‘It’s only eight or nine miles over the hills. We can walk that easy before dark if we take our time.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s Morgan,’ she said.
‘You’ll have to help Morgan on a bit.’
‘It’s too much. You can’t carry her all that way.’
He laughed at her and, in the end, persuaded her. By this time Morgan, awake and refreshed, was again clamouring for food. In the post-office at Redlake they bought him a packet of acid-drops and some biscuits.
‘Now that’s got to last you, my son,’ Mary told him, and for the present he was satisfied.
They set out slowly on their journey home. For amile or more the road ran along the side of the little river, but soon the valley fell away beneath them, a deep trough clogged with brushwood, and the road degenerated into a stony track. It seemed that they had now penetrated a country that was untouched by the excitements of Bron Fair, for whenever they came near to a farm, and these grew fewer and fewer, being hidden for the most part in folds of the hills and lost in sheltering trees, they found men moving slowly about the fields or calling cattle to the byre for the evening’s milking.
Soon the distances of the landscape had faded from them altogether. They came to an upland scarred with stony lanes where they could see nothing on either side of them but thistle pastures, poor and unkindly, huge fields where many sheep were feeding in the mist. Morgan enjoyed himself, running up the banks to a gap in the broken wall and scaring them as he stood there like a phantom himself, waving his arms. At last, when it seemed that they could climb no farther into the clouds, the road began to fall.
Abner was glad of this, for, strong as he was, the weight of Gladys, made more awkward by her long splint, was telling on him. The road gave him no rest: it went on inflexibly between its walls of stone, and when his breath failed him there was no clean air with which he might fill his lungs: only this thin, clammy whiteness. They jolted down into a valley, where they found a village of stone houses, so cold and mountainous in character that it seemed to have been scoured with snow.
Above the door of the post-office Abner spelt out the word,Newchurch.
‘New church?’ said Mary, with a sinking heart. ‘But Newchurch is miles and miles away from us! I drove here once with father. Are you sure it’s the right road?’
‘It’s right by what I heard at the Pound House, when Mick talked of walking over to Bron. It’s right enough . . . only the hills make it seem longer.’
A little later she asked him anxiously what the time was.
‘Don’t you know my watch is gone?’ he repliedirritably. ‘By what it was in Newchurch I reckon we’ve a good four hour before dark. And then there’s a moon.’
They crossed another ridge of hills. Half-way up the slope Morgan said that he was tired, and asked his mother to carry him. She took him up in her arms without a word and dragged along behind Abner. He looked back at her, questioning, for the slowness of her pace impeded him. She knew what he was thinking.
‘I can’t go faster,’ she said, trying to smile; but at the next brow she had to stop to fetch her breath, putting Morgan down on the bank beside her under a bush of green broom.
‘I want to walk again now, mam,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Are we nearly there?’
He had pestered her so often with this question that for a moment her strained temper gave way.
‘Don’t worry, Morgan!’ she said sharply. ‘I’ll tell you when we’re there.’
Abner laughed, and she turned on him with annoyance. She thought he was laughing at her irritability, but found that his eyes were kindly.
‘Lucky for them they don’t know,’ he said, shaming her with a smile.
She tried to cover her annoyance by asking if they were anywhere near the top of the hills.
He knew no more than she did. Certainly by the time that they had rested and moved on again the fog had thickened. The stone walls and the clumps of hawthorn and furze with which the fields were scattered looked misty, wild, gigantic.
‘Time we quickened up a bit,’ he said.
‘How can you be sure it’s the right road?’
‘Because there bain’t no other, missus,’ he replied. ‘Up you come, my pretty!’ And he hoisted Gladys into his arms again.
They could no longer guess at the time of day. Mary supposed that it was now getting on for six o’clock, but the sky that drooped upon them was of a uniform, milky whiteness, and they could not guess the level of the sun. The air, indeed, grew colder, but that was a relief in itself after the oppression of the valleys.
They walked on, maybe for another hour. Mary’s arms ached with the burden of Morgan, who told her from time to time that his legs hurt him or that he wanted to go to bye-bye, and vexed her to the point of anger with his cry of, ‘Are we nearly there?’ She herself was utterly fagged and hungry. Her anxiety for Gladys had made it impossible for her even to think of food in the earlier part of the day. Now her stomach ached with emptiness, and the cold, moist air that she drew into her labouring lungs did nothing to quench the drought in her throat. Morgan suddenly began to whine for a drink of water. The sweets had made him thirsty.
‘They don’t lay on the water up here, my son,’ said Abner cheerfully.
‘But Iwantsome,’ Morgan insisted. ‘Ortea,’ he added, as a slight concession.
Mary quietened him as well as she could with promises. They had not passed a farm or a shepherd’s cabin for miles. She could see no hope of any building ahead short of the Wolfpits valley, not even as much as would shelter them for the night if they lost their way or if the strength of the weakest failed. They were wandering on and on, blindly, as it seemed, into a desert of high, poor pastures. Now they no longer saw large flocks of sheep. Those that they startled were solitary creatures that sprang up in alarm from the wayside tangles of furze and brier, horned mountain sheep, with shaggy fleeces and black faces.
She felt that the light was failing. Perhaps the sun had set. Surely it had set, for they had walked endlessly. At sunset the birds began their song in the thickets about Wolfpits, but here there was no shelter for birds. Only the wheat-ears bobbed their white rumps in front of them and the meadow-pipits flew before them in their endless game of waiting and of flight, so tame that Morgan ran to catch one with his hands. Out of the whiteness above them they heard the lost bubbling voices of curlews, or the harsh cawing of the carrion crow.
She dragged on behind, and Abner walked ahead, never tiring. She would have died rather than havecomplained, as long as he made no complaint. A stone cottage rose up out of the mist.
‘Now you shall have your drink,’ she cried encouragingly to Morgan. The sight brightened her, for she was parched dry herself. But the cottage was only a ruin with a broken gate on either side of it that had made a walled enclosure for sheep. Not very long ago sheep had been penned there, for torn fleece had stuck to the splinters of the gates and the road was strewn with dry dung. Abner went up to the door to see if by any chance they were mistaken; but the place was quite deserted.
‘Let’s sit down a bit,’ he said, and lit his pipe. She sat down wearily beside him. Morgan, smelling round the garden like a puppy, came back with a bunch of wallflowers and gave them to her. Their scent was a poor substitute for food, but she kissed his cold face.
‘I want a drink of water, mam,’ he said again.
She looked desperately at Abner.
‘Wait till we come on a bottle of pop, son,’ he said. Morgan stared at him with big eyes. ‘Real pop?’ he asked.
‘You wait and see,’ said Abner cheerfully.
Gladys, who had just begun to cry quietly in his arms, said that she was cold.
‘We’ll keep you warm, my pretty!’ he said, gathering her to his breast.
‘Are we nearly there, mam?’ came the voice of Morgan.
‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ She turned to Abner: ‘It can’t be much farther, the time we’ve been walking.’
