“You are going to her?” said my mother.
“I have been sent for,” said my father; “I must—it may mean business.”
My mother laughed bitterly; why, at the time, I could not understand; and my father flung out of the house. During the many hours that he was away my mother remained locked in her room, and, stealing sometimes to the door, I was sure I heard her crying; and that she should grieve so at old Teidelmann's death puzzled me.
She came oftener to our house after that. Her mourning added, I think, to her beauty, softening—or seeming to soften—the hardness of her eyes. Always she was very sweet to my mother, who by contrast beside her appeared witless and ungracious; and to me, whatever her motive, she was kindness itself; hardly ever arriving without some trifling gift or plan for affording me some childish treat. By instinct she understood exactly what I desired and liked, the books that would appeal to me as those my mother gave me never did, the pleasures that did please me as opposed to the pleasures that should have pleased me. Often my mother, talking to me, would chill me with the vista of the life that lay before me: a narrow, viewless way between twin endless walls of “Must” and “Must not.” This soft-voiced lady set me dreaming of life as of sunny fields through which one wandered laughing, along the winding path of Will; so that, although as I have said, there lurked at the bottom of my thoughts a fear of her; yet something within me I seemed unable to control went out to her, drawn by her subtle sympathy and understanding of it.
“Has he ever seen a pantomime?” she asked of my father one morning, looking at me the while with a whimsical screwing of her mouth.
My heart leaped within me. My father raised his eyebrows: “What would your mother say, do you think?” he asked. My heart sank.
“She thinks,” I replied, “that theatres are very wicked places.” It was the first time that any doubt as to the correctness of my mother's judgments had ever crossed my mind.
Mrs. Teidelmann's smile strengthened my doubt. “Dear me,” she said, “I am afraid I must be very wicked. I have always regarded a pantomime as quite a moral entertainment. All the bad people go down so very straight to—well, to the fit and proper place for them. And we could promise to leave before the Clown stole the sausages, couldn't we, Paul?”
My mother was called and came; and I could not help thinking how insignificant she looked with her pale face and plain dark frock, standing stiffly beside this shining lady in her rustling clothes.
“You will let him come, Mrs. Kelver,” she pleaded in her soft caressing tones; “it's Dick Whittington, you know—such an excellent moral.”
My mother had stood silent, clasping and unclasping her hands, a childish trick she had when troubled; and her lips were trembling. Important as the matter loomed before my own eyes, I wondered at her agitation.
“I am very sorry,” said my mother, “it is very kind of you. But I would rather he did not go.”
“Just this once,” persisted Mrs. Teidelmann. “It is holiday time.”
A ray of sunlight fell into the room, lighting upon her coaxing face, making where my mother stood seem shadow.
“I would rather he did not go,” repeated my mother, and her voice sounded harsh and grating. “When he is older others must judge for him, but for the present he must be guided by me—alone.”
“I really don't think there could be any harm, Maggie,” urged my father. “Things have changed since we were young.”
“That may be,” answered my mother, still in the same harsh voice; “it is long ago since then.”
“I didn't intend it that way,” said my father with a short laugh.
“I merely meant that I may be wrong,” answered my mother. “I seem so old among you all—so out of place. I have tried to change, but I cannot.”
“We will say no more about it,” said Mrs. Teidelmann, sweetly. “I merely thought it would give him pleasure; and he has worked so hard this last term, his father tells me.”
She laid her hand caressingly on my shoulder, drawing me a little closer to her; and it remained there.
“It was very kind of you,” said my mother, “I would do anything to give him pleasure, anything-I could. He knows that. He understands.”
My mother's hand, I knew, was seeking mine, but I was angry and would not see; and without another word she left the room.
My mother did not allude again to the subject; but the very next afternoon she took me herself to a hall in the neighbourhood, where we saw a magic-lantern, followed by a conjurer. She had dressed herself in a prettier frock than she had worn for many a long day, and was brighter and gayer in herself than had lately been her wont, laughing and talking merrily. But I, nursing my wrongs, remained moody and sulky. At any other time such rare amusement would have overjoyed me; but the wonders of the great theatre that from other boys I had heard so much of, that from gaudy-coloured posters I had built up for myself, were floating vague and undefined before me in the air; and neither the open-mouthed sleeper, swallowing his endless chain of rats; nor even the live rabbit found in the stout old gentleman's hat—the last sort of person in whose hat one would have expected to find such a thing—could draw away my mind from the joy I had caught a glimpse of only to lose.
So we walked home through the muddy, darkening streets, speaking but little; and that night, waking—or rather half waking, as children do—I thought I saw a figure in white crouching at the foot of my bed. I must have gone to sleep again; and later, though I cannot say whether the intervening time was short or long, I opened my eyes to see it still there; and frightened, I cried out; and my mother rose from her knees.
She laughed, a curious broken laugh, in answer to my questions. “It was a silly dream I had,” she explained “I must have been thinking of the conjurer we saw. I dreamt that a wicked Magician had spirited you away from me. I could not find you and was all alone in the world.”
She put her arms around me, so tight as almost to hurt me. And thus we remained until again I must have fallen asleep.
It was towards the close of these same holidays that my mother and I called upon Mrs. Teidelmann in her great stone-built house at Clapton. She had sent a note round that morning, saying she was suffering from terrible headaches that quite took her senses away, so that she was unable to come out. She would be leaving England in a few days to travel. Would my mother come and see her, she would like to say good-bye to her before she went. My mother handed the letter across the table to my father.
“Of course you will go,” said my father. “Poor girl, I wonder what the cause can be. She used to be so free from everything of the kind.”
“Do you think it well for me to go?” said my mother. “What can she have to say to me?”
“Oh, just to say good-bye,” answered my father. “It would look so pointed not to go.”
It was a dull, sombre house without, but one entered through its commonplace door as through the weed-grown rock into Aladdin's cave. Old Teidelmann had been a great collector all his life, and his treasures, now scattered through a dozen galleries, were then heaped there in curious confusion. Pictures filled every inch of wall, stood propped against the wonderful old furniture, were even stretched unframed across the ceilings. Statues gleamed from every corner (a few of the statues were, I remember, the only things out of the entire collection that Mrs. Teidelmann kept for herself), carvings, embroideries, priceless china, miniatures framed in gems, illuminated missals and gorgeously bound books crowded the room. The ugly little thick-lipped man had surrounded himself with the beauty of every age, brought from every land. He himself must have been the only thing cheap and uninteresting to be found within his own walls; and now he lay shrivelled up in his coffin, under a monument by means of which an unknown cemetery became quite famous.