Edward Henry and Nellie had taken advantage of her helplessness, then, to force her to give up her barbaric cottage in Brougham Street and share permanently the splendid comfort of their home. She existed in their home like a philosophic prisoner-of-war at the court of conquerors, behaving faultlessly, behaving magnanimously in the [17] melancholy grandeur of her fall, but never renouncing her soul's secret independence, nor permitting herself to forget that she was on foreign ground.
When Edward Henry looked at those yellow and seasoned fingers, which by hard manual labour had kept herself and him in the young days of his humble obscurity, and which during sixty years had not been idle for more than six weeks in all, he grew almost apologetic for his wealth.
They reminded him of the day when his total resources were five pounds—won in a wager, and of the day when he drove proudly about behind a mule collecting other people's rents, and of the glittering days when he burst in on her from Llandudno with over a thousand gold sovereigns in a hat-box—product of his first great picturesque coup—imagining himself to be an English Jay Gould.
She had not blenched, even then. She had not blenched since. And she never would blench. In spite of his gorgeous position and his unique reputation, in spite of her well-concealed but notorious pride in him, he still went in fear of that ageless woman, whose undaunted eye always told him that he was still the lad Denry, and her inferior in moral force. The curve of her thin lips seemed ever to be warning him that with her pretensions were quite useless, and that she saw through him and through him to the innermost grottoes of his poor human depravity.
He caught her eye guiltily.
"Behold the Alderman!" she murmured with grimness.
That was all. But the three words took thirty years off his back, snatched the half-crown cigar out of his hand and reduced him again to the raw, hungry boy of Brougham Street. And he knew that he had sinned [18] gravely in not coming upstairs very much earlier.
"Is that you, father?" called the high voice of Robert from the back of the screen.
He had to admit to his son that it was he.
The infant lay on his back in Maisie's bed, while his mother sat lightly on the edge of nurse's bed near by.