“Say no more, dear!” Hannah exclaimed. “I understand it all! You want a good, solid sandbag to fill up the gap; you want a watchdog, of no breed or beauty, but warranted to bark; your affection for the poor woman’s memory is stronger than his and you’re not going to let him forget her altogether. Quite right!” Hannah’s thin, odd face was glowing, her eyes, greener than usual, shone. “It’s not complimentary to me, but it’s magnificent and I’ll bark like fury. And they say women are not loyal to each other! Why, already, I feel like a sister to Mrs. What’s-her-name myself!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mrs. Spenser-Smith. “I liked Mrs. Corder well enough. She was rather a nonentity, compared with him, poor little woman, but I believe she did her best, and when I see that Patsy Withers making eyes at him—”
“I’ll remember the name,” Hannah said.
“You haven’t got the post yet,” Lilla said sharply, “and I don’t believe you’re really fit for it. I’ve stretched a point, Hannah. I don’t suppose you could produce a written character which Mr. Corder would look at twice, and goodness knows what you’ve been doing all these years, and if you go, I do hope you’ll remember that I’ve practically guaranteed you. And, by the way, I’ve said nothing about our relationship. I thought it wouldn’t be fair to either of you. I want you to go there on your own merits. I mentioned this to Ernest and he quite agrees.”
Hannah smiled with pleasant maliciousness and said nothing, but she gave the impression of being ready to say a good deal and Lilla went on hastily. “I’ll let you know what happens. I shall see him at the weeknight service.”
“But won’t he want to see me?”
“Not necessary,” said Mrs. Spenser-Smith in her best Spenser-Smithian manner.
“Not advisable, you mean! I daresay you’re right. What sort of man is he? Is he brisk and hearty, or one of those gentle paw-folders?”
“That isn’t funny, Hannah, it’s vulgar; I might say irreverent. Do try to remember you’re a lady.”
“But I’m not. I come of the same stock as you do, Lilla, and we know what that is. Simple yeoman stock, and my father often dropped his aitches and so did yours. I know you don’t like remembering it, but there’s the fact. I happened to be educated above my station—though you, of course, were not!—and there are times when I revert—revert, Lilla! But I’ll try to behave myself and I’ll keep my eye on Patsy. Thank you for the tea, and now I’ll go back to Mrs. Gibson and cobble up some of my underclothes, though I hope they’ll be a matter of indifference to the Reverend Corder.”
“There you are again!” Lilla said with a sigh, and she offered her cool, rosy face to be kissed.
“It’s only a bit of fun between us girls!” Hannah cried, and as she brushed her cheek against her cousin’s, she added, “You’re a good soul, Lilla. I always liked you.”
“Oh, go along with you,” Lilla said good-naturedly and gently urged her to the door. There was no knowing what generous foolishness Ernest would commit, if he found her in the house when he came home.
V
The wind had risen strongly as night came on and Hannah crossed the Downs under swaying branches and swirling leaves. The football-players, the riders, the children had all gone home; lamps edged the roads but, where Hannah walked under the elms, there was a stormy darkness. The branches creaked lugubriously or with shrill protest, and those which still kept their leaves were like great flails, threshing the winds, maddened by their sterile efforts, for it was the wind, threshing harder, that produced the harvest, whipping it from the trees and driving it before him. Hannah was driven, too; a wisp of a woman, exhilarated by the noise and the buffeting. Lilla’s comfortable, bright room seemed unreal to her, Mr. Corder was the invention of an idle moment and Hannah Mole had no past, no future, only this breathless present when the wind would have had her go westwards and she was making for the south. For ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, until she reached lower ground and the shelter of the streets, where the wind did its best with the trees in the gardens but found their weaker resistance a dull affair, she had that freedom from care which is the reward of exciting physical effort; but in the comparative quiet of Chatterton Road she became conscious of the self which needed money for food and clothing and, absurdly, she saw it handed to her by Mr. Corder on one of his own offertory plates. She shook her head and made a grimace of refusal. She had a prejudice against Nonconformist ministers, she pictured Mr. Corder according to the pattern in her mind, ignorantly unctuous, pretending to a humility which was patently absent, and she had a moment of rebellion. She could see herself clearly enough with other people’s eyes: she was drab, she was nearing, if she had not reached, middle-age, she bore the stamp of a woman who had always worked against the grain, she was, in fact, the ideal housekeeper for Mr. Corder. She admitted that no one sitting in his dining-room and mending his woven underwear at a table with a rusty little fern in the middle of a green serge cloth,
