The Greatest Works of J. S. Fletcher (64+ Titles in One Illustrated Edition). J. S. Fletcher
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was difficult, looking at man and horse, to decide as to which most suggested helplessness and incompetence. The horse showed itself to be a poor man's beast in every line and aspect of its ill-shaped, badly-fed body, in the listless droop of its head, in its ungroomed, rough-haired coat, in the very indecision with which it set down its oversized, sprawling feet. It had a dull, listless eye, the eye of an equine outcast; there was an evident disposition in it to stop on any provocation, to crop the fresh green of the grass from the broad stretches of turf on the wayside, to nibble at the tender shoots of the hedgerows, to do anything that needed little effort. It breathed heavily as it breasted the hill, following the man who slouched in front, his head drooping from his bent shoulders, his lips, still moist and sticky from the ale he had drunk, sucking mechanically at a foul clay pipe. He was a little more fully attired than the scarecrows in the neighbouring fields, but there was all over him the aimlessness, the ineptitude, the purposelessness of the unfit. His old hat, shapeless and colourless, shaded a face which suggested nothing but dull stupidity, and was only relieved from utter vacancy by a certain slyness and craftiness of expression. He shambled in his walk, and his long arms, the finger-tips of which reached below his knees, wagged and waved in front of him as he forged ahead, as though they were set loose in their sockets, his small, pig-like eyes fixed on the few inches of high-road which lay immediately before his toes. From the foot of the hill to its crest those eyes were never lifted.
And yet, the crest of the hill once gained, a landscape presented itself over which most folk would have gazed with pleasure and appreciation. On all sides the country stretched away in a great plateau, thickly wooded, and just then smiling in the clear light and fresh, unsullied tints and colours of spring-tide. The place to which the unkempt man was leading the unkempt horse was in itself a picture. It stood, a small but very old farmhouse, with a high sloping roof, dormer windows, and tall chimneys, in t he angle made by the meeting of two roads; before i t lay a flower-garden, in one corner of which rose an ancient cedar-tree; behind it stretched a wide-spreading orchard, filled, for the most part, with cherry-trees, just then in the full glory of pink and white blossom. I immediately in front of it, on the opposite side of the highway, rose a great grove of chestnut-trees; they, too, were in bloom, and the wax-like clusters made little pyramids of light against the, glossy green of the widespreading leaves. And over everything was the clear blue of the May sky, and in the hedgerows and the coppices were the first signs of the flowering of the hawthorn.
Pippany Webster saw nothing of all this. He shambled slowly round the corner of the high-road into the lane which led towards the woods, and made a boundary on that side to Perris's farmstead, into which he let himself by a ramshackle door that opened on a range of dilapidated buildings. These buildings stood between the old house and the cherry orchard; the lane ran at the back of them; a farm-fold lay in front of them, fenced off from the rear of the house by a low stone wall. Against this wall, on the fold side, was a stone trough; above it a leaden spout projected through the wall; on the other, the house side of the wall, was a pump, which communicated with the well below. The human animals in the house and the brute animals in the field both drank water from a spring thirty feet beneath them, into which the runnings of fold and byre and stable percolated in some indefinite degree about which neither ever speculated.
The range of buildings into which Pippany Webster dragged the newly-shod horse was characteristic of what is usually seen on a small holding when the holder is poor and more or less shiftless. Between it and the house stood a dilapidated Dutch barn, empty of aught but a mess and litter of straw on the earth flooring almost as empty was the range of buildings itself when entered and inspected. The lower part was stable, cow-house, piggery so far as one-half was concerned; above these offices was a granary, and next it a chamber wherein wool might be stored; the other half of the range, unfloored from earth to roof face, made a barn which was nearly as destitute of straw as its Dutch substitute outside. Two horses in the stable, three cows in the byre, a few pigs in the sty, constituted Perris's live stock; but outside in the fold, and in the adjoining orchard, his wife kept a pretty good establishment of poultry—fowls, ducks, and geese—and at various times made a little money out of it. It was well that she had some such stand-by, for the evidences of prosperity at Cherry-trees were few. An observer, skilled in matters of farming, having taken due stock of the animals, the condition of the fold, the emptiness of barns and granary, the poor bits of dead stock, ploughs, harrows, and the like, which lay rusting and woe-begone of appearance in a lean-to shed, would have sniffed and turned up his nose with a remark as to the folly of trying to work even fifty acres without capital.
