The change was instantaneous. She did not say a word, but she flashed a quick, frightened look at him, and turned on her heel and fled. He looked after her pitifully as her tall figure flitted down the lane beside the wind-twisted pine-trees, behind whose red trunks the sun was setting in a sea of crimson beyond the purple downs. He watched to see if she would look for Miss Crutch, but she passed the oast-house by on her right, and ran straight on down the lane till she came to the turning that led to her home.
* * * * * * * *
The moonlight fell into that lane the same night as the clock of the old Abbey struck its nine wavering strokes, fell so full upon it that the shadow of the pines lay hard and black upon its whiteness, and that the figure of a man sauntering leisurely along between its low stone walls was conspicuous as in broad daylight. He had come up from the camp in the marsh-land below, where the fires of those “hoppers” who were not villagers burned brightly in the still night; he left the oast-houses on his left, and before he came to the farm on the right he vaulted the low paling and made off across the down to the windmill. He was not an inhabitant or he would have known that that was not the shortest way from the plain to his destination. And there—on the slopes under the great spreading arms of the mill, with the dykes wandering rippleless across the plain below, like winding streams of molten metal in the moonlight—this man waited awhile patiently. He was not used to waiting, and the scene before him engrossed him but little, so that when the ashes of his pipe had burned themselves out and the moon was riding high in the heavens, he grew weary of the tryst, and slowly but surely incensed against the girl who had broken it. He was no beauty—many even said that he was an ugly chap—but he knew that he always got his way with women, and not infrequently even with men, and he never troubled himself to wonder why, and would have been very much surprised if he had been told that it was because folk were in a certain sense afraid of him—afraid not of his strength, but of his selfishness—of the selfishness that always managed to take that for which it had no intention of paying.
It was the first time he remembered being baulked of what he had intended to get, and his fury grew as the minutes sped past. He ground out a fierce oath from between the white teeth that were the most conspicuous thing in his face, and turned back across the down. The “public” lay but a little way down the road to the village. He could soon forget ’Melia Shaw, and she should repent bitterly of her folly.
Was ’Melia repenting already, and was it really of her folly that she was repenting—of the folly of her wild and misguided craving? Or was she mourning the broken tryst that it was now too late to keep?
Who can tell? Anyway, a duty had fallen across her path, so plain and strong that she saw nothing else for the moment; for on the bed in the corner of the little cottage on the brow of the hill Widow Shaw lay motionless, speechless—struck down in the midst of her work—the soul only alive still, and eager as it looked forth, piteous and beseeching, from the weary grey eyes.
“It be them shirts she be frettin’ over,” said the neighbour, Martha Jones, standing at the foot of the bed as ’Melia rushed in, white and scared. “Ye didn’t ought to have left her to do it all. But it be jest like what ye be always after.”
But Miss Crutch in the doorway, throwing a scornful glance at the girl, tossed her head.
“Shirts,” echoed she with a laugh, “shirts, indeed! A pore mother ’ave got somethin’ wuss nor shirts to think about when she knows her daughter’s a-carryin’ on with good-for-nothing chaps as ’aven’t the fear o’ God so much as in their backbone. No wonder the Lord ’ave stricken ’er!”
“Hush, now, do there!” cried a kindlier woman who had risen from beside the bed, “ye’ll drive the poor lass crazy. The doctor says as she’ll get over it this time, dear,” added she to ’Melia, “but she ’ave got to be kep’ quiet, and he’ll call again presently.”