The dog was not all.
On another day Constance, prying into the least details of the parlour, discovered a box of cigars inside the lid of the harmonium, on the keyboard. She was so unaccustomed to cigars that at first she did not realize what the object was. Her father had never smoked, nor drunk intoxicants; nor had Mr. Critchlow. Nobody had ever smoked in that house, where tobacco had always been regarded as equally licentious with cards, “the devil’s playthings.” Certainly Samuel had never smoked in the house, though the sight of the cigar-box reminded Constance of an occasion when her mother had announced an incredulous suspicion that Mr. Povey, fresh from an excursion into the world on a Thursday evening, “smelt of smoke.”
She closed the harmonium and kept silence.
That very night, coming suddenly into the parlour, she caught Samuel at the harmonium. The lid went down with a resonant bang that awoke sympathetic vibrations in every corner of the room.
“What is it?” Constance inquired, jumping.
“Oh, nothing!” replied Mr. Povey, carelessly. Each was deceiving the other: Mr. Povey hid his crime, and Constance hid her knowledge of his crime. False, false! But this is what marriage is.
And the next day Constance had a visit in the shop from a possible new servant, recommended to her by Mr. Holl, the grocer.
“Will you please step this way?” said Constance, with affable primness, steeped in the novel sense of what it is to be the sole responsible mistress of a vast household. She preceded the girl to the parlour, and as they passed the open door of Mr. Povey’s cutting-out room, Constance had the clear vision and titillating odour of her husband smoking a cigar. He was in his shirtsleeves, calmly cutting out, and Fan (the lady companion), at watch on the bench, yapped at the possible new servant.
“I think I shall try that girl,” said she to Samuel at tea. She said nothing as to the cigar; nor did he.
On the following evening, after supper, Mr. Povey burst out:
“I think I’ll have a weed! You didn’t know I smoked, did you?”
Thus Mr. Povey came out in his true colours as a blood, a blade, and a gay spark.
But dogs and cigars, disconcerting enough in their degree, were to the signboard, when the signboard at last came, as skim milk is to hot brandy. It was the signboard that, more startlingly than anything else, marked the dawn of a new era in St. Luke’s Square. Four men spent a day and a half in fixing it; they had ladders, ropes, and pulleys, and two of them dined on the flat lead roof of the projecting shopwindows. The signboard was thirty-five feet long and two feet in depth; over its centre was a semicircle about three feet in radius; this semicircle bore the legend, judiciously disposed, “S. Povey. Late.” All the signboard proper was devoted to the words, “John Baines,” in gold letters a foot and a half high, on a green ground.
The Square watched and wondered; and murmured: “Well, bless us! What next?”
It was agreed that in giving paramount importance to the name of his late father-in-law, Mr. Povey had displayed a very nice feeling.
Some asked with glee: “What’ll the old lady have to say?”
Constance asked herself this, but not with glee. When Constance walked down the Square homewards, she could scarcely bear to look at the sign; the thought of what her mother might say frightened her. Her mother’s first visit of state was imminent, and Aunt Harriet was to accompany her. Constance felt almost sick as the day approached. When she faintly hinted her apprehensions to Samuel, he demanded, as if surprised—
“Haven’t you mentioned it in one of your letters?”
“Oh no!”
“If that’s all,” said he, with bravado, “I’ll write and tell her myself.”
IV
So that Mrs. Baines was duly apprised of the signboard before her arrival. The letter written by her to Constance after receiving Samuel’s letter, which was merely the amiable epistle of a son-in-law anxious to be a little more than correct, contained no reference to the signboard. This silence, however, did not in the least allay Constance’s apprehensions as to what might occur when her mother and Samuel met beneath the signboard itself. It was therefore with a fearful as well as an eager, loving heart that Constance opened her side-door and ran down the steps when the wagonette stopped in King Street on the Thursday morning of the great visit of the sisters. But a surprise awaited her. Aunt Harriet had not come. Mrs. Baines explained, as she soundly kissed her daughter, that at the last moment Aunt Harriet had not felt well enough to undertake the journey. She sent her fondest love, and cake. Her pains had recurred. It was these mysterious pains which had prevented the sisters from coming to Bursley earlier. The word “cancer”—the continual terror of stout women—had been on their lips, without having been actually uttered; then there was a surcease, and each was glad that she had refrained from the dread syllables. In view of the recurrence, it was not unnatural that Mrs. Baines’s vigorous cheerfulness should be somewhat forced.
“What is it, do you think?” Constance inquired.
Mrs. Baines pushed her lips out and raised her eyebrows—a gesture which meant that the pains might mean God knew what.
“I hope she’ll be all right alone,” observed Constance.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Baines, quickly. “But you don’t suppose
