J. S. Fletcher - The Collected Works of J. S. Fletcher - 17 Novels & 28 Short Stories (Illustrated Edition)

A generous dose of whisky-and-water enabled Pippany to move his four limbs and to convince his interested helpers that he had not broken his back. Taffendale smiled grimly, and turned to Rhoda.

"He's all right, Mrs. Perris," he said. "Let him rest a bit and then send him home."

And again he smiled, looking at her inquisitively behind the smile.

Rhoda, in her turn, looked at Taffendale. She, too, was seeing him for the first time. She had often heard of him as the rich farmer and lime-burner across at the Limepits, but she had never met him. Now she viewed him with curiosity. He was a tall, loosely-built man, evidently about thirty or thirty-two years of age, dark of hair, eye, and complexion; there was a curiously reserved, self-reliant air about him which unconsciously impressed her. Just as unconsciously the sense of his masculinity was forced upon her; she was sensible of it just as she was sensible of his good clothes, his polished boots and fine cloth Newmarket gaiters, his white stock with the gold horseshoe pin carelessly thrust into its folds. And she compared him, scarcely knowing that she did so, with her husband, Abel Perris, and something in the comparison aroused a curious and subtle feeling in her.

"I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Taffendale," she said. "And so ought you to be, Pippany. You'd have been dead by now if Mr. Taffendale hadn't chanced to be riding by."

"I'm deeply obligated to Mestur Taffendale," mumbled Pippany, eyeing the whisky bottle. "I'm allus obligated to them as does good to me. But I'm worth a good many dead 'uns yet, and if Mestur Taffendale theer ever wants a friend—"

Taffendale gave Rhoda another grim smile, and moved towards the door. He had bestowed a swift circular glance on his surroundings, and he was marvelling at their poverty. The house-place in which they stood was little superior in its furnishing to any day-labourer's cottage; through an open door he caught a glimpse of a parlour that looked cold and bare. It seemed to him a poor setting for a woman as good-looking as he had found Perris's wife to be.

"Well, good-day," he said. "You go home, Webster, and get to bed."

Rhoda made a motion of her hand towards the whisky bottle.

"Won't—won't you take anything, Mr. Taffendale?" she said diffidently.

"No, no, nothing, thank you," replied Taffendale hurriedly. "I'm pressed for time. Good-day, Mrs. Perris."

He walked quickly through the fold, observing things to right and left of him without turning his eyes in either direction. And he saw the evident poverty of the place, and mentally appraised its value, and when he had got his coat and mounted his horse, and was riding away, he shook his head to the accompaniment of another of his sardonic smiles.

"That looks to be in a poorish state!" he thought. "And it's rent-day next week. I wonder how Perris stands for that? It's a pity for that wife of his—a fine woman!"

Rhoda and Tibby Graddige went back to the orchard to finish hanging out the clothes. Both were in meditative mood, brought about by the event of the afternoon.

"So that's Mr. Taffendale, is it?" said Rhoda. "For all we've been here two years I never saw him before. Well off, isn't he, Tibby?"

Tibby Graddige jerked her head.

"Well off!" she exclaimed. "I'll warrant! What with his big farm, and his lime-kilns, I should think he were well off, yon! Why, his father, old Mestur Taffendale, left him thirty thousand pound. An' isn't it fair shameful?—he's never yet shown sign o' tekkin' a wife to share it wi' him!"

Rhoda made no answer. She was wondering what so wealthy a man had thought of the palpable poverty of Cherry-trees.

Table of Contents

About the time that Mark Taffendale and Tibby Graddige carried Pippany Webster into the house-place, Abel Perris got out of a train at the little railway station, Somerleigh, which stood four miles away along the high-road to the north of Martinsthorpe. A tallish, bony man, somewhat uncertain at his knees and rounded of shoulder, with a sharp, thin face, a weak chin, and a bit of sandy whisker cropping out in front of each over-large ear, he looked almost pathetically desolate as he stood on the platform, mechanically feeling in one pocket after another in the effort to find his ticket. His attire gave no force to his naturally colourless personality.' Having been on a visit to his relations he had worn his best clothes—garments rarely brought out of the chest which had been their place of repose for several years. The sleeves of the black coat were too short, and exposed the prominent, fleshless bones of the wearer's wrists; the legs of the grey trousers had been shortened by much creasing and bagging at the knees, and revealed the rough grey stockings which terminated in unpolished lace-up boots; the waistcoat, loose and baggy, was crossed by a steel watch-chain, bought in youth, a great bargain, at some forgotten statute-hiring fair. A much frayed collar, dirty and crumpled by its two days' wearing, and at least a size too small for the neckband of the coarse shirt on which it had with difficulty been fastened, formed a striking contrast to the gaudy necktie of blue satin, which was wound about it and had worked itself out of place until its knot lay beneath the wearer's left ear. The necktie, like the watch-chain, was the result of a visit to some fair or other; it expressed Perris almost as eloquently as the useless switch of ashplant which he carried aimlessly in his great raw hand—a switch that was of no use for anything in a pedestrian's hand but to snick off the heads of the flowers and weeds by the wayside.

Perris was the only person who left the train; a solitary porter was the only person who emerged from the station buildings to greet and speed it. The train went on slowly, and Pen-is made for the exit at the end of the platform with equal leisureliness. He found and gave up his ticket, and went out on the high-road. Opposite the station stood a wayside inn, meagre and poor of aspect, but dignified with the title of Railway Hotel; Perris, having moved a few yards in the homeward direction, paused and looked at its open door uncertainly. His feet began to shuffle towards it; eventually he crossed the road with shambling gait and bent head.

"I may as well take an odd glass," he muttered. "There's nowt 'twixt here and our house, and it's a good four mile."

The parlour into which he turned on entering the inn was close and heavy with the smell of rank tobacco and stale beer. Sawdust, strewn about three days before, and now littered and foul with the accumulations brought in from the road outside, covered the floor; the rough tables of unpolished wood were marked with the rings made by the setting down upon them of overflowing pots and mugs; the walls, originally washed in some indefinite tint of yellow or drab, and now stained and discoloured by damp and neglect, were relieved from sheer bleakness by framed advertisements of ales and spirits, and here and there by a grocer's fly-blown almanack. One side of the room was filled up by a bar, covered over with zinc sheeting, out of which projected three beer-pulls standing up like ninepins; behind it, on shelves ranged against the walls, were displayed a few bottles of spirits, an ancient cigar-box or two, and some rows of cloudy glasses. The whole place was down at heel and disconsolate: Perris, however, noticed nothing of its shabbiness: his eyes were no more offended by the squalor and the untidiness than his nose was vexed by the unpleasant atmosphere. He sat down heavily at the table nearest to the bar, and tapped on its surface with his ash switch.

A man emerged lazily from an inner apartment—a gross-habited, bloated man, about whose thickly-jowled face coarse black hair grew in sparse tufts. The silence with which he advanced to the bar was due to the fact that although the afternoon was merging towards eventide, he still retained the slippers into which he had thrust his feet on rising; it needed no particular observation to see that so far he had performed no ablutions nor made his toilet. His trousers were kept in place by a single suspender; between them and his open waistcoat, almost destitute of buttons and greasy from much spilling of fat meats, large rolls of coarse linen forced themselves and suggested that he considered an allowance of one shirt a week ample for his requirements. He wore neither collar nor necktie: his unbuttoned shirt revealed a thick bull neck, and beneath it a chest covered as with the pelt of an animal.