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_ "You've been out, Sophia?" said Mrs. Baines in the parlour,
questioningly. Sophia had taken off her hat and mantle hurriedly
in the cutting-out room, for she was in danger of being late for
tea; but her hair and face showed traces of the March breeze. Mrs.
Baines, whose stoutness seemed to increase, sat in the rocking-
chair with a number of The Sunday at Home in her hand. Tea was
set.
"Yes, mother. I called to see Miss Chetwynd."
"I wish you'd tell me when you are going out."
"I looked all over for you before I started."
"No, you didn't, for I haven't stirred from this room since four
o'clock. ... You should not say things like that," Mrs. Baines
added in a gentler tone.
Mrs. Baines had suffered much that day. She knew that she was in
an irritable, nervous state, and therefore she said to herself, in
her quality of wise woman, "I must watch myself. I mustn't let
myself go." And she thought how reasonable she was. She did not
guess that all her gestures betrayed her; nor did it occur to her
that few things are more galling than the spectacle of a person,
actuated by lofty motives, obviously trying to be kind and patient
under what he considers to be extreme provocation.
Maggie blundered up the kitchen stairs with the teapot and hot
toast; and so Sophia had an excuse for silence. Sophia too had
suffered much, suffered excruciatingly; she carried at that moment
a whole tragedy in her young soul, unaccustomed to such burdens.
Her attitude towards her mother was half fearful and half defiant;
it might be summed up in the phrase which she had repeated again
and again under her breath on the way home, "Well, mother can't
kill me!"
Mrs. Baines put down the blue-covered magazine and twisted her
rocking-chair towards the table.
"You can pour out the tea," said Mrs. Baines.
"Where's Constance?"
"She's not very well. She's lying down."
"Anything the matter with her?"
"No."
This was inaccurate. Nearly everything was the matter with
Constance, who had never been less Constance than during that
afternoon. But Mrs. Baines had no intention of discussing
Constance's love-affairs with Sophia. The less said to Sophia
about love, the better! Sophia was excitable enough already!
They sat opposite to each other, on either side of the fire--the
monumental matron whose black bodice heavily overhung the table,
whose large rounded face was creased and wrinkled by what seemed
countless years of joy and disillusion; and the young, slim girl,
so fresh, so virginal, so ignorant, with all the pathos of an
unsuspecting victim about to be sacrificed to the minotaur of
Time! They both ate hot toast, with careless haste, in silence,
preoccupied, worried, and outwardly nonchalant.
"And what has Miss Chetwynd got to say?" Mrs. Baines inquired.
"She wasn't in."
Here was a blow for Mrs. Baines, whose suspicions about Sophia,
driven off by her certainties regarding Constance, suddenly sprang
forward in her mind, and prowled to and fro like a band of tigers.
Still, Mrs. Baines was determined to be calm and careful. "Oh!
What time did you call?"
"I don't know. About half-past four." Sophia finished her tea
quickly, and rose. "Shall I tell Mr. Povey he can come?"
(Mr. Povey had his tea after the ladies of the house.)
"Yes, if you will stay in the shop till I come. Light me the gas
before you go."
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 to-morrow. 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. _
Read next: BOOK I MRS. BAINES: CHAPTER VII - A DEFEAT: PART I
Read previous: BOOK I MRS. BAINES: CHAPTER VI - ESCAPADE: PART III
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