my ringolets."
The comb was thrust within cold fingers which did not close upon it.
"If so bein' yer don't set ter wark and comb 'em out I'll shake ye.
I'll shake ye, mother, du yer hare? Du yer hare, mother? Th' bell's
gone, an' how'm I ter go ter school an' my ringolets not carled?"
They were not curled that morning, however, for at the sound of the
child's angry, frightened voice Mrs Barrett came running upstairs and
seized her and dragged her from the room.
"Yer baggige, yu! Ter spake i' that mander to a dyin' woman!"
"She ain't a-dyin', then," the child screamed as she was thrust from
the house. "She ain't a-dyin', an' I want my ringolets carled."
Once, when Dora had announced in the hearing of a pupil-teacher that
she was the prettiest girl in the school: "You ain't, then," the older
girl had told her. "You are not pretty at all, Dora, but exactly like
your brother Jim."
"Jim's ugly! You're a-tazin' of me!" Dora had fiercely cried.
"If you hadn't your curls you'd be Jim over again," the teacher had
persisted.
She was a tempestuous little animal. She had flown to her mother with
the horrid insinuation, had sobbed and screamed, and kicked the
innocent, ugly Jim. If she had not her curls!
But she had them. Even this morning, when for the first time she must
appear in school without having them freshly curled, the consciousness
of their weight upon her shoulders was a comfort to the child. As well
as she could without disarranging the set of it, she smoothed each long
curl into order as she walked along. The sun of autumn shone, lying
like a benediction upon the land whose fruits were gathered; among the
hips and haws in the hedges the birds, their family cares all over,
sang lightsomely, with vacant hearts. Happiness was in the air. Perhaps
someone would say how pretty the curls were, to-day. Perhaps, as once,
blessedly, before had happened, a lady riding slowly along the green
wayside might pull up her horse to inquire whose little girl she was,
to give her sixpence, to ask how much she would take for her beautiful
curls.
Ah, with what joy on that happy morning Dora had galloped home to give
the account to her mother! The sixpence had gone to buy the blue ribbon
Dora wore among her locks on Sundays; but how the mother had cheered
up! She had seemed almost well for half an hour that evening, and Dora
had told the tale again and again.
"I was a-walkin' along, like this here, not a thinkin' a mite o' my
ringolets, an' I see th' woman on th' horse keep a-smilin'. So I made
my manners, an' she pulled up 'r horse. 'Whu's little gal be yu?' she
say; 'an' where did yu git yer lovely hair?'"
Her mother had eaten two bits of bread-and-butter, that evening, and
had drunk the tea Dora all alone had made her. How happy it had been!
Perhaps it would all happen again.
Morning school over, she was putting on her hat among a struggling mass
of children anxious to get into the open, where there was a great blue
vault to shout under, and stones to shy, when the schoolmistress from
the empty class-room called her back. The woman stood by her silently
for a minute, one hand on the child's shoulder, the other moving
thoughtfully over the shining fell of hair.
"Don't shout and play with the others to-day, Dora," she said at
length. "Wait till they clear off, and then go right home."
"Yes, tacher."
The schoolmistress waited for another minute, smoothing the curls.
"You're only right a little girl, Dora, but you're the only one. You
must try to be good, and look after poor little Jack and Jim, and your
father--and be a comfort."
"Yes, tacher." Dora took courage beneath the caressing hand: "I like to
be a comfit to mother best," she vouchsafed, brightly daring.
"But your mother----" the governess said, then stopped and turned away
her head; she could not bring herself to tell the child the news of the
mother she had heard that morning, since school began.
So Dora went, sedately for the first few steps, afterwards with a happy
rush, the curls dancing on her shoulders.
"Yer mother is a-dyin', she 'ont be here long; you must try to be a
better gal"; how often of late had that phrase offended her ears! She
had met such announcements with a fury of denial, with storms of tears.
She had rushed to her mother with wild reproach and complaint. "Why
don't ye tell 'm yu ain't a-dyin', stids o' layin' there, that mander.
They're allust a-tazin' of me?"
To-day no one had said the hated words; and mother would like to hear
how teacher had "kep'" her at her side, and coaxed her hair. "I ha'n't
niver seed her du that to Gladus, nor none on 'em," she would say, and
would remind her mother how these less fortunate girls had not her "hid
o' hair."
So, her steps quickened with joyful anticipation, she came running
across the meadow in which was her home.
