Twice in the night Deleah slipped from her own warm bed to stand, an anxious little figure, shivering in her nightgown, her dark curls streaming down her back, a suspensive ear to the keyhole of her mother's door. People fainted because they had heart disease. Of heart disease they also died. She dared not go in, because papa was there, but waited, trembling with cold and fear, until her mother's sigh reassured her.
In the morning the mistress of the house came down with a pale face and dark rings about her deeply-set large eyes. She could not smile, she could not eat, she hardly spoke, but she was better, she said.
The children would have to know; but she could not bring herself to tell them. That their father was not in the house they did not perceive, but put down his absence from the breakfast-table to the fact that he had over-slept himself.
A great fire blazed on the hearth. A stack of muffins was being kept warm in a silver dish on a brass stand before it. Fish, and broiled kidneys were on the table; a ham, and a brawn, and a glazed tongue on the sideboard. Mrs. Day always drank coffee at her breakfast, Deleah liked cocoa, the rest took tea; all three were served.
Mrs. Day surveyed these signs of comfort and luxury with a numb feeling at her heart. All this, and such as this, would have to go. How would the children endure life without it. Was this lavish amount of food "extravagance"? she asked herself, for the first time. Was it possible she, with her well-filled table on which she had prided herself, had conduced to the misfortune? She was a woman whose conscience was very easily touched, and she began to blame herself. "But I never dreamed!" she said, "I never dreamed!"
Bessie could eat neither fish nor kidneys, that morning. "Mama, there was some game-pie left, last night. Mayn't I have some of it?"
The servant was rung for to bring the game-pie. "If there are any oyster patties we might have them in, mother," Bernard suggested.
The mother, sadly gazing, assented. Nothing would she have denied them, that morning—her poor children who were so soon to be deprived of game-pies and oysters for ever!
They were in the midst of breakfast, their voices a little subdued because mama was not well, yet with an enjoyable sense of freedom because papa, who was so often irritable at that meal, had not yet come down, when suddenly the door opened and without any announcement Mr. George Boult walked in.
He was a man they all knew as a friend and associate of the master of the house, but he had never been held in favour by its mistress nor her children, who indeed had but the slightest acquaintance with him. He had been a school-fellow of William Day's at the Brockenham Grammar School; a kind of comradeship had existed between the two from that time till now. George Boult had assumed for years the habit of dropping in at Queen Anne Street on Sunday afternoons to smoke a cigar and drink a glass of wine with the lawyer, but it was a function the men had enjoyedtête-à-tête: as an intimate in the family circle he had not been admitted.
Boult could have bought up all the superior people who turned up their noses at him, his friend frequently declared; it had been a standing grievance of his against his wife that she declined to put Mr. Boult's name on the list of people invited to her parties.
George Boult was a self-made man; the process of manufacture recent, and unfortunately fresh in people's minds. "If I invite the man who keeps the draper's shop the professional people won't come to meet him," Mrs. Day pointed out, and remained obdurate on the point. But because he, who did not in the least wish to go to her parties, could not be invited to them, a little awkwardness in the relations of her husband's Sunday afternoon visitor and Mrs. Day had arisen.
His appearance thus early in the morning, and in the midst of their meal was a matter more than a little surprising to them all. He was a short, rather podgy man, with fair whiskers curled upon red cheeks, a common, up-turned, broad-nostrilled nose, a wide, thick-lipped mouth; quick, observant, but by no means beautiful eyes, a protruding chin, and a roll of flesh which showed above his collar at the back of his neck. Well and carefully he was dressed, however, and wore that air of conscious prosperity to be observed in the man who has carved his own fortunes and is proud of the fact.
He grasped, in his broad, short-fingered, red one, the white hand of Mrs. Day, who went forward to meet him. "I got a verbal message from your husband last night, asking me to look you up the first thing this morning," he said. "This is a sad business for you all; I am sorry—very sorry."
Mrs. Day took her place behind her tea-cups again, lacking the strength to stand.
"Do the children know?" he asked, in a tone, muffled indeed, but quite audible in the children's ears.
Mrs. Day shook her head. "But they must know," she said.
"Know what?" they all asked, alert for news, but suspecting no evil. Even Franky looked up from his toast and marmalade with an inquiring glance. Perhaps the circus was coming, and there would be another procession, with elephants and camels walking through the streets, and unseen but loudly roaring lions dragged in their cages.
"There is bad news, my dears," Mrs. Day began, but very faintly; she clasped her hands upon the edge of the tea-tray, the cups and saucers jingled with their shaking. "Poor papa is in trouble. Tell them," she whispered to the man who stood beside her. "I can't tell them."
Mr. Boult fixed Bessie with the gaze of his slightly protruding eyes of stone-coloured blue. She was the eldest, the only one who could really be said to be grown up. For all his tail coat and smart neckties, Bernard at seventeen was only a boy still.
"What is the matter with papa? Where is papa?" Bessie asked him.
"Just at present—we hope only for a short time until we can bail him out—your papa is in prison," George Boult said.
He had known it would be a blow to them, but he was a man entirely without imagination, and therefore quite incapable of putting himself in another person's place. Rumours had been afloat in the business world. Money, which the jog-trot profession of law alone could never have brought him in, had been spent: more than once the suspicion of what would be the end of his old school-friend had crossed his mind. But that the possibility of such a, to them, hideous calamity, had never presented itself to the man's wife and children he had not considered, nor was he capable of appreciating the sorrow and shame they would suffer by such a disgrace.
He had not a high opinion of William Day's wife and family; they were people who thought the world a place for play rather than hard work, who frequented theatres and concert-rooms, and dances. It was not likely they could feel anything very much. He was unprepared for the effect of his words.
They were young, they were undisciplined, they were quite unused to misfortune. The children met the news of its appearance among them by a loud yell of terrified protest. Mrs. Day had flung herself upon him, grasped him, clung to him.
"Not William! Not my husband! No! No! No!" she shrieked.
"I thought you knew! I thought you knew!" George Boult said. The woman hurt him by her grip upon his arms; what a din was in his ears!
"Papa! Oh, papa! Papa!" Bessie screamed.
Franky was screaming too. He had got down from the table and rushed round to his younger sister, who, white, and shaking like a leaf, took the child in her arms. Bernard had risen, ashen-faced, staring. "It isn't true!" he shouted savagely at his father's traducer. "It's a lie!"
"Didn't you know?" George Boult kept saying to the poor woman who was shaking him by the force of her trembling as she clung to him. "I would have prepared you—I thought you knew."
"I thought it was bankruptcy," she got out between her chattering teeth."I didn't know it was—disgrace. Are you sure? Quite sure?"
