Family loyalties and disloyalties are like currents in the sea: they
intermingle, jostle each other, change places and are diverted or
united according to the strength of the obstacles they meet, and
Hannah, sailing alone, like her bottled ship, on this unknown ocean,
found that her little craft, which might be upset at any moment, was
quite robust enough to affect these currents. Ruth, undoubtedly, had
been embarrassed by her father's instructive monologue, but she could
not tolerate his discomfiture by a stranger, though the stranger's
intention might have been innocent, and in the mild amiability she
showed him until the meal was over and the few remarks she made to
Ethel, who seemed to have missed what Ruth resented, she proclaimed her
allegiance to the Corder clan.
Her tongue was always Hannah's danger and its readiness had sometimes
been her undoing. She could control the expression of her face, but
the temptation of a quick reply or a disconcerting statement was too
much for her, and she would have been superhuman if she had resisted
this one and remarkably careless of her future if she had not tried to
disarm suspicion by a quietly sensible demeanour while her duties were
explained by Ethel and they made a tour of the house together.
When they returned to the dining-room, Ruth had her homework spread
out on the green serge table cover, and a young man, with his shoulders
wedged under the mantelpiece, was warming his back at the fire. He was
rather a beautiful young man, Hannah thought, as she looked at his
slenderness and the studied carelessness of his dark hair, but one, she
decided the next moment, who would have to be kept in his place, for
he was returning her glance quizzically, and the lift of his eyebrows
condoled with her while his smile invited her to share his amusement
at the alien atmosphere in which he and she found themselves. This was
drawing a bow at a venture, but he was safe enough, for if the arrow
missed its mark no one need know where he had aimed it, and Hannah's
demure response to his greeting did not discountenance him.
'I've been trying to make Ruth tell me about you,' he said gaily, 'but
she's like David Balfour. She's an awful poor hand at a description.'
'I didn't tell you a single thing!' Ruth cried.
'And now, methinks, you do protest too much.'
'But I could tell you something about yourself! I knew you'd begin
showing off at once!'
'No, no,' Wilfrid protested genially. 'I was only letting Miss Mole
know that this is a cultured household--as indeed, it ought to be. We
have _Familiar Quotations_ on our bookshelves and they save a deal of
trouble and hard work.'
'If you're hinting that Father hasn't read as much as you have--'
'I didn't mention the uncle, dear child,' Wilfrid said gently. 'But all
the same,' he dropped his pose of an ironical young man and became a
natural one, 'all the same, I'll bet you he hasn't. Bet you anything
you like. I don't blame him. He's a busy man. He's the kind of man
_Familiar Quotations_ was made for, and he'd be a fool if he didn't
take advantage of it.'
'He's got more sense in his little finger--' Ruth began. She looked as
if she was going to cry. 'It's you that's the fool! And I don't know
how I'm going to get my homework finished with so many people in the
room! I shall have to do it in my bedroom. And I don't care if I do
catch cold,' she said, in answer to Ethel's expostulations, and from
the door, she gave half a glance at Hannah. 'It won't be my fault,
anyhow.'
Ethel looked anxiously at Hannah. 'I don't know what's the matter with
her,' she said. 'And I don't know what Miss Mole will think of us,' she
said to Wilfrid.
'No, I don't suppose we shall ever know that. Well, I'm sorry I teased
the child. Is the uncle in?'
'Yes,' Ethel was anxious again, 'and I said you had an engagement.'
'So I had. An important committee meeting of the Medical Students'
Temperance Society--if he wants to know.'
'Oh, Wilfrid! Really?' Ethel clutched the blue beads round her neck and
smiled with an alarming joyfulness.
Wilfrid dropped his eyelids. 'But if he doesn't want to know,' he said
drawlingly, 'it wasn't!' and he slouched gracefully out of the room.
'Dear me!' Hannah said. They were the first words she had spoken and
she wished Wilfrid could have heard them. It was the only possible
comment and she thought he would have appreciated it in her own sense.
Ethel interpreted it as astonishment, and she hastened to explain that
Wilfrid was a dreadful tease but he did not mean to be unkind. He
did not realize how much she was in earnest about temperance reform.
