"I don't say he has. I only want to know where he is. You can understand, Carry, that it would be best that he should be at home."
She paused again, and then she blurted out her answer. "He went out o' that back door, Mr. Fenwick, when you came in at t'other." The Vicar immediately went to the back door, but Sam, of course, was not to be seen.
"Why should he be hiding if he has done no harm?" said the Vicar.
"He thought it was one of them police. They do be coming here a'most every day, till one's heart faints at seeing 'em. I'd go away if I'd e'er a place to go to."
"Have you no place at home, Carry?"
"No, sir; no place."
This was so true that he couldn't tell himself why he had asked the question. She certainly had no place at home till her father's heart should be changed towards her.
"Carry," said he, speaking very slowly, "they tell me that you are married. Is that true?"
She made him no answer.
"I wish you would tell me, if you can. The state of a married woman is honest at any rate, let her husband be who he may."
"My state is not honest."
"You are not married, then?"
"No, sir."
He hardly knew how to go on with this interrogation, or to ask questions about her past and present life, without expressing a degree of censure which, at any rate for the present, he wished to repress.
"You are living here, I believe, with old Mrs. Burrows?" he said.
"Yes, sir."
"I was told that you were married to her son."
"They told you untrue, sir. I know nothing of her son, except just to have see'd him."
"Is that true, Carry?"
"It is true. It wasn't he at all."
"Who was it, Carry?"
"Not her son;--but what does it signify? He's gone away, and I shall see un no more. He wasn't no good, Mr. Fenwick, and if you please we won't talk about un."
"He was not your husband?"
"No, Mr. Fenwick; I never had a husband, nor never shall, I suppose.
What man would take the likes of me? I have just got one thing to do, and that's all."
"What thing is that, Carry?"
"To die and have done with it," she said, bursting out into loud sobs. "What's the use o' living? Nobody 'll see me, or speak to me.
Ain't I just so bad that they'd hang me if they knew how to catch me?"
"What do you mean, girl?" said Fenwick, thinking for the moment that from her words she, too, might have had some part in the murder.
"Ain't the police coming here after me a'most every day? And when they hauls about the place, and me too, what can I say to 'em? I have got that low that a'most everybody can say what they please to me.
And where can I go out o' this? I don't want to be living here always with that old woman."
"Who is the old woman, Carry?"
"I suppose you knows, Mr. Fenwick?"
"Mrs. Burrows, is it?" She nodded her head. "She is the mother of the man they call the Grinder?" Again she nodded her head. "It is he whom they accuse of the murder?" Yet again she nodded her head. "There was another man?" She nodded it again. "And they say that there was a third," he said,--"your brother Sam."
"Then they lie," she shouted, jumping up from her seat. "They lie like devils. They are devils; and they'll go, oh, down into the fiery furnace for ever and ever." In spite of the tragedy of the moment, Mr. Fenwick could not help joining this terribly earnest threat and the Marquis of Trowbridge together in his imagination. "Sam hadn't no more to do with it than you had, Mr. Fenwick."
"I don't believe he had," said Mr. Fenwick.
"Yes; because you're good, and kind, and don't think ill of poor folk when they're a bit down. But as for them, they're devils."
"I did not come here, however, to talk about the murder, Carry. If I thought you knew who did it, I shouldn't ask you. That is business for the police, not for me. I came here partly to look after Sam. He ought to be at home. Why has he left his home and his work while his name is thus in people's mouths?"
"It ain't for me to answer for him, Mr. Fenwick. Let 'em say what they will, they can't make the white of his eye black. But as for me, I ain't no business to speak of nobody. How should I know why he comes and why he goes? If I said as how he'd come to see his sister, it wouldn't sound true, would it, sir, she being what she is?"
He got up and went to the front door, and opened it, and looked about him. But he was looking for nothing. His eyes were full of tears, and he didn't care to wipe the drops away in her presence.
"Carry," he said, coming back to her, "it wasn't all for him that I came."
[Illustration: "Carry," he said, coming back to her, "it wasn't all for him that I came."]
"For who else, then?"
"Do you remember how we loved you when you were young, Carry? Do you remember my wife, and how you used to come and play with the children on the lawn? Do you remember, Carry, where you sat in church, and the singing, and what trouble we had together with the chaunts? There are one or two at Bullhampton who never will forget it?"
"Nobody loves me now," she said, talking at him over her shoulder, which was turned to him.
He thought for a moment that he would tell her that the Lord loved her; but there was something human at his heart, something perhaps too human, which made him feel that were he down low upon the ground, some love that was nearer to him, some love that was more easily intelligible, which had been more palpably felt, would in his frailty and his wickedness be of more immediate avail to him than the love even of the Lord God.
"Why should you think that, Carry?"
"Because I am bad."
"If we were to love only the good, we should love very few. I love you, Carry, truly. My wife loves you dearly."
"Does she?" said the girl, breaking into low sobs. "No, she don't. I know she don't. The likes of her couldn't love the likes of me. She wouldn't speak to me. She wouldn't touch me."