Book 1 - Chapter 6. Rilla Farm

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_ BOOK I CHAPTER VI. RILLA FARM

The way was long, the sun was hot, the minstrel (as surely he may be called who carries a musical box) was more than once in two minds about turning back. He perspired under his absurdly superfluous burden.

To be sure he might--for Troy is always neighbourly--have knocked in at some cottage on his way through the tail-end of the town and deposited the box, promising to return for it. But he was flurried, pressed for time, disgracefully behind time, in fact; and, moreover, thanks to his attire and changed appearance, no friendly face had smiled recognition though he had recognised some half a dozen. There was no time to stop, renew old acquaintance, ask a small favour with explanations. . . . All this was natural enough: yet he felt an increasing sense of human selfishness, human ingratitude--he, toiling along with this token of human gratitude under his arm!

At the extreme end of the town his way led him through the entrance of a wooded valley, or coombe, down which a highroad, a rushing stream, and a railway line descend into Troy Harbour, more or less in parallels, from the outside world. A creek runs some little way up the vale. In old days--in Captain Cai's young days--it ran up for half a mile or more to an embanked mill-pool and a mill-wheel lazily turning: and Rilla Farm had in those days been Rilla Mill, with a farmstead attached as the miller's _parergon_.

But the railway had swept away mill-pool and wheel: and Rilla was now Rilla Farm. The railway, too, cutting sheer through the slope over which the farmstead stood, had transformed shelving turf to rocky cliff and farmstead to eyrie. You approached Rilla now by a footbridge crossing the line, and thereafter by a winding pathway climbing the cliff, with here and there a few steps hewn in the living rock. Nature in some twenty odd years had draped the cliff with fern--the _Polypodium vulgare_--and Mrs Bosenna in her early married days had planted the crevices with arabis, alyssum, and aubrietia, which had taken root and spread, and now, overflowing their ledges, ran down in cascades of bloom--white, yellow, and purple. The ascent, in short, was very pretty and romantic, and you might easily imagine it the approach to some foreign hill-castle or monastery: for the farmhouse on the summit hid itself behind out-buildings the walls of which crowned the escarpment and presented a blank face, fortress-like, overlooking the vale. The path (as you have gathered) was for pedestrians only. Mrs Bosenna's farm-carts and milk-carts--her dairy trade was considerable--had to fetch a circuit by the road-bridge, half a mile inland.

The air in the valley was heavy, even on this April day. Captain Cai reached the footpath-gate in a bath of perspiration, despite his alpaca coat and notwithstanding that the last half mile of his way had lain under the light shade of budding trees. He gazed up at the ascent, and bethought him that the musical box was an intolerable burden for such a climb. It would involve him in explanations, too, being so unusual an accessory to a morning call. He searched about, therefore, for a hiding-place in which to bestow it, and found one at length in a clump of alder intermixed with brambles, that overhung the stream a few paces beyond the gate, almost within the shadow of the footbridge.

Having made sure that the bed on which it rested was firm and moderately dry, he covered the box with a strewing of last year's leaves, cunningly trailed a bramble or two over it, and pursued his way more lightsomely, albeit still under some oppression: for the house stood formidably high, and he feared all converse with women. For lack of practice he had no presence of mind in their company, Moreover, his recent fiasco in speech-making had dashed his spirits.

He reached the last turn of the path. It brought him in sight of a garden-gate some ten yards ahead, on his left hand. The gate was white, and some one inside was even at this moment engaged in repainting it; for as he halted to draw breath he caught sight of a paint-brush--or rather the point of one--briskly waggling between the rails.

The gate opened and Mrs Bosenna peeped out. "Ah, I _thought_ I heard footsteps!" said she. She wore a widow's cap--a very small and natty one; and a large white apron covered the front of her widow's gown from bosom to ankles.

"I--I'm sorry to call so late, ma'am."

"Late? Why, it can't be past noon, scarcely. . . . We don't have dinner till one o'clock. You'll excuse my not shaking hands, but I never _could_ paint without messing my fingers."

"But I hadn't an idea, ma'am--"

"Eh?"

"Nothing was farther from my thoughts than--than--"

"Staying to dinner? Oh, but it's understood! There's roast sucking-pig," said Mrs Bosenna tranquilly, as if this disposed of all argument. She added, "I didn't recognise you for the moment. You're wearing a different hat."

"Actin' under advice, ma'am."

