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Clem was ready with a malicious description, whereto her husband attended very carefully. He mused over it, and proceeded to make inquiries about Clara's family. The Hewetts were now living in another part of Clerkenwell, but there was no hostility between them and the Peckovers. Was anything to be gained by keeping up intimacy with them?
It was not, of course, that he dreamt of refusing, but he was busy revolving all he knew of Jane's life with the Peckovers, and asking himself what it behoved him to tell, what to withhold. 'Yes, yes; I'll go with you at once, he made haste to reply, when he perceived that his hesitancy was occasioning doubt and trouble.
It was as though the corner of a curtain had been raised, giving him a glimpse of all the vile greed, the base machination, hovering about this fortune that Jane was to inherit. Of Scawthorne he knew nothing, but his recollection of the Peckovers was vivid enough to suggest what part Mrs.
The house-door was left wide open between the departure and return of the mourners; a superstition of the people demands this. The Peckovers brought back with them some half a dozen relatives and friends, invited to a late dinner. The meal had been in preparation at an eating-house close by, and was now speedily made ready in the parlour. Mrs.
Clara says she'll go to a magistrate an' let it all out, if nobody else will. She hates the Peckovers, Clara does. 'It won't come to that, said Sidney. 'I can see the old man'll take her away as soon as possible. He may have a little money; he's just come back from Australia. I like the look of him myself.
Civilisation could bring no charge against this young woman; it and she had no common criterion. Who knows but this lust of hers for sanguinary domination was the natural enough issue of the brutalising serfdom of her predecessors in the family line of the Peckovers? A thrall suddenly endowed with authority will assuredly make bitter work for the luckless creature in the next degree of thraldom.
'Don't you upset yerself about it, my dear; you've got quite enough to think about. Yer 'usband got anythink yet? Dear, dear! Don't you put yerself out. I'm sure it was a great kindness of you to let the troublesome thing lay 'ere all night. Funeral guests were beginning to assemble. On arriving, they were conducted first of all into the front-room on the ground-floor, the Peckovers' parlour.
The name was not a common one; it was worth while to spend a hope or two on the chance of doing Jane a kindness. Her look and voice when he bade her be of good courage had touched him. In his rejected state, he felt that it was pleasant to earn gratitude even from so humble a being as the Peckovers' drudge. His workshop, it has been mentioned, was in St. John's Square.
'You remember they went to live with somebody you used to know, John replied, with hesitation. 'They're still in the same house. 'So she's grown up. Did you ever hear about that old man having a lot of money? 'Why, my dear, I never heard nothing but what them Peckovers talked at the time. But there was a son of his turned up as seemed to have some money. He married Mrs. Peckover's daughter.
The friend to whom she looked up with such reverence, with voiceless gratitude, when he condescended to speak kindly to her, the Peckovers' miserable little servant he, after all these changes and chances of life, sought her now that she was a woman, and had it on his lips to say that he loved her.