The Sheep-Stealers

by Violet Jacob

Between the two, as the child grew older, there existed a curious relationship, more like a defensive alliance between two small powers against a greater one than anything else, tacit, unspoken, and, strange to say, better understood by the boy than by the man.

Eli stood in awe of his wife, and young Rhys knew it; he was not afraid of her himself, for fear was a sensation he was physically incapable of feeling, but he saw in his father’s society a road of escape from Anne, whose unsympathetic attitude towards his youthful errors was at once dull and inconvenient. A worse education for a little boy could hardly be imagined, and Rhys’ shrewdness was perhaps a source of greater danger to his character than any quality he possessed; he was too acute to be deceived in Eli, and he knew perfectly the worth of an affection which, though genuine of its kind, would not hesitate to neglect him if it grew tired of him, or to sacrifice him if he stood in the way.

The one great good which he got out of his profitless childhood was an intense familiarity with outdoor life. The sky was his ceiling, the earth his carpet, and he wandered about the pastures around, the mountain above, and the valley below, with the same assurance that other little boys of his age felt in wandering about their nurseries. He knew the habits of every living creature and every nesting-place for miles; he could climb like a mountain-sheep or run like a hare, and his observation of Nature became so highly developed as to make him, in some respects, very like an animal. He knew the meaning of every sound, distant or near, and the whole world teemed with voices for him which it generally keeps for birds and beasts alone.

It was only natural that he should be attracted by the delights of poaching, and an inveterate poacher he became; he set nets for partridges and laid night-lines in the trout-streams of the valley, and no outdoor rascality entered his head which he did not immediately attempt. On the few occasions on which he was caught, Mrs. Walters, after rebuking him severely, took him to his father and insisted on his being thrashed, and when this happened, Rhys knew that there was no escape; so he took his punishment with as much equanimity as he could, merely resolving to work his next escapade on more careful lines.

When he was five years old his brother died; had he lived to be older he might have done something to humanize the selfish and uncivilized little boy, and his death, which was the blackest grief that Anne had ever known, seemed to turn the poor woman’s already hard heart into stone. With her elder child she lost the one real interest she had contrived to glean from her narrow life, and when the funeral was over and there was nothing left but an aching blank, she turned further from her husband and the boy, shutting herself round with a wall of indifference. Rhys was absolutely nothing to her. She was glad that he was so strong and healthy, and sorry that he was so disobedient; beyond that she hardly gave him a thought. He was a sealed book to her—a sealed book with a binding which offended her and which it did not occur to her to open.

It was just at this time that an earnest preacher, a light in his sect and a man of extraordinary personal influence, came to hold meetings among the Methodists of the mountain district, and Anne went to hear him speak. With her grief, her silent bitterness, and her unsatisfied life, she was an ideal subject upon which this man’s zeal could act. Before he had well begun what he called his “struggle for her soul,” the work was half done and the issue decided; the hard doctrines and straitened ideas which he preached appealed to her in a way that nothing else could; the wholesale condemnation of sinners which he announced was entirely in accordance with a type of mind that had ever hated the Devil more than it had loved God, and she threw herself wholly into the sea of his relentless Christianity, for there were no half-measures with her.

Eli looked on at the spectacle with apprehension, quailing as he thought of her possible attempts at his own conversion to the paths of the more active and elaborate righteousness. But as time went on, and he found that his personal salvation formed no part of his wife’s plans, he was a good deal relieved and felt very grateful to the preacher, welcoming anything which helped to keep them separate and divert her attention from his comfortable habits of life. He never interfered with her in any way, though he would sometimes stroll into the kitchen when a meeting was being held there, loitering about and pretending that he was not quite sober, while he internally enjoyed the agonies she suffered from fear that her decorous guests should suspect what she perceived with horror. Thus did the malicious old farmer gratify his sense of humour.

So the years passed on until it occurred to the pair that Rhys’ education should be considered. He must go to school, and they resolved to send him to the Grammar School at Hereford. The small amount of pride that Eli had was centred in the pleasant thought that he was, in his calling, a rich man. With all his laxity he had been shrewd in business, and could look round on his possessions with the knowledge that there was enough and to spare for his son and his son’s son after him. The boy should better himself in life, should have the education which he had lacked, should spend his money with the best of the gentlefolks’ children with whom he would be brought into contact at Hereford. The end of it was that Rhys, considerably interested in his new position, found himself one morning on the top of the Hereford coach with a Bible given him by Anne in one pocket and half-a-sovereign given him by Eli in the other. He was very much pleased with the half-sovereign.

His feelings as he rolled along were mixed. He could not but welcome the prospect of the livelier interests and companionships before him, but, at the same time, he knew very well that that freedom which had been the breath of his nostrils would be his no longer; and, until he saw how much he might be compensated for its loss in other ways, he could not exactly rejoice. As regards any sentiment at leaving his parents, he had not much.

He did not flatter himself that either would miss him to any distressing degree, and though he felt a little lump in his throat as he bade good-bye to his father, the sensation had passed almost as soon as he was out of sight. No, a new world was opening, and he prepared to plunge into it with a curiosity at once suspicious and hopeful.