“I’m sure I don’t know where you would go.”
“I would ask a porter,” Letizia suggested. “I would say, ‘Please, Mr. Porter, where shall I go to?’ and then he’d tell me, and I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s where I shall go, is it?’”
Suddenly a cloud passed across the mother’s mind. It might be that to-morrow she would be travelling back through these same fields without her little girl. Ah, nothing that Letizia said could justify her in making mock threats of abandoning her in the train when in her heart was the intention of abandoning her in the house of that unknown brother-in-law. In swift contrition she picked Letizia up and kissed her.
“My sweetheart,” she whispered.
Rugby was left behind, Lichfield in its frosty vale, the smoky skies of Crewe and Stafford. The country outraged by man’s lust for gold writhed in monstrous contortions. About the refuse heaps of factories bands of children roamed as pariahs might, and along the squalid streets women in shawls wandered like drab and melancholy ghosts.
“Brigham, Brigham,” cried the porters.
On the cold and dreary platform Letizia in her scarlet hood made the people turn round to stare at her as if she were a tropical bloom or some strange bird from the sweet South.
“Lebanon House?” the driver of the fly repeated in surprise. “Mr. Fuller’s, do you mean, ma’am?”
And every time he whipped up the smoking horse his perplexity seemed to be writing on the grey air a note of interrogation.
Letizia drew a face on the mildewed window strap and another larger face on the window itself.