Mrs. Day's Daughters Part 12

When he had flung himself upon the bed beside his wife he was choking and sobbing still, in a fashion dreadful to hear.

"William!" she said timidly, and put a shaking hand upon his shoulder. "Is there anything I can do or say that can help you, William?"

He did not answer her, but the bed shook with his rending sobs; and she lay and sobbed beside him.

When at length such calm as comes from exhaustion fell: "I did it for you and the children," he said. "I thought, with luck, I could have put it right. But it was for all of you I did it. You will remember that?"

"I will remember it while I live," she said. "You may be quite sure that neither your children nor I will ever forget."

"Deleah upset me. She should have been in bed"--it was so he excused his tears to her--"I should not have broken down like this if she had not unmanned me. The child should have gone to bed."

She heard him swallow down his tears, and then he began again: "Deleah and Franky have always been--have always been--"

"The dearest," she supplied, understanding him. "The dearest of your children, William?"

"Tell them that--after to-morrow, will you?"

She promised. "Bessie and Bernard have not such winning ways, perhaps, but they love you, William, I am sure."

To this he made no answer. After a time she spoke to him again: "Have you anything else to say to me, William? There have been too few words between us of late. It has been my fault, perhaps. But now, have you anything to say that might comfort us both to remember?"

"Nothing." He said the word drearily, but not unkindly, and she did not resent his silence. Full well she knew that volumes, if he could have spoken them, could not have lightened her helplessness in the present and terror of the future, nor his despair.

She lay for a few minutes, the tears pouring down her cheeks, unchecked in the darkness, then she forced herself to say the only few words she could think of which might comfort him in the time to come.

"William, I won't talk to you, I won't disturb you. I want you to go to sleep, to get a night's rest, if you can; but just this one thing I do wish to say to you--I do want you to remember. It is that you must be sure never to think I feel any anger against you. Only pity--only pity, William; and such a sorrow for you that I cannot put it into words. I have wanted to tell you all along, but--"

She left it there, and he received what she said in silence.

Only once again he spoke. "This has been h.e.l.l," he said, and she knew he spoke of the weeks he had spent, an alien in his own home, awaiting his trial. "h.e.l.l! Whatever comes, I am glad this is over."

Then he turned on his side, away from her, and lay quite quiet; and presently she knew with thanksgiving that he slept.

CHAPTER VIII

The Way Out

The prisoner in accordance with his counsel's advice pleaded Guilty. It was only a question of the length of the sentence, therefore, and the judge before whom William Day appeared did not err on the side of mercy.

The heaviest sentence that it was in his power to allot to a malefactor of that cla.s.s he pa.s.sed upon William Day.

None of his own were present, but the Court was filled with people to whom the prisoner was a familiar figure of everyday life.

It was all but impossible to look upon this big, important-looking man in the well-cut clothes, holding till the last few weeks among them the position of gentleman, and believe that it was a criminal standing before their eyes. The attraction of gazing at, of gloating upon, such a phenomenon was great. He had been a hectoring kind of man, walking very noisily among his fellows, taking to himself a great deal of room. Such an one gives offence frequently if unconsciously. There was none who saw William Day standing up for his sentence in the dock that day who bore a grudge, or remembered.

With some there he had a.s.sumed an insolent superiority, with other few, whose position ent.i.tled them to choose their acquaintance, he had been unwarrantably familiar. For the minute he held his place after sentence was p.r.o.nounced his eyes travelled slowly but with a dreadful look of appeal over the familiar faces. Over faces of tradespeople, with whom he had dealt; of clients for whom he had done business; of people with whom he had dined and whom he had entertained in return; of men who had driven him in cabs, blacked his boots, carried his portmanteaux. The slowly travelling gaze had in it something of a sick despair, something of a wild appeal. The men over whom it pa.s.sed, bore it in absolute, breathless silence, but they never forgot it.

The great cheeks that had seemed ready to burst with good-living, hung loose and flabby now, the hands that had been prompt with the grasp of friendship, that had waved greetings from window or pavement, that had ever been generous in giving, clung to the rail of the dock, the knuckles whitened with the tension. The tongue that had been so loud in dispute, so rough in anger, so boisterous in welcome, lay dry and silent in the mouth which had lopped open.

There was a feeling upon many of those who momentarily encountered the dreadful gaze that they were responsible; they longed to exonerate themselves, to say to him, "I, at least, had nothing to do with it. I am sorry, William Day. Indeed I am sorry." It was a relief when he turned, at the warder's touch on his arm, and went below.