"Quite. There is not the shadow of a chance it is not true. A police officer brought me a message from him from the station-house last night."
She let go his arms, and sank into her chair again; and Franky, who could find no comfort in Deleah's embrace, left her, and still screaming his terrified "Papa! papa! papa!" flew to hang upon his mother's neck.
Deleah crept round to Bernard. "Oh, Bernard, what can we do?" she said."What ought we to do?"
Bernard, who had sunk into his chair, only laid his arms upon the table, his head upon his arms, and sobbed.
George Boult thought they were taking it very badly. "This comes of too much pleasuring," he told himself. He looked round upon the miserable group, feeling shocked and helpless. He had gone there to see if he could be of use. How was it possible to help people who behaved like this! He was a widower, but had no children of his own. If he had been more fortunate in that respect what serious-minded, well-conducted boys and girls they would have been: not squeaking over misfortune, but standing up to it when it came; looking about them, open-eyed, for ways of making money, marrying money, and getting on. The children of William Day and their mother were acting like a set of lunatics only fit for Bedlam.
"I'm sorry to have to spring it upon you suddenly. I thought your mama knew," he said again. "But it's a thing that had to be known—and perhaps as well one time as another. It's a thing that has got to be borne, too, and made the best of."
It was quite easy to play the philosopher if only they would have listened, but they would not. Mrs. Day was rocking herself backwards and forwards in her chair, the screaming Franky in her arms; Bessie had flung herself upon the floor and was beating it with her palms and calling upon the name of papa. George Boult was sorry for their misfortune, but he looked on and listened with distaste. To have no more spunk than that!
"Which of you can I speak to?" he asked sharply at last. He crossed the room and touched Bernard's heaving shoulders. "Come out," he said; and Bernard, openly blubbering, got up, and followed his father's friend from the room. In the hall George Boult laid a steadying hand upon the poor boy's arm. "You must bear this like a man, Bernard," he said. "You're not a child, nor a woman; try to be a man."
"What's he done? What's my father done?" the boy asked. He blew his nose and wiped his eyes, and made an effort to hold himself upright.
"It's a question of some money belonging to a client."
"To a client, sir?"
"Your father invested a large sum of money for her, then sold the shares, and did not buy others or give her the money."
"But—he would have done—in time. He—meant to do it."
"Your father has got to prove that."
"My father will do it," with a sob.
"I hope so. There's another matter we need not go into now. Her signature authorising the sale she disputes."
"My father—will explain."
"Perhaps. He'll be up before the magistrates to-day. I shall attend, and shall offer myself to go bail for him. They'll probably want two. Who is there you can ask?"
Bernard did not know. He had not his wits sufficiently about him even to think. "I can ask my mother," he said. He was sobbing again, fallen limply against the wall, his face hidden.
"Do remember you've got to play the man," George Boult said. He felt helpless in the presence of such surprising helplessness. He looked at the heaving shoulders of the youth with an astonished distaste. What was to be done with material so soft as this! "I am sorry I have been the bearer of such ill news, but there is no good in my stopping now. I'll drop in, tell your mother, when you're all more used to it. Wonderful how quickly people do get used to things! Meantime, remember, I'll stand bail for your father if you can find another. And there's no time to lose. You must shake yourself together and set about it at once."
"Helpless set!" he said to himself as he let himself out and passed down the three glistening white steps into the quiet street. "Hysterical, useless, helpless set! Fit only for pleasure-seeking and money-spending. What is to become of them now?"
They were certainly helpless. When Bernard went back to the room where breakfast—the meal to be for ever unfinished—stood about, and told them they had, there and then, to find some one willing to bail out his father, none of them understood, or knew what to do.
"Do you know of any one we could ask, mother?" Mrs. Day sat, her brow clasped tightly in her two hands as if she really feared her head would split. "Let me think! Let me think!" she said piteously, but was incapable of thinking.
"Would any of the people who were here at the dance—the Challises, the Hollingsbys, the Buttifers, the Frosts, do it? Which of them shall we ask?"
"I don't think one of them would do it. They would not care."
"But they're often here—to dinner, and so on."
"Don't ask them."
"Who then, mama?" Deleah questioned. She had made less noise than the others, and there was about her an air of purpose, lacking in the rest, although her childish face looked stricken.
"There is no one I should like you to ask a favour of."
"But we must ask some one."
"Let it be some one we do not know, then."
"Could we ask Sir Francis Forcus? He is very rich."
"I will go somewhere—I will ask—some one," Mrs. Day said; but, trying to stand, she fell back in her chair, and her frightened children saw that she had fainted.
They laid her on the sofa, and over her prostrate body renewed the subject of the bail.
"Bessie must go," Deleah said.
"Then, I won't, miss!" said Bessie, and sobbed and choked and screamed at her sister: "I won't! I won't!"
"Bernard must go."
"It would come better from a woman," Bernard said.
In the end it was Deleah who went—the little petted, sheltered Deleah, who had never gone before on any errand of more moment than for the matching of Berlin wools, or for the changing of the three-volume novel at the Public Library.
"Deleah can't go—Deleah mustn't!" the prostrate mother on the sofa gasped. She looked like a corpse beneath the cloths soaked in eau-de-cologne-and-water which Bessie had arranged over her brow. "We can't ask Sir Francis. Call Deleah back. Stop her."
But Deleah would not be stopped. It was a question of getting her father out of prison, and they had been told to lose no time. While Bessie and her mother and Bernard were still declaring she must not go she had run up to her room for her hat and jacket; and lest they should catch and stop her, she would not stay in the house to put them on, but flung them anyhow upon her when once outside the door. Then, with her little wild white face almost lost in the masses of loose dark hair escaped from the net she wore in the morning, and falling anyhow beneath her hat, and her small bare hands grasping the jacket she would not stop to button at her throat, she ran through the streets.
Was that really Deleah running there, and on that errand? Deleah, who at that hour was usually walking sedately to school; saying over to herself her French poetry, perhaps, as she went, or taking a last peep in her geography book, to make sure once again of the latitude and longitude of Montreal, or to impress more firmly on her mind the imports and exports of Prussia.
To get to her school she had to pass her father's office; and sometimes, if it pleased him to start early enough, he would walk there with his little daughter, her hand tucked within his arm. With her he was never savage, and rarely irritable; on these walks his mood would be playful and jocose, and they would incite each other to play the truant from office and school, and pretend they were off on a holiday jaunt together.
And now her laughing, noisy, loving, boisterous father was in prison—in prison!—and she was running to beg the help of a stranger to take him out.
