Part 3 (2/2)
For a moment or two May put her hand to her face. ”Eh, but what a pity!” she murmured, after a while. ”What does it matter whose bra.s.s fetches him home?”
”It matters to me.”
”It matters a deal more that you're breaking your heart----”
”Nay, then, I'm not! ... Ay, well, then, what if I be?”
”Let me get the bra.s.s right off!” May said, in a coaxing tone. ”Let me,--do now! Send it to him to-day.”
”Nay.”
”You've got it into your head he's different, but I'll swear you're wrong! Different in looks, maybe, but he'll be none the worse for that.
He always framed to be a fine figure of a man when he was set. You'd be as throng wi' him as a clockie hen wi' a pot egg.”
Sarah snorted scorn, but her face softened a little.
”He's forty, but I'll be bound he hasn't changed. I'll be bound he's n.o.bbut the same merry lad inside.”
”Happen none the better for that.”
”Geordie isn't the sort as grows old--Geordie an' Jim----”
”Nay, then, I want nowt about Jim!” Sarah flared, and the other laughed.
”It's hard to think of 'em apart even now,--they were that like. Why, I've mixed 'em myself, over and over again, and fine fun it was for them, to be sure!”
”_I_ never mixed 'em!” Sarah snapped, with a blind glare. ”I never see a sc.r.a.p o' likeness myself.”
”Why, the whole countryside couldn't tell 'em apart,--school-folk an'
all! 'Twasn't only their faces was like; 'twas their voices, too.”
”Hold your whisht!”
”You'll remember yon calls they had, Geordie an' Jim----”
”Whisht, I tell ye!” There was something scared as well as angry in Sarah's tone, and May was hushed into silence in spite of herself. ”Jim was sweet on you, too,” the old woman went on surlily, after a pause.
”If there wasn't that much to choose between 'em, why didn't you choose him?”
”There was all the world to choose between them, when it come to it,”
May said smiling, but with tears in her voice. ”Once Geordie'd kissed me, I never mixed 'em up again!”
The rough colour came suddenly into Sarah's face. She tried to turn it away, with the pathetic helplessness of the blind who cannot tell what others may be reading there in spite of their will. May, however, was looking away from her into the past.
”Not but what Jim was a rare good sort,” she was saying, with the tenderness of a woman towards a lover who once might have been and just was not. ”Eh, and how fond he was of you, Mrs. Thornthet!” she added, turning again. ”No lad could ha' thought more of his own mother than he did of you.”
”I wanted nowt wi' his fondness,” Sarah said in a hard tone. ”And I want no mewling about him now, as I said afore!”
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