“Ah, ’tis no choice o’ mine.”
“Where are you going, Williams?”
“’Tis very like to be to the jail. I owe Mr. Bumpett a sight o’ money, and I can’t pay him, ma’am.”
She looked at him in astonishment as he stood hanging his head.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said, turning from the window.
It was perhaps the first time that any one had ever wished to confide in Mrs. Walters, and, sorely as he longed to do so, it was impossible for George to tell her the whole history of his trouble. But his simplicity and evident belief in her sympathy touched her as they might not have touched a more expansive heart, accustomed to the near contact of other lives. She sat upright on the kitchen settle while he poured out the tale of his debt; it was a common story, badly told, and it had to end just where he would have liked to begin. He felt as if the confession of his past doings would have taken pounds from that weight of shame which he had carried about with him ever since his acceptance of Bumpett’s terms. His only comfort was in the fact that his mother had never suspected the life to which he had pledged himself for her sake. He had not known the sympathy of a woman since her death.
He looked down at the earth on his boots as he spoke, for he had forgotten, when he came in, to clean them on the heap of bracken by the doorstep. He was afraid that Mrs. Walters was looking at it too. But her eyes seemed fixed on something far off as she rose, slim and straight, from the settle. What she saw was a man little younger than the one before her, who had brought disgrace and shame upon her and her house. She could not understand it at all. What earthly temptation could there have been to have made him act as he had acted? Her mouth tightened. How was it that this stranger, this rude labourer, should trust her as her own son had never done? She stared out of the window to where the Twmpa reared its great shoulder, unconscious that she was looking at places nightly trodden by Rhys’ feet, and, as her bitterness against him increased, so did her sympathy for the other deepen.
“I will pay Mr. Bumpett,” she said suddenly, her back still turned “and your debt will be to me.”
The young man stammered some confused words; he would have liked to say many things, but his tongue failed him in the emergency, as it usually did. But he felt as if the gates of heaven were opening in his face.
“Go on with your work, Williams,” said Anne, turning round and waving him out of the room. “I have no more time to talk to you just now.”