A WORM AT THE ROOTS.
Each looked at the other, aghast. An expression as of sudden
enlightenment flitted across the boyish face of Tom Black; but nobody
noticed that.
“That sound means some accident!” exclaimed Lucy, hurrying out of the
room. Miss Latimer followed her. Mr. Somerset and young Black stayed
behind, Mr. Somerset holding back little Hugh.
But they only lingered for a moment. A cry from Lucy and a pungent
smell of burning which saluted their nostrils set them too running
downstairs.
Mrs. Challoner and Miss Latimer were bending over the body of Mrs.
Morison, prostrate just outside the dining-room door. A japanned tray
containing knives and forks and spoons, scattered over the floor,
explained the crash which had followed the heavy fall. Little Hugh
shrieked, “Mrs. Morison is dead!” and began to cry. But she breathed
stertorously.
“She has had a fit,” Lucy said. “Working over the big fire has brought
it on.”
Wilfrid Somerset caught up his hat.
“I know the nearest doctor’s!” he exclaimed, and, putting young Black
aside, he hirpled off, self-consciousness suspended in his eager desire
to be of service.
“Mrs. Morison isn’t dead, dear,” Miss Latimer reassured little Hugh;
“but she is very ill, and you must not interrupt us while we take care
of her.”
She led him into the dining-room and bade him watch at the window
for the coming of Mr. Somerset and the doctor. Then she returned to
Lucy. Young Black had got some water, and Lucy was dashing it on her
servant’s face. But, though she struggled and writhed under the chill,
it did not rouse her.
“What was she bringing up these things for?” asked Lucy, looking round
at the scattered cutlery. “She knew I had set out the table already.”
“It’s likely there was a good deal of mental confusion before the fit
came,” suggested the old governess.
Tom Black stood over the prostrate figure and the kneeling ladies.
It was true he had fetched the water, but otherwise he did not seem
eagerly sympathetic. Suddenly he said—
“There’s something on fire somewhere!”
“Certainly there is,” assented Lucy, her senses regaining their power
of attention. “I think it must be downstairs. I can’t move.” (She was
trying to support the heavy, tossing head.) “Will you both go and see
what is burning, and do your best with it?”
As the old lady and the youth descended the kitchen stair he whispered
to her—
“That woman is tipsy.”
“Oh, surely not!” Miss Latimer replied. “Mrs. Challoner has told me she
is an excellent servant and a respectable person.”
“She is tipsy,” he repeated. “I saw it when I came in. But I didn’t
think she was quite so bad as this.”
It was a terrible picture that met their eyes as they entered that
kitchen, which only a few hours before had been so bright and trim.
A big fire was burning, and a clothes-rail—covered with damask
table-napkins, among which hung an old rag mat—had been put so close
to the bars that one of the napkins was nearly consumed, two or three
were scorched, and the rag rug was smouldering. To draw back the
clothes-rail and to throw the burning mat into the sink was the work of
a moment, and effectually ended a great danger.
The hearth was blurred with trodden cinders and spotted with grease.
There were two pots standing on the range, one containing burnt-up
porridge, and the other full of water with something floating in it
which looked like a rag. Miss Latimer hurriedly opened the oven door,
fully expecting to see a cindered fowl; but the oven was empty. Going
to a cupboard she discovered the little turkey nicely trussed. That had
been done the previous night, and it had not been touched since. Miss
Latimer quietly lifted it down and put it into the oven. Dinner would
be certainly late; but it would be the earlier the sooner one made a
beginning.
“I fear you are right, after all,” she said to Tom Black. “Yet this fit
may have been coming on, and that may have stopped her work, and—— Ah!”
Tom had also been making an investigation, and as she was speaking, he
held up before her shocked eyes a bottle of whisky. It was still in the
paper in which it had been sold; but it was almost empty.
“There’s the doctor and Mr. Somerset!” Miss Latimer exclaimed with
a tone of relief. “Now we shall soon know the truth. Anyway, we’re
not wanted upstairs just this minute—we’d be only in the way. So let
us try to get a little to the bottom of things down here. I know how
keenly Mrs. Challoner will feel all this,” she said, confiding in the
youth whom she had never seen till half an hour before, but for whose
domestic help she now appealed as if it were the most natural thing in
the world. “Will you just see what is in that basin beside you?”
Tom lifted the cover, peering gingerly.
“I believe this is the pudding,” he said.
“Dear me; very likely,” said Miss Latimer.
She went back to the fireplace, and, dipping her fingers into the pot
of water, drew forth the floating rag. It was the pudding-cloth neatly
fastened up; only the pudding had never been inside!
“And what is that strange noise I hear?” asked the old lady, gazing
around.
