Lark Rise to Candleford (77 page)

When her mother called her at five o'clock on the Monday
morning to get up and prepare for her long walk back and she tiptoed downstairs
and saw the lamplit room and savoured the bacon and potatoes frying for her breakfast,
the new interests which had come into her life seemed of small account compared
with the permanence of this life at home, to which she felt she belonged. Her
father had already gone on his way to work. The children upstairs still slept.
For the first time during her visit, she was really alone with her mother.

While Laura ate they conversed in whispers. How glad she was,
her mother said, to know she was happy, and how pleased to see her well grown.
'You won't be a little bit of a thing like me. Nobody will ever call you a pocket
Venus,' which certainly no one was ever likely to do, and that not for reasons
of size alone. Then there was news of the hamlet doings, some of it very
amusing when told by the speaker, some of it a little saddening, and, at last,
they came to Laura's own affairs. First of all, her mother wanted to know why
Laura had not been home before. 'Every few weeks,' she reminded her had been
the agreement, and she had been away seven months. Miss Lane had kept saying,
'You must wait until we hear of some one going that way to give you a lift,'
but to this explanation Laura's mother retorted: 'But what was the matter with
walking? You could walk here one day and back the next easily enough, as you
are doing now'; to which Laura agreed. She had longed to walk home many a time
and had several times suggested that she should, but had never been firm and
strong enough to insist in face of Miss Lane's objections.

'You must stick up for your rights, my dear,' said her mother
that morning. 'And don't forget what I've always told you; don't try to be clever,
or go speaking ill of anybody just to show off your own wit. I know how it is
with these clever people, like Dorcas Lane. They think they can see through
everybody, and so they can to some degree, but they see so far through people
that they sometimes see more than there is there and miss the things that are.
And, of course, it was very kind of her to give you that nice fur and fur cap.
They'll keep you warm this cold weather. But you don't want to go on accepting
a lot of things like that from somebody who, after all, is no relation. You
have got your own wages now and can buy what you want, or, if not, we'll buy it
for you, and if you want any advice as to what to buy or where to buy it,
you've got your two aunts at Candleford town.'

Laura blushed again at that, for, although she was supposed
to go to see the Candleford relatives on alternate Sundays, she had not been
there for weeks. Something had always turned up to prevent her going. Snow or rain,
or one of Miss Lane's bad headaches, when she could do no other than offer to
get off the Sunday evening mail, though it was not her turn to do so. 'I don't
like keeping you from your friends,' Miss Lane would say, 'but I really must
lie down for an hour.' Or: 'Really, you can't want to go out in this weather.
When you've got off the mail, we'll have a good fire in the parlour and make
ourselves cosy and read. Or we might have down that box from upstairs I told
you about, and I'll show you the letters my father had from that gentleman
about Shakespeare. After all, Sunday's the only day of the week we have to ourselves,
with Zillah and the men away.' And, if Laura still looked a little regretful,
she would add: 'I believe you think more of your Uncle Tom than you do of me.'
Laura did. She thought more of that particular uncle in one way than she did of
any one else she knew, for no one else, she felt sure, could equal him in
wisdom, wit, and sound, homely common sense. But she was fond of Miss Lane,
too, and did not wish to displease her, so she stayed.

She did not attempt to describe to her mother a position she
had scarcely begun to realize; but her looks and manner must have betrayed something
of it, for her mother repeated: 'You must stand up for your rights, child.
Nobody will think any the better of you for making a doormat of yourself. But
you'll be all right. You've got a head well screwed on to your shoulders, and a
conscience to tell you right from wrong, I should hope'; and they talked of
other things until it was time for Laura to go.

Her mother put on her thick cape and walked to the turn of
the hamlet road with her. It was a raw, grey winter morning, with stars paling
in a veil of cottage chimney smoke. Men, about to start on their way to work, stood
lighting pipes at garden gates, or shuffled past Laura and her mother with a
gruff 'G'marnin!' Although not frosty, the air was cold and the two snuggled
closely together, Laura's arm in her mother's, under the cape. She had grown so
much that she had to lean down to her mother, and they laughed at that and recalled
the time when she, a tiny mite, had said: 'Some day, when I'm grown up, I'll be
the mother and you'll be my little girl.' At the turn of the road they halted
and, after a close embrace, her mother said good-bye in the old country words:
'Good-bye. God bless you!'

