The little old woman opened her eyes—they were not clouded with cataract; that must have been a fancy of mine before: she saw me and smiled, and made a sort of crowing noise in her throat. I stooped over to kiss her, when—click! in an instant she had fastened herself on me, and driven her tooth into my chest, and grabbed me with her hands, so that I was held as in a vice. To wrench her off would have been impossible. I believe if torn away the hands would have held to me still, and the arms come off at the wrists. I know that when a ferret fastens on a rabbit you may kill the beast before he will let go, unless you nip his hind foot; then he opens his mouth to squeal, and loosens his grip to defend himself I did not think of this at the time, or I might have called in someone to pinch Margery’s foot; but I doubt, even if I had remembered this, whether I should have had recourse to this expedient.
I did not care to have my situation discussed; moreover, I was conscious of a soothing sensation all the time Margery was fast. Besides, I knew by this time that when the little old woman had had enough she would drop off, just as a leech does when full. I would not have you suppose that Margery was sucking my blood. Nothing of the sort; that is, not grossly in the manner of a leech. But she really did, in some marvellous manner, to me quite inexplicable, extract life and health, the blood from my veins and the marrow from my bones, and assimilate them herself.
Presently she fell off, as I knew she would when satisfied, and lay in my lap, across my knees. She looked up at me with a smile that had something really pleasant in it. She was positively taller, her skin fresher, her eye clearer than before; her eyelashes were grey, not snowy; and there was actually a down of grey hairs covering her poll, like the feathers on a cockatoo. I wrapped a blanket round her, and was about to replace her in the basket, when I found, to my surprise, that it would cramp her limbs; she could not kick out in it. So I got a drawer out of my bureau, fitted it up with pillows, and laid her in that.
I really do think there is something taking about her expression. When you consider her age, she gave wonderfully little trouble. At first it was strange to me to have to do with this sort of little creature—it was my first and only—but I saw that I should soon get used to it. In the afternoon I employed myself in making a pair of rockers, which I adjusted to the drawer, and by this means converted it into a very tolerable cradle. I am handy at carpentering.
Indeed there are not many things which I cannot do when put to it. When the emergency arose, as the reader will see, I became really a superior nurse, without any training or experience. Indeed, I feel confident that in the event of this Radical Gladstone-Chamberlain Government altering the land laws, and robbing me of Foggaton, I could always earn my living as a nurse; I could take a baby from the month, if not earlier, or a person of advanced age lapsed into second childhood. Never before have I taken in hand the tools of literature, and yet, I venture to say that—well! there are idiots in the world who don’t know the qualities of a cow, and to whom a sample of wheat is submitted in vain.
Such persons are welcome to form what opinion they like of my literary style. Their opinion is of no value whatever to me. There is no veneer in my work, it is sterling. There is no padding, as it is called; my literary execution is substantial and thorough as were the rockers I put on thicky (I mean, that there) cradle. The rockers were not put on many days before they were needed. Old Margery became very restless at night, and she would not let me be long out of the house by day. She was cutting her teeth. The back teeth are terribly trying to babies—they have fits sometimes and big heads and water on the brain, all through the molars.
If it be so with an infant of a few months, just consider what it must be with an old woman in her three-hundreth year, or thereabouts! I bore with her very patiently, but broken rest is trying to a man. Besides, about the same time I suffered badly in my jaws, for my teeth, which were formerly perfectly sound, began to decay, break off, and fall out. I may say, approximately, that as Margery cut a tooth I lost one; also that, as her hair grew and darkened, mine came out or turned grey. Moreover, as her eye cleared, mine became dim, and as her spirits rose, mine became despondent.
In this way, weeks, and even months passed. It really was a pretty sight to see the havoc of ages repaired in the person of Margery; the sight would have been one of unalloyed delight, had not the recovery been effected at my expense. The colour came back into her cheek as it left my once so florid complexion; she filled out as I shrivelled up, she grew tall as I collapsed; the drawer would now no longer contain her, and a bed was made for her by the fire in the parlour. I noticed a gradual change in the tenor of her talk, as she grew younger.
