Sam glanced at her and hastened to change the subject from apples to women, with some instinctive sense of the connection.
“He doesn’t get a wife—Mr. Deane doesn’t. They say Miss Elizabeth Atterton give him the mitten. I don’t credit it. She seemed keen enough on him so long as he kept going to see her.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Mrs. Jebb coldly; then she closed her eyes as if the light affected them and conversed no more.
But under her calm exterior a great storm was going on, and above that storm echoed some words that her father had read aloud from David Copperfield, while they all sewed in the old, old days in a narrow street of the place where she was born. “The first fancy of an undisciplined heart”—that was how the quotation came back, not quite correctly, of course, to a brain like Mrs. Jebb’s, but near enough to make her feel another Agnes, and to dismiss Elizabeth to that sentimental paradise where foolish girls with light hair and creamy complexions belong.
She pictured Andy turning for consolation to a more mature affection such as an experienced woman could give, and she was walking down the church aisle in pale-grey on his arm when Sam drew up with a jerk at the grocer’s shop, and she was obliged to come back from all that and order food. No wonder she forgot the sardines and the gelatine! Ordinary groceries, of course, were purchased in Gaythorpe, but these were to have been part of the supper next night. However, even when Mrs. Jebb remembered them on the way home, she still was in an exalted state of mind which made her feel vaguely that where love was, all was, and that a sardine more or less mattered nothing.
She was rather rudely shaken out of this blissful state by Andy’s reception of the news.
“But sardines on toast were to have been the only hot dish,” he said, “and you can’t get decent ones in Gaythorpe. Why didn’t you make a proper list, Mrs. Jebb? You know you have no memory.”
“Is it likely I should have a good memory after all I’ve gone through?” she asked.
So Andy felt rather ashamed of himself, while knowing he had no reason to be, and that a man who orders sardines ought to get them.
After tea young Sam Petch watched the little cottage with its one apple tree now black against the end of the sunset until the niece, who was a hot Primitive, had departed to an evening class at the chapel. He held a bottle concealed beneath his coat, and every now and then he laid its cool side affectionately against his face, while he sniffed at the leaden cap which jealously retained the fragrance locked within. Once he muttered something to himself and began to ease the cap, but with a terrific effort he desisted and put the bottle resolutely farther away from his thirsty mouth.