The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons Read Free Book Online Page A

tongue. I’ll go over to the farm, she decided, and see what happens about letters and milk. She had received an impression that the Hoadleys did not want to be friendly but there was no harm in asking.
    When she came down in her oilskins, Meg was sitting on the floor.
    “Just getting on me boots,” she explained. “Meg will go with mudder.”
    “Oh now, Meg darling, you can’t come this time, it’s pouring with rain,” exclaimed Alda impatiently, wild to be off. “You stay here goodly with Jenny and Weez.”
    “Meg doesn’t want to.”
    “ We don’t particularly want you , goodness knows,” said Jenny, without looking up from her work.
    “I should think not, indeed,” from Louise.
    “Dwell, if vey don’t want me and you don’t want me, what shall I do?” roared Meg, bursting into tears and standing up with one boot off and one on. “Oh, oh, oh, what shall I do?”
    “Put your silly ass boot on and come with me,” said Alda crossly and gaily, snatching her up and pulling on the boot. “Oh, for goodness’ sake don’t make that noise!”
    A few minutes later she was splashing across the meadow with the rain driving in her face and the laughing Meg on her back. A raised track strengthened by flints led from the cottage to the farm, but in parts it had been broken away and deeply worn down by the passage of hay wains and herds of cows, and in these places the pools were inches deep, while on either side extended quagmires. Alda would have preferred to enjoy this wet day by herself, but Meg’s weight felt pleasant upon her shoulders and she liked the clasp of the little hands round her throat.
    Keats said that poetry should steal upon the senses . Even so, Naylor’s Farm stole upon Alda’s eyes. At one moment she was plodding along the track, moving her wet eyelashes to free them from the raindrops, while ahead of her lay a group of barns and sheds built of tarred weatherboarding and thatched with ancient straw that had changed in the course of years from gold to silver; the next moment, she had passed the buildings, and the farm (whose upper storey alone had been visible from the track) lay before her in a hollow. And what had been a pleasant country landscape was transformed.
    It looks like the end of somewhere, she thought vaguely, lifting her hand again to wipe the rain from her eyes, and yet it is not shut in. How very beautiful.
    There was nothing special or solemn in the scene: it was only that the guardian group of elms was perfectly shaped, and that a sheet of water brimmed between herself and the low, rose-red farmhouse so that the building seemed rising from a lake. Rose-vines, on which masses of withered white blossoms and even a few living ones lingered, overgrew porch and windows; how sheltered the place must be! the gentlest possible slopes and folds in the surrounding meadows enclosed it and made it remote rather than lonely. A low wall of the same rosy brick surrounded the tangled garden, threaded by a narrow brick path; there was not much attempt at flower growing and the place seemed a little neglected, gradually settling into this hollow among the fields, where throughout the years the pond had gathered and white ducks sailed in the rain.
    Having walked round the water, Alda pushed open the faded wooden gate and went up the path. After she had used the creaking knocker, she let Meg slip to the ground and stood gazing away at the endless gentle folds of meadow, the farm buildings and the disturbed grey sky. There were no signs of life until a man in a brown uniform came out of a shed with a sack over his head and a sullen face under it; she recognised the blue-eyed Italian of the woods, but though he glanced in her direction he made no reply to her pleasant “good morning” and disappeared among the buildings towards the back of the farmhouse. At that moment the door opened.
    “Yes?” said the young woman who stood there, unsmiling under a coquettish turban, with a duster in one