Sour Misfortune

Mrs. Day, in looking back over the miserable weeks and months and years that succeeded her last New Year's party, was inclined to award the palm for wretchedness to the weeks which intervened between her husband's appearance before the magistrates and the Spring Assizes at which his trial came on. It is more than possible that if George Boult and Sir Francis Forcus had refused to stand bail for him, and he had remained for those ten weeks in prison, he would have been less unhappy there than was possible to him, a consciously guilty man, in the changed atmosphere of his home.

What had happened had changed for him for ever his relations with wife and children. Among the latter he sat as one beaten, cowed, estranged. With Franky, alone, for ever again, did he approach to any intimacy. Franky, who, now that that strange talk of his father being in prison was over, and his father here at home once more, holding no apprehension of the future, troubled his head no further about the matter. Him he sometimes took upon his knee, as of old. To Franky he would give languid advice about the pictures he was colouring, about the amount of cobbler's wax to affix to the skipjack he was making, about the rigging of his walnut ships.

Of Deleah—Deleah, who had been his pet, whom he had acknowledged openly to be his favourite child—he was shy. He had been told how it had been she who had arranged the matter of his bail. His little Deleah, to have gone on such an errand for him! He would have liked never to meet again those pretty trusting eyes of hers that had been full of pride in and love for him.

When he had first come home she had cried heart-brokenly against him, had hung with her arms about his neck, sobbing out that she knew—she knew—she knew he had done nothing wrong. He had had to push her roughly from him. He did not wish to go through a scene like that again!

To Bessie and his son, who maintained a sullen condemnatory attitude towards him, he never spoke if he could avoid doing so.

Towards his wife he held an altogether different demeanour.

The troubles which had come upon him had been induced by his good-natured desire to meet the heavy expenses of an extravagant household. Money which he could not earn in the legitimate exercise of his profession, nor come by honestly, had been spent. Who had had the spending of it but she—his wife? Of his grievous undoing, then, it was she who was the sole cause.

Of this explanation he delivered himself to her in the first hour of his return to his home.

She was too stricken, too dumbfounded, too much overwhelmed with shame and sorrow for him to resent the attack upon herself, or to attempt reprisals. Of her defenceless submission he took advantage, and presently had brought himself honestly to believe that on his wife's shoulders lay the responsibility of his downfall.

His counsel advised him to plead guilty. There was not in any one's mind a doubt of what the verdict must be. The few who cared for him could only hope for a light sentence.

When Deleah heard he was not even to deny his guilt she hid herself in her bedroom, and lay there for hours, face downwards upon the floor. The carpet was wet with her tears, its scent in her nostrils. For all her life that snuffy, stuffy smell brought back to her the time of her uncontrolled, rebellious anguish and her cruel shame.

Was it true? Was it possible? Could this horrible thing have happened in her home? Deleah's, who had known there only careless, happy days? Was this man who was to plead guilty to forgery, who had robbed a poor woman of every farthing she possessed, who was to pass years, perhaps, in prison, really her father? Who had been sometimes so affectionate to them all, always so loving and indulgent to her; who had sat in the square family pew with them all on the Sunday morning, and said grace every day at meals; who had often told them funny tales, shouting with laughter over his own jokes; who had banged the tambourine and joined in Sir Roger de Coverley only a few nights ago?

Bessie and Bernard, drawn together by their misfortune, and forgetting to torment one another, talked, their heads close together, over the tragedy which had befallen. They were angry, outraged, seeing what their father had done as it affected themselves, and they did not spare him. Sometimes to them—the elder boy and girl—Mrs. Day felt constrained to talk. It was a relief to pent-up feelings to talk, if only to say, "What will become of us? How are we to live? What, in the name of God, are we to do?" To these three, from companionship in misfortune, some consolation was afforded.

But Deleah spoke no word—except to the carpet.

All of them had much leisure. Mrs. Day and Bessie would not show their faces out of doors. Bernard, who was spending a last quarter at school in order to pass the Senior Cambridge Exam. before going into his father's office, decided to work for it at home, rather than at school, where all the other fellows knew. A letter was received from the head-mistress of the Establishment, "all of whose pupils were the daughters of professional men," and where Deleah was receiving her education, saying that, until the dark cloud was lifted which at present overshadowed her family, it would be better for Deleah Day to take a holiday.