At first she could think and speak of nothing but her ailings, but after, she took to talking scandal, bitter and venomous, of neighbours, that is, of neighbours dead and dropped to dust, whose very tombstones are weathered so as to be illegible. Little by little her talk became less virulent, and softened into harmless prattle, and was all about the things of the farm and house. She was a first-rate worker. I was glad she took such an interest in the farm; she brisked about and saw to everything. I was not able now to get about as much as I might have liked, as I suffered much from rheumatism and bronchitis.
Neighbours came to see me, and all were in the same tale, that I was becoming an old man before my time, that the change in me was something unprecedented and unaccountable. I could not walk without a stick. I stooped. My hair was thin and grey, my limbs so shrunken that my clothes hung on me as on a scarecrow. I was advised to see a doctor: that is—everyone had a special doctor who was sure to cure me; one said I must go to Dr. Budd at North Tawton, and another to Dr. Kingston at Plymouth, and one to this and one to that; they would have sent me flying over the country consulting doctors, and varying them every week. Some said—and I soon found that was the prevailing opinion—that I was bewitched, and advised me strongly to consult the white witch either in Exeter or Plymouth. I turned a deaf ear to them all. I wanted no doctors. I needed no white witch. I knew well enough what ailed me.
I never now went up Brentor to church. Dear life! I could not have climbed such a height if I had wished it! My poor old bones ached at the very thought, and my back was nigh broken when I walked through the shippen one day to the linney (cattle shed. ) Besides, I had grown terribly short of wind, and I had such a rattling in my chest. I almost choked of a night. That was the bronchitis, and when I coughed it shook me pretty well to pieces.
So time passed, and I knew that I was sinking slowly and surely into my grave; there was no real complaint on me to kill me. I was breaking up of old age, and yet was no more than three and twenty. Everyone said I looked as if I was over ninety years. If I could see the hundred, it would be something to be proud of before I was four and twenty. One thought troubled me sorely. Whatever would become of Foggaton without a Rosedhu in it? I should die without leaving a lineal descendant in the male line. It would go out of the family. I had not a relation in the world. We Rosedhus always marry late in life, and never have large families. I was the single thread on which the possible Rosedhu posterity depended.
I believe that an aunt had once married, and had a lot of children, but she was never named in the family. It was tantamount to a loss of character in Rosedhu eyes. I did not even know her married name. She was dead; but her issue no doubt remained, though I knew nothing of them. They, I suppose, would inherit. I found as I grew older that this fretted me more and more. I would soon pass beyond the grave into the world of spirits, and I knew, the moment I turned up there, that all the Rosedhus would be down on me for not having left male issue to inherit Foggaton, each, with intolerable self-assurance, setting himself up before me as an example I ought to have copied. As if, under my peculiar circumstances, I could help myself. The only one of my ancestors with whom I would be able to exchange words would be the George Rosedhu who had married Mary Cake. I could cast it in his teeth that had he been faithful to his first love, this disastrous contingency would not have occurred.
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br /> “Ah!” said I, in a fit of spleen, “it is all very well of you, Margery, to go about the house singing. What is to become of the Rosedhus? To whom will Foggaton fall? You have drawn all the flush and health out of me and made yourself young at my charge—but I get nothing thereby.”
“I will nurse you in your decrepitude, dearest George,” she answered, and a dimple came in her rosy cheek, the prettiest twinkle in her laughing blue eye. Upon my word she was a bonny buxom wench, and it would have been a delight to be in the house with her, had I been younger. . Now I could only gaze on her charms despairingly from afar off, as Moses looked on the Promised Land from Pisgah. What a worker she was, moreover! What a manager! What an organiser! What a housekeeper, cook, dairy-woman, rolled into one! Never was the house so neat, the linen so cared for, the brass pans so scoured, the butter so sweet, the dairy so clean. She had been brought up in the old-fashioned, hard-working, sensible ways of a farm in the reign of Good Queen Bess.
