CHAPTER XIV

ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised if not exhilarated by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.

"It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a'

come out on," she told them, in salutation--and for comment they all glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. A gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but could not drive away, and with only now and again a pa.s.ser-by moving across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with chin buried in turned-up collar. In the doorway outside the sulky boy stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic mutiny against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers, which n.o.body would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.

"I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go home," she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. "But it isn't three yet--it seems ridiculous to close up. Still, if you'd be more comfortable upstairs--"

"Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us," protested Julia.

She strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was unmistakable.

The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her daughter. The pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long, listless face seem more devoid of colour than ever.

"But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?" she observed, coldly.

"You've been back in town ten days and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes upon either of you. But don't you want to sit down? You can put those parcels on the floor anywhere. Or shall I do it for you?"

Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old magazines tied in bundles. He sprang up now and cleared the chair, but his sister declined it with a gesture. Her small figure had straightened itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.

"There has been so much to do, mamma," she explained, in a clear, cool voice. "We have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. All the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me--and Alfred has his studio to do. But of course we should have looked in upon you sooner--and much oftener--if we had thought you wanted us. But really, when we came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible for us to pretend that you were glad to see us."

"Oh, I was glad enough," Mrs. Dabney made answer, mechanically. "Why shouldn't I be glad? And why should you think I wasn't glad? Did you expect me to shout and dance?"

"But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square," Alfred reminded her.

"That's different," she declared. "What would I be doing in Ovington Square? It's all right for you to be there. I hope you'll be happy there. But it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there; it would be quite the other way about. I know that, if you DON'T. This is my place, here, and I intend to stick to it!"

Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal countenance, hardened beyond their wont. "You talk as if there had been some cla.s.s war declared," she said, with obvious annoyance. "You know that Uncle Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you as he is to us."

"Uncle Stormont!" Mrs. Dabney's repet.i.tion of the words was surcharged with hostile sarcasm. "But his name was Stormont as much as it was Joel,"

broke in Alfred, from his dark corner. "He has a perfect right to use the one he likes best."

"Oh, I don't dispute his right," she replied, once more in her pa.s.sionless monotone. "Everybody can call themselves whatever they please. It's no affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have your own ideas and your own tastes. They are quite beyond me--but they're all right for you. I don't criticize them at all. What I say is that it is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets full of money to enable you to make the most of them. If I were religious I should call that providential."

"And that's what we DO call it," put in Julia, with vivacity. "And why should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all.

Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself--at least for the present. But when Uncle St--when uncle says there's more than enough money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things for you--why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should refuse to allow Alfred to do things for me."

"That you never did," interposed the young man, gayly. "I'll say that for you, Jule."

"And never will," she a.s.sured him, with cheerful decision. "But no--mamma--can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford, from the time we were of no age at all--and when uncle's money came you sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason to suppose that you would be--I won't say proud, but at least well satisfied with us--and then it turned out that you didn't like us at all."

"I never said anything of the sort," the mother declared, with a touch of animation.

"Oh no--you never said it," Julia admitted, "but what else can we think you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that--and I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go----"

"But I did want you to go," Mrs. Dabney affirmed.

"Well, then, when I come back--when we come back, and tell you what splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,--why, you won't even come and look at the house!"

"But I don't want to see it," the mother retorted; obstinately.

"Well, then, you needn't!" said Alfred, rising. "n.o.body will ask you again." "Oh yes they will," urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper.

That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own will of everybody--and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe.

After his disappearance from the scene--unlamented, to the best of Julia's juvenile perceptions--there had been relatively peaceful times in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and her father--a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as an a.s.sistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories--Julia and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons, who would not expect to have their own way.

Alfred and his mother were Thorpes--that is to say, people who necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath, however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a potential existence--and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe temper. A sort of pa.s.sive mulishness it was, impervious to argument, immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.

"Oh yes they will," she repeated, and warned her brother into the background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. "We are your children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be absurd to let anything come between you and us."

"How could I help letting it come?" demanded the mother, listlessly argumentative. "You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what I was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into his own hands. He can give you the kind of home that goes with your education and your ideas--and what more do you want? Why should you come bothering me?"

"How unjust you are, mamma!" cried Julia, with a glaze of tears upon her bright glance.

The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening herself, looked down upon her daughter. Her long plain face, habitually grave in expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the fingers of the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed restlessly against one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse in her voice as she spoke:

"If you ever have children of your own," she said, "and you slave your life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your betters, and they act accordingly--then you'll understand. But you don't understand now--and there's no good our talking any more about it. Come in whenever it's convenient--and you feel like it. I must go back to my books now."

She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter.

Her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.

Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless, ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the gla.s.s of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner.

At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet, and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the gla.s.s.

"Bring everything in!" she called to the boy, and helped out his apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.

Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.

"I think you may go home now," she said to him, with the laconic abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. "You have a home, haven't you?"

Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job, he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion he nodded a.s.sent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.

"Got a mother?" she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.

"And do you think yourself better than she is?"

The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the fell acuteness of the Dials. "I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't," he answered, in swift, rasping accents. "She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave--" "Go home!" she bade him, peremptorily--and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the shop.

Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book--the wretched day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history--but loitered about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others.

Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked street. A tradesman's a.s.sistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters down for the night. If business in hats was over for the day, how much more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with shutters--for what reason she could not guess. The opened pages of numerous volumes were displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of nightfall forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise, she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway, preparatory to entering the shop.

It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder, she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.

Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. "Do mind what you're about!" she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.

"Shut up the place!" he answered, with lordly geniality. "I've walked all the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion--I couldn't have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a talk. G.o.d! What things I've got to tell you!"

"There isn't any fire down here," she said, apologetically, as they edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. "The old fireplace took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I have an oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find it too cold--do you?--with your coat on? Or would you rather come upstairs?"