"Goodness!--what an ugly place it is! It wants five thousand spent on it
at once to make it tolerable!"
The remark was Letty Tressady's. She was standing disconsolate on the
lawn at Ferth, scanning the old-fashioned house to which George had
brought her just five days before. They had been married a fortnight, and
were still to spend another week in the country before going back to
London and to Parliament. But already Letty had made up her mind that
Ferth _must_ be rebuilt and refurnished, or she could never endure it.
She threw herself down on a garden seat with a sigh, still studying the
house. It was a straight barrack-like building, very high for its
breadth, erected early in the last century by an architect who, finding
that he was to be allowed but a very scanty sum for his performance,
determined with considerable strength of mind to spend all that he had
for decoration upon the inside rather than the outside of his mansion.
Accordingly the inside had charm--though even so much Letty could not now
be got to confess; panellings, mantelpieces, and doorways showed the work
of a man of taste. But outside all that had been aimed at was the
provision of a central block of building carried up to a considerable
height so as to give the rooms demanded, while it economised in
foundations and general space; an outer wall pierced with the plainest
openings possible at regular intervals; a high-pitched roof to keep out
the rain, whereof the original warm tiles had been long since replaced by
the chilliest Welsh slates; and two low and disfiguring wings which held
the servants and the kitchens. The stucco with which the house had been
originally covered had blackened under the influence of time, weather,
and the smoke from the Tressady coalpits. Altogether, what with its
pitchy colour, its mean windows, its factory-like plainness and height,
Ferth Place had no doubt a cheerless and repellent air, which was
increased by its immediate surroundings. For it stood on the very summit
of a high hill, whereon the trees were few and windbeaten; while the
carriage drives and the paths that climbed the hill were all of them a
coaly black. The flower garden behind the house was small and neglected;
neither shrubberies nor kitchen garden, nor the small park, had any
character or stateliness; everything bore the stamp of bygone possessors
who had been rich neither in money nor in fancy; who had been quite
content to live small lives in a small way.
Ferth's new mistress thought bitterly of them, as she sat looking at
their handiwork. What could be done with such a place? How could she have
London people to stay there? Why, their very maids would strike! And,
pray, what was a country house worth, without the usual country-house
amenities and accessories?
Yet she already began to feel fretted and hampered about money. The
inside of the house had been to some extent renovated. She had helped
George to choose papers and curtains for the rooms that were to be her
special domain, while they were in London together before Easter. But she
knew that George had at one time meant to do much more than had actually
been done; and he had been in a mood of lover-like apology on the first
day of their arrival. "Darling, I had hoped to buy you a hundred pretty
things!--but times is bad--dreadful bad!" he had said to her with a
laugh. "We will do it by degrees--you won't mind?"
Then she had tried to make him tell her why it was that he had abandoned
some of the schemes of improvement that had certainly been in his mind
during the first weeks of their engagement. But he had not been very
communicative, and had put the blame mostly, as she understood him, on
the "beastly pits" and the very low dividends they had been earning
during the past six months.
Letty, however, did not in the least believe that the comparatively
pinched state of their finances, which, bride as she was, she was already
brooding over, was wholly or even mainly due to the pits. She set her
little white teeth in sudden anger as she said to herself that it was
_not_ the pits--it was Lady Tressady! George was crippled now because of
the large sums his mother had not been ashamed to wring from him during
the last six months. Letty--George's wife--was to go without comforts and
conveniences, without the means of seeing her friends and taking her
proper position in the world, because George's mother--a ridiculous,
painted old woman, who went in for flirtations and French gowns, when she
ought to be subsiding quietly into caps and Bath chairs--would sponge
upon his very moderate income, and take what did not belong to her.
"I am _certain_ there is something in the background!" said Letty to
herself, as she sat looking at the ugly house--"something that she is
ashamed of, and that she doesn't tell George. She _couldn't_ spend all
that money on dress! I believe she is a wicked old woman--she has the
most extraordinary creatures at her parties."
The girl's delicate face stiffened vindictively as she fell brooding for
the hundredth time over Lady Tressady's enormities.
Then suddenly the garden door opened, and Letty, looking up, saw that
George was on the threshold, waving his hand to her. He had left her that
morning--almost for the first time since their marriage--to go and see
his principal agent and discuss the position of affairs.
As he approached her, she noticed instantly that he was looking tired and
ruffled. But the sight of her smoothed his brow. He threw himself down on
the grass at her feet, and pressed his lips to the delicately tended hand
that lay upon her lap.
"Have you missed me, madame?" he said, peremptorily.
