"But there are the debts I cannot pay. There is poor Bernard. I ought to do it, Deleah. I know I ought. But I have had miseries enough."
When Deleah left her, Mrs. Day still sat a huddled heap upon the sofa. "I have had miseries enough," she repeated; and upon that text she spoke to herself—going over in faithful detail the troubles she had known—vainest and most useless occupation in which a woman can indulge.
Her orphaned, dependent childhood; her marriage. It had been loveless on her part, but she had cared a little, believing that love on her husband's part would suffice. Was it love, ever at all? Is love possible where tenderness, courtesy, consideration do not exist? Time going on, daily she had suffered his incivility, the despite he did to her sense of what was due to her as his wife, the mother of his children, the mistress of his home. Habit, and love for her children, had made life tolerable. But for twenty years he and she had lived side by side in the outward union of inwardly divided minds.
Then had come his crime, its awful expiation, the terror, the disgrace, the bitterness of the fall for her children and herself, the salt, salt taste of the bread of charity, the drudgery which had been humiliating all through, with failure at the end. The grievous sorrow of Bernard's blighted career, the cruel death of her innocent comfort and consoler, her little boy.
Were not these things enough? Great God, was it possible she still had unspeakable agonies of mind and humiliation of body to go through? Her eyes, so pathetic in their subdued look of patience, wandered round the room which had been to her a haven of refuge from her sordid life in the grocer's shop. A hat Bessie had just discarded lay upon the table. Poor Bessie! poor undisciplined, unruly, never wholly grown-up Bessie! In the day of cataloguing the miseries of her life she was too sadly honest to pretend that Bessie could be a comfort to her.
A picture of Bernard painted by a local artist at a time when father and mother were for once united in the opinion that a handsomer, more promising boy did not exist, hung on the wall. Poor Bernard, who by last mail from India had written to his mother that his life in barracks was a hell.
The tired eyes wandered from that heart-breaking record of promise never to be fulfilled to the whatnot, holding Franky's toys. Was that dust on the lid of the paint-box?
She crossed the room, mounted a chair, took down the precious box, dusted it tenderly with her handkerchief, looked within. Such broken odds and ends of his gamboge, his yellow ochre, his Indian ink of which he had prattled to his father, questioning whether carmine or vermilion should be used for the roofs of his absurd houses; if Prussian blue or ultramarine should be for his seas and skies. She saw again the huge man and the little child bending over their pictures on Sunday evenings of long ago, heard the very tones of their voices. Her tears dropped upon the shabby old box, upon the little earthen palette on which the colours Franky had rubbed still remained. All the bitterness had died out of her heart. Only sadness was left, and a sense of irreparable loss.
CHAPTER XXVIII
At Laburnum Villa