Bessie Costrell | Page 7

formidable was Eliza--a
woman of the hardest and sourest virtue--when she chose, that Bessie
was afraid of her, even on her deathbed, though generally ready enough
to quarrel with other people. Nevertheless, Bessie had always felt that it

would be a crying shame and slight if she and Isaac did not have the
guardianship of the money. She thirsted, perhaps, to make an
impression upon public opinion in the village, which, as she
instinctively realised, held her cheaply. And then, of course, there was
the secret thought of John's death, and what might come of it. John had
always loudly proclaimed that he meant to spend his money, and not
leave it behind him. But the instinct of saving, once formed, is strong.
John, too, might die sooner than he thought--and she and Isaac had
children.
She had come up, indeed, that afternoon, haunted by a passionate desire
to get the money into her hands; yet the mere sordidness of
"expectations" counted for less in the matter than one would suppose.
Vanity, a vague wish to ingratiate herself with her uncle, to avoid a
slight--these were, on the whole, her strongest motives. At any rate,
when he had once asked her the momentous question, she knew well
what to say to him.
"Well, if you arst me," she said hastily, "of course we think as it's only
nateral you should leave it with Isaac an' me, as is your own kith and
kin. But we wasn't goin' to say nothin'; we didn't want to be pushin' of
ourselves forward."
John rose to his feet. He was in his shirt-sleeves, which were rolled up.
He pulled them down, put on his coat, an air of crisis on his fat face.
"Where 'ud you put it?" he said.
"Yer know that cupboard by the top of the stairs? It 'ud stand there easy.
And the cupboard's got a good lock to it; but we'd 'ave it seen to, to
make sure."
She looked up at him eagerly. She longed to feel herself trusted and
important. Her self-love was too often mortified in these respects.
John fumbled round his neck for the bit of black cord on which he kept
two keys--the key of his room while he was away and the key of the
box itself.

"Well, let's get done with it," he said. "I'm off to-morrer mornin', six
o'clock. You go and get Isaac to come down."
"I'll run," said Bessie, catching up her shawl and throwing it over her
head. "He wor just finishin' his tea."
And she whirled out of the cottage, running up the steep road behind it
as fast as she could. John was vaguely displeased by her excitement;
but the die was cast. He went to make his arrangements.
Bessie ran till she was out of breath. When she reached her own house,
a cottage in a side lane above the Bolderfields' cottage and overlooking
it from the back, she found her husband sitting with his pipe at the open
door and reading his newspaper. Three out of her own four children
were playing in the lane, otherwise there was no one about.
Isaac greeted her with a nod and slight lightening of the eyes, which,
however, hardly disturbed the habitual sombreness of the face. He was
a dark, finely featured man, with grizzled hair, carrying himself with an
air of sleepy melancholy. He was much older than his wife, and was a
prominent leader in the little Independent chapel of the village. His
melancholy could give way on occasion to fits of violent temper. For
instance, he had been almost beside himself when Bessie, who had
leanings to the Establishment, as providing a far more crowded and
entertaining place of resort on Sundays than her husband's chapel, had
rashly proposed to have the youngest baby christened in church. Other
Independents did it freely--why not she? But Isaac had been nearly mad
with wrath, and Bessie had fled upstairs from him, with her baby, and
bolted the bedroom door in bodily terror. Otherwise, he was a most
docile husband--in the neighbours' opinion, docile to absurdity. He
complained of nothing, and took notice of little. Bessie's untidy ways
left him indifferent; his main interest was in a kind of religious
dreaming, and in an Independent paper to which he occasionally wrote
a letter. He was a gardener at a small house on the hill, and had rather
more education than most of his fellows in the village. For the rest, he
was fond of his children, and, in his heart of hearts, exceedingly proud
of his wife, her liveliness and her good looks. She had been a
remarkably pretty girl when he married her, some eight years after his

first wife's death, and there was a great difference of age