Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Courtship
to live at Hootsey. Jake was a fine farmer, a canny bargainer, and very
handy among the sheep, till he took to drink, and roystering every week
with the town wenches up at Carlisle. He was a corpulent, deep-voiced,
free-handed fellow: when his time came, though he died very hardly, he
remained festive and convivial to the last. And for years afterwards, in
the valley, his memory lingered: men spoke of him regretfully, recalling
his quips, his feats of strength, and his choice breed of Herdwicke
rams. But he left behind him a host of debts up at Carlisle, in Penrith,
and in almost every market town--debts that he had long ago pretended to
have paid with money that belonged to his sister. The widow Garstin sold
the twelve Herdwicke rams, and nine acres of land: within six weeks she
had cleared off every penny, and for thirteen months, on Sundays, wore
her mourning with a mute, forbidding grimness: the bitter thought that,
unbeknown to her, Jake had acted dishonestly in money matters, and that
he had ended his days in riotous sin, soured her pride, imbued her with
a rancorous hostility against all the world. For she was a very proud
woman, independent, holding her head high, so folks said, like a Garstin
bred and born; and Anthony, although some reckoned him quiet and of
little account, came to take after her as he grew into manhood.
She took into her own hands the management of the Hootsey farm, and set
the boy to work for her along with the two farm servants. It was
twenty-five years now since his uncle Jake's death: there were grey
hairs in his sandy beard; but he still worked for his mother, as he had
done when a growing lad.
And now that times were grown to be bad (of late years the price of
stock had been steadily falling; and the hay harvests had drifted from
bad to worse) the widow Garstin no longer kept any labouring men; but
lived, she and her son, year in and year out, in a close parsimonious
way.
That had been Anthony Garstin's life--a dull, eventless sort of
business, the sluggish incrustation of monotonous years. And until Rosa
Blencarn had come to keep house for her uncle, he had never thought
twice on a woman's face.
The Garstins had always been good church-goers, and Anthony, for years,
had acted as churchwarden. It was one summer evening, up at the
vicarage, whilst he was checking the offertory account, that he first
set eyes upon her. She was fresh back from school at Leeds: she was
dressed in a white dress: she looked, he thought, like a London lady.
She stood by the window, tall and straight and queenly, dreamily gazing
out into the summer twilight, whilst he and her uncle sat over their
business. When he rose to go, she glanced at him with quick curiosity;
he hurried away, muttering a sheepish good night.
The next time that he saw her was in church on Sunday. He watched her
shyly, with a hesitating, reverential discretion: her beauty seemed to
him wonderful, distant, enigmatic. In the afternoon, young Mrs. Forsyth,
from Longscale, dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother, and the two
set off gossiping of Rosa Blencarn, speaking of her freely, in tones of
acrimonious contempt. For a long while he sat silent, puffing at his
pipe; but at last, when his mother concluded with, 'She looks t' me fair
stuck-oop, full o' toonish airs an' graces,' despite himself, he burst
out: 'Ye're jest wastin' yer breath wi' that cackle. I reckon Miss
Blencarn's o' a different clay to us folks.' Young Mrs. Forsyth tittered
immoderately, and the next week it was rumoured about the valley that
'Tony Garstin was gone luny over t' parson's niece.'
But of all this he knew nothing--keeping to himself, as was his wont,
and being, besides, very busy with the hay harvest--until one day, at
dinner-time, Henry Sisson asked if he'd started his courting; Jacob
Sowerby cried that Tony'd been too slow in getting to work, for that the
girl had been seen spooning in Crosby Shaws with Curbison the
auctioneer, and the others (there were half-a-dozen of them lounging
round the hay-waggon) burst into a boisterous guffaw. Anthony flushed
dully, looking hesitatingly from the one to the other; then slowly put
down his beer-can, and of a sudden, seizing Jacob by the neck, swung him
heavily on the grass. He fell against the waggon-wheel, and when he rose
the blood was streaming from an ugly cut in his forehead. And
henceforward Tony Garstin's courtship was the common jest of all the
parish.
As yet, however, he had scarcely spoken to her, though twice he had
passed her in the lane that led up to the vicarage. She had given him a
frank, friendly smile; but he had not found the resolution to do more
than lift his hat. He and Henry Sisson stacked the hay in the yard
behind the house; there was no further mention made of Rosa Blencarn;
but all day long Anthony, as he knelt thatching the rick, brooded over
the strange sweetness of her face, and on the fell-top, while he tramped
after the ewes over the dry, crackling heather, and as he jogged along
the narrow, rickety road, driving his cartload of lambs into the auction
mart.
Thus, as the weeks slipped by, he was content with blunt, wistful
ruminations upon her indistinct image. Jacob Sowerby's accusation, and
several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly
incredulous; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant; but from
the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering
conception of her difference from the ruck of her sex.
But one evening, as he passed the vicarage on his way down from the
fells, she called to him, and with a childish, confiding familiarity
asked for advice concerning the feeding of the poultry. In his eagerness
to answer her as best he could, he forgot his customary embarrassment,
and grew, for the moment, almost voluble, and quite at his ease in her
presence. Directly her flow of questions ceased, however, the returning
perception of her rosy, hesitating smile, and of her large, deep eyes
looking straight into his face, perturbed him strangely, and, reddening,
he remembered the quarrel in the hay-field and the tale of Crosby Shaws.
