Disaster
Shortly after Mrs. Day had left her husband sitting in his stocking-feet
over the breakfast-room fire, she, in the midst of her children at their
several occupations but attentive to what went on beyond, heard his heavy
step in the hall, heard the front door open and close.
"Your father has gone to the club, after all," she said, and gave a sigh of
relief as she worked away at her embroidery, making holes in a strip of
muslin and stitching round them, for the adornment of the elder daughter's
petticoat. She was a timid woman, in spite of her fine and handsome
appearance, with a great fear of the unusual. It was her husband's habit to
go out. The thought of him sitting alone and idle in the other room had
been weighing on her mind.
The children paid no attention; they were all a little tired and languid
and disinclined for their usual amusements after the excitement of last
night's dance and the exertion of their morning on the ice. Even Deleah,
the reader of the family, neglected her book to lie back in her chair and
gaze into the fire, the music of galop, and rattle of her father's
tambourine humming in her ears; before her eyes figures chasing each other
over the blue sheet of ice or flying rhythmically over polished boards.
Franky having temporarily deserted his paint-box and the _Illustrated News_
he had designed to colour for many tinted sheets of gelatine, saved from
the crackers on last night's supper table, now held them in turn before his
eyes. "Mama, you're all red--all lovely red, like roses," or "Bessie,
you're frightful--you're white as if you felt sick," he cried, accordingly
as a red or a green transparency was before his eyes.
The game called "Tactics," over which Bessie and Bernard nightly
quarrelled, had been so far neglected; a circumstance not to be regretted,
since Bessie generally played a losing game in tears, and signalised
Bernard's victory by upsetting the board and flinging the red and white
ivory pegs in his face.
For, the last night's dance, which had been an engrossing topic for several
weeks before it had come off, now that it was over must still be talked
about.
How silly Deleah had looked when her white satin shoe had come off and shot
across the slippery floor in the last waltz; and she would not stop, for
all that, but finished the dance without it.
"Were your shoes too big, Deleah?"
"A little, mama. They were a pair of Bessie's last year's ones, that were
too small for her."
"There you go! At me again!" Bessie cried. "Deda is proud because her foot
is smaller than mine, mama. If you're a little weed of a thing like Deda,
of course your feet are narrow and small. They have to be. There's no merit
in it."
"And I suppose Deleah danced her silk stockings into holes?"
"No, mama! Mr. Frost, I was waltzing with, held me up most beautifully; so
that after the shoe came off my feet never once touched the floor."
"Lucky it wasn't you, Bessie! It would have been the finish of poor Frost
to have tried to carry such a lump as you."
"Mama, will you speak to Bernard, and ask him not to be always saying rude
things about me."
"Hush, Bessie! Nonsense! Bernard, my dear, do try to be more polite to your
sister."
"Mama, here's a motter I rather like in this green cracker.
"'What I most admire in you
Are your eyes of lovely blue.'
"What would you have done, Deleah, if a gentleman had pulled the cracker
with you? Because your eyes aren't blue; they're yellow-brown."
"I should have passed it on to Bernard."
"And why wouldn't you have passed it on to me, pray, miss. My eyes are as
blue as Bernard's, I suppose?"
"Your eyes are green," from a Bernard ever ready for the fray.
"Mama! Mama! He's at me again! Bernard is at me again! He says my eyes are
green!"
"Come, come, children! Hush, Bessie! You are too bad, Bernard. Now then,
we have not yet decided who was the belle of the ball, last night."
It was while they gave their opinion on this momentous subject that Franky
fell asleep over his cracker papers and was sent to bed, an hour before
his time, his mother going up to hear him say his prayers, as was her
nightly custom. She was crossing the hall on her return when the front
door opened and the master of the house, to his wife's astonishment,
reappearing, stepped in again.
"Lydia!" he whispered, and with an odd shrinking from him, she noticed
that there was something furtive in his manner, and that his voice, wont
to sound alarmingly through the house on his return to it, was husky and
hushed. "Lydia, how much money have you in the house?"
