“Doctor?” said Reuben. “It’s not a doctor that is needed now, it’s a hangman. Lock that in the cellar,” he said to the servants, dropping his sprawling burden on the floor, “and go for the constables.” Then, when they were gone, when he had silenced by one look their cries of horror and they had slunk out of the door as if they and not the senseless boy they carried were the murderers, “Leave me, Edward, leave me,” he said.
Edward stretched out his hand. There was sympathy in his gesture and there was, too, a claim to a share in the sorrow that had come to them. Dorothy was Edward’s mother.
“Go,” said Reuben fiercely; and Edward left him with his dead.
The beast had made his spring. Dorothy had not gone to the factory, and the factory had come to her.
CHAPTER XI—THE HATE OF THE HEPPLESTALLS
PHOEBE made all reasonable, and a few indulgent, allowances for the weaknesses of manflesh, but when she awoke to the knowledge that John had not been home all night, she was downright angry with him. A bereaved husband might accept the consolation offered by his friends on the day of his wife’s funeral, and might go on accepting it late into the night. She had left the door on the latch for him with the thought that it wasn’t like John to drown his sorrow, but men were men, even the best of them, and she had put a lot of housework behind her that day. He would have been constantly getting in her way with his clumsy efforts to help, and if he had found forgetfulness, no matter how, they had both of them come through the day very well.
But he had not come home at all; he had forgotten too thoroughly, and Phoebe intended to give him “the rough side of her tongue” the moment she came across him in the factory. It never occurred to her that he would not be in the factory. To be out all night was a departure from his custom, and on such a night a departure from decency, but to be absent from work was more than either of these; it was defiance of necessity, a treachery to her and to his children and she knew her John better than to suspect him of conduct like that. He might be grief-stricken and, after that (homeopathically), ale-stricken, but the law of nature was “Work or Clem,” and John would be at work.
He was not at work, and that was not the only thing to be remarked that morning. Nobody appeared to have a word for her, though there was an exceptional disposition to gossip. Even the overseers had caught the infection and formed gossiping groups to the detriment of discipline. She was too preoccupied at first to notice that she was their cynosure or to wonder what it meant, but she couldn’t for long be unconscious of their gaze.