Part 30 (2/2)

”Of course,” said Marcella, with dignity. ”I have a great many names already. The old people are always difficult. But Mrs. Jellison will come round.”

”Are you going in here?”

”Please.”

Wharton knocked at the Hurds' door, and Mrs. Hurd opened.

The cottage was thick with smoke. The chimney only drew when the door was left open. But the wind to-day was so bitter that mother and children preferred the smoke to the draught. Marcella soon made out the poor little bronchitic boy, sitting coughing by the fire, and Mrs. Hurd busied with some was.h.i.+ng. She introduced Wharton, who, as before, stood for some time, hat in hand, studying the cottage. Marcella was perfectly conscious of it, and a blush rose to her cheek while she talked to Mrs.

Hurd. For both this and Mrs. Jellison's hovel were her father's property and somewhat highly rented.

Minta Hurd said eagerly that she would join the new straw-plaiting, and went on to throw out a number of hurried, half-coherent remarks about the state of the trade past and present, leaning meanwhile against the table and endlessly drying her hands on the towel she had taken up when her visitors came in.

Her manner was often nervous and flighty in these days. She never looked happy; but Marcella put it down to health or natural querulousness of character. Yet both she and the children were clearly better nourished, except Willie, in whom the tubercular tendency was fast gaining on the child's strength.

Altogether Marcella was proud of her work, and her eager interest in this little knot of people whose lives she had shaped was more possessive than ever. Hurd, indeed, was often silent and secretive; but she put down her difficulties with him to our odious system of cla.s.s differences, against which in her own way she was struggling. One thing delighted her--that he seemed to take more and more interest in the labour questions she discussed with him, and in that fervid, exuberant literature she provided him with. Moreover, he now went to all Mr.

Wharton's meetings that were held within reasonable distance of Mellor; and, as she said to Aldous with a little laugh, which, however, was not unsweet, _he_ had found her man work--_she_ had robbed his candidate of a vote.

Wharton listened a while to her talk with Minta, smiled a little, unperceived of Marcella, at the young mother's docilities of manner and phrase; then turned his attention to the little hunched and coughing object by the fire.

”Are you very bad, little man?”

The white-faced child looked up, a dreary look, revealing a patient, melancholy soul. He tried to answer, but coughed instead.

Wharton, moving towards him, saw a bit of ragged white paper lying on the ground, which had been torn from a grocery parcel.

”Would you like something to amuse you a bit--Ugh! this smoke! Come round here, it won't catch us so much. _Now_, then, what do you say to a doggie,--two doggies?”

The child stared, let himself be lifted on the stranger's knee, and did his very utmost to stop coughing. But when he had succeeded his quick panting breaths still shook his tiny frame and Wharton's knee.

”Hm--Give him two months or thereabouts!” thought Wharton. ”What a beastly hole!--one room up, and one down, like the other, only a shade larger. Damp, insanitary, cold--bad water, bad drainage, I'll be bound--bad everything. That girl may well try her little best. And I go making up to that man Boyce! What for? Old spites?--new spites?--which?--or both!”

Meanwhile his rapid skilful fingers were tearing, pinching, and shaping; and in a very few minutes there, upon his free knee, stood the most enticing doggie of pinched paper, a hound in full course, with long ears and stretching legs.

The child gazed at it with ravishment, put out a weird hand, touched it, stroked it, and then, as he looked back at Wharton, the most exquisite smile dawned in his saucer-blue eyes.

”What? did you like it, gra.s.shopper?” cried Wharton, enchanted by the beauty of the look, his own colour mounting. ”Then you shall have another.”

And he twisted and turned his piece of fresh paper, till there, beside the first, stood a second fairy animal--a greyhound this time, with arching neck and sharp long nose.

”There's two on 'em at Westall's!” cried the child, hoa.r.s.ely, clutching at his treasures in an ecstasy.

Mrs. Hurd, at the other end of the cottage, started as she heard the name. Marcella noticed it; and with her eager sympathetic look began at once to talk of Hurd and the works at the Court. She understood they were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter.

Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases. ”Oh! he didn't have nothing to say against it.” Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed satisfied. All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's annoyance, plaintive as usual. Wharton, with the boy inside his arm, turned his head an instant to listen.

Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs.

Jellison's gossip, then shrank from it. He had promised her, she thought to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the word of a working man as different from anybody else's.

So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her companion and give a smile or two to the sick boy.

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