He never forgot the gift. Clad in immovable content, nothing could rouse any latent aspiration in his heart; but still he dwelt much upon these roses in his quiet mind, wondered about them, puzzled over the memory of them, tried to understand what they meant. There are some flowers that never die.
IV
The miller did not shoot the rascal rats on Sundays; but habit led him one Sunday evening to take his place on the log by the stubble-rick. It was thus he became conscious that some other creatures besides rats were about, and stealthily shifting himself along the log till he could see round into the rickyard—between the rick and an elder-bush—he watched them without difficulty.
Mary Shaw and Abner Brown had made this retired spot their trysting-place. As a rule, people in the dusk of the evening rather avoided the neighbourhood of the deep and dangerous mill-pool. This suited them very nicely, and here they spent an hour or so on Sunday evenings in amorous converse.
Miller Bond did not interfere or spoil the game; in a rude sort of way he rather liked to see it, never having had experience in this line. Nor did he spy on them at all in the spy’s spirit; he looked occasionally, grinned, and said nothing to anyone.
There was scarce another man in his condition in the hamlet who would have been as kindly as this. Had anyone else discovered the lovers, there would have been some horseplay, some trick or other played upon them. The discreditable knaves who loiter about hamlets on Sundays, often make it their especial business to watch those who go off in couples, to track them secretly, and presently annoy them. It is difficult to imagine a practice more low.
Miller Bond chuckled and said nothing. He chuckled first at the loving passages, and secondly because Polly Shaw had rather the character of a prude—not a common character in hamlets. Prude is not exactly the word; she was not a coquette then, and she bore a stainless reputation.
You might on a Sunday see Mary coming down the road, dressed in her best (and she dressed very well, having caught the idea of it from Felise), with her parasol in her hand, swinging it like a walking-stick, so that the tip just touched the grass at the side, tossing her proud little head disdainfully as the hamlet lads made loud remarks on her personal appearance.
A very pretty, plump, merry little girl she looked; the pink of neatness, with her laughing eyes and rosy cheeks, her hair so cleverly arranged, and a silver brooch—real silver (Felise’s present)—at her neck, and an air as much as to say, “I’m Mary Shaw; you may laugh, and I will laugh with you, but none of your coarse jests for me. Hands off!”
It had always been “hands off” with pretty Polly Shaw.
A hamlet girl of the cottage order has a rude ordeal to go through as she enters her teens, and few of them succeed in preserving their modesty, not to mention their reputation.
One harvest, not long before Mary entered service at Mr. Goring’s, she was tying up sheaves in the wheatfield, and happened to be quite alone. By-and-by Mr. Robert Godwin walked up, and without any preamble or preliminary courting made her a dishonourable proposal, at the same time holding out his hand on which glittered a silver sixpence. Always the miser.
Polly snatched up a reaping-hook that was lying near and cut at him; it was only by jumping aside that he escaped a fearful gash. He swore at and threatened her with the law for assault, but of course nothing came of it. He never spoke to her again, but he did not forget or forgive.
A rejected lover has the quickest of eyes, second only to those of a jealous woman; and long afterwards Robert Godwin was the only one who suspected Mary Shaw and Abner Brown. From that hour he determined the old couple should be turned out, in order to injure Mary’s prospects as much as possible. He knew there was no other cottage available for them in the hamlet: they could be married and go home there; but if that was shut to them, their future was gloomy and uncertain.
Shaw’s mother, when the girl told her of the incident in the wheatfield, severely rebuked her for being such a fool, and missing such a chance. Measter Godwin had heaps of money; she might never catch such a one as he again.
The mother, in fact, would gladly have sold her daughter. All she expressed indignation about was the sixpence.
These morals are born of generations of cruel poverty, and they are perpetuated by the brutal modern system which leaves for the worn-out labourer or labourer’s wife no refuge but the workhouse or the grave. Workhouse and grave lower in the distance all their lives, as a cloud lowers on the horizon. They snatch, therefore, at any means of present enjoyment—drink, or worse; why not? They have no hereafter on earth; no age of ease and comfort. “Hang it, let’s take what us can!” is their maxim.
Some will say, I suppose, that I am painting Robert Godwin in too black colours, and that to be true to nature he ought to have one redeeming trait.
This is one of the special cants of the nineteenth century. A drunken blackguard navvy or low seaman stabs his woman, then he begs for a lock of her hair. An extraordinary brute—extraordinary even among a collection of brutes—the other day took up a heavy hammer and smashed his own children on their mother’s breast; but as some redeeming trait—some redeeming cant—was found in his character, he was reprieved from the