After this, the poultry became a link between them--a link which he
regarded in all seriousness, blindly unconscious that there was aught
else to bring them together, only feeling himself in awe of her, because
of her schooling, her townish manners, her ladylike mode of dress. And
soon, he came to take a sturdy, secret pride in her friendly familiarity
towards him. Several times a week he would meet her in the lane, and
they would loiter a moment together; she would admire his dogs, though
he assured her earnestly that they were but sorry curs; and once,
laughing at his staidness, she nick-named him 'Mr. Churchwarden'.
That the girl was not liked in the valley he suspected, curtly
attributing her unpopularity to the women's senseless jealousy. Of
gossip concerning her he heard no further hint; but instinctively, and
partly from that rugged, natural reserve of his, shrank from mentioning
her name, even incidentally, to his mother.
Now, on Sunday evenings, he often strolled up to the vicarage, each time
quitting his mother with the same awkward affectation of casualness;
and, on his return, becoming vaguely conscious of how she refrained from
any comment on his absence, and appeared oddly oblivious of the
existence of parson Blencarn's niece.
She had always been a sour-tongued woman; but, as the days shortened
with the approach of the long winter months, she seemed to him to grow
more fretful than ever; at times it was almost as if she bore him some
smouldering, sullen resentment. He was of stubborn fibre, however,
toughened by long habit of a bleak, unruly climate; he revolved the
matter in his mind deliberately, and when, at last, after much plodding
thought, it dawned upon him that she resented his acquaintance with Rosa
Blencarn, he accepted the solution with an unflinching phlegm, and
merely shifted his attitude towards the girl, calculating each day the
likelihood of his meeting her, and making, in her presence, persistent
efforts to break down, once for all, the barrier of his own timidity. He
was a man not to be clumsily driven, still less, so he prided himself, a
man to be craftily led.
It was close upon Christmas time before the crisis came. His mother was
just home from Penrith market. The spring-cart stood in the yard, the
old grey horse was steaming heavily in the still, frosty air.
'I reckon ye've come fast. T' ould horse is over hot,' he remarked
bluntly, as he went to the animal's head.
She clambered down hastily, and, coming to his side, began breathlessly:
'Ye ought t' hev coom t' market, Tony. There's bin pretty goin's on in
Pe'rith today. I was helpin' Anna Forsyth t' choose six yards o'
sheetin' in Dockroy, when we sees Rosa Blencarn coom oot o' t' 'Bell and
Bullock' in company we' Curbison and young Joe Smethwick. Smethwick was
fair reelin' drunk, and Curbison and t' girl were a-houldin' on to him,
to keep him fra fallin'; and then, after a bit, he puts his arm round
the girl t' stiddy hisself, and that fashion they goes off, right oop t'
public street--'
He continued to unload the packages, and to carry them mechanically one
by one into the house. Each time, when he reappeared, she was standing
by the steaming horse, busy with her tale.
'An' on t' road hame we passed t' three on' em in Curbison's trap, with
Smethwick leein' in t' bottom, singin' maudlin' songs. They were passin'
Dunscale village, an't' folks coom runnin' oot o' houses t' see 'em go
past--'
He led the cart away towards the stable, leaving her to cry the
remainder after him across the yard.
Half-an-hour later he came in for his dinner. During the meal not a word
passed between them, and directly he had finished he strode out of the
house. About nine o'clock he returned, lit his pipe, and sat down to
smoke it over the kitchen fire.
'Where've ye bin, Tony?' she asked.
'Oop t' vicarage, courtin', he retorted defiantly, with his pipe in his
mouth.
This was ten months ago; ever since he had been doggedly waiting. That
evening he had set his mind on the girl, he intended to have her; and
while his mother gibed, as she did now upon every opportunity, his
patience remained grimly unflagging. She would remind him that the farm
belonged to her, that he would have to wait till her death before he
could bring the hussy to Hootsey: he would retort that as soon as the
girl would have him, he intended taking a small holding over at
Scarsdale. Then she would give way, and for a while piteously upbraid
him with her old age, and with the memory of all the years she and he
had spent together, and he would comfort her with a display of brusque,
evasive remorse.
But, none the less, on the morrow, his thoughts would return to dwell on
the haunting vision of the girl's face, while his own rude, credulous
chivalry, kindled by the recollection of her beauty, stifled his
misgivings concerning her conduct.
Meanwhile she dallied with him, and amused herself with the younger men.
Her old uncle fell ill in the spring, and could scarcely leave the
house. She declared that she found life in the valley intolerably dull,
that she hated the quiet of the place, that she longed for Leeds, and
the exciting bustle of the streets; and in the evenings she wrote long
letters to the girl-friends she had left behind there, describing with
petulant vivacity her tribe of rustic admirers. At the harvest-time she
went back on a fortnight's visit to friends; the evening before her
departure she promised Anthony to give him her answer on her return.
But, instead, she avoided him, pretended to have promised in jest, and
took up with Luke Stock, a cattle-dealer from Wigton.
V