The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

Mary had gone to bed when he reached Wolfpits, but she had left his supper ready on the kitchen table. He ate his bread and cheese and drank his beer. That night, exhausted with the strain of the day, he slept heavily.

So the new life began. If George Malpas, lying in Shrewsbury Jail, returned, in one of the debauches of sentiment to which his nature was subject, to the idea of his desolate wife and family, and dwelt on it with pity or remorse, he might well have spared himself the luxury of these emotions. There were few changes at Wolfpits. The children knew that they need no longer expect the violent attentions which George gave them when he felt like it; Spider, the bitch, settled down to a life untroubled by George’s kicks and stones; while Mary, that strange and secret creature, was spared at least the alternations of reproaches and endearments which made up the greater part of her marriage. George had vanished from her life. For three months at least no word, no sign from him might reach her. It was true that the family had to live more simply. Abner’s wages, which she now took without question every Saturday night, could buy them nothing more than the absolute necessities of life, and, even so, must be spent with care; but it pleased her to think that she was managing on them and that not one penny went on frivolous things.

Abner himself kept back no more than a couple of shillings for tobacco every week. To drink was out of the question, and it now seemed to him fortunate that Mr Hind, in a fit of temper, should have warned him off the Pound House. He now spent most of his evenings at home sitting before the fire, with Gladys on his knee, and making catapults or other wooden weapons for Morgan with his knife. Even in so small a household as theirs there was plenty of rough work that a man could do, not only in the way of digging and dressing the garden and hewing wood for the fires, but actually in patching up the crumbled fabric of Wolfpits which, left to the mercies of rain and frost, would have fallen about their heads. The sudden intimacy with their neighbours into which George’s arrest had thrown them, continued, and the more Abner detached himself from the life of the cloggers and of his own mates, the more sufficient did this isolated communal life of Wolfpits become. It was the most peaceful and natural that he had ever lived, and he grew to love it for its regularity and calm.

The only force that tended to drag him out of this centripetal existence was Susie. Whatever her father might think of Abner, and however little he might come to the Pound House, she had no intention of giving up a man to whom she had taken such a passionate fancy. Of all those with whom she came in contact in Mainstone, Abner had pleased her best, being more completely her opposite than any of the others. His fairness, his strength, and a certain innocence in his composition, had made her choose him for her own, and even though he found the relation exacting and occasionally inconvenient, Abner was still under the spell of her physical attraction. Indeed there seemed to be no fear of this being exhausted, for their meetings were necessarily rarer and therefore more enthralling.

In the regularity of his new life at Wolfpits lurked the obvious disadvantage that Abner’s visits to Susie became conspicuous. Mary knew better than to question him on his movements—pride, as well as the tact which she had learned in her experience of George forbade her to do so—but when Abner returned late at night from these assignations she would look at him queerly, and a silence and restraint out of which she could not school herself, made it evident that she resented the mystery. He wished, indeed, that she would ask him where he had been, for then he would have been able to put her off with some deliberate lie which she could believe or reject as she pleased. Anything, he felt, was better than this uncomfortable chill, this shy curiosity of gaze, this silence. It was a condition of affairs that he could not stand and made him anxious, beyond all considerations of prudence, to blurt out his secret—if secret it were—and dissolve the grudging air of mystery with which she received him.

One night when he had come home late and could stand her silence no longer, he said suddenly:—

‘Where d’you reckon I’ve been to-night?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

He laughed, and she made a slight gesture of annoyance.

‘I never met a woman yet who didn’t want to know where a man had been,’ he said.