CHAPTER XVI

At the head of the table sat his mother; long, straight, and grave.  She was in the seat of authority, the one with its back to the windows and its face to the door, from whence she could see what everybody did, especially Amanda.  Having seen what Amanda did, she then complained to Edith.  She didn’t complain direct to Amanda, because Amanda could and did give notice.

Her eyes were fixed on the door.  Between it and her was the table, covered with admirable things to eat, it being supper and therefore, according to a Twist tradition surviving from penurious days, all the food, hot and cold, sweet and salt, being brought in together, and Amanda only attending when rung for.  Half-eaten oyster patties lay on Mrs. Twist’s plate.  In her glass neglected champagne had bubbled itself flat.  Her hand still held her fork, but loosely, as an object that had lost its interest, and her eyes and ears for the last five minutes had not departed from the door.

At first she had felt mere resigned annoyance that Amanda shouldn’t have answered the bell, but she didn’t wish to cast a shadow over Edward’s homecoming by drawing poor Edith’s attention before him to how very badly she trained the helps, and therefore she said nothing at the moment; then, when Edith, going in search of Amanda, had opened the door and let in sounds of argument, she was surprised, for she knew no one so intimately that they would be likely to call at such an hour; but when Edward too leapt up, and went out and stayed out and failed to answer her repeated calls, she was first astonished, then indignant, and then suddenly was overcome by a cold foreboding.

Mrs. Twist often had forebodings, and they were always cold.  They seized her with bleak fingers; and one of Edith’s chief functions was to comfort and reassure her for as long a while each time as was required to reach the stage of being able to shake them off.  Here was one, however, too icily convincing to be shaken off.  It fell upon her with the swiftness of a revelation.  Something unpleasant was going to happen to her; something perhaps worse than unpleasant,—­disastrous.  And something immediate.

Those excited voices out in the hall,—­they were young, surely, and they were feminine.  Also they sounded most intimate with Edward.  What had he been concealing from her?  What disgracefulness had penetrated through him, through the son the neighbourhood thought so much of, into her very home?  She was a widow.  He was her only son.  Impossible to believe he would betray so sacred a position, that he whom she had so lovingly and proudly welcomed a few hours before would allow his—­well, she really didn’t know what to call them, but anyhow female friends of whom she had been told nothing, to enter that place which to every decent human being is inviolable, his mother’s home.  Yet Mrs. Twist did instantly believe it.