“That was a wonderful fine bit of work,” he remarked as they left the mountain behind them, “few could match you at that, Williams!”
“’Tis a cursed business,” said George between his teeth. “God’s truth! but I do hate it!”
“Then what makes you do it, man?” exclaimed Rhys.
“Ah, that’s just it. I’ve sold myself to the devil, that’s why.”
Rhys laughed. “Where did you meet with him?” he asked lightly.
“At Abergavenny,” replied George gravely. “And his name is James Bumpett.”
[CHAPTER XIII
THE SEVEN SNOW-MEN]
MARY’S child opened its eyes prematurely on this world, only to wail itself out of it again in a couple of weeks. It was a miserable, feeble little creature, but the mother clung to it, though it was the son of her father’s murderer, of the lover whose baseness towards herself seemed to her nothing compared with his baseness in lifting his hand against the grey head now lying by the wall in Crishowell churchyard. This she told herself again and again as she lay tossing in the weary days succeeding its birth. Though her love for the father was dead, struck down by that foul blow, she had still some to give the child; it was hers, she felt, hers alone. He had never seen it, never would see it, and never would his face shadow its little life.
During her illness the Vicar had been to visit her, and had tried, very gently, to bring home to her the greatness of her fault. She listened to his words meekly and with respect, but he left the house feeling that he had not made much impression. When he was gone she thought over all he had said; to have explained to him what was in her heart would have been impossible, for she could hardly explain it to herself, but she knew that, though she recoiled from the man who had once been everything to her, she could not go back upon the love. It was a gift she had made fully, freely, rejoicing in the giving, and she would not repent it. If the sun had gone down on her and left her to grope through the black night, she would accept it as the price of her short happiness; she felt this instinctively, dumbly. She was proud, and, knowing that all the world would think itself at liberty to cast stones at her, she was not going to invite it to do so, much less to shrink from its uplifted hand. The thing was her affair, her loss, and no one else’s. Life would be hard, but she would meet it for the child’s sake; she would make him an honest man, and, perchance, if she did her duty by him, he might one day stand between her and the loneliness of existence. That was what one might call the middle stratum of her soul; down below—far, far down—there was a tideless sea of grief. Then the poor little infant died.