“Ah,” he said, “that’s good. If he had known, I believe I must have taken measures to defeat justice. I should have done all in my power to have spirited him away before the trial, and I believe I should have contrived it. I feel quite keenly enough about the matter to have done that.” Which was, to Phoebe, confirmation of her belief in his omnipotence. “But, as it is,” he went on, “as it is, thank God, the law can take its course.” He was back in his chair now, looking at her with a relief that was almost a smile, if tigerish. She, he was thinking, might still speak to his discomfiture if she were put in the box at the trial, but he would see that she was not called. There was no need to call her to establish John’s absence from home that night, when he had been caught red-handed. They could do without Phoebe, and he would take care they should.
“Can take its course,” she repeated, bewildered. What had Reuben meant if not, incredibly, that had she told John of her “shame,” he would have been saved now, but that, as it was, John must—“But it cannot tak’ its course, John is your son. Your son. Reuben, he’s your son. You cannot hang your son.”
“He killed my wife.”
“But you haven’t understood. They haven’t told you. John was not himself. He—”
“Drunk?”
“No, no. Oh, Reuben. He was crazed with grief on account of his wife. Don’t they tell you when the likes of that chances in the factory? Annie Bradshaw, that was John’s wife and your daughter-in-law—she bore a child on the floor in there and died. You must have heard of it.”
Reuben nodded. “These women,” he said, “are always cutting it too fine.” His gesture disclaimed responsibility for the reckless greed of women.
“Yes,” she said, brazenly agreeing with his monstrous imputation, “but John loved Annie and he’s been in a frenzy since she died and in his mazed brain we can see how it seemed to him. We can, can’t we, Reuben? She died in the factory and it looked to him that the factory had killed her. And then he must have got a gun. I don’t know how, but we can see the crazy lad with a gun in his hands and the wild thought in his mind that the factory killed Annie. It’s your factory, it’s Hepple-stall’s, and it ‘ud seem to him that Hepplestall killed. Annie, so he took his gun and came to your house and tried to kill you. A daft lad and a senseless deed and an awful, awful end to it, but we can read the frantic thoughts in his grief-struck brain, we can understand them, Reuben—you and I.” She sought to draw him into partnership with her, to make him share in the plea which she addressed to him.
But “He killed my wife,” Reuben said again.
She had a momentary vision of Reuben and Phoebe twenty years ago riding home to Bradshaw’s on the afternoon when they had met Dorothy in the road, and Dorothy had cut him. She had talked then, she had chattered, she had striven to be gay and her talk had rebounded, like a ball off a wall, from the stony taciturnity of his abstraction and that night, that very night.... It had been Dorothy then, and it was Dorothy now. “He killed my wife.”