could be put to was more than balanced by the number of things he broke. His madness had of late developed both a terrible and an irritating side. He was sometimes consumed by the idea that the house was burning, and had on one or two occasions scared the family by jumping out of bed in the middle of the night and running about the passages shouting--"The house is afire! the house is afire! Oh, God save us all!" After he had done this once or twice, young Piper was made to sleep in his room, but even so he was often visited by his terrors during the day, and would interrupt work or meals with shrieks of--"The house is afire! Oh, wot shall we do! The house is afire, and the children are burning."

Another habit of his, less alarming, but far more annoying, was to repeat some chance word or sentence over and over again for hours. If his mother said "Take these plates into the kitchen, Harry," he would spend the rest of the day murmuring, "Take these plates into the kitchen, Harry," till those about him were driven nearly as mad as he.

It was soon found that he hindered rather than helped the work, so Reuben had to cast about for fresh plans. He felt utterly ruthless now, and was resolved to make his daughters manage the house alone. He redistributed the labour, and by handing over the poultry, calves, and pigs to Beatup, and taking some of his work upon his own shoulders, made it physically possible for Caro and Tilly to run the house and dairy with the feeble help of old Mrs. Backfield. He told them that he could not afford to engage a woman, and that they must do without her--making no appeal to their interest or ambition as he might have done six months ago.

Caro and Tilly did not rebel. Somehow or other their young backs did not break under the load of household toil, nor, more strangely, did their young hearts, in the loneliness of their hard, uncared-for lives.

Tilly was now nearly eighteen. She had always been like her mother, but as she grew older the likeness became more and more pronounced, till sometimes it seemed to Reuben as if it were Naomi herself with her milky skin and fleeting rose-bloom who sat at his table and moved about his house. The only difference lay in a certain prominence of the chin which gave her an air of decision that Naomi had lacked. Not that Tilly was ever anything but docile, but occasionally Reuben felt that some time or other she might take her stand--a fear which had never troubled him with Naomi.

Caro was not like her sister; she was of larger build, yet thinner, and much darker, inheriting her father's swarthy skin and thick black hair. She did not give Reuben the same anxiety as Tilly--she was heavy and coltish, and, he felt, would not appeal to men. But Tilly, especially when the summer heats had melted together the little freckles over her nose, struck his masculine eye in a way that made him half proud, half fearful.

No young men ever visited Odiam. The young Ditches, the young Vennals, or Coalbrans, or Ginners, who had business to transact with Backfield, did so only at a safe distance. Reuben could not as yet afford to lose his housemaids. Some day, he told himself, he would see that the girls married to the honour of his farm, but at present he could not do without them.

They did not murmur, for they had known no different life. They had never, like other girls, wandered with bevies of young people through the lanes at dusk, or felt in the twilight a man's hand grope for theirs. They had not had suitors to visit them on Sundays, to sit very stiff and straight in the parlour, and pass decorous remarks about the weather all the while their eyes were eating up a little figure from toe to hair.

Nevertheless when they worked side by side in the kitchen or dairy, skimming milk, churning butter, watching puddings bubble and steam, or when they made Reuben's great bed together, they had queer, half-shy, half-intimate talks--in which their heads came very close and their voices sank very low, and an eavesdropper might have often caught the word "lover," uttered mysteriously and sometimes with an odd little sigh.

§ 2.

That spring the news flew round from inn to inn and farm to farm that Realf of Grandturzel had bought a shire stallion, and meant to start horse-breeding. This was a terrible shock to Reuben, for not only was horse-breeding extremely profitable to those who could afford it, but it conferred immeasurable honour. It seemed now as if Odiam were seriously threatened. If Realf prospered at his business he could afford to fight Reuben for Boarzell.

As a man in love will sometimes see in every other man a plotter for his beloved, and would never believe it if he were told that he alone sees charm in her and that to others she is undesirable, so Reuben could not conceive ambition apart from the rugged, tough, unfruitful Boarzell, whom no man desired but he. He at once started negotiations for buying another twenty acres, though at present he could ill afford it, owing to the expenses involved by his family misfortunes and his new mania for prestige.

He watched Grandturzel's developments with a stern and anxious eye, and kept pace with them as well as he could. The farm consisted of about fifty-five acres of grass and tilth, apart from the forty acres of Boarzell, which neither Realf nor his father had ever attempted to cultivate, using them merely for fuel and timber, or as pasturage for the ewes when their lambs were taken from them. Old Realf had allowed the place to acquire a dilapidated rakish look, but his son at once began to smarten it up. He tarred the two oast-houses till they shone blue with the reflected sky, he painted his barn doors green, and re-roofed the Dutch Barn with scarlet tiles that could be seen all the way from Tiffenden Hill. He enriched his poultry-yard with a rare strain of Orpington, and was the only farmer in the district besides Reuben to do his reaping and hay-making by machinery.

Realf was about twenty-five, a tall, well-set-up young fellow, with certain elegancies about him. In business he was of a simple, open-temperament, genuinely proud of his farm, and naïve enough to boast of its progress to Backfield himself.

Indeed he was so naïve that it was not till Reuben had once or twice sneered at him in public that he realised there was any friction between Grandturzel and Odiam, and even then he scarcely grasped its importance, for one night at the Cocks, Coalbran said rather maliciously to Reuben:

"Which of your gals is it that young Realf is sweet on?"

"My gals! Neither of 'em. Wot d'you mean?"

"Only that he walks home wud them from church every Sunday, and föalkses are beginning to wonder which he's going to mäake Mrs. Realf, surelye!"

Reuben turned brick-red with indignation.

"Neither of my gals is going to be Mrs. Realf. I'd see her dead fust! And the fellers as spread about such ugly lying tales, I'll----" and Reuben scowled thunderously at Coalbran, whom he had never forgiven since the scene in Rye Court-house.

"He slanders my sons and he slanders my daughters," he muttered to himself as he went home, "and I reckon as this time it äun't true."

However, next Sunday he astonished his family by saying he would accompany them to church. Hitherto Reuben's churchmanship had been entirely political, he had hardly ever been inside Peasmarsh church since his marriage, except for the christenings of his children--though he considered himself one of the pillars of the Establishment. His family were exceedingly suspicious of this change of heart, and the girls whispered guiltily together. "He's found out," said Caro, and Tilly sighed.

There was much turning of heads when Ben Backfield was seen to take his place with his children in their pew.... "Wot's he arter now?"--"Summat to do wud his farm you may be sartain."--"He's heard about his gals and young Realf."--"Ho, the wicked old sinner! I wish as Passon 'ud tip it to un straight."

Realf of Grandturzel sat a little way ahead on the opposite side, and Reuben watched him all through the service. Times had changed since Robert had hurled his big voice among the rafters with the village choir. The choir now sat in the chancel and wore surplices; the Parson too wore a surplice when he preached; for the Oxford Movement had spread to Peasmarsh, and Mr. Barnaby, the new clergyman, lived at the Rectory, instead of appointing a curate to do so, and unheard-of things happened in the way of week-day services and Holy Communion at eight o'clock in the morning. Reuben, however, scarcely noticed the changes, so absorbed was he in young Realf. Occasionally the boy would turn his head on his shoulder and rashly contemplate the Backfield pew. Reuben invariably met him with a stare and a scowl.

All through the sermon he sat with his eyes fixed on Realf's profile. There was his rival, the man with whom he would have to reckon most during the difficult future, with whom he was fighting for Boarzell. He looked marvellously young and comely as he sat there in the fretted light, and suddenly for the first time Reuben realised that he was not as young as he had been. He was forty-six--he was getting old.

Something thick and icy seemed to creep into his blood, and he gripped the edge of the pew, as he stared at Realf, sitting there so unconsciously, his damped and brushed hair gleaming ruddily in the light that poured through some saint's aureole. He must not let this youngster beat him.... Beat him?--the ice in his blood froze thicker--after all he had not done so very much during the twenty-six years he had toiled and struggled; he had won only a hundred acres of Boarzell--little more than Realf had to start with ... and Realf was only twenty-five.

Caro and Tilly, sitting carefully so as not to crush their muslins, both their heads slewed round a little towards Realf, noticed how their father's throat was working, how hot flows of colour rushed up and ebbed away under the tan on his cheeks. For the first time Reuben was contemplating failure, looking that livid horror full in the face, seeing himself beaten, after all his toil and heartache, by a younger man.

But the next moment he cast the coward feeling from him. His experience had given him immeasurable advantage over this babe. Realf who had never felt the sweat pouring like water down his tired body, who had never swooned asleep from sheer exhaustion, or lain awake all night from sheer anxiety, who had not sacrificed wife and children and friends and self to one dear, loved, darling ambition ... bah! what could he do against the man who had done all these things, and was prepared to go on doing them to the end?

When the congregation rose to sing Reuben held his head proudly and his shoulders square. He felt himself a match for any youngster.