"In any case, I would not have gone there again," Deleah said. "The girls are always talking about who their fathers are, and looking down on each other. Not but what there were some upon whose fathers I also looked down. The Clarks—the wholesale shoe-makers—you could hardly call them professional, could you? But now—oh, what nonsense it all seems now!"

The education of Franky had been carried on hitherto by Bessie. In a lamentably desultory fashion it is true; but now that, for economy's sake, they had restricted themselves to a fire in only one sitting-room the poor child's tuition had to be abandoned. It would have been impossible to live within the four walls wherein the elder daughter and the younger son fought through the difficulties of imparting and acquiring knowledge. Either Franky, on his back, on the floor, was screaming and dangerously waving his legs, or an infuriate Bessie was chasing him round the table. The spelling-book was more often used as a weapon of attack than a primer, and Bessie's voice screaming out the information that C A T spelt Cat could be heard in the street.

Economies in coal, economies in every direction they had to practise. Money, where it had been so plentiful was all at once painfully scarce; credit, which had seemed unlimited, there was none. George Boult, taking things in hand, and trying to bring some order out of chaos, handed over weekly to Mrs. Day two pounds for housekeeping. The change from lavishness to penury bewildered the poor woman, and the change from a table loaded with good things to one that was nearly bare was not skilfully made. For a time, until experience taught her, things they could have done without she continued to buy, and that which was really necessary they went without. And that allowance, poor as it seemed to her, could not go on for long. It was by no means certain that enough legally remained to them to repay Mr. Boult for these disbursements. If they had been willing to live upon his means he was not at all a generous man; he did not encourage them to expect pecuniary help from him.

"What do you advise? Have you no plan? What are we all to do?" Mrs. Day asked of her husband.

"You must hang on till I come out. If we're lucky it will only be a matter of a few months."

"But even for a few months, William, what are we to do?"

"You must work," William said. "Earn something. It will be a change for you. I've kept the lot of you in idleness till now. Now you'll learn what it is to work. It won't do you any harm."

"All that is so easy to say. But what work are we to do? Where are we to work? I cannot see that we shall have a roof over our heads."

Then the wretched man, who knew no more than she what would become of them all, and was infinitely the more wretched on that account, broke into a torrent of oaths. "Haven't I enough to bear?" he asked her. "Haven't I myself to think about? Is mine such a pleasant prospect, that you come to pester me, giving me no peace? How do other women manage? Women that have never had husbands to slave for them as I have slaved for you."

Poor Mrs. Day, the least pugnacious of women, who at the best of times had scarcely known how to hold her own with him, fled before the unreasonable, miserable man.

Bessie, in talking to her brother over the hopelessness of their position, used the child's time-honoured reproach against the parent. "Papa and mama should not have had children if they were going to make such a muddle as this," she argued. Bessie had not wanted to be born, she declared. Her father and mother were responsible. They must at least say what was to be done. Papa, she declared to Bernard, should be made to say.

"Papa, when Deleah and I want our hats and dresses for the spring, what are we to do?" she asked her father, with that note of aggression in her voice with which he had become familiar from her.

"Do? Go without them," he promptly replied.

"You know very well we can't go without clothes, papa."

"Then go to the devil," papa said, and getting up slouched from the room.

Bernard, too, who was more afraid of the altered man than Bessie, and for long shrank from any conversation with him, was at last induced by his mother to consult his father as to his own future.

"There isn't much use that I can see, sir, in my sweating away at my books for this exam," he said.

"Oh? Why not?"

"Supposing that I get through it, what am I to do then?"

"You must do the best you can. This Senior Cambridge Exam, they tell me, is a door to any of the professions."

"But you want money to enter a profession, sir. From what I hear we have none."

"Your hearing has not played you false in that direction. What I had you managed to spend, among you. I was the goose that laid the golden egg; now circumstances forbid my laying any more—for a time. You must look after yourselves."

