As Meat Loves Salt Read Online Free PDF Page B

with her, until the steward came forward saying, 'Pray, young master, send your brother Isaiah to us.'
    When Izzy came out from the chamber he told me that we were nine-tenths ruined. The house and lands were certain to be seized. The steward was at that instant writing a letter for Mother to sign, begging our neighbour Sir John that of his goodness he succour a distressed widow of gentle birth and her three helpless children.
    Sir John Roche was not in those days the wineskin he is since become, and his wife (who inclined to a somewhat Papistical style of worship) was known for her rather short-sighted charity. Our mother was given a cottage in the village and the three helpless children were put to work in the fields on Sir John's estate. This was perhaps not what Mother had in mind.
    Margett, who was at that time the cook at Beaurepair, later enlightened me. We were in the kitchen together and her forehead shone
    greasily as she bent over a pig she had on the spit. I thought her grey hair very ugly, but her face was kind, if wrinkled, and from her I could find out things the others kept secret.
    'Your father owed Sir John a deal of money,' Margett said. 'Turn the handle there, it's about to catch. Lost a fortune by him, the Master did.'
    And so he wished us to work his fields. It was every inch my mother, not to have understood this. She understood nothing but weeping, coaxing and prayer.
    When we were let fall into the furrow, I was ill prepared for my new life. For one thing, I was then accustomed to the attentions of servants (though unlike Mervyn Roche, I had been taught always to address them with respect). Now I found a great abatement of rest and of comfort, whether I were in the field or cooped up in the dark cramped place that was become our home.
    Most unendurable was the utter loss of all means of raising myself from the earth. My books were left behind in our old house. Weary as I was, I would gladly have had them by me. I could read well and was skilled in reckoning, knew my rhetoric and Scripture, and had begun the ancient tongues some years before.
    'A forward lad for his age,' our tutor, Doctor Barton, had told my father. 'He might be trained up in the law perhaps, and become secretary to some great man.'
    Now the forward lad found himself grubbing at roots, spreading dung, pulling thistles. When there was nothing else to do a boy could always be set to scare crows. Alone in the field where none could see me at it, I wept. Zeb, too young to grasp that we would be wasted in this valley of humiliation, was less wretched, though from time to time he would whine, 'When are we going home?'
    The other workers were at first somewhat in awe of us, but when they understood that for all our polish we were penniless, things altered. Very soon they made no difference between us and themselves.
    'Here, young Cullen, take this off-a me; don't stand there gawking,' said a man who could not read. I felt myself bitterly degraded. When I perceived that I was forgetting what I had been taught, that my only study now would be scythes and manures, terror seized me.
    Izzy, finding me one day in a fit of despair, knelt by me in the field and crooked his arm about my neck. 'A man's value lies in his obedience to God's will,' he said. 'We are as precious to Him now as ever we were.'
    'He does not show it.'
    'Indeed He does. We eat and drink; we have good health, and one another,' he reproached me. But I lacked his greatness of heart.
    Margett also told me that about this time, My Lady passing by in the carriage was struck by the sight of the three 'black-boys' labouring in her field. She made enquiries, and found that while she had thought us to be living on the charity of the Roches, her husband had reduced us to peasants.
    "That was an evil day, for him. The sermons!' Margett gloated. 'Table lectures, fireside lectures, pillow lectures! — until he said she might bring you to the house. A fellow was sent for you directly, before