Then, almost immediately, as it seemed to Laura when looking
back, it was spring. The countryside around Candleford Green was richer and
more varied than that near her home. Instead of flat, arable fields, there were
low, green hills, and valleys and many trees and little winding streams. Her
path as postwoman led over much pasture land and she often returned with her
shoes powdered yellow with buttercup pollen. The copses were full of bluebells
and there were kingcups and forget-me-nots by the margins of the brooks and
cowslips and pale purple milkmaids in the water-meadows. Laura seldom returned
from her round without more flowers in her hand than she knew what to do with.
Her bedroom looked and smelled like a garden, and she stood as many pots and
vases about the kitchen as Zillah would permit.

The official time allowance for the journey was so generous
that she found that, by walking quickly on her outward way, she could deliver
her letters and still have an hour to spare for sauntering and exploring before
she need hurry back home. The scheme had evidently been drawn up for older and
more sedate travellers than Laura.

Soon she came to know every tree, flower-patch arid
fern-clump beside her path, as well as the gardens, houses, and faces of the
people on her round. There was the head gardener's cottage, semi-Gothic and substantial
against the glittering range of glasshouses, and his witty, talkative Welsh
wife, kindly, but difficult to escape from; and the dairymaid at the farmhouse
who had orders to give her a mug of milk every morning and see that she drank
it, because the farmer's wife thought she was growing beyond her strength; and
the row of half a dozen cottages, all exactly alike in outward appearance and
inside accommodation, but differing in their degree of comfort and cleanliness.
Laura wondered then, as she was often to do in her after-life, why, with houses
exactly alike and incomes the same to a penny, one woman will have a cosy,
tasteful little home and another something not much better than a slum
dwelling.

The women at the cottages, clean and not so clean alike, were
always pleasant to Laura, especially when she brought them the letters they were
always longing for, but seldom received. On many mornings she did not have to
go to the cottages, for there was not a letter for any one there, and this left
her with still more time to loiter by the pond, reaching out over the water for
brandyballs, as the small yellow water-lily was called there, or to brood with
her hand over bird's eggs in a nest, or to blow dandelion clocks in the sun.
Her uniform in summer was a clean print frock and a shady straw hat, which she
would sometimes trim with a wreath of living wild flowers. In wet weather she
wore her stout new shoes and a dark purplish waterproof cloak, presented to her
by one of her Candleford aunts. She carried a postman's pouch over her shoulder
and, for the first part of her outward journey, Sir Timothy's locked leather
private postbag.

The only drawbacks to perfect happiness on her part were
footmen and cows. The cows would crowd round the stiles she had to get over and
be deaf to all her mild shooings. She had been used to cows all her life and
had no fear of them in the open, but the idea of descending from the stile into
that sea of heads and horns was alarming. She knew they were gentle creatures
and would never attack her; but, accidentally, perhaps—— Their horns were so
very sharp and long. Then, one morning, a cowman saw her hesitating and bade
her, 'Coom on.' If she approached and climbed over the stile quickly, he said
the cows would disperse. 'They dunno what you want to be up to. Let 'em see
that you've got business on the other side of that stile and that you be in a
hurry and they'll make way for'ee. They be knowin' old craturs, cows.' It was
as he had said: when she came to and crossed the stile in a businesslike way,
they moved politely aside for her to pass, and they soon became so used to
seeing her there that they dispersed at her approach.

