Chapter 13

Mr. Druitt had been introduced by Mrs. Goudie as the higgler, or itinerant poulterer and greengrocer, who served the house in Mr. Bates' time. He was a thin middle-aged man, with light watery eyes, a straggling beard, and an astoundingly dilatory manner. He used to pull his pony and cart into the hedge or bank by the roadside, and leave them there an unconscionable time, while he pottered about the back doors of his customers, offering the articles that he had brought with him, or trying to obtain orders for other articles that he would bring next week; and although apparently so shy himself, no bruskness in others ever seemed to rebuff him. His arrival now broke up the breakfast party, and was accepted as a signal that the day's labors must really be attacked. Mrs. Goudie and Mary pushed back their chairs with a horrid scrooping noise, Mavis got up briskly, the baby awoke and began to cry.

"No, thank you, Mr. Druitt. Nothing this morning."

"I've some sweet-hearted cabbages outside."

"No, thank you."

"It's wonderful late to get 'em with any heart to 'em. I'll fetch 'em."

Thus, as was usual, the higgler went backward and forward between the door and his cart; and Mavis, with the baby on her arm, at intervals inspected various commodities. Eventually she purchased a capon for the Sunday dinner, paid for it, and bade Mr. Druitt good-by.

"Good-by, mum--and much obliged."

But then, quite ten minutes afterward, his shadow once more fell across the kitchen floor. He had not really gone yet. Here he was back again at the kitchen door, staring reflectively at his grubby little pocketbook.

"Beg pardon--but did I mention the side o' bacon I've been promised for Tuesday. It's good bacon."

Mavis Dale with courteous finality dismissed him; but Mary, whose ordinarily red cheeks had become a fiery crimson, spoke hotly and angrily.

"Drat the man. I've no patience with him. He ought to know better, going on so."

"But what harm does he do, poor fellow," said Mavis, indulgently, "except muddling away his own time?"

"He's up to no good," said Mary; and she flounced across to the door, and looked out at the now empty path. "Hanging about like that! Why can't he keep away? I don't want him."

Mrs. Goudie, at the sink, screwed up her wrinkled nut-cracker face, and chuckled.

"No, mum, she don't want un. But he wants she."

And, astonishing as it might seem, this was truly the case. The higgler had fallen in love with Mary; and she, apparently without a single explicit word, had understood the nature of the emotion that stirred his breast. He had somehow surrounded her with an atmosphere of admiration--anyhow he had made her understand.

Mavis laughed gaily, and chaffed Mary about her conquest; and henceforth she more or less obliterated herself when this visitor called, and allowed the servant to conduct all transactions with him.

Mary was always very stern, disparaging his goods, and beating down his prices; while he stood sheepishly grinning, and in no wise protesting against her harshness. He now of course stayed longer than ever, indeed only withdrew when Mary indignantly drove him away.

"Be off, can't you?" cried Mary. "I'm ashamed of you."

"Haw, haw," chuckled Mrs. Goudie. "Don't she peck at un fierce."

"Yes, Mary," and Mrs. Dale laughed, much amused. "I do think you're rather cruel to him."

"'Twill be t'other way roundabout one day, Mary, preaps."

Then Mary tossed her head and bustled at her work. "I ain't afeard o' that day, Mrs. Goudie. He isn't going the right way to win me, I can tell him. I hate his sly ways."

Mavis and the old charwoman thought that Mr. Druitt would win the prize in the end, and with a natural tendency toward match-making tacitly aided and abetted his queer courtship. Except for the disparity of years it seemed a desirable match. It was known that he had a tidy place, almost a farm, eight miles away on the edge of the down; and Mrs. Goudie, who confessed that she had merely encountered him higgling, said the tale ran that he was quite a warm man.

And thus Mary's little romance, announcing itself so abruptly and developing itself so slowly, brought still another new interest to Vine-Pits kitchen. It was something vivid and bright and even fantastic in the midst of solidly useful facts, like the strange flower that blooms on a roadside merely because some high-flying strong-winged bird has carelessly happened to drop a seed.

"What," thought Mavis, "can any of us do without love? And where should we be without the odd chances that bring love to us?"

