The Beth Book Part 99

Beth read the volume, and then said, "You shall try Salisbury. It is easy enough."

"Yes," he answered. "It is easy enough with a nurse like you."

But in order to carry out the treatment some things had to be bought, and this led to the discovery which was a shock to Beth. Arthur's income depended princ.i.p.ally upon the pictures he sold, and no more money came in after he fell ill. He had had some by him, but not nearly so much as he supposed, and it was all gone now, in spite of the utmost economy on Beth's part. Her own, too, was running short, but she had not troubled about that, because she still had some of her secret h.o.a.rd to fall back upon. She had left it in one of the boxes which were sent on after her from Slane--a box which she had not opened until now, when she wanted the money. The money, however, was not there. She searched and searched, but in vain; all she found was the little bag that had contained it. She was stunned by the discovery, and sat on the floor for a little, with the contents of the box all scattered about her, trying to account for her loss. Then all at once a vision of Maclure, as she had seen him on one occasion with the bunch of duplicate keys, peering into her dress-basket with horrid intentness, flashed before her; but she banished it resolutely with the inevitable conclusion to which it pointed. She would not allow her mind to be sullied by such a suspicion. And as to the money, since it was lost, why should she waste her time worrying about it? She had better set herself to consider how to procure some more. She had still some of Arthur Brock's, but that she kept that she might be able to tell him truthfully that it was not all done when he asked about it--a pious fraud which relieved his mind and kept him from r.e.t.a.r.ding his recovery by attempting to begin work again before he was fit for it.

What money she had of her own would last but a little longer, and how to get more was the puzzle.

Her evening dresses had been in the box which she had just unpacked, and while she was still sitting on the floor amongst them cogitating, Ethel Maud Mary came into the attic out of breath to ask how she was getting on.

"Why," she exclaimed in admiration of Beth's finery, "you've got some clothes! They'd fetch something, those frocks, if you sold them."

"Then tell me where to sell them, for money I must have," Beth rejoined precipitately.

"And it's no use keeping gowns; they only go out of fas.h.i.+on," Ethel Maud Mary suggested, as if she thought Beth should have an excuse.

"Gwendolen would manage it best. She's great at a bargain; and there's a place not far from here. I'd begin with the worst, if I was you."

"Advise me, then, there's a dear," said Beth, and Ethel Maud Mary knelt down beside her, and proceeded to advise.

Only a few s.h.i.+llings was the result of the first transaction; but the better dresses had good tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs on them, and real lace, which fetched something, as Ethel Maud Mary declared it would, if sold separately; so, with the strictest self-denial, Beth was still able to pay her way and provide for the sick man's necessities.

From the time she put him on the Salisbury treatment, he suffered less and began to gain strength; but the weather continued severe, and Beth suffered a great deal herself from exposure and cold and privations of all kinds. She used to be so hungry sometimes that she hurried past the provision shops when she had to go out, lest she should not be able to resist the temptation to go in and buy good food for herself.

If her sympathy with the poor could have been sharpened, it would have been that winter by some of the sights she saw. Sometimes she was moved by pity to wrath and rebellion, as on one occasion when she was pa.s.sing a house where there had evidently been a fas.h.i.+onable wedding.

The road in front of the house, and the red cloth which covered the steps and pavement, were thickly strewed with rice, and on this a band of starving children had pounced, and were sc.r.a.ping it up with their bony claws of hands, clutching it from each other, fighting for it, and devouring it raw, while a supercilious servant looked on as though he were amused. Beth's heart was wrung by the sight, and she hurried by, cursing the greedy rich who wallow in luxury while children starve in the streets.

In a squalid road which she had often to cross there was a butcher's shop, where great sides of good red beef with yellow fat were hung in the doorway. Coming home one evening after dark, she noticed in front of her a gaunt little girl who carried a baby on her arm and was dragging a small child along by the hand. When they came to the butcher's shop, they stopped to look up at the great sides of beef, and the younger child stole up to one of them, laid her little hand upon it caressingly, then kissed it. The butcher came out and ordered them off, and Beth pursued her way through the mire with tears in her eyes. She had suffered temptation herself that same evening. She had to pa.s.s an Italian eating-house where she used to go sometimes, before she had any one depending on her, to have a two-s.h.i.+lling dinner--a good meal, decently served. Now, when she was always hungry, this was one of the places she had to hurry past; but even when she did not look at it, she thought about it, and was tormented by the desire to go in and eat enough just for once. Visions of thick soup, and fried fish with potatoes, and roast beef with salad, whetted an appet.i.te that needed no whetting, and made her suffer an ache of craving scarcely to be controlled. That day had been a particularly hungry one. The coffee was done, every precious tea-leaf she had to husband for Arthur, and the b.u.t.ter had also to be carefully economised because a good deal was required for his crisp toast, which was unpalatable without it. Beth lived princ.i.p.ally on the crusts she cut off the toast. When they were very stale, she steeped them in hot water, and sweetened them with brown sugar. This mess reminded her of Aunt Victoria's bread-puddings, and the happy summer when they lived together, and she learnt to sit upright on Chippendale chairs. She would like to have talked to Arthur of those tender memories, but she could not trust herself, being weak; the tears were too near the surface.

That day she had turned against her crusts, even with sugar, and had felt no hunger until she got out into the air, when an imperious craving for food seized upon her suddenly, and she made for the Italian restaurant as if she had been driven. The moment she got inside the place, however, she recovered her self-possession. She would die of hunger rather than spend two precious s.h.i.+llings on herself while there was that poor boy at home, suffering in silence, gratefully content with the poorest fare she brought him, always making much of all she did.

Beth got no farther than the counter.

"I want something savoury for an invalid," she said.

