‘Ah Mr Bailey, I never had no head for pottery.’ She stared nervously at the manuscript he proffered her. ‘I’ll ’low tis very elegant verses. And all by your own hand.’ The man’s erudition intimidated her. ‘Please to tell me how it reads,’ she begged him.
‘With pleasure, madam,’ said Mr Bailey. Holding the manuscript at arm’s length, he declaimed, not without pomp but with manifest sincerity, a poetical effusion of which some fragments are already known to us:
Mr Bailey, not venturing as yet to face his charmer, folded the manuscript and placed it on the table without a word. His self-confidence had suddenly deserted him; he wondered if he seemed to Mrs Lavender as foolish as he felt. But when at last he ventured a glance in her direction he was both heartened and touched by what he saw. She was regarding him with shy admiration, and with something of wistfulness. He doubted whether she understood what in his verses he had tried to tell her; or it may be that she took it to be no more than a piece of playful gallantry on the part of one elderly person to another. Sitting there with her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes gravely wondering at him, she looked lonely, courageous, and curiously young. It was almost as if his florid praises had awakened a young girl in her; and though she knew his nonsense to be nonsense she wished it might be true. Elderly and wise she was, but would fain have been young and credulous.
‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, after a long silence—and for a moment she thought he was about to take his leave. ‘Well, my dear—what do you say to that?’
‘Tis wondrous, I’m sure,’ she answered, with a smile. ‘It do fair terrify me how you think of such things, Mr Bailey.’
It was so sweet a smile, so delicate and fragrant, and for all its youthfulness so richly mellowed by the years that had gone to its making, that Mr Bailey forgot himself and his embarrassment and became a lover.
‘You’re a very distracting creature, Mrs Lavender my dear, and you must please marry me. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. When you smile like that, I can’t bear the thought of leaving you even for a minute. Bless my soul, I’m in love with ee, old as I am. And that’s the sense of the matter. Come,’ he said urgently—for she was staring in silence at the floor—‘make up your mind to it, my dear. For I won’t leave this house till you say yes, so I warn you.’
It was evident by the way she looked up at him now that she was in no mood to say No. But, before surrendering to the happily inevitable, she must make her protest. ‘Tis nonsense, Mr Bailey. I’m too old for marrying and such. You’d better go find a young woman to wed.’
‘That’s what I’m doing this minute, ma’am,’ said Mr Bailey. ‘That’s what I’m doing and that’s what I’ve done. You’re all the young woman I want. I could have fathered you pretty near, if I’d been quick. You’ll be foolish, I’ll ’low, to take an old fellow like me, a young woman in your prime as you are, and I’m not saying I deserve you. But don’t talk to me of younger women, for if you’ll not have me I’ll have none.’
He gazed at her crossly: so crossly that she was provoked to mischief. ‘Won’t you? Don’t be in haste, Mr Bailey. There’s many a likely one that ud have you. My darter Patience now. She’s but turned farty a month since. She’d make a good wife, I bluv.’
She was laughing at him, and Mr Bailey knew that there is but one answer to that. So he bent over her and took her by surprise (or so he flattered himself) and gave her a hearty kiss. ‘Jump up, my dear, and let me sit down.’ He lifted her out of her chair, sat himself in it, and pulled her on to his knees. ‘Now I’ll have no more fandangle from you, mistus!’ said Mr Bailey, holding her very tight.
She nestled comfortably against him. ‘What a stonishment twill be for Patience,’ she murmured, half to herself. ‘Her own mother and nigh sixty. Tis a shame for you, and so they’ll all say. But there be one good thing—Patience must have my shop, but I’ll bring ee a well-filled stocking, Mr Bailey.’
‘I hope and trust,’ said Mr Bailey naughtily, ‘that you’ll bring me two, my dear.’
‘Mercy, what a style to talk!’ she protested. ‘Tis a stockingful of money I do mean.’
‘But I’ll ’low you’ve a fine womanly pair of legs,’ he cried, dropping joyously into the vernacular. ‘And them’s all I look to find in stockings, mistus.’
She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked down at him with mischievous solemnity, pretending to be offended by his freedom. The next moment they were laughing together; and when they had enjoyed their joke to the full he announced his resolve that they should be church-cried the very next Sunday. ‘What d’ye say to that?’
She nodded; her eyes shone; her cheeks marvellously dimpled.
‘Why, you’re nothing but a bit of a girl after all.’ cried Mr Bailey in delight. And with a smile that matched her own, in its bantering tenderness, ‘I’d haply do better to look round for a grown woman,’ he added.
CHAPTER 5
CHARITY, ARMED WITH A NEW WEAPON, RETURNS TO THE HOUSE OF NOKE
A little before dusk, Noke’s daughter went home from Glatting Wood feeling highly satisfied with her day’s work. She had lived so long in the shadow of her parents and their unremitting industry that this new life, the life of personal conquest, was exhilarating beyond anything she had ever dreamed. She was intoxicated with a sudden sense of her own beauty and power, and scornful of those dullards at home who had never noticed this queen moving among them. Others had lightly flattered her, and some had gone further than flattery; but it had been left to Seth Shellett to awaken, and in the same moment fulfil, the woman in her, the wolf of hunger and the lion of pride. Hugh Marden had been well enough in his way, and at first she had thought him wonderful. A gentleman, the Squire’s own son, with elegant manners and a flow of fine talk, he at least provided a very pretty feather for her cap. But, after all, he was little more than a boy, younger than herself by years. Moreover he was only amusing himself: a girl who had sharpened her wits against Harry Noke’s could not fail to see that this young gentleman would never lose his heart to her, however ardently, in fits and starts of enthusiasm, he might court her favours. She had indeed learned much from Master Hugh and her pride had suffered not a little at his hands. The growing realization that he held her cheap, something between a passion and a plaything, had filled her with dismay, with resentment, and finally with a lust to find someone who would admire her as much as she admired herself. And now she had Seth and was enchanted with him: with his strength, his taciturnity, his unexpectedness: and above all with the woman she saw in his eyes. For, however much he might be lacking in the airs and graces of gentility, he was (she vowed) a man to make two of Master Hugh, with whom, moreover, she always felt inferior. Seth was slow and sudden and surprising. His tongue-tied sheepish pleasure in her and his dullness of mind, and then the sudden masterful desire that could make a god of him: these, by their contrast and alternation, kept her in a continual delight and terror. By his silences, and by his rough impetuous handling of her, he told her what she wished to be told with an eloquence that Master Hugh, with his half-playful audacities of speech, could never hope to command. The worship in his face enraptured her; his flame of animal exultation shone out upon her and burned her hunger away. And if he was so different from Master Hugh, he was more different still from her dour industrious brothers. That he was perhaps himself ‘a sort of brother’—for Harry Noke made no secret of having begotten him—made this differentness of his all the more enticing. The relationship, or its possibility, did not dismay or deter her, except when she thought of her father, of whom she had good reason to be afraid. A month ago, Seth Shellett had been a stranger to her; now he was a lover. He had never been a brother, and she could not regard him as a brother now. The tale her father told of him was probably no more than a trick for making her mother angry, a mere parcel of lies; and, if not, tis no consarn of mine, thought Charity.