She gave no thought to the man to whom she was going, nor to the words she would say to him. The difficulty of asking such a favour of such a stranger did not distress her. Her father—her father—her father! was her only thought.
Deleah's Errand
It chanced that Sir Francis Forcus drove to the Brewery an hour earlier than usual that morning, and—a circumstance of rare occurrence—that Reginald was pleased to drive with him. Both men came together into the private room of the elder, where Deleah, for an hour which had seemed a lifetime, awaited them.
If Sir Francis had ever seen William Day's little daughter, he had forgotten her. It was Reggie, at whom Deleah never looked, who called her name in his pleasant, good-natured tone of welcome.
"Why, it is Deleah!" he cried out, as if Deleah, of all the people in the world, was the person he most wanted to see. "This is Deleah Day, Francis."
He liked little Deleah—what young man with eyes in his head did not like her!—she was so pretty; far and away prettier than Bessie, who had in Francis's word tried to grab him. She was the jolliest little thing to laugh with and to dance with; light as a feather—you could sweep her off her feet and dance on with her, never feeling her weight upon your arm.
He held out his hand to her now, but she did not see it. Her own hands were clasped. Without clasping them she would not have knelt to ask anything of God. She went across the room and lifted her little white stricken face to Sir Francis above the clasped hands, and gazed at him with an agony of prayer in her eyes.
"My papa is in prison," she said. "I have come to ask you to take him out."
Sir Francis looked at her in astonishment, not unmoved; at the back of his mind the thought that this was one of a family who had impertinently intruded on him, with whom, emphatically, he wished to have nothing to do. Because this girl was so young and pretty they had sent her!
"Will you take my papa out of prison?"
"My poor child, I fear that is beyond me. Beyond any one now."
She squeezed the clasped hands painfully together, her eyes clung to his face: "No: you can! You can! I heard them say so," she said. "Mr. George Boult and you can take him out if you will. You can do it with money. He said so. You can do it to-day."
"She means go bail for him," Reginald explained under his breath.
"But why should I do that?" Sir Francis asked, turning upon his brother. "Her father was no friend—not even an acquaintance—of mine." He was most anxious that point should be established. "People in—in Mr. Day's position get their friends to bail them," he said to the girl. "And I shall not be present; I am going out of town to-day."
"No! you must not go!" Deleah sobbed. "You must do it. There is no one else. I don't know where to go—I don't know what to do. We none of us know. You must! You must!"
Half because her strength was failing her, and half because it was the attitude of prayer, she went to her knees, her head thrown back, looking up at him, her clasped hands beneath her upturned chin.
How could any man, however cold, reserved, remote, inimical to her cause, even, turn a deaf ear to such an appeal, remain adamant before her helplessness, her trustfulness, her childish beauty and self-abandonment!
"Who sent you to me?" he asked.
"No one. I came," she whispered. The change in his tone had weakened her, she began to shake from head to foot.
"They should have picked on a fitter person for such an errand. It is a cruelty to have sent such a child as you," he said.
He held out his hand to raise her; but Reggie went to her and lifted her and placed her in a comfortable chair. "It'll be all right. He'll do it. Don't you fret," he whispered, soothing her.
She did not heed him, her eyes were on the elder man, who had gone to a cupboard in the room from whence he produced a decanter of sherry. It was in that primitive time when in trouble of mind or body, to "take a glass of wine" was the customary thing. He was always stiff and distant in bearing, and just now he was annoyed and aggrieved to feel that he was being "had," as the word of a later age puts it. But his heart was sound. To look on that trembling, frightened child, and to remember the errand on which she had been sent he found to be an upsetting thing.
"Sip a little sherry," he said, and passed the glass to his brother to hold to her lips.
But Deleah took no notice of the glass, she seemed unaware of the presence of Reggie, her eyes clinging to the face of Reggie's brother: "Will you do it? Will you save him? Will you?" she implored.
Then, with a gloomy brow, Sir Francis consented. "Very well. I will be in the way, this afternoon. You say Mr. Boult also will be in the way? If we can do anything we will."
"It's all right, Deleah," Reggie said. "I told you it would be all right."
"And, remember," Sir Francis adjured her, "that what I do, I do for you—and for you alone."
Her petition, she understood, was granted; her clasped hands fell from their attitude of prayer, but her strained eyes still clung to Sir Francis's face. She did not attempt to thank him; words were inadequate to express what she felt—she did not think of using them; but there was adoration of him in her eyes.
With his promise to help, resentment had died out of the man. He took the glass which Reggie had put down, and himself held it to her lips. "Sip a little; it will give you strength," he said in the voice of authority; and she obediently sipped.
"I'll go," she said, but held him with her adoring child's eyes for a minute still, then slipped from the chair and went to the door. But there she turned, and with her head pitifully lifted faced the two men. "My papa has done nothing wrong," she said. "They have put him in prison, but it is a mistake. Papa has done nothing wrong."
"Poor child!" Sir Francis said, and turned away. The scene had been painful. He was anxious that it should be over.
Reginald had gone to the door and opened it for her. "You keep your spirits up," he said coaxingly. "Don't you go and be unhappy, Deleah." He was passing through the door with her, whispering cheery words, but his brother called him sharply back.
"Reggie, come here!"
"In a minute."
"No, now. I want you."
There were certain tones of his brother's voice which the younger man had, so far, never dreamed of disregarding. He reappeared in the room and closed the door on Deleah's retreating figure.
"Where were you going?"
"Nowhere, in particular. To walk part of the way home with that poor little girl."
"Stop here, will you? I want you."
Sir Francis Forcus was not going to allow his brother to be seen in the streets of Brockenham with any member of Mr. William Day's family, that morning.
Sour Misfortune
Mrs. Day, in looking back over the miserable weeks and months and years that succeeded her last New Year's party, was inclined to award the palm for wretchedness to the weeks which intervened between her husband's appearance before the magistrates and the Spring Assizes at which his trial came on. It is more than possible that if George Boult and Sir Francis Forcus had refused to stand bail for him, and he had remained for those ten weeks in prison, he would have been less unhappy there than was possible to him, a consciously guilty man, in the changed atmosphere of his home.
What had happened had changed for him for ever his relations with wife and children. Among the latter he sat as one beaten, cowed, estranged. With Franky, alone, for ever again, did he approach to any intimacy. Franky, who, now that that strange talk of his father being in prison was over, and his father here at home once more, holding no apprehension of the future, troubled his head no further about the matter. Him he sometimes took upon his knee, as of old. To Franky he would give languid advice about the pictures he was colouring, about the amount of cobbler's wax to affix to the skipjack he was making, about the rigging of his walnut ships.