XIV

Fat easy years came now after the hard and lean ones; and the Dales in the dual regions of home and trade were doing really well. Dale had a powerful decently-bred cob to ride; on Wednesdays, when he went into Old Manninglea for the Corn Market, he often wore a silk top-hat and always a black coat; and at all times he looked exactly what he was, an alert, industrious, straight-dealing personage who has risen considerably and who intends to rise still higher in the social scale.

As to Mavis, she had another baby--a boy this time--and she was an infinitely proud mother as well as a very busy woman. She kept cows, poultry and bees; could and did distil a remarkably choice sloe gin, had achieved some reputation for her early peas and late lettuces, and had made the quadrangle in front of the house a sight that even tourists from London talked about. It blazed with color from May to November, and there was one of the Rodhaven drivers who on several occasions stopped his char-à-bancs to let the passengers have a long look at it. Wandering artists, too, fascinated by the stone walls, the flowers, the white paint, and the green shutters, would sometimes ring the bell and ask if Mrs. Dale let lodgings.

Mrs. Dale was rather crushing to masculine intruders of this sort, especially when they adopted an off-handedly gallant air.

In answering their questions she drawled slightly, and smiled in a manner that, although not contemptuous, might permit them to guess that they had made a tactless mistake.

"Oh, no, we do not let lodgings."

"Don't you really? I think you _ought_ to, you know."

"Possibly," said Mavis, drawling and smiling. "But Mr. Dale and I do not think so. Of course if we did, we should put up a board, or notice--and you may observe that there isn't one."

She was, however, always gentle and forbearing with wanderers of her own sex. To two ladies who expressed disappointment at finding no apartments and asked if she did not at least provide afternoon tea, she said at once, "Oh, certainly, I shall be delighted to give you some tea."

They were tired, dusty, not young; and she showed them into the grand front parlor that contained her piano, pictures, well-bound books, and there laid the table and brought the tea with her own hands. Such a tea--the best china, thick cream, three sorts of jam, cakes, and jolly round home-made bannocks! The ladies were so pleased, until they became embarrassed. For of course when they wished to pay, Mavis could not accept payment.

"Oh, indeed no. You're very welcome. I hope that you'll stop and rest as long as you like;" and faintly blushing she shied away from the open purse and hurried out of the room.

"What on earth are we to do?" said one of the ladies.

"I saw a child in the passage," said the other lady. "Let us offer the child a present."

"Ah. That solves the difficulty. But how much? I suppose it must be half-a-crown."

"_Nonsense!_" said the other lady, tartly. "That is more than the price of the whole meal if she had let us pay for it. A present of a shilling at the _outside_. No, a shilling is absurd. Sixpence."

"Do you really think so?"

"Yes, sixpence wrapped up in a bit of paper."

"Then _you_ must offer it."

And the other lady did. "Is that your little girl? Oh, what brown eyes--and mamma's pretty complexion. Good afternoon! We are so much obliged. And this is for _you_, dear--to buy sweeties."

Mavis was not disposed to allow her small princess to take a tip from a stranger's hand; but natural good-breeding forced her to acquiesce.

The ladies looked back at her, waved their hands by the garden gate, and went away talking.

"The child never said 'Thank you.' Badly reared."

"But the mother thanked you. I liked her face. She must have been distinctly good-looking."

The artists thought her distinctly good-looking even now, and perhaps, after being repulsed in their quest for bed and board, drifted off into an idle dream of how they might have met her a few years ago when they were less famous but more magnetically attractive. What a sitter she would have been for them, if she wouldn't be anything else! They admired the extreme delicacy of her nose that seemed so narrow in the well-rounded face, the loose brown hair that showed such a red flash in it beneath her sunbonnet, the perfect modeling of full forearms, firm neck, and ample bosom, the whole poise of her graciously solid figure, at once so reposeful and so free. But it was the eyes principally that set them dreaming of vanished youth, abandoned hopes, and lost opportunities. Nowadays Mavis could meet the unduly interested regard of male investigators with a candid unvacillating outlook; there came no hint of feebleness in resistance, too ready submission, or temperamental proneness to surrender; but her eyes, whether she wished it or not, still served as messengers between all that was feminine in her and all that was masculine outside her; and, with no reason not to tell the truth, they told it boldly, seeming to say, "Yes, once I had much to give, and I gave every single bit of it to one man. I have nothing left now for cadgers, sneak-thieves, and other outsiders."

