“You ask me why the poor complain,

    And these have answered thee.”

    Southey.

“Hullo, Molly Hewlett, who’d ha’ thought of seeing you out here?”

It was in a wet turnip field, and a row of women were stooping over it, picking out the weeds. The one that was best off had great boots, a huge weight to carry in themselves; but most had them sadly torn and broken. Their skirts, of no particular colour, were tucked up, and they had either a very old man’s coat, or a smock-frock cut short, or a small old woollen shawl, which last left the blue and red arms bare; on their heads were the oldest of bonnets, or here and there a sun-bonnet, which looked more decent. One or two babies were waiting in the hedgeside in the charge of little girls.

“Molly Hewlett,” exclaimed another of the set, straightening herself up. “Why, I thought your Dan was working with Master Hewlett, for they Gobblealls,” (which was what Uphill made of Carbonel).

“So he be; but what is a poor woman to do when more than half his wage goes to the ‘Fox and Hounds,’ and she has five children to keep and my poor sister, not able to do a turn? There’s George Hewlett, grumbling and growling at him too, and no one knows how long he’ll keep him on.”

“What! George, his cousin, as was bound to keep him on?”

“I don’t know; George is that particular himself, and them new folks, Gobbleall as they call them, are right down mean, and come down on you if they misses one little mossle of parkisit; and there’s my poor sister to keep—as is afflicted, and can’t do nothing!”

“But she pays you handsome,” said Betsy Seddon, “and looks after the children besides.”

“Pays, indeed! Not half enough to keep her, with all the trouble of helping her about! Not that I grudges it, but she wants things extry, you see, and Dan he don’t like it. But no doubt the ladies will take notice of her.”

“I thought the lady kind enough,” interposed another woman. “She noticed how lame our granny was with the rheumatics, and told me to send up for broth.”

“We wants somewhat bad enough,” returned another thin woman, with her hand to her side. “Nobody never does nothing for no one here!”

“Nor we don’t want no one to come worriting and terrifying,” cried the last of the group, with fierce black eyes and rusty black hair sticking out beyond her man’s beaver hat, tied on with a yellow handkerchief. “Always at one about church and school, and meddling with everything—the ribbon on one’s bonnet and to the very pots on the fire. I knows what they be like in Tydeby! And what do you get by it, but old cast clothes and broth made of dish-washings?” She enforced all this with more than one word not to be written.

“I know, I’d be thankful for that!” murmured the thin woman, who looked as if she had barely a petticoat on, and could have had scarcely a breakfast.

“Oh, we all know’s Bessy Mole is all for what she can get!” said the independent woman, tossing her head.

“And had need to be,” returned Molly Hewlett, in a scornful tone, which made the poor woman in question stoop all the lower, and pull her groundsel more diligently.

“The broth ain’t bad,” ventured she who had tried it.

“I shall see what I can get out of them,” added another. “I bain’t proud; and my poor children’s shoes is a shame to see.”

“You’ll not get much,” said Molly Hewlett, with a sniff. “The captain, as they calls him, come down on my Jem, as was taking home a little bit of a chip for the fire, and made him put it down, as cross as could be.”

“How now, you lazy, trolloping, gossiping women! What are you after?”

Farmer Goodenough was upon them; and the words he showered on them were not by any means “good enough” to be repeated here. He stormed at them for their idleness so furiously as to set off the babies in the hedge screaming and yelling. Tirzah Todd, the gipsy-looking woman whom he especially abused, tossed her head and marched off in the midst, growling fiercely, to quiet her child; and he, sending a parting imprecation after her, directed his violence upon poor Bessy Mole, though all this time she had been creeping on, shaking, trembling, and crying, under the pelting of the storm; but, unluckily, in her nervousness and blindness from tears, she pulled up a young turnip, and the farmer fell on her and rated her hotly for not being worth half her wage, and doing him more harm than good with her carelessness. She had not a word to say for herself, and went on shivering and trying to check her sobs while he shouted out that he only employed her from charity, and she had better look out, or he should turn her off at once.

“Oh, sir, don’t!” then came out with a burst of tears. “My poor children—”

“Don’t go whining about your children, but let me see you do your work.”

However, this last sentence was in a milder tone, as if the fit of passion had exhausted itself; and Mr Goodenough found his way back to the path that crossed the fields, and went on. Tirzah Todd set her teeth, clenched her fist and shook it after him, while the other women, as soon as he was out of sight, began to console Bessy Mole, who was crying bitterly and saying, “what would become of her poor children, and her own poor father.”

“Never you mind, Bessy,” said Molly Hewlett, “every one knows as how old Goodenough’s bark is worse than his bite.”

“He runs out and it’s over,” put in Betsy Seddon.

“I’m sure I can hardly keep about any way,” sobbed the widow. “My inside is all of a quake. I can’t abide words.”

“Ten to one he don’t give you another sixpence a week, after all,” added Nanny Barton.

“He ain’t no call to run out at one,” said Tirzah, standing upright and flourishing her baby.

“I’d like to give him as good as he gave, an old foul-mouthed brute!”

“Look there! There’s the ladies coming,” exclaimed Nanny Barton.

“I thought there was some reason why he stopped his jaw so soon,” exclaimed Molly, stooping down and pulling up weeds (including turnips) with undiscerning energy, in which all the others followed her example, except Tirzah, who sulkily retreated under the hedge with her baby, while Jem Hewlett and Lizzie Seddon ran forward for better convenience of staring. It was a large field, and the party were still a good way off; but as it sloped downwards behind the women, the farmer must have seen them a good deal before the weeders had done so.