"Money!" his wife repeated, and gazed upon him with alarm in her eyes.
"Money--I gave you a cheque for ten pounds on Monday. How much of it is
left?"
Most of it had gone in expenses for the dance. "I have only about thirty
shillings left, William." Without knowing why, her voice, like his, had
sunk to the tone of mystery.
"Give it me, then. Quick!"
She hesitated, fearfully questioning: "Has anything--?"
"Never mind now. Get it. Get all you can lay your hands on. Quick!"
Her purse was in the pocket hidden in the many folds of her silk dress.
There was not quite so much in it as she had reckoned; she slipped the
sovereign and few shillings with trembling fingers into his hand.
"I could ask Bernard, and Bessie, William."
"No! I won't take their money," he said. "This will get me to London."
"To London?"
"I am going up by the mail."
"But why in this hurry?"
Not the prospect of the sudden journey, but the something secret and
horribly unfamiliar in his manner frightened her. He came a step further
into the hall and picking up a dark muffler from a chair, wound it round
his neck. She saw that his face was livid, and looked suddenly flabby, and
that his hands were shaking.
"Business," he whispered. "Don't worry."
As he turned to the door, she laid a hand on his arm. "Something is wrong.
I have felt it all the evening. Tell me, have you had losses, William?"
He nodded, without looking at her. "That's about the tune of it."
"You should have told me."
"I've told you now. You'll hear about it soon enough."
She gripped his arm. "Don't go like this! Whatever it is, don't run away.
Is it very bad? Is it--" the word that stood for the worst business
misfortune she could imagine, trembled and died on her lips--"is it
_Failure_?"
He pulled his muffler about his face, his hat lower upon his brow: "You've
hit it," he said. "It's that."
Her hand slid from his coat-sleeve, he slipped through the half-open door,
and shuffled down the three white steps which led to the silent street.
Then, as white, half-stupefied, she watched him, he turned and climbed the
steps again and stood beside her.
"You had better go to George Boult," he said. "Boult will tell you what to
do. Are you listening? Go to Boult."
"But aren't you coming back to-morrow, William? You can't leave us like
this! You must come back!"
He was going down the steps again. There was a moon clear in a frosty sky.
How white the steps shone! For all her life she remembered the big,
unwieldy figure of her husband shuffling down them.
"I don't know what my movements may be. Just at present they are
uncertain." Arrived on the pavement he turned his miserable, furtive eyes
on her as she stood in the open door, the brightly-lit hall of home behind
her. "Shut the door," he said with something of his old passionate
irritability of manner. "I don't want all the world to know I'm going away
to-night. Shut the door!"
She obeyed him, as ever when he used that tone to her, with nervous haste.
William Day waited a moment to hear the bolts slipping into place. It was
a duty he performed himself every night of his life as he went up to bed.
The door was bolted with him on the wrong side of it, now. Never, he knew,
in all the years to come would he turn the lock of security on the
sleeping house and shuffle upstairs, bed-candle in hand, to warmth and
comfort and peaceful sleep again.
Mrs. Day, going back into the hall, came to a standstill beneath the
hanging lamp, trying to collect her thoughts, trying to realise, but
totally unable to do so, that ruin had come upon her home, her children,
herself. Ruin which she had seen visit the homes of other people,
devastate them; but whose shadow she had never imagined falling on the
fortunes of her own.
On the William Days; so well-to-do; so respected in the place; who had
their annual dance last night, all the nicest, most desirable people of
the town present. No one's dance was so nicely managed, so spirited, so
successful as theirs.
She was actually thinking of the dance as she stood there, dazed, in the
gas-lit hall. They would never give another New Year's dance.
William, with all his faults, was never mean. "Don't spoil the ship for a
ha'po'rth of tar," was a favourite motto of his. She had ever thought it a
proverb both pleasant and wise. She was not an extravagant woman, but she
also liked to have things well done, and had no sympathy with
cheese-paring ways. The house was well and handsomely furnished, she and
the children had plenty of dress, their table was an excellent one, all of
them indulging in an amused contempt of the domestic economies of their
friends. Servants stayed with them for years, and it was easy to fill
their places when they left. They kept one more of them than was needed,
for comfort's sake. She was a good mistress; he, for all his passionate
rating of his dependents at times, was a good master.
