The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

After that day she never uttered one complaint, though the tale of her sufferings increased beyond the bounds of endurance. To their hardships she turned a front of steel, but to Abner himself she was as tender as she dared to be. The consciousness of this discipline sustained her. She was a new woman, worn and anxious but invincibly cheerful; and Abner himself took heart from her courage.

Winter fell upon them. The snow-bound ramparts of the hills came nearer to them, encircling the valley with a clear-cut beauty. The colours of life faded from the land, and every farm was like a fortress of stone, close-barred against the assaults of rain and icy wind. The fields lay cold and dead; the sap sank downward from every frozen branch. There was no colour in all the land but a brilliant mockery of red berries on brier and holly and thorn. ‘There’s a tarrable lot of berry this year,’ said old Drew. ‘I reckon we’m in for a hard winter again.’

And so the remotest possibility of finding work on the farms drifted away from Abner. The few labourers who moved about the fields, the solitary teams at plough, seemed glued to the frozen surface of the land, stirring sadly as in a dream. In spite of the kindness of their neighbours, so delicately shown in the gifts of roots and bundles of wood that old Drew carried home on his bent shoulders, the family at Wolfpits felt the pinch of cold and want. Mary, true to her resolution, uttered no word of complaint, but her face told Abner what she was suffering so plainly that he could not bear to look at her. One night he left her and spent the evening with old Drew in his bedroom, drinking the labourer’s home-made poison till his brain was fuddled and his limbs, for the first time, were warm. Mary heard him stumbling up the stairs at night, but when they met next morning she did not reproach him.

Her little store of money was nearly gone. One day, racking her brains for some new expedient to stave off the inevitable end, she remembered Mrs Malpas’s visit and the story of the fifty pounds which George had stolen from the Buffalo on the eve of his imprisonment. She wondered, desperately, if the old woman was right, and he had hidden it in some corner of the house. She began to search, with the fierce enthusiasm of a seeker after treasure. She spent all her energy in turning the bedroom and kitchen inside out; she looked into the chimneys, for she had heard that money was sometimes hidden in such places. By the end of the day she was utterly exhausted but had found nothing. ‘At any rate,’ she thought, ‘the place looks tidier.’ A poor consolation!

That night it occurred to her that if only she could get as far as Shrewsbury she might pawn some of her wedding presents, particularly a set of plated tea-things which her father, lavish in the expenditure of other people’s money, had given her. They made a clumsy parcel, difficult to conceal, and in order to spend as little as possible on the railway fare she decided to walk over the hills towards Clun and catch a train on the branch railway. She left the children in Mrs Mamble’s care, and slipped away without letting Abner know that she had gone. In Shrewsbury a sad discouragement awaited her. The man in the pawnshop sniffed at her property. ‘This kind of thing’s gone out of fashion,’ he said. ‘If you’d brought it here five year ago I might have done better for you. Twenty-five shillings’s all it’s worth.’ The sacrifice hurt her, but she accepted his figure. The fare home to Llandwlas left her with a guinea in hand, and on that money they existed for more than two weeks. She only prayed that Abner would not notice the blank in the cupboard from which she had taken the silver, but she need not have been frightened, for Abner had no eye for things of that kind. One imprudence, however, nearly betrayed her. On the way to the station at Shrewsbury she had seen a box of oranges newly imported for Christmas and had not been able to resist the temptation of buying two for the children. Next day Abner saw them on the table.

‘Oranges?’ he said, his eyes shocked by her extravagance.

She lied quickly.

‘Yes, Mrs Hendrie met me on the road and gave me them for Morgan and Gladys.’

Afterward, in the curiously sensitive state of her conscience, this lie troubled her. He himself was so open with her that she felt it almost a duty to tell him the truth. She brooded over the question for several days, but in the end it sank into insignificance before the fact that they had no money left. Looking at her empty purse she felt that she could face the situation no longer. She dared not ask for credit in any shop in Mainstone, for she suspected that all the shop-people must be aware of her plight. Greatly daring, she made an expedition to Lesswardine and entered a grocer’s with whom she had not dealt since the days before her marriage. The man had been a friend of her father’s. Perhaps that would count for something.

It was Saturday night, and the shop was buzzing with people. The grocer, flurried with work, scarcely nodded to her, and she was nearly leaving the shop in fright when a new assistant whom she did not know asked her what he could serve her with. Fortunately, she had dressed herself with care and looked respectable. She ordered blindly, lavishly, and the smart young man dumped her purchases on the counter with a flourish and dashed off the bill with a pencil that he carried behind his ear in a hieroglyphic of his own.