George staggered to the end of the table.
‘You have heard the jury’s verdict. You will be committed on my warrant to take your trial on a charge of manslaughter. You are lucky that the charge is not . . . ah . . . graver.’
The sergeant, who had been waiting for this, again presented his paper to the coroner, and Mr Mortimer, having wiped the nib of his pen, signed it in his bold, deliberate handwriting. He signed it carefully and looked at his signature afterward. It was not often that he tasted so singular a sensation of power. The sergeant blotted the document and advanced toward George Malpas. He came like a dignified spider toward a fly safely entangled in its web.
‘Better go and tell them,’ George said to Abner. ‘Tell mother first. . . . Tell ’em I’m all right.’
The Fifteenth Chapter
Abner did not wait for George to be arrested. To the evident scandal of the sergeant he made straight for the door and slipped into the bar. He closed the door quietly, and stopped for a moment. There was something in the feeling of the room that told him he had broken in on a secret. No doubt the continued strain with which he had heard the evidence unfolded had tuned his nerves to a supersensitive pitch: he wasn’t usually nervous under any conditions, but the sudden change from the courtroom to this cold, empty chamber, unfamiliar in the snow-light, took him aback, unsteadied him. At the moment of his entrance the room had been expectant, listening. Now, when he paused for a second to look at it, he saw nothing unusual, only the long shelves with their black bottles of dubious port and sherry, the keg-shaped receptacles of glass in which spirits were kept on tap, the polished handles of the beer-engine. The only unusual thing was the closed door of the room behind the counter in which Bastard’s body now lay. He didn’t try to find an explanation for the peculiar chill that this room gave him, midway between the dead man’s flesh and the anguished soul of the man who had killed him; but he felt it, and when he turned the key in the locked door and stepped out into the street he felt again, behind him, the sense of something strange stealing back into the bar. He shivered and set off for Chapel Green to tell Mrs Malpas.
All sparkle of light had vanished from the snow; the sky had now grown colder than the land, and in the north a wind was rising. He walked fast to keep the heat in his limbs. He passed the last cottages of Mainstone and came into the length of Roman road which he and George had so often travelled at night. The wind set up a faint and mournful singing in the telegraph wires. The winter night descended. No human shape was to be seen on the long white road but that of Abner and another smaller figure that approached him rapidly from the west. He took it for granted that this was a little girl hurrying home to Mainstone from the dissenting school at Chapel Green, but when they met in the dusk and stared at one another he suddenly became aware that the wayfarer was George’s mother. All the time since he left the inn he had been turning over in his mind the ways in which he might best reveal his tragic news. Now that he found himself face to face with Mrs Malpas, small, intense, and awful in her Sunday bonnet, he could say nothing. They stared at each other for a moment in which Abner was conscious of the hatred in her black eyes.
‘Evenin’, ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s lucky I met you. George sent me along with a message.’
‘Tell me . . . tell me quick, young man,’ she cried. ‘Don’t keep it back whatever it be!’
‘Bad news, ma’am.’