§ 3.

That summer old Mrs. Backfield became completely bedridden. The gratefulness of sunshine to her old bones was counteracted by the clammy fogs that streamed up every night round the farm. It was an exceptionally wet and misty summer--a great deal of Reuben's wheat rotted in the ground, and he scarcely took any notice when Tilly announced one morning that grandmother was too ill to come downstairs.

When the struggle on the lower slopes of Boarzell between the damp earth and the determined man had ended in the earth's sludgy victory and a pile of rotten straw which should have been the glory of the man--then Reuben had time to think of what was going on in the house. He sent for the doctor--not Dr. Espinette, but a Cockney successor who boiled his instruments and washed his hands in carbolic--and heard from him that Mrs. Backfield's existence was no longer justified. She could not expect to work again.

Reuben was grieved, but not so much grieved as if she had been cut down in her strength--for a long time she had been pretty useless on the farm. He handed her over to the nursing of the girls, though they were too busy to do more for her than the barest necessities. Now and then he went up himself and sat by her bed, restlessly cracking his fingers, and fretting to be out again at his work.

Sometimes Harry would sit by her. He had wandered in one day when she was feeling especially ill and lonely, and in her desperation she had begged him to stay. At all events he was someone--a human being, or very nearly so. He shuffled restlessly round and round the room, fingering her little ornaments and pictures, and muttering to himself, "Stay wud me, Harry."

He liked her room, for she had a dozen things he could finger and play with--little vases with flowers modelled over them, woolly mats, a velvet pincushion, and other survivals of her married life, all very dusty and faded now. Soon she began to find a strange comfort in having him there; the uneasiness and vague repulsion with which he had filled her, died down, and she began to see in him something of the old Harry whom she had loved so much better than Reuben in days gone by.

As the summer wore on she grew steadily worse. She lay stiff and helpless, through the long August days, watching the sunlight creep up the wall, slip along the ceiling, and then vanish into the pale, heat-washed sky that gleamed with it even after the stars had come. She did not fret much, or think much--she watched things. She watched the sunshine from its red kindling to its red scattering, she watched the moon slide across the window, and haunt the mirror after it had passed--or the sign of the Scales dangling in the black sky. Sometimes the things she looked at seemed to fade, and she would see a room in which she and her husband were sitting or a lane along which they were walking ... but just as she had begun to wonder whether she were not really still young and happy and married and this vision the fact and the sickness and loneliness the dream, then suddenly everything would pass away like smoke, and she would be back in her bed, watching the travelling sun, or the haunting moon, or the hanging stars.

In October a steam-thresher came to Odiam. The wheat had been bad, but there was still plenty of grain to thresh, and for a whole day the machine sobbed and sang under the farmhouse walls--"Urrr-um--Urrr-um--Urrr-um."

Mrs. Backfield lay listening to it. She felt very ill, but everyone was too busy to come to her--Reuben was out in the yard feeding his monster, while the boys gathered up and sacked what it vomited out; Caro and Tilly were washing blankets. Harry had gone off on some trackless errand of his own.

The afternoon was very still and soft. It was full of the smell of apples--of apples warm and sunny on the trees, of apples fallen and rotting in the grass, of apples dry and stored in the loft. There were little apples on the walls of the house, and their skins were warm and bursting in the heat.

The thresher purred and panted under the window--"Urrr-um--Urrr-um." Now and then Reuben would call out sharply, "Now then! mind them genuines--they're mixing wud the seconds!" or "Kip them sacks closed, Beatup." But for most of the afternoon the stillness was broken only by the hum of the machine which sometimes almost seemed a part of it.

Mrs. Backfield according to her custom watched the sun. It bathed the floor at first, but gradually she saw the square of the window paint itself on the wall, and then slide slowly up towards the ceiling. Her eyes mechanically followed it; then suddenly it blazed, filmed, flowed out into a wide spread of light, in the midst of which she saw the kitchen at Odiam as it used to be, with painted fans on the chimney-piece and pots of flowers on the window-sill. Her husband sat by the fire, smoking his pipe, while Harry was helping her tidy her workbasket.

"There now!" she said to him, "I knew as it really wur a dream."

"Wot?" he asked her, and she, in her dream, felt a spasm of delight, for it was all happening so naturally--it must be true.

"About fäather being dead, and you being blind, and Ben having the farm."

"Of course it's a dream--fäather äun't dead, and I äun't blind, and Ben's picking nuts over at Puddingcake."

"You couldn't spik to me lik this if it wur a dream, Harry--could you, dear?"

He didn't answer--and then suddenly he turned on her and shouted:

"Sack your chaff, now--can't you sack your chaff?"

"Harry! Harry!" she cried, and came to herself in the little sun-smouldering room, while outside Reuben stormed at his boys to "sack their chaff," and the machine purred and sang--"Urrr-um--Urrr-um."

A sudden terrible lucidity came to Mrs. Backfield.

"It's machines as he wants," she said to herself, "it's machines as he wants...."

Then a gentle darkness stole upon her eyes, as her overworked machine of flesh and blood ran down and throbbed slowly into stillness and peace.

Outside the great fatigueless machine of steel and iron sang on--"Urrr-um--Urrr-um--Urrr-um."

§ 4.

The girls cried a great deal at their grandmother's death--she had never taken up enough room in the boys' lives for them to miss her much. As for Reuben, though he had been fond of her, he could not sincerely regret her, since for the last few months she had, so to speak, been carried on entirely at a loss.

He needed every penny and every minute more desperately than ever, for Grandturzel ran Odiam closer and closer in the race. Realf now plainly saw how matters stood. As yet there was no open breach between him and Reuben--when one of them came into the public-house the other always waited a decent interval before clearing out--but if there was no open breach, there was open rivalry. All the neighbourhood knew of it, and many a bet was made.

The odds were generally on Reuben. It was felt that a certain unscrupulousness was necessary to the job, and in that Backfield had the advantage. "Young Realf wudn't hurt a fly," his champions had to acknowledge. Though the money was with Reuben, the sympathy was mostly with Realf, for the former's dealings had scarcely made him popular. He was a hard man to his customers, he never let them owe him for grain or roots or fodder; his farm-hands, when drunk, spoke of him as a monster, and a not very tender-hearted peasantry worked itself sentimental over his treatment of his children.

For some months the antagonism between Odiam and Grandturzel remained in this polite state, most of the fighting being done by their champions. The landlord of the Cocks grew quite tired of chucking out Odiamites and Grandturzelites who could not, like their leaders, confine their war to words. But it only wanted some cause, however trivial, to make the principals show their fists. The time that Reuben would stay in the bar after Realf had entered it grew shorter and shorter, and his pretexts for leaving more and more flimsy. Realf himself, though a genial, good-tempered young man, could not help resenting the scorn with which he was treated. He once told Ginner that Backfield was an uncivilised brute, and Ginner took care to forward this remark to the proper quarter.

At last the gods, who are more open-handed than ungrateful people suppose, took pity on the rivals, and gave them something to fight about. The pretext was in itself trivial, but when the gunpowder is laid nothing bigger than a match is needed. This particular pretext was a barrow of roots which had been ordered from Kitchenhour by Reuben and sent by mistake to Grandturzel. Realf's shepherd, not seeing any cause for doubt, gave the roots as winter fodder to his ewes, and said nothing about them. When Reuben tramped over to Kitchenhour and asked furiously why his roots had never been sent, the mistake was discovered. He came home by Grandturzel, and found his precious roots, all thrown out on the fields, being nibbled by Realf's ewes.

Realf himself was away, but Reuben left such a stinging message for him, that apology was impossible except in a form that could only be regarded as a fresh insult. An apology in this shape reached Odiam at dinner-time, and Reuben at once sent off Beatup with an acceptance of it that was very nearly obscene. The result was that Realf himself arrived about three o'clock furiously demanding an explanation of his neighbour's insulting conduct.

The two men met in the kitchen, Peter backing up his father, and for a long time the scene was stormy, the word "roots" whirling about the conversation, with the prefix "my good" or "your hemmed" as the case might be. Realf was genuinely angry--Reuben's attitude of mingled truculence and scorn had wounded even his easy pride.

"You're justabout afeard of me, that's wot you are. You think I'll bust up your old farm and show myself a better man than you. You're afeard of me because I'm a younger man than you."

"Ho, afeard of you, am I?--and because you're a youngster? I'll justabout show you wot a youngster's worth. A better man, are you?--Put up your fists, and we'll see who's the better man."

Reuben began to take off his coat--young Realf drew back almost in disgust.

"I'm not going to fight a man old enough to be my father," he said, flushing.

"Ho, äun't you?--Come on, you puppy-dog, and see fur yourself if you need täake pity on my old age."

He had flung off his coat, and squared up to Realf, who, seeing no alternative, began to strip.

