F. Tennyson Jesse - Secret Bread

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SECRET BREAD

BY

F. TENNYSON JESSE

Author Of "The Milky Way,"
"Beggars On Horseback," Etc.

"_Bread eaten in secret_..."

New York
George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1917,
By George H. Doran Company

Printed In The United States Of America

TO

EUSTACE TENNYSON D'EYNCOURT JESSE
MY FATHER AND FRIEND

CONTENTS

BOOK I--SOWING

Prologue

CHAPTER

I High Adventures in a Farmyard
II The Mill
III The Kitchen
IV Pagan Pastoral
V Head of the House
VI Reactions
VII The Chapel
VIII Seed-Time
IX Fresh Pasture
X Hilaria
XI The Place on the Moor
XII Some Ambitions and an Announcement
XIII The Wrestling
XIV The Wind upon the Grass-Field

BOOK II--GROWTH

CHAPTER

I A Family Album
II What Men Live By
III First Furrow
IV The Shadow at the Window
V Lull Before Storm
VI The Bush-Beating
VII The Heart of the Cyclone
VIII New Horizons
IX Hidden Springs
X Blind Steps
XI Glamour
XII Sheaves
XIII The Stile
XIV A Letter
XV Blown Husks
XVI The Grey World
XVII The Cliff and the Valley
XVIII The Immortal Moment

BOOK III--RIPENING

CHAPTER

I Under-Currents
II The Passage
III Phoebe Pays Toll
IV The Discovering of Nicky
V Centripetal Movement
VI The Nation and Nicky
VII Paradise Cottage Again
VIII What Nicky Did
IX Judith's White Night
X Lone Trails
XI Ways of Love
XII Georgie

BOOK IV--THE SHADOW OF THE SCYTHE

CHAPTER

I Questions of Vision
II Autumn
III Bodies of Fire
IV The New Judith
V The Parson's Philosophy
VI "Something Must Come to All of Us..."
VII Earth

BOOK V--HARVEST

CHAPTER

I The Four-Acre
II Archelaus, Nicky, Jim
III The Letters
IV Hester
V Reaping
VI Threshing
VII Garnered Grain

Epilogue

BOOK I

SOWING

SECRET BREAD

PROLOGUE

There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed,
awaiting his marriage and his death--a silence so hushed that it was not
broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the
casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the
hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were
dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick
man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined
hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All
life, both without and within, was dying life--waning day at the
casement, failing fire on the hearth, and in the shadowy bed a man's
soul waiting to take wing.

Ruan lay with closed eyes, so still he might have been unconscious, but
in reality he was gathering together all of force and energy he
possessed; every sense was concentrated on the bare act of keeping
alive--keenly and clearly alive--until the wished-for thing was
accomplished. Then, the effort over, the stored-up vitality spent, he
hoped to go out swiftly, no dallying on the dim borderland. As he lay
his closed lids seemed like dull red films against the firelight, and
across them floated a series of memory-pictures, which he noted
curiously, even with a dry amusement.

He saw himself, as a big-boned surly lad, new to his heritage; then as a
middle-aged man, living in a morose isolation save for Annie and the
children. Little half-forgotten incidents drifted past him, and always,
with the strange detachment of the dying, he saw himself from the
outside, as it were, even as he saw Annie and the children. Finally, his
travelling mind brought him to the present still hour of dusk, so soon
to deepen into night. Thinking of that which was to come, his mouth
twitched to a smile; he flattered himself he had kept his neighbours
well scandalised during his life; now, from his death-bed, he would send
widening circles of amazement over the whole county, and set tongues
clacking and heads wagging at the last freak of that old reprobate, Ruan
of Cloom. He lay there, grimly smiling, the pleasure of the successful
creator in his mind as he thought over the last situation of his making.
The smouldering patches of red on the crumbling logs shrank smaller and
smaller as the close-set little points of fire died out, and the
feathery ash-flakes fell in a soft pile on the hearthstone.