These, be it remembered, were days when both farmers and their labourers were a great deal rougher in their habits than we, their grandchildren, can remember them; and there was, besides, the Old Poor Law, which left the amount of relief and of need to be fixed at the vestry meetings by the ratepayers themselves of each parish alone so that the poor were entirely dependent on the goodwill or judgment of their employers, whose minds were divided between keeping down the wages and the rates, and who had little of real principle or knowledge to guide them. It was possible to have recourse to the magistrates at the Petty Sessions, who could give an order which would override the vestry; but it was apt to be only the boldest, and often the least deserving, who could make out the best apparent cases for themselves, that ventured on such a measure.

The two ladies stopped and spoke to Molly Hewlett and Nanny Barton, whom they had seen at their doors, and who curtsied low; and Nanny, as she saw Mrs Carbonel’s eyes fall on her boots, put in—

“Yes, ma’am, ’tis bitter hard work this cold, damp weather, and wears out one’s shoes ter’ble. These be an old pair of my man’s, and hurts my poor feet dreadful, all over broken chilblains as they be; and my fingers, too,” she added, spreading out some fingers the colour of beetroot, with dirty rags rolled round two of them.

Dora shrank. “And you can go on weeding with them?”

“Yes, ma’am. What can us do, when one’s man gets but seven shillings a week. And I’ve had six children, and buried three,” and her face looked ready for tears.

“Well, we will come and see you, and try to find something to help you,” said Mrs Carbonel. “Where do you live?”

“Out beyond the church, ma’am—a long way for a lady.”

“Oh, we are good walkers.”

“And please, my lady,” now said Molly, coming to the front, “if you could give me an old bit of a pelisse, or anything, to make up for my boy there. He’s getting big, you see, and he is terrible bad off for clothes. I don’t know what is to be done for the lot of ’em.”

Dora had recognised in the staring boy, who had come up close, him who had made the commotion in church; and she ventured to say, “I remember him. Don’t you think, if you or his father kept him with you in church, he would behave better there?”

“Bless you, miss, his father is a sceptic. I can’t go while I’ve got no clothes—nothing better than this, miss; and I always was used to go decent and respectable. Besides, I couldn’t nohow take he into the seat with me, as Master Pucklechurch would say I was upsetting of his missus.”

“Well, I hope to see him behave better next Sunday.”

“Do you hear, Jem? The lady is quite shocked at your rumbustiousness! But ’twas all Joe Saunders’s fault, ma’am, a terrifying the poor children. His father will give him the stick, that he will, if he hears of it again.”

Meantime Mrs Carbonel had turned to Widow Mole, who, after her first curtsey, had been weeding away diligently and coughing.

“Where do you live?” she asked. “I don’t think I have seen you before.”

“No, ma’am,” she said quietly. “I live down the Black Hollow.”

“You don’t look well. Have you been ill? You have a bad cough.”

“It ain’t nothing, ma’am, thank you. I can keep about well enough.”

“Do you take anything for it?”

“A little yarb tea at night sometimes, ma’am.”

“We will try and bring you some mixture for it,” said Mrs Carbonel. And then she spoke to Betsy Seddon, who for a wonder had no request on her tongue, and asked her who the other woman was, in the hedge with the baby.

“That’s Tirzah Todd, ma’am,” began Mrs Seddon, but Molly Hewlett thrust her aside, and went on, being always the most ready with words; “she is Reuben Todd’s wife, and I wouldn’t wish to say no harm of her, but she comes of a gipsy lot, and hasn’t never got into ways that us calls reverend, though I wouldn’t be saying no harm of a neighbour, ma’am.”

“No, you’d better not,” exclaimed a voice, for Tirzah was nearer or had better ears than Mrs Daniel Hewlett had suspected, “though I mayn’t go hypercriting about and making tales of my neighbours, as if you hadn’t got a man what ain’t to be called sober twice a week.”

“Hush! hush!” broke in Mrs Carbonel; “we don’t want to hear all this. I hope no one will tell us unkind things of our new neighbours, for we want to be friends with all of you, especially with that bright-eyed baby. How old is it?”

She made it smile by nodding to it, and Tirzah was mollified enough to say, “Four months, ma’am; but she have a tooth coming.”

“What’s her name?”

Tirzah showed her pretty white teeth in a smile. “Well, ma’am, my husband he doth want to call her Jane, arter his mother, ’cause ’tis a good short name, but I calls her Hoglah, arter my sister as died.”

“Then she hasn’t been christened?”

“No. You see we couldn’t agree, nor get gossips; and that there parson, he be always in such a mighty hurry, or I’d a had her half-baptized Hoglah, and then Reuben he couldn’t hinder it.”

Tirzah was getting quite confidential to Mrs Carbonel, and Dora meantime was talking to Molly Hewlett, but here it occurred to the former that they must not waste the women’s time, and they wished them good-bye, Dora fearing, however, that there would be a quarrel between Tirzah and Molly.

“Oh dear! oh dear!” she sighed, “couldn’t you make peace between those two,” she said; “they will fight it out.”

“No, I think the fear of the farmer and the need of finishing their work will avert the storm for the present at least,” said Mary, “and I thought the more I said, the worse accusations I should hear.”

“But what people they are! I do begin to believe that attorney man, that they are a bad lot.”

“Don’t be disheartened, Dora, no one has tried yet, apparently, to do anything for them. We must try to see them in their own homes.”

“Beginning with Mrs Seddon. She was quiet and civil, and did not beg.”

“Neither did that thin little woman. I should like to give her a flannel petticoat. There is a look of want about her.”

“But I’m most taken with the wild woman, with the teeth and the eyes, and the merry smile. I am sure there is fun in her.”

“Little enough fun, poor things!” sighed Mrs Carbonel.

She was more used to poor people. She had more resolution, though less enthusiasm than her sister.