‘And there’s a word to me!’ she said. ‘Fancy telling me that my mother detests my husband. That’s an un-Christian thing to say about anybody.’
‘It’s an un-Christian feeling, maybe, to have about anybody,’ said he, ‘but that’s your mother’s affair and not mine. She may feel about me what she pleases, but I wish her to know she must speak properly to me, or not speak at all. I shouldn’t have referred to it again, unless you had begun, but now that you’ve begun it’s best you should know what my opinion on the subject is. Before the children, too: I had better manners than that when I was in the fish-shop myself.’
Mrs Keeling began to fear the worst, and forced a twin tear from her other eye.
‘Well, what Mamma will do unless you help her this Christmas, is more than I can tell,’ she said. ‘Coal is up now to winter prices, and Mamma’s cellar is so small that she can’t get in enough to last her through. And it’s little enough that I can do for her, for with John at home it’s like having two young lions to feed, and how to save from the house-money you give me I don’t see. I dare say it would be better if Mamma got rid of Blenheim for what it would fetch and went into furnished lodgings.’
‘Now who’s been talking about my not behaving properly to your mother except yourself?’ said Keeling.
‘There’s other ways of saying a thing than saying it,’ said Mrs Keeling cryptically. ‘You speak of Mamma detesting you, and not having the manners of a fishmonger, and what’s that but another way of saying you’re set against her?’
Mr Keeling regarded his wife with a faint twinkle lurking behind his gray eyes.
‘Take your tea, Emmeline,’ he said, ‘and you’ll feel better. You haven’t had your nap this afternoon, but have been listening to your mother talking all sorts of rabid stuff against me. Don’t you deny it now, but just remember I don’t care two straws what she says about me behind my back. But I won’t stand her impertinence to my face. And as for coal in the winter I can tell you that she still owes me for what she bought at the Stores last January. Perhaps I’ll county-court her for the bill. I’m glad you talked about coal, I had almost forgotten about that bill.’
It dawned faintly and vaguely on Mrs Keeling’s mind, as on summits remote from where she transacted her ordinary mental processes, that her husband did not quite mean what he said about that county-courting. Possibly there lurked in those truculent remarks some recondite sort of humour.
‘Certainly Mamma has no call to be so rude to you, when you do so much for her,’ she said.