“And a good thing, too!” she muttered, glancing at the clock on the otherwise conscientiously Early English Church.
There was no time to go round the hill and look at the river: she must go down Chatterton Street, which had a turning into Channing Square, and risk encountering Mrs. Widdows. The risk was not great. She would be dozing, poor thing, over the fire in the stuffy little sitting-room, while the woman she had dismissed with contumely—that was a good word, though Hannah was never sure how to pronounce it—was taking a part in this fine pageant. She realized that her contribution was purely spiritual: there was nothing ornamental in her appearance and her clothes were always of a useful shade, but she held up her head and walked briskly, enjoying the snap of twigs and the sibilance of leaves under her feet.
The narrow road she was following widened at its juncture with several others. The Avenue was stately on her left hand, another road, shaded by trees, came curling up from the river: on her right, a broader one skirted that edge of the Downs which she could reach by the short ascent in front of her, and the ends of all these roads were held together, as in a knot, by a drinking fountain for men and beasts.
It was hard to believe that the big, sprawling city was so near. This was a place for leisure, for genteel strolling, for long crocodiles of schoolgirls who must partake of the elegant beauties of nature among their other forms of nourishment, and ladies in small bonnets and bustles should have been walking under the trees. Here there was no impingement of new on old or of shabbiness on prosperity, and Hannah would have felt less affection for this part of Upper Radstowe, lovely as the trees made it, if it had not grown out of the older one and if she had not known that her own country, wild under its demureness, grey-rocked under its springy turf, lay just across the water.
The Downs were not the country, but they came as near it as they could. They stretched away, almost out of sight, rimmed by distant roads and houses on all sides but the cliffed one, and great trees as well as hawthorn bushes grew there. A double row of elms marched straight towards Lilla’s house and, as Hannah walked in their dappled shadows, she heard the thud of hooves and the creak of leather and the jingle of steel, and it seemed to fit the mixed character of the Downs that these riders should be on hired horses, that the sheep, industriously nibbling, should have dirty fleeces, and that voices thick with the Radstowe burr should come from the throats of youths kicking a football. But always, even, it seemed to Hannah, when it rained, the clouds sailed higher over that part of the world than elsewhere, and she had heard Lilla say that, except on Saturdays and Sundays, the view from her windows had almost the appearance of a private park. Unfortunately, Lilla’s house, which was already discernible as a red and white blot beyond the trees, could not be mistaken for one of England’s stately homes. It had been built for Ernest’s father towards the end of his life, and the attempt to produce something like a small Elizabethan manor house had been frustrated by his determination that there should be no misunderstanding about its origin, and below the flat gables of the top storey, bow windows and a porch bulged on the ground floor; the tiles were the reddest procurable and white stucco concealed the bricks. The garden was separated from the road by its own width of greensward guarded by posts and chains, and this indication that the Spenser-Smiths had more than enough garden to spare was callously interpreted by urchins as an invitation to swing on the chains. Even Lilla’s ointment had a fly in it, Hannah thought, beaming on a culprit who had expected a frown, and she blinked affectedly, for her own amusement, when she opened the gate and met the full glare of white and red and yellow under the sunshine.
The doorstep was spotless, the knocker gleamed, potted chrysanthemums were arranged in tiers in the porch, and Hannah had her nose against a flower and was savouring its sweet bitterness, when the door opened. From the parlourmaid’s point of view, this was a bad beginning, and either in punishment or on her quick estimate of this caller’s place in the world, she took Hannah to a small room which had a feeling of not being lived in. Here the humble and the suppliant sat on the edges of the chairs; here were kept the books which were not obviously the ones for the Spenser-Smiths to possess. The classics, Hannah guessed, were displayed somewhere to advantage, and these were the pickings from bookstalls, children’s books and those by writers of whose eminence and respectability Lilla was not assured.
Hannah took down a volume and prepared to wait, but Lilla, apparently, was anxious to know the worst as soon as possible, and after tactfully showing annoyance that Hannah should have been left in a room without a fire, she took her cousin into a drawing-room bright with gay cretonne, a wood fire and sunshine, and asked cheerfully if this were her free afternoon.
“Well, yes, as you might say and in a manner of speaking, it is. And a very nice afternoon, too. It will help us through the
