“If I were free to take Rosalie and Ughtred home to-morrow,” she thought, “I could not bear to go. I should suffer too much.”
She was suffering now. The strong longing in her heart was like a physical pain. No word or look of this one man had given her proof that his thoughts turned to her, and yet it was intolerable—intolerable—that in his hour of stress and need they were as wholly apart as if worlds rolled between them. At any dire moment it was mere nature that she should give herself in help and support. If, on the night at sea, when they had first spoken to each other, the ship had gone down, she knew that they two, strangers though they were, would have worked side by side among the frantic people, and have been among the last to take to the boats. How did she know? Only because, he being he, and she being she, it must have been so in accordance with the laws ruling entities. And now he stood facing a calamity almost as terrible—and she with full hands sat still.
She had seen the hop pickers' huts and had recognised their condition. Mere brick sheds in which the pickers slept upon bundles of hay or straw in their best days; in their decay they did not even provide shelter. In fine weather the hop gatherers slept well enough in them, cooking their food in gypsy-fashion in the open. When the rain descended, it must run down walls and drip through the holes in the roofs in streams which would soak clothes and bedding. The worst that Nigel and Mrs. Brent had implied was true. Illness of any order, under such circumstances, would have small chance of recovery, but malignant typhoid without shelter, without proper nourishment or nursing, had not one chance in a million. And he—this one man—stood alone in the midst of the tragedy—responsible and helpless. He would feel himself responsible as she herself would, if she were in his place. She was conscious that suddenly the event of the afternoon—the interview upon the marshes, had receded until it had become an almost unmeaning incident. What did the degenerate, melodramatic folly matter——!
She had restlessly left her chair before the dressing-table, and was walking to and fro. She paused and stood looking down at the carpet, though she scarcely saw it.
“Nothing matters but one thing—one person,” she owned to herself aloud. “I suppose it is always like this. Rosy, Ughtred, even father and mother—everyone seems less near than they were. It is too strong—too strong. It is——” the words dropped slowly from her lips, “the strongest thing—in the world.”
She lifted her face and threw out her hands, a lovely young half-sad smile curling the deep corners of her mouth. “Sometimes one feels so disdained,” she said—“so disdained with all one's power. Perhaps I am an unwanted thing.”
But even in this case there were aids one might make an effort to give. She went to her writing-table and sat thinking for some time. Afterwards she began to write letters. Three or four were addressed to London—one was to Mr. Penzance.
. . . . .
Mount Dunstan and his vicar were walking through the village to the vicarage. They had been to the hop pickers' huts to see the people who were ill of the fever. Both of them noticed that cottage doors and windows were shut, and that here and there alarmed faces looked out from behind latticed panes.
“They are in a panic of fear,” Mount Dunstan said, “and by way of safeguard they shut out every breath of air and stifle indoors. Something must be done.”