[V
SETTLING DOWN]
O the mad days that I have spent! and to see how many of mine old acquaintances are dead!
PROFESSOR SMALLMAN had been lent by his university to deliver a series of lectures in America, and some weeks of the term would pass before his return. René, therefore, had no escape from his father. Breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, he was there all the time on his best behavior, though with a naughty malice stirring in him and peeping out of his eyes. He ate—how he ate! Hardly a meal left remnants enough to provide for the next, and butcher’s meat, which before had only been got every third day, was now brought to the house every morning. In an access of filial devotion, René had undertaken to relieve his mother of household accounts, always a plague to her, and the little blood-stained butcher’s bills alarmed him by their number and the amount of money they represented. He hardly spoke to his father, avoided him, shut himself up in his bedroom, and there realized horribly that he was also avoiding his mother, that she made no protest, not even by glance or gesture, and that they were making him feel the intruder. The change in his mother was amazing. She was three times as active, and was often for hours together without her crochet-work. She, who was accustomed for days never to leave the house, now went out every afternoon with her husband to walk in Potter’s Park, or in the evening to visit the streets where they had lived, and to seek out old acquaintances. When her son was present she was discreet, and prattled reminiscently of people he had never known, or remembered only as names and remote presences. But often when he was in his room, he would hear them below talking excitedly, and his mother laughing or protesting. And he came to think of them as “they,” and they seemed to have so little they cared to or could share with him.
One black night he had when, after coming in late in the afternoon, he found his mother unaided moving the heavy iron bedstead and wire mattress from George’s room to her own. He gulped down his dismay, and stood on the stairs watching her. She had not heard him, and went on until suddenly she caught sight of him and jumped.
“Oh!”
“Shall I help you?”
“It is—too heavy for me.”
“Where is—he?”
“He went out. He thought he saw old Mr. Timperley in Derby Street to-day. Of course you don’t remember Mr. Timperley.”
“In your room?”