Furze the Cruel

CHAPTER XXIII

ABOUT A HOUSE ON THE HIDDEN LANES

Thomasine was sitting in the stone kitchen of Town Rising sewing and trying to think; but the little skeletons of thought that did present themselves were like bad dreams. She had given notice to the Chegwiddens and would be leaving in a few days, not because she wanted to go, but because it had become necessary. Town Rising was a moral place, where nothing lower than drunkenness was permitted, and Thomasine was able to comprehend how much better it was to resign than to be turned out. Pendoggat had found a place for her, not a permanent one as he explained, a place where she would receive no wages, where indeed a premium would be required; there she would pay a certain debt to Nature, and then he would come and take her away.

Thomasine was making garments which she smuggled away when any one came to the door. They were ridiculous garments which she could not possibly have worn herself, but perhaps she was making doll's clothes for a charity bazaar, although girls like Thomasine are not usually interested in such things; or she might have been preparing a complete outfit for a certain little person who had benefited her. Pixies of the Tavy are famed for their generosity to servant maids who do their work properly; and the girls have been known to make garments for their benefactors, and spread them out in the kitchen before going to bed, so that the little person could put them on in the night. But the clothes, small though they were, would have been a few sizes too large for pixies, and somewhat too roomy for dolls. Thomasine seemed to be wasting her time and materials; and as a matter of fact she was, although she did not know it because she knew nothing, except that she was not particularly happy.

She was trying to think of matrimony while she sewed. All that she knew about it was that the clergyman mentioned a couple by name publicly three Sundays running, and then they went to church, the girl in her fair-clothes, and the man with a white tie which wouldn't fit his collar, and the clergyman read something which made the man grin and the girl respectable. Time was getting on, it was the dull month of February, and the burden of maternity seemed to be much nearer than the responsibilities of matrimony. Thomasine knew nothing of the place she was going into except that her duties would be light, merely to look after an old woman who would in return render her certain services at a critical time. She did not even know where the place was, for Pendoggat was not going to tell her until the last moment. She had seen young Pugsley the previous Sunday, in a hard hat and a suit of new clothes, the trousers turned up twice in order that a double portion of respectability might rest upon him, with close-cropped head, and a bundle of primroses pinned to his coat. He had stepped up, shaken her by the hand in a friendly way, and told her he was going to be married at Easter. He had got the promise of a cottage, and the ceremony would take place early on Easter Monday, and they were going for their honeymoon to St. Thomas's Fair. Thomasine went back crying, because Pugsley was a good sort of young fellow, and it seemed to her she had missed something, though it was not her fault. She had always wanted to be respectable Mrs. Pugsley, only she had been taken away from the young man, and told not to see him again, and farm-maids have to be obedient.

Thomasine spent the remainder of her time sewing when she was not occupied with household duties, and then the day came when she was to leave. One of the farm-hands drove her to the station, with her box in the cart behind, and her wages in her pocket. She knew by then where she was going; into the loneliness of mid-Devon. She would much rather have gone home, but that was impossible, for the pious cobbler, her father, would have taken her by the shoulders, placed her outside the door, and have turned the key upon her.

If a map be taken, and one leg of a compass placed on the village of Witheridge, the other leg may be extended to a circumference six miles distant, and a wide circle be swept without encountering a railway or cutting more than half-a-dozen good roads, and inside that circle there is not a single town. It is almost unexplored territory, there are no means of transit, and the inhabitants are rough and primitive. Distances there seem great, for the miles are very long ones, and when a call is made to some lonely house the visitor will often be pressed to stay the night, as he would be in Canada or Australia. The map is well sprinkled with names which suggest that the country is thickly populated, but it is not. Many of the names are delusions, more suggestive of the past than the present. A century ago hamlets occupied the sites now covered by a name, but there is nothing left of them to-day except dreary ruins of cob standing in a thicket of brambles or in what was once an apple-orchard. What was formerly the name of a good-sized village is now the title of a farm-house, or one small cottage which would not pay for repairing and must therefore be destroyed when it becomes uninhabitable. It is a sad land to wander through. It suggests a country at the end of its tether which has almost abandoned the struggle for existence, a poverty-stricken country which cannot face the strong-blooded flow of food importations from foreign lands. Even the goods sold in the village shops are of alien manufacture. A hundred little hamlets have given up the struggle in the same number of years, and been wiped, not off the map, but off the land. The country of Devon is like a rosy-cheeked apple which is rotten inside.

This region within the circle is densely wooded, and in parts fertile, though the soil is the heavy dun clay which is difficult to work. It is well-watered, and is only dying because there are no markets for its produce and no railways to carry it. It is a country of lanes, so narrow that only two persons can walk abreast along them, so dirty and ill-kept as to be almost impassable in winter, so dark that it is sometimes difficult to see, and so stuffy and filled with flies in hot weather that any open space comes as a relief. These lanes twist everywhere, and out of them branch more lanes of the same dirtiness and width; and if they are followed a gate is sure to be reached; and there, in a dark atmosphere, may be seen a low white house with a gloomy orchard on each side, and behind a wilderness of garden, and in front a court containing crumbling barns of cob and a foul pond; and on the other side of the court the lane goes on into more gloomy depths, towards some other dull and lonely dwelling-place in the rotten heart of Devon.

