Chapter XVIII: Maynard

Mr. Stockman, having decided that sea air and a fortnight of rest were desirable to fortify him against another winter, had been absent from his home and was only recently returned. He had visited a friend, who farmed land in the neighbourhood of Berry Head, above Brixham, and he declared himself very much better for the change of scene and companionship. He related his adventures, told how he had trusted himself to the sea on more than one occasion in a Brixham trawler, and also expatiated in Soosie-Toosie's ear upon a woman whom he had met--the daughter of his friend.

"Mr. King has but one stay-at-home child, like me," he said, "and I could wish you were able to see the way Ann King runs her father's house. Not a breath against you, Susan--you know how I thank my God every night on my knees for such a daughter; but there's a far-sightedness and a sureness about Ann as I don't remember to have marked in any other female."

"How old might she be?" asked Susan.

"Older than you by ten years I dare say; but it's not so much that as her way of dealing with life and her sure head. The Elms Farm is bigger than ours and mostly corn. They grow amazing fine wheat, to the very edge of the cliffs; and Ann King reigns over the place and the people in such a way that all goes on oiled wheels. She's always ahead of time, that woman--bends time to her purpose and never is run about, or flustered. A great lesson to a simple man like me, who never seems to have enough time for his work."

Mr. Palk heard these things. There was growing between him and Joe a shadow of antagonism. So faintly did this contest of wills begin that neither appreciated it yet.

"And how many females do Miss King have at her word of command, master?" asked Thomas, his subconscious self up in arms as usual when Susan was even indirectly assailed.

Joe stared blandly at him.

"Hullo! I didn't know you was there, Thomas. I was talking to my daughter, Thomas, not you, if you'll excuse me; and if you've got nothing on your hands for the moment, perhaps you won't mind having a look over the harness and reporting to me to-morrow. I was put about when I came home to see a bit of rope where there did ought to be leather, Thomas. You know what I mean."

"I was going to name it," answered Mr. Palk.

"Good; I'm sure you was; we'll go over the lot at your convenience--to-morrow perhaps. I admire you a lot for making shift and saving my pocket. It shows a spirit that I value in a man; but we must keep our heads up, even under the present price of harness if we can; and when we've had a tell over it, I'll go down to saddler at Ashburton and put it to him as an old customer."

Joe returned from his holiday full of energy. He had to-day been at a sale of sheep at Hey Tor village and was tramping with Maynard by road behind fifty fine ewes from a famous breeder. He discoursed of sheep and his man listened without much concentration.

They trudged together behind the raddled flock with a sheep-dog attending them.

"The rare virtue of our Dartmoors is not enough known," declared Mr. Stockman. "In my opinion, both for flesh and coat, there's no long-wooled sheep in the world to beat 'em and few to equal 'em. Yet you'll find, even to this day, that our Devon long-wools be hardly known outside the South Hams and Cornwall. Mr. King had a friend from Derbyshire stopping at Brixham--a very clever man and wonderful learned in sheep; but he knew naught about our famous breed. They did ought to be shown at all the big shows all over England, and then, no doubt, they'd come into their own, and some of us who rears 'em would earn our just reward."

"That class ought to be included in all important shows certainly," admitted Lawrence. "At their best they can't be beat."

"And they ought to be shown in their wool," added Mr. Stockman. "The difficulties ought to be got over, and it should be done for the credit of the county, not to say Dartmoor."

They debated this question till the younger man wearied of it and was glad when a farmer on horseback overtook them. He had been a seller, and he approved of Joe's opinions, now repeated for his benefit. Maynard walked a little apart and found leisure to think his own thoughts. They revolved about one subject only, and reverted to it with painful persistence.

He was in love with Dinah Waycott and knew that she was in love with him. The something that was left out of her made this all the more clear, for she relied on no shield of conventions; she had a way to slip a subject of the clothes it generally wore, in shape of speech.

She had exerted no wiles, but she could not be illusive, and the obvious qualities of Dinah which had appealed to Johnny's first love had also, for different reasons, overwhelmed Maynard. Many men by these very qualities in her would have been repulsed. Experienced men might have missed those elements in Dinah that, for them, make a woman most provocative and desirable; but in the case of this man, his own experience of life and his personal adventure combined to intensify the charm that her peculiar nature possessed. He had known nothing like her; she contrasted at almost every possible point with what he had known; she shone for him as an exemplar of all that was most desirable in feminine character. He could not believe that there were many such women, and he doubted not that he would never see such another. He had tried to adopt a fatherly attitude to Dinah and, for a considerable time, succeeded. The view he took of her at their first acquaintance, when she was betrothed to John Bamsey, persisted after the breaking of the engagement; but the very breaking of the engagement enlarged this view, and the freedom, that could no longer be denied to her after that event, had improved their knowledge of each other until both learned the same fact. Then Maynard could play a fatherly friendship no more, nor could the figment of an elder brother serve. He loved her and she loved him. A thing he had never considered as possible now complicated a life that for seven years he had striven with all his might to simplify; and the new situation extended far beyond Dinah, for it was calculated to alter his own agreement and undertaking with himself. These covenants had been entered into with himself alone. Circumstances had long ago combined, at a certain period of his early, adult life, to change the entire texture of existence, deflect its proposed purpose and throw down the goal he set out to attain. And with the changes wrought in temporal ambitions had come others. Life thus dammed ceased to flow. His future collapsed and in its place appeared a new purpose, if negation could be called a purpose. That had sufficed, though at a cost of mental corrosion he did not guess; but now it seemed that a closed book was thrown open again and he stood once more facing outlets to life that even implied happiness. His existence for seven years, it appeared, had not been a progression, but a hiatus. Yet he knew, even while he told himself this, that it must be a delusion and a juggle with reality; since no man can for seven years stand still.

