She could always recall in detail a September Sunday afternoon, when they had sat under the vine at the back of her father’s house. The sun came through the chinks of the vine-leaves and made beautiful patterns, like a lace scarf, falling on her and on him. Some of the leaves were clean yellow, like yellow flat flowers.
“Now sit still,” he had cried. “Now your hair, I don’t know what it is like! It’s as bright as copper and gold, as red as burnt copper, and it has gold threads where the sun shines on it. Fancy their saying it’s brown. Your mother calls it mouse-colour.”
She had met his brilliant eyes, but her clear face scarcely showed the elation which rose within her.
“But you say you don’t like business,” she pursued.
“I don’t. I hate it!” he cried hotly.
“And you would like to go into the ministry,” she half implored.
“I should. I should love it, if I thought I could make a first-rate preacher.”
“Then why don’t you—why don’t you?” Her voice rang with defiance. “If I were a man, nothing would stop me.”
She held her head erect. He was rather timid before her.
“But my father’s so stiff-necked. He means to put me into the business, and I know he’ll do it.”
“But if you’re a man?” she had cried.
“Being a man isn’t everything,” he replied, frowning with puzzled helplessness.
Now, as she moved about her work at the Bottoms, with some experience of what being a man meant, she knew that it was not everything.
At twenty, owing to her health, she had left Sheerness. Her father had retired home to Nottingham. John Field’s father had been ruined; the son had gone as a teacher in Norwood. She did not hear of him until, two years later, she made determined inquiry. He had married his landlady, a woman of forty, a widow with property.
And still Mrs. Morel preserved John Field’s Bible. She did not now believe him to be—Well, she understood pretty well what he might or might not have been. So she preserved his Bible, and kept his memory intact in her heart, for her own sake. To her dying day, for thirty-five years, she did not speak of him.
When she was twenty-three years old, she met, at a Christmas party, a young man from the Erewash Valley. Morel was then twenty-seven years old. He was well set-up, erect, and very smart. He had wavy black hair that shone again, and a vigorous black beard that had never been shaved. His cheeks were ruddy, and his red, moist mouth was noticeable because he laughed so often and so heartily. He had that rare thing, a rich, ringing laugh. Gertrude Coppard had watched him, fascinated. He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own father had a rich fund of humour, but it was satiric. This man’s was different: soft, nonintellectual, warm, a kind of gambolling.
She herself was opposite. She had a curious, receptive mind which found much pleasure and amusement in listening to other folk. She was clever in leading folk to talk. She loved ideas, and was considered very intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or philosophy or politics with some educated man. This she did not often enjoy. So she always had people tell her about themselves, finding her pleasure so.
In her person she was rather small and delicate, with a large brow, and dropping bunches of brown silk curls. Her blue eyes were very straight, honest, and searching. She had the beautiful hands of the Coppards. Her dress was always subdued. She wore dark blue silk, with a peculiar silver chain of silver scallops. This, and a heavy brooch of twisted gold, was her only ornament. She was still perfectly intact, deeply religious, and full of beautiful candour.
Walter Morel seemed melted away before her. She was to the miner that thing of mystery and fascination, a lady. When she spoke to him, it was with a southern pronunciation and a purity of English which thrilled him to hear. She watched him. He danced well, as if it were natural and joyous in him to dance. His grandfather was a French refugee who had married an English barmaid—if it had been a marriage. Gertrude Coppard watched the young miner as he danced, a certain subtle exultation like glamour in his movement, and his face the flower of his body, ruddy, with tumbled black hair, and laughing alike whatever partner he bowed above. She thought him rather wonderful, never having met anyone like him. Her father was to her the type of all men. And George Coppard, proud in his bearing, handsome, and rather bitter; who preferred theology in reading, and who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the Apostle Paul; who was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic; who ignored all sensuous pleasure:—he was very different from the miner. Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing; she had not the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never learned even a Roger de Coverley. She was puritan, like her father, high-minded, and really stern. Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man’s sensuous flame of life, that flowed off his
