Mary Gray | Page 7

the wall?"
"I have been missing Wistaria Terrace," Mary said. "You don't know
how lonesome it feels for the children. I wonder how Mamie is getting
on without me. I want to go home. Indeed, I feel quite able to. I don't
know how I shall do without going home."
"If you went home," said Walter Gray, unexpectedly practical, "your
arm would never set, Mary. You'd be forgetting and doing all manner
of things you oughtn't to do. If Lady Anne is kind enough to ask you to
visit her, stay a while and rest, dear. Indeed, you do too much for your
size."
"You will all miss me so dreadfully."
"Indeed, I don't think we shall miss you--in that way. Oddly enough--I
suppose Matilda was on her mettle--the house seemed quieter when I
came home. The children were in bed. I smelt something good from the
kitchen. Don't imagine that we shall not be able to do without you,
child."

Mary, who knew no more of the capable charwoman than Walter Gray
did, looked on this speech of her father's as a mere string of tender
subterfuges. She said nothing, but her eyes rested on her grey woollen
skirt, faded by wear and the weather, and she had an unchildish sense
of the incongruity of her presence as a visitor in Lady Anne's house.
Walter Gray's glance roamed over his young daughter. He saw nothing
of her dreary attire. He saw only the spiritual face, over-pale, the
slender, young, unformed body, graceful as a half-opened flower in its
ill-fitting covering, the slender feet that had a suggestion of race, the
toil-worn hands the fingers of which tapered to fine points.
"You have always done too much, child," he said, with sudden, tender
compunction.
When he rose to go Mary clung to him as though their parting was to
be for years.
"I will come in again to-morrow," he said. "I shall sleep better to-night
for thinking of you in this quiet, restful place. Get some roses in your
cheeks, little girl, before you come back to us."
"I wish I were going back now," said Mary piteously. She looked round
the old walls with their climbing fruit trees as though they were the
walls of a prison. "It is awful not to be able to come and go. And
Mamie will never be able to do without me. The children will be ill----"
He left her in tears. As he re-entered the house by its iron steps up to a
glass door Lady Anne came out from her morning-room and called him
within. He looked about him at the room, walled in with books, with
yellowed marble busts of great men on top of the book-cases. His feet
sank in soft carpets. The smell of a pot of lilies mingled with the smell
of leather bindings. The light in the room, filtered through the leaves of
an overhanging creeper, was green and gold. It seemed to him that he
must have known such a room in some other world, where he had not
had to make watches all day with a glass screwed in his eye, but had
abundant leisure for books and beautiful things. Not but that there
might be worse things than the watchmaking. Over the works of the
watches, the fine little wheels and springs, Walter Gray thought hard,

thought incessantly. He thought, perhaps, the harder that he had neither
the leisure nor opportunity for putting down his thoughts on paper or
imparting them to another like-minded with himself. How his fellows
would have stared if they could have known the things that went on
inside Walter Gray's mind as he leant above his table, peering into the
interior of the watch-cases!
"Sit down, Mr. Gray," said Lady Anne graciously; "I want to talk to
you about Mary."
She approached the matter delicately, having wit enough to see that
Walter Gray was no common person. While she talked she looked with
frank admiration at his face: the fine, high, delicate nose; the arched
brows, like Mary's own; the over-development of the forehead. The
dust of years and worries lay thick upon his face, yet Lady Anne said to
herself that it was a beautiful face beneath the dust.
"I want to talk to you about Mary," she went on. "The child interests
me strongly. She is a fine vessel, this little daughter of yours. Pray
excuse me if I speak plainly. She has been doing far too much for her
age and her strength. Haven't you noticed that she is pulled down to
earth? Those babies, Mr. Gray--they are remarkably fat and heavy; they
are killing Mary."
"Her mother died of consumption," Walter Gray said, his face
whitening with terror.
"Ah!" the old lady thought; "she is the