"I knew we was acting bad towards you. I told Jim so. I couldn"t hardly bear to see you come in. But there, miss,--I couldn"t do anything. I tried, oh! the Lord knows I tried! There was never no happiness between us at last, I talked so. But I don"t believe he could help himself--he"s not made like other folks, isn"t Jim--"
Her features became convulsed again with the struggle for speech.
Marcella reached out for the toil-disfigured hand that was fingering and clutching at the edge of the settle, and held it close. Gradually she made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over Westall"s discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his restless s.n.a.t.c.hes of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth out of him by degrees. Her reproaches, her fears, had merely angered and estranged him; her nature had had somehow to accommodate itself to his, lest affection should lose its miserable all.
As to this last fatal attack on the Maxwell coverts, it was clear to Marcella, as she questioned and listened, that the wife had long foreseen it, and that she now knew much more about it than--suddenly--she would allow herself to say. For in the midst of her out-pourings she drew herself together, tried to collect and calm herself, looked at Marcella with an agonised, suspicious eye, and fell silent.
"I don"t know nothing about it, miss," she stubbornly declared at last, with an inconsequent absurdity which smote Marcella"s pity afresh. "How am I to know? There was seven o" them Oxford fellows at Tudley End--that I know. Who"s to say as Jim was with "em at all last night? Who"s to say as it wasn"t them as--"
She stopped, shivering. Marcella held her reluctant hand.
"You don"t know," she said quietly, "that I saw your husband in here for a minute before I came in to you, and that he told me, as he had already told Jenkins, that it was in a struggle with him that Westall was shot, but that he had fired in self-defence because Westall was attacking him.
You don"t know, too, that Charlie Dynes is alive, and says he saw Hurd--"
"Charlie Dynes!" Mrs. Hurd gave a shriek, and then fell to weeping and trembling again, so that Marcella had need of patience.
"If you can"t help me more," she said at last in despair, "I don"t know what we shall do. Listen to me. Your husband will be charged with Westall"s murder. That I am sure of. He says it was not murder--that it happened in a fight. I believe it. I want to get a lawyer to prove it. I am your friend--you know I am. But if you are not going to help me by telling me what you know of last night I may as well go home--and get your sister-in-law to look after you and the children."
She rose as she spoke. Mrs. Hurd clutched at her.
"Oh, my G.o.d!" she said, looking straight before her vacantly at the children, who at once began to cry again. "_Oh, my G.o.d_! Look here, miss"--her voice dropped, her swollen eyes fixed themselves on Marcella--the words came out in a low, hurried stream--"It was just after four o"clock I heard that door turn; I got up in my nightgown and ran down, and there was Jim. "Put that light out," he says to me, sharp like. "Oh, Jim," says I, "wherever have you been? You"ll be the death o"
me and them poor children!" "You go to bed," says he to me, "and I"ll come presently." But I could see him, "cos of the moon, almost as plain as day, an" I couldn"t take my eyes off him. And he went about the kitchen so strange like, puttin" down his hat and takin" it up again, an" I saw he hadn"t got his gun. So I went up and caught holt on him.
An" he gave me a push back. "Can"t you let me alone?" he says; "you"ll know soon enough." An" then I looked at my sleeve where I"d touched him--oh, my G.o.d! my G.o.d!"
Marcella, white to the lips and shuddering too, held her tight. She had the _seeing_ faculty which goes with such quick, nervous natures, and she saw the scene as though she had been there--the moonlit cottage, the miserable husband and wife, the life-blood on the woman"s sleeve.
Mrs. Hurd went on in a torrent of half-finished sentences and fragments of remembered talk. She told her husband"s story of the encounter with the keepers as he had told it to her, of course with additions and modifications already struck out by the agony of inventive pain; she described how she had made him take his blood-stained clothes and hide them in a hole in the roof; then how she had urged him to strike across country at once and get a few hours start before the ghastly business was known. But the more he talked to her the more confident he became of his own story, and the more determined to stay and brave it out.
Besides, he was shrewd enough to see that escape for a man of his deformity was impossible, and he tried to make her understand it so. But she was mad and blind with fear, and at last, just as the light was coming in, he told her roughly, to end their long wrestle, that he should go to bed and get some sleep. She would make a fool of him, and he should want all his wits. She followed him up the steep ladder to their room, weeping. And there was little Willie sitting up in bed, choking with the phlegm in his throat, and half dead of fright because of the voices below.
"And when Hurd see him, he went and cuddled him up, and rubbed his legs and feet to warm them, an" I could hear him groanin". And I says to him, "Jim, if you won"t go for my sake, will you go for the boy"s?" For you see, miss, there was a bit of money in the house, an" I thought he"d hide himself by day and walk by night, and so get to Liverpool perhaps, and off to the States. An" it seemed as though my head would burst with listening for people comin", and him taken up there like a rat in a trap, an" no way of provin" the truth, and everybody agen him, because of the things he"d said. And he burst out a-cryin", an" Willie cried.
