CHAPTER IX
A WORM AT THE ROOTS.
ach looked at the other, aghast. An expression as of sudden enlightenment flitted across the boyish face of Tom Black; but nobody noticed that.
“That sound means some accident!” exclaimed Lucy, hurrying out of the room. Miss Latimer followed her. Mr. Somerset and young Black stayed behind, Mr. Somerset holding back little Hugh.
But they only lingered for a moment. A cry from Lucy and a pungent smell of burning which saluted their nostrils set them too running downstairs.
Mrs. Challoner and Miss Latimer were bending over the body of Mrs. Morison, prostrate just outside the dining-room door. A japanned tray containing knives and forks and spoons, scattered over the floor, explained the crash which had followed the heavy fall. Little Hugh shrieked, “Mrs. Morison is dead!” and began to cry. But she breathed stertorously.
“She has had a fit,” Lucy said. “Working over the big fire has brought it on.”
Wilfrid Somerset caught up his hat.
“I know the nearest doctor’s!” he exclaimed, and, putting young Black aside, he hirpled off, self-consciousness suspended in his eager desire to be of service.
“Mrs. Morison isn’t dead, dear,” Miss Latimer reassured little Hugh; “but she is very ill, and you must not interrupt us while we take care of her.”
She led him into the dining-room and bade him watch at the window for the coming of Mr. Somerset and the doctor. Then she returned to Lucy. Young Black had got some water, and Lucy was dashing it on her servant’s face. But, though she struggled and writhed under the chill, it did not rouse her.
“What was she bringing up these things for?” asked Lucy, looking round at the scattered cutlery. “She knew I had set out the table already.”
“It’s likely there was a good deal of mental confusion before the fit came,” suggested the old governess.
Tom Black stood over the prostrate figure and the kneeling ladies. It was true he had fetched the water, but otherwise he did not seem eagerly sympathetic. Suddenly he said—
“There’s something on fire somewhere!”
“Certainly there is,” assented Lucy, her senses regaining their power of attention. “I think it must be downstairs. I can’t move.” (She was trying to support the heavy, tossing head.) “Will you both go and see what is burning, and do your best with it?”
As the old lady and the youth descended the kitchen stair he whispered to her—
“That woman is tipsy.”
“Oh, surely not!” Miss Latimer replied. “Mrs. Challoner has told me she is an excellent servant and a respectable person.”
“She is tipsy,” he repeated. “I saw it when I came in. But I didn’t think she was quite so bad as this.”
It was a terrible picture that met their eyes as they entered that kitchen, which only a few hours before had been so bright and trim. A big fire was burning, and a clothes-rail—covered with damask table-napkins, among which hung an old rag mat—had been put so close to the bars that one of the napkins was nearly consumed, two or three were scorched, and the rag rug was smouldering. To draw back the clothes-rail and to throw the burning mat into the sink was the work of a moment, and effectually ended a great danger.
The hearth was blurred with trodden cinders and spotted with grease. There were two pots standing on the range, one containing burnt-up porridge, and the other full of water with something floating in it which looked like a rag. Miss Latimer hurriedly opened the oven door, fully expecting to see a cindered fowl; but the oven was empty. Going to a cupboard she discovered the little turkey nicely trussed. That had been done the previous night, and it had not been touched since. Miss Latimer quietly lifted it down and put it into the oven. Dinner would be certainly late; but it would be the earlier the sooner one made a beginning.
“I fear you are right, after all,” she said to Tom Black. “Yet this fit may have been coming on, and that may have stopped her work, and—— Ah!”
Tom had also been making an investigation, and as she was speaking, he held up before her shocked eyes a bottle of whisky. It was still in the paper in which it had been sold; but it was almost empty.
“There’s the doctor and Mr. Somerset!” Miss Latimer exclaimed with a tone of relief. “Now we shall soon know the truth. Anyway, we’re not wanted upstairs just this minute—we’d be only in the way. So let us try to get a little to the bottom of things down here. I know how keenly Mrs. Challoner will feel all this,” she said, confiding in the youth whom she had never seen till half an hour before, but for whose domestic help she now appealed as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Will you just see what is in that basin beside you?”
Tom lifted the cover, peering gingerly.
“I believe this is the pudding,” he said.
“Dear me; very likely,” said Miss Latimer.
She went back to the fireplace, and, dipping her fingers into the pot of water, drew forth the floating rag. It was the pudding-cloth neatly fastened up; only the pudding had never been inside!
“And what is that strange noise I hear?” asked the old lady, gazing around.
