The Captives

by Hugh Walpole

"Mustn't let anything excite him, Mrs. Warlock," he said.

There came then gradually over the old house and the village the belief that Martin was "fey." Mrs. Bolitho was in most ways a sensible, level-headed, practical woman, but like many of the inhabitants of Glebeshire, she was deeply superstitious. It was not so very many years since old Jane Curtis had been ducked in the St. Dreot's pond for a witch, and even now, did a cow fall sick or the lambs die, the involuntary thought in the Glebeshire "pagan mind" was to look for the "evil eye." But Mrs. Bolitho herself had had a very recent example in her own family of "possession." There had been her old grandfather, living in the farm with them, as hale and hearty a human of sixty-five years as you'd be likely to find in a day's march through Glebeshire. "He lost touch with them," as Mrs. Bolitho put it. In a night his colour failed him, his cheerful conversation left him, he could "do nought but sit and stare out o' window." A month later he died.

Martin had not been long at Borhedden before she came to her conclusions about him, told them to her James, and found that his slow but sure brains had come to the same decision. In the sense of the tragedy overhanging the poor young man she forgot to consider the possible impropriety of his relations with Maggie. He was removed at once from human laws and human judgment. He became "a creature of God" and was surrounded with something of the care and reverence with which the principal "softie" in the village was regarded.

It was not that Martin's behaviour was in any way odd. After a few days in the utter peace and quiet of the moor and farm he screamed no more at night. He was gentle and polite to every one, ate his meals, took little walks out on to the moor and into the village, but liked best to sit in front of the parlour window and look out on to the heath and grass, watching the shadows and the sunlight and the driving sheets of rain.

Mrs. Bolitho had a tender heart and Maggie shared in her superstitious pity. Looking back to her youth she had always thought Maggie a "wisht little thing." "Poor worm," what chance had she ever had with that great scandalous chap of a father? She saw her still in her shabby clothes trying to keep that dilapidated house together. No, what chance had she ever had? She was still a "wisht little thing."

Nor did it need very shrewd eyes to see how desperately devoted Maggie was to Martin. The sight of that touched the hearts of every human being in the farm. Not that Maggie was foolish; she did not hang about Martin all the time, she never, so far as Mrs. Bolitho could see, kissed him or fondled him, or was with him when he did not want her. She was not sentimental to him, not sighing nor groaning, nor pestering him to answer romantic questions. On the contrary, she was always cheerful, practical, and full of common sense, although she was sometimes forgetful, and was not so neat and tidy as Mrs. Bolitho would have wished. She always spoke as though Martin's recovery were quite certain, and Dr. Stephens told Mrs. Bolitho that he did not dare to speak the truth to her. "The chances against his recovery," Stephens said, "are about one in a hundred. He's been racketing about too long. Too much drink. But he's got something on his mind. That's really what's the matter with him."

Mrs. Bolitho was as naturally inquisitive as are most of her sex, and this knowledge that Martin was a doomed creature with a guilty conscience vastly excited her curiosity. What had the man done? What had been his relations with Maggie? Above all, did he really care for Maggie, or no? That was finally the question that was most eagerly discussed in the depths of the Bolitho bedchamber. James Bolitho maintained that he didn't care "that" for her; you could see plain enough, he asserted, when a man cared for a maid—there were signs, sure and certain, just as there were with cows and horses.

"You may know about cows and horses," said Mrs. Bolitho; "you're wrong about humans." The way that she put it was that Martin cared for Maggie but "couldn't get it out." "He doesn't want her to know it," she said.

"Why shouldn't he?" asked James.

"Now you're asking," said Mrs. Bolitho.