Deleah Has No Dignity

A day or so after her encounter with the local magnate in the principal street of Brockenham, Deleah found herself, to her extreme surprise, on her way to the Hope Brewery, in response to a letter from Sir Francis Forcus, asking her to call on him there on a matter of business. He had named the afternoon hour in which she was released from school.

"I sent for you, because I wished to see you alone, and I thought it might be difficult to do so at your own house," Sir Francis said.

His address was more formal, his appearance more formidable than ever, she thought, as he indicated the chair in which he wished her to sit, and took his own seat, entrenched behind his writing-table, at some distance from her. "I hope it is not objectionable to you to come to me here, my own house being so far away?"

Deleah shyly, but quite honestly, said that she did not mind in the least. "He is going to tell me that, after all, he has decided to buy Bernard off," she told herself, but was not allowed to maintain that illusion long.

"I have a word or two I wished to say to you about my young brother,
Reginald," he said, plunging into his subject.

He sat, his face a little averted from her, looking down at the papers on his desk, and spoke in a tone as cold and non-committal as if he read what he had to say to her, written there.

Deleah receiving his communication in uncomfortable silence, he went on: "For several reasons—some of them business ones—it has been arranged for my brother to leave Brockenham for a year. To travel!"

Pausing there, she still finding nothing to say, he added, looking closer at the paper on the desk, "He will not go."

"I am sorry," Deleah shyly said.

"He won't go, because of you." Then he turned his face to her, and Deleah saw that his face expressed cold disapproval. "I am quite sure you do not wish to stand in Reginald's light, Miss Day?"

"Oh no."

"I was sure of it. And therefore I was encouraged to send for you. It will be better that we talk matters over a little. You have influence over Reggie?"

"I think not." Once or twice she had tried to impose her own ideas of what was right and fitting upon the young man, and had failed. Why should she pretend to any influence?

"But of course you have. I want to ask you to be unselfish enough to exert it for my brother's good."

"I would do that gladly if I could."

"Then, send him away. It will be doing him an inestimable benefit."

"I can tell him it would be better for him to go; but he is not easily made to do a thing he does not like.

"He tells me—without any engagement on your part—he considers himself bound to you."

She shook her head quickly, her face rose-red: "Oh no!"

"He is always being engaged to—somebody: poor Reggie!"

"Is he?" she asked innocently.

"Reginald is my brother," he went on, and he turned his gaze from her face and looked at the finger-nails of his left hand with an absorbed attention. "He is, however, so much younger than myself that he has almost been like my son. You will give me credit, I am sure, for not wishing to disparage Reginald, when I tell you that this is not by any means the first time Reginald has thought of marriage." He paused, and smiled awry to himself as he contemplated the finger-nails. "Or, rather, I should put it, not the first time he has talked to young ladies of being engaged to them."

Deleah sat silent, determined not to speak till speech was absolutely demanded of her.

"It has not cost my brother much to change his mind," Sir Francis said, and dropped his hand and looked at the pretty girl sitting before him.

"Since he has to do it so often, that is well," Deleah said.

"It is well, in a way," Sir Francis agreed. "But supposing that he took an irretrievable step, and then changed his mind?"

"That would be more serious," Deleah admitted.

"You understand what I mean, Miss Day?"

"Perfectly. You mean, supposing he married me and then repented, not having been given time to repent beforehand. Having been taken at his word as soon as he spoke—and snatched up."

"That is putting the case more strongly than I had thought of doing; but—"

"But it is what you mean?"

"You are not offended, I hope?"

"No; because I quite understand. It would be surprising if you did not feel as you do about it."

Her voice shook a little, and Sir Francis felt compunction. After all, from the girl's side of the question, what a sacrifice this was he was so coolly demanding of her. He felt suddenly ashamed, and half afraid of what he had taken upon himself to do.

"I hope you believe I am actuated by no feeling antagonistic to yourself,
Miss Day?"

"I think I understand that," she said gently.

