Helen with the High Hand | Page 6

ease, which put an end to blushing. She knew she was admired.
"What are you doing i' Bosley?" James demanded.
"I'm living i' Bosley," she retorted, smartly.
"Living here!" He stopped, and his hard old heart almost stopped too. If not in mourning, she was in semi-mourning. Surely Susan had not had the effrontery to die, away in Longshaw, without telling him!
"Mother has married again," said Helen, lightly.
"Married!" He was staggered. The wind was knocked out of him.
"Yes. And gone to Canada!" Helen added.
You pick up your paper in the morning, and idly and slowly peruse the advertisements on the first page, forget it, eat some bacon, grumble at the youngest boy, open the paper, read the breach of promise case on page three, drop it, and ask your wife for more coffee--hot--glance at your letters again, then reopen the paper at the news page, and find that the Tsar of Russia has been murdered, and a few American cities tumbled to fragments by an earthquake--you know how you feel then. James Ollerenshaw felt like that. The captain of the bowling-club, however, poising a bowl in his right hand, and waiting for James Ollerenshaw to leave his silken dalliance, saw nothing but an old man and a young woman sitting on a Corporation seat.
CHAPTER III
MARRYING OFF A MOTHER
"Yes," said Helen Rathbone, "mother fell in love. Don't you think it was funny?"
"That's as may be," James Ollerenshaw replied, in his quality of the wiseacre who is accustomed to be sagacious on the least possible expenditure of words.
"We both thought it was awfully funny," Helen said.
"Both? Who else is there?"
"Why, mother and I, of course! We used to laugh over it. You see, mother is a very simple creature. And she's only forty-four."
"She's above forty-four," James corrected.
"She told me she was thirty-nine five years ago," Helen protested.
"Did she tell ye she was forty, four years ago?"
"No. At least, I don't remember."
"Did she ever tell ye she was forty?"
"No."
"Happen she's not such a simple creature as ye thought for, my lass," observed James Ollerenshaw.
"You don't mean to infer," said Helen, with cold dignity, "that my mother would tell me a lie?"
"All as I mean is that Susan was above thirty-nine five years ago, and I can prove it. I had to get her birth certificate when her father died, and I fancy I've got it by me yet." And his eyes added: "So much for that point. One to me."
Helen blushed and frowned, and looked up into the darkling heaven of her parasol; and then it occurred to her that her wisest plan would be to laugh. So she laughed. She laughed in almost precisely the same manner as James had heard Susan laugh thirty years previously, before love had come into Susan's life like a shell into a fortress, and finally blown their fragile relations all to pieces. A few minutes earlier the sight of great-stepuncle James had filled Helen with sadness, and he had not suspected it. Now her laugh filled James with sadness, and she did not suspect it. In his sadness, however, he was glad that she laughed so naturally, and that the sombre magnificence of her dress and her gloves and parasol did not prevent her from opening her rather large mouth and showing her teeth.
"It was just like mother to tell me fibs about her age," said Helen, generously (it is always interesting to observe the transformation of a lie into a fib). "And I shall write and tell her she's a horrid mean thing. I shall write to her this very night."
"So Susan's gone and married again!" James murmured, reflectively.
Helen now definitely turned the whole of her mortal part towards James, so that she fronted him, and her feet were near his. He also turned, in response to this diplomatic advance, and leant his right elbow on the back of the seat, and his chin on his right palm. He put his left leg over his right leg, and thus his left foot swayed like a bird on a twig within an inch of Helen's flounce. The parasol covered the faces of the just and the unjust impartially.
"I suppose you don't know a farmer named Bratt that used to have a farm near Sneyd?" said Helen.
"I can't say as I do," said James.
"Well, that's the man!" said Helen. "He used to come to Longshaw cattle-market with sheep and things."
"Sheep and things!" echoed James. "What things?"
"Oh! I don't know," said Helen, sharply. "Sheep and things."
"And what did your mother take to Longshaw cattle-market?" James inquired. "I understood as she let lodgings."
"Not since I've been a teacher," said Helen, rather more sharply. "Mother didn't take anything to the cattle-market. But you know our house was just close to the cattle-market."
"No, I didn't," said James, stoutly. "I thought as it was in