“It is the cat,” said Tom. “She is under the dresser, and she keeps
‘swearing.’”
The young man seemed rather afraid to approach the indignant animal;
but the old lady bravely put in her hand and drew pussy out.
“No wonder she ‘swears,’ poor dear!” she observed. “Hot oil or grease
has been dropped on her, and has burned away about an inch of fur. I
don’t know what we can do for her, especially just now. But, at least,
we’ll give her a saucer of milk as a sign of sympathy.”
At that moment the uncertain step of Wilfrid Somerset was heard on the
kitchen stair.
“Mrs. Challoner asks me to get the cushions off the armchair,” he said,
“and I’m afraid you’ll be wanted,” he added, addressing Tom, “for I’m a
poor, useless creature where bodily strength is required.”
Without a moment’s hesitation the doctor had diagnosed Mrs. Morison’s
“fit.”
“She’s been drinking,” he said laconically.
“But there is no smell of spirit,” pleaded Lucy, reluctant to lose
faith in the unhappy woman.
“No,” said the doctor; “but there’s the scent of the little lozenges
which gentlemen take to hide the smell of tobacco. That’s the secret,
ma’am. This case doesn’t want any treatment save to be put on a safe
couch and allowed ‘to sleep it off,’ when I trust she will awake
properly ashamed of herself.”
It was impossible to carry the heavy inert body to the servant’s
bedroom upstairs. But there was a little closet-like room at the back
of the hall, empty save for a few ferns and polled plants which Lucy
kept there. In that room Mr. Somerset arranged all the cushions he
could find in the kitchen, which were not a few, since they included
the mattress of a chair-bedstead which stood there in its chair
capacity. Then the doctor and Tom Black carried in the unconscious
woman, while poor Lucy gathered up the scattered cutlery, which
included a broken knife, a toasting-fork, and an oyster opener.
“I am so sorry to have called you out on Christmas Day, and for what,
after all, was no work of yours,” said Lucy to the doctor as he came
back through the hall, drawing down his cuffs and straightening his
coat.
He gave his head a queer little shake.
“It’s hard to know what is a doctor’s work and what isn’t,” he said.
“But it’s always a doctor’s work to be useful, if not to the case, why,
then, to its caretaker. Get rid of that woman directly she wakes, Mrs.
Challoner. Such as she are at the bottom of two-thirds of the awful
accidents which happen in the world.”
“She might have broken her neck if she had fallen on the stairs,”
observed Lucy.
“And as she didn’t, she may live to break some other body’s neck,” said
the doctor as he went away.
Lucy opened the dining-room door and went in, to find poor little Hugh
still dutifully watching at the window as Miss Latimer had bidden him.
And there was the dining-table, with its gleaming napery and sparkling
crystal, standing there as in mockery of the squalid scene which had
just been enacted.
“And is it to this misery that I have invited my guests?” cried Lucy.
Even as she spoke her eye fell on her little desk, with her unfinished
letter to Charlie peeping out of the blotting-case. That letter could
not be finished now. It could never be sent. Then the memory of all
she had believed and hoped rolled back on her. If there is anything
calculated to give us the sensation of despair, it is the recollection
of thanksgiving offered for what in the end has proved disastrous!
For one moment Lucy sat down on a chair, covered her face and wept.
She might have had “a good cry,” but for her sudden realisation that
she was not alone, that her guests were in the house, and that she had
a duty to discharge towards them. She sprang up and dashed away her
tears. Where had the guests gone? What were they doing? She had been
so occupied with the unhappy drunkard that she had not realised what
else had gone on around her. In her confusion she went first to the
drawing-room. The door was wide open and the room was empty, an album
lying on the floor just as she had dropped it. She paused, puzzled.
Then she heard sounds below. It was evident that her friends were all
in the kitchen.
There she found them, busy. The pudding was already in the pot. The
burned serviettes were put aside. Tom Black had carried the rag mat out
to the scullery, and Wilfrid Somerset was washing plates.
Lucy cried out in dismay; but they all laughed good-humouredly. The
disaster had happened, they said, and now they’d got to make the best
of it.
“What is the use of having old friends, if they can’t do such a thing
as this?” asked Miss Latimer.
But Mr. Black, anyhow, was not an old friend, protested Lucy.
No, Mr. Somerset admitted that—at least, he hadn’t been only an hour
ago. “I think he is now,” he added. “Hours count for years sometimes.”
Lucy resolutely pulled herself together. She, too, must make the best
of it. Though, as a hostess, she was humiliated and defeated, she must
still be the hostess, and try to extract a smile out of the cruel
situation. For the time she must put this unhappy woman out of her
thoughts, along with what might come on the morrow and the utter upset
of all her plans for the future. She must try to turn the household
wreck into an impromptu picnic.
