"Oh!... Then you must accept this shilling for yourself."
"No, ma'am. Mr. Prentice tipped me. Good-night, ma'am."
XXVI
Enid was free. The farmhouse stood empty, with the ivy hanging in festoons and long streamers about the windows, the grass growing rank and strong over the carriage drive, and a board at the gate offering this eligible modernised residence to be let on lease. Its sometime mistress had gone with her little daughter to the seaside for eight or ten months. After her stay at Eastbourne she would return to Mallingbridge, and take furnished apartments—or perhaps rent one of the tiny new villas on the Linkfield Road. She wished to be near her mother, and she apologized now for leaving Mrs. Marsden quite alone during so many months; but, as she explained, Jane needed sea air.
"Never mind about me," said Mrs. Marsden. "Only the child matters. Build up her health. Make her strong. I shall do very well—though of course I shall miss you both."
She was getting accustomed to solitude and silence. Truly she had never been so entirely isolated and lonely as now. In the far-off days when Enid used by her absence to produce a wide-spreading sense of loss, there had been the work and bustle of the thriving shop to counteract the void and quiet of the house. And there had been Yates. Now there was nobody but the plain-faced grim-mannered Eliza, who had become the one general-servant of the broken home.
Mr. Marsden still lunched and dined at the house, but he was never there for breakfast. He did not go upstairs to his bedroom and dressing-room once in a week. Sometimes for a fortnight he and his wife did not meet at meals. His voracious appetite manifested itself intermittently; there were days on which he gorged like a boa-constrictor, and others on which he felt disinclined to eat at all. Then he required Eliza to tempt him with savoury highly-spiced food, or to devise some dainty surprise which would stimulate his jaded fancy and woo him to a condescending patronage. He would toy with a bird—or a couple of dozen oysters—or a bit of pickled mackerel. Now and then, after he had been drinking more heavily than usual, he would himself inspire Eliza.
"Eliza, I can't touch all that muck;" and he pointed with a slightly tremulous hand at the dinner table. "But I believe I could do with just a simple hunk of bread and cheese, and a quart of stout. Run out and get some stout—get two or three bottles, with the screw tops. You know, the large bottles."