The Making of William Edwards Part 10

But Mr. Pryse grew no more civil; indeed, he seemed ever on the watch for some pretext to turn the widow and her children off the farm she had done so much to improve. He had never forgiven Edwards for saying of him, 'he was too grasping to be altogether honest,' and, when the farmer was drowned, rejoiced as only an evil-minded curmudgeon could do.

It was no satisfaction to him, as years went by, to see one whitewashed cottage after another stand out like a pearl among emerald fields and foliage, and know whose house had been the model. Nor could he hear of Owen Griffith and others venturing on a potato crop without a sneer. And he positively snarled when he heard the prices the widow's piglings and bacon brought in the market. Not that he ascribed the prosperity of Mrs.

Edwards to her own good management. No; he set that down to Evan Evans and his previous initiation on the Castella estate. He owed the farm-servant a grudge accordingly. He rejoiced when he heard that Rhys regarded Evans as an interloper, and never missed an opportunity, by subtle sneer or insinuation, to fan the supposed antagonism into an active flame.

As years rolled on, and he saw the down of incipient manhood darken on the lip of Rhys, ever his mother's escort on rent-days, his innuendoes became broader and stronger. There was an air of self-sustained mastership about the st.u.r.dy young fellow that suggested ripe soil for his weeds.

'Humph!' said he, when Rhys was about eighteen; 'I should have thought a stout chap like you might have saved your mother the cost of a _head man_.'

At a later date: 'Well, young man, I never expected your father's son to submit to a servant's rule so long.'

Had there been any _submission_ in the case, Rhys would have taken fire at once. No hints would have been needed to provoke rebellion that would have led to the ousting of Evan. But the latter had never presumed to _give orders_, and, of late, had deferred to Rhys as his 'young master.'

Whatever suggestions he made in farming matters were made to Mrs.

Edwards. Command rested with _her_.

Then Rhys had conceived a mortal antipathy to the agent that first rent-paying day, and he suspected a sinister motive in every word that fell from the ill-natured, thin lips.

And it had been made a condition, by the shrewd widow, that Rhys should bridle his tongue, and allow nothing said by Mr. Pryse to provoke hasty reply, or she must take Evan in his stead as witness. Yet it was hard sometimes for either to listen quietly to the agent's coa.r.s.e and insulting speeches, of which his n.o.ble employer had no suspicion.

Some of his sharpest bullets were fired from a double-barrelled gun.

'Well, Mrs. Edwards, I hear you and Evan Evans are about to make a match of it at last. How soon is this fine young man of yours to have a step-father?'

A frown darkened the brow of Rhys, and an indignant retort was on his tongue, but, before a second word was uttered, the frown changed to a significant smile at a look from his mother.

It was an open secret at the farm that Ales and Evan were courting, and only waited until they had saved enough money to set up housekeeping and farming for themselves, as husband and wife.

Had Mr. Pryse but known it, there _was_ an element of disquiet and rebellion at Brookside Farm, of which he might have taken advantage.

But he never gave a second thought to the boy whose walls he had levelled so wantonly. He had not seen that same boy, his pa.s.sion over, pick up every scattered bit of stone, and patiently raise his walls once more.

He had no suspicion how the strong will and pertinacity of that three years child would come later into collision with the mastership of his eldest brother, or the important part these stone chips would play in William's life, or how they might affect the welfare of the whole county, or make an enduring name when his own was forgotten.

CHAPTER X.

FRIENDS AND BROTHERS.

There was no necessity for Mr. Pryse to suggest 'employment' for little William. In the last century, and far into this, children were set to work and expected to earn their own living at a wofully early age, and that long before machinery came into use and drove them into factories to be the slaves of brutal overseers, who scored their six and eight year old backs with weals from whip or stick on the slightest provocation. William Hutton, the historian, tells how he, a small child of seven years, was apprenticed, in 1730, to an overseer of Lombe's silk mill, in Derby, how he had to wear high pattens to reach the machine, had to rise at five in the depth of winter and hurry to work, slipping down on the ice as he ran, and how he was beaten till his back was all festering sores. And this was no uncommon case. I, who write this, can remember when the little barefooted children went to the cotton factories and print works at five in the morning, and worked till seven or eight at night.

The boys and girls of this generation have no conception how children were trained and treated a few generations back. Not the poor only. The children of even rich parents had to endure painful punishments both at school and at home, and were fed sparely on coa.r.s.e food for their health's sake. The late n.o.ble Lord Shaftesbury related how he and a sister were well-nigh starved in their childhood through the negligence of parents and servants.

History and biography teem with such instances. So that when I state that William Edwards and Jonet were sent into their mother's fields to weed, and pick up stones, and scare the birds away from newly-sown lands before the boy was six years old, I cast no reflection on his mother, who had no experience of a different state of things.

Nay, for her time, she was enlightened, and being a woman with good natural feeling, she was careful they were not taxed beyond their strength, as she and her husband had been; but that children should spend their hours in play, when they were old enough to be of use, had never dawned on her imagination. She considered she was doing her duty by them in setting them early to work, especially as she was careful they should be taught to read also.

