But the heart of Luke was relieved, and he walked homewards encouraged to fight out the battle with himself, and overcome the jealousy with which he began to regard his cousin Anthony.
CHAPTER XI. THE GLOVES AGAIN.
Anthony remained at Willsworthy. He had behaved exceedingly badly, had wounded the good lady of the house where most susceptible to pain, and so acutely that she had fallen into unconsciousness; yet he remained on. He was accustomed to consult his own wishes, not those of others, and to put on one side all considerations of expediency and good feeling, where his own caprice was concerned.
Urith and the servant wench had carried Madame Malvine to her room, and Solomon Gibbs had dashed off to the stables to get his horse, so as to summon the surgeon from Tavistock.
Anthony was alone in the little hall, and he leaned his elbows on the window-sill and looked out. There was nothing for him to see; nothing to interest him in the barn wall opposite, which was all that was commanded by the window; so he turned his eyes on a peacock butterfly that had hybernated in the hall, and now, with return of spring, shook off sleep and fluttered against the leaded panes, bruising its wings in its efforts to escape into the outer air. There were no flowers in the window; nothing at all save some dead flies and a pair of lady's riding-gloves folded together.
Anthony looked round the hall. It was low, not above seven feet high, unceiled, with black oak unmoulded rafters. There was a large granite fireplace, no sculptured oak mantelpiece over it; nothing save a plain shelf; and above it some arms, a couple of pistols, a sword, a pike or two, and a crossbow. The walls were not panelled save only by the window, where was the table, and where the family dined. The walls elsewhere were plainly white-washed, and had not even that decoration that was affected at the tavern—ballads with quaint woodcuts pasted against them. There was no deer park attached to the house; there never had been even a paddock for deer, consequently there were no antlers in the hall.
Near the window was a recess in the wall over a granite pan or bowl partly built into the wall. At first sight it might be taken as a basin in which to wash the hands; but it had no pipe from it to convey the fouled water away. Such pans are found in many old western farmhouses and manor halls, and their purport is almost forgotten. They were formerly employed for the scalding of the milk and the making of clouted cream. Red-hot charcoal was placed in these basins, and the pans of milk planted on the cinders. The pans remained there, the coals being fanned by the kitchen maid, till the cream was formed on the surface, and in this cream-coat the ring of the bottom of the pan indicated itself on the surface. This was the token that the milk had yielded up all its quotient of fatty matter. Thereupon the pan was removed to the cool dairy. The presence of the granite cream-producer showed that the hall served a double purpose: it was not only a sitting- and dining-room, but one in which some of the dairy processes were carried on. Moreover, near the entrance-door was what was called the "well-room," entered from the hall. This was a small lean-to apartment on one side of the porch, paved with cobble-stones, in which was a stone trough always brimming with crystal moorland water, conducted into it from outside, and, running off, was carried away outside again. As this was the sole source whence all the water-supply required for the house was obtained—for dairy, for kitchen, and for table—it may be imagined that the hall was a passage-room, traversed all day long by the servant-wenches with pails, and pans, and jugs.
Such an arrangement was suitable enough in the time before the Wars of the Roses, when Willsworthy was built; but its inconvenience became apparent with the improved social conditions of the Tudor reigns, and in the time of Elizabeth an addition had been made to the house, so that it now possessed two small parlours looking into the garden at the back; but these Anthony had not seen. In these some attempt was made at ornament. A manor house before the Tudor epoch rarely consisted of more than a hall, a lady's bower, kitchen, and cellars, on the ground-floor; Willsworthy had been enlarged by the addition of a second parlour, with the object of abandoning the Hall, to become a sort of second kitchen.
But the family had been poor, and continued in its ancestral mode of life. The second parlour had its shutters shut, and was never used, and Madame Malvine sat, as had her husband, and the owners of Willsworthy before them, in the Hall, and endured the traffic through it, and the slops on the stone floor from the overflowing pails.