Lucy reluctantly put them down.
"Do you think, Dora, Mr. Grieve cares anything at all about me?"
she said at last, hurrying out the words, and looking Dora in the face, very red and bold.
Dora laughed outright.
"I knew you were going to ask that!" she said. "Perhaps I"ve been asking myself!"
Lucy said nothing, but the tears dropped again down her cheeks and on to her small quivering hands--all the woman awake in her.
Dora pushed her frame away, and put her arm round her cousin, quite at a loss what to say for the best.
Another woman would have told Lucy plumply that she was a little fool; that in the first place young Grieve had never shown any signs of making love to her at all; and that, in the second, if he had, her father would never let her marry him without a struggle which n.o.body could suppose Lucy capable of waging with a man like Purcell. It was all a silly fancy, the whim of a green girl, which would make her miserable for nothing. Mrs. Alderman Head, for instance, Dora"s chaperon for the Inst.i.tute dance, the sensible, sharp-tongued wife of a wholesale stationer in Market Street, would certainly have taken this view of the matter, and communicated it to Lucy with no more demur than if you had asked her, say, for her opinion on the proper season for bottling gooseberries. But Dora, whose inmost being was one tremulous surge of feeling and emotion, could not approach any matter of love and marriage without a thrill, without a sense of tragedy almost. Besides, like Lucy, she was very young still--just twenty--and youth answers to youth.
"You know Uncle Tom wouldn"t like it a bit, Lucy," she began in her perplexity.
"I don"t care!" cried Lucy, pa.s.sionately. "Girls can"t marry to please their fathers. I should have to wait, I suppose. I would get my own way somehow. But what"s the good of talking about it, Dora?
I"m sick of thinking about it--sick of everything. He"ll marry somebody else--I know he will--and I shall break my heart, or--"
"Marry somebody else, too," suggested Dora slyly.
Lucy drew herself angrily away, and had to be soothed into forgiving her cousin. The child had, in fact, thought and worried herself by now into such a sincere belief in her own pa.s.sion, that there was nothing for it but to take it seriously. Dora yielded herself to Lucy"s tears and her own tenderness. She sat pondering.
Then, suddenly, she said something very different from what Lucy expected her to say.
"Oh! if I could get him to go and talk to Father Russell! He"s so wonderful with young men."
Her hand dropped on to her knee; she looked away from Lucy out of the window, her sweet face one longing.
Lucy was startled, and somewhat annoyed. In her disgust with her father and her anxiety to attract David"s notice, she had so entirely forgotten his religious delinquencies, that it seemed fussy and intrusive on Dora"s part to make so much of them. She instinctively resented, too, what sounded to her like a tone of proprietary interest. It was not Dora that was his friend--it was she!
"I don"t see what you have to do with his opinions, Dora," she said stiffly; "he isn"t rude to you now as he used to be. Young men are always wild a bit at first."
And she tossed her head with all the worldly wisdom of seventeen.
Dora sighed and was silent. She fell to her work again, while Lucy wandered restlessly about the room. Presently the child stopped short.
"Oh! look here, Dora--"
"Yes."
"Do come round with me and look at some spring patterns I"ve got.
You might just as well. I know you"ve been slaving your eyes out, and it"s a nice day."
Dora hesitated, but finally consented. She had been at work for many hours in hot rooms, and meant to work a good many more yet before night. A break would revive her, and there was ample time before the three o"clock dinner which she and her father took together after the midday rush of the restaurant was over. So she put on her things.
On their way Dora looked into the kitchen. Everything was in full work. A stout, red-faced woman was distributing and superintending.
On the long charcoal stove which Daddy under old Barbier"s advice had just put up, on the hot plates near, and the glowing range in the background, innumerable pans were simmering and steaming. Here was a table covered with stewed fruits; there another laden with round vegetable pies just out of the oven--while a heap of tomatoes on a third lent their scarlet to the busy picture. Some rays of wintry sun had slipped in through the high windows, and were contending with the steam of the pies and the smoke from the cooking. And in front of all on an upturned box sat a pair of Lancashire la.s.ses, peeling apples at lightning speed, yet not so fast but they could laugh and chat the while, their bright eyes wandering perpetually through the open serving hatches which ran along one side of the room, to the restaurant stretching beyond, with its rows of well-filled tables and its pa.s.sing waitresses in their white caps and ap.r.o.ns.
Dora slipped in among them in her soft deprecating way, smiling at this one and that till she came to the stout cook. There she stopped and asked something. Lucy, standing at the door, saw the huge woman draw a corner of her ap.r.o.n across her eyes.
"What did you want, Dora?" she inquired as her cousin rejoined her.
"It"s her poor boy. He"s in the Infirmary and very bad. I"m sure they think he"s dying. I wanted to send her there this morning and do her work, but she wouldn"t go. There"s no more news--but we mustn"t be long."
She walked on, evidently thinking with a tender absorption of the mother and son, while Lucy was conscious of her usual impatience with all this endless concern for unknown people, which stood so much in the way of Dora"s giving her full mind to her cousin"s affairs.
Yet, as she knew well, Sarah, the stout cook, had been the chief prop of the Parlour ever since it opened. No other servant had stayed long with Daddy. He was too fantastic and exacting a master.
