Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/285

Rh Sam, seeing her look at him, distorted his honest features, and overheated her wrath, till Lettie and Emily trembled with dismay.

The mother’s head appeared at the bedroom window. She slid the sash back, and craned out, vainly trying to look over the gutter below the slates. She was even more dishevelled than usual, and the tears had dried on her pale face. She stretched further out, clinging to the window frame and to the gutter overhead, till I was afraid she would come down with a crash.

The men, squatting on their heels against the wall of the ashpit, laughed, saying:

“Nab ’im. Poll—can ter see ’m—clawk ’im!” and then the pitiful voice of the woman was heard crying: “Come thy ways down, my duckie, come on—on’y come ter thy mother—they shanna touch thee. Du thy mother’s biddin’, now—Sam—Sam—Sam!” her voice rose higher and higher.

“Sammy, Sammy, go to thy mammy,” jeered the wits below.

“Shonna ter come, Shonna ter come to thy mother, my duckie—come on, come thy ways down.”

Sam looked at the crowd, and at the eaves from under which rose his mother’s voice. He was going to cry. A big gaunt woman, with the family steel comb stuck in her back hair, shouted, “Tha’ mun well bend thy face, tha’ needs ter scraight,” and aided by the woman with the birthmark and the squint, she reviled him. The little scoundrel, in a burst of defiance, picked a piece of mortar from between the slates, and in a second it flew into fragments against the family steel comb. The wearer