His countenance fell sadly. But he got the water, exclaiming when he saw the wound.
He bathed it clumsily, then tied a bit of rag round it, and made her head easy with the pillow. She did not speak, and he sat on beside her, looking at her pale face, and torn, as the silent minutes passed, between conflicting impulses. He had just passed an hour listening to a good man's plain narrative of a life spent for Christ, amid fever-swamps, and human beings more deadly still. The vicar's friend was a missionary bishop, and a High Churchman; Isaac, as a staunch Dissenter by conviction and inheritance, thought ill both of bishops and Ritualists. Nevertheless, he had been touched; he had been fired. Deep, though often perplexed, instincts in his own heart had responded to the spiritual passion of the speaker. The religious atmosphere had stolen about him, melting and subduing.
And the first effect of it had been to quicken suddenly his domestic conscience; to make him think painfully of Bessie and the children as he climbed the hill. Was his wife going the way of his son? And he, sitting day after day like a dumb dog, instead of striving with her!
He made up his mind hurriedly. "Bessie," he said, stooping to her and speaking in a strange voice, "Bessie, had yer been to Dawson's?"
Dawson was the landlord of the Spotted Deer.
Bessie was long in answering. At last she said, almost inaudibly—
"Yes."
She fully understood what he had meant by the question, and she wondered whether he would fall into one of his rages and beat her.
Instead, his hand sought clumsily for hers.
"Bessie, yer shouldn't; yer mustn't do it no more; it'll make a bad woman of yer. I know as I'm not good to live with; I don't make things pleasant to yer; but I've been thinkin'; I'll try if yo'll try."