Chapter 6

Reuben at once laid out his wife's money to the best advantage. He bought twenty cows, good milkers, and started a dairy business in Rye. A shop was opened near the Landgate, which sold milk, butter, cream, and eggs from Odiam. He also tried to establish a milk-round in Rye, sending circulars to inns and private houses. He engaged a young woman to serve in the shop, and boys to drive his milk-carts. This meant a big expenditure, and almost all Rose's money was swallowed up by it.

Reuben was surprised at Lardner's attitude. The old man refused to look upon this spending of his niece's dowry as an excellent investment, which would soon bring in returns a hundredfold—he would have preferred to see her money lying safe and useless in Lewes Old Bank, and accused Backfield of greed and recklessness. Reuben in his turn was disgusted with Lardner's parsimony, and would have quarrelled with him had he not been afraid of an estrangement. The farmer of Starvecrow could not speak without all sorts of dreadful roars and clearings in his throat, and Reuben hopefully observed the progress of the cancer.

Rose herself did not much care how her money was spent as long as she had the things she wanted. First of these at present was Reuben's love, and that she had in plenty. She was a perpetual source of delight to him; her beauty, her astounding mixture of fire and innocence, her good humour, and her gaiety were even more intoxicating than before marriage. He felt that he had[Pg 263] found the ideal wife. As a woman she was perfect, so perfect that in her arms he could forget her short comings as a comrade. After all, what did it matter if she failed to plumb the depths of his desire for things outside herself, as long as she herself was an undying source of enchantment?—smoothing away the wrinkles of his day with her caresses, giving him love where she could not give him understanding, her heart where she could not give her brain. During the hours of work and fret he would long for her, for the quiet warm evenings, and the comfort which the wordless contact of her brought. She made him forget his heaviness, and gather strength to meet his difficulties, giving him draughts of refreshment for to-morrow's journey in the desert.

His times were still anxious. Even if the milk-round turned out a success, it was bound to be a loss to him during the first year. A multiplication of servants also meant for a man like Reuben a multiplication of trials. He would have liked to do all the work himself, and could trust no one to do it properly for him. His underlings, with their detached attitude towards the farm, were a perpetual source of anxiety and contempt. His heart sickened for those stalwart sons he had dreamed of in the days of his first marriage—a dream which mocked him daily with its pitiful materialisation in the shred of family that still worked for Odiam. Reuben longed for Rose to have a child, but the months passed, and she had no favourable answer to his repeated questionings, which struck her at first as amusing, later as irritating, and at last—at the suggestion of one or two female friends—as indelicate.

She herself had no wish for motherhood, and expressed this so openly that in time Reuben began to entertain dark doubts of her, and to feel that she would avoid it if she could. Yet she in herself was so utterly sweet that he could not find it in his heart to be angry, or use anything but tender remonstrance when she vexed[Pg 264] him with her attitude towards life in general and marriage in particular.

She gulped at pleasure, and she gave him so much that he could not deny her what she craved for, though the mere decorativeness of her tastes amazed and sometimes appalled him. She coaxed him to buy her new curtains and chair-covers for the parlour, and to turn it into a room which could be used, where she could lounge in her pretty frocks, and entertain her women-friends—of whom she had a startling number—to afternoon tea, with cream, and little cakes that cost an amount of money altogether disproportionate to the space that they filled in one's inside. She demanded other entertainments too—visits to Rye, and even to Hastings, and jaunts to fairs other than the sanctioned one on Boarzell.

Reuben was delighted with her fashionable clothes, the dainty things with which she managed to surround herself, her fastidious care for her person, her pomadings, her soapings, her scentings—but he sometimes had vague doubts of this beautiful, extravagant, irresponsible creature. He was like a man stirring in a happy dream, realising in the midst of it that he dreams, and must some day awake.