Once Aboard the Lugger Part 11

"_Stupid!_ Take off your glove!"

The white kid clung to the warm flesh. Nervous and clumsy the girl struggled with it.

"Miss _Humfray!_ How slow you are! _Pull_ it!"

Mrs. Chater grabbed the turned-back wrist. A crack answered the jerk, and the glove split away in her hand. "_There!_ Not my fault. Next time, perhaps, you will buy gloves sufficiently large. Oh, my poor heart! Now, feel. _Press!_"

The girl bit her lip. Humiliation lumped in her throat. She pressed, as bid, into that heaving blouse; said she could feel it. It was not very violent, she. thought. Perhaps if Mrs. Chater lay back and closed her eyes--

"_I_ was not able to jump out, you see," said Mrs. Chater, sinking.

"Oh, you don't think I _jumped_ out--and left you? I _wouldn't_.

Besides, it is the most dangerous thing to do. That would have prevented me in any case. I was thrown. I thought I was going to be killed."

"You were with a young man."

"He caught me."

The words came faintly. Nearly the girl was crying. That lump in her throat seemed to be squeezing tears from her eyes--silly tears. She did not want Mrs. Chater's sympathy, yet could not but reflect what disregard for her the utter absence of inquiry showed. Bitter thoughts yet more dangerously squeezed the tears. She was a paid _thing_, that was all--not even a servant. Mrs. Chater was on kindly terms with her servants--had experienced the servant problem and craftily evaded it by the familiarity that was too useful to produce contempt--knew her maids' young men, entered into their quarrels with their young men, read their young men's letters.

II.

Gazing through the cab window, pressed into her corner, the girl felt herself friendless, outcast, alone. Again she told herself that she did not want Mrs. Chater's sympathy; yet it was the studied withholding of it--studied or callous because so natural, the merest conventionalism, to have asked, "Were you hurt?"--that made her acutely feel her position.

A paradox, she thought, not to want a thing and yet to be wounded because it was not hers. A ridiculous paradox--and brightly she tried to smile at the silliness of it; blinking the tears that were swelling now, her face turned against the window towards the pavement.

A tall, slim girl was pa.s.sing, holding the arm of a nice-looking little old man with a grey moustache and military air. The tall, slim girl was laughing down at him, and he looked to be chuckling merrily, just as--Her mind swung off, and the tears must be blinked again.

They reminded her, those two, of herself and her father. Such familiar friends as they looked so she had been with Dad who idolised her and whom she had idolised. Just like that--arm in arm, joking, "ragging"-- she used to walk with him round about the home in Ireland--the world to one another and none else in the world, except the mother who was so intimately and inseparably of them that years past her death they still spoke of her as if she were alive.

Thus, long after her death, it would be: "Dad, we can't go home by the hill; mother never lets Grizzle do that climb after a long day." And: "Mary, your mother won't like you being so late; we must turn back."

And: "Mary, there's the pig by mother's almond tree; run and shoo him."

Partly this refusal to recognise that, though dead, Mother was actually gone from them, no longer was sharing their little jokes and duties, was because death came with such steady, appreciable, unfrightening steps. First the riding stopped, and then the walks made shorter and shorter; then the strolls in the garden stopped, and then carrying the couch out under the trees--and none of them very fearful, because prepared: it was to be--almost the very day could have been named. Thus, when it came, though the blow swooped heavy, terrific, she never seemed actually to have left them.

"Well, now, dear dears," she had said with a little smile and a little sigh, "we have been happy ... only a little way away...."

But with Dad it was different. Somehow, looking back on it, one had supposed that nothing would ever touch the cheery little man; that she and he would go on and on and on--well, till they grew very old together.

Nothing could ever touch him....

"What a wicked beauty, eh, Mary?" he had said when the man brought round the half-broken filly that its owner "funked."

And she had laughed and said: "Yes, an angel in a temper--what a run you will have, Dad!" and had waved from the gate as the angel in a temper curveted away around the corner.

Nothing could ever touch him....

And then the man on a bicycle--with a dent in his hat, she noticed.

"If you can come quickly, missy. Top of the Three Finger field he lays."

Bare-backed she had galloped Grizzle there, and as she sped could not for the life of her think of aught else than the dent in the man's hat; rode up Three Finger Lane wondering how it came there; approached the little group wondering why he did not push it out.

Just as she galloped up they took off their hats. Someone who had been on his knees stood upright--she saw the stain of wet earth where he had been kneeling; forgot the dented hat; wondered if he knew of the Marvel Cleaning Pad that had done so wonderfully with Dad's breeches when he took a toss last Friday.

Dad...! Of course...! It was to see Dad that she was here.

Somebody tried to dissuade her ... better wait till they brought him home ... could do no good--now.

"Why? Why not see him? Let me pa.s.s, Mr. Saunders."

Well, the filly lay across him ... he had begged them not to move her because of the pain.... Better come away.

She pushed through them.... Yes, better perhaps not to have seen ...

all crumpled up....

Recollecting, she could feel distinctly in her knees the creepy damp as the moisture of the marshy ground penetrated her skirts, bending over the twisted face.

III.

Thereafter a blank of days in which events must have occurred but to which memory brought no lamp until the faint crunch as the coffin touched the earth seven feet down....

Mult.i.tudinous papers after that. Wearying, sickening ma.s.ses of doc.u.ments; interminable writing of signature; interminable making of lists. And then the word LOT. "Lot I," "Lot 2," "Lot 50," "Lot 200"--a hammerlike word to thump the brain at night, frightening sleep, producing grotesque nightmares, as "Lot 12, a polished oak coffin, finished plain, bra.s.s Handles."

No! No! That was not to be sold!--leaden hands holding her down; stifling hands at her mouth to stay her shouting "Stop!"

Then sudden consciousness--only a dream! Bolt upright in bed staring into the darkness. A dream? How much of it a dream? Was it all a dream? The fevered brain would fetch her from her bed, groping to Dad's room, striking a match--no familiar form upon the bed; a big white ticket--"Lot 56."

Back to the hot, crumpled couch, there, tossing, to lie attempting a grasp, a realisation of what it all meant....

IV.

A dark little office in Dublin.... So much the "Lots" had fetched, so much the balance at the bank; no investments, it was to be feared; no insurance, my dear Miss Humfray; so much the bills and other claims on the estate.... "Don't wish to be bothered with figures? Of course not, my dear.... And then we come to the balance--I'm afraid a few pounds, practically nothing...."

V.

On the steamer bound for Holyhead.... During the crossing the stifling weight that had benumbed her intellect ever since the man with the dent in his hat came riding up the drive seemed suddenly to lift.

Whipped away perhaps by the edged wind that rushed past her from England to Ireland sinking in the sea--a wind to cut you to the bone; discovering sensation in every marrow; stinging her to clear thought.... That idyllic life with Mother and Dad--the world to one another and none else in the world beside--had been rather the creation of circ.u.mstance than of design. Dad's people were furious when he married Mother; in defiance of hers, Mother married Dad.

Relations on either side had shrieked their disapproval of the match, then left the couple to their own adventures. A thing to laugh at in those days, but bringing now to the child that was left the realisation of not a support in the world.