Opening his eyes, Ruan turned his head a little on the pillow, so that
he could watch the changing square of sky. A ragged curtain of cloud,
blurred and wet-looking at the edge, hung almost to the hill-top, but
between ran a streak of molten pallor, and against it the hedge of
wilted thorns that crowned the hill stood out black and contorted. One
great ploughed field stretched from the garden to the hill-crest; in the
middle of its curve a tall grey granite monolith reared up, dark where
its top came against the sky, but at its base hardly distinguishable
from the bare earth around, which was charmed by the hour to a warm
purple hue; when Ruan's eyes left the gleam in the sky they could find
out the subdued green of the nearer hedge-row. For the last time, he
told himself; then, as the gleam faded from the sky and was gone, he
swallowed hard upon the knowledge that never again, for him, would the
daylight live behind the clouds. He rubbed his finger up and down the
sheet, that he might still feel a tangible sensation at will; then,
lifting his bare forearm, he looked closely and curiously at it, noting
the way the brown hairs lay across the back, and the finer texture of
skin down the inside of elbow and wrist. He, his living self, was in
that arm--he could still make the fingers contract and straighten, could
still pinch the flesh gently till it whitened--could still call it part
of himself. He was not thirsty, but he laboriously lifted the glass of
water at his side and drank, because the fancy took him to feel one of
the accustomed old sensations, the commonplaces of his every-day life,
now that his body would so soon be beyond his power. As the slow fingers
pushed the glass on to the little table again, the click of a gate
sounded sharply, followed by the noise of footsteps on a paved path. The
smile flickered back to Ruan's lips, and he settled himself to enjoy his
last little comedy.

Up bare stairs came the footsteps, then the room door opened with a
protest of rusty hinges, and Ruan saw the Parson standing on the
threshold. A woman's face, pale and strained, swam out of the darkness
behind, and to Ruan, materialist though he was, came the thought that
the pale blur looked like the face of someone drowning in a black flood.
He put the idea aside and nodded slightly at the woman. She gave a gasp
of relief, and, pushing by the priest, walked over to the bed.

"So you've not cheated me, James!" she said. "I made sure to find 'ee
dead when I brought Passon--I thought you'd ha' done it to spite me."

"Dear woman," answered the Squire gently, "it's for my own pleasure I'm
wedding you, and not to make an honest woman of you. I've a fancy to
have the old place carried on by a child who's got a right to my name,
that's all."

"An' our first-born, Arch'laus, can go begging all's days, s'pose? An'
t'other lads and Vassie can go starve wi' en?"

Ruan's face changed, grew darker, and he spoke harshly.

"They were the children of our passion--true love-children. They remind
me of the days when I was a fool, and I'll leave them only my folly. But
the child that's coming--he'll be blessed by the law and the
Church--quite a gentleman of quality, Annie; far above the likes of you.
He'll live to breed hatred and malice in the pack of ye, and every hand
of his own flesh and blood'll be against him.... Parson, do your duty,
and tie the holy knot--small harm in it now nothing can hold me long."

The Parson came forward without a word. He was a clever man, whose
knowledge of souls was deep, if not wide, and he refrained from asking
whether repentance urged this tardy compliance with the law of his
religion; such a question could only have provoked a sneer from the old
cynic in the bed.

Annie groped along the mantelshelf until her fingers met a tallow rush,
which she lit by holding it to the fire, and in the wan flare of yellow
her weary figure showed that she was very near to her confinement. She
turned to the bed and set the candle on the table, meeting the Squire's
quizzical glance with eyes lit only by the tiny reflections of the
candle flame--expressionless eyes, the blue of them faded and the life
dulled. Then she went out of the room, and the stairs creaked beneath
her descending feet; the clamour of her voice came to the two men above
as she called through open doors:

"Katie! Kat-_ie!_ Passon's here, and you'm to fetch Philip and come up
to wance."

More feet sounded on the stairs, clattering hobnails among them, and
Annie returned, accompanied by Katie Cotton, the dairymaid, and her
sweetheart, Philip Jacka. Philip was a lithe, restless youth, with curly
hair that caught the light and bright, glinting eyes. He was far
better-looking than his girl, and far more at his ease; sturdy,
high-bosomed Katie was guilty of an occasional sniff of feminine
sympathy; Philip looked on with the aloof superiority of the male.

The service began, and Annie listened to the words she had longed to
hear for twelve years past, the words that would make her mistress of
Cloom Manor. Morality meant as little to her as to any of the
half-savage folk of the remote West in the middle of the nineteenth
century, when the post of squire's mistress was merely considered less
fortunate than that of squire's wife; but socially Annie was
gaining--for she would become an eligible widow-woman.

With fumbling hands Ruan slipped his signet-ring on the ugly, work-worn
finger of the woman who was at last his wife.

