Six Words

There were two feet of snow on the level by the mark on the stable pump, and the sky was not finished.

Wardlow stood in the yard at first light with Isaac Heathcote and the head groom, Shaw. The snow had stopped an hour before dawn. Every roof and wall had lost its edges. The men had dug a trench from the kitchen door to the stables, and they talked in it, with white banks at either elbow.

“The lad took a pole to the head of the pass,” Heathcote said. “Six foot where he could reach, my lord. He couldn’t reach far. It’s blown in off both sides, and it’s level across, like a filled ditch.”

“How long, if it thaws?”

“It’ll not thaw. Not with that sky.” The old man sucked his teeth. “A week. Happen more.”

Wardlow nodded. He had expected it. The road was closed, and wishing would not shift it. There was a good deal else that could be shifted before noon.

“The high farms,” he said. “Edge Top lost half its stack to the wet in August. Coldside and Rushup are little better. They will have beasts in the yard this morning and nothing to give them by Thursday.” He paused, and laid it out in order. “Three sledges, Shaw. Load them from the great barn, as much as two horses will draw uphill. Two men to each sledge, and a third to walk in front with a pole. He is to sound every yard of it. I will not have a horse in a drift.”

“Which way, my lord? The lane’s gone.”

“Not by the lane. Along the wall-tops, where the wind has scoured it. Isaac will shew you the line.” He waited until the groom had it. “And they turn for home at two o’clock, wherever they are. If they have not reached the farm, they leave the hay at the last gate they can find and the farmer fetches it. Nobody is out on that hill at dusk.”

“I’ll go with Edge Top, my lord,” said a voice behind him. Ned Varley had come up the trench with a shovel on his shoulder and his ears scarlet with cold. “I know the wall. And there’s word from the Row. Bagshaw’s lad came up on foot. Nine inches at the mark last night, and running clear.”

That was the best news of the morning. Frith had said nine by Tuesday. They had done it with a day in hand, and the level would be dry before the snow could get into it.

“Tell the lad he shall have his breakfast before he goes down. And you may take the pole for Edge Top, Ned. Sound the ground, mind. Do not gossip with it.”

He would have given a good deal to go himself. He watched the first sledge creak out under the arch with the hay roped down and Ned prodding importantly ahead, and then he turned and went in. A hill and a load of hay were a morning’s pleasure. The sum that waited indoors was his proper work.

Cecily was already at it. She sat at the table in the housekeeper’s room with the store-book open, and Mrs. Orme stood at her shoulder with the keys.

“Thirty-one,” his sister said, without looking up. “I have counted twice. Eight of us at table and three-and-twenty below, with Lady Halewood’s maid and coachman and Mr. Brome’s man. And nothing coming up the road until Heaven knows when.”

“Flour?”

“Nine sacks, my lord,” said Mrs. Orme. “That’s five weeks, baking as we do.”

“Meat?”

“Two sides of beef hanging and the Christmas geese. And all the mutton you please, walking about by the dower house,” Cecily said. “We shall not starve. We shall be very tired of mutton. It is the coal, Adrian.”

He had known it would be the coal. It came by cart from the far side of the pass, and the last load had been a fortnight ago.

“What is in the cellar?”

“Four ton, near enough,” said Mrs. Orme. “And we burn seven hundredweight a day with every fire going, the way it’s been since the company came.”

He did it in his head. Eighty hundredweight, at seven a day. “Eleven days. That will not serve, if Isaac is wrong by a week.” He thought a moment. “The kitchen must have what it needs. Bedroom fires morning and night, not between. The drawing room lit at five, for the evening. Nothing in the breakfast room, the billiard room or the gallery.”

“That comes to four a day,” said Cecily, who had been writing as he spoke. “Twenty days. And where are eight people to sit from breakfast until five? Lady Halewood will not go about in a blanket to oblige you.”

“The library. That hearth was built for logs, and there is ash enough in the wood-house to burn till Easter. It need not cost us one coal.”

“All of us, in the library, all day.” Cecily put down her pen. “With one sofa, four chairs and your speech.”

“Yes.”

“God help us, then. We shall know one another very well by Twelfth Day.” She shut the book and waited until Mrs. Orme had gone out to give the orders. Then she said, more quietly, “He was to have gone this morning.”

“I know it.” Wardlow made himself say the rest. “I am sorry, Cecy. I would dig the pass out myself, to be rid of him.”

“You did not make it snow. I can bear it. I have borne three days.” She gave him her straight hazel look. “I should bear it better if you did not watch him across the table as though you were measuring him for a drift. You gave me your word.”

“You have it still.”

“Then go and write your speech. Somebody in this house should get some good of the weather.”
***
By eleven the library was the only warm room at Scarrow, and it had begun to fill.