Was all this finished now? Was it possible? The old pleasant, natural
order of things--the only order to which she had ever been accustomed.
Finished now?
And if so what would follow?
Furniture sale. Dust of strange feet in the familiar rooms. People she
would never have dreamed of admitting there pulling about her carpets,
poking her feather-beds, turning up their noses at the breakfast-room
chair-covers which were shabby, there was no good in denying it; and with
her not by to explain they preferred them so. No more expensive
paint-boxes and toys for Franky; Bessie and darling Deleah in shabby hats;
Bernard without pocket-money, made a banker's clerk, perhaps--she had
heard her husband say bank-clerks had no prospects, poor beggars!
Bernard--her handsome Bernard to be a "poor beggar"--!
A sudden vertigo seized her: the hall was whirling round; she stretched a
hand blindly for support, and pulled over an umbrella-stand which fell
with a crash and clatter.
The girls and Bernard came running out. "What on earth are you doing,
mama? Have you hurt yourself? What is it?"
She had subsided upon a hall-chair, her face was ghastly, all her strength
seemed gone. "I felt faint. I am better," she got out, and looked
strangely round upon them all. Her gaze wandered lingeringly from object
to object in the hall as if she had never seen it before. She shivered
violently with deadly cold. "I will go to bed," she said.
The children helped her upstairs. She leant on Bessie's arm, the arm of
Deleah was round her waist. The stairway was broad, there was room for all
three. Bernard stood on the mat below and watched with an anxious face.
"Sure I can't do anything, mother?" he kept saying.
They were all so fond of her, so frightened if for a moment she seemed to
fail them. She could not get rid of them till they had undressed her and
put her to bed. Until they themselves went to bed they kept coming back
and peeping in at her. "Papa will be back soon; mind you send him for us
if you feel at all ill," they adjured her.
"Mama, you are sure it is not because I worried you about Reggie Forcus?"
a contrite Bessie asked. "Because he is sure to come to-morrow--you think
so, don't you?--and we shall make it all right, in spite of Sir Francis.
Promise not to worry, mama."
Twice in the night Deleah slipped from her own warm bed to stand, an
anxious little figure, shivering in her nightgown, her dark curls
streaming down her back, a suspensive ear to the keyhole of her mother's
door. People fainted because they had heart disease. Of heart disease they
also died. She dared not go in, because papa was there, but waited,
trembling with cold and fear, until her mother's sigh reassured her.
In the morning the mistress of the house came down with a pale face and
dark rings about her deeply-set large eyes. She could not smile, she could
not eat, she hardly spoke, but she was better, she said.
The children would have to know; but she could not bring herself to tell
them. That their father was not in the house they did not perceive, but
put down his absence from the breakfast-table to the fact that he had
over-slept himself.
A great fire blazed on the hearth. A stack of muffins was being kept warm
in a silver dish on a brass stand before it. Fish, and broiled kidneys
were on the table; a ham, and a brawn, and a glazed tongue on the
sideboard. Mrs. Day always drank coffee at her breakfast, Deleah liked
cocoa, the rest took tea; all three were served.
Mrs. Day surveyed these signs of comfort and luxury with a numb feeling at
her heart. All this, and such as this, would have to go. How would the
children endure life without it. Was this lavish amount of food
"extravagance"? she asked herself, for the first time. Was it possible
she, with her well-filled table on which she had prided herself, had
conduced to the misfortune? She was a woman whose conscience was very
easily touched, and she began to blame herself. "But I never dreamed!" she
said, "I never dreamed!"
Bessie could eat neither fish nor kidneys, that morning. "Mama, there was
some game-pie left, last night. Mayn't I have some of it?"
The servant was rung for to bring the game-pie. "If there are any oyster
patties we might have them in, mother," Bernard suggested.
The mother, sadly gazing, assented. Nothing would she have denied them,
that morning--her poor children who were so soon to be deprived of
game-pies and oysters for ever!
