“We’ll come, Jim,” he said. “Come in and have a bite of food and a pull at the ale-pot.”
The poacher capped Isaac, for Grimshaw was a man of some circumstance among the night-moths of Pevensel. They went, the three of them, into Isaac’s cottage, and were soon gossiping over their bacon, brown bread, and ale. When they had ended the meal, Isaac whispered a few words into his son’s ear, and Dan, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, marched off to his cottage to look at Bess.
He found her much as they had left her, sitting stiffly in the chair, and gazing out of the window. Her face brightened a little when Dan entered, and she tried to smile at him as though for welcome. The man appeared in no mood to pity her. He felt the cords about her wrists and ankles, stared at her a moment in silence, stroking his beard with the palm of his hand.
“Dan,” she said, with a wistful drooping of the mouth.
Her husband’s dark eyes were hard and without light.
Dan frowned as he turned towards the door.
“Keep ye from playing more tricks,” he said. “You will bide there safe, I reckon, till we come back.”
Bess said never a word to him, but it was with a sinking heart that she heard Dan shut and lock the door. What would they do with her when they returned? Of a surety she had discovered some great secret that had lain hid in the deeps of Pevensel. What if her meddling should bring her to her death?
An hour passed, dragging its linked minutes like a snake crawling lazily in the long grass under the summer sun.
Bess, bound fast to the chair, sat like one weak after a long illness, the sunlight falling on the floor, to be reflected upon the brown beams of the old room. The girl’s face looked white and apathetic against the dark background of an old linen-press. Her eyes stared out steadily through the window at the green woods bathed in sunshine, and the white clouds sailing slowly north across the infinite azure of the June sky. The life fire had burned low in her since Dan had struck her down in the woods. The shock of the night had not yet lifted from her heart. Old Isaac’s pitiless gray eyes still haunted her, and she remembered the gleam of the barrel of the gun.
This same evening she was to have met Jeffray at Holy Cross, and the thought stirred the blood in her a little. She lay back in the chair, resting her head upon the rail, and taking her breath in deeply with slow, sighing inspirations. The memories of her last meeting with Jeffray began to work in her with quickening force. All the sweet complicity of the plot set the cords of her heart vibrating. If he but knew, if he had but guessed how Dan had treated her! If he were only wise as to her present peril!