"Here come Dora," Mrs Barrett, who had been busy in Mrs Green's room,
said to the neighbour who had helped her. Both women peeped through the
lowered blind. "She'll come poundin' upstairs to her mother. There
ain't no kapin' of 'r away; and a nice how-d'ye-do there'll be!"
The elder boy, Jim, whose ugly little face Dora's was said to resemble,
was standing against the gate of the neglected garden. He did not shout
at her, nor throw a stone at her, in the fashion of his usual greeting,
but pulled open the rickety gate as she came up.
"Mother's dead," he whispered, and looked at her with curiosity.
"She ain't, then," Dora said. He drew his head back to avoid the blow
she aimed at it, and shut the gate after her.
Jack, an ugly urchin of five, the youngest of the family, was sitting
on the doorstep, hammering with the iron-shod heel of his heavy boot a
hazel nut he had found on his way home. The nut, instead of cracking,
was being driven deep into the moist earth. He did not desist from his
employment, or lift his head.
"Father's gone for mother's corffin," he said.
The howl he gave when Dora knocked him off the step brought Mrs Barrett
upon the scene. She pulled the girl off the fallen Jack with a gentler
touch than usual.
"You come along upstairs, along o' me," she said.
* * * * *
There was not only the coffin to be ordered in Wotton, but suits of
black for himself and children, besides the joint of meat to be cooked
for the meal after the funeral. Mr Green did not hurry over his
purchases, but went about them with the leisurely attentiveness of one
anxious to do the right thing, but unaccustomed to the business of
making bargains.
His wages had been "made a hand on," lately; there had been brandy and
"sech-like" to buy for the missus; the neighbour to pay, leaving little
more than enough for bread for the rest of them. But now, with this
burying money--! The new-made widower enjoyed the hitherto undreamed-of
experience of knowing that he might put in for a glass at every
public-house he passed, and not exhaust it.
He treated himself to a tin of salmon to have with his supper, when he
got back to Dulditch. While his wife had been well and about, she had
been wont at rare intervals to supply such a "ralish" to the evening
meal. Having the means to indulge himself, his thoughts had at once
travelled to the luxury.
Yet, arrived at home, he had had too much beer to be very hungry, and
the thought of the dead wife, up there, just beyond the ceiling,
destroyed what little pleasure the feast might have held.
"Happen she'd been alive, she'd maybe ha' picked a mossel," he said to
himself.
That she could be totally indifferent to the delicacy, even although
dead and fairly started on her heavenward journeying, was a bewildering
fact his dull brain could scarcely grasp. He got up from the table, and
taking the unshaded lamp, walked heavily upstairs to look upon this
marvel--his wife who was no more.
He was a stolid creature, but was shaken enough to give a sharp growl
of fear when, from the other side of the rigid form upon the bed, a
head was lifted.
"Hello!" he called. "Hello! What yu a-doin' here? Now then! Come out o'
that, yu young warmint; don't, I'll hide ye."
The figure lying by the dead woman slipped to the ground. It wore a
brown frock and a crumpled white overall trimmed with lace.
"Hello!" the man said again. He looked stupidly at his little daughter,
then pulled aside the sheet which covered his wife.
In the waxen face, with lids still half-open above the dull eyes, with
lips drawn back to show the gums, was little change. Beneath the chin a
large white bow of coarse muslin had been tied. It was designed to hide
the thinness of the throat, but gave, besides, a dreadful air of
smartness to the poor corpse. Above the sunken chest the arms were
crossed, but, over them, and over the thin hands, in a burning, shining
mass of resplendent colour lay--
The husband held the lamp nearer, and bent his dull, red face to peer
closer at the scattered heap--the miracle of bronze and red, red living
gold. "Hello!" he said again, then moved the lamp to let its light
shine on his daughter's face, and stared at her.
"Hello!"
"I ha'n't got no one now to carl my ringolets," the child sobbed, her
voice rising high in the scale of rebellious misery; "my ringolets
ain't no good to me no more. I ha' cut 'em off; mother, she kin have
'em. They ain't no good ter me."
The glare of the lamp held awry was upon the broad red face of the girl
with the streaming, yellow eyes, with the unevenly cropped head.
"I thought yu was the boy Jim," her father said.
