It was a plan little to the man’s taste; grievous to his pride. But for his son’s sake, for the innocent boy’s sake, he was willing to do even this. Moreover, with all his coldness, he had sufficient nobility to feel that he owed the girl the fullest amends in his power. He had laid hands on her. He had treated her—no matter what the provocation—cruelly, improperly, in a manner degrading to her and disgraceful to himself. His face flushed as he recalled the scene and his violence. Now it was hers to triumph, hers to blame: nor his to withhold the opportunity.
“I will go,” he said, after a brief perturbed silence. “I am obliged to you for your advice. You think that there is a chance she will speak?”
“I do,” Sutton answered manfully. “I do.” And he said more to the same purpose.
But later, when the hot fit ebbed, he wondered at himself. What had come over him? Why had he, who had so little while his patron had so much, given up his ewe lamb, his one chance? Reason answered, because he had no chance and it was wise to make a virtue of necessity. But he knew that, a day or two before, he would have snapped his fingers at reason, he would have clung to his forlorn hope, he would have made for his own advantage by the nearest road. What then had changed him? What had caused him to set the girl’s happiness before his own, and whispered to him that there was only one way by which, smirched and discredited as she was, she whom he loved could reach her happiness? He did not answer the question, perhaps he did not know the answer. But wandering in the darkness by the lake-side, with the first snowflakes falling on his shoulders, he cried again and again, “God bless her! God bless her!” with tears running down his pale, insignificant face.
CHAPTER XXV
PRISON EXPERIENCES
When Henrietta rose on the second morning of her imprisonment, and opened her door and looked out, she met with an unpleasant surprise. Snow had fallen in the night, and lay almost an inch deep in the yard. The sheet of dazzling white cast the dingy spiked wall and the mean cell-doors into grey relief. But it was not this contrast, nor the memory of childish winters with their pleasures—though that memory took her by the throat and promised to choke her—that filled her with immediate dismay. It was the difficulty of performing the prison duties, of going beyond her door, and refilling her water-pitcher at the pump. To cross the yard in sandaled shoes—such as she and the girls of that day wore—was to spoil her shoes and wet her feet. Yet she could not live without water; the more as she had an instinctive fear of losing, under the pressure of hardship, those refinements in which she had been bred. At length she was about to venture out at no matter what cost, when the door of the yard opened, and the jailor’s wife came stumbling through the snow on a pair of pattens. She carried a second pair in her hand, and she seemed to be in anything but a pleasant humour.
“Here’s a mess!” she said, throwing down the pattens and looking about her with disgust. “By rights, you should set to work to clear this away, before it’s running all of a thaw into your room. But I dare say it will wait till midday—it don’t get much sun here—and my good man will come and do it. Anyways, there are some pattens, so that you can get about—there’s as good as you have gone on pattens before now! Ay, and mopped the floor in them! And by-and-by my girl will bring you some fire ’gainst you’re ready for your breakfast.”
“I’m ready whenever the breakfast is ready,” Henrietta answered, as cheerfully as she could. She was shivering with cold.
“Ah, well, ah, well, my lass!” the woman answered snappishly, “there’s worse troubles in the world than waiting for your breakfast. For the Lord’s sake, don’t you get complaining.”
“I wasn’t complaining, indeed!” Henrietta said.