At the same moment a couple of heavily built men, evidently colliers, came down the road from the village. George at once called to them from across the palings.
"Here, you there! this young rascal has been throwing a lump of dirt at Lady Tressady, and has. .h.i.t her badly on the arm. Will you two just walk him up to the police-station for me, while I take my wife home?"
The two men stopped and stared at the lady by the railings and at Sir George holding the boy, whose white but grinning face was just visible in the growing dusk.
"Noa," said one of them at last, "it"s noa business ov ourn--is it, Bill?"
"Noa," said the other, stolidly; and on they tramped.
"Oh, you heroes!" George flung after them. "Attacking a woman in the dark is about what you understand!--Madan!"
He whistled again, and this time there was a hurrying from overhead.
"Sir George!"
"Come down here, will you, at once!"
In a few more minutes the boy was being marched up the road to the police-station in charge of the strong-wristed Scotch manager, and George was free to attend to Letty.
He adjusted a sling very fairly, then made her cling to him with her sound arm; and they were soon inside their own gates.
"You can"t climb this hill," he said to her anxiously. "Rest at the lodge, and let me go for the brougham."
"I can walk perfectly well--and it will be much quicker."
Involuntarily, he was surprised to find her rather belittling than exaggerating the ill. As they climbed on in the dark, he helping her as much as he could, both could not but think of another accident and another victim. Letty found herself imagining again and again what the scene with Lady Maxwell, after the East End meeting, might have been like; while, as for him, a face drew itself upon the rainy dusk, which the will seemed powerless to blot out. It was a curious and unwelcome coincidence. His secret sense of it made him the more restlessly kind.
"What were you in the village for?" he asked, bending to her; "I did not know you had anything to do there!"
"I had been to see old Bessie Hammersley and Mrs. Batchelor," she said, in a tone that tried to be stiff or indifferent. "Bessie begged, as usual."
"That was very good of you. Have you been doing visiting, then, during all these days I have been away?"
"Yes--a few people."
George groaned.
"What"s the use of it--or of anything? They hate us and we them. This strike begins to eat into my very being. And the men will be beaten soon, and the feeling towards the employers will be worse than ever."
"You are sure they will be beaten?"
"Before Christmas, anyway. I daresay there will be some bad times first.
To think a woman even can"t walk these roads without danger of ill-treatment! How is one to have any dealings with the brutes, or any peace with them?"
His rage and bitterness made her somehow feel her bruises less. She even looked up in protest.
"Well, it was only a boy, and you used to think he wasn"t all there."
"Oh! all there!" said George, scornfully. "There"d be half of them in Bedlam if one had to make that excuse for them. There isn"t a day pa.s.ses without some devilry against the non-union men somewhere. It was only this morning I heard of two men being driven into a reservoir near Rilston, and stoned in the water."
"Perhaps we should do the same," she said unwillingly.
"Lean on me more heavily--we shall soon be there. You think we should be brutes too? Probably. We seem to be all brutes for each other--that"s the charming way this compet.i.tive world is managed. So you have been looking after some of the old people, have you? You must have had a dull time of it this last three weeks--don"t think I don"t know that!"
He spoke with emotion. He thought he felt her grasp waver a little on his arm, but she did not speak.
"Suppose--when this business was over--I were to cut the whole concern--let the pits and the house, and go right away? I daresay I could."
"Could you?" she said eagerly.
"We shouldn"t get so much money, you know, as in the best years. But then it would be certain. What would you say to a thousand a year less?"
he asked her, trying to speak lightly.
"Well, it doesn"t seem easy to get on with what we have--even if we had it," she said sharply.
He understood the reference to his mother"s debts, and was silent.
But evidently the recollection, once introduced, generated the usual heat and irritation in her, for, as they neared the front door, she suddenly said, with an acerbity he had not heard for some weeks:
"Of course, to have a country house, and not to be able to spend a farthing upon it--to ask your friends, or have anything decent--is enough to make anyone sick of it. And, above all, when we needn"t have been here at all this October--"
She stopped, shrinking from the rest of the sentence, but not before he had time to think, "She say _that_!--monstrous!"
Aloud he coldly replied:
"It is difficult to see where I could have been but here, this October."
Then the door opened, and the light showed her to him pale, with lips tight pressed from the pain of her injury. Instantly he forgot everything but his natural pity and chivalry towards women. He led her in, and half carried her upstairs. A little later she was resting on her bed, and he had done everything he could for her till the doctor should come. She seemed to have pa.s.sed into an eclipse of temper or moodiness, and he got little grat.i.tude.
The evening post brought her a letter which he took up to her himself.
He knew the clear, rapid hand, and he knew, too, that Letty had received many such during the preceding month. He stood beside her a moment, almost on the point of asking her to let him see it. But the words died on his lips. And, perceiving that she would not read it while he was there, he went away again.
When he returned, carrying a new book and asking if he should read to her, he found her lying with her cheek on her hand, staring into the fire, and so white and miserable that his heart sank. Had he married her, a girl of twenty-four, only to destroy her chance of happiness altogether? A kind of terror seized him. He had been "good to her," so far as she and his business had allowed him, since their return; there had been very little outward jarring; but no one knew better than he that there had not been one truly frank or reconciling moment.
His own inner life during these weeks had pa.s.sed in one obscure continuous struggle--a sort of dull fever of the soul. And she had simply held herself aloof from him.
He knelt down beside her, and laid his face against hers.
"Don"t look so unhappy!" he said in a whisper, caressing her free hand.
She did not answer or make any response till, as he got up again in a kind of despair as to what to do or say next, she hastily asked:
"Has the constable been up here to see you?"
He looked at her in surprise.
"Yes. It is all arranged. The lad will be brought up before the magistrates on Thursday."
She fidgeted, then said abruptly: