The Man on the Other Side
9781465632012
188 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Ruth Courthope Seer stood on her own doorstep and was content. She looked across the garden and the four-acre field with the white may hedge boundary. It was all hers. Her eyes slowly followed the way of the sun. Another field, lush and green, sloped to a stream, where, if the agents had spoken truth, dwelt trout in dim pools beneath the willows. Field and stream, they too were hers. Good fields they were, clover thick, worthy fields for feed for those five Shorthorns, bought yesterday at Uckfield market. The love of the land, the joy of possession, the magic of the spring, they swept through her being like great clean winds. She was over forty; she had worked hard all her life. Fate had denied her almost everything—father or mother, brother or sister, husband or children. She had never had a home of her own. And now fate had given her enough money to buy Thorpe Farm. The gift was immense, still almost unbelievable. “You perfectly exquisite, delicious, duck of a place,” she said, and kissed her hand to it. The house stood high, and she could see on the one hand the dust-white road winding for the whole mile to Mentmore station; on the other, green fields and good brown earth, woodland, valley, and hill, stretching to the wide spaces of the downs, beyond which lay the sea. In 1919, the year of the Great Peace, spring had come late, but in added and surpassing beauty. The great yearly miracle of creation was at its height, and behold, it was very good. In front of her sat Sarah and Selina. The day’s work was over. They had watched seeds planted and seeds watered. They had assisted at the staking of sweet-peas and the two-hourly feeding of small chicken. Now they demanded, as their habit was, in short sharp barks of a distinctly irritating nature, that they should be taken for a walk. Sarah and Selina were the sole extravagance of Ruth’s forty years of life. They had been unwanted in a hard world. Aberdeens were out of fashion, and their sex, like Ruth’s own in the struggle for existence, had been against them. So bare pennies which Ruth could ill afford had gone to the keep of Sarah and Selina, and in return they loved her as only a dog can love. Sarah was a rather large lady, usually of admirable manners and behaviour. Only once had she seriously fallen from grace, and, to Ruth’s horror, had presented her with five black and white puppies of a description unknown before in heaven or earth. Moreover, she was quite absurdly pleased with herself, and Selina was, equally absurdly, quite unbearably jealous. Selina had never been a lady, either in manners or behaviour. She was younger and smaller than Sarah, and of infinite wickedness both in design and execution.
