Lazarus remained out late that evening, and, as he had forgotten to
borrow the key, Salvina was sitting up for him.
She utilized the time in preparing her sewing. She was making a
night-dress with dozens and dozens of tiny tucks at the breast, all
run by hand, and she was putting into the fine calico an artistic
needlework absolutely futile, and with its perpetual "count two, miss
two,"--infinitely trying to the eyes, especially by gas-light. The
insane competition of the teachers, refining upon a Code in itself
stupidly exacting, made the needlework the most distressing of all the
tasks of the girl-teachers of that day. Salvina herself, with her
morbid conscientiousness and desire to excel, underwent nightmares
from the vexatiousness of learning how to cut holes so that they could
not possibly be darned, and then darning them. When, at the
head-centre, the lady demonstrator, armed with a Brobdingnagian
whalebone needle, threaded with a bright red cord, executed
herringboned fantasias on a canvas frame resembling a violin stand, it
all looked easy enough. But when Salvina herself had to unravel a
little piece of stockinette with a real needle and then fill in the
hole so as to leave no trace of the crime, she was reduced to
hysteria. Even the coloured threads with which she worked were a scant
relief to the eye. And all this elaborate fancywork was entirely
useless. At home Salvina was always at work, darning and mending;
never was there a defter needle. Even the "hedge-tear-down" was neatly
and expeditiously repaired, so long as she avoided the scholastic
methods. "What's all this madness?" her mother had asked once, when
she had tried the orthodox "Swiss darning" on a real article. And
Mrs. Brill surveyed in amazement the back of the darn, which looked
like Turkish towelling.
To-night Salvina could not long continue her taxing work. Her eyes
ached, and she at last resolved to rise early in the morning and
proceed with the night-dress then. She turned the gas low, so as to
reduce the bill, and it was as if she had turned down her own spirits,
for a strange melancholy now took possession of her in the silent
fuscous kitchen in the denuded house, and the emptiness of the other
rooms seemed to strike a chill upon her senses. There were strange
creaks and ghostly noises from all parts. She fixed her thought on the
one furnished bed-room now occupied by her mother, as on a symbol of
life and recuperation. But the uncanny noises went on; rustlings, and
patterings, and Salvina felt that she might shriek and frighten her
mother. She had almost resolved to turn up the gas, when the sound of
a harmonium came muffled through the wall, and the softened voices of
her Christian neighbours sang a Sunday hymn. Salvina ceased to be
alone; and tears bathed her cheeks, as the crude melody lilted on. She
felt absorbed in some great light and love, which was somehow both a
present possession and a beckoning future that awaited her soul, and
it was all mysteriously mixed with the blue skies of Victoria Park, in
those far-off happy days when she had gone home on her father's
shoulder; and with the blue skies of those enchanted sunlit lands of
art and beauty, in which she would wander in the glorious future, when
she should be making a hundred and fifty a year. Paris, Venice,
Athens, Madrid--how the mellifluous syllables thrilled her! One by
one, in her annual summer holiday, she and her mother might see them
all. Meantime she saw them all in her imagination, bathed in the light
that never was on sea or land, and it was not her mother with whom she
journeyed but a noble young Bayard, handsome and tender-hearted, who
had imperceptibly slipped into her mother's place. Poor Salvina, with
all her modesty, never saw herself as others saw her, never lost the
dream of a romantic love. Lazarus's rat-tat recalled her to reality.
"I know I'm late," he said, with apologetic defiance, "but it's no
pleasure to sit in an empty house. _You_ may like it, but your tastes
were always peculiar, and that straw mattress on the floor isn't
inviting."
"I am so sorry, dear. But then mother _must_ have the bed."
"Well, it won't last long, thank Heaven. I made the Jonases consent to
the marriage before the scandal gets to them."
"So soon!" said Salvina with unconscious social satire.
"Yes, and we'll have our honeymoon travelling for Granders Brothers.
She's a good sort, is Rhoda, she doesn't mind gypsying. And that saves
us from the expense of completing the furniture." He paused, and
added awkwardly, "I'd lend it to you, only that might give us away."
"But we don't need the furniture, dear, and don't you think they
_ought_ to know--it is the rest of the world that it _doesn't_
concern."
"They are bound to know after the marriage. We've kept it dark so far,
thanks to being in Hackney away from our old acquaintances and to
mother's stinginess in not having encouraged new people to drop in.
I've told the Jonases father was ill and might have to go away for his
health. That'll pave the way to his absence from the wedding. It
sounds quite grand. We'll send him to a German Spa."
Salvina did not share her brother's respect for old Jonas, who bored
her with trite quotations from English literature or the Hebrew Bible.
He was in sooth a pompous ignoramus, acutely conscious of being an
intellectual light in an ignorant society; a green shade he wore over
his left eye added to his air of dignified distinction. Foreign Jews
in especial were his scorn, and he seriously imagined that his own
stereotyped phrases uttered with a good English pronunciation gave his
conversation an immeasurable superiority over the most original
thinking tainted by a German or Yiddish accent. Salvina's timid
corrections of his English quotations made him angry and imperilled
Lazarus's wooing. The young man was indeed the only member of the
family who cultivated relations with the Jonases, though now it would
be necessary to exchange perfunctory visits. Lazarus presided over
these visits in fear and trembling, glossing over any slips as to the
father, who was gone to the seaside for his health. On second
thoughts, Lazarus had not ventured on a German Spa.