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Updated: June 24, 2025
She liked him, on account of an occasional wistful expression in his eyes, and because she had been kind to him during his fearful visit to Bycars. She even admired him, for his cruel honesty and force. At the same time, he excited her compassion to an acute degree. As she gazed at him the tears were ready to start from her eyes.
Yet she ought to have known, and she did know as well as any one, that though in Bursley itself people will pretend out of politeness that nothing unusual is afoot when something unusual most obviously is afoot, in the small suburbs of Bursley, such as Bycars, no human or divine power can prevent the populace from loosing its starved curiosity openly upon no matter what spectacle that may differ from the ordinary.
The distinctive bow-window of Mrs. Maldon's shone yellow. Within the sacred room was still the old lady, sitting expectant, and trying to interest herself in the paper. Strange thought! Bycars Lane led in a north-easterly direction over the broad hill whose ridge separates the lane from the moorlands honeycombed with coal and iron mines.
Between the masses of the ragged hedge on the north side of the lane there was the thin gleam of Bycars Pool, lost in a vague, unoccupied region of shawdrucks and dirty pasture the rendezvous of skaters when the frost held, Louis Fores had told her, and she had heard from another source that he skated divinely. She could believe it, too. She resumed her way more slowly.
Going down Bycars Lane amid the soft wandering airs of the September night, Rachel had the delicious and exciting sensation of being unyoked, of being at liberty for a space to obey the strong, free common sense of youth instead of conforming to the outworn and tiresome code of another age. Mrs. Maldon's was certainly a house that put a strain on the nerves.
"I'll come and shut it after you." The next moment he had undone the door and was down the front steps and in the solitude of Bycars Lane. He ran up the street, full of the one desire to accomplish his errand and be back again in the spare bedroom alone. The notes were utterly safe where they lay, and yet astounding events might happen.
The municipal park, of which Bycars Lane was the north-western boundary, lay in mysterious and forbidden groves behind its spiked red wall and locked gates, and beyond it a bright tram-car was leaping down from lamp to lamp of Moorthorne Road towards the town.
Bycars Lane, though free from mud, was everywhere heavily bedewed. The narrow pavement glistened. The roofs glistened. Drops of water hung on all the edges of the great gas-lamp beneath her, which was still defying the dawn. The few miserable trees and bushes on the vague lands beyond the lane were dripping with water.
In words almost identical with those already reported to her by Louis, Batchgrew insisted on the honesty and efficiency of the valuer in Hanbridge, a lifelong friend of his own, who had for a specially low fee put a price on the house at Bycars and its contents for the purpose of a division between Louis and Julian.
The sky was low and heavy, in scarcely distinguishable shades of purplish grey, and Bycars Pool, of which she had a glimpse, appeared in its smooth blackness to be not more wet than the rest of the scene. Nothing stirred. Not the tiniest branch stirred on the leafless trees, nor a leaf on a grey rhododendron-bush in a front garden below. Every window within sight had its blind drawn.
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