"Perhaps she will," said Gibbon, and looked at his partner, who met the other's eyes hardily.

"If she does," he said with sudden bl.u.s.ter, "the fool that owns the carriage is a ruined man. Mark my words. Extravagant, idle young woman.

Die in the workhouse--that's what Bessie Day will do. Look here, Gibbon; you know how things are; you know all I've done for them. I could put up the shutters of the shop to-morrow, and they could not help theirselves.

Bessie knows it too. I have not made a secret of these things. She knows I hold them in the hollow of my hand. Yet to hear her cheek me! The daring of it! Gibbon," he touched the younger man's shoulder with the stiff finger of his thick hand, "I used to think that you--eh?"

"No," said Gibbon, with decision.

"Nice little place all ready--when you've spent a few pounds more--?"

"No, thank you."

"Is that so?" Boult said, and pressed his lips together, nodding his head and seeming to take time to turn the information over in his mind. Then he leant forward, and again touched the other's shoulder, tapping it two or three times by way of emphasis. "You're wise," he said, confidentially.

"Take my word for it, Gibbon, you're wise. If I were a marrying man, which, thank Heaven, I am not, I wouldn't risk marrying Bessie Day if there was not another woman on earth."

CHAPTER XXVII

Promotion For Mrs. Day

Deleah had lived for several months at Cashelthorpe as companion to Miss Forcus, when on a certain Thursday afternoon she excused herself, as it was often her habit to do, from attending on Miss Forcus, and went to pa.s.s the hour and a half of the early-closing day with her mother and sister.

Mrs. Day was alone at the moment of her arrival, and that her mother was in unusually low spirits was quite obvious to Deleah.

"Come for a walk with me, mama; it is not good for you to be shut up on such a day in this stuffy room."

Mrs. Day declined, but she could not deny that the room was stuffy. No flowers were on the table now that Gibbon's offerings had ceased. No plants on the wide window seat. On a whatnot in a corner which had been devoted to the child's belongings were Franky's paint-box and some of his toys. The mother's eyes turned from Deleah, now well appointed in her pretty muslin and hat with its long ostrich feather, and rested on these mementoes.

"But for what happened to him you would not be where you are, Deleah," she said.

"But you wish me to be there, mama?"

"Oh, I wish it, dear, since you are happy; only--"

She did not put the thought into words--only Franky seemed to have died for this. Franky, who had come crying to her one day because a school-fellow had laughed at the patch on this trousers: Franky who had begged so hard only a few hours before his death for a little box of conjuring tools like w.i.l.l.y Spratt's, which had to be denied him. Her little Franky crushed to death beneath the wheels of the Forcus carriage!

In her heart the mother would have liked Deleah to reject the good things offered her by the Forcus hand.

"Of course I am not happy!" Deleah said. "How can I be happy, mama, if you are unhappy? And poor little Franky--do you think I forget him? And Bernard, and--poor papa? And again I'm not happy because I don't _earn_ the money they pay me," Deleah said, and her cheeks grew pink at the thought. "It is out of charity they give it me. I _can't_ earn fifty pounds a year by just sitting in a carriage, or sewing beads on to canvas, giving a few messages to servants, writing a few letters! I wonder if they would be glad if I gave it all up, mama?"

"We're leaving the shop," Mrs. Day told her. "You must try to keep where you are, for the time, Deleah. Miss Forcus is kind to you?"

"Oh, so heavenly kind!"

"And Sir Francis?"

"I suppose he knows I am in the house. Yes. Sometimes he speaks to me quite ten words a day. Tell me about leaving the shop, mama."

"Mr. Boult has proved to me that we are not solvent."

"What does that mean? Not that we are bankrupt? Oh, mama! As if we had not had disgrace enough without that!"

"There is no end to it," Mrs. Day said hopelessly. "But you, at least, are out of it, Deleah." She had a dreary air of detachment about her; the troubles that had beset them had been common to them all, but Mrs. Day sat, on this holiday afternoon, as if she were singled out and set apart, a queen of sorrows. Deleah resented that att.i.tude.

"Surely you don't think I want to be out of it, mama! Do you think I want to live in luxury while you and Bessie haven't a home?"

And at that moment Bessie appeared, coming in from the kitchen and confidential confabulation with Emily. Her face was flushed, and her eyes glittered with an excitement too evidently not pleasurable.

"Well! What do you think of it?" she burst forth.

"It is bad news. But everything that happens to us is bad," said Deleah, with uncharacteristic despondency.

"Bad?" echoed Bessie. "That depends on how you look at it."

"Bankruptcy? To owe more than we can pay? I should have thought that there was only one way of looking at it."

Bessie swung round to her mother. "You haven't told Deda!" she cried accusingly. "She hasn't told you! Mama is going to marry Mr. Boult, Deleah."

"To _marry_ him!" Deleah cried, as if she might have cried "to _murder_ him!" and sprang from her chair to stand before her mother. "Mama! Mama!"

Mrs. Day, sitting huddled in her chair as if she lacked the spirit to hold herself upright, and looking all at once a dozen years older, shook a desponding head. "I can't!" she said. "I don't think I _can_ do it."

"Well, you've got the chance," Bessie said, hardly. "And it's a good one.

Good for all of us. He's rich. He has sat here bragging of his money to me--and that he might spend a couple of thousand a year if he liked. As if I cared! But if it's going to be yours, mama--two thousand a year--I do care. I do!"

"But we can't think only of ourselves, Bessie," Deleah, horrified, put in.

"We've got to think of mama. She could never endure it."

"She should have thought of that before," Bessie said. "Mama should not have been so sly and underhand--"

"Bessie! Bessie! You can't mean what you say."

"I mean every word of it. Pretending to dislike him! Pretending to keep out of his way!"

"Deleah, I have told your sister I nearly died of astonishment when he spoke to me. The idea had never entered my head." Poor Mrs. Day leant the head upon her hand and hid her face, in her misery.

"Bessie, you are not to bully mama. Do be silent. Don't mind her, mama.

What did you say to him?"

"I didn't say one way or the other."

"Such nonsense!" cried the irrepressible Bessie. "You'll have to say! and he isn't in any doubt about it. He came to me and told me he was going to be my papa. I could have felled him to the earth when he said it! But I did not. I said 'You may be a papa to me a hundred times over, I will never be a daughter to you. Never! Never! Never!'"

"But if mama did this horrible thing, you'd have to be his daughter--you'd have to live in his house--"

"I'd live there, but I'd make it warm for him!" Bessie cried; and then her feelings becoming too much for her, she dashed from the room, and slammed the door behind her.