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Mad Barbara

<div><h1>XXXV</h1></div> Chris Jennifer was too busy a man to worry his slow brain greatly over other people’s affairs, for when a man farms for the children who shall come after him he can give all the daylight to the land, and trudge home to feed and sleep without much communion with the philosophers and poets. There is always work upon a farm, save for those who have sore heels and a chronic thorn in the forefinger. For these autumn and winter months ploughing, hedging, ditching, carting fagots and stacking them for the winter, spreading the muck abroad, taking odd carpentering jobs in hand, to say nothing of the feeding and tending of sheep and cattle, the fattening of pigs and bullocks for Christmas, the trapping of vermin, and the netting of the accursed cony. Chris Jennifer’s most luminous moment was after a rat-hunt about the barns and out-houses. To take by the tail the carcasses of sundry strapping rats and heap them in a funeral pile was an act that made Mr. Jennifer feel that Satan can be confounded in this world and his imps punished for stealing a farmer’s com. For if Chris Jennifer hated anything it was a rat, and next to the rat he hated couch-grass, while the purple-polled thistle came in a bad third. When Mrs. Winnie’s husband went to bed he slept the deep, sonorous sleep of a round-headed peasant whose lungs had been breathing in clean air all the day. And not even the facts that John Gore had borrowed his best rope and that his wife was dabbling her hands in affairs that did not concern her could keep Master Christopher awake and talking. All he had deigned to hope was that “us be not goin’ agen the law,” and that “this fine gentleman ben’t feedin’ on hot pie-crust.” Then he drew his nightcap down, turned on his right side, and went to sleep with the ease of a dog. Mrs. Winnie, being a woman, and more impressionable and imaginative, remained very wakeful all that night, thinking of all manner of strange adventures, and not a little afraid of John Gore’s neck. She had banked the kitchen hearth up with logs, left some supper on the table, and the door unbarred, so that there should be some welcome for him if he came home after bedtime. Yet in spite of all this satisfying forethought she kept awake to listen, and even when she dropped away toward Christopher’s oblivion Mrs. Winnie came to with a start, thinking that she had heard sounds. Daylight came, with a west wind swishing in the beech-trees and making a low murmur in the chimney, and the adventurer had not returned. Mrs. Winnie jerked an elbow into her man’s back, rose up, and began to dress. She was down and at work in the kitchen getting the fire alight before Chris Jennifer got a very stout pair of legs out of the bed. Mrs. Winnie had piled up the fire, lit the dry brushwood under it, and was kneeling to help the blaze with the bellows, when the door swung open, and John Gore walked in. He looked muddy as to the boots and breeches, and rather white about the face, like a man who has been out long in the cold, though his eyes had a quiet steadfastness that proved he had no pallor at the heart. Winnie Jennifer twisted round on her knees. “Body of me, sir, you are here at last! I’ve been kep’ awake most of the night through thinking of ye, and listening.” He smiled down at her, and when he smiled the mystery that was in him seemed to glow and to exult in a way that made Mrs. Winnie hanker after her own days of being courted. “You should not have troubled your head about me, Mrs. Jennifer.” The fire was blazing now, making a brave crackle, and John Gore looked at it as though he were cold and empty and dead tired. Mrs. Winnie was up and bustling in an instant. “Sit you down, sir. Why, bless my heart, you must be cold and damp as a dish-clout! I’ll fetch Chris down to see to your horse.” “I have seen to him myself, Mrs. Winnie.” She pushed forward the great box of a chair that was padded with horsehair and leather, and had been polished to a rare sheen by her husband’s breeches. “Just you pull off your boots, sir, and rub yourself dry. I’ll have something hot in ten minutes, and a dish of bacon and some eggs.” She was bustling with curiosity as well as with good-will, for there was something in the man’s manner that told of mystery and of strange things accomplished, and perhaps of looking deep into other eyes. He sat down obediently before the fire, and, pulling off his boots, spread himself to the blaze. Overhead they could hear the stumping of Chris Jennifer’s feet as he tumbled into his clothes with decent circumlocutions. Mrs. Winnie came to hang the kettle on the chain, and while she was bending forward with the firelight on her face John Gore sat forward in his chair and laid a hand upon her shoulder. “I am giving you a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Jennifer,” he said. “Dear life, no, sir.” “Can I ask you to do something more for me?” She knelt and looked around at him, her honest, comely face perfectly trustful. “To be sure, sir.” “Then I must make my terms with you.” “You can talk of them, sir, though I may not be for listening to them when you have told me what you wish.” John Gore sat back in the chair again, his eyes on the fire. “Mrs. Jennifer, I want some one whom I can trust. I want to bring her to you here, away from people who wish her out of the world.” Mrs. Winnie took up the poker and made a thrust or two at the fire. “It’s good of you, sir, to give me the honor—” “There shall be no danger to you or yours, I can promise that.” “There, sir, I was not thinking of any such thing! We are only farming folk, and the lady may have prettier notions than—” He bent forward suddenly and looked into her face. “She would bless you, Mrs. Winnie, as I should, for the very warmth of a fire. She has not felt the warmth of a fire this month or more, and she is half starved into the bargain.” Mrs. Jennifer opened her eyes with indignation. “What! not a stick of fire! Who be they who have the caring for her? And no victuals!” “Then you will let me bring her here—if I can?” “Dear heart, sir, yes. I’ll have my best blankets out, and make cakes and pasties. And perhaps she would like a nice young pullet, sir. We will put her in the parlor ingle-nook, and melt her heart, and give her stuff to make the color come.” John Gore held out a hand. “You do not know how I thank you for this. But there are my terms to be considered.” “Oh, get along, sir.” “I shall pass over to you three gold pieces a week.” Mrs. Winnie looked ready to scoff and laugh. “Three sixpences would be nearer the mark, sir. Why, Jem and Sam and Nicholas, our men, wouldn’t eat and drink a third of that in seven whole days.” “Never mind your men, Mrs. Jennifer.” “Not mind them! And where should we be in six months, the lazy loons! No, I tell you, sir.” John Gore tried her on another quarter. “Very well, Mrs. Winnie, take the money and put it in a stocking for your boy.” “But, sir—” “Take it, or turn me out of the door. I hold to your good-will and your trust with all my heart, but live on you I will not, just because I happened to pull the youngster out of the pond.” The woman gave the fire three more pokes. