A Life's Secret: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

'Mother took 'em out,' responded Jacky.

The girl turned round, and stood still for a moment as if taking in the sense of the words. Then she attacked her mother, anger flashing from her eyes. 'If you have been and took 'em to the pawnshop, you shall fetch 'em back. How dare you interfere with my things? Aren't they my boots? Didn't I buy 'em with my own money?'

'If you don't hold your tongue, I'll box your ears,' shrieked Mrs. Dunn, with a look and gesture as menacing as her tone. 'Hold your tongue! hold your tongue, I say, miss!'

'I shan't hold my tongue,' responded Jemima, struggling between anger and tears. 'I will have my boots! I want to go out, I do! and how can I go barefoot?'

'Want to go out, do you!' raved Mrs. Dunn. 'Perhaps you want to go and follow your sister! The boots be at Cox's, and you may go there and get 'em. Now, then!'

The words altogether were calculated to increase the ire of Jemima; they did so in no measured degree. She and her mother commenced a mutual contest of ranting abuse. It might have come to blows but for the father's breaking into a storm of rage, so violent as to calm them, and frighten the children. It almost seemed as if trouble had upset his brain.

Long continued hunger—the hunger that for weeks and months never gets satisfied—will on occasion transform men and women into demons. In the house of the Dunns, not only hunger but misery of all sorts reigned, and this day seemed to have brought things to a climax. Added to the trouble and doubt regarding Mary Ann, was the fear of a prison, Dunn having just heard that he had been convicted in the Small Debts Court. Summonses had been out against him, hopeless though it seemed to sue anybody so helplessly poor. In truth, the man was overwhelmed with misery—as was many another man in Daffodil's Delight—and did not know where to turn. After this outburst, he sat down on the bench again, administering a final threat to his wife for silence. Mrs. Dunn stood against the bare wooden shelves of the dresser, her hair on end, her face scarlet, her voice loud enough, in its shrieking sobs, to alarm all the neighbours; altogether in a state of fury. Disregarding her husband's injunction for silence, she broke out into reproaches. 'Was he a man, that he should bring 'em to this state of starvation, and then turn round upon 'em with threats? Wasn't she his wife? wasn't they his children? If she was a husband and father, she'd rather break stones till her arms rotted off, but what she'd find 'em food! A lazy, idle, drunken object! There was the masters' yards open, and why didn't he go to work? If a man cared for his own family, he'd look to his interests, and set the Trades Union at defiance. Was he a going to see 'em took off to the workhouse? When his young ones lay dead, and she was in the poorhouse, then he'd fold his hands and be content with his work. If the strike was to bring 'em all this misery, what the plague business had he to join it? Couldn't he have seen better? Let him go to work if he was a man, and bring home a few coals, and a bit of bread, and get out a blanket or two from Cox's, and her gownds and things, and Jemimar's boots——'

Dunn, really a peacefully inclined man by nature, and whose own anger had spent itself, let it go on to this point. He then stood up before her, and with a clenched fist, but calm voice of suppressed meaning, asked her what she meant. What, indeed! In the midst of Mrs. Dunn's reproaches, how was it she did not cast a recollection to the past? To her own eagerness, public and private, for the strike? how she had urged her husband on to join it, boasting of the good times it was to bring them? She could ignore all that now: perhaps really had almost forgotten it. Anyway, her opinions had changed. Misery and disappointment will subdue the fiercest obstinacy; and Mrs. Dunn, casting all the blame upon her husband, would very much have liked to chastise him with hands as well as tongue.