The scenes came back as if they were enacted before him. The old eight-day dock ticked in its recess; the fire rustled and dropped a cinder; the cat purred on the hearth; Paul sat reading, absorbed, and yet in memory he knew of the cat and the dock and the fire, and even of a humming fly somewhere, and a gleam of sunshine on the weather-stained whitewash of the wall outside.
In came Mrs. Armstrong, with the little household servant at her heels, and laid something on the ledge of the old clock face. She was an uncommonly tall woman, and had a knack of putting things on high out of other people’s reach.
‘That’s for the potatoes,’ she said; ‘run and get ‘em as soon as ever you’ve peeled the turnips.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the girl; and they both went out together.
Two or three minutes later Paul went out. His father sat behind the counter of the shop, and Paul was afraid that if he went that way he would be seized upon and compelled to take his place. So he ran up the garden, climbed a wall or two, and dropped into Badger’s field. He had not gone twenty yards when he found a halfpenny lying on the grass. He laid hands on it, and made for the confectioner’s, where he expended it on a sickly sweet called ‘paper-suck’—a treacly, sticky abomination with a spiral of old newspaper twined about it Brother Dick appeared by chance, and shared the treat. Paul at this time had taken to making verses on his own account, incited by a great deal of miscellaneous reading. This was an exercise which demanded quiet and retirement, and he got away into the fields, and, lying face downwards on the grass, gave himself over hand and foot to fancy. It was quite late in the afternoon when appetite brought him to himself. He had forgotten his dinner, but relying on his ability to filch something, he walked home with a light heart He marched innocently through the open door of the shop.
‘Paul!’ His father stopped him, his spectacles tipped up into his white hair, and his gray eyes half hidden under eyebrows like a shaggy Scotch deer-hound’s. The portrait of Sir Walter’s ‘Maida’ had a strong suggestion of the Scottish face, wistful, affectionate, and full of simple sagacity. Just now the gray eyes looked doom. Paul knew he had done something awful, and felt guilty, though he knew nothing as yet of the charge against him. ‘What ha’ ye dune wi’ the threepenny-bit ye stole this morning?’
‘What threepenny-bit?’ said Paul. ‘I haven’t seen no threepenny-bit, father.’
The verse he hammered out in his lonely moments was grammatical, because his exemplars would have it so; but to have been grammatical in common speech would have seemed like a pedantry.
‘The threepenny-bit your mother put on the clock-ledge, ye pelferin’ vag’bond!’ said his father sternly.
‘I never seen it,’ Paul declared.