In the foreground of his dream (rich parqueterie) three figures went to and fro, one adorable in plum color and point lace; one, the one with the red hair, still beautiful in green; and one, not beautiful, but—well—elegant in pink. Now he saw a dining-room sumptuously furnished, a table white with silver and fine linen, and the same figures sitting at it, drinking champagne and eating the fool messes that women love to eat, queer things cooked in cream, and ice-puddings, and so on. And now it was a lofty music room, and Minnie taking the roof off with one of her So-nahters on the Steinway Grand; and now a library (the Hundred Best Books had grown into a library), and Kate, studious, virgin, inviolate in leisure. Then slap through it all went the little mother driving in her own carriage, a victoria for fine weather, a brougham for wet. (It was before the days of motor-cars.) Somewhere on the outskirts of his dream (moorland for choice) there hovered a gentleman in shooting clothes, carrying a gun, or on the uttermost dim verge, the sky-line of it, the same vague form (equestrian) shot gloriously by. But he took very little interest in him.
Ah, there were the cross-roads and the Bald-faced Stag at the corner. Not a scrap changed since the last time he visited it—day when he rode the Major's roan mare slap through the saloon bar into the bowling-alley. Did it for a bet, and won it, too, and bought his mother a stuffed badger in a glass case with the money, as a propitiatory offering. Only another mile.
His road ran into the lighted High Street, through a black avenue of elms as through a tunnel. Reality assailed him with a thousand smells. No need to ask his way to the North End.
He turned off through an alley into a dark lane, bordered with limes. The thick, sweet scent dropped from the trees, a scent dewy with the childhood of the night. It felt palpable as a touch. It was as if he felt his mother's fingers on his face, and the kisses of his innocent girl-sisters.
He went slowly up the lane toward a low light at the end of it. At the corner, where it turned, was a small house black with ivy and fenced with a row of espalier limes. The light he made for came from the farthest window of the ground floor. Through a gap in the lime fence he could see into the room.
The house was sunk a little below the level of the lane, so that he seemed to be looking straight down into a pit of yellow light hollowed out of the blackness. Two figures sat knitting at the window on the edge of the pit. His mother and Kate. A third, in the center of the light, leaned her elbows on the table and propped her head on her hands. He knew her for Minnie by her red hair. Beyond them a side window was open to the night.
There were two ways by which he could approach them. He could go boldly in at the iron gate and up the flagged path to the front door. Or he could go round to the side, up the turning of the lane, where the garden wall rose high, into the back garden. Thence, through a thick yew arch into a narrow path between the end of the house and the high wall. By the one way they would be certain to see him through the front window. By the other he would see them (through the side window) without being seen. Owing to a certain moisture and redness about his eyes and nose he was not yet quite ready to be seen. Therefore he chose the side way. Sitting on a garden seat in the embrasure of the arch, he commanded a slanting but uninterrupted view of the room and its inmates.
There, in the quiet, he could hear the clicking needles of the knitters, and the breathing of the red-haired woman. And he longed with a great longing for the sound of their voices. If one of them would only speak!
III
"The question is"—it was the red-haired girl who spoke, and her tone suggested that the silence marked a lull in some debate—"how much do you mean to advance me this year from the housekeeping?"