Peter interposed:

"Let me täake him on, fäather. I'll show him a thing or two."

Reuben turned on him savagely.

"Stand clear!--who wants your tricks? I'm going to show him wot a man's worth--a man wot's had his beard longer than this puppy's bin in the warld."

"But you're out of training."

"I'm in training enough to whip boys. Stand clear!"

Pete stood clear, as the two combatants closed. Neither knew much of the game. Realf had been born too late for boxing to have been considered a necessary part of his education, and Reuben had been taught in an old school--the school of Bendigo and Deaf Burke--mighty bashers, who put their confidence in their strength, despised finesse, and counted their victories in pints of blood.

He fairly beat down on Realf, who was lithe enough generally to avoid him, but not experienced enough to do so as often as he might. Every time Reuben struck him, the floor seemed to rush up to his eyes, and the walls to sag, and the house to fill with smoke. Pete danced round them silently, for while his sympathies were with his father his sporting instincts bade him keep outwardly impartial. He was disgusted with their footwork, indeed their whole style outraged his bruising ideals; but it pleased him to see how much Reuben was the better man.

They hardly ever clinched--on the other hand, there was much plunging and rushing. Reuben brought down Realf three times and Realf brought down Reuben once. It was noticeable that if the younger man fell more easily he also picked himself up more quickly. Between the rounds they leaned exhausted against the wall, Pete prowling about between them, longing to take his father on his knee, but still resolved to see fair play.

It was not likely that the fight would be a long one, for both combatants were already winded. Realf, moreover, was bleeding from the nose, and Reuben's left eye was swollen. Once he caught a hit flush on the mouth which cut his nether lip in two, and, owing to his bad footwork, brought him down. But he was winning all the same.

For once that Realf managed to land a blow, Reuben landed a couple, and with twice as much weight behind them. The younger man soon began to look green and sick, he staggered about, and flipped, while the sweat poured off his forehead into his eyes. Reuben breathed stertorously and could scarcely see out of his left eye, but was otherwise game. Pete felt prouder of him than ever.

Suddenly Backfield's fist crashed into Realf's body, full on the mark. The wind rushed out of him as out of a bellows, and he doubled up like a screen. This time he made no effort to rise; he lay motionless, one arm thrown out stiff and jointless as a bough, while a little blood-flecked foam oozed from between his teeth.

"You've done it!" cried Pete.

Reuben had flopped down in a heap on the settle, and his son ran off for help. He flung open the door, and nearly fell over Tilly who was cowering behind it.

§ 5.

"Here--bring some water!" cried Peter, too much relieved to see her to be surprised at it.

Tilly flung one wide-eyed glance over her shoulder into the room where young Realf lay, and dashed off for water and towels, while Pete fetched a piece of raw meat out of the larder.

It was a minute or two before Realf opened his swollen, watering eyes, and gazed up bewildered into the face of the woman he had said his prayers to for a dozen Sundays. She held his head in the crook of her arm, and wiped the froth and blood from his lips.

"Better now?" asked Pete.

Realf suddenly seemed to shrink into himself. The next minute he was swaying unsteadily on his legs, refusing the hands held out to support him.

"I'm going home," he mumbled through his bruised lips.

"I'll täake you," said Pete cheerily.

But Realf of Grandturzel shook his head. His humiliation was more than he could bear. Without another look at Pete or Tilly, or at Reuben holding the raw chop to his eye, he turned and walked out of the room with bent head and dragging footsteps.

For a moment Pete looked as if he would follow him, but Reuben impatiently called him back.

"Leave the cub alone, can't you? Let him go and eat grass."

Tilly stood motionless in the middle of the room, her little nose wrinkled with horror at the bloodstains on the floor and at Reuben whose face was all bruised and swollen and shiny with the juice of the raw meat. Pete saw her shudder, and resented it.

"It wur a präaper fight," he declared. "You want to manage them feet of yourn a bit slicker, fäather--but you wur justabout smart wud your fists."

Tilly's blood ran thick with disgust; she turned from them suddenly--that coarse, bloodthirsty, revolting pair--and ran quickly out of the room.

She ran out of the house. Away on Boarzell a man plodded and stumbled. She saw him stagger as the wind battered him, reel and nearly fall among the treacheries of the dead heather. He was like a drunken man, and she knew that he was drunk with shame.

All flushed with pity she realised the bitterness of his fate--he who was so young and strong and clean and gay, had been degraded, shamed by her father, whom in that moment she looked upon entirely as a brute. It must not be. He had been so good to her, so friendly and courteous in their Sunday walks--she must not let him go away from her shamed and beaten.

She gathered up her skirts and ran across the garden, out on to the Moor. She ran through the heather, stumbling in the knotted thickness. The spines tore her stockings, and in one clump she lost her shoe. But she did not wait. Her little chin was thrust forward in the obstinacy of her pursuit, and when she came closer to him she called--"Mr. Realf! Mr. Realf!"

He stopped and looked round, and the next minute she was at his side. Her hair was all blown about her face, her cheeks were flushed the colour of bell-heather, and her breast heaved like a wave. She could not speak, but her eyes were blessing him, and then suddenly both her hands were in his.

§ 6.

Early in the next year Sir Miles Bardon died, and his son Ralph became Squire. Reuben had now, as he put it, lived through three Bardons. He despised the enfeebled and effete race with its short life-times, and his own body became straighter when he thought of Sir Miles's under the earth.

For every reason now, Odiam was being forced on. Realf had sought comfort for his personal humiliation in making his farm more spick and span than ever. Reuben became aware of a certain untidiness about Odiam, and spent much on paint and tar--just as the frills of a younger rival might incite to extravagance a woman who had hitherto despised the fashions. He painted his waggons a beautiful blue, and his oasts were even blacker and shinier than Grandturzel's. He had wooden horses to dance on their pointers, whereupon Realf put cocks on his.

The thought of Tilly did not check the young man in this beggar-my-neighbour, for he knew that her father's ambition meant her slavery. So when Reuben added a prize Jersey heifer to his stock, Realf bought a Newlands champion milker, and when Reuben launched desperately on a hay-rope twister, Realf ran him up with a wurzel-cutter. Finally Reuben bought twenty acres, of Boarzell, in which Realf did not attempt to rival him, for he already had forty which he did not know what to do with. Reuben's strugglings with Boarzell struck him as pathetic rather than splendid, an aberration of ambition which would finally spoil the main scheme.

So Realf's answer took the form of an extra cowman, whereupon Reuben hired a couple of new hands, causing his family to leap secretly and silently for joy and to bless the man who by his rivalry had lightened their yoke. As a matter of fact, Reuben would have been forced to engage one man, anyhow; for the new piece of land had at once to be prepared for cultivation, and gave even more trouble than the pieces which had already been cultivated but showed a distressing proneness to relapse into savagery. The lower slope of Boarzell was now covered with fields, where corn grew, as the neighbours said, "if one wur careful not to spik too loud," and the ewes could pasture safely if their shepherd were watchful. But it somehow seemed as if all these things were only on sufferance, and that directly Reuben rested his tired arm Boarzell would snatch them back to itself, to be its own for ever.

Reuben swaggered a little about his new farm-hands, especially as Realf showed no signs of going any further in hirelings. One man, Boorman, came from Shoyswell near Ticehurst, and was said to be an authority on the diseases of roots, while the other, Handshut, came from Cheat Land on the western borders of Peasmarsh. Reuben went over to get his "character" from Jury the tenant--and that was how he met Alice Jury.

§ 7.

The door was opened to him by a tall young woman in a grey dress covered by an apron. Reuben was struck by that apron, for it was not the sacking kind to which he was accustomed, or the plain white muslin which his women-folk wore on Sundays, but a coarse brick-coloured cotton, hanging from her shoulders like a pinafore. The girl's face above it was not pretty, but exceptionally vivid--"vivid" was the word, not prominent in Reuben's vocabulary, which flashed into his mind when he saw her. Her colouring was pale, and her features were small and irregular, her hair was very frizzy and quite black, while her grey eyes were at once the narrowest and the liveliest he had ever seen.

"I'm sorry--father's not at home," she said in answer to his question.

"But I töald him as I wur coming over--it's about that Handshut."

She smiled.

"I'm afraid father forgets things. But come in, he's bound to be home to his dinner soon."

Reuben grumbled and muttered to himself as he crossed the threshold--small fry like these Jurys must not be allowed to think that he had any time to spare. The young woman led him into the kitchen and offered him a seat. Reuben took it and crossed his legs, looking appraisingly round the room, which was poorly furnished, but beautifully kept, with some attempts at decoration. There was a print of Rossetti's "Annunciation" above the meal-chest, and a shelf of books by the fireplace. It all struck him as strange and rather contemptible. He remembered what he had been told about the Jurys, who had only just come to Cheat Land. Tom Jury had, so rumour said, kept a bookshop in Hastings, but trade had gone badly, and as his health demanded an outdoor life and country air, charitable friends had established him on a small holding. He had an invalid wife, and one daughter, who was not very strong either--an ignoble family.

