“I wish we could get sight of a photograph of Parham,” I said. “It would help us so much.”
“He’s never had his portrait taken—objects to it, I hear. The police told me so. They always look with suspicion upon a man who objects to being photographed.”
I entertained the same suspicions regarding Parham as did the police, and resolved to revisit his wife and endeavour to discover something further.
Next day, however, receiving an urgent express letter from Tibbie, I was compelled to assume the guise of William Morton and travel by a circuitous route down to Camberwell. She had the midday dinner of roast sirloin and vegetables ready prepared for me, cooked by herself, and looked a thoroughly capable housewife in her cheap black gown and white apron. The clothes she had bought were well fitted to the station she had assumed, and beyond a smart saying or two which now and then escaped her, she passed well as the lady’s-maid married to an honest, hard-working compositor.
“The only thing I can’t do,” she confided to me, as we sat together at the clean little dinner-table, “is the washing. I put it out, and I fear that the landlady thinks me horribly extravagant. But the truth is I don’t know how to wash, and if I tried I’d at once betray my ignorance,” she laughed.
I glanced at her hands, now rather red and rough by unaccustomed work, and smiled.
“Let them think what they may,” I said. “You play your part far better than I ever thought you would.”
“Oh, sometimes I find it quite amusing,” she declared. “One sees more of the realities of life in Camberwell than in Mayfair. Here I see how the poor live, and I pity them. I was ignorant of how hard are the lives of the working people; how they have to struggle to keep the wolf from the door, or of the long hours of work, and the cutting down, of wages. Do you know, Wilfrid, I sometimes hear stories of poverty and distress that make my heart bleed. I want to help them, but how can I? To give them money would be to arouse suspicion against myself. I’ve found a method, however. I send them groceries and meat from certain shops in the Old Kent Road and Camberwell Road, and pay for it myself. They don’t then know where it comes from.”
I was somewhat surprised to discover this sympathetic trait in her character. I had never believed that, gay butterfly of fashion as she was, she entertained any thought of the poor seamstress who worked all night upon her ball-dress, or the consumptive shop-girl who danced attendance upon her, compelled to indulge her every whim. The Scarcliffs, if a wild race, were a proud one. They regarded “the people” as being different from themselves and treated all their underlings, save grave old Adams at Ryhall, without thought or consideration.
Yes, the few weeks that Tibbie had lived estranged from her fast, exotic set, and with the example of the workaday world before her eyes, had wrought a great change in her.