When Principles Collide With Tragedy — North and South

Margaret and Higgins walk together through Milton and learn, in the course of the walk, that Boucher has killed himself. He lay face-down in the brook, and the report is delivered with the flat exactness of people too familiar with poverty to dress it up. Boucher had been denied Union support and had no other income; his family was starving; he had run out of the endurance that the strike required and that he had never fully possessed. They go to the Boucher house. The widow is barely holding herself together in front of the children. She tells them to take something to play with and not to cry, and in the same breath breaks apart, calling for her husband. Margaret catches her before she falls. Higgins takes the children. The household is reorganised around immediate practical necessity. Higgins is shaken in a way he rarely allows to show. He knows his own role in what has happened: the Union rule that denied Boucher relief was applied because of what Boucher had done, and Boucher is now dead. The chapter ends with Margaret's understated observation, made to Higgins, that after a day like this, being alone is the only thing that can do one any good. Neither of them has the resources to comfort the other, and they both know it.