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, sir.” “Then you will put the money aside for the child’s sake.” Mr. Christopher Jennifer had had great faith in his wife’s wisdom ever since she had elected to marry him in preference to a gay sprig of a harness-maker at Lewes, a gallant who could write verses after the fashion of a gentleman, and had deigned to dazzle both with dress and address. Chris Jennifer in his courting days and season of rivalry had fallen violently foul of this same harness man for the love of Mrs. Winnie. Chris, who had never been a quarrelsome man, had put his bristles up at last under the provocation of his rival’s genteel and foppish impertinence. He had led the harness man by the ear into the back-yard of Mrs. Winnie’s father’s house, and there had smitten him, and in the smiting had won his way to Winnie’s heart. For she was a woman who must have strength of a kind in a man, and silence and shrewd sense, nor could she abide a ranter or a puff-bag, nor a fellow who was always talking big about the gentry, and telling how he had dined at the justice’s table. Men with long tongues were not after her fancy, seeing that length of tongue generally goes with a league of silly vanity and boasting, and that men who talk much are still talking while your quiet man has ploughed his furrow. Therefore, when Mrs. Winnie threw out a downright hint to her man that Gentleman John was likely to bring his lady-loveto Furze Farm, and insisted upon putting sundry gold pieces into son William’s pocket, Mr. Jennifer humphed and nodded, and supposed there would be no harm in it “if t’ parson be not left out in t’ cold.” Mrs. Winnie snubbed him for his sneaking prudery, and protested that he had no wits in him to see when a gentleman was of clean, brave blood and the very stock of honor. “The lad’s in love, Chris, as a lad should be, though he be past thirty by the set of his jaw and mouth. He ben’t one of your gilliflower gentlemen, prancing along and tweaking his chin to and fro to see how the women fall to him. It be none of my business to spy and to speculate, but the woman he be after, Chris, must be a woman worth winning.” Mr. Jennifer was heaving a couple of fagots into the wood-shed while his wife dropped these suggestions into his ear. Son William had been sent out with a basket to pick blackberries, and the men were down in the fields. “I hope it be nothing agen t’ law, Winnie.” “Go on, you great coward!” “Woa, my dear!” “When ye smacked Peter Tinsel on the mouth that day for love of me, did ye think of the law, Chris?” He stood and looked at her with a slow, broadening grin, as though he were proud of her cleverness and her courage. “T’ law be damned; that were what I told Peter Tinsel.” Mrs. Winnie stuck out her elbows as though to express the word “exactly.” But her husband came up to her and kissed her on the mouth with a manly vigor that swept away any sense of superiority on her part. Mrs. Jennifer was busy over many things that day, seeing that Furze Farm might be turned into a refuge for romance, and that she had people of quality to cook for. Yet she found time to have a short gossip or two with John Gore over the parlor fire, and that which struck her most was the grim foreshadowing of something in his eyes, as though he had an enemy to meet or a debt to wipe out in the cause of honor. Had Mrs. Winnie been able to read his thoughts as he sat before the fire and cleaned his pistols after sending the bullets splashing into the pond, she would have hugged her bosom and have understood that grim look about his eyes and mouth. For in the silence of the night, and amid the wet, black woods where he had seen the dawn gather, John Gore had suffered a revelation that would have made any man’s heart heavy and ashamed. He had never greatly loved his father, nor had they ever trusted each other with the inner intimacies of life, yet a son cannot lay bare his begetter’s true nature without recoiling from it when he beholds rottenness and hidden sores. The tragedy was so plain to him, so terribly simple now that the scattered rays of his conjectures had been gathered by the burning-glass of truth. And John Gore had ridden into Furze Farm that morning with the cold raw air of the wet woods in his blood and the heart numb in him but for the thought of Barbara. The warmth of the fire and a tankard of ale had driven some of the poisonous taste from under his tongue, but the truth galled him like a bone in the throat, filling him with wrath and shame and pity. Mrs. Winnie found herself called upon to provide more tools for him that day, and after some rummaging in an oak locker in the harness-room she found him what he needed—namely, a file and a half-inch auger. He also borrowed the pillion on which Christopher Jennifer took his wife to market at Battle, Hailsham, or Robertsbridge. By reason of these details Mrs. Winnie understood that the romance was deepening to a crisis, and though she kept her tongue to herself in the matter of asking questions, she cordially commended John Gore in his prison-breaking, having a hearty contempt for authority when true sentiment was threatened. While John Gore rode through the woods when the evening mists began to dim the splendor of the trees so that they were like shrines of gold seen through the drift of incense, Simon Pinniger sat in the kitchen at Thorn drinking to get his temper up and his blood hot and muddled against the night. He would spread out his great hands before the fire and look at them with a kind of sottish pride, keeping an uneasy eye upon the woman Nance, who in turn kept a keen eye on him. “What is it to be, Sim?” she asked, with the air of one who must keep a surly dog in good temper with himself. The man drew off a great red neckerchief that he was wearing, made a loop, and, putting one fist through it, drew the ends tight with his teeth and the other hand. “That’s my trick,” he said, dropping the end from his mouth; “them Spaniards have a liking for it, and Spaniards are particular in the playing of such tricks.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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