He did not answer. ‘Up she comes!’ he said, kissing Gladys and lifting her gently.
‘Your ‘stache is all over water, Abner,’ the child whispered.
They passed through the second gate, but here a new perplexity faced them. They had come to open moorland. The road that had hitherto been enclosed by stone walls was now no more than outlined by wheel-ruts bitten deep into the peaty soil. Mile upon mile of misty heather rolled away before them. Then the track faded altogether, splitting into three narrowlanes between the masses of ling. Abner stopped, and this, his first hesitation, filled Mary with dread.
‘Which way is it?’ she called.
He could not answer. ‘We must be somewhere near the top,’ he said at last. ‘Somewhere on the far side of the Ditches. If it wasn’t for this stuff we could see all right.’
‘But you can’t see,’ she said. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know any more than I do. We’re lost.’
‘Don’t you go on so quickly,’ he said. ‘If we keep to the middle we can’t be far out.’
He pushed on a little. A hen grouse rose with a frightening flutter from under his feet. She went whirring away low over the heather with a harsh stuttering cry.
‘Where’s the cattypult, Morgan?’ Abner cried.
And then they found water.
‘Come along, here’s the pop-shop!’ he said. The child ran forward and knelt above a tiny cup of peat fringed with yellow stars of butterwort. He lapped up the precious stuff eagerly like a dog, so greedily that he choked, spluttered, and soused his white lace collar. Mary wiped his face for him. ‘Go on!’ said Abner, and she too stooped her aching back and drank. Abner drank last, having laid Gladys down in the yielding heather and scooped up water for her in his hands.
Now they were refreshed, almost joyful; but Mary could not help looking anxiously at the hills in front of them, for every moment it seemed to her that the heather grew blacker and the distance fainter in the mist.
A crest that had once seemed unattainable fell behind them. Reaching it they had expected to find themselves looking down into the Wolfpits valley. Instead of this they saw more broken walls and the outlines of two huge trees. It puzzled them. It seemed that they had come to the edge of a shallow basin scooped in the top of the hills. Perhaps they might find a farm. The idea encouraged them.
They walked forward more quickly, for here the turf was smooth and the heather no longer impeded them. The trees came up out of the mist, not only two of them but a whole avenue of beeches planted by thehands of men, stretching away before them in the line that they had followed.
‘There must be a house,’ said Mary. ‘They wouldn’t plant trees like this for nothing.’
Abner nodded. In spite of his air of gaiety he had been anxious and was now relieved. It was a noble avenue of more than a hundred trees. They walked on midway between the two lines of them, expecting at every moment to see the shadow of the house. But the avenue ended suddenly as it had begun, and instead of a house they saw nothing but two gateposts of stone, ancient and weathered, surmounted by immense round balls. The man who had built them two hundred years before had planned a stately approach to his mansion. It was easy to imagine the gates of wrought iron that would have swung there. But of the house that he had dreamed there remained not as much as a ghost.
‘There must be a house!’ Mary cried.
Abner shook his head. Nothing could now be seen but the desolate line of the beech avenue stretching away behind them. A light wind rose on their right, driving the mist in front of it. They seemed to hear the endless volumes of it hurrying by, but it was only the long sighing of a waste of heather. This sound made Mary really aware of the threatening silence that surrounded them. Even the presence of Abner standing there as stolid and unmoved as ever could not steady her.
‘We can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘It’s an awful place. It’s like a churchyard. Do let us go on.’
She left the desolate gateposts with a shiver. She hurried, taxing her strength to the last, to put them behind her. The wind rose; the mist was whirled along the slopes before them in torn fleeces. She crossed another ridge and then sank down in the heather, ready to cry herself. The buffetings of the wind were fit to break her heart.
Then a miracle happened. A gust of wind tore an opening in the mist and the vision of a heaped mountainous landscape grew before their eyes. Southward the indented bow of Radnor Forest rose blue-black, the summit of Black Mixen hugely threatening. Westwardin molten clouds the sun went down over Wales and fifty miles of thin air and solid mountain were mingled in a fiery haze. The sky was a furnace in which the mountains melted away. But Abner and Mary had no desire to see these splendours. Their eyes were fixed, peering into the trough of the valley beneath them. They saw green woods, blue in the evening light, the squares of barns, the rich mosaic of fields, the gleam of a river. And their hearts fell, for each was certain that the valley beneath them was not that of the Folly Brook. It was far wilder and more strange. They looked at each other.
‘Do you know where it is?’ he asked.
‘I can’t think, unless it’s somewhere near Clun.’
‘Better get down while the light lasts. There’s farms there,’ he said. As he spoke the sun dipped down. White clouds swept across their window. Only the memory of what they had seen told them that they were not utterly lost.
They descended the slope carefully, for the grass was slippery and the only tracks were scattered with stones. Abner could not help her; she knew that he was far too busy saving Gladys from unnecessary jars. She fell, and Morgan cried out that she had hurt his arm. She pulled her strength together and tried to carry him. Somehow she must struggle on, for the darkness was falling. Even with their sudden vision in her mind she could not now feel certain that their direction was right. For a time they followed a wheel-track skirting the mountain, but it ended by turning upwards, and they knew that this could not help them. Downward it was difficult to go, for the fields were small and irregular, and the hedges often impassable, yet downward, somehow, they must go.
They beat through a zone of these entanglements in wood and stone. Night was falling fast. Since the revealing moment of the last summit they had sunk so deep that they must now surely be near the bottom of the valley, whatever valley it might be. But when the barrier of irregular fields lay behind them they found themselves on open, sloping ground again. Abner stalked on ahead without pausing. She, at theend of her tether, called out after him to stop for a moment, but he did not hear her. His shape went on into the dusk, and she knew that if she did not follow she must be left behind.
Suddenly the white air was full of the screaming of birds . . . a shrill, high, sound that took her back into her childhood. Once, with her father, she had been taken to Swansea on a business trip and had heard gulls calling on the Gower Cliffs. She felt that she must be dreaming. Even on a night of storm no gulls could be blown so far inland as this, and yet she was sure that her childish memory could not have failed. The cries that she heard now were the cries of gulls wheeling and screaming in the mist above her head.
Abner turned and called her. ‘Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he called. ‘I never heard such a chronic row!’
‘They’re gulls,’ she shouted. Her voice was thin in the mist. ‘Seagulls.’
‘That’s where they must have come from. Off of this water,’ he called.
And she saw, peering in front of her, a ghostly wood of pines and before them a lake of dark water fringed with reeds. The wind swept across it, bending the reeds, breaking the glassy surface into ripples, and rolling milky mist before it. The wind came in gusts, roaring through the trees with a noise that was like that of the sea, and the gulls screamed above them, unseen, as they might have screamed over storm-bound cliffs. She stood with her knees trembling at Abner’s side, and Morgan clutched her hand. She herself felt like a child, lonely, frightened. They stood so quietly together that some of the birds swooped down on to the water as though driven by the wind.
