Abner did not wait for George to be arrested. To the evident scandal of the sergeant he made straight for the door and slipped into the bar. He closed the door quietly, and stopped for a moment. There was something in the feeling of the room that told him he had broken in on a secret. No doubt the continued strain with which he had heard the evidence unfolded had tuned his nerves to a supersensitive pitch: he wasn’t usually nervous under any conditions, but the sudden change from the courtroom to this cold, empty chamber, unfamiliar in the snow-light, took him aback, unsteadied him. At the moment of his entrance the room had been expectant, listening. Now, when he paused for a second to look at it, he saw nothing unusual, only the long shelves with their black bottles of dubious port and sherry, the keg-shaped receptacles of glass in which spirits were kept on tap, the polished handles of the beer-engine. The only unusual thing was the closed door of the room behind the counter in which Bastard’s body now lay. He didn’t try to find an explanation for the peculiar chill that this room gave him, midway between the dead man’s flesh and the anguished soul of the man who had killed him; but he felt it, and when he turned the key in the locked door and stepped out into the street he felt again, behind him, the sense of something strange stealing back into the bar. He shivered and set off for Chapel Green to tell Mrs Malpas.

All sparkle of light had vanished from the snow; the sky had now grown colder than the land, and in the north a wind was rising. He walked fast to keep the heat in his limbs. He passed the last cottages of Mainstone and came into the length of Roman road which he and George had so often travelled at night. The wind set up a faint and mournful singing in the telegraph wires. The winter night descended. No human shape was to be seen on the long white road but that of Abner and another smaller figure that approached him rapidly from the west. He took it for granted that this was a little girl hurrying home to Mainstone from the dissenting school at Chapel Green, but when they met in the dusk and stared at one another he suddenly became aware that the wayfarer was George’s mother. All the time since he left the inn he had been turning over in his mind the ways in which he might best reveal his tragic news. Now that he found himself face to face with Mrs Malpas, small, intense, and awful in her Sunday bonnet, he could say nothing. They stared at each other for a moment in which Abner was conscious of the hatred in her black eyes.

‘Evenin’, ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s lucky I met you. George sent me along with a message.’

‘Tell me . . . tell me quick, young man,’ she cried. ‘Don’t keep it back whatever it be!’

‘Bad news, ma’am.’

‘I know it is. Tell me!’

‘They’ve took him in charge. It’s manslaughter.’

She made a shrill, wailing noise, something between a laugh and a cry. She gripped his arm tight. He knew that she would almost rather have touched any one on earth, but if she had not steadied herself she would have fallen.

‘Manslaughter. . . . Oh, God, my God! O Lord, have mercy on him, poor soul, and on us too. To think it should come to that! Oh, God . . . God!’

She clutched him again as though a wave were sweeping her legs from under her. Her bony fingers went into the muscle of Abner’s arm.

‘Now don’t take on, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Manslaughter’s a different thing from murder. Thank your luck for that!’

‘Don’t talk to me of luck!’ she cried. ‘Luck’s a heathen word. As a man sows so shall he reap. The hand of the Lord is heavy on me and my son. He hath forsaken the way of righteousness. Drink and strange women and all the abominations of the ungodly. All my prayers on him were wasted, young man, for I couldn’t keep his feet in the way. Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth. The Lord gave and the Lord hath took away, and now he stands before an earthly judge. I must go and see him.’

She detached herself from Abner’s arm, but a fit of trembling took her and made her cling to it again.

‘You’d best come home along of me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘They’ll have took him to Lesswardine by this time.’

She broke down into harsh sobs, crying childishly, and in between her sobbing he could hear her babble the same curious mixture of scriptural and unscriptural lamentation. She talked so wildly that he thought the old woman was going off her head. When she sobbed the jet ornaments on her bonnet danced.

‘Come home along of me, ma’am,’ he repeated helplessly.

She seemed not to hear him. ‘George, my little George . . .’ she sobbed, abasing, accusing herself before the harsh personal deity that she imagined, wrestling with him in prayer and entreaty, ‘Oh, Lord, forgive him . . . forgive him . . . forgive him!’ Then, quite suddenly, she stopped. No sound was heard but that of her faint trembling. Abner thanked goodness that she had tired herself out, but he was mistaken. Without the least warning her weak hands pushed him away. She stood before him in the middle of the road and faced him with her ridiculous bonnet awry and her fingers clenched like the claws of some small, fierce wild animal, waiting to spring at a man’s throat. Her wrists worked with passion. She forgot all her scripture and cursed him in her own words.