Preoccupied as she was, Letty must needs flush and smile, so well she
knew from his eager eye that she pleased him, that he noticed the pretty
gown she had put on for luncheon, and that all the petting his absence
had withdrawn from her for an hour or two had come back to her. Other
women--more or less of her type--had found his ways beguiling before
now. He took courtship as an art, and had his own rooted ideas as to how
women should be treated. Neither too gingerly nor too sentimentally--but,
above all, with variety!
He repeated his question insistently; whereupon Letty said, with her pert
brightness, thinking all the time of the house, "I'm _not_ going to make
you vain. Besides, I have been frightfully busy."
"You're not going to make me vain? But I choose to be vain. I'll go away
for the whole afternoon if I'm not made vain this instant. Ah! that's
better. Do you know that you have the softest little curl on your soft
little neck, and that your hair has caught the sun on it this morning?"
Letty instinctively put up a hand to tuck away the curl. But he seized
the hand. "Little vandal!--What have you been busy with?"
"Oh! I have been over the house with Mrs. Matthews," said Letty, in
another tone. "George, it's _dreadful_--the number of things that want
doing. Do you know, _positively_, we could not put up more than two
couples, if we tried ever so. And as for the state of the attics! Now do
listen, George!"
And, holding his hand tight in her eagerness, she went through a vehement
catalogue of all that was wanted--new furniture, new decoration, new
grates, a new hot-water system, the raising of the wings, and so on to
the alteration of the stables and the replanning of the garden. She had
no sooner begun upon her list than George's look of worry returned. He
got up from the grass, and sat on the bench beside her.
"Well, I'm sorry you dislike the place so much," he said, when her breath
failed her, staring rather gloomily at his despised mansion. "Of course,
it's quite true--it is an ugly hole. But the worst of it is, darling, I
don't quite see how we're to do all this you talk about. I don't bring
any good news from the pits, alas!"
He turned quickly towards her. The thought flashed through his
mind--could he be justly charged with having married her on false
pretences as to his affairs? No! There had been no misrepresentation of
his income or his risks. Everything had been plainly and honestly stated
to her father, and therefore to her. For Letty knew all that she wanted
to know, and had managed her family since she was a baby.
Letty flushed at his last words.
"Do you mean to say," she said with emphasis, "that those men are really
going to strike?"
"I am afraid so. We _must_ enforce a reduction, to avoid working at sheer
loss, and the men vow they'll come out."
"They want you to make them a present of the mines, I suppose!" said
Letty, bitterly. "Why, the tales I hear of their extravagance and
laziness! Mrs. Matthews says they'll have none but the best cuts of meat,
that they all of them have an harmonium or a piano in the house, that
their houses are _stuffed_ with furniture--and the amount of money they
spend in betting on their dogs and their football matches is perfectly
sickening. And now, I suppose they'll ruin themselves and us, rather than
allow you to make a decent profit!"
"That's about it," said George, flinging himself back on the bench.
"That's about it."
There was a pause of silence. The eyes of both were turned to the
colliery village far below, at the foot of the hill. From this high
stretch of garden one looked across the valley and its straggling line of
houses, to the pits on the further hillside, the straight black line of
the "bank," the pulley wheels, and tall chimneys against the sky. To the
left, along the ascending valley, similar chimneys and "banks" were
scattered at long intervals, while to the right the valley dipped in
sharp wooded undulations to a blue plain bounded by far Welsh hills. The
immediate neighbourhood of Ferth, for a coal country, had a woodland
charm and wildness which often surprised a stranger. There were untouched
copses, and little rivers and fern-covered hills, which still held their
own against the ever-encroaching mounds of "spoil" thrown out by the
mines. Only the villages were invariably ugly. They were the modern
creations of the coal, and had therefore no history and no originality.
Their monotonous rows of red cottages were like fragments from some dingy
town suburb, and the brick meeting-houses in which they abounded did
nothing to abate the general unloveliness.
This view from the Ferth hill was one which had great familiarity for
Tressady, and yet no charm. As a boy he had had no love for his home and
very few acquaintances in the village. His mother hated the place and the
people. She had married very young--for the sake of money and
position--to his dull old father, who nevertheless managed to keep his
flighty wife in order by dint of a dumb, continuous stubbornness and
tyranny, which would have overborne a stronger nature than Lady
Tressady's. She was always struggling to get away from Ferth; he to keep
her tied there. He was never at ease away from his estate and his pits;
she felt herself ten years younger as soon as she had lost sight of the
grim black house on its hilltop.
