“And there’s the grandchildren, you’ll think on; you’ve not forgotten them? You’ll likely never set eyes on them if you don’t go. It costs a deal to go back and forwards, these days, and there’s time as well. Sally’ll likely come, if Ellen’s bringing her to stop, but not Joe’s lad or the rest——”
She stumbled to her feet, throwing out her hand a second time as if to lay it across his patient, relentless mouth.
“Nay, now! Don’t, I tell you! D’you think I don’t know what it’ll be like, and how it’s going to hurt before I’ve finished with it? Day and night I’ll remember,—day and night. But it’s got to be borne. Some way or other I’ve got into a trap, and I doubt I’ll never get out.”
“You can get out, Mattie,” Kirkby said gently. “You’ve only to say the word.”
“Nay, but I can’t.” She looked down at her hands as she rested them on the table, as if already she saw ghostly fetters forming about her wrists.... “Words won’t make any difference, nor letters, neither. It’s my own self makes the trap,—being too old, and being afraid of things. You should have let us go when I was younger and able to face it. You’ve kept us here too long.”
“’Twasn’t me, Mattie,” Kirkby said, wincing a little for the first time. “’Twas just life.”
“Nay, it was you, all right!” she said, lifting her head again. She sent him a look which he had seen more than once before, a hard, sneering look which called him an enemy and hated him as it said it. He met it quietly.... “It was you kept us. And now I’ve got to go eating my heart out till I die!”
Moving away from the table, she began to walk up and down the room, clasping and unclasping her hands.
“And it’ll be worse now than it was before,—a deal worse, a deal harder to bear. There’ll be nothing to hope for, now.... It’ll be just prison again, and the same old life right on to the end. If I’d known things were going to turn out like this, I’d have finished myself long ago!”
She was crying now and wringing her hands, stumbling blindly from point to point, and blundering against things in her passage. From time to time she looked wildly from side to side, as if she saw the cottage-walls closing in upon her. From his seat by the table Kirkby sat and watched her, as only the night before he had watched the firelight beat against the ceiling....