Women of the Country | Page 9

chair with a jerk, scuffled his feet once or twice on the floor, took his cap out of his pocket, and ejaculated "Good-night."
"Good-night," replied Anne, still preoccupied. "Thank you for bringing the eggs;" and she sat down with a slight groan.
"Why, it might be herself," reflected Dick, looking back at the dejected figure in the darkening room. Being a simple youth, he felt vaguely uncomfortable at the sight of such trouble over the doings of one who was no relation, and began to take a little blame to himself for thinking lightly of the girl's downfall.
"Well, she's very good," he concluded in his thoughts, "but she's peculiar;" and he tramped heavily through the yard into the lane.
Anne did not stir. She was so shocked that her bodily faculties seemed to have ceased, and her mind to have remained sorrowing and awake. This lapse was even worse than that of Sir Richard's son, because it seemed irretrievable. Then, too, it had happened before she knew anything about it, whereas, in the other case, she had been active, and able to expostulate and screen the young man's fall. And then, too, there was the surprise of a middle-aged woman at the lapses of "young, strong people," just as, if one of more maturity had fallen, the comment of the young would have been equally certain, "an old thing like her."
To Anne, whose temptations were of the kind that betray rather than assault, all faults of the flesh seemed of equal gravity--a man's gluttony or drunkenness, or a woman's misdemeanour. The one did not shock her more than the other. She thought of her old friend, the grandmother who had brought up the girls, denying herself sleep and ease that they might not run wild as many girls do, but might grow up girls of good character. Since the grandmother died, Jane, who was young and pretty, had tried to support herself. Anne did not know Richard Burton, but he was older and a "married man," which, of itself, implied responsibility to her mind. With the passion for justice, in which her intellectual faculties found material for exercise, she declared that Burton must be more to blame than Jane. He had money and position in the country-side. But equally as he was more to blame he would be less blamed. No one would dare to tell him he was wrong. They would wait, stone in hand, for the girl who had been a child among them, and when she was forsaken and alone would throw and strike. Anne lived apart, but she knew that. "It will be visited on the girl," she thought; and indignation at Richard Burton rose steadily in her thoughts.
After a while she stirred, and, lighting a candle, slowly stooped and raised the lid of the bread-mug. Pulling out half a loaf, she cut a thick piece for supper. She ate it slowly, with a piece of cold bacon, then, taking the candle, her shadow growing gigantic behind her, she fastened the door without looking outside, and climbed the stairs, heavily and sorrowfully, to her solitary bedroom, her shadow with one jerk filling the whole room.
CHAPTER VII
There was no covered market even in so considerable a town as Haybarn. From end to end of the rectangular market-place were set wooden tables on movable trestles, and over these were stretched frames of canvas, the whole assembly looking like a fantastic toy village set in the middle of the substantial brick houses, banks, and inns of the square, or like a child's erections amid the solid furniture on a nursery floor.
On each side of the square, with their backs to the stalls and facing the shops whose goods and attractions overflowed to the pavement as if offering themselves at the feet of the passers-by, stood a row of countrywomen and girls with market baskets of butter and eggs, plucked fowls, red currants, plums, curds, tight nosegays of pinks, stocks, wall-flowers, or anything else saleable or in season which a cottage garden produces. In and about among these, pushed women of all degrees and ages, tasting butter, holding eggs to the light, or placing them against their lips to test their freshness, stopping now and then to feel the wearing quality of some piece of dress-stuff or flannel, draped and ticketed alluringly at a shop door; all moving with the slow, ungainly pace of those unaccustomed to walking and impeded by bundles and purchases in both arms. Here and there a younger woman, dressed in the fashion of the best shop in the town, with a basket of rather more elegant shape, went about her marketing with equal decision, if more fashion: the wife of some tradesman who lived in one of the numerous new villas with small gardens increasing every year on