She was a woman steadily completing her cycle. In fact, with her added weight, broadened contours and settled mental equilibrium, she had so changed from the slim, pallid, childish Mrs. Dale of the post office that any old Rodchurch friends might be forgiven for saying that they could scarcely recognize her.

"Really shouldn't have known you," said one of them frankly. "You have furnished like a colt brought in from grass to corn."

This outspoken old friend was Mr. Allen the saddler, who turned up one winter day when Vine-Pits had been thrown into a great state of excitement and confusion by the passage of the hunt right across the meadows behind the orchard. Just after dinner everybody had heard the horn sounding in the woods, with distant holloas and deep music of hounds, and then the pack came streaming out in full cry, and next moment all the horsemen were galloping over the fields and leaping the hedges. The women ran forth from the back of the house; the men abandoned their work. "Oo, oo! Look an' look." There were shouts of rapture each time the horses jumped. "Oo! Crimany! That _were_ a beauty!"

Then in another minute Dale himself came galloping to the empty yard, rode his horse along the flags into the garden, and yelled to Mavis that she was to fetch trays of bread and cheese and bannocks as quick as life.

"An' bring the white bob full of beer--an' whisky, an' water--an' some o' the sloe gin; an' devel knows how many glasses."

Mrs. Dale and Mary, before one could look round, carried out into the yard all these light refreshments, and with them Dale regaled the large concourse of unexpected visitors that was pouring through the opened gates. His guests were grooms, second-horsemen, one or two farmers, and several dealers--the people who are rarely in a hurry when out hunting; and after them came pedestrians, a sturdy fellow in a red coat with a terrier in his pocket and a terrier under his arm, a keeper, a wood-cutter, Abraham Veale the hurdle-maker, and just riffraff--the very tail of the hunt, and, as the tail of the tail, that stupid trade-neglecting Mr. Allen. For a while the yard was full of animation, the horses pawing and snorting, Dale bustling hospitably, his wife filling the glasses and handing the food, and everybody talking who was not eating or drinking.

Mr. Allen was exhausted, tottering on his skinny legs, but nevertheless burning with ardor for the chase.

"They've changed foxes," he cried breathlessly. "They've lost the hunted fox, and they've only themselves to thank for it. I told them, and they wouldn't listen. I knew."

"Ah, but you always know," said a second-horseman, grinning.

"If Mr. Maltby," said Allen, "had cast back instead of forward last time I holloa'd, he'd have had the mask on his saddle rings by now."

Then he sank down upon one of the upping-stocks, snatched a hunk of bread, munched hastily.

"Mr. Allen, you've no cheese. Here, let me fill your glass again. How's Rodchurch?" Every time that Mavis passed, she asked a question. "Mr. Allen, how's Miss Waddy's sister?"

"Dead," said Allen, with his mouth full.

"Dead. Oh, that's sad!" Then next time it was: "How's Miss Yorke? Not married yet?"

"No, nor likely to be."

The horse-people soon began to move off again--"Thank you, Mr. Dale. Good night, Mr. Dale.... You've done us proper, sir.... Just what I wanted.... Good night, ma'am;"--but the foot-people lingered. The red-coated earth-digger, Veale, and one or two others, had got around Mr. Allen and were chaffing him irreverently.

"There, that'll do," said Dale, joining the group and speaking with firmness. Then he politely offered to have a nag put into the gig and to send Mr. Allen home on wheels.

"Thank you kindly," said Allen. "I'm not going home; but if your man can rattle me a mile or so up towards Beacon Hill, it's a hundred to one I shall drop in with them again. With the wind where it is, hounds are bound to push anything that's in front of them up to the high ground."

As soon as Dale went to order his gig the clumsy facetiousness was renewed.

"'Tes a pity you ben't a hound yersel, Mr. Allen."

"Ah," said Veale, "if the wood pucks cud transform him on to all fours, what a farder he'd mek to th' next litter o' pops at the Kennels."

