Bessie Costrell, Mrs. Humphry Ward [romantic novels to read txt] 📗

mouth to her ear.

"'Liza, don't yer think no more about it. Did Mr. Drew read to yer? Are yer comfortable in yer mind?"

She made a sign of assent, which showed, however, no great interest in the subject. There was silence for a long time. Louisa was getting supper downstairs. John, oppressed by the heat of the room and tired by his day's work, had almost fallen asleep in his chair, when the old woman spoke again.

"John--what 'ud you think o' Mary Anne Waller?"

The whisper was still human and eager.

John roused himself, and could not help an astonished laugh.

"Why, whatever put Mary Anne into your head, 'Liza? Yer never thought anythink o' Mary Anne--no more than me."

Eliza's eyes wandered round the room.

"P'r'aps----" she said, then stopped, and could say no more. She seemed to become unconscious, and John went to call for Louisa.

In the middle of the night John woke with a start, and sat up to listen. Not a sound--but they would have called him if the end had come. He could not rest, however, and presently he huddled on some clothes and went to listen at Eliza's door. It was ajar, and, hearing nothing, he pushed it open.

Poor Eliza lay in her agony, unconscious, and breathing heavily. Beside her sat the widow, Mary Anne Waller, and Louisa, motionless too, their heads bent. There was an end of candle in a basin behind the bed, which threw circles of wavering light over the coarse whitewash of the roof and on the cards and faded photographs above the tiny mantelpiece.

John crept up to the bed. The two women made a slight movement to let him stand between them.

"Can't yer give her no brandy?" he asked, whispering.

Mary Anne Waller shook her head.

"Dr. Murch said we wer'n't to trouble her. She'll go when the light comes--most like."

She was a little shrivelled woman with a singularly delicate mouth, that quivered as she spoke. John and Eliza Bolderfield had never thought much of her, though she was John's cousin. She was a widow, and greatly "put upon" both by her children and her neighbours. Her children were grown up, and settled--more or less--in the world, but they still lived on her freely whenever it suited them; and in the village generally she was reckoned but a poor creature.

However, when Eliza--originally a hard, strong woman--took to her bed with incurable disease, Mary Anne Waller came in to help, and was accepted. She did everything humbly; she even let Louisa order her about. But before the end, Eliza had come to be restless when she was not there.

Now, however, Eliza knew no more, and the little widow sat gazing at her with the tears on her cheeks. John, too, felt his eyes wet.

But after half an hour, when there was still no change, he was turning away to go back to bed, when the widow touched his arm.

"Won't yer give her a kiss, John?" she said timidly. "She wor a good sister to you."

John, with a tremor, stooped, and clumsily did as he was told--the first time in his life he had ever done so for Mary Anne. Then, stepping as noiselessly as he could on his bare feet, he hurried away. A man shares nothing of that yearning attraction which draws women to a death-bed as such. Instead, John felt a sudden sickness at his heart. He was thankful to find himself in his own room again, and thought with dread of having to go back--for the end. In spite of his still vigorous and stalwart body, he was often plagued with nervous fears and fancies. And it was years now since he had seen death--he had, indeed, carefully avoided seeing it.

Gradually, however, as he sat on the edge of his bed in the summer dark, the new impression died away, and something habitual took its place--that shielding, solacing thought, which was in truth all the world to him, and was going to make up to him for Eliza's death, for getting old, and the lonesomeness of a man without chick or child. He would have felt unutterably forlorn and miserable, he would have shrunk trembling from the shapes of death and pain that seemed to fill the darkness, but for this fact, this defence, this treasure, that set him apart from his fellows and gave him this proud sense of superiority, of a good time coming in spite of all. Instinctively, as he sat on the bed, he pushed his bare foot backwards till his heel touched a wooden object that stood underneath. The contact cheered him at once. He ceased to think about Eliza, his head was once more full of whirling plans and schemes.

The wooden object was a box that held his money, the savings of a labourer's lifetime. Seventy-one pounds! It seemed to him an ocean of gold, never to be exhausted. The long toil of saving it was almost done. After the Frampton job, he would begin enjoying it, cautiously at first, taking a bit of work now and again, and then a bit of holiday.

