“I’d sooner walk,” she said.
“Don’t be daft; riding’s better. Pull this side when you want him to go this way, and t’other side when . . .”
“I know,” said Flo coldly.
She settled on the frame again and there was no more trouble. The roller swayed and bumped a little, but the slight discomfort was more than made up by the increased feeling of mastery over Colonel which the reins gave her. She was away from his great hooves, and he no longer overshadowed her. Really it was rather fun being trundled over the grass. Her pleasure was upset by an angry whistle. Colonel stopped. Mrs. Nadin was at the yard gate impatiently waving.
“Come ’ere . . . what d’you mean?” came faintly but imperatively over the grass.
Colonel was still a hundred yards from the hedge.
“Leave ’im,” came a more angry shout.
“What the hell are you doin’?” demanded Mrs. Nadin as Flo walked up. “I guess the bloody old fool set you on, eh? I’m boss here, an’ dunna forget it.
Flo at the gate gave a last doubtful glance to Colonel. His nose had dropped almost to his knees and he looked already asleep. When she went out twenty-five minutes later with a basket of vests and pants and stockings he was still there as settled as a statue. But she dared not go to him. She wondered if Bert knew, and then almost at the same moment she heard a shot from past the boat-house somewhere. She looked but could not see him. After she had been back in the wash-house five minutes she ventured to ask if it was all right leaving Colonel.
“Why the heck not?” demanded Mrs. Nadin tartly. “If ’e conna look after him, let ’im stond.”
When Flo went out with the last batch, dusters and spare miscellaneous cloths, Colonel had gone and the roller was by the barn end with its shafts tilted at the milky blue sky. When Mr. Nadin came in for dinner Flo expected a row, but he sat without a word. Mrs. Nadin put his steaming mutton stew down out of the oven with a, “Tek that an’ dunna brun thiself like a babby”, and Colonel was never mentioned.
Flo felt sorry for Mr. Nadin. However Mrs. Nadin stormed he so seldom answered back. He was not exactly meek, but he absorbed everything that she said with a kind of independent resignation. If Mrs. Nadin was upstairs or in the outhouses and Mr. Nadin came in late for his afternoon cup of tea, Dot sometimes would say:
“If you can’t come in to time, you deserve to do without.”
“Keep your lip to yourself,” he would answer quietly, but with unmistakable authority.
Flo liked it. But why didn’t he do the same to Mrs. Nadin?
The abandonment of Colonel was only one of many somewhat similar happenings. Flo soon got into the habit of trying to help the farmer all she could. She thought that he needed help; and more important to herself, though she did not admit it, she preferred working out-of-doors.
The boys did not do much. Bert was perfunctory towards farm work; Clem was lazy. The only thing that he liked was going off in the trap with Job. Where he went to most times Flo did not know; and she was often in bed when she heard the clatter of hooves and the rolling of the iron-tyred wheels. Then she would lie till she heard his stockinged tread and saw the yellow candle light in a broad bar beneath her door. She watched its brilliance rise up the side cracks, then grow dim and disappear as Clem went along the landing. Perhaps it was foolish, but she did not feel at ease till he had climbed the stairs and gone. There was no lock or bolt, and it would be so simple for him to walk in. Otherwise Flo soon got to like her room. It was the one place where she could get away effectively from Mrs. Nadin’s perpetual harsh talk; where she could feel that she had a little part of life still her own. There, in silence only faintly disturbed occasionally by the sleepy cheep of a sparrow under the stone-slated eaves, or the sly running of mice somewhere in the walls or beams, and in steady friendly candle light she wrote home. From there she tried to tell her mother what her new life was like: