"In our rooms. The letter says so."
"And you still believe what he says?" She began to mount the stairs.
"I am sure he packed in my Paisley shawl while he was about it. It is
fortunate I wore all my jewellery. And you always say I put on too
much!"
Sustained by this unanswerable vindication of her past policy, Mrs.
Brill ascended the stairs without further wailing.
Salvina, whose sense of romance never exalted her above the practical,
remembered now that her brother Lazarus might come back at any moment
clamorously hungry. This pinned her to the concrete moment. How to get
him some supper! And her mother, too, must be faint and tired. She ran
into the kitchen, and found enough odds and ends left to make a meal,
and even a cracked teapot and a few coarse cups not worth carrying
away; and, with a sense of Robinson Crusoe adventure, she extracted
light, heat, and cheerfulness from the obedient gas branch, which took
on the air of a case of precious goods not washed away in the
household wreck. When her mother at last came down, cataloguing the
wardrobe salvage in picturesque Yiddish, Salvina stopped her curses
with hot tea. They both drank, leaning against the kitchen-dresser,
which served for a table for the cups.
Salvina's Crusoe excitement increased when her mother asked her where
they were to sleep, seeing that even the beds had been spirited away.
"I have five shillings in my purse; I'll go out and buy a cheap
mattress. But then there's Lazarus! Oh dear!"
"Lazarus has his own bed. Yes, yes, thank God, we'll be able to borrow
his wedding furniture."
"But it's all stored away in the Jonas's attic."
A smart rat-tat at the door denoted the inopportune return of Lazarus
himself. Salvina darted upstairs to let him in and break the shock. He
was a slimmer and more elegant edition of his father, a year older
than Kitty, and taller than Salvina by a jaunty head and shoulders.
"And why isn't the hall lamp alight?" he queried, as her white face
showed itself in the dusky door-slit. "It looks so beastly shabby. The
only light's in the kitchen; I daresay you and the mater are pigging
there again. Why can't you live up to your position?"
The unexpected reproach broke her down. "We have no position any
more," she sobbed out. And all the long years of paralyzing economies
swept back to her memory, all the painful progress--accelerated by her
growing salary--from the Hounsditch apartments to the bow-windows and
gas-chandeliers of Hackney!
"What do you mean? What is the matter? Speak, you little fool! Don't
cry." He came across the threshold and shook her roughly.
"Father's run away with the furniture and some woman," she explained
chokingly.
"The devil!" The smart cane slipped from his fingers and he
maintained his cigar in his mouth with difficulty. "Do you mean to say
the old man has gone and--the beastly brute! The selfish hypocrite!
But how could he get the furniture?"
"He made mother go on a visit to the Borough."
"The old fox! That's your religious chaps. I'll go and give 'em both
brimstone. Where are they?"
"I don't know where--but you must not--it is all too horrible. There's
nothing even to sleep on. We thought of borrowing your furniture!"
"What! And give the whole thing away to the Jonases--and lose Rhoda,
perhaps. Good heavens, Sally. Don't be so beastly selfish. Think of
the disgrace, if we can't cover it up."
"The disgrace is for father, not for you."
"Don't be an idiot. Old Jonas looked down on us enough already, and if
it hadn't been for Kitty's calling on him in the Samuelsons' carriage,
he might never have consented to the engagement."
"Oh, dear!" said Salvina, melted afresh by this new aspect. "My poor
Lazarus!" and she gazed dolefully at the handsome youth who had
divided with Kitty the good looks of the family. "But still," she
added consolingly, "you couldn't have married for a long time,
anyhow."
"I don't know so much. I had a very promising interview this afternoon
with the manager of Granders Brothers, the big sponge-people."
"But you don't understand travelling in sponge."
"Pooh! Travelling's travelling. There's nothing to understand.
Whatever the article is, you just tell lies about it."
"Oh, Lazarus!"
"Don't make eyes--you ain't pretty enough. What do you know of the
world, you who live mewed up in a Board School? I daresay you believe
all the rot you have to tell the little girls."
Her brother's shot made a wound he had not intended. Salvina was at
last reminded of her own relation to the sordid tragedy, of what the
other teachers would think, ay, even the little girls, so sharp in all
that did not concern school-learning. Would her pupils have any
inkling of the cloud on teacher's home? Ah, her brother was right.
This disgrace besplashed them all, and she saw herself confusedly as a
tainted figure holding forth on honour and duty to rows of white
pinafores.