He stood for a time gazing after her with a smile on his great face. He knew that she knew he was watching, and as he stood he drew his hand from his pocket and tapped and smoothed his moustache. He had a red moustache; it grew very thickly, but was cropped short and square, and its fibre was so strong that it stood out above his lip like wire. One expected it to crackle when he touched it, but it never did.
XI
When Mrs. Makebelieve came home that night she seemed very tired, and complained that her work at Mrs. O’Connor’s house was arduous beyond any which she had yet engaged in. She enumerated the many rooms that were in the house: those that were covered with carpets, the margins whereof had to be beeswaxed; those others, only partially covered with rugs, which had to be entirely waxed; the upper rooms were uncarpeted and unrugged, and had, therefore, to be scrubbed; the basement, consisting of two red-flagged kitchens and a scullery, had also to be scoured out. The lady was very particular about the scouring of wainscotings and doors. The upper part of the staircase was bare and had to be scrubbed down, and the part down to the hall had a thin strip of carpet on it secured by brazen rods; the margins on either side of this carpet had to be beeswaxed and the brass rods polished. There was a great deal of unnecessary and vexatious brass of one kind or another scattered about the house, and as there were four children in the family, besides Mrs. O’Connor and her two sisters, the amount of washing which had constantly to be done was enormous and terrifying.
During their tea Mrs. Makebelieve called to mind the different ornaments which stood on the parlour mantelpiece and on the top of the piano. There was a china shepherdess with a basket of flowers at one end of the mantelpiece and an exact duplicate on the other. In the centre a big clock of speckled marble was surmounted by a little domed edifice with Corinthian pillars in front, and this again was topped by the figure of an archer with a bent bow—there was nothing on top of this figure because there was not any room. Between each of these articles there stood little framed photographs of members of Mrs. O’Connor’s family, and behind all there was a carved looking-glass with bevelled edges having many shelves. Each shelf had a cup or a saucer or a china bowl on it. On the left-hand side of the fireplace there was a plaque whereon a young lady dressed in a sky-blue robe crossed by means of well-defined stepping-stones a thin but furious stream; the middle distance was embellished by a cow, and the horizon sustained two white lambs, a brown dog, a fountain, and a sundial. On the right-hand side a young gentleman clad in a crimson coat and yellow knee-breeches carried a three-cornered hat under his arm, and he also crossed a stream which seemed the exact counterpart of the other one and whose perspective was similarly complicated. There were three pictures on each wall—nine in all: three of these were pictures of ships; three were pictures of battles; two portrayed saintly but emaciated personages sitting in peculiarly disheartening wildernesses (each wilderness contained one cactus plant and a camel). One of these personages stared fixedly at a skull; the other personage looked with intense firmness away from a lady of scant charms in a white and all-too-insufficient robe: above the robe a segment of the lady’s bosom was hinted at bashfully—it was probably this the personage looked firmly away from. The remaining picture showed a little girl seated in a big armchair and reading with profound culture the most massive of Bibles: she had her grandmother’s mutch cap and spectacles on, and looked very sweet and solemn; a doll sat bolt upright beside her, and on the floor a kitten hunted a ball of wool with great earnestness.
All these things Mrs. Makebelieve discussed to her daughter, as also of the carpet which might have been woven in Turkey or elsewhere, the sideboard that possibly was not mahogany, and the chairs and occasional tables whose legs had attained to rickets through convulsions; the curtains of cream-coloured lace which were reinforced by rep hangings and guarded shutters from Venice, also the deer’s head which stood on a shelf over the door and was probably shot by a member of the family in a dream, and the splendid silver tankards which flanked this trophy and were possibly made of tin.
Mrs. Makebelieve further spoke of the personal characteristics of the
