Mrs. Day's Daughters Part 26

"Me!" said Deleah. The shock of the surprise made her for a moment breathless. She sat and gazed at him with wide eyes for what seemed an age, saying nothing; and he also, for the moment incapable of further speech, gazed back. At last "Bessie?" Deleah got out. "You mean Bessie?"

"Why should I mean Bessie? _Bessie!_" he said, and flung the thought of her from him with scorn. "Why should I mean Bessie? I mean you--you--you!"

he said, and endured her silence with eyes that clung desperately to her face.

"When I leave here, to go into that fine house--with the carriage and--conservatories--will you come too?"

"Oh, no!" Deleah said, whispering, with drooping head.

Then they sat opposite each other on table and dresser and were silent, while the blood sang loudly in Deleah's ears, and beat with such cruel throbbing in the man's temples that he did not know how to endure the agony, and thought that his head must burst.

When Deleah at last lifted her eyes and looked at him the change in his face frightened her, his breath came hard and noisily as if he had been running. Was it possible he could feel like that--this quiet, inoffensive, uninteresting, middle-aged boarder, who had never appeared to feel anything particularly before? About her?

"I am so sorry," she said in genuine distress, horribly grieved at and ashamed of her part in his pain. "I thought it was Bessie."

"You have refused me? You mean it--absolutely? There is no hope for me?"

Deleah s.h.i.+vered. It was the regulation phrase used by the rejected lover in the novel of the day. It had thrilled Deleah a hundred times as she had read it. There was nothing stilted or theatrical in the words as Charles Gibbon said them, but they brought home to her the unwelcome fact that he was in deadly earnest, that he loved her, and she was dealing him a cruel blow. She felt miserable, humiliated, ashamed. It was preposterous, out of all proportion, that he should have had to ask such a question, in such a tone, of little Deleah Day.

"I am so very sorry, Mr. Gibbon," she said again, and he heard in a silence that made her heart ache.

"Shall you go away?" she asked him presently. In books the lover being rejected removed himself for a time in order to recover from the blow. She was relieved to find in the boarder's case this was not considered necessary.

"Why should I go away?" he asked.

"It will be better to go on just the same," she advised eagerly. "Bessie need never know."

"Bessie!" he said again contemptuously; he loosed his grip of the dresser, and swung round, standing with his back to her, that she might not see his face. "You've crushed every hope I had; you've--broken me; and you talk to me of Bessie. What, in the name of heaven or h.e.l.l, do you suppose I care for _Bessie_; or whether she knows or not?"

Deleah, keeping her place on the table, listened to the altered, choked voice of him with astonishment. Their unfailingly polite--too polite! and retiring boarder! Was it really he, standing with his back to her, speaking of Bessie--Bessie!--in such a tone!

"You see, I never knew! I never guessed," she excused herself helplessly.

"No. I don't suppose you gave me a thought. Morning, noon and night you were everything to me. There was nothing else. I have worked for you, lived for you--"

His back was towards her--the horrible thought that he was crying came to her; his voice was rough and broken.

"If I had only guessed--" she said in hideous distress and embarra.s.sment.

She had thought, as all girls do, of one day getting an offer of marriage; that it could ever be such a miserable experience as this she had not imagined. If it had only been a stranger, she thought foolishly; some one outside her life, of whom she had seen little! But Mr. Gibbon--their boarder! The sight of him in their home circle had become as familiar to her as might have been the sight of her brother: she could not reconcile herself to the thought that this man in the horribly unfamiliar guise was he. "If I had only guessed--!"

"And if you had?" he asked, but hopelessly, without turning round.

"I could have told you the sooner. There wouldn't have been such a--waste."

She slipped off the table, and stood beside it in a painful state of indecision. She longed to get away from the sight of him, to escape; but at the same time, being Deleah, she also longed to comfort.

"I shall not even tell mama," she promised. "We shall go on just as usual.

And soon--soon we shall forget it has happened."

"Shall we?"

"Oh, yes! It is astonis.h.i.+ng how we can put things away, in the back of our minds, and go on as if they weren't there at all. Quite astonis.h.i.+ng."

"We oughtn't to make a piece of work about our sorrows if we can get along with them as easily as that!"