‘It’s you who’ve led him astray,’ she cried. ‘You . . you! Didn’t I know it the very day when you and your mate came to our house? You, the scum of the roads! That’s fine company for a decent man! You can’t touch pitch and not be defiled! I begged him and begged him not to have the likes of you in his house, but he laughed at me. And you’ve dragged him down, down . . . as low as a man can be dragged. You with your drink and your poaching and your women! Don’t think I haven’t heard what happened . . . the two of you coming home drunk of nights, singing bawdy songs in the dark. That wasn’t enough for you! You must drag him into your drunken fighting, drag him down and down into your mucky life. And then you come and talk to me of luck. Luck! He’s been led astray, that’s what George has, by your company. If George’s soul is damned, it’s you who will suffer for it, bringin’ your town ways into a country place. You and his precious wife! The two of you between you! What’s in the blood comes out in the life. Her father were a thief and a swindler and a suicide, and God visits the sins of the fathers. Like father, like daughter! That’s the sort of bedfellow my George has had, and this is what she’s brought him to, poor lamb! But don’t you think, young man, that God don’t remember! If you done it to the least of these you done it unto Me! Don’t you think you can push a young man into hell and not fall into the fire after him. You and her together. . . . You can trust God for that!’ She exhausted her breath and stood panting.

‘Come on, missus,’ said Abner heavily. ‘You’ll be perished out here.’ But when he clumsily approached her she ran away down the road toward Mainstone like a mad woman, this pathetic bundle of burning hatred in her Sunday clothes, and left him foolishly standing.

He went back in the dark to Wolfpits, heavily burdened with the second part of his task. The children were playing quietly on the hearthrug and Mrs Mumble, who considered it only neighbourly to give Mary the benefit of her company in a domestic emergency, was talking of homely, unimportant things with the idea of distracting her mind from the more tragic affair that held it. When Abner appeared she excused herself, kissed the children good-night, enveloped Mary in a more significant embrace, and left them.

Mary stood waiting for what he had to say. He could not help recognising the contrast between her impressive aloofness, her self-control, and the hysterics of old Mrs Malpas. She could not pretend that she felt nothing; since George’s disaster, however little she might care for him, must bring with it all sorts of complications. She was a woman who had been used, in the lavish days of her father, to a certain degree of comfort and elegance, and even if she had known hard times at Wolfpits during George’s freakish periods of idleness, she had never been faced with anything so threatening to herself and her children as a complete stoppage of wages and, in the last resort, the humiliation of parish relief. She waited with her head erect, straight as a larch, in the perfect control of her finely-tempered mind.

‘It’s what we thought it would be, missus,’ he said. ‘Manslaughter they brought it in.’

‘Where is he?’ she asked, almost in a whisper.

‘They’ve took him in charge. That’ll mean the lock-up at Lesswardine, time they’ve got the case ready for the police-court.’

She was silent for a moment, and then:—

‘Does he want me to see him?’

‘He didn’t say nought of that.’

‘No,’ she said reflectively.

‘He said: “Tell ’em that I’m all right,”’ Abner explained. ‘Nowt else.’

‘Them?’

‘That’s his mother . . .’

‘Ah!’ She stiffened a little, and Abner, scenting a new hostility, continued:

‘This business bain’t all George’s fault. It’s a bit of bad luck that might have happened to any one. It might just as well a’ been me . . . as well and better. If that Bastard hadn’t gone at me from behind George’d never have touched him.’

‘If he’d been home here,’ she interrupted, with a sudden energy, ‘it wouldn’t have happened at all. It’s drink that’s done for George,’ she added.

‘He hadn’t a drap in him,’ said Abner loyally. ‘He was as sober as I am this minute. He hadn’t set foot in the place not half an hour.’

She was silent for a moment, and then, with a curious directness, asked:

‘Where had he been then?’

‘How should I know where he’d been? I don’t meddle or mak in George’s affairs.’

She pressed him: ‘Didn’t it come out at the inquest where he’d been?’He saw how things were going, and lied brazenly in George’s defence.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s one comfort,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘I’ve borne enough shame from George without that!’ Then, as her suspicions flashed up again: ‘But I don’t believe you. They don’t let things like that pass.’

‘I don’t know what you’m after.’

‘Oh, you’re all the same, you men! You think women are simple enough to be put off with anything. It’s you who are simple. Do you think we don’t know it? I know where George was that night as well as you do. I’ve known of his new fancy for three months now. That woman and me have met one another on the road, and looked at each other and smiled and passed the time of day and not another word, because we knew, both of us, the thing was best hidden and it would humble the two of us if it came to light. But I don’t believe they’d let a thing like that go at a coroner’s inquest.’ She waited for his reply.

