ABNER did not wait for George to be arrested. To the evident scandal of
the sergeant he made straight for the door and slipped into the bar. He
closed the door quietly, and stopped for a moment. There was something
in the feeling of the room that told him he had broken in on a secret.
No doubt the continued strain with which he had heard the evidence
unfolded had tuned his nerves to a supersensitive pitch: he wasn’t
usually nervous under any conditions, but the sudden change from the
courtroom to this cold, empty chamber, unfamiliar in the snow-light, took
him aback, unsteadied him. At the moment of his entrance the room had
been expectant, listening. Now, when he paused for a second to look at
it, he saw nothing unusual, only the long shelves with their black
bottles of dubious port and sherry, the keg-shaped receptacles of glass
in which spirits were kept on tap, the polished handles of the
beer-engine. The only unusual thing was the closed door of the room
behind the counter in which Bastard’s body now lay. He didn’t try to
find an explanation for the peculiar chill that this room gave him,
midway between the dead man’s flesh and the anguished soul of the man who
had killed him; but he felt it, and when he turned the key in the locked
door and stepped out into the street he felt again, behind him, the sense
of something strange stealing back into the bar. He shivered and set off
for Chapel Green to tell Mrs Malpas.
All sparkle of light had vanished from the snow; the sky had now grown
colder than the land, and in the north a wind was rising. He walked fast
to keep the heat in his limbs. He passed the last cottages of Mainstone
and came into the length of Roman road which he and George had so often
travelled at night. The wind set up a faint and mournful singing in the
telegraph wires. The winter night descended. No human shape was to be
seen on the long white road but that of Abner and another smaller figure
that approached him rapidly from the west. He took it for granted that
this was a little girl hurrying home to Mainstone from the dissenting
school at Chapel Green, but when they met in the dusk and stared at one
another he suddenly became aware that the wayfarer was George’s mother.
All the time since he left the inn he had been turning over in his mind
the ways in which he might best reveal his tragic news. Now that he
found himself face to face with Mrs Malpas, small, intense, and awful in
her Sunday bonnet, he could say nothing. They stared at each other for a
moment in which Abner was conscious of the hatred in her black eyes.
‘Evenin’, ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s lucky I met you. George sent me along
with a message.’
‘Tell me . . . tell me quick, young man,’ she cried. ‘Don’t keep it back
whatever it be!’
‘Bad news, ma’am.’
‘I know it is. Tell me!’
‘They’ve took him in charge. It’s manslaughter.’
She made a shrill, wailing noise, something between a laugh and a cry.
She gripped his arm tight. He knew that she would almost rather have
touched any one on earth, but if she had not steadied herself she would
have fallen.
‘Manslaughter. . . . Oh, God, my God! O Lord, have mercy on him, poor
soul, and on us too. To think it should come to that! Oh, God . . .
God!’
She clutched him again as though a wave were sweeping her legs from under
her. Her bony fingers went into the muscle of Abner’s arm.
‘Now don’t take on, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Manslaughter’s a different thing
from murder. Thank your luck for that!’
‘Don’t talk to me of luck!’ she cried. ‘Luck’s a heathen word. As a man
sows so shall he reap. The hand of the Lord is heavy on me and my son.
He hath forsaken the way of righteousness. Drink and strange women and
all the abominations of the ungodly. All my prayers on him were wasted,
young man, for I couldn’t keep his feet in the way. Whom the Lord loveth
he chasteneth. The Lord gave and the Lord hath took away, and now he
stands before an earthly judge. I must go and see him.’
She detached herself from Abner’s arm, but a fit of trembling took her
and made her cling to it again.
‘You’d best come home along of me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘They’ll have took
him to Lesswardine by this time.’
She broke down into harsh sobs, crying childishly, and in between her
sobbing he could hear her babble the same curious mixture of scriptural
and unscriptural lamentation. She talked so wildly that he thought the
old woman was going off her head. When she sobbed the jet ornaments on
her bonnet danced.
‘Come home along of me, ma’am,’ he repeated helplessly.
She seemed not to hear him. ‘George, my little George . . .’ she sobbed,
abasing, accusing herself before the harsh personal deity that she
imagined, wrestling with him in prayer and entreaty, ‘Oh, Lord, forgive
him . . . forgive him . . . forgive him!’ Then, quite suddenly, she
stopped. No sound was heard but that of her faint trembling. Abner
thanked goodness that she had tired herself out, but he was mistaken.
Without the least warning her weak hands pushed him away. She stood
before him in the middle of the road and faced him with her ridiculous
bonnet awry and her fingers clenched like the claws of some small, fierce
wild animal, waiting to spring at a man’s throat. Her wrists worked with
passion. She forgot all her scripture and cursed him in her own words.
‘It’s you who’ve led him astray,’ she cried. ‘You . . you! Didn’t I
know it the very day when you and your mate came to our house? You, the
scum of the roads! That’s fine company for a decent man! You can’t
touch pitch and not be defiled! I begged him and begged him not to have
the likes of you in his house, but he laughed at me. And you’ve dragged
him down, down . . . as low as a man can be dragged. You with your drink
and your poaching and your women! Don’t think I haven’t heard what
happened . . . the two of you coming home drunk of nights, singing bawdy
songs in the dark. That wasn’t enough for you! You must drag him into
your drunken fighting, drag him down and down into your mucky life. And
then you come and talk to me of luck. Luck! He’s been led astray,
that’s what George has, by your company. If George’s soul is damned,
it’s you who will suffer for it, bringin’ your town ways into a country
place. You and his precious wife! The two of you between you! What’s
in the blood comes out in the life. Her father were a thief and a
swindler and a suicide, and God visits the sins of the fathers. Like
father, like daughter! That’s the sort of bedfellow my George has had,
and this is what she’s brought him to, poor lamb! But don’t you think,
young man, that God don’t remember! If you done it to the least of these
you done it unto Me! Don’t you think you can push a young man into hell
and not fall into the fire after him. You and her together. . . . You
can trust God for that!’ She exhausted her breath and stood panting.
‘Come on, missus,’ said Abner heavily. ‘You’ll be perished out here.’
But when he clumsily approached her she ran away down the road toward
Mainstone like a mad woman, this pathetic bundle of burning hatred in her
Sunday clothes, and left him foolishly standing.
He went back in the dark to Wolfpits, heavily burdened with the second
part of his task. The children were playing quietly on the hearthrug and
Mrs Mumble, who considered it only neighbourly to give Mary the benefit
of her company in a domestic emergency, was talking of homely,
unimportant things with the idea of distracting her mind from the more
tragic affair that held it. When Abner appeared she excused herself,
kissed the children good-night, enveloped Mary in a more significant
embrace, and left them.
Mary stood waiting for what he had to say. He could not help recognising
the contrast between her impressive aloofness, her self-control, and the
hysterics of old Mrs Malpas. She could not pretend that she felt
nothing; since George’s disaster, however little she might care for him,
must bring with it all sorts of complications. She was a woman who had
been used, in the lavish days of her father, to a certain degree of
comfort and elegance, and even if she had known hard times at Wolfpits
during George’s freakish periods of idleness, she had never been faced
with anything so threatening to herself and her children as a complete
stoppage of wages and, in the last resort, the humiliation of parish
relief. She waited with her head erect, straight as a larch, in the
perfect control of her finely-tempered mind.
‘It’s what we thought it would be, missus,’ he said. ‘Manslaughter they
brought it in.’
‘Where is he?’ she asked, almost in a whisper.
‘They’ve took him in charge. That’ll mean the lock-up at Lesswardine,
time they’ve got the case ready for the police-court.’