"Oh, not our sorrows, of course." She remembered how the sorrow of her father's dreadful end was with her still and would be while she lived.

"Our sorrow, of course, Mr. Gibbon, we cannot forget. But a little thing that goes amiss like this--a little disappointment--"

"I see," he said. Then he gave a sound, half choke, half hiccough, that was meant for a laugh; and presently he turned round. "Then, we will go on as before, Miss Deleah. You need not be afraid any one will learn of this--'little disappointment'--from me. I am pretty well used to hiding what I feel. It comes easy when you've once learnt that n.o.body cares."

"Oh, Mr. Gibbon. Don't please say that. I care."

"No, you don't. You don't care like I want you to. What's the good of anything else? Have we finished clearing away the tea-things, Miss Deleah?

Anything more that I can help you with?"

She shook her head, looking at him with eyes which implored him not to be bitter or unhappy. And as she looked, seeing the familiar red face and squat strong figure of him in a new light an idea struck her.

"Mr. Gibbon," she said, "it was _you_ who sent the concert tickets, and all the flowers and fruit, and the canary in its lovely cage. It was you--you!"

"No, no! Mr. Boult, of course, Miss Deleah. You found out who it was, long ago. Kind, generous Mr. Boult!"

"And I took them all, and never thanked you--!" She put out a hand to delay him as he walked past her to the door; but he took no heed, and without another word she let him go.

"What have you done with your roses?" Deleah asked. Bessie tucked in her plump chin and looked down upon the place beneath her jacket collar where they had been pinned. "I must have lost them coming out of church!" she said. "Pray do not let the Honourable Charles hear of it."

The three poor roses! Deleah's roses, the boarder had tramped the ten miles to get for her!

CHAPTER XVI

For Bernard

Sir Francis Forcus was standing with his back to the empty fireplace in his private room at the Brewery, a copy of the local daily newspaper in his hand. It was a pleasant room, although the view from the two open windows was only of the tall black wharves and warehouses across the way.

You must lean from the window to catch sight of the black river flowing beneath, upon which the Brewery was built; of the great wherries and barges unloading below; to see the canoes and pleasure boats, escaping from the polluted waters, the bricks and mortars of the locality, to the sunlit stream flowing between fair gardens and green pastures of the country, a half-mile farther on.

From a window in one of the black, ill-looking wharves across the way an imprisoned lark was singing, rewarding man for his cruel treatment with the best he had to give, after the manner of the brute creation, whose avenging is not yet. A ray of sunlight straggling in--in more open, more favoured localities, the sun lay broadly over all on that spring morning--touched the face of Sir Francis, which wore a by no means well-pleased expression. In the paper he was reading, wet from the press, was an account of a steeplechase in which his brother's name had largely figured. He had not won the race, nor distinguished himself in any way, except by the number and severity of his falls, and the fact that he had killed his horse; but the _Brockenham Star_ was, to a large extent, the property of the firm of big brewers, and had therefore made the most of the young man's exploits.

"The boy will break his neck yet," the reader said to himself. He was not largely in his brother's confidence. The death of the horse was news to him; he had not even known there was a steeplechase.

"What good is he doing with all this?" Sir Francis asked of himself, sternly looking off the paper. "He takes no interest in the Brewery. He is a man in years, and has never done a half-hour's work in his life."

Sir Francis's own half-hours of work would not have totalled up to much, but he had business ability, nevertheless. At certain hours of the day he was always to be found, as now, at his post, and what he did not do himself he took care that those he paid should do efficiently.

Above the mantelpiece hung the portrait of the founder of the Brewery, or rather of the man who had worked up the business already founded into a phenomenally successful one. Often as the elder partner looked upon the sensible, kindly, handsome-featured face, he reminded himself how very dear to his father in his old age had been this unbusiness-like, pleasure-loving, steeplechase-riding younger son, who had been but a boy at school when the old man had died. Very frequently it was necessary for him to remind himself of the fact; for between the duty-loving, serious-minded, middle-aged, sorrowing widower and his half-brother was very little in common.

A clerk opening the door announced that a lady had called who was waiting to see Sir Francis.