good-for-nothing set! Any magistrate would tell you that there’s no parish where they have so many up before them.”
“No wonder!” said Captain Carbonel under his breath.
“A bad set,” repeated Mr. Atkins, pausing at the shed where his old grey horse was put up; and there they parted.
The captain and his wife and her sister walked to Downhill, two miles off, across broad meadows, a river, and a pretty old bridge, the next Sunday morning, found the church scantily filled, but with more respectable-looking people, and heard the same sermon over again, so that Mary was able to identify it with one in a published volume.
Chapter Three.
The Turnip Field.
“You ask me why the poor complain,
And these have answered thee.”
Southey.
“Hullo, Molly Hewlett, who’d ha’ thought of seeing you out here?”
It was in a wet turnip field, and a row of women were stooping over it, picking out the weeds. The one that was best off had great boots, a huge weight to carry in themselves; but most had them sadly torn and broken. Their skirts, of no particular colour, were tucked up, and they had either a very old man’s coat, or a smock-frock cut short, or a small old woollen shawl, which last left the blue and red arms bare; on their heads were the oldest of bonnets, or here and there a sun-bonnet, which looked more decent. One or two babies were waiting in the hedgeside in the charge of little girls.
“Molly Hewlett,” exclaimed another of the set, straightening herself up. “Why, I thought your Dan was working with Master Hewlett, for they Gobblealls,” (which was what Uphill made of Carbonel).
“So he be; but what is a poor woman to do when more than half his wage goes to the ‘Fox and Hounds,’ and she has five children to keep and my poor sister, not able to do a turn? There’s George Hewlett, grumbling and growling at him too, and no one knows how long he’ll keep him on.”
“What! George, his cousin, as was bound to keep him on?”
“I don’t know; George is that particular himself, and them new folks, Gobbleall as they call them, are right down mean, and come down on you if they misses one little mossle of parkisit; and there’s my poor sister to keep—as is afflicted, and can’t do nothing!”
“But she pays you handsome,” said Betsy Seddon, “and looks after the children besides.”
“Pays, indeed! Not half enough to keep her, with all the trouble of helping her about! Not that I grudges it, but she wants things extry, you see, and Dan he don’t like it. But no doubt the ladies will take notice of her.”
“I thought the lady kind enough,” interposed another woman. “She noticed how lame our granny was with the rheumatics, and told me to send up for broth.”
“We wants somewhat bad enough,” returned another thin woman, with her hand to her side. “Nobody never does nothing for no one here!”
“Nor we don’t want no one to come worriting and terrifying,” cried the last of the group, with fierce black eyes and rusty black hair sticking out beyond her man’s beaver hat, tied on with a yellow handkerchief. “Always at one about church and school, and meddling with everything—the ribbon on one’s bonnet and to the very pots on the fire. I knows what they be like in Tydeby! And what do you get by it, but old cast clothes and broth made of dish-washings?” She enforced all this with more than one word not to be written.
“I know, I’d be thankful for that!” murmured the thin woman, who looked as if she had barely a petticoat on, and could have had scarcely a breakfast.
“Oh, we all know’s Bessy Mole is all for what she can get!” said the independent woman, tossing her head.
“And had need to be,” returned Molly Hewlett, in a scornful tone, which made the poor woman in question stoop all the lower, and pull her groundsel more diligently.
“The broth ain’t bad,” ventured she who had tried it.
“I shall see what I can get out of them,” added another. “I bain’t proud; and my poor children’s shoes is a shame to see.”
“You’ll not get much,” said Molly Hewlett, with a sniff. “The captain, as they calls him, come down on my Jem, as was taking home a little bit of a chip for the fire, and made him put it down, as cross as could be.”
“How now, you lazy, trolloping, gossiping women! What are you after?”
Farmer Goodenough was upon them; and the words he showered on them were not by any means “good enough” to be repeated here. He stormed at them for their idleness so furiously as to set off the babies in the hedge screaming and yelling. Tirzah Todd, the gipsy-looking woman whom he especially abused, tossed her head and marched off in the midst, growling fiercely, to quiet her child; and he, sending a parting imprecation after her, directed his violence upon poor Bessy Mole, though all this time she had been creeping on, shaking, trembling, and crying, under the pelting of the storm; but, unluckily, in her nervousness and blindness from tears, she pulled up a young turnip, and the farmer fell on her and rated her hotly for not being worth half her wage, and doing him more harm than good with her carelessness. She had not a word to say for herself, and went on shivering and trying to check her sobs while he shouted out that he only employed her from charity, and she had better look out, or he should turn her off at once.
“Oh, sir, don’t!” then came out with a burst of tears. “My poor children—”
“Don’t go whining about your children, but let me see you do your work.”
However, this last sentence was in a milder tone, as if the fit of passion had exhausted itself; and Mr. Goodenough found his way back to the path that crossed the fields, and went on. Tirzah Todd set her teeth, clenched her fist and shook it after him, while the other women, as soon as he was out of sight, began to console Bessy Mole, who was crying bitterly and saying, “what would become of her poor children, and her own poor father.”
“Never you mind, Bessy,” said Molly Hewlett, “every one knows as how old Goodenough’s bark is worse than his bite.”
“He runs out and it’s over,” put in Betsy Seddon.
“I’m sure I can hardly keep about any way,” sobbed the widow. “My inside is all of a quake. I can’t abide words.”
“Ten to one he don’t give you another sixpence a week, after all,” added Nanny Barton.
“He ain’t no call to run out at one,” said Tirzah, standing upright and flourishing her baby.
“I’d like to give him as good as he gave, an old foul-mouthed brute!”
“Look there! There’s the ladies coming,” exclaimed Nanny Barton.
“I thought there was some reason why he
