Book 4 — chapter three: The Deathly Bane

’TIS hard, and very hard, to write of the wintry time we went through after that night of grief and bitter woe. For when the quill has traced out good words of a kind meaning, it irks it to make them sad and evil. But sad and evil that time was, and there is no use in gainsaying it. For many days after the fire, the work on the farm stood still, as it often will after a death. Gideon’s one thought was to get at Beguildy, or if not that, to make him suffer the utmost of the law. Missis Beguildy was forced to give up the Stone House, for the landlord didna want a man there who burnt ricks, nor his folk so he made the excuse of the rent being late to turn them out. Everything was sold, and Missis Beguildy and Jancis went off to Silverton, where Beguildy lay in prison waiting for the assizes, with only what they stood in. At least, poor Jancis didna stand, for when she heard the dreadful news of what Gideon had said, which I told her Mother to break to her as best she could, she fell down on the floor and stirred neither hand nor foot, nor spoke a single word. They carried her to the waggon from Plash Farm, which was to take her and her mother away, and they say she lay there like a broken flower. Maybe it was as well, for if her strength hadna gone from her she’d have tried to see Gideon, and I do think he’d have struck her down in his bitter smouldering rage. It seemed to ease him to hear of their misfortune, and when the day came for them to go, he went off to a place in the woods where he could see the waggon pass by, and stood there looking down upon it, with the sullen farm labourer driving, misliking having anything to do with folk in such evil case in men’s sight, and poor Missis Beguildy sitting in the waggon all aged and wild, and Jancis lying on some straw at the bottom, like a white waxen image. I know, because Miller’s Tim was in the wood at the time, and he came running to me, frit out of his life, pretty near, to tell me all about it.

“Oh, Prue Sarn, I was in the ’ood after a tuthree nuts,” he says, “and I saw Mister Sarn a-walking by lonesome, very glooming and drodsome, and I was feared, so I did hide in a tree. And Mister Sarn went under the boughs of the big beech, where the road through the wood comes by. And in a while there was a rumbling, and I saw the waggon from Plash, and Missis Beguildy crying and taking on awful, but I couldna see Jancis. So I clomb the tree to see if she was in the bottom of the waggon, and there she was. She did look like a dead maid. Oh, she did look like the picture in the church of the little maid as was dead in the house when they fetched the Lord in, and He says ‘Rise you up!’ He says. Only He hadna said it to Jancis. And I was feared, and I came down quiet from the tree, and I saw Mister Sarn staring down upon the waggon, for you do know there’s a bit of a bank just there. And his face did frit me so that I made to run off, only then he stirred, so I kept quiet for fear he might come my way. He gloomed upon the waggon a long while, till the rumbling went ever so quiet, and wunna no more than the noise of a startle-de-buz when it be gone past, and then there was no sound at all, save the noise of a throstle banging a conker on a stone. And Mister Sarn did lift up both his fisses and did shake ’em after the waggon, and oh, Prue! his face was like the face of the Lord Jehovah in Feyther’s book, when His anger was not turned away. Then he went away, slow, looking upon the ground, and the throstle went on banging the conker on the stone, and I runned to you.”

And that was how the properest man in our countryside did see the girl of his choice go, a girl like a water-lily bud, as loved him right well.

I said to myself, “It be the bane. Oh, it be the dreadful bane.”

But after that Gideon seemed more at ease in himself. And I think it was that he had mistrusted his own heart, being afraid that if Jancis came to him he’d give in. And his purpose was not to give in, but to begin all over again, and go straight forrard to his fixed end and aim.

The morning after they’d gone, he fetched out the ploughs, and came to the kitchen door and called to me as I was making gruel for Mother, who was abed again, and had been ever since the fire, taking nought but gruel or a posset, and he said—

“Come and start of the big field, oot, Prue?”

I thought it was best not to give him a nay-word at all, so I said, Ah, I’d come. I took the gruel to Mother and said should I get Tivvy to come and sit with her a bit now and again, seeing we were starting on the ploughing. And she says—

“Oh, that bitter old ploughing! And maybe all the corn’ll be burnt like the last. No wedding, nor house nor china nor nothing, only the pigs to tend again come the spring! But maybe I wunna see the spring. I’m very middling, Prue. You mun get the doctor’s mon to me, I doubt.”

And indeed her poor hands were very thin and shrunken, and her small face browner and thinner, and she seemed more like a lost bird or a trapped creature than ever, and more in fear of Gideon.

“Dunna let him come in till I be better,” she’d say. “Dunna let my son Sarn come and make me feel as I’m a burden. He dunna love me. He’d lief I was dead and sodded.”

And she’d lift up her hands, beseeching.