* * * * *

That night Annie gave birth to the latest heir of the house of Ruan, and
in the grey of the dawning, when, with the aid of parson and lawyer, the
Squire had arranged all his temporal affairs in a manner to ensure as
much ill-will as possible in the family he was leaving behind him, he
was gathered to his fathers.

In the big kitchen, where the mice skittered nervously over the last
night's supper-table, and the tall clock chuckled before it struck each
hour, huddled a group of frightened children. The eldest was angry as
well, for, while the younger boys and the little girl were but dimly
aware that all their world was tumbling about their ears, he, with the
precocious knowledge of the ten-year old country lad, knew more nearly
how the crying babe was ousting him from his previous height. Resentful,
sleepy, fearful, and exiled from the rooms of birth and death they
crouched together and watched the paling sky, their own quarrels
forgotten in their common discomfort; and overhead the cries of the
new-born child pierced the air of the new day.

CHAPTER I

HIGH ADVENTURES IN A FARMYARD

A bullet-headed little boy of eight sat astride upon a farmyard gate,
whistling and beating time with a hazel-switch. He had fastened his belt
round the gate-post and was using it as a bridle, his bare knees gripped
the wooden bar under him, and his little brass-tipped heels flashed in
the sun like spurs. It was Saturday morning, which meant no lessons with
Parson Boase at the vicarage, and a fine day in late August, which meant
escape from the roof of Cloom and the tongue and hand of its mistress.
Ishmael Ruan, his head stuffed with the myths and histories with which
the Parson was preparing him for St. Renny Grammar School, felt in the
mood for high adventures, and his surroundings were romantic enough to
stir the blood.

Cloom Manor, a deep-roofed, heavy-mullioned pile of grey granite dating
from the Restoration, presented a long, low front to the moorland, a
front beautified by a pillared porch with the Ruan arms sculptured above
it, and at the back it was built round a square court, from which an
arch, hollowed through the house itself, led into the farmyard. The
windows were low-browed and deep-set, thickly leaded into small squares,
with an occasional pane of bottle glass, which winked like an eye
rounded by amaze. Within, the wide fireplaces and ceilings were enriched
by delicate mouldings, whose once clean-cut outlines were blurred to a
pleasing, uncertain quality by successive coats of whitewash. The room
where Ishmael had been born boasted a domed ceiling, and a band of
moulding half-way up the walls culminated over the bed's head in a
representation of the Crucifixion--the drooping Christ surrounded by a
medley of soldiers and horses, curiously intent dogs and swooning women,
above whose heads the fluttered angels seemed entangled in the host of
pennons flaunting round the cross. Cloom was a house of neglected
glories, of fine things fallen on base uses, like the family itself.
When James Ruan came into his inheritance it was still a gentleman's
estate; when he died it was a mere farm. A distorted habit of mind and
the incredible difficulties of communication in the remote West during
the first half of the nineteenth century had gradually caused James Ruan
to sink his gentlehood in a wilful boorishness that left him a fierce
pride of race and almost feudal powers, but the tastes and habits of his
own labourers. As for the life of his mind, it was concentrated entirely
on money-making; and all that he made he invested, till he became the
most important landowner for miles, and in a district where no farms
were very large his manor lands and cottage property and his nine
hundred pounds or so of income made him a figure not to be ignored.

Nevertheless, for all his prosperity, he was a hard master, paying his
labourers, who were mostly married men with families, the wage of seven
shillings a week, and employing their womenfolk at hoeing or binding for
sixpence a day, while for fewer pence still the little children stumbled
on uncertain legs after the birds which threatened the new-tilled crops.
By such means--common to all his neighbours at a time when cultivation
was slow and such luxuries as meat, white bread, bedding, and coal were
unknown to the poor, and by a shrewdness peculiar to himself--did James
Ruan manage to make his property contribute to his private income, a
condition of affairs by no means inevitable in farming, although at that
time the hated Corn Law, only repealed soon after Ishmael's birth, had
for thirty years been in force for the benefit of landowners. If the
Squire had known the worth of the old family portraits hanging in what
had been the banqueting hall, where apples were now stored, he would
doubtless have sold them, but he had cut himself off from civilised
beings who might have praised them, and he thought the beruffed,
steel-plated men and high-browed, pearl-decked ladies rather a
dry-looking lot, though he never suffered Annie to say a disparaging
word on the subject.