Of Deleah—Deleah, who had been his pet, whom he had acknowledged openly to be his favourite child—he was shy. He had been told how it had been she who had arranged the matter of his bail. His little Deleah, to have gone on such an errand for him! He would have liked never to meet again those pretty trusting eyes of hers that had been full of pride in and love for him.
When he had first come home she had cried heart-brokenly against him, had hung with her arms about his neck, sobbing out that she knew—she knew—she knew he had done nothing wrong. He had had to push her roughly from him. He did not wish to go through a scene like that again!
To Bessie and his son, who maintained a sullen condemnatory attitude towards him, he never spoke if he could avoid doing so.
Towards his wife he held an altogether different demeanour.
The troubles which had come upon him had been induced by his good-natured desire to meet the heavy expenses of an extravagant household. Money which he could not earn in the legitimate exercise of his profession, nor come by honestly, had been spent. Who had had the spending of it but she—his wife? Of his grievous undoing, then, it was she who was the sole cause.
Of this explanation he delivered himself to her in the first hour of his return to his home.
She was too stricken, too dumbfounded, too much overwhelmed with shame and sorrow for him to resent the attack upon herself, or to attempt reprisals. Of her defenceless submission he took advantage, and presently had brought himself honestly to believe that on his wife's shoulders lay the responsibility of his downfall.
His counsel advised him to plead guilty. There was not in any one's mind a doubt of what the verdict must be. The few who cared for him could only hope for a light sentence.
When Deleah heard he was not even to deny his guilt she hid herself in her bedroom, and lay there for hours, face downwards upon the floor. The carpet was wet with her tears, its scent in her nostrils. For all her life that snuffy, stuffy smell brought back to her the time of her uncontrolled, rebellious anguish and her cruel shame.
Was it true? Was it possible? Could this horrible thing have happened in her home? Deleah's, who had known there only careless, happy days? Was this man who was to plead guilty to forgery, who had robbed a poor woman of every farthing she possessed, who was to pass years, perhaps, in prison, really her father? Who had been sometimes so affectionate to them all, always so loving and indulgent to her; who had sat in the square family pew with them all on the Sunday morning, and said grace every day at meals; who had often told them funny tales, shouting with laughter over his own jokes; who had banged the tambourine and joined in Sir Roger de Coverley only a few nights ago?
Bessie and Bernard, drawn together by their misfortune, and forgetting to torment one another, talked, their heads close together, over the tragedy which had befallen. They were angry, outraged, seeing what their father had done as it affected themselves, and they did not spare him. Sometimes to them—the elder boy and girl—Mrs. Day felt constrained to talk. It was a relief to pent-up feelings to talk, if only to say, "What will become of us? How are we to live? What, in the name of God, are we to do?" To these three, from companionship in misfortune, some consolation was afforded.
But Deleah spoke no word—except to the carpet.
All of them had much leisure. Mrs. Day and Bessie would not show their faces out of doors. Bernard, who was spending a last quarter at school in order to pass the Senior Cambridge Exam. before going into his father's office, decided to work for it at home, rather than at school, where all the other fellowsknew. A letter was received from the head-mistress of the Establishment, "all of whose pupils were the daughters of professional men," and where Deleah was receiving her education, saying that, until the dark cloud was lifted which at present overshadowed her family, it would be better for Deleah Day to take a holiday.
"In any case, I would not have gone there again," Deleah said. "The girls are always talking about who their fathers are, and looking down on each other. Not but what there were some upon whose fathers I also looked down. The Clarks—the wholesale shoe-makers—you could hardly call themprofessional, could you? But now—oh, what nonsense it all seems now!"
The education of Franky had been carried on hitherto by Bessie. In a lamentably desultory fashion it is true; but now that, for economy's sake, they had restricted themselves to a fire in only one sitting-room the poor child's tuition had to be abandoned. It would have been impossible to live within the four walls wherein the elder daughter and the younger son fought through the difficulties of imparting and acquiring knowledge. Either Franky, on his back, on the floor, was screaming and dangerously waving his legs, or an infuriate Bessie was chasing him round the table. The spelling-book was more often used as a weapon of attack than a primer, and Bessie's voice screaming out the information that C A T spelt Cat could be heard in the street.
Economies in coal, economies in every direction they had to practise. Money, where it had been so plentiful was all at once painfully scarce; credit, which had seemed unlimited, there was none. George Boult, taking things in hand, and trying to bring some order out of chaos, handed over weekly to Mrs. Day two pounds for housekeeping. The change from lavishness to penury bewildered the poor woman, and the change from a table loaded with good things to one that was nearly bare was not skilfully made. For a time, until experience taught her, things they could have done without she continued to buy, and that which was really necessary they went without. And that allowance, poor as it seemed to her, could not go on for long. It was by no means certain that enough legally remained to them to repay Mr. Boult for these disbursements. If they had been willing to live upon his means he was not at all a generous man; he did not encourage them to expect pecuniary help from him.
"What do you advise? Have you no plan? What are we all to do?" Mrs. Day asked of her husband.
"You must hang on till I come out. If we're lucky it will only be a matter of a few months."
"But even for a few months, William, what are we to do?"
"You must work," William said. "Earn something. It will be a change for you. I've kept the lot of you in idleness till now. Now you'll learn what it is to work. It won't do you any harm."
"All that is so easy to say. But what work are we to do? Where are we to work? I cannot see that we shall have a roof over our heads."
Then the wretched man, who knew no more than she what would become of them all, and was infinitely the more wretched on that account, broke into a torrent of oaths. "Haven't I enough to bear?" he asked her. "Haven't I myself to think about? Is mine such a pleasant prospect, that you come to pester me, giving me no peace? How do other women manage? Women that have never had husbands to slave for them as I have slaved for you."
Poor Mrs. Day, the least pugnacious of women, who at the best of times had scarcely known how to hold her own with him, fled before the unreasonable, miserable man.
Bessie, in talking to her brother over the hopelessness of their position, used the child's time-honoured reproach against the parent. "Papa and mama should not have had children if they were going to make such a muddle as this," she argued. Bessie had not wanted to be born, she declared. Her father and mother were responsible. They must at least say what was to be done. Papa, she declared to Bernard, should be made to say.
"Papa, when Deleah and I want our hats and dresses for the spring, what are we to do?" she asked her father, with that note of aggression in her voice with which he had become familiar from her.
"Do? Go without them," he promptly replied.
"You know very well we can't go without clothes, papa."
"Then go to the devil," papa said, and getting up slouched from the room.
Bernard, too, who was more afraid of the altered man than Bessie, and for long shrank from any conversation with him, was at last induced by his mother to consult his father as to his own future.
