Mrs. Stuckhey’s knees shook under her; she dropped the handkerchief which she had been pinning up, and covered her face with her hands.
“There, don’t ’ee take on,” said Mrs. Blanchard, commiseratingly. “Ye’d be like to feel it, I know; dear, yes, ’tis to be expected.”
“Well, now, I should think Mrs. Stuckhey ought to be glad,” said Mrs. Woolridge, surveying the washerwoman critically from her doorstep. “There be mothers’ sons in Ladysmith so well as anywhere else; ah, sure there be. Many a woman’s heart has been a-breakin’ thinkin’ of ’em starvin’ and famishin’ there. ’Twouldn’t bring your son back a bit more if they was to perish o’ hunger. You ought to be glad like the rest of us.”
“I am glad,” gasped poor Susan; and with that she turned, leaving her basket, and went into her house.
Her gaze, blurred though it was with tears, instantly sought Joe’s portrait, and the honest goggle eyes of the picture looked back, as it seemed to her, with infinite sadness.
“Ladysmith is relieved,” they seemed to say; “the victory is won—and I was not there.”
When presently the door creaked slowly open and Mrs. Blanchard entered, moving unwieldily on tip-toe, she found Susan seated by her steaming wash-tub with her apron thrown over her head.
“Don’t ’ee fret, my dear,” she said soothingly. “There isn’t one in the village as don’t sympathise for ’ee; and we do all feel as our own j’y bain’t full, so to speak. There, we do say to ourselves: If our own soldier was wi’ the others how proud we mid be!”
Mrs. Stuckhey did not answer, but pressed her apron more closely to her face with her trembling hands. Poor hands—seamed and sodden and, as it were, pock-marked from perpetual immersion in the suds; knotted and distorted by hard and heavy work—what a tale they told of privation and of toil!
“I don’t agree wi’ Martha Woolridge,” went on the visitor after a pause. “’Tisn’t fair to say as you have no feelin’ for the poor folks as was shut up over yonder. ’Tis but nat’ral you should be sorry your Joe didn’t have no hand in it.”