"A fat lot o' use it is, me havin' Connie front ways if she's not going to give a hand wi' t'work, but s'always gadding round after her fine relations. Ah suppose William 'ud tell me that the wife's kin are a scourge sent from God for t'original sin o' t'husband," and she tossed the head that had once been the pertest in Follerwick. But she was not William, nor did she really dislike Connie as much as her words implied; but she found in these monologues of indictment an outlet for the accumulated irritation of reproaches born without resentment. She contemplated the clean white cloth on the table, straightened a couple of dishes on the dresser, then flew towards the yard door and the coal-house, murmuring as a parting message to the kitchen, "I'm sure the Lord made relations-in-law to square up for them as can't get married."
She had, indeed, good reason to see in relations-in-law a doubtful blessing. As Meggie Megson, the bright-eyed daughter of a Follerwick publican, she had been wooed with greater enthusiasm than discretion by William Todd of Thraile. A hasty marriage ensured the legitimate birth of her eldest son, Matthew, but did not quiet the uneasy conscience of her lover. For a year of bitter recrimination alternating with reckless passion, he had lived with her as her husband, but before her second son, Benjamin was born, the Lord took vengeance upon the wickedness of William. A false step while manœuvring the thrashing-machine robbed the wild young Todd of his left leg, and so much injured his spine that he lay now always on a couch in the front parlour, contemplating the inexorable justice of God and the unending pageant of the sky from the west window. William Todd did not so much find religion as religion found him, the sunless, menacing religion of a tramping preacher, part Calvinist, part Wesleyan; a religion wherein strange anomalies of predestination strove with a Pauline emphasis upon justification by faith, without which, in spite of the admonition of St. James, works were dead. Meggie accepted her husband's religion as she had accepted his love. Finding herself regarded as an enticement sent from the devil, she listened with patience to the outpourings of St. James, "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God . . . but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed. Then the Lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin, and the sin, when it is full grown, bringeth forth death." But she endured with less tranquility the continual assurance that from her sons, Matthew and Benjamin, such sin and death should come. Since, however, things were as they were, she proceeded to her cooking, scrubbing, baking and nursing with undiminished vigour, comforted, perhaps, by the thought that if her husband despised her only less than he despised his children at least he could not do without her.
William's mother unfortunately also tended to regard her son's accident as something in the nature of divine retribution, not for compromising a publican's daughter, but for marrying her; and when it became known that Ben, the weakling, the awkward boy whom every one conspired to brand as "wanting," had got Connie, the land-girl, into trouble, then the fierce scene of personal remorse, impotent bitterness and denunciation had been visited, not so much upon Connie, as upon Mrs. Meggie, since she was clearly the root of all evil at the High Farm. Yet, after Connie had returned to the High Farm as Ben's wife, it was Mrs. Meggie who continued to make her new life bearable. To tell the truth, Mrs. Meggie was secretly glad that Ben had married under any circumstances. Between the grim couple of invalids in the front parlour and the boisterous conviviality of farm workers in the kitchen, she had been unconsciously numbed with loneliness, and the prospect of a daughter-in-law pleased her gregarious temperament. Then too, she was glad that Ben, whom his father and brother despised for lack of virility, should have been the first to marry after all.
As she bustled from the stone-paved yard this evening, and called up the long passage, her heart, though she hardly knew it, was softened to the thought of her Ben's little child.
"Polly, Alice, Gert, come on some of you. Give me a hand wi' t'table, now."
From the draughty darkness came a gust of song and laughter.
"Who, who, who, who, who were you with last night?
'Twasn't your sister, 'twasn't your ma!
Ah, ah, ah, ah, a—ah, ah! ah!"
The voices rose to a shrill crescendo, accompanied by the screeching gasps of Bob Wither's concertina, and the tramp of nailed boots on the floor.