Women of the Country Part 7

"Go on! dance, old lady," said one of the men who was carrying an empty drawer, which had just been scrubbed, to dry in the suns.h.i.+ne of the yard. He set it down, end upwards, and stood expectantly. The two other men paused also.

"Go on! Aren't you going to begin?" said one of them.

"She's a funny old thing, this one," said the Matron to Anne, stopping to watch, as the old woman, holding her skirts to her knees, her clogs clacking, and with a smile of imbecility fixed on her face, began to hop from one thin leg to the other, stamping slowly round on her heels in the artless manner of a child. All at once she stopped, and, pulling up her ap.r.o.n, put a corner of it in her mouth, hanging her head and giggling.

"They're all looking at me, all them men," she giggled. "Fancy me dancing with all them men looking." One of the men broke into a laugh, which was changed immediately into an attack of asthma.

"Dance again, old lady!" called a younger man, with the effects of hard drinking visible in his face.

The shrunken and pitiful figure revolved several times, stamping on her heels, then stopped with the same grotesque coquetry.

"She's a funny old thing, isn't she?" said the Matron to Anne. "She gives us many a laugh."

"It's too humbling to look at. I cannot laugh," said Anne. "Poor old thing, to have come to that."

"She doesn't know, you know," said the Matron. "You're wasting your pity. They're most of them better off in the infirmary here than they were outside. You've no idea what a dirty state _she_ was found in for one."

"It's the painfulness of such a sight--age without honour," repeated Anne.

"I've no time to think of that sort of thing," replied the Matron, as they began to ascend the wide stairs to the bed rooms, a woman, who was scrubbing the steps with sand, standing aside to let them pa.s.s.

Several women were sitting up in bed, with starched night-caps nodding at different angles. Over the fireplace was a lithograph of Queen Victoria giving the Bible as the source of England's greatness to an Indian potentate, and beneath it, sitting very still in a large armchair, was Jane Evans staring into the fire. She was very quiet, broken, and helplessly docile. Her stillness was alarming. She seemed to be already dead in spirit. Even the child soon to be separated from her scarcely concerned her. She was quite neat. Thin and fatigued as her face was, she did not appear to have suffered greatly in health.

"Jane, my dear, I've not come to blame you," began Anne, "I've come to see if there's anything I can do to make it easier for you to face the future and what's coming. I only heard of you coming here by accident or you shouldn't have been left alone. You mustn't think everybody's forsaken you and you've no friend left to you. It's often the case that you know your true friends in trouble," she continued sententiously.

"And if only you could find the best Friend of all now when you need Him most." Her prim phrasing changed to earnestness. "There was a woman once that they dragged out in front of everybody for evil-doing. But He wouldn't have it. He put them to silence, and then when she was all alone with Him He showed her how tender He was to them that do wrong. If you only knew Him and His kindness, and how He can understand any kind of trouble. There's a good deal you think none of us can understand, but _He_ can if you tell Him." She wiped her eyes. Jane did not seem to have heard.

"I don't want to worry you," continued Anne; "you've got a good deal to bear and to think of, and you've got to keep up for the sake of the child. He'll need you to be father and mother both. Matron thinks you'll be better here for the present, but you mustn't give up and think you're to stay in the Union all your life. But try to think of the child, and how G.o.d'll help you if you try to do the right."

It was like speaking to a person a very long way off, and Anne desisted.

"She's very quiet, isn't she?" said the Matron. "That'll have to break down soon. The doctor thinks she'll be all right when the child comes.

The labour'll give her a shock and rouse her. She comes of a better cla.s.s than the usual ones. It's the disgrace she can't get over. She'll do anything she's told to do. I sometimes get tired of making the other women do as they're told, but I wish sometimes she'd be a bit more like them. You'll be ready for your tea soon, won't you, Jane?" she added in the cheerful professional tone intended to deceive the sick.

"Yes, please," said Jane, without looking round.

"Here's Miss Hilton come all this way to see you," said the Matron a little more sharply. "Can't you say anything to her? you may not have so many friends come to see you as you expect, you know."

There was no echo from the abyss of misery in which Jane was sunken. She neither replied nor stirred. With the flight of Burton all hope had been killed within her; and without hope she had fallen like a bird with one wing broken. She was defenceless, and her misery laid open to all. She could only keep still, lest it should be tortured by being handled.

"You must think of the child, you know," said the Matron. "He'll depend on you altogether, and you mustn't give in like this. She doesn't care,"

she added to Anne as Jane still sat without a tremor of understanding.

"It's a bad sign. I can't even rouse her with speaking of Burton. She's given up hope of him. It's like as if something's dead inside her.

Doctor says it's shock."

"I should say it's temper," said a voice from one of the beds. "Petting and spoiling all day long." The voice came from an old woman, with a soft, withered face and infantile blue eyes.

