She was not a woman given to recognising failure under any circumstances; where a man was concerned, never. Heber had touched her imagination—and she had more of it than is given to most women of her class—and her heart too. She would bring him to her yet, she promised herself. There was a power in her that hard work and a cramped life had not been able to destroy. The consciousness of femininity in a working woman, should it be alive when its necessary function of attracting a mate and securing a home is accomplished, seldom survives the birth of her first child. Susannah Moorhouse had neither mate nor child; but it is possible that, had she gone through the ordeal of acquiring both, that consciousness would have endured, damaged, perhaps, but living still. There were some large qualities in her and persistence was one of them, though its roots were in her settled belief in herself. She meant to employ every means to attain her desire. She sought no witch and brewed no potion, though superstition still lurked in the crevices of the country and one or two aged people professed themselves able to heal cattle and to deal with scalds, unrequited affection and other human difficulties, by the mild charms they practised.
But Susannah’s trust was in none of these; she knew herself to stand, by virtue of some indefinable quality, in a different relationship to men from that of the women about her. She would draw the man of her choice to her by that unnamed force which she knew herself to possess and which she had put forth so often in idleness. It was no wonder that her neighbours, shrewish spinsters and toiling mothers of families, had not a good word for her; the gulf between them was so great.
Though Heber’s engagement to Catherine was a staggering blow to her, its breaking came soon enough to give her courage again. Nay, there was a fatalism in her that had, perhaps, preserved her from superstition by taking superstition’s place; and it suggested to her mind, preoccupied as it was with one idea, that larger powers than her own were playing into her hands. When she heard that Charles Saunders was to marry the girl she had never seen, and was more than ever curious to see, she resolved to possess her soul in patience. She smiled, standing before the cheap square of looking-glass that hung on her wall. There were lines in the face before her to which she would fain have been blind, but there were other things too. And all comes to him who waits. She meant to wait—not passively, but intelligently. Then Black Heber had brought the girl he loved, and, with the miraculous blindness of manhood, had given her into the charge of the woman who loved him.
If Susannah’s views of life were more enterprising than those of her neighbours her education had not differed from theirs, so it was a laborious business to her to write a letter. She went through a good deal of mental exercise before she lost sight of it in the maw of the local postman’s bag.
“MISTER SAUNDERS, Sir,” she had begun:
“I take the liberty of writing these few lines. Mister Saunders you may spose Catherine Dennis is gone with Heber, but not she. He nows no more nor you where shes gone. She run from here for fere of him sir, if you look you will find her yet.
“No more from your welwisher,
“SUSANNAH MOORHOUSE.”
Whether or no she expected an answer to this letter, she hoped for one; and when some days passed and brought no sign from Charles, she began to grow restless. Heber had not returned, though, hitherto, he had always contrived to pay a weekly visit to his father, if but for five minutes. He was the old man’s favourite son and the only one of four brothers who lived within reach.
The uncertainty as to what was going on began to prey upon Susannah’s nerves. Events which meant so much to her had run quickly enough of late to make inaction doubly unbearable; and, if she could not see Saunders, she must at least see her cousin. Pencoed Chapel was the only place in which she was sure of meeting him, and she informed her uncle that she meant to go there on the following Sunday.