"I'll tell you a scheme," said Harry roguishly. "Refuse to rejoin the domestic hearth until he comes and fetches you."
She gave a little laugh. "Oh, he won't come to fetch me."
"Well," said Harry shortly and decisively, "we shall see what can be done. I may tell you we're rather great at getting people down here.... I wonder where those girls are?" He turned round and Hilda turned round.
The red Georgian house with its windows in octagonal panes, its large pediment hiding the centre of the roof, and its white paint, showed brilliantly across the hoop-studded green, between some cypresses and an ilex; on either side were smooth walls of green--trimmed shrubs forming long alleys whose floors were also green; and here and there a round or oval flowerbed, and, at the edges of the garden, curved borders of flowers. Everything was still, save the ship-like birds on the pond, the distant children in the plantation, and the slow-moving, small clouds overhead. The sun's warmth was like an endearment.
Janet and Alicia, their arms round each other's shoulders, sauntered into view from behind the cypresses. On the more sheltered lawn nearest the house they were engaged in a quiet but tremendous palaver; nobody but themselves knew what they were talking about; it might have been the affair of Johnnie and Mrs. Chris Hamson, as to which not a word had been publicly said at Tavy Mansion since Janet and Hilda's arrival. Janet still wore black, and now she carried a red sunshade belonging to Alicia. Alicia was in white, not very clean white, and rather tousled. She was only twenty-five. She had grown big and jolly and downright (even to a certain shamelessness) and careless of herself. Her body had the curves, and her face the emaciation, of the young mother. She used abrupt, gawky, kind-hearted gestures. Her rough affectionateness embraced not merely her children, but all young living things, and many old. For her children she had a passion. And she would say openly, as it were, defiantly, that she meant to be the mother of more children--lots more.
"Hey, lass!" cried out Harry, using the broad Staffordshire accent for the amusement of Hilda.
The sisters stopped and untwined their arms.
"Hey, lad!" Alicia loudly responded. But instead of looking at her husband she was looking through him at the babies in the plantation behind the pond.
Janet smiled, in her everlasting resignation. Hilda, smiling at her in return from the distance, recalled the tone in which Harry had said 'old Jan'--a tone at once affectionate and half-contemptuous. She was old Jan, now; destined to be a burden upon somebody and of very little use to anybody; no longer necessary. If she disappeared, life would immediately close over her, and not a relative, not a friend, would be inconvenienced. Some among them would remark: "Perhaps it's for the best." And Janet knew it. In the years immediately preceding the death of Mr. and Mrs. Orgreave, she had hardened a little from her earlier soft, benevolent self--hardened to everybody save her father and mother, whom she protected--and now she was utterly tender again, and her gentle acquiescences seemed to say: "I am defenceless, and to-morrow I shall be old."
"I'm going to telegraph to Edwin Clayhanger to come down for the week-end," shouted Harry.