BOOK V

THE COUNCILLOR

1

The morrow’s daylight brought emancipation from many fears. Alderman

Bankett in his bed of masonry, seemed--for the nonce--remote as the

moon. His memory might be evoked without a qualm. Yet logically, if

there be any intrinsic awfulness in the condition of death, the late

lamented alderman--being one whole day deader than before--should have

been four and twenty hours more terrible to all juvenile respecters of

his latest state. But the fears of youth are as illogical as the loves

of mothers and the arguments of men.

Meanwhile the solitaire--that had passed the night warmly in Beryl’s

purse, beneath her pillow--resumed its interest and importance. It was

disclosed to the next door neighbour as a personage of no small

erudition in local affairs, who tested its quality with her tongue, and

described the hall-mark “eighteen carat, marm. You may be sure it’s not

been bought for nothink. The pair would cost somebody close on five

pound.” With Mrs. Holmroyd’s assent she took the trophy round to sundry

neighbours likely, in her opinion, to cast light upon it--or at least to

share (and even amplify) her curiosity. But none was able to affix

ownership.

“What I should do, marm,” she confided to Mrs. Holmroyd in a voice

lowered to suggest discretion, which was her nearest attainment to the

exercise of this excellent quality. “I shouldn’t say nothink to nobody

of a while. As like as not there’ll be a reward offered if you keep

quiet a bit.”

From such a course of action Mrs. Holmroyd’s spirit recoiled. “Reward!”

she said, shocked the more because her children both stood by, and so

corruptive a sentiment must be repelled at once. “I would not think of

taking it, Mrs. Kenway. The stud does not belong to us. We could not

possibly accept money for a thing which is not ours.”

Her neighbour, scornful of such weak-spirited morality, expressed a very

different view upon the question.

“When a thing’s once lost,” she said, “it’s nobody’s, marm. Them that

finds has as good a right to it as them that loses. If they was to say

nothink, nobody would never be the wiser.” The solitaire, reclaimed by

Mrs. Holmroyd with a “Thank you” of quiet dignity that was a

rebuke,--all told,--circulated through the inquisitive fingers of her

scholars in turn, who subjected it to every test of curiosity, and were

not indisposed to constitute it their exclusive study for the morning;

but these combined efforts brought no enlightenment. The father of one

of them (it transpired) had a pair of studs like these--though not the

same--and larger. The uncle of another had a diamond pin. Somebody’s

sister owned a pearl necklet and had been to London by the Railway Trip

three years ago. The conversation, obviously developing into a concerted

movement against Time--whom it sought to outflank by every manœuvre

known to scholarship--was brought back firmly to its pot-hooks and slate

pencils. Discipline had been restored, and the academic stillness of the

room was broken only by the sniffs and scratches and laboured breathings

of preoccupation when suddenly all heads were startled by a dreadful

announcement.

“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd! Willie Johnson’s spitting on his slate and

rubbing it with his hand!”

The infant thus detected in this most repulsive of academic crimes,

secreted his slate instantly beneath a defensive fore-arm, and, showing

a face of incredible malevolence over his shoulder, cried:

“I aren’t then! You’re a storyer. I haven’t spit once this morning. I

haven’t spit since yesterday. It’s you that’s spitting.”

Mrs. Holmroyd, shaping a countenance of appropriate horror and distress

at these revolting revelations, said “Hush! Oh hush!” But before she had

time to address her scholars on the reprehensibility of the act alleged,

or expound to the full its pernicious influence on health and morals

when developed into a habit, a voice accompanying an outstretched finger

cried dramatically:

“Look, Mrs. Holmroyd! It’s the Bellman. He’s stopping. He’s going to

shout something.”

Even the culprit, moved by the announcement, struggled from his seat to

catch a glimpse of this far-famed official. The scholars rose as one to

gather round the window. Over the colliding heads of her academy Mrs.

