There was in Ada Forcus that ineradicable love of gaiety which some women carry to the grave. Since, at the death of his wife, she had gone to keep house for her brother small indulgence had been shown to this pa.s.sion. In the grave of his wife, not only all Sir Francis's heart had been buried, but apparently the love of all that made for the brightness of life. By the time the poignancy of his sorrow had worn off, to be solemn and sad of demeanour, to shun the disturbing effects of social distraction, had become second nature to him. By no wish of his own, but naturally and irresistibly, that habit of melancholy which had fallen on its master seemed to enshroud his home. He liked his brother to be with him in the home in which he had been born, but he would not welcome his brother's friends. He was greatly attached to the sister, who was half a dozen years older than himself, but the idea that she could desire any other company than his own, had not apparently presented itself.

"There are some things a man can never learn," the mid-Victorian Ada said to herself, when Sir Francis prophesied that she would find a companion a bore. "And one is that a woman, however happily situated in a man's house, must have another woman easy of access to talk with, to sew with, to whisper to."

CHAPTER XXVI

A Householder

When it was explained to her that a man was to be put into the shop to give her a holiday, Mrs. Day refused the indulgence. Her heart was broken, but she was not ill. To have had a little time to give to Franky--to take him for walks in the country, to read to him, to help him with his favourite occupation of painting old numbers of the _Ill.u.s.trated News_ and _Punch_ would have been a joy. Often she had longed for the leisure to do these things. But now that Franky was gone, where was the use of leisure?

She did not even want the leisure to cry. She who had wept so often in this latest sorrow could shed no tears.

Deleah cried, wetting the pillow nightly with her tears. When talking of matters quite unconnected with the lost child the tears would come welling up, drowning the beautiful hazel eyes; would tremble, as she tried to go on talking, on the thick black lashes; would roll, she pretending not to notice, down her cheeks.

Bessie cried--howled, even, lying with her face buried in the sofa cushion, calling in a smothered voice upon Franky's name.

Emily cried, cleaning with spirits of ammonia the shabby school suit whose odour had so offended the nostrils of the elder sister. Putting yet another patch in the hinder portions of the trousers, the only use of such labours being that it delayed the laying away of the little garments for ever.

But the mother was denied such easy expression of sorrow that was beyond words and beyond tears. "I am not ill. Mr. Pretty and I can manage," she said, and the subst.i.tute supplied by George Boult was sent back.

Mr. Pretty was very good to her, giving up, for the time being, his surrept.i.tious smokes in the cellar, his skylarking with the youths of his own age who pa.s.sed the door, giving his serious attention to duties he had consistently shirked hitherto.

Every one who came near the bereaved mother committed the common mistake of ignoring her loss. Even her daughters did this as much as possible; so that in the place where the child's name had been on every lip it was no longer heard.

Those who have endured such a loss know how the ear sickens for the sound of a name which yet the tongue refuses to utter; how the heart stirs to the music of it when at length it is p.r.o.nounced.

Mr. Pretty did not understand this, but also he did not know the accepted creed that of the newly dead it is kindest not to speak. He had not seemed very fond of the child, had often complained of him as a hindrance when Franky had wished to help him to grind the coffee or to clean the currants, yet he had laid by a store of sayings and doings which he drew on now for his mother's ear. Stories of Franky's naughtiness, even: of his partiality for the neighbourhood of a certain drawer which contained preserved cherries. Of his cheek in daring to address the a.s.sistant as "Pretty" without the Mr., and, the youth objecting, his ready subst.i.tution of an adjective which certainly was more descriptive of his appearance. Of his riding on Mr. Pretty's back when he, in pursuit of his duty, must crawl on all fours under the counter; his clinging to his legs when duty again called him to mount the steps for the topmost shelf. Nothing was too absurd, no tiny record too trivial to be precious in the mother's ears.

A source of furtive interest to her were the movements of w.i.l.l.y Spratt, the cutler's son. Instructed thereto by his parents, who may have thought that the sight of him would be painful to the poor woman, the child gave up, going to the shop to spend his pennies. Looking in, a little wistfully at first, as he pa.s.sed, he soon ran, singing or shouting, by the door, with no thought of the little companion who used to wait to join him there. When at length he took to coming in again for his screw of sweets, Mrs. Day would look away from him resentfully, leaving him to Mr. Pretty to serve. She could not bring herself to speak to the child who was alive and well, and happy with his acid-drops, while Franky lay in his grave.

Of the company of Mr. Boult at that time the Days had more than enough.

Mr. Gibbon used to get up and retire to his room or go out to walk the streets, when the head of his firm appeared. "I have enough of him in working hours," he would excuse himself afterwards. "Mr. Boult is all very well in his place."

"I'm sure I wish he would keep there!" Bessie would declare. She thought the Honourable Charles was jealous; for with the elder daughter the draper had come to indulge in a kind of heavy badinage which may have gratified George Boult, and apparently was not displeasing to Bessie, but which those who looked on must have found fatiguing.

Bessie always pretended to be bored by these encounters of wit with the fat, bald-headed man who had been her father's contemporary: "You have no right to yawn when I am talking to you, Miss Bessie," he would reprove her. "Why do you do it?"

"Because I am tired."

"You mean because you are tired of my company? That is not the reason you yawn, however. You yawn because you have indigestion."

"I? Indigestion? What makes you think so, pray? Do I look like indigestion? Have I spots on my face, or a red nose?"

