The landlord of the Green Man had stood near enough to witness this scene, and he was a man whose abundant feeding served to keep his good nature, as well as his person, in high condition. And that lovely tearful face of Hetty’s would have found out the sensitive fibre in most men.
“Come, young woman, come in,” he said, “and have adrop o’ something; you’re pretty well knocked up, I can see that.”
He took her into the bar and said to his wife, “Here, missis, take this young woman into the parlour; she’s a little overcome”—for Hetty’s tears were falling fast. They were merely hysterical tears: she thought she had no reason for weeping now, and was vexed that she was too weak and tired to help it. She was at Windsor at last, not far from Arthur.
She looked with eager, hungry eyes at the bread and meat and beer that the landlady brought her, and for some minutes she forgot everything else in the delicious sensations of satisfying hunger and recovering from exhaustion. The landlady sat opposite to her as she ate, and looked at her earnestly. No wonder: Hetty had thrown off her bonnet, and her curls had fallen down. Her face was all the more touching in its youth and beauty because of its weary look, and the good woman’s eyes presently wandered to her figure, which in her hurried dressing on her journey she had taken no pains to conceal; moreover, the stranger’s eye detects what the familiar unsuspecting eye leaves unnoticed.
“Why, you’re not very fit for travelling,” she said, glancing while she spoke at Hetty’s ringless hand. “Have you come far?”
“Yes,” said Hetty, roused by this question to exert more self-command, and feeling the better for the food she had taken. “I’ve come a good long way, and it’s very tiring. But I’m better now. Could you tell me which way to go to this place?” Here Hetty took from her pocket a bit of paper: it was the end of Arthur’s letter on which he had written his address.
While she was speaking, the landlord had come in and had begun to look at her as earnestly as his wife had done. He took up the piece of paper which Hetty handed across the table, and read the address.
“Why, what do you want at this house?” he said. It is in the nature of innkeepers and all men who have no pressing business of their own to ask as many questions as possible before giving any information.
“I want to see a gentleman as is there,” said Hetty.
“But there’s no gentleman there,” returned the landlord. “It’s shut up—been shut up this fortnight. What gentleman is it you want? Perhaps I can let you know where to find him.”
“It’s Captain Donnithorne,” said Hetty tremulously, her heart beginning to beat painfully at this disappointment of her hope that she should find Arthur at once.
“Captain Donnithorne? Stop a bit,” said the landlord, slowly. “Was he in the Loamshire Militia? A tall young officer with a fairish skin and reddish whiskers—and had a servant by the name o’ Pym?”
“Oh yes,” said Hetty; “you know him—where is he?”
“A fine sight o’ miles away from here. The Loamshire Militia’s gone to Ireland; it’s been gone this fortnight.”
“Look there! She’s fainting,” said the landlady, hastening to support Hetty, who had lost her miserable consciousness and looked like a beautiful corpse. They carried her to the sofa and loosened her dress.
“Here’s a bad business, I suspect,” said the landlord, as he brought in some water.
“Ah, it’s plain enough what sort of business it is,” said the wife. “She’s not a common flaunting dratchell, I can see that. She looks like a respectable country girl, and she comes from a good way off, to judge by her tongue. She talks something like that ostler we had that come from the north. He was as honest a fellow as we ever had about the house—they’re all honest folks in the north.”
“I never saw a prettier young woman in my life,” said the husband. “She’s like a pictur in a shop-winder. It goes to one’s ’eart to look at her.”
“It ’ud have been a good deal better for her if she’d been uglier and had more conduct,” said the landlady, who on any charitable construction must have been supposed to have more “conduct” than beauty. “But she’s coming to again. Fetch a drop more water.”
Chapter II.
The Journey in Despair.
Hetty was too ill through the rest of that day for any questions to be addressed to her—too ill even to think with any distinctness of the evils that were to come. She only felt that all her hope was crushed, and that instead of having found a refuge she had only reached the borders of a new wilderness where no goal lay before her. The sensations of bodily sickness, in a comfortable bed, and with the tendance of the good-natured landlady, made a sort of respite for her; such a respite as there is in the faint weariness which obliges a man to throw himself on the sand instead of toiling onward under the scorching sun.
But when sleep and rest had brought back the strength necessary for the keenness of mental suffering—when she lay the next morning looking at the growing light which was like a cruel task-master returning to urge from her a fresh round of hated hopeless labour—she began to think what course she must take, to remember that all her money was gone, to look at the prospect of further wandering among strangers with the new clearness shed on it by the experience of her journey to Windsor. But which way could she turn? It was impossible for her to enter into any service, even if she could obtain it. There was nothing but immediate beggary before her. She thought of a young woman who had been found against the church wall at Hayslope one Sunday, nearly dead with cold and hunger—a tiny infant in her arms. The woman was rescued and taken to the parish. “The parish!” You can perhaps hardly understand the effect of that word on a mind like Hetty’s, brought up among people who were somewhat hard in their feelings even towards poverty, who lived among the fields, and had little pity for want and rags as a cruel inevitable fate such as they sometimes seem in cities, but held them a mark of idleness and vice—and it was idleness and vice that brought burdens on the parish. To Hetty the “parish” was next to the prison in obloquy, and to ask anything of strangers—to beg—lay in the same far-off hideous region of intolerable shame that Hetty had all her life thought it impossible she could ever come near. But now the remembrance of that wretched woman whom she had seen herself, on her way from church, being carried into Joshua Rann’s, came back upon her with the new terrible sense that there was very little now to divide her from the same lot. And the dread of bodily hardship mingled with the dread of shame; for Hetty had the luxurious nature of a round soft-coated pet animal.
How she yearned to be back in her safe home again, cherished and cared for as she had always been! Her aunt’s scolding about trifles would have been music to her ears now; she longed for it; she used to hear it in a time when she had only trifles to hide. Could she be the same Hetty that used to make up the butter in the dairy with the Guelder roses peeping in at the window—she, a runaway whom her friends would not open their doors to again, lying in this strange bed, with the knowledge that she had no money to pay for what she received, and must offer those strangers some of the clothes in her basket? It was then she thought of her locket and ear-rings, and seeing her pocket lie near, she reached it and spread the contents on the bed before her. There were the locket and ear-rings in the little velvet-lined boxes, and with them there was a beautiful silver thimble which Adam had bought her, the words “Remember me” making the ornament of the border; a steel purse, with her one shilling in it; and a small red-leather case, fastening with a strap. Those beautiful little ear-rings, with their delicate pearls and garnet, that she had tried in her ears with such longing in the bright sunshine on the 30th of July! She had no longing to put them in her ears now: her head with its dark rings of hair lay back languidly on the pillow, and the sadness that rested about her brow and eyes was something too hard for regretful memory. Yet she put