His uncle and aunt had the two chairs nearest the hearth. The Colonel was reading aloud from a Sheffield newspaper nine days old, at the full pitch of his lungs, and his wife was saying “FANCY!” at the end of each paragraph. Brome had taken a book to the sofa and fallen asleep under it. The door stood open on the passage, as it always did by day.

Wardlow sat at the long desk under the window with his eleven pages and a clean sheet. The brass plate lay at the corner of the blotter. He had written My Lords again, and one sentence under it, and he was looking at the sentence without love.

“I beg your pardon, my lord.”

Miss Ludlow stood on the far side of the desk with a leather blotting-book held against her grey gown. Her nose was pink with the cold of the passages.

“My godmother has declared that she will not leave her bed until the house is fit for Christians. She has given me nine letters to answer for her meanwhile. Lady Cecily said that I should find a fire and a table here.” She looked along the desk, and then about the room, and back at him. “I see there is only the one table.”

“There is only the one.”

“Then I shall write on my knee, by the door. I would not disturb you.”

“You would freeze, by the door. And you would blot.” He stood up. He was a little surprised at how much he disliked the thought of her going. “The desk is nine feet long, Miss Ludlow. I do not need nine feet to fail in.”

Her mouth twitched. “You are generous. I should want terms, however.”

“Terms?”

“We did not part quite as allies on Sunday, my lord. I think it would be wise to have a frontier.”

He considered her. She was perfectly grave, and her grey eyes were not.

“Very well. Name it.”

“The inkstand. Everything to the left of it is mine, and everything to the right is yours. The inkstand itself is common ground, and so is the sand.”

“Agreed. Pens?”

“Each power to bring its own.”

“And no reading across the frontier,” he said. “No looking over shoulders. What is written on one side is no concern of the other.”

“I was about to propose it myself.” She said that rather quickly. “Who is to judge, if the treaty is broken?”

He looked up at the shelf. “Cicero. He has no eyes to speak of, and he cannot be bribed.”

“Then I am content.”

She sat down on the left of the inkstand. He drew the brass plate over to his own side and sat down on the right, and the Colonel informed the room that pig-iron had risen in Rotherham.

For half an hour the treaty held.

She wrote fast. He did not look, but he could not help hearing it, a quick light scratching that hardly stopped. She held her page oddly close to her face and bent over it like a schoolboy. When she reached for the ink he saw that the middle finger of her right hand was stained black down one side. The stain was an old one. Lady Halewood must send out a great many cards.

His own pen had not moved. The sentence sat in front of him as it had sat for an hour. He had built it carefully. It was true in every part, and he knew that there was something wrong with it, as a man knows there is a stone in his boot.

He read it over under his breath. It was an old habit, and he did not think about it.

“‘That children of no more than six years of age are, by parents whom want has made deaf to the voice of nature, and for a sum which seldom exceeds three guineas, made over to the master sweep, your lordships will find it painful to believe.’”

The scratching on his left had stopped.

“It has the verb at the wrong end,” said Miss Ludlow.

He turned his head. She was looking straight in front of her, at the window, with her pen in the air. Her face was scarlet.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing, my lord. I said nothing. I was thinking of a wine merchant.”

“You said that it had the verb at the wrong end.”

“Then I broke the treaty, and I am sorry for it.” She put the pen down. “Although I did not read across the frontier. You read it to me. There was no article concerning ears.”

That was true, and it annoyed him a good deal. He had sat over that sentence since ten o’clock. She had heard it once, with half her mind on a wine merchant.

“Explain,” he said. It came out shorter than was civil.

She hesitated. Then she turned in her chair to face him, and he saw her decide to be honest and take the consequence. He had seen the same look on her on Sunday, just before Dean Swift.

“You begin with the child. That is right. And then you make the House wait. They must get past the parents, and want, and nature, and the three guineas, before they are allowed to know what becomes of him. That is thirty words, my lord. By the time the verb arrives, they have forgotten whom it happened to. And then you finish by telling them how they will feel, when you might simply have made them feel it.”

“How would you have it?”

“I would not have it at all. It is not my speech.”

“Miss Ludlow.”

She let out her breath. “‘A child of six is sold.’ Stop there. Then give them the price.”

He looked at her, and then at the page.

A child of six is sold. He counted the words against his thumb. There were six. He had used forty-four. And the six did what the forty-four had been built to do, and they did it at once, like a door shut hard in a quiet house.

He had been annoyed. He noticed that the feeling had gone, and that in its place he was curious, exactly as he had been at the mouth of the sough, when the water came out brown and he had wanted very much to know why.

“Where did you learn that?”