In the room where he was allowed to sit for a time before being driven to prison his lawyer came to speak to him; the confidential clerk from his own office; his friend, George Boult.

"It is very severe," George Boult kept saying with nervous reiteration.

"Very severe."

The prisoner did not speak. He was wearing, arranged across his heavy paunch, a handsome chain of gold. With fingers stiff from their hold upon the dock-rail he began, bunglingly, to detach this chain from his waistcoat. His watch came out with it--a big watch, with a double gold case. He opened the outer case in an aimless way, mechanically, and for no object, it seemed, for he did not look at the time. Then, without a word he held out the watch and chain to his friend, and lifted the fingers which had fumbled with the watch-case to his lead-coloured lips.

Within a quarter of an hour from the time that William Day had listened to his heavy sentence of penal servitude he lay on his back, dead.

CHAPTER IX

For The Widow And The Fatherless

At the initiative of George Boult a subscription was opened for "the widow and children of the late William Day, who had left them without any means of support."

This sad and irrefutable statement was made in an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the local newspaper, and was written, in Mr. Boult's own round and clerkly hand, on the top of the list of subscribers hanging in conspicuous places in the Banks, the Public Library, the princ.i.p.al shops of the town.

It was said by those competent to form an opinion that the engineering of this scheme to help poor Mrs. Day and her children should have been in other hands. That George Boult's social position in the town did not ent.i.tle him to head the list. A banker's name should have figured there, or the name of the M. P. for Brockenham, or Sir Francis Forcus's name.

With such an influential person to lead the way it was argued that the smaller fry would have been more willing to follow suit. It was also whispered that one of such persons of wealth and note would have led off with at least a hundred pounds. George Boult's name was down for fifty.

It was a large amount for him to give--not because he could not well have afforded more, but because he was all unaccustomed to giving. He had been known to be the unhappy man's friend, and because he headed the list with his fifty pounds it was said that no one liked to outdo that donation. Sir Francis Forcus, in order to avoid hurting those sensitive feelings with which Mr. Boult was accredited, had the happy thought to put his own name down for fifty pounds, and those of his wife and his young brother, each for the same amount.

There were two more names down for like sums, after which came a few for ten pounds, a few more for five pounds; there were numerous donations of one pound; after which the subscriptions dropped to ten shillings, to five--

Poor Mrs. Day, casting a sick eye down the list as it continued to appear, once a week, in the local paper, felt ashamed by the paltriness of the amounts which were being ama.s.sed in her behalf. "Collected by a well-wisher, six and nine." Several people, modestly content that their initials only should appear, presented two and six.

"Sympathy" was down for a shilling. How degraded she felt as she read!

Though, why a gift of a shilling should have hurt her more than the gift of fifty pounds she could not have explained.

When, after dragging on far several weeks, the subscription list was closed the sum collected only amounted to a little over six hundred pounds.

George Boult had been ready to pledge himself that it would have risen to a thousand. He had spared no trouble in the collection of the sum. The list of subscribers hung in a conspicuous place in his shop. He never failed to call to it the attention of his well-to-do customers. A case more needing help was never before the public of Brockenham, he would point out to them.

But the public of Brockenham, severely shocked by the tragic circ.u.mstances of William Day's death, recovered quickly from the blow, to say that the death had been the best thing which could happen to the family. To be rid of such a man, to have no more attaching to them the reproach of a father and husband in prison, removed half the woeful load of misfortune from the case. That the children were mostly of an age to earn their own livings, their mother still fairly young and strong, were facts also remembered.

Then the word began to be pa.s.sed about from mouth to mouth--spoken in a whisper at first, but presently a word which might be spoken without fear of rebuke in any ear--that the Day family had always been eaten up with pride, and that the lawyer's troubles had come about through the extravagance of his wife.

The sum of six hundred and forty-nine pounds being collected, what to do with it was the next thing to decide.

The day after the subscription list was closed Mrs. Day went to an interview with George Boult in order to set before him a proposition, the result of the unanimous conclusion to which she and her children after many tearful consultations had come.

"Of course I must have some plan to put before him," the mother had said, pathetically conscious that however helpless she felt she must by no means appear to be so. "It would not do for us to have made no plans, after the interest Mr. Boult has taken; and his fifty pounds."