‘They said he’d been at Lesswardine. A widow woman, they said, but they didn’t tell her name. That’s the truth.’

‘Nothing more?’

‘I tell you that’s the lot. I was neyther piller nor bo’ster. I’d have told you at the first, but I thought to save your feelings.’

‘Feelings!’ she repeated. ‘There’s better ways of saving a woman’s feelings than keeping the truth from her. That was George’s way. If you guessed anything of what women are like you’d know that it’s the truth they want. You can forgive a man a lot if he doesn’t lie to you.’ Her tone changed suddenly. She became dispassionate, practical, once more. ‘When will it come on at the police court?’

‘I don’t know. I reckon they won’t keep him long at Lesswardine.’

‘I shall have to go there,’ she said. ‘Even if he doesn’t want me it’s my place to be there. If I don’t go there George will think that I’ve thrown him over. I would have come to-day if he’d let me, but he begged me not to. He’s funny, like a child, is George.’Her voice softened when she spoke the last words, as though her imagination had suddenly carried her back to the days of George’s courtship when her father was a hearty, prosperous man and no troubles whatever had entered her life. For the moment she seemed to Abner no more than a child herself. At the first moment he had thought her insensitive, in the next she had put him to shame by her frankness, now she was yielding, pitiful. These alternations of stoicism, passion, and tenderness bewildered him. He had not thought that women were so various. In addition to this she was beautiful. He wondered what perverse strain in George could ever have compelled him to desert her.

After another long silence she thanked him for what he had told her, then turned and left him. He heard her talking brightly to the children as though nothing had happened.

Although darkness had fallen it was still early. Abner’s natural impulse would have bidden him walk back to Mainstone and find Susie. It had been a torment to see her cold and remote, seeming no more to him than a stranger. In the hushed court-room when he had stolen out at the moment of George’s arrest she had not looked at him. He had left her staring straight in front of her like a pious churchgoer. He decided, in the end, to stay at Wolfpits, for the night was cold and unhomely and he still carried in his mind the sinister vision of the empty bar with Bastard’s body lying in the room behind it. More than this, he began to be conscious of a definite duty toward Mary, whose attitude had ended by filling him with admiration and loyalty. He felt it in his bones that she despised him, being undeniably a creature of finer clay than himself, but the moment in which she had demanded his confidence remained with him. It was as though the veil which had always hung between them had been suddenly rent, admitting them to an intimacy as clear as light. In all his life he had known no such experience. Even in the most passionate moments of his relation with Susie she had been no more to him than a strange woman for whose beauty he hungered without reason. He knew her body and thrilled to it, but of herself he knew nothing. With Mary it was different. At first he had felt vaguely that he must be loyal to her for the sake of his friend, not so much because he loved George as because their friendship had been the immediate cause of their disaster. It was for herself that he must now be loyal, and this seemed strange to him, for it was an obligation which he had never considered as possible between a man and a woman, and nothing but that sudden moment of vision could have revealed it to him.

He devoted his evening to the children. Their frolic in the snow had excited them. They were full of play and laughter. Mary moved about her business silently, watching the fireside group with benevolent eyes. At seven o’clock, just before their bedtime, another constable came to the door with the police-court summons. The case had been fixed for the following day—eleven o’clock at Lesswardine. The man was in a hurry to serve his other summonses, and would not enter. Abner told Mary the news.

‘Eleven o’clock,’ she repeated intently. ‘Come thy ways, Morgan, love, time for bye-byes.’

The children left Abner unwillingly, Gladys insisting that he should carry her upstairs. He did so, and Mary followed with her son in her arms, rubbing his cold-flushed eyelids with his fists.

Abner returned to the fire. Eleven o’clock! Less than twenty-four hours ago none of this had happened. He was impressed, in spite of himself, with the inevitable regularity of the machine that had drawn George Malpas into its ponderous clutches. He saw, for the first time, the tremendous power of the law, and his own helplessness.

Mrs Mamble joined them for supper. When they had nearly finished another knock came to the door, and Abner went to open it. The new visitor was old Drew, who came in, blinking at the light.

‘Please come in, Mr Drew,’ said Mary, ‘and take a seat.’

He stood for a moment, a bowed and awkward figure. Then he placed on the tablecloth three brown eggs that he had carried in his huge misshapen hand.‘I bringed you two three eggs, missus,’ he said. ‘They’m getting tarrable scarce these days, and I reckon the chilring might like them.’

‘That is good of you, Mr Drew,’ Mary cried.