She tried and succeeded perfectly, so far at least as Tom Black and
Hugh were concerned. In half an hour those two were laughing and
running to and fro as if there could not be a better Christmas game
than tidying a disordered room and pushing on a belated dinner.
Tom Black thought in his own mind what a jolly woman Mrs. Challoner was
not to be a bit put out by what would have utterly upset some people.
Miss Latimer and Wilfrid Somerset knew better than that; they knew
what dramatisations life sometimes forces upon us, and how costly such
performances are.
But they nobly seconded Lucy in her determination to put a fair face on
things. The dinner was cooked in time and set upon the table with the
informal decency which prevails in houses where “the family do their
own work.”
Tom Black really enjoyed himself a great deal more than he had expected
he would when in prospect of the ordinary dinner-party. He actually
took courage to say that he thought it would be far better fun if
people always came prepared to get ready their own festivity, instead
of sitting talking about nothing and looking through stereoscopes.
Wilfrid Somerset replied that he believed something of the sort was
regularly done in some parts of Canada and the New England States.
“But where it is done, the whole construction of society is different
from what it is in London,” said Miss Latimer. “And it is where things
are half one way and half another that somebody has to suffer cruelly,”
she added.
She, a breadwinning woman all her days, knew the strain which had come
upon Lucy, and could understand how these few hours were wasting forces
which should have been conserved to suffice for the productive labour
of weeks. For Lucy’s sake, she was truly thankful when the effort was
over—when little Hugh had gone to bed, when Tom Black had said good-bye
and had departed in the best of spirits, and when, left only to her two
old and trusted friends, Lucy could drop the mask of cheerfulness and
be the anxious, shaken creature she really was.
“Well,” sighed Lucy, “Charlie is sure to have thought of us to-day; but
certainly his imagination has never pictured the reality!”
The miserable Mrs. Morison was sleeping quietly now, and was not
likely to waken until morning. Miss Latimer declared that she would
remain with Lucy if Mr. Somerset would leave word at her lodgings that
she was not to be expected that night.
He urged the two ladies to go to bed directly he departed. They both
needed rest, and he felt sure they would not be disturbed. It was good
advice; but they were too nervous to take it. They might sleep heavily
in their upper chamber, and the culprit might waken and steal out, or
she might rise and commit suicide.
So they made themselves as comfortable as they could in the
dining-room, dozing off and waking and talking in whispers to each
other, till suddenly they roused with a start. The house was full of
the dull grey light of winter dawn. There was a slow heavy footfall in
the passage.
The culprit stood before them, unkempt, dishevelled, pale, but once
more in her right mind.
“Oh, Mrs. Morison!” cried Lucy. “How could you do this thing? How could
you?” and Lucy began to weep bitterly.
“I’ve nothing to say for myself, mem, nothing at all!” said the woman
heavily, with no sign of feeling except what was conveyed in the utter
absence of such sign. “But I’m just going to get your breakfasts for
you. You shall have them all right. Then you can do what you like with
me.”
The coffee she set before them was dainty, and the yellow fish savoury,
and the toast brown and crisp. The breakfast almost choked Lucy. She
still liked this woman—still felt drawn to the something good and
kind which again looked out of the grey eyes even to-day, dim and
reddened as they were. She would have liked to give her another chance,
surrounded by strict conditions and solemn pledges; but she knew that
could not be done in the little house with the verandah. For there was
no doubt that this was no first and abnormal outbreak, but simply the
crisis of a constant tendency—the tumultuous outbreak of restrained
craving.
This would take years to cure, if in a woman of this one’s age it could
be ever wholly cured. Clearly this could not be Lucy’s work, since it
was absolutely incompatible with her direct duties as Charlie’s wife
and Hugh’s mother.
She shuddered to realise how easily she might have been so lulled into
false security as to have left Hugh for an hour or two in the charge
of this well-behaved, kindly woman, perhaps to find her home a heap of
cinders and her child a charred corpse!
They had scarcely finished breakfast when Wilfrid Somerset drove up
in his cab. He had felt anxious lest morning might bring some violent
and distressing scene. He was soon satisfied that there was little to
fear on that head. But he was urgent that Mrs. Morison should leave the
house at once. Lucy feared she had but a few shillings left, and in her
present depressed state was only too likely to spend those in bringing
more shame upon herself. So Mr. Somerset’s advice was that the cousin,
the Willesden plumber, should be communicated with. Mr. Somerset
charged himself with the transmission of the telegram, and worded it
with much tact and policy.
Before evening, just as the shadows were deepening, the cousin’s wife
arrived.
