The four last little words were almost sinister. And then in the unceremonious way in which he had entered the shop the great man walked out. The place was as distasteful to him as his presence in it was distasteful to his eldest daughter. Yet for both, and in spite of themselves, their meeting after long years had had an extraordinary grim fascination.
XIX
AT Christmas Private Hollis was granted forty-eight hours’ leave. He had been a member of the Blackhampton Battalion rather less than three months, but this was a piece of luck for which he felt very grateful.
Those three months had been a grueling time. His age was forty-one, and, in order to comply with the arbitrary limit of thirty-eight imposed by Field Marshal Viscount Partington in the first days of strife, it had been necessary to falsify his age. Many another had done likewise. Questions were not asked, and if a man had physical soundness and the standards of measurement demanded by the noble Viscount there seemed no particular reason why they should be. All the same the sudden and severe change from a soft life found some weak places in Private Hollis.
How he stuck it he hardly knew. Many a time in those trying early weeks he was sorely tempted to go sick with “a pain in his hair.” But ever at the back of his mind hovered the august shade of Troop Sergeant Major William Hollis, the distinguished kinsman who had fought at Waterloo, whose spurs and sword hung in the little back sitting room of Number Five, Love Lane; and that old warrior simply would not countenance any such proceeding. Therefore, Christmas week arrived without Private Hollis having missed a single parade. Although not one of the bright boys of the Battalion, he was not looked upon unfavorably, and on Christmas Eve, about four o’clock, he returned to his home from the neighboring town of Duckingfield.
His home in the course of the sixteen years he had lived in it had brought him precious little in the way of happiness. More than once he had wondered if ever he would be man enough to break its sinister thrall; more than once he had wished to end the ever-growing aversion of man and wife by doing something violent. He had really grown to hate the place. And yet after an absence of less than three months he was returning to it with a thankfulness that was surprising.
All the same he was not sure how Melia would receive him. When at last he had made the great decision and had told her that he was going to join up he had said she must either carry on the business in his absence, or that it could be wound up and she must be content with the separation allowance. Her answer had been a gibe. However, she proposed to carry on in spite of the fact that W. Hollis Fruiterer as a means of livelihood was likely to prove a stone about her neck. Still there was a pretty strong vein of independence in her and if she could keep afloat by her own exertions she meant to do so.