‘Don’t ’ee mention it!’ said the old man. ‘I rackon it won’t be so aisy for ’ee with the maister in trouble. Us all knows what that be, and you’m welcome to them. Iss, us all knows what trouble be, praise God! I had a brother of my own to Lapton Huish as was took for the killing of his wife, though the poor twoad never knew what he done, for a’ suffered from fits, a’ did. Tried and hanged into Exeter he were . . . dear soul too! Iss, I know what trouble manes.’

‘We all know what trouble means,’ said Mrs Mamble, with a sigh, ‘from the highest to the lowest; but the law be kinder these days than it used to be. My poor dear Robert’s grandfather was a labourin’ man, a quiet, Christian man too, as never raised a hand against any livin’ creature, as Robert told me times, but that weren’t enough to save him from hanging. It was a hard winter, I can’t mind how many years agone, though Robert he told me, and they got him for stealing a sheep—stealing, they says!—as he found dead-stiff in the snow on Clee Hills. As he’d a right to, with the fields like stone and no work and the children crying for bread. But they hanged men for that in Worcester jail in them days. Ay, and when my Robert was a lad, the other boys ‘d put it up against him as his dad had kept sheep by moonlight: that’s what they call hanging in chains, like the gibbet, so they call it, as used to stand in olden times near Clows Top. A quieter man never breathed, nor a better worker. Put a bit more wood on the fire, Mr Fellows, do!’

Abner threw a faggot on the fire and the flames leapt. This friendly flicker, aided, perhaps, by the hypnotic drone of Mrs Mamble’s voice, as soothing as the sound of running water or the midnight rustle of poplars, so encouraged the old labourer that he let himself sink into a chair by the corner of the table.

The firelight glinted in his beard, and Abner saw that his full lips were red as those of a young man. He saw also Mary’s face, withdrawn into the gloom. It seemed as if she were dreaming, her mind altogether removed from the voices of her comforters.

‘Ay,’ said Drew, ‘I’ve heard of men that was strung up for stealing sheep down Exmoor way. There’s a many sheep on the moors, and ponies too. You should see them when the foals come along, springtime, and when they’m drove down to Bampton fair. ’Tis a fine sight, sure ‘nuff! But that there’s nothing to the old times. My granf’er, ’er was barn up Somerset, not too far from Ta’nton, used to tell as how men was stringed up by the dozen, the same as jays or magpies, by a tarrable old chap of the name of Jeffereys. Bloody Jeffereys, that’s what they called ’en. A judge he were. . . . Iss, bloody Jeffereys.’

‘There now!’ said Mrs Mamble, throwing up her hands.

‘And them they durs’nt hang they sent off to Canada, so I’m told. Ay, many likely chaps was sent there and never came home no more, though what they sent ’en for I can’t rightly call to mind, unless ‘twere rick-burning. Had the redcoats to ’em, they did! But that’s all past and gone, thanks-be! Iss, past and gone. . . . The law bain’t what it used to be. There’s juries these days. An’ what be manslarter but a thing that might come to any man unbeknownst? Don’t ’ee be afeared, missus! Don’t ’ee be afeared! There be no shame in “going up the line,” as they do call it down our way.’

‘No shame, as you say, Mr Drew,’ said Mrs Mamble solemnly. ‘But the shame’s not everything. It’s a hard thing on a woman that has little children with her crying for an empty belly when a man’s away in jail and not a penny in the house but what the parish gives her. And the questions they ask! That’s where the shame comes in, and I’ve known many a proud woman starve for a crust of bread rather than answer them, they’re that disgusting.’

‘Ah, get away, do! woman,’ said old Drew, with a laugh. ‘What’s questions? And Mrs Malpas here ban’t going to do no such thing. A woman never knows what friends she’s got till she’s found trouble, and they that has a roof to their heads and a bit of garden to till can spare something for their neighbours. No, don’t ’ee believe ’en, my dear! If it’s only potatoes and swede out of the fields, no chilring ’ll starve to Wolfpits, not they! Don’t you believe it! An’ a woman like your George’s mother with a tidy little business at the Buffalo. . . . Trouble ’ll tell you your friends.’

The clock struck nine.

‘Now that’s a fine thing to be sure,’ he went on, with a glance of admiration, ‘a fine thing to have a clock to tell ’ee when to be going up over, and keep ’ee company night-time. ’Tis hard to judge the hour in winter when the old sun be hid!’

He pulled his stiff limbs together painfully, and left them with more encouragements.

‘He’s a quiet man,’ said Mrs Mamble, when they heard him treading softly over the snow, ‘but I always reckoned he’d be a good neighbour.’