So I got Tivvy to come and mind her, and all that winter of dark weather, dark within as well as without, we ploughed, turning over the stubble of that good harvest we’d lost. We were poorer than ever, and things didna prosper so well as they had, there being no heart in us. There were Tivvy’s meals to find as well, for though she came for love, being sweet on Gideon, yet we had her victuals to find, and she was a very hearty feeder. The doctor’s man cost a lot, also, and the worse the weather was, the more he charged. About the New Year there was a bitter cold spell, and ice on the roads, so his horse came down and broke its leg, and we had to pay summat towards that. Things seemed to go from bad to worse, for Gideon kept me so hard at it, driving plough, that I was forced to leave the dairy work and the fowls and pigs to Tivvy, and she was ever a bit flighty, and careless, so folks began to complain about the butter, and the fowls laid badly, and the pigs began to look thin and unkind, and Tivvy thought of nothing but to make herself look pretty and temptuous for Gideon. As January went on the weather got worse, and we had a heavy fall of snow, and Mother was so bad one night that I was forced to send for the doctor’s man again. At least, send I didna, for nobody would go, the snow being deep. There was nothing for market, the cows being dry all but one, and eggs scarce. So Gideon didna go to Lullingford, and I made up my mind to go on Sunday, when even Gideon didna plough, and once at Lullingford I could send word to the doctor by the Silverton coach. This I did, and a weary day I had of it, and a sad day also, passing the empty house of Kester Woodseaves, and thinking maybe some ill might come to him in the great city, or he might meet a lover there, and so come no more to Lullingford. But I was glad of this weary day after, for there be times when the only comfort a body has is the remembrance of hardship borne for somebody dear.

When the doctor’s man came after a good few days, he was forced to bide with us some time, on account of the badness of the roads. This irked Gideon, for the expense of the food and also his nag’s keep. He was the more put out because the doctor’s man gave a good account of Mother, for he seemed to think she should have been at death’s door afore I called the man to come from so far away. I mind we were sitting round the hearth, late on a wild night, with hail-storms taboring on the window, and a good clear fire that we were mighty glad of. The doctor’s man was a pleasant-spoken person, round and short and ruddy, with a bright red colour on his cheeks that looked as if it had a good glaze over it. He was always rubbing his hands, as if the last patient had pleased him very well, but you could never tell from this how the person had prospered, for he’d rub his hands as much over a corpse as over a quick person, and indeed, I sometimes thought, more. He was rubbing them while we talked about Mother, though not so much as he did when he told us of poor Missis Beguildy, who had ailed more and more ever since she got to Silverton, and was now said to be going into a decline. It wasna that he was an unkind man, or wished folk harm, only naturally it was more interesting to him if they were took for death than if they were only a little ailing.

“Missis Sarn’ll pull through now. Nicely, she will,” he said.

“Oh!” says Gideon. “Her’ll pull through, will her?”

“Ah. And last a-many years, I shouldna wonder. A wiry old lady! Tough, for all she’s thin and nesh-looking.”

“How many years?” says Gideon.

“Oh! It’s hard to say. Doctor might be able to, but of course I be only like his ’prentice. But it might be as much as ten, easy. Ah. I should say ten. With care.”

“Ten years!” Gideon said it in a very strange way.

“Ah, but you mun cosset her.”

“Ten years, and always like this?”

“Oh, ah! Her’ll be bed-ridden, winters, and maybe all the year round later on.”

“And she’ll be no more use?”

“Use? Why, what use could she be?”

“And you coming over a tuthree times every winter, I suppose?”

“Oh, ah, if you send for me,” says doctor’s man, taking a pull at his ale and helping himself to another piece of bread and cheese, which made Gideon scowl.

“Whenever be you going to clear supper, Prue?” he says. “I’ve had my bellyful this long while.”

“Oh, but you’re such a poor eater, Sarn,” Tivvy cries out. “It’s wonder you’re not clemmed. You want a wife to cook for ye and sarve up temptuous dishes. Chitterling puffs, now. They’re as different from plain chitterlings as heaven from hell. I made some Sunday was a week, and neither Feyther nor Sammy spoke a word all day after, they were that contented in their innards.”

“Oh, dear me, I do wish I wunna a married man,” says the doctor’s chap. “Ah, in good sadness I wish it!”

“If you wunna, it would be no manner use,” said Tivvy pertly. “I like a big man.”

Gideon took no notice, any more than he did of the chitterling puffs.

“A very big man,” went on that forrard little piece, “and dark. Big shoulders, big ’ands, arms with great big lumps of muscle and sinew, big feet, strong legs——”

“Why, missis, you be giving a list like the list in the Song o’ Solomon,” says doctor’s man.