They were in the midst of breakfast, their voices a little subdued because
mama was not well, yet with an enjoyable sense of freedom because papa,
who was so often irritable at that meal, had not yet come down, when
suddenly the door opened and without any announcement Mr. George Boult
walked in.
He was a man they all knew as a friend and associate of the master of the
house, but he had never been held in favour by its mistress nor her
children, who indeed had but the slightest acquaintance with him. He had
been a school-fellow of William Day's at the Brockenham Grammar School; a
kind of comradeship had existed between the two from that time till now.
George Boult had assumed for years the habit of dropping in at Queen Anne
Street on Sunday afternoons to smoke a cigar and drink a glass of wine
with the lawyer, but it was a function the men had enjoyed _tête-à-tête_:
as an intimate in the family circle he had not been admitted.
Boult could have bought up all the superior people who turned up their
noses at him, his friend frequently declared; it had been a standing
grievance of his against his wife that she declined to put Mr. Boult's
name on the list of people invited to her parties.
George Boult was a self-made man; the process of manufacture recent, and
unfortunately fresh in people's minds. "If I invite the man who keeps the
draper's shop the professional people won't come to meet him," Mrs. Day
pointed out, and remained obdurate on the point. But because he, who did
not in the least wish to go to her parties, could not be invited to them,
a little awkwardness in the relations of her husband's Sunday afternoon
visitor and Mrs. Day had arisen.
His appearance thus early in the morning, and in the midst of their meal
was a matter more than a little surprising to them all. He was a short,
rather podgy man, with fair whiskers curled upon red cheeks, a common,
up-turned, broad-nostrilled nose, a wide, thick-lipped mouth; quick,
observant, but by no means beautiful eyes, a protruding chin, and a roll
of flesh which showed above his collar at the back of his neck. Well and
carefully he was dressed, however, and wore that air of conscious
prosperity to be observed in the man who has carved his own fortunes and
is proud of the fact.
He grasped, in his broad, short-fingered, red one, the white hand of Mrs.
Day, who went forward to meet him. "I got a verbal message from your
husband last night, asking me to look you up the first thing this
morning," he said. "This is a sad business for you all; I am sorry--very
sorry."
Mrs. Day took her place behind her tea-cups again, lacking the strength to
stand.
"Do the children know?" he asked, in a tone, muffled indeed, but quite
audible in the children's ears.
Mrs. Day shook her head. "But they must know," she said.
"Know what?" they all asked, alert for news, but suspecting no evil. Even
Franky looked up from his toast and marmalade with an inquiring glance.
Perhaps the circus was coming, and there would be another procession, with
elephants and camels walking through the streets, and unseen but loudly
roaring lions dragged in their cages.
"There is bad news, my dears," Mrs. Day began, but very faintly; she
clasped her hands upon the edge of the tea-tray, the cups and saucers
jingled with their shaking. "Poor papa is in trouble. Tell them," she
whispered to the man who stood beside her. "I can't tell them."
Mr. Boult fixed Bessie with the gaze of his slightly protruding eyes of
stone-coloured blue. She was the eldest, the only one who could really be
said to be grown up. For all his tail coat and smart neckties, Bernard at
seventeen was only a boy still.
"What is the matter with papa? Where is papa?" Bessie asked him.
"Just at present--we hope only for a short time until we can bail him
out--your papa is in prison," George Boult said.
He had known it would be a blow to them, but he was a man entirely without
imagination, and therefore quite incapable of putting himself in another
person's place. Rumours had been afloat in the business world. Money,
which the jog-trot profession of law alone could never have brought him
in, had been spent: more than once the suspicion of what would be the end
of his old school-friend had crossed his mind. But that the possibility of
such a, to them, hideous calamity, had never presented itself to the man's
wife and children he had not considered, nor was he capable of
appreciating the sorrow and shame they would suffer by such a disgrace.
He had not a high opinion of William Day's wife and family; they were
people who thought the world a place for play rather than hard work, who
frequented theatres and concert-rooms, and dances. It was not likely they
could feel anything very much. He was unprepared for the effect of his
words.