"There isn't much use that I can see, sir, in my sweating away at my books for this exam," he said.
"Oh? Why not?"
"Supposing that I get through it, what am I to do then?"
"You must do the best you can. This Senior Cambridge Exam, they tell me, is a door to any of the professions."
"But you want money to enter a profession, sir. From what I hear we have none."
"Your hearing has not played you false in that direction. What I had you managed to spend, among you. I was the goose that laid the golden egg; now circumstances forbid my laying any more—for a time. You must look after yourselves."
"But if you could only give us some idea of how to set about it."
Then, upon him, too, his father, having shown a greater measure of forbearance so far than he accorded the mere women of his family, turned savagely. The poor wretch did not know how to help them, did not know what to advise them to do: to frighten them was his only resource.
"Haven't I got enough to think about?" he shouted at the boy. "You and your mother and sisters come and badger—and badger me—"
"All right, sir. I won't badger you any more."
"All I ask is to be let alone—to be granted a little peace. You have no mercy—none!"
But after that conversation the boy gave up even the pretence of studying. "Where's the good?" he asked of Bessie. "If I passed the blessed thing, where's the good? I shall have to be an errand boy, I suppose, or sweep a crossing. I don't want a Senior Cambridge Certificate for that."
The womankind did their best to persuade him to persevere, but he declared that he could not study in his bedroom without a fire, nor could he so much as drive a word into his head if he had to sit in the same room as his father.
That room where their pleasant evenings had been passed while Mr. Day played his cards at the club, presented altogether a different aspect in these sad times when that unhappy man formed part of the circle. The poor, bulky wretch sat always over the fire—literally over it, his chair-feet touching the fender, his own feet as often as not on the bars; the rest of the family withdrawn as much as possible from the hearth. If there was talk among them as they sat at their table with their sewing, their painting, their books—and being young they talked, and even sometimes laughed—he resented the fact that they could do so, and sometimes snarled round upon them with a request for silence. But equally, it seemed, did he resent their silence when it fell, and would make sarcastic remarks to them when they withdrew on the liveliness of the society they provided for him.
An undue amount of the weekly two pounds for housekeeping money went to find the master of the house tobacco. There was some good port wine in the cellar; he might as well drink it while he had the chance, William Day thought. What else had he to do but smoke and drink; and he did both, all day long.
He had not been a drinking man, although he had ever taken his share of the good things of life, nor an idle one. His family looked on now at his altered habits with fear and a growing disgust. It was surprising how, in the loss of his own self-respect and the knowledge that he had lost the respect of those who had loved him, the man altered. With astonishment they, who had known him all their lives, saw him in a few short weeks become selfish, greedy, unmannerly, even unclean. The ash from his pipe fell on his coat, he would not brush it away; he had evidently given up the use of a nail-brush; his hair hung over his forehead; his untrimmed beard and whiskers stuck out round the big face which was flabby now, and unwholesome.
Missing the luxuries from his table, he forgot the niceties he had hitherto observed there. When he came to his meals with unwashed hands, took to himself, with apparently no thought for the rest, the best of what he found there, the elder boy and girl would look at each other with angry condemnation in their eyes. Such lapses from a hitherto observed code of good manners Mrs. Day bore with an apparently apathetic indifference. For years, truth to tell, she had ceased to love the man, and the little deviations, which read so trivially but mean in daily life so much, were almost unnoticed by her in the stupefying sense of the misfortune which had befallen them all.
It was only Deleah, devotedly loving her father, who perceived the real tragedy at the back of this neglect of personal and family obligations; only she who dimly understood that this disfiguring outward alteration was but the sign of an inner, more pitiful change; only she who had the insight to read in her father's savage ways the despair, the scorn of himself, the rage with destiny, the bitter enmity against a world in which he was no longer to exist. Only Deleah felt in her heart the sorrow of it all—Deleah who was a reader of Thackeray, of Trollope, of Dickens, of Tennyson; whose eyes had wept for imaginary woes before these bitter drops had been wrung from them for her own; who had learnt that tears were not the only signs of an anguished heart; and knew that the love of position, of home, of a fair name even were not the chief things for which they as a family should have mourned.
And so the slow weeks, even the slow months passed. The muddy, narrow pavements of Brockenham grew dry and dusty in the biting east winds. People at whom Mrs. Day and her daughters peeped through curtained windows walked by with snowdrops, with violets, and presently with cowslips in their hands. Spring, so slow in coming, yet so dreaded by them all, was coming at last. Easter was here. Easter too soon was here!—and the Easter Assizes.
Husband And Father
On the evening before the morning on which his trial was to take place, a different creature seemed to be in the place lately occupied by William Day.
For one thing, his appearance was improved. A barber, sent for, that afternoon, had cut off the greasy, disguising locks of sand-coloured hair, and trimmed the wildly luxuriant beard which had given the man such a slovenly, unfamiliar appearance. His upper lip was once more shaved.
"I don't mind kissing you now, papa," Franky said, who had shirked saluting the stubbly face.
This improvement being completed, he made a change in his clothes, and at their tea-time appeared among them all in his black cloth, long-skirted coat, his "pepper and salt" trousers. As another outward sign of his moral degradation he had dispensed with linen at throat and wrists lately, but now his heavy chin sank once more into the enclosure of a collar whose stiffly starched points reached to the middle of his cheeks. The pin which adorned his thickly padded necktie was large in size, consisting of a gold-rimmed glass case in which was exhibited, braided and intertwined, hair cut from the heads of his four children. They had all of them clubbed together to prepare this offering for papa on last St. Valentine's Day.
And with the resumption of a more careful toilette the poor man had gone back to the decent demeanour of happier days. He said nothing; was, indeed, in a state of black depression which he made no attempt to hide, but he outraged no longer the sensitive feelings of his family by his behaviour.
"Papa is just like what he used to look," Franky said, when he beheld the renovation of his parent's appearance. "Shall we paint pictures this evening, papa?"
They tried to hush the child, but Franky saw no reason why he should not make his request, nor why it should be refused. He fetched his paint-box and a store of pictures he had cut from some old papers.
"You do sunsets so much more beautifully than me, papa. If you'd just do the sunsets for me!"
And presently the father had drawn a chair by the side of his little son's, and was showing him how to mix his colours, and admonishing him not to suck his paintbrushes, as on the happy winter evenings before the crash.
It was a landscape with mill and marshland and water, the child had chosen, and there was a large space to be occupied with the sunset at which his parent excelled, and much scraping and mixing of carmine and yellow ochre and cobalt blues. So that Franky's bed-time was here before the picture was finished. He was sent off as usual, protesting and in tears.
