"There, Lazarus, do you hear?"
"Yes, I hear," he said incredulously. "But does she know what father offers her--every comfort, every luxury? He is rich now."
"Rich?" said Mrs. Brill. "The old swindler!"
"He didn"t swindle--he"s very sorry for the past now, and awfully kind and generous."
Salvina had a flash of insight. "Ho! So this is why--" She checked herself and looked round the handsome room, and the new easy-chair in which her mother sat became suddenly as hateful as the old.
"Well, suppose it is?" said Lazarus defiantly. "I don"t see why we shouldn"t share in his luck."
"And where does the luck come from?" Salvina demanded.
"What"s that to do with us? From the Stock Exchange, I believe."
"And where did he get the money to gamble with?"
"Oh, they always had money."
Salvina"s eyes blazed. The nerveless creature of the school became a fury. "And you"d touch that!"
"Hang it all, he owes us reparation. You, too, Salvina--he is anxious to do everything for you. He says you must chuck up school--it"s simply wearing you away. He says he wants to take you abroad--to Paris."
"Oh, and so he thinks he"ll get round mother by getting round me, does he? But let him take his furniture away at once, or we"ll pitch it into the street. At once, do you hear?"
"He won"t mind." Lazarus smiled irritatingly. "He wants to put better furniture in, and his real desire is to move to a big house in Highbury New Park. But I persuaded him to put back the old furniture--I thought it would touch you--a token, you know, that he wanted "auld lang syne.""
"Yes, yes, I understood," said Salvina, and then she thought suddenly of Kitty and a burst of hysteric laughter caught her. "Elopements economically conducted," went through her mind. "By the day or hour!"
And she imagined the new phrases Kitty would coin. "The Prodigal Father and the Pantechnicon"--"The old Love and the old Furniture,"
and the wild laughter rang on, till Lazarus was quite disconcerted.
"I don"t see where the fun comes in," he said wrathfully. "Father is very sorry, indeed he is. He quite cried to me--on that very chair where mother is sitting. I swear to you he did. And you have the heart to laugh!"
"Would you have me cry, too? No, no; I am glad he is punished."
"Yes--a nice miserable lonely old age he has before him."
"He has plenty of money."
"You"re a cold, unfeeling minx! I don"t envy the man who marries you, Salvina."
Salvina flushed. "I don"t, either--if he were to treat me as mother has been treated."
"Yes, no one has had a life like mine, since the world began," moaned Mrs. Brill, and her waning tears returned in full flood.
"My poor mammy," and Salvina put a handkerchief to the flooded cheeks.
"Come home, we have had enough of this."
Mrs. Brill rose obediently.
"Oh, yes, take her home," said Lazarus savagely, "take her to your shabby, stinking lodging, when she might have a house in Highbury New Park and three servants."
"She has a house at Hackney, and I"ll give her a servant, too. Come, mother."
Salvina mopped up her mother"s remaining tears, and with an inspiration of arrogant independence, she rang for Lazarus"s servant and bade her hail a hansom cab.
"If you don"t want all Hackney to come and gaze at a furnished road,"
she said, in parting, "you"ll take away that furniture yourself."
Mrs. Brill bowled homeward, half consoled for everything by this charioted magnificence. Some neighbours stood by gossiping as she alighted, and then her unspoken satisfaction was complete.
XII
They moved into the new-old house, after Salvina had carefully ascertained that the furniture had returned to the cloud under which it had so long lived. In her resentment against its reappearance, she spent more than she could afford on the rival furniture that succeeded it, and which she now studied to make unlike it, so that quite without any touch of conscious taste, it became light, elegant, and even artistic in comparison with the old horsehair ma.s.siveness.