And this one opinion of hers she was able to impress upon her
son--George, too, was always glad to turn his back on Ferth and its
people. The colliers seemed to him a brutal crew, given over to coarse
sports, coarse pleasures, and an odious religion. As to their supposed
grievances and hardships, his intimate conviction as a boy had always
been that the miner got the utmost both out of his employers and out of
society that he was worth.
"Upon my word, I often think," he said at last, his inward reverie
finding speech, "I often think it was a great pity my grandfather
discovered the coal at all! In the long run I believe we should have done
better without it. We should not at any rate have been bound up with
these hordes, with whom you can no more reason than with so many blocks
of their own coal!"
Letty made no answer. She had turned back towards the house. Suddenly
she said, with an energy that startled him,
"George, what _are_ we to do with that place? It gives me a nightmare.
The extraordinary thing is the way that everything in it has gone to
ruin. Did your mother really live here while you were away?"
George's expression darkened.
"I always used to suppose she was here," he said. "That was our bargain.
But I begin to believe now that she was mostly in London. One can't
wonder at it--she always hated the place."
"Of course she was in London!" thought Letty to herself, "spending piles
of money, running shamefully into debt, and letting the house go to
pieces. Why, the linen hasn't been darned for years!"
Aloud she said:
"Mrs. Matthews says a charwoman and a little girl from the village used
to be left alone in the house for months, to play any sort of games, with
nobody to look after them--_nobody_--while you were away!"
George looked at his wife--and then would only slip his arm round her
for answer.
"Darling! you don't know how I've been worried all the morning--don't
let's make worry at home. After all it _is_ rather nice to be here
together, isn't it?--and we shall do--we sha'n't starve! Perhaps we shall
pull through with the pits after all--it is difficult to believe the men
will make such fools of themselves--and--well! you know my angel mother
can't always be swooping upon us as she has done lately. Let's just be
patient a little--very likely I can sell a few bits of land before long
that will give us some money in hand--and then this small person shall
bedizen herself and the house as much as she pleases. And meanwhile,
_madame ma femme_, let me point out to you that your George never
professed to be anything but a very bad match for you!"
Letty remembered all his facts and figures perfectly. Only somehow she
had regarded them with the optimism natural to a girl who is determined
to be married. She had promptly forgotten the adverse chances he had
insisted upon, and she had converted all his averages into minima. No,
she could not say she had not been warned; but nevertheless the result
promised to be quite different from what she had expected.
However, with her husband's arm round her, it was not easy to maintain
her ill-humour, and she yielded. They wandered on into the wood which
fringed the hill on its further side, she coquetting, he courting and
flattering her in a hundred ways. Her soft new dress, her dainty
lightness and freshness, made harmony in his senses with the April day,
the building rooks, the breaths of sudden perfume from field and wood,
the delicate green that was creeping over the copses, softening all the
edges of the black scars left by the pits. The bridal illusion returned.
George eagerly--hungrily--gave himself up to it. And Letty, though
conscious all the while of a restless feeling at the back of her mind
that they were losing time, must needs submit.
However, when the luncheon gong had sounded and they were strolling
back to the house, he bethought himself, knit his brows again, and
said to her:
"Do you know, darling, Dalling told me this morning"--Dalling was the
Tressadys' principal agent--"that he thought it would be a good thing if
we could make friends with some of the people here? The Union are not--or
_were_ not--quite so strong in this valley as they are in some other
parts. That's why that fellow Burrows--confound him!--has come to live
here of late. It might be possible to make some of the more intelligent
fellows hear reason. My uncles have always managed the thing with a very
high hand--very natural!--the men _are_ a set of rough, ungrateful
brutes, who talk impossible stuff, and never remember anything that's
done for them--but after all, if one has to make a living out of them,
one may as well learn how to drive them, and what they want to be at.
Suppose you come and show yourself in the village this afternoon?"
Letty looked extremely doubtful.
"I really don't get on very well with poor people, George. It's very
dreadful, I know, but there!--I'm not Lady Maxwell--and I can't help it.
Of course, with the poor people at home in our own cottages it's
different--they always curtsy and are very respectful--but Mrs. Matthews
says the people here are so independent, and think nothing of being rude
to you if they don't like you."
George laughed.
"Go and call upon them in that dress and see! I'll eat my hat if
anybody's rude. Beside, I shall be there to protect you. We won't go, of
course, to any of the strong Union people. But there are two or
three--an old nurse of mine I really used to be rather fond of--and a
fireman that's a good sort--and one or two others. I believe it would
amuse you."
Letty was quite certain that it would not amuse her at all. However, she
assented unwillingly, and they went in to lunch.
