The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) Read Online Free PDF

town, and be more prone to get vain and giddy. I shall get over to Muchanger, time she start, and fix so she hev one Sunday every month so as to attend chapel.'
    Now, looking at her daughter's hands, still slender and shapely, but rough and reddened from hard work, Mrs Greenway gave a little secret sigh; and looking at scraped-back hair whose prettiness had once been her pride, she sighed again. Then she rebuked herself, and thought what a good girl Damask was, and compared her with Matt Ashpole's ripstitch of a daughter, Sally. And then she asked herself again that old tiresome question, was there no middle way?
    Meanwhile Sir Charles had found ample justification for his ride beside the Waste. It was not the first time by many. Once he had found a stranger, a Nettleton man, slyly taking fuel there, quite illegally; another time he had been just in time to save Shad Jarvey's donkey from drowning in the pond, and a fine mess he'd made of himself, dragging it out of the mud; and on more summer evenings than he could be bothered to count he had come across couples engaged in illicit love-making in the--one would have thought--unpromising and unsuitable shelter of the gorse bushes which edged the Waste. The opportunity of preventing the begetting of bastards was not likely to offer itself this afternoon in October daylight; June evenings were the dangerous times. Still, one never knew; young people were quite unaccountable.
    He did find, however, two of Matt Juby's snub-nosed, ill-clad brats amusing themselves by throwing stones at two tethered cows: Bert Sadler's with the broken horn and Jim Gaunts with the defective quarter. He bellowed at them in a voice which could have been, and probably was, heard in Nettleton.
    'Stop that, you young devils, and come here to me.' They came cringing, and he gave them, not a talk upon kindness to dumb creatures, which he would not have known how to deliver, but a stern lecture upon the ill-effects upon the milk-yield of cows thus made unduly active; and to impress the lecture on their memories he followed it with two good stinging cuts with his crop upon each ragged behind. That, he reflected, riding on, was the way to keep order; constant vigilance, prompt rebuke. Given a free hand, he knew himself capable of keeping all England in order, and the Continent too, if it came to that. Disgraceful the way the Continent had been going on lately. Not that it had ever been properly run-- and here he had the evidence of his own eyes; for he, in his youth, had made the Grand Tour. And he summed it up in a verse of doggerel which had been his only excursion into the world of creative art. He had written it in a letter to his father, and also in the visitors' book of the inn, just near the St. Gotthard Pass, where he had spent the night and entertained the spirit of poetry for a brief moment. It ran thus: 'In France I ate well, but paid dear for my meat; In Germany there was nothing but calves' flesh to eat; In Italy the inns are bad and the people are beasts; But the Swiss, honest Swiss, charge fair for their feasts.'
    It might not be verse of the highest standard, but it summed up tersely and accurately young Charles Shelmadine's reaction to 'foreign parts'; it also emphasised his difference from his father, who had enjoyed every mile of his tour, and often harked back to it with wistfulness.
    Nothing else demanded immediate action. He noted with approval that the geese were doing well, and his mind slid forward to Christmas. He reared no geese of his own, but he always bought half a dozen, spreading his custom justly among his tenants. He observed with interest that Shad Jarvey's donkey was still alive and able to forage; the beast must be of incredible age. He marked, with disapproval, the fact that Matt Juby's cow still had husk. Only a fortnight ago he had drawn Matt's attention to the fact and offered him the necessary linseed and hore-hound to make it a draught, and a long-necked bottle with