“I’ll have Mrs. Summers in during the daytime when you don’t know anything about it,” she said.
The words brought Mr. Marble out of his chair in a panic. That would be worse than the other thing; it would start gossip of a more poisonous sort than ever, and gossip better directed towards the real food for suspicion, for Mrs. Marble would have to tell Mrs. Summers that he did not like having other people about the house. He glared at her with frightful intensity.
“You mustn’t, you mustn’t ever do anything like that,” he said, and his voice was cracked and shrill. His clenched fists shook in his agitation. Mrs. Marble could only stare at him, surprised and speechless.
“You mustn’t do it. Do you hear me?” he shrieked.
His agitation infected his wife, and she fumbled nervously with the sewing on her lap.
“Yes, dear.”
“Yes, dear! Yes, dear! I don’t want any of your ‘yes, dears.’ You must promise me, promise me faithfully, that you won’t ever do that. If ever I find out, I’ll—I’ll—”
Mr. Marble’s high-pitched scream died away as the door swung open. John had come running down as soon as he heard his father’s voice at that hysterical pitch. It was not very long since the last time he had heard it like that, and then he had had to carry his mother up to bed, and she had a bruise on her face.
John stood by the door with the light on his face. Mr. Marble shrank back a little, and his lips wrinkled back from his teeth. He was the rat in the corner once more. Hatred flashed from the father to the son. It was not John’s fault, nor, by that time, was it Mr. Marble’s. For James Medland, he who had come in that memorable evening, nearly a year ago now, was John’s cousin when all was said and done, and there was a considerable family likeness. As John stood by the door he was in the same attitude and in the same light as Medland had been in, that evening, when he had entered the dining-room after Winnie had opened the door to him. No wonder that Mr. Marble hated John, and had hated him ever since he first noticed the likeness, that evening when he had struck his wife.
Father looked at son, son looked at father. The room was all aglare with gilded furniture. The diamond in Mr. Marble’s tiepin winked and glittered as he shrank slowly back before John’s slow and menacing advance. John had come to protect his mother, but the desperate challenge in his father’s attitude had roused him to the limit of his self-control. It was Mrs. Marble who saved the situation. She glanced terror-stricken at her husband’s snarling countenance, and at the wrinkled scowl of her son. In utter fear she flung herself into the breach.
“John, go away,” she said. “Go—quickly—it’s all right.”
John checked himself, and his hands unclenched. Mrs. Marble’s hand was on her heart; for in that same second she had seen what her husband had seen long before, and she had guessed that it was this that had called up that ferocity into his face. She was frightened, and she did not yet know why.
“Go, go, go,” wailed Mrs. Marble, and then, with a supreme effort, “There’s nothing to worry about John. You had better go to bed. Good night, sonny.”
When he had gone, silent, wordless as when he had entered, Mrs. Marble sank into a chair and laid her face on her arms on the gilded table and sobbed and sobbed, heartbroken, while her husband stood morosely beside her, hands in pockets, the gaudy glare of the ornate furniture mocking him, mocking his hopes of the future, mocking his submerged, sensual dreamings of Madame Collins.
IX
After this episode matters went for some time exactly as Mr. Marble would have wished. John’s application to enter Sydenham College was favourably received, and he went there without further demur. He was not quite sixteen. There was more trouble about Winnie. Mr. Marble obtained from scholastic agents a list of all the more expensive girls’ schools, but his endeavours to enter Winnie in one of them were baulked for some time. They displayed a not unnatural reluctance to receive in their midst a girl of nearly fifteen who hailed from an address in a dubious street in a south London suburb, and who had been educated so far at a Council school and at a secondary school. But at last a Berkshire school accepted her—it was incidentally the most expensive of all—and then there was a flurrying and a scurrying to get ready the vast outfit that the rules of the school demanded. There was a special type of gymnasium frock to be obtained, and day clothes and evening clothes and, crowning glory of all, a riding-habit and boots. Mr. Marble was delighted. He certainly seemed prouder of Winnie’s outfit than she was herself.
And so, after Easter, the same day that Mr. and Mrs. Marble, he dressed in his very best to impress the other girls’ parents and the other girls, she rather tearful, with her appearance not justifying the amount spent on it, saw Winnie off from Paddington, John put on the blue and black cap of Sydenham College and set off on his two-mile walk thither, not feeling at all happy, with all the mysteries of Rugby football and the prevailing etiquette of the new school before him.
True, his father had been jolly decent to him lately. He had given him nearly all the pocket-money he wanted, while in