* * * * *
So in the afternoon the husband and wife sallied forth. Letty felt that
she was being taken through an ordeal, and that George was rather foolish
to wish it. However, she did her best to be cheerful, and to please
George she still wore the pretty Paris frock of the morning, though it
seemed to her absurd to be trailing it through a village street with only
colliers and their wives to look at it.
"What ill luck," said George, suddenly, as they descended their own hill,
"that that fellow Burrows should have settled down here, in one's very
pocket, like this!"
"Yes, you had enough of him at Malford, didn't you?" said Letty. "I don't
yet understand how he comes to be here."
George explained that about the preceding Christmas there had been,
temporarily, strong signs of decline in the Union strength of the Perth
district. A great many miners had quietly seceded; one of the periodical
waves of suspicion as to funds and management to which all trade unions
are liable had swept over the neighbourhood; and wholesale desertion from
the Union standard seemed likely. In hot haste the Central Committee
sent down Burrows as organising agent. The good fight he had made against
Tressady at the Market Malford election had given him prestige; and he
had both presence and speaking power. He had been four months at Perth,
speaking all over the district, and now, instead of leaving the Union,
the men had been crowding into it, and were just as hot--so it was
said--for a trial of strength with the masters as their comrades in other
parts of the county.
"And before Burrows has done with us, I should say he'll have cost the
masters in this district hundreds of thousands. I call him dear at the
money!" said George, finally, with a dismal cheerfulness.
He was really full of Burrows, and of the general news of the district
which his agent had been that morning pouring into his ear. But he had
done his best not to talk about either at luncheon. Letty had a curious
way of making the bearer of unpleasant tidings feel that it was somehow
all his own fault that things should be so; and George, even in this dawn
of marriage, was beginning, half consciously, to recognise two or three
such peculiarities of hers.
"What I cannot understand," said Letty, vigorously, "is why such people
as Mr. Burrows are _allowed_ to go about making the mischief he does."
George laughed, but nevertheless repressed a sudden feeling of
irritation. The inept remark of a pretty woman generally only amused him.
But this Burrows matter was beginning to touch him home.
"You see we happen to be a free country," he said drily, "and Burrows and
his like happen to be running us just now. Maxwell & Co. are in the
shafts. Burrows sits up aloft and whips on the team. The extraordinary
thing is that nothing personal makes any difference. The people here know
perfectly well that Burrows drinks--that the woman he lives with is not
his wife--"
"George!" cried Letty, "how _can_ you say such dreadful things!"
"Sorry, my darling! but the world is not a nice place. He picked her up
somehow--they say she was a commercial traveller's wife--left on his
hands at a country inn. Anyway she's not divorced, and the husband's
alive. She looks like a walking skeleton, and is probably going to die.
Nevertheless they say Burrows adores her. And as for my
resentments--don't be shocked--I'm inclined to like Burrows all the
better for _that_ little affair. But then I'm not pious, like the people
here. However, they don't mind--and they don't mind the drink--and they
believe he spends their money on magnificent dinners at hotels--and they
don't mind that. They don't mind anything--they shout themselves hoarse
whenever Burrows speaks--they're as proud as Punch if he shakes hands
with them--and then they tell the most gruesome tales of him behind his
back, and like him all the better, apparently, for being a scoundrel.
Queer but true. Well, here we are--now, darling, you may expect to be
stared at!"
For they had entered on the village street, and Ferth Magna, by some
quick freemasonry, had become suddenly conscious of the bride and
bridegroom. Here and there a begrimed man in his shirt-sleeves would
open his front door cautiously and look at them; the children and
womenkind stood boldly on the doorsteps and stared; while the people in
the little shops ran back into the street, parcels and baskets in hand.
The men working the morning shift had just come back from the pits, and
their wives were preparing to wash their blackened lords, before the
whole family sat down to tea. But both tea and ablutions were forgotten,
so long as the owner of Ferth Place and the new Lady Tressady were in
sight. The village eyes took note of everything; of the young man's
immaculate serge suit and tan waistcoat, his thin, bronzed face and fair
moustache; of the bride's grey gown, the knot of airy pink at her
throat, the coils of bright brown hair on which her hat was set, and the
buckles on her pretty shoes. Then the village retreated within doors
again; and each house buzzed and gossiped its fill. There had been a
certain amount of not very cordial response to George's salutations; but
to Letty's thinking the women had eyed her with an unpleasant and rather
hostile boldness.
"Mary Batchelor's house is down here," said George, turning into a
side lane, not without a feeling of relief. "I hope we sha'n't find
her out--no, there she is. You can't call these people affectionate,
can you?"
They were close on a group of three brick cottages all close together.