She had stayed--for Dora"s sake--and, from bearing with him, had learnt to manage him. When she came she brought with her a sickly, overgrown lad, the only son of her widowhood, to act as kitchen-boy. He did his poor best for a while, his mother in truth getting through most of his work as well as her own, while Dora, who had the weakness for doctoring inherent in all good, women, stuffed him with cod-liver oil and "strengthening mixtures." Then symptoms of acute hip-disease showed themselves, and the lad was admitted to the big Infirmary in Piccadilly. There he had lain for some six or eight weeks now, toiling no more, fretting no more, living on his mother"s and Dora"s visits, and quietly loosening one life-tendril after another. During all this time Dora had thought of him, prayed for him, taught him--the wasted, piteous creature.
When they arrived at Half Street, they let themselves in by the side-door, and Lucy hurried her cousin into the parlour that there might be no meeting with her father, with whom she was on decidedly uncomfortable terms.
The table in the parlour was strewn with patterns from several London shops. To send for them, examine them, and imagine what they would look like when made up was now Lucy"s chief occupation. To which might be added a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting--not much, for she hated most of her father"s friends, and was at present too closely taken up with self-pity and speculations as to what David Grieve might be doing to make new ones--and a great deal of ordering about of Mary Ann.
Dora sat down, and Lucy pounced on one pattern after another, folding them between her fingers and explaining eagerly how this or that would look if it were cut so, or trimmed so. "Oh, Dora, look--this pink gingham with white spots! Don"t you think it"s a love? And, you know, pink always suits me, except when it"s a blue-pink. But you don"t call that a blue-pink, do you? And yet it isn"t salmon, certainly--it"s something between. It _ought_ to suit me, but I declare--" and suddenly, to Dora"s dismay, the child flung down the patterns she held with a pa.s.sionate vehemence--"I declare nothing seems to suit me now! Dora!"--in a tone of despair--"_Dora!_ don"t you think I"m going off? My complexion"s all dull, and--and--why I might be thirty!" and running over to the gla.s.s, draped in green cut-paper, which adorned the mantelpiece, Lucy stood before it examining herself in an agony. And, indeed, there was a change. A touch of some withering blight seemed to have swept across the whole dainty face, and taken the dewy freshness from the eyes. There was fever in it--the fever of fret and mutiny and of a starved self-love.
Dora looked at her cousin with less patience than usual--perhaps because of the inevitable contrast between Lucy"s posings and the true heartaches of the world.
"Lucy, what nonsense! You"re just a bit worried, and you make such a lot of it. Why can"t you be patient?"
"Because I can"t!" said Lucy, sombrely, dropping into a chair, and letting her arm fall over the back. "It"s all very well, Dora. You aren"t in love with a man whom you never see, and whom your father has a spite on! And you won"t do anything to help me--you won"t move a finger. And, of _course,_ you might!"
"What could I do, Lucy?" cried Dora, exasperated. "I can"t go and ask young Grieve to marry you. I do wish you"d try and put him out of your head, that I do. You"re too young, and he"s got his business to think about. And while Uncle Tom"s like this, I can"t be always putting myself forward to help you meet him. It would be just the way to make him think something bad--to make him suspect--"
"Well, and why shouldn"t he suspect?" said Lucy, obstinately, her little mouth set and hard; "it"s all rubbish about girls leaving it all to the men. If a girl doesn"t show she cares about a man, how"s he to know--and when she don"t meet him--and when her father keeps her shut up--_shameful!"_
She flung the word out through her small, shut teeth, the brows meeting over her flashing eyes.
"Oh! it"s shameful, is it--eh, Miss Purcell?" said a harsh, mimicking voice coming from the dark pa.s.sage leading into the shop.
Lucy sprang up in terror. There on the steps stood her father, bigger, blacker, more formidable than he had ever been in the eyes of the two startled girls. All unknown to them, the two doors which parted them from the shop had been slightly ajar, and Purcell, catching their voices as they came in, and already on the watch for his daughter, had maintained a treacherous quiet behind them. Now he was entirely in his element. He surveyed them both with a dark, contemptuous triumph. What fools women were to be sure!
As he descended the two steps into the parlour the floor shook under his heavy tread. Dora had instinctively thrown her arm round Lucy, who had begun to cry hysterically. She herself was very pale, but after the first start she looked her uncle in the face.
"Is it you that"s been teaching Lucy these _beautiful_ sentiments?" said Purcell, with ironical emphasis, stopping a yard from them and pointing at Dora, "and do you get "em from St.
Damian"s?"
Dora threw up her head, and flushed. "I get nothing from St.
Damian"s that I"m ashamed of," she said in a proud voice, "and I"ve done nothing with Lucy that I"m ashamed of."
"No, I suppose not," said Purcell dryly; "the devil don"t deal much in shame. It"s a losing article."
Then he looked at Lucy, and his expression suddenly changed. The flame beneath leapt to sight. He caught her arm, dragged her out of Dora"s hold, and shook her as one might shake a kitten.
"Who were you talking of just now?" he said to her, holding her by both shoulders, his eyes blazing down upon her.
Lucy was much too frightened to speak. She stood staring back at him, her breast heaving violently.