It was impossible not to feel more interest in the room now that it could be imagined in its pretty new dress, and the discussion of how it should be arranged and decorated occupied an hour out of a dreary wait. The sisters had slept the night before at a boarding-house, and had hurried to the flat directly after breakfast, so as to be ready to receive the furniture at ten o’clock as agreed. At eleven o’clock there was no sign of the vans; but no one expects furniture-vans to be punctual within an hour or two, and until noon the girls managed to possess themselves in patience, and to find amusement in wandering from room to room. But when one o’clock drew near the matter became serious. They had brought a tea-basket with them, but there were no chairs on which to sit, no table to hold the cups and saucers. They were growing tired, and were longing to get to work while daylight lasted, and to have a bed to sleep on before night fell. It was two o’clock before the first van arrived, and seven before the men departed, leaving the two young mistresses to thread their way between stacks of furniture, unopened crates, and boxes of luggage. There was no room for a servant to sleep in the flat, and the charwoman who was engaged to help could not come until the following day, so it was hopeless to try to do more than get one bedroom in tolerable order. By Hope’s forethought the necessary blankets and linen had been packed in one box and plainly labelled, so preparations were soon made, and by eight o’clock the tired workers were already longing for bed. Downstairs in the basement was a public dining-room where dinner could be obtained for a shilling a head; but they were too dishevelled and footsore to feel inclined to appear in public, so they refreshed themselves instead with more tea, more cakes, more dried-up sandwiches. Philippa leant back in her chair and sighed heavily as she looked first at her roughened hands, then at the hopeless disorder by which she was surrounded.
“I used to dream,” she said slowly—“I used to dream of coming up to London. Father seemed so often on the eve of doing something great, and I used to imagine what it would be like if the book really turned out as he expected, or the picture made his name famous. He would have brought us to town, and we should have been rich, and every one would have wanted to know us—”
“I know! So have I. ‘Beautiful Miss Charringtons—the rage of the London season.’ That’s the kind of thing, isn’t it? I’m not beautiful, of course, but I’m vivacious—that’s my point. I can espiègle fifty times better than Hope, though she is such a darling. You are very handsome, Phil, when you look pleasant; and Theo has the air of a princess in disguise. We are an interesting family. It seems hard lines that the world should not know us. We do seem slightly—just a little—what you might call cornered up here.”
“We do indeed. Oh, it is different—so different from what I expected!” faltered poor, tired Philippa, with a sob; and then of a sudden her fears and dreads caught her in a grip from which there was no escape. She looked round the strange, unlovely room, through the bare window at the great city, lurid and threatening in the light of many lamps, and trembled at the thought of what she had done. She had been as a mother to these children, and she had brought them away from their peaceful home to face a thousand trials, a thousand difficulties: Stephen, constitutionally despondent, to be burdened with fresh responsibilities; the girls, ardent and credulous, to be ready prey for unscrupulous acquaintances; Barney, pining for mischief, to a swift and certain ruin! Her face blanched; she held out her hands to her sister with a gesture of terrified appeal.
“Madge, Madge, I’m frightened! Suppose it is all a mistake! Suppose we fail, and all the money goes, and we are left penniless and alone in this great wilderness! I have read of it so often: people come up hoping to make their fortunes, and the time passes, and they move into smaller and smaller rooms—and no work comes—and they fall ill. It is my doing! I persuaded Stephen. Oh Madge, if it’s all a mistake, you will believe I did it for the best, won’t you? I was not thinking of myself. It would have been easier for me to stay where we were. You will not blame me if the money goes and there is none left? Promise that you will never blame me.”
But Madge lay back in her chair and folded her arms out of reach of the trembling hands.
“I will, though!” she replied bluntly. “I’ll make an awful row; and quite right, too, for it will be your fault. If you lose heart the very first night, and fall to crying and groaning, how do you expect to get on? If you get low in your mind, Steve will be indigo, and Hope and Theo will have no spirit left in them. As for me, I’m not going to fail, nor fall ill, nor starve, nor throw myself over London Bridge, nor anything else interesting or melodramatic I’ve always longed to come up to town, and now that I am here I am going to enjoy myself in the best way I can. It is ripping to work hard when you feel you are getting on, and a little taste of success now and then will be a wonderful fillip. There must be some compensations for being poor, and I mean to find them out, and see if I can’t get as much fun for sixpence as Avice Loftus does for a sovereign.”
“I—I believe you will,” said Philippa, with a feeble laugh. “You mustn’t think me a coward, Madge; I could be brave for myself; but it is the awful feeling of responsibility that weighs upon me. All this day I have been saying to myself, ‘Now we are here. What is the next step? What ought we to do next?’”
“Go to bed, I should say. You look as if you needed it,” came the curt rejoinder; and at that Philippa was obliged to laugh outright.
“Oh, Mr Dick, Mr Dick! your common-sense is invaluable. Come along, then; let us go. We shall need all the rest we can get to prepare us for our hard work to-morrow.”