After Mark and Dan had gone a great and very remarkable change came over
Papa and Mamma. Mamma left off saying the funny things that Mary could
not understand, and Papa left off teasing and flying into tempers and
looking like Jehovah and walking by himself in the cool of the evening.
He followed Mamma about the garden. He hung over her chair, like Mark, as
she sat sewing. You came upon him suddenly on the stairs and in the
passages, and he would look at you as if you were not there, and say,
"Where's your mother? Go and tell her I want her." And Mamma would put
away her trowel and her big leather gloves and go to him. She would sit
for hours in the library while he flapped the newspaper and read to her
in a loud voice about Mr. Gladstone whom she hated.
Sometimes he would come home early from the office, and Mamma and Mary
would be ready for him, and they would all go together to call at Vinings
or Barkingside Vicarage or on the Proparts.
Or Mr. Parish's wagonette would be ordered, and Mamma and Mary would put
on their best clothes very quick and go up to London with him, and he
would take them to St. Paul's or Maskelyne and Cooke's, or the National
Gallery or the British Museum. Or they would walk slowly, very slowly, up
Regent Street, stopping at the windows of the bonnet shops while Mamma
picked out the bonnet she would buy if she could afford it. And perhaps
the next day a bonnet would come in a bandbox, a bonnet that frightened
her when she put it on and looked at herself in the glass. She would
pretend it was one of the bonnets she had wanted; and when Papa had
forgotten about it she would pull all the trimming off and put it all on
again a different way, and Papa would say it was an even more beautiful
bonnet than he had thought.
You might have supposed that he was sorry because he was thinking about
Mark and Dan and trying to make up for having been unkind to them. But he
was not sorry. He was glad. Glad about something that Mamma had done. He
would go about whistling some gay tune, or you caught him stroking his
moustache and parting it over his rich lips that smiled as if he were
thinking of what Mamma had done to make him happy. The red specks and
smears had gone from his eyes, they were clear and blue, and they looked
at you with a kind, gentle look, like Uncle Victor's. His very beard was
happy.
"You may not know it, but your father is the handsomest man in Essex,"
Mamma said.
Perhaps it wasn't anything that Mamma had done. Perhaps he was only happy
because he was being good. Every Sunday he went to church at Barkingside
with Mamma, kneeling close to her in the big pew and praying in a great,
ghostly voice, "Good Lord, deliver us!" When the psalms and hymns began
he rose over the pew-ledge, yards and yards of him, as if he stood on
many hassocks, and he lifted up his beard and sang. All these times the
air fairly tingled with him; he seemed to beat out of himself and spread
around him the throb of violent and overpowering life. And in the
evenings towards sunset they walked together in the fields, and Mary
followed them, lagging behind in the borders where the sharlock and wild
rye and poppies grew. When she caught up with them she heard them
talking.