She seemed loath to leave Mary to herself, and even proposed that she should sleep with her, nominally for the sake of warmth, until the strain of George’s trial should be over, an offer that Mary found it difficult to refuse with grace. When she left them she took the younger woman to her breast and kissed her tenderly. Abner opened the door for her, and when he returned he saw that Mary’s eyes were bright with tears. He felt that he himself must struggle to add some words of reassurance, but before he could do so she had said good-night and vanished.

Next morning he rose early. He had lit the fire and made the kettle boil before she was astir. When she heard his feet in the kitchen she hurried to come down and thank him.

‘You needn’t have done that,’ she said.

‘That’s nowt,’ he replied bluntly. ‘We’ve got to get on the road early.’

After breakfast she deposited the children, as had been arranged, with Mrs Mamble. Morgan, who scarcely ever left his mother’s side, resented this.

‘Where are you going, mam?’ he cried.

‘Only to Lesswardine with Abner here.’‘You’re not going for good, mam? You’re coming back again?’

‘Don’t be a silly boy, Morgan. Of course I’m coming back.’

‘When, mam?’

‘This afternoon.’

A new anxiety seized him. ‘What’s for dinner, mam?’ he said.

‘A nice brown egg, my love, what Mr Drew brought you,’ said Mrs Mamble, coming to the rescue. ‘You come along now, and you shall have dear Robert’s watch to play with.’

To the last temptation Morgan succumbed. This watch was the principal curiosity of Mrs Mamble’s bedroom. It hung there in the smell of rotting wood, a silver monster, like a toy warming-pan, suspended in a celluloid case above the old woman’s bed. Mrs Mamble whipped them away, and Abner set out with Mary.

Snow still covered the ground, but by this time, in lane and road, the trampled ways were clear and the bordering drifts marked with the treading of birds, squirrels, and other woodland creatures. Abner was so unused to walking with a woman that he set a pace that Mary could not equal. Breathless, she begged him to walk more slowly. The exertion and the cold air flushed her cheeks and reddened her lips to the hue of holly and spindle-berries in the hedge. Her body glowed, and her hair was bright as the fronds of bracken in the sun. In spite of their tragic mission her lips smiled. No spiritual anxiety could check the exhilaration of the blood that this crisp winter morning gave her walking under the open sky. But when they drew near to Lesswardine the houses closed in on them like the walls of a prison; the fine snow was swept and sullied, the light faded from the sky.

A special court had been summoned to deal with George’s case. The squire, Sir George Delahay, was driving down to take the chair, and before Abner and Mary arrived the court-room was nearly full of Lesswardine villagers who could always spare a morning if anything sensational was passing. Abner, as one of the principal witnesses, was soon separated from his companion. He was herded together with the others into a small block of chairs on the right-hand side of the bench and opposite to the dock. From this point he could see the court, a mass of white faces from which arose a rumour like the buzzing of flies. In the midst of them he saw Mary, pale and innocent. It was in her agony that these buzzing tormentors would find delight. Almost on a level with her at the other end of the bench he saw old Mrs Malpas. She had come to the court as she would have come to chapel, in the same dour, determined spirit, in the same tight black dress. They sat abreast of one another, these two women to whom George Malpas belonged, and not a glance passed between them.

A new witness arrived, a fair young woman, clothed in black and veiled, who walked in hurriedly with lowered eyes and tried to conceal herself, as it seemed, behind the chairs of the men. The flies buzzed as loudly as when they are driven from a heap of filth. Abner guessed that this was George’s Lesswardine woman. Mrs Malpas darted one eager glance in the new-comer’s direction, but Mary did not raise her eyes. At the last moment Mr Hind entered with Susie. She smiled, and the sight of her made Abner’s blood leap, for she was no longer the white-faced impersonal being that she had seemed at the inquest. She met his eyes full, and smiled again. Mary also was looking at him now. Abner went hot under their two glances. Why did Mary look at him? The other was the woman that he wanted!

In a sudden silence George was brought forward. He seemed none the worse for his night in the cells. He walked straight to the dock with a policeman on either side of him, looking neither at his mother, whose hands went to her heart, nor at Mary, who did not move. His eyes found Abner on the opposite side of the court, and he smiled, but the smile suddenly vanished and he went pale, for beyond Abner he had seen the face of the woman from Lesswardine. He went pale with anger that they should have dragged her into this; but there was no one on whom his anger could fall. His hands, that had quickly clutched at the edge of the dock, fell to his sides. He stood there with his fine, pale face and black hair, and on him were centred the emotions of those three women who would not look at each other. The court buzzed again, going suddenly silent as Badger’s master entered and took his seat on the bench above the head of the clerk.

