“Nay, you’ll know best about that!” The pivoting prosecutor was swift. “Kitchen fire could tell, likely, if it was nobbut axed....” Sweeping her off the earth again, she turned back to the rest, happily conscious of now being able to hold them as long as she chose. “The fact is, I couldn’t help feeling a bit down when news come as I’d lost the house. I don’t say as perhaps Ann Clapham here hadn’t the best right, but still there was more than a few as considered it might ha’ been me.” (She paused at this point, as if to allow an opening to Mrs. James, but the latter was too absorbed to avail herself of the chance.) “Ay, I was right down,” Martha Jane continued, with cheerful ease, “and badly in want of a bit o’ comfort. Likely I carried over far, being rarely troubled, but that’s nowt to do with the present matter. It took me as long to get over the comfort, though”—she grinned impishly—“as the disappointment!—but as soon as I was myself again I writ a line to his lordship.” (Here she paused a second time, even more pointedly than before, and Mrs. James, awakened as if by a trumpet, obligingly played up.)
“Well, I tellt his lordship what I thought about things in general, and while I was at Post Office getting t’ stamp, t’ lass and me had a bit of a chat. ‘Grand news this for Mrs. Clapham,’ says I, conversational-like, and she just gawps at me like a coffin-hole. ‘Grand?’ says she, as bright as a dead fish: ‘you call t’ news as her daughter is dying grand?’ ... ‘What, surely to goodness you don’t say—’ says I, looking as much like a hen at a bucket as she did herself. ‘Well, anyway, that’s what telegraph said this morning,’ said she; and then it all come out. I was that puzzled I left t’ stamp behind me on t’ counter, and they sent telegraph-boy after me with it. ‘You was up our way this morning, wasn’t you?’ I axed, as quiet as you like, and he says ‘Ay, message for Catterall!’ as pat as butter. ‘Nay, what, you mean Clapham,’ says I, but he stuck to it I was wrong. ‘C.A.T.—cat; and a bad ’un at that!’ says he, impident-like, and went flying off; and by t’ time I’d reached home it come over me how it was.”
Emma punctuated this dramatic recital with a superior laugh.
“What, yon’s no proof as I can see!” she protested scornfully. “I tell you what it is, Ann Clapham, she’s making it all up! You’ll not have forgotten, likely, as she’s after yon house herself? If she can saddle you wi’ t’ children, she’ll have nowt to do but sail in!”
The next moment, however, even her self-possession had quailed before the terrible Martha Jane that came swooping upon her. This was, in fact, the very same Martha Jane that had damaged the lady of Lame Lane. In the midst of her moral darkness a gem of pure feeling had shone for once, and now it was being tarnished by the touch of a mean hand.
“It’s true as God’s Death!” she cried in a terrible voice, and swore another great oath in the next breath, one of those Tudor corruptions of God’s Name which survive in a shrivelled distortion even to-day. “If it’s proof you’re wanting,” she went on, as soon as this effort had sunk in, “they’ll repeat t’ message when you like; but to say as I’ve let wit because of yon house is a b—y lie!”
“I don’t say I wasn’t set on it, though,” she added, more quietly, though with a touch of bitterness in her tone. “It meant a deal more to me than you folks think. I’d ha’ been right glad of a chance for starting afresh. But all the same I’d ha’ held my tongue if it hadn’t been for them poor children. Things was sad enough as it was without owt as might make ’em worse.”
“Them’s just words—!” Emma began on a vicious burst, but the other snapped the speech at the stem.
“I’ll swear it on t’ Book, if you like,” she flung at her—“ay, and a deal more!” Advancing to the table, she laid a hand on the Bible, challenging Mrs. Clapham. “If you’ll promise me what I ax, I’ll swear I’ll refuse t’ house!”
For a long moment they stood facing each other without speaking, the respectable, honest-lived woman, and the graceless, immoral slattern. Across the table of scrubbed deal their two hands almost touched, Mrs. Clapham’s plump fingers bent to support her weight, and Martha Jane’s long, thin ones resting on the Book. The frizzled fringe of the one foiled the clean silver of the other’s hair; her trailing and tawdry garments flared at the other’s sober gown. At such close quarters that they almost met, each stared in the other’s face, the one ravaged but wholesome, the other fevered and flushed and hard. There seemed no point at which they could possibly have anything in common, not even a mutual language which could mean anything in their ears; and yet the spark of true feeling which burnt in the heart of the drab reached out to the same spark in the heart of the good woman.