‘Next time you’d better go farther off than Redlake,’ she spluttered. ‘You dirty, rotten swine!’
It was lucky for her that she wrenched herself away from him, for Abner’s blood was in his head. She went running like a madwoman over the ghostly field. If she had stayed he could have murdered her. Slowly following, he came to himself, and wondered what the devil he was doing in that damp field in the middle of the night. He cursed all women as he saw them in her violent image, but when he set his feet on the high road, his anger had subsided and he began to realise how blind he had been. He knew that Susie had probably spoken no less than the truth about the local scandals. Looking backward he found that he could explain the smiles and winks and sidelong glances of his mates. Fine friends they were, who made sport of a man and never told him why! And it dawned on him, still stupidly incredulous, that this trouble and nothing else was the cause of the change in Mary’s behaviour, the thing that had snatched her so violently away from him. No doubt it had come to her ears through Mrs Mamble. All women were spiteful by nature, and could not resist the pleasant temptation of giving pain to others of their kind. They had let her know in some covert way what folk were saying, and she, too proud to confide in him, was protecting herself as best she could. He knew her pride . . . he wished to God she were not so proud, and yet, since that was her nature, he must be patient with her.
He was not built for patience. Walking home to Wolfpits with the high road beneath him, and the mild humming of telegraph wires that stretched away to the ends of the earth above, he felt once more the restlessness with which his spirit was so familiar: the desire that had come over him in fierce gusts from time to time ever since the days of his childhood, the will to be free, to cut all coils and launch out into the life to which he had a right. Ever since his boyhood he had been as much a prisoner as George Malpas, and for even less reason. Breaking free from Mawne and reaching out over these hills, he had merely passed from one prison to another. The only periods of freedom he had known had been those dimly-remembered days with his father before Alice came to Hackett’s Cottages, and the week of his travels on the road with Mick Connor. Always, somehow or other, a woman had been at the bottom of his slavery. Women were the curse of his existence. It pleased him fiercely to think that in his breach with Susie he had shorn through one of these shackles. He hated women, and yet, in his heart, he could not remember Mary without tenderness, and knew that, however loudly he might protest, he was going back along the road to Wolfpits of his own free will, and whatever it might cost him, must stay there until George Malpas returned.
That night he was too late to see Mary; but next morning, when he arrived at the work, he tackled Munn on the subject of the Redlake scandal.
‘What do they say about me and Mrs Malpas, Joe?’ he asked.
Munn stammered. ‘Nowt as I know, Ab,’ he said.
‘Drop that, kid! Don’t you come that over me!’ he said. ‘Spit it out!’
‘Naught out of the way,’ Munn said at last. ‘They say as you and her is pretty thick.’
‘Oh, they do, do they?’ said Abner. ‘And what do you think about it, eh?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ said Munn doggedly.