"Lookee, I'll carry youyou mustn't git wet."However, someone had to look after the invalid, and Pete might as well do it as anybody elseas long as he realised that his sick-nursing was a recreation, and not a substitute for his duties on the farm.
ONE:His temper had grown a little difficult of late yearsit had never been a particularly pleasant one, but it had been fierce rather than quick. His sons felt uneasily that they were partly responsible for thisthey irritated him by asserting their independence. Also he suspected them of a lack of enthusiasm. He had tried to arrange a marriage for David with the daughter of the new farmer at Kitchenhour. She was ten years older than he, and not strikingly beautiful, but she satisfied Reuben's requirements by being as strong as a horse and having a hundred a year of her own. His indignation was immense when David refused this prize.
"Yes, I was a freeman, and I was a yeoman; but I am now avillein! Ay, starestare! I live through it all. It was but the space of a momentthe drawing of a breath, that changed me from a man who dared look the heavens in the face, and close his door, if he listed, on even the baron himself, to a poor worm, that must crawl upon the earth, and has not even this (taking up a log of wood) that he can call his own. True, it was not my birthright, but I earned it, in sweat, in hunger, and cold, and I fought for it amidst swords and lancesand I sold it, like a traitor, forher!" And he pointed, with a look of bitter reproach, to his wife.The Moor was on the eastern edge of the parish, five miles from Rye. Heaving suddenly swart out of the green water-meadows by Socknersh, it piled itself towards the sunrise, dipping to Leasan House. It was hummocked and tussocked with coarse grasshere and there a spread of heather, growing, like all southern heather, almost arboreally. In places the naked soil gaped in sores made by coney-warrens or uprooted bushes. Stones and roots, sharn, shards, and lumps of marl, mixed themselves into the wealden clay, which oozed in red streaks of potential fruitfulness through their sterility."Yes," replied Mary; "he was by the monk when he stood at the door of the villein's hut, and I dare say he is with him now."