“The boy seemed to think that his uncles would help.”
“I do not allow Mr. Lawrie’s brothers to interfere in my affairs in any way.”
“Then . . .”
“That is all, Mr. Folyat.”
Francis found himself forced to admiration of this woman. There was a sort of finality about her. He told himself that she was like a very large garden roller, a roller so heavy that no one man could move it. He had a trick of nicknaming people—(Minna had inherited it)—and he ticked her off in his mind as the garden-roller. When he had done that, he found that she was talking about the weather and Mr. Gladstone. When she had told him how she wept at the death of Charles Dickens, Francis thought it time to go. Mrs. Lawrie chatted amiably as she took him to the door, and she stood watching him as he walked down the asphalt path to the little rustic-gate. He turned down towards the bridge and took a long breath, and blew it out again. How good the sky was! How good the air upon one’s face! . . . He remembered old Lawrie’s verses:
The distant tolling of the bell
Told the great sun a man was dead. . . .
What was dead? Old Lawrie? Hardly. The dead were surely not so mad as that. The woman? “Dead as a doornail,” said Francis, and he thought with pity of Bennett Lawrie, young, ardent, groping for life, coming back at night, tired from his dull work in his dull office, to that house.
Almost unconsciously he found himself comparing it with his own house and wondering what that might be like for the young people in it—for Minna, for Annette for Frederic. Not so bad as that, surely not so bad as that. And yet . . . He would not admit to himself that all was not well in his own house.
“How strange,” he thought. “How strange, to walk out of the street, an ordinary street, into lives like that! One would never have imagined it. . . . But the boy, Bennett; what’s to become of the boy?”