J. S. FLETCHER Ultimate Collection: 20+ Novels & 44 Crime Stories: Mysteries, Detective Stories & Historical Novels (Illustrated) E-Book
J.S. Fletcher
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
The "J. S. Fletcher Ultimate Collection" presents a rich tapestry of over 20 novels and 44 crime stories, deftly weaving together intricate plots that span the realms of mystery, detective fiction, and historical narratives. Fletcher's literary style is characterized by meticulous plotting and a profound understanding of human psychology, offering readers engaging tales that push the boundaries of conventional detective work. His works are set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Britain, reflecting the social mores and anxieties of his time, all while harnessing an illustrative quality that enhances the reading experience. J. S. Fletcher, a prominent British writer, was well-versed in the dynamics of crime fiction and journalism, which greatly influenced his narrative style. His career spanned several decades during which he published numerous novels, articles, and stories that showcased his keen observations of contemporary society. Fletcher's experiences as a journalist provided a foundation for crafting suspenseful tales, while his historical interest infused depth into his fictional landscapes, enabling readers to immerse themselves fully in the worlds he created. This ultimate collection is highly recommended for anyone who appreciates the intricacies of crime and mystery embedded within a historical context. Fletcher's works not only entertain but also provoke thought regarding moral complexities and societal issues of the era, making this compilation indispensable for both genre enthusiasts and historians alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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J. S. FLETCHER Ultimate Collection: 20+ Novels & 44 Crime Stories: Mysteries, Detective Stories & Historical Novels (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume assembles, in a single illustrated edition, the broad span of J. S. Fletcher’s storytelling: more than twenty novels, forty-four crime stories, and a select group of historical writings. Its purpose is simple and comprehensive—to present a coherent panorama of an author whose name became closely associated with British mystery, detective fiction, and historical narrative. By gathering landmark titles alongside lesser-known pieces, the collection allows readers to follow recurring methods, motifs, and settings across forms and decades. It is both an introduction for first-time readers and a consolidated reference for admirers who wish to revisit Fletcher’s work in its rich variety and full narrative range.
The genres represented are diverse yet clearly defined. The novels range from classic mysteries and detective stories—such as The Middle Temple Murder, The Charing Cross Mystery, Scarhaven Keep, The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation, and Dead Men’s Money—to object-centered intrigues like The Orange-Yellow Diamond, The Borgia Cabinet, The Kang-He Vase, and The Safety Pin, as well as maritime and atmospheric work like Sea Fog. The sequence also includes historical fiction, notably In the Days of Drake, and additional novels such as Perris of the Cherry Trees and Where Highways Cross. The short fiction spans series cases and stand-alone tales, from Paul Campenhaye – Specialist in Criminology to Mr. Poskitt’s Nightcaps and The Secret of the Barbican and Other Stories, with “Other Stories” broadening the tonal register. Historical works—Mistress Spitfire, Baden-Powell of Mafeking, and The Solution of a Mystery—round out the set.
Across these categories, unifying themes emerge. Fletcher repeatedly explores how crime hides in plain sight—within ordinary institutions, civic offices, and respectable professions—so that the everyday becomes a field of inquiry. Money, property, and reputation—signaled by titles like The Borough Treasurer, The Chestermarke Instinct, and The Herapath Property—often supply both motive and moral pressure. Artifacts and curiosities catalyze plots (The Borgia Cabinet, The Kang-He Vase, The Orange-Yellow Diamond), while public spaces and networks—stations, streets, and coastal towns—frame investigations (The Charing Cross Mystery, Sea Fog, Scarhaven Keep). The historical pieces and historical novel further echo this preoccupation by situating suspense against the legacies of the past.
Stylistically, Fletcher favors lucid prose, steady pacing, and the incremental accumulation of clue and counter-clue. His mysteries tend to honor a fair-play spirit: readers are invited to weigh evidence alongside investigators who are often journalists, lawyers, or observant laypeople rather than flamboyant specialists. Settings—market towns, legal precincts, rural estates, and sea-facing communities—are rendered with practical detail that supports logic-driven detection. He uses precise objects and documents as pivots for testimony and inference, keeps the dramatis personae tightly focused, and heightens tension through measured revelation rather than sensational display. The result is an atmosphere of reasoned inquiry that sustains both novel-length immersion and compact short-form puzzles.
The short stories present Fletcher’s method in miniature: compressed premises, swiftly sketched milieus, and decisive turns. The Paul Campenhaye sequence showcases a specialist’s casework; pieces like Room 53, The Irish Mail, The Tobacco-Box, and The Champagne Bottle turn on apparently mundane spaces and things that yield unexpected significance. Structural experiments appear in tales of time pressure or technical ingenuity—Against Time and Patent No. 33—while civic mysteries such as The Murder in the Mayor’s Parlour and Extra-Judicial probe officialdom and public duty. Collections like The Secret of the Barbican and Other Stories, together with Mr. Poskitt’s Nightcaps, broaden tone and register, balancing pure detection with character sketch and anecdote.
The historical writings and the historical novel deepen the collection’s range. In the Days of Drake offers an adventure set against an earlier age, while Mistress Spitfire and The Solution of a Mystery add further historical resonance. Baden-Powell of Mafeking provides a biographical perspective. These works illuminate Fletcher’s longstanding interest in the interplay between past and present, showing how lineage, record, and reputation inform both narrative tension and moral judgment. By including these texts alongside the mysteries, the collection emphasizes continuity in his concerns: the scrutiny of evidence, the weight of circumstance, and the shaping force of history on individual action and communal life.
Taken together, the novels, stories, and historical writings form a coherent portrait of J. S. Fletcher’s craft: practical in method, exact in observation, and alert to the social textures that envelop crime and consequence. Readers may begin with a marquee mystery such as The Middle Temple Murder or The Charing Cross Mystery, explore the atmospheric Scarhaven Keep or Sea Fog, or sample the Paul Campenhaye cases before moving to the historical pieces. However one proceeds, the illustrated compendium offers a sustained encounter with a writer whose clarity of plot and sense of place continue to reward attention, yielding both intellectual satisfaction and narrative momentum.