The country would be less sad without these dreary houses which suggest tragedies. Sometimes stories dealing with young women and very young girls reach the newspapers, but not often; the lanes are so dark and twisting, and the houses are so entirely hidden. It is possible to walk along the lanes for miles and to see no human beings; only the ruins of where they lived once, and the decaying houses where they live now. It is like walking through a country of the past.

Along one of these lanes Thomasine was taken in a rickety cart ploughing through glue-like mud, and at one of the gates she alighted. There had been a hamlet once where the brambles spread, and its name, which had become the name of the one small house remaining, was Ashland, though the map calls it something else. The tenant was an elderly woman who appeared to find the greatest difficulty in suiting herself with a servant, as she was changing them constantly. She was always having a fresh one, all young girls, and they invariably looked ill when they went away, which was a sure sign that the house was not healthy, and that Mrs. Fuzzey's temper was a vile one. The woman had no near neighbours, though there were, of course, people scattered round about, but they saw nothing suspicious in the coming and going of so many maids. No girl could be expected to stand more than a month or two of Mrs. Fuzzey and her lonely house, especially as some of the girls she engaged were rather smart and well dressed. No one suspected that the mistress of dark little Ashland of the hidden lanes was there solely in the way of business.

"How be ye, my dear?" said the lady in an amiable fashion to her new servant, client, or patient, or whatever she chose to regard her as, when the driver after his customary joke: "Here's one that will stop vor a month likely," had been dismissed. "You'm a lusty maid what won't give much trouble, I reckon. You'm safe enough wi' me, my dear. Seems you ha' come a bit early like. Well, most of 'em du. They get that scared of it showing. Not this month wi' yew, I reckon. Be it early next?"

"Ees," said Thomasine.

"Well, my dear, I'll be a proper mother to ye. 'Twill du ye good to get abroad a bit. Run out and pick up the eggs, and us will ha' tea. Yonder's the hen-roost."

Mrs. Fuzzey seemed a pleasant body, but it was all in the way of business. She was a stout woman, with a big florid face, and crisp black hair which suggested foreign extraction. She reared poultry successfully, and was quite broken-hearted when a young chicken met an evil fate and perished, which indicated the presence of a vein of tenderness somewhere, in the region of the pocket probably, as she was usually insensible to the suffering of human beings. Still she did not look the sort of woman who might reasonably be expected to end her life upon the scaffold, if success in business made her careless, or if any of her patrons or clients ventured to risk their own safety by giving information against her.

Thomasine was not accustomed to stately interiors and fine furniture, and yet she was astonished at the bareness of the interior of Ashland. Had everything in the place been put up to auction less than five pounds would possibly have bought the lot. There was nothing in the way of luxury, not an article that was unnecessary, except the curtains that hung across the windows for respectability's sake. It was not a home, but a place of business. The mistress had the sense to know she might require to leave in a hurry some day without being allowed time to pack anything, and she saw no advantage in investing her savings in furniture which she would have to leave behind.

The garden was at the back, a dark garden, shadowed and gloomy, like an Eastern cemetery. It made a sort of quadrangle, with the house at one end, a jungle-like coppice with bracken and bramble undergrowth at the other, and an orchard on each side; as an additional protection there was a stone hedge round the three sides. There was only one entry and that was from the house. There had been another, a gate leading in from one of the orchards, but Mrs. Fuzzey had closed it up. She did not want people trespassing in her garden.

Near the hedge at the back, and in front of the dense coppice, was an old well which had not been used for a long time as the water was supposed to be polluted. It had been practically closed up when Mrs. Fuzzey came into residence, but she had opened it for her own purposes. The water supply of the house came from a well in the court, which was fed either by a spring or by the river Yeo which passed close by. The old well was very deep and contained a good deal of water with a scum on it which fortunately could not be seen, and a smell to it which in hot weather became rather pronounced, as it had not been cleared out for ages and was filled with dead bodies of rats – and other things. But the miasma carried no distance, and there was nobody to complain about it except Mrs. Fuzzey, who didn't mind. Ashland was almost as much out of the way as a farm upon the back blocks of Australia. Nobody ever entered the garden except herself and her maid for the time being. It was in a land where the sanitary inspector ceases from troubling. She did her own gardening, planting her potatoes and onions, being a strong woman well able to wield a spade. She had piled a lot of rocks about the well and made quite a pleasant flower garden there. She was fond of flowers, and in the warm weather would take out a chair and sit beside the well, admiring the beauty of the various saxifrages, creepers, and trailing plants which her efforts had induced to grow. She called it the Grotto. She had penny novelettes sent her regularly, and would devour them greedily as she sat in her garden, being very much addicted to romance and sentiment when it was strong enough; and sometimes she thought it would be agreeable to retire from business and have a husband and family of her own. It was so very dull at Ashland though she was making money. There never had been a Mr. Fuzzey, although she always gave herself the courtesy title of Mrs.