“No, don’t,” said Mrs. Breezy, “you’d upset Lola. She believes in Ernest and wants him to make a name.”
“What’s the good of a name without money? However, I won’t interfere. You—you don’t suppose that Lola’s thinking of marrying that boy some day, do you?” It was a most uncomfortable thought. His little girl must do better than that.
Mrs. Breezy was silent for a moment and her face wore a look of the most curious puzzlement.
“I don’t know what she thinks, John. To tell you the truth, dear, I don’t know anything about her, and I never did. I don’t know why she went to Dover Street or why she came back. She’s never told me and I’ve never asked her. When I catch her face sometimes, I can see in it something that makes my heart miss a beat. I can’t describe it. It may be pain, it may be joy,—I don’t know. I can’t tell. But it isn’t regret and it isn’t sorrow. It lights her up like, as though there was something burning in her heart. John, our little girl’s miles away from us, although she’s never been nearer. She dreams, I think, and walks in another world with some one. We’ve got to be very kind to her, old man. She’s—she’s a strange, strange child.”
Breezy pushed himself out of the sofa as a rather heavily laden boat is oozed out of mud. He was irritable and perhaps a little frightened.
“I don’t find her strange,” he said. “Strange! What a word! She’s a good girl, that’s what she is,—as open as a book, with nothing to hide. And she’s our girl, and she’s doing her job without grumbling, and she’s doubling the business. And what’s more, she’s cheerful and happy and loving. I’m damned if I can see anything strange about her. You certainly have a knack of saying queer things about Lola, one way ’n’ another, you have!” And he marched out of the parlor in a kind of fat huff, only to march back again immediately to put his arm round the little woman’s neck and give her an apologetic kiss. He was one of these men who loved peace at any price and erected high barriers round himself in order that he shouldn’t see anything to disturb his ease of mind. It was the same form of brain anæmia, the same lack of moral courage from which the Liberal Government had suffered in the face of the warning of Lord Roberts. In other words, the policy of the ostrich. Knowing very well that his wife had all the brains of the partnership and never said anything for the mere sake of saying it, he was quite sure that she was right as to Lola, and he had himself almost swallowed one of the little screws that played so large a part in the interior of his watches on seeing the look that Mrs. Breezy had described on the face of his little girl as she sat perched up on a high stool waiting for the next customer, with her eyes on something very far away. And because this gave him a jar and frightened him a little, he persuaded himself that what he had seen he had not seen, because it was uncomfortable to see it. It is a form of mental dope and it suits all sorts of constitutions,—like religion.
And so, blotting out of his mind the little conversation which had taken place over the teapot, Breezy returned to his job, his fat hands working on the intricate mechanisms of his Swiss and American invalids with astonishing delicacy of touch; and all the while he whistled softly through his teeth. He was never at a loss for a tune because the flotsam and jetsam that came in and went out of Queen’s Road, Bayswater, with their tired pianos, their squeaky fiddles, and their throaty baritones provided him with all the sentimental ballads of yesterday and to-day.
It was seven o’clock when he looked up and saw Lola enter with Ernest Treadwell,—the girl with a reflection of all the flowers of Hampton Court in her eyes and the boy with love and adoration in his. It was true that all about him there was a great improvement, a more healthy appearance, a look of honest sleep and clean thinking. But he was still the same ugly duckling with obstreperous hair and unfortunate teeth and a half-precocious, half-timid manner. All the same, the fairies had touched him at his birth and endowed him with that strange thing that is called genius. He had the soul of a poet.
“Come up,” said Lola, “you’re not doing anything to-night, so you may as well stay to dinner. I’ve found something I want to read to you.”
She waved her hand to her father, smiled at her mother who was selling note-paper to a housemaid from Inverness Terrace for love letters—and so the paper was pink—and led the way upstairs to the drawing-room which had been opened up and put in daily use. Its Sabbath look and Sabbath smell, its antimacassars had disappeared. There were books about, many books; sevenpenny editions of novels that hadn’t fallen quite stillborn from the press, and one or two by Wells and Lawrence and Somerset Maugham.