‘Ay, ay, it’s just as well she’s feathered her nest before troubles come,’ or if Nell said she felt stronger and better for the fine weather, it would be, ‘Well, I don’t know as it’s a thing to crow over. Many a person’s happier dead than alive.’
At last one morning she came down to breakfast to find him in a brown study over a lawyer’s letter, which had reached him in a long, blue envelope. The postman was a rare visitor at Panty-cuckoo Farm. The Llewellyns had not many relatives, and were not a writing family, if they had had them. Everything went on too simply with them to require much correspondence. Above all, a lawyer’s letter was a rarity.
‘Had bad news, father?’ inquired Nell, as she met him.
‘Ay, my lass, as bad as it could well be. Sir Archibald Bowmant’s going to raise the rent of the old farm again, and I don’t know how it’s to be made to pay it. Times have been awful bad the last year or two, Nell. Of course, the mother didn’t say nothing to you up in London town about it. Where was the use? You was well provided for in a rare good and respectable situation; we knew you was safe, and didn’t want to worry you with our troubles. But since Sir Archibald’s married this new lady he’s been an altered man. He used to think a deal of his tenants in the old times, and I don’t say he’s a bad landlord now, but she runs him into a lot of money, I hear, and then the land has to pay for it. Here’s a notice from the solicitor, to say the rents will all be raised again after next summer. It’s deuced hard on a man like me. I’ve spent more than I knew where to put my hand on, this autumn, draining and manuring, and now I shall have to pay all I hoped to make by it on the rent. But it can’t go on for ever. The worm will turn some day, and I shall chuck up the farm and emigrate.’
‘Oh, father, don’t talk like that!’ cried his wife. ‘What would you and I do emigrating at our age? ’Tisn’t as if we were young and strong. We should die before we had crossed the sea. We’ll get on right enough, now I’ve got Nell to help me with the dairy, and that must keep us going till you’re straight again.’
‘You’re a good wife, Mary,’ said the farmer, ‘but you’re a fool for all that. Will the dairy keep the men and horses, and pay for the subsoil dressings and the fish-manure and the losses which every year brings with it? You women don’t understand the number of expenses keeping up a large farm like this entails. I’ve only just done it for years past, and if the rents are to be raised, why, I can’t do it, and that’s all.’
‘But you won’t decide in a hurry, father?’ said Nell.
‘No, lass, no. But it’s very discouraging. It takes the heart out of a man for work, or anything. Sometimes I wish I had emigrated when I was a young man. There, out in Canada, the Government give a man one hundred and fifty acres of land free, and, if he’s got a little money of his own and a little gumption, he can make a living for his family, and have something to leave behind him when he dies.’
‘Well, well,’ said his daughter soothingly, ‘if the worst comes to the worst, father, I will go out to Canada with mother and you, and we’ll see if we can’t manage to keep ourselves alive somehow.’
She put her hand on the old man’s grey head as she spoke, and he got hold of it and drew it down with his own.