Mrs. Day's Daughters Part 11

"Then go to the devil," papa said, and getting up slouched from the room.

Bernard, too, who was more afraid of the altered man than Bessie, and for long shrank from any conversation with him, was at last induced by his mother to consult his father as to his own future.

"There isn't much use that I can see, sir, in my sweating away at my books for this exam," he said.

"Oh? Why not?"

"Supposing that I get through it, what am I to do then?"

"You must do the best you can. This Senior Cambridge Exam, they tell me, is a door to any of the professions."

"But you want money to enter a profession, sir. From what I hear we have none."

"Your hearing has not played you false in that direction. What I had you managed to spend, among you. I was the goose that laid the golden egg; now circ.u.mstances forbid my laying any more--for a time. You must look after yourselves."

"But if you could only give us some idea of how to set about it."

Then, upon him, too, his father, having shown a greater measure of forbearance so far than he accorded the mere women of his family, turned savagely. The poor wretch did not know how to help them, did not know what to advise them to do: to frighten them was his only resource.

"Haven't I got enough to think about?" he shouted at the boy. "You and your mother and sisters come and badger--and badger me--"

"All right, sir. I won't badger you any more."

"All I ask is to be let alone--to be granted a little peace. You have no mercy--none!"

But after that conversation the boy gave up even the pretence of studying.

"Where's the good?" he asked of Bessie. "If I pa.s.sed the blessed thing, where's the good? I shall have to be an errand boy, I suppose, or sweep a crossing. I don't want a Senior Cambridge Certificate for that."

The womankind did their best to persuade him to persevere, but he declared that he could not study in his bedroom without a fire, nor could he so much as drive a word into his head if he had to sit in the same room as his father.

That room where their pleasant evenings had been pa.s.sed while Mr. Day played his cards at the club, presented altogether a different aspect in these sad times when that unhappy man formed part of the circle. The poor, bulky wretch sat always over the fire--literally over it, his chair-feet touching the fender, his own feet as often as not on the bars; the rest of the family withdrawn as much as possible from the hearth. If there was talk among them as they sat at their table with their sewing, their painting, their books--and being young they talked, and even sometimes laughed--he resented the fact that they could do so, and sometimes snarled round upon them with a request for silence. But equally, it seemed, did he resent their silence when it fell, and would make sarcastic remarks to them when they withdrew on the liveliness of the society they provided for him.

An undue amount of the weekly two pounds for housekeeping money went to find the master of the house tobacco. There was some good port wine in the cellar; he might as well drink it while he had the chance, William Day thought. What else had he to do but smoke and drink; and he did both, all day long.

He had not been a drinking man, although he had ever taken his share of the good things of life, nor an idle one. His family looked on now at his altered habits with fear and a growing disgust. It was surprising how, in the loss of his own self-respect and the knowledge that he had lost the respect of those who had loved him, the man altered. With astonishment they, who had known him all their lives, saw him in a few short weeks become selfish, greedy, unmannerly, even unclean. The ash from his pipe fell on his coat, he would not brush it away; he had evidently given up the use of a nail-brush; his hair hung over his forehead; his untrimmed beard and whiskers stuck out round the big face which was flabby now, and unwholesome.

Missing the luxuries from his table, he forgot the niceties he had hitherto observed there. When he came to his meals with unwashed hands, took to himself, with apparently no thought for the rest, the best of what he found there, the elder boy and girl would look at each other with angry condemnation in their eyes. Such lapses from a hitherto observed code of good manners Mrs. Day bore with an apparently apathetic indifference. For years, truth to tell, she had ceased to love the man, and the little deviations, which read so trivially but mean in daily life so much, were almost unnoticed by her in the stupefying sense of the misfortune which had befallen them all.

It was only Deleah, devotedly loving her father, who perceived the real tragedy at the back of this neglect of personal and family obligations; only she who dimly understood that this disfiguring outward alteration was but the sign of an inner, more pitiful change; only she who had the insight to read in her father's savage ways the despair, the scorn of himself, the rage with destiny, the bitter enmity against a world in which he was no longer to exist. Only Deleah felt in her heart the sorrow of it all--Deleah who was a reader of Thackeray, of Trollope, of d.i.c.kens, of Tennyson; whose eyes had wept for imaginary woes before these bitter drops had been wrung from them for her own; who had learnt that tears were not the only signs of an anguished heart; and knew that the love of position, of home, of a fair name even were not the chief things for which they as a family should have mourned.

And so the slow weeks, even the slow months pa.s.sed. The muddy, narrow pavements of Brockenham grew dry and dusty in the biting east winds.

