Chapter 15

Early the next year, Tilly married Realf of Grandturzel.

Reuben received the blow in silence—it stunned him. He did not go over to Cheat Land—something, he scarcely knew what, kept him away. In the long yellow twilights he wandered on Boarzell. The rain-smelling March wind scudded over the grass, over the wet furrows of his cornfields, over the humming tops of the firs that, with the gorse splashed round their trunks, marked the crest of the Moor and of his ambition. Would they ever be his, those firs? Would he ever tear up that gorse and fling it on the bonfire, as he had torn up the gorse on the lower slopes and burned it with roars and cracklings and smoke that streamed over the Moor to Totease? Perhaps Realf would have the firs and the gorse, and pile that gorgeous bonfire. Tilly would put him up to her father's game—Reuben's imagination again failed to conceive the man who did not want Boarzell—she would betray Odiam's ambitions, and babble its most vital secrets. Tilly, Reuben told Boarzell, was a bitch.

It became now all the more necessary to smash Realf. He could no longer be content with keeping just ahead of him; he must establish a sort of two-power standard, and crush his rival to the earth. That was not a good summer for expansion—a drought baked up the greater part of Sussex, and there was an insect plague in the hops—nevertheless, Reuben bought thirty-five acres of Boarzell, on the east slope, by the road. He was tormented by a fear that Realf would buy the land if he[Pg 235] did not, and, moreover, during May two boards had appeared advertising it as "an eligible building site"; which was possibly bluff, possibly unusual cunning on the part of Flightshot, made resourceful by its straits.

He no longer had any direct intercourse with the Bardons. Their latest impropriety had put them beyond even the favour of a casual nod. If they chose to break up his family they must take the consequences. He only wished he could break up their estate, sell their rat-holed old Manor over their heads, and leave them unprotected by landed property to the sure workings of their own incompetence.

He did not fail to show his neighbours how he despised Flightshot, and the more humorously inclined among them were never tired of asking how soon it would be before Richard married Anne.

"Your family seems to be in a marrying way jest now, Mus' Backfield—there's your daughter made an unaccountable fine match, and it's only nat'ral as young Richard shud want to do as well fur himself."

Reuben treated these irreverences with scorn. Nothing would make him abate a jot of his dignity. On the contrary, his manner and his presence became more and more commanding. He drove a splendid blood mare in his gig, smoked cigars instead of pipes, and wore stand-up collars about four inches high—when he was not working, for it had not struck him that it was undignified to work, and he still worked harder on his farm than the worst-paid pig-boy.

He was more stoutly resolved than ever that the mob of small farmers and incompetents should not gape at his misfortunes. So he hid under a highly repulsive combination of callousness and swagger his grief for his sons' defection, his rage and shame at Tilly's marriage, and his growing anxiety about Odiam. That summer had been terrible—a long drought had been followed too late by thundery rains. His harvest had been[Pg 236] parched and scrappy, most of the roots shedding their seed before reaping; the green-fly had spoiled several acres of hops, which otherwise would have been the one bright patch in the season; his apples and pears had been eaten by wasps; and then a few untimely showers had beaten down two fields of barley yet unreaped and his only decent crop of aftermath hay.

If Grandturzel had fared as badly he could have borne it, but Grandturzel, though scarred, came out of the summer less battered than he. Realf's oats, being in a more sheltered position, did no private threshing of their own; his hops for the most part escaped the blight, and though he lost a good deal on his plums, his apples were harvested at a record, and brought him in nearly ten pounds an acre. On both farms the milk had done badly, but as Realf's dairy business was not so extensive as Backfield's, he was better able to stand its partial collapse.

Reuben felt that Tilly was at the bottom of his rival's success. She was practical and saving, the very virtues which Realf lacked and the want of which might have wrecked him. She doubtless was responsible for the good condition of his orchards and the immunity of his hops; she had probably told her husband of that insect-spray of her father's—which had failed him that summer, being too much diluted by the fool who mixed it, but had proved a miracle of devastation in other years.

He wanted to smash Tilly even more than he wanted to smash Realf. He had seen her twice since her marriage—meeting her once in Rye, and once on Boarzell—and each sight had worked him into a greater rage. Her little figure had strengthened and filled out, her demure self-confidence had increased, her prettiness was even more adorable now that the rose had deepened on her cheeks and her gowns strained over her breast; she was enough to fill any man with wrath at the joke of[Pg 237] things. Tilly ought to be receiving the wages of her treachery in weariness and anxiety, fading colour and withering flesh—and here she was all fat and rosy and happy, well-fed and well-beloved. He hated her and called her a harlot—because she had betrayed Odiam for hire and trafficked in its shame.