"Did Mrs. Kingwell's cow come to 'Turk'?" asked Adam.
"She came," answered his brother.
Then the men went out to their evening labours.
No great prosperity marked the farm, but Adam was not ambitious and his future hopes only extended to his brother. He desired to see Samuel safely through life and never at the mercy of unfriendly or indifferent hands. His own needs were of the simplest. He had abandoned any wish to wed, or raise up a family. He was content and his life went uneventfully forward, brightened by various friendships. He was well liked but not well known. To more full-blooded and energetic men he seemed shadowy; yet none ever heard him say a foolish thing. His neighbours knew him for a capable farmer, but they wondered why he stopped on year after year at a place which offered such small opportunity for enterprise as Shipley. Others, however, explained this seclusion as accepted on Samuel's account. Samuel was happier in loneliness.
CHAPTER IV
ON SHIPLEY BRIDGE
The subconscious work of grievances and the secret attrition of their fret are dangerous. Margery Bullstone harboured such an ill, and it had wrought inevitable modification of character, for sense of personal wrong, if indulged, must mar quality. She was barely conscious of this buffet, and when she thought upon her life, assured herself that its compensations and disillusions were fairly balanced, for she loved her husband and tried to keep his fine characteristics uppermost in her mind; but she liked him less than of old and her grievance appeared in this: that he hindered her and came between her and many innocent pleasures which would have made her life fuller and happier. She did not understand Jacob save in flashes, and was dimly aware of perils in his nature and chambers, hidden in his heart, which held danger. He told her often that he held no secrets from her, and perhaps he believed it. Regarding temporal matters—his success or failure, his money, his possessions, his plans—it was emphatically true. He liked her to know how he stood, to share his hopes, to sympathise in his disappointments. But this was not all, and Margery knew that in the far deeper secrets of character and conviction, she had not entered the depth of her husband's mind and never would. He was a warm-hearted man and yet, under the warmth, flowed currents hidden from every eye. Sometimes, more by accident than intention, she had dipped for a moment into these currents, been chilled and found herself glad to ascend into the temperate region of their usual communion. She knew he was jealous, yet he seldom said a word to prove it. But she understood him well enough to read his silences and they were unspeakably pregnant. They would sometimes last for several days and frighten her. She had known bitter weeks when Jacob addressed no living thing but the dogs. Then the darkness would drift off and his steadfast and not uncheerful self shine out. Sometimes she was able to discover a reason for such eclipse; sometimes, puzzle as she might, no cause occurred to her mind. If she approached him, expressed grief for his tribulation and prayed to share it, he would put her off. Then she felt the cause, if not the fault, was in herself.
"If you don't know the reason, then no doubt there's no reason," was a cryptic answer he often made, and it left her dumb. She was conscious of a strange sense that somebody beside her husband dwelt unseen at Red House—somebody who watched and noted, but made no comment. The unseen expressed neither pleasure nor displeasure, but concentrated upon her and chronicled her actions and opinions. Jacob seemed to be two personalities, the one obvious, trustworthy, affectionate, the other inscrutable, attentive, vigilant. If one Jacob praised her and seemed to come closer, so that she felt happy, then arose the consciousness of the other Jacob, concerning whom she knew so little, and whose attitude to herself she could not feel was friendly. Had she been able to put a name to it, or analyse her husband's second self, she might have felt easier in some directions; but as yet she had failed to understand. Nor could anybody help her to do so. Perhaps Judith Huxam came nearest to explaining the obscurity. But she refused to give it a name, though her suspicion found vent in cautions to Margery.
Jacob was not secretive in many things, and a habit of his, quite familiar to his wife, might have helped towards elucidation had she been of a synthetic bent. He would sometimes himself harbour grievances for days and then plump out with them. They were generally of a trivial appearance in Margery's eyes, and she often wondered at the difference between the things that annoyed a woman and perturbed a man. He was obstinate and had his own way as a matter of course. She never opposed him, and where alternatives of action presented themselves, Jacob decided; but some things happened that she felt were a permanent bruise to him. They grew out of life and struck the man in his tenderest part. None was responsible for them and they rose from material as subtle and intangible as heredity and character. Margery granted that they were very real facts and would have altered them for her husband's sake had it been possible to do so; but to alter them was not possible, for they rooted in the souls of the four children now swiftly growing up at Red House.
Jacob was a good father, and coming to paternity when already advanced in manhood, he had devoted more personal time and attention to his children, their nurture and formation of character, than a younger parent might have done. From the first Margery perceived that the upbringing of her brood would lie in the will of their father; and since she had cared for him better and glorified him mere during the years when they were born than now, she had not differed from his opinions, even when sometimes prompted from her parents' home to do so. But chance, as though conscious of Jacob's jealousy and his overmastering desire to dominate by love of his children and his wife, had flouted this passion and denied him love.