The daughter must be the girl who was talking to him now. She sat on a little stool by the fire, and had brought out some sewing.

"You come from Odiam, don't you?" she asked.

"Yes, that's it."

"Is Odiam that farm near Totease?"

Reuben looked as if he had swallowed the poker. He stared at her to see if she were making fun of him, but her bright eyes were quite innocent.

"Yes," he said huskily--"it is."

"We've only been here a month, so I haven't got the neighbourhood quite clear. You see I can't often go out, as my mother's generally in bed, and I have all the house-work to do. That's why my father has to have a man to help him out of doors. It's a pity, for wages are so high--Handshut's leaving us because we could do with someone cheaper and less experienced."

Reuben liked her voice, with its town modulation, the only vestige of Sussex taint being a slight drawl. It struck him that Alice Jury was a "lady," and that he was not condescending very much in speaking to her.

"It's unaccountable hard to know what to do about labour. Now as these fellers are gitting eddicated they think no end of theirselves and 'ull ask justabout anything in wages--as if a man hoed turnups any better for being able to read and write."

"But don't you think he does?"

"No--I döan't. I'm all agäunst teaching poor people anything and setting them above theirselves. It's different fur their betters. Now I've got six boys, and they can all read and write and cast accounts."

"Six boys, have you? Are they grown up?"

"Yes, the youngest's sixteen."

"And do they help you on the farm?"

"Yes--leastways four of 'em do. Two have--have left home."

"I suppose they didn't care for farming?"

"One's in prison, and t'other I turned away."

Reuben had no idea why he said this. It must have been the way her eyes were fixed on him, glowing above bistred shadows.

"Oh, indeed!--how sad."

He flushed the colour of her apron. What a fool he was!--and yet after all she would be bound to hear the truth sooner or later; he had only been beforehand. All the same he was surprised at himself. A sudden tide of anger went over him.

"Sad fur them, I reckon, but not fur me. I'm well shut of them."

"Don't you miss them at all?"

"Naun particular. Robert he wur good and plodding-like, but you couldn't trust his stacking, and he'd be all nohow wud the horses--and Albert he'd shirk everything wotsumdever, he'd go off into dreams in the middle of killing a pig--surelye!"

"But in themselves, I mean."

"Wot's that--in themselves?"

"Well, as boys, as sons, not as farm-servants."

"I döan't never think of them that way. One's no good to me wudout t'other."

Alice Jury said nothing, and Reuben began to feel vaguely uncomfortable. What queer eyes she had!--they seemed to bore into him like nails. He suddenly rose to his feet.

"See here--I must be going."

"But father won't be long now."

"I'm sorry--I can't wait. I've a load of field-bean coming in. I'll be round agäun to-morrow."

"What time?--and I'll promise father shall be here to see you."

"About eleven, say. Good-bye, miss."

"Good-bye."

She went with him to the door. A great lump of phlox grew on either side of it. She stood between them, and suddenly pointed out over Jury's miserable little root-patch towards Boarzell, heaving its great hummocks against the east.

"What's that?" she asked.

§ 8.

Reuben came away from Cheat Land with odd feelings of annoyance, perplexity, and exhilaration. Alice Jury was queer, and she had insulted him, nevertheless those ten minutes spent with her had left him tingling all over with a strange excitement.

He could not account for it. Women had excited him before, but merely physically. He took it for granted that they had minds and souls like men, but he had not thought much about that aspect of them or allowed it to enter his calculations. Of late he had scarcely troubled about women at all, having something better to think of.

Now he found himself thrown into a kind of dazzle by Alice Jury. He could not explain it. Her personal beauty was negligible--"a liddle stick of a thing," he called her; their conversation had been limited almost entirely to her tactless questions and his forbearing answers.

"She äun't my sort," he mumbled as he walked home, "she äun't at all my sort. Dudn't know where Odiam wur--never heard of Boarzell--oh, yes, seems as she remembered hearing something when I töald her"--and Reuben's lip curled ironically.

He had not told her of his ambitions with regard to Boarzell, and now he found himself wishing that he had done so. He had been affronted by her ignorance, but as his indignation cooled he longed to confide in her. Why, he could not say, for unmistakably she "wasn't his sort"; it was not likely that she would sympathise, and yet he wanted to pour all the treasures of his hope into her indifference. He had never felt like this towards anyone before.

He spent the day restlessly, and the next morning walked over to Cheat Land before half-past ten. Alice Jury opened the door, and looked surprised to see him.

"You said you were coming at eleven. I'm afraid father's out again."

"I wur passing this way, so thought I'd call in on the chance," said Reuben guiltily--"I döan't mind waiting."

She called a long-legged boy who was weeding among the turnips, and bade him go over to Puddingcake and fetch the master. Then she led the way to the kitchen, which smelled deliciously of baking bread.

"You don't mind if I go on with my baking? I've twelve loaves in the oven."

"Oh, no," said Reuben, sitting in yesterday's chair, and gazing up at the Rossetti.

"Do you like pictures?" asked Alice, thumping dough.

"Some," said Reuben, "but I like 'em coloured best."

"I paint a little myself," said Alice--"when I've time."

"Wot sort o' things do you paint?"

"Oh, landscapes mostly. That's mine"--and she pointed to a little water-colour sketch of a barn.

"Could you paint a picture of Odiam?"

"I expect I could--not really well, you know, just something like this."

"Could you paint Boarzell?"

He leaned towards her over the back of his chair.

"Yes, I dare say."

"Could you do it wud all the colours on it and all that?--all the pinks you git on it sometimes, and the lovely yaller the gorse mäakes?"

She was surprised at his enthusiasm. His eyes were kindling, and a blush was creeping under his sunburn.

"Oh, I could try! Do you want a picture of Boarzell?"

"I'd like one if you could really do it to look natural."

She smiled. "Perhaps I could. But why do you think so much of Boarzell?"

"Because I'm going to mäake it mine."

"Yours!"

"Yes--I mean to have the whole of it."

"But can you grow anything on a waste like that?"

"_I_ can. I've got near a hundred acres sown already" ... and then all the floodgates that had been shut for so long were burst, and the tides of his confidence rolled out to her, moaning--all the ache of his ambition which nobody would share.

Her eyes were fixed on him with their strange spell, and her sharp little face was grave. He knew that she did not sympathise--he had not expected it. But he was glad he had told her.

Her first words startled him.

"Do you think it's worth while?"

"Wot's worth while?"

"To give up so much for the sake of a piece of land." Reuben gaped at her.

"I've no right to preach to you; but I think I may be allowed to ask you--'is it worth while?'"

He was too flabbergasted to be angry. The question had simply never come into his experience. Many a man had said, "Do you think you'll do it?" but no one had ever said, "Do you think it's worth while?"

Alice saw her blunder. She saw that she had insulted his ambition; and yet, though she now understood the ferocities of that ambition, it filled her with a definite hostility which made her want to fight and fight and fight it with all the strength she had. At the same time, as his surprise collapsed, his own antagonism rose up. He felt a sudden hatred, not for the girl, but for the forces which somehow he knew she was bringing to oppose him. They faced each other, their eyes bright with challenge, their breasts heaving with a stormier, earthlier emotion--and the white flame of antagonism which divided them seemed at the same time to fuse them, melt them into each other.

§ 9.

Reuben was going through a new experience. For the first time in his life he had fallen under the dominion of a personality. From his boyhood he had been enslaved by an idea, but people, in anything except their relation to that idea, had never influenced him. Now for the first time he had a life outside Boarzell, an interest, a set of thoughts, which were not only apart from Boarzell but antagonistic to it.

Hitherto he had always considered the opposite of his ambition to be the absence of it. Either one lived to subdue the hostile earth, or one lived with no object at all. It was a new experience to find someone whose life was full of hopes, ideals, and ambitions, all utterly unconnected with a farm, and it was even more strange than new that he should care to talk about them. Not that he ever found himself being tempted from his own--the most vital part of his relations with Alice Jury lay in their warfare. He fought her as he fought Boarzell, though without that sense of a waiting treachery which tinctured his battles with the Moor; their intercourse was full of conflict, of fiery, sacred hostilities. They travelled on different roads, and knew that they could never walk together, yet each wanted to count the other's milestones.

Sometimes Reuben would ask himself if he was in love with her, but as the physical element which he had always and alone called love was absent, he came to the conclusion that he was not. If he had thought he loved her he would have avoided her, but there was no danger in this parliament of their minds. Her attitude towards life, though it obsessed him, no more convinced him than his convinced her. They would rail and wrangle together by the hour.

"Life is worth while," said Alice, "in itself, not because of what it gives you."

"I agree with you there," said Reuben, "it's not wot life gives that's good, it's wot you täake out of it."