Holmroyd peeped into the street below, where the portly functionary who

had paced at the rear of Alderman Bankett’s funeral yesterday was now to

be seen, looking first to this side and then to that, and taking stock

of all the windows, as a primo tenore rolls impressive eyes around the

tiers of breathless boxes before melting into an aria. He wore his

municipal silk hat bound with its silver braid, and his municipal blue

tail coat garnished with the bright electro-plated buttons, and the

municipal red and white striped waistcoat. But in addition he wore on

his right hand to-day a brazen gauntlet that turned out to be the bell

of office held by its clapper. This, first transferring to his left hand

and thence back again by way of the handle to his right, he swung with

solemn emphasis for the space of nearly a minute; at the end of which

time, stifling the bell’s vibrations in the folded hollow of his left

hand he threw up his head like a bull at feeding time and cried forth

his proclamation in the stentorian foggy voice for which he was

renowned, and by whose virtue and his impressive corporate ventrosity he

had prevailed over half a score of rivals in open competition before a

Sub-Committee of the Town Fathers in the Horse Green, where his masterly

manipulation of the bell, his side-whiskers and excellent demeanour

(even at the extreme range of two hundred yards) evoked favourable

comment from critics previously (and subsequently) fortified for their

exacting duties by recourse to the mayoral parlour.

He vocalized monotonously over two tones--these being, as Mr. Rencil

might have pointed out, the unaccentuated subdominant and accented

tonic--in much the same way that Oswald pointed the psalms. His vocal

organ was so resonant, and as he declaimed the words he so turned his

head and mouth towards the four quarters of the compass in rotation that

by far the larger part of what he uttered was lost to his hearers in the

schoolroom; who, truth to tell, were more active in imposing silence

than observing it. But it was agreed he had begun his proclamation with

the word “Lost,” and “Tuesday” had been mentioned, and an address in

Daneborough given, and some of the scholars vowed there was mention of a

Reward. None betrayed the least doubt as to the nature of the

publication. It concerned Oswald’s solitaire. The owner, alive to its

loss, was having it cried to the town. There was only one course to be

followed.

“Run, Oswald dear,” said his mother, “and ask the Crier who it is, and

where the stud is to be taken.” Adding in a commendatory undertone as he

moved to do her bidding: “Don’t forget to say Please and Thank you,

Oswald.”

Filled with importance to be the unquestionable discoverer of so

notable a solitaire, Oswald ran downstairs bareheaded and into the

roadway to the spot where the Bellman had been. But he was there no

longer. Actuated by conspicuous powers of locomotion he had travelled

already some distance up the street, and after a moment’s hesitation at

the sight of his objective so far remote--giving an uneasy glance at the

schoolroom window, that seemed alive with rapping knuckles and agitated

heads and hands--Oswald started in pursuit.

Now there is more difficulty in negotiating a Bellman--once he is in

motion--than the thoughtless deem. As Oswald pursued the retreating

shoulders he was dismayed to note how big and broad they grew, and how

much more bulk the functionary offered for respectful eyes to dwell on,

viewed from the roadway in the rear, than from the vantage of the

schoolroom window. Also, the blue of his official coat assumed a cut and

tincture too constabulary; and Oswald grew uncomfortably conscious of

the absence of his own hat. With a beseechful gaze, therefore, upon the

Bellman’s tail buttons, that stared back on their pursuer with the stony

disregard of eyes, Oswald kept up his pursuit at a dog-trot pace between

walking and running, nicely regulated by the Bellman’s own.

“He is sure to stop at the next corner,” Oswald assured himself. “I must

not lose sight of him.”

But the Bellman ignored the next corner as completely as if it had been

no corner at all, and passed on with a step betraying not the least

abatement. Nor was Oswald’s peace of mind improved by the fact that

other children, without the least official claim on the Bellman’s

attention, but stimulated by his own pursuit, joined in the chase, thus

compromising his mission with the vulgarest curiosity. Depressed by this

new company at his heels, it was not until Oswald had begun to lose both

ground and hope that the Crier stopped at last and smote the air with

his bell.

This time Oswald could better mark the notable effect produced by it.

Doors opened; curtains were pulled aside; heads in dustcaps issued from

upper windows; bare arms wrapped up in aprons multiplied at passage

ends. From everywhere and in no time an audience assembled to collect

the words expelled by the Bellman’s powerful lungs. And strangely

stirred, Oswald heard the message, spaced by stertorous breathing, that

the object of his long pursuit declaimed. It was as follows:--

LOST!

On TUESDAY afterNOON

Betwixt the MANSION HOUSE

St. SAVIOUR’S CHURCH

And CIMITERY

Or THEREABOUTS.