"You'll help me to finish it to-morrow night, papa? Promise you'll help me to-morrow night!" he entreated, through his weeping. But Bessie, whose task it was to see him to bed, pulled the child relentlessly from the room, and slammed the door upon them both.
George Boult had come in, for a last talk with his friend. His presence was never desired by the family, but it relieved the tension, somewhat, of that sad evening.
The two men sat with their pipes, and a bottle of that much diminished store of "eighteen forty-sevens" was broached. But presently it was noticed that although William Day held his pipe in his hand he did not smoke. With the other hand he shaded his eyes from the gas light, and he said nothing. One by one the young people crept off to bed, and presently Mrs. Day, whose attempt to keep up a conversation with the visitor had quickly failed, also stood up to go.
"Are you leaving us, Lydia?" the husband said when he became aware of her intention.
"I will not go if you wish me to stay, William."
"No, no. Go, and get some sleep."
Then, as for a moment she stood, hesitating at the door, longing to escape from that sad presence, yet miserable to go: "Do the best you can for my poor wife," Day said to his friend. "She has been a good wife to me."
She had lived with him for twenty years, and had, perhaps, never heard a word of praise from him before. When at last it came it was too much for her to bear, and she went, sobbing loudly, from the room.
An hour later when the unhappy master of the house had for the last time attended his friend to the hall-door, watched him down the steps into the quiet street, given a silent nod to the other's silent gesture of farewell as he turned to walk down the echoing pavement; when he had put out the gas in the sitting-room and hall, and dragged himself—who can divine with what heaviness of heart?—heavily up the stairs, he came upon a little white night-gowned figure, watching for him on the landing, outside his bedroom door.
It was Deleah who had waited for him there.
"It is only I, papa," she said when he stopped short at sight of her."Only your little Deleah that I—I—loves you so."
"Be off to bed, this instant," he said, and pointed an angry finger in the direction of her room.
But she put her arms about his neck and clung to him with stifled sobbing, till with the choke of his own sobbing she felt his great chest heave beneath her clinging form.
When he had flung himself upon the bed beside his wife he was choking and sobbing still, in a fashion dreadful to hear.
"William!" she said timidly, and put a shaking hand upon his shoulder. "Is there anything I can do or say that can help you, William?"
He did not answer her, but the bed shook with his rending sobs; and she lay and sobbed beside him.
When at length such calm as comes from exhaustion fell: "I did it for you and the children," he said. "I thought, with luck, I could have put it right. But it was for all of you I did it. You will remember that?"
"I will remember it while I live," she said. "You may be quite sure that neither your children nor I will ever forget."
"Deleah upset me. She should have been in bed"—it was so he excused his tears to her—"I should not have broken down like this if she had not unmanned me. The child should have gone to bed."
She heard him swallow down his tears, and then he began again: "Deleah andFranky have always been—have always been—"
"The dearest," she supplied, understanding him. "The dearest of your children, William?"
"Tell them that—after to-morrow, will you?"
She promised. "Bessie and Bernard have not such winning ways, perhaps, but they love you, William, I am sure."
To this he made no answer. After a time she spoke to him again: "Have you anything else to say to me, William? There have been too few words between us of late. It has been my fault, perhaps. But now, have you anything to say that might comfort us both to remember?"
"Nothing." He said the word drearily, but not unkindly, and she did not resent his silence. Full well she knew that volumes, if he could have spoken them, could not have lightened her helplessness in the present and terror of the future, nor his despair.
She lay for a few minutes, the tears pouring down her cheeks, unchecked in the darkness, then she forced herself to say the only few words she could think of which might comfort him in the time to come.
"William, I won't talk to you, I won't disturb you. I want you to go to sleep, to get a night's rest, if you can; but just this one thing I do wish to say to you—I do want you to remember. It is that you must be sure never to think I feel any anger against you. Only pity—only pity, William; and such a sorrow for you that I cannot put it into words. I have wanted to tell you all along, but—"
She left it there, and he received what she said in silence.
Only once again he spoke. "This has been Hell," he said, and she knew he spoke of the weeks he had spent, an alien in his own home, awaiting his trial. "Hell! Whatever comes, I am glad this is over."
Then he turned on his side, away from her, and lay quite quiet; and presently she knew with thanksgiving that he slept.
The Way Out
The prisoner in accordance with his counsel's advice pleaded Guilty. It was only a question of the length of the sentence, therefore, and the judge before whom William Day appeared did not err on the side of mercy. The heaviest sentence that it was in his power to allot to a malefactor of that class he passed upon William Day.
None of his own were present, but the Court was filled with people to whom the prisoner was a familiar figure of everyday life.
It was all but impossible to look upon this big, important-looking man in the well-cut clothes, holding till the last few weeks among them the position of gentleman, and believe that it was a criminal standing before their eyes. The attraction of gazing at, of gloating upon, such a phenomenon was great. He had been a hectoring kind of man, walking very noisily among his fellows, taking to himself a great deal of room. Such an one gives offence frequently if unconsciously. There was none who saw William Day standing up for his sentence in the dock that day who bore a grudge, or remembered.
With some there he had assumed an insolent superiority, with other few, whose position entitled them to choose their acquaintance, he had been unwarrantably familiar. For the minute he held his place after sentence was pronounced his eyes travelled slowly but with a dreadful look of appeal over the familiar faces. Over faces of tradespeople, with whom he had dealt; of clients for whom he had done business; of people with whom he had dined and whom he had entertained in return; of men who had driven him in cabs, blacked his boots, carried his portmanteaux. The slowly travelling gaze had in it something of a sick despair, something of a wild appeal. The men over whom it passed, bore it in absolute, breathless silence, but they never forgot it.
The great cheeks that had seemed ready to burst with good-living, hung loose and flabby now, the hands that had been prompt with the grasp of friendship, that had waved greetings from window or pavement, that had ever been generous in giving, clung to the rail of the dock, the knuckles whitened with the tension. The tongue that had been so loud in dispute, so rough in anger, so boisterous in welcome, lay dry and silent in the mouth which had lopped open.
There was a feeling upon many of those who momentarily encountered the dreadful gaze that they were responsible; they longed to exonerate themselves, to say to him, "I, at least, had nothing to do with it. I am sorry, William Day. Indeed I am sorry." It was a relief when he turned, at the warder's touch on his arm, and went below.
In the room where he was allowed to sit for a time before being driven to prison his lawyer came to speak to him; the confidential clerk from his own office; his friend, George Boult.
"It is very severe," George Boult kept saying with nervous reiteration."Very severe."
