“Stephen told you I was bad to him, I reckon?” Emma’s tone was injured but patient. “Stephen told your Tibbie, and your Tibbie told you?”
Tibbie’s mother looked a trifle abashed. “Nay, what, haven’t I said we could all on us see it at the time?”
“Ay, but summat’s been said—summat from inside,” Emma persisted gently, and Mrs. Clapham stirred uncomfortably.
“Ay, well, what if it has?”
Emma nodded sorrowfully, grief-stricken, but forgiving. “Ay, well, it’s only what I’ve suspected all along. There was I, fair breaking my heart over my lad while he was in France, and he miscalling me all the time behind my back!”
“He said nowt but the truth!” Mrs. Clapham flung at her brutally, all the more brutal because she was beginning to have her doubts.
“What he took for the truth, I don’t doubt,” Emma corrected her sweetly. “It was like this, d’ye see, Ann Clapham—it was Jemmy as couldn’t abide Stephen. Jemmy wasn’t much of a man himself, you’ll think on, and it made him right wild that Stephen should be so weakly. It’s the big men, you’ll have noticed, likely, as is kind to cripples and the like; them as is weaklings themselves want their barns to be big and broad. Jemmy always had it Stephen was daft from the time he was born, but anyway, if he wasn’t, he did his best to make him. Eh, but the rows we’ve had over the poor lad, and not stopping at words, neither! But he was my man, after all, Ann Clapham, and so I couldn’t say much about it. We’re both on us married folk, you and me, so you don’t need telling you’ve to stand by your man. Eh, but it goes agen the grain with me, it does that, even to be speaking hardly about him to-day!”
Plausible as this explanation undoubtedly was, it seemed to have no effect upon Mrs. Clapham. Her expression was one of such pure contempt that in spite of herself Emma flinched. Her arms crossed and uncrossed with the regularity of some dull machine. The breath that she drew now was not a pretended sigh, but an urgent relief in a moment of fierce strain.
“Nay, now, Emma, yon tale won’t wash!” Mrs. Clapham pronounced firmly. “Jemmy was a wastrel—a real nowt—I’ll give you that; but it was you and not him as played Old Harry with Poor Stephen.”
“Ay, I know that’s what folks said ... what poor Stephen said an’ all. It’s right hard to have it thrown up agen you when your poor lad’s dead in France!... You’re a mother yourself, Ann Clapham,” she went on, warming to an impassioned tone, “so you won’t need telling what it’s been like! But it was Jemmy as set him agen me, as I said before, tellt him I couldn’t abide him, spied on him and a deal more—”