her moods.
The mild Edwin said secretly:
“By Jove! If I had you to myself, my lady, I’d soon teach you a thing or two!” He was quite sincere, too.
His glance, roving, discovered Mrs Hamps above him, ten feet over his head, at the corner of the Baines balcony. He flushed, for he perceived that she must have been waiting to catch him. She was at her most stately and most radiant, wonderful in lavender, and she poured out on him the full opulence of a proud recognition.
Everybody should be made aware that Mrs Hamps was greeting her adored nephew, who was with a lady friend of the Orgreaves.
She leaned slightly from her cane chair.
“Isn’t it a beautiful sight?” she cried. Her voice sounded thin and weak against the complex din of the Square.
He nodded, smiling.
“Oh! I think it’s a beautiful sight!” she cried once more, ecstatic. People turned to see whom she was addressing.
But though he nodded again he did not think it was a beautiful sight. He thought it was a disconcerting sight, a sight vexatious and troublesome. And he was in no way tranquillised by the reflection that every town in England had the same sight to show at that hour.
And moreover, anticipating their next interview, he could, in fancy, plainly hear his Aunt Clara saying, with hopeless, longing benignancy: “Oh, Edwin, how I do wish I could have seen you in the Square, bearing your part!”
Hilda seemed to be oblivious of Mrs Hamps’s ejaculations, but immediately afterwards she straightened her back, with a gesture that Edwin knew, and staring into his eyes said, as it were resentfully—
“Well, they evidently aren’t here!”
And looked with scorn among the sightseers. It was clear that the crowd contained nobody of the rank and stamp of the Orgreaves.
“They may have gone up the Cock Yard—if you know where that is,” said Edwin.
“Well, don’t you think we’d better find them somehow?”
Chapter 12.
The Top of the Square.
In making the detour through the Cock Yard to reach Saint Luke’s Square again at the top of it, the only members of the Orgreave clan whom they encountered were Jimmie and Johnnie, who, on hearing of the disappearance of their father and Janet, merely pointed out that their father and Janet were notoriously always getting themselves lost, owing to gross carelessness about whatever they happened to be doing. The youths then departed, saying that the Bursley show was nothing, and that they were going to Hanbridge; they conveyed the idea that Hanbridge was the only place in the world for self-respecting men of fashion. But before leaving they informed Edwin that a fellow at the corner of the Square was letting out rather useful barrels on lease. This fellow proved to be an odd-jobman who had been discharged from the Duke of Wellington Vaults in the market-place for consistently intemperate language, but whose tongue was such that he had persuaded the landlord on this occasion to let him borrow a dozen stout empty barrels, and the police to let him dispose them on the pavement. Every barrel was occupied, and, perceiving this, Edwin at once became bold with the barrel-man. He did not comfortably fancy himself perched prominent on a barrel with Hilda Lessways by his side, but he could enjoy talking about it, and he wished to show Hilda that he could be as dashing as those young sparks, Jimmie and Johnnie.
“Now, mester!” shouted the barrel-man thickly, in response to Edwin’s airy remark, “these ’ere two chaps’ll shunt off for th’ price of a quart!” He indicated a couple of barrel-tenants of his own tribe, who instantly jumped down, touching their soiled caps. They were part of the barrel-man’s machinery for increasing profits. Edwin could not withdraw. His very cowardice forced him to be audacious. By the time he had satisfied the clawing greed of three dirty hands, the two barrels had cost him a shilling. Hilda’s only observation was, as Edwin helped her to the plateau of the barrel: “I do wish they wouldn’t spit on their money.” All barrels being now let to bona fide tenants and paid for, the three men sidled hastily away in order to drink luck to Sunday schools in the Duke of Wellington’s Entire. And Edwin, mounting the barrel next to Hilda’s, was thinking: “I’ve been done over that job. I ought to have got them for sixpence.” He saw how expensive it was, going about with delicately nurtured women. Never would he have offered a barrel to Maggie, and even had he done so Maggie would assuredly have said that she could make shift well enough without one.
“It’s simply perfect for seeing,” exclaimed Hilda, as he achieved her altitude. Her tone was almost cordial. He felt surprisingly at ease.
Two.
The whole Square was now suddenly revealed as a swarming mass of heads, out of which rose banners and pennons that were cruder in tint even than the frocks and hats of the little girls and the dresses and bonnets of their teachers; the men, too, by their neckties, scarves, and rosettes, added colour to colour. All the windows were chromatic with the hues of bright costumes, and from many windows and from every roof that had a flagstaff flags waved heavily against the gorgeous sky. At the bottom of the Square the lorries with infants had been arranged, and each looked like a bank of variegated flowers. The principal bands—that is to say, all the bands that could be trusted—were collected round the red baize platform at the top of the Square, and the vast sun-reflecting euphoniums, trumpets, and comets made a glittering circle about the officials and ministers and their wives and women. All denominations, for one day only, fraternised effusively together on that platform; for princes of the royal house, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London had urged that it should be so. The Primitive Methodists’ parson discovered himself next but one to Father Milton, who on any other day would have been a Popish priest, and whose wooden substitute for a wife was the queen on a chessboard. And on all these the sun blazed torridly.
And almost in the middle of the Square an immense purple banner bellied in the dusty breeze, saying in large gold letters, “The Blood of the Lamb,” together with the name of some Sunday school, which Edwin from his barrel could not decipher.
Then a hoary white-tied notability on the platform raised his might arm very high, and a bugle called, and a voice that had filled fields in exciting times of religious revival floated in thunder across the enclosed Square, easily dominating it—
“Let us sing.”
And the conductor of the eager massed bands set them free with a gesture, and after they had played a stave, a small stentorian choir at the back of the platform broke forth, and in a moment the entire multitude, at first raggedly, but soon in good unison, was singing—
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure:
Cleanse from guilt and make me pure.
The volume of sound was overwhelming. Its crashing force was enough to sweep
