The prison! The prison and the one damned, dear soul beating within its walls! But that was past. She had wrestled out that finally—at night, in her London room, close beneath the slates; at night, in her bed, the letter under her pillow, or twisting in her hot fingers.
The gate which led into the garden was a white wicket. At each side was a poplar. These had grown so thick and tall that they met midway and formed an arch. There was a path of red brick, a little raised, leading up to the house door; it led up straight, between box edgings two feet high. The garden-beds were rather neglected, but a great clump of red-hot pokers pointed flame fingers to the sky, and a loose white rose, like foam, clung to the walls and ran along the low roof. There was a long window each side the door, and in front of the one on the right was a yew-tree clipped into the shape of an umbrella. The clipping had been neglected, and the tree had the dishevelled appearance of a man who neglects to shave. There was an air of indolence about the garden, but it did not seem the indolence of poverty. A pond partly encircled the place. A red-and-white cow came down to drink and to look at her reflectively with its big, closely-veined eyes.
What sort of greeting was garnering for her beyond that door with the wooden hood, the veil of white roses, and the rough iron knocker? She looked at a Virginia creeper twisting among the roses. Autumn had touched it. She looked at the red leaves, then at the white flowers. They seemed flame and pale fire to strained eyes, short of sleep and dazzled with the sun. The deep, haggard line curved round her mouth. Within! What waited within?
*****
Within was the second woman, old Gainah Toat. She sat in a low-pitched room—the room on the right, made dark by the umbrella yew. There was a great open hearth. There were three doors: one led into a dairy; it was open, and showed the bricked floor, the yellow and brown pans, the thick cream and made-up butter; the second door opened into the passage; the third into the garden.
She sat by the third door, which was thrown well back. She could see the orchard strewn with mussel plums, ripe to rottenness, with little yellow stewing pears and apples specked with black. She did not seem to see anything; she had those eyes—cold blue with a dash of gray—that are always dull; eyes that evade and puzzle. They were very wide open, the lids rolled well back, and the lashes sparse.
She had a white face; there was a general appearance of wasting about her. The fingers, holding a letter—the other woman had been influenced by a letter too—were twisted and disfigured with rheumatism. Her body was flat and square; her faded gown made no pretense of slurring the defect. It went straight from her stringy throat to her hardly perceptible hips without a break, without a kindly fold or ruck of the stuff.
She was an odd-looking figure; a spectral woman almost—with her bloodless skin, her dead eyes, her twisted, transparent hands. But the people around Folly Corner were not given to fanciful imaginings; they only knew that Gainah seemed made of iron, that she worked on the farm without tiring from sunrise until night. Her life was spent in making things for other people to eat. She belonged to a dying type: she was one of those women who devote themselves to tickling the masculine palate. Machine-made food did not enter into her economy. Her mushroom ketchup, her marmalade, her blackberry jelly were renowned. She gave them to anyone who asked, not because she was generous, but because she was inordinately proud of her productions. She toyed with medicine too; made balm tea, and, from a particular sort of nettle, green ointment that would cure a gathering. She made herb beer and water cider to save beer at harvest-time. She knew the effect of foxglove on the human heart, and made a concoction of a certain herb which she gathered secretly. With it she claimed to cure palsy. She was mistress at Folly Corner. She had come to old Jethro Jayne when his wife died. She had brought up the present master by hand; she ruled him still.
Every master of Folly Corner had been a Jayne, and every male Jayne had been a Jethro since the first farmer had hidden his pet mare for ten days in a cellar so that Cromwell’s Ironsides should not steal her.
The room was always cool because the yew threw a continual shadow. Gainah, sitting without a glint of sun in her chilly blue gown and with her feet flat on the stone floor, seemed to have no part with the hot, throbbing world outside.