“No, nothing particular.”
She thought of Tom, but to save Catharine’s life she would not have acknowledged that it was possible for a Catchpole to have power to disturb a Furze. Had it been Mr. Colston now, the case would have been different.
“She needs care, but there is nothing serious the matter with her. She ought to go away, but I understand she has no friends at a distance with whom she can stay. Give her a little wine.”
“Any medicine?”
“No, none; I should like to see her again soon; good morning.”
Phœbe’s home was near Abchurch, and Catharine went over to Abchurch to see her, not without remonstrance on the part of Mrs. Furze, Phœbe having been discharged in disgrace. Her father was an agricultural labourer, and lived in a little four-roomed, whitewashed cottage about a mile and a half out of the village. The living-room faced the north-east, the door opening direct on the little patch of garden, so that in winter, when the wind howled across the level fields, it was scarcely warmer indoors than outside, and rags and dish-clouts had to be laid on the door-sill to prevent the entrance of the snow and rain. At the back was a place, half outhouse, half kitchen, which had once had a brick floor, but the bricks had disappeared. Upstairs, over the living-room, was a bedroom, with no fireplace, and a very small casement window, where the mother and three children slept, the oldest a girl of about fourteen, the second a boy of twelve, and the third a girl of three or four, for the back bedroom over the outhouse had been given up to Phœbe since she was ill. The father slept below on the floor. Phœbe’s room also had no fireplace, and great patches of plaster had been brought down by the rain on the south-west side. Just underneath the window was the pigstye. Outside nothing had been done to the house for years. It was not brick built, and here and there the laths and timber were bare, and the thatch had almost gone. Houses were very scarce on the farms in that part, and landlords would not build. The labourers consequently were driven into Abchurch, and had to walk, many of them, a couple of miles each way daily. Miss Diana Eaton, eldest daughter of the Honourable Mr. Eaton, had made a little sketch in water-colour of the cottage. It hung in the great drawing-room, and was considered most picturesque.
“Lovely! What a dear old place!” said the guests.
“It makes one quite enamoured of the country,” exclaimed Lady Fanshawe, one of the most determined diners-out in Mayfair. “I never look at a scene like that without wishing I could give up London altogether. I am sure I could be content. It would be so charming to get rid of conventionality and be perfectly natural. You really ought to send that drawing to the Academy, Miss Eaton.”
That we should take pleasure in pictures of filthy, ruined hovels, in which health and even virtue are impossible, is a strange sign of the times. It is more than strange; it is an omen and a prophecy that people will go into sham ecstasies over one of these pigstyes so long as it is in a gilt frame; that they will give a thousand guineas for its light and shade—light, forsooth!—or for its Prout-like quality, or for its quality of this, that, and the other, while inside the real stye, at the very moment when the auctioneer knocks down the drawing amidst applause, lies the mother dying from dirt fever; the mother of six children starving and sleeping there—starving, save for the parish allowance, for the snow is on the ground and the father is out of work.
Crowhurst’s wages were ten shillings a week, and the boy earned half a crown, but in the winter there was nothing to do for weeks together. All this, however, was accepted as the established order of things. It never entered into the heads of the Crowhursts to revolt. They did not revolt against the moon because she was sometimes full and lit everybody comfortably, and at other times was new and compelled the use of rushlights. It was so ordained.