“You soon get used to it. You live like th’ mice, an’ you pop out at night to see what’s going on.”
“It makes me feel blind,” she frowned.
“Like a moudiwarp!” he laughed. “Yi, an’ there’s some chaps as does go round like moudiwarps.” He thrust his face forward in the blind, snout-like way of a mole, seeming to sniff and peer for direction. “They dun though!” he protested naïvely. “Tha niver seed such a way they get in. But tha mun let me ta’e thee down some time, an’ tha can see for thysen.”
She looked at him, startled. This was a new tract of life suddenly opened before her. She realized the life of the miners, hundreds of them toiling below earth and coming up at evening. He seemed to her noble. He risked his life daily, and with gaiety. She looked at him, with a touch of appeal in her pure humility.
“Shouldn’t ter like it?” he asked tenderly. “’Appen not, it ’ud dirty thee.”
She had never been “thee’d” and “thou’d” before.
The next Christmas they were married, and for three months she was perfectly happy: for six months she was very happy.
He had signed the pledge, and wore the blue ribbon of a teetotaller: he was nothing if not showy. They lived, she thought, in his own house. It was small, but convenient enough, and quite nicely furnished, with solid, worthy stuff that suited her honest soul. The women, her neighbours, were rather foreign to her, and Morel’s mother and sisters were apt to sneer at her ladylike ways. But she could perfectly well live by herself, so long as she had her husband close.
Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried to open her heart seriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially, but without understanding. This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had flashes of fear. Sometimes he was restless of an evening: it was not enough for him just to be near her, she realized. She was glad when he set himself to little jobs.
He was a remarkably handy man—could make or mend anything. So she would say:
“I do like that coal-rake of your mother’s—it is small and natty.”
“Does ter, my wench? Well, I made that, so I can make thee one.”
“What! why it’s a steel one!”