‘Yes, they’re gulls,’ she said. ‘Seagulls. We’re more than fifty miles away from the sea. I don’t understand.’
She laughed nervously. It came to her suddenly that she could go no farther. Her legs could not make a single step. The gulls came dropping down in twos and threes, and settled on the lake. They were smaller than those that she remembered, she thought. Theydropped down just like pigeons when you scatter grain.
‘Come on,’ said Abner. ‘It’s near dark.’
But she could not move. The child tugged at her skirt. She felt the tugging in a dream.
‘We can’t stand staring here all night,’ Abner was saying. She was aware of him standing beside her in the dusk, holding Gladys to his breast. She saw the child’s white hands clasped about his neck, as quietly as if she were asleep. She heard him, but could not stir. Then Abner touched her upper arm, and the pressure of his fingers went through her body like fire along a fuse exploding some mine of passion that had lain hidden beneath her long silence. It burned her like flame, burned her and rent her. . . . She trembled and turned on him violently. Words of abuse came tumbling out of her mouth. She did not know or care what she was saying. She lashed him, wildly, desperately. It was he who was to blame for all this trouble, he who had persuaded her to take the children to Bron and allowed her to be insulted in the inn at Redlake; he who had entangled them in the crowd where Gladys’s leg was broken; and now he’d lost them, and brought them to a place where they might all die of cold with his damned foolishness. Some devil inside her brain drove her on, delighting in the vile things she said, raking up little grudges of the past and throwing them in his face, revealing, against her will, such petty miseries as her jealousy of Susie Hind. ‘It’s with her you ought to be,’ she cried, ‘instead of troubling us! That’s where you ought to be! You’d better go on and leave us, Gladys and Morgan and me. You don’t know any more than I do where we are, with the night coming on. We can’t go a step farther, neither me nor Morgan, poor little thing! Oh, go! Go! I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you!’ She threw herself down, exhausted, on the wet grass.
He had stood up to it utterly bewildered. He couldn’t protest, for all her ravings were so childish, so disconnected, so passionately illogical. He simply let her go on until she had finished with him. Thenhe disengaged Gladys’s arms from his neck and laid her down gently.
‘You’re just about done in,’ he said. ‘It’s natural.’
Again he placed his hand on Mary’s arm, hoping to soothe her and to persuade. She gave a strange shudder, as though his fingers had been ice, and burst into tears, covering her face with her hands.
He comforted her clumsily, talking to her as he would have done to a child, until she no longer shrank from him, being too weak to care. Then she took hold of his coat and clung to him, still sobbing her heart away. She was broken . . . quite broken.
The moment was terrible for Abner. He felt his heart leap so wildly that he knew she must be conscious of its thudding. The movement of her body, shaken with sobs, against his own, filled him not with pity but with exultation. There was no woman like her in the world. He knew it. Hadn’t he known it long enough? If he told himself the truth he must admit that for months he had never wanted any other woman. The desires that had hungered him the night before, walking beneath her window and in the moonlit lane, returned to him in waves of greater force. He laughed to think that, being so near to her, he should ever have given a thought to Susie Hind. Now she was in his arms. His hands caressed her beauty. How should he touch her body without passion? And why? Surely she could feel the blood beating in his fingers, even if she told herself that he was only trying to comfort her. No one could see them there . . . no one except the two children, crying softly together because they heard their mother crying. Why shouldn’t he gather her in his arms, overwhelming her with kisses? He could see nothing but her lips. . . .
But when he strained her to him she stopped sobbing and pushed him away. It was now dark but for the light of the moon hidden above the mist, and he could only see the paleness of her face. Her ghost spoke to him.
‘I’ve lost my handkerchief,’ she said simply.
He gave her his own, and she thanked him.
‘I don’t know what I’ve been saying,’ she whispered. ‘Ithink I must have been mad, Abner. Please forget it.’
He would have helped her to her feet, but her muscles would not respond to the brain’s message. She gave a weak laugh. Now she did not mind being weak. She looked at him helplessly.
‘I can’t go another step,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t. Perhaps, if you left us here, you might find if there’s a house near. I’ll look after these poor lambs. We can keep warm close together.’
No doubt she spoke wisely. He left them without a word, though Gladys cried out with alarm to see him going. His shoulders loomed up in the cloud, and as he skirted the lake the gulls rose screaming from its surface to be lost in the sky.
Abner continued his course downhill. Relieved of the weight of Gladys he now felt himself master of his limbs. The hedges and the roughness of the road troubled him no longer, and when he had been walking no more than ten minutes he saw in the growing brilliance of the moonlight a gate that gave on to a metalled road. He strained his ears to listen for any sound, and heard, at length, the noise of a dog howling at the hidden moon. That meant a farm, or at least a shepherd’s cottage. A walk of ten minutes in the direction of the sound brought him within sight of a mass of outbuildings that made a courtyard in front of a low-roofed house. Two long windows on the right of a central doorway were lighted. He saw the shadows of geraniums in pots against the blinds. Another dog came at him out of the darkness, snarling and sniffing him from a distance. He knocked at the door and heard a chair pushed back over the stone floor.
‘Come in . . . come in!’ some one cried.
The farm kitchen was bright, with a heavy brass lamp in the centre of the table and a yellow shade that threw a mild radiance over the many hams and sides of bacon that were slung from the smoky ceiling. The table was laid for supper and a shrewish-looking woman was eating bread and cheese. She stared at Abner with a piece of cheese stuck on the end of her knife, looking neither astonished nor frightened.
‘Who is it, please. And what do you want at this time of night?’ she said, without moving.
‘I’m sorry to put you out, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Me and three others, a woman and two children, lost our way coming over the hills from the fair. The little girl’s had an accident and we had to carry her. Proper done in, they are, and I left them about a mile away over there.’ He pointed in the direction of the hills.
‘Well, I don’t see how I can help you,’ said the woman, who went on eating. ‘The master never has no dealings with gipsies. What’s more, he’s gone to the fair himself in the trap and ban’t back yet.’
Abner explained to her that he was not a gipsy. ‘You can’t leave a woman an’ two kids out there at night,’ he said.’
‘Where did you leave them?’ she asked.
‘Up by a pool. There’s a lot of birds on it. Seagulls, she said.’
‘Oh, ay, them’s the sea-crows. They comes here every year. But that’s not ten minutes’ walk from here, that isn’t!’
‘There must be a man about the place as can give me a hand with them,’ said Abner, irritated by her unconcern.
‘All gone home an hour ago,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘There’s only me and the master, and he’s not back yet.’
At that moment all the dogs began to bark together. She got up and opened the door, and the lights of a gig turned the corner and dashed into the yard. Another cob was tied to the cart tail. The woman ran to meet the new-comer, and a big man threw the reins over the horse’s flanks and got out of the trap. The dog yelped round him friendlily, and he cursed it. ‘Get away!’ he said.
‘You’d best take out,’ he said to the woman. ‘I’m properly starved, I am. What do you think of the new cob? Forty-eight pound! I never knew such prices!’
