She worked hard to keep the laundry work together, and she did it, though there were folk enough that said she would never succeed. One by one the children grew up, and were put to service or to a trade, and at last the mother was laid to rest in the graveyard, and ’Melia was left with only one of her brood at her heels.
It had been a hard fight, and save for one hand that had often been stretched out for her in the dark and unknown to herself—she had fought it unaided.
There had been no time, as she had guessed, for larking, or trysting, or love-making. And it was in a very quiet spirit that one autumn Sabbath, when the hops were all in, ’Melia Shaw walked to church with a middle-aged man named Bill Wilkins, and said a gentle and quite untremulous “Yes” to the old question that is for ever being asked and answered in so many and varied moods.
AN ONLY SON
AN ONLY SON
“’Ave you ’eard as Widow Collins’ lad be down from London, Mr. Barfield?” said a little spare woman who stood willingly patient before the counter of a small shop and watched the grocer’s deft fingers pack up a neighbour’s tea and sugar before attending to her own demands.
It was dark, for it was eventide, and the shop did not face the sunset that was going on brilliantly behind the pines at the top of the village street; but any one could have told from the tone of the voice that there was something more than common about Widow Collins’ lad.
Mr. Barfield lit an odoriferous paraffin lamp and hung it to a hook on the low ceiling, amid a wonderful collection of boots and hats and sunshades, of kettles and coils of rope and saucepans—and of Spanish onions on strings.
“What, he that’s clerk in the London Post Office?” asked the other customer with sudden interest.
“I never ’eard as she had no other, Mrs. Neave,” answered the first speaker half crossly, for she was not pleased that the grocer should give more attention to business than to her news; “and I s’pose its ’cause he’s the only one that she see’d fit to bring ’im up above ’is station.” The lamp lit up a thin, pinched face that had once been pretty with that frail, trivial prettiness that seems so strangely ill-fitted for the hard life of daily labour, where it is nevertheless so common. Mrs. Cave drew her ill-fitting little black jacket around her with an irritability of gesture that told in itself how perpetual struggles and over-fatigue had wrought on her. She had had no chance of bringing up any one of her seven boys above his station, for laundry work only brought in a fair pittance in the summer time, when the place was full of visitors, and Widow Collins had the monopoly of the all-the-year-round families.