Two Sides of the Face | Page 9

a man to talk with servants, brooded rather on the attempted wrong. That in itself was enough to sour a man. He had met it with prompt action and baulked it, but he nursed a sense of injury. He felt especially bitter towards Mr. Jose, first of all for permitting such a will to be made without discovering it, and next for shilly-shallying over the decisive counter-stroke. To possible trouble ahead he gave no thought.
The days drew on to hay-harvest, and on the 5th of June Roger and his men started to mow Behan Parc, a wide meadow to the east of the house. Roger took a scythe himself: he enjoyed mowing.
By noon the field was half-shorn, and the master, pausing to whet his scythe, had begun to think upon dinner, when at a call from Malachi he looked up to see a ragged wastrel of a man picking his way across the swathes towards him with a paper in his hand.
"Hullo! What's this?" he demanded, taking the paper and unfolding it.
As his eye took in its contents the blood surged up and about his temples. He tore the paper across and across again, flung the pieces on the ground, and stooped for his scythe.
The wastrel cast a wild look about him and fled. As he turned, presenting his back, Roger hurled his hone. It caught him a little above the shoulder-blades, almost on the neck, and broke in two pieces. The unhappy man pitched forward on his face.
Some of the mowers ran to pick him up. "Thee'st killed him, master, for sure!" cried one.
"Ch't!" snarled Roger, and strode back to the house without another look.
The law was in motion, then, and in motion to oust him! He could scarcely believe it; indeed, it was scarcely thinkable. But over his first blind, incredulous rage there swept a passionate longing to be alone in the house --to sit in it and look about him and assure himself. Without thought of what he did, he touched the door-jamb reverently as he stepped across the threshold. He wandered from room to room, and even upstairs, feeling the groove in the oaken stair-rail familiar under his palm. Yes, it was his, this home of dead and gone Stephens; it was here, and he was its master. And of this they would dare to deprive him--they, an interloping trollop and a dirty little attorney! No, it couldn't be done. He clenched and unclenched his fists. It could never be done in England; but the wrong was monstrous, all the same.
By-and-by he grew calmer, went down to the parlour, ate his dinner, and sallied out to the meadow again. The wastrel had disappeared. Roger asked no questions, but took up his scythe, stepped into the rank, and mowed. He mowed like a giant, working his men fairly to a standstill. They eyed him askance, and eyed each other as they fell behind. But disregarding the rank, he strode on and on, scything down the grass-- his grass, grown on his earth, reaped with his sweat.

IX.
The hay had been gathered and stacked, and the stacks thatched; and still Roger lived on at Steens unmolested. He began to feel that the danger had blown over, and for this security old Malachi was responsible. Malachi had witnessed the scene in the hayfield, and dreamed for nights after of the look on his master's face. The next time a messenger arrived (he told himself) there would be murder done; and the old man, hazy upon all other points of the law and its operations, had the clearest notion of its answer to murder. He had seen gibbets in his time, and bodies dangling from them in chains.
He began to watch the road for messengers, and never slackened his watch. Six in all he intercepted during the next three weeks and took their papers to carry to his master. It seemed to him to be raining papers. He could not read, and, had he been able, their contents would have conveyed no meaning to him. He burned every one in secret.
It is possible, and even likely, that had they reached Roger they would have had no effect beyond angering him. He believed--as for miles around every man not a lawyer believed--that freehold land which had once descended to an heir could not be alienated without the next heir's consent: nor in all the countryside had such a wrong been perpetrated within living memory. It would have taken twenty lawyers with their books to shake him in this conviction. But it is a fact that he never received a last letter from Lawyer Jose imploring him to appear and fight the suit entered against him, and not to sit in obstinate slumber while his enemies destroyed him.
After this for some weeks the