"No, but you are growing fat. You eat too much."

"Mr. Boult, how _dare_ you!"

"You eat too much, and work too little. You don't take exercise enough to digest your food."

"You are making personal remarks, Mr. Boult. No gentleman can make personal remarks to a lady unless they are complimentary--" and so on.

When Deleah went away it seemed that Bessie blossomed out into greater attractiveness. Perhaps in the restricted s.p.a.ces of Bridge Street there had not been room enough or air enough for the development of both sisters; or it may have been that Deleah, with her superior beauty and winsomeness, shone the other down, and that Bessie had been conscious of the fact. Certainly she grew more amiable, more useful, even grew prettier and more lovable. And George Boult came often, and more often. Hardly a night that he did not come.

The business, not paying, must be disposed of; there was no absolute cause for hurry; Mrs. Day could hang on till an advantageous offer was made, Mr.

Boult decided. The house, open to receive him whenever it pleased him to go, suited him. He liked the long narrow sitting-room above the shop, with its fireplace at one end, and its three deep-seated windows at the other, where he could sit now as in his own home, and talk to Bessie wilfully idle, or Bessie pretending to sew--always Bessie pleasant to look upon, and oddly stimulating, with her daring treatment of him.

Deleah gone, Franky gone, it was very snug there, especially when the winter evenings came on, and the poor widow stayed late in her shop while he and Bessie sat and "chaffed," as he called it, alone.

How she dared! he often asked himself. To think of all the benefits he had bestowed on the family, and that she dared!

"What would have become of you all if I had not got up that subscription-list, and started you in business?" he asked her.

"What's going to become of us now that the money is spent, and the business has failed?" she retorted.

"You leave that to me," he told her, and as good as promised that the future of the family was safe with him. He expected her, perhaps, to be overcome with grat.i.tude; instead of which she gave him a not unneeded lesson in manners, advising him that a person of so much importance should not demean himself by blowing his own trumpet.

In the sitting-room over the shop was no attraction for Charles Gibbon, Deleah's light figure and darling face being absent from it. He could afford a house very well now. Not the grand house of which Deleah had spoken, but one which would suffice to his modest wants. A house with a big garden beyond, where, supposing a lady ever came to live there who was fond of flowers, roses might be grown, honeysuckle, jessamine trained. A garden where a bower could be constructed large enough for two who could eat their strawberries there, in season, or drink a gla.s.s of wine there, on a Sunday afternoon. Far out of the town, for choice, on a road at whose gate some one might stand watching the departure of the master, as he went to work in the morning, welcoming him when he returned at night.

In his spare hours he occupied himself in looking for such a retreat, and when the ideal one was found he left his rooms in Bridge Street and went to live there.

George Boult took the trouble to walk out one Sunday afternoon to the little trellis-covered house, a mile and a half away from the town, and discovered the junior partner in his shirt-sleeves rolling the gravel of the back-garden. Boult, a strict Sabbatarian, was more than a little shocked to observe that breach of decorum. The fact that the back-garden was not overlooked, set his mind at rest, however. "We've got to be careful about such things. Customers are often particular," he said.

The patronage of the visitor who insisted on being taken over the small domain was trying to the temper of its proprietor, uneasily conscious already that the lawn was only half big enough for the croquet-hoops ostentatiously set forth thereon; that the furniture in the dining-room was much too big for it, and that in the drawing-room absolutely unsuited to its purpose. He wished to forget these defects, which the other thought it his duty conscientiously to point out.

"Very nice. Very nice. Very suitable indeed," was the verdict finally p.r.o.nounced. The Honourable Charles's soreness was not at all soothed thereby. Since the abode, obviously in Mr. Boult's eyes, left so much to be desired, it was no compliment to be told it was suitable. "A very nice little cage, Gibbon. Where is the bird?"

"No hurry," Gibbon said, sullenly uncommunicative. Earnestly desiring his departure he had strolled with his visitor to the gate. To have him on Sunday as well as all the week was a little too much, he was saying to himself, aloud saying nothing. And at that moment a carriage was driven past, whose servants wore the green and tan liveries of the Forcuses. One of the two ladies seated in the carriage, with a look of surprise on her face, leant eagerly forward and bowed to the men at the gate. Mr. Boult, taken unaware, made a dash at his hat, Gibbon, bare-headed, did not so much as bend his neck in response to the salutation, but his face grew leaden-white.

"Slap up turn-out! I suppose their carriages are always dashing by?" Mr.

Boult said; for the road on which the Laburnums stood was that which led to Cashelthorpe.

He was generally at work at the back of the house, and could not say how often they pa.s.sed, Gibbon said.

"You'd rather be looking at your three-yard-square of croquet-lawn than at Deleah Day in the Forcuses' carriage, Gibbon?"

Gibbon plucked a leaf from the hedge and put it in his mouth, but made no reply to the facetious remark.

"What are they doing, driving their horses, and dragging out their servants in the middle of a Sunday afternoon?"

They went sometimes, in the afternoon, to a service at the Cathedral, Gibbon, who in spite of being habitually at the back of the house evidently knew something of the Forcuses' movements, was able to communicate.

"Little Miss Deleah thinks a mighty lot of herself, seated up there in state."

He should not think so, Gibbon said. "What is she but a servant there? She was a far greater lady, to my thinking, when she sat in the room over her mother's shop."

"It's Bessie that should ride in her carriage," Mr. Boult declared.