"I don't know that it's an improvement." Her eyes rested on him in cool scrutiny, and he flinched under it. "There's always a--a sort of distinction about a top hat. Of course, it was very thoughtful of you to change it for something more free-and-easy. But different styles suit different persons, and--as I'm always telling Dinah--the secret of dressing is to find out the style that suits you, and stick to it."

"Bein' free-an'-easy, ma'am, was the last thing in my mind," stammered Captain Cai.

"There, didn't I guess? . . . Well, you shall wear your top hat next time, and I'll take back my first impressions if I find 'em wrong."

"But, ma'am, the--the fact is--"

"Of course it was in the dusk," continued Mrs Bosenna; "but I certainly thought it suited you. One meets with so little of the real old-fashioned politeness among men in these days! Now "--she let her voice trail off reflectively as her eyes wandered past Captain Cai and rested on the tree-tops in the valley--"if I was asked to name my _bo ideal_ of an English gentleman--and the foreigners can't come near it, you needn't tell me--'twould be Sir Brampton Goldsworthy, Bart., of Halberton Court, Devon."

"Ma'am?"

"That's close to Holsworthy, where I was brought up. 'Goldsworthy of Holsworthy' he liked to be known as, dropping the 'Sir': and _he_ always wore a top hat, rather flat in the brim. But he'd off with it to anything in woman's shape. . . . And that's what women value. Respect. . . . It isn't a man's _age_--" She broke off and half closed her eyes in reverie. "And so particular, too, about his body-linen! Always a high stock collar . . . and his cuffs!"

"Talkin' about cuffs, now--" Captain Cai dived a hand into a hip-pocket and drew forth a circlet of white lawn, much flattened. "I found this in the garden last night--by the rose-bushes."

"Thank you--yes, it is mine, of course. I missed it on the way home." Mrs Bosenna reached out her hand for it. "You must have set me down for a very careless person? But with all my responsibilities just now--" She concluded the sentence with a sigh, and held open the gate, warning him to beware of the wet paint. "You see, there is so much to be looked after on a farm. One can never trust to servants--or at any rate not to the men kind. Dinah is different; but even with Dinah--" Mrs Bosenna let fall another, slightly fainter, sigh.

"That reminds me," said Captain Cai hardily entering, and for all his lack of observation falling at once under the spell of the little front garden--so scrupulously tidy it was, so trim and kempt, with a pathway of white pebbles leading up between clumps of daffodils and tulips to a neatly thatched porch: so homely too, with but a low fence of euonymus shutting off all that could offend in the court before the cow-byres; so fragrant already with scent of the just sprouting lemon verbena; so obviously the abode of cleanly health, with every window along the white-washed house front open to the April air. "That reminds me, I never mentioned the--the deceased--your late husband, I mean, ma'am--nor how sorry I was to hear of it."

"Did you know him?" asked Mrs Bosenna, scarcely glancing up as she pinched the fragrance out of an infant bud of the lemon verbena.

"Very slightly, ma'am. Indeed, I don't remember meetin' him but once, and that was at Summercourt Fair, of all places; me bein' home just then from a trip, an' takin' a day off, as you might say, just to see how things was gettin' on ashore. As fate would have it I happened into a boxin' booth, which was twopence, and there, as I was watchin' a bout, some one says at my elbow, ''Tis a noble art, deny it who can!' An' that was your late husband. We'd never met afore to my knowledge, an' we never met again; but his words have come back to me more'n once, an' the free manly way he spoke 'em."

"I feel sure," said Mrs Bosenna, "you and he would have found many things in common, had he been spared. . . Now, I dare say, you'd like to look around the place a bit before dinner. Where shall we begin? With the live stock?"

"As you please, ma'am."

"Well, as we're to eat sucking-pig, we'll go and have a look at the litter he was one of; and then we'll take the cows; and then you'll have to excuse me for a few minutes while I attend to the apple-sauce, about which I'm very particular."

They visited the sow and her farrows--a family group which Captain Cai pronounced to be "very comfortable-lookin'."

"But how stupid of me!" exclaimed Mrs Bosenna. "To forget that you sailors are tired to death with pork!"

"Not with this variety, ma'am," Captain Cai assured her.

They passed on to the cow-houses, which were empty just then, but nevertheless worth visiting, being brick-floored, well-ventilated, and roomy, with straw generously spread in the stalls, fresh and ready for the cattle's return. There were two houses, one for Jerseys (as Mrs Bosenna explained), the other for Devons; and she drew his attention to their drainage system. "If I had my way, every cow in the land should be as cleanly lodged as a cottager. None of your infected milk for me!"

