第38章

She tried to be affable,and her visitors smarted under a sense of patronage.The language of Buckland Street,coloured with oaths,the crude fashions of the slop-shop,and the drunken brawls,jarred on her nerves like the sharpening of a saw.So she lived,secluded as a nun,mocked and derided by her inferiors.

She was born with the love of the finer things that makes poverty tragic.

She kept a box full of the tokens of the past--a scarf of Maltese lace,yellow with age,that her grandmother had sent from England;a long chain of fine gold,too frail to be worn;a brooch set with diamonds in a bygone fashion;a ring with her father's seal carved in onyx.

Her daughter Clara was the image of herself in face and manner,and her grudge against her husband hardened every time she thought of her only child's future.Clara was fifteen when they descended to Buckland Street,a pampered child,nursed in luxury.The Duchess belonged to the Church of England,and it had been one of the sights of Billabong to see her move down the aisle on Sunday like a frigate of Nelson's time in full sail;but she had overcome her scruples,and sent Clara to the convent school for finishing lessons in music,dancing,and painting.

We each live and act our parts on a stage built to our proportions,and set in a corner of the larger theatre of the world,and the revolution that displaces princes was not more surprising to them than the catastrophe that dropped the Grimes family in Buckland Street was to Clara and her mother.

Clara had been taught to look on her equals with scorn,and she stared at her inferiors with a mute contempt that roused the devil in their hearts.

She had lived in the street ten years,and was a stranger in it.Buckland Street was never empty,but she learned to pick her time for going in and out when the neighbours were at their meals or asleep.She attended a church at an incredible distance from Waterloo,for fear people should learn her unfashionable address.Her few friends lived in other suburbs whose streets she knew by heart,so that they took her for a neighbour.

When she was twenty-two she had become engaged to a clerk in a Government office,who sang in the same choir.A year passed,and the match was suddenly broken off.This was her only serious love-affair,for,though she was handsome in a singular way,her flirtations never came to anything.She belonged to the type of woman who can take her pick of the men,and remains unmarried while her plainer friends are rearing families.

The natural destiny of the Waterloo girls was the factory,or the workshops of anaemic dressmakers,stitching slops at racing speed for the warehouses.A few of the better sort,marked out by their face and figure,found their way to the tea-rooms and restaurants.But the Duchess had encouraged her daughter's belief that she was too fine a lady to soil her hands with work,and she strummed idly on the dilapidated piano while her mother roughened her fine hands with washing and scrubbing.This was in the early days,when Dad,threatened with starvation,had passed the hotels at a run to avoid temptation,for which he made amends by drinking himself blind for a week at a time.Then,after years of genteel poverty,the Duchess had consented to Clara giving lessons on the piano--that last refuge of the shabby-genteel.But pupils were scarce in Waterloo,and Clara's manner chilled the enthusiasm of parents who only paid for lessons on the understanding that their child was to become the wonder of the world for a guinea a quarter.

This morning Clara was busy practising scales,while her mother dusted and swept with feverish haste,for Mr Jones,the owner of the great boot-shop,was bringing his son in the afternoon to arrange for lessons on the piano.

The Duchess knew the singular history of Jonah,the boot king,and awaited his arrival with intense curiosity.She had married a failure,and adored success.She decided to treat Jonah as an equal,forgiving his lowly origin with a confused idea that it was the proper thing for millionaires to spring from the gutter,the better to show their contempt for the ordinary advantages of education and family.She had decided to wear her black silk,faded and darned,but by drawing the curtains;she hoped it would pass.From some receptacle unknown to Dad she had fished out a few relics of her former grandeur--an old-fashioned card-tray of solid silver,and the quaint silver tea-set with the tiny silver spoons that her grandmother had sent as a wedding present from England.

Clara had just finished a variation with three tremendous fortissimo chords when she heard the wheels of a cab.This was an event in itself,for cabs in Buckland Street generally meant doctors,hospitals,or sudden death.She ran to the window and saw the hunchback and the boy stepping out.Clara opened the door with an air of surprise,and led them to the parlour where the Duchess was waiting.Years and misfortune had added to her dignity,and Jonah felt his shop and success and money slip away from him,leaving him the street-arab sprung from the gutter before this aristocrat.Ray took to her at once,and climbed into her lap,bringing her heart into her mouth as he rubbed his feet on the famous black silk.

"I have never had the pleasure of meeting you,but I have heard of your romantic career,"she said.

"Well,I've got on,there's no denying that,"said Jonah."Some people think it's luck,but I tell 'em it's 'ard graft.""Exactly,"said the Duchess,wondering what he meant by graft.

Jonah looked round the stuffy room.It had an indescribable air of antiquity.Every piece of furniture was of a pattern unknown to him,and there was a musty flavour in the air,for the Duchess,valuing privacy more than fresh air,never opened the windows.On the wall opposite was a large picture in oils,an English scene,with the old rustic bridge and the mill in the distance,painted at Billabong by Clara at an early age.

The Duchess caught Jonah's eye.