Each Sunday morning, Hannah sat under the blue, bespangled roof and she looked in vain for Mr. Blenkinsop. She would get a series of nods from Mrs. Gibson, and sometimes a whispered word, but their confidences were exchanged when Hannah dropped in for the cup of tea she had been promised, and she knew that Mr. Blenkinsop was still in Prince’s Road and that no further misadventure had disturbed his peace. Mrs. Gibson said it did her good to see Hannah sitting in the minister’s pew, with Ruth on one side of her and that handsome young man on the other. She liked to see a young man at chapel. While his mother was alive, Mr. Blenkinsop had been as regular as anyone could wish, and now he only went occasionally to the evening service, but, for all that, he was as steady as he could be and she was not the one to judge people entirely by their chapel-going.
“No, indeed,” Hannah said seriously, “but I shouldn’t enjoy the services so much if Mr. Corder’s nephew was not there.” She did not tell Mrs. Gibson how neatly he sometimes paraphrased the hymns and sang them in her ear, or how his elbow met hers during the sermon or the extemporary prayers. Wilfrid was one of Hannah’s many difficulties and few joys for, in the Corder household, he alone flatteringly suspected something of her quality and acknowledged it by paying her attentions she did her best to repress, because, as she had early discovered, to be favoured by Wilfrid was to irritate Ethel and to be implicated in Ruth’s determined scorn of him. Ethel was friendliness itself when no one else was troubling about Miss Mole, but she was a bad sharer, in Hannah as in Wilfrid, and when Ethel was upset Ruth seemed to take pains to irritate her, while Wilfrid teased them both in turn with bewilderingly quick changes. The truth was that Ethel openly, and Ruth secretly admired, him for his looks, his nonchalance, and his disregard for all they had been taught to consider sacred, and Hannah was mortified and amused to find herself in the same condition, though her sight was clearer. Under his obvious faults, he was a lovable young man, and for her what was his most lovable quality was the quickness with which he sought her eye when his uncle was at his most ministerial, while those nudges of his elbow in chapel was his indication that, in spite of all rebuffs, she could not deceive him. She could pretend to be the plain Miss Mole, keeping house for Mr. Corder, doing her work efficiently, presenting an imperturbable obtuseness to Ruth’s continued hostility, meeting Ethel’s gusts of friendship quietly and ignoring signs of jealousy, letting slip her opportunities to cap Wilfrid’s wit with her own, but, so those nudges and those glances warned her, failing to deceive him.
This was heartening to Hannah. It lightened a task which could only be done well if she persisted in seeing it as a game in which Wilfrid’s appreciation and the improvement in the meals were the only points she had yet scored. She would score again when she had made harmony out of these discords and when she had persuaded Ruth that an interloper could be a friend, but she had to play with a cautiousness which was alien to her or lose the game.
Why did she take this trouble? she sometimes asked herself. Was it for the sake of the game itself or in a belated realization that, somehow, her future must be assured, that with youth behind her she could not afford more failures? She could not answer her own questions but, day by day, as she dusted Mrs. Corder’s photograph, she liked to fancy that between her and this woman there was some sort of pact which she was trusted not to break.
IX
It was a long time since Hannah had lived with a family. After an exhausting experience in which she had battled with half-a-dozen riotous children, an ailing mother and a father who tried to be confidential about the trials and disappointments of marriage, she had taken a post with an old lady in the hope of comparative leisure and, like an actress who makes a success in a particular kind of part and finds it difficult to get another, she had seemed doomed to old, invalid and lonely ladies for the rest of her life. She had naturally been suspected of inability to deal with the young after an existence of picking up dropped stitches, fetching clean pocket handkerchiefs and reading aloud, though Hannah could have been eloquent about the wearing nature of such work. Often, she had looked at a charwoman with envy, desiring healthy labour with brush and bucket, and for her folly in not hiring a bedroom and letting herself out by the day, she blamed what must have been an odd lingering desire for the gentility she affected to despise. She would have made an admirable charwoman: that vulgar strain in her which Lilla justly deplored, so unsuitable in a companion or a housekeeper, would have been a positive recommendation in a charwoman, and she pictured herself, going from house to house, energetic, good-humoured, free of speech, the perfect charwoman of fiction, with a home which was all her own
