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It was as if Nature itself were aware that, if Ally were not dispossessed of that terror before Greatorex's child was born her own purpose would be insecure; as if the unborn child, the flesh and blood of the Greatorexes that had entered into her, protested against her disastrous cowardice.
If it pleased God to afflict him that was God's affair, and, even as a devout Wesleyan, Essy considered that God had about done enough. As Essy sat and stitched, she smiled, thinking of Greatorex's son who lay in her bed in the little room over the kitchen. Miss Gwenda let her have him with her on the nights when Mrs. Gale slept up at the Farm. It was quiet in the Vicarage kitchen.
Greatorex's voice was a voice of awful volume and it ranged somewhere from fairly deep barytone almost to tenor. It was at moments unmanageable, being untrained, yet he seemed to do as much with it as if it had been bass and barytone and tenor all in one. It had grown a little thick in the last year, but he brought out of its very thickness a brooding, yearning passion and an intolerable pathos.
It was bad enough that Augustus Greatorex's theories had cramped his own development; it would have been ten-fold worse had they been operative to the stunting of another soul. Letty Merewether was the daughter of a bishop in partibus.
Thot's t' road." Maggie whispered, awestruck by these preparations: "Which coops will yo' 'ave, Mr. Greatorex?" "T' best coops, Maaggie." At Greatorex's command she brought the little round oak table from its place in the front window and set it by the hearth before the visitor.
Her social value, obscured by the terrible two years in Garthdale, had come to her as a discovery and an acquisition. For all her complacency, she could not regard it as a secure thing. She was sensitive to every breath that threatened it; she was unable to forget that, if she was Steven Rowcliffe's wife, she was Alice Greatorex's sister. Even as Mary Cartaret she had been sensitive to Alice.
Thence back by water to Greatorex's, and there he showed me his varnish which he had invented, which appears every whit as good, upon a stick which he hath done, as the Indian, though it did not do very well upon my paper ruled with musique lines, for it sunk and did not shine.
After dinner I took leave and went to Greatorex's, whom I found in his garden, and set him to work upon my ruler, to engrave an almanac and other things upon the brasses of it, which a little before night he did, but the latter part he slubbered over, that I must get him to do it over better, or else I shall not fancy my rule, which is such a folly that I am come to now, that whereas before my delight was in multitude of books, and spending money in that and buying alway of other things, now that I am become a better husband, and have left off buying, now my delight is in the neatness of everything, and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat, which is a strange folly.
Then Essy came and took the baby from her. "'E's too 'eavy fer yo', Miss," she said. She laughed as she took him; she gazed at him with pride and affection unabashed. His one fault, for Essy, was that, though he had got Greatorex's eyes, he had not got Greatorex's hair. Mary and Rowcliffe went back together. "You're coming in to tea, aren't you?" she said. "Rather."
"And does it come to you then, Alice?" "I get my share, sir. He left it to be parted even between his nephews and nieces." "Why, Alice, you are quite an heiress, then!" returned her master, scarcely however believing the thing so grand as Alice would have it. "But don't you think now it would be rather hard that your fortune should be Mrs. Greatorex's misfortune?"
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