"I don't see that. Suppose that because I liked that girl's face in the picture I tore it out and kept it for myself, I should only spoil the picture--the piece I'd torn out wouldn't be any good to me away from the rest."

"I can't foller you," said Reuben gruffly.

"Now don't pretend to be stupid--don't pretend you can't understand anything but turnips."

"And döan't pretend you can't understand naun but picturs. A good solid turnup in real life is worth a dozen pretty gals in picturs."

"That's right--have the courage of your earthiness. But don't try to make me think that when you look out of the window at Boarzell, you don't see the sky beyond it."

"And döan't you try and make out as when you're looking at the sky you döan't see Boarzell standing in between."

"I don't try and make it out. I see your point of view, but it's only 'in between' me--and you--and something greater."

"Rubbidge!" said Reuben.

He always came away from these wrangles with a feeling as if he had been standing on his head. He was not used to mental scoutings and reconnoitrings. Also, he felt sometimes that Alice was laughing at him, which irritated him, not so much because she mocked as because he could never be really sure whether she mocked or not. Her laughter seemed to come from the remotest, most exalted part of her. The gulfs between their points of view never gaped so wide as when she laughed.

§ 10.

Reuben's constant visits to Cheat Land were soon noticed at Odiam, and every advantage was taken of them. A period of licence set in. Richard read Anne Bardon's Homer quite openly by the kitchen fire, Caro dropped tears over East Lynne in the dairy, and Jemmy spent long tarry hours at Rye, coming home with a rank chew in his mouth, and sailors' oaths to salt his work on the farm.

Tilly had private affairs of her own which occasionally led her out on Boarzell of an afternoon. She always took her sewing, for she dared not be behindhand with it. Strangely enough, in spite of Jemmy's and Tilly's truancies, the work was somehow got through as usual, for shortcomings would have been found out and punished on the master's return--or worse still, he might have stayed at home. For the first time a certain freemasonry was established between the brothers and sisters. Hitherto their rebellion had been too secret even for confederacy, but now some of the crushing weight was lifted, and they could combine--all except Peter, who was too much Reuben's man for them to trust him; luckily he was rather stupid. So Peter did not see and no one else took any notice if Caro read and wept over sentimental novels, or Jemmy brought home harbour mud on his shoes, or George, who was delicate and epileptic, slept away an hour under a haystack, or Richard pondered the Iliad, or Tilly ran out on the Moor--even though she went to meet Realf of Grandturzel.

They met on the further side of the fir clump, on the edge of Grandturzel's inclosure. Here Tilly would sit under a gorse-bush with her sewing, while young Realf lay along the grass at her feet. They did not talk much, for Tilly was busy, and generally had her mouth full of pins; but Realf's manhood worshipped her as she sat there, her delicious head bowed, and stains of sunshine, with sprinkled gorse-petals, in her hair. He loved her little determined chin, and the sweet smudge of freckles on her nose. Love filled their simplest actions, kindled their simplest words; it dreamed in their eyes and laughed on their lips; its silences linked them closer than the most passionate embraces.

Both unconsciously dreaded the time when they should demand more of each other--when the occasional enlacing of their hands would no longer be enough to open Paradise, when from sweet looking and longing they would have to pass into the bitterness of action. Tilly, though essentially practical and determined, was enjoying her first visit to faery, and also inherited her mother's gift of languor. She basked in those hours of sun and bees. She, like her father, was passing for the first time into a life outside the dominion of the farm--but, whereas he fought it, and sought it only to fight it, she submitted to it as to a caress.

She cared nothing for Odiam; it was no thought of disloyalty to it and her father, of breaking from her service, which made her mark time in dreams. As the weeks went by she felt more and more the hatefulness of the yoke. She now had a standard of comparison by which to judge Reuben and Odiam. She saw herself and her brothers and her sister more and more as victims. Other farmers' children were not slaves. Other farms did not hang like sucking incubuses on boys' and girls' backs, draining all the youth and joy and sport out of them.

It made her blood boil to think of Robert and Albert in their exile. Robert had now been released from gaol, and had been sent by a charitable society to Australia. Reuben had refused to move a hand to help him. As for Albert, a few months ago a piteous letter had arrived, begging for money. He had, through Mr. Hedges, found work on a small Radical paper which soon came to grief, and since then had been practically starving, having had no success as a freelance. A friend of his wanted to start a weekly review--Tory this time, for Albert's politics were subservient to occasion--and only required funds. Did Reuben feel prepared to make an investment? Thus poor Albert cloaked and trimmed his begging.

Of course Reuben had refused to help him, and Tilly had been unable to get any money out of Pete. Her heart bled for her brothers, and at the same time she could not help envying their freedom, though one enjoyed it as a beggar and the other as a felon.

§ 11.

At last the crisis came--through George, the youngest, least-considered son at Odiam. He had always been a weakling, as if Naomi had passed into his body her own passionate distaste for life. Also, as is common with epileptic children, his intellect was not very bright. It had been the habit to spare him, even Reuben had done so within reason. But he should not really have worked at all, or only in strict moderation--certainly he should not have been sent out that October evening to dig up the bracken roots on the new land. Tilly expostulated--"Anyhow he didn't ought to work alone "--but Reuben was angry with the boy, whom he had caught loafing once or twice that day, and roughly packed him off.

He himself went over to Moor's Cottage about a load of trifolium, and returning in the darkness by Cheat Land was persuaded to stay to supper. That was one of the nights when he did not like Alice Jury--he sometimes went through the experience of disliking her, which was an adventure in itself, so wild and surprising was it, so bewildering to remember afterwards. She seemed a little colourless--she was generally so vivid that he noticed and resented all the more those times when her shoulders drooped against her chair, and her little face looked strangely wistful instead of eager. It seemed as if on these occasions Alice were actually pleading with him. She lost that antagonism which was the salt of their relations, instead of fighting she pleaded. Pleaded for what? He dared not ask that question, in case the answer should show him some strange new Canaan which was not his promised land. So he came away muttering--"only a liddle stick of a woman. I like gurt women--I like 'em rosy, I like 'em full-breasted.... She'd never do fur me."

He tramped home through the darkness. A storm was rising, shaking the fir-plumes of Boarzell against a scudding background of clouds and stars. The hedges whispered, the dead leaves rustled, the woods sighed. Every now and then a bellow would come from the Moor, as the sou'wester roared up in a gust, then a low sobbing followed it into silence.

On the doorstep Reuben was greeted by Tilly--where was George? He had not been in to supper.

"Have you looked in the new field?"

"Yes--Benjamin went round. But he äun't there."

"Well, I döan't know where he is."

"Reckon he's fallen down in a fit somewhere and died."

Tilly was not looking at all like Naomi to-night.

"Nonsense," said Reuben, resenting her manner.

"It äun't nonsense. I always know when his fits are coming on because he's tired and can't work präaperly. He was like that to-day. And you--you drove him out."

Reuben had never been spoken to like this by his daughter. He turned on her angrily, then suddenly changed his mind. For the first time he really saw what a fine girl she was--all that Alice was not.

"We'll go and look for him," he said--"send out the boys."

All that night they hunted for George on Boarzell. It was pitch dark. Soon great layers of cloud were sagging over the stars, and Boarzell's firs were lost in the blackness behind them. Reuben, his sons, Beatup, Piper, Handshut, Boorman, fought the dark with lanterns as one might fight Behemoth with pin-pricks. They scattered over the Moor, searching the thorn-clumps and gorse-thickets. It was pretty certain that he was not on the new ground by Flightshot. Richard said openly that he did not believe in the fit and that George had run away, and--less openly--that it was a good job too. The other boys, however, did not think that he had enough sense to run away, and agreed that his condition all day had foretold an attack.

Reuben himself believed in the fit, and a real anxiety tortured him as he thrust his lantern into the gaping caverns of bushes. He had by his thoughtless and excessive zeal allowed Boarzell to rob him of another man. Of course, it did not follow that George was dead, but unless they found him soon it was quite likely that he would not survive exposure on such a night. If so, Reuben had only himself to thank for it. He should have listened to his daughter, and either let George off his work or made him work near home. He did not pretend to himself that he loved this weakling son, or that his death would cause his fatherhood much grief, but he found himself with increasing definiteness brought up against the conviction that Boarzell was beating him, wringing its own out of him by slow, inexorable means, paying him back a hundredfold for every acre he took or furrow he planted.

He had become separated from the other searchers, and was alone on the west side of the Moor. The wind barked and howled, hurling itself upon him as he stood, beating his face with hail, which hissed into the dead tangles of the heather, while the stripped thorns yapped and rattled, and the bushes roared. So great was the tumult that he seemed to fall into it like a stone into a wave--it passed over him, round him, seemed even to pass under him, he was hardly conscious of the solid ground. The blackness was impenetrable, save where his lantern stained it with a yellow smudge. He shouted, but his voice perished in the din--it seemed as if his whole man, sight, voice, hearing, and sensation, was blurring into the storm, as if Boarzell had swamped him at last, made him merely one of its hundred voices, mocking the manhood which had tried so much against its earth.