“It is the cat,” said Tom. “She is under the dresser, and she keeps ‘swearing.’”
The young man seemed rather afraid to approach the indignant animal; but the old lady bravely put in her hand and drew pussy out.
“No wonder she ‘swears,’ poor dear!” she observed. “Hot oil or grease has been dropped on her, and has burned away about an inch of fur. I don’t know what we can do for her, especially just now. But, at least, we’ll give her a saucer of milk as a sign of sympathy.”
At that moment the uncertain step of Wilfrid Somerset was heard on the kitchen stair.
“Mrs. Challoner asks me to get the cushions off the armchair,” he said, “and I’m afraid you’ll be wanted,” he added, addressing Tom, “for I’m a poor, useless creature where bodily strength is required.”
Without a moment’s hesitation the doctor had diagnosed Mrs. Morison’s “fit.”
“She’s been drinking,” he said laconically.
“But there is no smell of spirit,” pleaded Lucy, reluctant to lose faith in the unhappy woman.
“No,” said the doctor; “but there’s the scent of the little lozenges which gentlemen take to hide the smell of tobacco. That’s the secret, ma’am. This case doesn’t want any treatment save to be put on a safe couch and allowed ‘to sleep it off,’ when I trust she will awake properly ashamed of herself.”
It was impossible to carry the heavy inert body to the servant’s bedroom upstairs. But there was a little closet-like room at the back of the hall, empty save for a few ferns and polled plants which Lucy kept there. In that room Mr. Somerset arranged all the cushions he could find in the kitchen, which were not a few, since they included the mattress of a chair-bedstead which stood there in its chair capacity. Then the doctor and Tom Black carried in the unconscious woman, while poor Lucy gathered up the scattered cutlery, which included a broken knife, a toasting-fork, and an oyster opener.
“I am so sorry to have called you out on Christmas Day, and for what, after all, was no work of yours,” said Lucy to the doctor as he came back through the hall, drawing down his cuffs and straightening his coat.
He gave his head a queer little shake.
“It’s hard to know what is a doctor’s work and what isn’t,” he said. “But it’s always a doctor’s work to be useful, if not to the case, why, then, to its caretaker. Get rid of that woman directly she wakes, Mrs. Challoner. Such as she are at the bottom of two-thirds of the awful accidents which happen in the world.”
“She might have broken her neck if she had fallen on the stairs,” observed Lucy.
“And as she didn’t, she may live to break some other body’s neck,” said the doctor as he went away.
Lucy opened the dining-room door and went in, to find poor little Hugh still dutifully watching at the window as Miss Latimer had bidden him. And there was the dining-table, with its gleaming napery and sparkling crystal, standing there as in mockery of the squalid scene which had just been enacted.
“And is it to this misery that I have invited my guests?” cried Lucy. Even as she spoke her eye fell on her little desk, with her unfinished letter to Charlie peeping out of the blotting-case. That letter could not be finished now. It could never be sent. Then the memory of all she had believed and hoped rolled back on her. If there is anything calculated to give us the sensation of despair, it is the recollection of thanksgiving offered for what in the end has proved disastrous!
For one moment Lucy sat down on a chair, covered her face and wept. She might have had “a good cry,” but for her sudden realisation that she was not alone, that her guests were in the house, and that she had a duty to discharge towards them. She sprang up and dashed away her tears. Where had the guests gone? What were they doing? She had been so occupied with the unhappy drunkard that she had not realised what else had gone on around her. In her confusion she went first to the drawing-room. The door was wide open and the room was empty, an album lying on the floor just as she had dropped it. She paused, puzzled. Then she heard sounds below. It was evident that her friends were all in the kitchen.
There she found them, busy. The pudding was already in the pot. The burned serviettes were put aside. Tom Black had carried the rag mat out to the scullery, and Wilfrid Somerset was washing plates.
Lucy cried out in dismay; but they all laughed good-humouredly. The disaster had happened, they said, and now they’d got to make the best of it.
“What is the use of having old friends, if they can’t do such a thing as this?” asked Miss Latimer.
But Mr. Black, anyhow, was not an old friend, protested Lucy.
No, Mr. Somerset admitted that—at least, he hadn’t been only an hour ago. “I think he is now,” he added. “Hours count for years sometimes.”
Lucy resolutely pulled herself together. She, too, must make the best of it. Though, as a hostess, she was humiliated and defeated, she must still be the hostess, and try to extract a smile out of the cruel situation. For the time she must put this unhappy woman out of her thoughts, along with what might come on the morrow and the utter upset of all her plans for the future. She must try to turn the household wreck into an impromptu picnic.