In our days the women are all infected with your Gladstone-Chamberlain topsy-turveyism, and farmers’ daughters play the piano and murder French, and farmers’ wives read Miss Braddon and Ouida and neglect the cows. Her ways were a surprise to all on the estate. The men and the maids had never seen anything like it. Folks could not make Margery out, who she was, and where I had picked her up. Nobody seemed to belong to her; she had never been seen before, and yet she knew the names of every tor, and hamlet, and combe, and moor, as if she had been reared there. But though she knew the places, she did not know the people. She spoke of the Tremaines of Cullacombe, whereas the family had left that house two hundred years ago, and were settled at Sydenham.
She talked of the Doidges of Hurlditch, a family that had been gone at least a hundred years. Kilworthy, she supposed, was still tenanted by the Glanvilles, whereas that race is extinct, and the place belongs to the Duke of Bedford, who has turned it into a farm. On the other hand, what was curious was, that Margery hit right now and then on the names of some of the labouring poor; she would salute a man by his right Christian and surname, because he was exactly like an ancestor some two hundred and fifty years ago. Though the great families have migrated or disappeared, the poor have stuck to their native villages, and reproduce from century to century the same faces, the same prejudices, the same characteristics. They are almost as unchangeable as the hills.
As I have said, Margery was a puzzle to everyone, and because a puzzle, the workmen and girls looked on her with suspicion. They resented the close way in which they were kept to their work and the rigid supervision exercised over them. Solomon Davy, the clerk, alone suspected who she was. He called several times to see me, and looked hard at me, with an uneasy manner, and seemed as though he wanted to ask me something, but lacked the courage to do so. Margery is always pleasant to Solomon, she knew the Davys that went before him, but he gives her a wide berth; he never lets her come within arm’s reach of him. She feels it, I am sure, by her manner; but she is too goodhearted to remark on it.
I cannot deny that she was goodness and attention itself to me, and that I was fond of her. Just as a mother idolises her baby that draws all its life and growth from her, so was it with me. I begrudged her none of her youth and beauty; I took a sort of motherly pride in her growth and the development of her charms, and for precisely the same reasons—they were all drawn out of me.
One day Margery announced that she intended to marry me, and told me I must be prepared to stir my old stumps and go to church with her. She explained her reason candidly to me. She knew that I had a clear business head, and so she consulted me on the subject, which was flattering, and I should have felt more grateful had I not almost reached a condition past acute feeling. She told me that she would nurse me till I expired in her arms, and then, as my widow, would have Foggaton. This would secure her future, for with her renewed youth and with her handsome estate she could always command suitors and secure a second husband, from whom she could extract sufficient life and health to maintain her in the bloom of youth. When he was exhausted and withered up and dead, she could obtain a third, and so on ad infinitum. She objected to being again consigned to mummification in the tower of Brentor Church, and this was the simplest and most straightforward solution to her peculiar difficulties. The plan suggested was feasible, and, from her point of view, admirable. I was now so shattered mentally and physically that I was in no condition to raise an objection.
Indeed, I had no objection to raise. I freely, willingly submitted to her proposal. She exercised no undue compulsion on me; she appealed to my reason, and my reason, as far as it remained, told me that her plan was sensible, and in every way worthy of her. She was a handsome woman, with a fine head of brown hair, and the brightest, wickedest, merriest pair of blue eyes. As for her cheeks—quarantines were nothing to them. A man in the prime of life would be proud to have such a woman as his wife, and her selection of me was, in its way, complimentary, even though I knew that I was taken for the sake of Foggaton.