‘There’s a chap here says he’s a woman and two children lost up by the sea-crows’ pool,’ she said, disregarding his question. ‘You’d better go and have a word with him.’
‘Gipsies?’ he said angrily; but without waiting for her reply he stalked stiffly into the room, slapping his dank hands and blinking at the light. He stared at Abner.
‘Hallo!’ he said. ‘I know you. You’m George Malpas’s lodger.’
Abner also recognised his host. It was Mr Williams of Pentre Higgin, the farmer who had chosen himself foreman of the jury at Bastard’s inquest.
‘Well, what’s all this I hear about a woman and two kids?’ said the fanner threateningly. ‘Is that Malpas’s wife?’
Abner told him what had happened. What bewildered him most was to realise that after all they had hit the upper part of their own valley. The Pentre was indeed the farm on which old Drew worked, and less than five miles from Wolfpits itself. The farmer poured himself out a glass of cider and stood smacking his lips while Abner told his story.
‘Well, this is a pretty turn-out!’ he said. ‘I heard some talk of an accident to a little girl over there.’
He went to the door. ‘Hi!’ he shouted, ‘you’d better put to again, missus! Shove the new cob in the stall and give ’en some hay. Mind he don’t bite you.’
He chuckled to himself, being what people in those parts call ‘market-peart,’ then drank off another glass of cider, and motioned to Abner to follow him. ‘We’d best find Badger to give us a hand,’ he said.
He tied the reins of the harnessed horse to a post in the yard, and threw a blanket over its back. Abner followed him silently out of the yard and up the road. They stopped in front of a small cottage, and Williams knocked at the door. After some delay Badger in his shirt-sleeves opened it, emitting a queer odour of naphthaline and the dried skins of animals and birds.
‘Put your coat on, Bill,’ said the farmer. ‘Malpas’s wife and kids is up by the sea-crows’ pool. Got lost in the fog.’
In a few moments, as it seemed, they had found the derelicts. By this time Mary protested, she was quite able to walk. Abner again picked up Gladys, Williams carried Morgan, and an easy path brought them downto the farm again. Badger walked beside Abner, but never spoke a word.
‘Now I reckon I’ve got to drive you home,’ said Williams sourly. ‘You’d better jump up quick.’
The lights of the house shone on Mary’s pale face. She did not look at Abner, but the woman of the farm, who appeared to be Williams’s wife, stared at her with hostile eyes. ‘Good-night, Bill!’ the farmer called, as Badger slouched away.
‘Thank’ee, Mr Badger!’ Abner added. But Badger only mumbled something that he could not hear.
The sweating horse jogged easily down the lane to Wolfpits.
Allthat night Abner heard Gladys crying softly and Mary moving about in the room beneath him. In the small hours she knocked at his door and begged him to take Morgan into his bed. Gladys was so restless that the child could not get to sleep. They spoke together with the oak door between them, and a moment later, having knocked again, she thrust a small, red-eyed figure into the room. Abner picked him up and carried him into bed. The child nestled close to him, like a small, warm-blooded animal. Abner wrapped him up in his arms, protectively, as though, by steadying his muscles, he could compel him to settle down to sleep. Morgan’s fingers lay gently on his forearm, soft and listless. He was so quiet that Abner thought he had fallen asleep already. In this he was mistaken. The change of rooms and the adventure of finding a new bedfellow had completely wakened him, and when he had lain dead still for a little while, Morgan’s fingers began to stroke Abner’s arm. Then he fidgeted and spoke in a reverent whisper:
‘Abner, are you awake?’
‘Ay, what is it?’
‘Why is your arm all hairy, Abner?’
‘Why? Because I’m grown up.’
‘Mam’s isn’t,’ said Morgan, after a thoughtful pause, and then: ‘I like being here.’
‘Then don’t you go asking questions or I’ll put you out again,’ said Abner.
After this the child was quiet. He lay there burning in Abner’s arms. Falling asleep, his limbs relaxed, and then, suddenly clutching at consciousness, twitched violently. These movements were like those of a very young animal, feeble and frightened, and Abner, feeling them, gathered the child more closely in his arms, until he moved no longer save with the gentle breathing of a sweet sleep.
Abner had never slept with a child before. It gavehim a queer, almost physical sensation of comfort in addition to the protective emotions which Morgan’s helplessness aroused. He had never thought seriously what it would be like to have a child of his own, and even now he did not explain his feelings in that way. He pictured himself, for a moment, in the position of father to a child of Susie Hind’s, and the prospect did not move him. The only way in which he could explain this curious enthralling tenderness was by the fact that Morgan was really part of Mary, that the child had come to him straight from the warmth of her arms, carrying with him an impalpable essence of herself. He wondered vaguely what he would have felt like if the child had been not only Mary’s but his as well, and in the midst of these tender and dangerous reflections he fell asleep himself.
Next morning, before returning to work, he left a message with the doctor at Lesswardine, asking him to call at Wolfpits. All through the day he was restless and unhappy, feeling that his proper place was at Wolfpits lending Mary a hand, supporting her anxieties. He consoled himself with the knowledge that Mrs Mamble was used to domestic troubles and would probably be of more use to Mary than himself, even apart from the fact that their finances would not easily stand the strain of the lost time. He only wondered, all the time, what the doctor’s report would be, and whether their wild night-journey might have added to the child’s injury. He did not mention anything of what had happened to his mates, and the day was therefore long and anxious.
It was after dinner-time when the doctor reached Wolfpits. Escorted by Mrs Mamble, he soon got to business and took down the injured limb, complimenting the Brampton Bryan surgeon on the way in which he had done his job. The dislocated fragments, he said, had been skilfully opposed, and the leg now lay in a good position. Gladys was young, a child’s tissues were full of vitality, and the splint, which he put on again, need not be worn for more than three weeks.
He stayed a little longer than he need have done, forhe had finished his round and Mary Malpas was an attractive woman. He was a middle-aged man and not above taking a kind of guarded pleasure in the intimacy with such charming creatures that his profession gave him. He asked her how it had all happened, and Mary told him, without hesitation, of their train journey two nights before, of their difficulty of finding rooms at Redlake, and of all that had led up to the accident. He listened gravely, giving no sign of unusual interest when Abner’s name was mentioned, but when he drove away again he chuckled to himself, being intrigued by this new little sidelight on the frailty of human nature, and taking an interest that was not wholly professional in the idea of this extraordinarily desirable woman finding consolation in the arms of her lodger. For that was how he interpreted the case.
When he got home that evening he told the story to his wife. Little incidents of this kind, which came so often into his professional experience, supplied him with a vicarious sexual stimulus which his marital relations had lacked for some years. Mrs Hendrie, listening, pursed her lips, and smiled. The story was not one for general publication, but she knew that it would be acceptable to the vicar’s wife, who had already taken such a kindly, if profitless, interest in this unfortunate young woman.
