The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

At first he never accompanied George on his evening visits to the Pound House. It pleased him better to walk home up the valley in the cool of the evening and sluice his head and back beneath a pump of cold spring water that stood in the deserted stable-yard. Then Mary would give him his tea, always with the same air of watchful and remote reserve, and he would smoke his pipe in the garden, talking to the children who, in the confidence of their own secret alliance, were gradually becoming a little more friendly. Or he would play with Spider, who had now learnt to take a place near his chair at meal times in the hope of being fed with scraps from Abner’s plate.

Sometimes, too, he would lean on the fence watching old Drew at work in his garden. The old labourer was as hardy as the knotted oak that he resembled. His day’s work began before dawn: he had more than three miles to walk to the farm on which he was employed, but when he returned in the evening after trudging the fields all day, he could never rest, but must be putting his strip of garden in order so intently that he scarcely had time to answer Abner’s questions, staring up at him with those patient, over-burdened eyes. His wages, which were regulated by his age rather than his capacity for labour, were only twelve shillings a week, so that his garden produce was really essential to his life. When he had finished his gardening, or when the light failed, he would retire to his kitchen and drink a crude, sweet spirit that he distilled from turnips. Sometimes at night they would hear him singing to himself the innumerable obscene verses of Devonshire folk-songs. Then, when he could sing no longer, he would drag his twisted limbs upstairs and sleep like a log in the certainty of waking before dawn to set out on his labours again. His life indeed had been so solitary that he distrusted any intrusion, and Abner had known him and spoken with him for many weeks before he felt that his presence was welcome.

The other tenant of Wolfpits he rarely saw, though her five years in the old house had made her a confidante of Mary, and indeed her principal refuge in domestic emergencies. Sometimes when he came home at night he would find her talking to Mary in the kitchen, but at the sight of him she scuttled away so that he saw no more of her than one sees of a rabbit’s vanishing tail.

Mary Malpas did not evade him in this primitive fashion and yet, even when he had been living at Wolfpits for more than a month, he felt that he really knew her no better than the fugitive Mrs Mamble. He could find no parallel to her in the history of his dealings with Alice at Mawne. The thing for which Alice had been mostly concerned was her dignity as mistress of John Fellows’s house, and this she had been active to assert. Mary Malpas, on the other hand, had no need to stand upon her dignity. It was instinct in the refinement of her speech and even more in her silence. The fact that her father had been a swindler and a suicide could never rob her of it. Abner fancied for a time that the awkwardness between them was caused by the way in which he had been suddenly thrust upon her household. He felt that he might stand to her as a symbol of a new slight inflicted on her by her husband. Otherwise why should she deny him the least suspicion of human contact? He even made an awkward attempt to settle the matter by asking her if she would not be better pleased if he tried to find another lodging.

‘If I’m in the way like,’ he told her, ‘just you say so, and I’ll be off.’

‘Why should you think that?’ she said, without the least sign of emotion. ‘There’s no reason why you should go away . . . if you are comfortable.’

She didn’t say that they were glad to have him, though the fact remained that his money was useful to them. She didn’t say that they would be sorry to lose him. He simply felt that she had made him look foolish, and as this was the usual result of his dealings with her in spite of her politeness and her care for his comfort he gave up trying to find out what she was made of, and settled down to his life at Wolfpits as though she had nothing to do with it.

He had always been fond of dogs and children, and Gladys, Morgan, and Spider soon became devoted to him. Morgan was evidently his mother’s favourite, and the little girl soon took a shy but definite fancy to Abner, wandering alone down the lane in the hope of meeting him on his way home from work and riding back to Wolfpits perched on his shoulder. She would watch him gravely while he stripped and swilled himself in the stableyard, standing by with a towel ready to catch the beads of water that sparkled on his eyebrows and his hair. Then hand in hand they would wander round the farmstead, visiting the pigsties and the barn in which the fowls were housed and searching for the nests of broody hens in the hedgerows. She loved above all things to sit upon his shoulder when she carried home the eggs in the small cup of her hands. She liked his hugeness and his strength, and rather despised Morgan for the fact that he was his mother’s boy.

In those hills autumn came early, and soon sunset brought with it a hint of evening cold. The air of the mountains drooped upon the plain as soon as the western summits hid the sun, and in a little while their evenings were of lamplight. When Abner trudged home at night he could see the linnets gathering together for their autumn flights, hear the whir of their wings and their tender, reedy notes. Starlings, southward bound, swept the air in wheeling cohorts, and swifts darted wildly round the chimneys of Wolfpits. Wood fires were lighted in the kitchen grate at night, and when Abner had finished his tea he would settle down on the right hand of the fireplace with a pile of cut logs at his feet.

At first he looked forward to these evenings with some anxiety, feeling that the presence of this silent and, as he thought, unsympathetic woman, would make him uncomfortable; but strangely enough this did not happen. The devotion of Gladys put him at his ease and occupied him so much that he did not have to speak to her mother. When first the fire was lighted Mary Malpas would move about the house on her own business. Abner would hear her talking softly to Morgan in the scullery while Gladys chattered to him in the flickering light that filled the room with moving shadows. Later, like a shadow herself, Mary would return with the boy and settle herself softly in the chair on the other side of the fire. Morgan would struggle up on to her knee and cuddle into his mother’s breast, and Gladys, not to be outdone, would climb on Abner’s knee and beg him to tell her stories. He knew no stories for children, for he had never had a mother to tell them to him, but he would talk to her about Mawne and the blind pit-ponies, about the rabbits that lived in Dovehouse fields, about Tiger and the excitements of the wakes with their galloping horses and soaring swing-boats. Gladys had never seen a fair and these descriptions fired her imagination most.