“Who was the somebody else?” she asked.
He nodded and drank a draught of beer and wiped the froth from his moustache. Something unusual in his personal appearance suddenly caught her attention. His watch-chain was dangling loose from the buttonhole of his waistcoat.
“Your watch!” she gasped.
Dissimulation being vain, Jimmie confessed.
“You told me this morning, my dear, that if we didn't get fifty pounds to-day we were ruined. You spoke alarmingly of the workhouse. My debt collecting amounted to thirty-eight pounds fifteen. I tried hard to work the obdurate bosom up to eleven pounds five, but he would only give me eight.”
“You don't mean to say you have sold your beautiful gold watch for eight pounds?” cried the girl, turning as pale as the milk in front of her.
It had been a present from a wealthy stockbroker who had been delighted with his portrait painted by Jimmie a couple of years ago, and it was thick and heavy and the pride of Aline's existence. It invested Jimmie with an air of solidity, worldly substantiality; and it was the only timekeeper they had ever had in the house which properly executed its functions. Now he had sold it! Was there ever so exasperating a man? He was worse than Moses with his green spectacles. But Jimmie reassured her. He had only pawned the watch at Attenborough's over the way.
“Then give me the ticket, do, or you'll lose it, Jimmie.”
He meekly obeyed. Aline began her galantine with a sigh of relief, and condescended to laugh at Jimmie's account of his exploits. But when the meal was ended, she insisted on redeeming the precious watch, and much happier in knowing it safe in his pocket, she carried him off to a ready-made tailor's, where she ordered him a beautiful thin overcoat for thirty shillings, a neat blue serge suit for three pounds ten, handing over in payment the five-pound note she had abstracted from his gleanings, and a new hat, for which she paid from a mysterious private store of her own. These matters having been arranged to her satisfaction, she made up for her hectoring ways by nestling against him on top of the homeward-bound omnibus and telling him what a delightful, lovely morning they had spent.
Thus it will be seen that Jimmie, aided by Aline's stout little heart, was battling more than usual against adversity. Aline had many schemes. Why should she not obtain some lucrative employment? Jimmie made a wry face at the phrase and protested vehemently against the suggestion. A hulking varlet like him to let her wear her fingers to the bone by addressing envelopes at twopence a million? He would sooner return to the five-shillings-a-dozen oil paintings; he would go round the streets at dawn and play “ghost” to pavement artists; he would take in washing! The idea of the street-pictures caught his fancy. He expatiated upon its advantages. Five pitches, say at two shillings a pitch, that would be ten shillings a day—three pounds a week. A most business-like plan, to say nothing of the education in art it would be to the public! He had his own fantastical way of dealing with the petty cares of life. As for Aline working, he would not hear of it. Though they lived now from hand to mouth, they were always fed. He had faith in the ravens.