PINK CARNATIONS
"You see, they are my lucky flowers," she said. "I can't very well wear
them on my wedding-dress, but I'm to have some to go away with. Jack's
going to bring them down from town with him to-night."
I asked of Daphne, who had been the favourite of fortune from her
birth, in whose cup of sweet no bitter had ever mingled, who had walked
for all her happy days along a flowery path, what she meant by such
nonsense.
She was ready enough to give me her absurd girlish reasons.
What she told me was the feeblest folly, of course; but even silly
superstition must be pardoned to such a pretty person; and the words of
a young woman who is going to be married on the morrow must be treated
by a hopeless spinster, I suppose, with, at least, a semblance of
respect. There had been an occasion, it seemed, long ago in her
childhood, when she, having lost from her neck a locket which held her
dead father's portrait, had found it, all search for it having ceased,
on the carnation-bed where she had stooped to pick a flower. On the day
that the news reached them that Hugh, her brother, had won the hurdle
race at Cambridge (one of the chief triumphs, it appeared, of her
eventless life) she had just finished arranging a vase of pink
carnations for her dressing-table. Once, when her mother had been
seriously ill and there had been a fear the disease from which she
suffered was going to take a dangerous turn, she, Daphne, had been
frightened and very unhappy. Longing for, yet dreading the doctor's
arrival, she had watched him descend from his carriage, wearing a pink
carnation in his coat. She had known at once that his verdict on her
mother's state would be favourable; and it was. A burglar had tried to
get in at Daphne's sitting-room window--at least Daphne, on what
appeared to me insufficient evidence, declared that he had done so. The
window-box had fallen to the ground, and had put the burglar to
flight--that is, if there had been one. At any rate it was clearly
proved that the window-box had fallen. It contained, of course, pink
carnations.
And so on to many other instances, chief among which was the fact that
the first time she had beheld the handsome face of the Jack she was to
marry to-morrow she had worn a bunch of her favourite flowers in the
bodice of her white silk dress. Afterwards, on the day of the County
Ball, at which function he had proposed, he had sent her a bouquet
composed entirely of pink carnations, and had chosen one of those
blooms for his own buttonhole.
"Without knowing--without my having even mentioned to him that they
brought me luck!" Daphne assured me, the dark, poetic eyes in her small
face large with the mystery of it. "Do you wonder Jack agrees with me I
_must_ not be without them on my wedding-day?"
By her mother's command, and in order that she might not look, as I am
assured many brides do look, a "perfect rag" on her wedding-day, Daphne
was to rest for a certain number of hours, that afternoon. She was
forbidden, even, to write one of the seventy still remaining out of the
three hundred letters of thanks to the donors of wedding-presents.
She should have to work them off--so many a day--on her honeymoon,
Daphne ruefully supposed. Jack would help. She would make him direct
the envelopes. She bore a grudge apparently against the givers of the
treasures under which the tables in the morning-room were groaning.
"If you could only know what it has been!" she sighed. "However hard I
wrote I couldn't keep pace. No sooner had I wiped one name off the list
than three more presents had come!"
From this onerous duty, however, she was now to desist, and from all
fatigue of receiving the guests who were arriving by different trains
throughout the day. She was to lie at her ease on silken cushions in
that pretty room of her own, upon whose window-box the supposititious
burglar had set his too heavy boot. I was amused to see that the white
chintzes of the chairs and hangings were flowered with pink carnations,
and that garlands of the flower, tied with pink ribbons, formed the
frieze of the white wallpaper.
"Well, you were always a petted and spoilt child," I said to her; "and
I suppose you are going to be so to the end of the chapter."
"Only more so," she said, with her youthful arrogance. "You can't think
what a splendid hand at spoiling Jack is."
I laughed, told her to let me know how much he spoilt her in five
years' time, and left her. For a servant had interrupted our
conversation with the announcement that Mr Mavor, who had returned from
town, would be glad to speak to me.
"Hughie? how absurd!" Daphne said, who wanted to go on talking to me
about her lover. "As if Hughie could possibly have a thing to say to
you which would not keep, Hannah!"
"It is to make me an offer of marriage I have not the slightest doubt,"
I told her, being of an age when a woman can make jokes of that kind
about herself and pretend not to feel the heartprick.
I found the head of the house in the room which had been turned into a
museum of objects of art--precious and not precious--for exhibition on
the morrow. I had known the young man from boyhood, and I saw at once
that something was amiss. He had left for town before my arrival that
morning, and this was our first meeting, but he forgot to come forward
and put out his hand. He stalked past me, instead, and banged the door
by which I had entered; then he seized me by the arm.