Davy worked in field and farm, alongside Rhys, without a murmur of hardship. And when Jonet was first set to feed the chickens, or to look for the eggs of hens that laid away, to pull peas or beans, or to sh.e.l.l the latter for the pot (peas were boiled in the pod), imitative William, always at her heels, and wanting to show his own cleverness, set himself to do likewise.

And so long as he set himself voluntarily to work to a.s.sist Jonet, he was busy as a bee, and proud of his doings. Or when his mother or Ales sent him hither or thither to fetch or carry, or directed him to perform small services, he was as willing and amenable to order as most boys of his age. But no sooner did Rhys take advantage of his precocious industry, and exercise an a.s.sumed right to command, and bid him do this or that, than William began to rebel.

He was docile enough to his brother as a teacher. He was more eager to learn to read than Rhys was to instruct. Davy and Jonet took their spelling and reading lessons as compulsory tasks--Davy placidly, and Jonet with uneasy disfavour--but William with an absolute desire to _know_.

He no sooner discovered that the Ten Commandments painted up in the church, and the inscriptions on the upright gravestones in the churchyard, were just made up of the alphabetical characters on his painted battledore, and that the big Bible his mother read aloud to them was all a mixture of the same letters, than a craving to penetrate the mystery of these combinations seized him. He felt he had achieved something when he made his first grand discovery on a headstone taller than himself; but when, at his request, Evan read out the inscription, his perplexity and curiosity increased.

It was singular to see the little fellow--he was short for his age--Sunday by Sunday tracing letter or word, with tiny finger, on some grey old slab, while his seniors were gossiping all around.

'I tell you what,' said Rhys to him one Sunday when so employed, 'you might have been born in a stone quarry. I'm sure you ought to live in one, you do be so fond of the dirty rubbish.'

'What's a stone quarry?' put in William, with wide-open eyes.

'Oh, bother! It's a place where stone grows,' was the impatient reply.

'Grows like trees?' and the wondering eyes of the six years old querist opened still wider.

'Oh, what a plague you do be! No, grows like coal;' and away strode Rhys to avoid further questioning--a common but very unsatisfactory way of dealing with an inquiring child.

'I'll be asking Robert Jones, he will tell me,' said William to himself.

'Rhys do be caring more for Cate Griffith than for me, whatever,' his aggrieved looks following his well-grown brother as he strode over the gra.s.sy mound to join the weaver's wife and daughter under the patriarchal yew-tree, with all the importance of incipient manhood.

The following day William was missing from the farm, but as this was not uncommon, only slight uneasiness was felt until evening.

The boy had long before struck up a strange friendship with the red-haired peat-cutter, who, in fulfilment of his early promise, had taken him on his a.s.s when bound to a colliery across the river for culm, and there let him see the horse plodding round and round in a circle to wind up coal and grimy colliers from the dark, deep pit-shaft, and let down the empty tubs to be refilled. There the child had looked round in wonder at the great black heaps of coal, and at the half-naked children sent down the terrible dark hole, to work in the bowels of the mine, as Robert Jones explained to him.

Later he had taken the little fellow to see how peat was cut with long, narrow, flat shovels, 'shaped like a marrow-spoon,' from the boggy top of Eglwysilan Mountain. And when his sled was loaded, he had placed the child before him on the end of the sled, and gone sliding down the steep mountain-side with him swiftly and securely, to the youngster's infinite delight. He was too young to dream of danger, and to the man, long practice had made the perilous descent safe and easy, swift as was the downward motion, and sharp as was the jerk at the bottom. And many a ride on the turf-cutter's sled did William have after that.

The man had no children of his own, and, perhaps, that was the reason he took so kindly to the lad; answering his strange questions to the best of his untutored ability, and frequently giving him a mount on one of his patient beasts between tubs or panniers when going for loads, or carrying them for sale not too far away. To him the child could open all his wondering heart, fearing neither repulse nor ridicule, of which he had too much at home; and so their friendship grew.

On that particular Monday morning, Robert Jones had started on a long round, and nothing remained for the young inquirer, who had sought him at his ordinary haunts, but to limp homeward in the afternoon, hungry, footsore, and disappointed.

Cate Griffith, returning from the brook with a pitcher of water on her head and another in her hand, caught sight of him as he was pa.s.sing her father's door.

'Name o' goodness!' she cried, 'what brings you here this time o' day?

Look you, father, here's little Willem Edwards!'

The weaver, then changing his shuttle, looked out from his cas.e.m.e.nt window, and in two minutes was at the door questioning the wanderer.

Without any shyness or reservation the boy told where he had been, and for what; his brother's initiative remarks with the rest.

Cate, now a rosy-cheeked, buxom la.s.s on the borderland of womanhood, began to laugh outright, as she had often laughed before when Rhys amused her with some story of William's out-of-the-way questions.

Her father checked her sternly. 'What do you be laughing at?'

"Deed, he do be so queer. Rhys do say he be always at play with bits of stones. And now he asks if they do grow like trees. Oh, Willem, you are droll!'

Again her laugh broke out. William, child though he was, crimsoned to the roots of his brown hair. He seemed to comprehend that Rhys had made a jest of him, and no one is more sensitive to ridicule than a child of tender years.