Ansty — A Novel
Ansty — Volume the First
Chapter I
There is a kind of parish which is never spoken of as either prosperous or distressed, and Thrimby had been one of these for eighty years. It had four hundred and some souls, a church with a leaning tower which had leaned no further in living memory, eleven farms, a smithy, and a charity.
The charity had been left in 1734 by a Mr. Josiah Bowyer, who had gone from Thrimby to Ipswich with nothing and come back to be buried with a good deal; and it directed that the rents of two closes by the mill, being then eleven pounds a year and now nearer thirty, should be laid out in apprenticing poor boys of the parish to honest trades. It was administered by three trustees: the rector for the time being, the owner of Ansty, and one other to be chosen by the two.
It had apprenticed, in ninety years, upwards of sixty boys. Two had become masters in Ipswich; one had gone to Liverpool and was said to be worth a great deal; the rest had made shoes and barrels and horseshoes in an unremarkable way and had not troubled anybody. Thrimby was proud of the charity in the manner of a man who is proud of a coat he has not looked at for some years, and the pride was of the sort which does not survive an inspection of the seams.
Mr. Havers, of the Green House, had been an attorney at Bury for thirty-one years and had retired to Thrimby, his wife's country, at fifty-eight, with the intention of keeping bees. He kept them for a season, was stung about the eye, and gave them to the blacksmith; but he retained from his profession one habit which he never gave to anybody, which was that he could not see a paper without wanting to know what became of it. When the parish chest was moved during the repairs of 1811, and four boxes of vestry books and loose accounts were carried into the Green House for a fortnight and remained there eleven years, nobody thought anything of it, least of all Mr. Havers, who had by then forgotten they were in the room.
His daughter Anne had not forgotten. She was seven-and-twenty; she had read everything in her father's book-room by the time she was twenty and had then begun on the boxes, at first because there was nothing else and afterwards because she found she liked it. She knew what the parish had paid for its bells in 1689. She knew which of the Thrimby families had been dissenters in her grandfather's time and had come back. She knew, though she had never had the smallest occasion to mention it, that Mr. Kell's grandfather had been presented for keeping a disorderly alehouse and had got off.
She was not thought clever. She was thought quiet, and useful about the parish, and rather too particular; and the last of these was the nearest to the truth, though not in the sense the neighbourhood intended by it.
Chapter II
The thing began with a boy and a date.
Jem Bowyer — no kin to the founder, or none that could be proved, the name being common in that country — was thirteen in the March of that year, and his mother came to the Green House in April to ask Miss Havers to write for her, she not being able to write herself. The letter was to Mr. Kell, who kept the accounts, and it asked that Jem might be considered for the charity at the next binding, he being handy and willing and the family having no means to put him out.
Anne wrote the letter and carried it herself, and thought no more of it for five weeks.
The answer, when it came, said that the trustees regretted that the funds of the charity would not admit of a binding in the present year, the rents having been much reduced by the state of agriculture, and that Mrs. Bowyer's application was noted for the future.
Mrs. Bowyer accepted this. Everybody accepted it. It was a thing everybody had been hearing about every kind of money for six years.
What Anne did, and what she afterwards had cause to think about a good deal, was nothing out of the way at all. She went into the room where the boxes were, and took out the churchwardens' book for 1809, because she happened to remember that the Bowyer closes were let on a twenty-one-year lease taken in that year; and she read the lease; and the lease was at twenty-eight pounds ten, with no clause for abatement of any kind whatsoever.
A lease of that sort does not know that agriculture is in a bad way. It says twenty-eight pounds ten, and the tenant pays twenty-eight pounds ten or he is distrained upon; and Anne, who had been her father's copyist since she was fifteen, knew this as she knew the alphabet.
She sat with the book open for some while. Then she looked out the accounts for the four years last past, which Mr. Kell had laid before the vestry in the usual way and which were in the same box; and found that the charity had received, in those four years, sums of nineteen pounds, seventeen pounds twelve, sixteen pounds, and fifteen pounds four.
She added them, and subtracted them from what four years at twenty-eight pounds ten would come to, and arrived at a difference of fifty pounds two shillings; and the sum being simple, she did it three times, and got it right three times, and was not any better pleased at the end than at the beginning.
She did not think, at that stage, that Mr. Kell had stolen anything. She thought there was an explanation and that she did not have it. This was the last wholly comfortable hour she spent that year.
