while he stayed here. Such unequal attachments
had led to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs Crick
that Mr Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way,
what would be the use of his marrying a fine lady,
and all the while ten thousand acres of Colonial pasture
to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to reap.
A farm-woman would be the only sensible kind of wife
for him. But whether Mr Clare had spoken seriously
or not, why should she, who could never conscientiously
allow any man to marry her now, and who had religiously
determined that she never would be tempted to do so,
draw off Mr Clare’s attention from other women,
for the brief happiness of sunning herself in his
eyes while he remained at Talbothays?
They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming
and milking were proceeded with as usual, and they
went indoors to breakfast. Dairyman Crick was
discovered stamping about the house. He had
received a letter, in which a customer had complained
that the butter had a twang.
“And begad, so ’t have!” said the
dairyman, who held in his left hand a wooden slice
on which a lump of butter was stuck. “Yes—taste
for yourself!”
Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted,
Tess tasted, also the other indoor milkmaids, one
or two of the milking-men, and last of all Mrs Crick,
who came out from the waiting breakfast-table.
There certainly was a twang.
The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction
to better realize the taste, and so divine the particular
species of noxious weed to which it appertained, suddenly
exclaimed—
“’Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn’t
a blade left in that mead!”
Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry
mead, into which a few of the cows had been admitted
of late, had, in years gone by, spoilt the butter
in the same way. The dairyman had not recognized
the taste at that time, and thought the butter bewitched.
“We must overhaul that mead,” he resumed;
“this mustn’t continny!”
All having armed themselves with old pointed knives,
they went out together. As the inimical plant
could only be present in very microscopic dimensions
to have escaped ordinary observation, to find it seemed
rather a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich grass
before them. However, they formed themselves
into line, all assisting, owing to the importance
of the search; the dairyman at the upper end with
Mr Clare, who had volunteered to help; then Tess,
Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan,
and the married dairywomen—Beck Knibbs,
with her wooly black hair and rolling eyes; and flaxen
Frances, consumptive from the winter damps of the
water-meads—who lived in their respective
cottages.
With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly
across a strip of the field, returning a little further
down in such a manner that, when they should have
finished, not a single inch of the pasture but would
have fallen under the eye of some one of them.
It was a most tedious business, not more than half
a dozen shoots of garlic being discoverable in the
whole field; yet such was the herb’s pungency
that probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient
to season the whole dairy’s produce for the
day.
