There was an unspoken wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed
as well as unspoken. Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; jointly
with her husband she might have her say, and to a certain extent her way,
in ordering its affairs. But she was not mistress of the kitchen.
On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company with chipped sauce-
boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters, and paid bills, rested a worn and
ragged Bible, on whose front page was the record, in faded ink, of a
baptism dated ninety-four years ago. "Martha Crale" was the name written
on that yellow page. The yellow, wrinkled old dame who hobbled and
muttered about the kitchen, looking like a dead autumn leaf which the
winter winds still pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy. For longer than
anyone could remember she had pattered to and fro between oven and wash-
house and dairy, and out to chicken-run and garden, grumbling and
muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly. Emma Ladbruk, of whose
coming she took as little notice as she would of a bee wandering in at a
window on a summer's day, used at first to watch her with a kind of
frightened curiosity. She was so old and so much a part of the place, it
was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing. Old Shep, the
white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for his time to die, seemed
almost more human than the withered, dried-up old woman.
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