The gaunt old man stood up. Eve knew her power over him. She could make him obey her slightest caprice. She ran before him to the gardener’s tool-house and brought him the scythe.
In the quadrangle was a grass plat, and on this Eve had decided to play her game.
‘All the balls are here except the Jack,’ said she. ‘I shall have to rummage everywhere for the black-a-moor; I can’t think where he can be.’ Then she ran into the house in quest of the missing ball.
The grass had been left to grow all spring and had not been cut at all, so that it was rank. Mr. Jordan did not well know how to wield a scythe. He tried and met with so little success that he suspected the blade was blunt. Accordingly he went to the tool-house for the hone, and, standing the scythe up with the handle on the swath, tried to sharpen the blade.
The grass was of the worst possible quality. The quadrangle was much in shadow. The plots were so exhausted that little grew except daisy and buttercup. Jasper had already told Barbara to have the wood-ashes thrown on the plots, and had promised to see that they were limed in winter. Whilst Mr. Jordan was honing the scythe slowly and clumsily Barbara came to him. She was surprised to see him thus engaged. Lean, haggard, with deep-sunken eyes, and hollow cheeks, he lacked but the hour-glass to make him stand as the personification of Time. He was in an ill-humour at having been disturbed and set to an uncongenial task, though his ill-humour was not directed towards Eve. Barbara was always puzzled by her father. That he suffered, she saw, but she could not make out of what and where he suffered, and he resented inquiry. There were times when his usually dazed look was exchanged for one of keenness, when his eyes glittered with a feverish anxiety, and he seemed to be watching and expecting with eye and ear something or some person that never came. At table he was without conversation; he sat morose, lost in his own thoughts till roused by an observation addressed to him. His temper was uncertain. Often, as he observed nothing, he took offence at nothing; but occasionally small matters roused and unreasonably irritated him. An uneasy apprehension in Barbara’s mind would not be set at rest. She feared that her father’s brain was disturbed, and that at any time, without warning, he might break out into some wild, unreasonable, possibly dreadful, act, proclaiming to everyone that what she dreaded in secret had come to pass—total derangement. Of late his humour had been especially changeful, but his eldest daughter sought to convince herself that this could be accounted for by distress at the loss of Eve’s dowry.
Barbara asked her father why he was mowing the grass plot, and when he told her that Eve had asked him to do so that she might play bowls that evening on it, she remonstrated, ‘Whom is she to play with?’
‘Jasper Babb has promised her a game. I suppose you and I will be dragged out to make up a party.’
‘O papa, there is no necessity for your mowing! You do not understand a scythe. Now you are honing the wrong way, blunting, not sharpening, the blade.’
‘Of course I am wrong. I never do right in your eyes.’