Mrs. Day's Daughters Part 15

"Nonsense, mama. As if I could leave you all! Why should not I work as well as poor Mr. Gibbon, for instance?"

"Some are made for work and some aren't, I suppose," that gentleman said, with a side glance at Bessie's white hands. "I'm one of the workers. I don't mind tackling your nutmegs after I've finished my lemons, if you'll say the word, Miss Bessie."

"Mama, I wonder what Mr. Boult would say if he came in now and found me working like a slave at ten o'clock at night?"

"Nothing complimentary, dear, I fear."

"Horrid, rude man! Yesterday afternoon he found me sitting over the fire reading. I was in your comfortable chair, Mr. Gibbon--I hope you don't mind?"

"I hope you'll always do it the honour of sitting in it, Miss Bessie; and you, Miss Deleah--"

"I was gloriously comfortable; and Mr. Boult took upon him to lecture me."

"Well, he doesn't stop at much! but how he ever screws up his courage to lecture _you_, Miss Bessie, pa.s.ses everything," said the polite Manchester man.

"I thought you'd be surprised," and Miss Day smiled obliquely at the nutmegs. "He called me names, too."

"Names, Bessie! Surely not! What can you mean by 'names'?"

"He called me a drone, mama. A drone in a busy hive."

"And how did you answer him, Bessie?"

"I just went on, toasting my toes at the fire, and reading my book."

"And what then, Miss Bessie?"

"Oh, then he sat down opposite to me and preached me a sermon. A sermon of five minutes, by the clock. He said--"

"We don't want to hear any sermons, thank you," from a petulant, tired Franky. In the stress of their work the poor child's hour for retiring was often overlooked.

"Go to bed, Franky. Go off, this minute. Mama, send Franky to bed."

"Oh, go at once to bed, my darling boy."

Franky, crying that he wanted to sit by Deleah and see her cut the citron peel, was removed: "I hate Bessie," he announced at the door.

"Go! spoilt little wretch!" cried Bessie, threatening him with the nutmeg grater. "Mama, Franky is becoming as rude as a horrid little street boy."

"Never mind, my dear. Tell me what Mr. Boult said in the sermon."

"He said my happiness as well as my duty was to work. He said my 'peevishness,' and my 'nervy fits'--wasn't it rude of him!--came from idleness. He did, Mr. Gibbon, he said it in so many words."

"I hope you gave him one for hisself, Miss Bessie?"

"Oh, I hope not!" from an alarmed mother.

"It is what he wants, ma'am; and it is what he never gets. It is bully, bully, bully, all the day, with the governor. And unless Miss Bessie stands up to him--"

"You may trust me not to be afraid. All the rest are afraid. Not I! I just raised my eyes to him, and said 'I wonder you dare to use such words to me, Mr. Boult!' You should have seen him look! 'It's because I take an interest in you,' he said; quite quiet, like any other man. It does him good to snub him, mama."

"It was kind of him to say he takes an interest," Deleah put in.

"Now if he was only a handsome young gentleman, and Miss Bessie could take an interest in him, there'd be more sense," Emily remarked from her side table.

"Don't be such a ridiculous old thing, Emily!"

"Well, he've got his kerridge!"

"And a pretty sight he looks driving in it! podgy, fat, vulgar man!"

"Miss Bessie would never look twice in that direction, I'm sure," Mr.

Gibbon declared, and Mrs. Day gave one of her now seldom heard laughs.

"How can you all talk such nonsense?" she said.

"Oh, do let us do it!" Deleah pleaded. "It so helps with the citron peel, mama."

Deleah said very little in those days. The shock, the grief for the cruel end of a father, for all his faults most dearly loved, told more on her than on any of his other children. She had not felt the sense of injury against him which had helped Bessie to support the tragedy of his death, nor had she Bessie's engrossing preoccupations with herself, her looks, her fancies, her love affairs. Bernard at George Boult's little branch shop in the country town of Ingleby, chained body and soul to the heavy drudgery of uncongenial occupation, thought of his father only with rage and resentment. Franky, childlike, had apparently forgotten.

Deleah could not forget. Night by night her pillow was wet with tears shed for him on whose neck she had sobbed for those never-to-be-forgotten minutes of his last night on earth. She tortured herself with a secret, unearned remorse. Forgetting her habitual love and dutifulness, her mind would dwell on some remembered occasion when she told herself she had failed him. When she had pretended not to notice a hand held out for hers, or had s.h.i.+rked some little service she might have done him.

Of none such small sins against him had the father been aware, but she was tormented by the belief that she had wounded him. He seemed ever to be looking at her with reproachful eyes. She forgot his ill temper, his unlovableness, his want of consideration for any one but himself, during the last wretched weeks of his sojourn among them, and saw him only as he had been upon that last night before his trial, heard always the great sob which had seemed to rend his chest as she had leant upon it.

Her seventeenth birthday was past now, and it seemed to her mother that her young daughter had grown of a still more exceeding prettiness. Poor Mrs. Day often longed for a sympathetic ear into which to breathe her maternal admiration. With Bessie the subject of Deleah's beauty was like a red rag to a bull. Emily, the general and confidential friend of the family, was not an altogether satisfactory confidante on that matter, because in her eyes, blinded by affection, the whole family was equally beautiful.

"You've got handsome children, ma'am. I've knowed it since folk used to crowd round my pram to have a look at them when I wheeled 'em out, times gone by, as babies. Ofttimes the pavement got blocked, as you've heard me mention before. There's no two opinions about their looks, and we know which side they got them from."

There were no two opinions about that, at any rate. Not even the most charitable critic could have credited poor William Day with good looks; and the tired pathetic face of his widow was a handsome face still.

CHAPTER XI

The Attractive Bessie

Having been permitted to take his place among them, and to chop material for mincemeat at their kitchen table, it was felt by them all that their boarder could never be a stranger to the widow and her children again.

Through pride and through shyness they had held him at arm's length, but now that they had joked together about George Boult's peculiarities, and he had ventured with playful force to take the nutmeg grater from Bessie's weary fingers, valiantly completing her task himself, it would have been impossible, even if desirable, to return to their earlier relations.

Bessie, who had treated him with a carefully masked hauteur in the beginning, was among the first to place him on terms of easy familiarity.

She had strongly resented the inclusion of a stranger in their family circle, and presently was welcoming his presence there as supplying the one item of interest in the _menage_.

"A year ago, mama, we should not have admitted Mr. Boult's Manchester man to the same table with us. And now, here we are keeping his plates hot, if he comes in late, and telling him all our secrets."

"Mama and I don't tell Mr. Gibbon any secrets," Deleah said.