“Of course it is, not cold at all. And I’m sure this room needs airing.”
The maid, however, folded the cloth and went out without approaching the windows.
Meg had grown stouter, and there was a certain immovable confidence in her. She was authoritative, amiable, calm. She wore a handsome dress of dark green, and a toque with opulent ostrich feathers. As she moved about the room she seemed to dominate everything, particularly her husband, who sat ruffled and dejected, his waistcoat hanging loose over his shirt.
A girl entered. She was proud and mincing in her deportment. Her face was handsome, but too haughty for a child. She wore a white coat, with ermine tippet, muff, and hat. Her long brown hair hung twining down her back.
“Has Dad only just had his breakfast?” she exclaimed in high censorious tones as she came in.
“He has!” replied Meg.
The girl looked at her father in calm, childish censure.
“And we have been to church, and come home to dinner,” she said, as she drew off her little white gloves. George watched her with ironical amusement.
“Hello!” said Meg, glancing at the opened letter which lay near his elbow. “Who is that from?”
He glanced round, having forgotten it. He took the envelope, doubled it and pushed it in his waistcoat pocket.
“It’s from William Housley,” he replied.
“Oh! And what has he to say?” she asked.
George turned his dark eyes at her.
“Nothing!” he said.
“Hm-Hm!” sneered Meg. “Funny letter, about nothing!”
“I suppose,” said the child, with her insolent, high-pitched superiority, “it’s some money that he doesn’t want us to know about.”
“That’s about it!” said Meg, giving a small laugh at the child’s perspicuity.
“So’s he can keep it for himself, that’s what it is,” continued the child, nodding her head in rebuke at him.
“I’ve no right to any money, have I?” asked the father sarcastically.
“No, you haven’t,” the child nodded her head at him dictatorially, “you haven’t, because you only put it in the fire.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” he sneered. “You mean it’s like giving a child fire to play with.”
“Um! — and it is, isn’t it, Mam?”— the small woman turned to her mother for corroboration. Meg had flushed at his sneer, when he quoted for the child its mother’s dictum.
“And you’re very naughty!” preached Gertie, turning her back disdainfully on her father.
“Is that what the parson’s been telling you?” he asked, a grain of amusement still in his bitterness.
“No, it isn’t!” retorted the youngster. “If you want to know you should go and listen for yourself. Everybody that goes to church looks nice —” she glanced at her mother and at herself, pruning herself proudly, “— and God loves them,” she added. She assumed a sanctified expression, and continued after a little thought, “Because they look nice and are meek.”
“What!” exclaimed Meg, laughing, glancing with secret pride at me.
“Because they’re meek!” repeated Gertie, with a superior little smile of knowledge.
“You’re off the mark this time,” said George.
“No, I’m not, am I, Mam? Isn’t it right, Mam? ‘The meek shall inevit the erf’?”
Meg was too much amused to answer.
“The meek shall have herrings on earth,” mocked the father, also amused. His daughter looked dubiously at him. She smelled impropriety.
“It’s not, Mam, is it?” she asked, turning to her mother. Meg laughed.
“The meek shall have herrings on earth,” repeated George with soft banter.
“No, it’s not, Mam, is it?” cried the child in real distress.
“Tell your father he’s always teaching you something wrong,” answered Meg.
Then I said I must go. They pressed me to stay.
“Oh yes — do stop to dinner,” suddenly pleaded the child, smoothing her wild ravels of curls after having drawn off her hat. She asked me again and again, with much earnestness.
“But why?” I asked.
“So’s you can talk to us this afternoon — an’ so’s Dad won’t be so dis’greeable,” she replied plaintively, poking the black spots on her muff.
Meg moved nearer to her daughter with a little gesture of compassion.
“But,” said I, “I promised a lady I would be back for lunch, so I must. You have some more visitors, you know.”
“Oh, well!” she complained. “They go in another room, and Dad doesn’t care about them.”
“But come!” said I.
“Well, he’s just as dis’greeable when Auntie Emily’s here — he is with her an’ all.”
“You are having your character given away,” said Meg brutally, turning to him.
I bade him good-bye. He did me the honour of coming with me to the door. We could neither of us find a word to say, though we were both moved. When at last I held his hand and was looking at him as I said “Good-bye”, he looked back at me for the first time during our meeting. His eyes were heavy, and as he lifted them to me, seemed to recoil in an agony of shame.
Chapter 8
A Prospect Among the Marshes of Lethe
George steadily declined from this time. I went to see him two years later. He was not at home. Meg wept to me as she told me of him, how he let the business slip, how he drank, what a brute he was in drink, and how unbearable afterwards. He was ruining his constitution, he was ruining her life and the children’s. I felt very sorry for her as she sat, large and ruddy, brimming over with bitter tears. She asked me if I did not think I might influence him. He was, she said, at the Ram. When he had an extra bad bout on he went up there, and stayed sometimes for a week at a time, with Oswald, coming back to the Hollies when he had recovered —“though,” said Meg, “he’s sick every morning and almost after every meal.”
All the time Meg was telling me this, sat curled up in a large chair their youngest boy, a pale, sensitive, rather spoiled lad of seven or eight years, with a petulant mouth and nervous dark eyes. He sat watching his mother as she told her tale, heaving his shoulders and settling himself in a new position when his feelings were nearly too much for him. He was full of wild, childish pity for his mother, and furious, childish hate of his father, the author of all their trouble. I called at the Ram and saw George. He was half drunk.
I went up to Highclose with a heavy heart. Lettie’s last child had been born, much to the surprise of everybody, some few months before I came down. There was a space of seven years between her youngest girl and this baby. Lettie was much absorbed in motherhood.
When I went up to talk to her about George, I found her in the bedroom nursing the baby, who was very good and quiet on her knee. She listened to me sadly, but her attention was caught away by each movement made by the child. As I was telling her of the attitude of George’s children towards their father and mother, she glanced