"He's not an ill-natured man," said Anne. "You feel as though if he'd been brought up to have a respect for good behaviour he wouldn't have got loose so easily. He thinks he's doing a generous thing, and giving Jane a good time, without thinking what the result must be to her good character. He doesn't like to see people unhappy, as he calls unhappiness. He hasn't learnt the results of sin in his own experience, and won't look at them in others. He kept on telling me she'd got a servant of her own, and needn't do anything but fancy-work. They'd neither of them hear anything I could say. I can't understand how they came to know one another at the beginning. It seems to have come about without anyone's knowing till it was too late."
"He seems a joking sort of man," said Mary. "Once he came up to buy a paper, and gave me half a sovereign instead of sixpence to change, and when I told him he'd made a mistake he laughed a lot, and said he wanted to know if I could tell the difference. He never sees me now without speaking of it and laughing."
"Yes," said Anne; "he's fond of rough jokes of his own making, and thinks that giving people material things makes them happy," she continued in her bookish manner. "I remember just such another man as him, a boisterous sort of man, whose old father was dying, who took the old man out to look at a new grand-stand they were making. Poor old man! It was pitiful to see him in the presence of eternity, looking at a new grand-stand."
"I suppose, being as I am," said Mary, "there's a lot of temptations been spared to me."
"I wish we were all as kind and charitable as you," said Anne. "I never heard you say a hard thing of anybody all the years I've known you."
CHAPTER XII
Winter hastens his pace when the harvest is gathered, and it was one of those serene winter days on which, if one sat in a sheltered place full of sunshine, one might believe that the spring had begun; as if winter, secure in his domination of the frozen earth, could afford to relax his vigour and admit the approaches of the sun, like a playful child whom one could banish at will. A line of white clouds, with purple bases, were drawn about the horizon, standing like anger, as it were, within call. The sky on every side was of that deep transparency seen after many days of rain. The colours of the earth and grass were deepened and intense from the same cause. In many places in the fields, sheets of water showed above the grass, vivid as a wet rock just washed by the sea and colour hidden at other times glowed from the steeped ground. Villages and houses showed from a great distance as if some obscuring medium had been removed, and the remote country lay a deep band of indigo beneath the horizon, like a distant sea escaping under a light and infinite heaven.
Anne Hilton set off after the evening milking to visit a bed-ridden woman of her acquaintance who lived in a cottage in one of the numerous by-lanes intersecting the now bared fields. She was a woman who had lain many years in the kitchen, whose narrow, hot space was all she saw of the world. She was not a cheerful invalid, but peevish and querulous. The irritation with which she always lived, waking from sleep to be at once aware of it, and to know no pause during her waking hours, had worn away a temperament which might almost have been gay. At very rare intervals Anne had heard her laugh, and the laugh had such a note of gaiety in it that she surmised the nature that had been, as it were, knawed thin by this never-sleeping worm. It was pity for something imprisoned and smothered which made Anne a steadfast friend to the unhappy woman, whose other friends had long tired of her incessant complaints and down-cast mind.
Elizabeth Richardson had never any hesitation in expressing her opinions, and Anne had scarcely seated herself by the bed of the unfortunate woman, whose harrowed face told of the torment within, than she began to ask questions of the disgrace of Jane Evans, whom, she had heard, was to have a child to crown all. But contrary to Anne's expectations the bed-ridden woman was friendly to the girl. The habit of neglect and scarcely-veiled impatience with which she had for many years been treated, and of which she had been fully and silently aware, had produced in her tortured mind an exasperated rebellion against the opinions of her neighbours, who were unable to see anything beyond their own comfort. She knew that she had so much the worst of it; that even attending perfunctorily to another's human necessity was not so hard a task as to be there day after day in the company of a pain which never ceased, and beneath whose increasing shadow the world had slowly darkened.
"They're all afraid of the trouble to themselves about the girl," she said, with her bitter intonation. "They're afraid they'll be called on to do something for her sooner or later."