Chapter III
Mrs. Ferrand had come to Thrimby in the January, having taken the Dower House at Ansty for two years while her husband was in the Indies, and by April there was nobody in the parish who did not brighten when she was mentioned.
She was three-and-thirty, handsome without being troublesome about it, and possessed of the particular talent of appearing to find every person she spoke to more interesting than the last. She had money, and spent it without display and without stint. She had taken half the front pews' worth of the parish under her protection within six weeks, and she did it lightly, as one who has found an agreeable occupation and does not pretend it is a sacrifice.
She was also, it must be said at once, a woman who thought that an obligation was a thing one felt. If she felt it she discharged it magnificently; if she did not feel it, she could not be brought to see that anything remained. She had no notion of a duty that survived the cooling of the inclination which had prompted it, and she would have thought such a duty a kind of cant.
Anne Havers observed the general enchantment, and did not share it, and was rather proud of not sharing it.
What she said to herself was that Mrs. Ferrand's kindnesses were all in public. What she had, if she had chosen to lay it out as she had laid out the rents, was the following.
Mrs. Ferrand had sent broth to old Susan Dade three times in February, at seven in the morning, when nobody in Thrimby was awake to see it, and had never mentioned it. She had paid the Ipswich surgeon for the Norrell child's arm and had had the bill sent to her under cover to avoid the mother's thanks; Anne knew this because she had seen the cover on the hall table at the Dower House while waiting with a message, and had understood it in an instant, and had put it out of her mind in rather less than an instant. And she had twice, in Anne's hearing, declined to repeat an unkind thing about a person who was not present, on both occasions turning the subject so deftly that the company did not perceive that it had been turned.
Anne held all of this. She did not weigh any of it. It never occurred to her that she was in possession of evidence on the question, because she had not understood herself to be trying a question; she had formed her opinion of Mrs. Ferrand in the first fortnight, on the grounds that Mrs. Ferrand's laugh could be heard across a room and that she called the rector by a nickname, and had felt no want of anything further.
It is not comfortable to record that a woman capable of subtracting four years of rents from a lease should have settled a person's character on a laugh; but so it was, and Anne was to be a considerable time in coming at it.
Chapter IV
Mr. Gostwick of Ansty was fifty-four, a magistrate, a trustee of the Bowyer charity for nineteen years, and as upright a man as there was in that division of the county.
This is not said in irony and must be taken as it stands. He had twice paid out of his own pocket to keep a family off the parish. He had refused a living for a nephew because the nephew was not fit for it, and had said so to his sister and borne her not speaking to him for two years. When the militia had been quartered at Thrimby in 1804 and a girl had been got with child, Mr. Gostwick had had the man found and made to marry her, at some trouble and some expense, and had never afterwards alluded to it.
Anne walked to Ansty on the eleventh of June with the lease and her four columns of figures folded in her reticule.
He received her with the kindness he always showed her; asked after her father's chest; observed that the Green House garden was the best in the parish and that he did not know how she managed the espaliers. And when she came to it, and said that she had been looking at the Bowyer accounts and thought there might be a difficulty about the rents, he heard her out to the end without once interrupting.
Then he said:
'Miss Havers, I am very sensible of your taking the trouble. But I have gone into all this with Kell in the spring, and I am satisfied. The rents have been very ill to get in; he has had to take what he could and be glad of it; and if the figures in the book look short, that is because they are short. There is no mystery in a bad year.'
'The lease has no abatement clause, sir.'
'A lease is one thing and a tenant's pocket is another, my dear. You may have a bond for a thousand pounds and get nothing if the man has nothing.'
'It is not that he has nothing. Waller has taken the Hollow Field this year at — '
'Now, Miss Havers.' He said it very gently. 'I shall not go over it again. I have satisfied myself, and I am not to be satisfying myself twice a year at everybody's asking, or I shall do nothing else. You will forgive me.'
She had the papers half out of her reticule. He did not look at them. He turned, with great civility, to ask whether her father meant to come to the bench dinner; and she put them back, and answered him, and was walked to the door, and thanked for calling.
