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 pass
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 Willy 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 attitude.
"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.
Deleah, left alone with her mother, did her best to strengthen her. "Never
mind her, mama. Do not think of any of us in this; think of yourself
alone. You could never do it."
"Bessie and he would fight like cat and dog," Mrs. Day said. "They are
always fighting now. She says such things to him, and he to her!
Environment has told on Bessie. She says things no lady should say. My
life would be unbearable."
"It is not to be thought of for a moment."
"But there are the debts I cannot pay. There is poor Bernard. I ought to
do it, Deleah. I know I ought. But I have had miseries enough."
When Deleah left her, Mrs. Day still sat a huddled heap upon the sofa. "I
have had miseries enough," she repeated; and upon that text she spoke to
herself--going over in faithful detail the troubles she had known--vainest
and most useless occupation in which a woman can indulge.
Her orphaned, dependent childhood; her marriage. It had been loveless on
her part, but she had cared a little, believing that love on her husband's
part would suffice. Was it love, ever at all? Is love possible where
tenderness, courtesy, consideration do not exist? Time going on, daily she
had suffered his incivility, the despite he did to her sense of what was
due to her as his wife, the mother of his children, the mistress of his
home. Habit, and love for her children, had made life tolerable. But for
twenty years he and she had lived side by side in the outward union of
inwardly divided minds.
Then had come his crime, its awful expiation, the terror, the disgrace,
the bitterness of the fall for her children and herself, the salt, salt
taste of the bread of charity, the drudgery which had been humiliating all
through, with failure at the end. The grievous sorrow of Bernard's
blighted career, the cruel death of her innocent comfort and consoler, her
little boy.
Were not these things enough? Great God, was it possible she still had
unspeakable agonies of mind and humiliation of body to go through? Her
eyes, so pathetic in their subdued look of patience, wandered round the
room which had been to her a haven of refuge from her sordid life in the
grocer's shop. A hat Bessie had just discarded lay upon the table. Poor
Bessie! poor undisciplined, unruly, never wholly grown-up Bessie! In the
day of cataloguing the miseries of her life she was too sadly honest to
pretend that Bessie could be a comfort to her.
A picture of Bernard painted by a local artist at a time when father and
mother were for once united in the opinion that a handsomer, more
promising boy did not exist, hung on the wall. Poor Bernard, who by last
mail from India had written to his mother that his life in barracks was a
hell.
The tired eyes wandered from that heart-breaking record of promise never
to be fulfilled to the whatnot, holding Franky's toys. Was that dust on
the lid of the paint-box?
She crossed the room, mounted a chair, took down the precious box, dusted
it tenderly with her handkerchief, looked within. Such broken odds and
ends of his gamboge, his yellow ochre, his Indian ink of which he had
prattled to his father, questioning whether carmine or vermilion should be
used for the roofs of his absurd houses; if Prussian blue or ultramarine
should be for his seas and skies. She saw again the huge man and the
little child bending over their pictures on Sunday evenings of long ago,
heard the very tones of their voices. Her tears dropped upon the shabby
old box, upon the little earthen palette on which the colours Franky had
rubbed still remained. All the bitterness had died out of her heart. Only
sadness was left, and a sense of irreparable loss.