The Old Wives Tale | Page 9

gown ballooned about her in all its fantastic richness and
expensiveness. And with the gown she had put on her mother's
importance--that mien of assured authority, of capacity tested in many a
crisis, which characterized Mrs. Baines, and which Mrs. Baines seemed
to impart to her dresses even before she had regularly worn them. For it
was a fact that Mrs. Baines's empty garments inspired respect, as
though some essence had escaped from her and remained in them.
"Sophia!"
Constance stayed her needle, and, without lifting her head, gazed, with
eyes raised from the wool-work, motionless at the posturing figure of
her sister. It was sacrilege that she was witnessing, a prodigious
irreverence. She was conscious of an expectation that punishment
would instantly fall on this daring, impious child. But she, who never
felt these mad, amazing impulses, could nevertheless only smile
fearfully.
"Sophia!" she breathed, with an intensity of alarm that merged into
condoning admiration. "Whatever will you do next?"
Sophia's lovely flushed face crowned the extraordinary structure like a
blossom, scarcely controlling its laughter. She was as tall as her mother,
and as imperious, as crested, and proud; and in spite of the pigtail, the
girlish semi-circular comb, and the loose foal-like limbs, she could
support as well as her mother the majesty of the gimp-embroidered
dress. Her eyes sparkled with all the challenges of the untried virgin as
she minced about the showroom. Abounding life inspired her
movements. The confident and fierce joy of youth shone on her brow.
"What thing on earth equals me?" she seemed to demand with

enchanting and yet ruthless arrogance. She was the daughter of a
respected, bedridden draper in an insignificant town, lost in the central
labyrinth of England, if you like; yet what manner of man, confronted
with her, would or could have denied her naive claim to dominion? She
stood, in her mother's hoops, for the desire of the world. And in the
innocence of her soul she knew it! The heart of a young girl
mysteriously speaks and tells her of her power long ere she can use her
power. If she can find nothing else to subdue, you may catch her in the
early years subduing a gate-post or drawing homage from an empty
chair. Sophia's experimental victim was Constance, with suspended
needle and soft glance that shot out from the lowered face.
Then Sophia fell, in stepping backwards; the pyramid was
overbalanced; great distended rings of silk trembled and swayed
gigantically on the floor, and Sophia's small feet lay like the feet of a
doll on the rim of the largest circle, which curved and arched above
them like a cavern's mouth. The abrupt transition of her features from
assured pride to ludicrous astonishment and alarm was comical enough
to have sent into wild uncharitable laughter any creature less humane
than Constance. But Constance sprang to her, a single embodied
instinct of benevolence, with her snub nose, and tried to raise her.
"Oh, Sophia!" she cried compassionately--that voice seemed not to
know the tones of reproof--"I do hope you've not messed it, because
mother would be so--"
The words were interrupted by the sound of groans beyond the door
leading to the bedrooms. The groans, indicating direst physical torment,
grew louder. The two girls stared, wonder-struck and afraid, at the door,
Sophia with her dark head raised, and Constance with her arms round
Sophia's waist. The door opened, letting in a much-magnified sound of
groans, and there entered a youngish, undersized man, who was
frantically clutching his head in his hands and contorting all the
muscles of his face. On perceiving the sculptural group of two prone,
interlocked girls, one enveloped in a crinoline, and the other with a
wool-work bunch of flowers pinned to her knee, he jumped back,
ceased groaning, arranged his face, and seriously tried to pretend that it

was not he who had been vocal in anguish, that, indeed, he was just
passing as a casual, ordinary wayfarer through the showroom to the
shop below. He blushed darkly; and the girls also blushed.
"Oh, I beg pardon, I'm sure!" said this youngish man suddenly; and
with a swift turn he disappeared whence he had come.
He was Mr. Povey, a person universally esteemed, both within and
without the shop, the surrogate of bedridden Mr. Baines, the unfailing
comfort and stand-by of Mrs. Baines, the fount and radiating centre of
order and discipline in the shop; a quiet, diffident, secretive, tedious,
and obstinate youngish man, absolutely faithful, absolutely efficient in
his sphere; without brilliance, without distinction; perhaps rather
little-minded, certainly narrow-minded; but what a force in the shop!
The shop was inconceivable without Mr. Povey. He was under twenty
and not out of his apprenticeship when Mr. Baines had been struck
down, and he had