Now they had left the village behind, and were passing through fields
that were soon to be her fields. Her keen eyes appraised the crops
standing in them. She had paid the family of her predecessor a good
price for them, but they were worth it. And just ahead, on her left, was
a wide stretch of newly-ploughed land rising towards a bluff of grassy
down-land on the horizon. The ploughed land itself had been down up to a
few months before this date; thin pasture for a few sheep, through many
generations. She thought with eagerness of the crops she was going to
make it bear, in the coming year. Wheat, or course. The wheat crops all
round the village were really magnificent. This was going to be the
resurrection year for English farming, after fifty years of "death and
damnation"--comparatively. And there would be many good years to come
after.
Yes, Mr. Thomas Wellin, whose death had thrown the farm which she had now
taken on the market, had done well for the land. And it was not his fault
but the landlord's that the farmhouse and buildings had been allowed to
fall into such a state. Mr. Wellin had not wanted the house, since he was
only working the land temporarily in addition to his own farm half a mile
away. But the owner, Colonel Shepherd, ought to have looked after the
farmhouse and buildings better. Still, they were making her a fair
allowance for repairs.
She was longing to know how the workmen from Millsboro had been getting
on. Hastings, the Wellins' former bailiff, now temporarily hers, had
promised to stay behind that evening to meet her at the farm. She only
meant to insist on what was absolutely necessary. Even if she had wished
for anything more, the lack of labour would have prevented it.
The old horse jogged on, and presently from a row of limes beside the
road, a wave of fragrance, evanescent and delicious, passed over the
carriage. Miss Henderson sniffed it with delight. "But one has never
_enough_ of it!" she thought discontentedly. And then she remembered how
as a child--in far-away Sussex--she used to press her face into the
lime-blossom in her uncle's garden--passionately, greedily, trying to get
from it a greater pleasure than it would ever yield. For the more she
tried to compel it, by a kind of violence, the more it escaped her. She
used to envy the bees lying drunk among the blooms. They at least were
surfeited and satisfied.
It struck her that there was a kind of parable in it of her whole
life--so far.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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