“Miss Insull!” she called, in a low, clear voice, with a touch of haughtiness and a touch of command in it. The pose, a comical contradiction of Constance’s benevolent character, was deliberately adopted; it illustrated the effects of jealousy on even the softest disposition.
Miss Insull responded. She had no alternative but to respond. And she gave no sign of resenting her employer’s attitude. But then Miss Insull seldom did give any sign of being human.
The customers departed, one after another, obsequiously sped by the assistants, who thereupon lowered the gases somewhat, according to secular rule; and in the dim eclipse, as they restored boxes to shelves, they could hear the tranquil, regular, half-whispered conversation of the two women at the desk, discussing accounts; and then the chink of gold.
Suddenly there was an irruption. One of the assistants sprang instinctively to the gas; but on perceiving that the disturber of peace was only a slatternly girl, hatless and imperfectly clean, she decided to leave the gas as it was, and put on a condescending, suspicious demeanour.
“If you please, can I speak to the missis?” said the girl, breathlessly.
She seemed to be about eighteen years of age, fat and plain. Her blue frock was torn, and over it she wore a rough brown apron, caught up at one corner to the waist. Her bare forearms were of brick-red colour.
“What is it?” demanded the assistant.
Miss Insull looked over her shoulder across the shop. “It must be Maggie’s—Mrs. Hollins’s daughter!” said Miss Insull under her breath.
“What can she want?” said Constance, leaving the desk instantly; and to the girl, who stood sturdily holding her own against the group of assistants: “You are Mrs. Hollins’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“Yes, mum.”
“What’s your name?”
“Maggie, mum. And, if you please, mother’s sent me to ask if you’ll kindly give her a funeral card.”
“A funeral card?”
“Yes. Of Mr. Povey. She’s been expecting of one, and she thought as how perhaps you’d forgotten it, especially as she wasn’t asked to the funeral.”
The girl stopped.
Constance perceived that by mere negligence she had seriously wounded the feelings of Maggie, senior. The truth was, she had never thought of Maggie. She ought to have remembered that funeral cards were almost the sole ornamentation of Maggie’s abominable cottage.
“Certainly,” she replied after a pause. “Miss Insull, there are a few cards left in the desk, aren’t there? Please put me one in an envelope for Mrs. Hollins.”
She gave the heavily bordered envelope to the ruddy wench, who enfolded it in her apron, and with hurried, shy thanks ran off.
“Tell your mother I send her a card with pleasure,” Constance called after the girl.
The strangeness of the hazards of life made her thoughtful. She, to whom Maggie had always seemed an old woman, was a widow, but Maggie’s husband survived as a lusty invalid. And she guessed that Maggie, vilely struggling in squalor and poverty, was somehow happy in her frowsy, careless way.
She went back to the accounts, dreaming.
II
When the shop had been closed, under her own critical and precise superintendence, she extinguished the last gas in it and returned to the parlour, wondering where she might discover some entirely reliable man or boy to deal with the shutters night and morning. Samuel had ordinarily dealt with the shutters himself, and on extraordinary occasions and during holidays Miss Insull and one of her subordinates had struggled with their unwieldiness. But the extraordinary occasion had now become ordinary, and Miss Insull could not be expected to continue indefinitely in the functions of a male. Constance had a mind to engage an errand-boy, a luxury against which Samuel had always set his face. She did not dream of asking the herculean Cyril to open and shut shop.
He had apparently finished his home-lessons. The books were pushed aside, and he was sketching in lead-pencil on a drawing-block. To the right of the fireplace, over the sofa, there hung an engraving after Landseer, showing a lonely stag paddling into a lake. The stag at eve had drunk or was about to drink his fill, and Cyril was copying him. He had already indicated a flight of birds in the middle distance; vague birds on the wing being easier than detailed stags, he had begun with the birds.
Constance put a hand on his shoulder. “Finished your lessons?” she murmured caressingly.
Before speaking, Cyril gazed up at the picture with a frowning, busy expression, and then replied in an absentminded voice:
“Yes.” And after a pause: “Except my arithmetic. I shall do that in the morning before breakfast.”
“Oh, Cyril!” she protested.
It had been a positive ordinance, for a long time past, that there should be no sketching until lessons were done. In his father’s lifetime Cyril had never dared to break it.
He bent over his block, feigning an intense absorption. Constance’s hand slipped from his shoulder. She wanted to command him formally to resume his lessons. But she could not. She feared an argument; she mistrusted herself. And, moreover, it was so soon after his father’s death!
“You know you won’t have time tomorrow morning!” she said weakly.
“Oh, mother!” he retorted superiorly. “Don’t worry.” And then, in a cajoling tone: “I’ve wanted to do that stag for ages.”
She sighed and sat down in her rocking chair. He went on sketching, rubbing out, and making queer expostulatory noises against his pencil, or against the difficulties needlessly invented by Sir Edwin Landseer. Once he rose and changed the position of the gas-bracket, staring fiercely at the engraving as though it had committed a sin.
Amy came to lay the supper. He did not acknowledge that she existed.
“Now, Master Cyril, after you with that table, if you please!” She announced herself brusquely, with the privilege of an old servant and a woman who would never see thirty again.
“What a nuisance you are, Amy!” he gruffly answered. “Look here, mother, can’t Amy lay the cloth on that
