The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

‘It’s a job I’m cut out for. I like company. I could double your business in a month.’

‘And drink yourself dead in six,’ she said.

‘You’ve never seen me drunk, mother.’

‘But I know you, my son!’

‘I’m dead sick of this country,’ he said. ‘Town’s the place for me. If I could get away out of this and make a fresh start. Damn me if I won’t do it.’

‘Hush, George!’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard your father use a word like that in his life.’

But the thing that she was really frightened of was that he should go. He was the only thing left to her, and if he went all light would have gone from her life. She controlled her tears and took him into the little bedroom where, in an oak chest, she kept her savings. She gave him money, and he left her, contented, kissing her with an affection that was mingled faintly with pity. When she held him in her arms all her tense anxiety for a moment disappeared. She could only think of him as the son of her body in whose happiness and physical welfare she delighted. It seemed to her that she could now only purchase these precious moments with money, but for a little while she could forget this in the joy that he gave her.

Time after time he begged her to let him take on the business, but she always refused him, sheltering herself, as her habit now was, behind the negligible personality of her husband. It would have shocked her beyond words if George had pointed out to her that his father didn’t count, and that her consideration for him was a pretence; but George knew better than to vex her in this way, for the key of the chest upstairs was kept in her pocket. What is more, even though their two wills were always in conflict, he loved his mother. She meant a great deal more to him than Mary had ever done except in the first blindness of his passion, and for this reason, no less than for the other, he was tolerant.

‘Don’t you take no notice of mother,’ he told Abner as they walked along together. ‘She’s got a funny way with her, but she’s all right at the bottom. There’s not many women could have done what she has. The only bad turn she ever done me was when she got me threw over the pulpit.’

It was the third time in their walk that George had spoken grudgingly of his wife, but this did not strike Abner as strange, for it was exactly the attitude not only of his father but of most of the men with whom he had worked at Mawne. He grunted sympathetically in answer to George’s complaints, and all the time, as Malpas eagerly expounded his own aspirations towards freedom and adventure, they were climbing gradually, passing by many gyrations of a narrow road into the curve of the hills in which Wolfpits lay.