Nothing came of the refusal. This must be insisted upon, because it is the whole of the matter. In the July, Mr. Gostwick had occasion to look into the Ansty rentals for quite another purpose, and came across the Bowyer lease among them, and read it — the same words Anne had brought him, in the same hand — and thought about it for a quarter of an hour, and concluded, as he had concluded before, that Kell was an honest slovenly fellow who had done his best in a hard time. The boy was no worse off. Nobody had been injured by the four minutes in which the papers stayed in the reticule.
Anne walked home along the mill path and could not tell what had happened to her. She was not angry; she had been treated with perfect courtesy; she had, she supposed, been answered. It was some days before she found the words for it, and when she found them they surprised her by their plainness.
He had not looked.
Not that he had looked and disagreed, which she could have borne and would indeed have preferred, since a man who looks and disagrees may be argued with. He had decided the question and then declined the evidence, and had done it kindly, and did not know he had done anything.
Chapter V
Mr. Kell was forty-one, and had been a considerable while getting there.
He farmed his own eighty acres badly, kept the books of three parish concerns, was liked everywhere for his good humour, and had for some years past inhabited a world in which things happened to him. His barley had failed. His horse had gone lame at the worst possible time. The Ipswich people had used him abominably over the malt. He said all of this with the greatest cheerfulness and no appearance of complaint, and Thrimby said that poor Kell had no luck, and went on saying it.
What could be set against the run of ill fortune, for anybody who had the pieces, was as follows.
In the October of 1819 he had taken the Bowyer rent of Waller in a lump, twenty-eight pounds ten, and had given a receipt in his own name and not the charity's; Waller had the receipt still and showed it to anybody who asked about anything, being a great keeper of paper and no reader of it.
In the November he had bought a bay mare at Stowmarket for two-and-twenty guineas, and had told four separate people that he had had her of a cousin for nothing.
And in the January following he had laid the year's account before the vestry showing nineteen pounds received, and had sat through the reading of it, and had gone home to his dinner.
Three separate months; three separate acts; each of them requiring him to sit down and put his hand to something; each of them the easiest thing in the world to have left undone.
He was not, in his own account of himself, a man who had taken fifty pounds from a charity for poor boys. He was a man whom the times had used hardly, who had been obliged to shift as he could, and who fully meant to make it right when things came round. He said the last of these aloud once, to his wife, in a general way and about nothing in particular; and having said it, felt so much easier that he did not need to say it again for above a year.
Jem Bowyer, in the meantime, was in his fourteenth year, and there is a great deal of difference between apprenticing a boy at thirteen and apprenticing him at fifteen, as everybody in Thrimby knew and nobody said.
Ansty — Volume the Second
Chapter I
She did nothing for six weeks, and the six weeks are worth an account, because it was not idleness and it was not delicacy.
She had no standing. That was the whole of it, and she turned it over every way and it came out the same. She was not a trustee. She was not a parishioner of consequence. She was not the boy's relation, nor his mother's friend beyond the writing of one letter. She held the lease only because the parish chest had been carried into her father's book-room in 1811 and never carried out again, which was an accident and not a title. Any person she applied to would be entitled to ask by what right she came, and she had no answer but that she had read the papers and could add.
What made it worse was that she was sure. If she had had a doubt she might have gone about asking questions, and asking questions is a thing a woman may do; but she had no doubt at all, and to go about asking what she already knew would have been a piece of management, and she would not do it.
She said to her father at last, in as level a voice as she could manage, that she believed there was fifty pounds wanting in the Bowyer charity and that Mr. Gostwick was satisfied there was not.
Mr. Havers put down his newspaper and considered.
'Have you the lease?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And the vestry accounts?'
'Yes.'
'Then you are very likely right, and it will do you no good in the world.' He took up the paper again, and then put it down once more, which he did not often do. 'I was thirty-one years at Bury, Anne, and I will tell you the one thing I learnt that was worth the money. It is not the wrong ones who are hard to move. It is the good ones who have made up their minds. A rogue may be frightened. An honest man who has satisfied himself has nothing left to be frightened with.'
Chapter II
In the August Mrs. Ferrand did Anne Havers a service which she was never afterwards able to get out from under.
Mr. Havers was taken ill at the Ipswich assizes, whither he had gone to hear a case out of pure old habit, and was carried to an inn and could not be moved; and the news came to Thrimby at eight in the evening by a carrier who had it at third hand and made it worse than it was. There was no chaise to be had in the parish. Anne was standing in the road in front of the Green House with her bonnet in her hand and no notion in her head, and Mrs. Ferrand's carriage came round the corner from the Dower House with Mrs. Ferrand in it, who had heard the same story twenty minutes earlier and had ordered out without waiting to be asked.
