Secret Bread | Page 4

all his prosperity, he was a hard master, paying his labourers, who were mostly married men with families, the wage of seven shillings a week, and employing their womenfolk at hoeing or binding for sixpence a day, while for fewer pence still the little children stumbled on uncertain legs after the birds which threatened the new-tilled crops. By such means--common to all his neighbours at a time when cultivation was slow and such luxuries as meat, white bread, bedding, and coal were unknown to the poor, and by a shrewdness peculiar to himself--did James Ruan manage to make his property contribute to his private income, a condition of affairs by no means inevitable in farming, although at that time the hated Corn Law, only repealed soon after Ishmael's birth, had for thirty years been in force for the benefit of landowners. If the Squire had known the worth of the old family portraits hanging in what had been the banqueting hall, where apples were now stored, he would doubtless have sold them, but he had cut himself off from civilised beings who might have praised them, and he thought the beruffed, steel-plated men and high-browed, pearl-decked ladies rather a dry-looking lot, though he never suffered Annie to say a disparaging word on the subject.
Annie deeply resented this silent superiority of the Squire's, this shutting off from her of certain fine points in his garbled scheme of honour, and she chose to regard Ishmael as the embodiment of this habit. Had she been left with unrestricted powers as to estate and money she might have classed herself with her youngest-born and grown to grudge her other children their existence, but as things were Ishmael was as much in her way as he was in that of Archelaus. She realised she had been tricked at the last to satisfy a whim of the Squire's--she would have been far better off under the old will, which left Cloom to her eldest son after her. A dishonoured name was all she had gained by the transaction--a hollow reward, since to her equals it made little difference, and to her superiors none at all, and when she remembered at how much pains the special licence had been obtained from the commissary of the Bishop of Exeter, how she had sent for the Parson the moment the Squire had finally declared his mind made up, and then for Lawyer Tonkin, only to be excluded from the conference that followed, Annie felt her resentment surge up. If it had not been for the fact that the Parson and Tonkin had been appointed guardians to the boy, Ishmael would, in all probability, never have lived beyond babyhood. A little neglect would soon have ended the matter, and even if any local magnate had bestirred himself to make a fuss, no Cornish jury would have convicted. All this Boase knew, and he managed to make Annie aware of the fact that he meant his ward to thrive or he would make trouble, and she was one of those women who tremble before a spiritual pastor and master. Therefore she comforted herself by the reflection that at least Cloom would always be her home, and a home of which she meant to be mistress as long as possible. Under his father's will Ishmael came into the property at eighteen, an additional grievance to Annie, but she told herself that at least a boy of that age would not be able to turn her out--he would still be too afraid both of her and of public opinion. The hardness and the moral elasticity that go to make up a certain phase of the Cornish character, made up Annie's, and grew to sway her utterly, save for gusts of ungovernable emotions and an equally ungovernable temper. The little Ishmael learned to fear, to evade, and to lie, till he bade fair to become an infant Machiavelli, and at night his sins--the tremendous sins of childhood--would weigh upon him so that he broke into a sweat of terror.
On this August morning he had forgotten his crimes and was burning with the high adventures of a farmyard. In the blue of the sky fat gold-white clouds bellied like the sails of enchanted galleons, and the wind ruffled the cock's bronzed feathers about his scaly legs, blew pearly partings on the black-furred cat that sunned herself by the wall, and whirled two gleaming straws, Orthon-wise, about the cobbles. The triumphant cackling of a hen proclaimed an egg to be as much a miracle as the other daily one of dawn, and the shrill-voiced crickets kept up a monotonous and hurried orchestra. A big red cow came across the field and stood in a line with the gate, her head, with its calm eyes and gently