"Now then, where did you hide that thermometer?" said the Matron, with a good-natured laugh. "You know, Miss Hilton, this old lady's a famous hand at taking anything that's about, and keeping it for herself. She doesn't call it stealing, don't you see. Why, the other day she was having her temperature taken, and when the nurse turned her head away there was no thermometer to be seen. 'What have you done with it?' she says. 'Why, I declare, I must have etten it,' says this old lady. What do you think of that?"

The old woman turned over in bed, and her innocent eyes closed with a patient expression.

"I don't know what people are allowed to come talking here for when it isn't visiting day," she said. "n.o.body can go to sleep for such talking."

Anne sat down beside Jane and began to sing--

"I was a wandering sheep; I did not love the fold."

The Matron watched with an air of curiosity. Jane did not cease staring into the fire.

"It's no use, Miss Hilton. I daresay the old lady's a bit right. There's a slice of temper in it too. But we can't waste all day over her."

Anne took Jane's hand. "I'll come and see you again in a little while,"

she said. "And remember, there's always One that'll hear all that you can't tell to any one else. He's with you here waiting to hear and help you." She lingered. There was no response. The Matron walked briskly towards the door.

"Well, the old ones are easier to manage," she said. She led the way downstairs and left Anne on the doorstep of the big front door. The porter shut it with a clang.

The pony was pawing the gravel outside the gate and pulling hard with his head. He backed the cart vigorously into the road as Anne untied his head, and set off at a good pace towards the town.

"I'll go up to-morrow and see Mrs Hankworth," said Anne. "She'll perhaps be able to say something to help."

CHAPTER XV

Mrs Hankworth lived at one of the largest farms in the country, some three miles away from Anne Hilton's cottage. The farmstead was, contrary to the usual custom, not placed near the high road for convenience, but on an eminence in the midst of its own lands. A road had been cut to it between cornfields, so that in the time of springing corn a man walking on this road seemed to be wading to the knees in a green undulating sea, which had risen and submerged the hill. The farm itself was large, with a garden unusually well kept, a sign that the mistress counted in the establishment. Old rose trees grew almost to the roof of the wide building, and the thick turf bore token to the richness of the soil.

Inside, the pa.s.sage, the stairs, the rooms, were all s.p.a.cious, and, in spite of the rattling of cans and the sound of voices in the kitchen, the place retained an atmosphere of quiet and tranquillity, not of isolation or desertion, but of that comfortable restfulness which one recalls as a child, when, having been ill, one is left at home when the others have gone to school, and remains in a quiet house, watching contentedly the leisurely cheerful movements of one's mother.

Mrs Hankworth, the mistress of the best farm in the country, was an enormously stout but very active woman. Her husband, a man half her size and an excellent farmer, exhibited only one trait of nervousness, and that on her account. If she went to market without him he was uneasy until she came back lest something should have happened to her. In all the fifteen years of their married life they had never slept out of their own bed, and they had had no honeymoon.

With the contentment of a woman of sound health and of active useful life, who was fully aware that her good sense and management were as necessary to the farm, her husband and twelve children, as his own knowledge of farming, she looked upon this as a just sense of her own value, as indeed it was, and the reward of the confidence which she so completely deserved from her husband. She was generous to her poorer neighbours even when they cheated her. Not taking it very deeply to heart nor expecting much otherwise, she was yet able to remember that her lot was an affluent one compared with theirs, and was ready to excuse even while being perfectly aware of human fraility. Who, when she had sent to an old woman of the village who lived discontentedly on such pickings as she could induce her neighbours to leave her, and who had constantly profited by the liberality of this well-established mistress, a ticket for a large tea, and was informed by some officious person that the husband also had procured a ticket at her expense, said, "He's a poor old crab-stick. It'll do him no harm to have a good tea for once."

She was a contented woman, entirely satisfied with the position which life had allotted to her, a position in which all her faculties had full scope, and were to the full appreciated by those with whom she had most to do, and being of a really kind heart she was a good friend to the poor. When Anne arrived at the door of the dairy, she found its mistress seated before a tin pail containing a ma.s.s of b.u.t.ter which she was dividing into prints. With white sleeves and ap.r.o.n, a bucket of scalding water on one side of her and a pail of cold on the other, her ample knees spread apart for balance as she sat on a low chair, her bulky and capable hands moved with decision and practice about her work. She looked up as Anne appeared in the doorway, but her hands did not cease working.

"It's not often we have to do this," she said, "but they sent down word that there was no milk wanted yesterday, so we had to set to."

"It looks nice b.u.t.ter," said Anne, with the judgment of a connoisseur.

"_You_ ought to know what good b.u.t.ter is," returned Mrs Hankworth. "I've just been having a laugh over that Peter Molesworth. He wrote on his account, "17 pints." Did you ever hear such a thing! It took me quite a long time to know what 17 pints was. Him and his 17 pints!"

"He's not very clever, Peter," said Anne, "but I don't know what his poor mother would do without him."

"No," returned Mrs Hankworth, "he's hard-working if he's stupid, and that's better than the other way round."

"Mrs Hankworth," began Anne, "I know what a good friend you've always been to those that have got into trouble, and I came to ask your advice about that poor Jane Evans."