The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

She left them quietly to attend to the details of Abner’s room. Malpas, still a little restless, took him out again, talking incessantly and showing him what remained of the ancient features of Wolfpits: the line of damp stables with boxes for thirty horses, the yew-trees that had once been clipped to the shape of peacocks but had now straggled into those of monstrous antediluvian birds; the red-walled garden, now a wilderness of nettles, whose fruit trees spilled their pulpy produce on the mossed paths. From the farthest corner of the garden they could see the house which, from this angle appeared tall and narrow like a tower, with chimney-pots for battlements. In an upper window there appeared the figure of a woman standing still and gazing out over the mountain.

‘That’s Mary putting your room to rights,’ said George, but he did not call to her.

He spoke to Abner of the other inhabitants of Wolfpits. One was an old woman, Mrs Mamble by name, the widow of a labourer who had worked on a neighbouring farm. ‘She don’t properly belong to these parts,’ he said; ‘they came from down Tenbury way, but she’s took up with Morgan and Gladys, and Mary likes her company. He must have been a good chap in his time, for they give her the house rent-free.’

The other tenant, whom they saw working in his garden beneath the ivied end of the house, was another solitary creature, an old man named Drew who had worked as a farm-labourer in the district for more than thirty years. He, too, was a foreigner, having first come to Wolfpits in charge of a pedigree Devon bull. In the middle period of his life he had been employed in a flour mill a few miles down the valley of the Folly Brook. The new steam mills at Lesswardine had robbed him of this employment, but not before the constant carrying of heavy sacks had twisted his back to a curve in which rheumatism had fixed it. Now he could only walk with his shoulders bent so that when he spoke he had to raise his eyes, staring up at those who questioned him, as though his back still bore the burden of a phantom load. All his joints were swollen and knotted with rheumatism; his huge hands resembled the branches of an ancient tree and his whole aspect, staring with pale blue eyes beneath a tangle of reddish hair as yet untouched with gray, was that of a gnome, and proper to these inaccessible mountains. His life was lonely, and for this reason he had never lost the uncouth speech of the South Hams from which he had originally come. When they passed his garden on their way back George gave him good-afternoon and he raised himself, as with infinite labour, from his work, gazing at them with the patient eyes of a yoked beast of burden.

‘He’s a rum old chap,’ said George. ‘You wait till he’s on one of his boozing fits, and then you’ll see.’

By this time Mary had finished Abner’s room and set the table. The children, tired with play, had come in and were clamouring for their tea. At the same time the fourth member of the Malpas family arrived, a yellow lurcher bitch, named Spider, who had been absent on some dark business of her own and now returned to gambol with little Morgan on the floor. The children were never tired of teasing this animal, but George, who only tolerated her when he himself went rabbiting in the evening, generally treated her cruelly. The dog fawned on him, but there was more fear than affection in her devotion. Abner told them the story of Tiger. The children listened with wide eyes and the mother looked at him without speaking. A fire of sticks crackled merrily down in the room that Abner had taken for a dairy. At last Mary Malpas brought in tea and the children ate stolidly and shyly, talking to each other in whispers as though they were disturbed by the presence of the stranger.

Perhaps it was also the presence of Abner that made George Malpas take unusual notice of his wife. He treated her very much as he would have treated the children or the dog when the fancy took him, but his faintly patronising tone only appeared to embarrass her. When she gave him his tea he would have kissed her, but she stiffened slightly and even blushed, so that Abner could see the colour rising in her white neck. Later she softened a little from her seriousness and the children too, realising that Abner was no more than an ordinary mortal, began to raise their voices. They sat on with the door open in the mellow evening light, and an atmosphere of homeliness and quiet descended on the room so happily that Morgan cried when his mother told him that it was time for bed. During all the afternoon she had scarcely spoken to Abner, and she seemed relieved to find a chance of escape. She puzzled him. In his life he had only known one woman intimately, and that was Alice. He could not help comparing the two of them. The cleanliness and refinement of Mary Malpas became exaggerated by this comparison. Instinctively, at first, he had allowed himself to be influenced by George’s treatment of her, but her aloofness and reserve now made him feel that she was in some subtle way superior. He could not say that he liked her; but he wondered, none the less, what she was made of.

She disappeared upstairs and he and George sat on smoking in the twilight. The sun had fallen like a plummet behind the western hills; the valley now lay in deep shadow and only the upper air was overspread with films of light. Night fell. Down in the valley a night-jar began his mechanical trilling. Over by Mawne, in Dovehouse Fields, a hundred miles away, another night-jar was beginning. A sense of new and settled happiness descended on Abner. He had come, it seemed, to another stage in his pilgrimage. Wolfpits was not like one of the bivouacs in which he had sheltered with Mick Connor during this crowded week, but a resting place. He felt that the future need not trouble him, that his feet were firmly planted on this new soil. The only tie that held him to the past was the memory of Alice, so strangely awakened by the presence of this other, and so different, woman. He feared that there could be no such happiness for her. Lying in bed in that strange room he decided that as soon as he had earned some money he would send it to her. At least it was his duty to return her the two sovereigns that she had slipped into his pocket when he left her. Yet, when he remembered the life at Mawne against which he had fretted for so long, his heart was thankful for this release. He fell asleep.

The Twelfth Chapter

Next morning Abner went with George Malpas to interview the clerk of the works, who engaged him as a labourer at twenty-two shillings a week off-hand. This man had been as long on the waterworks job as Gunner Eve himself. Year after year he had led a nomadic life moving from one point to another of the great pipe line that stretches from the valley of the Dulas Fechen to the reservoirs above Halesby.