Historical Context
Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863–1935) wrote across the long transition from late Victorian to interwar Britain, carrying habits of the newsroom into plots shaped by modern urban life. Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, and trained as a journalist in Leeds and London for papers such as the Leeds Mercury and the Yorkshire Post, he sharpened an eye for civic machinery, crime reporting, and provincial nuance that reappears in his mysteries and historical fiction. The surge of post-1914 popular detective writing provided his widest readership; The Middle Temple Murder (1919) crystallized his public reputation. Across the collection, readers encounter a writer whose methods reveal the pressroom’s insistence on detail and the province-to-metropolis circuits he knew intimately.
The legal and policing worlds that structure many plots matured during Fletcher’s lifetime. The Metropolitan Police (founded 1829) and the Criminal Investigation Department (1878) professionalized inquiry, while the Scotland Yard Fingerprint Bureau (1901) typified the era’s faith in forensic exactitude. Settings such as the Inns of Court—especially the Middle Temple in London—root legal intrigue in centuries-old institutions. London’s rail arteries and markets supplied vivid stages: Charing Cross station (opened 1864), the early-morning bustle of Covent Garden’s fruit market, and the Irish Mail service from Euston to Holyhead suggest how speed, anonymity, and routine commerce could cloak or reveal crime. Telegraphs, telephones, and timetables underpin investigations as much as witness testimony.
Finance, municipal governance, and corporate risk—preoccupations of a journalist’s city desk—permeate Fletcher’s fiction. The expansion of joint-stock enterprise under the Companies Acts (notably 1900 and 1907), waves of speculation on the London Stock Exchange, and scandals such as the Marconi affair (1912–1913) furnished models of opaque dealings and insider advantage. Local government reform from the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 onward created new civic offices, budgets, and temptations for malfeasance, resonating with narratives of borough treasurers, council chambers, and ratepayers’ money. The postwar slump of 1920–1921 and periodic banking anxieties inform stories of shaky amalgamations, forged securities, and contested inheritances, aligning domestic motives with national cycles of boom and strain.
Antiquarian passions and imperial trade routes feed the collection’s fascination with objects that bridge eras and continents. The Borgia legend of Renaissance Italy, the worldly career of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), and the desirability of Qing porcelain from the Kangxi reign (1661–1722) reveal how cabinets, vases, and diamonds became portable histories—and perfect motives. Victorian and Edwardian collecting cultures, nourished by institutions like the South Kensington Museum and auction rooms in the West End, met the global traffic of London docks and bonded warehouses. The Great Exhibition of 1851 and subsequent world’s fairs popularized such treasures, while the Aesthetic and Japoniste tastes ensured that art objects could lure thieves as powerfully as they enchant connoisseurs.
Place is destiny across Fletcher’s oeuvre, nowhere more so than in Yorkshire mill towns, moorland villages, and North Sea harbors. The woollen districts of Leeds, Bradford, and Halifax, with their counting houses and chapels, frame struggles over credit, class, and respectability. On the coast, fog, tides, and cliff-side ruins invite wreckers’ lore and quiet smuggling; the Shivering Sands of the Thames Estuary and the storm-watch of lighthouses underline the perils of navigation and the secrecy of estuarial channels. Railway links that carried holidaymakers to Scarborough or Whitby also sped pursuers and fugitives, shrinking distances between provincial courts, London chambers, and remote manors. Local speech, parish politics, and landscape become evidence as surely as any footprint.
The First World War (1914–1918) and its aftermath shadow the interwar books in mood and matter. Demobilization in 1919 flooded cities with veterans, some broken, others resourceful, and all navigating disrupted careers. A broader electorate after the Representation of the People Act (1918) recalibrated power in boroughs and market towns. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act (1919) opened professions—law included—to women, with the Inns of Court calling the first women to the Bar in 1922, a change felt in narratives of secretaries, heiresses, and practitioners negotiating new roles. Espionage nerves, codified in the Official Secrets Act (1911), helped normalize plots about sealed files, clandestine labs, and extra-judicial fixes, fusing public security with private peril.
Fletcher’s historical works sit within a long British tradition from Scott and Stevenson to late Victorian romancers, yet are inflected by a reporter’s documentary appetite. In the Days of Drake summons Elizabethan maritime enterprise—Drake’s circumnavigation (1577–1580), privateering, and the contest with Spain—linking national myth with coastal geographies that elsewhere host crime. Mistress Spitfire evokes seventeenth-century England’s factional loyalties, household economies, and the hazards of civil conflict. Baden-Powell of Mafeking engages the Second Boer War and the 217-day Siege of Mafeking (1899–1900), capturing modern media’s manufacture of heroism around Robert Baden-Powell. The Solution of a Mystery exemplifies archival sleuthing, where the method—sifting documents, testing motives—mirrors the logic animating Fletcher’s contemporary detective tales.
Publication history shaped how these stories were written and read. The decline of the three-decker novel in the 1890s, the rise of single-volume fiction, and the dominance of railway bookstalls (W. H. Smith) and circulating libraries eased fast, plot-driven narratives into a mass market. Magazines serialized mysteries before book issue; firms such as Ward, Lock & Co. popularized affordable editions with vivid covers. Fletcher wrote amid the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, in dialogue with Wilkie Collins’s sensation legacy and contemporaries like E. C. Bentley and Dorothy L. Sayers. His blend of metropolitan expertise and Yorkshire particularity—courts, markets, trains, and tides—anchors crimes in the everyday machinery of modern Britain.
Synopsis (Selection)
Perris of the Cherry Trees
A rural romance-cum-mystery in which orchard life, land deals, and an outsider’s buried past converge, testing loyalties and opening the way to renewal.
The Middle Temple Murder
A young journalist investigates a corpse found near London’s Middle Temple, following a trail of hidden identities, an old crime, and a disputed fortune.
Dead Men's Money
Drawn into the disappearance of a reclusive moneylender, a novice sleuth chases rumors of illicit wealth along the English–Scottish border and unearths a lethal conspiracy.
The Talleyrand Maxim
A cynical political maxim shadows a junior lawyer’s quest to protect a missing heiress and a contested estate, pitting legal craft against social ambition.
The Paradise Mystery
A death in a cathedral close and a compromised antiquarian find pull an investigator into the cloistered intrigues of a cathedral city and a scandal long buried.
The Borough Treasurer
The sudden death of a civic treasurer and missing public funds spark an inquiry that peels back layers of municipal graft—and a murderer’s alibi.
The Chestermarke Instinct
When a bank manager vanishes with valuable securities, a clerk and Scotland Yard disentangle small-town loyalties from a calculated financial swindle.
