“Rhys Walters did it,” interrupted the woman shortly, “he killed him. Ah—he’ll swing for it yet.”
Mary got up like a blind person. Her hands were stretched out before her, and she walked straight to the wall till her face touched it. She put up her arms against it, and stood there like an image; only her two hands beat slowly upon the whitewashed stone.
“’Twould be well if she had a ring on one o’ they hands o’ hers,” observed the woman.
The scene was so painful that the man who was a participator in it could endure it no longer. Pity for the dead man who lay in the dignity of a death bravely come by, was swallowed up in pity for the poor young creature before him. One had faced death, the other had yet to face life. The two little hands beating against the wall, the hard, stupid face of the woman, the cheerless room, all were too horrible to a man of his disposition to be gone through with any longer. He could do nothing for Mary if he stayed, though he could not help feeling cowardly at leaving her to face the first moments of her grief with such a companion. A flutter of icy wind came through a broken pane near him, and his horse out in the road stamped once or twice; his mind ran towards the inn at Llangarth, and he thought of the bright, warm light in the bar.
“Here,” he said, holding out half-a-sovereign to the woman, “and mind you look after her.”
As he passed through the kitchen where the toll-keeper lay, his eye fell upon the bellows, and he shuddered. “Poor girl,” he said, “poor wretched girl.”
Howlie Seaborne was one of those rare persons whose silences are as eloquent as their speech. While the owner of the horse he held was in the toll-house, he stood placidly by its head, his eyes fixed upon the prisoner’s face; he grinned steadily. The formation of his mouth was unusual, for, while other people’s smiles are horizontal, so to speak, his, owing to his rabbit-teeth, was almost vertical.
At last Turnbull looked angrily at him. “’Twas you cried out I was Rhys Walters,” he said with a malignant glance.
If Howlie heard the words, there was no sign of the fact on his changeless countenance; his one idea appeared to be to see as much of the auctioneer as he could.
“I’ll remember this some day,” continued Turnbull; “do ye mind the hiding I gave ye at Crishowell auction last year? Well, ye’ll get another o’ the same sort.”