The Keys of the Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page B

were like his mother’s.
    ‘There’s a batch of cherry cakes I’ve just drawn. You can have one, if you’ve a mind to – on the oven rack.’
    At the senseless prodigality Mrs Glennie sniffed: casting his goods about like this had made him twice a bankrupt, a failure. Her head inclined in greater resignation.
    ‘When do you want to start? If we’re going now I’ll shut the shop.’
    He consulted his big silver watch with the yellow bone guard. ‘Ay, close up now, Mother, the Lord’s work comes first. And besides’ – sadly – ‘we’ll have no more customers tonight.’
    While she pulled down the blinds on the fly-blown pastries he stood, detached, considering his address for tonight. Then he stirred. ‘Come, Malcom!’ And to Francis: ‘Take care of yourself, grandson. Don’t be late out your bed!’
    Malcom, muttering beneath his breath, shut his book and picked up his hat. He sulkily followed his father out. Mrs Glennie, pulling on tight black kid gloves, assumed her martyred ‘meeting’ face. ‘Don’t forget the dishes, now.’ She threw a mean, sickly smile at Francis. ‘It’s a pity you’re not coming with us!’
    When they had gone he fought the inclination to lay his head upon the table. His new heroic resolution inflamed him, the thought of Willie Tulloch galvanised his tired limbs. Piling the greasy dishes into the scullery he began to wash them, rapidly probing his position, his brows tense, resentful.
    The blight of enforced benefactions had lain upon him since that moment, before the funeral, when Daniel had raptly told Polly Bannon: ‘I’ll take Elizabeth’s boy. We are his only blood relations. He must come to us!’
    Such rash benevolence alone would not have uprooted him. It took that later hateful scene when Mrs Glennie, grasping at the small estate, money from his father’s insurance and the sale of the furniture, had beaten down Polly’s offer of guardianship, with intimidating invocations of the law.
    This final acrimony had servered all contact with the Bannons – abruptly, painfully, as though he, indirectly, had been to blame: Polly, hurt and offended, yet with the air of having done her best, had undoubtedly erased him from her memory.
    On his arrival at the baker’s household, with all the attraction of a novelty, he was sent, a new satchel on his back, to the Darrow Academy: escorted by Malcom; straightened and brushed by Mrs Glennie, who watched the departing scholars from the shop door with a vague proprietary air.
    Alas! The philanthropic flush soon faded. Daniel Glennie was a saint, a gentle noble derided soul who passed out tracts of his own composition with his pies and every Saturday night paraded his van horse through the town with a big printed text on the beast’s rump: ‘ Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ But he lived in a heavenly dream, from which he periodically emerged, careworn, damp with sweat, to meet his creditors. Working unsparingly, with his head on Abraham’s bosom and his feet in a tub of dough, he could not but forget his grandson’s presence. When he remembered he would take the small boy by the hand to the back yard, with a bag of crumbs, to feed the sparrows.
    Mean, shiftless yet avaricious, viewing with a self-commiserating eye her husband’s progressive failure – the sacking of the van man, of the shopgirl, the closing of one oven after another, the gradual decline to a meagre output of twopenny pies and farthing pastries – Mrs Glennie soon discovered in Francis an insufferable incubus. The attraction of the sum of seventy pounds she had acquired with him quickly faded, seemed dearly bought. Already wrung by a desperate economy, to her the cost of his clothing, his food, his schooling became a perpetual Calvary. She counted his mouthfuls resignedly. When his trousers wore out she ‘made down’ an old green suit of Daniel’s, a relic of her husband’s youth, of such outlandish pattern and colour it provided derisive outcry in