“Emma was his eldest girl—no, not the eldest. Polly who married Ford, the ironmonger, was the eldest. Emma was the second. Married Harry Nixey, whose mother kept the all-sorts shop in Curwood Street. A drunken fellow, but very clever at his trade. Bolted with another woman when this lad Harold was twelve months old. Emma never saw nor heard of him again. Went to Australia, people said at the time. But I’ll say this for Emma, she was always a good plucked one.”
There was a moment of silence and then the Corporal demanded weightily, “Has she any others?”
“He’s the only one. But brought up very respectable ... she’s managed to give him a rare good education. How she did it nobody knows. Tremendous worker, was Emma. But that boy does her credit, I must say.”
“He does that.” The Corporal stared hard at the picture in front of him. “Nothing like education.” He sighed softly. “If only I’d had a bit of education I sometimes think I might have done something myself.”
XXIX
ON the afternoon of the day before the Corporal returned to France he went with Melia by bus to Sharrow Bridge and they walked thence to Corfield Weir. Many hours had he spent with rod and tackle in this hallowed spot. Those were the only hours in his drab life that he would have desired to live over again. Many a good fish had he played in the bend of the river below the famous Corfield Glade, much commemorated by the local poets in whom the town and county were exceptionally rich. In particular there was the legend of the fair Mary Corfield who in the days of Queen Bess had cast herself for love of an honest yeoman into the deep waters of the Sharrow. From Bill’s favorite tree, where from boyhood he had spun so many dreams that had come to naught, could be seen the high chimneys of the Old Hall, the home of the ill-fated Mary, about whose precincts her ghost still walked and was occasionally seen.
The day was perfect, a rare golden opulence of sky and earth with a sheen of beauty on wood and field and flowing water. They came to the little gnarled clump of alders, his old-time friends, whom the swift-flowing Sharrow was always threatening to devour, and lay side by side in the shade, on the dry grass, listening to the great rats plopping into the cool water.
Both were very silent at first; it was as if nature spoke to them in a new way. It was as if their eyes were bathed in a magical light. All the things around them were clearer in outline, brighter, sharper, more visible. Their ears, too, were attuned to a higher intensity. The swirl of the water, the rustle of leaves, the cry of the birds, the little voice of the wind, were more intimate, more harmonious, more audibly full of meaning. The world itself had never seemed so richly amazing, so gorgeously inexhaustible as at that moment.