Free The Hireling by L. P. Hartley

back from Chichester. Lady Franklin still believed that the answer to her problem could be found in a cathedral: its atmosphere always promised relief, there was always a moment when relief seemed to be coming, and though in fact it never came, she went on hoping. Disappointment made her silent and abstracted during the first part of the homeward journey: her lower lip came forward, trembling, and her face wore its shut look. On this occasion, as on others, Leadbitter waited for her distress to spend itself and then he said:
    ‘I’ve had some bad news since the last time we went out, my lady,’
    ‘Bad news?’ repeated Lady Franklin from the depth of her brown study, and it might just as well have been good news, by the expressionless way she said it. Then the meaning of the words seemed to penetrate, she shook her head, and turning to Leadbitter said in a very different voice, ‘Bad news? Did you say you had had bad news?’
    ‘I’m afraid so, my lady,’
    Lady Franklin hesitated. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’
    ‘I dare say I could,’ said Leadbitter, ‘but I don’t want to bother you with my affairs,’
    He looked straight ahead of him.
    Almost for the first time, it seemed to Lady Franklin, she was brought up against Leadbitter the man. Hitherto he had been her Chaucer, beguiling her with Canterbury tales, tales to be continued in our next, tales that had always had a happy ending. But for that one bereavement, the Leadbitter family had seemed to bear a charmed life. And now misfortune had overtaken them. A chill went through her, a shaft of cold like nothing she had felt for years, piercing the matted wadding of her self-generated emotions. She felt the embarrassment, the slight resentment that we feel when someone whom we have always known on one plane of acquaintance and at the same remove from us, steps out in front of us and blocks our way.
    ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ she said, and blushed for the inadequacy of the words.
    ‘Oh no, my lady,’ Leadbitter said. ‘I oughtn’t really to have mentioned it,’
    The harshness of his voice seemed to be a measure of the disaster he was up against: from that she gauged its seriousness. She was used to a society in which troubles spread and softened themselves in words; with articulate people of her own sort they reached out and clothed themselves in phrases, emollient phrases to which sympathy could respond. They used a conventional language for calamity which Leadbitter did not know.
    Lady Franklin felt utterly at a loss. How much did Leadbitter count with her as a human being? Should she press him to tell her? It seemed inhuman not to; but his trouble, whatever it was, seemed to have cased him in steel. She must be as sincere with him as she had it in her to be, stop thinking about herself, give him her unalloyed attention, as the Good Samaritan did to the traveller who had fallen among thieves.
    ‘Has it anything to do with your wife?’ she hazarded.
    ‘It affects all of us,’ he said.
    It affects all of us. … This laconic statement moved Lady Franklin strongly. The whole Leadbitter family whom she knew so well, whose life had become so much a part of hers that it was as real to her as anything outside herself could be, was threatened.
    ‘Please tell me,’ she said. ‘If I can’t do anything to help, I can at least say how sorry I am,’
    Leadbitter shook his head.
    ‘I’m afraid I can’t, my lady. What’s the good of upsetting you? It’s just one of those things,’
    Lady Franklin was baffled. Her instinct was to say no more, to intrude no further on the driver’s unhappiness. But that was cowardly. She felt a new respect for Leadbitter; she saw him as a soldier on the battlefield defending himself against overwhelming odds, disdaining help; driving the car, doing his job as though nothing had happened. Whereas she - she had thrown up the sponge, beaten a retreat, let life get her down. She wouldn’t desert him, even if he