It knows you not for portress."
Francis Thompson.
I have often envied Lesage's stratagem in which he makes Le diable boiteux transport his patron to a high point in the city, and then obligingly remove roof after roof from the houses spread out beneath his eyes, revealing with a sublime disregard for edification what is going on in each of them in turn. That is just what I should like to do with you, Reader, transport you to the top of, shall we say, the low church tower of Riff, and take off one red roof after another of the clustering houses beneath us. But I should not choose midnight, as Lesage did, but tea-time for my visitation, and then if you appeared bored, I would quickly whisk off another roof.
We might look in at Roger's cottage near the church first of all, and see what he is doing.
On this particular afternoon, some three weeks after his conversation with Annette under the apple tree, I am sorry to record that he was doing nothing. That was a pity, for there was a great deal waiting to be done. July and a new quarter were at hand. Several new leases had to be looked over, the death of one of his farmers had brought up the old hateful business of right of heriot, the accounts of the Aldeburgh house property were in at last and must be checked. There was plenty to do, but nevertheless Roger was sitting in his office-room, with his elbow on his last labour-sheet, and his chin in his hand. He, usually so careful, had actually blotted the names of half a dozen labourers. His housekeeper, the stoutest woman in Riff, sister to the late Mr. Nicholls, had put his tea near him half an hour before. Mr. Nicholls' spinster sister was always called "Mrs. Nicholls." But it was the wedded Mrs. Nicholls who had obtained the situation of Roger's housekeeper by sheer determination for the unwedded lady of the same name, and when Roger had faintly demurred at the size of his housekeeper designate, had informed him sternly that "she was stout only in appearance."
It was a pity he had let his tea grow cold, and had left his plate of thick, rectangular bread-and-butter untouched.
Roger was a person who hated thought, and he was thinking, and the process was fatiguing to him. He had for years "hustled" along like a sturdy pony on the rounds of his monotonous life, and had been fairly well satisfied with it till now. But lately the thoughts which would have been invading a more imaginative man for a long time past had at last reached him, had filtered down through the stiff clay of the upper crust of his mind.
Was he going on for ever keeping another man's property assiduously together, doing two men's work for one man's pay? When his uncle made him his agent he lived in the house at Hulver, and his horses were kept for him, and the two hundred a year was a generous allowance. But Dick had not increased it when he succeeded. He had given him the cottage, which was in use as an estate office, rent free, but nothing else. Roger had not liked to say anything at first, even when his work increased, and later on Dick had not been "to be got at." And the years were passing, and Roger was thirty-five. He ought to be marrying if he was ever going to marry at all. Of course, if Dick were in a state of health to be appealed to at close quarters—he never answered letters—he would probably act generously. He had always been open-handed. But Dick, poor beggar, was dead already as far as any use he could be to himself or others.
Roger shuddered at the recollection of the shapeless, prostrate figure, with the stout, vacant face, and the fat hand, that had once been so delicate and supple, which they had wanted to guide to do it knew not what.
Roger could not see that he had any future. But then he had not had any for years past, so why was he thinking about that now? Annette was the reason. Till Annette came to Riff he had always vaguely supposed that he and Janey would "make a match of it" some day. Janey was the only person he really knew. I do not mean to imply for a moment that Roger in his pink coat at the Lowshire Hunt Ball was not a popular partner. He was. And in times past he had been shyly and faintly attracted by more than one of his pretty neighbours. But he was fond of Janey. And now that his uncle was dead, Janey was, perhaps, the only person left for whom he had a rooted attachment. But it seemed there were disturbing women who could inspire feelings quite different from the affection and compassion he felt for his cousin. Annette was one of them. Roger resented the difference, and then dwelt upon it. He distrusted Annette's parentage. "Take a bird out of a good nest." That was his idea of a suitable marriage. Never in his wildest moments would he have thought of marrying a woman whose father was a Frenchman, much less a Frenchman who kept a public-house. He wasn't thinking of such a thing now—at least, he told himself he wasn't. But he had been deeply chagrined at Annette's mention of her father all the same, so deeply that he had not repeated the odious fact even to Janey, the recipient of all the loose matter in his mind.