Chapter 3

During the next ten years the farm went forward by strides. Reuben bought seven more acres of Boarzell in '59, and fourteen in '60. He also bought a horse-rake, and threshed by machinery. He was now a topic in every public-house from Northiam to Rye. His success and the scant trouble he took to conciliate those about him had made him disliked. Unprosperous farmers[Pg 124] spoke windily of "spoiling his liddle game." Ditch and Ginner even suggested to Vennal that they should club together and buy thirty acres or so of the Moor themselves, just to spite him. However, money was too precious to throw away even on such an object, especially as everyone felt sure that Backfield would sooner or later "bust himself" in his dealings with Boarzell.

After all, he had only fifty-six acres out of a possible three hundred, and had not made much profit out of them, judging by the austerity of ways at Odiam. Horse-rakes and steam-threshers could not blind his neighbours to the absence of muslin curtains and butcher's meat. "And the way he's working them pore childer, too ... all of 'em hard at it from mornun till evenun, surelye ... enough to make their mother turn in her grave, pore girl ... not but wot she hadn't every reason to expect it, considering the way he treated her," etc. etc.

At Flightshot Manor comment was more enlightened.

"I can't understand, papa," said Anne Bardon, "how you can go on selling land to that odious Backfield."

"Well, my dear, he pays me good money for it, and I'm in precious need of that just now."

"But in time the whole Moor will fall into his hands—see if it doesn't. And he's a Tory, a reactionary. It would be a dreadful thing for the parish if he became a big landowner."

Anne's politics were the most vigorous in the family.

"My dear, if anyone else would buy the Moor, I'd be only too pleased to sell it to them. But so far there hasn't been a nibble. Backfield's the only man who has the temerity to think he could make anything out of a desert like Boarzell, and I must say I admire his pluck."

"It's only because he has no imagination. He's a thick-skinned brute, and I hate the idea of a man like that becoming powerful. Why don't you give the land back to the parish? Acknowledge that grandpapa's[Pg 125] inclosure has failed, and let the people have their common again."

"It's all very well for you to talk, Anne," said her brother Ralph, "you have your godmamma's fortune, and don't need to think of money. But papa and I have to think of it, and after all we're making a little, a very little, out of Boarzell—just enough to keep up the Village Institute. As time goes on, and Backfield gets richer and more ambitious, we shall sell larger pieces at higher rates, and then we'll be able to repair those wretched cottages at Socknersh, and do a lot more besides."

"I think it would be better if you gave up the Institute and let the cottages tumble down. It's no good trying to raise the people if you leave a man like Backfield loose among them."

"I think you exaggerate his importance, and fail to realise that of the improvements we are making in Peasmarsh. I can't help thinking, as most of the people round here think, that Backfield will, as they call it, 'bust himself' over the Moor. After all he's not educated, and an uneducated man is hampered even in the least intellectual undertakings."

"I do not agree with you, papa."

Anne turned away from her father and brother, and walked towards the window. She disliked arguing, she thought it undignified. She was a tall woman, about twenty-eight years old, severely yet rather imposingly dressed, with a clear complexion, grey eyes, and a nose which was called by her friends aquiline, by her enemies hooked. She despised the Squire in his truck with Odiam, yet she was too fair-minded not to see the considerations that weighed him. And even she, as she gazed from the window, at the southward heap of Boarzell—stony, gorsy, heather-shagged, and fir-crowned—could not withhold a certain admiration from the man who expected of his own arm and tool to subdue it.