It was only Deleah, devotedly loving her father, who perceived the real tragedy at the back of this neglect of personal and family obligations; only she who dimly understood that this disfiguring outward alteration was but the sign of an inner, more pitiful change; only she who had the insight to read in her father's savage ways the despair, the scorn of himself, the rage with destiny, the bitter enmity against a world in which he was no longer to exist. Only Deleah felt in her heart the sorrow of it all--Deleah who was a reader of Thackeray, of Trollope, of Dickens, of Tennyson; whose eyes had wept for imaginary woes before these bitter drops had been wrung from them for her own; who had learnt that tears were not the only signs of an anguished heart; and knew that the love of position, of home, of a fair name even were not the chief things for which they as a family should have mourned.
And so the slow weeks, even the slow months passed. The muddy, narrow pavements of Brockenham grew dry and dusty in the biting east winds. People at whom Mrs. Day and her daughters peeped through curtained windows walked by with snowdrops, with violets, and presently with cowslips in their hands. Spring, so slow in coming, yet so dreaded by them all, was coming at last. Easter was here. Easter too soon was here!--and the Easter Assizes.
On the evening before the morning on which his trial was to take place, a different creature seemed to be in the place lately occupied by William Day.
For one thing, his appearance was improved. A barber, sent for, that afternoon, had cut off the greasy, disguising locks of sand-coloured hair, and trimmed the wildly luxuriant beard which had given the man such a slovenly, unfamiliar appearance. His upper lip was once more shaved.
"I don't mind kissing you now, papa," Franky said, who had shirked saluting the stubbly face.
This improvement being completed, he made a change in his clothes, and at their tea-time appeared among them all in his black cloth, long-skirted coat, his "pepper and salt" trousers. As another outward sign of his moral degradation he had dispensed with linen at throat and wrists lately, but now his heavy chin sank once more into the enclosure of a collar whose stiffly starched points reached to the middle of his cheeks. The pin which adorned his thickly padded necktie was large in size, consisting of a gold-rimmed glass case in which was exhibited, braided and intertwined, hair cut from the heads of his four children. They had all of them clubbed together to prepare this offering for papa on last St. Valentine's Day.