The girl longed, with an almost childish longing, for something more to eat and drink. Visions rose before her of the Donaldsons' cosy nursery, of a plate piled high with hot buttered toast, of a big home-made seed cake, that could be eaten as quickly as the nursery folks liked, without any dread of future want, and she pushed away her plate, and laid her head down upon the table, sobbing as though her heart would break. Hot buttered toast and seed cake are unromantic sounding things enough, no doubt, but when one is very hungry, and very heartsick, and only twenty into the bargain, the thoughts of past plenty make present poverty seem well nigh intolerable.
Good stuff must have gone to the making of little Christina, and whoever those ancestors on her mother's side had been, they had passed on to her a goodly heritage of courage and endurance. Her storm of sobs was of very brief duration. Giving herself a little shake both actually and metaphorically, she raised her head from the table, resolutely dried her eyes, choked back her sobs and forced herself to finish eating the dry morsels of bread, and drinking the nauseous draught of tea. Either the food itself, or the effort she had made to eat it, sent a tingling of new strength along her limbs, and she broke into a faint laugh over her own despair.
"You perfect goose," she said firmly, rising to wash up her tea things; "crying won't make anything better. Mr. Donaldson used to say, 'Don't look for your bridges before you come to them,' and so I won't look at the bridge. Mrs. Jones will put up for me about the rent, until I am really going to step right on to it. And before I give up every bit of hope, I ought—perhaps I ought to try and pawn the pendant, only I can't bear doing it. I can't bear it."
Mrs. Jones was not at all the pleasant and kindly landlady of fiction, who succours and helps her tenants, and plays the part of mother to them. The only part Mrs. Jones understood playing was that of the cruel stepmother of fairy legend, and Christina did not err in thinking that to allow rent to remain unpaid, was no part of her landlady's methods. Mrs. Jones's own life had been a hard one. Grinding work in her early girlhood, a brutal husband, and much grinding poverty during her married life, and in her widowhood an unending struggle to make two ends meet; these made up the sum of the landlady's existence, and she treated the world as she found herself treated by the world. She expected nothing from others, and she gave them nothing. She asked for no help from her fellow beings, and she most assuredly bestowed none.
She was lighting the gas jet in the hall, a hard-featured, tight-lipped woman, when, half an hour later, Christina went out again, a small brown paper parcel in her hand; and Mrs. Jones's thin lips tightened more than ever as her sharp eyes fell upon the parcel.
"Goin' out to pop somethin'," was her grim thought, and the thought was displeasing to her. Not that she particularly pitied her lodger. Pity was a virtue not cultivated by Mrs. Jones. But she instinctively dreaded the moment when her lodgers began to slip out stealthily with parcels under their arms, or in their hands. The significance of those parcels was well known to her, and she was fully aware that lodgers who once began to pawn their goods passed by easy stages to backwardness in paying their rent, and then followed eviction and new tenants. No; Mrs. Jones mistrusted brown paper parcels, just as much as she mistrusted the look, half-shy, half-frightened, which Christina cast at her in passing, and the flood of colour that dyed the girl's face, when she met the landlady's glance.
Some of her smarter clothes Christina had long ago sold to an old clothes' shop round the corner, but this was the first time she had visited a real pawnbroker, and her heart beat like a sledge-hammer, as she stood outside the window of a jeweller's shop, over which the three balls were displayed. She had shrunk from going into the establishment of Mr. Moss, the recognised pawnbroker of that squalid neighbourhood, and had gone further afield, thinking that from a jeweller, even though he engaged in pawnbroking as well, she would meet with more consideration, and perhaps receive a larger sum of money. But, looking through the glass doors at the two men who lounged behind the counter, her spirits sank to zero, and she allowed ten minutes to slip by before, taking her courage into her hands, she finally entered the shop.
Coming in out of the damp of the November evening, the pleasant warmth was grateful to her, but the brilliant gaslight dazzled her eyes, and sheer nervousness made her stumble hopelessly over the sentence she had been committing to memory, ever since she had left her lodgings.
"I called to ask whether this pendant was of any value," she had intended to say. But instead of that, she found herself stammering breathlessly, "I—I came—would you please tell me—if you can give me something on this," and she thrust her parcel into the hand indolently stretched out for it, by one of the young men behind the counter.
His eyes looked her up and down with an insolent stare that sent the blood flying over her face, and his smile gave her an impotent longing to strike his fat, sleek countenance.