They were at Ipswich by half past eleven. Mrs. Ferrand paid the inn people to give up a second room and did not mention it; sat up in the passage until three, when the surgeon said the thing was a stoppage and not an apoplexy and that the old gentleman would do; drove home the next day for clean linen and drove back with it; and at the end of nine days brought them both to Thrimby in her own carriage with cushions she had sent for from Ansty.
She did all this in high spirits, made a great deal of noise doing it, called the surgeon a treasure and the innkeeper a monster, and enjoyed herself thoroughly; and at no point did it occur to her that she was behaving well.
Anne knew exactly what she owed and to whom, and she knew it that first night in the passage at Ipswich, and it was the most unwelcome piece of knowledge she had ever come by.
Chapter III
The unwelcomeness wants explaining, and Anne spent the autumn explaining it to herself and getting it wrong twice before she got it right.
Her first attempt was to decide that she had been mistaken in Mrs. Ferrand altogether, and that the woman was all goodness, and that she herself had been a prig; and she held this for about a fortnight, with the particular warmth of a person making amends. It did not survive an evening at the Dower House in the September, at which Mrs. Ferrand, being asked to subscribe to the schooling of a girl at Wickham whom she had promised in the spring to help, said, with perfect good humour and no consciousness whatever, that she had gone quite off the notion, and that one could not be for ever taking up people, and that the girl was a sullen little thing and she saw no use in it.
She had promised. She had gone off the notion. In her account of the world these were the same fact, and the second cancelled the first.
Anne went home and was very near making her second mistake, which was to conclude that the Ipswich business had therefore been nothing — a whim, an amusement, a fit of activity that happened to fall her way — and that she owed no more for it than one owes the weather for a fine day.
She got no further than the gate with that one. It would not do, and she knew it would not do, and what stopped her was a plain question she could not get round: whether her father would have been carried out of that inn alive if the carriage had not come.
The claim did not depend on Mrs. Ferrand's motive. It did not depend on Mrs. Ferrand's being consistent, or good, or even on her remembering it a week later. The thing had been done and it had been done for them, and it did not become undone because the woman who did it held a false doctrine about obligation.
She had a claim. It was a real one. It sat in the account beside the other thing, which was also real, and neither cancelled the other; and Anne, who had wanted very much to be allowed to put one of them away, found that she was to keep both.
Chapter IV
Mr. Aldis came to the rectory at Michaelmas, the old rector having died in the spring.
He was nine-and-twenty, had been a fellow of his college, and arrived with a great many opinions about the state of the Church and no experience whatever of a parish. He was the third trustee of the charity by virtue of his office, and within a month he had asked for the accounts, because he had read somewhere that a new incumbent ought to.
Anne heard of it from Mrs. Bowyer, who heard it from the rectory girl.
She went to him on the sixth of November. She had learnt something in June: she did not begin with the difficulty. She began by asking whether he had the lease, and when he said he had not, she said she believed there was one of 1809 among the vestry papers at the Green House and that she would send it up.
He read it that night, and the accounts with it, and came to the Green House the next morning at nine, which is not a calling hour, with his hat still on in the hall.
'Miss Havers. There is fifty pounds wanting in this charity.'
'Fifty pounds two shillings, sir, to Lady Day.'
He looked at her. 'You knew.'
'Since June.'
'And you did nothing?'
It was said without unkindness, out of sheer astonishment; and Anne, who had spent five months on that exact question, found she could answer it in a sentence.
'I took it to Mr. Gostwick in June and he did not read it. I have no other place to take it. I am not a trustee, Mr. Aldis, and I am not the boy's family, and I have no title to the papers except that they are in my father's house by an accident of eleven years ago. If I had gone from house to house with them I should have been a woman spreading a story about a neighbour, and Mr. Kell would have been very much injured if I were wrong, and not injured at all if I were right, because nobody would have believed me. I could not think what to do that would not have been worse than doing nothing. I am not satisfied with it. I have not been satisfied with it since June.'
Mr. Aldis took his hat off, some minutes late.
Chapter V
He went to Ansty on the ninth, full of certainty, and came back on the ninth with rather less of it.