The Herapath Property
After a shipping magnate is found dead, a disputed will and corporate secrets entangle heirs, partners, and a patient investigator in a high-stakes struggle over a business empire.
The Orange-Yellow Diamond
A rare diamond’s passage through pawnbrokers and drawing rooms leaves theft and murder in its wake, its true provenance proving the key to the case.
The Root of All Evil
An unexplained death tied to a fortune lays bare how greed corrodes a provincial community, as the pursuit of money masks deeper crimes.
In The Mayor's Parlour
A body discovered in the mayor’s own chamber ignites a probe into small-town politics, rivalry, and the secrets that power keeps close.
The Middle of Things
After witnessing a neighbor’s murder, a young barrister is pulled into a London maze of identity mist, transatlantic crooks, and the guarded past of a woman in peril.
Ravensdene Court
At a remote coastal manor, a mysterious visitor and old charts revive whispers of smuggling and hidden treasure, drawing out a killer lurking in the shadows.
The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation
A high-profile business merger becomes the backdrop to a partner’s disappearance and murder, forcing a junior associate to expose corporate treachery.
Scarhaven Keep
An actor vanishes during a seaside pageant at an ancient keep, and the ensuing search uncovers questions of lineage, property, and crimes buried by time and tide.
The Charing Cross Mystery
When a traveler dies suddenly in a London railway carriage, suspicions of subtle poison send an amateur sleuth and a doctor from the city’s underbelly to its salons.
The Kang-He Vase
The pursuit of a priceless Chinese vase entwines collectors, dealers, and thieves in a game of forgery, betrayal, and a theft that refuses to stay solved.
The Safety Pin
A seemingly trivial safety pin becomes the vital clue in a society crime, allowing methodical deduction to unmask an audacious jewel-thief.
Sea Fog
A dense coastal fog cloaks a seaside crime—lost timelines, a missing boat, and a body on the shore—demanding careful reconstruction to pierce false alibis.
The Borgia Cabinet
An antique cabinet linked to Renaissance intrigue draws covetous eyes and bloodshed, its cunning compartments concealing the modern crime’s solution.
The Mill House Murder
A man is found dead in a riverside mill house; conflicting testimonies and a near locked-room setting test steady, clue-by-clue detection.
In the Days of Drake
An Elizabethan sea adventure follows a youth into Francis Drake’s world of privateering, perilous voyages, and the court politics that steer them.
Where Highways Cross
At a crossroads inn, chance encounters, a missing packet, and an inheritance tangle spur a brisk chase through deception toward an unexpected reckoning.
Paul Campenhaye – Specialist in Criminology
A cycle of short cases featuring consulting criminologist Paul Campenhaye, who applies scientific method and sharp observation to urban blackmail, fraud, and murder across London.
The Secret of the Barbican and Other Stories
A collection of twist-driven mysteries—ranging from legal puzzles to relic thefts and provincial intrigues—each hinging on a single decisive clue or courtroom turn.
Mr. Poskitt's Nightcaps (Stories of a Yorkshire Farmer)
Genial, humorous tales told by a canny Yorkshire farmer, whose common sense steers rustic romances, petty disputes, and opportunistic schemes toward wry, satisfying ends.
Other Stories
Four standalone pieces—mixing adventure, fate, and the uncanny—featuring exotic idols, second sight, fresh starts, and a perilous lighthouse episode with ironic payoffs.
Mistress Spitfire
A swashbuckling historical romance set in seventeenth-century England, where a spirited heroine navigates civil strife, disguise, and daring escapes.
Baden-Powell of Mafeking
A concise biographical study of Robert Baden-Powell, focusing on the Siege of Mafeking and the leadership, strategy, and public mythmaking that followed.
The Solution of a Mystery
A brief historical inquiry that reconstructs and proposes a documented explanation for a long-debated incident, blending archival detail with narrative clarity.
J. S. FLETCHER Ultimate Collection: 20+ Novels & 44 Crime Stories: Mysteries, Detective Stories & Historical Novels (Illustrated)
Novels
Perris of the Cherry Trees
Chapter I
Pippany Webster, handy-man and only labourer to Abel Perris, the small farmer who dragged a bare living out of Cherry-trees, the little holding at the top of the hill above Martinsthorpe, came lazily up the road from the village one May afternoon, leading a horse which seemed as fully inclined to laziness as Pippany himself. Perris had left home for a day or two, and had apportioned his man a certain fixed task to accomplish by the time of his return: Pippany, lid it so pleased him, might have laboured steadily at it until that event happened. And for the whole of the first day and half of the next he had kept himself to the work, but at noon on that second day it was borne in upon him that one of the two horses, which formed the entire stable of the establishment, required shoeing, and after eating his dinner, he had led it down the hill to the smithy near the cross-roads in Martinsthorpe. There, and in the kitchen of the Dancing Bear, close by, where there was ale and tobacco and gossip, he had contrived to spend the greater part of the afternoon. He would have stayed longer amidst such pleasant surroundings, but for the fact that supper-time was approaching.
It was difficult, looking at man and horse, to decide as to which most suggested helplessness and incompetence. The horse showed itself to be a poor man's beast in every line and aspect of its ill-shaped, badly-fed body, in the listless droop of its head, in its ungroomed, rough-haired coat, in the very indecision with which it set down its oversized, sprawling feet. It had a dull, listless eye, the eye of an equine outcast; there was an evident disposition in it to stop on any provocation, to crop the fresh green of the grass from the broad stretches of turf on the wayside, to nibble at the tender shoots of the hedgerows, to do anything that needed little effort. It breathed heavily as it breasted the hill, following the man who slouched in front, his head drooping from his bent shoulders, his lips, still moist and sticky from the ale he had drunk, sucking mechanically at a foul clay pipe. He was a little more fully attired than the scarecrows in the neighbouring fields, but there was all over him the aimlessness, the ineptitude, the purposelessness of the unfit. His old hat, shapeless and colourless, shaded a face which suggested nothing but dull stupidity, and was only relieved from utter vacancy by a certain slyness and craftiness of expression. He shambled in his walk, and his long arms, the finger-tips of which reached below his knees, wagged and waved in front of him as he forged ahead, as though they were set loose in their sockets, his small, pig-like eyes fixed on the few inches of high-road which lay immediately before his toes. From the foot of the hill to its crest those eyes were never lifted.