That evening, for the first time, Arthur sat up by the fire in the grandfather chair with a blanket round him, and enjoyed a dainty little feast which had been especially provided, as he understood, in honour of the event.

"But why won't you have some yourself?" he remonstrated.

"Well, you see," Beth answered, "I went to the Italian restaurant when I was out."

"Oh, did you?" he said. "That's right. I wish you would go every day, and have a good hot meal. Will you promise me?"

"I'll go every day that I possibly can," Beth answered, smiling brightly as she saw him fall-to contentedly with the appet.i.te of a thriving convalescent. Practising pious frauds upon him had become a confirmed habit by this time--of which she should have been ashamed; but instead, she felt a satisfying sense of artistic accomplishment when they answered, and was only otherwise affected with a certain wonderment at the very slight and subtle difference there is between truth and falsehood as conveyed by the turn of a phrase.

But now the money ran shorter and shorter; she had nothing much left to sell; and it was a question whether she could possibly hold out until her half-year's dividend was due. Perhaps the old lawyer would let her antic.i.p.ate it for once. She wrote and asked him, but while she was waiting for a reply the pressure became acute.

Out of doors one day, walking along dejectedly, wondering what she should do when she came to her last s.h.i.+lling, her eye rested on a placard in the window of a fas.h.i.+onable hairdresser's shop, and she read mechanically: "A GOOD PRICE GIVEN FOR FINE HAIR." She pa.s.sed on, however, and was half-way down the street before it occurred to her that her own hair was of the finest; but the moment she thought of it, she turned back, and walked into the hairdresser's shop in a business-like way without hesitation. A gentleman was sitting beside the counter at one end of the shop, waiting to be attended on; Beth took a seat at the other end, and waited too. She sat there, deep in thought and motionless, until she was roused by somebody saying, "What can I do for you, miss?"

Then she looked up and saw the proprietor, a man with a kindly face.

"Can I speak to you for a moment?" she asked.

"Come this way, if you please," he replied, after a glance at her glossy dark-brown hair and shabby gloves.

When she went in that day, Arthur uttered an exclamation.

"Do you mean to say you've had your hair cut short?" he asked, speaking to her almost roughly. "Are you going to join the uns.e.xed crew that shriek on platforms?"

"I don't know any uns.e.xed crew that shriek on platforms," she answered, "and I am surprised to hear you taking the tone of cheap journalism. There has been nothing in the woman movement to uns.e.x women except the brutalities of the men who oppose them."

He coloured somewhat, but said no more--only sat looking into the fire with an expression on his face that cut Beth to the quick. It was the first cloud that had come to overshadow the perfect sympathy of their intercourse. She was getting his tea at the moment, and, when it was ready, she put it beside him and retired to his attic, which she occupied, and looked at herself in the gla.s.s for the first time since she had sacrificed her pretty hair. At the first glance, she laughed; then her eyes filled with tears, and she threw herself on the bed and sobbed silently--not because she regretted her hair, but because he was hurt, and for once she had no comfort to give him.

Just after she left him, an artist friend of his, Gresham Powell, came in casually to look him up, and was surprised to find he had been so ill.

"I missed you about," he said, "but I thought you had shut yourself up to work. Who's been looking after you?"

Brock gave him the history of his illness.

Powell shook his head when he heard of Beth's devotion.

"Take care, my boy," he said. "The girls you find knocking about town in these sort of places are not desirable a.s.sociates for a promising young man. They're worse than the regular bad ones--more likely to trap you, you know, especially when you're shorn of your strength and have good reason to be grateful. You might think you were rewarding her by marrying her; but you'll find your mistake. Look at Simpson!

Could a man have done a girl a worse turn than he did when he married Florrie Crone? They haven't a thought in common except when he's ill and she nurses him; but a man can't be always getting ill in order to keep in touch with his wife. I don't know, of course, what this girl's like; but half of them are adventuresses bent on marrying gentlemen.

Is she a clergyman's daughter, by any chance?"

"I know nothing about her but her name," Brock answered coldly. "She has never tried to excite sympathy in any way."

"Well, they are of all kinds, of course," said Powell temperately.

"But you'd better break away in any case. Nothing will set you up so soon as a change. Come with me. I'm going into the country to see the spring come in, and the fruit trees flower, and to hear the nightingales. I know a lovely spot. Come!"

"I'll think about it, and let you know," Arthur Brock answered to get rid of him.

When he had gone Beth appeared. To please Arthur, she had covered her cropped head with a white muslin mob-cap bound round with a pale pink ribbon, and put on a high ruffle and a large white ap.r.o.n, in which she looked pretty and prim, like a sweet little Puritan, in spite of the pale pink vanity; and Arthur smiled when he saw her, but afterwards grumbled: "Why did you cut your pretty hair off? I shouldn't have thought you could do such a tasteless thing."

Beth knelt down beside his chair to mend the fire, and then she began to tidy the hearth.

"Am I not the same person?" she asked.

"No, not quite," he answered. "You have set up a doubt where all was settled certainty."

She had taken off the gloves she wore to do the grate, and was about to pull herself up from her knees by the arm of his chair when he spoke, but paused to ponder his words. It was with her left hand that she had grasped the arm of his chair, and he happened to notice it particularly as it rested there.

"You wear a wedding-ring, I see," he remarked. "Do you find it a protection?"

"I never looked at it in that light," she answered. "In this vale of tears I have a husband. That is why I wear it."

There was a perceptible pause, then he asked with an effort, "Where is your husband?"

"At home, I suppose," said Beth, her voice growing strident with dislike of the subject. "We do not correspond. He wishes to divorce me."

"And what shall you do if he tries?" Brock asked.

"Nothing," she replied, and was for leaving him to draw his own conclusions, but changed her mind. "Shall I tell you the story," she said after a while.