CHAPTER VIII
Some ten days more elapsed before Lucy was p.r.o.nounced fit to travel south. During this time Dora saw her frequently, and the bond between the two girls grew much closer than before. On the one hand, Lucy yielded herself more than she had ever done yet to Dora"s example and persuasion, promised to go to church and see at least what it was like when she got to Hastings, and let Dora provide her with some of her favourite High Church devotional books. On the other, it was understood between them that Dora would look after Lucy"s interests, and keep her informed how the land lay while she was in the south, and Lucy, with the blindness of self-love, trusted herself to her cousin without a suspicion or a qualm.
While she was tending Lucy, Dora never saw Purcell but twice, when she pa.s.sed him in the little dark entry leading to the private part of the house, and on those occasions he did not, so far as she could perceive, make any answer whatever to her salutation. He was changed, she thought. He had always been a morose-looking man, with an iron jaw; but now there was a fixed venom and disquiet, as well as a new look of age, in the sallow face, which made it doubly unpleasing. She would have been sorry for his loneliness and his disappointment in Lucy but for the remembrance of his mean plot against David Grieve, and for a certain other little fact. A middle-aged woman, in a dowdy brown-stuff dress and black mantle, had begun to haunt the house. She sat with Purcell sometimes in the parlour downstairs, and sometimes he accompanied her out of doors.
Mary Ann reported that she was a widow, a Mrs. Whymper, who belonged to the same chapel that Purcell did, and who was supposed by those who knew to have been making up to him for some time.
"And perhaps she"ll get him after all," said the little ugly maid, with a grin. "Catch me staying then, Miss Dora! It"s bad enough as it is."
On one occasion Dora came across the widow, waiting in the little sitting-room. She was an angular person, with a greyish-brown complexion, a prominent mouth and teeth, and a generally snappish, alert look. After a few commonplaces, in which Mrs. Whymper was clearly condescending, she launched into a denunciation of Lucy"s ill behaviour to her father, which at last roused Dora to defence.
She waxed bold, and pointed out that Lucy might have been managed if her father had been a little more patient with her, had allowed her a few ordinary amus.e.m.e.nts, and had not insisted in forcing her at once, fresh from school, into ways and practices she did not naturally like, while she had never been trained to them by force of habit.
"Hoity toity, Miss!" said the widow, bridling, "young people are very uppish nowadays. They never seem to remember there is such a thing as the fifth commandment. In _my_ young days what a father said was law, and no questions asked; and I"ve seen many a Lancashire man take a stick to his gell for less provocation than this gell"s given her feyther! I wonder at you, Miss Lomax, that I do, for backing her up. But I"m afraid from what I hear you"ve been taking up with a lot of Popish ways."
And the woman looked her up and down with an air which plainly said that she was on her own ground in that parlour, and might say exactly what she pleased there.
"If I have, I don"t see that it matters to you," said Dora quietly, and retreated.
Yes, certainly, a stepmother looked likely! Lucy in her bedroom upstairs knew nothing, and Dora decided to tell her nothing till she was stronger. But this new development made the child"s future more uncertain than ever.
On the day before her departure for Hastings, Lucy came out for a short walk, by way of hardening herself for the journey. She walked round the cathedral and up Victoria Street, and then, tired out with the exertion, she made her way in to Dora, to rest. Her face was closely hidden by a thick Shetland veil, for, in addition to her general pallor and emaciation, her usually clear and brilliant skin was roughened and blotched here and there by some effect of her illness; she could not bear to look at herself in the gla.s.s, and shrank from meeting any of her old acquaintances. It was, indeed, curious to watch the effect of the temporary loss of beauty upon her; her morbid impatience under it showed at every turn. But for it, Dora was convinced that she must and would have put herself in David Grieve"s way again before leaving Manchester. As it was, she was still determined not to let him see her.
She came in, much exhausted, and threw herself into Daddy"s arm-chair with groans of self-pity. Did Dora think she would ever be strong again--ever be anything but an ugly fright? It was hard to have all this come upon you, just through doing a service to some one who didn"t care.
"Hasn"t he heard yet that I"ve been ill?" she inquired petulantly.
No; Dora did not think he had. Neither she nor Daddy had seen him.
He must have been extra busy. But she would get Daddy to ask him up to supper directly, and tell him all about it.
"And then, perhaps," she said, looking up with a sweet, intense look--how little Lucy was able to decipher it!--"perhaps he may write a letter."
Lucy was cheered by this suggestion, and sat looking out of window for a while, idly watching the pa.s.sers-by. But she could not let the one topic that absorbed her mind alone for long, and soon she was once more questioning Dora in close detail about David Grieve"s sister and all that he had said about her. For, by way of obliging the child to realise some of the inconvenient burdens and obligations which were at that moment hanging round the young bookseller"s neck, and making the very idea of matrimony ridiculous to him, Dora had repeated to her some of his confidences about himself and Louie. Lucy had not taken them very happily. Everything that turned up now seemed only to push her further out of sight and make her more insignificant. She was thirsting, with a woman"s nascent pa.s.sion and a schoolgirl"s vanity, to be the centre and heroine of the play; and here she was reduced to the smallest and meanest of parts--a part that caught n.o.body"s eye, do what she would.
Suddenly she broke off what she was saying, and called to Dora:
"_Do_ you see that pair of people, Dora? Come--come at once!
What an extraordinary-looking girl!"
