Her own fireside was over there, behind the barrier, and if she ever sat at it again it would be alone, or with a dog or cat for company. It was ten years since she had been inside the house and since then she had seen it only once, coming upon it stealthily and peering through the apple trees to make sure of its existence outside her dreams. She had taken care not to intrude on the tenant, lest he should think she came in search of the rent he never paid, but she had seen that the house was really there, a little flat-fronted cottage, badly needing another wash of pink, with a plume of smoke very blue against a cold grey sky. That was five years ago and anything might have happened to it since then. It hurt her to think of it neglected, perhaps deserted. It was cruel to ignore it, absurd to own property about which her pride forbade her to ask questions, she was acting with recklessness of the future when she might want her home, but she had been a fool and she must pay for her folly.
The folly had had its sweetness and she remembered the sweetness and folly together, the precious and the worthless, without any sense of incongruity. All life could be likened to that episode, and all human beings, and the worst sorrows came from the failure to accept imperfection, knowing it for the alloy it was and yet, by some strange spiritual alchemy, seeing it as pure gold.
“Like a wedding ring,” Hannah said, twisting her lips ironically.
A little spatter of rain fell between her and those memories. She looked from the dim line on the horizon to the lights of Radstowe, far below on her left hand, and she thought they were like the campfires of innumerable explorers in a strange and dangerous country. Each man tended his own fire sedulously and to one, as to Hannah Mole, what lay beyond the ring of light was hopeful adventure; to another, as to Ruth, the justification of his fears was in the darkness.
Hopeful adventure, even here in Robert Corder’s house! She was grateful to Fortune who, in making her a servant, had remembered to give her freedom and happiness in herself. She might have been meek and dutiful and dull inside as well as out, or she might have been discontented and defiant. She was lucky, she thought, as she knelt there with her face towards the cottage which might be crumbling and her back to the narrow room which held everything else she had, for the chief of her possessions, as she knew, was the power to see those lights as campfires, and herself as an adventuress. She was not sure she told the truth in saying she was lonely. Yes, lonely and tired too, sometimes, and chilled by the thought of poor and solitary old age, but these were moods that passed and there remained for her good company the many natures in her own thin body. And the rich old gentleman was steadily approaching.
The thought of him reminded her of Mr. Samson, who had offered Ruth a kitten, and withheld information from Robert Corder. He seemed to make a habit of talking to people over hedges; she would give him another opportunity, she decided, and very busy with her inventions about him, she undressed swiftly. He might be a bad old man, but he might be a rich one, and if he was so free with his kittens for a little girl, she said to herself in the vulgar manner that made Lilla wince, he might be equally free with his money for an older one.
“Upon my word,” she said aloud, “I believe I’d marry anyone who asked me—except Robert Corder,” and she chuckled as she got into bed and chuckled again when she remembered that she was lying on Wilfrid’s mattress.
That was a dishonourable trick, she supposed, but it did not prevent her from sleeping well. It was not the first she had played in the course of her career and it would not be the last. Each week she took threepence from the housekeeping money to put in the plate on Sunday, and she owed Mrs. Widdows exactly a penny halfpenny, the price of a reel of silk. But what did Mrs. Widdows owe her in the form of kindness? And why should she pay for listening to sermons she could hear for nothing from Robert Corder on any other day of the week? These rigid codes of conduct were made for people who did not know morality when they saw it. It was immoral for the hardest-worked person in the house to lie on the hardest bed: it would be wrong for Mr. Corder’s housekeeper to let the offertory plate go by without a contribution, but it was worse to rob the poor in the person of herself. She was quite happy about the weekly threepence and quite safe, for, to do Robert Corder justice, he did not interfere with her expenditure or overlook her accounts, and she
