“I want you to go to Mrs. Hone’s,” she continued, “that is why I ran after the cart. Say I’ll give her five shillings for that figure with the skull in its hand. Tim thinks an exhibition of Staffordshire would be a good idea.”
“Bert Hone’s?”
“Yes. He is dead. Queer old savage! Good-by. I’m going to talk to the landlord of the Buttery.”
She turned off at the cross-roads. Pamela drove to Mrs. Hone’s, haggled for the figure, wrapped it in newspaper, and put it in the cart. As she did so she mentioned carelessly that Mrs. Clutton was going away.
“Be she now?” the doubled-up old woman cried. “Sure! London now. You don’t say so, my dear soul. I shall miss her. When my man died she came in to look at him. He worked up to the very last, although he was so old—past eighty. He took his turn with the hayin’. He never wasted a hour; it was Sunday when he died, so it was. She come and looked at him a-layin’ in his coffin, and she shed a tear. The other ladies gi’ me black clothes. Young Mis’ Jayne up at the Mount brought the little baby for me to see, and Mis’ Turle sent Miss Nancy down with a bottle o’ doctor’s stuff—it’s nothin’ but camphor; jest smell it. But Mis’ Clutton brought a fine wreath like wax. He went down into his grave as if he was a gentleman farmer. Nobody else thought o’ flowers; wreaths aint for the likes o’ we.”
As Pamela turned the pony’s head she decided not to go to the Mount that day. There were still moments when Annie’s impenetrability and Aunt Sophy’s phlegm jarred.
She drove home across the common. It was a burning day—the last in July. There was a ticking sound in the hot air, as the black seed pods of the broom burst. High in the sky was an intense angry sun, swept now and then by boding thunder-clouds. Across the common stretched a carpet of heather, exquisite purple, just breaking into bloom. When she turned off and drove down Waggoner’s Lane on the way to Folly Corner, the hedges were full of blackberry blossoms, widely opened, and pale heliotrope. There was a fishy smell of privet from a cottage garden, and the soft, tearing swish of a scythe came from a field. The high hedges were hung with butter-colored hay, which had caught in the branches as the loaded wain toiled by. At Folly Corner, in her garden, the long edgings of white pinks were dry, and brown, and scentless, and sad. The elder tree which hung over the barn was shabby. The leaves on the poplars rustled dryly, as they never had done in June.
The newspaper, which the carrier brought daily from Liddleshorn, was on the table in the corridor, neatly folded, tied with twine, and addressed to Jethro. She carried it into the drawing-room and read it listlessly. Politics didn’t interest her—foreign politics in particular seemed singularly superfluous. But she read the art notices and the reviews of new books as a matter of duty, and the advertisements as a matter of interest. There were twelve pages to the paper that day. One was taken up with an advertisement—the prospectus of a new company. It was something about a ruby mine—it didn’t matter much, anyhow. She was far too languid to read it all. Still, her eye ran listlessly down. When she came to the names of the directors she cried out. Edred Crisp, Esq., of Marquise Mansions, W., headed the list.
That name brought everything back. She drove it into her brain letter by letter. She stared at it so long, so fixedly, that her eyes played pranks, and the one name, Edred Crisp, took up the whole sheet.
There was a barking of dogs, a grating grind of wheels outside, Jethro’s voice. She jumped up, her face suddenly stern, desperate. She looked out of the window, her head framed in fully-blown roses which had shriveled and turned brown.