She tried and succeeded perfectly, so far at least as Tom Black and Hugh were concerned. In half an hour those two were laughing and running to and fro as if there could not be a better Christmas game than tidying a disordered room and pushing on a belated dinner.
Tom Black thought in his own mind what a jolly woman Mrs. Challoner was not to be a bit put out by what would have utterly upset some people.
Miss Latimer and Wilfrid Somerset knew better than that; they knew what dramatisations life sometimes forces upon us, and how costly such performances are.
But they nobly seconded Lucy in her determination to put a fair face on things. The dinner was cooked in time and set upon the table with the informal decency which prevails in houses where “the family do their own work.”
Tom Black really enjoyed himself a great deal more than he had expected he would when in prospect of the ordinary dinner-party. He actually took courage to say that he thought it would be far better fun if people always came prepared to get ready their own festivity, instead of sitting talking about nothing and looking through stereoscopes.
Wilfrid Somerset replied that he believed something of the sort was regularly done in some parts of Canada and the New England States.
“But where it is done, the whole construction of society is different from what it is in London,” said Miss Latimer. “And it is where things are half one way and half another that somebody has to suffer cruelly,” she added.
She, a breadwinning woman all her days, knew the strain which had come upon Lucy, and could understand how these few hours were wasting forces which should have been conserved to suffice for the productive labour of weeks. For Lucy’s sake, she was truly thankful when the effort was over—when little Hugh had gone to bed, when Tom Black had said good-bye and had departed in the best of spirits, and when, left only to her two old and trusted friends, Lucy could drop the mask of cheerfulness and be the anxious, shaken creature she really was.
“Well,” sighed Lucy, “Charlie is sure to have thought of us to-day; but certainly his imagination has never pictured the reality!”
The miserable Mrs. Morison was sleeping quietly now, and was not likely to waken until morning. Miss Latimer declared that she would remain with Lucy if Mr. Somerset would leave word at her lodgings that she was not to be expected that night.
He urged the two ladies to go to bed directly he departed. They both needed rest, and he felt sure they would not be disturbed. It was good advice; but they were too nervous to take it. They might sleep heavily in their upper chamber, and the culprit might waken and steal out, or she might rise and commit suicide.
So they made themselves as comfortable as they could in the dining-room, dozing off and waking and talking in whispers to each other, till suddenly they roused with a start. The house was full of the dull grey light of winter dawn. There was a slow heavy footfall in the passage.
The culprit stood before them, unkempt, dishevelled, pale, but once more in her right mind.
“Oh, Mrs. Morison!” cried Lucy. “How could you do this thing? How could you?” and Lucy began to weep bitterly.
“I’ve nothing to say for myself, mem, nothing at all!” said the woman heavily, with no sign of feeling except what was conveyed in the utter absence of such sign. “But I’m just going to get your breakfasts for you. You shall have them all right. Then you can do what you like with me.”
The coffee she set before them was dainty, and the yellow fish savoury, and the toast brown and crisp. The breakfast almost choked Lucy. She still liked this woman—still felt drawn to the something good and kind which again looked out of the grey eyes even to-day, dim and reddened as they were. She would have liked to give her another chance, surrounded by strict conditions and solemn pledges; but she knew that could not be done in the little house with the verandah. For there was no doubt that this was no first and abnormal outbreak, but simply the crisis of a constant tendency—the tumultuous outbreak of restrained craving.
This would take years to cure, if in a woman of this one’s age it could be ever wholly cured. Clearly this could not be Lucy’s work, since it was absolutely incompatible with her direct duties as Charlie’s wife and Hugh’s mother.
She shuddered to realise how easily she might have been so lulled into false security as to have left Hugh for an hour or two in the charge of this well-behaved, kindly woman, perhaps to find her home a heap of cinders and her child a charred corpse!
They had scarcely finished breakfast when Wilfrid Somerset drove up in his cab. He had felt anxious lest morning might bring some violent and distressing scene. He was soon satisfied that there was little to fear on that head. But he was urgent that Mrs. Morison should leave the house at once. Lucy feared she had but a few shillings left, and in her present depressed state was only too likely to spend those in bringing more shame upon herself. So Mr. Somerset’s advice was that the cousin, the Willesden plumber, should be communicated with. Mr. Somerset charged himself with the transmission of the telegram, and worded it with much tact and policy.
Before evening, just as the shadows were deepening, the cousin’s wife arrived.
