Tom Wycombe heaved a deep sigh.
That awful peevish, maddening voice rambling on, like cinders dropping on a wound, had nearly driven him crazy. If she had not gone away he would have hunted her forth with blows. He had never beaten a woman in his life—he had never raised his hand on a man—but he knew that he must have fallen upon that woman now.
Slowly—for he was cold and stiff though it was a June night—he dragged himself to the door and locked and bolted it. Then he went to the recess in which stood the child’s cot, and drew the curtains in front of it—curtains which he had put up with his own hand to keep her tiny chamber sacred, and to shield her tender little head from the night draughts.
After he had done that, he let himself drop wearily into his old chair by the empty hearth, and sat gazing vacantly into the dead embers. He could not think—he was stunned; only he felt old for the first time—very old, older than his fifty odd years.
Without, the summer night had, for a short space, dropped the whole cloak of its darkness upon the wide plain. Unconsciously, he was glad of it: glad that the moon was hidden behind a deep bank of cloud that had overlapped the horizon and was gradually creeping up the sky: glad that, as he looked through the door, left open because of the heat, he could scarcely make out the cabbages and sweet-peas in his terrace garden: glad that the darkness covered him—that the earth could not see his misery.
He sat, stupid, almost senselessly stupid, not trying to realize his woe. But gradually the blood flowed back to his brain, and with it the power of thought came to him; the woman’s words, though he had scarcely been conscious of them all at the time, came dropping back into his recollection, and, with the remembrance of each careless thrust, the tide of his conviction slowly but surely gathered strength till it flooded his reason and rushed in at last and swamped his soul in terrible certainty.
He had told the woman to get out of his house, he had longed to kill her for what she had said—but it was not because he had not believed her.
Alas! if he had not believed her perhaps he could have done it! But from the first word that she had spoken an awful fore-knowledge that he should have to come to believe her had been borne in upon him.
Yes, Ben Forester, the good-looking, easy-going, pleasant-spoken sailor-lad whom his wife had known all her life down at the Harbour, who had been away at sea when he had wooed her—but who had come back—who had come back!
But why, if she loved Ben, had she married him? The answer was easy enough. She had a brute of a drunken father, and neither kith nor kin beside. Her only chance of escape from a life of slavery, spiced with blows, was marriage, and—fancied as she had been by many—he was the only one who had offered her that. Ben was a rolling stone that gathered no moss, and he was sure enough Ben had never offered her marriage. Why, yes, she had told him the very day he asked her last, that his was the only offer she had had!