The wind seemed to be laughing at him, as it bellowed up in gusts, struck him, sprayed him, roughed his hair out madly, smacked his cheeks, drove the rain into his skin, and then rumbled away with a hundred chatterings and sighings. It seemed to be telling him that as his breath was to this wind so was he himself to Boarzell. The wind was the voice of the Moor, and it told him that in fighting Boarzell, he did not fight the mere earth, an agglomeration of lime and clay which he could trample and compel, but all the powers behind it. In arming himself against Boarzell he armed himself against the whole of nature's huge resources, the winds, the storms, the droughts, the early and the latter rain, the poisons in plants, and the death in stones, the lusts which spilling over from the beasts into the heart of man slay him from within himself. He had armed himself against all these, and once again the old words sang in his head--"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?"

He had shrunk into the rattling shelter of some thorn-bushes. They scraped their boughs like grotesque violins, and every other moment they would sweep down over him and shut him into a cavern of snapping twigs. He was soaked to the skin and his teeth chattered. He lay close to the earth, seeking shelter even from the skeleton heather which writhed woody stems all round him. He cursed. Must he spend the night here, lost and grovelling, to listen while Boarzell screeched its triumph over his cold, drenched body....

"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

"His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.

"The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold; the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.

"He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.

"Sharp stones are under him...."

A crash of thunder and a spit of lightning tore open the sky, and for a moment Reuben saw the slope of the Moor livid in the flash, and the crest of firs standing against the split and tumbling clouds. The air rang, screamed, hissed, rushed, and rumbled. Reuben, hardly knowing what he did, had sprung to his feet.

"I'll have wheat growing here in a twelvemonth!" he shouted.

§ 12.

The dawn broke over Boarzell like a reconciliation. The clamouring voices of wind and trees were still, and only a low sobbing came now and then from the woods. In the sky pale streamers of rose barred and striped a spreading violet. One or two clouds flew low, and slowly pilled themselves, scattering into the fields. On every blade of grass and twig of thorn, on every leaf and spine, glimmered pearls of rain, washing the air with a faint scent of stagnant water, perfuming it with the steams of sodden grass.

Reuben crept out of his thorn cavern and looked down the slope. At the bottom by Socknersh one or two lanterns moved through the dusk. He stiffly threw up his arm and tried to shout. His throat felt cramped and swollen, and it was not till after one or two attempts that a sound pitifully like a bleat came out of it. A voice answered him from the hollow, and then he saw that they were carrying something. He limped painfully down to them. Richard, Boorman, and Handshut carried a hurdle between them, and on the hurdle lay a draggled boy, whose clenched hand clutched a tuft of earth and grass as a victim might clutch a handful of his murderer's hair.

"Is he dead?" asked Reuben.

"Yes, mäaster," said Boorman.

Richard's mouth twisted in contemptuous silence--Handshut being young and silly was crying.

"He wurn't on the new land," continued Boorman, "he'd fallen into the ditch by Socknersh palings--that's why we cudn't find un. Reckon as he'd felt the fitses coming on un, and tried to git höame, pore souly."

"When did you find him?"

"Half an hour agone. He'd bin dead for hours, mäaster. He must have choked in the ditch--see, his mouth is full of mud."

Reuben drew back with a shiver. He limped behind the little procession towards Odiam, slouching for the first time in his life. In spite of his conquests he and Boarzell still were quits, still had to prove which was the better man. George, lying there muddy, white, and crumpled, was a sign that the Moor had its victories, in spite of the spreading corn.

He looked down at George--the boy's face had an unhuman chalky appearance under the mudstains; on the forehead a vein had swollen up in black knots, others showed pale, almost aqueous, through the stretched skin. After all, George was the weakest, the best-spared of his children. This thought comforted and stiffened him a little, and he went into the house with something of his old uprightness.

The other children were in the kitchen. They had seen their dead brother from the window, and stood mute and tearless as he was carried into the room. Reuben gave orders for him to be taken upstairs and the doctor to be sent for. No one else spoke. Tilly's breast heaved stormily, and he did not like the dull blaze in her eyes. Strange to say, of his whole family, excepting Pete, she was the only one of whom he was not faintly contemptuous. She had spirit, that girl--he prophesied that she would turn out a shrew.

For the very reason that he could not despise her, he took upon himself to bully her now.

"Get me some tea," he said roughly, "I'm cold."

§ 13.

Though there had been no open rupture, from that day forward Odiam was divided into two camps. On one side were Reuben and Pete, on the other, Tilly and Richard. Benjamin and Caro were neutrals; they were indifferent to vital issues, one engrossed in snatching holidays, the other in hankering after she did not quite know what. Pete had always been a good son, hard-working and enthusiastic, not exactly a comrade, but none the less an ally, always to be depended on and now and then taken into confidence. He seemed to accept his father's attitude towards George's death and to resent Richard's and Tilly's. That spring he beat Squinty Bream at Robertsbridge Fair, and gave half the purse to Reuben to buy a chaff-cutter.

Of the enemy Tilly was the most effective--Reuben did not quite know how to deal with her. His inability to despise her told heavily against him. Richard, on the other hand, he despised from the depths of his heart. The boy was insufferable, for he still had his old knack of saving his skin. It was nearly always impossible to pick any definite faults in his work--it was wonderful how he managed to combine unwillingness with efficiency. He also had an irritating habit of speaking correct English, and of alluding to facts and events of which Reuben had never heard in such a manner as to make it impossible for him not to show his ignorance.

Reuben never lost a chance of baiting him, he jibed at his squeamishness and fine manners, at his polite way of eating and the trouble he took to clean his nails; he despised him all the more for occasionally getting the better of him, verbally at any rate, in these encounters. One night at supper Reuben, having actually succeeded in finding this sneering son at fault, abused him roundly for the shocking condition of the ewes' fleeces. Richard had the bad sense to quote Shakespeare, whereat Reuben told him that if he could not speak English he could leave the room. Richard replied that he would be very pleased to do so, as certain people's table-manners made supper rather an ordeal. Reuben helped him out with a kick most vulgarly placed.

The next day Backfield was due at an auction at Northiam, but before leaving he ordered Richard to clean out the pig-sties. It was not, properly speaking, his work at all, but Reuben hoped it would make him sick, or that he would refuse to obey and thus warrant his father knocking him down.

"Certainly," said Richard without a tremor.

"Oh, thank you," said Reuben, bowing in mock politeness, and trying to copy his clipped English.

Ten minutes later he rode off, and the family separated to their tasks, or to such evasions of them as were possible in the master's absence.

Tilly cleared the table and began to prepare the dinner. She had promised the boys a bag pudding, and must start it early. She had not been cooking more than half an hour when the door opened, and Richard came in, dressed in a neat black suit with a stiff Gladstone collar. His hair was nicely brushed, and he carried a pair of gloves and a little valise.

"Oh!" cried Tilly.

"I'm off," said Richard shortly, banging down his valise on the table.

"Off!--where?"

"To London."

Tilly gaped at him.

"I'm sick of all this, I'm sick of the old man and his beastliness. Miss Bardon is lending me money to go to London University, and perhaps I shall read for the Bar."

"The Bar," repeated Tilly vaguely.

"Yes, I've learned a heap of Latin and other things during the last five years, and two or three years at the University ought to be all I want. Miss Bardon's taught me--I owe everything to her."

"I must say as how you've kept it dark."

She knew of his friendship with Anne Bardon, but had never expected it to bear such generous fruit.

"Well, it would never have done if the old man had got to know of it. Good heavens, Tilly! How can you live on with that old brute?"

"Maybe I shan't much longer," said Tilly, looking down at her rolling-pin.

Richard stared at her for a moment--"I'm glad to hear it. But the others--oh, my dear girl, this is damnable!"

Tilly sighed.

"The law ought to suppress such men--it ought to be a criminal offence to revert to type--the primordial gorilla."

"But fäather's a clever man--Albert always used to say so."

"Yes, in a cunning, brutish sort of way--like a gorilla when he's set his heart on a particular cocoanut. Boarzell's his cocoanut, and he's done some smart things to get it--and in one way at least he's above the gorilla, for he can enslave other people of superior intelligence to sweat under his orders for what they care nothing about."

"We're all very unlucky," said Tilly, "to have been born his children. But one by one we're gitting free. There'll soon be only Pete and Jemmy and Caro left."

"And I hope to God they'll have the wit to follow the rest of us. I'd like to see that old slave-driver left quite alone. Heavens! I could have strangled him yesterday--I should have, if I hadn't had this to look forward to."

"Where are you going to stay in London?"