People at whom Mrs. Day and her daughters peeped through curtained windows walked by with snowdrops, with violets, and presently with cowslips in their hands. Spring, so slow in coming, yet so dreaded by them all, was coming at last. Easter was here. Easter too soon was here!--and the Easter a.s.sizes.

CHAPTER VII

Husband And Father

On the evening before the morning on which his trial was to take place, a different creature seemed to be in the place lately occupied by William Day.

For one thing, his appearance was improved. A barber, sent for, that afternoon, had cut off the greasy, disguising locks of sand-coloured hair, and trimmed the wildly luxuriant beard which had given the man such a slovenly, unfamiliar appearance. His upper lip was once more shaved.

"I don't mind kissing you now, papa," Franky said, who had shirked saluting the stubbly face.

This improvement being completed, he made a change in his clothes, and at their tea-time appeared among them all in his black cloth, long-skirted coat, his "pepper and salt" trousers. As another outward sign of his moral degradation he had dispensed with linen at throat and wrists lately, but now his heavy chin sank once more into the enclosure of a collar whose stiffly starched points reached to the middle of his cheeks. The pin which adorned his thickly padded necktie was large in size, consisting of a gold-rimmed gla.s.s case in which was exhibited, braided and intertwined, hair cut from the heads of his four children. They had all of them clubbed together to prepare this offering for papa on last St. Valentine's Day.

And with the resumption of a more careful toilette the poor man had gone back to the decent demeanour of happier days. He said nothing; was, indeed, in a state of black depression which he made no attempt to hide, but he outraged no longer the sensitive feelings of his family by his behaviour.

"Papa is just like what he used to look," Franky said, when he beheld the renovation of his parent's appearance. "Shall we paint pictures this evening, papa?"

They tried to hush the child, but Franky saw no reason why he should not make his request, nor why it should be refused. He fetched his paint-box and a store of pictures he had cut from some old papers.

"You do sunsets so much more beautifully than me, papa. If you'd just do the sunsets for me!"

And presently the father had drawn a chair by the side of his little son's, and was showing him how to mix his colours, and admonishing him not to suck his paintbrushes, as on the happy winter evenings before the crash.

It was a landscape with mill and marshland and water, the child had chosen, and there was a large s.p.a.ce to be occupied with the sunset at which his parent excelled, and much sc.r.a.ping and mixing of carmine and yellow ochre and cobalt blues. So that Franky's bed-time was here before the picture was finished. He was sent off as usual, protesting and in tears.

"You'll help me to finish it to-morrow night, papa? Promise you'll help me to-morrow night!" he entreated, through his weeping. But Bessie, whose task it was to see him to bed, pulled the child relentlessly from the room, and slammed the door upon them both.

George Boult had come in, for a last talk with his friend. His presence was never desired by the family, but it relieved the tension, somewhat, of that sad evening.

The two men sat with their pipes, and a bottle of that much diminished store of "eighteen forty-sevens" was broached. But presently it was noticed that although William Day held his pipe in his hand he did not smoke. With the other hand he shaded his eyes from the gas light, and he said nothing. One by one the young people crept off to bed, and presently Mrs. Day, whose attempt to keep up a conversation with the visitor had quickly failed, also stood up to go.

"Are you leaving us, Lydia?" the husband said when he became aware of her intention.

"I will not go if you wish me to stay, William."

"No, no. Go, and get some sleep."

Then, as for a moment she stood, hesitating at the door, longing to escape from that sad presence, yet miserable to go: "Do the best you can for my poor wife," Day said to his friend. "She has been a good wife to me."

She had lived with him for twenty years, and had, perhaps, never heard a word of praise from him before. When at last it came it was too much for her to bear, and she went, sobbing loudly, from the room.

An hour later when the unhappy master of the house had for the last time attended his friend to the hall-door, watched him down the steps into the quiet street, given a silent nod to the other's silent gesture of farewell as he turned to walk down the echoing pavement; when he had put out the gas in the sitting-room and hall, and dragged himself--who can divine with what heaviness of heart?--heavily up the stairs, he came upon a little white night-gowned figure, watching for him on the landing, outside his bedroom door.

It was Deleah who had waited for him there.

"It is only I, papa," she said when he stopped short at sight of her.

"Only your little Deleah that I--I--loves you so."

"Be off to bed, this instant," he said, and pointed an angry finger in the direction of her room.

But she put her arms about his neck and clung to him with stifled sobbing, till with the choke of his own sobbing she felt his great chest heave beneath her clinging form.