Between the HOWERS of ONE

And TWO THIRTY, p. m.

Part of a GOLD

SLEEVE STUD

Oo-HEVER shall FIND SAME

And will RETURN it

To number THIRTY

HUNMOUTH ROAD

Will be SUITABLY

Re-WARD-ed.

This proclamation ended, the Bellman reclaimed his bell once more from

its resting place in the cradle of his folded left arm and passed

quickly on to arouse the interest and stir the echoes of other corners.

The congregated women, reducing their circle now that the Bellman was no

longer constituted the attractive centre of it, prepared to discuss the

news at length.

“A gold stud,” said one.

“It’ll tek some finding, missus,” said another.

“A deal more finding than what it would if it’d been brass,” said a

third.

“They don’t name Reward,” said a fourth.

“They know better,” said the fifth.

Speculation was indulged in as to the identity of the advertiser and the

chances of the stud’s recovery, and the listening children were

stimulated to activity with reproaches on their indolence.

“Don’t stand staring there. Be off wi’ you. Use your eyes and look for

stud. You’ll let somebody else get it if you’re not sharp.”

Oswald, magnetized by the conversation, stood for some minutes a silent

auditor. At first a wondrous pride possessed him. He it was who had the

stud, whose vigilance discovered it. His eye, sharpened to a point of

supplication, almost besought these loquacious ladies to connect his

presence with the thing discussed and to interrogate him. But for all he

was by far the cleanest member of the company, they gave him no

attention; his presence passed without comment. Not until the children

were commanded to “be off and look for stud” did his pride undergo a

sudden transformation and turn to guilt and shame. He had forestalled

these children. The stud was his already that they were about to look

for. Their diligence must be in vain. O! how angry they would be with

him if they did but know. All longing to be questioned left him. He

stole away.

2

The bricks of the houses on the Hunmouth Road were redder than the

bricks of houses in other quarters of the town; for to this eastern side

of Daneborough, more than any other, the energies of the builder and

the ambitions of the prosperous were directed. As each aspiring

tradesman advanced in turn to a degree of prosperity that could

contemplate detachment from the business source of it, he turned his eye

towards the Hunmouth Road as inevitably as in decrepit age men give a

thought to Heaven, to which (indeed) this pious retirement on the

Hunmouth Road might be regarded as the first stage. Even the lamented

Alderman Bankett, albeit never to his latest breath employing fourpence

for any purpose that threepence ha’penny was competent to serve,

submitted to this custom, prompted by the laudable desire that his last

days might be spent in some spot nearer and more befitting his Maker

than the potato shop in Lower Tomb Street.

The house whose number had been proclaimed so lustily by the Town Crier

during the course of the morning was within but a few years of being as

ruddy as the ruddiest. It was a detached double-fronted villa

overlooking the extensive Town Acres, from which only the Hunmouth Road

divided it. Above one of its gables the slated roof gave birth to an

aborted turret, protected by a cast iron balustrade, on which the

individual fond of elevation and unsubject to vertigo might take the air

on all fours, or with the aid of binoculars and favoured by the weather,

obtain a view of the horses streaming across the Race Course on

Sellinger Day. Not that anybody ever did; this superb prospect remaining

the prerogative of brick-layers and an occasional plumber. On the

bevelled coping of the lower front wall immediately flanking the iron

gate, from which a painted palisading sprang, was carved in deep and

monumental letters the number that the Bellman had announced, whilst on

the coping at the opposite side of the gate, in the same deep and

chiselled lettering, were the words BRIAR DENE, offered evidently as a

picturesque alternative to visitors with no head for numbers. From the

gateway an asphalt path, cutting a curt lawn in two, led to the front

porch. Ferns in place of flowers spread their fronds at the foot of the

window bays, and wreathed a rockery outrivalling the turret in

pretentiousness--and even superseding the house itself in topographical

importance, being used by every postman, constable and errand boy as a

bearing in their negotiation of the district. For this rockery,

dissociating itself from glittering felspar and oyster shells with which

rockeries of the period usually ravished the eye of the beholder,

aspired to architectural heights by its incorporation of crocketed stone

finials and gargoyles and molten glass and twisted lead and bell-metal

from the ancient church of St. Gyles, that had been destroyed by the

fiery hand of God within the living memory of man. Elizabeth’s own eyes,

in fact, had seen the belfry fall, and her two hands were able to depict

its collapse with a graphic intensity that thrilled Oswald’s imagination

and lent an added terror to the dark. It is true that scarce a garden of

self-respect or consequence in Daneborough but was regaled with relics

from the same source; nevertheless, few offered them to the public eye

in such impressive form, and “Rockery House” was not less frequently an

appellation of the home of the solitaire than the name and number

incised upon its garden wall.

