Bessie Costrell | Page 7

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 between them. His two elder children by his first marriage had long since left home. The girl was in service. It troubled him to think of the boy, who had fallen into bad ways early. Bessie's children were all small, and she herself still young, though over thirty.
When Bessie came up to him, she looked round to see that no one could hear. Then she stooped and told him her errand in a panting whisper. He must go down and fetch the box at once. She had promised John Borrofull that they would stand by him. They were his own flesh and blood--and the cupboard had a capital lock--and there wasn't no fear of it