The prisoner did not speak. He was wearing, arranged across his heavy paunch, a handsome chain of gold. With fingers stiff from their hold upon the dock-rail he began, bunglingly, to detach this chain from his waistcoat. His watch came out with it—a big watch, with a double gold case. He opened the outer case in an aimless way, mechanically, and for no object, it seemed, for he did not look at the time. Then, without a word he held out the watch and chain to his friend, and lifted the fingers which had fumbled with the watch-case to his lead-coloured lips.
Within a quarter of an hour from the time that William Day had listened to his heavy sentence of penal servitude he lay on his back, dead.
For The Widow And The Fatherless
At the initiative of George Boult a subscription was opened for "the widow and children of the late William Day, who had left them without any means of support."
This sad and irrefutable statement was made in an advertisement in the local newspaper, and was written, in Mr. Boult's own round and clerkly hand, on the top of the list of subscribers hanging in conspicuous places in the Banks, the Public Library, the principal shops of the town.
It was said by those competent to form an opinion that the engineering of this scheme to help poor Mrs. Day and her children should have been in other hands. That George Boult's social position in the town did not entitle him to head the list. A banker's name should have figured there, or the name of the M. P. for Brockenham, or Sir Francis Forcus's name. With such an influential person to lead the way it was argued that the smaller fry would have been more willing to follow suit. It was also whispered that one of such persons of wealth and note would have led off with at least a hundred pounds. George Boult's name was down for fifty.
It was a large amount for him to give—not because he could not well have afforded more, but because he was all unaccustomed to giving. He had been known to be the unhappy man's friend, and because he headed the list with his fifty pounds it was said that no one liked to outdo that donation. Sir Francis Forcus, in order to avoid hurting those sensitive feelings with which Mr. Boult was accredited, had the happy thought to put his own name down for fifty pounds, and those of his wife and his young brother, each for the same amount.
There were two more names down for like sums, after which came a few for ten pounds, a few more for five pounds; there were numerous donations of one pound; after which the subscriptions dropped to ten shillings, to five—
Poor Mrs. Day, casting a sick eye down the list as it continued to appear, once a week, in the local paper, felt ashamed by the paltriness of the amounts which were being amassed in her behalf. "Collected by a well-wisher, six and nine." Several people, modestly content that their initials only should appear, presented two and six.
"Sympathy" was down for a shilling. How degraded she felt as she read! Though, why a gift of a shilling should have hurt her more than the gift of fifty pounds she could not have explained.
When, after dragging on far several weeks, the subscription list was closed the sum collected only amounted to a little over six hundred pounds.
George Boult had been ready to pledge himself that it would have risen to a thousand. He had spared no trouble in the collection of the sum. The list of subscribers hung in a conspicuous place in his shop. He never failed to call to it the attention of his well-to-do customers. A case more needing help was never before the public of Brockenham, he would point out to them.
But the public of Brockenham, severely shocked by the tragic circumstances of William Day's death, recovered quickly from the blow, to say that the death had been the best thing which could happen to the family. To be rid of such a man, to have no more attaching to them the reproach of a father and husband in prison, removed half the woeful load of misfortune from the case. That the children were mostly of an age to earn their own livings, their mother still fairly young and strong, were facts also remembered. Then the word began to be passed about from mouth to mouth—spoken in a whisper at first, but presently a word which might be spoken without fear of rebuke in any ear—that the Day family had always been eaten up with pride, and that the lawyer's troubles had come about through the extravagance of his wife.
The sum of six hundred and forty-nine pounds being collected, what to do with it was the next thing to decide.
The day after the subscription list was closed Mrs. Day went to an interview with George Boult in order to set before him a proposition, the result of the unanimous conclusion to which she and her children after many tearful consultations had come.
"Of course I must have some plan to put before him," the mother had said, pathetically conscious that however helpless she felt she must by no means appear to be so. "It would not do for us to have made no plans, after the interest Mr. Boult has taken; and his fifty pounds."
"I wish we could chuck it in his face," Bernard said; he was well on his way, poor boy, to exemplify the truth of the proverb that scornful dogs eat dirty puddings.
"Of all the people who have given, Mr. Boult is the one I would most love to send his money back to," Bessie agreed. "We may be able to wipe the rest off our minds in time, but we shall never be allowed to forget the fifty pounds of the detestable Boult."
"He was poor papa's friend—the only one. He was good to papa," Deleah said, but to herself alone. For in that unhappy household was a law, unwritten, unspoken, but binding none the less, that the name of the husband and father should never be spoken.
"We must remember that the fifty pounds seems a great deal to him," Mrs. Day reminded them. "The least we can do is to pay him the compliment of telling him what we intend to do with the money."
However, she found, on interviewing George Boult, that no such delicate attention was expected from her. The money he had raised was money for him to handle—for the benefit of Mrs. Day and her children of course, but without reference to what might be their feelings in the matter.
He was not a man to doubt his own wisdom, or to seek to confirm an opinion with the approval of others, or to hesitate in the pursuit of a course which to his perceptions appeared desirable. Also, having mapped out his plan or set out on his chosen path he never afterwards allowed to himself that there were others. A simple method which reduced to nothing for him the chances of regret or mental worry.
He was an eminently successful tradesman. His draper's business, which had been on a par with the businesses of half a dozen drapers when he had originally started in Brockenham, was now easily the first of its kind, not only in the town but in the county. It was natural that he should believe in trade—natural that he should fix his faith to nothing else as a means of money-making.
"There's nothing like business," he said to Mrs. Day.
She was seated in his private counting-room on the upper floor of the big shop—it was half a dozen shops joined into one now. To reach that room she had to pass through an ante-room full of entering clerks, busy at their desks. They lifted their heads from their quill-driving to look at the poor woman as she went by. She went with hanging head, her thick widow's veil over her face, the thought in her mind, "Perhaps among the poor clerks that collection of six shillings and ninepence had been made." Perhaps one of the chilblain-fingered girls behind the counters down below had been the "Sympathiser" to whom she had been indebted for a shilling.
She was humbled to the earth. It was so she would have described her condition, as she walked to her interview with George Boult. If she had been told that her heart, on the contrary, was filled with pride, and beating high with rebellion, and that it was just the want of humility within her, who yet contrived to present a humble bearing, which made everything so unnecessarily painful, she would not have believed.
When, seated opposite to him at the small square leather-covered writing-table in the draper's counting-house, she turned back her veil, he noticed at once the ravages which grief and shame and anxiety had made in her face. He was quick to notice, because, practical, hard-working, hard-headed widower as he was, he had an eye for female beauty, and the handsome dark face of his friend's wife—the woman who, in the days of her haughtiness, had turned her back on him and kept him at arm's length—he had unwillingly admired.
