‘Come home along of me, ma’am,’ he repeated helplessly.
She seemed not to hear him. ‘George, my little George . . .’ she sobbed, abasing, accusing herself before the harsh personal deity that she imagined, wrestling with him in prayer and entreaty, ‘Oh, Lord, forgive him . . . forgive him . . . forgive him!’ Then, quite suddenly, she stopped. No sound was heard but that of her faint trembling. Abner thanked goodness that she had tired herself out, but he was mistaken. Without the least warning her weak hands pushed him away. She stood before him in the middle of the road and faced him with her ridiculous bonnet awry and her fingers clenched like the claws of some small, fierce wild animal, waiting to spring at a man’s throat. Her wrists worked with passion. She forgot all her scripture and cursed him in her own words.
‘It’s you who’ve led him astray,’ she cried. ‘You . . you! Didn’t I know it the very day when you and your mate came to our house? You, the scum of the roads! That’s fine company for a decent man! You can’t touch pitch and not be defiled! I begged him and begged him not to have the likes of you in his house, but he laughed at me. And you’ve dragged him down, down . . . as low as a man can be dragged. You with your drink and your poaching and your women! Don’t think I haven’t heard what happened . . . the two of you coming home drunk of nights, singing bawdy songs in the dark. That wasn’t enough for you! You must drag him into your drunken fighting, drag him down and down into your mucky life. And then you come and talk to me of luck. Luck! He’s been led astray, that’s what George has, by your company. If George’s soul is damned, it’s you who will suffer for it, bringin’ your town ways into a country place. You and his precious wife! The two of you between you! What’s in the blood comes out in the life. Her father were a thief and a swindler and a suicide, and God visits the sins of the fathers. Like father, like daughter! That’s the sort of bedfellow my George has had, and this is what she’s brought him to, poor lamb! But don’t you think, young man, that God don’t remember! If you done it to the least of these you done it unto Me! Don’t you think you can push a young man into hell and not fall into the fire after him. You and her together. . . . You can trust God for that!’ She exhausted her breath and stood panting.
‘Come on, missus,’ said Abner heavily. ‘You’ll be perished out here.’ But when he clumsily approached her she ran away down the road toward Mainstone like a mad woman, this pathetic bundle of burning hatred in her Sunday clothes, and left him foolishly standing.
He went back in the dark to Wolfpits, heavily burdened with the second part of his task. The children were playing quietly on the hearthrug and Mrs Mumble, who considered it only neighbourly to give Mary the benefit of her company in a domestic emergency, was talking of homely, unimportant things with the idea of distracting her mind from the more tragic affair that held it. When Abner appeared she excused herself, kissed the children good-night, enveloped Mary in a more significant embrace, and left them.
Mary stood waiting for what he had to say. He could not help recognising the contrast between her impressive aloofness, her self-control, and the hysterics of old Mrs Malpas. She could not pretend that she felt nothing; since George’s disaster, however little she might care for him, must bring with it all sorts of complications. She was a woman who had been used, in the lavish days of her father, to a certain degree of comfort and elegance, and even if she had known hard times at Wolfpits during George’s freakish periods of idleness, she had never been faced with anything so threatening to herself and her children as a complete stoppage of wages and, in the last resort, the humiliation of parish relief. She waited with her head erect, straight as a larch, in the perfect control of her finely-tempered mind.
‘It’s what we thought it would be, missus,’ he said. ‘Manslaughter they brought it in.’
‘Where is he?’ she asked, almost in a whisper.
‘They’ve took him in charge. That’ll mean the lock-up at Lesswardine, time they’ve got the case ready for the police-court.’
She was silent for a moment, and then:—