The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

‘Nothing more?’

‘I tell you that’s the lot. I was neyther piller nor bo’ster. I’d have told you at the first, but I thought to save your feelings.’

‘Feelings!’ she repeated. ‘There’s better ways of saving a woman’s feelings than keeping the truth from her. That was George’s way. If you guessed anything of what women are like you’d know that it’s the truth they want. You can forgive a man a lot if he doesn’t lie to you.’ Her tone changed suddenly. She became dispassionate, practical, once more. ‘When will it come on at the police court?’

‘I don’t know. I reckon they won’t keep him long at Lesswardine.’

‘I shall have to go there,’ she said. ‘Even if he doesn’t want me it’s my place to be there. If I don’t go there George will think that I’ve thrown him over. I would have come to-day if he’d let me, but he begged me not to. He’s funny, like a child, is George.’

Her voice softened when she spoke the last words, as though her imagination had suddenly carried her back to the days of George’s courtship when her father was a hearty, prosperous man and no troubles whatever had entered her life. For the moment she seemed to Abner no more than a child herself. At the first moment he had thought her insensitive, in the next she had put him to shame by her frankness, now she was yielding, pitiful. These alternations of stoicism, passion, and tenderness bewildered him. He had not thought that women were so various. In addition to this she was beautiful. He wondered what perverse strain in George could ever have compelled him to desert her.

After another long silence she thanked him for what he had told her, then turned and left him. He heard her talking brightly to the children as though nothing had happened.

Although darkness had fallen it was still early. Abner’s natural impulse would have bidden him walk back to Mainstone and find Susie. It had been a torment to see her cold and remote, seeming no more to him than a stranger. In the hushed court-room when he had stolen out at the moment of George’s arrest she had not looked at him. He had left her staring straight in front of her like a pious churchgoer. He decided, in the end, to stay at Wolfpits, for the night was cold and unhomely and he still carried in his mind the sinister vision of the empty bar with Bastard’s body lying in the room behind it. More than this, he began to be conscious of a definite duty toward Mary, whose attitude had ended by filling him with admiration and loyalty. He felt it in his bones that she despised him, being undeniably a creature of finer clay than himself, but the moment in which she had demanded his confidence remained with him. It was as though the veil which had always hung between them had been suddenly rent, admitting them to an intimacy as clear as light. In all his life he had known no such experience. Even in the most passionate moments of his relation with Susie she had been no more to him than a strange woman for whose beauty he hungered without reason. He knew her body and thrilled to it, but of herself he knew nothing. With Mary it was different. At first he had felt vaguely that he must be loyal to her for the sake of his friend, not so much because he loved George as because their friendship had been the immediate cause of their disaster. It was for herself that he must now be loyal, and this seemed strange to him, for it was an obligation which he had never considered as possible between a man and a woman, and nothing but that sudden moment of vision could have revealed it to him.

He devoted his evening to the children. Their frolic in the snow had excited them. They were full of play and laughter. Mary moved about her business silently, watching the fireside group with benevolent eyes. At seven o’clock, just before their bedtime, another constable came to the door with the police-court summons. The case had been fixed for the following day—eleven o’clock at Lesswardine. The man was in a hurry to serve his other summonses, and would not enter. Abner told Mary the news.

‘Eleven o’clock,’ she repeated intently. ‘Come thy ways, Morgan, love, time for bye-byes.’