The Regent | Page 7

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, snatched 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 glass 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