The Sheep-Stealers

by Violet Jacob

His long face was one which few persons of any discernment would have passed without a second glance; fewer still could have determined what it actually expressed. He had eyebrows of the real Welsh type coming down low towards the nose, the eyes underneath being set near together and looking either brown or grey according to the light in which they were seen. They were usually called brown, to match the tanned complexion and dark hair to which they belonged. His cheekbones were high, his nose long and pointed, though the refinement which it might appear to indicate found its unexpected contradiction in a straight and unsensitive nostril.

When he spoke, Rhys used much less gesticulation than was common to his countrymen (for he was three-parts a Welshman), but his thin lips moved a great deal and the quick turns of his close-cropped head—he kept his hair short when it was the fashion among men to wear it rather long—showed that he did not by any means possess the true phlegmatic temperament. Above all, he looked entirely at one with the natural and animal creation around him. Had he been a poorer man, he might easily have been taken for a poacher, had he been a richer one, for a country gentleman of active and sporting tastes; as a matter of fact, he was neither of these, being a farmer and the son of a farmer. His earlier childhood had been spent in what one might almost call savagery, and the rest of his youth in Hereford Grammar School, where, except for a far more polished speech and accent than was natural to his position, he had learnt but a certain amount of what his parents wished him to acquire. He had also learned much of which they, in their greater simplicity, had never dreamed.

Of these two, Eli Walters and his wife, only Mrs. Walters was alive, and she lived with Rhys at Great Masterhouse, a farm standing high in Crishowell parish on the skirts of the mountain land. It was a long and ancient stone house which had consisted of one storey until Eli had added an upper floor to suit his more modern ideas of convenience, and, as this outcome of his full purse and soaring mind extended but half the length of the dwelling-house, it gave the approaching stranger a notion that it might be some kind of religious building with a squat tower at one end. Owing to the impossibility of dovetailing a proper staircase in, the upper rooms were reached from outside by a ladder with a weather-beaten railing running up it. To this protection Eli, who occupied a room at the top, had often had reason to be grateful, for the excellent beer produced in Hereford town had played a larger part in his latter years than was altogether decorous; many a time, on winter nights, Mrs. Walters, sitting below in the kitchen, had listened sternly to his uneven footstep in its spasmodic descent to earth.

Great Masterhouse looked towards the Twmpa, and, from the kitchen window, the view presented to the eye a strip of turf forming a parade-ground for troops of cocks and hens. This sloped to a tortuous little stream, upon which the ducks, having picked up everything worth having near home, might cruise down to a pool in search of more alluring gluttonies. At the south side of the house lay the strip of garden that was all of which the farm could boast. It was used for vegetable-growing alone, and wore a dreary aspect all the year round, enlivened only for a short time in spring, when a pear-tree, trained up the dead wall of the additional storey, broke out into a green and white cloud. Old Walters, it is true, had taken some interest in the few yards of flower-bed it had contained in his lifetime. He had planted sweet-williams, peonies and such like, for he was a man who loved beauty in any form, though, unfortunately, he had been as apt to see it in the bottom of a beer-jug as in any other more desirable place.

His wife cared for none of these things, for she regarded the culture of what merely pleased the eye as a wanton throwing away of time. It seemed to her to be people’s duty to make themselves as uncomfortable as possible in this world by way of suitable preparation for the next. So, after Eli had finished alike his drinks and his gardenings and been carried down the hill to Crishowell churchyard, the flowers disappeared from the poor little garden, and rows of sensible cabbages and onions raised their aggressive heads from the places they had left empty.

At the back was a great yard surrounded by outbuildings, and this place gave to Great Masterhouse the only picturesqueness it possessed. From it one looked at the curious old back-door which opened on a stone passage to the kitchen, and might admire the solid oak and heavily-moulded lintel. Inside there was a niche in the wall into which a strong wooden beam could be shot, while above it a porch projected bearing the date 1685. Patches of golden-brown stonecrop sprawled over this, and a heap of dried bracken which lay upon the doorstep for all who entered to clean their boots upon, added to the antiquated effect. Such had been Rhys’ home during his twenty-seven years of life.

At his father’s death, when Great Masterhouse with the good slice of land belonging to it passed into his hands, he was fully prepared to do his duty by his inheritance, and in this he was supported by his mother, who was a practical woman, as well as by his own dislike of being bested in the affairs of life, a failing to profit in any way by his advantages. In other words, he hated to be done, and she, like many other worthy persons whose minds are professedly set above this froward world, hated it too.

Mrs. Walters had been right in many deeds of her married life, though she had not, perhaps, made her sterling virtues very attractive to her husband and son. Those inclined to blame her for this were too quick in forgetting that her life had been no bed of roses, and that to one of her type, daily contact with a weak, idle nature like that of Eli was a perpetual martyrdom. She was an utterly humourless woman, and her want of humour, which is really no less than the want of a sense of proportion, added a thousand-fold to her trials.

She took everything too hard, giving to each untoward trifle which crossed her path the value of a calamity, with the result that the mountain she had created fell and crushed her. She was truthful and upright in the highest degree, and though her hardness and pride repelled her husband and her want of elasticity wearied him to the verge of madness, her integrity was a matter of admiration to him. His weaker spirit might have been dominated by hers, but for that touch of originality in him which forbade his being entirely swayed by another. He was a man addicted to cheerful company, joviality and good-fellowship; in conversation he was a desperate liar, which made him none the less amusing to his friends on market-days, and they rallied round him with unfailing constancy, receiving his sprightly ideas with guffaws of laughter, slapping their own legs, or other people’s backs—whichever chanced to be handiest—as his wit struck them in assailable places.

When he first married, Eli was very much in love with his unsuitable companion, but the day soon came when he grew tired of her. He wearied of her dark, hawk-faced beauty, and her narrowness of mind oppressed him; his want of seriousness also bred a contempt in her heart which she allowed him to feel plainly. It was not long before this led to quarrels—of a mild kind, it is true—but enough to make husband and wife see the mistake they had committed; and when their first child, a boy, arrived, Anne Walters wrapped herself up in her baby’s existence, finding in it an outlet for the intense feeling which had all her life been dormant, and was now awake in her for the first time. At Rhys’ birth, some two years later, she had little to bestow on him but a well-meaning interest, for her whole soul was occupied with her eldest born; so Eli, longing for companionship of some kind, took possession of him and proceeded to alternately spoil and neglect him.