“Oh, no.”
“It was a surprisement to me. When I ’eared a knock at the side door and opened it and saw Rosie standing there, you could ’ave knocked me down with a feather. ‘Mary-Ann,’ she says, an’ before I knew what she was up to she was kissing me all over me face. I couldn’t but ask ’er in and when she was in I couldn’t but ask her to ’ave a nice cup of tea.”
Mary-Ann was anxious to excuse herself. After all she had said of Mrs. Driffield it must seem strange to me that I should find them sitting there together chatting away and laughing. I did not want to crow.
“She’s not so bad, is she?” I said.
Mary-Ann smiled. Notwithstanding her black decayed teeth there was in her smile something sweet and touching.
“I don’t ’ardly know what it is, but there’s somethin’ you can’t ’elp likin’ about her. She was ’ere the best part of an hour and I will say that for ’er, she never once give ’erself airs. And she told me with ’er own lips the material of that dress she ’ad on cost thirteen and eleven a yard and I believe it. She remembers everything, how I used to brush her ’air for her when she was a tiny tot and how I used to make her wash her little ’ands before tea. You see, sometimes her mother used to send ’er in to ’ave her tea with us. She was as pretty as a picture in them days.”
Mary-Ann looked back into the past and her funny crumpled face grew wistful.
“Oh, well,” she said after a pause, “I dare say she’s been no worse than plenty of others if the truth was only known. She ’ad more temptation than most, and I dare say a lot of them as blame her would ’ave been no better than what she was if they’d ’ad the opportunity.”
VIII
The weather broke suddenly; it grew chilly and heavy rain fell. It put an end to our excursions. I was not sorry, for I did not know how I could look Mrs. Driffield in the face now that I had seen her meeting with George Kemp. I was not so much shocked as astonished. I could not understand how it was possible for her to like being kissed by an old man, and the fantastic notion passed through my mind, filled with the novels I had read, that somehow Lord George held her in his power and forced her by his knowledge of some fearful secret to submit to his loathsome embraces. My imagination played with terrible possibilities. Bigamy, murder, and forgery. Very few villains in books failed to hold the threat of exposure of one of these crimes over some hapless female. Perhaps Mrs. Driffield had backed a bill; I never could quite understand what this meant, but I knew that the consequences were disastrous. I toyed with the fancy of her anguish (the long sleepless nights when she sat at her window in her nightdress, her long fair hair hanging to her knees, and watched hopelessly for the dawn) and saw myself (not a boy of fifteen with sixpence a week pocket money, but a tall man with a waxed moustache and muscles of steel in faultless evening dress) with a happy blend of heroism and dexterity rescuing her from the toils of the rascally blackmailer. On the other hand, it had not looked as though she had yielded quite unwillingly to Lord George’s fondling and I could not get out of my ears the sound of her laugh. It had a note that I had never heard before. It gave me a queer feeling of breathlessness.
During the rest of my holidays I only saw the Driffields once more. I met them by chance in the town and they stopped and spoke to me. I suddenly felt very shy again, but when I looked at Mrs. Driffield I could not help blushing with embarrassment, for there was nothing in her countenance that indicated a guilty secret. She looked at me with those soft blue eyes of hers in which there was a child’s playful naughtiness. She often held her mouth a little open, as though it were just going to break into a smile, and her lips were full and red. There was honesty and innocence in her face and an ingenuous frankness and though then I could not have expressed this, I felt it quite strongly. If I had put it into words at all I think I should have said: She looks as straight as a die. It was impossible that she could be “carrying on” with Lord George. There must be an explanation; I did not believe what my eyes had seen.
Then the day came when I had to go back to school. The carter had taken my trunk and I walked to the station by myself. I had refused to let my aunt see me off, thinking it more manly to go alone, but I felt rather low as I walked down the street. It was a small branch line to Tercanbury and the station was at the other end of the town near the beach. I took my ticket and settled myself in the corner of a third-class carriage. Suddenly I heard a voice: “There he is”; and Mr. and Mrs. Driffield bustled gaily up.
“We thought we must come and see you off,” she said. “Are you feeling miserable?”
“No, of course not.”
“Oh, well, it won’t last long. We’ll have no end of a time when you come back for Christmas. Can you skate?”
“No.”
“I can. I’ll teach you.”
Her high spirits cheered me, and at the same time the thought that they had come to the station to say goodbye to me gave me a lump in my throat. I tried hard not to let the emotion I felt appear