Their doors were all open. In one cottage a stout collier's wife was
toiling through her wash. At the door of another the sewing-machine agent
was waiting for his weekly payment; while on the threshold of the third
stood an elderly tottering woman shading her eyes from the light as she
tried to make out the features of the approaching couple.
"Why, Mary!" said George, "you haven't forgotten me? I have brought my
wife to see you."
And he held out his hand with a boyish kindness.
The old woman looked at them both in a bewildered way. Her face, with its
long chin and powerful nose, was blanched and drawn, her grey hair
straggling from under her worn black-ribboned cap; and her black dress
had a neglected air, which drew George's attention. Mary Batchelor, so
long as he remembered her, whether as his old nurse, or in later days as
the Bible-woman of the village, had always been remarkable for a peculiar
dignity and neatness.
"Mary, is there anything wrong?" he asked her, holding her hand.
"Coom yer ways in," said the old woman, grasping his arm, and taking no
notice of Letty. "He's gone--he'll not freeten nobody--he wor here three
days afore they buried him. I could no let him go--but it's three weeks
now sen they put him away."
"Why, Mary, what is it? Not _James_!--not your son!" said George, letting
her guide him into the cottage.
"Aye, it's James--it's my son," she repeated drearily. "Will
yer be takkin a cheer--an perhaps"--she looked round uncertainly,
first at Letty, then at the wet floor where she had been feebly
scrubbing--"perhaps the leddy ull be sittin down. I'm nobbut in a
muddle. But I don't seem to get forard wi my work a mornins--not sen
they put im away."
And she dropped into a chair herself, with a long sigh--forgetting her
visitors apparently--her large and bony hands, scarred with their life's
work, lying along her knees.
George stood beside her silent a moment.
"I hardly like to say I hadn't heard," he said at last, gently. "You'll
think I _ought_ to have heard. But I didn't know. I have been in town and
very busy."
"Aye," said Mary, without looking up, "aye, an yer've been gettin
married. I knew as yer didn't mean nothin onkind."
Then she stopped again--till suddenly, with a furtive gesture, she
raised her apron, and drew it across her eyes, which had the look of
perennial tears.
On the other side of the cottage meanwhile a boy of about fourteen was
sitting. He had just done his afternoon's wash, and was resting himself
by the fire, enjoying a thumbed football almanac. He had not risen when
the visitors entered, and while his grandmother was speaking his lips
still moved dumbly, as he went on adding up the football scores. He was a
sickly, rather repulsive lad with a callous expression.
"Let me wait outside, George," said Letty, hurriedly.
Some instinct in her shrank from the poor mother and her story. But
George begged her to stay, and she sat down nervously by the door, trying
to protect her pretty skirt from the wet boards.
"Will you tell me how it was?" said George, sitting down himself in front
of the bowed mother, and bending towards her. "Was it in the pit? Jamie
wasn't one of our men, I know. Wasn't it for Mr. Morrison he worked?"
Mrs. Batchelor made a sign of assent. Then she raised her head quickly,
and a flash of some passionate convulsion passed through her face.
"It wor John Burgess as done it," she said, staring at George. "It wor
him as took the boy's life. But he's gone himsel--so theer--I'll not say
no more. It wor Jamie's first week o hewin--he'd been a loader this three
year, an taken a turn at the hewin now an again--an five weeks sen John
Burgess--he wor butty for Mr. Morrison, yer know, in the Owd Pit--took
him on, an the lad wor arnin six an sixpence a day. An he wor that
pleased yo cud see it shinin out ov im. And it wor on the Tuesday as he
went on the afternoon shift. I saw im go, an he wor down'earted. An I
fell a cryin as he went up the street, for I knew why he wor down'earted,
an I asked the Lord to elp him. And about six o'clock they come
runnin--an they towd me there'd bin an accident, an they wor bringin
im--an he wor alive--an I must bear up. They'd found him kneelin in his
place with his arm up, an the pick in it--just as the blast had took
him--An his poor back--oh! my God--scorched off him--_scorched off him_."
A shudder ran through her. But she recovered herself and went on, still
gazing intently at Tressady, her gaunt hand raised as though for
attention.
"An they braat him in, an they laid him on that settle"--she pointed to
the bench by the fire--"an the doctors didn't interfere--there wor nowt
to do--they left me alone wi un. But he come to, a minute after they laid
im down--an I ses, 'Jamie, ow did it appen' an he ses, 'Mother, it wor
John Burgess--ee opened my lamp for to light hissen as had gone out--an
I don't know no more.' An then after a bit he ses, 'Mother, don't you
fret--I'm glad I'm goin--I'd got the drink in me,' he ses. An then he
give two three little breaths, as though he wor pantin--an I kiss him."
