Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/54

 after some sheep. Stephen waited, and four hours later Kinley returned, looking abashed but dogged, and saying he must have good security or a year's rent down.

Stephen went back home with his head deep in his breast. Again the woman saw him coming, again she studied his face, and again she laughed in her heart.

"He will lift his hand to me," she thought, "and then we shall see."

But he seemed to read her purpose, and determined to defeat it. She might starve him, herself, and their child, but the revenge she had set her mind upon she should not have.

Yet to live with her and to contain himself at every brutal act or bestial word was more than he could trust himself to do, and he determined to fly. Let it be anywhere—anywhere, if only out of the torture of her presence. One place was like another in Man, for go where he would to any corner of the island, there she would surely follow him.

Old Thurstan Coobragh, of Ballacreggan, gave him work at draining a flooded meadow. It was slavery that no other Christian man would do, but for a month Stephen Orry worked up to his waist in water, and lived on barley bread and porridge. At the end of his job he had six-and-thirty shillings saved, and with this money in his pocket, and the child in his arms, he hurried down to the harbour at Ramsey, where an Irish packet lay ready to sail.

Could he have a passage to Ireland? Certainly he could, but where was his licence?

Stephen Orry had never heard until then that before a man could leave the Isle of Man he must hold a licence permitting him to do so.

"Go to the High Bailiff," said the captain of the packet; and to the High Bailiff Stephen Orry went.

"I come for a licence to go away into Ireland," he said.

"Very good. But where is your wife?" said the High Bailiff. "Are you leaving her behind you to be a burden on the parish?"

At that Stephen's heart sank, for he saw that his toil had been wasted, and that his savings were worthless. Doomed he was for all his weary days to live with the woman who hated him. He was bound to her, and he must go begrimed and bedraggled to the dregs of life with her. So he went back home, and hid his money in a hole in the thatch of the roof, that the touch of it might vex his memory no more.