“But, surely, we may still be friends?”
She looked him in the face. “We need not be enemies,” she answered. “And, perhaps, some day I may be able to think more kindly of you. If that day comes I will tell you. Good-bye.” She went out without touching his hand. She went down the stairs.
She drove through the dusky, dimly-lighted streets in a kind of dream, seeing all things through a pleasant haze. The bank was closed and to deliver up her papers she had to go into the bank-house. The glimpse she had of the cheerful parlor, of the manager’s wife, of his two children playing the Royal Game of Goose at a round table, enchanted her. Presently she was driving again through the darkling streets, passing the Maypole, passing the quaint, low-browed shops, lit only by an oil lamp or a couple of candles. The Audley Arms, the Packhorse, the Portcullis, were all alight and buzzing with the voices of those who fought their battles over again or laid bets on this candidate or that. What the speaker had said to Lawyer Stubbs and what Lawyer Stubbs had said to the speaker, what the “Duke” thought, who would have to pay for the damage, and the odds the stout farmer would give that wheat wouldn’t be forty shillings a quarter this day twelvemonth if the Repeal passed—scraps of these and the like poured from the doorways as she drove by.
All fell in delightfully with her mood and filled her with a sense of well-being. Even when the streets lay behind her, and the driver hunched his shoulders to meet the damp night-fog and the dreary stretch that lay beyond the canal-bridge, Mary found the darkness pleasant and the chill no more than bracing. For what were that night, that chill beside the numbing grip from which she had just—oh, thing miraculous!—escaped! Beside the fetters that had been lifted from her within the last hour! O foolish girl, O ineffable idiot, to have ever fancied that she loved that man!
No, for her it was a charming night! The owl that, far away towards the Great House, hooted dolefully above the woods—no nightingale had been more tuneful. Ben Bosham—she laughed, thinking of his plight—blessings on his bare, bald head and his ragged shoulders! The old horse plodding on, with the hill that mounts to the Gatehouse sadly on his mind—he should have oats, if oats there were in the Gatehouse stables! He should have oats in plenty, or what he would if oats failed!
“What do you give him when he’s tired?” she asked.
“Well,” the driver replied with diplomacy, “times a quart of ale, Miss. He’ll take it like a Christian.”
“Then a quart of ale he shall have to-night!” she said with a happy laugh. “And you shall have one, too, Simonds.”
Her mood held to the end, so that before she was out of her wraps, Mrs. Toft was aware of the change in her. “Why, Miss,” she said, “you look like another creature! It isn’t the bank, I’ll be bound, has put that color in your cheeks!”
“No!” Mary answered, “I’ve had an adventure, Mrs. Toft. And briefly she told the tale of Ben Bosham’s plight and of her gallant rescue. She began herself to see the comic side of it.