"But if you could only give us some idea of how to set about it."

Then, upon him, too, his father, having shown a greater measure of forbearance so far than he accorded the mere women of his family, turned savagely. The poor wretch did not know how to help them, did not know what to advise them to do: to frighten them was his only resource.

"Haven't I got enough to think about?" he shouted at the boy. "You and your mother and sisters come and badger—and badger me—"

"All right, sir. I won't badger you any more."

"All I ask is to be let alone—to be granted a little peace. You have no mercy—none!"

But after that conversation the boy gave up even the pretence of studying. "Where's the good?" he asked of Bessie. "If I passed the blessed thing, where's the good? I shall have to be an errand boy, I suppose, or sweep a crossing. I don't want a Senior Cambridge Certificate for that."

The womankind did their best to persuade him to persevere, but he declared that he could not study in his bedroom without a fire, nor could he so much as drive a word into his head if he had to sit in the same room as his father.

That room where their pleasant evenings had been passed while Mr. Day played his cards at the club, presented altogether a different aspect in these sad times when that unhappy man formed part of the circle. The poor, bulky wretch sat always over the fire—literally over it, his chair-feet touching the fender, his own feet as often as not on the bars; the rest of the family withdrawn as much as possible from the hearth. If there was talk among them as they sat at their table with their sewing, their painting, their books—and being young they talked, and even sometimes laughed—he resented the fact that they could do so, and sometimes snarled round upon them with a request for silence. But equally, it seemed, did he resent their silence when it fell, and would make sarcastic remarks to them when they withdrew on the liveliness of the society they provided for him.

An undue amount of the weekly two pounds for housekeeping money went to find the master of the house tobacco. There was some good port wine in the cellar; he might as well drink it while he had the chance, William Day thought. What else had he to do but smoke and drink; and he did both, all day long.

He had not been a drinking man, although he had ever taken his share of the good things of life, nor an idle one. His family looked on now at his altered habits with fear and a growing disgust. It was surprising how, in the loss of his own self-respect and the knowledge that he had lost the respect of those who had loved him, the man altered. With astonishment they, who had known him all their lives, saw him in a few short weeks become selfish, greedy, unmannerly, even unclean. The ash from his pipe fell on his coat, he would not brush it away; he had evidently given up the use of a nail-brush; his hair hung over his forehead; his untrimmed beard and whiskers stuck out round the big face which was flabby now, and unwholesome.

Missing the luxuries from his table, he forgot the niceties he had hitherto observed there. When he came to his meals with unwashed hands, took to himself, with apparently no thought for the rest, the best of what he found there, the elder boy and girl would look at each other with angry condemnation in their eyes. Such lapses from a hitherto observed code of good manners Mrs. Day bore with an apparently apathetic indifference. For years, truth to tell, she had ceased to love the man, and the little deviations, which read so trivially but mean in daily life so much, were almost unnoticed by her in the stupefying sense of the misfortune which had befallen them all.

It was only Deleah, devotedly loving her father, who perceived the real tragedy at the back of this neglect of personal and family obligations; only she who dimly understood that this disfiguring outward alteration was but the sign of an inner, more pitiful change; only she who had the insight to read in her father's savage ways the despair, the scorn of himself, the rage with destiny, the bitter enmity against a world in which he was no longer to exist. Only Deleah felt in her heart the sorrow of it all—Deleah who was a reader of Thackeray, of Trollope, of Dickens, of Tennyson; whose eyes had wept for imaginary woes before these bitter drops had been wrung from them for her own; who had learnt that tears were not the only signs of an anguished heart; and knew that the love of position, of home, of a fair name even were not the chief things for which they as a family should have mourned.

And so the slow weeks, even the slow months passed. The muddy, narrow pavements of Brockenham grew dry and dusty in the biting east winds. People at whom Mrs. Day and her daughters peeped through curtained windows walked by with snowdrops, with violets, and presently with cowslips in their hands. Spring, so slow in coming, yet so dreaded by them all, was coming at last. Easter was here. Easter too soon was here!—and the Easter Assizes.