And yet, the crest of the hill once gained, a landscape presented itself over which most folk would have gazed with pleasure and appreciation. On all sides the country stretched away in a great plateau, thickly wooded, and just then smiling in the clear light and fresh, unsullied tints and colours of spring-tide. The place to which the unkempt man was leading the unkempt horse was in itself a picture. It stood, a small but very old farmhouse, with a high sloping roof, dormer windows, and tall chimneys, in t he angle made by the meeting of two roads; before i t lay a flower-garden, in one corner of which rose an ancient cedar-tree; behind it stretched a wide-spreading orchard, filled, for the most part, with cherry-trees, just then in the full glory of pink and white blossom. I immediately in front of it, on the opposite side of the highway, rose a great grove of chestnut-trees; they, too, were in bloom, and the wax-like clusters made little pyramids of light against the, glossy green of the widespreading leaves. And over everything was the clear blue of the May sky, and in the hedgerows and the coppices were the first signs of the flowering of the hawthorn.
Pippany Webster saw nothing of all this. He shambled slowly round the corner of the high-road into the lane which led towards the woods, and made a boundary on that side to Perris's farmstead, into which he let himself by a ramshackle door that opened on a range of dilapidated buildings. These buildings stood between the old house and the cherry orchard; the lane ran at the back of them; a farm-fold lay in front of them, fenced off from the rear of the house by a low stone wall. Against this wall, on the fold side, was a stone trough; above it a leaden spout projected through the wall; on the other, the house side of the wall, was a pump, which communicated with the well below. The human animals in the house and the brute animals in the field both drank water from a spring thirty feet beneath them, into which the runnings of fold and byre and stable percolated in some indefinite degree about which neither ever speculated.
The range of buildings into which Pippany Webster dragged the newly-shod horse was characteristic of what is usually seen on a small holding when the holder is poor and more or less shiftless. Between it and the house stood a dilapidated Dutch barn, empty of aught but a mess and litter of straw on the earth flooring almost as empty was the range of buildings itself when entered and inspected. The lower part was stable, cow-house, piggery so far as one-half was concerned; above these offices was a granary, and next it a chamber wherein wool might be stored; the other half of the range, unfloored from earth to roof face, made a barn which was nearly as destitute of straw as its Dutch substitute outside. Two horses in the stable, three cows in the byre, a few pigs in the sty, constituted Perris's live stock; but outside in the fold, and in the adjoining orchard, his wife kept a pretty good establishment of poultry—fowls, ducks, and geese—and at various times made a little money out of it. It was well that she had some such stand-by, for the evidences of prosperity at Cherry-trees were few. An observer, skilled in matters of farming, having taken due stock of the animals, the condition of the fold, the emptiness of barns and granary, the poor bits of dead stock, ploughs, harrows, and the like, which lay rusting and woe-begone of appearance in a lean-to shed, would have sniffed and turned up his nose with a remark as to the folly of trying to work even fifty acres without capital.
Pippany Webster unceremoniously turned the horse into a stable as destitute of straw on the bouldered floor as it was empty of aught to eat in the broken mangers. The horse looked into the manger, and at the rack fixed in the wall above it, and turning its head gazed at Pippany. It knew as well as Pippany knew that it and its stable companion would presently be cast forth for the night into the adjoining grass meadow, and that as the spring nights were still nipping cold it was only right and just that something more warming to the belly than buttercups and daisies should be served up before the casting forth took place. And Pippany recognised the look and wagged his head.
"Then ye mun wait till I can cut some o' yon owd clover," he said. "Theer's none so much left, and when it's done wi' ye'll hev' to depend on what ye can pick up—if so be as ye're alive. There's nowt much of owt left about this here place."
As if in proof of this assertion he lifted the lid of the old stable-chest in which the horse-corn was kept, and gazed meditatively at its contents. In the depths of the chest lay two or three bushels of meal: Pippany remembered that there was none left in the granary above the stable; he remembered, too, that he had only enough pig-meal left wherewith to feed the pigs that night. He scratched his head dubiously.
"This is a bonny come-up!" he soliloquised. "If t' maister doesn't come home to-morrow and bring soome brass wi' him these here animals 'll go fro' bad to worse—if such is possible! Howsomever, I mun cut some o' yon clover for t' hosses and t' cows."
From a nook behind the corn-chest Pippany brought forth a hay-cutting knife, and proceeded to put an edge on it with a whetstone which he took from a hole in the wall. And at last, armed with this and with a stable fork whereupon he meant to impale the chunk of dried clover which he intended to carve out of the old stack at the end of the orchard, he went forth into the fold and crossed over to the orchard gate.
In the orchard, amidst the pink and white of the cherry-trees, two women were hanging out the last results of a day's family washing. The lines to which they suspended the various articles of clothing, drawn wet and heavy from the wicker basket which they had just set down on the grass, were fastened here and there to the trunks or branches of the trees, here and there to certain ancient posts which were shaky in their foundations, and looked as if a little extra weight on the lines would pull them down altogether. There was scarcely any movement of air in the orchard; the lighter garments stirred but feebly when they were safely pinned to the line, the heavy ones hung straight down, motionless and inert.
Of the two women thus employed when Pippany entered the orchard, one, the elder, Tibby Graddige, general odd-job woman to the parish, was a tall, spare, athletic female whose every action indicated energy and strength. When she moved, every muscle and sinew of her body seemed to be brought into play; hands moved in unison with feet, and elbows with knees. Just as active were the motions of her thin, straight lips and her coal-black eyes; the way in which her hair, equally black, was drawn in straight, severe fashion from her forehead and hidden behind an old cap fashioned from the remains of some shred of funeral crape indicated her views of life and of a day's work, which were to keep going at both until both were over. She passed now from basket to line and from line to basket as if everything of importance in the world depended upon the swiftness with which the wet linen was hung out to dry.
