“Oh, don’t say it like that, as though it’s the only chance!”
“For the benefit of our health,” Hannah said. “Why didn’t you wait and let me finish my sentence?”
They had their walk, up a long winding hill until they reached the level of the bridge, along a pleasant road bordered with the woods that sloped down to the river, across fields and through copses, to the Monks’ Pool where the red trunks of firs were mirrored in the water. There, rather late in the day, they ate their lunch, and dusk seemed to be deepening round them though the sky was a pale blue circle like a reflection of the pool, and the tops of the trees which circled the water made a fringe for the patch of sky, and when they had thrown their crumbs for the age-old carp which were said to live in that water, they walked home slowly, saying very little, happy in each other’s company, and passed over the spangled bridge and saw the docks, spangled too, far below them on one side and the dark river on the other.
“It’s been a lovely day,” Ruth said, on a deep breath, when they stood outside the door in Beresford Road, but when they entered the dining-room and saw Ethel sitting by the fire, they knew it had not been a lovely day for her.
XXXVIII
It was fortunate for Hannah that Robert Corder heard her story from Mr. Pilgrim. From another, he might have listened to it receptively, but from Mr. Pilgrim whom he disliked, who had spoilt Mrs. Spenser-Smith’s party for him, who had lured Ethel to his chapel and who was creating trouble of the kind Robert Corder dreaded most and felt, in some obscure way, to be indecent, he heard it with studied incredulity. He was not the man to let Mr. Pilgrim think he could supply information of any kind to the leading Nonconformist minister in Radstowe, and he would have seen this approach as an insult to his household and his own acumen if his vanity had not assured him that Mr. Pilgrim had worldly, as well as sentimental, reasons for performing what he called an unpleasant duty, though it was one which might be the means of putting him on familiar terms with Ethel’s father. Robert Corder was not, and never had been, quite comfortable about Miss Mole and, while he listened and showed Mr. Pilgrim a forbidding face, he remembered all his suspicions and irritations, forgotten lately in his reliance on her, but his chief impulse, at the moment, was to be as different from Mr. Pilgrim as he could, and he read him a little lecture on tolerance, generosity, tenderness towards women and the duty of Christians to accept sinners who had repented, which was as good as the best of his sermons. He did not commit himself to a belief in Miss Mole’s innocence: he was too wily for that, and he preferred to present himself as a man who was ready to fit his practice to his theory, but if Mr. Pilgrim had had a tail, it would have been between his legs when he left the house, and that was why Ethel wept alone.
“Oh, what’s the matter now?” Ruth exclaimed. “It’s always the same. We can’t have anything nice, in this family, without having something nasty afterwards. Is it because Moley and I have been out together?”
“I don’t care what you and Miss Mole do!” Ethel cried. “I wished she’d never come here!”
“Oh—you beast!” Ruth said with vicious slowness. “If she wasn’t here, I wouldn’t stay. No, I wouldn’t. I’d ask Uncle Jim to let me live with him, and I know he would. But you’ll stay, won’t you, Moley? Don’t listen to her. She doesn’t mean it. She’ll be sorry, soon, but she hasn’t any self-control.”
“Be quiet!” Hannah said sharply. “Why, in the name of goodness, can’t you be kinder to each other? I tell you this—and I hope you’ll remember it—I believe unkindness is the worst sin of all. Yes,” she said, looking at Ethel, “the very worst.”
“I’m not unkind to Ruth,” Ethel said sullenly.
“But you were to Moley, so I was to you. What’s she done to you, anyhow?”
“That’s not for a child like you to know,” Ethel said.
“Then I don’t believe you know yourself.”
“Well, I know more—” Fearful, Ethel caught her lip on what she was going to say, but daring, and careless, in her wretchedness, of consequences, she let it go, and said in a strained, weak voice, “I know more than Mr. Blenkinsop does,” and she looked at Hannah from between shoulders raised as if to ward off a blow.
It was the table Hannah struck with a single smart rap, calling attention, if it had been necessary, to her white face and sombre eyes, and Ruth’s murmured, questioning repetition of Mr. Blenkinsop’s name sounded, in all their ears, like the last effrontery. There had been dark rings round Hannah’s eyes for days and now they showed, like bruises, on her pallor, and Ruth and Ethel, looking at what seemed to them the very symbol of fury and, waiting for fierce, denunciatory tones, heard her say quietly, in a movingly sweet and weary voice, “You have no manners, either of you. What’s to become of you? You can’t go through life biting and scratching like this.” The sadness went out of her voice and, in the one they were used to she said, “I don’t flatter myself that mine are good, but they ought to be, for when I was at school in—when I was at school—I used to look at a motto on the wall and I thought it was rather silly, but I’ve never forgotten it. And that just shows that when you’re at school, or anywhere else, for that matter, there are people who know better than you do. And, in this room, I’m the one who knows,
