Mr. Blenkinsop had not applied to any agencies for the cottage he wanted. He had heard of this one in a roundabout fashion which ended in a customer at the bank, and back again, through this customer, he had made his appointment with the owner, a procedure which suited his own desire for secrecy.
“And I think those must be the chimneys,” he said.
It was then that Hannah stopped dead. She had a physical feeling of sickness, a horrible, shrivelling feeling in her breast, as though her heart, with all its generosity and courage, had been squeezed in a hard hand to the size of a pea and, for a moment, she felt murderous at this outrage. Then shame swooped over her like a great flapping, threatening bird, and the robin piped his gay derisive note.
In the sunk lane, in sight of her own chimneys, she looked about her for escape. She could not face the man to whom she had given everything she had, she would not look at him and see the full folly of her surrender and her treasure broken at his poor feet of clay. The black bird hovered, the robin piped, and she knew she had been befooling herself for years, making excuses for him, clinging to every memory that had beauty in it, and now the fingers, which had so quickly grown flaccid in hers, were insolently snapped in her face. This was the man she had loved! Her shame lay in his character and her misreading of it, not in the physical intimacy which, though it was misery to remember it, was comparatively unimportant, and no power could have dragged her, accompanied by Mr. Blenkinsop, into his presence.
“I can’t go,” she had said. “I can’t go. You must go alone,” and she had scrambled up the steep, earthy bank into a little wood, and there, as she heard the breeze very softly singing in the pine trees and felt their needles under her feet, she knew that the black bird had not followed her and she felt no shame, only a purely human grief that anyone could have hurt her so cruelly.
At this point in her memories, Hannah stopped and dropped her face into her hands. The rest was a confusion of woods and fields and lanes, with Mr. Blenkinsop at her side and the bird shadowing them again. She did not know where she had gone, or what she had said, or whether she had been silent. Kind Mr. Blenkinsop, had he but known it, was retarding her recovery from shock. She longed to be free of him. Alone, she could have steadied herself and concocted more of her excuses, striving to find something not altogether dishonourable in this sorry business, but Mr. Blenkinsop persisted, and a funny pair they must have made—a distraught woman pursued by a solemn gentleman who vainly hoped for a clue to this mystery, and the longer she left her behaviour unexplained, and she might so easily have invented something, the more impossible explanation became, but, in truth, she hardly thought of him, except as someone she did not want, and someone who subtly made the conduct of the other more abominable.
She realised, and she grew hot, that he had treated her as the mental case she actually was, and, but that he had made her eat and drink, he had let her have her way which was that of physical exhaustion, until at last he had found a station and a train, and back they had jogged, in a darkness that hid the beauties she had rejoiced in earlier in the day.
Her weariness and her poverty in friendship assailed her now. For the first time in her career she had behaved like a baby, and she was denied the luxury of having someone who would bear with her in that state and think no worse of her, and that, at the moment, was the greatest luxury she could think of. There was Mr. Samson and there was Wilfrid who both, in their different ways, would have offered sympathy and comfort, but Mr. Samson was not sensitive to human emotions and Wilfrid was too young to be made a confidant. On the shoulder of neither of these two could she lay her weary head. There was no one to look to beyond herself, and after all, this despondency would pass. She had had enough experience of unhappiness to know that it need not be permanent if she willed otherwise, and she willed it now with all her might. She told herself it was a good thing she had finished with the remains of her sentiment about her cottage and its occupant, and if she had lost her first motive for frustrating Mr. Pilgrim, she had found another in the simple necessity of earning her bread, yet, like a fool, she was encouraging Mr. Corder to have him to the house! That was the fault of Mrs. Corder who could hear every word spoken in the study and could do nothing more. It would be cowardly and cruel not to help her, moreover Hannah knew that what was not worth risking was not worth keeping, and while she was prepared to risk, she was also prepared to fight.
She sat there, waiting for Ethel to return, but it was Wilfrid who came in first, and, at once, she said, “You did well to give me that brooch and remind me that Cupid is blind.”
He hesitated for a moment and if, like everybody else, he knew of her excursion with Mr. Blenkinsop, he made no reference to it. “In wounding Ethel?” he asked. “Is this Pilgrim fellow as bad as that? We had the hell of a Sunday dinner, Mona Lisa. What did you want to go out for?”
“You may well ask that! But all things work together for good.”
“To those who love God. I’ve always told you God’s the uncle and no one loves