“And hard,” went on Tivvy, taking no notice, but fixing her eyes on Gideon, “hard and never tired, lusty and lungeous and ill to thwart, but a good lover, ah, and fiery, and not to be gainsayed by the girl he’s a mind for. That’s the man for me! Ah. That’s the man Sexton’s Tivvyriah would be a right good missus to, with no other thought but to save and scrape and scrat to do his will and make him rich.”

“Well, you should have been a lawyer, Missis, so you should,” says the visitor, “and if you dunna get what you want, may I be bottled in spirits like a tadpole!”

But Gideon never lifted his eyes to Tivvy at all, only sat and glowered till she’d gone to bed. Then he said again—“And she’ll last for years, always ailing, but lasting on?”

“Ah. Indeed to goodness! Creaking doors, you know. But you mun see you keep her pulse strong. There’s the danger. If it wunna kept strong, she’d very likely go off quiet and sudden before you’d time to say sarsaparilla. Keep the pulse strong and she’ll be as merry as a robin.” We talked a bit more, and then Gideon said he was going to look the stock afore turning in.

“The brindled longhorn’s very middling,” he said. “Seems to be in a fever all the while. Heart’s like to burst sometimes. I suppose a dose of foxglove ud put her right, maybe?”

“Ah. Foxglove’ll lower the pulse as quick as anything. But you mun be careful. Be she a young cow?”

“Going four.”

“Dunna give her too much, then. When things get old and worn out they canna stand much of it.”

When the visitor was gone to bed, and Gideon back from the shippen, he sat down, hopeless-like, and said—

“Her means dying.”

“What, Brindle?” I says.

“Ah. Seems like that old devil’s put a curse on me all right.”

“It’s only the weather, and Tivvy being a bit careless, and me so busy at it, ploughing.”

“And there’s Mother,” he said, “as was used to help a bit, no use, and less than no use. A heavy burden! We’ll never pick up now she’s like that.”

“Dunna let her know you think it,” I said.

But the very next day, when I took her supper, there was Gideon standing in the mid of the room, talking very loud, and Mother like a frittened mouse.

“Well,” he was saying, “you be very middling, Mother!”

“Ah, I be ailing, Sarn,” she says, with her smile.

“It mun be a sorrow to you that you canna do a hand’s turn.”

“Ah. It be, Sarn. But come the warm weather, I’m in behopes to see to the broody hens and the rest of the fowl. Ah! And the ducks and the cade lambs.”

“But not the pigs?”

“Well, if Tim could mind ’em a bit longer I’d be glad. It does make me so rheumaticky, down by the water there.”

“It’s a big expense, giving that great lad his tea every day.”

“I know it be, and I’ll be as quick as I can getting better, Sarn.”

“I shouldna think life’s much of a pleasure to you, ailing so.”

“It be weary time and again, but in between I’m pretty comfortable.”

“What with the rheumatics and the cough and the sinking feeling, I should think you’d as lief be in the Better Land.”

“When it pleases the Lord to take me to the Better Land, I mun go without complaint, but I’d liefer be in life, for life I do know, and the worst of it, but the Better Land I dunna know.”

“You know there’s no coughs nor rheumatics there, nor sinking feeling.”

“Nor chimney corners nor cups of tea,” she says, “and I doubt it’ll be too grand for me, Sarn.”

But Gideon, standing in the mid of the room and talking very loud, said—

“You’d as lief be dead as quick.”

He went away then, but every evening he went in again and talked in the same way, which seemed a pity to my mind, for though he might mean to cheer her up, and though folk never seem to think it matters what you say to the sick, yet it seemed to me melancholy talk for a poor old ailing woman. But at last, one evening at the end of March, in a spell of wet, muggy weather, when the rheumatics were very bad, she said, when he came to what he always ended with—“I should think you’d as lief be dead as quick——”

“Well, maybe I would, Sarn.”

And that seemed to content him. He left off coming every evening, which eased Mother, for she was more in dread of him than ever nowadays, so that even Tivvy noticed it. I thought when April came in, things seemed to be going better, Mother being more cheerful, though still very weak. I got on better with my work, being free of worry, and Mother seemed quite happy with Tivvy. We were working harder than ever, and my clo’es hung about me, but I didna mind that. I was sowing the big field with wheat, while Gideon went on ploughing. It was grand out there in the fresh of the morning, with purple shadows on the wet earth, and the sun rolling up beyond the woods, and Sarn Mere like pale blue crackled glass with a light behind it. Times, the sky would be all pale blue too, with larks hanging in it. Times, the big white clouds, like new-washed and carded wool, stood upon the tops of the budding trees. The bright colours made me think of the coloured weaving, which I supposed Kester would have pretty near mastered by now. Though no word had come, since Christmas, of his doings or his well-being, I felt in myself that all was right with him. At Christmas the Silverton coachman had left a little packet for me at the Mug of Cider, and when I was raught back to the attic I found within a bit of cloth woven in two colours, and a letter.

