“If he help Davy; ay, if he help Davy! Nay, I cannot go to the graveyard, Faith. Take me home,” he said with emotion.
His hand remained in hers. She had conquered. She was set upon a new path of influence. Her hand was upon the door of his heart.
“Thee is good to me, Faith,” he said, as they entered the door of the Red Mansion.
She glanced over towards the Cloistered House. Smoke was coming from the little chimney of the laboratory.
CHAPTER XVII. THE WOMAN OF THE CROSS-ROADS
The night came down slowly. There was no moon, the stars were few, but a mellow warmth was in the air. At the window of her little sitting-room up-stairs Faith sat looking out into the stillness. Beneath was the garden with its profusion of flowers and fruit; away to the left was the common; and beyond-far beyond—was a glow in the sky, a suffused light, of a delicate orange, merging away into a grey-blueness, deepening into a darker blue; and then a purple depth, palpable and heavy with a comforting silence.
There was something alluring and suggestive in the soft, smothered radiance. It had all the glamour of some distant place of pleasure and quiet joy, of happiness and ethereal being. It was, in fact, the far-off mirror of the flaming furnace of the great Heddington factories. The light of the sky above was a soft radiance, as of a happy Arcadian land; the fire of the toil beneath was the output of human striving, an intricate interweaving of vital forces which, like some Titanic machine, wrought out in pain—a vast destiny.
As Faith looked, she thought of the thousands beneath struggling and striving, none with all desires satisfied, some in an agony of want and penury, all straining for the elusive Enough; like Sisyphus ever rolling the rock of labour up a hill too steep for them.
Her mind flew to the man Kimber and his task of organising labour for its own advance. What a life-work for a man! Here might David have spent his days, here among his own countrymen, instead of in that far-off land where all the forces of centuries were fighting against him. Here the forces would have been fighting for him; the trend was towards the elevation of the standards of living and the wider rights of labour, to the amelioration of hard conditions of life among the poor. David’s mind, with its equity, its balance, and its fire—what might it not have accomplished in shepherding such a cause, guiding its activity?