Pippany Webster unceremoniously turned the horse into a stable as destitute of straw on the bouldered floor as it was empty of aught to eat in the broken mangers. The horse looked into the manger, and at the rack fixed in the wall above it, and turning its head gazed at Pippany. It knew as well as Pippany knew that it and its stable companion would presently be cast forth for the night into the adjoining grass meadow, and that as the spring nights were still nipping cold it was only right and just that something more warming to the belly than buttercups and daisies should be served up before the casting forth took place. And Pippany recognised the look and wagged his head.
"Then ye mun wait till I can cut some o' yon owd clover," he said. "Theer's none so much left, and when it's done wi' ye'll hev' to depend on what ye can pick up—if so be as ye're alive. There's nowt much of owt left about this here place."
As if in proof of this assertion he lifted the lid of the old stable-chest in which the horse-corn was kept, and gazed meditatively at its contents. In the depths of the chest lay two or three bushels of meal: Pippany remembered that there was none left in the granary above the stable; he remembered, too, that he had only enough pig-meal left wherewith to feed the pigs that night. He scratched his head dubiously.
"This is a bonny come-up!" he soliloquised. "If t' maister doesn't come home to-morrow and bring soome brass wi' him these here animals 'll go fro' bad to worse—if such is possible! Howsomever, I mun cut some o' yon clover for t' hosses and t' cows."
From a nook behind the corn-chest Pippany brought forth a hay-cutting knife, and proceeded to put an edge on it with a whetstone which he took from a hole in the wall. And at last, armed with this and with a stable fork whereupon he meant to impale the chunk of dried clover which he intended to carve out of the old stack at the end of the orchard, he went forth into the fold and crossed over to the orchard gate.
In the orchard, amidst the pink and white of the cherry-trees, two women were hanging out the last results of a day's family washing. The lines to which they suspended the various articles of clothing, drawn wet and heavy from the wicker basket which they had just set down on the grass, were fastened here and there to the trunks or branches of the trees, here and there to certain ancient posts which were shaky in their foundations, and looked as if a little extra weight on the lines would pull them down altogether. There was scarcely any movement of air in the orchard; the lighter garments stirred but feebly when they were safely pinned to the line, the heavy ones hung straight down, motionless and inert.
Of the two women thus employed when Pippany entered the orchard, one, the elder, Tibby Graddige, general odd-job woman to the parish, was a tall, spare, athletic female whose every action indicated energy and strength. When she moved, every muscle and sinew of her body seemed to be brought into play; hands moved in unison with feet, and elbows with knees. Just as active were the motions of her thin, straight lips and her coal-black eyes; the way in which her hair, equally black, was drawn in straight, severe fashion from her forehead and hidden behind an old cap fashioned from the remains of some shred of funeral crape indicated her views of life and of a day's work, which were to keep going at both until both were over. She passed now from basket to line and from line to basket as if everything of importance in the world depended upon the swiftness with which the wet linen was hung out to dry.
The other and younger woman, Rhoda Perris, wife of Pippany's absent master, was of a different order of femininity. She looked to be about two-and-twenty years of age; the print gown which she wore did little to hide a figure which sculptors would have had nothing to find fault with had it been suggested to them as a model for the statue of something between a Venus and a Diana. Above the medium height, generous of bosom and hip, there was yet a curious suggestion of lissom slenderness about her which was heightened by the print gown. Her uncovered hair, catching the glint of