Or perhaps he did--what did Miss Mole think?--but liked to pretend he
could take nothing seriously. She wished he was not a medical student.
They were rather a wild lot, yet the doctor's was a noble profession
and that of a medical missionary was the best of all. She had wanted to
be a missionary herself--in China--but, when her mother died, it seemed
to be her duty to stay at home.
'And now I've come, and if I turn out all right, perhaps you'll be able
to go after all.'
Ethel gave what was equivalent to a violent shy, keeping her eyes,
meanwhile, on the object which had alarmed her. 'I don't know,' she
said. 'I do such a lot for Father. And I have a Girls' Club at the
Mission. I'd given up all idea of going away.'
'The missionary field, as they call it, or the stage,' Hannah said.
'It's generally one or the other, in one's teens, not that I ever
fancied myself at either. But all the world's a stage, as you'll find
in _Familiar Quotations_.'
'And, in a way, a missionary field, too,' Ethel said eagerly. 'And
perhaps it's really harder to stay at home.'
'I shouldn't be surprised,' Hannah said. 'Oughtn't I to be darning, or
something?'
'Oh, not on your first evening, Miss Mole! The basket's in that
cupboard and I'm afraid you'll find a lot of socks in it.'
'All the more reason for starting, then. And you said Mr. Corder likes
his tea at ten o'clock?'
'And biscuits.'
'And biscuits,' Hannah repeated. 'Keeps him awake, I should think,'
she said, rummaging in the mending basket. 'Yes, there's plenty to do
here.'
Ethel shied again. 'I'm always so busy,' she said fidgeting with
her beads, while Hannah thrust a thin, probing hand into socks and
stockings. 'I'm so glad you've come, Miss Mole, and I knew I should
like anyone recommended by Mrs. Spenser-Smith.'
'Did she choose the servant for you, too?' Hannah asked casually.
'Oh no! She's one of my girls. One of my club girls. So she always has
to go out on Wednesdays, Miss Mole. That's the Club social evening. And
it's the week-night service at the chapel, so Father and Doris and I
are all out and we have to have a high-tea that evening.'
'Sardines, I suppose?'
'Not always,' Ethel said simply, and Hannah, who had been ready to
suggest that these piles of mending should be shared and Ethel's
restless hands employed, felt herself softening towards this young
woman who wanted to approach and would be scared by a sudden movement.
She went on with her darning, behaving as she would have behaved with
the nervous colt, pretending she was not watching it and letting it
get used to her presence before she advanced, and she could feel Ethel
gaining confidence though her fears kept jerking her back.
Aloud, she said cunningly, 'I'm afraid I've frightened everybody else
away. Do you think your sister ought to be sitting up there, in the
cold?'
Ethel showed the whites of her eyes but, this time, she did not jump.
'I think we'd better leave her alone, Miss Mole. Nobody knows how to
manage her. Mother did.' And now it was Ethel's turn to look ready to
cry. 'And she gets on with my brother--everyone does--but she doesn't
seem to want me to be kind to her.'
'She doesn't look very strong.'
'Perhaps that's it,' Ethel said hopefully, and it occurred to Hannah
that here was another someone else who was not happy unless everybody
appreciated her, and this one had less than common skill to evoke the
admiration she wanted. Hannah was inclined to think that this was a
feminine craving, the result of work in which the personal element
was supreme, but she was to learn that in this household there was
no one who was free from it. Robert Corder, it was true, made no
efforts: he had found they were unnecessary and he accepted, as his
due, the particular kind of adulation given to a man in his position
and was astonished only if it was denied him, and when Hannah had seen
him in his chapel, after a service, petting, and being petted by, a
docile flock, it was easy to understand why he treated her with marked
coldness. She had tripped him up on her first evening in his house, and
while his vanity and her appearance could persuade him that this was
an accident, he was careful not to get in her way again. It was also
easy to understand why Lilla had introduced the watchdog. Miss Patsy
Withers, a plump, fading, but still comely blonde, would have made a
soothing companion for the Reverend Robert, a woman who would always
say what she meant and, still more commendably, mean the thing most
likely to please him, and when Hannah dusted the large photograph of
the late Mrs. Corder which stood on the minister's desk, she wondered
if that lady had ever puzzled her husband. She looked capable of a
silence which was certainly not due to any lack of ideas, and the more
Hannah examined that face, the more she liked it, and the more she
was convinced that Lilla's loyalty to the dead was a romantic way of
expressing her determination to keep her own place as leading lady in
the chapel.