Dora turned unwillingly, being absorbed in a golden halo which she had set herself to finish that day; then she dropped her needle, and pushed her stool back that she might see better. From the cathedral end of Market Place an elderly grey-haired man and a young girl were advancing along the pavement towards the Parlour.
As they pa.s.sed, the flower-sellers at the booths were turning to look at them, some persons in front of them were turning back, and a certain number of errand boys and other loungers were keeping pace with them, observing them. The man leant every now and then on a thick stick he carried, and looked uncertainly from house to house. He had a worn, anxious expression, and the helpless movements of short sight. Whenever he stopped the girl moved on alone, and he had to hurry after her again to catch her up. She, meanwhile, was perfectly conscious that she was being stared at, and stared in return with a haughty composure which seemed to draw the eyes of the pa.s.sers-by after it like a magnet. She was very tall and slender, and her unusual height made her garish dress the more conspicuous. The small hat perched on her black hair was all bright scarlet, both the felt and the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g; under her jacket, which was purposely thrown back, there was a scarlet bodice, and there was a broad band of scarlet round the edge of her black dress.
Lucy could not take her eyes off her.
"Did you _ever_ see anybody so handsome, Dora? But what a fast, horrid creature to dress like that! And just look at her; she won"t wait for the old man, though he"s calling to her--she goes on staring at everybody. They"ll have a crowd, presently! Why, they"re coming _here!_"
For suddenly the girl stopped outside the doorway below, and beckoned imperiously to her companion. She said a few sharp words to him, and the pair upstairs felt the swing-door of the restaurant open and shut.
Lucy, forgetting her weakness, ran eagerly to the sitting-room door and listened.
There was a sound of raised voices below, and then the door at the foot of the stairs opened, and Daddy was heard shouting.
"There--go along upstairs. My daughter, she"ll speak to you. And don"t you come back this way--a man can"t be feeding Manchester and taking strangers about, all in the same twinkling of an eye, you know, not unless he happens to have a few spare bodies handy, which ain"t precisely my case. My daughter "ll tell you what you want to know, and show you out by the private door. Dora!"
Dora stood waiting rather nervously at the sitting-room door. The girl came up first, the old man behind her, bewildered and groping his way.
"We"re strangers here--we want somebody to show us the way. We"ve been to the book-shop in Half Street, and they sent us on here.
They were just brutes to us at that book-shop," said the girl, with a vindictive emphasis and an imperious self-possession which fairly paralysed Lucy and Dora. Lucy"s eyes, moreover, were riveted on her face, on its colour, its fineness of feature, its brilliance and piercingness of expression. And what was the extraordinary likeness in it to something familiar?
"Why!" said Dora, in a little cry, "aren"t you Mr. David Grieve"s sister?"
For she had traced the likeness before Lucy. "Oh, it must be!"
"Well, I am his sister, if you want to know," said the stranger, looking astonished in her turn. "He wrote to me to come up. And I lent the letter to uncle to read--that"s his uncle--and he went and lost it somehow, fiddling about the fields while I was putting my things together. And then we couldn"t think of the proper address there was in it--only the name of a man Purcell, in Half Street, that David said he"d been with for two years. So we went there to ask; and, _my!_--weren"t they rude to us! There was an ugly black man there chivied us out in no time--wouldn"t tell us anything. But as I was shutting the door the shopman whispered to me, "Try the Parlour--Market Place." So we came on here, you see."
And she stared about her, at the room, and at the girls, taking in everything with lightning rapidity--the embroidery frame, Lucy"s veil and fashionably cut jacket, the shabby furniture, the queer old pictures.
"Please come in," said Dora civilly, "and sit down. If you"re strangers here, I"ll just put on my hat and take you round. Mr.
Grieve"s a friend of ours. He"s in Potter Street. You"ll find him nicely settled by now. This is my cousin, Mr. Purcell"s daughter."
And she ran upstairs, leaving Lucy to grapple with the new-comers.
The two girls sat down, and eyed each other. Reuben stood patiently waiting.
"Is the man at Half Street your father?" asked the new-comer, abruptly.
"Yes," said Lucy, conscious of the strangest mingling of admiration and dislike, as she met the girl"s wonderful eyes.
"Did he and Davy fall out?"
"They didn"t get on about Sundays," said Lucy, unwillingly, glad of the sheltering veil which enabled her to hold her own against this masterful creature.
"Is your father strict about chapel and that sort of thing?"
Lucy nodded. She felt an ungracious wish to say as little as possible.
David"s sister laughed.
"Davy was that way once--just for a bit--afore he ran away, _I_ knew he wouldn"t keep it on."
Then, with a queer look over her shoulder at her uncle, she relapsed into silence. Her attention was drawn to Dora"s frame, and she moved up to it, bending over it and lifting the handkerchief that Dora had thrown across it.
"You mustn"t touch it!" said Lucy, hastily, provoked, she knew not why, by every movement the girl made. "It"s very particular work."
"I"m used to fine things," said the other, scornfully. "I"m a silk-weaver--that"s my trade--all the best brocades, drawing-room trains, that style of thing. If you didn"t handle _them_ carefully, you"d know it. Yes, she"s doing it well," and the speaker put her head down and examined the work critically. "But it must go fearful slow, compared to a loom."
"She does it splendidly," said Lucy, annoyed; "she"s getting quite famous for it. That"s going to a great church up in London, and she"s got more orders than she can take."