Economies in coal, economies in every direction they had to practise. Money, where it had been so plentiful was all at once painfully scarce; credit, which had seemed unlimited, there was none. George Boult, taking things in hand, and trying to bring some order out of chaos, handed over weekly to Mrs. Day two pounds for housekeeping. The change from lavishness to penury bewildered the poor woman, and the change from a table loaded with good things to one that was nearly bare was not skilfully made. For a time, until experience taught her, things they could have done without she continued to buy, and that which was really necessary they went without. And that allowance, poor as it seemed to her, could not go on for long. It was by no means certain that enough legally remained to them to repay Mr. Boult for these disbursements. If they had been willing to live upon his means he was not at all a generous man; he did not encourage them to expect pecuniary help from him.
"What do you advise? Have you no plan? What are we all to do?" Mrs. Day asked of her husband.
"You must hang on till I come out. If we're lucky it will only be a matter of a few months."
"But even for a few months, William, what are we to do?"
"You must work," William said. "Earn something. It will be a change for you. I've kept the lot of you in idleness till now. Now you'll learn what it is to work. It won't do you any harm."
"All that is so easy to say. But what work are we to do? Where are we to work? I cannot see that we shall have a roof over our heads."
Then the wretched man, who knew no more than she what would become of them all, and was infinitely the more wretched on that account, broke into a torrent of oaths. "Haven't I enough to bear?" he asked her. "Haven't I myself to think about? Is mine such a pleasant prospect, that you come to pester me, giving me no peace? How do other women manage? Women that have never had husbands to slave for them as I have slaved for you."
Poor Mrs. Day, the least pugnacious of women, who at the best of times had scarcely known how to hold her own with him, fled before the unreasonable, miserable man.
Bessie, in talking to her brother over the hopelessness of their position, used the child's time-honoured reproach against the parent. "Papa and mama should not have had children if they were going to make such a muddle as this," she argued. Bessie had not wanted to be born, she declared. Her father and mother were responsible. They must at least say what was to be done. Papa, she declared to Bernard, should be made to say.
"Papa, when Deleah and I want our hats and dresses for the spring, what are we to do?" she asked her father, with that note of aggression in her voice with which he had become familiar from her.