"Your servant," said she to Phoebe, with more amiability than the girl anticipated. "Yours too, Glory," curtly to Mehalah.
Mrs. De Witt was not favourable to her son's attachment to Glory. She was an imperious, strong-minded woman, a despot in her own house, and she had no wish to see that house invaded by a daughter-in-law as strong of will and iron-headed as herself. She wished to see George mated to a girl whom she could browbeat and manage as she browbeat and managed her son. George's indecision of character was due in measure to his bringing up by such a mother. He had been cuffed and yelled at from infancy. His intimacy with the maternal lap had been contracted head downwards, and was connected with a stinging sensation at the rear. Self-assertion had been beaten or bawled out of him. She was not a bad, but a despotic, woman. She liked to have her own way, and she obtained it, first with her husband, and then with her son, and the ease with which she had mastered and maintained the sovereignty had done her as much harm as them.
She was a good-hearted woman at bottom, but then that bottom where the good heart lay was never to be found with an anchor, but lay across the course as a shoal where deep water was desired. Her son knew perfectly where it was not, but never where it was. Mrs. De Witt in face somewhat resembled her nephew, Elijah Rebow, but she was his senior by ten years. She had the same hawk-like nose and dark eyes, but was without the wolfish jaw. Nor had she the eager intelligence that spoke out of Elijah's features. Hers were hard and coarse and unillumined with mind.
When she saw Phoebe enter her cabin she was both surprised and gratified. A fair, feeble, bread-and-butter Miss was just the daughter she fancied. She would be able to convert such a girl very speedily into a domestic drudge and a recipient of her abuse. Men make themselves, but women are made, and the making of women, thought Mrs. De Witt, should be in the hands of women; men botched them because they let them take their own way.
Mrs. De Witt never forgave her parents for having bequeathed her no money; she could not excuse Elijah for having taken all they left, without considering her. She was a saving woman, and spent little money on her personal adornment. "What coin I drop," she would say, "I drop in rum, and smuggled rum is cheap."
The vessel to which she acted as captain, steward, and cook, was named the Pandora. The vicar was wont to remark that it was a Pandora's box full of all guests, but minus gentle Zephyr.
"Will you take a chair?" she said obsequiously to Phoebe placing one for her, after having first breathed on the seat and wiped it with her sleeve. Then turning to Mehalah, she asked roughly, "Well, Glory! how is that old fool, your mother?"
"Better than your manners," replied Mehalah.
"I am glad you are come, Glory," said Mrs. De Witt. "I want to have it out with you. What do you mean by coming here of a night, and carrying off my son when he ought to be under his blankets in his bunk? I won't have it. Such conduct is not decent. What do you think of that?" she asked, seating herself on the other side of the table, and addressing Phoebe, but leaving Mehalah standing. "What do you think of a girl asking my lad to go off for a row with her all in the dark, and the devil knows whither they went, and the mischief they were after. It is not respectable, is it?"
"George should not have gone when she asked him," said the girl.
"Dear sackalive! she twists him round her little finger. But I will have my boy respectable, I can promise you. I combed his head wall for him when he came home, I did by cock! He shall not do the thing again."
"Look here, mother," remonstrated George; "wash our dirty linen in private."
"Indeed!" exclaimed Mrs. De Witt. "That is strange doctrine! Why, who would know we wore any linen at all next our skin unless we exposed it when washed over the side of the wessel? Now you come here. I have a bone to pick along with you, George!"
To stare him full in the eyes she sat on the table, and put her feet on the chair.
"What has become of the money? I have been to the box and there are twenty pounds gone out of it, all in gold. Now I want to know what you have done with it. Where is the money? Fork it out, or I will turn all your pockets inside out, and find and retake it. You want no money, not you. I provide you with tobacco. Twenty pounds, and all in gold. I was like a shrimp in scalding water when I went to the box to-day and found the money gone. I turned that red you might have said it was erysipelas. I shruck out that they might have heard me at the City. Turn your pockets out at once."
George was cowed by his mother.
"I'll take the carving knife to you!" said the woman, "if you do not hand me over the cash at once."
"Oh don't, pray don't hurt him!" cried Phoebe, interposing her arm, and beginning to cry.
"Dear sackalive!" exclaimed Mrs. De Witt, "I am not aiming at his witals, but at his pockets. Where is the money?"
"I have had it," said Mehalah, stepping forward and standing between De Witt and his mother. "George has behaved generously by us. You have heard how we were robbed of our money. We could not have paid our rent for the Ray had not George let us have twenty pounds. He shall not lose it."
"You had it, you! � you!" cried Mrs. De Witt in wild and fierce astonishment. "Give it up to me at once."
"I cannot do so. I paid the money to-day to Rebow, our landlord."
"Elijah gets everything. My father left me without a shilling, and now he gets my hard-won earnings also."
"It seems to me, mistress, that the earnings belong to George, and surely he has a right to do with them what he will," said Mehalah coldly.
"That is your opinion, is it? It is not mine." Then she mused: "Twenty pounds is a fortune. One may do a great deal with such a sum as that. Mehalah; twenty pounds is twenty pounds whatever you may say; and it must be repaid. "
"It shall be."
"When?"
"As soon as I can earn the money."
Mrs. De Witt's eye now rested on Phoebe, and she assumed a milder manner. Her mood was variable as the colour of the sea. She said: "I have to maintain order in the wessel. You will stay and have something to eat?"
"Thank you; your son has already promised us some oysters, � that is, promised me."
"Come on deck," said George. "We have them there, and mother shall brew the liquor below."
The mother grunted a surly acquiescence.
When the three had re-ascended the ladder, the sun was setting. The mouth of the Blackwater glittered like gold leaf fluttered by the breath. The tide had begun to flow, and already the water had surrounded the Pandora. Phoebe and Mehalah would have to return by boat, or be carried by De Witt.
The two girls stood side by side. The contrast between them was striking, and the young man noticed it. Mehalah was tall, lithe, and firm as a young pine, erect in her bearing, with every muscle well developed, firm of flesh, her skin a rich ripe apricot, and her eyes gloomy, but full of fire. Her hair, rich to profusion, was black, yet with coppery hues in it when seen with a side light. It was simply done up in a knot, neatly not elaborately. Her navy-blue jersey and skirt, the scarlet of her cap and kerchief, and of a petticoat that appeared below the skirt, made her a rich combination of colour, suitable to a sunny clime rather than to the misty bleak east coast. Phoebe was colourless beside her, a faded picture, faint in outline. Her complexion was delicate as the rose, her frame slender, her contour undulating and weak. She was the pattern of a trim English village maiden, with the beauty of youth, and the sweetness of ripening womanhood, sans sense, sans passion, sans character, sans everything � pretty vacuity. She seemed to feel her own inferiority beside the gorgeous Mehalah, and to be angry at it. She took off her bonnet, and the wind played with her yellow curls, and the setting sun spun them into a halo of gold about her delicate face. "Loose your hair, Mehalah," said the spiteful girl.
"What for?"
"I want to see how it will look in the sun."
"Do so, Glory!" begged George. "How shining