“Anyhow, I’m arranging with the Duke to come over on the twenty-sixth of January to open the new annex. And in the meantime we’ll think about giving it to the city as an orphanage or a cottage hospital.”
XXXIX
THE next morning Josiah paid a visit to Love Lane. The business of Sally had taught him a lesson. Events moved so quickly in these crowded days that it might not be wise to postpone a reconciliation with Melia.
So busy had the Mayor been since his return from Bridlington at the end of August that he had not found time to visit his eldest daughter, nor had she been to Strathfieldsaye since her first somewhat uncomfortable appearance there. She was still inclined to be much on her dignity. Women who lead lonely lives in oppressive surroundings are not easily able to forget the past. The olive branch had been offered already; but it was by no means certain that Melia intended to accept her father’s overtures.
This December morning, however, as the great man, proceeding majestically on foot from the Duke of Wellington, turned up the narrow street with its worn cobblestones and its double row of mean little houses, he fully intended as far as might be humanly possible “to right things with Melia once for all.”
The Mayor entered the shop and found his eldest daughter serving a woman in a white apron and a black and white checked shawl over her head with two pennyworth of carrots and a stick of celery. The honest dame was so taken aback by the arrival of the Mayor of the city, who was personally known to every man, woman and child throughout the district as one of a great triumvirate, of whom the King and the Prime Minister were the other two, that she fled in hot haste without paying for the spoils she bore away in her apron.
Melia, however, true to the stock whence she sprang, had no false delicacy in the matter. Without taking the slightest notice of the august visitor, she was the other side the counter in a jiffy, out of the shop and calling after the fleeing customer, “You haven’t paid your fivepence, Mrs. Odell.”
The Mayor stood at the shop door, watching with a kind of grim enjoyment the process of the fivepence being extracted. He plainly approved it. Melia, with all her limitations, had the root of the matter in her. Upon her return, a little flushed and rather breathless, he refrained from paying her the compliment he felt she deserved but was content to ask if trade was brisk.