In this way the scandal of the Redlake adventure began to be whispered in that most exclusive circle of which the sewing-party at the vicarage was the centre. In this quarter, indeed, Mary had been already judged and damned as a woman who preferred a life of open sin to the privilege of attending to the blameless, physical needs of the Rev. Cyril Malpas. The new intelligence did no more than supply a sorrowful confirmation of what was already suspected. ‘It’s those two sweet children I’m thinking of,’ said the vicar’s wife. ‘Imagine the awful effects of surroundings of that kind in later life!’ The vicar only shook his head. After all, Wolfpits was so very nearly in his neighbour’s parish as to make him scarcely responsible.
It came as a great relief to Abner to find that Gladys was none the worse for her journey in his arms. Inthe morning they pulled round the long kitchen settle into the sun, and in the evening he carried this out of doors so that the child might enjoy the mellow light with the others. She took a few days to get over the original shock of the accident, but after that she settled down into a placid convalescence, fully aware of her importance and treating, not only Mary and Mrs Mamble, but Abner and Mick Connor, as her slaves. Morgan was vaguely jealous of the attention that they paid her.
‘ButIslep’ with Abner,’ he said, ‘and Gladys an’t, has her, mam?’
Mary smiled at him. Now that she knew that Gladys’s injury was not so severe as they had imagined she could afford to smile, sitting there in the summer evening with her friends about her. It was so quiet at Wolfpits. Not even the birds were singing. She sat there and heard the trout rising and plopping in the pool beneath the bridge, a hundred yards away, and then the murmurous wings of a humming-bird-hawk moth, hovering in a nebula of bronze, swooping to plunge its curled trumpet into the cups of flowers. Then beetles droned above them and bats zig-zagged with rapid wings. She told Abner that it was time for him to take the settle into the house. While he did so she held Gladys in her lap and watched the man’s big shoulders as he moved almost without effort under the weight of the settle. It reminded her of another memory of him that she knew she would never forget: a picture of trailing mists and loneliness, and a man walking before her with a child in his arms.
In this state of happiness and innocence neither of them suspected any mischief of tongues. It is true that Abner had found the presence of Badger at the Pentre on the night of the fair a little sinister at first, but the fact that they had chosen to descend into the Wolfpits valley at the level of the sea-crows’ pool and Williams’s farm was the purest accident, and Mary, who only knew the keeper by name, and had never seen him outside a court of law, thought nothing of it, while Mr Williams of the Pentre never entered into their calculations as a source of evil.
But Williams, in spite of his ready kindness in driving them back to Wolfpits with his tired horse, had chuckled to find in this incident a chance of annoying his old enemy, Mrs Malpas of the Buffalo. In all things he was a gross and childish man, whose plan of life embraced only two classes of acquaintance, enemies and friends, and he spent the greater part of his time in scheming to annoy the former and overwhelm the latter with the most naïve of kindnesses. As for Mrs Malpas, not even pity for her in the affair of George could induce him to forget his quarrel over the hogshead of cider. He knew very well that her weak spot was her own claim to an unassailable chapel morality, and having already enjoyed the pleasure of scoring her off by sending her only son on his first stage to Shrewsbury as a felon, he could not now resist the satisfaction of telling her that her daughter-in-law had been away with the lodger while George was in Salop jail.
Next week, at Ludlow market, he entertained the farmers’ ordinary with the story, and in the evening, having done a good day’s business and drunk enough to make him fear no man, he drove home, chuckling to himself, by way of Chapel Green, pulling up at the Buffalo for a final drink. It was the first time that he had visited the inn since that unfortunate quarrel. The cloggers who had gone away in the previous winter had found lodgings in a village farther westward on their return in the spring, and the Buffalo had never emerged from the silence in which they had left it. Mrs Malpas seemed surprised that any one should call so late at night. The bar was empty, and she had to light the swinging oil lamp for him, standing on a chair. Williams himself found a match and lit it for her out of sheer fuddled kindness. It struck her that he was too kind by half. He drank his whisky standing in the middle of the taproom, smacking it on his tongue.
‘You didn’t go to Bron Fair, ma’am?’ he said.
‘No,’ Mrs Malpas replied. ‘Nor have I these many years.’
‘There’s pretty things to be seen there,’ said Williams, with a grin. She made no reply, and he advanced obliquely from another angle.
‘How’s your son getting on?’
‘But for the shame that we all bear, Mr Williams, he’s out of harm’s way.’
‘Yes, it’s a good Christian prison, I’m told,’ said he, laughing. ‘Chaplains and all! How’s his wife, eh?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Malpas shortly. ‘And I don’t want to know.’
‘Smart looking young woman!’ Williams leered.
‘I know nothing about her, Mr Williams.’
‘Then I’ll tell you something, ma’am. She’s been off on the spree, childer an’ all, to Bron Fair. Slept the night at the Harley Arms, Redlake, with that lodger chap. What do you think of that?’
Mrs Malpas blenched. ‘That’s your story, Mr Williams, but there’s no need to believe you, thanks be!’
‘But seeing’s believing, ma’am,’ said Williams heavily. ‘And I seen. What is it I owe you now?’
She gasped: ‘Sixpence,’ and took the money. Williams gave her a cheery good-night. He wondered at the way in which she had taken his scandal. ‘A proper hard old case, an’ no mistake!’ he thought. Mrs Malpas, forgetful of economy, left the light burning and went straight in to her husband. In moments of stress, even though she despised him and knew that he hardly understood her, she would use him as a dummy on which to vent her feelings.
‘Dad, dad!’ she cried. ‘That was Mr Williams of the Pentre.’
‘Ay, mother . . . good land, good land! Williams. . . . Ay.’
‘He has a tale of our George’s wife. She’s going on with that Fellows as lodges with them, the one that brought trouble on George. They was caught the two on them, at the Harley Arms, Redlake. You know . . .’
The old man, who was now awake, mumbled something about that being in the nature of things when a young woman was left too long to herself. She picked up the word furiously.
‘Nature!’ she cried. ‘It’s the nature of a brute beast, not the nature of a Christian woman! It’s the bad blood in her!’
He let her rave on in the dark. It was late, and now unlikely that any one else would call in at the bar. His head nodded, while she went on fuming, half to him and half to herself. She persuaded herself that her morality had been offended, though it was really the spiteful satisfaction of Williams rather than his news that had wounded her, for she could not think any worse of Abner and Mary than she did already. When the heat of her irritation against the farmer subsided, its place was taken by another and more subtle flame. She realised that she had found something to explain her former unreasonable hatred. Williams, in trying to shame her, had put a new weapon into her hands, one with which she might positively injure Abner and Mary together in George’s eyes. It had been the hardest part of her dealings with him at the time of the trial to see the way in which his loyalty to Mary, however little that might mean, returned. Now that her chance had come, George couldn’t keep up this sentimental pretence of a belief in Mary’s goodness any longer. Williams had justified her at last.
