When Reginald Mallett died in the shabby boarding-house kept by Mrs. Banks, he left his family without a penny but with a feeling of extraordinary peace. They were destitute, but they were no longer overshadowed by the fear of disgrace, the misery of subterfuge, the bewildering oscillations between pity for the man who could not have what he wanted and shame for his ceaseless striving after pleasure, his shifts to get it, his reproaches and complaints.
In the gloomy back bedroom on the third story of the boarding-house he lay on a bed hung with dingy curtains, but in the dignity which was one of his inheritances. Under the dark, close-cut moustache, his lips seemed to smile faintly, perhaps in amusement at the folly of his life, perhaps in surprise at finding himself so still; the narrow beard of a foreign cut was slightly tilted towards the dirty ceiling, his beautiful hands were folded as though in a mockery of prayer. He was, as Mrs. Banks remarked when she was allowed to see him, a lovely corpse. But to Henrietta and her mother, standing on either side of the bed, guarding him now, as they had always tried to do, he had subtly become the husband and father he should have been.
“We must remember him like this,” Mrs. Mallett said, raising her soft blue eyes, and Henrietta saw that the small sharp lines which Reginald Mallett had helped to carve in her face seemed to have disappeared. It was extraordinary how placid her face became after his death, but as the days passed it was also noticeable that much of her vitality had gone too. She left herself in Henrietta’s young hands and she, casting about for a way of earning her living, found good fortune in the terrible basement kitchen where Mrs. Banks moved mournfully and had her disconsolate being. The gas was always lighted in that cavernous kitchen, but it remained dark, mercifully leaving the dirt half unseen. A joint of mutton, cold and mangled, was discernible, however, when Henrietta descended to put her impecunious case before the landlady and, gazing at it, the girl saw also her opportunity. Mrs. Banks had no culinary imagination, but Henrietta found it rising in herself to an inspired degree and there and then she offered herself as cook in return for board and lodging for her mother and herself.
“I’m sure I’ll be glad to keep you,” Mrs. Banks said: “you give the place a tone, you do really, you and your dear Ma sitting in the drawing-room sewing of an evening; but it isn’t only the cooking, though I do get to hate the sight of food. I get a regular grudge against it. But it’s that butcher! Ready money or no meat’s his motto, and how to make this mutton last—” She picked it up by the bone and cast it down again.
“Oh, I can manage butchers,” Henrietta said. “Besides, we’ll pay our way. You’ll see. Leave the cooking to me.”
“I will, gladly,” Mrs. Banks said, wiping away a tear. “Ever since Banks took it into his head to jump into the river, it seems like as if I hadn’t any spirit, and that Jenkins turns up his ugly nose every time I put the mutton on the table—when he doesn’t begin talking to it like an old friend. I can’t bear Jenkins, but he does pay regular, and that’s something. Well, I’ll get on with the upstairs and leave you to it.”
And so Henrietta began the work which kept her amazingly happy, fed and sheltered her mother, who sat all day slowly making beautiful baby linen for one of the big shops, and cemented Henrietta’s friendship with the lachrymose Mrs. Banks. To be faced with a mutton bone and a few vegetables, to have to wrest from these poor materials an appetizing meal, was like an exciting game, and she played it with zest and with success. She had the dubious pleasure of hearing Mr. Jenkins smack his lips and seeing him distend his nostrils with anticipation; the unalloyed one of watching the pale face of little Miss Stubb, the typist, grow delicately pink and less dangerously thin, under the stimulus of good food; the amusement of congratulating Mrs. Banks, in public, on her new cook, and seeing Mrs. Banks, at the head of the supper table, nod her head with important secrecy.
“I’ve made out,” she told Henrietta, “that I’ve a daily girl, without a character, that’s how I can afford her, in the basement, but I must say it’s made that Jenkins mighty keen on fetching his own boots of a morning, but no lodgers below-stairs is my rule. You look out for Jenkins, my dear. He’s no good. I know his sort.”
“Oh, I can manage Mr. Jenkins, too,” Henrietta said, and indeed she made a point of bringing him to the hardly manageable state for the amusement of proving her capacity. She despised him, but not for nothing was she Reginald Mallett’s daughter; and Mr. Jenkins and the butcher and a gloomy old gentleman who emerged from his bedroom to eat, and locked himself up between meals, were the only men she knew. No doubt Mrs. Mallett, placidly sewing, was alive to the attentions and frustrations of Mr. Jenkins and had planned her letter to her sisters-in-law some time before she wrote it, but the idea of parting from her mother never occurred to Henrietta until Miss Stubb alarmed her.
“Your mother,” she said poetically, “makes me think of snow melting before the sun. In fact, I can’t look at her without thinking of snow and snowdrops and—and graves. Last spring I said to Mrs. Banks, ‘She won’t see the leaves fall,’ I said, and Mrs. Banks agreed. She has been spared, but take care of her in these cold winds, Miss Henrietta, dear.”