She ran into the shop—or she would have run if she had not checked her girlishness betimes—and on her lips, ready to be whispered importantly into a husband’s astounded ear, were the words, “Maggie has given notice! Yes! Truly!” But Samuel Povey was engaged. He was leaning over the counter and staring at an outspread paper upon which a certain Mr. Yardley was making strokes with a thick pencil. Mr. Yardley, who had a long red beard, painted houses and rooms. She knew him only by sight. In her mind she always associated him with the sign over his premises in Trafalgar Road, “Yardley Bros., Authorised plumbers. Painters. Decorators. Paperhangers. Facia writers.” For years, in childhood, she had passed that sign without knowing what sort of things “Bros.” and “Facia” were, and what was the mysterious similarity between a plumber and a version of the Bible. She could not interrupt her husband, he was wholly absorbed; nor could she stay in the shop (which appeared just a little smaller than usual), for that would have meant an unsuccessful endeavour to front the young lady-assistants as though nothing in particular had happened to her. So she went sedately up the showroom stairs and thus to the bedroom floors of the house—her house! Mrs. Povey’s house! She even climbed to Constance’s old bedroom; her mother had stripped the bed—that was all, except a slight diminution of this room, corresponding to that of the shop! Then to the drawing room. In the recess outside the drawing room door the black box of silver plate still lay. She had expected her mother to take it; but no! Assuredly her mother was one to do things handsomely—when she did them. In the drawing room, not a tassel of an antimacassar touched! Yes, the fire screen, the luscious bunch of roses on an expanse of mustard, which Constance had worked for her mother years ago, was gone! That her mother should have clung to just that one souvenir, out of all the heavy opulence of the drawing room, touched Constance intimately. She perceived that if she could not talk to her husband she must write to her mother. And she sat down at the oval table and wrote, “Darling mother, I am sure you will be very surprised to hear. … She means it. … I think she is making a serious mistake. Ought I to put an advertisement in the Signal, or will it do if. … Please write by return. We are back and have enjoyed ourselves very much. Sam says he enjoys getting up late. …” And so on to the last inch of the fourth scalloped page.
She was obliged to revisit the shop for a stamp, stamps being kept in Mr. Povey’s desk in the corner—a high desk, at which you stood. Mr. Povey was now in earnest converse with Mr. Yardley at the door, and twilight, which began a full hour earlier in the shop than in the Square, had cast faint shadows in corners behind counters.
“Will you just run out with this to the pillar, Miss Dadd?”
“With pleasure, Mrs. Povey.”
“Where are you going to?” Mr. Povey interrupted his conversation to stop the flying girl.
“She’s just going to the post for me,” Constance called out from the region of the till.
“Oh! All right!”
A trifle! A nothing! Yet somehow, in the quiet customerless shop, the episode, with the scarce perceptible difference in Samuel’s tone at his second remark, was delicious to Constance. Somehow it was the real beginning of her wifehood. (There had been about nine other real beginnings in the past fortnight.)
Mr. Povey came in to supper, laden with ledgers and similar works which Constance had never even pretended to understand. It was a sign from him that the honeymoon was over. He was proprietor now, and his ardour for ledgers most justifiable. Still, there was the question of her servant.
“Never!” he exclaimed, when she told him all about the end of the world. A “never” which expressed extreme astonishment and the liveliest concern!
But Constance had anticipated that he would have been just a little more knocked down, bowled over, staggered, stunned, flabbergasted. In a swift gleam of insight she saw that she had been in danger of forgetting her role of experienced, capable married woman.
“I shall have to set about getting a fresh one,” she said hastily, with an admirable assumption of light and easy casualness.
Mr. Povey seemed to think that Hollins would suit Maggie pretty well. He made no remark to the betrothed when she answered the final bell of the night.
He opened his ledgers, whistling.
“I think I shall go up, dear,” said Constance. “I’ve a lot of things to put away.”
“Do,” said he. “Call out when you’ve done.”
II
“Sam!” she cried from the top of the crooked stairs.
No answer. The door at the foot was closed.
“Sam!”
“Hello?” Distantly, faintly.
“I’ve done all I’m going to do tonight.”
And she ran back along the corridor, a white figure in the deep gloom, and hurried into bed, and drew the clothes up to her chin.
In the life of a bride there are some dramatic moments. If she has married the industrious apprentice, one of those moments occurs when she first occupies the sacred bedchamber of her ancestors, and the bed on which she was born. Her
