“What a dreadful place!” she exclaimed.
“Well, it is not beautiful,” Basset admitted. “One does not look for beauty in Birmingham and the Black Country.”
He got her some tea, and marshalled her carefully to the upper line. But his answer had jarred upon her, and when they were again seated, Mary kept her thoughts to herself. Beyond Birmingham their route skirted towns rather than passed through them, but she saw enough to deepen the impression which the lanes and alleys of that place had made upon her. The sun had set and the cold evening light revealed in all their meanness the rows of naked cottages, the heaps of slag and cinders, the starveling horses that stood with hanging heads on the dreary lands. As darkness fell, fires shone out here and there, and threw into Dantesque relief the dark forms of half-naked men toiling with fury to feed the flames. The change which an hour had made in all she saw seemed appalling to the girl; it filled her with awe and sadness. Here, so near the paradise of the country and the plough, was the Inferno of the town, the forge, the pit! Here, in place of the thatched cottage and the ruddy faces, were squalor and sunken cheeks and misery and dearth.
She thought of the question which Lord Audley had raised twenty-four hours before, and which he had told her was racking the minds of men—should food be taxed? And she fancied that there was, there could be, but one answer. These toiling masses, these slaves of the hammer and the pick, must be fed, and, surely, so fed that a margin, however small, however meagre, might be saved out of which to better their sordid lot.
“We call this the Black Country,” Basset explained, feeling the silence irksome. After all, she was in his charge, in a way she was his guest. He ought to amuse her.
“It is well named,” she answered. “Is there anything in England worse than this?”
“Well, round Hales Owen and Dudley,” he rejoined, “it may be worse. And at Cradley Heath it may be rougher. More women and children are employed in the pits; and where women make chains—well, it’s pretty bad.”
She had spoken dryly to hide her feelings. He replied in a tone as matter-of-fact, through lack of feeling. For this he was not so much to blame as she fancied, for that which horrified her was to him an everyday matter, one of the facts of life with which he had been familiar from boyhood. But she did not understand this. She judged him and condemned him. She did not speak again.
By and by, “We shall be at Penkridge in twenty minutes,” he said. “After that a nine-miles drive will take us to the Gatehouse, and your journey will be over. But I fear that you will find the life quiet after Paris.”
“I was very quiet in Paris.”