on ruining us. Here is Pasco as wax in your hands. We’ve already lost half our land, and that is your doing. I do not wish to be sold out of house and home because of your rash ventures--you risk nothing, it is Pasco and I who have to pay.”
“Go to your scouring and cooking,” said Jason. “Zerah, that is in your line; leave us men to our proper business.”
“I know what comes of your brooding,” retorted the woman; “you hatch out naught but disaster. If Pasco turned a deaf ear, I would not mind all your tales, but more is the pity, he listens, and listening in his case means yielding, and yielding, in plain letters, is LOSS.”
Instead of answering his sister, Jason looked once more in the direction of the girl, seated in the bay-window. She was absorbed in her thoughts, and seemed not to have been attending to, or to be affected by, the prospects of wealth that had been unfolded by her father. When he had addressed her previously, she had answered, but as he had not attended to her answer, she had relapsed into silence.
She was roused by his strident voice, as he sang out--
“There was a frog lived in a well
Crock-a-mydaisy, Kitty alone!
There was a frog lived in a well,
And a merry mouse lived in a mill,
Kitty alone and I.”
Now her pale face turned to him with something of appeal.
“How is the little worm?” asked Quarm; “no roses blooming in the cheeks. Wait till I carry you to the moors. There you shall sit and smell the honeybreath of the furze, and as the heather covers the hillsides with raspberry-cream, the flush of life will come into your face. I’m not so sure but that money might be made out of the spicy air of Dartmoor. Why not condense the scent of the furze-bushes, and advertise it as a specific in consumption? I won’t say that folks wouldn’t buy. Why not extract the mountain heather as a cosmetic? It is worth considering. Why not the juice of whortleberry as a dye for the hair? and pounded bog-peat for a dentifrice? Pasco, my boy, I have ideas. I say, listen to me. This is the way notions come flashing up in my brain.”
He had forgotten about his daughter, so enkindled was his imagination by his new schemes.
Once again, discouraged and depressed, the girl dropped her eyes on her work.
The sun shining on the flowing tide filled the bay of the room with rippling light, walls and ceiling were in a quiver, the glisten was in the glass, it was repeated on the floor, it quivered over her dress and her pale face, it sparkled and winked in her knitting-pins. She might have been a mermaid sitting below the water, seen through the restless, undulatory current.
Mrs. Pepperill growled, and struck with her fingers the pan she had been cleaning.
“What is a woman among men but a helpless creature, who cannot prevent the evil she sees coming on? Talk of woman as the inferior vessel! It is she has the common sense, and not man.”
“It was not you who brought Coombe Cellars to me, but I brought you to Coombe Cellars,” retorted her husband. “What is here is mine--the house, the business, the land. You rule in the kitchen, that is your proper place. I rule where I am lord.”
Pasco spoke with pomposity, drawing his chin back into his neck.
“When you married me,” said Zerah, “nothing was to be yours only, all was to be yours and mine. I am your wife, not your housekeeper. I shall watch and guard well against waste, against folly. I cannot always save against both, but I can protest--and I will.”
On hearing the loud tones of Mrs. Pepperill, Kate hastily collected her knitting and ball of worsted and left the room. She was accustomed to passages of arms between Pasco and his wife, to loud and angry voices, but they frightened her, and filled her with disgust. She fled the moment the pitch of the voices was raised and their tones became harsh.
“Look there!” exclaimed Zerah, before the girl had left the room. “There is a child for you. Her father returns, after having been away for a fortnight. She never rises to meet him, she goes on calmly knitting, does not speak a word of welcome, take the smallest notice of him. It was very different with my Wilmot; she would fly to her father--not that he deserved her love; she would dance about him and kiss him. But she had a heart, and was what a girl should be; as for your Kate, brother Jason, I don’t know what to make of her.”
“What is the matter with Kitty?”
“She is not like other girls. Did you not take notice? She was cold and regardless when you arrived, as if you were a stranger--never even put aside her knitting, never gave you a word.”
Zerah was perhaps glad of an excuse for not continuing an angry discussion with her husband before her brother. She was hot; she could now give forth her heat upon the head of the girl.
“I don’t think I gave her much chance,” said Jason; “you see, I was talking to Pasco about the oaks.”
“Give her the chance?” retorted Zerah. “As if my Wilmot would have waited till her father gave her the chance. It is not for the father to dance after his child, but the child should run to its father. I’ll tell you what I believe, Jason, and nothing will get me out of the belief. You know how Jane Simmons’ boy was born without eyelashes; and how last spring we had a lamb without any tail; and that Bessie Penny hasn’t got any lobe of ear at all, only a hole in the side of her head; and Ephraim Tooker has no toe-nails.”
“I know all that.”
“Very well. I believe--and you’ll never shake it out of me--that child of yours was born without a heart.”
CHAPTER III
ALL INTO GOLD
Pasco Pepperill was a man slow, heavy, and apparently phlegmatic, and he was married to a woman full of energy, and excitable.
Pasco had inherited Coombe Cellars from his father; he had been looked upon as the greatest catch among the young men of the neighbourhood. It was expected that he would marry well. He had married well, but not exactly in the manner anticipated. Coombe Cellars was a centre of many activities; it was a sort of inn--at all events a place to which water parties came to picnic; it was a farm and a place of merchandise. Pasco had chosen as his wife Zerah Quarm, a publican’s daughter, with, indeed, a small sum of money of her own, but with what was to him of far more advantage, a clear, organising head. She was a scrupulously tidy woman, a woman who did everything by system, who had her own interest or that of the house ever in view, and would never waste a farthing.
Had the threads of the business been placed in Zerah’s hands, she would have managed all, made money in every department, and kept the affairs of each to itself in her own orderly brain.
But Pepperill did not trust her with the management of his wool, coal, grain, straw and hay business. “Feed the pigs, keep poultry, attend to the guests, make tea, boil cockles--that’s what you are here for, Zerah,” said Pepperill; “all the rest is my affair, and with that you do not meddle.”
The pigs became fat, the poultry laid eggs, visitors came in quantities; Zerah’s rashers, tea,