From the cow-houses she conducted him through the mowhay, where the number and amplitude of the ricks fairly took his breath away. "Oh, we call Rilla quite a small farm!" said Mrs Bosenna carelessly. "But I could never endure to be short of straw. Clean bedding is a craze with me." She halted and invited him to admire some details in the thatching--the work of an old man past seventy, she told him, and sighed. "Thatching's a lost art, almost. Too much education nowadays, and everybody in a hurry--that's what's the matter. . . . In a few years we shall all be thatching with corrugated iron."

"An' by that time every one will be in steam."

"Eh?"

"Shipping, ma'am."

"Ah, yes--to be sure. And everybody making butter with a County Council separator. 'All very scientific,' I tell them, 'so long as you don't ask me to eat it!' Why, look at this!" Captain Cai looked. She was holding out her hand palm uppermost, and a very pretty, plump hand it was to be sure.

"I should be sorry to say how many hundredweights of butter I've made wi' that very hand--or how many hundreds of persons have eaten it."

Captain Cai dived his own hands into the hip-pockets of his new coat, aimlessly searching for pipe and tobacco-pouch; not that he would have ventured to smoke in her presence!--but it gave his hands something to do.

"'Glad,' I think you must mean, ma'am," said he slowly.

She laughed. "If you're going to make pretty speeches, it's time for me to run indoors," and she left him with a warning that dinner would be ready in ten minutes, or at one o'clock to the tick.

This was by the gate of a broad-acred field ("Parc Veor" she had called it) in which her Jerseys browsed. Captain Cai counted them--they were five--while still half-consciously searching for pipe and pouch, which, in fact, he had left behind in the shop, in the pockets of his old coat. By-and-by he realised this, and with a curious sense of helplessness--of having lost his bearings. . . .

Ten minutes later Dinah, coming across the mowhay to invite Captain Cai into the house, found him leaning against the gate, sunk in a brown study, contemplating the kine.

The smell of roasted sucking-pig dissipated this transient cloud upon his spirits. Mrs Bosenna (who had discarded her apron, and looked mighty genteel with a gold locket dependent from her throat) avowed, appealing to his sympathy, that it mightn't be sentimental, but she, for her part, adored the savour of crackling.

"And as for Robert--my late husband--he doted on it."

Captain Cai came within an ace of saying fatuously it was a pity the late Mr Bosenna couldn't be present to partake of this; but checked himself.

"To think that you should have met him! Well, it's a small world."

"There's a lot of folks attend Summercourt Fair--or used to," said Captain Cai, and added that the world was not so noticeably small, if you tried sailing up and down it a bit.

"Ah!" exclaimed Mrs Bosenna, dropping knife and fork and clasping her hands. "Yes, to be sure, the vastness of it--the great distances! . . . And so you met my late husband in a boxing tent? Sport of all kinds appealed to him. But isn't boxing a-er--more or less degrading exhibition?"

"Nothing of the sort, ma'am. I never went in for it myself--worse luck; never had the time. But my friend 'Bias, now! He's past his prime, o' course; but if only you'd seen him strip--in the old time--"

"Er--you're surely not referring to your friend Captain Hunken?"

"But I am, ma'am. . . . He had a way o' stepping back an' usin' his reach . . . a trifle slow with the left, always . . . that was his failin'. But the length of his arms would delight you--and he had a hug, too, of his own--if you happened to take an interest in such things."

"But I don't," protested Mrs Bosenna. "And you frighten me! If I'd guessed that my other tenant was a prize-fighter--"

"Prize-fighter, ma'am? What, 'Bias? . . . He's the gentlest you ever knew, and the easiest-goin': and for ladies' company--well, I don't know," confessed Captain Cai, "as he ever found himself in such, least-ways not to my knowledge. But I'll be bound he wouldn't be able to open his mouth."

"--Unless in defence of a friend," suggested Mrs Bosenna, laughing. "You must bring him to call on me."

Captain Cai shook his head.

"Oh"--she nodded confidently--"I'll make him talk, never fear! If he's half so true a friend to you as you are to him--"

"He's a truer."

"Then, as a last resource, I have only to run _you_ down. So it's easy."

The sucking-pig was followed by a delectable junket with Cornish cream; and the junket--when Dinah had removed the cloth--by a plate of home-made biscuits, flanked by decanters of port and sherry.

