CHAPTER XXI
In the front window of one of the row of little flat-faced brick houses on a narrow street in Manchester, Dowie sat holding Henrietta's new baby upon her lap. They were what is known as "weekly" houses, their rent being paid by the week and they were very small. There was a parlour about the size of a compartment in a workbox, there was a still smaller room behind it which was called a dining room and there was a diminutive kitchen in which all the meals were eaten unless there was "company to tea" which in these days was almost unknown. Dowie had felt it very small when she first came to it from the fine spaces and heights of the house in Eaton Square and found it seemingly full of very small children and a hysterically weeping girl awaiting the impending arrival of one who would be smaller than the rest.
"You'll never stay here," said Henrietta, crying and clutching the untidy half-buttoned front of her blouse. "You come straight from duchesses and grandeur and you don't know how people like us live. How can you stand us and our dirt, Aunt Sarah Ann?"
"There needn't be dirt, Henrietta, my girl," said Dowie with quite uncritical courage. "There wouldn't be if you were yourself, poor lass. I'm not a duchess, you know. I've only been a respectable servant. And I'm going to see you through your trouble."
Her sober, kindly capableness evolved from the slovenly little house and the untended children, from the dusty rooms and neglected kitchen the kind of order and neatness which had been plain to see in Robin's more fortune-favoured apartment. The children became as fresh and neat as Robin's nursery self. They wore clean pinafores and began to behave tidily at table.
"I don't know how you do it, Aunt Sarah Ann," sighed Henrietta. But she washed her blouse and put buttons on it.
"It's just seeing things and picking up and giving a touch here and there," said Dowie. She bought little comforts almost every day and Henrietta was cheered by cups of hot tea in the afternoon and found herself helping to prepare decent meals and sitting down to them with appetite before a clean tablecloth. She began to look better and recovered her pleasure in sitting at the front window to watch the people passing by and notice how many new black dresses and bonnets went to church each Sunday.
When the new baby was born there was neither turmoil nor terror.
"Somehow it was different from the other times. It seemed sort of natural," Henrietta said. "And it's so quiet to lie like this in a comfortable clean bed, with everything in its place and nothing upset in the room. And a bright bit of fire in the grate—and a tidy, swept-up hearth—and the baby breathing so soft in his flannels."
She was a pretty thing and quite unfit to take care of herself even if she had had no children. Dowie knew that she was not beset by sentimental views of life and that all she wanted was a warm and comfortable corner to settle down into. Some masculine creature would be sure to begin to want her very soon. It was only to be hoped that youth and flightiness would not descend upon her—though three children might be supposed to form a barrier. But she had a girlish figure and her hair was reddish gold and curly and her full and not too small mouth was red and curly also. The first time she went to church in her little widow's bonnet with the reddish gold showing itself under the pathetic little white crêpe border, she was looked at a good deal. Especially was she looked at by an extremely respectable middle-aged widower who had been a friend of her dead husband's. His wife had been dead six years, he had a comfortable house and a comfortable shop which had thriven greatly through a connection with army supplies.