Annie deeply resented this silent superiority of the Squire's, this
shutting off from her of certain fine points in his garbled scheme of
honour, and she chose to regard Ishmael as the embodiment of this habit.
Had she been left with unrestricted powers as to estate and money she
might have classed herself with her youngest-born and grown to grudge
her other children their existence, but as things were Ishmael was as
much in her way as he was in that of Archelaus. She realised she had
been tricked at the last to satisfy a whim of the Squire's--she would
have been far better off under the old will, which left Cloom to her
eldest son after her. A dishonoured name was all she had gained by the
transaction--a hollow reward, since to her equals it made little
difference, and to her superiors none at all, and when she remembered at
how much pains the special licence had been obtained from the commissary
of the Bishop of Exeter, how she had sent for the Parson the moment the
Squire had finally declared his mind made up, and then for Lawyer
Tonkin, only to be excluded from the conference that followed, Annie
felt her resentment surge up. If it had not been for the fact that the
Parson and Tonkin had been appointed guardians to the boy, Ishmael
would, in all probability, never have lived beyond babyhood. A little
neglect would soon have ended the matter, and even if any local magnate
had bestirred himself to make a fuss, no Cornish jury would have
convicted. All this Boase knew, and he managed to make Annie aware of
the fact that he meant his ward to thrive or he would make trouble, and
she was one of those women who tremble before a spiritual pastor and
master. Therefore she comforted herself by the reflection that at least
Cloom would always be her home, and a home of which she meant to be
mistress as long as possible. Under his father's will Ishmael came into
the property at eighteen, an additional grievance to Annie, but she told
herself that at least a boy of that age would not be able to turn her
out--he would still be too afraid both of her and of public opinion. The
hardness and the moral elasticity that go to make up a certain phase of
the Cornish character, made up Annie's, and grew to sway her utterly,
save for gusts of ungovernable emotions and an equally ungovernable
temper. The little Ishmael learned to fear, to evade, and to lie, till
he bade fair to become an infant Machiavelli, and at night his sins--the
tremendous sins of childhood--would weigh upon him so that he broke into
a sweat of terror.

On this August morning he had forgotten his crimes and was burning with
the high adventures of a farmyard. In the blue of the sky fat gold-white
clouds bellied like the sails of enchanted galleons, and the wind
ruffled the cock's bronzed feathers about his scaly legs, blew pearly
partings on the black-furred cat that sunned herself by the wall, and
whirled two gleaming straws, Orthon-wise, about the cobbles. The
triumphant cackling of a hen proclaimed an egg to be as much a miracle
as the other daily one of dawn, and the shrill-voiced crickets kept up a
monotonous and hurried orchestra. A big red cow came across the field
and stood in a line with the gate, her head, with its calm eyes and
gently moving wet nostrils, turned towards Ishmael. She was against the
sun, and at the edges of her the fine outer hairs, gleaming transparent,
made her seem outlined in flame--she was a glorified, a transfigured
cow, a cow for the gods. In a newly-turned field beyond a man and a boy
were planting young broccoli; they worked with the swiftness and
smoothness of a machine, the man making a succession of holes with his
spud as he walked along, the boy dropping in the plants on the instant.
From where Ishmael sat the boy and his basket were hidden behind the
man, and it looked as though wherever that shining spud touched the
earth a green thing sprang up as by magic. Truly, Cloom was a farm in
the grand manner this morning, a farm fit for the slopes of Olympus.
Ishmael flogged his gate and bounced up and down till the latch rattled
in its socket and the wide collar of his little print shirt blew up
under his chin like two cherub wings supporting his glowing face.

A clatter of hoofs made him look around, and a young man rode down the
lane opposite and into the farmyard. He was a splendid young man, and he
sat the big, bare-backed horse as though he were one with it, his
powerful thighs spreading a little as they gripped its glossy sides. His
fair hair curled closely over his head and clung to his forehead in damp
rings, the sweat standing out all over his face made it shine like
metal, and the soaked shirt clung to the big muscles of his body. His
face changed a little as he caught sight of the child on the gate--such
a faint expression, something between sulkiness and resentment, that it
was obviously the result of instinctive habit and not of any particular
emotion of the moment. As he flung himself off the horse a woman emerged
from the courtyard and called out to Ishmael.

"Come and tak' th' arse to meadow for your brother, instead of wasten'
the marnen'. Couldn' 'ee be gleanen' in th' arish? You may be gentry,
but you'll go starve if you do naught but twiddle your thumbs for the
day."

