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She was at her most stately and most radiant, wonderful in lavender, and she poured out on him the full opulence of a proud recognition. Everybody should be made aware that Mrs Hamps was greeting her adored nephew, who was with a lady friend of the Orgreaves. She leaned slightly from her cane chair. "Isn't it a beautiful sight?" she cried.
Maggie tells me he was " "Oh!" Edwin interrupted her almost roughly. "That's nothing. I've known him cry before." "Have you?" She seemed taken aback. "Yes. Years ago. That's nothing fresh." "It's true he's very sensitive," Mrs Hamps reflected. "That's what we don't realise, maybe, sometimes. Of course if you think he's all right "
"He wants to give dear Edwin the watch, because Edwin's been so kind to him, helping him to dress every day, and looking after him just like a professional nurse don't you, dear?" Edwin secretly cursed her in the most horrible fashion. But she was right. "Ye-hes," Darius confirmed her, on a sob. "He wants to show his gratitude," said Auntie Hamps. "Ye-hes," Darius repeated, and wiped his eyes.
Mrs Nixon preceded him, carrying the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the kitchen that they were not to `wait tea' for him. Mrs Hamps had splendidly arrived. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was changed. Maggie, smiling, wore her second-best black silk apron. Clara, smiling and laughing, wore a clean long white pinafore.
"Oh no!" protestingly. "Don't you?" asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential astonishment. "Oh no!" Mrs Hamps repeated. "It's beautiful!" She did not smack her lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her unbounded pleasure in the jam. "How much sugar did you put in?" she inquired after a while.
"I'm sure everybody's very kind. Will you believe me, those darling children of Clara's were round at my house before eight o'clock this morning!" "Is Amy's cough better?" Maggie interjected, as she and Edwin sat down. "Bless ye!" cried Auntie Hamps, "I was in such a fluster I forgot to ask the little toddler. But I didn't hear her cough. I do hope it is. October's a bad time for coughs to begin.
"I've made my will," he whimpered. "Yes, yes," said Auntie Hamps. "Of course you have!" "Did I tell you I'd made my will?" he feebly insisted. "Yes, father," said Clara. "Don't worry about your will." "I've left th' business to Edwin, and all th' rest's divided between you two wenches." He was weeping gently. "Don't worry about that, father," Clara repeated.
"There, father!" exclaimed Auntie Hamps proudly, surveying the curve of the Albert on her nephew's waistcoat. "Ay!" Darius murmured, and sank back on the pillow with a sigh of relief. "Thanks, father," Edwin muttered, reddening. "But there was no occasion." "Now you see what it is to be a good son!" Auntie Hamps observed. Darius murmured indistinctly. "What is it?" she asked, bending down.
Not only did Edwin feel apologetic for himself, but also for Parnell. He wished he had not tried to be funny about Parnell; he wished he had not mentioned him. The brightness of the birthday was for an instant clouded. "I don't know what's coming over things!" Auntie Hamps murmured sadly, staring out of the window at the street gay with October sun shine. "What with that!
As the tea drew to an end, and the plates of toast, bread and butter, and tea-cake grew emptier, and the slop-basin filled, and only Maggie's flowers remained fresh and immaculate amid the untidy debris of the meal; and as Edwin and Clara became gradually indifferent to jam, and then inimical to it; and as the sounds of the street took on the softer quality of summer evening, and the first filmy shades of twilight gathered imperceptibly in the corners of the room, and Mr Clayhanger performed the eructations which signified that he had had enough; so Mrs Hamps prepared herself for one of her classic outbursts of feeling.
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