Mrs. Day's Daughters Part 9

"But they're often here--to dinner, and so on."

"Don't ask them."

"Who then, mama?" Deleah questioned. She had made less noise than the others, and there was about her an air of purpose, lacking in the rest, although her childish face looked stricken.

"There is no one I should like you to ask a favour of."

"But we must ask some one."

"Let it be some one we do not know, then."

"Could we ask Sir Francis Forcus? He is very rich."

"I will go somewhere--I will ask--some one," Mrs. Day said; but, trying to stand, she fell back in her chair, and her frightened children saw that she had fainted.

They laid her on the sofa, and over her prostrate body renewed the subject of the bail.

"Bessie must go," Deleah said.

"Then, I won't, miss!" said Bessie, and sobbed and choked and screamed at her sister: "I won't! I won't!"

"Bernard must go."

"It would come better from a woman," Bernard said.

In the end it was Deleah who went--the little petted, sheltered Deleah, who had never gone before on any errand of more moment than for the matching of Berlin wools, or for the changing of the three-volume novel at the Public Library.

"Deleah can't go--Deleah mustn't!" the prostrate mother on the sofa gasped. She looked like a corpse beneath the cloths soaked in eau-de-cologne-and-water which Bessie had arranged over her brow. "We can't ask Sir Francis. Call Deleah back. Stop her."

But Deleah would not be stopped. It was a question of getting her father out of prison, and they had been told to lose no time. While Bessie and her mother and Bernard were still declaring she must not go she had run up to her room for her hat and jacket; and lest they should catch and stop her, she would not stay in the house to put them on, but flung them anyhow upon her when once outside the door. Then, with her little wild white face almost lost in the ma.s.ses of loose dark hair escaped from the net she wore in the morning, and falling anyhow beneath her hat, and her small bare hands grasping the jacket she would not stop to b.u.t.ton at her throat, she ran through the streets.

Was that really Deleah running there, and on that errand? Deleah, who at that hour was usually walking sedately to school; saying over to herself her French poetry, perhaps, as she went, or taking a last peep in her geography book, to make sure once again of the lat.i.tude and longitude of Montreal, or to impress more firmly on her mind the imports and exports of Prussia.

To get to her school she had to pa.s.s her father's office; and sometimes, if it pleased him to start early enough, he would walk there with his little daughter, her hand tucked within his arm. With her he was never savage, and rarely irritable; on these walks his mood would be playful and jocose, and they would incite each other to play the truant from office and school, and pretend they were off on a holiday jaunt together.

And now her laughing, noisy, loving, boisterous father was in prison--in prison!--and she was running to beg the help of a stranger to take him out.

She gave no thought to the man to whom she was going, nor to the words she would say to him. The difficulty of asking such a favour of such a stranger did not distress her. Her father--her father--her father! was her only thought.

CHAPTER V

Deleah's Errand

It chanced that Sir Francis Forcus drove to the Brewery an hour earlier than usual that morning, and--a circ.u.mstance of rare occurrence--that Reginald was pleased to drive with him. Both men came together into the private room of the elder, where Deleah, for an hour which had seemed a lifetime, awaited them.

If Sir Francis had ever seen William Day's little daughter, he had forgotten her. It was Reggie, at whom Deleah never looked, who called her name in his pleasant, good-natured tone of welcome.

"Why, it is Deleah!" he cried out, as if Deleah, of all the people in the world, was the person he most wanted to see. "This is Deleah Day, Francis."

He liked little Deleah--what young man with eyes in his head did not like her!--she was so pretty; far and away prettier than Bessie, who had in Francis's word tried to grab him. She was the jolliest little thing to laugh with and to dance with; light as a feather--you could sweep her off her feet and dance on with her, never feeling her weight upon your arm.

He held out his hand to her now, but she did not see it. Her own hands were clasped. Without clasping them she would not have knelt to ask anything of G.o.d. She went across the room and lifted her little white stricken face to Sir Francis above the clasped hands, and gazed at him with an agony of prayer in her eyes.

"My papa is in prison," she said. "I have come to ask you to take him out."

Sir Francis looked at her in astonishment, not unmoved; at the back of his mind the thought that this was one of a family who had impertinently intruded on him, with whom, emphatically, he wished to have nothing to do.

Because this girl was so young and pretty they had sent her!

"Will you take my papa out of prison?"

"My poor child, I fear that is beyond me. Beyond any one now."

She squeezed the clasped hands painfully together, her eyes clung to his face: "No: you can! You can! I heard them say so," she said. "Mr. George Boult and you can take him out if you will. You can do it with money. He said so. You can do it to-day."

"She means go bail for him," Reginald explained under his breath.

"But why should I do that?" Sir Francis asked, turning upon his brother.

"Her father was no friend--not even an acquaintance--of mine." He was most anxious that point should be established. "People in--in Mr. Day's position get their friends to bail them," he said to the girl. "And I shall not be present; I am going out of town to-day."

"No! you must not go!" Deleah sobbed. "You must do it. There is no one else. I don't know where to go--I don't know what to do. We none of us know. You must! You must!"

Half because her strength was failing her, and half because it was the att.i.tude of prayer, she went to her knees, her head thrown back, looking up at him, her clasped hands beneath her upturned chin.

How could any man, however cold, reserved, remote, inimical to her cause, even, turn a deaf ear to such an appeal, remain adamant before her helplessness, her trustfulness, her childish beauty and self-abandonment!

"Who sent you to me?" he asked.

"No one. I came," she whispered. The change in his tone had weakened her, she began to shake from head to foot.

"They should have picked on a fitter person for such an errand. It is a cruelty to have sent such a child as you," he said.

He held out his hand to raise her; but Reggie went to her and lifted her and placed her in a comfortable chair. "It'll be all right. He'll do it.

Don't you fret," he whispered, soothing her.

She did not heed him, her eyes were on the elder man, who had gone to a cupboard in the room from whence he produced a decanter of sherry. It was in that primitive time when in trouble of mind or body, to "take a gla.s.s of wine" was the customary thing. He was always stiff and distant in bearing, and just now he was annoyed and aggrieved to feel that he was being "had," as the word of a later age puts it. But his heart was sound.

To look on that trembling, frightened child, and to remember the errand on which she had been sent he found to be an upsetting thing.

"Sip a little sherry," he said, and pa.s.sed the gla.s.s to his brother to hold to her lips.

But Deleah took no notice of the gla.s.s, she seemed unaware of the presence of Reggie, her eyes clinging to the face of Reggie's brother: "Will you do it? Will you save him? Will you?" she implored.

Then, with a gloomy brow, Sir Francis consented. "Very well. I will be in the way, this afternoon. You say Mr. Boult also will be in the way? If we can do anything we will."

"It's all right, Deleah," Reggie said. "I told you it would be all right."