To this house, as shortly after midday as her scholastic labours

allowed, Mrs. Holmroyd made her way accompanied by both her children.

Beryl carried her hands in a little woolwork muff sedately borne before

her--not that the morning air was cold, or that her fingers felt the

need of such defence against the weather, but as an adjunct to

importance. Oswald, wearing his Sunday gloves and cap, guarded in his

pocket the momentous solitaire, wrapped in cotton wool and fine paper.

They had no knowledge of the famous Rockery to guide them, and relied

solely on the number retained by Oswald from the Crier’s proclamation;

but the numbers along the Hunmouth Road, intercepted by gardens and by

other roads leading out of it, multiplied so slowly that Mrs. Holmroyd

began to entertain a doubt of the accuracy of her son’s memory or

hearing--a doubt which, truth to tell, whilst denying, he more than

shared with her. When at last they reached the mystic Thirty it struck

their eyes with such a strangeness, and the gate and rockery and garden

seemed to bear so little relationship to solitaires that all of them

gazed in silence for a moment at this unconvincing goal of their

journey.

“ ... Are you _quite_ sure, Oswald?” Mrs. Holmroyd asked. He was. That

is to say he tried his very best to be. For other numbers had now begun

to press their claims unpleasantly upon him. Without further question

his mother pushed open the elaborately foliated gate, and solemnly they

walked in order up the asphalt path to the front door, whose upper

panels were resplendent with cut and coloured glass.

Succeeding a delay not without significance to one well versed in the

liturgy of housekeeping, the door was dubiously opened by a maid of

diminutive stature, occupied in pulling over a plump red wrist the

second of her sleeves. Being, doubtless, more accustomed to the call of

tramps and travellers at this hour of noon, her countenance expressed

amazement to find the step so liberally occupied, and she stared at the

visitors with as blank a look as if she had been asked a question in Old

Testament history. Nor was her perplexity lessened when Mrs. Holmroyd,

realizing her own ignorance of the family on which she called, sought on

this subject to be informed. After a facial struggle with an

intelligence so ill equipped for such a query that more than once it

seemed the maid was on the point of leaving her interlocutor in order to

refer the subject to higher authority indoors, she replied to Mrs.

Holmroyd’s question with the one word. “Burfords.” Burfords evidently

signifying the plural. Mrs. Holmroyd felt thereupon emboldened (and the

more so by reason of a now more noticeable smell of cookery) to enquire

if Mrs. Burford were at home.

“There isn’t a Mrs. Burford,” the maid said after a struggle. “She’s

dead.” The intelligence seemed tragic until, perhaps noting the shocked

adjustment of Mrs. Holmroyd’s face, she modified its abruptness by

saying: “She’s been dead a long while. She was dead when I came.”

“There’s Mr. Burford,” she vouchsafed helpfully, “if you mean _him_. But

he won’t be home while dinner.” She further added: “There’s Miss Burford

...” and having communicated the information was gathered up into

conflict with her own intelligence again. Indeed, all the while she held

the door she appeared to be tormented by some secret intuition to shut

it, and every time she spoke she seemed to lend ear to subtle

atmospheric disturbances behind her as if a will were active in the

ether whose messages she sought to pick up. In reply to Mrs. Holmroyd’s

enquiry whether Miss Burford were at liberty the maid’s face suffered a

spasm, accompanied by the words, “I’ll see.” For some moments her

actions maintained a conflict between closing and re-opening the door.

