Hope seemed justified for a week or two, while Bettesworth's new garden, heretofore a wilderness, assumed a new order. He had sowed early peas--probably other things too--having actually paid a neighbour to help him get the ground dug; and he was extremely happy, until a day came when he said, cautiously and bitterly, "I thinks I got a enemy." He went on to explain that some one, he suspected, wanted his cottage, and was trying to get him out of it. I have forgotten what raised his suspicions. He did not even then realize that himself, or rather his wife, was the only enemy he had to fear.
That was the miserable truth, however. Down in that other place, secluded from the neighbours, the old woman had grown utterly squalid, though Bettesworth had not seen it. And now the owner of the new cottage, perhaps from the grounds of the large residence destined for his friends, had caught sight of old Lucy Bettesworth, and had been, as anyone else would have been, horrified at her filthy appearance. But he did not act on that single impression: it was not until kindly means had been taken to ascertain the truth of it that he first expostulated, and then told Bettesworth that he could not be permitted to stay. Nay, I was allowed to try first if persuasion of mine could remedy the evil.
Unfortunately, remedies were not in Bettesworth's power, or he would by now have employed them, being alarmed as well as indignant. He listened to my hints that his wife was intolerably dirty, but (I write from memory) "What can I do, sir?" he said. "I knows she en't like other women, with her bad hand and all." (She had broken her wrist some years before, and never regained its strength.) "But I can't afford to dress her like a lady. I told 'n so to his head: 'I can't keep a dressed-up doll,' I says." Neither could he, being so nearly blind, see that his wife was going about unwashed, grimy, like a dreadful apparition of poverty from the Middle Ages. To her it would have been useless to speak. Her epilepsy had impaired her intellect, and any suggestion of reform, even from her own husband, seemed to her a piece of persecution to be obstinately resented.
So there was nothing to be done. The prospective tenants of the big house near by could not be expected to endure such a neighbour; the cottage itself, which had cost £20 for repairs, the owner told me, was no place for such a tenant. The Bettesworths therefore must go. They received formal notice to quit; then, as nothing appeared to be happening, a more peremptory notice was sent limiting their time to three weeks, yet promising a sovereign as compensation for the work done and the crops planted in the garden. In the meantime they had probably done more than a sovereign's worth of damage to the cottage interior, with its new paper and paint.