The other and younger woman, Rhoda Perris, wife of Pippany's absent master, was of a different order of femininity. She looked to be about two-and-twenty years of age; the print gown which she wore did little to hide a figure which sculptors would have had nothing to find fault with had it been suggested to them as a model for the statue of something between a Venus and a Diana. Above the medium height, generous of bosom and hip, there was yet a curious suggestion of lissom slenderness about her which was heightened by the print gown. Her uncovered hair, catching the glint of the westering sun, revealed tints of gold and red and brown accordingly as her head was turned; it fell away to her ears in natural undulations from a centre parting, and was carelessly bound up into a heavy coil at the nape of her neck. Beneath the low, square forehead which the ripples of this elusively-tinted hair shaded were a pair of large eyes, the colour of which was as elusive as the hair—at times they seemed to be violet, at times grey, at times green. Always there was in them a strange sleepy seductiveness and a curious steadiness of gaze when they fixed themselves upon the object of their possessor's thoughts. The nose was in the slightest degree retrousse, the mouth inclining to largeness but perfectly shaped, the chin firm and rounded. As for the woman's colour it was that of the healthy, full-blooded human animal whose surroundings from infancy have been those of the woods and fields, and into whom the spirit of free air and the strength of the earth has entered with all the stirring nourishment of mother's milk.
Rhoda Perris, idly hanging a garment on the clothesline, looked round as Pippany shambled through the rickety gate. She took a clothes-peg from between her strong, white teeth, and smiled sideways at Tibby Graddige.
"Seems to me it takes a nice long time to put one shoe on a horse nowadays, Pippany Webster," she remarked. "You took that horse down to the crossroads at one o'clock, and it's past five now."
"T' smith weren't theer when I landed," said Pippany sullenly. "He were away up to Mestur Spink's about summat or other. An' when he came back theer wor another man afore me 'at had browt two hosses—leastways a hoss an' a mare. Ye can't shoe a beast i' five minutes. An' I worn't going down there to wait all that time for nowt."
"No, and I'll warrant you didn't!" remarked Tibby Graddige. "T' Dancing Bear mek's a good waiting-room for such-like as ye when ye go to t' smith's!"
"Ye ho'd yer wisht!" retorted Pippany. "Nobody's given ye onny right to order my goings and comings, Mistress Graddige. I know when a hoss wants its shoes seeing to as weel as onny man."
"We'll see what your master says when he comes home," said Rhoda. "You'd no need to take the horse to-day—it was naught but an excuse to go and drink."
"I care nowt for what t' maister says nor what nobody else says," retorted Pippany, lurching forward past the women. "If Mestur Perris has owt to say to me he can pay me mi wage and let me go. I'm stalled o' this job—there's nowt left about t' place, and t' animals 'll be starvin' afore to-morrow neet. I'm none a fooil, and I can see how things is goin' wi' Mestur Perris—so theer!"
Tibby Graddige shot a swift look out of her black eyes in Rhoda's direction.
"There's imperence for yer!" she said softly. "But he allus were a bad un wi' his tongue, were that there Pippany Webster—used to miscall his poor mother, as were bedridden, shameful. Eh, dear—when the cat's away the mice will play, as it says in the Good Book. If I were Mestur Perris I should show t' way to the back door to yon theer."
Pippany shambled on to the old clover-stack, which stood at the end of the orchard. There was little of it left: what little there was made a dusky tower which rose some eighteen or twenty feet in air from a base of two square yards. It was already shored up on three sides with stack props; on the fourth a ladder led to the particular elevation at which Pippany on the previous day had cut sufficient provender out of the tightly compressed mass to serve for the animals' supper. Round the base of this remnant many inroads had been made upon the clover by the depredations of the cattle which had been allowed to pull at it; when Pippany, carrying his hay-knife and the stable fork, proceeded slowly to climb the ladder, the stack began to tremble and to sway; it was obvious that it would have tottered over but for the support which it received from the poles. But Pippany gave no heed to these signs; he steadily mounted to the top, plunged his fork into the side, and kneeling down proceeded to drive his knife into the edges of the portion which he desired to cut out.
To drive an imperfectly edged cutting-knife into the compressed mass of an old clover-stack which has been standing, as this stack had, for at least three years, and had accordingly become almost solid, requires no small expenditure of might and strength. At every downward thrust which Pippany gave to his knife the stack shook and tottered on its insecure base, and if he had not been muttering threats and anathemas against Tibby Graddige to himself, he might have heard an ominous cracking and crunching below him. Pippany, however, heard nothing but the harsh voice of his knife crunching through the clover. And suddenly one of the supporting poles, already rotten when it was put up, snapped off short, the reeling stack gave way, and flinging Pippany, knife still in hand, headlong from it, heeled over after him and enveloped him in the debris of its destruction.
The two women looked round from the clotheslines with scared faces.
"God ha' mercy on us, missis!" exclaimed Tibby Graddige. "What's yon atomy done now? Oh, Lord, Lord, that owd stack's fallen on him! And us wi'out a man about the place!"
When they reached the scene of disaster there was no sign of Pippany. The fine dust caused by the fall of the stack was clearing away, but neither leg nor arm protruded from it.
"He's buried under it!" whispered Tibby Graddige. "Oh, Lord, whatever mun we do?"
Rhoda was already silently tearing at the clover, seizing great heaps of it in her powerful arms and casting it aside. The elder woman joined her, but ever and anon loudly lamented the absence of a man. And suddenly she looked up, listening.
"There's somebody a-horseback riding past the corner!" she said. "Eh, I mun call to him, whoever he is!"
She ran swiftly through the cherry-trees to the low hedge which separated the orchard from the lane, and craned her neck above the green branches. The next instant Rhoda heard her voice, shrill and insistent.
"Hi, mestur! Mestur Taffendale! Mestur Taffendale!"
The man thus hailed, who was slowly riding along the highway at the end of the lane, drew rein, and, turning in the saddle, looked in Tibby Graddige's direction. Seeing that she was frantically waving her bare arm to him, he turned his horse's head, and rode towards her.
"What is it, missis?" he said as he drew near. "Anything wrong?"
Tibby Graddige panted out her reply.
"Oh, Mestur Taffendale, sir, th' owd clover-stack's fallen on Pippany Webster, and he's buried under it, and there's nobody about but me and the missis. Come over and help us wi' it, if you please, sir!"
Taffendale's first thought was that if the clover-stack had buried Pippany Webster once and for all the Martinsthorpe community would have experienced no great loss. But without making audible reply to Tibby Graddige's supplication, he forced his horse through one of the many gaps which abounded in the hedge of Perris's orchard, dismounted, and tied the bridle to the lower branch of a cherry-tree.
"Where is he?" he said, speaking in the tones of a man who is asked to do something in which he has no personal concern and about which he is utterly indifferent.
"This way, sir; the missis and me's pulled some of it offen him already," replied Tibby Graddige. "But there's more on it than you'd think."
