“There now, you oughtn’t to take it so ungrateful, and him so nice and obliging to you. There’s some lads ’ud be so stuck up with being raised up—why, they might think it beneath ’em to do such a job!”
Mrs. Cave smiled, and then laughed outright, and the old woman’s eyes grew harder than ever.
Mr. Barfield brought her change—two coppers and a threepenny-bit—and laid it on the counter before her. She took it up without a word, nodded good-night a trifle more surlily than usual, and without unlocking her set lips or turning her eyes once upon either of the two women, passed out into the dusk. Her face was as thunder.
“Well, ’pon my word, it ain’t no sort o’ use tryin’ to be civil and kindly to ’er,” sighed Mrs. Neave; but Mr. Barfield, who had seen the widow’s face, felt a vague sense of pity rise in his calculating little soul, and said as he stuck his pen briskly behind his ear after “entering” Mrs. Neave’s purchase:
“We can’t always just tell, ye know. She may be glad enough to get a sight of ’im though she do talk so short, and as like as not she never sent him round with the linen at all.”
Mrs. Cave was already in the road; she was watching the mother, who set her face once more to the sunset, and, whipped by the creeping mist, struggled on to the cross-roads, where a line of straight pine-stems stood black against the sky that flamed beyond the downs: the downs were blue with mist and the sky was red—red and angry—and the spare bent figure made a spot upon it, and that little spot was the blackest in the whole scene.
“No,” said Mrs. Cave decisively, to those within, “I shouldn’t think she did send him round with it! I should like to know what a body’d want to spend years toilin’ and moilin’ for, except to have the boy cut a bit of a figure when ’e come back among them as knowed ’im a little dirty brat! She sent him indeed!”
Mrs. Cave stuck her sharp little nose in the air, and Mrs. Neave retorted stoutly:
“Well, if she didn’t send ’im, I should say she’d be all the better pleased. I s’pose she’s fond o’ the lad arter her fashion, though, to be sure, she showed it a queer way when ’e was little. My boys do say ’e was that frightened of her there was times when they’d a job to get him to go ’ome.”
“And yet,” put in the grocer, “I can call to mind the day when he fell into the river down yonder. Some one ran up and told ’er of it, and didn’t know whether the child was alive or dead, and they do say she went down all of a ’eap like a corpse of lead. And the doctor told my wife she’s never been the same woman since. And yet when the neighbours brought ’im in drippin’’ wet and queer—if she mustn’t needs go rating ’im for it all the while she was a puttin’ ’im to bed. I know she spoke quite sharp to me when I went round at night to ask after ’im, and yet I could swear I ’eard her cryin’ over ’im soft and a kissin’ of ’im whiles he slept, as I stood waitin’ at the door.”