“She’s my daughter,” said Mrs. Bell.
Before that excellent young lady returned poor Mrs. Bell and Robert had a long, confidential talk. The cheerful old lady regretted that her time had arrived before Trixie had become a grown woman, but this regret was tempered by confidence in her daughter, and by a promise which had been given by Miss Threepenny to come and live with Trixie when all was over. There breathed pride in the statement that her doctor from New North Road could find no English name for her illness, and had been compelled to fall back on the Latin tongue to give it title; Mrs. Bell’s old head trembled with gratification as she told Robert of this.
“D’you mind ’olding my ’and, Bobbie?” she asked, interrupting herself. “I feel so much more contented somehow when someone’s ’olding me ’and. Thanks! As I was telling you—”
The doctor had some time since recommended that she should be taken away to the seaside, a procedure which might prolong her life for a few months, but the old lady congratulated herself upon having had the shrewdness to reply that Hoxton was as good a place to die in as any other, and that she had not been saving money all her life in order to spend it foolishly on herself at the end. The good soul seemed quite happy; everybody, she said, was very kind to her, and Trixie, who in former days had been somewhat masterful towards her, now waited on her “hand and foot.” Mrs. Bell declared that she only wished everybody could be looked after at the end of all as effectively. Trixie, returning with her substitute, came upstairs in a hat which Robert, on being appealed to for an opinion, declared looked like ten thousand a year, and they said good-bye to Mrs. Bell, Trixie promising to send up ’Tilderann and to return herself at the earliest possible hour.
“Don’t ’urry,” said the old lady. “And, Bobbie! Come back one moment. Trixie, you go down.” Robert obeyed. “I shan’t be seeing you again,” said the old lady brightly. “If so be as I should meet your poor mother, I shall tell her what a fine lad you’ve growed to.” Robert bent and kissed the large white face. “Be good, won’t you,” she whispered brokenly, “to her?”
“You can make yourself quite sure about that, ma’am,” said Robert.
Before going west on this sunny afternoon, the young lady insisted that Robert should accompany her for a short tour through certain streets in Hoxton, where her lady acquaintances resided, which same young women told each other afterwards that they had not realized what the word pride really meant until seeing Trixie with her young man. They looked at Ely Place from the dwarf posts at the Kingsland Road end, where towzled-hair, half-dressed, grubby babies played games with mud and swore at one another, but the two agreed that they had no desire to go through the Place. One more girl acquaintance in a Hoxton street shop in whose sight Robert had to be paraded, and then the two young people, walking down into Old Street, took a tram for Bloomsbury.
“You pay for yourself,” said Trixie Bell definitely, “I’ll pay for myself.”
“No fear,” protested Robert, “I pay for both to-day. This is my beanfeast.”
“Then I go no further,” declared the young woman. “Agree to that, Bobbie, or down the steps I go.”