For that was what it amounted to. Pa realized it, after he had dressed the wound. Clifton’s mind was not at ease: a glass eye was not a very difficult matter ... but, who knows, some callous person might inform Harrasford, who stood no nonsense on that subject. Fortunately the artistes present had not paid much attention ... had hardly noticed anything, in the dim light of the stage....
And soon after the New Zealanders were walking back to Rathbone place with Maud in their midst, her head a roll of bandages, leaning on Lily’s arm.
It was a pathetic home-coming. Ma had told them what would happen! That would teach them to take in vagabonds from the streets. Mrs. Clifton thought that, in a respectable house....
“That’ll do,” said Pa, dropping into the easy-chair in the dining-room. “I’m worn out. If you’d been like me, Mrs. Clifton, running after those Woolly-legs all the morning”—and he pointed to the apprentices standing round the table—“gee, you wouldn’t talk so much! I’ll take Maud to the hospital this afternoon; it’s only a trifle. Is dinner ready?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Come along, then, all of you Woolly-legs,” said Pa jovially.
Pa was sorry for poor Maud, as a rule, but he felt a need to shed a little gaiety, to extenuate the accident as far as possible, to turn it into a joke, so as to prevent his girls from being panic-stricken. He talked of heads smashed to a jelly, of legs in smithereens, of a bicyclist who had had not one, but both eyes caught in the chain. As for himself, when he was a small boy—that was in the time when they brought up artistes, real ones, mind you; not, as nowadays, on sugar and sweets; no, real ones, on the whip and the stick, damn it!—why, the accidents which he’d seen! Yes, he himself, to go no farther, he could have shown them, here, there, there, here, damn it, all over his body, scars deep enough to put your finger in!
“Eh? Frightens you, does it? Never fear,” added Pa, in a good-humored voice, “that sort of thing won’t happen to any of you Woolley-legs; a good Irish stew is better than a kick of the pedal, eh?”
And Pa, after a last cup of strong tea, dismissed the girls, lit his pipe, threw himself into the easy-chair, with his legs long out in front of him; but soon:
“Well, Maud, what is it? What are you crying for now? I tell you, I’ll buy you a glass one,” said Pa, at the sight of Maud, who blubbered silently and sat glued to her chair instead of getting up to go.