Women of the Country Part 6

Anne turned to the bed-ridden woman, saying, "On Thursday I shall be going in to market and I'll call at the Union Infirmary and see the Matron. I think you'll be better looked after there and have peace and quietness."

"It couldn't be worse than this," said the woman. "I think perhaps I've been foolish to stay here so long."

"I'll see the Matron for you on Thursday," said Anne. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye, and thank you," returned the sick woman, turning wearily away from her fellow-lodger and settling down to the silence and endurance in which she habitually lived.

"Good afternoon, Mrs Wright," said Anne to the other woman as she opened the door. The woman stared in a way meant to put Anne out of countenance, making no reply, while Anne, going outside, shut the door gently behind her.

CHAPTER XIII

For three months Anne had prayed constantly for Jane. Living alone in an orderly and quiet house with one window open towards her Invisible Friend, she had spoken with Him of her desire for Jane's recovery, until it appeared to her that He too must yearn as she did for this definite thing. Elizabeth Richardson had been removed to the Infirmary and was at peace, so that Anne's thoughts were of little else than Jane and her re-instatement in the country. It was not the chagrin of the failure of her visit to Burton's house which troubled her, but her helplessness. If she went again she could do no more than plead as she had done before.

But it might be that the girl had by this time felt her need of outside friends. It was fully three months ago. As Anne was returning from the nearest village one afternoon in the solemn winter sunshine, she determined suddenly to pay a second visit to Jane. And she would try to be less hard on Burton, which would perhaps draw Jane to her. It might be that she needed a friend by now. Half a mile from her own cottage she came to a three-cornered patch of the way where several roads met. By one side was a pond with two posts painted white as a mark for drivers at night-time. The sloping edge of the pond was trodden into mud by the feet of horses stopping to drink, and as Anne, crossing the road to avoid the mud, arrived opposite one of the posts, she saw a bill posted upon it announcing a sale.

"I must see what it is," she said. "Perhaps it's something for Mary."

She read the heading. "Sale of Bankrupt Stock."

"It seems to be nothing but horses," she said as she read the list. Two men carrying forks on their shoulders came at that moment from the Ashley Road and joined her, looking over her shoulder at the bill.

"I heard about it this morning," said one. "I thought he couldn't last long at that rate. It was always spending and making a show."

"There was someone else in it," said the other. "They say Burton's done a moonlight flitting and gone to America."

Anne, whose thoughts had been engrossed by a new opportunity for Mary, became aware of calamity of a new sort. She turned to the men.

"What has happened?" she asked, though even as she spoke she had grasped it all. The man, a young, fair-haired man of twenty-six, with great breadth of chest and long straight legs, answered with the willingness of a countryman to spread news.

"Why, that Richard Burton's gone bankrupt and made a bolt. They say it'll take the house as well as the horses to pay it all up. The bailiffs was in to-day as I pa.s.sed taking it all down. It's a bad job for _somebody_, I heard," he said winking at the other man. He, glancing at Anne, looked embarra.s.sed and pretended not to see.

"Can either of you tell me where the girl who was living there has gone?

Is she still there?" she asked the latter man.

"Not she!" answered the former.

"They say she walked in the night to Ashley Union," said the elder man.

"She's there now and n.o.body saw her go, so I suppose she must have done.

It's a good eight miles of a walk."

"Do her good," said the younger man; and they began to discuss the list and quality of the horses for sale.

Anne walked on. It had come then, and sooner than it was looked for.

Jane's fancy-work and "lady-like" life seemed like the play-things of a baby by the side of a scaffold, as helpless and as foolish.

"I was going to the Union to-morrow anyway for Elizabeth Richardson,"

said Anne, as she unlocked her door, trying not to see Jane Evans walking all alone, with no new house or protector, through the darkness of which she was afraid, to the formidable iron gate of the Union.

CHAPTER XIV

In the afternoon of the following day Anne entered the common room of the Infirmary. In this large room, with high windows spotlessly clean, a fireplace at one end in which a sufficiently generous fire was burning, and before which were two wicker cradles; women for the most part in extreme old age of body rather than years were sitting in every possible att.i.tude on the wooden seat which ran round the wall on three sides of the room. At the far end, near the fire, a blind woman was knitting men's stockings. Two very old women sat with their chins in their hands and heads bent, motionless, neither hearing nor seeing anything outward.

