Hannah turned to look at her brother; but it was evident he had only partly heard his father’s remarks, being engaged with his own thoughts; and her brow bent into an expression of impatience.
CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH THE WOMAN ENTERS WITH THE SERPENT
THREE hours later Hannah and Jagger were alone, but for a while neither of them had much to say. To watch the changing expression on the woman’s face you would have said that tenderness and contempt were striving for the mastery on the battlefield of her soul and that the issue was uncertain. Hannah was only thirty but Nature had taken little pains in her fashioning, leaving her angular in outline and pinched in features; and responsibility had unloaded its burden on her shoulders at an age when most girls are unfettered or at worst in leading-strings, for the mother had died when Hannah was fourteen. Ten years later the grandmother, recently widowed, had come to share the home and the income and to add to the girl’s trials. Grannie was masterful; but Hannah was mistress and had no mind at twenty-four to bend her neck to the authority of seventy-five. The encounters that took place were by tacit consent of both parties confined to occasions when the men-folk were out of hearing, and victory was not always on one side, but in the end Hannah triumphed, and her crowning achievement, the trophy of her success, was not in the subjugation but the conversion of her grandmother. In the hour that grannie lay down her arms she confessed that she “liked a lass o’ mettle,” and could rest satisfied that one of the family had “a bit o’ bite in her,” now that Maniwel had turned queer in his head, and had bred a son whose bark was loud enough but who never bared his teeth in the good old moorland fashion. From that time Hannah’s ascendancy had been undisputed, but the conflict, and the anxiety that had attended her father’s accident, had left their mark upon her features which contradicted the parish register by ten years at least.
You had only to enter the cottage to discover at once where Hannah’s energies found their outlet and justification. If her house was no cleaner than the houses of her neighbours it was to their credit and not to her disparagement. Not all the women of Mawm made pretensions of godliness but there were few who did not worship at the shrine of cleanliness, and with no mere lip-service—were they not Yorkshire folk and moor-folk?
“Cleanliness next to godliness?” Yea, verily; and in that order.
There was something about the Drakes’ cottage, however, that was not found everywhere; something not quite definable—a daintiness, a touch of refinement, revealed in the harmony of colours and the sight of flowers, perhaps, and accentuated by the absence of anything that jarred. It was Hannah’s doing, but it aroused neither admiration nor envy in the breasts of her neighbours, none of whom was very concerned to inquire how it was that the Drakes’ home was the cosiest and pleasantest in the village.
Having been sent into the world by a watchful Providence four years in advance of her brother, and installed by force of circumstances in the position of mother to the boy of ten, the girl recognised in the position a special responsibility which she changed into a privilege. Other lads, other young men, rather annoyed her; she treated them with the scant attention that is almost a discourtesy; but she lavished a mother’s as well as a sister’s affection on Jagger, and did her best to correct the faults in his character which the maternal instinct enabled her to remark even before they became apparent to the quick eyes of her father. It was quite in accordance with her nature that she rarely discussed her hopes and fears and difficulties with her father, though she endowed him in her thoughts with all the virtues of the superman; a sense of loyalty to her brother and also a recognition of her father’s ability to deal with the situation held her back. But she lost no opportunity to repress the boy’s tendencies to indulge in a half-feminine peevishness that made him moody and irritable, and,—to one of her temperament—even contemptible. It had the same effect on her father; but what she fought against in herself she could not tolerate in another, so the exhibition of disdain in look or word always brought her to arms.
The room was looking particularly attractive in the yellow light of the lamp and the red glow of the dwindling fire, and as Hannah leaned back in the chair grannie had vacated an hour before and listened to the wind which was now howling about the door, her eyes rested with an appraising scrutiny on this article and that as if she were determining what ravage of to-day would call for first attention on the morrow.
Jagger had not moved from his place on the hearth, and sat with his head in his hands gazing into the embers where he had already built sufficient wooden castles to line the banks of the Rhine. It was one of Jagger’s faults (or excellences, if that is your point of view) that he was ready to build without troubling his brain over much on the subject of foundations.