PART II
THANK-OFFERING
CHAPTER I
By the time the Chorus had talked itself to rags and a dribbling finish, and Mrs. James had remembered her pudding and Mrs. Airey her hot irons; and Mrs. Clapham had had time to think of her knee, and how she was tired with standing, and how it would be just as easy to enjoy the news sitting down—both Emma and Martha Jane had vanished utterly from the scene. It was the charwoman who noticed their disappearance first, wiping away the last glad tears from her shining, glorified face.
“Eh, now, if Martha Jane hasn’t made off, and I never thought on to say I was sorry she’d lost! I was that taken up wi’ t’ letter I couldn’t think of nowt else. She’ll be feeling bad about it, I reckon, will poor Martha Jane. I wish I’d had a word wi’ her before she slipped away!”
“I shouldn’t worry myself.... Likely she’ll go whingeing to yon lordship of hers, and get summat instead!” Mrs. James looked back from between her pillars, anxious, in spite of her pudding, for a last slap at Martha Jane. “Anyway, I was right about Mr. Baines bringing the news,” she went on proudly; “or next best thing to Mr. Baines! A bonny little thing, that little girl, isn’t she now?—and that like him an’ all!... Ay, well, Mrs. Clapham, I’m main glad it come out right, and there’s a deal more I’d like to know if it wasn’t for yon pan....”
“Eh, and yon irons o’ mine’ll be fit to scorch!” ... Mrs. Airey bestirred herself also at the departure of Mrs. James. “I’m as throng as I can be to-day, an’ all. Folks is that put about if they don’t get their washing on the tick, you’d think they’d only a shirt and a pillow-slip to their names!... Step along in with her, Maggie, and get her a cup o’ tea,” she added to Mrs. Tanner, as she and her sister moved away. “She’s a bit upset wi’ it all, and a cup o’ tea’ll pull her together. Folks is easy put out about good news—I cried a deal more when my Teddy come back from t’ War than I ever did when he went—even if they don’t all get strokes and suchlike just by clapping an eye on poor Baines!”
There was a last burst of laughter in the street at that, the last that it was to hear that morning, the last, perhaps, that it was to hear that day.... “Ay, Emma was right creepy with her nasty tales!” Mrs. Clapham concluded meditatively, when the sisters had gone. “(I can manage right enough, Maggie. Don’t you put yourself out!) She’s cleared off again, I notice, and with never a word. She must just ha’ waited to hear the news, and then made back.”
“There was summat queer about her ever coming at all!” ... Mrs. Tanner lingered, cogitating, in the empty street. “What, she never stirred foot even for t’ Coronation, you’ll think on—(Edward was it, or George?). You and she have never been that thick, I’m sure, that she should turn out to wish you luck!”
“She talked that strange, too,” the charwoman puzzled, thinking back, “praising me up and so on, and yet wi’ a scrat in it all the time! She fair made me begin to think things was going to go all wrong.”
“It’s that way she has of making you feel she knows summat important as you don’t. It’s like as if she give you plenty o’ rope to hang yourself, and then stood about smiling, waiting for the pull. Ay, and what you’d feel right sore about when it come to it wouldn’t be as you was hung, but feeling you’d made a fool o’ yourself with yon woman a-looking on!”