"So you've seen my boy?" she began, with no softening of tone.
"Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning--the other day. He
didn't seem to me to be so ill as all that."
"Ill!" she exclaimed. "He certainly wasn't ill when he left here. But
he had been. And the doctor said that this air didn't suit him--it
never had suited him. It doesn't suit some folks, you know--people can
say what they like."
"Anyhow, he's a lively piece--no mistake about that!"
"When he's well, he's very well," said George's mother. "But he's up
and down in a minute. And on the whole he's been on the poorly side."
He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her
accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she
never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her
furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local
quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his
admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly
foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in
her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had
been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long
ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He
imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical
impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness...
And then she was a mother! That meant a mysterious, a mystic
perfecting! For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a
mother--so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her.
He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal,
transcendentalised it, and centred it on one being. And he was
disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his
own unsuspected emotion. He was made sad, and sadder. He wanted to
right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create
bliss; and he knew that this could never be done. He now saw Hilda
exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable. Imagine
this creature, with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by
circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night!
Imagine her solitary in the awful house--with the broker's man! Imagine
her forced to separate herself from her child! Imagine the succession
of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into
harshness and acridity! ... And within that envelope, what a soul must
be burning!
"And when he begins to grow--he's scarcely _begun_ to grow yet," Hilda
continued about her offspring, "then he will need all his strength!"
"Yes, he will," Edwin concurred heartily.
He wanted to ask her, "Why did you call him Edwin for his second name?
Was it his father's name, or your father's, or did _you_ insist on it
yourself, because--?" But he could not ask. He could ask nothing. He
could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word. He knew
naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information. She
might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and
under what circumstances Janet had taken possession of the child. All
was a mystery. Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst
of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery. She was too proud to
reveal anything whatever. The grand pride in her forbade her even to
excuse her conduct to himself. A terrific woman!
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