by Ruskin Bond
Beside his nice manners and clean ways, Mr Brine was known to have strong opinions about women, whose place, he would say with a kindly smile, should be the home. He would tell Mr Wanley so, whose wife was a merry chatter-box as well as a gadder, and would say, too, that no woman should be allowed her own way—‘for all they do is to walk the streets at any market or fair when they should be tending the pigs and washing the clothes at home.’
Mr Wanley would often stay beside Mr Brine, whose manners he admired, and once the farmer said with a sigh—
‘I do know that your wife bain’t a gadder and when thee do go home ’tis to find one of they suet puddings for tea, that folk do hear about.’
Mr Brine smiled. He liked to hear his wife’s cooking praised, and he liked Mr Wanley too, for he always saw to it that Mr Brine was given the whitest and newest bread that Mr Pople, the village baker, had to sell.
Although Mr Brine cut the corn in the autumn, he would never send in his account or receive the payment for his work until the winter, for it was then that he liked his summer earnings to come in, so that he could pay his rent.
It was December when Mr Wanley received his account, for Mr Brine had been cutting the farmer’s barley when he talked to him about the pudding, and, having nothing better to do one dismal afternoon, Mr Wanley decided to pay the money himself.
Mr Wanley hadn’t gone far along Deadman’s Lane before he began to notice the brambles. These brambles appeared to grow out of the hedge in a nasty manner, as if they meant to trip him up and then scratch his face when he was fallen. The way was dreary and the afternoon darkened quicker than Mr Wanley thought it should, and the remembrance that a man was once found hanging there did not tend to make Mr Wanley’s thoughts happy ones.
He wished to change them, and bethought him that he had once met, years ago when he walked there in the summer, two lovers. Mr Wanley liked a pretty girl and he thought of this one now. She was a pretty meek thing with fair hair and eyes that were gentle and cow-like, and she was none other than Alice Amey, who married her lover, John Brine.
Mr Wanley hadn’t seen Alice since that day when he caught her holding up her lips, that were pretty and pouting, to be kissed by a great beard. From what Mr Wanley had heard, Alice had pleased her husband more in the making of her suet puddings than in other family matters, for though she had borne him six children, they had all, in some way or other, been injured or deformed in the womb and were all born dead.
‘Perhaps it’s the fir-tree that frightens her,’ the nurse had said.
Mr Wanley quickened his pace. The night was coming and, although he liked a young girl best, he had no objection to seeing a married woman whom he hoped would be both buxom and merry, even though she had lost her children.
He reached the farm, that was always so much admired by those who passed that way for its tidy neatness. But Mr Wanley did not go to the gate at once; he stopped by the tree.
This tree was an old Scotch fir that had seen better days. Its great gnarled trunk went high upwards and then leaned above in an unpleasant manner, as if it wanted to fall. Mr Wanley looked at the tree with interest because it was said that it had killed those babies.
Mr Wanley was on the point of leaving the dark tree and going to the gate when, from the farm, he heard sounds that made him wait for a moment. These sounds were most unmistakably blows, and after each one of them there came low moans.
Mr Wanley shivered, but he soon recollected how kind Mr Brine was to animals, and, the sounds ceasing, he supposed that they could only have been the wind in the tree.
Mr Wanley opened the gate and walked to the farm, admiring the tidiness of all he saw, that was so different from his own muddle at home. He knocked gently, and Mr Brine opened the door.
He was exactly as usual, with his clothes as neat and brushed as a woman’s untiring attention could make them. Mr Brine’s large form in the doorway looked genial and kindly, and Mr Wanley, who was invited at once to enter, felt more sure than ever that those sounds he had heard beside the tree must have been mere imagination.
As soon as Mr Wanley had paid his bill, Mr Brine invited him to stay to supper in order to taste the farmer’s suet pudding that Alice made so well.
Mr Wanley sat down and admired the neatness of the room, where everything was in its right place and no speck of dust was to be seen.
‘But how do she manage to do it all so nice?’ inquired Mr Wanley, ‘for me wife do say that it’s impossible for one pair of hands to do so much.’
