"You old!" and the anæmic little school-mistress looked with laughing admiration at her sister's untarnished radiance. But when Kitty went, and lunch came, Salvina could not eat it.
XI
It was clear, however, that of the alternatives—giving up the night-work or returning to Hackney—the latter was the one favoured by Providence. Kitty might at any moment return to the parental roof, and there must be something, that Kitty would consider a roof, to shelter her.
On Saturday Salvina went house-hunting alone in Hackney, and there—as if further pointed out by Providence—stood their old house "To let!" It had a dilapidated air, as if it had stood empty for many moons and had lost hope. It seemed to her symbolic of her mother's fortunes, and her imagination leapt at the idea of recuperating both. Very soon she had re-rented the house, though from another landlord, and the workmen were in possession, making everything bright and beautiful. Salvina chose wall-papers of the exact pattern of aforetime, and ordered the painting and decorations to repeat the old effects. They were to move in, a few days before the quarter.
Her happy secret shone in her cheeks, and she felt all bright and refreshed, as if she, too, were being painted and cleaned and redecorated. The task of keeping it all from her mother was a great daily strain, and the secret had to overbrim for the edification of Lazarus. Lazarus hailed the change with expressions of unselfish joy, that brought tears into Salvina's eyes. He even went with her to see how the repairs were getting on, chatted with the workmen, disapproved of the landlord's stinginess in not putting down new drain pipes, and made a special call upon that gentleman.
One day on her return from school Salvina found a postcard to the effect that the house was ready for occupation. Salvina was for once glad that she had never yet found time to persuade her mother to learn to read. She went to feast her eyes on the new-old house and came home with the key, which she hid carefully till the Sunday afternoon, when she induced her mother to make an excursion to Victoria Park. The weather was dull, and the old woman needed a deal of coaxing, especially as the coaxing must be so subtle as not to arouse suspicion.
On the way back in the evening from the Park, which, as there was an unexpected band playing popular airs, her mother enjoyed, Salvina led her by the old familiar highways and byways back to the old home, keeping her engrossed in conversation lest it should suddenly befall her to ask why they were going that way. The expedient was even more successful than she had bargained for, Mrs. Brill's sub-consciousness calmly accepting all the old unchanged streets and sights and sounds, while her central consciousness was absorbed by the talk. Her legs trod automatically the dingy Hackney Terrace to which she had so often returned from her Park outing, her hand pushed open mechanically the old garden-gate, and as Salvina, breathlessly wondering if the spell could be kept up till the very last, opened the door with the latch-key, her mother sank wearily, and with a sigh of satisfaction, upon the accustomed hall-chair. In that instant of maternal apathy, the astonishment was wholly Salvina's. That hall-chair on which her mother sat was the very one which had stood there in the bygone happy years; the hat-rack was the one with which her father had "eloped"; on it stood the little flower-pots and on the wall hung the two engravings of the trials of Lord William Russell and Earl Stafford exactly in the same place, and facing her stood the open parlour with all the old furniture and colour. In that uncanny instant Salvina wondered if she had passed through years of hallucination. There was her mother, natural and unconcerned, bonneted and jewelled, exactly as she had come from Camberwell years ago when they had entered the house together. Perhaps they were still at that moment; she knew from her studies as well as from experience that you can dream years of harassing and multiplex experience in a single second. Perhaps there had been no waking hallucination; perhaps the long waiting for her mother to appear with the house-key had made her sleepy, and in that instant of doze she had dreamed all those horrible things—the empty house, her father's flight, his reappearance at her brother's marriage; the long years of evening lessons. Perhaps she was still seventeen, studying the Greek verbs for the Bachelorhood of Arts, perhaps her mother was still a happy wife. Her eyes filled with tears, and she let herself dwell upon the wondrous possibility a second or so longer than she believed in it. For the smell of new paint was too potent; it routed the persuasions of the old furniture. And in another instant it had penetrated through Mrs. Brill's fatigue. She started up, aware of something subtly wrong, ere clearer consciousness dawned.
"Michael!" she shrieked, groping.
"Hush, hush, mother!" said Salvina, with a pain as of swords at her heart. She felt her mother had stumbled—with whatever significance—upon the word of the enigma. "Another trick has been played on us."
"A trick!" Mrs. Brill groped further. "But you brought me. How comes this house here? What has happened?"