The proceedings were formal, being no more than another step in George’s journey to Salop. The only new witness was the young woman whom the police had unearthed to establish the sequence of George’s movements on the night of Bastard’s death. She gave her evidence in a subdued voice and never raised her eyes. She said that George had never taken liquor in her house; that he had often come to see her; that he was her friend. No more.

When she had left the box George gave a sigh of relief. Abner wondered why he should have preferred this shrinking creature to Mary or to Susie Hind. The sitting ended in the obvious way, George being committed to take his trial at the county assizes. Nothing else could have been expected.

At the door of the court Abner rejoined Mary. Mrs Malpas, who had been whispering to the local solicitor, marched past them without speaking, and Mary flushed at this deliberate slight.

‘She won’t speak to me,’ she said. ‘I think that’s too bad! That was Lawyer Harley she was talking to.’

‘Don’t take no notice of her,’ said Abner. ‘That old woman’s half-cracked.’

He went on to tell her that Mick Connor, who had gone to the Buffalo out of curiosity the night before, had heard Mrs Malpas tell one of her customers that if George were sent to Shrewsbury she would employ the best criminal advocate on the circuit, even if it cost her the last penny she possessed. He did not tell her that Mrs Malpas had declared that it was nothing but the proud ways of Mary, ‘that thief’s daughter,’ she called her—that had driven George to his ruin.

‘He didn’t look at me once,’ said Mary on the way home.

‘He’d no call to look at nobody,’ Abner replied.‘He looked at her,’ said Mary bitterly. ‘He’s strange. I don’t know what to make of him.’

‘That’s natural enough. He didn’t want to see her dragged out in public.’

‘Dragged out in public?’ she cried, with an unusual flush of spirit. ‘What about me?’

They settled down to another placid evening at Wolfpits. The children had enjoyed their day with Mrs Mamble, though Morgan was persuaded with difficulty to go to bed without the coveted warming-pan under his pillow. Mrs Mamble was just preparing to leave them for the night when a knock came to the door, and without waiting for it to be opened to her Mrs Malpas entered. Her walk to Wolfpits over the roadway, now slippery with ice, had exhausted her, so that she looked more like a wraith than a woman. Even so she did not stop to recover her breath. She clenched her hands in the queer gesture that Abner had noticed the evening before, and with trembling wrists began to storm in Mary’s face.

‘What have you done with the money?’ she cried. ‘What have you done with it?’ Abner laid his hand on her shoulder, for she looked dangerous.

‘Take your hands off me!’ she screamed. ‘The money. . . . I want my money!’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Mary said.

‘My money, you brazen madam!’ she cried. ‘The money out of the box in father’s bedroom. More than fifty pound . . .’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ repeated Mary, bewildered.

‘It’s gone . . . gone! Don’t tell me you don’t know where it’s gone, when I know you’ve a’ had it! He can’t have spent it all. Give me what’s left . . . to pay the lawyers. George would never have gone and took it without you to put him up to it . . . you with your lady’s ways and your fine speech! Ah, that’s where the bad blood comes out. Your father was a thief, and you’re no better! Bad blood . . . bad blood!’

‘Don’t you dare . . .’ Mary cried. ‘Don’t you dare speak of my father!’She stood tall and flushed above her mother-in-law.

‘Give me the money . . . what’s left of it,’ Mrs Malpas pleaded. ‘Give it me, and I won’t say no more.’

Her violence had spent itself. Now she was only small, pathetic, withered. Mary controlled herself. She would not answer.

‘I’d forgive him taking it. . . . I’d forgive him. Mr Harley says they’ll want twenty pound before they touch the case. Only twenty pound. . . . I can find more later. Give me twenty pound.’

‘She says she don’t know nothing about it,’ said Abner.

‘Says! It must have been George. No one else knew where I kept it. He’s hidden it. Up in his room. You must look . . . you must look!’

‘I know nothing about it,’ said Mary, mastering herself. ‘I’ve not seen a penny. I . . . I can’t talk to you. I wish you would go away.’

‘Leave the woman alone, missus,’ said Abner. ‘She’s enough to put up with without you. You’d best go out quiet. You’m not answerable. Come on, now!’

The old woman seemed to pull her strength together, looking from one to the other. They waited for a new outburst, but instead of speaking she suddenly threw up her hands and burst into a fit of choking sobs. Mary made a compassionate movement toward her, but Mrs Malpas stopped her with a violent gesture. Then she straightened her bonnet and moved to the door. She became her old, wiry, deliberate self. Her voice was clear and her face like stone.

