CHAPTER V

STORY OF THE PRESS-GANG

For a few days after the evening mentioned in the last chapter the weather was dull.  Not in quick, sudden showers did the rain come down, but in constant drizzle, blotting out all colour from the surrounding landscape, and filling the air with fine gray mist, until people breathed more water than air.  At such times the consciousness of the nearness of the vast unseen sea acted as a dreary depression to the spirits; but besides acting on the nerves of the excitable, such weather affected the sensitive or ailing in material ways.  Daniel Robson’s fit of rheumatism incapacitated him from stirring abroad; and to a man of his active habits, and somewhat inactive mind, this was a great hardship.  He was not ill-tempered naturally, but this state of confinement made him more ill-tempered than he had ever been before in his life.  He sat in the chimney-corner, abusing the weather and doubting the wisdom or desirableness of all his wife saw fit to do in the usual daily household matters.  The ‘chimney-corner’ was really a corner at Haytersbank.  There were two projecting walls on each side of the fire-place, running about six feet into the room, and a stout wooden settle was placed against one of these, while opposite was the circular-backed ‘master’s chair,’ the seat of which was composed of a square piece of wood judiciously hollowed out, and placed with one corner to the front.  Here, in full view of all the operations going on over the fire, sat Daniel Robson for four live-long days, advising and directing his wife in all such minor matters as the boiling of potatoes, the making of porridge, all the work on which she specially piqued herself, and on which she would have taken advice—­no! not from the most skilled housewife in all the three Ridings.  But, somehow, she managed to keep her tongue quiet from telling him, as she would have done any woman, and any other man, to mind his own business, or she would pin a dish-clout to his tail.  She even checked Sylvia when the latter proposed, as much for fun as for anything else, that his ignorant directions should be followed, and the consequences brought before his eyes and his nose.

‘Na, na!’ said Bell, ‘th’ feyther’s feyther, and we mun respect him.  But it’s dree work havin’ a man i’ th’ house, nursing th’ fire, an’ such weather too, and not a soul coming near us, not even to fall out wi’ him; for thee and me must na’ do that, for th’ Bible’s sake, dear; and a good stand-up wordy quarrel would do him a power of good; stir his blood like.  I wish Philip would turn up.’

Bell sighed, for in these four days she had experienced somewhat of Madame de Maintenon’s difficulty (and with fewer resources to meet it) of trying to amuse a man who was not amusable.  For Bell, good and sensible as she was, was not a woman of resources.  Sylvia’s plan, undutiful as it was in her mother’s eyes, would have done Daniel more good, even though it might have made him angry, than his wife’s quiet, careful monotony of action, which, however it might conduce to her husband’s comfort when he was absent, did not amuse him when present.