“Yours will come by road, from Manchester. I ride in for it to-morrow.”
“Neglecting your work?”
“I choose my work,” he said, and strode off, leaving her to follow as she might, but if he thought to outdistance her, he reckoned without the grit of Phoebe. As a lady, he could find a dozen chinks a day in her Brummagen armor; as a country lass she had a native energy that all her vanities left unimpaired, and set what hot pace he could, she kept level with him like a taunt which refuses to stop ringing in a man’s ears. If this was a duel, Phoebe was scoring winning points that night. “But a horse will test your mettle, my wench,” he was thinking savagely, and with relief that the idea of a horse had come to him.
“When I go driving through new country,” he had told the lawyer, “I like a brake on my wheels,” and he was feeling very urgently the need of a brake on his wheels in the new country through which he suddenly discovered himself to be driving now. He put it to himself in phrases that may or may not be paradoxical.
“Damn her, I love her,” he said aloud as he undressed that night.
Phoebe, in her room across the passage, mingled fear with triumph. If one is not born to horses, horses terrify. In that, more than in anything else, lay the difference between Phoebe’s world and Reuben’s. If her ladyhood was pretentious and calculated instead of instinctive, well, theirs did not go very deep either. There was culture in that age, but not, extensively, in Lancashire. Culture hugged the capital, throwing outposts in the great houses of the Home Counties. In Manchester itself there were bookish people, but in the county sport was the touchstone, and if horsemanship in the skilled sense was not expected of a woman, she must at any rate be not shy of a horse. It was almost the test of gentry.
When the thought came to him as he panted on the heather it had not, indeed, been as a test of her quality. At first, he was more generous than that. To be his wife, she must ride; she did not ride; and he must teach her. Only later did he see it as a trial of her fitness, as she, at once, saw it, gathering courage for an ordeal. If she must ride to win this husband, then, cost what it might, she would ride.
He kept his word, taking for the first time a full day off from his education as a spinner, demanded measurements of her at breakfast, rode with them into Manchester, was back by early evening with a habit and, from his stables, a horse used to a side-saddle: doing all with characteristic concentration of energy that brooked no opposition from any such bombastical pleader for delay as the outraged habit-maker.
Hepplestall commanded, and Hepplestall received.
There are degrees in habits? Then this was a habit of high degree. Whether it was a lover’s free-handed gift or the circumstance of a trial by ordeal, it was the best it could be, and Phoebe’s prettiness was equal to it. Indeed, she trended by choice to a fluffiness of dress and a cheapness in taste that Reuben, who was not fastidious, had not failed to note. You have seen, perhaps, a modern hospital nurse in uniform and the same nurse in mufti? That was the difference between Phoebe in her habit and Phoebe as he had seen her hitherto. More than ever, he felt conviction that no ill-judged passion was leading him astray, that here, when good dressmakers had clothed her, was his match and the match for the county. He tried to be skeptical, to criticize, and found, at the end of a scrutiny too frank to be well-mannered, that there was nothing here to criticize.