"Hannah," he said, "I want to talk to you. I want your advice. We're in
a devil of a mess."
"It's the wedding-dress, or the wedding-cake!" I said, staring at him.
"One of them hasn't come!"
"It's about Marston. Something I only heard to-day. He must not be
allowed to marry my sister."
"Hughie!"
He took his hand from my arm, laid it on one of the tables spread with
the presents. There was a faint ringing of silver and china to show the
hand was not steady. He is a self-contained, sturdily-built,
matter-of-fact young man in the early twenties; quite unlike his
sister, whose appearance is elegantly fragile, who is filled with
nerves, and sensitive to the fingertips.
"I got a letter this morning," he went on, and for a moment fumbled in
his coat-pocket as if with the intention, quickly relinquished, of
showing it. "It was from a woman; telling me of certain incidents in
Marston's career."
"Probably all made up. Lies."
"It isn't. Once for all, don't waste time in saying that. I went up
this morning to the address she gave me. I saw her. She told me worse
than she wrote--poor wretch! I didn't take it for gospel. I got
confirmation, all round. There isn't room for the shadow of a doubt.
She left her husband a year ago for Marston----"
"A year ago? Only a year?"
"A year. The husband got a divorce; this brute refused to marry her."
"Oh, Hugh!"
"It's worse. I can't tell you all. Sufficient that he played the
traitor, the coward, the beast. Left her to face shame, and poverty,
and--everything, alone."
"Can it be so bad! You are certain?"
He lifted the unsteady hand and laid it open, heavily again upon the
table where the Crown Derby coffee services, the silver inkstands,
muffineers and bridge boxes, whose donors had not even been thanked,
jingled with a tiny music once more.
"Certain. Now, don't keep repeating that word, Hannah. I don't want to
waste time producing proofs, but I've got them. It's as certain as
death. And it's not the only thing. Once I was on his track--late in
the day as it was--I learnt more. We live so in a hole, down here, and
nothing like this has ever come near us. We've taken people for what
they seemed to be--as I, ass that I was, took Marston--and never poked
into their histories. The man's got a bad record, all along. Decent
people have closed their doors in his face."
"_What_ will you do, Hugh? What _can_ you do now?"
"Do? Stop the marriage," he said. He glared for a minute upon the
costly display on the table, then turned his back on it all, and
carried his white face to the window. "My sister shall never marry that
scoundrel," he said.
"Daphne's heart will break."
"I know." He looked out on the wintry landscape with gloomy eyes, and a
resolutely held underlip. "That is what my mother says. I do not
believe it; but if it is so, it does not alter what is the right and
only course to take."
"What else does your mother say?"
He moved his shoulders impatiently. "That the wedding must go on; that
it is too late to draw back." He turned swiftly upon me. "Could you
have believed that _my mother_, of all people, could take such a view
as that?"
"I can see how she feels about it. To break it off now is too hideously
painful----"
"And what will it be for Daphne if it goes on? Don't you suppose her
life with a brute like that would be hideously painful?" He held the
back of his hand to his forehead for a moment and shut his eyes tightly
as if in painful thought. "My poor little sister!" he said. "Poor
Dapple!"
I sat down and stared stupidly before me, too overcome by the situation
to be able even to think.
"Your mother says the wedding is to go on; you say it is to be
stopped----"
He pounced upon me. "I am master here," he said.
He had always seemed a boy to me, and I had never known him to exert
his authority before. His mother and young sister had taken their own
way in affairs, and had never been hampered by the consideration that
"Hughie" was a person of importance. Yet, there was no doubt about his
position. Looking at, and listening to him now, I saw that he meant to
have his way; and my conscience told me that his way was the right one.
A word or two more he said to me of incidents in Jack Marston's
history; showed me how it had happened that these were only recently
revealed to him; how, to the Mavors' circle he had been entirely a
stranger; how the few friends of Hugh's who had had any acquaintance
with the man had wondered at the sister's engagement, but thought it no
business of their own.
"Have you made your mother understand you are determined in the
matter?"
"I have told her I will shoot the man before he shall marry my sister."
"And what is she doing? Your mother?"
"She is raving like a madwoman in her bedroom."
