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Read Ebook: One Woman: Being the Second Part of a Romance of Sussex by Ollivant Alfred
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Ebook has 2368 lines and 89070 words, and 48 pages
THE CARRIER'S CART
PART I
DEEPENING DUSK
PART II
TROUBLED DAWN
THE COMFORTER
THE CARRIER'S CART
An old-fashioned carrier's cart, such as you may still meet on the roads of Sussex, tilted, one-horsed, and moving at the leisurely pace of a bye-gone age, turned East at the Turnpike, and made slowly along the Lewes-Beachbourne road under the northern scarp of the Downs one evening of autumn in 1908. In it, at the back of the driver, were a young man and a young woman, the only passengers, ensconced among hen-coops, flitches of bacon, and baskets of greens.
They sat hand-in-hand.
The woman was a noble creature, about her the majestic tranquillity of a great three-decker that comes to rest in sunset waters after its Trafalgar. The man, but for a certain wistfulness about his eyes which betokened undue sensibility, was not remarkable. Till he spoke you would have said he was a gentleman--that is to say if your eyes confined their scrutiny to his face and refused to see his hands, his boots, his clothes. When he spoke you would have recognised at once that he was Sussex of the soil as, surely, was the woman beside him; though the speech of both was faintly marred with the all-pervading cockney accent of those who have passed beyond the village-green into the larger world of the England of to-day.
To the man and woman in the cart old Mus. Woolgar had been a familiar figure from childhood. The little girl skipping by the market-cross in Aldwoldston would stop to watch him start; the little boy would wait at Billing's Corner on the top of the hill to see him come along the New Road past Motcombe at the end of his journey. Long before either had been aware of the other's existence the old carrier had served as an invisible link between them.
Now the two were married.
Ruth Boam had become Mrs. Ernie Caspar that afternoon in the cathedral-church of Aldwoldston, on the mound among the ash-trees above Parsons' Tye and the long donkey-backed clergy-house that dates from the fourteenth century.
It had been a very quiet wedding. The father and mother of the bride had stumped across from Frogs' Hall, at the foot of the village, Ruth accompanying them, her little daughter in her arms. For the rest, Dr. and Mrs. Trupp had come over from Beachbourne with Mr. Pigott and his wife in the chocolate-bodied car driven by the bridegroom's brother.
Alf had not entered the church to see Ernie married. He had mouched sullenly down to the river instead, and stood there during the service, his back to the church, looking across the Brooks to old Wind-hover's dun and shaven flank with eyes that did not see, and ears that refused to hear.
After the ceremony the car-party returned to Beachbourne by way of the sea--climbing High-'nd-over, to drop down into Sea-ford, and home by Birling Gap and Beau-nez. From the almost violent gesture with which Alf had set his engines in motion and drawn out of the lane under the pollarded willows of Parson's Tye, he at least had been glad to turn his back on the scene.
Ruth and her husband had returned to Frogs' Hall with the old folk.
Later, as the sun began to lower behind Black Cap into the valley of the Ouse, they went up River Lane and picked up the carrier's cart by the market-cross.
For the moment they were leaving little Alice with her grandmother while they settled into the Moot, Old Town, where Ernie had found a cottage close to his work, not a quarter of a mile from the home of his father and mother in Rectory Walk.
The carrier's cart moved slowly on under the telegraph wires on which the martins were already gathering: for it was September. Now and then Ernie raised the flap that made a little window in the side of the tilt, and looked out at the accompanying Downs, mysterious in the evening.
"They're still there," he announced comfortably, "and like to be yet a bit, I reckon."
"They move much same pace as us doos, seems to me," said Ruth.
"We should get there afoor them yet though," answered Ernie.
"Afoor the Day of Judgment we might, if so be we doosn't die o breathlessness first," the woman replied.
"You'd like a car to yourself you would," chaffed Ernie. "And Alf drivin you."
Ruth turned in her lips.
They moved leisurely forward, leaving Folkington clustered about its village-green upon the right, passing the tea-gardens at Wannock, and up the long pull to Willingdon, standing among old gardens and pleasant fig-trees. Once through the village the woods of Hampden Park green-bosomed upon the left, blocked out the marshes and the splendid vision of Pevensey Bay. Now the road emerged from the shelter of hedges and elm-trees and flowed with a noble billowy motion between seas of corn that washed the foot of the Downs and swept over Rodmill to the outposts of Beachbourne. Between the road and the Downs stood Motcombe, islanded in the ruddy sea, amongst its elms and low piggeries. Behind the farm, at the very foot of the hill, was Huntsman's Lodge where once, when both were boys, Alf had betrayed his brother on the occasion of the looting of the walnut-tree.
Ern pointed out the spot to his bride and told the tale. Ruth listened with grim understanding.
"That's Alf," she said.
"Mr. Pigott lived there that time o day," Ern continued. "One of the five Manors of Beachbourne, used to be--I've heard dad say. Belonged to the Salwyns of Friston Place over the hill--the clergy-folk. The farm's where the Manor-house used to be; and the annual sheep-fair was held in a field outside from William the Conqueror till a few years back."
He pointed to one of a little row of villas on the left which looked over the allotment gardens to the Downs.
"That's where Mr. Pigott lives now. My school-master he were that time o day."
"Who's Mr. Pigott?" Ruth asked.
Ernie rootled her with a friendly elbow.
"My guv'nor, stoopid! Manager of the Southdown Transport Company. Him that was at the wedding--with the beard. Settin along o Mrs. Trupp."
The cart climbed the steep hill to Billing's Corner and Ernie looked down the familiar road to the Rectory and even caught a peep of the back of his old home. Then they turned down Church Street with its old-world fragrance of lavender and yesterday.
On the left the parish-church, long-backed and massive-towered upon the Kneb, brooded over the centuries it had seen come and go.
"Dad says the whole history of Beachbourne's centred there," said Ernie in awed voice. "Steeped in it, he says."
Ernie, who had been leaning forward to peep at the Archdeacon posed in the entrance of St. Michael's, now dropped back suddenly, nudging his companion.
A lean woman with white hair and wrathful black eyebrows, her complexion still delicate as a girl's, was coming up the hill.
"Mother," whispered Ernie.
It was Ruth's turn to raise the flap and peer forth stealthily at the figure passing so close and so unconsciously on the pavement.
So that was the woman who had opposed her marriage with such malevolent persistency!
Ruth observed her enemy with more curiosity than hostility, and received a passing impression of a fierce unhappy face.
"She don't favour you no-ways," she said, as she relapsed into a corner. "Where's dad though?"
Ernie shook his head.
"He's never with her," he said. "I ca-a-n't call to mind as ever I've seen them out together, not the pair of them."
"I'd ha liked him to have been at the wedding," murmured Ruth a thought discontentedly.
"And he'd ha liked it too, I'll lay," Ernie answered. "Only she'd never have let him."
On the Manor-house steps a tall somewhat cadaverous man was standing. He was so simply dressed as almost to be shabby; and his straw hat, tilted on the back of his head, disclosed a singularly fine forehead. There was something arresting about the man and his attitude: a delicious mixture of mischievous alertness and philosophical detachment. He might have been a mediaeval scholar waiting at the door of his master; or a penitent seeking absolution; or, not least, a youth about to perpetrate a run-away knock.
Ernie across the road watched him with eyes in which affection and amusement mingled. Then the door opened, and the scholar-penitent-youth was being greeted with glee by Bess Trupp.
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