"Widow's port is the best, they say." Mrs Bosenna invited him to fill his glass without waiting for ceremony. "You smoke?" she asked.

He confessed that he was without pipe or tobacco. Dinah was summoned again, left the room after a whispered consultation, and returned with a small sheaf of clean churchwarden pipes and a cake of tobacco, dark in hue, somewhat dry but (as a quick inspection assured Captain Cai) quite smokeable.

"Now you're to make yourself at ease," said Mrs Bosenna, rising and moving to the door. Captain Cai, remembering his manners, rose and held it open for her. "The wine is at your elbow and (oh, believe me, I understand men!) when you've finished your smoke you will find me in the rose-garden. That's my _real_ garden, though nothing to boast of at this time of the year. But April's the month for pruning tea-roses, and this weather in April is not to be missed. I want to hear more of your friend; and when you are ready--you are not to hurry--Dinah will show you the way."

Captain Cai, left alone, carved a pipeful of tobacco with his pocket-knife; chose a clay; filled, lit it, and smoked. Two glasses of wine had sufficed him, for he was an abstemious man: but, for all his hard life, he could enjoy comfort. He found it here; in the good food, the generous liquor, the twinkle on the glass and decanter, the ill-executed but solid portraits on the walls, the hearthrug soft beneath his sole, the April combination of sunshine slanting through the window and a brisk but not oppressive coal fire on the hearth.

He smoked. The tobacco (smuggled and purchased at low cost by the late Mr Bosenna) had been excellent in its time, and was palatable yet.

It stuck in Captain Cai's conscience, however, and pricked it while he smoked, that he had given Mrs Bosenna a wrong impression of his friend.

'Bias a mere prize-fighter! 'Bias of all people! But that is what comes of laying stress on one particular accomplishment of an Admirable Crichton.

He ruminated on this: finished his pipe: and having knocked out the ashes thoughtfully on the bars of the grate, sought the back garden without the help of Dinah.

The rose-garden to the uninstructed eye was--now in April--but a wilderness of scrubby stunted thorns. In the midst of it he found Mrs Bosenna, gloved, armed with a pair of secateurs, and engaged in cutting the thorns back to a few ugly inches.

She smiled as he approached. "You don't understand roses?" she asked. "If you don't, you'll be surprised at my hard pruning. If there's real strength in the root, you can trust for June, no matter what a stick you leave. The secret's under the ground; or, as you may say, under the surface, as it is with folks."

"That helps me, ma'am," said Captain Cai, "to tell you it's like that with my friend 'Bias--"

A whistle sounded up the valley. "The three-thirty coming!" said Mrs Bosenna. "It's at the signal-box outside the tunnel."

"The three-thirty?" Captain Cai gasped and pulled out his watch. "But that's 'Bias's train--and I was to meet him!"

"You _might_ just do it," hazarded Mrs Bosenna. "We count it half a mile to the station, and by the time they have the luggage out--"

"I _must_ do it, ma'am! To think that--" Captain Cai held out a hand. "I'd no notion--the time has flown so!"

"Dinah! Dinah!" called Mrs Bosenna, and as Dinah appeared at the back door with a promptitude almost suspicious,--"Run and fetch Captain Hocken's hat, girl! He has to catch a train."

Dinah vanished, and in the twinkling of an eye came running with the hat; with a clothes-brush, too. "Confound her!" Captain Cai swore inwardly as she insisted on brushing his coat, paying special attention to a dry spot of mud on the right hip-pocket. Feminine attentions may be overdone, and Mrs Bosenna showed more tactfulness than her maid.

"Have finished, you silly woman! Cannot you see that Captain Hocken is dying to leave us? . . . But you are to bring your friend, sir, at the first opportunity!"

She repeated this, calling it after him as he raced down the path. At the footbridge he remembered the musical box in the bushes. But it was too late. Mrs Bosenna had followed him to the head of the slope, and stood watching, waving her handkerchief.

As he glanced back and up at her over his shoulder, his ear caught the rumble of a train, not far up the valley. He must run! . . .

He ran, sticking his elbow to his sides. But soon the rumble of the train grew to a roar. It was upon him. . . . It overtook him some three hundred yards from the station, and the carriage windows, as he staggered down the high road, went past him in a blur. _

Read next: Book 1: Chapter 7. Bias Arrives

Read previous: Book 1: Chapter 5. A Testimonial

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