The stupendousness of the situation, to which at moments I felt
insensible, kept coming over me in waves of comprehension.
"Well, I don't wonder!" I said.
Long pauses fell between our fragments of speech. He stood before the
square centre table, black-browed, staring at its glittering burden.
The footman appeared at the door. "If you please, sir, Hamley wishes to
know if the dog-cart as well as the brougham and omnibus is to meet the
5.15 this evening?"
His master looked at the man with knit brows, as if making a painful
effort to understand what was said. He pulled out his watch, and for a
minute studied it.
"Tell Hamley," then he said, "not to meet the 5.15 at all. No one will
come by that train. In ten minutes I shall want to send some
telegrams."
The man, staring at the strange order, withdrew.
"You are going to stop the rest of the guests?" I asked.
"Of course. They were coming to the wedding. There will be no wedding."
"And Jack Marston? You can't _telegraph_ this horrible thing to him!"
"Can't I? I shall."
"And Daphne? She is sitting in her room counting the minutes till he
comes to her."
"Hannah, I want you to go and tell her."
"I, Hugh! Why should I be picked out to do such a horrible thing?"
"My mother will not. Daphne has always known you. You have sense----"
"I will not. So that is the finish, Hugh. I haven't got a stone for a
heart. I would cut out my tongue rather than do it."
"Then, I must," he said, turned on his heels and made for the door.
Having reached it and flung it open, he looked back at me with his
distressed, scowling face. "This is how one's friends fail one in an
emergency!" he said.
His scorn, at the moment, was nothing to me, but I was beside myself
with sorrow and dismay. Daphne, with her sweet, small face lying among
her cushions, her dark eyes filled with visions of the lover who was
speeding to her, of the joyful life just opening before her--and
Tragedy, pitiless, relentless, awaiting her! Her messenger, oh so much
more cruel than the messenger of Death, crossing corridors, mounting
stairs, hurrying with the inevitableness of Fate upon her! Was there
nothing to be done? Was there no hand to save?
Hugh was right. Boy as he was, he was acting as a man should act. His
mother, who, to save her ears from the despairing cries of her child,
to avoid the painful explanation to invited guests, the perplexity of
interrupted plans, was willing that the marriage should continue, was
weak, wicked even, perhaps. But I found it in my heart to wish that she
might have her way, that the suffering, since there must be suffering,
should be, at any rate, postponed.
The engagement had been a short one, and circumstances had of late
limited my intercourse with the family; the bridegroom and I had met
but once. Yet now his handsome face rose before me--a face whose only
fault was that it was, perhaps, too handsome. I thought of the tales
Daphne's mother had told me of his extraordinary passion for the girl
with whom he had fallen in love at first sight. Women love love. No
woman is too old to thrill at the story of a lover's ardour. The man
was a sinner, no doubt; to Hugh he seemed a scoundrel; but--
I caught up with Hugh as he was going--very slowly going, poor
boy--round the last turning to his sister's room.
"Hughie," I gasped, breathless with my haste. "You are right--but don't
be brutal. Don't _kill_ the child. Listen. Instead of writing to Jack
Marston, let him come. Let him tell her himself. Give her a chance.
Give him one, even. It is a cruel business, anyhow. Don't let's blunder
into making it worse than it is."
I suppose as he had gone to the accomplishment of his heavy task he had
become more appreciative of its difficulty. He was very fond of his
sister, and must have shrunk with dread from the contemplation of her
pain. Anyhow, his purpose had weakened. With a few words more I got him
to acquiesce in the amended plan.
"How can we be certain he tells her? He will lie to her," he objected.
"We will take measures to be sure he does not."
"He is a specious beggar; she will marry him all the same."
"Then, if he has such an ascendency over her, would she not in any
case? She is of age; her own mistress."
"But not from my house," the boy said.
However, in what I proposed there was respite; and, for better or
worse, I had my way.
I could not return to witness the innocent happiness of Daphne, and I
spent the rest of the afternoon in trying to soothe the agitation of
Daphne's mother; listening to her tirades against her suddenly
masterful son, hearing her protestations of faith in the rectitude of
Jack Marston, alternating with her outbursts of anger and grief at his
hitherto unsuspected villainy.
"Hugh will see him when he arrives, will confront him with the story,"
I told her. "I don't suppose he can utterly deny, but he can palliate.
There will be nothing told to Daphne which she can't forgive. The
wedding will go on."