She expressed great disgust at “Jessie’s” lapse. But she did not need
it to be explained. She evidently knew what was to be expected. All
that she could say was that she had really hoped “Jessie” had learned
more wisdom at last. They had done all they could for her. They had
thought her cured. She had “kept straight” for so many weeks. They had
never let her go out without one of their children with her, and they
had kept all her money from her. She had called on Jessie, poor body,
on the day she thought she would get her wages, and had taken them
away, and was keeping them for her. Jessie was quite willing for one to
do that, if one took her at the right time. She could not think what
“Jessie” had done to get money, for she had said she gave up all.
“I paid her a month’s wages a few days in advance,” explained Mrs.
Challoner; “and, when I did so, she told me that you had called to
borrow money from her, and how gladly she had spared it.”
The cousin looked up at Mrs. Challoner, hesitated for a moment, and
said—
“She didn’t say that till she knew you were going to pay her in
advance, did she?”
“No, she did not,” Mrs. Challoner admitted. “Nor did she ask me for the
advance. I offered it.”
“That’s it,” said the cousin. “The craving was on her, and the moment
she saw a way to satisfy it, she began to tell lies. She’s as true as
daylight at any other time, and as honest.”
“I’m so sorry I gave her that money,” sighed Lucy, forgetting for the
moment that if such a revelation was to come, then the sooner it came
the better.
“Oh, it wasn’t having the money that did it!” answered the other
reassuringly. “As she told a lie the fit had come, and if she hadn’t
got drunk one way, why, she would another! Once she actually pawned my
little girl’s boots. And she so fond of the child! ’Tisn’t her fault,
poor dear! We mustn’t judge her. It’s just like a disease.”
“But how could you think of allowing her to use you as a reference, and
yet of not warning me of her terrible weakness?” said Mrs. Challoner.
The woman’s eyes wandered a little.
“Well, we didn’t want her to mention us!” she answered. “I’ll engage
she didn’t till after you’d seen the Edinburgh letters. Jessie came
home so full of you and the little gentleman that I thought, ‘Here’s a
place where she’ll be happy and will keep right if ever she will.’ And
when the lady came to inquire, my husband he kep’ out of the way. He
said he wasn’t going to mix hisself in it; but I said to him, ‘It’s our
Christian duty to do the best we can for our own. Ain’t we told we’ve
got to bear each other’s burdens?’ says I.”
Lucy drew her breath hard. How was one to meet this perverted
sentiment, this putting of “charity,” as it were, upside down?
“But don’t you see you were wrong to further her coming into my house
without telling me the truth about her?” she urged. “She might have
burned my house, she might have killed my boy! Could you not see that
you were not dealing justly by me?”
“I don’t know about ‘justly,’” said the woman tartly, with a sneer on
the last word. “It’s our Christian duty to have charity and cover a
multitude of sins. If I’d told about Jessie’s weakness, nobody would
have taken her; and, as she’s spent her bit of money already, there’s
nothing and nobody between her and the workhouse but just ourselves,
and my husband doesn’t like to have his flesh and blood made a pauper.
Yet it’s rather hard he should have to take from me and his own
children to keep her.”
Lucy’s heart fainted within her at this strange mixture of warped
exegesis, perverted family pride, and private self-interest. Yet she
made another attempt to get the matter set in a right light.
“It is very kind of you and your husband to wish to help Jessie,” she
said; “but then, if you are willing to sacrifice yourselves in this
direction, it must really be yourselves whom you do sacrifice, and
not other people, whom you mislead into being sacrificed blindfold.
Our sacrifices must be costly to ourselves and not to others. If poor
Jessie is really, as you seem to say, the irresponsible victim of her
vice, just as if it was a disease, it would be truer kindness on your
part to sacrifice your pride for her real good. You are only giving
her freedom to do some great harm to other people, even if you feel it
right to endure such an example as hers among your own children. But I
do not think you need let her go to the workhouse. I believe there are
people willing and able to undertake the care and cure of such cases.
If you like, I will write to some of these. But meantime, as you helped
Jessie to get into my house, I must really ask you to take her away
with you at once.”
“Oh, yes, that’s the way burdens are always thrown back on poor folk!”
muttered the woman.
“I am throwing no burden on you,” said Lucy, with a firmness which
surprised herself. “I am simply handing back a great risk which you
deceitfully imposed upon me. I think we have nothing more to discuss,”
and thereupon she rang the kitchen bell, and summoned Jessie into the
presence of her mistress and her cousin.
(_To be continued._)
A HAPPY HEALTHY GIRLHOOD.
BY “MEDICUS” (DR. GORDON-STABLES, R.N.).