“What’s the use of shutting me up about a thing as everybody knows?” she demanded boldly, “barring perhaps Mrs. James here, as is over-young? It’s a wonder the boy stayed right in his head, the way he was tret!”
“Mrs. Catterall’s set up enough about him now, anyhow,” Mrs. James said, throwing another glance up the street. “What with cramming his likeness down everybody’s throat, and taking flowers to the War Memorial and the Shrine, you’d think he’d been her own pet lamb and a mother’s darling from the start!”
“I never rightly knew what it was she did!” Mrs. Dunn said in her flat tones, giving vent to the inevitable remark which had its place in every discussion of Emma’s doings. “I don’t know as I ever heard her lift her voice to him once, and she isn’t the sort to lift a hand. ’Tisn’t shouting and leathering a lad as does him that much harm, neither; nay, nor even keeping him a bit short o’ grub. I’ve seen a many as fair throve on it, and that’s a fact—laughing and whistling and making right fine men an’ all! It wants summat else to take the heart out on ’em as it was took out o’ Poor Stephen.”
“It’s not feeling safe as does for a child,” Mrs. Clapham said slowly, repeating rather reluctantly her statement of less than an hour before. “I was saying so to Maggie Tanner just now.... A child’s got to be growing and learning things every day, and without knowing he’s doing either; and if he don’t feel certain he’s doing the right thing, what, he stops doing it altogether. That’s how it was with Stephen, I reckon. He just stopped.... It was like as if he was always holding his breath.”
“Doctor says there’s some folk should never have charge of children at all,” Mrs. Airey put in with sudden and ghoulish emphasis. “He says they sort of destroy them just by living with ’em—fair suck the life out on ’em, so to speak!”
Mrs. Clapham stirred unhappily.
“Eh, for t’ land’s sake, don’t talk like that, Bessie!” she besought her anxiously. Fear came over her after that last speech, the sense of a sinister presence brooding over the street that was very much worse than the shadow of the War. A look of almost clairvoyant apprehension came into her eyes, slaying their happy prevision of beautiful things.... “It don’t seem quite fair to be talking like that of folks as live so close.”
“She gives me the shivers right enough, anyway!” Mrs. James broke out, laughing nervously, and casting yet another glance at the dreaded door. “It’s that smile of hers ... and the way she watches to see what you’re at! There’s something at the back of her mind as sneers and laughs at you all the time.... As for yon tag of hers about knowing your own business best, all I can say is it fair makes me want to scream!”
“I’ve known a many as was feared of Emma,” Mrs. Tanner followed on; “parson’s wife, for one—ay, and parson an’ all! I’ve seen district visitors and suchlike coming out of yon house looking for all the world like a bit o’ chewed string. Ay, and one day—yon time when parson had a curate as was more than a shade soft—I see him come shambling down t’ steps fair crying and wringing his hands. I was in t’ street at the time, clipping yon bit of box we have at the door, and he stopped alongside of me, and said, ‘Mrs. Tanner, that woman’s a devil!’ I was fair took aback by such language, as you might think; but when I looked up there was Emma smiling behind her ferns, and watching yon snivelling lad like a cat wi’ a half-dead mouse. It was so like the way she carried on wi’ Poor Stephen, it fair give me a turn; so for Stephen’s sake I took curate into t’ house and give him a cup o’ tea and all the gossip I could lay my tongue to, and sent him off home with Emma clean out of his mind, and chuckling as throng as a laying hen!”
“There’s only one as has never taken much count of her,” Mrs. Airey said, when they had stopped laughing about the curate, “and that’s Martha Jane Fell. I’ve heard her reeling off stuff at Emma as just made you catch your breath, and Emma’s smile getting lesser and lesser with every minute. Ay, and I’ve seen her bolt into yon house like a rabbit into its hole, just to get away from her long tongue!”