"Miss Bardon's taken some rooms for me in Montague Street."

"She's good to you, Richard."

"She's an angel "--he lifted his eyes, and his mouth became almost worshipful--"she's an angel, who's raised me out of hell. I shall never be able to repay her, but she doesn't expect it. All she wants is my success."

"I wish Caro or Jemmy cud meet someone like her. I döan't think as Pete minds."

"No, he's quite the young gorilla. Now I must be off, Tilly. I'll write to you."

"Oh, wöan't fäather be in a taking!"

"I reckon--I expect he will. But don't you mind him, little sister. He isn't worth it."

He stooped and kissed her.

"Good-bye. Say it to the others for me."

"Good-bye--good luck to you."

... And he was gone--walking past the window in a top-hat.

§ 14.

It would be mere politeness to describe as a "taking" Reuben's condition when he heard Richard had gone. He was in a stamping, bellowing, bloodshot rage. He sent for various members of his family, questioned them, stormed at them, sent them away, then sent for them again. He boxed Caro's ears because she cried--hitherto he had kept his hands off the girls. As for Tilly, he would have liked to have whipped her--he felt sure that somehow it was all her doing--but the more furious he grew, the more he felt himself abashed by her manner, at once so soft and so determined, and he dared do no more than throw his boots at her.

After a night of cursings and trampings in his room, he took the fermenting dregs of his wrath to Cheat Land. It was queer that he should go for sympathy to Alice Jury, who was chief in the enemy's camp. But though he knew she would not take his part, she would not be like the others, leering and cackling. She would give him something vital, even if it was only a vital opposition. That was all the difference between her and everyone else--she opposed him not because she was flabby or uninterested or enterpriseless, but because she really hated what he strove for. She was his one strong candid enemy, so he went to her as his only friend.

She was shocked at his white twitching face and bloodshot eyes; for the first time since she had known him, Reuben came to her bereft of that triumphant manhood which had made him so splendid to watch in his struggles.

"The hound!" he cried, striking his fists together, "the miserable, cowardy hound!--gone and left me--gone to be a gentleman, the lousy pig. Oh, Lard, I wish as I had him in these hands o' mine!--I'd mäake a gentleman of him!"

Alice, as he expected, had caustic for him rather than balm.

"Once again," she said slowly, "I ask you--is it worth while?"

"Wot's worth while?"

"You know. I asked you that question the first or second time I saw you. No one had ever asked it you before, and you would have liked to beat me."

"I shud like to beat you now--talking of wot you know naun about."

"I daresay--but I'm not your son or your daughter or your wife----"

"I never beat my wife."

"Chivalrous, humane man!--well, anyhow I'm not anyone you can beat, so I dare ask--is it worth while?"

"And I ask wot d'you mean by 'worth while'?"

"You know that it's Boarzell and your farm which have lost you your boys."

"I know nothing of the sort."

"Well, would Robert have stolen money, or Albert disgraced your name, to get free, if you and your farm hadn't made them slaves? If you hadn't been a heartless slave-driver would George have died the other night alone on the Moor?--or would Richard have taken advantage of a neighbour's charity to escape from you? Don't you see that your ambition has driven you to make slaves of your children?"

"Well, they wöan't wark fur me of their free will. Lard knows I've tried to interest 'em...."

"But how can you expect them to be interested? Your ambition means nothing to them."

"It ought to--Odiam's their home jest as it's mine."

"But don't you see that you've forced them to give up all the sweet things of life for it?--Robert his love, and Albert his poetry, and Richard his education."

"Well, I gave up all the sweet things of life, as you call 'em--and why shudn't they?"

"Because you gave those things up of your free will--they were made to give them up by force. You've no right to starve and deny other people as you have to starve and deny yourself."

"I döan't see that. Wot I can do, they can."

"But--as experience has taught you--they won't. You can see now what your slave-driving's brought you to--you've lost your slaves."

"Well, and I reckon they wurn't much loss, nuther"--the caustic was healing after all--"Robert wur a fool wot didn't know how to steal a ten-pound note, Albert wur always mooning and wasting his time, and George wur a pore thing not worth his keep. As for Richard--that Richard--who wants a stuck-up, dentical, high-nosed, genteel swell about the pläace? I reckon as I'm well shut of the whole four of 'em. They wurn't worth the food they ate, surelye!"

"That's what strikes me as so pathetic."

"Wot?"

"That you should be able to comfort yourself with the thought that they weren't worth much to you as a farmer. What were they worth to you as a father?"

"Naun."

"Quite so--and that's what makes me pity you," and suddenly her eyes kindled, blazed, as with her spirit itself for fuel--"I pity you, I pity you--poor, poor man!"

"Adone do wud that--though you sound more as if you wur in a black temper wud me than as if you pitied me."

"I am angry with you just because I pity you. It's a shame that I should have to pity you--you're such a splendid man. It ought to be impossible to pity you, but I do--I pity you from my soul. Think what you're missing. Think what your children might have been to you. How you might have loved that dear stupid Robert--how proud you might have been of Albert, and of Richard leaving you for a professional career ... and poor little George, just because he was weak and unlike the rest, he might have been more to you than them all. Then there's your brother Harry----"

"Come, come--stick to the truth. I äun't to blame for Harry."

"But can't you see that he's the chief part of the tragedy you're bringing on yourself and everyone?--He's the type, he's the chorus, the commentary on every act. Reuben, can't you see--oh, why won't you see?--he's you, yourself, as you really are!"

"Nonsense!--döan't be a fool, my gal."

"Yes--you--blind, crazy with your ambition, repulsive and alone in it. Don't you see?"

He smiled grimly--"I döan't."

"No--you don't see this hideous thing that's pursuing you, that's stripping you of all that ought to be yours, that's making you miss a hundred beautiful things, that's driving you past all your joys--this Boarzell...."

"--äun't driving me, anyhow. I'm fighting it."

"No," said Alice. "It's I who am fighting Boarzell."

§ 15.

Early the next year, Tilly married Realf of Grandturzel.

Reuben received the blow in silence--it stunned him. He did not go over to Cheat Land--something, he scarcely knew what, kept him away. In the long yellow twilights he wandered on Boarzell. The rain-smelling March wind scudded over the grass, over the wet furrows of his cornfields, over the humming tops of the firs that, with the gorse splashed round their trunks, marked the crest of the Moor and of his ambition. Would they ever be his, those firs? Would he ever tear up that gorse and fling it on the bonfire, as he had torn up the gorse on the lower slopes and burned it with roars and cracklings and smoke that streamed over the Moor to Totease? Perhaps Realf would have the firs and the gorse, and pile that gorgeous bonfire. Tilly would put him up to her father's game--Reuben's imagination again failed to conceive the man who did not want Boarzell--she would betray Odiam's ambitions, and babble its most vital secrets. Tilly, Reuben told Boarzell, was a bitch.

It became now all the more necessary to smash Realf. He could no longer be content with keeping just ahead of him; he must establish a sort of two-power standard, and crush his rival to the earth. That was not a good summer for expansion--a drought baked up the greater part of Sussex, and there was an insect plague in the hops--nevertheless, Reuben bought thirty-five acres of Boarzell, on the east slope, by the road. He was tormented by a fear that Realf would buy the land if he did not, and, moreover, during May two boards had appeared advertising it as "an eligible building site"; which was possibly bluff, possibly unusual cunning on the part of Flightshot, made resourceful by its straits.

He no longer had any direct intercourse with the Bardons. Their latest impropriety had put them beyond even the favour of a casual nod. If they chose to break up his family they must take the consequences. He only wished he could break up their estate, sell their rat-holed old Manor over their heads, and leave them unprotected by landed property to the sure workings of their own incompetence.

He did not fail to show his neighbours how he despised Flightshot, and the more humorously inclined among them were never tired of asking how soon it would be before Richard married Anne.

"Your family seems to be in a marrying way jest now, Mus' Backfield--there's your daughter made an unaccountable fine match, and it's only nat'ral as young Richard shud want to do as well fur himself."

Reuben treated these irreverences with scorn. Nothing would make him abate a jot of his dignity. On the contrary, his manner and his presence became more and more commanding. He drove a splendid blood mare in his gig, smoked cigars instead of pipes, and wore stand-up collars about four inches high--when he was not working, for it had not struck him that it was undignified to work, and he still worked harder on his farm than the worst-paid pig-boy.

He was more stoutly resolved than ever that the mob of small farmers and incompetents should not gape at his misfortunes. So he hid under a highly repulsive combination of callousness and swagger his grief for his sons' defection, his rage and shame at Tilly's marriage, and his growing anxiety about Odiam. That summer had been terrible--a long drought had been followed too late by thundery rains. His harvest had been parched and scrappy, most of the roots shedding their seed before reaping; the green-fly had spoiled several acres of hops, which otherwise would have been the one bright patch in the season; his apples and pears had been eaten by wasps; and then a few untimely showers had beaten down two fields of barley yet unreaped and his only decent crop of aftermath hay.

