[CHAPTER VI
CATHERINE OPENS THE GATE]
TEN days had passed since the sturdy widow led her guest across the threshold, and Catherine, with the remains of a badly twisted ankle, was still under her roof. She had been molested by nobody. One of her two lovers supposed her to be with the other; Mrs. Job did not know where she was; and Susannah, equally ignorant, was only interested in knowing where she was not.
The attraction of opposites had done its work between Mrs. Cockshow and her housemate, for the two women were excellent friends. The human-heartedness of the elder one, and her permanent fancy for other people’s business, made her deaf when Catherine began to speak of leaving the place. She was still very lame and the toll-woman was right when she took Pharaoh to witness that to travel on foot would be insanity. Besides which, where was she going to? The question was unanswerable; and finally it was settled between them that the cleaning of the house, the cooking, and the minding of that mob of fowls which dwelt at the bottom of the garden should devolve upon Catherine, indefinitely, in return for her keep.
In this arrangement of Mrs. Cockshow’s, convenience and charity, like righteousness and peace, kissed each other. Her whole interest was found outside her own walls; the road was her passion, her world; and those who went up and down on it her pictures, her newspapers, and, very often, her victims. To bandy words with her was the act of a fool; and so well was this understood that the ridicule which her strange appearance evoked when she first came into residence by the gate had died a natural but by no means lingering death, and gossip had taken its place. This was for the best, because the latter was satisfactory to all, while the former had only been satisfactory to Mrs. Cockshow.
The thing that suited Catherine’s patroness best in their arrangement was that the girl could be left in charge of the gate while she went to Llangarth market. She was a woman of some means, who did a small trade in eggs and poultry, and the difficulty of leaving her post on Thursdays had been a weekly annoyance; for a market day was a foretaste of Paradise to her. She owned a stout, aged pony of her late husband’s which she occasionally hired out to her neighbours for odd jobs, and she now looked forward to journeying in comfort to the very fountain-head of gossip. Besides this, it was delightful to her to have under her roof the heroine of an episode of which she had been almost the first to hear. She had dragged Catherine’s secret from her in the early hours of their acquaintance, and thought a great deal more of her companion when she learnt that she had eluded two of the opposite sex.
Mrs. Cockshow did not believe in men. Her own husband had drunk heavily and persistently; and she had had time to visit his sins upon him before he escaped into the next world. She was well acquainted with Charles Saunders, and slightly so with Black Heber, for both had passed through her gate at various times.
“Take care ye don’t let the sun go over the ’ill, all the same,” she had said to Catherine; for though a despiser of men, she was an advocate of marriage. To her, matrimony, with the whip hand, was the ideal life.
So far, she had kept her tongue quiet on the subject of her guest. Perhaps it pleased her to hug to her heart the gratification of knowing more than any one else; to pet her knowledge, so to speak, before using it as a boast. Catherine had been kept a prisoner indoors for several days by her ankle, and when she went outside the walls it was only to tend the poultry or to hang out the washing in the garden. Never had so much washing been seen on the toll-house hedges before, though Mrs. Cockshow, to whom soap was not important, eyed the display contemptuously. Her cleanings consisted generally of what the country-side called “a lick and a promise.” The toll-house hid Catherine from prying eyes on the road as she went about her business in the garden, and she began to feel secure in her very public retreat.
Between herself and Bungo, the white cur dog, no great friendship existed. The girl was fond of all animals; but her efforts to be on easy terms with this one had been useless, for he persisted in looking with imperishable distrust at her out of his blinking eyes and galloping away whenever she spoke to him. He would follow her to the garden at a servile distance; but the first words she threw him would send him flying across the cabbage beds, from the safe side of which he would stun her ears with his insane barking. In Mrs. Cockshow, who had hurled enough stones at him to pave a yard, he had implicit trust; but he took each movement of Catherine’s hand for a menace.