"You don"t mean to tell me--" Lady Piers started up from her chair.
""Tis atrocious!" she exclaimed, and a pink spot showed itself on each of her delicate cheeks. "Indeed, Mrs. Stephen, you cannot dare to come to me for help; and if you have come for my opinion, I must tell you what I think--that you are a wicked, designing young woman, and have met with no more than your deserts."
"But he called me a dear wife, and he spoke of my loving care."
"Who did? Mr. Roger?"
"My husband did, my lady."
"Oh!" There was a world of meaning in Lady Piers" "oh!" Even a good and happy wife may be allowed to know something of men"s weakness. "And Mr.
Trudgian, I suppose, put that down on parchment?"
Mrs. Stephen gazed for a moment disconsolately out of the window, and rose to go.
"Nay," Lady Piers commanded, "you must sit down for a while and rest.
Sir John is in London, as you know, and were he at home I feel sure you would get little condolence from him. But you are weak and over-worn, and have few friends, I doubt, between this and Porthleven. You cannot walk so far. Rest you here, and I will send you some food, and order John Penwartha to saddle a horse. I can lend you a cloak too, and you shall ride behind him to Porthleven. A _friend_ I cannot find, to escort you; but John is a sensible fellow, and keeps his opinions to himself."
VIII.
Next day Roger went over the house with Jane Trewoofe, the cook, and collected all his stepmother"s belongings. These he did up carefully into three bales, and had them ready at the gate by six o"clock on the following morning, when Pete Nancarrow, the carrier between h.e.l.leston and Penzance, pa.s.sed with his pack-ponies.
"You"re to deliver these to the woman"s own cottage over to Porthleven,"
was his order, conveyed by old Malachi.
Two days later, towards evening, Roger himself happened to be mending a fence on the slope behind the house, when he looked along the road, spied Pete returning, and stepped down to meet him.
"You delivered the parcels?"
Pete nodded.
"What"s your charge?" asked Roger, dipping his hand in his pocket.
"Bless you, they"re paid for. I took the goods round by way of Penzance, meaning to deliver them on the return journey; but in Market-jew Street whom should I run up against but the widow herself, sporting it on the arm of a lawyer-fellow called Trudgian. "Hullo, mistress!" says I, "I"ve a pack of goods belonging to you that I"m taking round to Porthleven."
So she asked what they were, and I told her. "There"s no need for you to drag them round to Porthleven," said she, "for I"m lodging here just now while Mr. Trudgian gets up my case." And with that they fetched me over to Trudgian"s office and paid me down on the table; "for," says the lawyer, "we won"t put expense on a man so poor as Roger Stephen is like to be, though he _have_ given these fal-lals a useless journey." "Tell ye what, master; they mean to have you out of Steens if they can, that pair."
"Let "em come and try," said Roger grimly.
The packman laughed. "That"s what I told the folks over to Penzance.
That"s the very speech I used: "Let "em come and try," I said.
Everyone"s prettily talking about the case."
"What can it concern anyone over there?"
"Why, bless you, the wide world"s ringing with it! And look here, master, I"ll tell you another thing. The country"s with you to a man.
You"ve been shamefully used, they say, and they mean it. Why, you"ve only to lift a hand and you can have "em at your back to defy the Sheriff and all his works--if ever it should come to that."
"It won"t," said Roger, turning back to the house.
This was the first news to reach him that his affairs were being publicly discussed, and for a moment it annoyed him. Of danger he had scarcely a suspicion. Here at Steens the days pa.s.sed quietly, the servants obeying him as though he had been master for years. They brought him no gossip, and any rumours Malachi picked up Malachi kept to himself. Roger, never a man to talk with servants, brooded rather on the attempted wrong. That in itself was enough to sour a man. He had met it with prompt action and baulked it, but he nursed a sense of injury. He felt especially bitter towards Mr. Jose, first of all for permitting such a will to be made without discovering it, and next for shilly-shallying over the decisive counter-stroke. To possible trouble ahead he gave no thought.
The days drew on to hay-harvest, and on the 5th of June Roger and his men started to mow Behan Parc, a wide meadow to the east of the house.