They were young, they were undisciplined, they were quite unused to
misfortune. The children met the news of its appearance among them by a
loud yell of terrified protest. Mrs. Day had flung herself upon him,
grasped him, clung to him.
"Not William! Not my husband! No! No! No!" she shrieked.
"I thought you knew! I thought you knew!" George Boult said. The woman
hurt him by her grip upon his arms; what a din was in his ears!
"Papa! Oh, papa! Papa!" Bessie screamed.
Franky was screaming too. He had got down from the table and rushed round
to his younger sister, who, white, and shaking like a leaf, took the child
in her arms. Bernard had risen, ashen-faced, staring. "It isn't true!" he
shouted savagely at his father's traducer. "It's a lie!"
"Didn't you know?" George Boult kept saying to the poor woman who was
shaking him by the force of her trembling as she clung to him. "I would
have prepared you--I thought you knew."
"I thought it was bankruptcy," she got out between her chattering teeth.
"I didn't know it was--disgrace. Are you sure? Quite sure?"
"Quite. There is not the shadow of a chance it is not true. A police
officer brought me a message from him from the station-house last night."
She let go his arms, and sank into her chair again; and Franky, who could
find no comfort in Deleah's embrace, left her, and still screaming his
terrified "Papa! papa! papa!" flew to hang upon his mother's neck.
Deleah crept round to Bernard. "Oh, Bernard, what can we do?" she said.
"What ought we to do?"
Bernard, who had sunk into his chair, only laid his arms upon the table,
his head upon his arms, and sobbed.
George Boult thought they were taking it very badly. "This comes of too
much pleasuring," he told himself. He looked round upon the miserable
group, feeling shocked and helpless. He had gone there to see if he could
be of use. How was it possible to help people who behaved like this! He
was a widower, but had no children of his own. If he had been more
fortunate in that respect what serious-minded, well-conducted boys and
girls they would have been: not squeaking over misfortune, but standing up
to it when it came; looking about them, open-eyed, for ways of making
money, marrying money, and getting on. The children of William Day and
their mother were acting like a set of lunatics only fit for Bedlam.
"I'm sorry to have to spring it upon you suddenly. I thought your mama
knew," he said again. "But it's a thing that had to be known--and perhaps
as well one time as another. It's a thing that has got to be borne, too,
and made the best of."
It was quite easy to play the philosopher if only they would have
listened, but they would not. Mrs. Day was rocking herself backwards and
forwards in her chair, the screaming Franky in her arms; Bessie had flung
herself upon the floor and was beating it with her palms and calling upon
the name of papa. George Boult was sorry for their misfortune, but he
looked on and listened with distaste. To have no more spunk than that!
"Which of you can I speak to?" he asked sharply at last. He crossed the
room and touched Bernard's heaving shoulders. "Come out," he said; and
Bernard, openly blubbering, got up, and followed his father's friend from
the room. In the hall George Boult laid a steadying hand upon the poor
boy's arm. "You must bear this like a man, Bernard," he said. "You're not
a child, nor a woman; try to be a man."
"What's he done? What's my father done?" the boy asked. He blew his nose
and wiped his eyes, and made an effort to hold himself upright.
"It's a question of some money belonging to a client."
"To a client, sir?"
"Your father invested a large sum of money for her, then sold the shares,
and did not buy others or give her the money."
"But--he would have done--in time. He--meant to do it."
"Your father has got to prove that."
"My father will do it," with a sob.
"I hope so. There's another matter we need not go into now. Her signature
authorising the sale she disputes."
"My father--will explain."
"Perhaps. He'll be up before the magistrates to-day. I shall attend, and
shall offer myself to go bail for him. They'll probably want two. Who is
there you can ask?"
Bernard did not know. He had not his wits sufficiently about him even to
think. "I can ask my mother," he said. He was sobbing again, fallen limply
against the wall, his face hidden.