She stopped, her face working, her trembling hands pressed hard against
each other on her knee. Letty felt the tears leap to her eyes in a rush
that startled herself.
"An he would a bin twenty-one year old, come next August--an allus a lad
as yer couldn't help gettin fond on--not sen he were a little un. An when
he wor layin there, I ses to myself, 'He's the third as the coal-gettin
ha took from me.' An I minded my feyther an uncle--how they was braat
home both togither, when I wor nobbut thirteen years old--not a scar on
em, nobbut a little blood on my feyther's forehead--but stone dead, both
on em--from the afterdamp. Theer was thirty-six men killed in that
explosion--an I recolleck how old Mr. Morrison--Mr. Walter's father--sent
the coffins round--an how the men went on because they warn't good ones.
Not a man would go down the pit till they was changed--if a man got the
life choked out of im, they thowt the least the masters could do was to
give un a dacent coffin to lie in. But theer--nobody helped me wi
Jamie--I buried him mysel--an it wor all o the best."
She dried her eyes again, sighing plaintively. George said what kind and
consoling things he could think of. Mary Batchelor put up her hand and
touched him on the arm as he leant over her.
"Aye, I knew yo'd be sorry--an yor wife--"
She turned feebly towards Letty, trying with her blurred and tear-dimmed
sight to make out what Sir George's bride might be like. She looked for a
moment at the small, elegant person in the corner,--at the sheaf of
nodding rosebuds on the hat--the bracelets--the pink cheeks under the
dainty veil,--looked with a curious aloofness, as though from a great
distance. Then, evidently, another thought struck her like a lash. She
ceased to see or think of Letty. Her grip tightened on George's arm.
"An I'm allus thinkin," she said, with a passionate sob, "of that what he
said about the drink. He'd allus bin a sober lad, till this lasst winter
it did seem as though he cudna keep hiself from it--it kep creepin on
im--an several times lately he'd broke out very bad, pay-days--an he knew
I'd been frettin. And who was ter blame--I ast yo, or onybody--who was it
ter blame?"
Her voice rose to a kind of cry.
"His feyther died ov it, and his grandfeyther afore that. His
grandfeyther wor found dead i the roadside, after they'd made him
blind-drunk at owd Morse's public-house, where the butty wor reckonin
with im an his mates. But he'd never ha gone near the drink if they'd
hadn't druv him to't, for he wasn't inclined that way. But the butty as
gave him work kep the public, an if yer didn't drink, yer didn't get no
work. You must drink yoursel sick o Saturdays, or theer'd be no work for
you o Mondays. 'Noa, yer can sit at ome,' they'd say to un, 'ef yer so
damned pertickler.' I ast yor pardon, sir, for the bad word, but that's
ow they'd say it. I've often heerd owd John say as he'd a been glad to ha
given the butty back a shillin ov is pay to be let off the drink. An
Willum, that's my usband, he wor allus at it too--an the doctor towd me
one day, as Willum lay a-dyin, as it ran in the blood--an Jamie heard
im--I know he did--for I fouu im on the stairs--listenin."
She paused again, lost in a mist of incoherent memories, the tears
falling slowly.
After a minute's silence, George said--not indeed knowing what to
say--"We're _very_ sorry for you, Mary--my wife and I--we wish we
could do anything to help you. I am afraid it can't make any difference
to you--I expect it makes it all the worse--to think that accidents are
so much fewer--that so much has been done. And yet times are mended,
aren't they?"
Mary made no answer.
George sat looking at her, conscious, as he seldom was, of raw youth and
unreadiness--conscious, too, of Letty's presence in a strange, hindering
way--as of something that both blunted emotion and made one rather
ashamed to show it.
He could only pursue the lame topic of improvement, of changed times. The
disappearance of old abuses, of "butties" and "tommy-shops"; the greater
care for life; the accident laws; the inspectors. He found himself
growing eloquent at last, yet all the time regarding himself, as it were,
from a distance--ironically.
Mary Batchelor listened to him for a while, her head bent with something
of the submission of the old servant, till something he said roused
again the quick shudder, the look of anguished protest.
"Aye, I dessay it's aw reet, Mr. George--I dessay it is--what yer say.
The inspectors is very cliver--an the wages is paid proper. But
theer--say what yer will! I've a son on the railway out Lichfield
way--an he's allus taakin about is long hours--they're killing im, he
says--an I allus ses to im, 'Yer may jest thank the Lord, Harry, as yer
not in the pits.' He never gets no pity out o me. An soomtimes I wakes
in the morning, an I thinks o the men, cropin away in the dark--down
theer--under me and my bed--for they do say the pits now runs right
under Ferth village--an I think to mysel--how long will it be before yo
poor fellers is laying like my Jim? Yer may be reet about the
accidents, Mr. George--but I _know_, ef yer wor to go fro house to
house i this village--it would be like tis in the Bible--I've often
thowt o them words--'_Theer was not a house_--no, nary one!--_where
there was not one dead_.'"
