Nan opened the door for Mr. Medhurst and Calthorpe, who passed out
together and were immediately lost to sight in the fog. In the winter
months, fog hung almost continuously over that low, fenny country; white
fog; billowy, soaking mist. Little wraiths of it swirled into the
kitchen as she opened the door, so she shut it again quickly,—she did
everything quickly and neatly. For one moment of panic she wished she
could have gone with Calthorpe, who was kindly, commonplace, and easy,
instead of remaining alone with those two violent and difficult men, and
the dead body of her sister-in-law upstairs. She was weary of the strain
that never seemed to be relaxed in their cottage.
“Next time that canting parson comes here, I’ll lay hands upon him,”
said Silas.
“Will I get supper now?” asked Nan, trying to distract him.
“What a packet of folk we had!” Silas broke out; “it was rat-tat at the
door all the time, till the whole village had passed through, I should
say.”
“Folks are kindly,” said Nan.
“Folks are curious,” barked Silas.
She sighed, but, knowing better than to remonstrate, resumed her
question.
“Will you have supper now, Silas?” and she repeated the question on her
fingers to Gregory. “We’ll eat with you, Silas, to-night. Gregory and
I,—we’ll be there whenever you want us. I’ll do the house for you, and
your cooking. We’ll all eat together, so long as you want us to.” She
was gentle and bright.
“I don’t want your pity.”
She busied herself with getting the supper out of the oven, carrying the
hot dishes carefully with a cloth. Gregory watched her, pivoting in his
chair to follow her movements. Once he talked to her on his fingers:
“Don’t you take no notice of Silas; he looks queer to-night,” and when
she answered, “Small wonder,” a broad grin distorted his dark face. His
bones and features, strongly carven, in conjunction with the muscularity
of his body and the perpetual silence to which he was condemned, made
him appear like a man cast in bronze. He was, moreover, singularly
still; he would sit for hours without stirring, his arms folded across
his chest; he never betrayed what he was thinking, but the others knew
that it was always about machinery. Silas, on the other hand, was far
more excitable; he was always occupied; his mind had many trains of
thought which it pursued; Nan never knew which of the two brothers she
found the more alarming, and life had become for her an uneasy effort to
conciliate them both. She had hesitated before speaking of supper; meals
seemed to accord badly with tragedy.
Silas talked unceasingly; he talked with his mouth full and many phrases
were unintelligible. Now and then he mumbled, now and then raised his
voice to a shout. He thundered assertions, and spat questions at Nan.
Gregory sat crumbling bread and sneering at her distress. She was
distressed because Silas was in one of his most uproarious moods,
launching opinions on his diverse subjects, every one of which readily
attained the proportions of an obsession in his mind; and she was
distressed further because she had all the while the alienating
sensation that her husband understood his brother better than she did,
although he could hear no word. She sat between them, eating very
little, while they ate voraciously. She was thinking of Hannah, who lay
upstairs.
Once she asked a question. “Who’ll you get, Silas, to live with you
now?”
“Linnet Morgan. He’s anxious to find handy lodgings.”
“Linnet Morgan. That’s the chap newly in charge of the scents? Would he
live with just working-people like us?”
“What’s the difference?”
Nan could not define it. She had not intended a challenge, but Silas had
a trick of treating everything as a challenge.
“He’s soft,” she said at last.
“He’ll learn not to be soft here.”
Towards the end of the supper, Silas fell into one of his silences that
were little less alarming than his speech. He sat over the range,
chewing his pipe. Nan, having cleared away the supper, made herself
small with some sewing in a corner. Gregory, looming hugely about the
low room, disposed his drawings on the table under the direct light of
the hanging lamp. They were on oiled paper, pale blue, pale pink, and
white; large sheets of exact drawings of exquisitely intricate
machinery. He bent over them, handling pencils, rulers, small compasses,
and other neat instruments of his craft with a certain and delicate
touch. He had clamped the drawings to the table with drawing pins,
holding down the curling corners, smoothing out the shine of the folds.
He was lost at once in them, forgetting both his own observant mockery
and the tragedy which had seized and shaken his relations in its rough
grasp. He was lost in his silent world of smooth-sliding precision and
perfection.
His drawing was his hobby, not his profession; he guarded it from the
outside world as a secret, and in the factory perversely clung to the
meanest and most strenuous physical labour. When his wife protested—with
more politeness than indignation—his fingers ran in emphatic oaths. When
his machines were ripe to be shown, he would lay them before the whole
board of directors; yes, he would startle those gentlemen; but until
then he would be a workman, wheeling the barrels of liquid soap to the
vats, beating and stirring it in the vats when it needed
cooling,—nothing more.
He worked under the light of the lamp, making here a dot of correction,
there a measurement of infinitesimal exactitude. His great fingers
touched as delicately as those of a painter of miniatures.
The kitchen clock ticked in the stillness.