Promotion For Mrs. Day
Deleah had lived for several months at Cashelthorpe as companion to Miss Forcus, when on a certain Thursday afternoon she excused herself, as it was often her habit to do, from attending on Miss Forcus, and went to pass the hour and a half of the early-closing day with her mother and sister.
Mrs. Day was alone at the moment of her arrival, and that her mother was in unusually low spirits was quite obvious to Deleah.
"Come for a walk with me, mama; it is not good for you to be shut up on such a day in this stuffy room."
Mrs. Day declined, but she could not deny that the room was stuffy. No flowers were on the table now that Gibbon's offerings had ceased. No plants on the wide window seat. On a whatnot in a corner which had been devoted to the child's belongings were Franky's paint-box and some of his toys. The mother's eyes turned from Deleah, now well appointed in her pretty muslin and hat with its long ostrich feather, and rested on these mementoes.
"But for what happened to him you would not be where you are, Deleah," she said.
"But you wish me to be there, mama?"
"Oh, I wish it, dear, since you are happy; only—"
She did not put the thought into words—only Franky seemed to have died for this. Franky, who had come crying to her one day because a school-fellow had laughed at the patch on this trousers: Franky who had begged so hard only a few hours before his death for a little box of conjuring tools like Willy Spratt's, which had to be denied him. Her little Franky crushed to death beneath the wheels of the Forcus carriage! In her heart the mother would have liked Deleah to reject the good things offered her by the Forcus hand.
"Of course I am not happy!" Deleah said. "How can I be happy, mama, if you are unhappy? And poor little Franky—do you think I forget him? And Bernard, and—poor papa? And again I'm not happy because I don't earn the money they pay me," Deleah said, and her cheeks grew pink at the thought. "It is out of charity they give it me. I can't earn fifty pounds a year by just sitting in a carriage, or sewing beads on to canvas, giving a few messages to servants, writing a few letters! I wonder if they would be glad if I gave it all up, mama?"