Mr. Gostwick had been perfectly civil. He had also been nineteen years a trustee to Mr. Aldis's five weeks; had known Kell from a boy; had pointed out, with some justice, that a lease is evidence of what is owed and not of what is paid; had observed that new men commonly began by finding a great deal wrong and generally left off after a year or two; and had said, at the end, that if Mr. Aldis wished to bring an accusation against a neighbour of nineteen years' standing on the strength of some old papers turned up by a young lady in a lumber-room, he must of course do as he thought right, but that he should be very sorry to see it.
'And the worst of it,' said Mr. Aldis at the Green House that evening, 'is that he is not defending Kell. I could deal with a man defending Kell. He is defending having been right in the spring.'
'Yes,' said Anne. 'That is what it is.'
'How long have you understood that?'
'Since about the middle of June.'
They sat some time. Then Mr. Aldis said that he would put it in writing to the two of them, formally, as a trustee, and require an answer; and Anne said that he was very likely right to; and he did it, and it was answered in eleven days by a letter from Mr. Gostwick which said that the trustees had gone into the accounts and were satisfied, and which was signed by Mr. Gostwick and by Mr. Kell.
Chapter VI
Jem Bowyer was bound in the February, not to a trade but to the sea, his mother having got him a place through a cousin at Harwich; and he went off from Thrimby on a carrier's cart at six in the morning with a bundle, in high spirits, being fifteen and having never in his life been further than Stowmarket.
Anne walked out to the turn to see him go, which she had told nobody she meant to do.
It is necessary to be exact here, because this is the point at which a certain kind of account would say that the boy's going to sea was the consequence of Mr. Kell's fifty pounds, and it was not. He might have been bound at thirteen to a cooper at Debenham and have been a cooper at Debenham all his life, and it is by no means certain that this would have been the better thing; his mother thought the sea a very good opening and said so; the boy himself wanted to go and had wanted to for a year. Nothing that happened to Jem Bowyer can be laid at Mr. Kell's door with any confidence at all.
What can be laid there is that fifty pounds left by a man in 1734 for the apprenticing of poor boys had gone instead into a bay mare, and that this was true whether Jem Bowyer prospered at sea or drowned in his first winter, and would have been just as true if there had been no Jem Bowyer at all and the money had lain in a chest untouched and unmissed.
Anne understood this on the road back from the turn, and it did not console her in the least, and she found that she had not expected it to.
Chapter VII
In the April Mr. Aldis asked her to marry him.
He did it badly, which she liked, and he did it on the ground that she was the only person in the parish he could talk to and that he did not see how he was to get on without her; and he added, being an honest man in a difficulty, that he was aware this was not perhaps the whole of what a woman would wish to hear.
She refused him.
She was a great while afterwards in getting her own reasons clear, and she never got them wholly clear, and she was honest enough not to pretend to more clarity than she had. Part of it was that she did not love him and did not think it would come. Part of it was that she had watched him for six months and had seen that he wanted an ally more than a wife, and that a woman who is married for an ally is very well used until the day her judgment differs from her husband's. And part of it — the part she liked least and would not let herself off — was that she had grown used to being the only person in Thrimby who knew a certain thing, and was not sure she would have refused him in June.
She told him none of the third part. She told him the first, plainly, and enough of the second to be honest without wounding him; and he took it very well, and they went on as they had been, and the parish never knew there had been anything to know.
Nothing followed from the refusal either. She was no worse off in the world and no better. She had simply done, on a Tuesday morning in April, the thing that seemed to her to be true, and had got nothing whatever by it, and had not been looking for anything.
Ansty — Volume the Third
Chapter I
The house of Bacon, Cobbold and Bacon stopped payment on the fourteenth of December, and for a fortnight afterwards nobody in that part of Suffolk talked of anything else.
It was not a great failure as failures go. Ipswich had seen worse in 1814 and would see worse again. But it took in a good many small people who had thought a bank a sort of hole in the ground where money stayed, and among the small people it took in were four parish charities, two turnpike trusts, and the funds of a subscription library at Woodbridge.