‘Oh,’ replied Mr Brine, rubbing one great fist against the other, ‘I do keep something behind door that be a good foreman over she.’ Mr Brine rubbed his fists again and again.
Mr Wanley joined in the laugh, supposing that Mr Brine meant some country jest or other that was a harmless one.
The evening being damp and a small rain that had been falling having wetted Mr Wanley’s overcoat, that gentleman took it off, and as soon as Mr Brine went out to the stable to feed his horses, he carried the coat to the outer door, intending to hang it there.
He was doing so, but stepped back in horror, for something else hung there. This was a thick leather strap that had upon it dark stains and also redder ones—blood.
Mr Wanley carried his coat back in a hurry and laid it upon a chair.
Presently Alice Brine came in to lay the supper. She never spoke nor looked at Mr Wanley, and she certainly wasn’t the same Alice who had lifted up her red pouting lips to that bearded mouth in Deadman’s Lane. She moved and shuddered, but made no sound, and Mr Wanley could see from her shape that she was soon to bear another of those dead children.
Mr Wanley watched her nervously until Mr Brine returned and the famous suet pudding was set upon the table.
Mr Brine ate in the same nice manner that he did in the fields. He conveyed little pieces of the pudding into his bearded mouth, talking, meanwhile, and advising Mr Wanley to keep something behind his door if his wife turned lazy.
As soon as supper was over and the pudding heartily praised by genial Mr Brine, Mr Wanley took his coat and departed, being glad enough when he reached the lane that the clouds were gone and the moon risen.
But even with the moon as a companion, he was still nervous, and waited for a few moments beside the fir-tree to obtain confidence.
For a while all was quiet, except for the wind that moaned in the tree. But in a moment or two ugly sounds came from the farm, that was but thirty paces from the tree, and the same horrid groans that Mr Wanley had heard before. Mr Wanley hurried away, but before he had gone a hundred yards along Deadman’s Lane he turned and looked back. Someone was come out of the door who appeared but scantily clothed, who twisted and foiled upon the path in agony.
The next morning Mr Wanley heard from his wife that Alice had given birth to another dead child.
‘E’ do bury they all under thik fir-tree,’ the village nurse had said.
The evening after the dead child came Mr Brine dug carefully under the tree, putting the mould upon the little still body with kindly gentleness.
The wind was wild and boisterous, and a gust rushed along Deadman’s Lane and uprooted the fir-tree, that fell upon and crushed Mr Brine. At first it was supposed that he wasn’t too much injured to recover, but in a fortnight’s time the doctor said that the worst must be expected.
Mr Wanley and Mr Pople, who were invited to witness Mr Brine’s will reached the house as Dr Hawkins happened to be leaving it.
‘Ah, yes,’ the doctor said to Mrs Brine, ‘he may eat anything he wishes now.’
‘I have made a suet pudding,’ said Mrs Brine, looking down, ‘and he wants to eat it—he eats so nicely, you know—’
As soon as the two witnesses were in the bedroom, Mrs Brine brought in the pudding and putting pillows behind her husband, she bade him eat.
Mr Brine took a piece into his mouth and then another, in his usual polite manner. But, upon chewing for a moment, he threw out what he had in his mouth.
> ‘The suet’s not cooked,’ he said fiercely, ‘it’s as hard as leather. Go down, Farmer Wanley, and bring me what’s hung behind the door.’
He turned viciously to Alice.
‘Strip yourself bare,’ he shouted.
Alice Brine smiled upon him.
‘The strap’s in the pudding,’ she said meekly, ‘you’ve been eating it.’
Mr Brine gasped, his rage convulsed him—but not his rage alone, for another unseen hand held him and he lay still.
He did not know where she came from or who she was, but he brought her to that desolate dreary house as his bride. When she saw her own name scratched on the window, she knew that destiny had overtaken her.
FLORENCE FLANNERY
BY MARJORIE BOWEN
She who had been Florence Flannery noted with a careless eye the stains of wet on the dusty stairs, and with a glance ill used to observance of domesticities looked up for damp or dripping ceilings. The dim-walled staircase revealed nothing but more dust, yet this would serve as a peg for ill-humour to hang on, so Florence pouted.
