Next day she set out deliberately to meet Abner on the road. She called ‘Good-evening’ to him, but he, still smarting under the discomfort of Mary’s outburst, would not answer her. She followed him and took him by the arm.
‘Abner,’ she said. ‘Will you ever forgive me? I don’t like to think of the way we parted.’
‘I don’t bear you any ill-will,’ he said. ‘That’s all over and done with.’
‘I want you to think of me as a friend,’ she said. ‘Abner, if ever you’re in need of money . . . if you want money now . . . I wish you’d take it from me.’
He laughed. ‘I’m in work now,’ he said. ‘You’d best leave us alone. We don’t want your money.’ His resentment burst out afresh. ‘Nor you neither,’ he added.
She controlled herself. ‘Very well. That’s understood,’ she said, and left him without another word.
She walked home violently in the dusk, thinking of the desperate mess she had made of her life, wondering if she could ever bring herself to marry a man with sloping shoulders and a squeaky voice like Fred Maddy. What did it matter? What did anything matter?
Mr Williams had reckoned that the top fields would provide Abner with a fortnight’s work. He had merely given him the job to satisfy a passing whim of inflicting a pin-prick on Mrs Malpas, and had told him from the first that he could not continue to employ him when the work was done. Luckily for Abner at the end of the fortnight half the fields remained uncleared. Mr Williams recognised that he had worked well, and decided to keep him on, for perhaps another ten days. The expense was trivial, and the job worth doing. Christmas, his second Christmas at Wolfpits, intervened, but by the third of January Abner’s work at the Pentre was nearly finished.
The Twenty-Third Chapter
Once again the situation had to be faced. This time Abner was in no doubt as to what must be done. Those lonely days on the cold upland had given him time to think. He now realised that as far as finding work in the Lesswardine district went he was definitely beaten, and that every day that he spent at Wolfpits must make him more and more a drag upon the resources of the family. The obvious thing for him to do was to turn his early experiences at Mawne to account, to set off southward for the coal valleys and work as a miner underground. On the Welsh coalfield, wages ran high and he might be sure of earning enough to keep himself in comfort and to supply the Wolfpits household with a living that would seem luxurious after their long privations. In solitude this determination had been easily made, and the feeling that something definite was in view had made him happier and better pleased with himself; but when he left the Pentre and came to lay his plans before Mary, his course did not seem so clear or so free from complications.