Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/51

 drink; he had no purpose save the degrading purpose of defeating the nightly wanderings of his drunken wife. Thus, without any human eye upon him in the dark way he was going, Stephen Orry had grown coarse and base.

But the end was not yet of all this man was to be and know. One night, after spending the day on the sea with the lines for cod, the year deepening to winter, the air muggy and chill, he went away home, hungry and wet and cold, leaving his mates at the door of the "Plough," where there was good company within and the cheer of a busy fire. Home! On reaching Port-y-Vullin he found the door open, the hearth cold, the floor in a puddle from the driving rain, not a bite or sup in the cupboard, and his wife lying drunk across the bed, with the child in its grimy blueness creeping and crying about her head.

It was the beginning of the end. Once again he fumbled the haft of his seaman's knife, and then by a quick impulse he plucked up the child in his arms.

"Now, God be praised for your poor face," he said, and while he dried the child's pitiful eyes, the hot drops started to his own.

He lit the fire, he cooked a cod he had brought home with him, he ate himself and fed the little one. Then he sat before the hearth with the child at his breast, as any mother might do, for at length it had come to him to know that if it was not to be lost and worse than orphaned, he must henceforth be father and mother both to it.

And when the little eyes, wet no longer, but laughing like sunshine into the big seared face above them, struggled in vain with sleep, he wrapped the child in his ragged guernsey and put it to lie like a bundle where the fire could warm it. Then all being done, he sat down again, and leaning his elbows on his knees covered his ears with his hands, so that they might shut out the sound of the woman's heavy breathing.

It was on that night, for the first time since he fled from Iceland, that he saw the full depth of his offence. Offence? Crime it was, and that of the blackest; and in the tenor of his loneliness he trembled at the thought that some day his horrible dumb secret would become known, that something would happen to tell it—that he was married already when he married the woman who lay behind him.

At that he saw how low he had fallen—from her who once had been so pure and true beside him, and had loved him and given up father and home and fame for him, to this trull, who now dragged him through the slush, and trod on him and hated 4em