"Very well, then, I'll get yer a cup o' beer," and as she drew it from a cask in the linhay her glance rested for a moment on the high-girdled brown jug, the jug which Sabina had always used for her cocoa. Mrs. Tom regarded it thoughtfully. Many a time she had seen it standing on the stove, waiting till Sabina should be ready to carry it to her room. It was a part of the nightly ritual of locking up, undressing, sleep-wooing, a part of the old order which, with Sabina, had passed away.
In spite of his bulk Byron was a moderate eater. The quality of his food was, as he said, a matter of indifference and he swallowed the leathery eggs as contentedly as if they had been worthy examples of Mrs. Tom's skill.
"I think I should like to 'av a pipe," he said as soon as his hunger was appeased. "I 'aven't smoked much lately, 'aven't felt like it." Crossing the room he put a hand on the high mantelshelf in search of his pipe. The restlessness of the past months had ebbed, leaving him at peace. He craved the dreamy satisfaction of tobacco. "Why, what's this? 'Ere's a new pipe! 'Owever did it get 'ere?"
Mrs. Tom, glancing up from her work of clearing the table, saw that he held in his hand the pipe with an amber mouthpiece which she had brought from Stowe.
"Why, that's the one poor S'bina bought for yer!"
The unexpected was to Byron the threatening and the presence of the pipe disturbed his new serenity. His mind began to bubble with suspicion, with wild extravagant surmise. It did not occur to him that the purchase of the pipe was a sign of Sabina's persistently kindly thought, a survival from the disowned discredited past. "She did?" he muttered, turning on it a look of mingled fear and aversion. "I didn't know that. You don't mean to say she put it there?" It was as if she had crept from her bed of death, had stolen in, shrouded but invisible and set the mysterious pipe where his hand would chance on it.
Mrs. Tom, observant and wondering, filled the wooden wash-up bowl with water and set it on the table. "I dare say she did."
"Did she put it there," he hesitated, calculating, "did she put it there, last night?"
Last night when he was planning her death, had she too had her thoughts, her plans? It was a disconcerting, to a guilty man, even an alarming thought.
"It don't seem only last night, it seem ages since," said Mrs. Tom, beginning to wash the cloam. "We bought it into Stowe and gived it to S'bina and what she did with it then, I dunno. I s'pose she put it on the chimley-piece."