Three others, their white pleated caps nodding at different angles, were making ap.r.o.ns. A young woman with a healthy but sullen face was nursing a large baby. Another, younger, but early-developed, as girls are in the country, sat nearest the fire, a shawl half off her shoulders, her foot rocking one of the cradles. There seemed no trace of coa.r.s.eness in her face, refined now by illness and days indoors; only an infinite ignorance and bewilderment. She seemed not more than seventeen. The tone of the Matron in speaking to her was not unkind, but had in it the mixture of impatience and contempt, which sensible middle-aged women have for foolish girls who can't look after themselves. There was, too, unknown to herself, for she would have looked upon herself as a kind woman, a slight feeling of satisfaction that, though the silly girl was sheltered in this place and everyone was kind to her, she'd find out what it meant to get herself in that state when she went outside. In the meantime, being really kind, if sensible, she said.

"Keep your shawl over your shoulders, Maggie. You mustn't catch cold your first day out of bed!"

"She doesn't look fit for much does she?" said the other young mother contemptuously. "Ten days and then to be as washed out as that."

One of the old women, who had remained motionless, got up slowly and stretched out her hand, pointing at the girl vindictively.

"That girl's next the fire! That was _my_ place before she come."

"Oh, you're all right, mother," said the Matron cheerfully, pushing her gently back to her seat. The old woman mumbled to herself as she sank back into the same stupor, in the midst of which she brooded on her grievance. The other old woman began in a hard, high voice without raising her head:

"That's the way they do in this place. Push out the old ones."

"Now you two don't begin talking and grumbling," interrupted the Matron decidedly. "You're as well treated as anyone else."

At this moment Anne made a movement in the corner where she had stood unnoticed. From every bench withered hands were thrust at her, some grasping her arm, some her mantle, some were held open at her face.

"Give me a ha'penny--just a ha'penny!" screamed a dozen old voices. "A ha'penny! Spare a ha'penny!"

"Now then," interrupted the Matron, taking two of the women and leading them back to their places. "What good would a ha'penny do to _any_ of you?" She touched two other women, and they retired grumbling to their seats, all except one tall, bony old creature, with a frightful palsy, who kept hold of Anne by the arm, repeating in a voice which was more like an angry scream than the whisper which her deaf ears imagined it to be.

"Those other women'll all beg from you. They'd take the bread out of anybody's mouth. Give me a ha'penny Missis, only a ha'penny," and her avaricious, bony hand pinched Anne's arm tightly as though she already clutched the coin. The Matron, using both her own hands, unfastened her hands as she might have done a knot. The old woman shook with rage and palsy, and fell rather than sat down on her seat under the flowering geraniums in the window.

"Now, I _knew_ there was somebody strange in the room," said the blind woman. "Just let me have a look at her."

She tucked her knitting needles into her ap.r.o.n-string. She had been for many years in the workhouse infirmary, where she knitted and repaired the thick stockings worn by the inmates. She had become a kind of pride of the ward. Beyond the misfortune of her blindness she had no defect, and her mind was alert and cheerful.

"She calls it 'looking,'" said the Matron with a laugh. "Just you see her knitting, Miss Hilton. She's re-footing those stockings. See if you can tell where she's patched them." She took up a bright blue stocking from the bench. The blind woman took the other end and felt it carefully.

"That's not _my_ work," she said with amused contempt. "It's too like patchwork. Here's mine."

Anne took the stocking and looked. "It's beautiful," she said. "I could never have told there was a join." The blind woman's hand touched her arm and wandered slowly upwards, over her face and neck and head.

"I've not seen you before, have I?" she said. "No, I don't think I have."

The Matron had already turned to leave the room. Anne, held by the blind woman, looked again round the big room with its clean floor and battered inmates. The uneventful peace broken by the bickering of the old women, the babies bringing a double burden to their mothers, the blind woman, to whom all days were alike, seemed to be imprisoned for ever.

She followed the Matron into the courtyard. Several men in bottle-green corduroys loitered there, and a tiny old woman shrivelled and imbecile, who ran to Anne the moment she appeared, holding her skirts high to her knees, skipping on one foot and then on the other.

"I'll dance for a ha'penny! I'll dance for a ha'penny!" she whined.