ONE:"She ?un't my sort," he mumbled as he walked home, "she ?un't at all my sort. Dudn't know where Odiam wurnever heard of Boarzelloh, yes, seems as she remembered hearing something when I t?ald her"and Reuben's lip curled ironically.
TWO:Then when he was about a hundred feet from the house the door opened stealthily and a man slunk out. The gleam of a street lamp passed over his face, and Dansay rushed at him with his fists up.The next morning Richard, without breastplate or helmet, but simply attired in a saffron-coloured tunic and an azure mantle lined with ermine (on which opened pea-shells were wrought in their natural green, but with the peas represented by large pearls), a cap of azure velvet, edged also with ermine, and with no other weapon but a small dagger in the girdle of his tunic, prepared himself to meet his rebellious subjects. The idea of letting down the drawbridge, and passing by it from the Tower, was too imprudent a thing to be thought of, and Richard, therefore, attended by De Boteler, Oxford, Warwick, Sir Aubrey de Vere, and a few others, were just about taking water, in order to pass a little way down the river, and then proceed to Mile-end on horseback, when the Princess Joan, attended by the Lady Warwick, joined the party, and intimated her intention of accompanying her son.
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ONE:"Why w?an't you let me kiss you?"
TWO:
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ONE:
TWO:
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TWO:"How are you getting on with Boarzell? I hear that most of it's yours now."He stood staring at the grass with its dribbles of[Pg 39] lavant and spines of rushes. The wind brought the sound of someone singing. At first he scarcely noticed, then gradually the song worked in with his daydream, and ended by rousing him out of it. He strolled across his domain, and marked half a dozen sturdy willows which must come out somehow roots and all. He climbed into the bracken zone, and from thence saw Harry sitting by a gorse thicket some hundred yards off with Naomi Gasson.
FORE:He looked down at Georgethe boy's face had an unhuman chalky appearance under the mudstains; on the forehead a vein had swollen up in black knots, others showed pale, almost aqueous, through the stretched skin. After all, George was the weakest, the best-spared of his children. This thought comforted and stiffened him a little, and he went into the house with something of his old uprightness.After all, fifty pounds and some furniture was very little to leave his only niece, who had lived with him, and had been married from his house. It was nonsense to plead the excuse that she was comfortably settled and provided forthe old man knew that Backfield had made a desperate plunge and could not recoup himself properly without ready money. He must have drawn up his will in the spirit of maliceReuben could imagine him grinning away in his grave. "Well, Ben Backfield, I've justabout sold you nicely, haven't I?next to no capital, tedious heavy expenses, and a wife who d?an't know the difference between a shilling and a soverun. You thought you'd done yourself unaccountable well, old feller, I reckon. Now you've found out your mistake. And you can't git even wud me where I am. He! He!"
FORE:The evidence was then entered into, and Mary Byles was called into the witness box. A rod was handed to her to identify the prisoner, and she then, without venturing to encounter the look of her whose life she was about to swear away, deposed to having received the liquid which had occasioned the child's death, from Edith; and to certain mysterious words and strange gestures used by the prisoner on delivering the phial.CHAPTER I
FORE:Reuben moved away from the crest and stood looking round him at what had once been Boarzell Moor. A clear watery light had succeeded the sunset, and he was able to see the full extent of his possessions. From the utmost limits of Grandturzel in the south, to the Glotten brook in the north, from Socknersh in the east to Cheat Land in the westall that he could see was his. Out of a small obscure farm of barely sixty acres he had raised up this splendid dominion, and he had tamed the roughest, toughest, fiercest, cruellest piece of ground in Sussex, the beast of Boarzell.
FORE:"Yes, there is your boywould you let him grow up a bondman?"Chapter 5
FORE:That night, the freemen and serfs that dwelt on the estate of De Boteler, and even the inmates of the castle itself, were alarmed by the sudden glare of red flames rising in a bright column above the tallest trees, and so fiercely burned the flame, that in a few minutes the horizon was tinged with a ruddy glow. There was an eager rush to discover from whence the phenomenon arose, and many were the exclamations, and many the whispered surmises, when it was ascertained that the cottage was on fire from which Holgrave had been so recently ejected."But I daren't tell him where you've agone."
FORE:"Funny how he never seems to think of anything but Odiam."
FORE:"How I hate the sight of that man! he is so full of consequence, and has so many airs, and talks so much about what he will do when he is king of Norfolk;just as if an honest blacksmith was not as good as a dyer any day! Or, as if Wat Turner (Wat Tyler, I mean)I declare I often catch myself going to call you Turner in the shop,aye, as if Wat Tyler wasn't as good a name as John Leicester! And then he talks about his wife, too. I'll let him see when you are king of Kent."
FORE:"Wot's the matter wud you?" asked a gruff voice.
FORE:"What say you, brethren?" resumed the foreman, looking at the rest: "our friend served usand besides, it is a pity to let good things go a-begging."Peter interposed:
TWO:As a matter of fact, Reuben at fifty was a lover of whom any girl might still be proud. If a little grey had come into his hair, it had merely been to give it the gleam of polished iron, and contrast it more effectively with the swarthiness of his skin. His teeth were as white and even as when he was twenty, for he had never risked spoiling them by too much tobaccohis eyes, dark and bright, were like a boy's; his broad back was straight, and his powerful arms could lift even the plump Rose to his shoulder. He once carried her on his shoulder all the way from Tide Barn to the beginning of Starvecrow lane.
Since his father's death he had denied himself woman's company, after two years lived in the throb and sweetness of it. A warm and vigorous temperament, controlled by a strong will, had promised a successful libertinism, and more than once he had drunk the extasies of passion without those dregs which spoil it for the more weakly dissolute. But now, with that same fierce strength and relentless purpose which had driven him to do the work of two men, to live hard, and sleep rough, he renounced all the delights which were only just beginning. Henceforth, with his great ambition before him, there could be nothing but marriageprudent, solid, and constructive. His girl at the Forstal knew him no more, nor any of her kind. He had set himself to build a house, and for the sake of that house there was nothing, whether of his own or of others, that he could not tame, break down, and destroy.Chapter 6"Why not? There's naun shameful in it. Munds's brother did it for twenty years. And think of the difference it'll m?ake to usthirty pound or so a year, instead of the dead loss of Harry's keep and the wages of an extra man beside. I tell you, mother, I wur fair sick about the farm till I thought of this."
TWO:Rose pattered up to him in the shabby white kid shoes that had been so trim and smart five years ago.