Then began a very bad year for Salvina, even though the Damocles sword of Kitty"s dismissal never fell, and Lily"s migration to the Cape with Moss M. Rosenstein left Kitty still in power as companion to Mabel, to judge at least by Kitty"s not seeking the parental roof, even as visitor. Mrs. Brill"s happiness did not keep pace with the restored grandeurs and Salvina"s own spurt of hope died down. She grew wanner than ever, going listlessly to her work and returning limp and f.a.gged out.
"You mew me up here with not a soul to speak to from morning till night," her mother burst forth one day.
Salvina was not sorry to have her mother"s silent lachrymosity thus interpreted. But she regretted that her helpless parent had not expressed her satisfaction with gossip when the Ghetto provided it, instead of yearning for higher scenes. She tried again to persuade Mrs. Brill to learn to read by way of mental resource, and Mrs. Brill indeed made some spasmodic efforts to master the alphabet and the vagaries of p.r.o.nunciation from an infant"s primer. But her brain was too set; and she forgot from word to word, and made bold bad guesses, so that even when "a fat cat sat on a mat" she was capable of making a fat cow eat in a mug. She struggled loyally though, except when Salvina"s attention relaxed for an instant, and then she would proceed by leaps and bounds, like a cheating child with the teacher"s eye off it, getting over five lines in the time she usually took to spell out one, and paradoxically pleased with herself at her rapid progress.
Salvina was in despair. There is no creche for mothers, or she might have sent Mrs. Brill to one. She bethought herself of at last laying on a servant, as providing the desired combination of grandeur and gossip. To pay for the servant she undertook two hours of extra night-teaching. But the maid-of all-work proved only an exhaustless ground for grumbling. Mrs. Brill had never owned a servant, and the girl"s deviation from angelhood of character and unerring perfection of action in every domestic department were a constant disappointment and grief to the new mistress.
"A nice thing you have done for me," she wept to Salvina, having carefully ascertained the servant was out of ear-shot, "to seat a mistress on my head--and for that I must pay her into the bargain."
"Aren"t you glad you haven"t got three servants?" said Salvina, with a touch of irresistible irony.
"Don"t throw up to me that you"re saving me from falling on your father. I can be my own bread-winner. I don"t want your doll"s house furniture that one is scared to touch--like walking among eggsh.e.l.ls.
I"d rather live in one room and scrub floors than be beholden to anybody. Then I should be my own mistress, and not under a daughter"s thumb. If only Kitty would marry, then I could go to _her_. Why doesn"t she marry? It isn"t as if she were like you. Is there a prettier girl in the whole congregation? It"s because she"s got no money, my poor, hardworking little Kitty. Her father would give her a dowry, if he were a man, not a pig."
"Mother!" Salvina was white and trembling. "How can you dream of that?"
"Not for myself. I"d see him rot before I"d take a farthing of his money. But I"m not domineering and spiteful like you. I don"t stand in the way of other people benefiting. The money will only go to some other vermin. Kitty may as well have some."
"Lazarus has some. That"s enough, and more than enough."
"Lazarus deserves it--he is a better son to me than you are a daughter!" and the tears fell again.
Salvina cast about for what to do. Her mother"s nerves were no doubt entirely disorganized by her sufferings and by the shock of Lazarus"s trick. Some radical medicine must be applied. But every day Duty took Salvina to school and hara.s.sed her there and drove her to private lessons afterward, and left her neither the energy nor the brain for further innovations. And whenever she met Lazarus by accident--for she was too outraged to visit a house practically kept up by dishonourable money, apart from her objection to its perpetually festive atmosphere of solo-whist supper-parties--he would sneer at her high and mighty airs in casting out the furniture. "Oh, we"re very grand now, we keep a servant; we have cut our father off with a shilling."
She wished her mother would not go to see Lazarus, but she felt she had not the right to interfere with these visits, though Mrs. Brill returned from them, fretful and restive. Evidently Lazarus must be still insinuating reconciliation.
"Lazarus worries you, mother, I feel sure," she ventured to say once.
"Oh, no, he is a good son. He wants me to live with him."
"What! On _her_ money!"