"Clean!" said Patton, refilling his pipe. "Trust them!"
Meanwhile, inside this poor cottage Marcella was putting out all the powers of the soul. As the door closed behind her and the inspector, she saw Hurd sitting handcuffed in the middle of the kitchen, watched by a man whom Jenkins, the local policeman, had got in to help him, till some more police should arrive. Jenkins was now upstairs searching the bedroom. The little bronchitic boy sat on the fender, in front of the untidy fireless grate, shivering, his emaciated face like a yellowish white mask, his eyes fixed immovably on his father. Every now and then he was shaken with coughing, but still he looked—with the dumb devoted attention of some watching animal.
Hurd, too, was sitting silent. His eyes, which seemed wider open and more brilliant than usual, wandered restlessly from thing to thing about the room; his great earth-stained hands in their fetters twitched every now and then on his knee. Haggard and dirty as he was, there was a certain aloofness, a dignity even, about the misshapen figure which struck Marcella strangely. Both criminal and victim may have it—this dignity. It means that a man feels himself set apart from his kind.
Hurd started at sight of Marcella. "I want to speak to her," he said hoarsely, as the inspector approached him—"to that lady"—nodding towards her.
"Very well," said the inspector; "only it is my duty to warn you that anything you say now will be taken down and used as evidence at the inquest."
Marcella came near. As she stood in front of him, one trembling ungloved hand crossed over the other, the diamond in her engagement ring catching the light from the window sparkled brightly, diverting even for the moment the eyes of the little fellow against whom her skirts were brushing.
"Ee might ha' killed me just as well as I killed 'im," said Hurd, bending over to her and speaking with difficulty from the dryness of his mouth. "I didn't mean nothink o' what happened. He and Charlie came on us round Disley Wood. He didn't take no notice o' them. It was they as beat Charlie. But he came straight on at me—all in a fury—a blackguardin' ov me, with his stick up. I thought he was for beatin' my brains out, an' I up with my gun and fired. He was so close—that was how he got it all in the head. But ee might 'a' killed me just as well."
He paused, staring at her with a certain anguished intensity, as though he were watching to see how she took it—nay, trying its effect both on her and himself. He did not look afraid or cast down—nay, there was a curious buoyancy and steadiness about his manner for the moment which astonished her. She could almost have fancied that he was more alive, more of a man than she had ever seen him—mind and body better fused, more at command.
"Is there anything more you wish to say to me?" she asked him, after waiting.
Then suddenly his manner changed. Their eyes met. Hers, with all their subtle inheritance of various expression, their realised character, as it were, searched his, tried to understand them—those peasant eyes, so piercing to her strained sense in their animal urgency and shame. Why had he done this awful thing?—deceived her—wrecked his wife?—that was what her look asked. It seemed to her too childish—too stupid to be believed.