‘An ill, muddy place,’ said she, who loved gilding and gimcracks and mirrors reflecting velvet chairs, and flounced away to the upper chamber, lifting frilled skirts contemptuously high.
Her husband followed; they had been married a week and there had never been any happiness in their wilful passion. Daniel Shute did not now look for any; in the disgust of this draggled homecoming he wondered what had induced him to marry the woman and how soon he would come to hate her.
As she stood in the big bedroom he watched her with dislike; her tawdry charms of vulgar prettiness had once been delightful to his dazed senses and muddled wits, but here, in his old home, washed by the fine Devon air, his sight was clearer and she appeared coarse as a poppy at the far end of August.
‘Of course you hate it,’ he said cynically, lounging with his big shoulders against one of the bedposts, his big hands in the pockets of his tight nankeen trousers, and his fair hair, tousled from the journey, hanging over his mottled face.
‘It is not the place you boasted to have,’ replied Florence, but idly, for she stood by the window and looked at the tiny leaded panes; the autumn sun gleaming sideways on this glass, picked out a name scratched there:
Florence Flannery. Born 1500.
‘Look here,’ cried the woman, excited, ‘this should be my ancestress!’
She slipped off a huge diamond ring she wore and scratched underneath the writing the present year, ‘1800’.
Daniel Shute came and looked over her shoulder.
‘That reads strange— “Born 1500”—as if you would say died 1800,’ he remarked. ‘Well, I don’t suppose she had anything to do with you, my charmer, yet she brought you luck, for it was remembering this name here made me notice you when I heard what you were called.’
He spoke uncivilly, and she responded in the same tone.
‘Undervalue what is your own, Mr Shute. There was enough for me to choose from, I can swear!’
‘Enough likely gallants,’ he grinned, ‘not so many likely husbands, eh?’
He slouched away, for, fallen as he was, it stung him that he had married a corybante of the opera, an unplaced, homeless, nameless creature for all he knew, for he could never quite believe that ‘Florence Flannery’ was her real name.
Yet that name had always attracted him; it was so queer that he should meet a real woman called Florence Flannery when one of the earliest of his recollections was tracing that name over with a curious finger in the old diamond pane.
‘You have never told me who she was,’ said Mrs Shute.
‘Who knows? Three hundred years ago, m’dear. There are some old wives’ tales, of course.’
He left the great bedroom and she followed him doggedly downstairs.
‘Is this your fine manor, Mr Shute? And these your noble grounds? And how am I to live here, Mr Shute, who left the gaieties of London for you?’
Her voice, shrill and edged, followed him down the stairs and into the vast dismantled drawing-room where they paused, facing each other like things caught in a trap, which is what they were.
For he had married her because he was a ruined man, driven from London by duns, and a drunken man who dreaded lonely hours and needed a boon companion to pledge him glass for glass, and a man of coarse desires who had bought with marriage what he was not rich enough to buy with money, and she had married him because she was past her meridian and saw no more conquests ahead and also was in love with the idea of being a gentlewoman and ruling in the great grand house by the sea—which was how she had thought of Shute Manor.
And a great grand house it had been, but for twenty years it had been abandoned by Daniel Shute, and stripped and mortgaged to pay for his vices, so that now it stood barren and desolate, empty and tarnished, and only a woman with love in her heart could have made a home of it; never had there been love in Florence Flannery’s heart, only greed and meanness.
Thus these two faced each other in the gaunt room with the monstrous chandelier hanging above them wrapped in a dusty brown holland bag, the walls festooned with cobwebs, the pale wintry sunshine showing the thick dust on the unpolished boards.
‘I never can live here!’ cried Mrs Shute. There was a touch of panic in her voice and she lifted her hands to her heart with a womanly gesture of grief.
The man was touched by a throb of pity; he did not himself expect the place to be so dilapidated. Some kind of a rascally agent had been looking after it for him, and he supposed some effort would have been made for his reception.
