“Of all the dunderheaded asses! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I can't talk to you.”
And in a very rare fury he sped from the house, slamming doors after him, leaving John foolishly frowning in the middle of the violent Axminster carpet.
Unity, for all her fingers' nimbleness with needle and thread, was clumsy with her hands. Glasses, bowls, vases, whatever she touched, seemed to be possessed by an imp of spontaneous disruption. Hitherto her code of morals with regard to breakage had been, first, to hide the pieces; secondly, to deny guilt if questioned; thirdly, if found out, to accept punishment with sullen apathy: for chastisement had followed discovered breakage as inevitably as the night the day. Accordingly when she broke a bowl of gold-fish in the drawing-room, she obeyed ingrained tradition. She threw the fish out of the window, mopped up the water, put a hassock on the wet patch on the carpet, and threw the shards of the bowl into the dust-bin. Miss Lindon, entering soon afterward, missed her gold-fish, bought only a few days before from an itinerant vendor. Unity disclaimed knowledge of their whereabouts. Phoebe, being summoned, took the parts of principal witness, counsel for the prosecution, judge, and jury all in one. Unity stood convicted. The maid was sent back to her work. “Now,” thought Unity, “I'm going to catch it,” and she stood with her eyes on the floor, stubbornly awaiting the decree of doom. An unaccustomed sound met her ear, and looking up, she beheld the gentle lady weeping bitterly.
“I should n't have minded your breaking the bowl, though I should like to know what has become of the poor little fishes,—they must be real fish out of water, poor dears! and one of them I called Jacky was just beginning to know me,—but why did you tell me a story about it?”
Unity, not having the wit to retort truthfully that it seemed the natural thing to do, maintained a stolid silence.
Miss Lindon, profoundly upset by this depravity, read her a moral lecture on the sin of lying, in which she quoted the Book of Revelation, related the story of George Washington and an irrelevant episode in her far-away childhood, and finally asserting that John would be furiously angry if he heard of her naughtiness, bade her go and find the gold-fish, which must be panting their little hearts out. And that was the last Unity heard of the matter. She thought Aunt Gladys a fool. Thenceforward she felt cynically indifferent toward accidental breakages of Aunt Gladys's property.
But one day during John's absence she upset a Dresden china shepherd,—such a brave, saucy shepherd,—that stood on his writing-desk, and, to her dismay, the head rolled apart from the body. It was one of his few dainty possessions. She knew that he set an incomprehensible value on the thing. Even Aunt Gladys touched it with extraordinary reverence. She turned white with fear. Her guardian was a far different being from Aunt Gladys. His wrath would be terrible. Herold was not far wrong in likening John Risca, as conceived by the child, to a Hebraic Jehovah. His dread majesty overwhelmed her, and she had not the courage to face his anger. With trembling fingers she stood the poor decapitated shepherd on his feet and delicately poised the head on the broken neck. She gazed at him for a moment, his sauciness and bravery apparently unaffected by the accident, and then she fled, and endured hours of misery.
The inevitable came to pass, John discovered the breakage, instituted an elementary court of inquiry, and summoned the delinquent into his presence.
“Did you break this, Unity?”
“No,” said Unity.