Arminell, Vol. 1

“Who can interfere with me? The board of guardians have applied to the petty sessions for an order, and it has been granted and served on me.”

“Then, of course, you go?”

“No; they can order me to go, but they cannot force me to go. The policeman says they can fine me ten shillings a day if I remain and defy them. Let them fine me. They must next get an order to distrain to get the amount. They may sell my furniture, but they won’t be able to turn me out.”

“But why remain in peril of your life? You will be crushed under the ruins some stormy night.”

“Why remain here? Because I’ve nowhere else to go to. I will not go into the union, and I will not live in a house with other folk. I am accustomed to be alone. I am not afraid. Here I am at liberty, and I will die here rather than lose my freedom.”

“You cannot even shut your door.”

“I do not need to. I fear nothing, not the sanitary officer; he can do nothing. Not the board of guardians; they can do nothing. Not the magistrates; they cannot touch me.”[1 - The reader may think this an impossible case. At the present moment an old woman in the author’s immediate neighbourhood is thus defying all the authorities. They have come to a dead lock. She has resisted orders to leave for three years, and is in hourly peril of her life. The only person who could expel her is the landlord, who happens to be poor, and who says that he cannot rebuild the cottage, the woman who has it on a lease is bound to deliver it over at the end of the time in good order, but she is without the means to put the cottage in order. Next equinoctial gale may see her crushed to death.]

“Have you anything to live on?”

“I pick up a trifle. I bless bad knees and stop the flow of blood, and show where stolen goods are hidden, and tell who has ill-wished any one.”

“You receive contributions from the superstitious.”

“I get my living my own way. There is room for all in the world.”

Arminell seated herself in a chair offered her, and looked at the raven in its cage, picking at the bars.

Silence ensued for a few minutes. Patience folded her bare brown arms across her bosom, and standing opposite the girl, studied her from head to foot.

“The Honourable Miss Inglett!” she said, and laughed. “Why are you the honourable, and I the common person? Why are you a lady, at ease, well-dressed, and I a poor old creature badgered by sanitary officers and board of guardians, and magistrates, and by my lord, the chairman at the petty sessions?”

Arminell looked wonderingly at her, surprised at her strange address.

“Because the world is governed by injustice. What had you done as a babe, that you should have the gold spoon put into your mouth, and why had I the pewter one? It is not only sanitary officers and guardians of the poor against me, bullying me, a poor lone widow. Heaven above has been dead set against me from the moment I was born. I’ve seen the miners truck out ore and cable; now a truck load of metal, then one of refuse; one to be refined, the other to be rejected. It is so in life; we are run out of the dark mines of nothingness into light, and some of us are all preciousness and some all dross. But do you know this, Miss Arminell, they turned out heaps on heaps of refuse from the copper mines, and now they have abandoned the copper to work the refuse heaps. They find them rich – in what do you suppose? In arsenic.”

“You have had much trouble in your life?” asked Arminell, not knowing what to say to this strange, bitter woman.

“Much trouble!” Patience curtsied. She unlaced her arms, and used her hands as she spoke, like a Frenchwoman. She lacked the words that would express her thoughts, and enforced and supplemented them with gesture. “Much trouble! You shall hear how I have been served. My father worked in this old lime quarry till it was abandoned, and when it stopped, then he was out of work for two months, and he went out poaching, and shot himself instead of a pheasant. He was not used to a gun. ’Twasn’t the fault of the gun. The gun was good enough. When he was brought home dead, my mother went into one fainting fit after another, and I was born; but she died.”

“The quarry was given up, I suppose, because it was worked out?” said Arminell.

“Why did Providence allow it to be worked out so soon? Why wasn’t the lime made to run ten feet deeper, three feet, one foot would have done it to keep my father alive over my birth, and so saved my mother’s life and made me a happy woman?”

“And when your poor mother died?”

“Then it was bad for poor me. I was left an orphan child and was brought up by my uncle, who was a local preacher. He wasn’t over-pleased at being saddled wi’ me to keep. He served me bad, and didn’t give me enough to eat. Once he gave me a cruel beating because I wouldn’t say ‘Forgive us our trespasses,’ for, said I, ‘Heaven has trespassed against me, not I against Heaven.’ Why was there not another foot or eighteen inches more lime created when it was made, so that my father and mother might have lived, and I had a home and not been given over to uncle? What I said then, I say now” – all Patience’s fierceness rushed into her eyes. “Answer me. Have I been fairly used?” She extended her arms, and held her hands open, appealing to Arminell for her judgment.

“And then?” asked the girl, after a long silence, during which nothing was heard but the pecking of the raven at the bars.

“And then my uncle bade me unsay my words, but I would not. Then he swore he would thrash me every day till I asked forgiveness. So it came about.”

“What came about?”

“That I was sent to prison.”

“Not for profanity! for what?”

“For setting fire to his house.”

“You – ?”

“Yes, finish the question. Yes, I did; and so I was sent to prison.”

Arminell involuntarily shrank from the woman.

“Ah! I frighten you. But the blame does not attach to me. Why were there not a few inches more lime created when the quarry was ordained? Providence means, I am told, fore-seeing. When the world was made I reckon it was foreseen that for lack of a little more lime my father would shoot himself, and the shock kill my mother, and cast me without parents on the hands of a hard uncle, who treated me so bad that I was forced to set his thatch in a blaze, and so was sent to prison. Providence saw all that in the far-off, and held hands and did not lay another handful of lime.”

