Chapter 12

TRAGEDY OF A MUD HOUSE.

THE dog-cart bumped between the trees of Caddam, flinging Gavin and
the doctor at each other as a wheel rose on some beech-root or
sank for a moment in a pool. I suppose the wood was a pretty sight
that day, the pines only white where they had met the snow, as if
the numbed painter had left his work unfinished, the brittle twigs
snapping overhead, the water as black as tar. But it matters
little what the wood was like. Within a squirrel's leap of it an
old woman was standing at the door of a mud house listening for
the approach of the trap that was to take her to the poorhouse.
Can you think of the beauty of the day now?

Nanny was not crying. She had redd up her house for the last time
and put on her black merino. Her mouth was wide open while she
listened. If yon had, addressed her you would have thought her
polite and stupid. Look at her. A flabby-faced woman she is now,
with a swollen body, and no one has heeded her much these thirty
years. I can tell you something; it is almost droll. Nanny Webster
was once a gay flirt, and in Airlie Square there is a weaver with
an unsteady head who thought all the earth of her. His loom has
taken a foot from his stature, and gone are Nanny's raven locks on
which he used to place his adoring hand. Down in Airlie Square he
is weaving for his life, and here is Nanny, ripe for the
poorhouse, and between them is the hill where they were lovers.
That is all the story save that when Nanny heard the dog-cart she
screamed.

No neighbour was with her. If you think this hard, it is because
you do not understand. Perhaps Nanny had never been very lovable
except to one man, and him, it is said, she lost through her own
vanity; but there was much in her to like. The neighbours, of whom
there were two not a hundred yards away, would have been with her
now but they feared to hurt her feelings. No heart opens to
sympathy without letting in delicacy, and these poor people knew
that Nanny would not like them to see her being taken away. For a
week they had been aware of what was coming, and they had been
most kind to her, but that hideous word, the poorhouse, they had
not uttered. Poorhouse is not to be spoken in Thrums, though it is
nothing to tell a man that you see death in his face. Did Nanny
think they knew where she was going? was a question they whispered
to each other, and her suffering eyes cut scars on their hearts.
So now that the hour had come they called their children into
their houses and pulled down their blinds.

"If you would like to see her by yourself," the doctor said
eagerly to Gavin, as the horse drew up at Nanny's gate, "I'll wait
with the horse. Not," he added, hastily, "that I