She helped the old man up to bed, blew out his candle, and left him in the dark. Then she went downstairs, carried the lamp from the bar into the parlour, took out a sheet of lined paper, and a penholder carved out of olive wood from the garden of Gethsemane, and—began a letter to George. She wrote without haste, in the firm pointed characters that she had learnt as a young girl, carefully, methodically, with a perfect and cold precision. From first to last not the least quaver of indecision stayed her pen; but when she held the paper to the light to read what she had written, her hands trembled and the words ran like fire across her brain.
‘My dear Son,’—she had written, ‘I hope this finds you in perfect health as it leaves me,thank God,and your father.I am sorry to say that I have sad news to tell you which,I am afraid,is all too true.Your wife and the young man Fellows have been away together,living in sin at the Harley Arms,Redlake.It was madness of you,as I tried to tell you before,but you would not listen to yourmother,to have trusted them,but you only laughed me to scorn.Now it is an open scandal and hard for your poor father to bear.You can do nothing to mend it where you are,but be patient,dear George,and remember the word of Hebrews xii. 6: “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”I wish I had not to write this,George,but I have always told you that she was a light and wicked woman.Still it is just as well,and God moves in a mysterious way,for when you come back you can take the children away from her,though do not think that you will have the Buffalo,even if God should take your dear father,for the justices would never give it to one who had been in jail,even for no fault of their own.In this way you are saved from temptation.This is the Lord’s doing,dear George,and it is marvellous in our eyes.Why did you not send for me last month,my son?I will tell you more,please God,when we meet,I remain,with fond kisses,
‘My dear Son,’—she had written, ‘I hope this finds you in perfect health as it leaves me,thank God,and your father.I am sorry to say that I have sad news to tell you which,I am afraid,is all too true.Your wife and the young man Fellows have been away together,living in sin at the Harley Arms,Redlake.It was madness of you,as I tried to tell you before,but you would not listen to yourmother,to have trusted them,but you only laughed me to scorn.Now it is an open scandal and hard for your poor father to bear.You can do nothing to mend it where you are,but be patient,dear George,and remember the word of Hebrews xii. 6: “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”I wish I had not to write this,George,but I have always told you that she was a light and wicked woman.Still it is just as well,and God moves in a mysterious way,for when you come back you can take the children away from her,though do not think that you will have the Buffalo,even if God should take your dear father,for the justices would never give it to one who had been in jail,even for no fault of their own.In this way you are saved from temptation.This is the Lord’s doing,dear George,and it is marvellous in our eyes.Why did you not send for me last month,my son?I will tell you more,please God,when we meet,I remain,with fond kisses,
Your loving mother,‘Arabella Malpas.’
She sighed, sealed the envelope, and addressed it to:—
‘George Malpas,‘No.157.County Jail,‘Shrewsbury.’
‘George Malpas,‘No.157.County Jail,‘Shrewsbury.’
Then she folded her spectacles, blew out the light, and went upstairs in the dark to the room where her husband was already snoring. She crept into bed beside him and soon fell asleep in the blessed consciousness of innocence.
Williams, blabbing to old Mrs Malpas in the childish hope of irritating her, was not the only person who found an interest in spreading the story. Badger, pulled into the mist out of the stink of his preservatives and walking sullenly up the slope toward the sea-crows’ pool, had slowly realised that here was an opportunity of discrediting Abner in the eyes of Susie Hind once and for all. Although the lovers’ meetings had of late been fewer and secret, while Susie, reminded from time to time of the keeper’s jealousy, had been clever enoughto laugh him off and to make him feel ridiculous, Badger had not forgotten his suspicions. It was true that he never now saw Abner at the Pound House, and never heard his name mentioned outside the tirades of Mr Hind, who was still anxious for his licence, but the rearing of his young pheasants was now keeping Badger busy, and since he had no time to waste in watching, he could never be quite sure that Abner was not profiting by his forced neglect. Sometimes he would threaten Susie as he had done before, pretending that he knew more than he did; but experience had taught her how to deal with this crude creature; she treated his violence as though it amused her, and he always ended by accepting what she said with certain dark reservations that only troubled him beneath the threshold of consciousness, and set him strangely wondering at night.
In the middle of one of these doubting moods Williams had come knocking at his door with Abner beside him, asking for his help in the search for Mary, and next day he and his neighbour had talked together, Williams delighted as a child in his discovery of such frailty in old Mrs Malpas’s daughter-in-law. Badger cared nothing one way or the other for Mary’s chastity, he had no particular grudge against Mrs Malpas or her son, but he quickly saw that in Williams’s discovery he had hit on a rare touchstone for Susie’s feelings toward Abner. He saw that he must make use of it before the tale became common talk, so he cornered Susie at the first opportunity that he found, and told her, as bluntly as was his custom, what had happened.
‘He’s brazen-faced enough, that chap Fellows,’ he said, ‘seeing that he told Mr Williams right out that he and George Malpas’s wife had slept at the Harley Arms, over Redlake way. Took the two children with ’em and all! That was the rum part of it!’
While he spoke he watched Susie with his small keen eyes, sharpened by the habit of observing wild game, waiting for her face to betray to him exactly what she felt toward Abner. But it was not for nothing that Susie had learnt the art of being all things to all men. Badger’s eyes were a little too eager, and she was quick to see it.
‘Why do you want to tell me this, Mr Badger?’ she said slowly.
‘He’s an old friend of yours. You don’t put me off as easy as that!’
‘Then you might have saved yourself the trouble,’ she said, turning her back on him. ‘If you’ve any other dirty stories to tell, I’ll be obliged if you’ll keep them to yourself.’
He flushed darkly, so that she felt she was overdoing it. She came back to him and stood talking of other things, her hand on the table within an inch of his own.
‘I hope you didn’t take any offence,’ she said softly. ‘Only I don’t like to hear my name coupled with a chap of that kind.’
Badger swallowed his liquor with satisfaction. It seemed to him that he had artfully secured his point. He looked Susie up and down, appraising her, lazily satisfied. She had gained a new value in his eyes. He held her in talk, and she loitered by his table, standing on one leg. In taking away his glass she even touched his hand. They were alone in the bar. He caught her and kissed her. Protesting, as a matter of form, she smiled. In her heart she hated him like poison. Her mind was aflame with vague jealousies, for any fool could see that Abner was worth two of this man.
That night she heard the gang from the pipe-track discussing the accident at Bron, winking at each other over the way in which the story had come out. They laughed without condemning. To them it seemed no more than a good joke. When her father’s back was turned the Gunner began to pull her leg about it; but she laughed back at him, giving him coarseness for coarseness, and went on wiping her glasses, humming to herself the refrain of a pantomime tune. She heard herself singing. Her voice sounded toneless and unreal. When she went to bed she could not sleep for fretting. Abner had not been near her for more than a week, and she did not dare to take the risk of sending him a message at his work. She knew that she wanted him. She was not going to lose him without a fight.