What followed was a thing nobody had intended and nobody could have arranged: the county became, for about five months, interested in trusts. There were letters in the Ipswich paper. There was a meeting at the Shire Hall. And in the March the Bishop's registrar, who had been asked a question about one charity and had discovered that he could not answer it, sent out a circular to every incumbent in the archdeaconry requiring a return of all parochial charities, their deeds, their present income, their disbursements for seven years, and the names of their trustees.
It was a printed form with spaces on it. It had nothing whatever to do with Thrimby, or with Anne Havers, whose name did not occur in the business at any stage and whose existence was unknown to every person concerned in it.
Mr. Aldis filled it in and did not need to be careful about it. The spaces did the work. There was one for the sum receivable by the terms of the deed and another, four inches to the right, for the sum actually received; and a man who fills in twenty-eight pounds ten in the first and fifteen pounds four in the last does not have to say anything at all.
Chapter II
The registrar's clerk who read the Thrimby return was two-and-twenty and had been at the work eleven weeks. He had a hundred and forty of these forms in front of him and had grown quick at them. He did not know Suffolk, had never heard of the Bowyer charity, and formed no opinion whatever about Mr. Kell, of whom he had likewise never heard.
He put a pencil cross in the margin, as he had been told to do where the two columns disagreed by more than a fifth, and passed it on; and this was the whole of his part in it, and he thought no more about it for the rest of his life.
Twenty-nine forms out of the hundred and forty got a pencil cross. Nineteen of the twenty-nine were cleared within a month, the difference being explained by a lapsed lease or a fallen-in life or a clerk's bad hand. Ten were not. In the June a Mr. Bardwell was sent out from Ipswich to look at the ten, and he came to Thrimby on the second of July and spent a day and a half at it, and asked for the receipts, and Waller produced his, being a great keeper of paper; and there it was, in Kell's own hand and Kell's own name, twenty-eight pounds ten, October 1819.
Mr. Bardwell was neither shocked nor gratified. It was the fourth of the ten and he had two more counties to do.
Chapter III
Mr. Kell made no fight of it at all, which surprised everybody and ought not to have surprised anybody.
He wept in Mr. Gostwick's book-room on the ninth of July, and said that he had always meant to make it right, and that if the barley had answered in 1820 there would never have been a word about any of it; and this was perfectly sincere and very likely true, and did not alter the case by a hair. He gave up the mare, which was ten years old and worth about seven pounds. His brother-in-law at Framlingham found nineteen. The remainder was made good by Mr. Gostwick out of his own pocket within the week, in silence, and the parish knew of it in a fortnight, as parishes do.
Kell left Thrimby in the September for a place near Diss, and was not prosecuted, and Anne Havers was one of perhaps four people in the parish who thought this right; the general feeling being that he had got off, and her own being that the money was restored, the trust was safe, the man was ruined in the only way that signified, and that a prosecution would have gratified the parish without adding a farthing to the Bowyer closes.
Chapter IV
Mr. Gostwick came to the Green House on the eleventh of July.
He was not brought there by the discovery, which he might have borne alone; he was brought by a thing he had done to himself on the evening of the ninth, after Kell had gone, which was to take out his own letter of the previous November and read it. It was a very short letter. It said that the trustees had gone into the accounts and were satisfied. He had written it in about four minutes and had thought at the time that he was putting an end to an unpleasantness.
He asked for Miss Havers and would not sit down.
'You came to me in June of last year with the lease and the accounts, and I did not read them. I want to be sure I have it right. Did you offer me the papers?'
'You had answered me, sir. I put them away.'
'That is not what I asked you.'
'I had them out of my reticule,' said Anne. 'They were in my hand.'
'Thank you.' He stood a moment. 'I have been trying since Tuesday to find the place where I went wrong, and I supposed at first it must have been in the spring, when I went into it with Kell and let him talk me over. But I did not go wrong there. I was careless there, which is a different thing and not a very interesting one. I went wrong in this room, with your papers in your hand, and what I did was not carelessness. I had a thing I could have looked at and I chose not to look at it, and I chose it because I had said in the spring that I was satisfied, and I could not afford to find out that I was not.'
'Sir — '
'No, if you please. I have had two days at this and I should like to get to the end of it.' He turned his hat over once. 'I have thought of myself, all my life, as a man who would rather be corrected than comfortable. It appears that I am not that man and have not been for some while, and that the way I found it out was that a woman of seven-and-twenty stood in front of me with fifty pounds' worth of evidence in her hand and I would not put out my arm for it. I am not asking your pardon. There is nothing to pardon; you were not injured. I am telling you what I have found, because you are the only person who was in the room.'
