“’E ain’t dead, my dear, ’e ain’t dead yet,” faltered the old housekeeper.
Lucy began to run.
“Anyways it weren’t the blow Casey ’it ’im as done for ’im, Mrs. Wood,” panted Wilson, keeping up with her, “Nobody don’t love Casey, but ’tweren’t all ’is fault. There were a bit of a brawl—over a gal. Jerry was drunk, ’e ’it out. Then the perlice come. Somebody did say Casey split on Jerry, but if ’e did ’e be paid for it. For t’other boys ’elped Jerry off—’e was allers a favourite with ’em—and Casey, seein’ ’isself left-like, ’it out at the perlice. Nobody knows the rights o’t, but Casey be took up. So’d Jerry ha’ been if ’e ’adn’t come by that fall on the bridge. ’E was blind-drunk, and ’e missed ’is foot in the mist.”
“Casey done it,” was all Lucy said. “’Oo’s fault was it as ’e were drunk?” And she ran on.
Lights appeared faintly before her through the murky mist; they shone from the doctor’s house at the corner of the churchyard. The moon, piercing the clouds for a moment, threw a wan light on the square tower of the old church, on the summit of its massive buttresses, on the lopped pine-tree beyond; but it was too feeble to illumine the dank vapours that floated through the ghostly arches of the ruined transepts and rested, almost opaquely, on the tops of the time-worn tombstones in the graveyard.
There was a little knot of folk in the road hard by the surgery door; the same lads were there who had stood at the same corner in the morning, goading the wife to frenzy with their careless taunts, merrily “chaffing” the man whom they had now carried home to die: they stood aside, shamed and silent, to let the widow pass.
The doctor appeared in the doorway; he was a rough old man, and he had often roughly upbraided this woman for bringing children into the world at the risk of her life—children whom she was too frail to suckle and too poor to properly feed; but he took her kindly by the hand now.
“Come,” said he gently.
Something in his voice told her the truth: she looked at him wildly.
Yet she would not understand.