me when cultivation
was slow and such luxuries as meat, white bread, bedding, and coal were
unknown to the poor, and by a shrewdness peculiar to himself--did James
Ruan manage to make his property contribute to his private income, a
condition of affairs by no means inevitable in farming, although at that
time the hated Corn Law, only repealed soon after Ishmael's birth, had
for thirty years been in force for the benefit of landowners. If the
Squire had known the worth of the old family portraits hanging in what
had been the banqueting hall, where apples were now stored, he would
doubtless have sold them, but he had cut himself off from civilised
beings who might have praised them, and he thought the beruffed,
steel-plated men and high-browed, pearl-decked ladies rather a
dry-looking lot, though he never suffered Annie to say a disparaging
word on the subject.

Annie deeply resented this silent superiority of the Squire's, this
shutting off from her of certain fine points in his garbled scheme of
honour, and she chose to regard Ishmael as the embodiment of this habit.
Had she been left with unrestricted powers as to estate and money she
might have classed herself with her youngest-born and grown to grudge
her other children their existence, but as things were Ishmael was as
much in her way as he was in that of Archelaus. She realised she had
been tricked at the last to satisfy a whim of the Squire's--she would
have been far better off under the old will, which left Cloom to her
eldest son after her. A dishonoured name was all she had gained by the
transaction--a hollow reward, since to her equals it made little
difference, and to her superiors none at all, and when she remembered at
how much pains the special licence had been obtained from the commissary
of the Bishop of Exeter, how she had sent for the Parson the moment the
Squire had finally declared his mind made up, and then for Lawyer
Tonkin, only to be excluded from the conference that followed, Annie
felt her resentment surge up. If it had not been for the fact that the
Parson and Tonkin had been appointed guardians to the boy, Ishmael
would, in all probability, never have lived beyond babyhood. A little
neglect would soon have ended the matter, and even if any local magnate
had bestirred himself to make a fuss, no Cornish jury would have
convicted. All this Boase knew, and he managed to make Annie aware of
the fact that he meant his ward to thrive or he would mak