“I shall come to you for a character!” Henrietta replied with a laugh.
And she came out quickly and joined Captain Clyne, who, waiting with his hand on the lock, had heard all. He saw that though she laughed there was a tear in her eye; and the mingling of gaiety and sensibility in her conduct and her words was not lost upon him. She seemed to be bent on putting him in the wrong; on proving to him that she was not the silly-pated child he had deemed her! Even the praise of this jailor’s wife, a coarse, cross-grained woman, sounded reproachfully in his ears. She was a better judge, it seemed, than he.
He put Henrietta into the chaise—the brisk, cold air of the winter morning was welcome to her; and they set off. Gnawed as he was by unhappy thoughts, wretchedly anxious as he was, he was silent for a time. He knew what he wanted, but he was ashamed to clutch at that advantage for the sake of which Sutton had resigned to him the mission. And for a long time he sat mute and brooding in his corner, the bright reflection of the snow adding pallor to his face. Yet he had eyes for her: he watched her without knowing it. And at the third milestone from Kendal, a little beyond Barnside, he saw her shiver.
“I am afraid you are cold?” he said, and wondering at the rôle he played, he drew the wraps closer about her—with care, however, that his fingers should not touch her.
“No,” she answered frankly. “I am not cold. But I remember passing that mile-stone. I was almost sick with fright when I passed it. So that it was all I could do not to try to get out and escape.”
This was a revelation to him; and not a pleasant one. He winced.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I am very sorry.”
“Oh, I felt better when I was once in the prison,” she answered lightly. “And with Mrs. Weighton. Before that I was afraid that there might be only men.”
He suffered, in the hearing, something of the humiliation which she had undergone; was she not of his blood and his class—and a woman? But he could only say again that he was sorry. He was sorry.
A little later he forgot her in his own trouble: in thoughts of his child, thoughts which tortured him unceasingly, and became more active as his return to the Low Wood suggested the possibility of news. At one moment he saw the lad stretched on a pallet, ill and neglected, with no eye to pity, no hand to soothe; at another he pictured him in some dark hiding-place with fear for his sole companion. Or again he saw him beaten and ill-treated, shrieking for the father who had been always to him as heaven, omniscient and omnipotent—but shrieking in vain. And then the thought that to one so weak and young a little added hardship, another day of fear, an insignificant delay, might prove fatal—it was this thought that wrung the heart most powerfully, and went far towards maddening the man.