‘Right?’ she cried. Then she turned on the others. ‘Out of this!’ she said. ‘Out of this, every one of you. . . . As if there wasn’t enough shame and sorrow in this house without your mocking it with your drink and your music. Out of it, I say!’ And she waved her arms as though she were driving cattle.
‘Now don’t take on so, ma’am,’ said Wigan Joe mildly. ‘It was all meant for the best. Can’t you let the man forget his troubles? It’s a poor heart that never rejoices!’
‘Don’t speak to me!’ she cried angrily. ‘To think that you have the face to come here, you that led him astray with your drink and your bawdiness! To come and make a mock of his own father!’
Her eyes fell on Abner, who had risen to go to the door.
‘And that man!’ she cried, whipping herself up into a white paroxysm of rage. ‘That man who, if all had their rights, would be in the dock and in the prison where my son is lying! That’s the man he’s suffering for! That’s the serpent he took into his bosom!’ She stood before Abner spitting like a snake herself. ‘Never let me see your face again!’ she cried. ‘Never come nigh this door. It was the devil that sent you to bring trouble on a good Christian house!’
Again Wigan Joe protested the innocence of his intentions, while the old man sat nodding by the fire as if the storm had broken without him knowing it.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said, ‘with the liquor in your breath. Go away and leave us alone.’
Abner went out. The other men were standing on the pavement laughing. Mick implored him to go on with them to the Pound House where Mr Hind and Susie had by this time presumably arrived, but he shook his head and took the road to Wolfpits, pondering, through the darkness of night, on the curious turn which his fortune had taken.
He had now time to think about Mary, and the unreasonable obstinacy she had shown in leaving him on the steps of the court and later avoiding him both at Shrewsbury and Llandwlas. He felt a little concerned that she should have chosen to walk so many miles cross-country through the dark rather than submit to his company. After all it would have been only natural for them to go home together; he had always treated her with respect, and there was nothing in the history of their acquaintance that should have made her shy of him, nothing—unless it were perhaps that one curious moment on the night when they had carried George upstairs between them and put him to bed. Then he had told her, in George’s defence, of his own intimacy with Susie Hind, and this revelation, instead of putting her at ease, as it should have done, had actually seemed to embarrass her. This knowledge, however, gave her no reason for her present behaviour. Indeed, if she knew him to be so thick with Susie, there was surely less cause than ever for her to be shy with him herself. He gave women up—you never knew where you were with them. He supposed that nothing but fear of Mrs Malpas was at the bottom of Mary’s queer behaviour. ‘I don’t want you to be with me: she’s watching us,’ she had said when she gave him the slip at Shrewsbury. Another memory of Mrs Malpas returned to him: the end of her outburst at Wolfpits when she had come in search of her money. ‘You and your fancy lodger!’ she had screamed. Abner laughed to himself. It was clear that Mary hadn’t much of a fancy for him at present.
All the same he couldn’t entirely dismiss Mrs Malpas from his thoughts. She had shown herself definitely hostile to him, and his last vision of her clearing the bar of the Buffalo, a puny figure with white cheeks, burning eyes, and nodding plume of jet, showed him her fanatical strength, stronger for the fact that she regarded herself in her most violent moments as a representative of the right and the rest of the world as inspired by the devil. Yet he couldn’t get away from the ludicrous side of her, and found himself chuckling in the dark, ‘Poor old soul’ he thought. ‘She dain’t know what she wants, and that’s the truth!’ But Mrs Malpas did know what she wanted.