‘If George took it,’ she said emphatically, ‘it was the devil that drove him, and I can’t do no more. But not one penny shall you ever get out of me, Mary Condover. You can starve, you and your children together, but don’t come crying to dad and me. You and your pride. . . .! Now you can see what you’ve to be proud of. The daughter of a thief and the wife of a thief. That’s what you are! I never want to set eyes on you again . . . you and your fancy lodger!’

She went out, leaving the door open behind her. Mary stood looking after her, shaken like a tree in the wind. Then she gave a curious laugh and sat down at the table. Abner could do nothing for her; but she managed to contain herself until she had risen and passed from his sight upstairs.

It was fortunate for them all in the suspense that now held them that the Shrewsbury assizes had been fixed for the middle of December, immediately before the Christmas vacation. On his committal by the Lesswardine bench, George had been taken at once to the county jail where he lay awaiting his trial. In the meantime the leisurely routine of work in those wintry valleys, disturbed so abruptly by these violent events, reasserted itself. The snow melted. To the sodden days of thaw succeeded a period of mild and mistily golden weather that would have seemed like spring had it not been so silent. The work on the pipeline began again like the progress of some great engine that had kept its power hissing beneath the snow, and daily gathered speed. Even the Pound House, still suspect by the police but happily safe until the Brewster sessions, regained its old popularity, though Mr Hind, having been duly warned, gave more attention to his business than ever before. It had been clear from the first that he had taken a violent dislike to Abner, whom he regarded as the cause of all his trouble. On the day of the inquest he had shown this by his silence; but when Abner appeared again at the inn, he told him in as many words that his custom wasn’t wanted. Susie, a little shaken by her father’s severity, implored him not to persist in coming to the Pound House, and though she appeared no less passionately devoted to Abner, the lovers’ meetings were fewer and their secrecy more precarious.

It was strange how little difference George’s absence made to life at Wolfpits. Within a week it almost seemed as if the place and its inhabitants had forgotten him. Neither Mary nor the children ever mentioned his name, and since the day of the police-court proceedings Abner had heard nothing from him but a single scribbled letter which George contrived to send from the lock-up by the hand of the young policeman who had drunk his beer. In this letter a new flicker of care for his family had shown itself: he had reminded Abner of his promise to stay at Wolfpits and look after them. ‘I would have sent you some money,’ he wrote, ‘but they’ve taken it off me. Mary can ask mother if she’s in a fix.’ The reminder was quite unnecessary. Abner had given his word to a pal and meant to stick to it, though he foresaw a difficult moment when the plan should be disclosed to Mary. He could not see, for the life of him, how to open the subject, and so he let things take their course, waiting for the occasion to arrive without his interference.

It came, as he had half expected, at the end of the week, when the next payment for his lodging was due. Instead of his usual fourteen shillings he gave Mary the whole of his wages wrapped up in the piece of paper in which he received them at the works. The situation embarrassed her, as she told him, for she had no change.

‘I don’t want none,’ he said bluntly.

‘But I can’t take it from you,’ she protested. ‘It isn’t right.’

‘Right or wrong,’ said he, ‘you and the children can’t live on less, and you’ll find it a tight pinch as it is.’

‘I can’t take it,’ she said again.

They stood on either side of the table with the packet of money between them.

‘It isn’t only that,’ she added. ‘Don’t suppose I think the less of your kindness. . . . I wish I could tell you what I do think . . . but I’m afraid it isn’t right for you to stay on here now George is away.’

‘That’s why I ought to stay,’ he said.

‘You don’t understand,’ she replied. ‘Men don’t think of such things. It would be the talk of the village. They’d say there was something wrong.’

‘As long as there bain’t nothing wrong there’s no harm in talk. Talk never hurt nobody.’

‘There’s George’s mother . . . you don’t know her! Remember what she said that night.’

‘Do you think I’d ever take the upper hand of you?’

‘No, no . . . it’s not me,’ she said quickly, turning away from him.

‘Then there’s no call to be soft over it.’

‘There’s George, too . . .’

‘Don’t you fret yourself about George,’ he said, and showed her her husband’s letter. ‘That’s what George thinks about it. I reckon that’s good enough.’

For a long time she would not take his money. The hard facts of her case, the words of Mrs Malpas, and the ugly necessity of applying for parish relief, seemed to weigh less with her than this tyrannous modesty.

‘You can take it or leave it,’ he said, ‘but I’ve promised George and the money will come to you just the same. . . . Supposing I get another lodge, the money will be less, that’s all. If you bain’t afeard of me . . . .’

She protested: ‘No . . . no . . . .’

