“Curse the child!” said one, staring at it. “I think it’s bewitched!”
“See if it will eat,” said another. “Bewitched children never eat.”
Some bread was fetched and milk put to it—though Bess set nothing by such notions—and, “You eat that, do you hear!” the girl said. “Or we’ll give you to that old man there,” pointing with an undutiful finger to the squalid figure of the old miser. “And he’ll take you to his bogey-hole!”
The child shook pitifully, and the fear in its eyes deepened as it regarded the loathsome old man. With a sigh that seemed to rend the little heart, it took the iron spoon, and strove to swallow. The spoon tinkled violently against the bowl.
“I’ll manage him,” Bess said with a look of triumph. “You will see, I’ll have him so in two days that he’ll not dare to say who he is, if they do find him! You leave him to me, and I’ll sort the little imp!”
Perhaps the child knew that he had fallen among his father’s enemies. Perhaps he knew only that in a second his world was overset and he cast on the mercy of the ogres he saw about him. As he looked fearfully round the gloomy, fire-lit room with its lights and black shadows, a single large tear rolled from each eye and fell into the coarse earthen-ware bowl. And for an instant he seemed about to choke. Then he went on eating.
CHAPTER XX
PROOF POSITIVE
Anthony Clyne had made no moan, but, both in his pride and his better feelings, he had suffered more than the world thought through Henrietta’s elopement. He was not in love with the girl whom he had chosen for his second wife and the mother of his motherless child. But no man likes to be jilted. No man, even the man least in love, can bear with indifference or without mortification the slur which the woman’s desertion casts on him. At best there are invitations to be cancelled, and servants to be informed, and plans to be altered; the condolences of some and the smiles of others are to be faced. And many troubles and much bitterness. The very boy, the apple of his eye and the core of his heart, had to be told—something.
And Anthony Clyne was proud. No man in Lancashire set more by his birth and station, or had a stronger sense of his personal dignity; so that in doing all these things he suffered. He suffered much. Nor did it end with that. His own world knew him, and took care not to provoke him by a tactless word or an inquisitive question. But the operatives in his neighbourhood, who hated him and feared him, and thanked God for aught that hurt him, gibed him openly. Taunts and jests were flung after him in the streets of Manchester; and men whose sweethearts had been flung down or roughly used on the day of Peterloo inquired after his sweetheart as he passed before the mills.
But he made no sign. And no one dreamed that the suffering went farther than the man’s pride, or touched his heart. Yet it did. Not that he loved the girl; but because she was of his race, and because her own branch of the family cast her off, and because the man with whom she had fled could do nothing to protect her from the consequences of her folly. For these reasons—and a little because of a secret nobility in his own character—he suffered vicariously; he felt himself responsible for her. And the responsibility seemed more heavy after he had seen her; after he had borne away from Windermere the picture of the girl left pale and proud and lonely by the lake side.