"There—she's burning fine." He rose, turning triumphantly on his hearth as the flame leaped in the grate.
"Yo'll let me mak' yo' a coop of tae, Miss Cartaret."
There was an interrogative lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what was said.
"Please don't trouble."
"It's naw trooble—naw trooble at all. Maaggie'll 'ave got kettle on."
He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen. "Maaggie! Maaggie!" he called. "Are yo' there? Putt kettle on and bring tae into t' parlor."
Alice looked about her while she waited.
Though she didn't know it, Jim Greatorex's parlor was a more tolerable place than the Vicarage drawing-room. Brown cocoanut matting covered its stone floor. In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets. The wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period of simplicity. The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room, the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere enough to be almost beautiful. Down the white ground of the wall-paper an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between parallel stripes of blue.
There were no ornaments to speak of in Greatorex's parlor but the grocer's tea-caddies on the mantelshelf and the little china figures, the spotted cows, the curly dogs, the boy in blue, the girl in pink; and the lustre ware and the tea-sets, the white and gold, the blue and white, crowded behind the diamond panes of the two black oak cupboards. Of these one was set in the most conspicuous corner, the other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups, the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties—faces defiant, stolid and pathetic; yearning, mournful, tender faces, slightly blurred.
All these objects impressed themselves on Ally's brain, adhering to its obsession and receiving from it an immense significance and importance.