The Mating of Lydia

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

X

While Faversham was driving back to Threlfall, his mind possessed by a tumult of projects and images—which was a painful tumult, because his physical strength was not yet equal to coping with it—a scene was passing in a bare cottage beside the Ulls-water road, whence in due time one of those events was to arise which we call sudden or startling only because we are ignorant of the slow [Greek: anankê ] which has produced them.

An elderly man had just entered the cottage after his day's work. He was evidently dead tired, and he had sunk down on a chair beside a table which held tea things and some bread and butter. His wife could be heard moving about in the lean-to scullery behind the living-room.

The man sat motionless, his hands hanging over his knees, his head bent. He seemed to be watching the motes dancing in a shaft of dusty sunlight that had found its way into the darkened room. For the western sun was blazing on the front, the blinds were down, and the little room was like an oven. The cottage was a new one and stood in a bare plot of garden, unshaded and unsheltered, on a stretch of road which crossed the open fell. It was a labourer's cottage, but the furniture of the living-room was superior in quality to that commonly found in the cottages of the neighbourhood. A piano was crowded into one corner, and a sideboard, too large for the room, occupied the wall opposite the fireplace.

The man sitting in the chair also was clearly not an ordinary labourer. His brown suit, though worn and frayed, had once been such a suit as Messrs. Carter, tailors, of Pengarth, were accustomed to sell to their farmer clients, and it was crossed by an old-fashioned chain and seal. The suit was heavily splashed with mud; so were the thick boots; and on the drooped brow shone beads of sweat. John Brand was not much over fifty, but he was tired out in mind and body; and his soul was bitter within him.

A year before this date he had been still the nominal owner of a small freehold farm between Pengarth and Carlisle, bordering on the Threlfall property. But he was then within an ace of ruin, and irreparable calamity had since overtaken him.

How it was that he had fallen into such a plight was still more or less mysterious to a dull brain. Up to the age of forty-seven, he had been employed on his father's land, with little more than the wages of a labourer, possessing but small authority over the men working on the farm, and no liberty but such as the will of a tyrannical master allowed him. Then suddenly the father died, and Brand succeeded to the farm. All his long-checked manhood asserted itself. There was a brief period of drinking, betting, and high living. The old man had left a small sum of ready money in the bank, which to the son, who had always been denied the handling of money, seemed riches. It was soon spent, and then unexpected burdens and claims disclosed themselves. There was a debt to the bank, which there were no means of paying. And he discovered to his dismay that a spinster cousin of his mother's had lent money to his father within the preceding five years, on the security of his stock and furniture. Where the borrowed money had gone no one knew, but the spinster cousin, alarmed perhaps by exaggerated accounts of the new man's drinking habits, pressed for repayment.

Brand set his teeth, ceased to spend money, and did his best to earn it. But he was a stupid man, and the leading-strings in which his life had been held up to middle age had enfeebled such natural powers as he possessed. His knowledge was old-fashioned, his methods slovenly; and his wife, as harmless as himself, but no cleverer, could do nothing to help him. By dint, however, of living and working hard he got through two or three years, and might just have escaped his fate—for his creditors, at that stage, were all ready to give him time—had not ill-fortune thrown him across the path of Edmund Melrose. The next farm to his belonged to the Threlfall estate. Melrose's methods as a landlord had thrown out one tenant after another, till he could do nothing but put in a bailiff and work it himself. The bailiff was incompetent, and a herd of cattle made their way one morning through a broken fence that no one had troubled to mend, and did serious damage to Brand's standing crops. Melrose was asked to compensate, and flatly declined. The fence was no doubt his; but he claimed that it had been broken by one of Brand's men. Hence the accident. The statement was false, and the evidence supporting it corrupt. Moreover the whole business was only the last of a series of unneighbourly acts on the part both of the bailiff and landowner, and a sudden fury blazed up in Brand's slow mind. He took his claim to the county court and won his case; the judge allowing himself a sharp sentence or two on the management of the Threlfall property. Brand spent part of his compensation money in entertaining a group of friends at a Pengarth public. But that was the last of his triumph. Thenceforward things went mysteriously wrong with him. His creditors, first one, then all, began to tighten their pressure on him; and presently the bank manager—the Jove of Brand's little world—passed abruptly from civility or indulgence, to a peremptory reminder that debts were meant to be paid. A fresh bill of sale on furniture and stock staved off disaster for a time. But a bad season brought it once more a long step nearer, and the bank, however urgently appealed to, showed itself adamant, not only as to any further advance, but as to any postponement of their own claim. Various desperate expedients only made matters worse, and after a few more wretched months during which his farm deteriorated, and his business went still further to wreck, owing largely to his own distress of mind, Brand threw up the sponge. He sold his small remaining interest in his farm, which did not even suffice to pay his debts, and went out of it a bankrupt and broken man, prematurely aged. A neighbouring squire, indignant with what was commonly supposed to be the secret influences at work in the affair, offered him the post of bailiff in a vacant farm; and he and his family migrated to the new-built cottage on the Ullswater road.

As to these secret influences, they were plain enough to many people. Melrose who had been present on the day when the case was tried had left the court-house in a fury, in company with a certain ill-famed solicitor, one Nash, who had worked up the defence, and had served the master of Threlfall before in various litigations connected with his estates, such as the respectable family lawyers in Carlisle and Pengarth would have nothing to do with. Nash told his intimates that night that Brand would rue his audacity, and the prophecy soon dismally fulfilled itself. The local bank to which Brand owed money had been accustomed for years to deal with very large temporary balances—representing the rents of half the Threlfall estates. Nash was well known to the manager, as one of those backstairs informants, indispensable in a neighbourhood where every farmer wanted advances—now on his crops—now on his stock—and the leading bank could only escape losses by the maintenance of a surprising amount of knowledge as to each man's circumstances and character. Nash was observed on one or two occasions going in and out of the bank's private room, at moments corresponding with some of the worst crises of Brand's fortunes. And with regard to other creditors, no one could say precisely how they were worked on, but they certainly showed a surprising readiness to join in the harrying of a struggling and helpless man.

In any case Brand believed, and had good cause for believing, that he had been ruined by Melrose in revenge for the county court action. His two sons believed it also.