And he knew that she comprehended, and was grateful to her that she did not say, "You hate, not me, but the grocer's shop; but the idea of an alliance with my father's daughter, my brother's sister." "After all the girl is a lady," he said to himself, and the thought crossed his mind: was his empty-headed young brother likely to marry a better woman than this? All the same, his duty in the matter was clear before him.

"And you will do what I ask? You will help me to send the boy away?"

"He won't go for my telling, I fear."

"He won't go unless you tell him;" and he permitted himself to smile persuasively on her.

"Then I will tell him," she said gravely; and feeling that was all he wanted with her she got up and turned to the door.

He reached it before her. "Mine has been an ungracious task," he said. "It has seemed to me that it was demanded of me. I hope you will forgive me." He said it quite earnestly, quite humbly, all his grand formality of manner laid aside for the moment. And the anger and the hurt pride which had been in her heart melted from it.

"You have been very kind to me, always. If there was anything to forgive I would forgive you," she said simply; and her face was charming with its look of innocent confidence in him, its wavering, shy smile.

"What I have said has been for my brother's sake," he assured her, compunction stirring at his heart. "But I believe it to be equally good for yours. You may not think so to-day, but you may take my word for it that you will come to think so."

He clasped her hand reassuringly for a moment; then she went.

The letter from Sir Francis Forcus had been on Deleah's breakfast plate. The family had the bad habit of expecting to see each other's letters. They all knew who it was who had written, and what he had asked. At supper, when the family met again it was expected of Deleah to describe the interview, and publicly proclaim what had taken place.

Preferring to keep the matter to herself, she had eluded her mother and sister by going without her tea, gaining only by the delay the addition, to those already agog for her news, of the innocent Franky, of the ever-curious Emily, of an Honourable Charles consumed with jealous fears.

They would not even let her take her place at table before they were upon her. "Well?" inquired Bessie, alert, her suspicious, bright eyes upon her sister, who appeared a little pale of face, a little languid of manner, the effect of going without her tea, perhaps.

"Well?" Deleah echoed.

"I don't suppose it's a secret. Mama, I don't suppose Deleah has been sent for by Sir Francis Forcus for anything she can't tell!"

Emily, pouring out the lodger's supper beer, remarked that Miss Deleah was always one to keep things to herself, even when she had been a baby.

"I can't imagine, Deleah, what he can have wanted with you," Mrs. Day said, in answer to Bessie's appeal.

"It was nothing much, mama."

"It couldn't have been nothing. At least say if it was good or bad," persisted the elder sister. "I don't see why Deda need be so affected and silly, mama."

"Oh, do let me get some supper first," Deleah prayed.

"Thank you, Mr. Gibbon. Some beef, please."

Those prominent, burning eyes of the boarder, the eyes which Mrs. Day and Bessie had discovered rescued his face from the commonplace, were upon her face, with a desperately eager questioning. In his heart he believed that Sir Francis had sent for her to beg her to marry either himself or his brother. Supposing she had consented! Supposing she was going to say it now! His red, square-looking hands shook pitiably as he carved the beef and put it on her plate.

"Perhaps Miss Deleah would rather keep her news till I'm gone," he forced himself to say.

"Oh no," Deleah, who would infinitely have preferred to do so, but must not hurt his feelings, declared.

"It is about Reggie, I know," said Bessie, her eyes, filled with fierce questioning, on the girl.

It was not till Emily had reluctantly withdrawn that Deleah confessed that Bessie was right, and told her news defiantly, in a sentence. "Sir Francis sent for me to ask me not to marry his brother," she said, and applied herself to the contents of her plate as if she were really enjoying them.

For a minute, speechless with surprise, they gazed upon her.

"But were you going to marry him?" Bessie at length inquired.

"No," said Deleah; "I was not."

"And did you tell him so."

"No."

"My dear Deleah!" from her mother. "You should have told him, of course."

"I didn't. I don't know why. I felt I could not. I hardly said anything, I think."

"But now I would marry him!" Bessie cried. "No man should put an insult like that on me for nothing." Her face had flushed pink. She felt the insult to the family very keenly. "Now you've got to marry him, Deleah. Mama, tell Deleah that for her own pride's sake she's got to marry Reggie now."

