“To America, I know, I know, so you can stop making your bullock’s eyes and get me something to eat. What’s been going on here?”
She gave him an outline of affairs. He looked at her sternly when he asked her about his sweetheart.
“Has Rosa Beauchamp been along here?”
“No,” said Phemy, and he was silent. She was surprised at the question. The Beauchamps were such respectable high-up people that to Phemy’s simple mind they could not possibly favour an alliance, now, with a man that had been in prison: it was absurd, but she did not say so to him. And she was bewildered to find that her conviction was wrong, for Rosa came along later in the day and everything between her master and his sweetheart was just as before; Phemy had not divined so much love and forgiveness in high-up people.
It was the same with everything else. The old harsh rushing life was resumed, Weetman turned to his farm with an accelerated vigour to make up for the lost time and the girl’s golden week or two of ease became an unforgotten dream. The pails, the guns, the harness, crept back into the kitchen. Spiders, cockroaches, and mice were more noticeable than ever before, and Weetman himself seemed embittered, harsher. Time alone could never still him, there was a force in his frame, a buzzing in his blood. But there was a difference between them now; Phemy no longer feared him. She obeyed him, it is true, with eagerness, she worked in the house like a woman and in the fields like a man. They ate their meals together, and from this dissonant comradeship the girl in a dumb kind of way began to love him.
One April evening on coming in from the fields he found her lying on the couch beneath the window, dead plumb fast asleep, with no meal ready at all. He flung his bundle of harness to the flags and bawled angrily to her. To his surprise she did not stir. He was somewhat abashed, he stepped over to look at her. She was lying on her side. There was a large rent in her bodice between sleeve and shoulder; her flesh looked soft and agreeable to him. Her shoes had slipped off to the floor; her lips were folded in a sleepy pout.
“Why, she’s quite a pretty cob,” he murmured. “She’s all right, she’s just tired, the Lord above knows what for.”
But he could not rouse the sluggard. Then a fancy moved him to lift her in his arms; he carried her from the kitchen and staggering up the stairs laid the sleeping girl on her own bed. He then went downstairs and ate pie and drank beer in the candle-light, guffawing once or twice, “A pretty cob, rather.” As he stretched himself after the meal a new notion amused him: he put a plateful of food upon a tray together with a mug of beer and the candle. Doffing his heavy boots and leggings he carried the tray into Phemy’s room. And he stopped there.
III
The new circumstance that thus slipped into her life did not effect any noticeable alteration of its general contour and progress, Weetman did not change towards her. Phemy accepted his mastership not alone because she loved him but because her powerful sense of loyalty covered all the possible opprobrium. She did not seem to mind his continued relations with Rosa.