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The Old Wives' Tale. Arnold Bennett
Читать онлайн.Название The Old Wives' Tale
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066052027
Автор произведения Arnold Bennett
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
Sophia took a wax taper from a vase on the mantelpiece, stuck it in the fire and lit the gas, which exploded in its crystal cloister with a mild report.
“What’s all that clay on your boots, child?” asked Mrs. Baines.
“Clay?” repeated Sophia, staring foolishly at her boots.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Baines. “It looks like marl. Where on earth have you been?”
She interrogated her daughter with an upward gaze, frigid and unconsciously hostile, through her gold-rimmed glasses.
“I must have picked it up on the roads,” said Sophia, and hastened to the door.
“Sophia!”
“Yes, mother.”
“Shut the door.”
Sophia unwillingly shut the door which she had half opened.
“Come here.”
Sophia obeyed, with falling lip.
“You are deceiving me, Sophia,” said Mrs. Baines, with fierce solemnity. “Where have you been this afternoon?”
Sophia’s foot was restless on the carpet behind the table. “I haven’t been anywhere,” she murmured glumly.
“Have you seen young Scales?”
“Yes,” said Sophia with grimness, glancing audaciously for an instant at her mother. (“She can’t kill me: She can’t kill me,” her heart muttered. And she had youth and beauty in her favour, while her mother was only a fat middle-aged woman. “She can’t kill me,” said her heart, with the trembling, cruel insolence of the mirror-flattered child.)
“How came you to meet him?”
No answer.
“Sophia, you heard what I said!”
Still no answer. Sophia looked down at the table. (“She can’t kill me.”)
“If you are going to be sullen, I shall have to suppose the worst,” said Mrs. Baines.
Sophia kept her silence.
“Of course,” Mrs. Baines resumed, “if you choose to be wicked, neither your mother nor any one else can stop you. There are certain things I CAN do, and these I SHALL do . . . Let me warn you that young Scales is a thoroughly bad lot. I know all about him. He has been living a wild life abroad, and if it hadn’t been that his uncle is a partner in Birkinshaws, they would never have taken him on again.” A pause. “I hope that one day you will be a happy wife, but you are much too young yet to be meeting young men, and nothing would ever induce me to let you have anything to do with this Scales. I won’t have it. In future you are not to go out alone. You understand me?”
Sophia kept silence.
“I hope you will be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. I can only hope so. But if you aren’t, I shall take very severe measures. You think you can defy me. But you never were more mistaken in your life. I don’t want to see any more of you now. Go and tell Mr. Povey; and call Maggie for the fresh tea. You make me almost glad that your father died even as he did. He has, at any rate, been spared this.”
Those words ‘died even as he did’ achieved the intimidation of Sophia. They seemed to indicate that Mrs. Baines, though she had magnanimously never mentioned the subject to Sophia, knew exactly how the old man had died. Sophia escaped from the room in fear, cowed. Nevertheless, her thought was, “She hasn’t killed me. I made up my mind I wouldn’t talk, and I didn’t.”
In the evening, as she sat in the shop primly and sternly sewing at hats — while her mother wept in secret on the first floor, and Constance remained hidden on the second — Sophia lived over again the scene at the old shaft; but she lived it differently, admitting that she had been wrong, guessing by instinct that she had shown a foolish mistrust of love. As she sat in the shop, she adopted just the right attitude and said just the right things. Instead of being a silly baby she was an accomplished and dazzling woman, then. When customers came in, and the young lady assistants unobtrusively turned higher the central gas, according to the regime of the shop, it was really extraordinary that they could not read in the heart of the beautiful Miss Baines the words which blazed there; “YOU’RE THE FINEST GIRL I EVER MET,” and “I SHALL WRITE TO YOU.” The young lady assistants had their notions as to both Constance and Sophia, but the truth, at least as regarded Sophia, was beyond the flight of their imaginations. When eight o’clock struck and she gave the formal order for dust-sheets, the shop being empty, they never supposed that she was dreaming about posts and plotting how to get hold of the morning’s letters before Mr. Povey.
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