"No!" said Mr. Gibbon. He laid down his knife and fork with a clatter, and fixed angry eyes on Bessie.

"No!" he said, and having stared at her till, astonished, she averted her eyes, he turned a protecting gaze on Deleah. "Miss Deleah need do nothing of the sort," he said reassuringly.

"I certainly shall not," Deleah said.

"Are we to sit down tamely under such rudeness, then?" Bessie asked at large. "You never assert yourself, Deda—you and mama. That's why people dare to treat you so. Sir Francis would not have sent for me like a servant, to give me his orders. What did you do, Deda? Stood there meekly, like an idiot, to listen, I suppose?"

"Miss Deleah did what was right. Least said soonest mended," the boarder declared. He had never openly stood as Deleah's champion before.

"I'm on Deda's side too," Franky said. "Deda's got the most on her side.
C'n I have another piece of tart, ma?"

"No, you can't," said Bessie promptly. "Mama, Franky cried out in his sleep the last time he had two pieces of tart."

"C'n I have another piece of tart, ma?"

Mrs. Day explained to Franky that instead of having more tart, at that time of night, he must go to bed; and Bessie with excitement started a new idea.

"I suppose that was what he came here for," she cried.

"Sir Francis called, and found Reggie Forcus with me," she explained, turning to the boarder. "He came here spying upon me. No doubt he meant to say to me what he's said to Deleah, but he found a different person to deal with. I didn't give him any chance to put an insult on me, I can tell you! So he sent for Deleah, who can't defend herself."

"Poor little Deleah!" the mother said, fondly regarding the girl, indisposed to defend herself at that moment evidently, and apparently busy with her supper.

"Miss Deleah could find them that would defend her if she'd say the word," Gibbon said, greatly daring; the beef was untasted on his plate, but his eyes devoured Deleah.

Bessie gave him a glance of astonished disapproval, and went on to expatiate on what would have been her own conduct in Deleah's place. How she would have listened to Sir Francis with apparent calm, saying nothing, leading him on to his own destruction, and then—

"I did listen, I didn't say anything. I was thinking all the time how horrid it was for him to have to do what he did."

"Well, my dear child, that was no concern of yours, you need not have been unhappy about it."

"No, mama. But I was; and unhappy that I had to sit to listen to him. I wanted desperately to get away, that was all. I came the very instant that I could."

"Instead of which, I should have said," explained the eager Bessie, "I should have said: 'Until this moment I have not given your brother a thought, Sir Francis. But now that you have dared—dared to insult me and my family in such a way, I will tell you what I will do. I will marry him to-morrow morning. I'd have done it too," Bessie declared, looking round the table, eyes shining with strong self-approval.

"My dear Bessie. Don't let your feelings run away with you so much," Mrs.
Day reproved.

"Deleah has no dignity, mama. Any one can see Deleah behaved without the least dignity."

Deleah listened miserably, pretending not to hear. She did not agree with Bessie's idea of what was dignified, but she knew that she had cut a poor figure. She felt humiliated, hurt, helpless. Sir Francis Forcus had been for her her ideal of what a man and a gentleman should be. He had helped her in the day of her necessity, and she had set him at once as her hero on a pinnacle, and had looked up to him and worshipped him secretly, and from afar. She knew that she had sat before him this afternoon shamed, and helpless, and childish; filled with as much sorrow for him who was so clumsily wounding her as for herself. She had not desired to retaliate; she would not have been revenged on him if she could; the only effort of which she had been capable had been the effort to make him think that she had been as little wounded as possible, that the situation was not a horrible one to her.

Yet when they asked her why she had not shown more spirit she could not explain. She could only sit silent and miserable, and let them talk.

Even Mr. Gibbon, usually so preoccupied and silent now, talked. He said that he supposed Sir Francis Forcus called hisself a gentleman, but that he, the Manchester man, had always had his doubts on the subject, and that one day he hoped for the opportunity of telling him that he was a snob. And more, with unwanted, stammering loquacity, to that effect, with fire of eye, with un-called-for, excited repetition.