In the kitchen Essy Gale sat by the dying fire and waited for the stroke of ten. And as she waited she stitched at the torn breeches of her little son.
Essy had come back to the house where she had been turned away. For her mother was wanted by Mrs. Greatorex at Upthorne and what Mrs. Greatorex wanted she got. There were two more children now at the Farm and work enough for three women in the house. And Essy, with all her pride, had not been too proud to come back. She had no feeling but pity for the old man, her master, who had bullied her and put her to shame. If it pleased God to afflict him that was God's affair, and, even as a devout Wesleyan, Essy considered that God had about done enough.
As Essy sat and stitched, she smiled, thinking of Greatorex's son who lay in her bed in the little room over the kitchen. Miss Gwenda let her have him with her on the nights when Mrs. Gale slept up at the Farm.
It was quiet in the Vicarage kitchen. The door into the back yard was shut, the door that Essy used to keep open when she listened for a footstep and a whisper. That door had betrayed her many a time when the wind slammed it to.
Essy's heart was quiet as the heart of her sleeping child. She had forgotten how madly it had leaped to her lover's footsteps, how it had staggered at the slamming of the door. She had forgotten the tears that she had shed when Alice's wild music had rocked the house, and what the Vicar had said to her that night when she spilled the glass of water in the study.
But she remembered that Gwenda had given her son his first little
Sunday suit; and that, before Jimmy came, when Essy was in bed, crying
with the face-ache, she had knocked at her door and said, "What is it,
Essy? Can I do anything for you?" She could hear her saying it now.
Essy's memory was like that.
She had thought of Gwenda just then because she heard the sound of Dr.
Rowcliffe's motor car tearing up the Dale.
* * * * *
The woman in the other room heard it too. She had heard its horn hooting on the moor road nearly a mile away.