'I can't do anything with him now, poor father,' she said, when she could control herself. 'He won't listen to me at all. The debts are beginning to be dreadful, and the business is going down fast. I don't know what we shall do. And it all makes him worse—drives him to drink.'
David thought a minute, lifted out of himself for the first time.
'Shall I come to-night to see him?'
'Oh do!' she said eagerly; 'come about nine o'clock. I will tell him—perhaps that will keep him in.'
Then she went into more details than she had yet done; named the creditors who were pressing; told how her church-work, though she worked herself blind night and day, could do but little for them; how both the restaurant and the reading-room were emptying, and she could now get no servants to stay, but Sarah, because of her father's temper.
It seemed to him as he listened that the story, with its sickened hope and on-coming fate, was all in some strange way familiar; it or something like it was to have been expected; for him the strange and jarring thing now would have been to find a happy person. He was in that young morbid state when the mind hangs its own cloud over the universe.
But Dora got up to go, tying on her veil with shaking hands. She was so humbly grateful to him that he was sorry for her—that he could spare a thought from his own griefs for her.
As they went down the dark stairs together, he asked after Lucy. She was now staying with some relations at Wakely, a cotton town in the valley of the Irwell, Dora said; but she would probably go back to Hastings for the winter. It was now settled that she and her father could not get on; and the stepmother that was to be—Purcell, however, was taking his time—as determined not to be bothered with her.
David listened with a certain discomfort. 'It was what she did for me,' he thought, 'that set him against her for good and all. Old brute!'
Aloud he said: 'I wrote to her, you know, and sent her that book. She did write me a queer letter back—it was all dashes and splashes—about the street-preachings on the beach, and a blind man who sang hymns. I can't remember why she hated him so particularly!'