Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green. Джером К. Джером
myself,” replied the other, with a laugh, “or run away with the first man that asked me.”
So Sennett stayed on.
Blake himself had made the path easy to them. There was little need for either fear or caution. Indeed, their safest course lay in recklessness, and they took it. To Sennett the house was always open. It was Blake himself who, when unable to accompany his wife, would suggest Sennett as a substitute. Club friends shrugged their shoulders. Was the man completely under his wife’s thumb; or, tired of her, was he playing some devil’s game of his own? To most of his acquaintances the latter explanation seemed the more plausible.
The gossip, in due course, reached the parental home. Mrs. Eppington shook the vials of her wrath over the head of her son-in-law. The father, always a cautious man, felt inclined to blame his child for her want of prudence.
“She’ll ruin everything,” he said. “Why the devil can’t she be careful?”
“I believe the man is deliberately plotting to get rid of her,” said Mrs. Eppington. “I shall tell him plainly what I think.”
“You’re a fool, Hannah,” replied her husband, allowing himself the licence of the domestic hearth. “If you are right, you will only precipitate matters; if you are wrong, you will tell him what there is no need for him to know. Leave the matter to me. I can sound him without giving anything away, and meanwhile you talk to Edith.”
So matters were arranged, but the interview between mother and daughter hardly improved the position. Mrs. Eppington was conventionally moral; Edith had been thinking for herself, and thinking in a bad atmosphere. Mrs. Eppington, grew angry at the girl’s callousness.
“Have you no sense of shame?” she cried.
“I had once,” was Edith’s reply, “before I came to live here. Do you know what this house is for me, with its gilded mirrors, its couches, its soft carpets? Do you know what I am, and have been for two years?”
The elder woman rose, with a frightened pleading look upon her face, and the other stopped and turned away towards the window.
“We all thought it for the best,” continued Mrs. Eppington meekly.
The girl spoke wearily without looking round.
“Oh! every silly thing that was ever done, was done for the best. I thought it would be for the best, myself. Everything would be so simple if only we were not alive. Don’t let’s talk any more. All you can say is quite right.”
The silence continued for a while, the Dresden-china clock on the mantelpiece ticking louder and louder as if to say, “I, Time, am here. Do not make your plans forgetting me, little mortals; I change your thoughts and wills. You are but my puppets.”
“Then what do you intend to do?” demanded Mrs. Eppington at length.
“Intend! Oh, the right thing of course. We all intend that. I shall send Harry away with a few well-chosen words of farewell, learn to love my husband and settle down to a life of quiet domestic bliss. Oh, it’s easy enough to intend!”
The girl’s face wrinkled with a laugh that aged her. In that moment it was a hard, evil face, and with a pang the elder woman thought of that other face, so like, yet so unlike—the sweet pure face of a girl that had given to a sordid home its one touch of nobility. As under the lightning’s flash we see the whole arc of the horizon, so Mrs. Eppington looked and saw her child’s life. The gilded, over-furnished room vanished. She and a big-eyed, fair-haired child, the only one of her children she had ever understood, were playing wonderful games in the twilight among the shadows of a tiny attic. Now she was the wolf, devouring Edith, who was Red Riding Hood, with kisses. Now Cinderella’s prince, now both her wicked sisters. But in the favourite game of all, Mrs. Eppington was a beautiful princess, bewitched by a wicked dragon, so that she seemed to be an old, worn woman. But curly-headed Edith fought the dragon, represented by the three-legged rocking-horse, and slew him with much shouting and the toasting-fork. Then Mrs. Eppington became again a beautiful princess, and went away with Edith back to her own people.
In this twilight hour the misbehaviour of the “General,” the importunity of the family butcher, and the airs assumed by cousin Jane, who kept two servants, were forgotten.
The games ended. The little curly head would be laid against her breast “for five minutes’ love,” while the restless little brain framed the endless question that children are for ever asking in all its thousand forms, “What is life, mother? I am very little, and I think, and think, until I grow frightened. Oh, mother, tell me, what is life?”
Had she dealt with these questions wisely? Might it not have been better to have treated them more seriously? Could life after all be ruled by maxims learned from copy-books? She had answered as she had been answered in her own far-back days of questioning. Might it not have been better had she thought for herself?
Suddenly Edith was kneeling on the floor beside her.
“I will try to be good, mother.”
It was the old baby cry, the cry of us all, children that we are, till mother Nature kisses us and bids us go to sleep.
Their arms were round each other now, and so they sat, mother and child once more. And the twilight of the old attic, creeping westward from the east, found them again.
The masculine duet had more result, but was not conducted with the finesse that Mr. Eppington, who prided himself on his diplomacy, had intended. Indeed, so evidently ill at ease was that gentleman, when the moment came for talk, and so palpably were his pointless remarks mere efforts to delay an unpleasant subject, that Blake, always direct bluntly though not ill-naturedly asked him, “How much?”
Mr. Eppington was disconcerted.
“It’s not that—at least that’s not what I have come about,” he answered confusedly.
“What have you come about?”
Inwardly Mr. Eppington cursed himself for a fool, for the which he was perhaps not altogether without excuse. He had meant to act the part of a clever counsel, acquiring information while giving none; by a blunder, he found himself in the witness-box.
“Oh, nothing, nothing,” was the feeble response, “merely looked in to see how Edith was.”
“Much the same as at dinner last night, when you were here,” answered Blake. “Come, out with it.”
It seemed the best course now, and Mr. Eppington took the plunge.
“Don’t you think,” he said, unconsciously glancing round the room to be sure they were alone, “that young Sennett is a little too much about the house?”
Blake stared at him.
“Of course, we know it is all right—as nice a young fellow as ever lived—and Edith—and all that. Of course, it’s absurd, but—”
“But what?”
“Well, people will talk.”
“What do they say?”
The other shrugged his shoulders.
Blake rose. He had an ugly look when angry, and his language was apt to be coarse.
“Tell them to mind their own business, and leave me and my wife alone.” That was the sense of what he said; he expressed himself at greater length, and in stronger language.
“But, my dear Blake,” urged Mr. Eppington, “for your own sake, is it wise? There was a sort of boy and girl attachment between them—nothing of any moment, but all that gives colour to gossip. Forgive me, but I am her father; I do not like to hear my child talked about.”
“Then don’t open your ears to the chatter of a pack of fools,” replied his son-in-law roughly. But the next instant a softer expression passed over his face, and he laid his hand on the older