When they turned the corner of the hedgerow behind which the fallen clover-stack lay piled in a shapeless mass, Taffendale saw Rhoda Perris for the first time. He himself lived on his farmstead a mile and a half away across the plateau behind the woods; he rarely visited the village or passed Cherry-trees, and though he had heard of Perris's wife as what the country-folk called a bit of a beauty, he had never seen her since she and her husband had come to the place two years before. Now, as she stood up, flushed and panting from her exertions, he gave her one swift glance and as swiftly looked away. He had not been prepared for what he had seen.
By that time Rhoda had torn away a good deal of the fallen clover, and had uncovered the handle of the stable fork. Taffendale threw off his coat and seized the fork, at the same time jerking his head at the two women.
"Stand aside!" he said half-roughly.
He went to work carefully and systematically, but with sureness and swiftness. Tibby Graddige volubly gave forth her fears for Pippany and her admiration for Mr. Taffendale's cleverness and strength; Rhoda, her hands planted on her hips, stood by, watching in silence.
"Here he is!" said Taffendale at last, throwing aside the fork and resorting to his hands. "And, by George, he looks like a goner!"
He turned the crumpled-up Pippany over on his back, swiftly untied his neckcloth, and moved his head. Pippany's throat gurgled, and his lips emitted a long breath.
"He's alive, but he's unconscious," said Taffendale quickly. "We'll carry him into the house. Here, Mrs. Graddige, get hold of his legs and I'll take his shoulders. Have you got any brandy?" he continued, turning and looking squarely at Rhoda.
"No, but there's some whisky," answered Rhoda.
"Whisky will do," said Taffendale. "Now then, Mrs. Graddige, come on. He's no weight."
Rhoda ran on before them to the house, and was ready with the whisky bottle when they arrived and laid Pippany on the settle in the house-place. Taffendale took the bottle from her, poured some of its contents into a saucer which he caught up from the table, and some into a teacup. He handed the saucer to Tibby Graddige.
"Here, rub that on his forehead," said he. "Have you got a spoon handy, Mrs. Perris?"
Rhoda gave him a teaspoon, and he slowly poured small quantities of the raw spirit between Pippany's lips. Pippany began to stir and to moan; in a few minutes and under the influence of the whisky he opened his eyes. He gazed vacantly around him.
"Where—what—?" he began. "Where—?"
"Hold your tongue!" said Taffendale. "You're all right. You've saved your neck this time. Here, drink this, and then let's see if you've broken any bones."
A generous dose of whisky-and-water enabled Pippany to move his four limbs and to convince his interested helpers that he had not broken his back. Taffendale smiled grimly, and turned to Rhoda.
"He's all right, Mrs. Perris," he said. "Let him rest a bit and then send him home."
And again he smiled, looking at her inquisitively behind the smile.
Rhoda, in her turn, looked at Taffendale. She, too, was seeing him for the first time. She had often heard of him as the rich farmer and lime-burner across at the Limepits, but she had never met him. Now she viewed him with curiosity. He was a tall, loosely-built man, evidently about thirty or thirty-two years of age, dark of hair, eye, and complexion; there was a curiously reserved, self-reliant air about him which unconsciously impressed her. Just as unconsciously the sense of his masculinity was forced upon her; she was sensible of it just as she was sensible of his good clothes, his polished boots and fine cloth Newmarket gaiters, his white stock with the gold horseshoe pin carelessly thrust into its folds. And she compared him, scarcely knowing that she did so, with her husband, Abel Perris, and something in the comparison aroused a curious and subtle feeling in her.
"I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Taffendale," she said. "And so ought you to be, Pippany. You'd have been dead by now if Mr. Taffendale hadn't chanced to be riding by."
"I'm deeply obligated to Mestur Taffendale," mumbled Pippany, eyeing the whisky bottle. "I'm allus obligated to them as does good to me. But I'm worth a good many dead 'uns yet, and if Mestur Taffendale theer ever wants a friend—"
Taffendale gave Rhoda another grim smile, and moved towards the door. He had bestowed a swift circular glance on his surroundings, and he was marvelling at their poverty. The house-place in which they stood was little superior in its furnishing to any day-labourer's cottage; through an open door he caught a glimpse of a parlour that looked cold and bare. It seemed to him a poor setting for a woman as good-looking as he had found Perris's wife to be.
"Well, good-day," he said. "You go home, Webster, and get to bed."
Rhoda made a motion of her hand towards the whisky bottle.
"Won't—won't you take anything, Mr. Taffendale?" she said diffidently.
"No, no, nothing, thank you," replied Taffendale hurriedly. "I'm pressed for time. Good-day, Mrs. Perris."
He walked quickly through the fold, observing things to right and left of him without turning his eyes in either direction. And he saw the evident poverty of the place, and mentally appraised its value, and when he had got his coat and mounted his horse, and was riding away, he shook his head to the accompaniment of another of his sardonic smiles.
"That looks to be in a poorish state!" he thought. "And it's rent-day next week. I wonder how Perris stands for that? It's a pity for that wife of his—a fine woman!"
Rhoda and Tibby Graddige went back to the orchard to finish hanging out the clothes. Both were in meditative mood, brought about by the event of the afternoon.
"So that's Mr. Taffendale, is it?" said Rhoda. "For all we've been here two years I never saw him before. Well off, isn't he, Tibby?"
Tibby Graddige jerked her head.
"Well off!" she exclaimed. "I'll warrant! What with his big farm, and his lime-kilns, I should think he were well off, yon! Why, his father, old Mestur Taffendale, left him thirty thousand pound. An' isn't it fair shameful?—he's never yet shown sign o' tekkin' a wife to share it wi' him!"
Rhoda made no answer. She was wondering what so wealthy a man had thought of the palpable poverty of Cherry-trees.
