“She’s always altering things. It’s the reforming spirit. And I’m going to alter mine, the newest I’ve got, and that’s three years old. I shall be out all day on Sunday.”
“How perfectly beastly! But you’re not going into the country, are you?”
“Yes I am. I can’t take you. I’m sorry. Some day we’ll go together.”
“It’s always some day with you,” Ruth complained.
“Yes,” Hannah said, “it always has been and I suppose it always will be.”
“You’re not unhappy, are you?”
“I should be happier if I could take you with me. In another month or two, perhaps we’ll go across the river and find primroses and violets.”
“In the Easter holidays?”
“If we can,” Hannah said, wondering where she would be by that time.
“We can if you really want to.”
“Want to!” Hannah cried. “I’d like to spend the rest of my life doing nothing else.”
“You’d soon get tired of that,” Ruth said wisely.
XXXIV
Hannah studied the sky carefully on Saturday night. It promised well for the next day, and when she had finished with the stars she lowered her gaze to the housetops and tried to decide from which of the chimneys in Prince’s Road the smoke of Mr. Blenkinsop’s excellent coal fire was rising. She thought there would have been more sense in an arrangement which allowed her to look after the baby while Mr. Blenkinsop took Mrs. Ridding into the country, but, fond as Hannah was of babies, she rejoiced in Mr. Blenkinsop’s caution. A day spent in Mrs. Ridding’s basement, or in pushing the baby about the streets of Upper Radstowe, could hardly be favourably compared with the plan he had made, and no one but a woman with Hannah’s experience of living in other people’s houses and of being perpetually on duty, could understand the rapture with which she looked forward to the morrow. If she had a wish it was that she might have gone alone into some place free of associations, where she could have walked whither she liked, and as fast or as slowly, thinking her own thoughts until, in wide spaces, she lost all pressing sense of her personality. But things were very well as they were, and in this mood she started the next morning, before the family had gone to chapel, leaving a Ruth who tried not to look neglected and a Robert Corder who was almost paternal in his good wishes for her undertaking.
She put away her cares. She would not think about Mr. Pilgrim and what he had told Ethel: she would not think about Ethel and her renewed manner of a distrustful colt, advancing, with suspicious glances, for favours, in such matters as altering a hat, and edging away as though it were Hannah, and not she, who had a tendency to bite. With such worries, Miss Mole was not going to spoil her day: Mr. Blenkinsop was waiting for her at the station, and the tramcar which carried her to that grimy portal was a processional coach, and the more it swayed, the better Hannah was pleased. She was determined to be, she could not help being, pleased with everything.
At nine o’clock that evening, Miss Mole walked slowly up the garden path. She did not turn and wave a hand to Mr. Blenkinsop at the gate, yet she knew he would stand there until he heard the front door shut behind her, and perhaps a little longer, and through all her other memories of the day she saw his stalwart figure, pursuing and protective; his solemn face, anxious but chivalrously incurious. She went through the hall and up the stairs, hardly feeling solidity under her feet, noticing things from the habit of observation, but indifferent to them. The drawing-room door was open and she could see that the blinds had not been drawn, an omission peculiarly irritating to her, and on any other night she would have drawn them quickly and had a sharp word for Doris: tonight she passed on. She knew Mr. Corder would be waiting for his tea and the knowledge flicked her mind and left no impression, and it was only when she came to Ruth’s door, which was ajar, and heard Ruth’s voice, that she halted in a march which seemed to have been going on forever, through lanes, and fields, and woods and the streets of Radstowe.
“Oh, come in, Moley,” Ruth said. “I’ve been waiting for you. Light the night-light. I thought you said you would be in to supper, and we’ve had such an awful day! Have you seen Ethel?”
“I haven’t seen anybody,” Hannah said in a colourless voice. She stood at the end of Ruth’s bed, gradually distinguishing the face from the pillow and the dark eyes from the face, and slowly, finger by finger, she drew off her gloves, making that business last as long as possible.
“I was afraid she would come upstairs before you did and begin banging,” Ruth sighed. “I very nearly got into your bed. Why don’t you light the light? I’d do it, but you always do, and I like you to.”
“In a minute,” Hannah said.
“I can’t see you and you don’t sound as if you’re here at all. You sound as if you’re where you’ve come from.”
“Oh, no, no,” Hannah said faintly. And now Ruth sat up and asked anxiously, “Have you had an awful day, too?”
Hannah swept her face with her hands, trying to brush away its weariness and the stiffness of its control. A certain amount of mental warmth invaded her cold brain, telling her that here was Ruth, who had had an awful day, and who was afraid of Ethel, and she responded to the suggestion that she was needed. “Where are the matches?” she said.
“Oh, that’s right, that’s right,” Ruth said, as the little flame budded and then flowered. “That’s better. Standing