"By gum," said the earth-digger, slapping his leg, "they pups would have noses. They wuddent never be at fault, would 'em?"

Old Mrs. Goudie, who had a simple taste in raillery, was so convulsed by this jesting that she put down her tray in order to laugh at ease; and chiefly because she was laughing, Mary laughed also.

"An' you know most o' the tricks o' foxes too, don't you, Mr. Allen?"

"Now then," said Dale, returning, "that's enough, my lads. I dropped you the hint by now. You're welcome to as much more of my beer as you can carry, but you won't sauce my friends inside my gates--nor outside, either, if I chance to be there."

"Aw right, sir."

"Take no heed of them," said Allen. "It is only their ignorance;" and he staggered to his feet.

Dale escorted the honored guest to the gig, then wiped his perspiring face, lighted a pipe; and then reproved Mary and Mrs. Goudie for unseemly mirth.

They still had Mary with them, and, although they did not know it, were to enjoy her faithful service for some time to come. Now that Mrs. Dale grew her own vegetables, purchases from Mr. Druitt, the higgler, had become rare; only an occasional bit of bacon, or once in a way a couple of rabbits, a hare, a doubtfully obtained pheasant, could ever be required from him; so that the greater part of his frequent visits were admittedly paid to the servant and not to the mistress. But he proved an unconscionably slow courtier. Mary, for her part, when she was teased about him and asked if he did not yet show anxiety to reach the happy day, always tossed her head and said that she was in no hurry, that she doubted if she could ever tear herself away from Vine-Pits, and so on.

Then, at last, a shocking discovery was made. Mary, after an afternoon out, came home with her face all red and blubbered, sat in the kitchen sobbing and rocking herself, and told Mavis how she had heard on unimpeachable authority that the higgler was a married man. He had always been married--and poor Mary confessed that she was very fond of him, although so angry with him for his disgraceful treatment of her.

On the next visit of the higgler Dale was lying in wait for him.

"Come inside, please. I'd like a few words with you, Mr. Druitt;" and the higgler was led through the kitchen, and up the three steps into the adjacent room.

Here, as soon as the door had been shut, Mr. and Mrs. Dale both tackled him. Dale was very fine, like a magistrate, so dignified as well as so severe, accusing the culprit of playing fast and loose with a young woman, of arousing feelings in her bosom which he was not in a position to satisfy.

"A girl," said Mavis, "that we consider under our charge, as much as if she was our daughter."

"Who looks to us," said Dale, "for guardianship and protection."

Mr. Druitt, sitting on the edge of his chair, smiling foolishly, nodded his head in the direction of the kitchen door, and gave a queer sort of wink.

"Meaning _her?_"

"Yes, who else should we mean?"

"I've never said a word of love to her in my life."

"Oh, how," cried Mavis, "can you make such a pretense?"

"Because it's the truth."

"But," said Mavis, indignantly, "you've made her fond of you. You've courted her."

The higgler distinctly preened himself, and smiled archly. "Ah, there's a language of the eyes, which speaks perhaps when the lips are sealed."

Mavis was angry and disgusted. "You, a married man!"

Dale, outraged too, spoke with increasing sternness. "You don't deny you've got a wife?"

The higgler answered very gravely. "Mr. Dale, that's my misfortune, not my fault. But my wife isn't going to last forever, and the day she's gone--that is, the day after I've buried her decently--I shall come here to Mary Parsons and say 'Mary'--mind you, I've never called her Mary yet--I shall say, 'Mary, my lips are unsealed, and I ask you to be my true and lawful second wife.'"

They could make nothing of the higgler.

"It's seven years," he went on, "since Doctor Hollin said to me, 'I have to warn you Mrs. Druitt isn't going to make old bones.' However, we find it a long job. There's a proverb, isn't there? Creaking doors!"

Mavis was inexpressibly shocked. "How can you talk of your wife so? Have you no feelings for her?"

"Mrs. Dale," said the higgler, solemnly, "I married my first wife for money, and I've been punished for my mistake. That's why I made up my mind I'd marry next time for love--in choosing a wholesome maiden and not asking what she'd got sewed in her petticoat or harbored in the bank;" and, nodding, he again gave his curious self-satisfied wink. "Mr. Dale, you tell her to wait patiently. I'll be true to her, if she'll be true to me." Then he rose, and smiling sheepishly, once more addressed Mrs. Dale. "The purpose of my call this morning was to say I shall have some _good_ bacon next week."