The face of Lydia Day now was that of a woman who had been plump but was so no longer. The cheeks which had been firm and full were pendulous, the healthily pale but brunette complexion was of a leaden pallor; in the darkened skin beneath the deep-set, large dark eyes, little puckers showed. Her figure, too, had fallen away. She had lost her proud, self-assured carriage.
"It's finished her off, as far as looks go," George Boult said to himself, not entirely without satisfaction. He was one of those who firmly believed his friend's ruin lay at her door. William Day had robbed to minister to his wife's extravagance and pride. It was well that she should be humbled.
"There is nothing like business," he repeated. "And I have decided to invest the little capital of six hundred and forty-nine pounds and a few odd shillings I have raised for you, in a business which will yield a good return, and enable you to make a living for your two younger children. A groshery business, in short."
"Grocery?" repeated Mrs. Day, gazing blankly at him.
"Groshery," he said shortly, and looked hardily at her with his lips set, his chin stuck out, and his quick observant eyes on her face.
"Grocery?" she reiterated faintly, at a loss for anything else to say.
"You know that nice bright little business in Bridge Street? Carr's. Old Jonas Carr's. He is retiring, you know—or perhaps you don't know—it's been kept secret for business purposes. I am glad to have got hold of it in the nick of time, and I am putting your little capital into the business."
"Indeed!"
"It's a stroke of wonderful luck, I consider—its falling in, just now."
"But I do not quite understand. Will someone who is taking the shop allow a good interest, do you mean?"
"Not exactly that, ma'am." He gave a sound that might have been caused by a smothered chuckle, or have been meant for a snort of contempt, and going from the table, placed himself upon the hearthrug, where he paused, making a prayer perhaps for patience to be given him to deal with this fool in her untrained, untaught folly.
"Not exactly," he went on. "I am taking the business for you to work, ma'am. Jonas Carr is an old man now, but he has lived out of the business, and brought up his children out of it, and this with only antiquated methods. With new life put into the concern, and with altogether up-to-date management, there is the making there, in my opinion—and I think I may say my opinion on such a matter is of value—of an excellent little business."
"For me to work?" Mrs. Day asked in feeble protest. "Me? Agrocerybusiness?"
"Why not?" He eyed her relentlessly, biting his finger nails. "What did you think you were going to do with the money which I have collected for you? Spend it? And collect again?"
"Not that, Mr. Boult. Certainly not that." She looked down at the black-gloved hands which lay in her lap. They trembled; to keep them steady she caught them one in the other. "I have been talking it over with my children, and we have decided, if you approve, to take a good-sized house by the sea, where we could all live together, and take in lodgers. That would be a way of making a living which would come easier to my girls and me than any other."
"Easier? Yes. The misfortune is, ma'am, that the things which are easier in the beginning are always difficult to finish up. We'll begin the other way round, if you please." He bit the nail a minute longer, looked at it, put it out of sight behind his coat tails. "Ah no; that scheme won't do at all," he said, quite pleasantly. "I know these lodgings, and the miserable women who keep them, and can only make ends meet by thieving the lodgers' mutton. The groshery line is altogether on another shelf. You and your daughters can not only make a living at it, you can make money. Make money."
Mrs. Day lifted her head, tried to capture something of her old bearing, tried to get a note of firmness into her voice. "I do not really think I could keep a shop," she said. "Above all, a grocery shop. I could not undertake it, Mr. Boult; and I am sure the girls would not like it at all; nor my son."
"What then?" he asked her, very quiet.
"I think my own plan. The house by the sea. We should escape from Brockenham, which we much wish to do; we should begin again where we—where our story—is not known. For the children's sake it would be best. For us all it would be more—suitable."
"But I have told you, ma'am, the plan is out of the question." He turned from her and kicked the coal in the grate, working off his irritation in that harmless fashion. Then, facing the poor lady again he adopted a tone intended to show her he was not to be trifled with. "Understand at once, Mrs. Day, I will be no party to the money subscribed on the tacit understanding that it is to be properly invested for you and your children, being thrown away in any such hopeless, silly fashion. Your husband asked me to stand your friend; to do my best for you. As I understand the position, you have no one else to look to?"
He paused, but she said nothing. William Day's relatives had been poorer, less well placed than he. As he had risen he had left them behind, forgotten them. Mrs. Day had been the only child of parents long since dead.
"Since there is no one else, I am willing to be your friend—within limits, of course. I have been instrumental in securing for you this sum of money—many fortunes have been made with less. To begin with I did not have half the capital. In doing so I made myself responsible for its being put to a proper use. I intend to see that it is done."
Mrs. Day was mute. The eyes looking out from their dark-stained orbits were hopeless.
Mr. Boult having paused for the reply which did not come, went on in a lighter tone. "There is a very good-sized house over Carr's shop. I went over it, and in deed into everything before deciding. There are six bed-rooms and a living room of unusual size. This gives you the opportunity of taking a lodger. I have already spoken to my new buyer about it. My Manchester man. He is anxious to board with a pleasant family, he tells me. So there you have a lodger ready to your hand, ma'am; since you fancy lodgers."
Mrs. Day had a feeling of oppression in the breathless air of the counting-house, of being smothered by George Boult. She untied the broad strings of ribbon and crape of her widow's bonnet, and looked round anxiously for a window. There was none, the counting-house being lighted by a sky-light. Two big tears rolled down her cheeks, she drew a long breath like a great sigh.
"I am giving my Manchester man a good salary," the draper went on. "He would easily be able to spare you thirty shillings a week for board and lodging, and I should not advise you to take a penny less."
Mrs. Day with an effort pulled herself together. "The man who is to manage the shop would want a room in the house, I suppose?" she suggested.
"Manage the shop? What shop?"
"The shop you have been speaking of—the grocer's shop."
"You yourself will manage it," Boult said. "Nice bright little concern as it is, the business won't keep a man; you will manage it, assisted on busy days by your eldest daughter."
But although Mrs. Day could not fight for herself, she was capable of defending her children. "To that I could not consent," she said; "I would never allow Bessie—Bessie!—to wait in a grocer's shop."
"It would not hurt her, ma'am. It would do her good."
Mrs. Day was silent, but her silence was eloquent. With shaking fingers she tied her bonnet strings—the wide black strings that wanted pulling out, the narrow white ones which must be arranged above them.
Boult, seeing that she was preparing to depart, assumed a more friendly tone. "You must not feel that you are being hustled into this thing," he said. "The money is, of course, in a sense, yours, although I have had to decide what to do with it."