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 n.o.body to look after them--_n.o.body_--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" princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sented 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 n.o.body--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 n.o.bbut 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 ap.r.o.n, and drew it across her eyes, which had the look of perennial tears.