“At home.” She had picked up her pen again and was examining the nib. “My father read his sermon to us every Saturday night. If the kitchen-maid could not follow a sentence, he took it out. He said that people listen with only one ear in a pew, and that the verb must come while they still have it turned toward you.”

“The House of Lords is not a kitchen-maid.”

“No, my lord. I believe she attended better.”

Brome gave a snort under his book. Wardlow could not tell whether he was asleep.

“One boy, Wardlow,” said the book. “I told you so on Sunday. Give them one boy.” Then it was quiet again.

He dipped his pen. Under the long sentence he wrote the six words, and looked at them, and wrote on. The price is three guineas. That was five more. He had not written five words together in a year that pleased him so well.

“‘A child of six is sold,’” he read aloud, and this time he did it on purpose. “‘The price is three guineas.’ And the parents? I had a reason for the parents. I will not have the House say that only monsters do it.”

“Then give the parents a sentence of their own. They have earned one.”

He thought. It came more easily than he expected, because he had only to say what he knew. He had stood in those yards in Sheffield. “‘His father sells him because there are five more at home.’”

She was silent a moment.

“I should leave that one alone,” she said. Her voice had changed. “I should not touch a word of it.”

He found that he was absurdly pleased. He was about to tell her so when a shadow fell across the right-hand end of the desk.

“What a picture of industry,” said Halewood.

He had come in by the open door without a sound. He was dressed as carefully as if for Bond Street, with a shawl of his stepmother’s thrown over one shoulder like a jest. He strolled to the hearth, bowed to Mrs. Marsden, and took the last armchair. He turned it a little before he sat, so that it faced the desk.

“Pray go on. I am only here for the fire. I find I am to be your guest somewhat longer than either of us had hoped, Wardlow, and my room has been put on short allowance.”

“The whole house is on short allowance,” Wardlow said. He kept his voice even. He had given his word. “You will find it warm enough here.”

“Oh, very warm.” The pale eyes moved from Wardlow to Miss Ludlow and back again, without haste. “I had no notion you kept a secretary. Or is it that my stepmother has lent you hers? I should take care. She lends nothing without interest.”

“Miss Ludlow is answering Lady Halewood’s letters. I am writing a speech. We are sharing a desk because there is one fire.”

“And an inkstand, I see. How snug.” Halewood crossed his legs. “Nine letters, was it, Miss Ludlow? I heard you in the passage. I admire your zeal. There is not a mail-bag will leave this house for a week, and still you write.”

“A letter written in a snowstorm is no shorter when the thaw comes, my lord,” said Miss Ludlow. She did not turn round. “And my godmother has never yet let the weather find her idle.”

“No. She was always thorough.” He smiled at the back of her head. “You write a remarkably quick hand. I was watching it from the door. One would say you had done a great deal of it.”

Wardlow saw her shoulders stiffen. He did not know why the remark should trouble her. He knew only that Halewood had meant it to trouble somebody, and had not much cared whom. The man was bored and shut in, and he was looking about the room for something to pull the wings off.

“WHAT DOES HE SAY, LETTICE?” the Colonel demanded.

“HE SAYS SHE WRITES QUICKLY, IVO.”

“Ah! Capital thing in a woman,” said the Colonel, and returned to Rotherham.

Halewood laughed, and settled deeper into his chair. He did not take up a book. He sat with his fingertips together and his eyes on the desk, as he might have sat in a box at Drury Lane, and plainly he meant to stay there until dinner.

Miss Ludlow had drawn her blotting-book toward her. She was a good foot further to the left than she had been five minutes ago, and she was writing again with her head bent very low. She had gone back to being furniture, and she was not good at it. He had seen what she was good at.

He ought to do the same. He ought to turn to his own side of the inkstand and build another careful wall, with that man watching him do it. Halewood had sat through the forty minutes in May and told half the clubs in London that he had slept. He would enjoy the spectacle.

Wardlow looked at the eleven words under his hand. Then he looked at the eleven pages beside them.

He had promised himself a name before Twelfth Day. The thing he needed far more than a name was a speech that five peers could not sleep through. He had not known where to get it until this last half hour. It was sitting a yard to his left, in a darned glove, pretending to write to a wine merchant.

His pride would suffer for it, and he judged that it could be spared. He had kept it carefully since May and it had not won him a single vote.

He took up the first page. It was the worst of them. It had circumstances of peculiar hardship in it. He laid it flat on the desk and put two fingers on it, and slid it past the inkstand, across the frontier, until it lay on top of her blotting-book.

Her pen stopped. She looked at the page, and then at him.

Behind them, Halewood’s chair creaked as he sat forward.

“Go on, then,” said Wardlow. “Be unkind.”
***