"And it's no use keeping gowns; they only go out of fashion," Ethel Maud Mary suggested, as if she thought Beth should have an excuse. "Gwendolen would manage it best. She's great at a bargain; and there's a place not far from here. I'd begin with the worst, if I was you."
"Advise me, then, there's a dear," said Beth, and Ethel Maud Mary knelt down beside her, and proceeded to advise.
Only a few shillings was the result of the first transaction; but the better dresses had good trimmings on them, and real lace, which fetched something, as Ethel Maud Mary declared it would, if sold separately; so, with the strictest self-denial, Beth was still able to pay her way and provide for the sick man's necessities.
From the time she put him on the Salisbury treatment, he suffered less and began to gain strength; but the weather continued severe, and Beth suffered a great deal herself from exposure and cold and privations of all kinds. She used to be so hungry sometimes that she hurried past the provision shops when she had to go out, lest she should not be able to resist the temptation to go in and buy good food for herself. If her sympathy with the poor could have been sharpened, it would have been that winter by some of the sights she saw. Sometimes she was moved by pity to wrath and rebellion, as on one occasion when she was passing a house where there had evidently been a fashionable wedding. The road in front of the house, and the red cloth which covered the steps and pavement, were thickly strewed with rice, and on this a band of starving children had pounced, and were scraping it up with their bony claws of hands, clutching it from each other, fighting for it, and devouring it raw, while a supercilious servant looked on as though he were amused. Beth's heart was wrung by the sight, and she hurried by, cursing the greedy rich who wallow in luxury while children starve in the streets.
In a squalid road which she had often to cross there was a butcher's shop, where great sides of good red beef with yellow fat were hung in the doorway. Coming home one evening after dark, she noticed in front of her a gaunt little girl who carried a baby on her arm and was dragging a small child along by the hand. When they came to the butcher's shop, they stopped to look up at the great sides of beef, and the younger child stole up to one of them, laid her little hand upon it caressingly, then kissed it. The butcher came out and ordered them off, and Beth pursued her way through the mire with tears in her eyes. She had suffered temptation herself that same evening. She had to pass an Italian eating-house where she used to go sometimes, before she had any one depending on her, to have a two-shilling dinner—a good meal, decently served. Now, when she was always hungry, this was one of the places she had to hurry past; but even when she did not look at it, she thought about it, and was tormented by the desire to go in and eat enough just for once. Visions of thick soup, and fried fish with potatoes, and roast beef with salad, whetted an appetite that needed no whetting, and made her suffer an ache of craving scarcely to be controlled. That day had been a particularly hungry one. The coffee was done, every precious tea-leaf she had to husband for Arthur, and the butter had also to be carefully economised because a good deal was required for his crisp toast, which was unpalatable without it. Beth lived principally on the crusts she cut off the toast. When they were very stale, she steeped them in hot water, and sweetened them with brown sugar. This mess reminded her of Aunt Victoria's bread-puddings, and the happy summer when they lived together, and she learnt to sit upright on Chippendale chairs. She would like to have talked to Arthur of those tender memories, but she could not trust herself, being weak; the tears were too near the surface.
That day she had turned against her crusts, even with sugar, and had felt no hunger until she got out into the air, when an imperious craving for food seized upon her suddenly, and she made for the Italian restaurant as if she had been driven. The moment she got inside the place, however, she recovered her self-possession. She would die of hunger rather than spend two precious shillings on herself while there was that poor boy at home, suffering in silence, gratefully content with the poorest fare she brought him, always making much of all she did.
Beth got no farther than the counter.
"I want something savoury for an invalid," she said.
That evening, for the first time, Arthur sat up by the fire in the grandfather chair with a blanket round him, and enjoyed a dainty little feast which had been especially provided, as he understood, in honour of the event.
"But why won't you have some yourself?" he remonstrated.