Mavis refused the bacon, and Dale said a few words of stern rebuke.

"I can tell you, Mr. Druitt, I take a very poor opinion of your manhood and proper feeling."

Then Mavis interposed to check her husband. The fact was, she felt baffled by the situation and utterly at a loss as to what would be the best way of dealing with it. Whatever one might think of Mr. Druitt one's self, there was Mary to be considered. What would ultimately be best for her? The man was warm; and Mary, who was not growing younger, said she liked him.

"I'll wish you good morning," said the higgler.

Then, when they thought he had been long gone and Mavis was talking to Mary, he put in his head at the kitchen doorway.

"Will this make any difference?" he asked shyly. "Should I call again--or do you forbid me the house?"

The three women, Mavis, Mary and Mrs. Goudie, all looked at one another, quite perplexed.

"Er--no," said Mavis, after a pause. "You can call. I may, just possibly, be wanting bacon next week."

"It's a real beautiful side;" and, without a glance at Mary, he disappeared.

Then Mary instantaneously decided that she would wait for him, and not break with him; and she asked Mrs. Dale to run out and tell him that she would wait.

But that Mavis could not do. It would be too undignified. Mary must restrain her emotions till next week, and tell him herself.

XV

The little girl Rachel at the age of six was able to take interest in everything that happened, and to be a real companion who loved to help her mother at any important task. Thus one winter evening between tea and supper, when Mavis was most importantly engaged, she sat up late by special license and gave her company and aid in the little room behind the kitchen.

"Now, see if you can find the blotting-paper over there on daddy's desk. Quietly, my darling. Very quietly--because we mustn't wake Billy."

Billy, the little boy, was asleep in his cradle, near, but not too near, the cheerful fire; a bluish flicker that reminded one of the frost out of doors showed intermittently among the yellow and red flames; the wick of the lamp on the round table burned clearly; and in the mingling lamplight and firelight the whole room looked delightfully cozy and homelike. Mavis, with a body just pleasantly tired and a mind still comfortably active, paused before starting her labor in order luxuriously to feel the peaceful charm that was being shed forth by all her surroundings.

More and more the very heart of their home life seemed to locate itself in this room, and so every day additional memories and associations wove themselves about the objects it contained. Rachel, young as she was, showed a marked predilection for it, loving it better than all other rooms. From the dawn of intelligence she had been fascinated by the two guns and the brass powder-flasks that hung high over the chimney-place; her first climbings and tumblings had been performed on the three steps that led to the kitchen; and she had addled her tender brains, as well as inflamed the natural greed which is so pardonable in infants, by what was to her a sort of differential calculus before she learned to discriminate nicely among the various jams kept by Mummy in the big cupboard.

Nearly all the furniture, as well as the two guns, had belonged to Mr. Bates. It was solid, and very old--a tall-boy with a drawer that, opening out, made a writing-desk; a bureau with a latticed glass front; three chairs of the Chippendale farmhouse order; and one vast chair, covered with leather and adorned with nails, that had probably been dozed in by the hall-porter of some great mansion more than a century ago. Here and there Mavis had of course dabbed her small prettinesses--blue china and a clock on the mantel-shelf, colored cushions, photographs of the children, views of Rodchurch High Street, the Chase, Rodhaven Pier; and the old and the new, the useful and the ornamental, alike whispered to her of fulfilled desires, gratified fancies, and William Dale.

It was her husband's room. Perhaps that formed the real source of all its charms, the essence or base of attraction that lay deep beneath visual presentations of chairs and fire-gleamings, or associations of ideas, or memories of past happiness. Those were his books, behind the latticed glass--the _Elocution Manual_, the _Elements of Rhetoric_, the ten-volumed _People's Encyclopedia_, that he had read, and still read so assiduously. It was here that he ate, drank, and mused. Here he did all of his work that wasn't real office work. Here he received such visitors as head coachmen, stud-grooms, and the huntsmen.