“That’s well, then,” said the other, in his big voice, as his hands tightened. “We’ve met again. I’m glad I didn’t break your neck, for your heart’s left to break, and by the living God I’ll break it! I can wait. I’m older than you, but young enough. Remember, I’ll run you down sooner or later. I’ve hunted most things, and men aren’t the cleverest beasts and you’re not the cleverest man I’ve bested in my time. You beat me—I know it—but it would have been better for you if you hadn’t been born. There’s the truth for your country ears, you damned young hound. I’ll fight fair and I’ll fight to the finish. Sport—that’s what it is. The birds and the beasts and the fish have their close time; but there won’t be any close time for you, not while I can think and work against you. So now you know. D’ you hear me?”
“Ess,” said Will, meeting the other’s fierce eyes; “I hear ’e, an’ so might the dead in Chagford buryin’-ground. You hollers loud enough. I ban’t ’feared of nothing a hatch-mouthed,[7] crooked-minded man, same as you be, can do. An’ if I’m a hound, you ’m a dirty red fox, an’ everybody knaws who comes out top when they meet. Steal my gal, would ’e? Gaw your ways, an’ mend your ways, an’ swallow your bile. I doan’t care a flicker o’ wildfire for ’e!”
John Grimbal heard only the beginning of this speech, for he turned his back on Will and rode away while the younger man still shouted after him. Blanchard was in a rage, and would have liked to make a third trial of strength with his enemy on the spot, but the rider vanished and Will quickly cooled as he went down the hill to Chagford. The remembrance of this interview, for all his scorn, chilled him when he reflected on John Grimbal’s threats. He feared nothing indeed, but here was another cloud, and a black one, blown violently back from below the horizon of his life to the very zenith. Malignity of this type was strange to him and differed widely from the petty bickerings, jealousies, and strifes of ordinary country existence. It discouraged him to feel in his hour of universal contentment that a strong, bitter foe would now be at hand, forever watching to bring ruin on him at the first opportunity. As he walked home he asked himself how he should feel and act in Grimbal’s shoes, and tried to look at the position from his enemy’s standpoint. Of course he told himself that he would have accepted defeat with right philosophy. It was a just fix for a man to find himself in,—a proper punishment for a mean act. Arguing thus, from the right side of the hedge, he forgot what wiser men have forgotten, that there is no disputing about man’s affection for woman, there is no transposition of the standpoint, there is no looking through another’s eyes upon a girl. Many have loved, and many have rendered vivid pictures of the emotion, touched with insight of genius and universally proclaimed true to nature from general experience; but no two men love alike, and neither you nor another man can better say how a third feels under the yoke, estimate his thrall, or foretell his actions, despite your own experience, than can one sufferer from gout, though it has torn him half a hundred times, gauge the qualities of another’s torment under the same disease. Will could not guess what John Grimbal had felt for Phoebe; he knew nothing of the other’s disposition, because, young in knowledge of the world and a boy still, despite his age, it was beyond him to appreciate even remotely the mind of a man fifteen years older than himself—a man of very different temper and one whose life had been such as we have just described.
Home went Blanchard, and kept his meeting secret. His mother, returning long before him, was already in some argument with Chris concerning the disposal of certain articles of furniture, the pristine splendour of which had been worn off at Newtake five-and-thirty years before. At Farmer Ford’s death these things passed to his son, and he, not requiring them, had made them over to Damaris.
“They was flam-new when first my parents married and comed to Newtake, many a year ago; and now I want ’em to go back theer. They’ve seed three generations, an’ I’d be well pleased that a fourth should kick its li’l boots out against them. They ’m stout enough yet. Sweat went to building of chairs an’ tables in them days; now it’s steam. Besides, ’twill save Will’s pocket a tidy bit.”
Chris, however, though she could deny Will nothing, was divided here, for why should her mother part from those trifles which contributed to the ample adornment of her cottage? Certain stout horsehair furniture and a piano were the objects Mrs. Blanchard chiefly desired should go to Newtake. The piano, indeed, had never been there before. It was a present to Damaris from her dead husband, who purchased the instrument second-hand for five pounds at a farm sale. Its wiry jingle spoke of evolution from harpsichord or spinet to the modern instrument; its yellow keys, from which the ivory in some cases was missing, and its high back, stained silk front, and fretted veneer indicated age; while above the keyboard a label, now growing indistinct, set forth that one “William Harper, of Red Lion Street, Maker of piano-fortes to his late Majesty” was responsible for the instrument very early in the century.
Now Will joined the discussion, but his mother would take no denial.
“These chairs and sofa be yours, and the piano’s my present to Phoebe. She’ll play to you of a Sunday afternoon belike.”
“An’ it’s here she’ll do it; for my Sundays’ll be spent along with you, of coourse, ’cept when you comes up to my farm to spend ’em. That’s what I hope’ll fall out; an’ I want to see Miller theer, tu, after he’ve found I’m right and he’m wrong.”
But the event proved that, even in his new capacity as a man of money and a landholder, Will was not to win much ground with Mr. Lyddon. Two circumstances contributed to the continued conflict, and just as Phoebe was congratulating herself and others upon the increasing amity between her father and her husband matters fell out which caused the miller to give up all hope of Will for the hundredth time. First came the occupancy of Newtake at a rent Mr. Lyddon considered excessive; and then followed a circumstance that touched the miller himself, for, by the offer of two shillings more a week than he received at Monks Barton, Will tempted into his service a labourer held in great esteem by his father-in-law.