Next afternoon she was free, and knowing that Abner would be safely at work, she dressed herself elaborately in her best clothes and a pair of new shoes and set off boldly for Wolfpits. Her hands trembled and her frock was drenched with perspiration as she dressed.
‘Where are you off to, got up like that?’ her father called after her.
‘Can’t I dress as I like, dad?’ she said, with a toss of her head.
‘There’s tempest about. You’ll get soaked to the skin!’ he shouted.
She felt as if she were soaked to the skin already. The long spell of rainless weather had reached its climax, and the delaine frock that she had chosen had been cut for elegance rather than for comfort. The sun went in, leaving a white and heavy sky. The leaves of elm and chestnut drooped in the heat as with the weight of their own dust. Her new shoes were too small for her, and by the time that she had toiled up to the bridge over the Folly, she wished that she had not come. A yaffle mocked her from the edge of the wood. Swallows were hawking low down over the dust of the road. An awful, oppressive silence weighed on the land. She hesitated, then turned painfully up the Wolfpits avenue, but when she had almost decided to turn back, the thunder broke above her and big drops spattered the dust. The thought of the new tulle in her hat made her run for shelter. The trees of the avenue gave a long sigh and the rain swished down in torrents. Round the corner she saw Mrs Mamble running about, like a woman possessed, after the washing that she had spread on the bushes to dry.
‘Slip into the porch, miss,’ she cried, catching sight of Susie, ‘or you’ll be drownded.’ Then she called to Mary, who was ironing in the kitchen: ‘There’s a young lady got caught in the storm, Mrs Malpas!’
‘Please come inside and wait till it’s over,’ Mary cried, glancing through the window.
Susie entered. ‘Take a seat,’ Mary said, and went on with her ironing. One side of her face was flushed with the heat of the iron that she had tested by holding it to her cheek. It made her look as if she were angryor embarrassed. The kitchen was full of the sweet, scorched smell of linen. Susie, sitting nervously on the edge of the seat to which she had been shown, felt that the falseness of her position must be made clear. She was out to fight, and not without courage.
‘My name is Hind . . . Susan Hind,’ she said. ‘From the Pound House, you know.’
Mary stopped ironing and looked at her. She began to wish that she had not turned herself out so elegantly. She felt that she must look like a street-woman.
‘Yes . . . I thought I knew you,’ Mary said.
‘I came over to speak to you.’ Susie hesitated: ‘About Mr Fellows . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a tale going round . . .’ She faltered. She wished that she were not sitting on the edge of the chair, that Mary were not taller than herself. There was something unfair and consciously superior in the woman’s plain white apron. More than this, she had the subtle, inexplicable advantage of being a married woman with children . . . even if her husband had deserted her. Mary put down her iron on its stand and looked her full in the eyes. Now her cheeks were equally flushed. Susie wished that she would speak, even if she were only to repeat her provocative ‘Yes?’ She took fright suddenly, stood up, and plunged.
‘It’s not fair!’ she cried. ‘You know it’s not fair! You, a married woman, that have had your life and a couple of children! But as soon as your husband’s well out of sight you must go running after another man. Take his money—that’s one thing! But take him—that’s another! I suppose you’re the kind that can’t make yourself happy unless you’re making some man soft on you . . . so they can hang round you and you play the lady on them! Don’t you imagine I don’t know the dog’s life you give George! And now you’ve got hold of your lodger—lodger, I says!—and turned him crazy. Call yourself a lady! Doesn’t every one know what your father was? We all know about that. George himself told me. And I can tell you what you are, straight. You’re nothing betterthan a whore on the streets if the truth was known.’
Mary trembled. ‘Don’t shout so! Don’t shout so!’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘What I mean?’ cried Susie hysterically. ‘What I mean? Why, going about the country in strange places and laying about with single men. That’s what I mean. Call yourself a married woman . . .’
‘You’re wrong . . . you’re quite wrong!’
‘Am I wrong then? I know whose word I’d sooner take: Mr Williams’s and Mr Badger’s or yourn! I know that was the first time it came out, but that makes no difference to what every one in the district has known for a fact these months. But I’ll tell you one thing—and don’t you forget it!—you’re not going to take Abner off me. Not if I kill him first. And I’m not talking wild, understand. I mean it. If I have to shame you to your face I’m not going to let him go. Shame . . .’ she laughed. ‘That’s a fine word to use for the likes of you!’
She gave a gasp for breath, then, with a flash of hopeless hatred, as though she were searching the room for something that her violence might appropriately destroy, she went out blindly into the rain.
Mary stood rigidly at her ironing-table. A flash of lightning ripped the sky in front of her window, nearly blinding her, and her lips uttered a cry. Mrs Mamble ran in with her skirt thrown over her head, for she was frightened of thunder.
‘My!’ she cried from under the skirt. ‘My, what a downpour!’ She looked out timidly. ‘Well, I never! She’s gone!’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, with a helpless laugh. ‘She’s gone!’
‘Gone? Why, the girl must be mad!’
Again Mary laughed at the wide astonishment in Mrs Mamble’s eyes. Another flash followed and the old woman wrapped up her head again, waiting for the thunder. It came with a crash, right overhead, and the house shook. Mary suddenly remembered the children, who were playing in the parlour.
‘Do go and see to them, Mrs Mamble,’ she said. ‘There’s a dear.’
She herself could not move. She went on folding her linen. It seemed as if she must find some mechanical task for her hands to do. In a moment Mrs Mamble returned to say that the children were not in the least frightened. She kept dodging in and out of the house all afternoon for fear of the storm returning and catching her unawares, telling of the damage that the rain might have done to the hay lying out in the meadows or to the standing corn.
‘But there’s no denying that it’s wanted,’ she said inconsequently.
By the time that Abner left work that evening the storm had rolled away, rumbling over the treetops of Bringewood Chase. All day he had worked under the heavy sky, breathing an air that was dead and choked with dust. Now the vault was clear and brilliant as that of an evening in spring. The smell of dust rose from the road, blackbirds were singing, and from the pale, steaming hayfields waves of sweetness drifted across his path. His steps were light and his heart happy.
Mary received him as usual and gave him his tea. He laughed with her over the violence of the storm and asked her gaily if the doctor had been to take the splint off Gladys’s leg.
‘We must put by a shillin’ or two for that,’ he said. For the moment he was so full of his own content that he had scarcely noticed her preoccupation; but when he mentioned money she made a quick, instinctive movement, as though she wanted to speak and to refuse it. Little by little he began to realise that she was trying to avoid him and sometimes leaving his questions unanswered.
‘What’s up with you, missus?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Nothing at all that I know of.’
But her denial did not convince him. All the evening he tried to guess what could have upset her, but she evaded him, pretending that she was her normal self. He knew better. Even when she spoke to the children or to Mrs Mamble, who came in to talk about the havoc of the storm and to give them the news that a sheep had been struck by lightning on Williams’s farm, Mary was listless and dull.