She hung her head again, muttering to herself. George made out with
difficulty that she was going through one phantom scene after another--of
burning, wounds, and sudden death. One or two of the phrases--of the
fragmentary details that dropped out without name or place--made his
flesh creep. He was afraid lest Letty should hear them, and was just
putting out his hand for his hat, when Mrs. Batchelor gripped his arm
again. Her face--so white and large-featured--had the gleam of something
like a miserable smile upon it.
"Aye, an the men theirsels ud say jest as you do. 'Lor. Mrs. Batchelor,'
they'd say, 'why, the pits is as safe as a church'--an they'd
_laff_--Jamie ud laff at me times. But it's the _women_, Mr. George, as
knows--it's the women that ave to wash the bodies."
A great trembling ran through her again. George instinctively rose, and
motioned to Letty to go. She too rose, but she did not go. She stood by
the door, her wide grey eyes fixed with a kind of fascination on the
speaker; while behind her a ring of children could be seen in the street,
staring at the pretty lady.
Mary Batchelor saw nothing but Tressady, whom she was still holding by
the arm--looking up to him.
"Aye, but I didna disturb my Jamie, yer know. Noa!--I left im i the owd
coat they'd thrown over im i the pit--I dursn't ha touched is back. Noa,
I _dursn't_. But I made his shroud mysen, an I put it ower his poor
workin clothes, an I washed his face, an is hands an feet--an then I
kissed him, an I said, 'Jamie, yo mun go an tell the Lord as yo ha done
your best, an He ha dealt hardly by you!--an that's the treuth--He ha
dealt hardly by yer!'"
She gave a loud sob, and bowed her head on her hands a moment. Then,
pushing back her grey locks from her face, she rose, struggling for
composure.
"Aye, aye, Mr. George--aye, aye, I'll not keep yer no longer."
But as she took his hand, she added passionately:
"An I towd the vicar I couldn't be Bible-woman no more. Theer's somethin
broken in me sen Jamie died. I must keep things to mysen--I ain't got
nuthin good to say to others--I'm allus _grievin_ at the Lord. Good-bye
to yer--good-bye to yer."
Her voice had grown absent, indifferent. But when George asked her, just
as they were leaving the cottage, who was the boy sitting by the fire,
her face darkened. She came hurriedly to the door with them, and said in
George's ear:
"He's my darter's child--my darter by my first usband. His feyther an
mother are gone, an he come up from West Bromwich to live wi me. But he
isn't no comfort to me. He don't take no notice of anybody. He set like
that, with his football, when Jamie lay a-dyin. I'd as lief be shut on
him. But theer--I've got to put up wi im."
Letty meanwhile had approached the boy and looked at him curiously.
"Do you work in the pits too?" she asked him.
The boy stared at her.
"Yes," he said.
"Do you like it?"
He gave a rough laugh.
"I reckon yo've got to like it," he said. And turning his back on his
questioner, he went back to his almanac.
"Don't let us do any more visiting," said George, impatiently, as they
emerged into the main street. "I'm out of love with the village. We'll do
our blandishments another day. Let's go a little further up the valley
and get away from the houses."
Letty assented, and they walked along the village, she looking curiously
into the open doors of the houses, by way of return for the inquisitive
attention once more lavished upon herself and George.
"The houses are _quite_ comfortable," she said presently. "And I looked
into Mrs. Batchelor's back room while you were talking. It was just as
Mrs. Matthews said--such good carpets and curtains, two chests of
drawers, and an harmonium--and pictures--and flowers in the windows.
George! what are 'butties'?"
"'Butties' are sub-contractors," he said absently--"men who contract with
the pit-owners to get the coal, either on a large or a small scale--now
mostly on a small scale. They engage and pay the colliers in some pits,
in others the owners deal direct."
"And what is a 'tommy-shop'?"
"'Tommy' is the local word for 'truck'--paying in kind instead of in
money. You see, the butties and the owners between them used to own the
public-houses and the provision-shops, and the amount of coin of the
realm the men got in wages in the bad old times was infinitesimal. They
were expected to drink the butty's beer, and consume the butty's
provisions--at the butty's prices, of course--and the butty kept the
accounts. Oh! it was an abomination! but of course it was done away with
long ago."
