Mrs Alleyne was going about her blank, chilly house one morning, looking very much troubled; and now and then she stopped to wring her hands, but it was generally in a cupboard or in a drawer, when there was not the slightest likelihood of her being seen. Her forehead was deeply lined, and there was a peculiar drawing down about the corners of her lips that indicated care.
It was the old story—money. She had been up to town only the week before to sell out a sum in Government Stock, to pay for an astronomical instrument her son required—a tremendously costly piece of mechanism, thus leaving herself poorer than ever; and now her idol had been putting her to fresh expense.
“So thoughtless of him,” she moaned, with her face in the linen closet—“so foolish. He seems to have no idea whatever of the value of money, and I don’t know what I shall do.”
But all the same there was the same glow of satisfaction in Mrs Alleyne’s breast that she used to feel when she had bought the idol a wooden horse, or a toy waggon full of sacks, or one of those instruments of torture upon wheels, which, when a child draws it across the floor, emits a series of wire-born notes of a most discordant kind.
Mrs Alleyne turned over three or four clean tablecloths, opening them out and looking wistfully at darns and frayings, and places where the clothes pegs had torn away the hems when they had been hung out to dry. These she refolded with a sigh, and put back.
“Oh, my boy, my boy, if you only thought a little more about this world as well as the other worlds!” she sighed, as she closed the door, and, with her brow growing more wrinkled, wrung her hands over the pantry sink.
It was not that she had washed them, for the tap was dry, no water being ever pumped into the upper cistern, and the pantry was devoted to the reception of Mrs Alleyne’s meagre stores.
There were cupboards here that held glass and china—good old china and glass; but in the one, there were marks of mendings and rivets, and in the other chips and, worse troubles, cracks, and odd glasses without feet, or whose feet were upon the next shelf.
“I don’t know how we shall manage,” sighed Mrs Alleyne, wringing her hands once more. “It was very, very thoughtless of him. The knives are worst of all.”
She unrolled a packet or two, which contained nothing but table knives that had once been remarkably good, but which had done their work in company with hard usage, and some of which had shed their ivory handles, while others were thin and double edged, others again being bent at the points, or worn down by cleaning until they were about two-thirds of their original length.