Abner used her gently. He knew that women must have their moods, and that a man needed to be patient with them if he would be happy; but day after day now passed without any change in her attitude. Since the discovery of his own passion that he had made by the sea-crows’ pool, it had been hard enough as it was for him to live with her on ordinary terms; but now, even though he humoured her, she was distant with him.
He tried to make her explain herself. She only shook her head. It seemed, indeed, as if a single day had thrown them back into all the awkwardness of his early life at Wolfpits, and that she had suddenly taken it into her head to upset the convention under which they had agreed to live. Most of all, she avoided him whenever he spoke of money, and when he brought her his wages at the end of the week she left them lying on the table as though touching them would have burned her fingers. If he had not loved the woman, and her children too, he would have broken away in accordance with his nature. As it was, he hung on, sore and bewildered, wondering what new coldness she could inflict upon him.
Another shock awaited her. One day, when Abner was away at work, the postman bicycled up to Wolfpits and handed her a letter. This was so rare an event at Wolfpits that the man waited, as country postmen, who also act as interpreters, often do, to hear its contents.
‘You’ll see by the postmark it’s come from Shrewsbury,’ he said.
‘Yes, so I see,’ she replied, thrusting it into the pocket of her apron.
She had already recognised George’s freehand writing. He went away, but she kept the letter in her pocket unopened. She dared not open it; and when at last she did so, the words sent a chill over all her body.
‘My dear Wife,’—she read, shivering—‘Although I may be doing time I’m not yet dead that I know of.They say that love is blind,but don’t you go imagining that other people haven’t got eyes.‘Your loving husband,‘George.’
‘My dear Wife,’—she read, shivering—‘Although I may be doing time I’m not yet dead that I know of.They say that love is blind,but don’t you go imagining that other people haven’t got eyes.
‘Your loving husband,‘George.’
She was seized with a pain that had scarcely abated when Abner came home at night. She could not bring herself to speak to him. She desired, passionately, to show him the letter, but shame would not let her do so. He, in his turn, was sick of the wretchedness of their present relation, and when the children had been put to bed, he told her so in words that he had chosen for their roughness. She stared at him from the other side of the supper table with grief and resentment in her eyes.
‘If it’s as bad as that, what makes you stay here?’ she said slowly.
‘I like that!’ he replied. ‘You know as well as I do.’
She took fright at this, for she wasn’t sure of his meaning, though she knew in her heart what she wanted him to mean. She was afraid that he would guess at her unspoken admission.
‘Idon’t keep you here,’ she said.
He got up and walked the room. A hay-moth hurled itself against the shade of the lamp with a sharp ringing sound and fell crippled on the tablecloth.
‘It’s hurt,’ she cried. ‘Kill it!’
Abner crushed the insect with his thumb and threw it in the fireplace. The coppery bloom came off on his fingers. For a moment she was hypnotised watching him. Then she recovered her senses.
‘I don’t keep you. There’s no need for you to stay in every night,’ she said.
‘No. There bain’t. I’m damned if there be!’ he replied.
He picked up his cap and walked out of the room. She nearly ran after him to thrust George’s letter into his hand. But she was too late. ‘So much the better,’ she thought. She felt that she had been saved from some calamity.
He set off, walking furiously through the mellow evening, trying to cool his blood with violent exertion as instinctively as an animal eats grass. By nightfall he had reached the remote valley, nine miles away in folds of the Forest of Clun, whither his friends the cloggers had returned in the spring. He found theircanvas pitched in a coomb under high sheepwalks, and Wigan Joe made him as welcome as ever. They sat out in the soft, moonless night, talking and drinking beer. It was like old times for Abner to hear Joe reeling off stories one after another in his flat Lancashire dialect. He lolled there listening till the company grew drowsy. There was no question of his returning to Wolfpits that night, for the sky drooped like a pall of velvet on the earth and he could never have found his way. He turned in with the others on a pile of dried bracken, waking at dawn to set off again toward Chapel Green.
For a few hours he had shed his restlessness, but when he reached Wolfpits in the evening the sense of restraint descended on him again. He felt that Mary was watching him, wondering where he had been. Her eyes were tragic, and, as he thought, reproachful.
This only irritated him. He couldn’t be bothered with her moods. When, speaking to Mrs Mamble, he happened to mention that he had walked over in the evening to the sloggers’ workings, she looked at him with such a searching suspicion that he could not contain himself.
‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m codding you?’
She looked away without answering.
‘There’s no need to believe me if you don’t want to,’ he said.
And what the hell did it matter to her where he went or what he did? If he were to leave her to herself for a bit perhaps she’d begin to realise that he was useful, and that it wouldn’t pay her to treat him like dirt. It was time she had a lesson!
He spent the next evening with Mick Connor in a pub at Lesswardine, mixing his drinks, standing treat recklessly. He had to borrow six shillings from Mick to pay his score. It pleased him to think how Mary would stare at his money next Saturday when she found it six bob short . . . she, who was too proud to pick it up when he gave it her!
At the yellow turnpike house outside Lesswardine their paths diverged; and this was unfortunate, for it was easier to walk arm in arm. Mick left him; but assoon as he found himself alone the vision of Mary returned to him: Mary, as he had seen her and desired her, sitting pale on the border of the pool a fortnight ago. In his perverse and drunken mind he hated her. It seemed to him that she had been making a fool of him, alternately alluring and rejecting.
He walked along, sweating violently, in the direction of Mainstone, wishing to God he’d never known the damned woman. Women . . . and yet a lusty man of his age couldn’t live without women! It was against nature to live without women, and a man was a fool if he did so. He went hot and cold, thrilled with voluptuous sensations. He laughed at himself, and staggered up to a gate at the side of the road to light his pipe. He broke three matches and then discovered that they were damp and would not strike. He remembered indefinitely that Mick had upset a pint of beer into his pocket. He cursed the matches and Mick together.
A light breeze moved above him, and as in the distance he heard a sound like that of a gentle shower falling on leaves in June: a sound that meant something to his memory. He became suddenly aware that he was standing at that moment on the outskirts of Mainstone village, immediately beneath a big poplar tree. A dozen times he had stood there in the shadow waiting for the light to go out in the windows of the Pound House, for the steps of Bastard to pass him, for the moment when he might safely steal across to Susie’s door.
His pulse quickened. Some hidden instinct must have made him stop there. No light could be seen, but there, in the darkness, was a woman whom he could have for the asking. He pulled himself together, and a moment later was standing by the outhouse door. He threw a clod at her window-pane. She had better not try putting him off to-night! If he had to climb in at her window she must come to him. He fretted with impatience.
But he had not long to wait. In a few minutes she had opened the back door. He heard the door scrape, but it was so dark that he could not see her. He putout his hands, groping in the darkness, and found her, warm and breathing.
‘I thought you were never coming again,’ she whispered.
He took her in his arms and clothed her in kisses. She clung to him, breathing softly, while his kisses enveloped her. His misery left him, vanished miraculously in the darkness. In the black confusion of his thoughts it seemed to him as if he were kissing Mary Malpas.