The women were about her at once, calling out and asking her how she had done it, all in a breath; while she, gasping out anxious requests to be left alone, laughed at their futile efforts to raise her, even while tears of pain poured steadily down her face. They desisted at last, standing back in dismay, and a passing butcher, nimbly stopping his cart in its descent of the hill, left his accustomed horse to look after itself, and came to offer a helping hand.
“Nay, let me be, can’t you?” Mrs. Clapham protested, still laughing and crying. “It’s queer to me how folks can’t never let a tummelled body lie. They must always be heaving them up again, same as a sheep or a sack o’ coals!... I’ve got a bit of a shake, of course,” she informed them presently, “and I’ve twisted my bad knee; but I’ll be as right as a bobbin if only you’ll let me be.”
“You should look where you’re going, at your age, mother!” the butcher chaffed her, arms akimbo in his blue coat. “Doesn’t do to go backing down steps like a ballet-girl at your time of life, you know!”
“I’ll give you ballet-girl when I’m on my feet again—see if I don’t!” Mrs. Clapham gasped, chuckling through her tears, though somehow the teasing words made her feel terribly old. “Eh, but it was a daft thing to do, and a daft sight I must look; and, eh, losh save us, what’s come to yon key!”
The staring women sprang to attention at once, and, with the help of the butcher, began a search. It was Mrs. Bell who finally pounced on it where it lay, flown from the charwoman’s hand in the track of the butcher’s wheels.
“Happen you’ll agree now as it’s safest with me!” she demanded grimly, and pocketed it as the other nodded.... “Ay, I can’t say I seem fit to be trusted with it at present!” Mrs. Clapham agreed, though with an inward sigh, and feeling as if, with the loss of the key, something vital had been taken from her. “Now I’ll be getting up again, if you’ll lend me a hand.”
Crowding round her again, they hoisted her to her feet, amid fresh gaspings and chucklings and injunctions to “let be!” “You’d best let me give you a lift back,” the butcher suggested, seeing that she was lame, and after more pulling and pushing she was presently seated by his side. Almost at once they had slipped away down the hill, with the houses behind them rising higher and higher. It was almost as if they were being lifted into the air, actual mansions of the blest returning rapidly into the sky. The rapping hoofs of the horse were fast dropping the charwoman into the mist in which the village was drowned, and suddenly it was over her head, and the almshouses were out of sight. The world that she knew came up about her on every side, while the world in which she had dreamed through the afternoon was gone as if it had never been....
The horse stopped of its own accord at the shop opposite the Post Office, but was urged on again by its driver. “I’ll run you on to your own spot, if you like, missis,” he offered, breaking off a cheerful recital of all the casualties he had ever seen, and which had ended badly in every instance. Mrs. Clapham, however, would not hear of taking him out of his way, and was presently on the ground, watched, as she noticed with some amusement, by alarmed-looking faces at the Post Office window. She nodded and smiled at the faces to show that nothing was wrong, whereupon they vanished with one accord, as though pulled by a taut string. It was kind of them, she thought, to seem so troubled on her account, and then forgot them again as she turned her attention to getting home.
She was shaken, of course, and she walked lame, but she was glad to find she could get along. Her chief trouble, indeed, was that she felt sadly old, disheartened and somehow belittled by the butcher’s joking speech. Then, too, she was still fretting over the loss of the key, and wishing that she had been able to fight its battle with Mrs. Bell. Even the feel of it in her hand would have helped to sustain her diminishing courage. At all events it would have been a link with the house that now seemed so hopelessly left behind.
But her spirits rose again when she found herself at the foot of her own street, opposite Mr. Baines’s office and close to her own home. She would be all right in the morning after a night’s rest, and when she awoke in the morning the dream would be still true. That was the important thing, after all, the great truth and the great fact. It was absurd to feel as if the loss of the key might possibly spoil her luck. Even if she lost the key every day of the week, it could not alter the fact that she had got the house.