"Do remember you've got to play the man," George Boult said. He felt
helpless in the presence of such surprising helplessness. He looked at the
heaving shoulders of the youth with an astonished distaste. What was to be
done with material so soft as this! "I am sorry I have been the bearer of
such ill news, but there is no good in my stopping now. I'll drop in, tell
your mother, when you're all more used to it. Wonderful how quickly people
do get used to things! Meantime, remember, I'll stand bail for your father
if you can find another. And there's no time to lose. You must shake
yourself together and set about it at once."
"Helpless set!" he said to himself as he let himself out and passed down
the three glistening white steps into the quiet street. "Hysterical,
useless, helpless set! Fit only for pleasure-seeking and money-spending.
What is to become of them now?"
They were certainly helpless. When Bernard went back to the room where
breakfast--the meal to be for ever unfinished--stood about, and told them
they had, there and then, to find some one willing to bail out his father,
none of them understood, or knew what to do.
"Do you know of any one we could ask, mother?" Mrs. Day sat, her brow
clasped tightly in her two hands as if she really feared her head would
split. "Let me think! Let me think!" she said piteously, but was incapable
of thinking.
"Would any of the people who were here at the dance--the Challises, the
Hollingsbys, the Buttifers, the Frosts, do it? Which of them shall we
ask?"
"I don't think one of them would do it. They would not care."
"But they're often here--to dinner, and so on."
"Don't ask them."
"Who then, mama?" Deleah questioned. She had made less noise than the
others, and there was about her an air of purpose, lacking in the rest,
although her childish face looked stricken.
"There is no one I should like you to ask a favour of."
"But we must ask some one."
"Let it be some one we do not know, then."
"Could we ask Sir Francis Forcus? He is very rich."
"I will go somewhere--I will ask--some one," Mrs. Day said; but, trying to
stand, she fell back in her chair, and her frightened children saw that
she had fainted.
They laid her on the sofa, and over her prostrate body renewed the subject
of the bail.
"Bessie must go," Deleah said.
"Then, I won't, miss!" said Bessie, and sobbed and choked and screamed at
her sister: "I won't! I won't!"
"Bernard must go."
"It would come better from a woman," Bernard said.
In the end it was Deleah who went--the little petted, sheltered Deleah,
who had never gone before on any errand of more moment than for the
matching of Berlin wools, or for the changing of the three-volume novel at
the Public Library.
"Deleah can't go--Deleah mustn't!" the prostrate mother on the sofa
gasped. She looked like a corpse beneath the cloths soaked in
eau-de-cologne-and-water which Bessie had arranged over her brow. "We
can't ask Sir Francis. Call Deleah back. Stop her."
But Deleah would not be stopped. It was a question of getting her father
out of prison, and they had been told to lose no time. While Bessie and
her mother and Bernard were still declaring she must not go she had run up
to her room for her hat and jacket; and lest they should catch and stop
her, she would not stay in the house to put them on, but flung them anyhow
upon her when once outside the door. Then, with her little wild white face
almost lost in the masses of loose dark hair escaped from the net she wore
in the morning, and falling anyhow beneath her hat, and her small bare
hands grasping the jacket she would not stop to button at her throat, she
ran through the streets.
Was that really Deleah running there, and on that errand? Deleah, who at
that hour was usually walking sedately to school; saying over to herself
her French poetry, perhaps, as she went, or taking a last peep in her
geography book, to make sure once again of the latitude and longitude of
Montreal, or to impress more firmly on her mind the imports and exports of
Prussia.
To get to her school she had to pass her father's office; and sometimes,
if it pleased him to start early enough, he would walk there with his
little daughter, her hand tucked within his arm. With her he was never
savage, and rarely irritable; on these walks his mood would be playful and
jocose, and they would incite each other to play the truant from office
and school, and pretend they were off on a holiday jaunt together.
And now her laughing, noisy, loving, boisterous father was in prison--in
prison!--and she was running to beg the help of a stranger to take him
out.
She gave no thought to the man to whom she was going, nor to the words she
would say to him. The difficulty of asking such a favour of such a
stranger did not distress her. Her father--her father--her father! was her
only thought.