Roger took a scythe himself: he enjoyed mowing.
By noon the field was half-shorn, and the master, pausing to whet his scythe, had begun to think upon dinner, when at a call from Malachi he looked up to see a ragged wastrel of a man picking his way across the swathes towards him with a paper in his hand.
"Hullo! What"s this?" he demanded, taking the paper and unfolding it.
As his eye took in its contents the blood surged up and about his temples.
He tore the paper across and across again, flung the pieces on the ground, and stooped for his scythe.
The wastrel cast a wild look about him and fled. As he turned, presenting his back, Roger hurled his hone. It caught him a little above the shoulder-blades, almost on the neck, and broke in two pieces. The unhappy man pitched forward on his face.
Some of the mowers ran to pick him up. "Thee"st killed him, master, for sure!" cried one.
"Ch"t!" snarled Roger, and strode back to the house without another look.
The law was in motion, then, and in motion to oust him! He could scarcely believe it; indeed, it was scarcely thinkable. But over his first blind, incredulous rage there swept a pa.s.sionate longing to be alone in the house --to sit in it and look about him and a.s.sure himself. Without thought of what he did, he touched the door-jamb reverently as he stepped across the threshold. He wandered from room to room, and even upstairs, feeling the groove in the oaken stair-rail familiar under his palm. Yes, it was his, this home of dead and gone Stephens; it was here, and he was its master.
And of this they would dare to deprive him--they, an interloping trollop and a dirty little attorney! No, it couldn"t be done. He clenched and unclenched his fists. It could never be done in England; but the wrong was monstrous, all the same.
By-and-by he grew calmer, went down to the parlour, ate his dinner, and sallied out to the meadow again. The wastrel had disappeared.
Roger asked no questions, but took up his scythe, stepped into the rank, and mowed. He mowed like a giant, working his men fairly to a standstill.
They eyed him askance, and eyed each other as they fell behind.
But disregarding the rank, he strode on and on, scything down the gra.s.s-- his gra.s.s, grown on his earth, reaped with his sweat.
IX.
The hay had been gathered and stacked, and the stacks thatched; and still Roger lived on at Steens unmolested. He began to feel that the danger had blown over, and for this security old Malachi was responsible.
Malachi had witnessed the scene in the hayfield, and dreamed for nights after of the look on his master"s face. The next time a messenger arrived (he told himself) there would be murder done; and the old man, hazy upon all other points of the law and its operations, had the clearest notion of its answer to murder. He had seen gibbets in his time, and bodies dangling from them in chains.
He began to watch the road for messengers, and never slackened his watch.
Six in all he intercepted during the next three weeks and took their papers to carry to his master. It seemed to him to be raining papers.
He could not read, and, had he been able, their contents would have conveyed no meaning to him. He burned every one in secret.
It is possible, and even likely, that had they reached Roger they would have had no effect beyond angering him. He believed--as for miles around every man not a lawyer believed--that freehold land which had once descended to an heir could not be alienated without the next heir"s consent: nor in all the countryside had such a wrong been perpetrated within living memory. It would have taken twenty lawyers with their books to shake him in this conviction. But it is a fact that he never received a last letter from Lawyer Jose imploring him to appear and fight the suit entered against him, and not to sit in obstinate slumber while his enemies destroyed him.
After this for some weeks the stream of messengers ceased, and even Malachi breathed more freely. He still, however, kept his eye lifting, and was able to intercept the doc.u.ment announcing that in the case of "Stephen _versus_ Stephen," judgment had been entered against the defendant, who was hereby commanded to evade the premises and yield up possession without delay. This also he destroyed.
But there arrived a morning when, as Roger sat at breakfast, the old man came running with news of a gang of men on the road, not six hundred yards away, and approaching the house.
"Are the gates bolted?" asked Roger, rising and taking down two guns from the rack over the chimney-piece.
"Ay, master, bolted and locked." With some vague notion that thereby he a.s.serted possession, Roger had bought new padlocks and clapped them on all three gates--the wrought-iron one admitting to the courtlage, the side wicket, and the great folding-doors of the stable-yard at the back.
"Where"s Joseph?"--this was the farm-hind.