"Lave en be, lave en be, mother," said Archelaus Beggoe impatiently.
"Women's clacken' never mended matters nawthen. It'll be a good day,
sure 'nough, when he goes to school to St. Renny, if it gives we a
little peace about the place. Do 'ee hold tha tongue, and give I a glass
o' cider, for I'm fair sweaten' leaken'."

Mother and son passed through the archway into the courtyard, and
Ishmael, who had been silently buckling on his belt, took hold of the
rope head-stall and led the horse towards the pasture. As he went his
childish mind indulged in a sort of gambling with fate.

"I wonder if my right foot or my left will step into the lane first. If
it's my right I'll have it to mean that I shall be saved...." Here he
paused for a moment, aghast; it was such a tremendous risk to take, such
a staking of his soul. He went forward, measuring the distance with his
eye, and trying to calculate which foot would take that fateful step
from the cobbles on to the lane. He was there, and for one awful moment
it seemed as though it would be his left, but an extra long stride just
met the case.

"It didn't come quite natural that way," he thought, anxiously, "but
p'raps it means I'll be saved by something I do myself. I wish I could
be quite sure. Shall I have it that if I see a crow in the field I shall
be saved?"

The reflection that for a dozen times on entering the pasture he saw no
crow for once that he did made him change to, "Suppose I say if I don't
see a crow I shall be saved?" But that too had its drawback, as if,
after laying a wager in which the odds were so tremendously in his
favour, he did see a crow, there would then be no smoothing away the
fact, as often before, with "Perhaps that doesn't count"--it would be
too obviously a sign from Heaven. He finally changed the wager to, "If I
see birds in the field I'll see Phoebe to-day:" to such considerations
does a man turn after contemplation of his soul. On seeing a couple of
magpies, the white and black of their plumage showing silver and
iridescent green in the sun as they swooped over the field, he took
steps to justify the omen by setting off across the moors in quest of
Phoebe.

CHAPTER II

THE MILL

As Ishmael went along he picked a large bunch of the wayside flowers as
an offering to Phoebe--purple knapweed and betony, the plumy dead-pink
heads of hemp-agrimony, and tufts of strong yellow fleabane, all
squeezed together in his hot little hand. The air seemed alive with
butterflies and moths, white and brown and red, and clouds of the "blue
skippers" that look like periwinkles blown to life. A bee shot past him
so quickly that the thrum of it sounded short as a twanged string, and
the next moment a late foxglove spire, naked save for its topmost bell,
quivered beneath the onslaught of the arched brown and yellow body. The
heat haze shimmered on the distant horizon like an insect's wing, but
was tempered on the moorland height by the capricious wind, and Ishmael
kept doggedly on.

He was a wiry little boy, thin and brown, with dark hair that grew in a
point on the nape of his neck, and hazel eyes set rather deeply under
straight, sulky-looking brows. The lower part of his face was small and
pointed for the breadth across forehead and cheek bones, and, with his
outstanding ears, combined to give him something the look of a piskie's
changeling. Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away,
and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved, if at all, in the
malleable years between fifteen and twenty was as yet far ahead.
Nevertheless, Parson Boase was not wrong in scenting the idealist in
Ishmael, and he wondered how far the determined but excitable child,
with the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a
boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether,
after all, he might not so build up resisting power as to make a fair
thing of his life. A no more distant future than the next hour held
Ishmael's mind at the moment, and attracted by a strong smell of
peppermint from the marsh, the child turned that way, to add the pale
purple blossoms to his fast-wilting bunch.

A man in a black cassock, looped up for convenience in walking by a
shabby cincture, was wandering among the brambles and gorse bushes,
peering short-sightedly here and there, and as Ishmael appeared the
man's hand closed suddenly over some object on a leaf. Ishmael had
hardly recognised the Parson before he himself was seen.

"Come and look at what I've got here," shouted Boase, straightening his
long back and holding his curved-out hands aloft. Ishmael ran towards
him, the tussocks, dry from long drought, swaying and sagging beneath
him. As he drew near he caught a whirring sound, so strong as to seem
metallic, and saw a big green and yellow dragon-fly fighting in the
Parson's hands. Boase took hold of it carefully but firmly by the wings,
and the creature stared angrily at Ishmael with its huge glassy green
eyes, opening its oddly-fleshy mouth and wagging its fawn-coloured lips
like an evil infant cockatrice.

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