“If she believes so ill of me, she may,” he used to say to himself. “A woman who can love like that is not worth a second thought from any man.”
He used to say that often, and tell himself that he could never tire. He could live it all down, and that some day he would enjoy a keen revenge on those who had doubted him. He was happy enough, he said, and the fools might think what they liked so long as they did not molest him.
The little mob of Danmouth had gone near this though once, when, soon after the news was spread, they found that no steps were taken to bring the crime home to the murderer. For Trevithick, though terribly exercised in spirit about that missing sum of money, felt himself bound to agree with the Doctor that no steps could be taken, and consequently Gartram was left in peace beneath the handsome granite obelisk cut from his own quarry.
So the wrath of those who would have liked to take the law in their own hands cooled down, and their enmity found its vent in scowls and avoidance, at which Chris laughed scornfully, or resented with looks as fierce in public; but there was a hard set of lines growing more marked about the corners of his mouth and his eyes, and there were times when he broke down in secret far up the glen, and told himself that life was not worth living. He would be better dead.
Claude went to recover her strength in the south of France, and Sarah Woodham was left in charge of the house, about which Reuben Brime sighed as he mowed the grass, and groaned as he drove in his spade; but Sarah did not heed, and he too used to think to himself that he might as well put out his pipe some night by taking a plunge off the end of the pier.
Glyddyr stayed on in the harbour till the day after Claude and Mary left, when the yacht glided slowly out, and Chris watched it till it disappeared beyond one of the headlands far away; and then the time seemed like years as he went on setting public opinion at defiance, wrestling with it still.
There were those in the place who would have met him on friendly terms, notably Asher; but Chris met all advances curtly, and went his way.
“They shall not tolerate me,” he said bitterly. “I will live in the full sunshine. Till I do, I can be content with the shade.”
There was one, though, whom he encountered from time to time when wandering listlessly whipping the streams, not very often, but on the rare occasions when she sought some solitary spot far away out on the rocky moorland to dream over the past.
The first time they met, Chris’s heart hounded, and his eyes flashed as he was about to speak.