"A man as comes home as I do 's too tired to care about cloths," said
Morel.
"Pity!" exclaimed his wife, sarcastically.
The room was full of the smell of meat and vegetables and pit-clothes.
He leaned over to the minister, his great moustache thrust forward, his
mouth very red in his black face.
"Mr. Heaton," he said, "a man as has been down the black hole all day,
dingin' away at a coal-face, yi, a sight harder than that wall--"
"Needn't make a moan of it," put in Mrs. Morel.
She hated her husband because, whenever he had an audience, he whined
and played for sympathy. William, sitting nursing the baby, hated him,
with a boy's hatred for false sentiment, and for the stupid treatment of
his mother. Annie had never liked him; she merely avoided him.
When the minister had gone, Mrs. Morel looked at her cloth.
"A fine mess!" she said.
"Dos't think I'm goin' to sit wi' my arms danglin', cos tha's got a
parson for tea wi' thee?" he bawled.
They were both angry, but she said nothing. The baby began to cry, and
Mrs. Morel, picking up a saucepan from the hearth, accidentally knocked
Annie on the head, whereupon the girl began to whine, and Morel to shout
at her. In the midst of this pandemonium, William looked up at the big
glazed text over the mantelpiece and read distinctly:
"God Bless Our Home!"
Whereupon Mrs. Morel, trying to soothe the baby, jumped up, rushed at
him, boxed his ears, saying:
"What are YOU putting in for?"
And then she sat down and laughed, till tears ran over her cheeks, while
William kicked the stool he had been sitting on, and Morel growled:
"I canna see what there is so much to laugh at."
One evening, directly after the parson's visit, feeling unable to bear
herself after another display from her husband, she took Annie and the
baby and went out. Morel had kicked William, and the mother would never
forgive him.
She went over the sheep-bridge and across a corner of the meadow to the
cricket-ground. The meadows seemed one space of ripe, evening light,
whispering with the distant mill-race. She sat on a seat under the
alders in the cricket-ground, and fronted the evening. Before her, level
and solid, spread the big green cricket-field, like the bed of a sea of
light. Children played in the bluish shadow of the pavilion. Many rooks,
high up, came cawing home across the softly-woven sky. They stooped in
a long curve down into the golden glow, concentrating, cawing, wheeling,
like black flakes on a slow vortex, over a tree clump that made a dark
boss among the pasture.
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