All the savour of life was connected for him with that box. His mind ran over the constant excitements of the many small loans he had made from it to his relations and friends. A shilling in the pound interest--he had never taken less and he had never asked more. He had only lent to people he knew well, people in the village whom he could look after, and seldom for a term longer than three months, for to be parted from his money at all gave him physical pain. He had once suffered great anxiety over a loan to his eldest brother of thirty pounds. But in the end James had paid it all back. He could still feel tingling through him the passionate joy with which he had counted out the recovered sovereigns, with the extra three half-sovereigns of interest.

Muster Drew indeed! John fell into an angry inward argument against his suggestion of the savings bank. It was an argument he had often rehearsed, often declaimed, and at bottom it all came to this--without that box under his bed, his life would have sunk to dulness and decrepitude; he would have been merely a pitiful and lonely old man. He had neither wife nor children, all for the hoard's sake; but while the hoard was there, to be handled any hour, he regretted nothing. Besides, there was the peasant's rooted distrust of offices, and paper transactions, of any routine that checks his free will and frightens his inexperience. He was still eagerly thinking when the light began to flood into his room, and before he could compose himself to sleep the women called him.

But he shed no more tears. He saw Eliza die, his companion of forty years, and hardly felt it. What troubled him all through the last scene was the thought that now he should never know why she was so set against "Bessie's 'avin' it."


SCENE II

It was, indeed, the general opinion in Clinton Magna that John Bolderfield--or "Borrofull," as the village pronounced it, took his sister-in-law's death too lightly. The women especially pronounced him a hard heart. Here was "poor Eliza" gone, Eliza who had kept him decent and comfortable for forty years, ever since he was a lad, and he could go about whistling, and--to talk to him--as gay as a lark! Yet John contributed handsomely to the burial expenses--Eliza having already, through her burial club, provided herself with a more than regulation interment; and he gave Jim's Louisa her mourning. Nevertheless, these things did not avail. It was felt instinctively that he was not beaten down as he ought to have been, and Mrs. Saunders, the smith's wife, was applauded when she said to her neighbours that "you couldn't expeck a man with John Bolderfield's money to have as many feelin's as other people." Whence it would seem that the capitalist is no more truly popular in small societies than in large.

John, however, did not trouble himself about these things. He was hard at work harvesting for Muster Hill's widow, and puzzling his head day and night as to what to do with his box.

When the last field had been carried and the harvest supper was over, he came home late, and wearied out. His working life at Clinton Magna was done; and the family he had worked for so long was broken up in distress and poverty. Yet he felt only a secret exultation. Such toil and effort behind--such a dreamland in front!

Next day he set to work to wind up his affairs. The furniture of the cottage was left to Eliza's son Jim, and the daughter had arranged for the carting of it to the house twelve miles off where her parents lived. She was to go with it on the morrow, and John would give up the cottage and walk over to Frampton, where he had already secured a lodging.

Only twenty-four hours!--and he had not yet decided. Which was it to be--Saunders, after all--or the savings bank--or Bessie?

He was cording up his various possessions--a medley lot--in different parcels and bundles when Bessie Costrell knocked at the door. She had already offered to stow away anything he might like to leave with her.

"Well, I thought you'd be busy," she said as she walked in, "an' I came up to lend a hand. Is them the things you're goin' to leave me to take care on?"

John nodded.

"Field's cart, as takes Louisa's things to-morrer, is a-goin' to deliver these at your place first. They're more nor I thought they would be. But you can put 'em anywheres."

"Oh, I'll see to them."

She sat down and watched him tie the knots of the last parcel.

"There's some people as is real ill-natured," she said presently, in an angry voice.

"Aye?" said John, looking up sharply. "What are they sayin' now?"

"It's Muster Saunders. 'Ee's allus sayin' nassty things about other folks. And there'd be plenty of fault to be found with 'im, if onybody was to try. An' Sally Saunders eggs him on dreadful."

Saunders was the village smith, a tall, brawny man, of great size and corresponding wisdom, who had been the village arbiter and general councillor for a generation. There was not a will made in Clinton Magna that he did not advise upon; not a bit of contentious business that he had not a share in; not a family history that he did not know. His probity was undisputed; his ability was regarded with awe; but as he had a sharp tongue and was no respecter of persons, there was of course an opposition.

John took a seat on the wooden box he had just been cording, and mopped his brow. His full cheeks were crimson, partly with exertion, partly with sudden annoyance.

"What's 'ee been sayin' now? Though it doan't matter a brass farthin' to me what 'ee says."

"He says you 'aven't got no proper feelin's about poor Eliza, an' you'd ought to have done a great deal more for Louisa. But 'ee says you