There was need for a jolt forward now, and the problem appeared simple enough as to the thing he must do, but shattering when he saw it done. He was deeply agitated, yet through the inexorable shot a thread of unexpected hope and beauty. To cut this thread, which had crept so magically into the grey fabric of existence and touched the days of his crepuscular life with the glimmering of an unguessed sunrise, promised to be a task so tremendous that it was not strange he hesitated. For did any vital necessity exist to cut it? He could not immediately convince himself, and every natural instinct and impulse combined to cry out against such a necessity.

He had reached an attitude of mind, and that long before he met Dinah Waycott, which now suffered no shock from the personal problem. He had dealt in generalities and pondered and meditated on human conduct in many aspects. The actual, present position, too, he had debated, and even asked himself how he might expect to act under certain circumstances. But the possibility of those circumstances ever arising had not occurred to him, and now that they had done so, he saw that his view and his judgment were only one side of the question in any case. The visionary figure of a woman had turned into a real one, and as such, her welfare and her future, not his own, instantly became the paramount thing. What he might have deemed as sudden salvation for himself, namely, a good and loving woman in his life, took another colour when the woman actually appeared. The temptation now lay in this. He knew Dinah so well, that he believed, from her standpoint, she might look at the supreme problem as he did; and for this very reason he delayed. Reason argued that, did Dinah see eye to eye with him, no farther difficulty could exist, while if she did not, there was an end of it; but some radical impulse of heredity, or that personal factor of character, which was the man himself, fought with reason at the very heart of his being and made the issue a far deeper matter for Maynard now.

The horseman left Mr. Stockman and galloped forward, while Joe regarded his retreating figure with mild amusement and turned to Lawrence.

"Did you hear that?" he asked, and the other replied that he had not.

"I've vexed him--just the last thing ever I meant, or intended. It's a funny world. If you mind your own business and stick to it, the people say you're a selfish, hard-hearted creature, with no proper feeling to humans at large. And if you seek to mind other people's business, and serve 'em, and help the folk along, and lend a hand where you may, then they lift their voices and call you a meddling Paul Pry and a busybody and so on. That man's just told me to look after my own affairs, because I went out of my way to give him a valuable tip about his!"

"More fool him," said Maynard. "The fools are the hardest to help."

"Nothing but the people themselves keep me from doing a great deal more good in the world than I might," declared Joe. "The will is there, and I think I may say the wit is there; but my fellow creatures choke me off."

"They're jealous of your sense I reckon."

"No doubt some be, Lawrence. But 'tis cutting off your nose to spite your face, when you quarrel with a man who might be useful, just because you hate to think he's got a better brain than you have."

"A very common thing."

"Not a mistake of the wise, however. For my part I've lived long enough to see that jealousy, look at it all round, is the feeblest and silliest vice we humans suffer from. There's nothing to it but wretchedness and wasted energy. Jealous I never could be of any living creature, I assure you."

But though Joe despised jealousy, such was his humour, that within an hour, for the sake of personal amusement he sought to awake the futile flame in another breast.

Melinda Honeysett was waiting at Falcon Farm when the men returned, but she had come to see Lawrence Maynard, not Mr. Stockman. He, however, entertained her while his man was looking after the sheep. Indeed, he insisted on Melinda joining him in a cup of tea. He had not seen her since his return from Brixham, and now the rogue in Joe twinkled to the top and he began to enumerate the rare qualities of Miss King. He knew that Melinda regarded herself as holding a sort of proprietary right over him, and he much enjoyed this shadowy bondage and often pretended to groan under it. But now he launched on the task of making Melinda jealous for his private entertainment. With Soosie-Toosie the enterprise had failed. She humbly accepted the accomplishments of Ann King and praised her genius so heartily that Joe soon dropped the subject; but for Melinda it came as a new idea, and this enthusiasm on Mr. Stockman's part for a paragon at once unknown and eligible, caused Mrs. Honeysett just that measure of exasperation her first male friend desired to awaken.