Chapter II
About the time that Mark Taffendale and Tibby Graddige carried Pippany Webster into the house-place, Abel Perris got out of a train at the little railway station, Somerleigh, which stood four miles away along the high-road to the north of Martinsthorpe. A tallish, bony man, somewhat uncertain at his knees and rounded of shoulder, with a sharp, thin face, a weak chin, and a bit of sandy whisker cropping out in front of each over-large ear, he looked almost pathetically desolate as he stood on the platform, mechanically feeling in one pocket after another in the effort to find his ticket. His attire gave no force to his naturally colourless personality.' Having been on a visit to his relations he had worn his best clothes—garments rarely brought out of the chest which had been their place of repose for several years. The sleeves of the black coat were too short, and exposed the prominent, fleshless bones of the wearer's wrists; the legs of the grey trousers had been shortened by much creasing and bagging at the knees, and revealed the rough grey stockings which terminated in unpolished lace-up boots; the waistcoat, loose and baggy, was crossed by a steel watch-chain, bought in youth, a great bargain, at some forgotten statute-hiring fair. A much frayed collar, dirty and crumpled by its two days' wearing, and at least a size too small for the neckband of the coarse shirt on which it had with difficulty been fastened, formed a striking contrast to the gaudy necktie of blue satin, which was wound about it and had worked itself out of place until its knot lay beneath the wearer's left ear. The necktie, like the watch-chain, was the result of a visit to some fair or other; it expressed Perris almost as eloquently as the useless switch of ashplant which he carried aimlessly in his great raw hand—a switch that was of no use for anything in a pedestrian's hand but to snick off the heads of the flowers and weeds by the wayside.
Perris was the only person who left the train; a solitary porter was the only person who emerged from the station buildings to greet and speed it. The train went on slowly, and Pen-is made for the exit at the end of the platform with equal leisureliness. He found and gave up his ticket, and went out on the high-road. Opposite the station stood a wayside inn, meagre and poor of aspect, but dignified with the title of Railway Hotel; Perris, having moved a few yards in the homeward direction, paused and looked at its open door uncertainly. His feet began to shuffle towards it; eventually he crossed the road with shambling gait and bent head.
"I may as well take an odd glass," he muttered. "There's nowt 'twixt here and our house, and it's a good four mile."
The parlour into which he turned on entering the inn was close and heavy with the smell of rank tobacco and stale beer. Sawdust, strewn about three days before, and now littered and foul with the accumulations brought in from the road outside, covered the floor; the rough tables of unpolished wood were marked with the rings made by the setting down upon them of overflowing pots and mugs; the walls, originally washed in some indefinite tint of yellow or drab, and now stained and discoloured by damp and neglect, were relieved from sheer bleakness by framed advertisements of ales and spirits, and here and there by a grocer's fly-blown almanack. One side of the room was filled up by a bar, covered over with zinc sheeting, out of which projected three beer-pulls standing up like ninepins; behind it, on shelves ranged against the walls, were displayed a few bottles of spirits, an ancient cigar-box or two, and some rows of cloudy glasses. The whole place was down at heel and disconsolate: Perris, however, noticed nothing of its shabbiness: his eyes were no more offended by the squalor and the untidiness than his nose was vexed by the unpleasant atmosphere. He sat down heavily at the table nearest to the bar, and tapped on its surface with his ash switch.
A man emerged lazily from an inner apartment—a gross-habited, bloated man, about whose thickly-jowled face coarse black hair grew in sparse tufts. The silence with which he advanced to the bar was due to the fact that although the afternoon was merging towards eventide, he still retained the slippers into which he had thrust his feet on rising; it needed no particular observation to see that so far he had performed no ablutions nor made his toilet. His trousers were kept in place by a single suspender; between them and his open waistcoat, almost destitute of buttons and greasy from much spilling of fat meats, large rolls of coarse linen forced themselves and suggested that he considered an allowance of one shirt a week ample for his requirements. He wore neither collar nor necktie: his unbuttoned shirt revealed a thick bull neck, and beneath it a chest covered as with the pelt of an animal.
"Day," said Perris, nodding mechanically. "I'll take a drop of Irish, if you please."
He reached up to the counter and laid a sixpenny-piece on it, and the landlord turned to a bottle behind him and poured some of its muddy-looking contents into a glass.
"Happen you'll take a drop o' summat yourself, like?" suggested Perris generously.
"Well, I'll just take a twopennorth o' gin," replied the landlord, helping himself from another bottle. "Here's my best respects."
"Best respects," murmured Perris. He picked up the penny which the landlord pushed across the counter, and dropped it into his pocket. "Quietish about here, isn't it?" he said.
The landlord leaned across the counter and stroked his sparse beard.
"Aye, there's naught much doing," he said. "This place is over far out o' the village, and them as comes by train doesn't turn in here very oft. It's naught to me—I was only put in to manage it, like: it's a tied house. Which way might you be going?"
"Nay, I come fro' Martinsthorpe yonder," answered Perris, nodding his head towards the south. "Least-ways, fro' Cherry-trees Farm—I been farming there this last two year. I don't oft come this way—it isn't in my direction for anywhere."
"How's things out your way, like?" asked the landlord.
"Middlin', middlin'," answered Perris, tapping his switch on the floor. "There's naught much to be made at it. It's naught but scrattin' a livin' out o' t' land."
"Why, it's summat to do that," observed the landlord. "There's some as can't scrat that much. And there's some as can. I'll lay yon neighbour o' yours at Martinsthorpe Limepits scrats more nor a livin'."
"Mestur Taffendale?" said Perris, looking up. "Ah, yes, but he were one o' them 'at's born wi' silver spoons i' their mouths, accordin' to what I understand. Yes, I understand that he's part brass, has Mestur Taffendale."
The landlord held out his hand for Perris's glass and replenished it and his own.
"Aye, he has so!" he observed. "And them that has aught, always gets more to put to it. I'll lay Taffendale could buy up all t' farmers i' Martinsthorpe."
Perris sipped his whisky and laughed feebly and foolishly.
"I'll lay he could buy me up!" he said. "It's our rent-day next week, and I'm sure a body's hard put to it to raise t' rent nowadays. There'll have to be some reductions or abatements, or summat, or else us little farmers 'll be sore tried."
The landlord made no reply to these remarks. He glanced the caller up and down, and drew his own conclusions. And Perris presently drank off his whisky, and rising to his feet looked indefinitely about him.
"Well, I must be off," he said. "It's four mile to my place. I think I'll take a sup o' whisky in a bottle, like, as there's no callin' place on t' way."
"Shillingsworth?" asked the landlord.
"Aye, shillingsworth or eighteenpennorth, it makes no difference," replied Perris, fumbling in his pocket and producing a florin. "Here, there's two shilling—make it eighteenpennorth, and we'll have another glass out o' t' change. And there's another penny, and I'll have a twopenny smoke."
