CHAPTER XVIII.
AFTER FOUR YEARS.
"
riting again—eternally writing! One would think it was Mrs. Jellyby. Confound the scribbling, I say. "Do, for Heaven's sake, put it down, Nellie, and let us have some dinner!"
Thus—impatiently, angrily—Mr. Laurence Thorndyke to the wife of his bosom. It is five o'clock, of a brilliant summer afternoon, a stiflingly close and oppressive afternoon, in the shabby street, in the shabby tenement wherein Mr. and Mrs. Thorndyke dwell. The scene is a dingy parlor—ingrain carpet, cane chairs, fly-blown wall paper, and a lady in a soiled and torn wrapper discovered at a table rapidly writing. A child of two years, a little boy, with Laurence Thorndyke's own blue eyes and curling locks, toddles about the floor. In a basket cradle there is coiled up a little white ball of a baby. The lady jogs this cradle with her foot as she writes. A lady, young and handsome, though sadly faded, her profusion of light hair all towsy and uncombed, her brows knit in one straight frowning line. She pauses in her work for a second to glance up—anything but a loving glance, by the by—and to answer:
"I don't know Mrs. Jellyby, Mr. Thorndyke. Did she write to keep herself and her children from starving, I wonder, while her husband gambled and drank their substance? As to dinner—couldn't you manage to get that meal in the places you spend your days and nights? There is some bread and butter on the kitchen table—some tea on the kitchen stove. Joanna will give them to you if you like. You are not likely to find champagne and ortolans in a tenement house."
And then, the pretty lips setting themselves in a tight, unpleasant line, Mrs. Thorndyke goes back to her work.
She writes very rapidly, in a bold, firm hand, heedless of the child who prattles and clings to her skirts. They are law papers she is copying, in that clear, legible chirography.
For in three years it has come to this. Four tiny tenement rooms in a shabby, crowded street, soiled and torn wrappers, bread and tea dinners, one small grimy maid of all work, a drunkard and gambler instead of her brilliant bridegroom, and law papers to copy all day and far into the night, for the friend of her girlhood, Mr. Richard Gilbert, to "keep the wolf from the door."