"Ah, you never saw my father," he said.
"I'd like to see him now," she answered angrily, but she wasted no energy on regrets. She realized that the acquiring of a profession would entail a loss of time to which neither was willing to submit, and then one night, as she sat over the fire after the old ladies had gone to bed, she remembered an incident which had impressed her girlhood. Driving through a little village once, she had seen, standing back from the road and fronted by a cobbled courtyard, a white-washed inn. There were bay-trees in tubs before the door, and at the side of the house a garden with clipped yews, but, better than all, just beyond the doorway there had stood a man and a woman with a child on her arm. Something in their attitude, something simple and content and elemental, had made the picture unforgettable. Why should not she and Jim have a little inn like that? He had capital, and they both had strength, and theirs should be a model public-house, with good entertainment for man and beast, and a welcome for every traveller. Rutherford met the proposal doubtfully. "Well, I don't know," he said. "I don't know that it's wise." But he went no further, and indeed her enthusiasm must have silenced him. Their inn was to be in some beautiful part of the country where people would like to stay, and it was not to be primarily a place for the sale of liquor, and people should not be encouraged to spend their evenings in hanging over the bar.
"It seems to me," he said drily, "that you'd better sell ginger beer."
"We shall, of course. But it's the visitors I'm counting on, Jim. We'll show that England can produce a good, cheap inn."
They found the place they wanted among the hills and trout streams, and they had not long been there when Clara learnt that her husband drank, not violently, but with incipient ruin.
"I shouldn't do it," he protested, "if I wasn't so near the stuff."
"Why didn't you tell me?" she cried.
"I tried, but I daren't. You wouldn't have married me."
"Yes I should; but I'd never have bought the inn. It must be put up for sale. Write to the agents to-night and swear, if you love me, you'll never touch anything again. We'll get a man to attend to the bar and you'd better see to the garden; it wants digging all over."
This was how she had met her tragedy, but at that time she had good hope of frustrating it. Her husband was rarely out of her sight, and she kept him at hard manual labour without any attempt at concealing her design. And they were both happy. He learnt to trust her, and when desire came heavily upon him he went to her and asked, without shame, for help. That was their safeguard; but it was removed on the night when Alexander was born. In a pitiable state of anxiety Rutherford found his way into the bar and began to drink. His fear fell from him after a glass or two, and, to encourage its departure, he drank on. The barman, who had been drawn to Clara's service from the plough, and was himself a father, tried to persuade him to go away.