CHAPTER V THE HERO
October dropped from red to brown in a sudden night of rain, and the Three Counties began to draw over themselves their fallow cloaks of sleep. In every view the ploughed fields spread brown and wet and empty, some with a ruddy touch of Kentish clay, others with a white gleam of Surrey chalk.
Nigel flung himself into the farmyard toil, and complained because it was too scanty. Their ten acres of grass and orchard, with three or four cows and some poultry, did not give nearly enough work, he thought, to two able-bodied men. He remembered the days when the acres of Sparrow Hall had rolled through marsh and coppice into Kent—when fifteen sweet-mouthed cows had gathered at the gates at milking-time, and golden rye from their high fields had gone in their waggon to Honey Mill. He was miserably aware that he had no one but himself to blame for this, though his brother and sister never reproached him. He had been impatient of the slow bounties of the fields, he had plunged into quick, adventurous dealings; for a few months he had brought wealth, hurry and excitement into his life—then had come poverty, and the ageless monotony of prison.
When he looked round on their reduced estate it was not so much humiliation that ate into his heart as a sense of treachery. He had betrayed the country. Impatient of its slow, honest ways, he had sought others, crooked, swift, defiled. He had turned renegade to the quiet fields round his home, and entered a rival camp of reckless strivings and meanness. This had been his sin, and he was being punished for it still. The punishment of the State for his sin against the State was over ... but the punishment for his sin against his home, the country, and himself was still being meted out to him by all three.
The high spirits that had seized him on that first rainy morning of his freedom often came and snatched him up again, but they always dropped him back into a depression that was almost horror. He had moments of crazy gaiety and uproariousness, of sheer animal delight in his bodily freedom; but behind them all lurked the consciousness that he was still in prison. He had been sentenced for life. He was shut up in some dreary place, away from the farm, away from Len and Janey. He might work on the farm the whole day, and fool with his brother and sister the whole evening, but he knew none the less that he was shut up away from them all.
During this time he had peculiar dreams. He often fell asleep full of fury and despair, but his dreams were always of sunlit spaces, children and flowers. Again and again in them appeared the little girl Ivy—not dirty and cross, but lovely and fresh and winsome, smiling and beckoning. It seemed as if behind all the horrors and fogs of his life something divine and innocent was calling—at times it was comfort and peace and healing to him, at others it was the chief of his torments.
The Furlongers had always lived aloofly at Sparrow Hall—scorned, even before their downfall, by their own class, they had nevertheless not sought comrades in the classes beneath them. They had always sufficed one another, and had not cared for the distractions of over-the-fence gossip or the public-house.
However, since his return from Parkhurst, Nigel had realised a certain tendency on the part of labourers and small farmers to seek him out and claim equal terms. This was not merely due to the consciousness of his degradation, the delight of patronising the proud Furlonger—its chief motive was a strange sort of deference. Socially, his crime had reduced him to their level, but morally it had given him an exaltation which had never been his before. He now belonged to that world of which they caught rare dazzling glimpses in their Sunday papers. He was only a rank below Crippen in their hero-worship, and when they met him in the village they stared at him in much the same way as they stared at the murderer's photograph in The People.
At first Nigel hung back from them, sick and confused with shame, but as the days went by, the emptiness of his life beat him into conciliation. Humiliated to the dust, he longed for some sort of regard, however spurious, just as a starving man will eat dung. His brother and sister gave him love and kindness in plenty, but they were much too practical in their emotions any longer to give him deference. Before he went to prison he had been, though the youngest, the leader of the family—his stronger brain, his quicker wits had made him the captain of their exploits. But now his brain and wits were discredited. Len and Janey did not despise him, they were not ashamed of him before men—but he had forfeited his position in the household. They no longer looked upon him as their superior, he was just the younger brother. At first he had scarcely noticed this—everything had been strange, and he had let slip former realities. But as the days went by, and Parkhurst became more and more of a horrible and suggestive parenthesis, he was able to recall the old ways and see how things had changed. He made no complaint, but his spirit was chafed, and sought crazily for balms.