London Town.

Christmas.

Dear Prue Sarn—

This is to wish you well as it leaves me. I can do two colours now, as you see by pattern. The women here are poor things, pale and small, mostly fair, and not a real melting dark eye among them. I was bid to a banquet at the house of an alderman that is a weaver. There was a young wench sat by me that had spared her bodice-stuff but not her blushes. I called to mind a dark stone chamber, and young Camperdine’s face in the shadows, and a woman that did what she did for loving-kindness and in bitterness of spirit, but did look like an apple-blossom fairy all the same, and did light a fire in one chap as will be very hard to dout. And so a happy Christmas and a good New Year from

Kester Woodseaves.

I may say that letter was in rags by April, as if the mice had been at it.

I had sent him a letter for Christmas also, and this was it.

Sarn.

Christmas.

Dear Weaver—

Please find herein a lockram shirt. If you wear it, they say you’ll take no harm from the smallpox or other ills. I wove it and made it of hemp, and said a good few old righteous charms over it, but no unrighteous ones. I often call to mind the day we watched the dragon-flies, at the time of the troubling of the waters, when the lilies were in blow. So farewell for now, and God send you happy.

Yours obediently,

Prudence Sarn.

The seventh of April being a very clear-coloured morning, I called the weaving to mind, and so, as I went up and down the field sowing the bright seed, I sang Barley Bridge.

“Shift your feet in nimble flight,

You’ll be home by candlelight.

Open the gate’s as wide as the sky,

And let the king come riding by.”

Would Kester ever come riding to Sarn from London Town? I wondered. For the fair, he’d said he’d come, at the time of the troubling of the waters, when the lilies were in blow all along the marges of the mere, looking at their angels, and when blue kingfisher-flies and the bright, lustre-coloured damsels were coming out of their shrouds.

I was thinking thus, when I looked up, and there was Tivvy, coming running in a great courant, all distraught. “Come quick, Prue!” she said. “Her’s took very bad. The tea didna agree. He says, give it her strong, he says, for it’ll do more good the like of that’n. So I did. And she said it was a bitter brew. But she drank it. And in a while she went ever so quiet, and I couldna hear her breathe. And then she gave a guggle and whispers—

“ ‘Go for Prue.’ ”

I was only just in time to kiss Mother, who was all shrunken down in her pillows. She whispered—

“A bitter brew!” and smiled, and caught her breath, and was gone.

After a while I says to Tivvy—

“Where’s that tea?”

But she’d thrown it away.

“Gideon,” I said, “was there bane in that tea you did tell Tivvy to give Mother?”

“Now what do I know what Tivvy did give to Mother?” says he.

“Oh, Sarn, you did know!” cries Tivvy. “You said, ‘Give it her strong,’ you did.”

“Hold your tongue, you little liar,” shouts Gideon, “or I’ll thank you to tell Prue what you and me were doing in the loft, Sunday’s a week.”

With that, Tivvy went as red as fire, and hushed.

I could make nothing of them. I sent for the doctor, to see what Mother died of. And he said, were we in the habit of giving her digitalis, a strange word that I didna know, but he spelled it out for me, and I wrote it down. So I said no, I’d never heard tell of it. So he says, “Foxglove! Foxglove!”

“Foxglove?” I says. “No. Whatever should I give her that for?”

“What indeed?” he says, looking at me very sharp.

“What do puzzle me, sir,” I says, “is what Mother died of. She was beginning to pick up so nice.”

“That’s what I want to know, too,” he says.

“Maybe we’d ought to have a Crowner’s ’Quest, sir?” I says.

“Oh, you’d be willing to have an inquest on the body?”

“Why, yes, indeed, if it was right and proper.”

“Well, if you’re willing to have it, there’s no need to have it.”

He was a very peculiar man. I couldna make him out at all.

“I was doubtful,” he says. “But if you’re willing . . . It’s nothing but old age, I expect. They go like that in the spring sometimes. And it’s a great trouble and expense, an inquest . . . all just for the flicker of a doubt . . . and can’t do the poor woman any manner of good . . . so, if you’re willing, we won’t bother with an inquest.”

I could make neither head nor tail of that. But remembering that Doctor was an educated man, I left off trying to understand him. For there’s as much of a mystery about an educated man, that’s been schooled and colleged proper, as there is about the Trinity. So, being busy over the funeral and all, I thought no more about him, but I grieved sorely for Mother, because as she lay in coffin she did look like a frozen bird, foredone with winter.