‘Then I may as well stay on. You can’t do without a man in a place like this. There’s the wood to chop and the water to draw and that. I should have to come here just the same. We’ve got to live on a poor wage, and it’s all the better if I’m here.’

‘I must think it over,’ she said.

In the end she consented to his staying—happily for herself since otherwise life would have been almost impossible. During the three weeks that passed before George’s trial, they settled down into a new and orderly condition, living poorly, it is true, but contentedly, and aided by the attentions of their neighbours. Mrs Mamble, perhaps at Mary’s request, often softened the awkwardness of the situation by dropping in about supper-time and staying to talk over the fire, and old Drew was continually giving the children presents of eggs from his own fowl-yard, farm-produce from the land on which he worked, and even some of the milk which, according to the custom in those parts, he received in part payment of his wage. Mary could not refuse these gifts so beautifully given; she could not even return him adequate thanks; but she tried to add a little to the comfort of the rooms in which the old man lived, and offered to attend to his clothes, an attempt in which she failed, since Drew always locked his door when he left it in the dawn, resenting, in the manner of many bachelors, the least interference with his own homely dirt, and wore in winter every shred of clothing that he possessed.

The sense of an obligation unfulfilled would have made them awkward if the old man had not accepted the help of Abner in his garden, a proceeding that he watched with suspicion, being as fidgety as any old maid, and that of Mary in the feeding of his fowls. Within a few weeks, indeed, the inhabitants of Wolfpits had settled down into a kind of communal life that was happy if only for the fact that its existence implied so much goodwill.

The subpoenas for the assizes arrived, and with them a new wave of rumour and excitement troubled the villages. It was agreed that George had no chance of being acquitted, but those who had experience of the law vied with those who had none in predicting the term of his sentence. Through the medium of Susie, Pound House gossip filtered back to Abner, and in this way he learned that Mrs Malpas had managed in spite of her loss to brief a barrister named Rees, who had a great reputation for skill in criminal defences on that circuit. A week before the trial Abner received a note from the lesser of the two local solicitors, who, being a liberal and a nonconformist, had nothing to lose by an implied opposition to the squire. Together with Mick Connor and Atwell, Abner repeated his version of the affair to this man.

‘I shall let Mrs Malpas, senior, know by wire when the case is likely to come on,’ he said, ‘and you, of course, will hold yourselves in readiness.’

A fortnight later Mrs Malpas sent up a message by a small boy from Chapel Green to Wolfpits, telling Abner that it would be necessary to set out for Shrewsbury on the following morning. The message made no mention of Mary.

‘But I shall go all the same,’ she said.

They left Wolfpits in darkness, whispering their farewells to Mrs Mamble for fear of waking the children, whom Mary, dressing quietly, had left asleep. The nearest station to Chapel Green was that of Llandwlas, a minute hamlet hidden amid the springs of the Barbel, a little to the north of the single line that winds painfully out of Wales between the dominant masses of the forests of Radnor and Clun. From Wolfpits, cross-country, this made a five-mile walk. A dripping mist hid the land, and they saw no soul until they reached the station. There, on the raw, deserted platform, where the porter had lit a single oil lamp to show that the day had begun, they waited, walking up and down to keep themselves warm. They were early, and the only other sign of life was the yellow square of the stationmaster’s bedroom in the adjoining cottage. Even if daylight had come, the density of the mist would have given them the same sense of isolation. Little by little the place became alive: first a float drove up with a couple of milk-cans; next came a gnomish figure who carried a stick, with dead rabbits slung from it over his shoulder: then a noisy party of two, whom Abner recognised as his fellow-witnesses.

‘That’s Connor and Atwell come up,’ he said.

‘Let’s keep at the other end,’ Mary whispered, moving away.

Two more traps arrived, the first containing the Hinds, the second Badger, alone, and last, the small, energetic figure of George’s mother. All these people, whom a chance blow had precipitated into the same grim business, stood waiting for the train singly or in isolated groups of two. A straining of wires was heard, and the fogged, red eye of the signal changed to green. The stationmaster threw up the shutter of the booking office with a rattle. Abner found himself wedged in front of the window between Badger and Mr Hind. Mrs Malpas, fidgeting with her purse, stood waiting in the background. As Abner rejoined Mary, a sound of distant panting was heard, and a minute later the front of the engine loomed enormous through the fog. They entered a third-class smoker at the end of the train. The milk-cans were rolled over the echoing platform into the van, and the train moved off with a clank of couplings and a hiss of white steam. Down through the valleys, mile on mile they wound. The train rocked on the gradients until it seemed that the carriages must touch the black edge of the woods. The mist turned white and dazzling. The sun had risen.