On, on, faster still, sobs choking her, tears blinding her. “I wanted so much to live and die here. God must have known it, and what difference could it make to him?”
“Don’t ye! Don’t ye, Tom! Ye’ve no right. Ye mustn’t, for God’s sake.” The words, in a woman’s shrill voice, as of one weak with fasting or illness, yet strong for the instant with the strength of a great fear or pain, broke in upon Jane’s passion, and, coming to herself, she found that she was close to the Haunted House. Fear was unknown to her; in an instant she stood within the room.
Evidently some tramp, poorer than the poorest, had sought shelter—little better than none, alas!—in the wretched place. A haggard woman was crouching on a pile of sea-weed and drift-wood, holding tightly to something hidden in the ragged clothing huddled about her, striving to keep it—whatever it might be—from the grasp of a desperate, half-starved man who bent over her.
“Gie it to me,” he cried. “I tell ye, Poll, I’ll have it, that I wull, for all ye. And I’ll trample it, and I’ll burn it, that I wull. No more carrying o’ crucifixes for we, and I knows on’t. Gie us bread and butter, say I, and milk for the babby there.”
“Nay, nay, Tom,” the woman pleaded. “It’s Christmas Eve. He’ll send us summat the night, sure. Wait one night, Tom.”
“Christmas! What’s him to we? Wait! Wait till ye starve and freeze to death, lass; but I’ll not do’t. There’s no God nowhere, and no Christmas—it’s all a sham—and there sha’n’t be no crucifixes neither where I bes. Ha! I’s got him now, and I’ll have my own way, lass.”
“Stop, man!” Jane stood close beside him, with flashing eyes and her proud and fearless face. “Give me the crucifix,” she said.
But she met eyes as fearless as her own, which scanned her from head to foot. “And who be you?” he asked.
“Jane Moore,” she answered, with the ring that was always in her voice when she named her father’s honored name.
“And what’s that to me?” the man exclaimed. “Take’s more’n names to save this.” And he shook the crucifix defiantly.