Finally she compromised the difficulty by leaving it ajar, and was

absent some considerable time--during which the smell of dinner grew

frenetic. When next the maid returned she said in a repressed voice

suitable to a house of mourning: “You’re to step inside.” She led the

way past a pretentious mahogany hall-stand, radiating branches like a

genealogical tree, from whose bristling pegs hung a couple of notably

large and masculine felt hats above a big bluff-handled masculine

umbrella that kept company with several substantial walking sticks, and

introduced Mrs. Holmroyd to a room on the right of the entrance hall,

saying in a voice now depressed to a whisper:

“You’re to take a seat.”

The room thus offered to the advancing visitors enhanced the funereal

atmosphere of their reception by the fact that its venetian blinds were

three parts drawn. Over the centre of the carpet a holland drugget had

been spread, whilst most of the chairs were similarly draped, and the

room was permeated with a fine haberdasher smell of stuffs and fabrics

not yet deprived of their pristine odours by too frequent usage. Barely,

however, had they time to seat themselves in accordance with the maid’s

instructions and take in the details of their surroundings before the

door was pushed open again, and the maid’s head reappeared to utter the

enquiry:

“Miss Burford asks what name please.”

She took the name dubiously, and the door--not closed immediately on her

retirement--was pulled mysteriously to, a few minutes later, by an

unseen hand. Mrs. Holmroyd fancied she heard the sound of acute whispers

and a furtive footstep on the stair, succeeded by muffled sounds above,

that might have been somebody making hasty journeys between a wardrobe

and a dressing table in some bedroom overhead. But she told herself she

was not paying attention to such things, being engaged in framing

suitable expressions of regret for having called (she was disposed to

fear) at a time so inconvenient; and composed her countenance to that

benignant look expectant of nothing, with which cultured callers sit in

wait.

Whilst she sat thus the door opened swiftly, all at once, without

warning, and a lady entered. In her hand she held a handkerchief whose

formal stiffness suggested it had but this moment been shaken out of

fold, which (on catching sight of Mrs. Holmroyd) she instantly applied

to her nose and inclined her head over it with an air of distance, as

if she bowed across a garden hedge. The salmon-tinted flesh upon her

face and neck reflected cookery; her hair, drawn tightly from her brow

and held in the grasp of a hard chignon behind the head, was sternly

practical, suggesting that its owner viewed hair less as an object of

adornment than of repression. How old she was seemed (in her particular

respect) a question without relevance. Probably she had never been

young. Her face was featureless; the dark broad eyebrows were its

strongest though not perhaps its pleasantest character, beneath which

the brown eyes moved with the restless activity of the

hyperconscientious housekeeper. Almost their first act, after admitting

Mrs. Holmroyd and her children into their brief area of recognition, was

to make a rapid survey of the room, as if in search of domestic

shortcomings.

“Well! I declare! Excuse me....” Without allowing Mrs. Holmroyd to

explain the object of her visit she passed to the window and drew up the

venetian blinds, with a minute eye on the carpet to regulate the light

admitted by what its susceptible colours could with safety bear,

smoothing the curtains at the same time with rapid touches of imperfect

satisfaction as if her fingers burned to do their work more thoroughly

than the constraint of visitors allowed. “Whatever is the girl thinking

of! To leave visitors sitting in the dark.” She begged Mrs. Holmroyd to

pardon the untidiness of the room into which she had been shown, and the

disgraceful state in which she found everything. “I must ask you to

excuse us, please. My maid is new. Well ... _new!_ I have had her three

weeks. But she is no better now than when she came. She seems to have no

idea. This room ought to have been thoroughly turned out yesterday. It

was my day for it. But of course ... in view of the funeral....” She

looked at Mrs. Holmroyd, who expressed her sympathetic understanding of

the situation. “ ... The room had to be left. I really don’t know

whenever we shall get straight with the house again.”

She smoothed the holland covering of the sofa and seated herself out of

politeness to her visitor, with more concern for the cushions than if

they had been human feelings. But it was plain to see this act of

sitting was a mockery, imposing only an irksome restraint upon a nature

so practical and energetic. Her interest, distracted between the

exigencies of politeness and the concerns of housekeeping, came to an

abrupt standstill at mention of the solitaire, which, Mrs. Holmroyd

said: “I understand you to have lost, Miss Burford.” Miss Burford

disclaimed ownership in so far as herself was concerned with an asperity

that seemed to defend her commonsense against the charge of being

responsible for such a loss, saying she knew and had prophesied how it

would be.

