“Where are you? What’s the matter that I can’t come in as usual?” he said, crossly, as he groped his way among tubs and piles of wood.
“Hush!” said some one, “hush, for heaven’s sake!”
It was not his mother’s voice. And there, in the corner among the washhouses and other offices, he saw a glimmer of something white.
“Good Lord! Joan! what’s the matter with my mother?” he cried.
“Hush! Nothing’s the matter with mother; father’s got her locked up, that is all; and it’s all your fault. Come on, and hold your tongue now you are here.”
It was a sort of little shed in which she stood, and he could see nothing but the whiteness of her nightdress, over which she had thrown a cloak.
“Things have gone just as wrong as can be,” she said; “warm your hands at the copper, you’ll not find a fire indoors. He’s cracked, I think; and so are you too, for ever running to that ‘Red Lion.’ What is there that’s so entertaining? If there’s any fun to be had I’d like to go too.”
“There’s no fun—that you could understand,” said Harry.
Joan laughed; she stood close to the copper in the dark, warming herself, and so did he. It was a kind of little excitement to her, she who had so few excitements, to have had to get up, as she expressed it, in the middle of the night to let her brother in. And though she was sagacious enough not to put much confidence in the “fun” of the “Red Lion,” still it represented jollity and wildness to her as well as to Isaac Oliver. She laughed.
“Oh, you’re very grand, I know; women folk can’t understand, you are cleverer than we are. But I wonder you can be so easy pleased; if young Selby and Jim Salkeld, and the common men of the village, are very entertaining at the ‘Red Lion,’ it’s more than they are in any other place.”