So I consented, and she herself took the banns to the clerk. Solomon opened his eyes when she told him her purpose, moved uneasily on his seat, and scratched his head. He hardly knew what to make of it. He came to see me, and looked inquiringly at me, but I had one of my fits of coughing on me. When I was sufficiently recovered to speak, I told Solomon how impatient I was for my wedding day to arrive, and how kind and excellent a nurse Margery was to me. He went away puzzled and rubbing his forehead. I made but one stipulation with respect to my wedding, that was, that I should be conveyed to the foot of Brentor in a spring-cart, laid on straw, and thence be conveyed up the hill to the altar by four strong men, in a litter, laid upon a feather-bed, and with hot bottles at my feet and sides. I was entirely incapable of walking.
This was at the beginning of November. Consequently ten months had clasped since that fatal Christmas Eve on which I had made the acquaintance of Margery of Quether. So the banns were read on the first Sunday in the month at the afternoon service, there being no service that day in the morning in the little church. The banns were published between George Rosedhu, of Foggaton, bachelor, and Margaret Palmer, of Quether, spinster. If anyone knew any just cause or impediment why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, they were now to declare it. That was the first time of asking.
A pretty sensation the reading of these banns caused. Farmer Palmer’s face turned as mottled as brawn, and Miss Palmer blushed as red as a rose and buried her face in her hymn-book. My old Margery had overshot her mark, as the sequel proved. She had not reckoned with young Margaret her great, great, great, great, grand-niece.
When public worship was concluded, Mr. Palmer and his daughter, instead of directing their steps homeward towards Quether, where tea was awaiting them, walked in the opposite direction, and descended on Foggaton, to know of me what was meant by the banns—sober earnest or silly joke.
Margery was not at home. She always frequented St. Mary Tavy Church, because she had a dislike to Brentor; it was associated in her mind with two centuries of chilling and repellent associations. Margery was a regular church-goer. That was part of her bringing up. In her young days, if anyone missed church, he was fined a shilling, and if he did not take the sacrament, was whipped at the cart-tail. These penalties are no longer exacted; nevertheless, Margery is punctual in her attendance. Such is the force of a habit early acquired.
Thus it came about that Farmer Palmer and his daughter arrived at Foggaton before Margery had returned from church. I am sorry that my hand is not expert at describing things which I neither saw nor heard accurately. I have no imagination, which is a delusive faculty leading to serious error. Palmer and his daughter were attended by Solomon Davy, who I believe endeavoured to explain the situation to them and told them who Margery really was. I had become so dull of hearing, and so cataracted in eye, that I was unable to understand all that went on, and to follow and take part in the somewhat heated and animated conversation.
If, like a modern wr
iter of fiction, I were to give the whole of what was said, with description of the attitudes assumed, the inflections of the voices, and the degrees of colour that mantled the several cheeks, I might make my narrative more acceptable, no doubt, to the vulgar many, but it would lose its value to the appreciative few, who asked for a true record of what I observed.
I believe that Solomon in time made it clear to the dull intellects of the Palmers that the banns were for my marriage with the great, great, great, great-aunt of Margaret, and not with herself. What he said of poor Margery I don’t know. I strained my ears to catch what he said, but heard only a buzzing as of bees. I doubt not that he spiced the truth with plenty of falsehood.
Farmer Palmer has a loud voice. I heard him say to his daughter, “Wait here a bit, Margaret, along with George Rosedhu, and bide till t’other Margery arrives; I back one woman against another.”
“Oh, father!” exclaimed the pretty creature, “where be you a-going to?”
“My dear, I shall be back directly. This be Fifth o’ November, and bonfire night. The lads will be all collecting faggots for a blaze on the moor. I’ll fetch ’em here, and they can have the pleasure o’ burning the old witch instead of a man o’ straw.”
I held out my hands in terror and deprecation. “You durstn’t do it!”
“Why not?” asked the farmer composedly. “Her’s a witch and no mistake. Her have sucked you dry of life as an urchin (hedgehog) sucks a cow of milk.”
“But,” protested Solomon, “though that be true enough, what about the laws? I won’t say but that it be right and scriptural to burn a witch; for it is written, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” but I reckon it be against the laws.”
“Not at all,” said Palmer. “No man can be had up for burning a person who has no existence.”
The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Sabine Baring-Gould Page 4