She expressed great disgust at “Jessie’s” lapse. But she did not need it to be explained. She evidently knew what was to be expected. All that she could say was that she had really hoped “Jessie” had learned more wisdom at last. They had done all they could for her. They had thought her cured. She had “kept straight” for so many weeks. They had never let her go out without one of their children with her, and they had kept all her money from her. She had called on Jessie, poor body, on the day she thought she would get her wages, and had taken them away, and was keeping them for her. Jessie was quite willing for one to do that, if one took her at the right time. She could not think what “Jessie” had done to get money, for she had said she gave up all.
“I paid her a month’s wages a few days in advance,” explained Mrs. Challoner; “and, when I did so, she told me that you had called to borrow money from her, and how gladly she had spared it.”
The cousin looked up at Mrs. Challoner, hesitated for a moment, and said—
“She didn’t say that till she knew you were going to pay her in advance, did she?”
“No, she did not,” Mrs. Challoner admitted. “Nor did she ask me for the advance. I offered it.”
“That’s it,” said the cousin. “The craving was on her, and the moment she saw a way to satisfy it, she began to tell lies. She’s as true as daylight at any other time, and as honest.”
“I’m so sorry I gave her that money,” sighed Lucy, forgetting for the moment that if such a revelation was to come, then the sooner it came the better.
“Oh, it wasn’t having the money that did it!” answered the other reassuringly. “As she told a lie the fit had come, and if she hadn’t got drunk one way, why, she would another! Once she actually pawned my little girl’s boots. And she so fond of the child! ’Tisn’t her fault, poor dear! We mustn’t judge her. It’s just like a disease.”
“But how could you think of allowing her to use you as a reference, and yet of not warning me of her terrible weakness?” said Mrs. Challoner.
The woman’s eyes wandered a little.
“Well, we didn’t want her to mention us!” she answered. “I’ll engage she didn’t till after you’d seen the Edinburgh letters. Jessie came home so full of you and the little gentleman that I thought, ‘Here’s a place where she’ll be happy and will keep right if ever she will.’ And when the lady came to inquire, my husband he kep’ out of the way. He said he wasn’t going to mix hisself in it; but I said to him, ‘It’s our Christian duty to do the best we can for our own. Ain’t we told we’ve got to bear each other’s burdens?’ says I.”
Lucy drew her breath hard. How was one to meet this perverted sentiment, this putting of “charity,” as it were, upside down?
“But don’t you see you were wrong to further her coming into my house without telling me the truth about her?” she urged. “She might have burned my house, she might have killed my boy! Could you not see that you were not dealing justly by me?”
“I don’t know about ‘justly,’” said the woman tartly, with a sneer on the last word. “It’s our Christian duty to have charity and cover a multitude of sins. If I’d told about Jessie’s weakness, nobody would have taken her; and, as she’s spent her bit of money already, there’s nothing and nobody between her and the workhouse but just ourselves, and my husband doesn’t like to have his flesh and blood made a pauper. Yet it’s rather hard he should have to take from me and his own children to keep her.”
Lucy’s heart fainted within her at this strange mixture of warped exegesis, perverted family pride, and private self-interest. Yet she made another attempt to get the matter set in a right light.
“It is very kind of you and your husband to wish to help Jessie,” she said; “but then, if you are willing to sacrifice yourselves in this direction, it must really be yourselves whom you do sacrifice, and not other people, whom you mislead into being sacrificed blindfold. Our sacrifices must be costly to ourselves and not to others. If poor Jessie is really, as you seem to say, the irresponsible victim of her vice, just as if it was a disease, it would be truer kindness on your part to sacrifice your pride for her real good. You are only giving her freedom to do some great harm to other people, even if you feel it right to endure such an example as hers among your own children. But I do not think you need let her go to the workhouse. I believe there are people willing and able to undertake the care and cure of such cases. If you like, I will write to some of these. But meantime, as you helped Jessie to get into my house, I must really ask you to take her away with you at once.”
“Oh, yes, that’s the way burdens are always thrown back on poor folk!” muttered the woman.
“I am throwing no burden on you,” said Lucy, with a firmness which surprised herself. “I am simply handing back a great risk which you deceitfully imposed upon me. I think we have nothing more to discuss,” and thereupon she rang the kitchen bell, and summoned Jessie into the presence of her mistress and her cousin.
(To be continued.)
[A HAPPY HEALTHY GIRLHOOD.]
By “MEDICUS” (Dr. GORDON-STABLES, R.N.).