It amused Hannah to see Lilla walking down the aisle to her prominent
pew, to meet her in the porch and receive an appropriate bow and
sometimes even a hand-shake, and Hannah always took care to respond
discreetly, but with a glance or a pressure which brought a wary
look into Lilla's eyes: It was hard to watch Ernest taking round the
offertory plate and not to smile at him: it was harder not to encourage
the kindness he was ready to bestow on her. His greetings were a little
too enthusiastic to be those of her patroness's husband but, in the
general cheerfulness of that porch and the heartiness with which the
sharers of a spiritual banquet mingled before they separated for their
more private and material feasts, this brotherliness was not likely to
attract attention.
Each Sunday morning, Hannah sat under the blue, bespangled roof and
she looked in vain for Mr. Blenkinsop. She would get a series of nods
from Mrs. Gibson, and sometimes a whispered word, but their confidences
were exchanged when Hannah dropped in for the cup of tea she had been
promised, and she knew that Mr. Blenkinsop was still in Prince's Road
and that no further misadventure had disturbed his peace. Mrs. Gibson
said it did her good to see Hannah sitting in the minister's pew, with
Ruth on one side of her and that handsome young man on the other. She
liked to see a young man at chapel. While his mother was alive, Mr.
Blenkinsop had been as regular as anyone could wish, and now he only
went occasionally to the evening service, but, for all that, he was as
steady as he could be and she was not the one to judge people entirely
by their chapel-going.
'No, indeed,' Hannah said seriously, 'but I shouldn't enjoy the
services so much if Mr. Corder's nephew was not there.' She did not
tell Mrs. Gibson how neatly he sometimes paraphrased the hymns and
sang them in her ear, or how his elbow met hers during the sermon or
the extemporary prayers. Wilfrid was one of Hannah's many difficulties
and few joys for, in the Corder household, he alone flatteringly
suspected something of her quality and acknowledged it by paying her
attentions she did her best to repress, because, as she had early
discovered, to be favoured by Wilfrid was to irritate Ethel and to be
implicated in Ruth's determined scorn of him. Ethel was friendliness
itself when no one else was troubling about Miss Mole, but she was a
bad sharer, in Hannah as in Wilfrid, and when Ethel was upset Ruth
seemed to take pains to irritate her, while Wilfrid teased them both
in turn with bewilderingly quick changes. The truth was that Ethel
openly, and Ruth secretly admired, him for his looks, his nonchalance,
and his disregard for all they had been taught to consider sacred,
and Hannah was mortified and amused to find herself in the same
condition, though her sight was clearer. Under his obvious faults, he
was a lovable young man, and for her what was his most lovable quality
was the quickness with which he sought her eye when his uncle was at
his most ministerial, while those nudges of his elbow in chapel was
his indication that, in spite of all rebuffs, she could not deceive
him. She could pretend to be the plain Miss Mole, keeping house for
Mr. Corder, doing her work efficiently, presenting an imperturbable
obtuseness to Ruth's continued hostility, meeting Ethel's gusts of
friendship quietly and ignoring signs of jealousy, letting slip her
opportunities to cap Wilfrid's wit with her own, but, so those nudges
and those glances warned her, failing to deceive him.
This was heartening to Hannah. It lightened a task which could only be
done well if she persisted in seeing it as a game in which Wilfrid's
appreciation and the improvement in the meals were the only points she
had yet scored. She would score again when she had made harmony out of
these discords and when she had persuaded Ruth that an interloper could
be a friend, but she had to play with a cautiousness which was alien to
her or lose the game.
Why did she take this trouble? she sometimes asked herself. Was it for
the sake of the game itself or in a belated realization that, somehow,
her future must be assured, that with youth behind her she could not
afford more failures? She could not answer her own questions but, day
by day, as she dusted Mrs. Corder's photograph, she liked to fancy that
between her and this woman there was some sort of pact which she was
trusted not to break.