The Sheep-Stealers

by Violet Jacob

Williams resumed his work, and went on turning over the earth which he was preparing for vegetable seeds. He determined to take no more notice of the Pig-driver, who had found in the fence a suitable cranny in which to insert his foot, and showed no signs of departure. His horse and cart were standing a little way off.

“There’s a sight o’ sludge in that garden,” he remarked at last, smiling agreeably.

Many excelled George in speech, but silence was rather a gift of his. His spade went on vigorously. Bumpett began to hum as he looked at the bare branches of the pear-tree trained against one end of the farm wall.

“Don’t you be afeard to speak up, George Williams,” he said reassuringly, when he had finished his tune.

It was a chilly morning, and the wind which swept over the plateau to Great Masterhouse was beginning to touch up the old man’s hands in a disagreeable way; his knuckles looked blue as he grasped the fence. The thud of the spade going into the earth was the only response.

“Ye’ll have something to say when I take the law on ye for that rent-money,” he called out as he slipped down to the ground and climbed into his cart.

Mrs. Walters soon discovered that, in doing well for Williams, she had also done well for herself. Her new servant worked harder than any one on the farm, and was so quiet and orderly that he gave trouble to neither mistress nor men. Although she despised flowers for mere ornament’s sake, she had some practical knowledge of gardening as far as the useful part of it went, and, her father having been a seedsman, she was learned in planting and the treatment of parsley and carrots and everything that contributed to the household table. Under her management George worked in the garden; he mended gates and fences, pumped water, and turned his hand to anything. She exacted from him a promise to go to chapel every Sunday, and looked upon him with that proprietary feeling that a man may have for a dog which he has personally saved from drowning. Sometimes she spoke to him of his soul, which abashed him terribly.

Although she wore a black silk dress on Sundays, as befitted a woman of her means, she was up and out early on week-days, walking through cow-house and poultry-yard, and appearing now and then in places in which she was not expected, to the great confusion of the idle.

She was just to her men, and, according to her lights, just to her maids. To the latter she was pitiless on the discovery that any one of them had so much as the ghost of a love-affair. Such things were intolerable to her, a shame and a hissing. For a money trouble she would open her purse, having had experience of poverty in the days before her parents grew prosperous; for a love trouble she had nothing but a self-satisfied contempt, and, for a sister who had loved too much—from whatever reason—she had a feeling which would have made her draw in her skirts with a sneer, should she pass such an one in the street. To her, the woman who had staked her all upon one man and lost it was the same as another who made a profession of such lapses; she had excellent theories of life, but she had seen nothing of it. She was, however, true to them, true to herself and true in her speech, though, in her mind, there was but one point of view to be taken by all decent people, and that was her own. Her leniency to Williams, who could look back on past dishonesty, was one of those contradictions which come, now and then, even to the consistent, and, for once in her life, she was ready to believe that a back-slider might yet retrace his steps. Besides, George was a man, and she had the idea, curiously common to good women, that, though a man’s sins might possibly be condoned, a woman’s were unpardonable.