With a single comprehensive movement the curtain had been flung back and the bed revealed. Seated upon it, half-dressed, with her hair hanging loose, and her bare arms exposed by her chemise, was his visitor of the previous night. Half a dozen hairpins were stuck in a row in her mouth. In the cold grayness of the December morning, which seemed to envelop her malignity in a bald realism, her features appeared blunt, pale, and hideous. The almost incredibly bitter and mocking glance was not directed upon the man, but upon the elderly, unprepossessing, and countrified figure in the shabby clothes and antique hat whom he was holding by the hand.
Northcote let the hand fall, and recoiled from his mother with a gasp of fear mixed with passion.
The young girl, whom life had done nothing to enlighten, stood in dumb amazement upon the chair on which she was poised.
There was a moment in which the older woman quivered with terror. The brutal eyes of the prostitute, fixed upon her face with a blunt contempt, seemed to change her into stone. Observing her to be petrified like a bird in the presence of a serpent, the woman seated upon the bed picked the row of hairpins from between her teeth with the circumspection of an actress who, upon the stage, is notorious for her power, and who, having a stupendous scene to enact, prepares her audience for it by a display of quietude. She proceeded to coil up her hair with a deliberation that had value as drama.
“Vice-president of the Great Trades’ Union,” she said, removing the last hairpin from her mouth.
The elder woman stood looking helplessly away. Those indomitable eyes were cowed for the first time in their history. For the first time they had come upon something upon which they had no opinion to deliver. She had barely the strength to carry her gaze to her son, who stood ten paces from her as pale and rigid as a statue.
“Better go—better take Peggy,” he whispered in a voice that she did not know to be his.
Margaret, still holding the holly, had come down from the chair, and like a child had come to stand at the side of her natural protectress. She was visibly afraid; and she had clutched the holly so tightly that blood was trickling from the wounds in her soft fingers.
The spectacle of her childishness restored to the elder woman that capacity for action which she was never without.
“Get your coat and gloves, child,” she said in her harsh tones. “Where’s the basket?”