Will opened the door of the main kitchen, and at once the warmth and jollity sweeping out of it smote the shrinking visitors like an actual blast. The party were already at table, as he had said, and met the latecomers with a single, focused stare. It was one of their chief bitternesses, indeed, that they always seemed to arrive late. Eliza was at the back of it, they felt almost sure, but they had never been able to discover how. No matter how they hurried the old horse, asked the hour of passersby, or had Simon’s old watch put as right as it would allow, they never seemed to arrive at the right time. They could not be certain, of course, that she had watched for them from upstairs, and at the first sign of their coming had hustled the party into tea, but somehow or other they knew it in their bones. Things happened like that, they would have told you, when you were up against Mrs. Will; things that never by any chance would have happened with anybody else.
The room was cloudy to Sarah as she went in, but jealousy had long ago printed its details on her mind. She knew what the vivid wallpaper was like, the modern furniture and the slow-combustion grate. Once it had been a beautiful old houseplace with a great fire-spot and a crane, an inglenook, a bacon-loft, and a chimney down which both sun and moon could slant a way. Eliza, however, had soon seen to it that these absurdities were changed, and Sarah, though she affected contempt, approved of the changes in her heart. It was true that she always returned to Sandholes with a great relief, but she did not know that its bare austerity soothed her finer taste. She only knew that her mind expanded and her nerves eased, and, though grief went with her over every flag and board, a cool hand reached to her forehead as she went in.
Simon included in one surly glance the faces round the loaded table, the bright flowers, the china with the gilded rim, and the new window-curtains which he would never even have seen in any house but this. “Plush, by the look on ’em, and the price of a five pun note!” he thought resentfully, as he stood waiting to be given a place, and wondering which of the people present he disliked the most. There were the two Swainson lasses from the nearest farm, with their young duke of a brother, who was in a Witham bank. There was a Lancashire youth whom Will had taken as pupil, and Stephen Addison and his missis, who were both of them preaching-mad. He held forth at chapel and she at Institute meetings and the like, and folk said they kept each other awake at nights, practising which of them could do it best. There was Sam Battersby of Kitty Fold, who never knew where his own heaf ended and other people’s began, and the familiar smug cousin, long since formally pledged to Eliza’s eldest lass. There was a grandchild or two, and of course the Blindbeck brood, with the exception of a couple of married daughters and the obliterated Jim. … It was small wonder, indeed, that, after all those years, nobody missed him in that upcoming crowd.
Eliza’s hearty voice, that was never hearty at core, rose like a strong-winged, evil bird at the unwanted guests. The sight of them seemed to surprise her so much that she dropped a gold-rimmed cup.
“Surely to goodness, Simon and Sarah, yon’s never you! I’d give you up an hour back or more, I had indeed. You’ve been a terble while on t’road, surely—a terble while after us? But there—I always forget how fast yon grand little mare of ours gets over t’ground! You’d need to start sooner than most folk wi’ your poor old crock.”
She broke off to throw a remonstrance at Will, who was bundling two of his daughters out of their seats to make room for their uncle and aunt.
“Nay, now, Will,” she called vexedly down the table. “What d’ye think you’re at? Leave t’lasses alone, can’t you? Let the poor things be! If it’s a chair you’re wanting, there’s one here by me as’ll suit Sarah just grand. Sarah can’t abide a chair wi’ a cane bottom—says it rubs her gown. It’s right enough, too, I’m sure, wi’ velvet and the like—(I made a bonny mess o’ yon grand gown I had when Annie Belle was wed)—but I can’t see as it’ll do any harm to a bit o’ poorish serge. Anyway, Sarah can have the best plush to set on, if she sets here, and, as for Simon, you’re forever sticking him where I can’t so much as see the end of his nose! You’re never thinking I’m still sweet on him, surely,” she added, laughing, “or that happen he’ll be making sheep’s eyes at me, as he used to do?”
She looked at the young folk, and chuckled and winked, and they nudged each other and laughed, too. But Sarah did not laugh as she
