‘I promise you I’ll keep an eye on you,’ Johnson cried after him, and the stranger sent back a volley of curses fortunately too hoarse to be very articulate.
Mrs. Sandford crossed the road again just at that moment, and she heard better than the observers far off. A look of horror came over her face.
‘Oh! my good man,’ she cried, lifting up her hand, ‘I am sure you don’t wish all those horrible things. What good can it do you to swear!’
The man looked at her for a moment. Her little dainty figure, her careful dress, her spotless looks made such a contrast to this big ruffian, all disordered, squalid, and foul, with every appearance of having lain among the straw all night, and the traces of last night’s debauch still hanging about him, as no words could express. He stood a moment taken aback by her address; probably he would have shrunk even from appealing to the charity of a being so entirely different and out of his sphere; but to have her stop there and speak to him took away his breath. His hand stole up to his cap involuntarily.
‘It do a man a deal of good, lady,’ he said; ‘it relieves your mind; but I didn’t ought to,’ he added, beginning to calculate, ‘I know.’
‘You should not, indeed,’ she said; and then added, ‘You seem a stranger. Are you looking for work? or have you any friends about here?’
The postman, the woman at the shop, and everybody within sight admired and wondered to see Mrs. Sandford talking to ‘the man.’ This was the name he had already acquired in Edgeley. They wondered if she could know that he was a man out of prison. But she was known to be very kind.
‘I shouldn’t wonder if that was just why she’s doing of it, because nobody else would touch him with a pair of tongs,’ an acute person said.
He seemed, it must be added, much surprised himself; but he was a man who had been used to prison chaplains and other charitable persons, and he thought he knew how to get over every authority of the kind.
‘Lady,’ he said, ‘that’s just what I want. It’s work, to earn an honest living; but, ’cause I’m a poor fellow as has been in trouble, nobody won’t have me or hear speak of me; but to have been in trouble oncet, that’s not to say ye don’t want to do no better. It’s only when ye gets there as ye know how bad it is.’