“’E belonged to a club, don’t yer see, and when ’e died there was twenty pound. My Bill wanted to blow it. But I ses no. It was ’is and ’e should ’av it. We ’ad mourning coaches to fetch all the people from their own doors. There was mutes—yer don’t often see them now—and weepers, and feathers in the ’orses’ ’eads. An’ yer should ’a’ seen the tea we set down to when we come ’ome from the funeral! We ’ad thin bread and butter, and winkles and three sorts of cake. I felt so mad with Bill. ’E goes and clouts my little Jim’s ’ead, jest because the innercent child said as ’e wished grandfathers ’ud die every day, so as we might ’ave sich a bustin’ tea. It was only natural in the child. Rose Adkins—she’s my brother’s wife—took Bill’s part. I didn’t forgit it neither. A nice one to talk, she wur! We was ’avin’ a few words, months after, and I ses to ’er:
“‘You ’ussy! ’Ow dare you talk to me?’ I ses. ‘’Ow many slices of thin bread and butter did you eat at my poor father’s funeral tea? I saw you take ten with my own eyes.’ That fetched ’er. ‘Be off,’ I ses, ‘and don’t ever show yer brazen face in my door agen.’”
*****
Well, we buried Jimmy. I rode with him, in a dreadful conveyance they call a Shillibeer, to Finchley. When I went back to the Inn and began to square up his affairs, the water bed was missing. We had clubbed together and hired that water bed for him before Queenie’s deception. I heard long afterward that Mrs. Morey had pawned it at the pawnbroker’s at the corner of Green Street. No doubt Bill, for once, was too strong for her.
About two months afterward there was a faint tap at my door one night. When I opened it I saw a woman standing outside. How shall I describe her?
She wasn’t young—your age, if you’ll forgive me, thirty or so—but there was a youthfulness and freshness about her which you seldom see in a girl out of her teens. She wasn’t pretty, not a bit. She didn’t even look clever. Yet I’ve never seen a more fascinating, a more delightful woman. She was a little like Adeline, only not half so handsome, and there was not the mark of knowledge on her face. She said firmly, “Does Mr. James Carol live here?”
Her voice was calm, but it was only the calmness of perfect breeding. There was none of a sister’s cold, lily-like air about her—no tepid, anxious touch of family concern. Jimmy had been her world.
She was a lady, using the word in its old dignified, graceful sense, without modern abuse, without that vulgar, exasperating “i” which degrades it into “laidy.”
“I’m sorry to say that Jimmy—Mr. Carol—is dead.”
She didn’t wait for me to say any more. She dropped at my feet on the dirty boards of the landing; dropped without a cry, without a contortion of her charming, pure face.