The Old Wives' Tale. Bennett Arnold
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figures. But she was unmistakably seen. She had been beyond the Square and was returning. Constance could scarcely believe her eyes. Mrs. Baines’s heart jumped. For let it be said that the girls never under any circumstances went forth without permission, and scarcely ever alone. That Sophia should be at large in the town, without leave, without notice, exactly as if she were her own mistress, was a proposition which a day earlier had been inconceivable. Yet there she was, and moving with a leisureliness that must be described as effrontery!
Red with apprehension, Constance wondered what would happen. Mrs. Baines said nought of her feelings, did not even indicate that she had seen the scandalous, the breath-taking sight. And they descended the Square laden with the lighter portions of what they had bought during an hour of buying. They went into the house by the King Street door; and the first thing they heard was the sound of the piano upstairs. Nothing happened. Mr. Povey had his dinner alone; then the table was laid for them, and the bell rung, and Sophia came insolently downstairs to join her mother and sister. And nothing happened. The dinner was silently eaten, and Constance having rendered thanks to God, Sophia rose abruptly to go.
“Sophia!”
“Yes, mother.”
“Constance, stay where you are,” said Mrs. Baines suddenly to Constance, who had meant to flee. Constance was therefore destined to be present at the happening, doubtless in order to emphasize its importance and seriousness.
“Sophia,” Mrs. Baines resumed to her younger daughter in an ominous voice. “No, please shut the door. There is no reason why everybody in the house should hear. Come right into the room—right in! That’s it. Now, what were you doing out in the town this morning?”
Sophia was fidgeting nervously with the edge of her little black apron, and worrying a seam of the carpet with her toes. She bent her head towards her left shoulder, at first smiling vaguely. She said nothing, but every limb, every glance, every curve, was speaking. Mrs. Baines sat firmly in her own rocking-chair, full of the sensation that she had Sophia, as it were, writhing on the end of a skewer. Constance was braced into a moveless anguish.
“I will have an answer,” pursued Mrs. Baines. “What were you doing out in the town this morning?”
“I just went out,” answered Sophia at length, still with eyes downcast, and in a rather simpering tone.
“Why did you go out? You said nothing to me about going out. I heard Constance ask you if you were coming with us to the market, and you said, very rudely, that you weren’t.”
“I didn’t say it rudely,” Sophia objected.
“Yes you did. And I’ll thank you not to answer back.”
“I didn’t mean to say it rudely, did I, Constance?” Sophia’s head turned sharply to her sister. Constance knew not where to look.
“Don’t answer back,” Mrs. Baines repeated sternly. “And don’t try to drag Constance into this, for I won’t have it.”
“Oh, of course Constance is always right!” observed Sophia, with an irony whose unparalleled impudence shook Mrs. Baines to her massive foundations.
“Do you want me to have to smack you, child?”
Her temper flashed out and you could see ringlets vibrating under the provocation of Sophia’s sauciness. Then Sophia’s lower lip began to fall and to bulge outwards, and all the muscles of her face seemed to slacken.
“You are a very naughty girl,” said Mrs. Baines, with restraint. (“I’ve got her,” said Mrs. Baines to herself. “I may just as well keep my temper.”)
And a sob broke out of Sophia. She was behaving like a little child. She bore no trace of the young maiden sedately crossing the Square without leave and without an escort.
(“I knew she was going to cry,” said Mrs. Baines, breathing relief.)
“I’m waiting,” said Mrs. Baines aloud.
A second sob. Mrs. Baines manufactured patience to meet the demand.
“You tell me not to answer back, and then you say you’re waiting,” Sophia blubbered thickly.
“What’s that you say? How can I tell what you say if you talk like that?” (But Mrs. Baines failed to hear out of discretion, which is better than valour.)
“It’s of no consequence,” Sophia blurted forth in a sob. She was weeping now, and tears were ricocheting off her lovely crimson cheeks on to the carpet; her whole body was trembling.
“Don’t be a great baby,” Mrs. Baines enjoined, with a touch of rough persuasiveness in her voice.
“It’s you who make me cry,” said Sophia, bitterly. “You make me cry and then you call me a great baby!” And sobs ran through her frame like waves one after another. She spoke so indistinctly that her mother now really had some difficulty in catching her words.
“Sophia,” said Mrs. Baines, with god-like calm, “it is not I who make you cry. It is your guilty conscience makes you cry. I have merely asked you a question, and I intend to have an answer.”
“I’ve told you.” Here Sophia checked the sobs with an immense effort.
“What have you told me?”
“I just went out.”
“I will have no trifling,” said Mrs. Baines. “What did you go out for, and without telling me? If you had told me afterwards, when I came in, of your own accord, it might have been different. But no, not a word! It is I who have to ask! Now, quick! I can’t wait any longer.”
(“I gave way over the castor-oil, my girl,” Mrs. Baines said in her own breast. “But not again! Not again!”)
“I don’t know,” Sophia murmured.
“What do you mean—you don’t know?”
The sobbing recommenced tempestuously. “I mean I don’t know. I just went out.” Her voice rose; it was noisy, but scarcely articulate. “What if I did go out?”
“Sophia, I am not going to be talked to like this. If you think because you’re leaving school you can do exactly as you like—”
“Do I want to leave school?” yelled Sophia, stamping. In a moment a hurricane of emotion overwhelmed her, as though that stamping of the foot had released the demons of the storm. Her face was transfigured by uncontrollable passion. “You all want to make me miserable!” she shrieked with terrible violence. “And now I can’t even go out! You are a horrid, cruel woman, and I hate you! And you can do what you like! Put me in prison if you like! I know you’d be glad if I was dead!”
She dashed from the room, banging the door with a shock that made the house rattle. And she had shouted so loud that she might have been heard in the shop, and even in the kitchen. It was a startling experience for Mrs. Baines. Mrs. Baines, why did you saddle yourself with a witness? Why did you so positively say that you intended to have an answer?
“Really,” she stammered, pulling her dignity about her shoulders like a garment that the wind has snatched off. “I never dreamed that poor girl had such a dreadful temper! What a pity it is, for her OWN sake!” It was the best she could do.
Constance, who could not bear to witness her mother’s humiliation, vanished very quietly from the room. She got halfway upstairs to the second floor, and then, hearing the loud, rapid, painful, regular intake of sobbing breaths, she hesitated and crept down again.
This was Mrs. Baines’s first costly experience of the child thankless for having been brought into the world. It robbed her of her profound, absolute belief in herself. She had thought she knew everything in her house and could do everything there. And lo! she had suddenly stumbled against an unsuspected personality at large in her house, a sort of hard marble affair that informed her by means of bumps that if she did not want to be hurt she must keep out of the