“To hell—or the Union! Who else’ll have you?”
“James!” Nancy faced her husband with hot indignation flashing from the eyes that looked fearlessly into his. “How can you say such things, and on Christmas Eve, too! You’ve punished him enough—only a brute ’ud kick a man so hard when he’s down!”
She turned to Baldwin, and laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Take no notice of him,” said she soothingly. “He doesn’t mean it! He’s just getting a bit of his own back!”
“Don’t I?” said her husband, as he disengaged her hand with a grip that hurt. “I’ll show you whether I mean it or not. Get away to the other baby and leave the brute to his work—get away, I say!”
She had clenched her free fist and beaten the hand that held her; but she was powerless, and he raised her from her feet and almost flung her into the parlour.
“I’m master here,” he said. “There isn’t room for two. You’d better shut yourself in for your own comfort.”
A little while later Baldwin knocked timidly at Maniwel’s door.
CHAPTER XXII
IN WHICH BALDWIN FINDS NEW LODGINGS
THE cottage by the bridge contrasted strongly with Nancy’s home. Two or three gaily coloured mottoes suitable to the season had been tacked to the wall, and a couple of attractive almanacks recently distributed by enterprising tradesmen in advance of the New Year, bore them company, and diverted attention from the framed funeral cards which grannie regarded with an owner’s mournful pride, and Hannah with an impatient contempt that was manifested every time she dusted them. Sprigs of holly, bright with scarlet berries, peeped from the vases on the mantelpiece, lay between the plates and dishes on the rack above the dresser, and were wreathed about the faded face of the grandfather’s clock in the corner. Grandfather’s? Great-great-grandfather’s, grannie would have told you, for it had ticked away in her grandsire’s time, and even then the cow upon the dial (which was now a mere ghost of a cow, and a badly dismembered ghost, too!) was losing its horns and tail. There were other sprigs upon the window-ledge but these could not be seen because the blind was drawn. There was, however, no mistletoe, for Hannah was thirty-one and the “baleful plant” was among the childish things she had put away.