“Sure, sir, the curate knows her.”
“Well, I’ll find the rent,” Basset said, addressing the constable, “if you’ll let her be. I’ll see the overseer about her in the morning.”
“So long as she don’t come on the rates, sir?”
“She’ll not come on the rates for six months,” Basset said. “I’ll be answerable for so much.”
The men had little stomach for their task, and with a good excuse they were willing enough to desist. A woman fetched a stub of a pen and a drop of ink and Basset wrote a word for their satisfaction. While he did so, “O’d Staffordshire! O’d Staffordshire!” a man explained in the background. “Bassets of Blore—they be come from an Abbey and come to a Grange, as the saying is. You never heard of the Bassets of Blore, you be neither from Mixen nor Moor!” In old Stafford talk the rich lands of Cheshire stood for the “mixen” as against the bare heaths of the home county.
In five minutes the business was done, the woman freed, and Basset was trudging away through the gathering darkness. But the incident had done him good. It had lightened his heart. It had changed ever so little the direction of his thoughts. Out of his own trouble he had stretched a hand to another; and although he knew that it was not by stray acts such as this that he could lift himself to Mary’s standard, though the battle over the new Poor Law had taught him, and many others, that charity may be the greatest of evils, what he had done seemed to bring him nearer to her. A hardship of the poor, which he might have seen with blind eyes, or viewed from afar as the inevitable result of the stay of outdoor relief, had come home to him. As he plodded across the moor he carried with him a picture of the old woman with her gray hair falling about her wrinkled face, and her hands clasped in hopeless resignation. And he felt that his was not the only trouble in the world.
When he had passed the wall of Beaudelays Park, Basset struck—not far from the Gatehouse—into the road leading down to the Vale, and a couple of hours after dark he plodded into Riddsley. He made for the Audley Arms, a long straggling house on the main street, in one part of two stories, in another of three, with a big bay window at the end. Entering the yard by the archway he ordered a gig to go to the Gatehouse for his portmanteau. Then he turned into the inn, and scribbled a note to John Audley, stating that he was called away, and would explain matters when he wrote again. He sent it by the driver.
It was eight o’clock. “I am afraid, Squire,” the landlord said, “that there’s no fire upstairs. If you’d not mind our parlor for once, there’s no one there and it’s snug and warm.”
“I’ll do that, Musters,” he said. He was cold and famished and he was not sorry to avoid the company of his own thoughts. In the parlor, next door to the Snug, he might be alone or listen to the local gossip as he pleased.
Ten minutes later he sat in front of a good plain meal, and for the time the pangs of appetite overcame those of disappointment. About nine the landlord entered on some errand. “I suppose, sir,” he said, lingering to see that his guest had all that he wanted, “you’ve heard this about Mr. Mottisfont?”