‘Please promise me at once not to suggest this to him,’ she added.
Mrs Keeling rose from her chair. The dressing-bell had already sounded, and she had not had a moment’s rest since before lunch.
‘Well, I’m sure it’s little reward one gets for being a mother in these days,’ she said, ‘or a wife either, for what with your father’s typewriter lording it in the library, and you telling me what’s right and what isn’t in my own room, there’s little left for me to be mistress of. I wear myself to the bone in doing my duty to you and him, and all I get is to be sworn at and scolded, and when I lie awake at night making plans for your future, you tell me that I might just as well have gone to sleep, for you won’t permit them. Pray may I go and dress, or haw you any other orders for me?’
‘No, I just want your promise that you won’t ask Mr Silverdale to Brighton,’ said Alice, unmoved by this withering sarcasm.
‘Well, what’s the use of repeating that like a parrot?’ observed Mrs Keeling. ‘Haven’t I promised?’
‘I didn’t hear you,’ said Alice.
‘Well, then, you may have your own way, and be crowed over by Mrs Fyson, since you prefer that to being taken care of by me.’
Alice’s smart red dress was good enough for a purely domestic dinner, and she sat down again by the fire when her mother had bewailed herself out of the room. She had got her way there, and that was a relief; she was Mr Silverdale’s Helper again, and that was a glow that had penetrated her very bones. When she wrote the little baby-note to him, she felt that if only she was granted such a welcome back as had been conveyed to her down the telephone, she would swoon with happiness. But already that which she thirsted for was dust in her mouth, like Dead Sea apples. She guessed that his little caresses and whispers had meant so much to her because she took them to be the symbols of so much more. Now she knew better, they were without meaning. And the measure of her disillusionment may be taken from the fact that independently of all that had happened, she was glad that there would be no chance of his coming to Brighton. She wanted him to love her, and failing that, she did not want the little tokens that had made her think he did. He might just remain in Bracebridge and dab away at Julia if he wished, provided only that he meant nothing whatever by it. She did not love him a whit the less, but just now she did not want him whose presence for these last six months had filled her with sunshine. She must go away into the dark, and see what the dark felt like. And poor Alice, sitting by the fire in her smart red dress, began to make the most extraordinary faces in efforts at self-control. But the convulsions in her throat threatened to master her completely, and with bitten, quivering lips she ran to her room, and burst into tears.
CHAPTER VIII
Spring weather, languid and damp, with mild airs and pale suns, had set in early in March, and now for a fortnight the restlessness and effervescence of the vernal month had been busy in the world. The grass showed through the grayness of its winter foliage the up-thrusting of the fresh green spikes and spears: big gummy buds stood upon the chestnut trees, a sherbet of pink almond flowers clothed the shrubs all along the front gardens of Alfred Road, and daffodils, faithful for once to their Shakespearian calendar, were ready with a day or two more of sun, to take the winds of March with beauty. Birds chirruped in every bush and were busy with straws and twigs; there were tokens everywhere of the great renewal. Then came three days of hot sun and tepid night showers and the sheaths of buds were loosed, and out of the swollen gummy lumps on the trees burst out the weak five-fingered chestnut leaves and the stiff varnished squibs of hawthorn.