An" I came an" entreated of him. An" he kissed me; an" at last he said he"d go. An" I made haste, the light was getting so terrible strong; an"
just as he"d got to the foot of the stairs, an" I was holding little Willie in my arms an" saying good-bye to him--"
She let her head sink against the settle. There was no more to say, and Marcella asked no more questions--she sat thinking. Willie stood, a wasted, worn figure, by his mother, stroking her face; his hoa.r.s.e breathing was for the time the only sound in the cottage.
Then Marcella heard a loud knock at the door. She got up and looked through the cas.e.m.e.nt window. The crowd had mostly dispersed, but a few people stood about on the green, and a policeman was stationed outside the cottage. On the steps stood Aldous Raeburn, his horse held behind him by a boy.
She went and opened the door.
"I will come," she said at once. "There--I see Mrs. Mullins crossing the common. Now I can leave her."
Aldous, taking off his hat, closed the door behind him and stood with his hand on Marcella"s arm, looking at the huddled woman on the settle, at the pale children. There was a solemnity in his expression, a mixture of judgment and pity which showed that the emotion of other scenes also--scenes through which he had just pa.s.sed--was entering into it.
"Poor unhappy souls," he said slowly, under his breath. "You say that you have got some one to see after her. She looks as though it might kill her, too."
Marcella nodded. Now that her task, for the moment, was nearly over, she could hardly restrain herself nervously or keep herself from crying.
Aldous observed her with disquiet as she put on her hat. His heart was deeply stirred. She had chosen more n.o.bly for herself than he would have chosen for her, in thus daring an awful experience for the sake of mercy. His moral sense, exalted and awed by the sight of death, approved, worshipped her. His man"s impatience pined to get her away, to cherish and comfort hen Why, she could hardly have slept three hours since they parted on the steps of the Court, amidst the crowd of carriages!
Mrs. Mullins came in still scared and weeping, and dropping frightened curtseys to "Muster Raeburn." Marcella spoke to her a little in a whisper, gave some counsels which filled Aldous with admiration for the girl"s practical sense and thoughtfulness, and promised to come again later. Mrs. Hurd neither moved nor opened her eyes.
"Can you walk?" said Aldous, bending over her, as they stood outside the cottage. "I can see that you are worn out. Could you sit my horse if I led him?"
"No, let us walk."
They went on together, followed by the eyes of the village, the boy leading the horse some distance behind.
"Where have you been?" said Marcella, when they had pa.s.sed the village.
"Oh, _please_ don"t think of my being tired! I had so much rather know it all. I must know it all."
She was deathly pale, but her black eyes flashed impatience and excitement. She even drew her hand out of the arm where Aldous was tenderly holding it, and walked on erect by herself.
"I have been with poor Dynes," said Aldous, sadly; "we had to take his deposition. He died while I was there."
"He died?"
"Yes. The fiends who killed him had left small doubt of that. But he lived long enough, thank G.o.d, to give the information which will, I think, bring them to justice!"
The tone of the magistrate and the magnate goaded Marcella"s quivering nerves.
"What is justice?" she cried; "the system that wastes human lives in protecting your tame pheasants?"
A cloud came over the stern clearness of his look. He gave a bitter sigh--the sigh of the man to whom his own position in life had been, as it were, one long scruple.
"You may well ask that!" he said. "You cannot imagine that I did not ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow"s bedside."
They walked on in silence. She was hardly appeased. There was a deep, inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack.
At last he resumed:
"But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present case is surely clear--horribly clear. Six men, with at least three guns among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition.
They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing but a light stick apiece. The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and threatened several times in public to "do for him." If that is not brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!"
Marcella stood still in the misty road trying to command herself.
"It was _not_ deliberate," she said at last with difficulty; "not in Hurd"s case. I have heard it all from his own mouth. It was a _struggle_--he might have been killed instead of Westall--Westall attacked, Hurd defended himself."
Aldous shook his head.
"Of course Hurd would tell you so," he said sadly, "and his poor wife.
He is not a bad or vicious fellow, like the rest of the rascally pack.
Probably when he came to himself, after the moment of rage, he could not simply believe what he had done. But that makes no difference. It was murder; no judge or jury could possibly take any other view. Dynes"s evidence is clear, and the proof of motive is overwhelming."
Then, as he saw her pallor and trembling, he broke off in deep distress.
"My dear one, if I could but have kept you out of this!"
They were alone in the misty road. The boy with the horse was out of sight. He would fain have put his arm round her, have consoled and supported her. But she would not let him.
"Please understand," she said in a sort of gasp, as she drew herself away, "that I do _not_ believe Hurd is guilty--that I shall do my very utmost to defend him. He is to me the victim of unjust, abominable laws!
If _you_ will not help me to protect him--then I must look to some one else."