“Have you ever been married?” asked Arminell, startled by the defiance, the rage and revolt in the woman’s heart. She asked the question without consideration, in the hope of diverting the thoughts of Mrs. Kite into another channel.

Patience was silent for a moment, and looked loweringly at the young lady, then answered abruptly, “No – a few inches of lime short stopped that.”

“How did that prevent your marriage? The quarry was stopped before you were born.”

“Right, and because stopped, my father was shot and I became an orphan, and was took by my uncle, and fired his house, and was sent to gaol. After that no man cared to take to wife a woman who put lighted sticks among the thatch. No respectable man would share his name with one who had been in prison. But I was a handsome girl in my day – and – but there – I will tell you no more. The stopping of the quarry did it. If there had been laid at the bottom a few inches more of lime rock, it would never have happened. Where lies the blame?”

“Another quarry was opened,” said Arminell, “that where Mr. Tubb is captain.”

“True,” answered Patience; “but between the closing of one and the opening of another, my father bought a gun, and went over a hedge with it on a moonlight night, and the trigger caught.”

Arminell rose.

“I have been here for some time,” she said, “and I ought to be on my way home. You will permit me – ” she felt in her pocket for her purse.

“No,” said Patience curtly. “You have paid me for what I did by listening to my story. But stay – Have you heard that if you go to a pixy mound, and take the soil thereof and put it on your head, you can see the little people, and hear their voices, and know all they say and do. You have come here – to this heap of ruin and wretchedness,” she stooped and gathered up some of the dust off the floor and ashes from the hearth, and threw them on the head of Arminell. “I am a witch, they say. It is well; now your eyes and ears are opened to see and know and feel with those you never knew of before this day – another kind of creatures to yourself – the poor, the wretched, the lonely.”

CHAPTER VI

CHILLACOT

Arminell Inglett walked musingly from the cottage of Patience Kite. The vehemence of the woman, the sad picture she had unfolded of a blighted life, the look she had been given into a heart in revolt against the Divine government of the world, united to impress and disturb Arminell.

Questions presented themselves to her which she had never considered before. Why were the ways of Heaven unequal? Why, if God created all men of one flesh, and breathed into all a common spirit, why were they differently equipped for life’s journey? Why were some sent to encounter the freezing blast in utter nakedness, and others muffled in eider-down? The Norns who spin the threads of men’s lives, spin some of silk and others of tow. The Parcæ who shovel the lots of men out of bushels of gold, dust and soot, give to some soot only; they do not trouble themselves to mix the ingredients before allotting them.

As Arminell walked on, revolving in her mind the perplexing question which has ever remained unsolved and continues to puzzle and drive to despair those in all ages who consider it, she came before the house of Captain Saltren.

The house lay in a narrow glen, so narrow that it was lighted and warmed by very little sun. A slaty rock rose above it, and almost projected over it. This rock, called the Cleve, was crowned with heather, and ivy scrambled up it from below. A brook brawled down the glen below the house.

The coombe had been wild and disregarded, a jungle of furze and bramble, till Saltren’s father settled in it, and no man objecting, enclosed part of the waste, built a house, and called it his own. Lord Lamerton owned the manor, and might have interfered, or claimed ground-rent, but in a former generation much careless good-nature existed among landlords, and squatters were suffered to seize on and appropriate land that was regarded of trifling value. The former Lord Lamerton perhaps knew nothing of the appropriation. His agent was an old, gouty, easy-going man who looked into no matters closely, and so the Saltrens became possessed of Chillacot without having any title to show for it. By the same process Patience Kite’s father had obtained his cottage, and Patience held her house on the same tenure as Saltren held Chillacot. Usually when settlers enclosed land and built houses, they were charged a trifling ground-rent, and they held their houses and fields for a term of years or for lives, and the holders were bound to keep the dwellings in good repair. But, practically, such houses are not kept up, and when the leases expire, or the lives fall in the houses fall in also. A landlord with such dwellings and tenements on his property is often glad to buy out the holders to terminate the disgrace to the place of having in it so many dilapidated and squalid habitations.

Saltren’s house was not in a dilapidated condition; on the contrary, it was neat and in excellent repair. Stephen drew a respectable salary as captain of the manganese mine and could afford to spend money on the little property of which he was proud. He had had the house recently re-roofed with slate instead of thatch, with which it had been formerly covered. The windows and doors had been originally made of home-grown deal, not thoroughly mature, and it had rotted. Saltren renewed the wood-work throughout. Moreover, the chimney having been erected of the same stone as that of Kite’s cottage, had decayed in the same manner. Saltren had it taken down and rebuilt in brick, which came expensive, as brick had to be carted from fourteen miles off. But, as the captain said, one does not mind spending money on a job designed to be permanent. Saltren had restocked his garden with fruit trees three or four years ago, and these now gave promise of bearing.

The glen in which Chillacot lay was a “coombe,” that is, it was a short lateral valley running up into hill or moor, and opening into the main valley through which flows the arterial stream of the district. It was a sequestered spot, and as the glen was narrow, it did not get its proper share of sun. Some said the glen was called Chillacoombe because it was chilly, but the rector derived the name from the Celtic word for wood.