angered her, and yet in whom she recognized a quality that was mysteriously precious and admirable, staring through the small window at the brown, tattered garden-plot where blackened rhododendrons were swaying in the October blast, she wilfully bathed herself in grim gloom and in an affectation of despair.
Somehow she enjoyed the experience. She had only to tighten her lips—and she became oblivious of her clumsiness and her cruelty, savouring with pleasure the pain of the situation, clasping it to her! Now and then a thought of Mr. Skellorn’s tragedy shot through her brain, and the tenderness of pity welled up from somewhere within her and mingled exquisitely with her dark melancholy. And she found delight in reading her poor mother like an open book, as she supposed. And all the while her mother was dreaming upon the first year of Hilda’s life, before she had discovered that her husband’s health was as unstable as his character, and comparing the reality of the present with her early illusions. But the clever girl was not clever enough to read just that page.
“We ought to be everything to each other,” said Mrs. Lessways, pursuing her reflections aloud.
Hilda hated sentimentalism. She could not stand such talk.
“And you know,” said Hilda, speaking very frigidly and with even more than her usual incisive clearness of articulation, “it’s not your property. It’s only yours for life. It’s my property.”
The mother’s mood changed in a moment.
“How do you know? You’ve never seen your father’s will.” She spoke in harsh challenge.
“No; because you’ve never let me see it.”
“You ought to have more confidence in your mother. Your father had. And I’m trustee and executor.” Mrs. Lessways was exceedingly jealous of her legal position, whose importance she never forgot nor would consent to minimize.
“That’s all very well, for you,” said Hilda; “but if the property isn’t managed right, I may find myself slaving when I’m your age, mother. And whose fault will it be?... However, I shall—”
“You will what?”
“Nothing.”
“I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own lawyer next!” said Mrs. Lessways bitterly.
They looked at each other. Hilda’s face flushed to a sombre red. Mrs. Lessways brusquely left the room. Then Hilda could hear her rattling fussily at the kitchen range. After a few minutes Hilda followed her to the kitchen, which was now nearly in darkness. The figure of Mrs. Lessways, still doing nothing whatever with great vigour at the range, was dimly visible. Hilda approached her, and awkwardly touched her shoulder.
“Mother!” she demanded sharply; and she was astonished by her awkwardness and her sharpness.
“Is that you?” her mother asked, in a queer, foolish tone.
They kissed. Such a candid peacemaking had never occurred between them before. Mrs. Lessways, as simple in forgiveness as in wrath, did not disguise her pleasure in the remarkable fact that it was Hilda who had made the overture. Hilda thought: “How strange I am! What is coming over me?” She glanced at the range, in which was a pale gleam of red, and that gleam, in the heavy twilight, seemed to her to be inexpressibly, enchantingly mournful. And she herself was mournful about the future— very mournful. She saw no hope. Yet her sadness was beautiful to her. And she was proud.
Chapter 3
Mr. Cannon
I
A little later Hilda came downstairs dressed to go out. Her mother was lighting a glimmer of gas in the lobby. Ere Mrs. Lessways could descend from her tiptoes to her heels and turn round Hilda said quickly, forestalling curiosity:
“I’m going to get that thread you want. Just give me some money, will you?”
Nobody could have guessed from her placid tone and indifferent demeanour that she was in a state of extreme agitation. But so it was. Suddenly, after kissing her mother in the kitchen, she had formed a tremendous resolve. And in a moment the resolve had possessed her, sending her flying upstairs, and burning her into a fever, as with the assured movements of familiarity she put on her bonnet, mantle, ‘fall,’ and gloves in the darkness of the chamber. She held herself in leash while her mother lifted a skirt and found a large loaded pocket within and a purse in the pocket and a sixpence in the purse. But when she had shut the door on all that interior haunted by her mother’s restlessness, when she was safe in the porch and in the windy obscurity of the street, she yielded with voluptuous apprehension to a thrill that shook her.
“I might have tidied my hair,” she thought. “Pooh! What does my hair matter?”
Her mind was full of an adventure through which she had passed seven years previously, when she was thirteen and a little girl at school. For several days, then, she had been ruthlessly mortifying her mother by complaints about the meals. Her fastidious appetite could not be suited. At last, one noon when the child had refused the whole of a plenteous dinner, Mrs. Lessways had burst into tears and, slapping four pennies down on the table, had cried, “Here! I fairly give you up! Go out and buy your own dinner! Then perhaps you’ll get what you want!” And the child, without an instant’s hesitation, had seized the coins and gone out, hatless, and bought food at a little tripe-shop that was also an eating-house, and consumed it there; and then in grim silence returned home. Both mother and daughter had been stupefied and frightened by the boldness of the daughter’s initiative, by her amazing, flaunting disregard of filial decency. Mrs. Lessways would not have related the episode to anybody upon any consideration whatever. It was a shameful secret, never even referred to. But Mrs. Lessways had unmistakably though indirectly referred to it when in anger she had said to her daughter aged twenty: “I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own lawyer next!” Hilda had understood, and that was why she had blushed.
And now, as she turned from Lessways Street into the Oldcastle Road, on her way to the centre of the town, she experienced almost exactly the intense excitement of the reckless and supercilious child in quest of its dinner. The only difference was that the recent reconciliation had inspired her with a certain negligent compassion for her mother, with a curious tenderness that caused her to wonder at herself.
II
The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town. The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind this crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a large chapel, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and almost deserted in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity of the bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns, and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station—rail-head of a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity of civilization in those parts. Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with iron-and-coal villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated the eternal damnation which was the chief article of their devout religious belief. And in the Market Square not even the late edition of the
