A Small Country Read Online Free

heavily, so that she had hurried to take shelter in the covered courtyard of the inn. Josi, passing through on the way to get his pony, had noticed her there, a fine figure of a woman, her colour heightened by wind and rain, and with a flourish of his battered old hat had asked if he might take her into the lounge for a cup of tea. She had started to refuse but his eyes, such a vivid blue in the dark face, and the wide, friendly smile, had proved irresistible. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said. That’s how it had begun. (Rachel’s father was often to think, afterwards, how much it had cost him to haggle so long over the little Hereford heifers in the mart that morning.)
    Josi knew who Rachel was. Perhaps that made him more ready to fall in love with her. But everybody who knew them at that time agreed that he had fallen in love with her and that he had remained in love for several months, perhaps a year or even two.
    Her father, embarrassed about the promise to Jim Reynolds – though that was the least of his worries – taunted Rachel about breaking her word.
    ‘But he never said he loved me,’ she said, as though that excused everything.
    ‘He wanted to marry you, girl, to unite two good farms, he wasn’t after a free gift. Fancy words are for those who haven’t anything else to offer.’
    It was no good. Rachel would have Josi and the old man had to accept it.
    But as he said afterwards, ‘He didn’t marry her for the farm, anyway, because he doesn’t care a snap for it and never will.’
    That’s what ultimately damned Josi in his eyes. He could have had his bit of fun with the maids, or the pretty shop girls on market days, if he had cared for the farm, really cared for it. He could work as hard as any man, he was proud of his physical strength, proud of his prowess in driving a straight furrow and of his way with the horses. But he wasn’t affected by the compound interest of farming. He was like a hired hand serving out his time till the next Michaelmas. Abiah Prosser and Davy Wern Isa, and even young Davy, liked to figure things out, they leaned on a gate with him and worried about the quantity of wild oats in the wheat, it had never been so bad, and whether swedes or mangolds would be more profitable for the March and April fodder, while his own son-in-law merely said, ‘You tell me what to do and I’ll get it done’, as though that was some sort of virtue. There was something lacking in the man.
    However, Griffydd Morgan kept his forebodings to himself. As for Rachel, she was conscious of nothing outside the closed, warm world of love.

THREE

    Tom felt much better after his long, hard day in the hayfield.
    His mother wanted him to be a lawyer; she had decided on it when he was quite a small boy – a lawyer was a gentleman – but he had never been wholly in favour of the idea, and it now struck him that if his father had really left for good, then he had an excellent excuse for throwing it over.
    Tom was twenty-one years old, and for his age a remarkable realist. While some of his friends, no brighter than he, talked blithely of pegging away and getting a First, Tom knew that he would work fairly consistently and get a Third. He was also aware that he would never become anything but a rather inefficient country solicitor whose heart was in farming. So was the effort really worth it? Capital would have to be raised to buy a practice; one of the small farms would have to be sold, or at least some of the top fields. He’d rather keep them. He was a farmer like his grandfather, old Griffydd Morgan, and that’s what he wanted to be. He derived positive pleasure from the feel of the sweat running down between his shoulder blades, pleasure, too, though not so easily defined, from the dark, gently-rising outline of the land.
    He walked home with the other men, but found it difficult to talk to them and was angry with himself on that account. His father never had difficulty in talking to anyone. Why had he