"They say that nothing has been done!"
Her tone was quiet, but her look pierced.
"I tried. It was impossible. The only thing that could be done was that the people should go. They are under notice. Every single person is here in defiance of the law. The police will have to be called in."
"And where are we to goa, sir!" cried one of the men who had come up.
"Theer"s noa house to be had nearer than Pengarth--yo" know that yoursen--an" how are we to be waakin" fower mile to our work i" t"
mornin", an" fower mile back i" t" evening? Why, we havena got t"
strength! It isna exactly a health resort--yo" ken--Mainstairs!"
"I"ll tell yo" where soom on us might goa, Muster Faversham," said another older man, removing the pipe he had been stolidly smoking; "theer"s two farmhouses o" Melrose"s, within half a mile o" this place--shut oop--noabody there. They"re big houses--yan o" them wor an"
owd manor-house, years agone. A body might put oop five or six families in "em at a pinch. Thattens might dea for a beginnin"; while soom o"
these houses were coomin" doon."
Lydia turned eagerly to Faversham.
"_Couldn"t_ that be done--some of the families with young children that are not yet attacked?" Her eyes hung on him.
He shook his head. He had already proposed something of the sort to Melrose. It had been vetoed.
The men watched him. At last one of them--a lanky youth, with a frowning, ironic expression and famous as a heckler at public meetings--said with slow emphasis:
"There"ll coom a day i" this c.o.o.ntry, mates, when men as treat poor foak like Muster Melrose, "ull be pulled off t" backs of oos an" our like. And may aa live to see "t!"
"Aye! aye!" came in deep a.s.sent from the others, as they turned away. But one white and sickly fellow looked back to say:
"An" it"s a graat pity for a yoong mon like you, sir, to be doin" Muster Melrose"s dirty work--taakin" o" the police--as though yo" had "em oop your sleeve!"
"Haven"t I done what I could for you?" cried Faversham, stung by the reproach, and its effect on Lydia"s face.
"Aye--mebbe--but it"s nowt to boast on." The man, middle aged but prematurely old, stood still, trembling from head to foot. "My babe as wor born yesterday, deed this mornin"; an" they say t" wife "ull lig beside it afore night."
There was a sombre silence. Faversham broke it. "I must see the nurses,"
he said to Lydia; "but again, I beg of you to go! I will send you news."
"I will wait for you. Don"t be afraid. I won"t go indoors."
He went round the houses, watched by the people, as they stood at their doors. He himself was paying two nurses, and now Lady Tatham had sent two more. He satisfied himself that they had all the stores which Undershaw had ordered; he left a donation of money with one of them, and then he returned to Lydia.
They walked together in silence; while a boy from the village led Faversham"s horse some distance in the rear. All that Faversham had meant to say had dropped away from him. His planned defence of himself could find no voice.
"You too blame me?" he said, at last, hoa.r.s.ely.
She shook her head sadly.
"I don"t know what to think. But when we last met--you were so hopeful--"
"Yes--like a fool. But what can you do--with a madman."
"Can you bear--to be still in his employ?"
She looked up, her beautiful eyes bright and challenging.
"Mainstairs is not the whole estate. If I"m powerless here--I"m not elsewhere--"
She was silent. He turned upon her.
"If _you_ are to misunderstand and mistrust me--then indeed I shall lose heart!"
The feeling, one might almost say the anguish, in his dark, commanding face moved her strangely. Condemnation and pity--aye, and something else than pity--struggled within her. For the first time Lydia began to know herself. She was strangely shaken.
"I will try--and understand," she said in a voice that trembled.
"All my power of doing anything depends on it!" he said, pa.s.sionately. "I can say truly that things would have been infinitely worse if I had not been here. And I have worked like a horse to better them--before you came."
She was silent. His appeal to her as to his judge hurt her poignantly.
Yet what could she do or say? Her natural longing was to console; but where were the elements of consolation? _Could_ anything be worse than what she had seen and heard?
The mingled emotion which silenced her, warned her not to continue the conversation. She perceived the opening of a side-lane leading back to the river and the Keswick road.
"This is my best way, I think," she said, pausing, and holding out her hand. "The pony-cart is waiting for me at Whitebeck."
He looked at her in distress, yet also in anger. A friend might surely have stood by him more cordially, believed in him more simply.
"You are at home again? I may come and see you."
"Please! We shall want to hear."
Her tone was embarra.s.sed. They parted almost coldly.
Lydia walked quickly home, down a sloping lane from which the ravines of Blencathra, edge behind edge, chasm beyond chasm, were to be seen against the sunset, and all the intermediate landscape--wood, and stubble, and ferny slope--steeped in stormy majesties of light. But for once the quick artist sense was shut against Nature"s spectacles. She walked in a blind anguish of self-knowledge and self-scorn. She who had plumed herself on the poised mind, the mastered senses!
She moaned to herself.
"Why didn"t he tell me--warn me! To sell himself to that man--to act for him--defend him--apologize for him--and for those awful, awful things! An agent must."
And she thought of some indignant talk of Undershaw, which she had heard that morning.
Her moral self was full of repulsion; her heart was torn. Friend? She owned her weakness, and despised it. Turning aside, she leant a while against a gate, hiding her face from the glory of the evening. Week by week--she knew it now!--through that frank interchange of mind with mind, of heart with heart, represented by that earlier correspondence, still more perhaps through the checks and disappointments of its later phases, Claude Faversham had made his way into the citadel.
The puny defences she had built about the freedom of her maiden life and will lay in ruins. Her theories were scattered like the autumn leaves that were scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore accusingness; the very contradictions of the man"s personality, now delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the pa.s.sion she must needs divine--of these various impressions, small and great, she was the struggling captive. Serenity, peace were gone.
Meanwhile, as Faversham rode toward the Tower, absorbed at one moment in a misery of longing, and the next in a heat of self-defence, perhaps the strongest feeling that finally emerged was one of dismay that her abrupt leave-taking had prevented him from telling her of that other matter of which Tatham"s visit had informed him. She must hear of it immediately, and from those who would judge and perhaps denounce him.
Nevertheless, as he dismounted at the Tower, neither the burden of Mainstairs, nor the fear of Lydia"s disapproval, nor the agitation of the news from Duddon, had moved him one jot from his purpose. A man surely is a coward and a weakling, he thought, who cannot grasp the "skirts of happy chance," while they are there for the grasping; cannot take what the G.o.ds offer, while they offer it, lest they withdraw it forever.
Yet, suppose, that by his own act, he raised a moral barrier between himself and Lydia Penfold which such a personality would never permit itself to pa.s.s?