Mrs. Shaw flushed all over her poor wrinkled, sallow face as she put down one iron and took up another with a trembling hand, holding it to her cheek to test the heat.
“I should like to know who they can be, then,” said she with a note of righteous indignation in her quivering voice. “I never did ’old with them dark lanes, and ’Melia knows it; but when it comes to be’aving—well, there, ’Melia may be a bit light-’earted—I don’t say she bain’t—but she comes o’ respectable folk, and none can say contrairy to that.”
“Oh, Lor’ bless you, yes; no offence, I’m sure,” declared Martha Jones, retreating. “Girls will be girls, so I say. But I’d make her do a bit at them shirts to-night. ’Tis but fair to you.”
She nodded in an offhand, friendly way as she shambled down the rough brick steps to the road—the matter dismissed from her mind. But the poor widow drew many a laboured sigh from her aching breast as the iron passed quickly or slowly over the white linen; and when she stepped to the threshold now and then to look to the children playing in the road there was more than the usual fret of work unfinished and worry to come on her weary face, and Martha Jones’s friendly advice was the cause.
Meanwhile, in the sun-steeped hop-gardens down the hill towards the sea, ’Melia was taking her fill of health and fun.
It was very hot; beyond the waste of yellow turf—relieved by the richer brown of nodding grasses at seedtime, and by the green of rushes along the sides of brackish dykes, all of which went to form the mellow plain between the village on the hill and the ocean in the distance—blue waves rippled in the sunlight and the shallow water farther out was streaked with purple shadows till a yellow dash in the distance told of scarce covered sands.
She was a tall, powerful, dark girl, in every particular opposite to the fragile woman over the ironing-board. Some strain of gipsy blood in the unknown past must have bred those deep, dark eyes and kindled the quick flash that pride, anger, or pleasure would stir in their brown softness. And in her gait, too, and in her movements there was a fulness and a freedom foreign to the less well-developed persons of most of her companions. Was it any wonder that the lads liked her, that her merry spirit and her hearty ways kept them good-tempered and civil, when a gloomy face would sour the best of them—that ’Melia Shaw was a favourite with every male creature, and not quite so popular with her own sex?
But for that, truth to tell, she seemed to care but little. She was hail-fellow-well-met with everybody—girl and boy alike; but if anybody presumed to “cheek” her, or to interfere with what she considered it right and proper to do, that person repented of his or her indiscretion in a very short space of time.
And to-day some one had ventured to interfere with ’Melia, and was “catching it hot” in return. The imprudent person was a hard-featured woman of about forty, who was cordially hated in the field because she never looked up from her work, but picked more poles in an hour than anybody else to right or left of her.
“Ye didn’t get much out o’ the lads yerself seemingly when you was young, Miss Crutch,” the girl was retorting with a merry toss of her black head. “Maybe we young ’uns know a way worth two o’ that now-a-days.”