IV
Nellie led the way to the chamber known as "Maisie"s room," where the youngest of the Machins was wont to sleep in charge of the nurse who, under the supervision of the mother of all three, had dominion over Robert, Ralph and their little sister.
The first thing that Edward Henry noticed was the screen which shut off one of the beds. The unfurling of the four-fold screen was always a sure sign that Nellie was taking an infantile illness seriously. It was an indication to Edward Henry of the importance of the dog-bite in Nellie"s esteem.
When all the chicks of the brood happened to be simultaneously sound the screen reposed, inconspicuous, at an angle against a wall behind the door; but when pestilence was abroad, the screen travelled from one room to another in the wake of it, and, spreading wide, took part in the battle of life and death.
In an angle of the screen, on the side of it away from the bed and near the fire (in times of stress Nellie would not rely on radiators) sat old Mrs.. Machin, knitting. She was a thin, bony woman of sixty-nine years, and as hard and imperishable as teak. So far as her son knew she had only had two illnesses in her life. The first was an attack of influenza, and the second was an attack of acute rheumatism, which had incapacitated her for several weeks.
Edward Henry and Nellie had taken advantage of her helplessness, then, to force her to give up her barbaric cottage in Brougham Street and share permanently the splendid comfort of their home. She existed in their home like a philosophic prisoner-of-war at the court of conquerors, behaving faultlessly, behaving magnanimously in the melancholy grandeur of her fall, but never renouncing her soul"s secret independence, nor permitting herself to forget that she was on foreign ground.
When Edward Henry looked at those yellow and seasoned fingers, which by hard manual labour had kept herself and him in the young days of his humble obscurity, and which during sixty years had not been idle for more than six weeks in all, he grew almost apologetic for his wealth.
They reminded him of the day when his total resources were five pounds--won in a wager, and of the day when he drove proudly about behind a mule collecting other people"s rents, and of the glittering days when he burst in on her from Llandudno with over a thousand gold sovereigns in a hat-box--product of his first great picturesque coup--imagining himself to be an English Jay Gould.
She had not blenched, even then. She had not blenched since. And she never would blench. In spite of his gorgeous position and his unique reputation, in spite of her well-concealed but notorious pride in him, he still went in fear of that ageless woman, whose undaunted eye always told him that he was still the lad Denry, and her inferior in moral force. The curve of her thin lips seemed ever to be warning him that with her pretensions were quite useless, and that she saw through him and through him to the innermost grottoes of his poor human depravity.
He caught her eye guiltily.
"Behold the Alderman!" she murmured with grimness.
That was all. But the three words took thirty years off his back, s.n.a.t.c.hed the half-crown cigar out of his hand and reduced him again to the raw, hungry boy of Brougham Street. And he knew that he had sinned gravely in not coming upstairs very much earlier.
"Is that you, father?" called the high voice of Robert from the back of the screen.
He had to admit to his son that it was he.
The infant lay on his back in Maisie"s bed, while his mother sat lightly on the edge of nurse"s bed near by.
"Well, you"re a nice chap!" said Edward Henry, avoiding Nellie"s glance, but trying to face his son as one innocent man may face another--and not perfectly succeeding. He never could feel like a real father, somehow.
"My temperature"s above normal," announced Robert, proudly, and then added with regret, "but not much!"
There was the clinical thermometer--instrument which Edward Henry despised and detested as being an inciter of illnesses--in a gla.s.s of water on the table between the two beds.
"Father!" Robert began again.
"Well, Robert?" said Edward Henry, cheerfully. He was glad that the child was in one of his rare loquacious moods, because the chatter not only proved that the dog had done no serious damage--it also eased the silent strain between himself and Nellie.
"Why did you play the Funeral March, father?" asked Robert, and the question fell into the tranquillity of the room rather like a bomb that had not quite decided whether or not to burst.
For the second time that evening Edward Henry was dashed.
"Have you been meddling with my music rolls?"
"No, father. I only read the labels."
This child simply read everything.
"How did you know I was playing a funeral march?" Edward Henry demanded.
"Oh, _I_ didn"t tell him!" Nellie put in, excusing herself before she was accused. She smiled benignly, as an angel-woman, capable of forgiving all. But there were moments when Edward Henry hated moral superiority and Christian meekness in a wife. Moreover, Nellie somewhat spoiled her own effect by adding, with an artificial continuation of the smile, "You needn"t look at _me_!"
Edward Henry considered the remark otiose. Though he had indeed ventured to look at her, he had not looked at her in the manner which she implied.
"It made a noise like funerals and things," Robert explained.
"Well, it seems to me _you"ve_ been playing a funeral march," said Edward Henry to the child.
He thought this rather funny, rather worthy of himself, but the child answered with ruthless gravity and a touch of disdain (for he was a disdainful child, without bowels):
"I don"t know what you mean, father." The curve of his lips (he had his grandmother"s lips) appeared to say: "I wish you wouldn"t try to be silly, father." However, youth forgets very quickly, and the next instant Robert was beginning once more, "Father!"
"Well, Robert?"
By mutual agreement of the parents the child was never addressed as "Bob" or "Bobby," or by any other diminutive. In their practical opinion a child"s name was his name, and ought not to be mauled or dismembered on the pretext of fondness. Similarly, the child had not been baptized after his father, or after any male member of either the Machin or the Cotterill family. Why should family names be perpetuated merely because they were family names? A natural human reaction, this, against the excessive sentimentalism of the Victorian era!
"What does "stamped out" mean?" Robert inquired.
Now Robert, among other activities, busied himself in the collection of postage stamps, and in consequence his father"s mind, under the impulse of the question, ran immediately to postage stamps.
"Stamped out?" said Edward Henry, with the air of omniscience that a father is bound to a.s.sume. "Postage stamps are stamped out--by a machine--you see."
Robert"s scorn of this explanation was manifest.
"Well," Edward Henry, piqued, made another attempt, "you stamp a fire out with your feet." And he stamped ill.u.s.tratively on the floor. After all, the child was only eight.
"I knew all that before," said Robert, coldly. "You don"t understand."
"What makes you ask, dear? Let us show father your leg." Nellie"s voice was soothing.
"Yes," Robert murmured, staring reflectively at the ceiling. "That"s it. It says in the _Encyclopaedia_ that hydrophobia is stamped out in this country--by Mr.. Long"s muzzling order. Who is Mr.. Long?"
A second bomb had fallen on exactly the same spot as the first, and the two exploded simultaneously. And the explosion was none the less terrible because it was silent and invisible. The tidy domestic chamber was strewn in a moment with an awful ma.s.s of wounded susceptibilities. Beyond the screen the _nick-nick_ of grandmother"s steel needles stopped and started again. It was characteristic of her temperament that she should recover before the younger generations could recover. Edward Henry, as befitted his s.e.x, regained his nerve a little earlier than Nellie.
"I told you never to touch my _Encyclopaedia_," said he, sternly.
Robert had twice been caught on his stomach on the floor with a vast volume open under his chin, and his studies had been traced by vile thumb-marks.
"I know," said Robert.
Whenever anybody gave that child a piece of unsolicited information he almost invariably replied, "I know."
"But hydrophobia!" cried Nellie. "How did you know about hydrophobia?"
"We had it in spellings last week," Robert explained.
"The deuce you did!" muttered Edward Henry.