Poor Salvina!

II

At last the welcome jar and creak of the gate awoke her.

"Why, I thought you knew I had to go to the Borough!" began a fretful voice, forestalling reproach, and a buxom woman resplendent with black satin and much jewellery came up the tiny garden-path.

"It doesn't matter, mother--I haven't been waiting long."

"Well, you know how difficult it is to get a 'bus in this weather--at least if you want to sit outside, and it always makes my head ache frightfully to go inside--I'm not strong and young like you--and such a long way, I had to change at the Bank, and I made sure you'd get something to eat at one of the girls', and go straight to the People's Palace."

Still muttering, Mrs. Brill produced a key, and after some fumbling threw open the door. Both made a step within, then both stopped, aghast.

"It's the wrong house," thought Salvina confusedly, conscious of her power of making such mistakes.

"_Kisshuf_ (witchcraft)!" whispered her mother, terrified into her native idiom. The pa.s.sage lay before them, entirely bare of all its familiar colour and furniture: the framed engravings depicting the trials of William Lord Russell, in the Old Bailey, and Earl Stafford in Westminster Hall, the flower-pots on the hall table, the proudly purchased hat-rack, the metal umbrella-stand, all gone! And beyond, facing them, lay the parlour, an equally forlorn vacancy striking like a blast of chilly wind through its wide-open door.

"Thieves!" cried Mrs. Brill, reverting from the supernatural and the Yiddish. "Murder! I'm ruined! They've stolen my house!"

"Hush! Hush!" said Salvina, strung to calm by her mother's incoherence. "Let us see first what has really happened."

"Happened! Haven't you got eyes in your head? All the fruit of my years of toil!" And Mrs. Brill wrung her jewelled hands. "Your father would have me call on those Sperlings, though I told him they'd be glad to dance on my tomb. And why didn't Lazarus stay at home?"

"You know he has to be out looking for work."

"And my gilt clock that I trembled even to wind up, and the big vase with the picture on it, and my antimaca.s.sars, and my beautiful couch that n.o.body had ever sat upon! Oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d!"

Leaving her mother moaning out a complete inventory in the pa.s.sage, Salvina advanced into the violated parlour. It was an aching void. On the bare mantelpiece, just where the gilt clock had announced a perpetual half-past two, gleamed an unstamped letter. She took it up wonderingly. It was in her father's schoolboyish hand, addressed to her mother. She opened it, as usual, for Mrs. Brill did not even know the alphabet, and refused steadily to make its acquaintance, to the ironic humiliation of the Board School teacher.

"You would not let me give you _Get_," [ran the letter abruptly], "so you have only yourself to blame. I have left the clothes in the bed-rooms, but what is mine is mine. Good-bye.

"MICHAEL BRILL.

"P.S.--Don't try to find me at the factory. I have left."

Salvina steadied herself against the mantelpiece till the room should have finished reeling round. _Get!_ Her father had wanted to put away her mother! Divorce, departure, devastation--what strange things were these, come to wreck a prosperity so slowly built up!

"Quick, Salvina, there goes a policeman!" came her mother's cry.

The room stood still suddenly. "Hush, hush, mother," Salvina said imperiously. "There's no thief!" She ran back into the pa.s.sage, the letter in her hand.

A fierce flame of intelligence leapt into the woman's face. "Ah, it's your father!" she cried. "I knew it, I knew he'd go after that painted widow, just because she has a little money, a black curse on her bones. Oh! oh! G.o.d in heaven! To bring such shame on me, for the sake of a saucy-nosed s.l.u.t whose sister sold ironmongery in Petticoat Lane--a low lot, one and all, and not fit to wipe my shoes on, even when she was respectable, and this is what you call a father, Salvina!

Oh my G.o.d, my G.o.d!"

Salvina was by this time dazed, yet she had a gleam of consciousness left with which to register this culminating destruction of all her social landmarks. What! That monstrous wickedness of marquises and epauletted officers which hovered vaguely in the shadow-land of novels and plays had tumbled with a bang into real life; had fallen not even into its natural gilded atmosphere, but through the amulet-guarded doors of a respectable Jewish family in the heart of a Hackney Terrace, amid the horsehair couches and deal tables of homely reality.

