“Oh, you wicked girl,” she said. “How dare you speak to us like that? You ought to be grateful to us for all we’ve done for you.”
Winnie could think of nothing better to say than “Ought I?” but it was quite enough for her to say. It was the manner, and not the matter, that told. Winnie was too superior altogether, and that throaty accent of hers irritated her parents past all bearing. It reminded her father too painfully of the days when he had been a slave in a bank, and it forced home upon her mother the knowledge that her criticism of her clothes had been sincere, and it gave her an uncomfortable feeling that Winnie knew what she was talking about. It was Mrs. Marble that found speech first.
“Yes, you did ought,” she said. “You owe us the clothes on your back, and all that fine schooling you’ve had, and—and everything else. So there!”
Winnie had lost her temper thoroughly by now.
“I do, do I?” she said. “Well, I shan’t owe you anything else, so there! I’ll go away now, this minute, if you’re not careful. I will, I tell you.”
She may have thought that this threat would be sure of silencing them, and making them sorry for what they had said; but she had left out of her reckoning the temper they were in, and the fact that they might not take her literally. Nor was she to know that there was one member in the house who might not be too sorry if she were to carry out her threat—someone who found it very worrying to have to guard his own backyard from his own daughter.
“Poo!” said Mr. Marble.
“I will, I tell you. I will. Oh—” And then Winnie stamped her foot at them as they stood there and turned and fled upstairs to her own room. Downstairs they heard the key turn in the lock.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Mrs. Marble, now that it was over. “I’ll go up to her, shall I?”
“No,” said Marble, “she’s only gone to have a good cry. Didn’t you hear her lock her door?”
But Winnie was not having a good cry. She had made her decision in red-hot mood, with a precipitation after her calm deliberation that was characteristic of her. She dragged out her trunks from under her bed and began to pile her clothes into them feverishly. It was all done before she had time to think.
Then she washed her face in cold water and re-powdered carefully. Now that her mind was made up there was nothing that could change it. She put on her hat, her very nicest hat, before the mirror, and walked downstairs again. Before her mother could come out into the hall to make her peace she had gone out, with the front door slamming behind her.
“Gone for a walk,” was Marble’s terse explanation when his wife tearfully reported this to him. “Gone for a walk to get over it. She’ll come back soon as right as rain.”
She was back sooner than they expected, however, and she came back in a cab. They heard her key in the door, and a moment afterwards they heard her directing the cabdriver upstairs to where her trunks lay. As the true import of this came home to her Mrs. Marble hurried into the hall, wringing her hands.
“Winnie, Winnie,” she wailed. “We didn’t mean it, really we didn’t. Winnie, dear, don’t go like this. Will, tell her she mustn’t.”
But Mr. Marble was silent. Winnie had come into the sitting-room to them, defiance in her eyes. They could hear the laboured steps of the cabdriver bringing down the first trunk.
“Will, tell her she mustn’t,” said Mrs. Marble again.
But Mr. Marble still said nothing. He was drumming with his fingers upon the arm of his chair. He was thinking, as hard as his confused mind and the tumult of his thoughts would allow. There was absolutely no denying the fact that it would be more convenient to have Winnie out of the house. One never knew, never. All the books said that it was the little things that gave one away, and the fewer people there were about to notice such things the better. Perhaps Mr. Marble would not have considered this in connection with Winnie, but during that quarrel there was something that forced it upon him. Once more it was that dread family likeness. Winnie had looked rather like John, that time when he had come blundering into the sitting-room; and she had looked rather like young Medland, too. It had shaken him badly.
The heavy steps of the cabdriver were heard re-descending the stairs. They paused outside the door, and he coughed apologetically.
“Two trunks and a ’atbox, mum. Is that right?”
“Quite right,” said Winnie, in her throatiest, most musical voice.
And still Mr. Marble said nothing.
“Goodbye,” said Winnie. The throatiness disappeared like magic; there was a little break in her voice. It would have taken very little to have diverted her from her purpose.
Mrs. Marble looked at her husband; waited for him to speak. All she could do was to wring her hands and choke in her breathing. Still Mr. Marble did not speak. Winnie could bear it no longer. She swung round on her heel and ran out of the room, down the hall and out to the waiting cab.
“Charing Cross,” she said to the driver, huskily.
Mrs. Marble only reached the gate when they were fifty yards away—beyond recall.
It was all very stupid and silly, and afterwards it seemed as if it might have been avoided—but it really might not.
XV
And now began the darkest period in all Annie Marble’s unhappy life, the last few weeks before its unhappy end. The shadows had massed about 53 Malcolm Road, and as they clustered round ready for the last act of the tragedy poor Annie grew more and more
