When he had gone she left the kitchen and went up the wooden staircase leading to the tower; the room that her husband had lived in was kept locked, and had been used for some years as a kind of storehouse for boxes. As she turned the key it screeched in the lock, and she determined to tell Nannie to have the thing oiled; she had not crossed the threshold since Rhys had left Great Masterhouse before the riot. A couple of old bridles were hanging on nails against the wall, for he had used the place to keep odd bits of harness in, and, in obedience to her mistress’s orders, Nannie had laid away his clothes in a cupboard at the end of the room. Mrs. Walters paused in front of it; standing in this spot which cried to her of an uncongenial past, she had an impulse to open it and look at the familiar things. She had no love for them and they could but bring back to her mind what it was her daily endeavour to forget, but she was in that experimental humour in which people long to assail their own feelings in the vain hope of finding them a little more impervious than they supposed. So she looked for the key only to see that it was gone, the old woman having carefully carried it away when she had given the garments to Bumpett, and passed on unknowing that the shelves were almost empty.
Some of Eli’s possessions also remained, and she went over to the mantel-piece to see the things she had come up to look at—two little daguerreotypes belonging to her late husband, one of the child who was dead, and one of the son who was living. They were framed in cheap brass, beaten out thin and ornamented with a florid, embossed pattern, and they had little rings behind them, to hang them to the wall. Between them was a similar portrait of herself as a young woman.
She took them up, one in each hand, her lips pressed close together as she carried them to the light. Rhys’ bold face looked out at her, the black shadows of the imperfect process giving it an unpleasant harshness. He was standing, his hand on a chair, with the usual looped-up curtain at his back; Eli had been very proud of the picture. The other frame contained the figure of a boy of six. Mrs. Walters could not look at it.
She replaced the two on the mantel-shelf and went out, locking the door. The wound she had carried for years was no harder—not a whit. She went into the parlour, a grim, uninviting room in which she sat when she was at leisure, or when she received any one whose position demanded more than the kitchen, and sitting down at the table, opened a Bible. It was a large book, and she propped it against a Manual of Practical Bee-keeping, turning to one of the chapters set apart by custom as particularly suited to the bereaved. She forced herself to read. It was the orthodox way with religious people of overcoming trouble, and the sect to which she belonged applied the words of Scripture to all circumstances and cases. But though she went through the lines steadily, moving her lips, they gave her no sensation of any kind, and seemed no more applicable to the tumult in her than if they had come from the book of bee-keeping which supported them. She glued her attention to the page, reading on and pausing after each verse. Presently her lips ceased to move and were still. A large tear rolled slowly out of each eye and ran down her cheek, falling on the red cloth of the table. The muscles of her face were rigid, never moving; one would not have supposed that she was crying, but for the drops. She took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes, and the act had the air of a concession awkwardly made; she shut the book and clasped her hands together. Then she opened it again in the Old Testament, and, beginning at one of the denunciatory psalms, read it through to the end.
[CHAPTER XXII
A BAD DEBT]
THE Pig-driver climbed into his high cart like some obscure insect legging its way up the face of a wall. He did not take the reins himself, but let his boy continue driving, so that he might have more leisure to think over the iniquities of George. He was so angry that it cost him quite an effort not to turn the wheels of his chariot towards Abergavenny, and begin at once to make out his bill against him. As he was jolted along he began reckoning up the pounds, shillings and pence on his fingers; but his transactions with other people were so numerous and so odd that he could not make much way through their complications without his accounts, and was forced to wait until he got home in the evening, before he could disentangle Williams’ liabilities from the mass of notes among which they reposed.
Bumpett’s accounts were like some human beings—only understood by their creator. They were perfectly safe under every prying eye which might light on them, and he could have left the keys of the box in which they were kept at the mercy of any one, and known that their perusal would leave the intruder no wiser than before. Not being a man of letters, and being barely able to read, he had invented certain signs which stood for words he had forgotten or never known how to write. Of figures he had only a small idea, for though he had learnt their character as far as the number five, his knowledge stopped there, and the actual accounts of his shop were kept by a less illiterate nephew, whose interests were bound up in his own, and whose open and burly appearance suggested the best aspects of the trade.
The old man rushed to his box that evening as soon as he had entered his house, and began to search among the chaos it contained for the record of George’s debt. As the papers had not any sort of classification and were stuffed into the bottom, one on the top of another, to make room for all sorts of incongruous articles which shared their home, it took Bumpett some time to find what he wanted. He turned them over and over, smoothing out the creases with his dirty hand, and peering into the medley of hieroglyphics which had been difficult enough to write, and which were now trebly difficult to read. They were of all sorts, but represented chiefly what he considered to be bad or doubtful debts.
“Owd 1 pownd bi Jamestench. he is in prisn. cums out Jooli. March ateen forty 3.”