"Of course it was!" said Letty, indignantly. "They never remember what's
done for them. Did you see what _excellent_ teas there were laid out in
some of the houses--and those girls with their hats smothered in
feathers? Why, I should never dream of wearing so many!"
She was once more her quick, shrewd self. All trace of the tears that had
surprised her while Mary Batchelor was describing her son's death had
passed away. Her half-malicious eyes glanced to right and left, peering
into the secrets of the village.
"And these are the people that talk of starving!" she said to George,
scornfully, as they emerged into the open road. "Why, anyone can see--"
George, suddenly returned from a reverie, understood what she was saying,
and remarked, with an odd look:
"You think their houses aren't so bad? One is always a little
surprised--don't you think?--when the poor are comfortable? One takes it
as something to one's own credit--I detect it in myself scores of times.
Well!--one seems to say--they _could_ have done without it--one might
have kept it for oneself--what a fine generous fellow I am!"
He laughed.
"I didn't mean that at all," said Letty, protesting.
"Didn't you? Well, after all, darling--you see, you don't have to live in
those houses, nice as they are--and you don't have to do your own
scrubbing. Ferth may be a vile hole, but I suppose you could put a score
of these houses inside it--and I'm a pauper, but I can provide you with
two housemaids. I say, why do you walk so far away from me?"
And in spite of her resistance, he took her hand, put it through his arm,
and held it there.
"Look at me, darling," he said imperiously. "How _can_ anyone spy upon us
with these trees and high walls? I want to see how pretty and fresh you
look--I want to forget that poor thing and her tale. Do you know that
somewhere--far down in me--there's a sort of black pool--and when
anything stirs it up--for the moment I want to hang myself--the world
seems such an awful place! It got stirred up just now--not while she was
talking--but just as I looked back at that miserable old soul, standing
at her door. She used to be such a jolly old thing--always happy in her
Bible--and in Jamie, I suppose--quite sure that she was going to a nice
heaven, and would only have to wait a little bit, till Jamie got there
too. She seemed to know all about the Almighty's plans for herself and
everybody else. Her drunken husband was dead; my father left her a bit of
money, so did an old uncle, I believe. She'd gossip and pray and preach
with anybody. And now she'll weep and pine like that till she dies--and
she isn't sure even about heaven any more--and instead of Jamie, she's
got that oafish lad, that changeling, hung round her neck--to kick her
and ill-treat her in another year or two. Well! and do you ever think
that something like that has got to happen to all of us--something
hideous--some torture--something that'll make us wish we'd never been
born? Darling, am I a mad sort of a fool? Stop here--in the shade--give
me a kiss!"
And he made her pause at a shady corner in the road, between two oak
copses on either hand--a river babbling at the foot of one of them. He
put his arm round her, and stooping kissed her red lips with a kind of
covetous passion. Then, still holding her, he looked out from the trees
to the upper valley with its scattered villages, its chimneys and
engine-houses.
"It struck me--what she said of the men under our feet. They're at it
now, Letty, hewing and sweating. Why are they there, and you and I here?
I'm _precious_ glad, aren't you? But I'm not going to make believe that
there's no difference. Don't let's he hypocrites, whatever we are."
Letty was perplexed and a little troubled. He had only shown her this
excitability once before--on that odd uncomfortable night when he made
her sit with him on the Embankment. Whenever it came it seemed to upset
her dominant impression of him. But yet it excited her too--it appealed
to something undeveloped--some yearning, protecting instinct which was
new to her.
She suddenly put up her hand and touched his hair.
"You talk so oddly, George. I think sometimes"--she laughed with a pretty
gaiety--"you'll go bodily over to Lady Maxwell and her 'set' some day!"
George made a contemptuous sound.
"May the Lord preserve us from quacks," he said lightly. "One had better
be a hypocrite. Look, little woman, there is a shower coming. Shall we
turn home?"
They walked home, chatting and laughing. At their own front door the
butler handed George a telegram. He opened it and read:
"Must come down to consult you on important business--shall arrive at
Perth about 9.30.--Amelia Tressady."
Letty, who was looking over George's shoulder, gave a little cry
of dismay.
Then, to avoid the butler's eyes and ears, they turned hurriedly into
George's smoking-room which opened off the hall, and shut the door.
"George! she has come to get more money out of you!" cried Letty, anger
and annoyance written in every line of her little frowning face.
"Well, darling, she can't get blood out of a stone!" said George,
crushing the telegram in his hand and throwing it away. "It is a little
too bad of my mother, I think, to spoil our honeymoon time like this.
However, it can't be helped. Will you tell them to get her room ready?"