Sometimes she would have anxious moments, a strange sense of fear. "I'm a bad woman," she would[Pg 350] repeat to herself, and she would dread the thought of her sister Tilly. But the terrors did not last, they were driven away by the remembrance of what her life had been before she met Joeits drabness, its aimless toil, its lassitude, its humiliations. She would have been a fool to spurn her golden chance when it came. It had been her only chance; after all it was not as if she ever could have married. She had had to choose between the life she had led up to that August evening and the life she was leading now, and she could not regret her choice.
When she had concluded, Edith questioned her, if she had not, at the time of giving her the medicine, warned her of its dangerous strength, and strictly enjoined her not to administer more than ten drops; but Mary, prepared for such questions, positively denied the fact, alleging, that Edith had merely desired her, when she saw the child looking pale, to give it the contents of the phial."Realf of Grandturzel has got his bit all safe.""Will I help, man! Aye, that I will, with a good stomachWhy, if they shut up a dog that I cared for within those four stone walls, I would help him out!But that monk is a holy manand they think to frighten him as they thought to frighten me. Tom," added Turner, leaning through the aperture, and laying his hand upon the young man's shoulder, "I have never held up my head like a man since that night. To be set upon like a fox! To be dragged and hauled, and thrown into a prisonTom! (grasping the arm of the other with a force that made him shrink) when I think of this in the day when I am at work, I throw down the hammer, for my blood boils, and I could not strike a sure blow for hours after, if a king's ransom was offered me. But, by St. Nicholas! 'tis little work that Wat Turner has done ever sinceall has gone wrongbut I shall soon leave the parish altogetherand then, may be, things will go on better. For, here, if a man looks at me, it seems as if he would say, 'Turner, you have been in jail!' Tom Merritt, never boast or brag of anything!"
"Ah, Tom Merritt!" said the smith, raising his head and recognizing, in the dusk, a stout, active, young man, a mason, who resided at Winchcombe."Nonsense, Ben. You mustn't say that. After all[Pg 302] there's nothing extraordinary about a mortgageuncle had one for years on a bit of his farm at Rowfant. Besides, think of all you've got left."The member, the colonel of the volunteers, and others present, pointed out to Reuben afterwards that the situation was military, not agricultural; but it was characteristic of him to see all situations from the agricultural point of view. His old ideas of an agricultural combine, which had fallen miserably to pieces in '65, now revived in all their strength. He saw East Sussex as a country of organised corn-growing, Odiam at the head. His rather eclectic newspaper reading had impressed him with the idea that England was on the verge of war with one or two European Powers, notably the French, whose ribald gloatings over British disasters stirred up all the fury of the man who had been born within range of the Napoleonic wars and bred on tales of Boney and his atrocities."Look'ee, mother, I've something to tell you. I've a plan in my head, and it'll justabout mean being shut of[Pg 30] a lot of things besides chocolate. I know f?ather dudn't care much about the farm, about m?aking it grow and buying more land, and all that. But I do. I mean to buy the whole of Boarzell."