If Grandturzel had fared as badly he could have borne it, but Grandturzel, though scarred, came out of the summer less battered than he. Realf's oats, being in a more sheltered position, did no private threshing of their own; his hops for the most part escaped the blight, and though he lost a good deal on his plums, his apples were harvested at a record, and brought him in nearly ten pounds an acre. On both farms the milk had done badly, but as Realf's dairy business was not so extensive as Backfield's, he was better able to stand its partial collapse.

Reuben felt that Tilly was at the bottom of his rival's success. She was practical and saving, the very virtues which Realf lacked and the want of which might have wrecked him. She doubtless was responsible for the good condition of his orchards and the immunity of his hops; she had probably told her husband of that insect-spray of her father's--which had failed him that summer, being too much diluted by the fool who mixed it, but had proved a miracle of devastation in other years.

He wanted to smash Tilly even more than he wanted to smash Realf. He had seen her twice since her marriage--meeting her once in Rye, and once on Boarzell--and each sight had worked him into a greater rage. Her little figure had strengthened and filled out, her demure self-confidence had increased, her prettiness was even more adorable now that the rose had deepened on her cheeks and her gowns strained over her breast; she was enough to fill any man with wrath at the joke of things. Tilly ought to be receiving the wages of her treachery in weariness and anxiety, fading colour and withering flesh--and here she was all fat and rosy and happy, well-fed and well-beloved. He hated her and called her a harlot--because she had betrayed Odiam for hire and trafficked in its shame.

§ 16.

He had been forced to engage a woman to help Caro in the house, and also a shepherd for Richard's work. His family had been whittled down to almost nothing. Only Caro, Pete, and Jemmy were left out of his eight splendid boys and girls. Caro, Pete, Jemmy, and hideous, mumbling Harry--he surveyed the four of them with contemptuous scowls. Pete was the only one who was worth anything--Caro and Jemmy would turn against him if they had the slightest chance and forsake him with the rest. As for Harry, he was a grotesque, an image, a hideous fum--"Reuben himself as he really was." He! He!

The weeks wore on and it dawned on him that he must pull himself together for a fresh campaign. He must have more warriors--he could not fight Boarzell with only traitors and hirelings. He must marry again.

It was some time since the abstract idea of marriage had begun to please him, but lately the abstract of marriage had always led to the concrete of Alice Jury, so he had driven it from his thoughts. Now, more and more clearly, he saw that he must marry. He wanted a woman and he wanted children, so he must marry. But he must not marry Alice.

Of late he had resumed his visits to Cheat Land, discontinued for a while at Tilly's marriage. The attraction of Alice Jury was as strong, unfathomable, and unaccountable as ever. Since the stormy interview after Richard's desertion they had not discussed his ambitions for Odiam and Boarzell, but that meeting was none the less stamped on Reuben's memory with a gloomy significance. It was not that Alice's arguments had affected him at all--she had not penetrated to the springs of his enterprise, she had not touched or conjured the hidden part of him in which his ambition's roots were twined round all that was vital and sacred in the man. But somehow she had expressed her own attitude with an almost sinister clearness--"It's I who am fighting Boarzell." What should she fight it for?--imagine that she fought it, rather, for a woman could not really fight Boarzell. She was fighting it for him. She wanted him.

He knew that Alice wanted him, and he knew that he wanted Alice. He did not know why he wanted Alice any more than he knew why Alice wanted him. "Wot is she?--a liddle stick of a creature. And I like big women."

There was something in the depths of him that cried for her, something which had never moved or cried in him before. In spite of her lack of beauty and beguilement, in spite of her hostility to all his darling schemes, there was something in him to which Alice actually and utterly belonged. He did not understand it, he could not analyse it, he scarcely indeed realised it--all he felt was the huge upheaval, the conflict that it brought, all the shouting and the struggling of the desperate and motiveless craving that he felt for her--a hunger in him calling through days and nights, in spite of her insignificance, her aloofness, her silences, her antagonism.

"I reckon as how I must be in love."

That was the conclusion he came to after much heavy pondering. He had never been truly in love before. He had wanted women for various reasons, either for their charm and beauty, or because, as in Naomi's case, of their practical use to him. Alice had no beauty, and a charm too subtle for him to realise, though as a matter of fact the whole man was plastic to it--as for practical usefulness, she was poor, delicate, unaccustomed to country life, and hostile to all his most vital ambitions. She would not bring him wealth or credit, she was not likely to bear him healthy children--and yet he loved her.

Sometimes, roaming through murky dusks, he realised in the dim occasional flashes which illuminate the non-thinking man, that he was up against the turning-point of his fight with Boarzell. If he married Alice it would be the token of what had always seemed more unimaginable than his defeat--his voluntary surrender. Sometimes he told himself fiercely that he could fight Boarzell with Alice hanging, so to speak, over his arm; but in his heart he knew that he could not. He could not have both Alice and Boarzell.

Yet, in spite of all this, one day at Cheat Land he nearly fell at her feet and asked her to be his ruin.

It was a March twilight, cold and rustling, and tart with the scents of newly turned furrows. Reuben sat with Alice in the kitchen, and every now and then Jury's wretched house-place would shake as the young gale swept up rainless from the east and poured itself into cracks and chimneys. Alice was sewing as usual--it struck Reuben that she was very quick and useful with her fingers, whatever might be her drawbacks in other ways. Sometimes she had offered to read poetry to him, and had once bored him horribly with In Memoriam, but as he had taken no trouble to hide his feelings she had to his great relief announced her intention of casting no more pearls before swine.

She was silent, and the firelight playing in her soft, lively eyes gave her a kind of mystery which for the first time allowed Reuben a glimpse into the sources of her attraction. She was utterly unlike anything there was or had been in his life, the only thing he knew that did not smell of earth. The pity of it was that he loved that strong-smelling earth so much.

"Alice," he said suddenly--"Do you think as how you could ever care about Boarzell?"

"No, I'm quite sure I couldn't."

"Not ever?"

"Never."

"Why?"

"Because I hate it. It's spoiling your life. It's making a beast and a maniac of you. You think of nothing--absolutely nothing--but a miserable rubbish-heap that most people would be throwing their old kettles on."

"That's just the point, my gal. Where most föalkses 'ud be throwing old kettles, I shall be growing wheat."

"And what good will that do you?"

"Good!--when I've two hundred acres sown with grain!"

"Yes, grain that's fertilised with the rotting remains of all that ought to have made your life good and sweet."

"You wöan't understand. There's naun in the world means anything to me but my farm. Oh, Alice, if you could only see things wud my eyes and stand beside me instead of agäunst me."

"Then there would be no more friendship between us. What unites us is the fact that we are fighting each other."

"Döan't talk rubbidge, liddle gal. It's because I see, all the fight there is in you that I'd sooner you fought for me than agäunst me. Couldn't you try, Alice?"

His voice had sunk very low, almost to sweetness. A soft flurry of pink went over her face, and her eyelids drooped. Then suddenly she braced herself, pulled herself taut, grew combative again, though her voice shook.

"No, Reuben, I could never do anything but fight your schemes. I think you are wasting and spoiling your life, and there's no use expecting me to stand by you."

He now realised the full extent of his peril, because for the first time he saw her position unmasked. She would never beguile him with the thought that she could help him in his life's desire; she would not alter the essential flavour of their relationship to suit his taste--rather she would force him to swallow it, she would subdue by strength and not by stealth, and fight him to the end.

He must escape, for if he surrendered now the battle was over, and he would have betrayed Boarzell the loved to something he loved less--loved less, he knew it, though he wavered.

He rose to his feet. The kitchen was dark, with eddying sweeps of shadow in the corners which the firelight caressed--while a single star put faint ghostly romance into the window.

"I--I must be gitting back home."

Alice rose too, and for a moment he was surprised that she did not try to keep him; instead, she said:

"It's late."

He moved a step or two towards the door, and suddenly she added in a low broken voice:

"But not too late."

The floor seemed to rise towards him, and the star in the window to dance down into Castweasel woods and up again.

Alice stood in the middle of the room, her face bloomed with dusk and firelight, her hands stretched out towards him....

There was silence, in which a coal fell. She still stood with her arms outstretched; he knew that she was calling him--as no woman had ever called him--with all that of herself which was in his heart, part of his own being.

"Reuben."

"Alice."

He came a few steps back into the room....

It was those few steps which lost him to her, for they brought him within sight of Boarzell--framed in the window, where Castweasel woods had been. It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay, Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle. And Alice?... He gave her a look, and left her.

"I once töald a boy of mine," he said to himself as he crossed the Moor, "that the sooner he found he could do wudout love the better.... Well, I reckon I'm not going to be any weaker than my words."

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