When, a few minutes later, she came up the lane, she was flatly conscious of having done a virtuous thing—several virtuous things—that afternoon, but certainly without any pleasure in them. She did not get on with Mary, nor Mary with her. The tragic absorption of the mother—little abated since the spring—in her dead boy seemed somehow to strike Letty dumb. She felt pity, but yet the whole emotion was beyond her, and she shrank from it. As for Mary, she had so far received Lady Tressady's visits with a kind of dull surprise, always repeated and not flattering. Letty believed that, in her inmost heart, the broken woman was offended each time that it was not George who came. Moreover, though she never said a word of it to Tressady's wife, she was known to be passionately on the side of the strikers, and her manner gave the impression that she did not want to be talking with their oppressors. Perhaps it was this feeling that had reconciled her to the loutish lad who lived with her, and had been twice "run in" by the police for stone-throwing at non-union men since the beginning of the strike. At any rate, she took a great deal more notice of him than she had done.
No—they were not very satisfactory, these attempts of Letty's in the village. She thought of them with a kind of inner exasperation as she walked home. She had been going to a few old and sick people, and trying to ignore the strike. But at bottom she felt an angry resentment towards these loafing, troublesome fellows, who filled the village street when they ought to have been down in the pits—who were starving their own children no less than disturbing and curtailing the incomes of their betters. Did they suppose that people were going to run pits for them for nothing? Their drink and their religion seemed to her equally hideous. She hated the two Dissenting ministers of the place only less than Valentine Burrows himself, and delighted to pass their wives with her head high in air.
With these general feelings towards the population in her mind, why these efforts at consolation and almsgiving? Well, the poor old people were not responsible; but she did not see that any good had come of it. She had said nothing about her visits to George, nor did-she suppose that he had noticed them. He had been so incessantly busy since their arrival with conferences and committees that she had seen very little of him. It was generally believed that the strike was nearing its end, and that the men were exhausted; but she did not think that George was very hopeful yet.
Presently, as she neared a dark slope of road, bordered with trees on one side and the high "bank" of the main pit on the other, her thoughts turned back to their natural and abiding subject—herself. Oh, the dulness of life at Ferth during the last three weeks! She thought of her amusements in town, of the country houses where they might now be staying but for George's pride, of Cathedine, even; and a rush of revolt and self-pity filled her mind. George always away, nothing to do in the ugly house, and Lady Tressady coming directly—she said to herself, suffocating, her small hands stiffening, that she felt fit to kill herself.
Half-way down the slope she heard steps behind her in the gathering darkness, and at the same moment something struck her violently on the shoulder. She cried out, and clutched at some wooden railings along the road for support, as the lump of "dirt" from the bank which had been flung at her dropped beside her.
"Letty, is that you?" shouted a voice from the direction of the village—her husband's voice. She heard running. In a few seconds George had reached her and was holding her.
"What is it struck you? I see! Cowards! damned cowards! Has it broken your arm? Try and move it."
Sick with pain she tried to obey him. "No," she said faintly; "it is not broken—I think not."
"Good!" he cried, rejoicing; "probably only a bad bruise. The brute mercifully picked up nothing very hard"—and he pushed the lump with his foot. "Take my scarf, dear; let me sling it. Ah!—what was that? Letty! can you be brave—can you let me go one minute? I sha'n't be out of your sight."
And he pointed excitedly to a dark spot moving among the bushes along the lower edge of the "bank."