Florence saw his look of half-sullen shame and urged her point.
‘We can go back, cannot we?’ she said, with the rich drop in her voice, so useful for coaxing; ‘back to London and the house in Baker Street? All the old friends and old pleasures, Mr Shute, and a dashing little cabriolet to go round the park?’
‘Curse it!’ he answered, chagrined. ‘I haven’t the money, Flo; I haven’t the damned money!’ She heard the ring of bitter truth in his voice and the atrocious nature of the deception he had practised on her overwhelmed her shallow understanding.
You mean you’ve got no money, Mr Shute?’ she screamed.
‘Not enough for London, m’dear.’
‘And I’ve to live in this filthy barn?’
‘It has been good enough for my people, Mrs Shute,’ he answered grimly. ‘For all the women of my family, gentlewomen, all of ’em with quarterings, and it will be good enough for you, m’dear, so none of your Bartholomew Fair airs and graces.’
She was cornered, and a little afraid of him; he had been drinking at the last place where they stopped to water the horses and she knew how he could be when he was drunk; she remembered that she was alone with him and what a huge man he was.
So she crept away and went down into the vast kitchens where an old woman and a girl were preparing a meal.
The sight of this a little heartened Mrs Shute; in her frilled taffetas and long ringlets she sat down by the great open hearth, moving her hands to show the firelight flashing in her rings and shifting her petticoats so that the girl might admire her kid shoes.
‘I’ll take a cordial to stay my strength,’ she said, ‘for I’ve come a long way and find a sour welcome at the end of it, and that’ll turn any woman’s blood.’
The old dame smiled, knowing her type well enough; for even in a village you may find women like this.
So she brought Mrs Shute some damson wine and a plate of biscuits, and the two women became friendly enough and gossiped in the dim candle-lit kitchen while Daniel Shute wandered about his old home, even his corrupt heart feeling many a pang to see the places of his childhood desolate, the walks overgrown, the trees felled, the arbours closed, the fountains dried, and all the spreading fields about fenced by strangers.
The November moon was high in a misted space of open heaven by the time he reached the old carp pond.
Dead weeds tangled over the crumbling, moss-gro
wn stone, trumpery and slime coated the dark waters.
‘I suppose the carp are all dead?’ said Mr Shute. He had not been aware that he spoke aloud, and was surprised to hear himself answered.
‘I believe there are some left, esquire.’
Mr Shute turned sharply and could faintly discern the figure of a man sitting on the edge of the pond so that it seemed as if his legs half dangled in the black water.
‘Who are you?’ asked Daniel Shute quickly.
‘I’m Paley, sir, who looks after the grounds.’
‘You do your work damned badly,’ replied the other, irritated.
‘It is a big place, esquire, for one man to work.’
He seemed to stoop lower and lower as if at any moment he would slip into the pond; indeed, in the half dark, it seemed to Mr Shute as if he was already half in the water; yet, on this speech, he moved and showed that he was but bending over the sombre depths of the carp pond.
The moonlight displayed him as a drab man of middling proportions with slow movements and a large languid eye which glittered feebly in the pale light; Mr Shute had an impression that this eye looked at him sideways as if it was set at the side of the man’s head, but soon saw that this was an illusion.
‘Who engaged you?’ he asked acidly, hating the creature.
‘Mr Tregaskis, the agent,’ replied the man in what appeared to be a thick foreign accent or with some defect of speech, and walked away into the wintry undergrowth.
Mr Shute returned home grumbling; in the grim parlour Mr Tregaskis was waiting for him—a red Cornishman, who grinned at his employer’s railings. He knew the vices of Mr Shute, and the difficulties of Mr Shute, and he had seen Mrs Shute in the kitchen deep in maudlin gossip with old Dame Chase and the idiot-faced girl, drinking the alcoholic country wine till it spilled from her shaking fingers on to her taffeta skirt.
So he assumed a tone of noisy familiarity that Mr Shute was too sunken to resent; the last of the old squire’s Oporto was sent for and the men drank themselves on to terms of easy good-fellowship.