With a rank cigar between his teeth, and a small bottle of bad whisky in the tail of his coat, Perris set out homeward along the highway. He had pushed his last coin across the zinc-covered counter, and his purse and pockets were now empty, yet he laughed as he shambled on beneath the wayside trees and the high hedgerows, carelessly swishing at weed or flower with his ashplant. But when he had gone a mile he paused, and leaning over a gate he drew out and took a long pull at his bottle and shook his head.
"I mun tell Rhoda how things is," he muttered. "She's a sharp un, is Rhoda; she'll happen be able to make out a bit. She might be for sellin' t' cows, and very like she's gotten a bit put away out o' them cocks and hens—women contrives to save a shillin' or two here and there where us men can't. Aye, I mun hev' a word or two wi' Rhoda."
Rhoda was alone when Perris came slowly in at the side gate and shambled along the cobble-paved path which lay between the fold and the house. He had drunk all his whisky and had thrown away the bottle, but the stump of his twopenny cigar still remained between his teeth, and he smiled weakly around it as he turned the door.
"I've corned, ye see, my lass," he said, dropping into the nearest chair. "Aye, and I didn't aim at gettin' back till to-morrow, but there were naught no more to do over yonder, so I thought I might as well be steppin', like. I could do wi' a bit o' supper, Rhoda, my lass."
Rhoda, who had got rid of Pippany, and having just seen Tibby Graddige depart, was trying to reduce the untidy house-place to something like order, turned from the hearth, looking at her husband with anything but a friendly glance. She instinctively compared his careless and forlorn appearance, his weak and fatuous face, with the vastly different impression which Mark Taffendale had left upon her, and she was suddenly conscious of an intense dislike, a fierce loathing of something which was not exactly Abel Perris, but with which he was somehow inextricably mixed up. Her glance lighted on the bright blue satin necktie, and she felt an almost insane impulse to snatch it from Perris's long, thin neck and stamp on it.
"How do you expect me to have any supper ready, or likely to be ready, when I didn't know you were coming?" she exclaimed. "You should come home when you say you're coming—there isn't so much as even a bone in the larder—yon there Pippany finished up what there was for his supper."
Perris, who was making vain attempts to relight the sucked and soddened stump of his cigar, looked up to where the shrunk shank of what had been a ham dangled from the rafters. There was little flesh left on it, but from the adjacent hooks hung a respectable piece of a flitch of bacon.
"Ye could fry a bit o' that bacon, my lass," he suggested. "And happen a egg or two wi' it."
"I can't spare any eggs," said Rhoda. "I want all the eggs I have for market. And if you must have some tea, you'd better go and fill that kettle. I wish you'd stopped away till to-morrow."
Perris took the kettle out to the pump, filled it, came back and placed it on the fire, and having reseated himself again tried to induce the cigar to burn.
"I didn't see no use i' stoppin' away when I'd done mi business," he remarked suddenly. "When business is done, it is done, and so there's an end on 't."
"And I hope you did whatever it was you set off to do," said Rhoda, who, mounted on a chair, was cutting slices off the flitch of bacon and tossing them into the frying-pan which she had placed on top of the oven. "And if it's aught to do with money I hope you've brought some home, for if ever there was a place where it was wanted, this is it! There was Mr. Taffendale here this afternoon, and I'm sure I was fair ashamed that he should see such a starved looking hole!"
Perris looked up with a faint gleam in his pale grey eyes.
"What might Mestur Taffendale be wantin' on my premises?" he asked.
"Your premises? Lord, you talk as if the place was a castle or a hall!" exclaimed Rhoda. "What did he want? Why, yon fool of a Pippany Webster pulled that old clover stack over on himself, and Mr. Taffendale happened to be passing, and helped Tibby Graddige to carry him in here—he'd have been suffocated if it hadn't been for Mr. Taffendale."
Perris slowly rose, and going to the door craned his long neck in the direction of the orchard.
"Ah, I see t' clover stack's down," he said, coming back. "Did he bre'k any bones, Pippany?"
"No, he didn't break any bones, nor his neck neither," replied Rhoda. "A good job if he had—idle good-for-naught! He'd been down at the Dancing Bear all the afternoon. It's worse nor a puzzle to me that you keep such a shiftless gawpy about the place. Why don't you go and clean yourself?" she suddenly burst out, turning upon him from the fire, where she was endeavouring to accommodate both kettle and frying-pan. "You look as if you'd never been washed since you went out of that door. And for goodness' sake take that necktie off—you look like one of those country joskins that's used to naught decent."
"Mi Aunt Maria, over yonder, thought it were a very fine tie," said Perris, unconsciously fingering the adornment. "She remarked that it were, as soon as ever she set eyes on it."
"Then your Aunt Maria's a fool!" remarked Rhoda. "Go and wash yourself, do!"
Perris went into a scullery beyond the house-place; when he returned, the dirty, crumpled collar and the blue necktie had disappeared, and his face shone with brown soap, and his neutral-tinted, damp hair was smoothly plastered over his forehead. He hung up his coat on a peg that projected from the end of the tall dresser, and sat down in his shirt-sleeves. Rhoda had cleared a place for him at the deal table, and had set out a cup and saucer, a plate, and bread on the hare board. While the bacon frizzled in the pan she folded the damp clothes which lay piled about, sorting them into heaps against the morrow's ironing.
"And what did you go away for?" she asked suddenly, glaring at Perris, who sat awaiting his supper, with his hands folded under his baggy waistcoat.
"I weern't talk no business till I've had mi supper," he answered. "I've had neither bite nor sup since I left yon place, and I'm none goin' to talk business on an empty belly."
Rhoda gave him another swift glance.
"You mayn't have bitten, but you'll none make me believe you haven't supped," she retorted. "You were stinking of spirits when you came in."
"That's neither here nor there," said Perris. "I might have taken an odd glass or two on t' way—all travellers does that. But I want summat to eat, and I'll none talk till I've had it."
Rhoda gave no further attention to him. When the bacon was cooked she set it before him, made him a pot of tea, and went on with her work. In the silence that ensued she was increasingly conscious of a growing dislike to her husband's presence; it seemed to her that the mere fact of his being there was setting up in her some sort of nausea which she could not explain. And once more she thought of Mark Taffendale, of his good clothes, his fine linen, his suggestion of power and prosperity and money, and a certain uneasiness grew and stirred to increasing activity within her.