Anne said, after a moment: 'You read the lease in the July, sir. A month after.'
'I did.'
'And made nothing of it.'
'And made nothing of it,' he agreed. 'Which I have also thought about. It does not help me at all. It only means that the harm I did was to myself and not to the charity, and I find that is not the consolation I had expected it to be.'
Chapter V
The parish, having a story, told it wrong.
By the harvest it was generally understood in Thrimby that Miss Havers of the Green House had found out Kell; that she had been at the papers for years and had had her eye on him; and that it was owing to her that the money came back. Mrs. Bowyer thanked her in the churchyard with tears. Two people who had never spoken to her before called at the Green House. Mrs. Ferrand, delighted, told the story at the Dower House to eleven persons with Anne sitting in the room, and improved it in three places.
Anne let it stand for a week, and was ashamed of the week ever afterwards.
What she did then was to say, whenever it was mentioned, and to as many people as mentioned it, that she had had nothing to do with it: that the enquiry came from the Bishop's registrar in consequence of the bank; that she had never spoken to anybody concerned in it; and that if the bank had not failed the money would in all likelihood be missing still. She said it plainly and she said it every time, and it did her no good whatever. Two or three thought she was being modest and liked her the better for it. The rest thought she was being tiresome. Not one person in Thrimby altered the story.
She had known before she began that it would answer nothing. It was true, and there was nobody else to say it, and she said it; and at the end of the autumn the parish believed exactly what it had believed in August, and Anne had a clear account with herself and nothing else at all.
Chapter VI
Mrs. Ferrand's husband came home in the October and she left Thrimby at the year's end.
She came to the Green House to take leave, and stayed an hour and a quarter, and was very affectionate; and she said, among a great many other things, that she should never forget the drive to Ipswich, and that it had been the greatest fun she had had in years.
She meant it kindly, and she meant it exactly. The night in the passage at the inn had been, to her, an adventure that had come her way and that she had risen to; and she had risen to it magnificently; and she had no more notion in December that anything remained owing from it than she had had in August that anything remained owing to the girl at Wickham.
Anne saw the whole of this quite clearly, and did not correct her, and said that she should never forget it either, which was true.
She had settled the matter in the autumn of the year before and had not needed to unsettle it. Mrs. Ferrand held a false doctrine about obligation; Mrs. Ferrand had saved her father's life; both were facts of the same order and one did not touch the other. What Anne owed was not diminished by the giver's not knowing she had given anything, and it was not increased by the giver being charming, and it would not have been cancelled if Mrs. Ferrand had gone away without calling at all.
She never had any opportunity of discharging it. Mrs. Ferrand went to Bath and afterwards to Cheltenham, wrote twice in the first year and once in the third, and needed nothing from anybody in Suffolk for the rest of her life. The claim stood open. Anne kept it open, in the only way a claim can be kept open by a person who is never called upon, which is by continuing to know that it was there.
Chapter VII
Mr. Aldis stayed nine years at Thrimby and then had a living in Norfolk, and married a Miss Pace of Norwich, and did very well.
Mr. Gostwick lived until 1841. He was, by the general account of the parish, a good man to the end, and this was true, and he had one habit in his last years which was thought a little tedious by those who did not know its origin: he would not be told a thing without asking to see the paper it came from, in the smallest matters, and would sit reading a bill of ten shillings while his company waited.
Anne Havers did not marry. Her father lived nine years more and she kept his house; and after his death she stayed on at the Green House on a hundred and forty a year, and had the parish papers moved formally into her keeping by a vote of the vestry in 1834, which was the only public recognition of any kind that she ever received in that parish, and which she valued.
Jem Bowyer was made a boatswain in the Levant service and came back to Thrimby twice, the second time with a wife; and he had no notion that anything had ever been amiss about the charity, and Anne did not tell him.
The Bowyer closes are still let, and the money is still laid out, and there is a board in the church which records the founder's name and the terms of the bequest, and has been repainted twice.
There is nothing on it about the year the rents were short, or about the eleventh of June, or about the four minutes in which the papers were in her hand and were not taken; and if there had been, it would have been the wrong sort of monument, and Anne Havers, who understood the matter better than anybody, would have been the first to say so.