The Price of Love | Page 2

bow-window--advantageous in the murky daytime of the Five
Towns, and inconvenient at night. The table might well have been
shifted at night to a better position in regard to the gas. But it never was.
Somehow for Mrs. Maldon the carpet was solid concrete, and the legs
of the table immovably embedded therein.
Rachel, gentle-footed, kicked the footstool away to its lair under the
table, and simultaneously extinguished the taper, which she dropped
with a scarce audible click into a vase on the mantelpiece. Then she put
the cover on the tube with another faintest click, restored the tube to its
drawer with a rather louder click, and finally, with a click still louder,
pushed the drawer home. All these slight sounds were familiar to Mrs.
Maldon; they were part of her regular night life, part of an
unconsciously loved ritual, and they contributed in their degree to her
placid happiness.
"Now the blinds, my dear!" said she.
The exhortation was ill-considered, and Rachel controlled a gesture of
amicable impatience. For she had not paused after closing the drawer;
she was already on her way across the room to the window when Mrs.
Maldon said, "Now the blinds, my dear!" The fact was that Mrs.
Maldon measured the time between the lighting of gas and the drawing
down of blinds by tenths of a second--such was her fear lest in that
sinister interval the whole prying town might magically gather in the
street outside and peer into the secrets of her inculpable existence.

II
When the blinds and curtains had been arranged for privacy, Mrs.
Maldon sighed securely and picked up her crocheting. Rachel rested
her hands on the table, which was laid for a supper for four, and asked
in a firm, frank voice whether there was anything else.
"Because, if not," Rachel added, "I'll just take off my pinafore and

wash my hands."
Mrs. Maldon looked up benevolently and nodded in quick agreement. It
was such apparently trifling gestures, eager and generous, that endeared
the old lady to Rachel, giving her the priceless sensation of being
esteemed and beloved. Her gaze lingered on her aged employer with
affection and with profound respect. Mrs. Maldon made a striking, tall,
slim figure, sitting erect in tight black, with the right side of her long,
prominent nose in the full gaslight and the other heavily shadowed. Her
hair was absolutely black at over seventy; her eyes were black and
glowing, and she could read and do coarse crocheting without
spectacles. All her skin, especially round about the eyes, was yellowish
brown and very deeply wrinkled indeed; a decrepit, senile skin, which
seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance. The cast of
her features was benign. She had passed through desolating and violent
experiences, and then through a long, long period of withdrawn
tranquillity; and from end to end of her life she had consistently
thought the best of all men, refusing to recognize evil and assuming the
existence of good. Every one of the millions of her kind thoughts had
helped to mould the expression of her countenance. The expression was
definite now, fixed, intensely characteristic after so many decades, and
wherever it was seen it gave pleasure and by its enchantment created
goodness and goodwill--even out of their opposites. Such was the
life-work of Mrs. Maldon.
Her eyes embraced the whole room. They did not, as the phrase is,
"beam" approval; for the act of beaming involves a sort of ecstasy, and
Mrs. Maldon was too dignified for ecstasy. But they displayed a mild
and proud contentment as she said--
"I'm sure it's all very nice."
It was. The table crowded with porcelain, crystal, silver, and flowers,
and every object upon it casting a familiar curved shadow on the
whiteness of the damask toward the window! The fresh crimson and
blues of the everlasting Turkey carpet (Turkey carpet being the ne plus
ultra of carpetry in the Five Towns, when that carpet was bought, just
as sealskin was the ne plus ultra of all furs)! The silken-polished

sideboard, strange to the company, but worthy of it, and exhibiting a
due sense of its high destiny! The sombre bookcase and corner
cupboard, darkly glittering! The Chesterfield sofa, broad, accepting,
acquiescent! The flashing brass fender and copper scuttle! The
comfortably reddish walls, with their pictures--like limpets on the face
of precipices! The new-whitened ceiling! In the midst the incandescent
lamp that hung like the moon in heaven!... And then the young, sturdy
girl, standing over the old woman and breathing out the very breath of
life, vitalizing everything, rejuvenating the old woman!
Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room had a considerable renown among her
acquaintance, not only for its peculiar charm, which combined and
reconciled the tastes of two very different generations,