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Updated: May 11, 2025
Georgie had once asked him; "you'll have to be there for ever and ever some day; why do you want to go before you have to?" John-James, attired in his best broadcloth, with a bowler hat firmly fixed above his weather-beaten face, stared at her stonily "I go to the graveyards," he said at length, "because them be the only places where folks mind their own business...."
These cows he now saw were good enough of their kind, but he wished to start Guernseys or Jerseys, or more probably a cross-breed of the two, as being fitter for the bare country than pure-bred animals. John-James tramped in behind the last cow and closed the gate. He had made no remark at sight of Ishmael, and all he now said was: "Them are good cows. Good as any you'll get up-country I reckon."
So he planned, and then, hearing the voice of John-James calling to the cows, he remembered that the utilitarian side of the place must come first; and he went up the path, through the panelled corridor that led through the house, into the court, passed under the arch at the opposite side, and so into the farmyard.
"I want to start Jerseys," said Ishmael boldly; "I'm sure the better quality of the milk will more than make up for the greater cost of the stock." "Jerseys! ... well," said John-James, startled, "that's a new idea, surely. I don't knaw where 'ee'd get a bull to serve en. Hav'ee thought on that?" "I don't see why I shouldn't have a bull myself.
The whole affair left the three at home very untouched John-James because he was of a stolid habit, Vassie because she was never in sympathy with her mother and had borne much from her of late, and Ishmael because it seemed to him to have really no more to do with him intimately than if she had been a stranger woman living in his house.
He was full of new ideas for farming, which he had imbibed in Saskatchewan, and Ishmael, with a smile of dry amusement against himself, found he was as suspicious of them as ever John-James had been of his iron ploughs and Jersey cows. Farming being "the thing" in Canada, Nicky, who had gone away rather despising it, came back eager to try his hand.
All this bad blood needs sweetening." "I daresay," said John-James, "but meanwhile Ishmael'll be growen up further and further from his folk." "But you wouldn't have me not educate him, would you?" urged Boase, speaking as to a fellow-man; "you say yourself it's too late with Archelaus. It always was; he hated me from Ishmael's birth."
An album lay on the floor, and he stooped to pick it up, but his mother, quick for all her years and rheumatism, was before him and had thrust it out of his reach. Tea was a stiff meal; everyone was on company manners. John-James, in from stabling the mare, sat at the edge of a chair; Vassie was too genteel, Phoebe too arch, Annie grim.
It was late autumn when they went back to Cloom, and under John-James' watchful care the harvest was all in; he awaited them at the station in the smart new trap that had been a present from the miller, and Katie Jacka, with a tight-lipped smile upon her face and a heart full of contempt for a mistress whom privately she considered no better than herself, was hovering between kitchen and passage when they drove up, with a large bouquet of bought flowers swaddled in a stiff paper frill ready as an offering.
But to Ishmael and John-James she still held the glow that for them had enwrapped her even in early days when her destiny was only clear cut in her own mind, and when her hardness, commented on by others, was to them an unknown quantity.
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