The footmen were far less mannerly. At the hour at which she
reached the great house every morning, their duties, or their pleasure, lay in
the back premises, near the door at which Sir Timothy's postbag had to be delivered.
At the sound of the doorbell, two or three of them would rush out, snatch the
leather postbag from Laura's hand and toss it from one to the other—sometimes
kick it. They hated that postbag because their own private letters were locked
therein, and if Sir Timothy was out on the estate or engaged in his justice
Room, they had to wait until he was ready, or chose, to unlock it. They accused
him of examining the handwriting and postmarks of their correspondence and of
asking inquisitive questions about it. Which he may at some time have done, for,
in Laura's time, they had betting tips and bookmakers' circulars addressed to
the Post Office to be called for.

It was this matter of the postbag which had caused their
animosity towards Laura. When she had first appeared as a postwoman they had asked—or,
rather, told—her to bring up to the house with the bag their letters addressed
to the Post Office. Miss Lane, who was a stickler for strict observance of the
official rules, would not permit her to do this. If a letter was addressed to
the Post Office to be called for, she said, called for it must be, and although
Laura, who thought it unfair that their letters should be inspected, like those
of small boys at school, had softened Miss Lane's message to them when
delivering it, they were annoyed and under a show of boisterous horseplay
visited their annoyance upon Laura.

They would creep silently up behind her and clap her heavily
upon the shoulders, or knock her hat over her eyes, or ruffle her hair with
their hands, or try to kiss her. The maids, several of whom were often present,
as the housekeeper and the butler were at that time taking their morning coffee
in the housekeeper's room, would only laugh at her discomfiture, or join in the
sport, gutting pebbles down her neck, or flicking her face with their
dusting-brushes.

'You look as if you'd been drawn through a quickset
hedge-backwards', remarked the head gardener's wife one day when Laura was more
than usually dishevelled; but, when told what had happened, she only laughed and
said: 'Well, you're only young once. You must get all the fun you can. You give
them as good as they give you and they'll soon learn to respect you.' She dared
not tell Miss Lane, for she knew that lady would complain to Sir Timothy and
there would be what she thought of as 'a fuss'. She preferred to endure the
teasing, which, after all, occupied but a few minutes during an outing in which
there were rich compensations.

Excepting the men working in the fields, she seldom saw any
one between the houses on her round. Now and then she would meet the estate carpenter
with his bag of tools, going to mend a fence or a gate, and occasionally she
saw Sir Timothy himself, spud in hand, taking what he called 'a toddle round
the estate,' and he would greet her in his jovial way as 'our little
Postmistress-General' and tell her to go to Geering, the head gardener, and ask
him to show her through the glasshouses and give her some flowers. Which was
kind of him, but unnecessary, as Mr. Geering had, on his own responsibility,
conducted her several times through the long, warm, damp, scented hothouses,
picking a flower here and there to add to her bouquet.
My
glasshouses,
the gardener called them;
our
glasshouses, said his wife when speaking
of them; to the actual owner they were merely
the
glasshouses. So much
for the privilege of ownership!

Once she saw Sir Timothy in a more serious mood. That was
after a night of high wind had brought down two magnificent elm trees on the
edge of the ha-ha, and he called to her to come and look at the damage. It was
a sad sight. The trees were lying with their roots upended and their trunks
slanting across the ditch to the ruin of broken branches and smashed twigs on
the lower level. Sir Timothy appeared to be as much distressed as if they had
been the only trees he possessed. There were tears in his eyes as he kept
repeating: 'Wouldn't have lost them for worlds! Known them all my life. Opened
my eyes upon them, in fact, for I was born in that room there. See the window?
It's this damned sunk fence is to blame. No root room on one side. Wouldn't
have lost them for worlds!' And she left him lamenting.

Although so few people were seen there at the early hour of
Laura's passing, the park was open to all. Couples went there for walks on summer
Sundays, and the poorer villagers were permitted to pick up the dead fallen
wood for their fires; but the copses and other enclosures were barred,
especially in the spring, when the game birds were nesting. There were notice
boards in such places to say trespassers would be prosecuted and, although
Laura considered herself to some extent a privileged person, she climbed into
them stealthily and kept a look-out for the gamekeeper. But he was an old man,
getting beyond his work, people said; his cottage stood in a clearing in a wood
on the other side of the estate, and she never once sighted him.