To his mind, this money was the payment of a very old debt. The amount of his first charitable donation sent nearly fifteen years ago, had been twenty pounds. That, the most urgent part of the debt, represented the four bank-notes given to the wife by Mr. Barradine in London. The other twenty instalments made up the amount of the legacy that came to her at his death. Mavis had lent the money to her husband, had in due course received a similar sum of money from him, and she held it now safely invested; but, as Dale told himself, she did not in truth hold one penny of the dead man's gifts. All that she had now was the gift of him, Dale; and the money that soiled her hands in touching it, the money that had burned his brain, the filthy gold that had made him half-mad to think of, had gone to strangers whom neither of them had ever seen. He had been slow about it; but, thank God, he had done at last what he wanted to do at the very beginning.
He folded the scrap of paper that was his receipt or quittance, put it in his breast pocket, and rode on at a foot-pace. He was absolutely alone, not a soul in sight wherever he turned his eyes, not a beast, not a bird moving, the desolate brown heath and the sad gray sky alike empty of life; straight ahead, about a mile distant, lay the Cross Roads, the tavern, and the small hamlet of cottages, but as yet they were hidden by a rise of the intervening ground; only the fringe of cultivated land at the point where it met the barren waste indicated the work or proximity of mankind. His face grew still darker as he approached these fields and saw the cluster of houses on their edge. He looked at the deep ditch that surrounded the outermost field; then turning his head looked again at the heath, its bleak contours mounting gradually till they showed an ugly ridge beyond which the downs swelled up soft and vague against the hanging curtain of clouds. And he thought of what lay on the far side of this long grass rampart of down country--the fat-soiled valley, the other railway line, the trains from the West of England, full of queer people, running by night as well as by day.
As he passed the Barradine Arms, he saw three louts leaning against a dry bit of wall under the eaves of an outhouse. They stared at him stupidly, not speaking or touching their caps, just loutishly staring; and he stared at them with black severity. He thought how he himself had been like one of those oafs, living in a cottage not so many miles from this spot. No one now seemed to remember his humble birth, his unhappy youth, his sordid home. Other people forgot everything; while he could forget nothing.