Nay--more sordid than the romantic wickedness of shadowland--it had even removed those couches and tables! And oddly blent with this tossing chaos of new thought in Salvina's romantic brain surged up another thought, no less new and startling. Her father and mother had once loved each other! They, too, had dawned upon each other, fairy prince and fairy princess; had laid in each other's hand that warm touch of trust and readiness to live and die for each other. It was very wonderful, and she almost forgot their hostile relationship in a rapid back-glance upon the years in which they had lived in mutual love before her unsuspecting eyes. Their prosaic bickering selves were transfigured: her vivid imagination threw off the damage of the years, saw her coa.r.s.e, red-cheeked father and her too plump mother as the idyllic figures on the lamented parlour vase. And when her thought struggled painfully back to the actual moment, it was with a new concrete sense of its tragic intensity.

"O mother, mother!" she cried, as she threw her arms round her. The Greek grammar and the letter fell unregarded to the floor.

The fountain of Mrs. Brill's wrongs leapt higher at the sympathy. "And I could have had half-a-dozen young men! The boils of Egypt be upon him! Time after time I said, 'No,' though the Shadchan bewitched my parents into believing that Michael was an angel without wings."

"But you also thought father an angel," Salvina pleaded.

"Yes; and now he _has_ got wings," said Mrs. Brill savagely.

Salvina's tears began to ooze out. Poor swain and shepherdess on the parlour vase! Was this, then, how idylls ended? "Perhaps he'll come back," she murmured.

The wife snorted viciously. "And my furniture? The beautiful furniture I toiled and sc.r.a.ped for, that he always grumbled at, though I saved it out of the housekeeping money, without its costing _him_ a penny, and no man in London had better meals,--hot meat every day and fish for Sabbath, even when plaice were eightpence a pound,--and no servant--every sc.r.a.p of work done with my own two hands! Now he carts everything away as if it were his."

"I suppose it is by law," Salvina said mildly.

"Law! I'll have the law on him."

"Oh, no, mother!" and Salvina shuddered. "Besides, he has left our clothes."

Mrs. Brill's eye lit up. "I see no clothes."

"In our rooms. The letter says so."

"And you still believe what he says?" She began to mount the stairs.

"I am sure he packed in my Paisley shawl while he was about it. It is fortunate I wore all my jewellery. And you always say I put on too much!"

Sustained by this unanswerable vindication of her past policy, Mrs.

Brill ascended the stairs without further wailing.

Salvina, whose sense of romance never exalted her above the practical, remembered now that her brother Lazarus might come back at any moment clamorously hungry. This pinned her to the concrete moment. How to get him some supper! And her mother, too, must be faint and tired. She ran into the kitchen, and found enough odds and ends left to make a meal, and even a cracked teapot and a few coa.r.s.e cups not worth carrying away; and, with a sense of Robinson Crusoe adventure, she extracted light, heat, and cheerfulness from the obedient gas branch, which took on the air of a case of precious goods not washed away in the household wreck. When her mother at last came down, cataloguing the wardrobe salvage in picturesque Yiddish, Salvina stopped her curses with hot tea. They both drank, leaning against the kitchen-dresser, which served for a table for the cups.

Salvina's Crusoe excitement increased when her mother asked her where they were to sleep, seeing that even the beds had been spirited away.

"I have five shillings in my purse; I'll go out and buy a cheap mattress. But then there's Lazarus! Oh dear!"

"Lazarus has his own bed. Yes, yes, thank G.o.d, we'll be able to borrow his wedding furniture."

"But it's all stored away in the Jonas's attic."

A smart rat-tat at the door denoted the inopportune return of Lazarus himself. Salvina darted upstairs to let him in and break the shock. He was a slimmer and more elegant edition of his father, a year older than Kitty, and taller than Salvina by a jaunty head and shoulders.

"And why isn't the hall lamp alight?" he queried, as her white face showed itself in the dusky door-slit. "It looks so beastly shabby. The only light's in the kitchen; I daresay you and the mater are pigging there again. Why can't you live up to your position?"

The unexpected reproach broke her down. "We have no position any more," she sobbed out. And all the long years of paralyzing economies swept back to her memory, all the painful progress--accelerated by her growing salary--from the Hounsditch apartments to the bow-windows and gas-chandeliers of Hackney!

"What do you mean? What is the matter? Speak, you little fool! Don't cry." He came across the threshold and shook her roughly.

"Father's run away with the furniture and some woman," she explained chokingly.

"The devil!" The smart cane slipped from his fingers and he maintained his cigar in his mouth with difficulty. "Do you mean to say the old man has gone and--the beastly brute! The selfish hypocrite!

But how could he get the furniture?"