Whether the lonely figure, with its suggestion of sadness, made its appeal, or the attraction of a grace that no depression could mar, overcame the dictates of prudence, he hesitated. At last, “I can’t do it!” he muttered, “hanged if I can! I suppose I ought not to have kissed her if I meant to do it to-day. No, I can’t do it.”
And when, half an hour later, he parted from her at the old Cross at the foot of the hill, he had not done it.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE MEETING AT THE MAYPOLE
Within twenty-four hours there were signs that Bosham’s brush with his lordship and the show of feeling outside Hatton’s Works had set a sharper edge on the fight. Trifles as these were, the farmers about Riddsley took them up and resented them. The feudal feeling was not quite extinct. Their landlord was still a great man to them, and even those who did not love him believed that he was fighting their battle. An insult to him seemed, in any case, a portent, but that such a poor creature as Bosham—Ben Bosham of the Bridge End—should insult him, went beyond bearing.
Moreover, it was beginning to be whispered that Ben was tampering with the laborers. One heard that he was preaching higher wages in the public houses, another that he was asking Hodge what he got out of dear bread, a third that he was vaporing about commons and enclosures. The farmers growled. The farmers’ sons began to talk together outside the village inn. The farmers’ wives foresaw rick-burning, maimed cattle, and empty hen coops, and said that they could not sleep in their beds for Ben.
Meanwhile those who, perhaps, knew something of the origin of these rumors, and could size up the Boshams to a pound, were not unwilling to push the matter farther. Men who fancied with Stubbs that repeal of the corn-taxes meant the ruin of the country-side, were too much in earnest to pick and choose. They believed that this was a fight between the wholesome country and the black, sweating town, between the open life of the fields and the tyranny of mill and pit; and that the only aim of the repealer was to lower wages, and so to swell the profits that already enabled him to outshine the lords of the soil. They were prone, therefore, to think that any stick was good enough to beat so bad a dog, and if the stout arms of the farmers could redress the balance, they were in no mood to refuse their help.
Nor were sharpeners wanting on the other side. The methods of the League were brought into play. Women were sent out to sing through the streets of an evening, and the townsfolk ate their muffins to the doleful strains of:
Child, is thy father dead?
Father is gone.
Why did they tax his bread?