"My!" said Melinda, after listening to the glowing story of the farmer's daughter, her virtues, her resource, her financial ability and her practical knowledge of affairs; "I didn't know there were any angels to Brixham. Do she fly about, or only walk, like us common women?"

"No, she walks," said Joe, delighted at his instant success; "but even in walking she never wastes a footstep, like most of us. Never wastes anything, and yet not close. Just a grasp of all that matters and a large scorn for all that don't. And as to being an angel, Melinda, you may say she is that--just in the same sense that you and Soosie-Toosie and all nice women are angels. Only that. She's a thorough human woman and, simply judged as a woman, a very fine piece indeed."

Mrs. Honeysett laughed somewhat harshly.

"Don't you drag me and Susan in. I'm sure he needn't do that, need he, Soosie? Such poor creatures as us--not worthy to hold a candle to this here Jane King."

"Ann King," corrected Joe.

"You and me will go and take lessons, and ax her to teach us how to look after our poor fathers," said Melinda to Miss Stockman. "We're such a pair of feckless, know-naught fools that it's time we set about larning how a parent did ought to be treated. And, by the same token, I must get back to mine. He's bad and getting worse. I only came to see Maynard, because father wants to have a tell with him--to-night if possible. Poor father's going down hill fast now--all, no doubt, because I've not understood how to nurse him and tend him and live my life for him alone. If he'd only had Ann King to look after him, I dare say he'd be well again by now."

Joe, greatly daring, pushed the joke a little deeper.

"You mustn't say that. There's nobody like you to look after a sick man, Melinda, and I'm sure Miss King couldn't have done it very much better and steadier than you have. But perhaps it might be a clever thought to invite her up along. I dare say she'd make time to pay us a visit, if I told her as you and Soosie-Toosie were very wishful to make her acquaintance and gather in a bit of her far-reaching sense. She's always as willing as I am myself to throw a bit of light."

"Ax her to come then," said Mrs. Honeysett. "'Twill be a great blessing for me and Susan to go to school to her. And something to see a really wise creature in Buckland, because we'm such a lot of God-forsaken zanies here--men and women alike."

She rose breathing rather deeply.

"No tea, thank you," she said. "I've changed my mind. I'll go home and pray for the light of Ann King to fall on my dark road. And when she comes along, you ask her if she'll give a poor, weak-minded widow a little of her sense. Tell her I'm one of they women that thinks the moon be made of green cheese, will 'e? And say I believe in pixies, and charms for warts, and black witches and white witches and all that. And you can add that I was one of them idiots that always gave men credit for nice feeling and good sense and liked to believe the best about some men and stuck up for 'em, even when I heard 'em run down and laughed at. Tell her all that; and say as I'm going to give certain parties a rest in future, because, though a poor worm and not worthy to be seen alongside her, yet I've got my pride, like the cleverest of us. And give Lawrence Maynard father's message, Soosie, if you please."

"Come back, you silly gosling!" shouted Joe; but Melinda did not come back. He laughed very heartily, yet not loud enough for the departing woman to hear him.

"Lord! To think now!" he said. "I've took a proper rise out of her, eh?"

"You have," admitted Susan ruthfully. "And if you done it on purpose, it weren't a very clever thing to do. Melinda's fiery, but a good friend and a great admirer of yours, father. Now you've vexed her cruel."

"You never larn all there is to know about a female," he said. "I meant to get her wool off--just for a bit of honest fun; but I can't say as I ever understood she felt so deep how clever she was. She's a vain, dear creature."

"It weren't that," explained Susan. "She ain't vain, though she knows her worth, and so do everybody else know it; but what she is proud of, naturally, be your great fondness for her. She knows you put her first, and she knows you're a clever man and wouldn't put her first if there wasn't a reason. And her father be going to die presently and--and God knows what's in her thoughts, of course. And then to hear that Miss King be worth all the women you've ever seen in your life put together, and be the top flower of the bunch, and such a wonder as was never seen by mortal man--why, of course, Melinda took it to heart a bit. Who wouldn't?"

"You didn't," said Joe.

"No, I didn't, because I know my place, father. I'm not so clever as Melinda. I'm a poor thing, though well intending. But Melinda's a fine thing and you know in your heart that a virgin woman, like Miss King, however clever she be, couldn't teach Melinda nothing about how to look after a man."

"Fun be thrown away on you creatures," said Joe. "You're terrible thick-headed where a joke's the matter, Soosie; but I did think as Melinda was brighter."

He turned to Palk, who had just entered for his tea. Thomas had heard the word thick-headed applied to Susan.

"Did you ever know a woman as could see a clever bit of fun, Tom?"

The horseman reflected.

"Women's fun ban't the same as ours," he answered. "No doubt they've got their own pattern of fun. But there ain't much time for Miss Stockman to practise laughing in this house."

"Ah! You can be so comical as any of us when you'm in a mind for it, Thomas," said his master.