He had a passion for music and played the
violin pretty well. But now he was getting old, he was very ill, dying of
a kidney disease. He had been rather a heavy whisky-drinker.
This quiet household, with one servant-maid, lived on year after year in
the Pottery House. Friends came in, the girls went out, the father drank
himself more and more ill. Outside in the street there was a continual
racket of the colliers and their dogs and children. But inside the
pottery wall was a deserted quiet.
In all this ointment there was one little fly. Ted Rockley, the father of
the girls, had had four daughters, and no son. As his girls grew, he felt
angry at finding himself always in a house-hold of women. He went off to
London and adopted a boy out of a Charity Institution. Emmie was fourteen
years old, and Matilda sixteen, when their father arrived home with his
prodigy, the boy of six, Hadrian.
Hadrian was just an ordinary boy from a Charity Home, with ordinary
brownish hair and ordinary bluish eyes and of ordinary rather cockney
speech. The Rockley girls--there were three at home at the time of his
arrival--had resented his being sprung on them. He, with his watchful,
charity-institution instinct, knew this at once. Though he was only six
years old, Hadrian had a subtle, jeering look on his face when he
regarded the three young women. They insisted he should address them as
Cousin: Cousin Flora, Cousin Matilda, Cousin Emmie.
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