Bob Smallpiece had reserved one piece of news till he could deliver it in person. This was that at last he had let the cottage, at three-and-sixpence a week, to a decent woodman and his wife. And so, wearing a new neckcloth, and with three weeks’ rent in his pocket, Bob Smallpiece appeared in Harbour Lane one spring morning, a vast astonishment of leather and velveteen, such as had never before brought a Blackwall housewife to attention in the midst of her dusting and sweeping. No name was painted over the shop, but no stranger could pass its red and blue and green without stopping to look; least of all Bob Smallpiece, in quest of the place itself. Nan May saw him, and ran to the door; and Bessy, with her crutch and her book, met him half-way to the back-parlour, gay and laughing.
Bob regarded the well-filled shop, the neat room, with some mixture of feelings. Prosperity was excellent in its own way, but it made the new obstacle more formidable. Further, Mrs. May, though she was pleased to hear that the cottage was let, and grateful enough for his trouble in letting it, was not so overjoyed as she might have been if the weekly three-and-sixpence had come at a time of pinching; more, she handled the half-sovereign almost as disrespectfully as the sixpence, and dropped it into a part of her purse where it fell among other gold. Poor Bob saw the obstacle not only bigger, but double. Not merely was Nan May tied to London by her trade and by Johnny’s apprenticeship, but she was a well-to-do tradeswoman, with whom a poor forest-keeper could expect no more than respectful acquaintance. He half feared she might even offer to pay him for his trouble with the cottage, and grew red and hot with the apprehension. But this affliction was spared him though Nan did venture to ask if his care of her property had involved out-of-pocket expenses; a suggestion which Bob repudiated desperately.
Neither Bessy nor her mother could understand why their visitor’s manner was so constrained and awkward, nor why he announced that he “must be going” after sitting for twenty minutes. But that, of course, was not to be allowed. Johnny would be home in half an hour, and there would be some dinner. So Bob Smallpiece, who wanted to get away somewhere by himself and think things over, remained, and made his part of the conversation as well as he could.
Johnny came, smudgy and hungry, surprised to find that his old friend, big man as he was, seemed to be scarcely so big as when he saw him last, eighteen months ago. For Johnny himself was grown surprisingly, and seemed like to stand as high as Bob Smallpiece’s shoulder by his seventeenth birthday. Bob found more to talk of now that Johnny had come, and he ate even better than Johnny himself, for nothing spoiled the keeper’s appetite. When could they all come to the forest again for a day? Nan May shook her head. She had no days free but Sundays—she might come some day, perhaps; some Sunday in the vague future. But Johnny might get a day off at a slack time, and he and Bessy would come. Bessy brimmed over with delight at the prospect. Every day, since she had left it, the forest had seemed a more wonderful and a more distant dream; every day some forgotten circumstance, some moment of delight, some long-dead bunch of wildflowers, trifles all, and daily commonplaces once, had come back to lend one more touch to the fairy picture her memory made ever more radiant as the simple facts fell farther into the past. And Johnny, little burdened with pictures of fancy (for he put his imagination away from him now, as a childishness unworthy an engineer), nevertheless thought that as soon as a certain large job was completed at Maidment and Hurst’s the gaffer would doubtless let him lose a day. So it was settled. And when Johnny hurried off to his work, Bob Smallpiece took the opportunity to leave too; for he must go and see his sister, he said.
He went, and saw his sister, and took tea with her; and his sister found him even duller than Nan May had done. For in truth Bob Smallpiece was in a mire of doubt and hesitation. In a frame of mind so foreign to his simple habit he grew fretful, and left things to chance and impulse. With no definite design in the world, he wandered back to Harbour Lane after tea, and there met, for the first time, Uncle Isaac and Mr. Butson. This company proved uncongenial; and indeed the distinguished Butson was indisposed to be cordial with an Essex bumpkin in a velveteen uniform. So, though Nan May was all kindness, Bob Smallpiece soon took himself off to the train, where his savage moodiness might not be seen. The whole thing was past hope now; though he might have found it hard to tell precisely what had occurred since midday to worsen the look of affairs.
XVIII.
Not for six weeks, at least, Johnny judged, could he beg the day’s holiday that was to take him and Bessy back to the forest; and it might be more. That would be in July—or even August—and probably the weather would be more trustworthy then. As for Bessy, she counted the days on the almanack, and tapped the yellow-faced old barometer that had been gran’dad’s, a dozen times a day. Johnny laughed at her impatience, and invented endless weather prophecies “just from America” putting the weather for the whole of July at every possible shade of unpleasantness, from blizzards to floods and thunderstorms.
The days went quietly—they were even dull. Mr. Butson did what he could to make himself agreeable, and several times praised a set of callipers that Johnny had made—a set of callipers that Johnny, in fact, thought very well of himself. So that he seemed not such a bad fellow, perhaps, after all, though a bit of a sponge.
There was nothing to cause it, to all seeming, but it was a fact that just now Nan May grew thoughtful and absent of manner. She would pause in the midst of needlework, as though to think; and more than once at such a time, Bessy, looking up from her own work, saw that her mother’s troubled gaze was fixed on herself. Nan May put away the anxious look as well as she might, and bent to her work again; but Bessy wondered.
Johnny, too, fancied that his mother was scarce so cheerful as was her wont, though he thought of it less than Bessy. But one Sunday afternoon, meeting her by her bedroom door, he took her cheeks between his palms, and looked hard in her face. “Mother,” he said, “I believe you’ve been crying! What’s up?”