Jill: A Flower Girl

by L. T. Meade

“Did you ask me what me name was, honey?” she would say to a customer attracted by the gleam of mischief in her eye. “Oh, then, glory be to heaven, it’s Molly Maloney, at your service, and where would you find a better or a swater? Do take a bunch of flowers, lady, do now, and I’ll pray for a good husband for you every time as I goes down on my bended knees.”

Sallies of this sort provoked smiles even from the refined people who wished to buy flowers, and secured roars of laughter from the other flower girls, who delighted in egging Molly on to “give sauce,” as they termed it, to the fine folks.

On this particular morning, however, Molly’s pleasantries were not so frequent as usual. She whispered to Jill that little Kathleen, that jewel of a girl, was down with a cowld, and she was moighty bothered with her, and didn’t know whether to send for the doctor or not.

“You might come and see her, Jill,” said Molly Maloney. “Kathleen she worships the very ground you treads on, and she’s down with a cowld or a faver, or something. I’ll have no doctor to see her, no that I won’t, for he’d be after ordhering her off to the hospital, and that ’ud kill her entirely. Oh, glory to heaven, what fine flowers you have this morning, Jill! I’m shamed to sit near you, that I am. Look at mine. They were under Kathie’s bed all night, and they seem to smell of the faver. Oh, I’ll get ’em off ef I sell ’em chape. You lend me a coil of wire, honey, and you’ll see how I’ll smarten ’em up.”

Jill handed the wire to her neighbour with scarcely a remark. Her thoughts were far away with Nat, and the home they might soon have together. She wondered if they might really dare to take that flat next to Mrs Stanley’s—if by any possible means they could justify for themselves the extravagance of paying seven shillings a week for their rooms. Then how would her mother do without her? Who would help her mother when she got those queer attacks of pain, those unsupportable hours of agony which had hitherto found relief only in the one way?

Jill knew that it was very wrong of her mother to drink. The girl’s own nature was so upright, so sweet, so high, that it was absolutely repulsive to her to see any one in the state in which she often now discovered her poor mother. The aim and object of her life was to hide the disgrace of her mother’s intemperate fits from the rest of the world; she called them by any name but the true one. She was ready to cover them with any amount of lies if necessary; she would have knocked down any one who accused her mother of getting drunk; even Mrs Robinson herself, in her repentant moments, did not dare to call a spade a spade—did not dare to speak of what she had done by its true name. Jill never blamed her, she put it all down to the pain and misery. It seemed to her there was no remedy left to her mother but to drown her sufferings in drink, and yet the fact cast a shadow over her own life, and caused her to sigh heavily, even though Nat was coming in the evening, and they could talk about their wedding-day, which was so soon to arrive.

As she arranged her flowers with deft fingers this morning she made up her mind that she would say yes to Nat. She would be in the same house with her mother, and could still look after her. As to the boys, they were both of them doing for themselves. Jill scarcely gave them a thought at all in making her arrangements.

Yes, she would marry Nat, and trust to his never discovering that ugly secret about her mother.

She had just finished the arrangement of her basket, picturesquely heaping her masses of pink, white, and yellow poppies at one side, and her roses and forget-me-nots at another, when a tall girl, dressed in the costume of the Flower Girls’ Guild, came up with a basket of flowers on her arm and spoke to her.

She was a handsome girl, and looked striking in her neat grey dress and scarlet apron. Her hair was of a pale gold, her eyes large and blue; the expression of her somewhat pale face a little austere. Her basket was full of lovely fresh flowers, but although they were superior to Jill’s in quality, they did not make nearly so fine a show.