The words brought her to a sudden halt, spreading their hopelessness on the evening air. She had forgotten, in her eagerness, that it was not a live Tibbie whom she went to seek.... “Ay, that’s so,” she admitted heavily, lifting her hand to her head. “I’m fair moidered to-night,” she muttered at length; “things has gone that fast ...” and slowly, heavily, went back to the angry chair.
“Ay, sit still and rest yourself, that’s it,” Mrs. Tanner coaxed. “You must take care of yourself, think on. There’ll be a deal to do at far end. I’ll send them Rawlinson folk a card, saying you’ll be coming by t’ first train, and I’ll get my Joe to ax ’em at t’ ‘Red Cow’ about the time. There’ll be two or three things you’ll want, likely, if you’re going to stop. I’d best see about putting them up.”
Mrs. Clapham found spirit to murmur “You’re right kind!”—the identical speech that she had been making throughout the day, a sort of continual “Selah” to recurring pæans of praise. Now it seemed as if the very words that composed it could not be quite the same; but then she herself seemed anything but the same. The silver bob of her hair had slipped from its moorings with the shock of her fall; loose hairs strayed across her cheeks, or straggled over the black gown. Her face, drained of its colour, seemed actually to have lost its shape, and wrinkles had come into being that were only the merest guesses before. Her eyes looked blind with age, with weeping, with mental and physical pain. Her hands shook as they wandered from table to chair, or came back to their miserable, fretting movement over her knees.... And yet even in storm and wreck she still looked wholesome and clean, fine even amid dust and tears and the crushing agony of her grief. It was chiefly the splendid buoyancy of the morning that was gone, the happy confidence, the gallant strength. Never again would she look as though she had suddenly been given the earth. Never again would she look like a ship coming homeward in full sail.
She roused herself a second time to find Mrs. Tanner hunting for something to serve as a rest. “You’ll be more comfortable-like wi’ summat under your leg,” she was chirping thoughtfully. “Whatever have you been doing to make yourself so lame?”
“Nay, I don’t know, I’m sure....” Again she put up her hand and pushed wearily at her hair. It was quite true that for the moment she could not remember how the accident had occurred, so far had the events of the afternoon receded into the past. “I fell in t’ road somewheres,” she added presently, knitting her brows, and Mrs. Tanner, remembering the dust on the black gown, nodded a wise head. Still hunting for a rest, she came at last to the little chair. “This’ll do grand,” she began, picking it up, but Mrs. Clapham put out a hand.
“Nay, not that,” she said, quickly, without looking at it. “There’s summat else, likely, but—not that.”
“What, it’ll do it no harm, will it?” Mrs. Tanner protested, puzzled. “It’s an old broken thing, I’m sure!”
The charwoman turned her head and gazed at it for a moment without speaking, and then—“It’s—it’s t’ babby chair!” she managed to get out chokingly, and burst again into a storm of tears. Backwards and forwards she rocked under the fresh torrent of grief, almost tearing the good black gown with her working, sorrowful hands. “Nay, I couldn’t put foot on it whatever!” she sobbed, shaking her head so that the silver bob slipped further and one of Tibbie’s carefully sewn hooks burst at her throat. “It would seem near like putting my feet on the corpse of the poor lile lass herself!
“Shove it in t’ cupboard agen, will you?” she finished brokenly, turning her eyes from it at last, and Mrs. Tanner, weeping herself for the child who would sit in the little chair no more, shut it away in its dark sanctuary, as the child, too, would be shut away....
The bursts of grief were growing shorter, however, as Nature accepted her bitter toll. The poor mother sat quietly enough while Mrs. Tanner propped her leg with a tub, eased the strain with a cushion, and wound a wet compress about her knee; quietly, too, told her where to find pen and ink, post-card and penny stamp. The post-card happened to show a picture of the parish church, and, forgetting her trouble, she brightened sharply. “Yon’s where she was wed,” she began briskly; “ay, send her that——” and then bit her lip with a deep sigh, and fell again to rubbing the black gown....