“I did, for they’re a nuisance. The place is fair snied wi’ em.”
“An’ what do they live on?”
“The corn as the ’osses drops—an’ they’ll get in your pocket an’ eat your snap, if you’ll let ’em—no matter where yo’ hing your coat—the slivin’, nibblin’ little nuisances, for they are.”
These happy evenings could not take place unless Morel had some job to do. And then he always went to bed very early, often before the children. There was nothing remaining for him to stay up for, when he had finished tinkering, and had skimmed the headlines of the newspaper.
And the children felt secure when their father was in bed. They lay and talked softly awhile. Then they started as the lights went suddenly sprawling over the ceiling from the lamps that swung in the hands of the colliers tramping by outside, going to take the nine o’clock shift. The listened to the voices of the men, imagined them dipping down into the dark valley. Sometimes they went to the window and watched the three or four lamps growing tinier and tinier, swaying down the fields in the darkness. Then it was a joy to rush back to bed and cuddle closely in the warmth.
Paul was rather a delicate boy, subject to bronchitis. The others were all quite strong; so this was another reason for his mother’s difference in feeling for him. One day he came home at dinner-time feeling ill. But it was not a family to make any fuss.
“What’s the matter with you?” his mother asked sharply.
“Nothing,” he replied.
But he ate no dinner.
“If you eat no dinner, you’re not going to school,” she said.
“Why?” he asked.
“That’s why.”
So after dinner he lay down on the sofa, on the warm chintz cushions the children loved. Then he fell into a kind of doze. That afternoon Mrs. Morel was ironing. She listened to the small, restless noise the boy made in his throat as she worked. Again rose in her heart the old, almost weary feeling towards him. She had never expected him to live. And yet he had a great vitality in his young body. Perhaps it would have been a little relief to her if he had died. She always felt a mixture of anguish in her love for him.
He, in his semi-conscious sleep, was vaguely aware of the clatter of the iron on the iron-stand, of the faint thud, thud