The solitaire, it seemed, belonged to her father--“Councillor Burford,”

she explained, adding the civic title for Mrs. Holmroyd’s enlightenment

and her own gratification, and stanching pride with her pocket

handkerchief that the information might have a moment’s grace in which

to sink into her visitor’s intelligence. Only the previous Sunday, it

transpired, the solitaire had been found on the dining-room carpet by

the maid. “And as I told my father: if it could be dropped on the carpet

in the dining-room, it could be dropped anywhere. He has,” she added,

with a bridling of satisfaction, “a second pair for business. Why

couldn’t he have worn those! They are quite good ones. To be sure,

Alderman Bankett was an old friend. We have known him a number of

years.” Having thus demonstrated the superiority of her feminine

intelligence at the expense of her parent, she broke off to enquire: “Do

you say the stud has been found?” Mrs. Holmroyd said, “I think my little

boy has had the pleasure of finding Mr. Burford’s stud. I hope it may

be so.--Oswald!”

Thus prompted, Oswald rose mutely from the chair edge on which he had

reseated himself after Miss Burford’s entrance, and timidly produced the

box containing his discovery. Taking the proffered box with more anxiety

than thankfulness, Miss Burford undid the careful wrappings in which the

treasure was preserved. Her fingers, strong and resolutely active,

seemed perfect instruments of precision. Before the stud was half

unclad, her face, darkened during the early operations, lit up with a

gleam of certainty. Yes. She was sure. She could tell. She extracted the

trophy with the triumph of a dentist for a tooth. It was her father’s

stud.

Gratification at its recovery came only second (one could see) to that

for the victory won by wisdom. With this damning piece of evidence she

would be able in due course to confront parental folly and justify all

her prophetic asperities. But the look of righteous triumph gave way to

a startling change of expression induced (as it appeared) by some

disturbance that her microphonic hearing recorded in a remote part of

the house. She elevated the stud with a dramatic gesture, imposing

silence.

“There! Did you hear that? What _is_ she up to? I _told_ her.

Particularly. Excuse me, please. One moment.” Laying the stud

incontinently on the sofa, she passed swiftly out of the room. After a

brief absence Miss Burford returned with the same swiftness that had

borne her away; her mouth distorted by what Oswald at first mistook for

a smile, but which at close quarters showed itself to be something

infinitely more complex and superior; being, in fact, the ineffable

expression which confirms, on the part of prophetic wisdom, the

realization of its worst fears. Miss Burford’s ear had not deceived her.

She had known. She had expected it. One of her large, last new dinner

plates. No thanks to the maid it had not been the meat dish. And she

had expressly _told_ the girl. Her very last words before coming into

the room had been: “Don’t go and break anything whilst I’m gone.”

With an uncomfortable sense of being, indirectly, responsible for this

catastrophe, Mrs. Holmroyd expressed her deep regret, coupled with

renewed apologies for having disturbed Miss Burford at so inopportune a

time; which, she explained, was in her own case less of choice than of

necessity. Accused by the delicate politeness of Mrs. Holmroyd’s voice

and the ladylike grace with which she now prepared to take her leave,

Miss Burford summoned all her forces of gentility. Her visitor must

please excuse a state of things for which her kindness was not at all to

blame.

“I am afraid I have not even thanked you for your trouble,” she said,

and asked a number of questions with regard to the finding of the

solitaire. After Mrs. Holmroyd, with an occasional reference to Oswald,

had told her, “I believe ...” Miss Burford said, assuming a perceptible

control over the edges of her mouth, “I am not _quite_ sure. I rather

fancy Mr. Burford entertained some thought ... of offering a slight

reward. I don’t know whether he has done so. Half a crown, I think, was

in his mind. Not more.”

Parrying the suggestion with evasive eyes and a quickening of the voice,

Mrs. Holmroyd begged Miss Burford not to mention it. “You are very

kind.... But it is _quite_ unnecessary.”

Miss Burford’s mouth, pursed until then, appeared to derive confidence

from her visitor’s polite refusal, and regained a measure of its

arrested volubility.

“Some small acknowledgment,” she pleaded. “I feel sure Mr. Burford....

But of course. If you would _rather_. Still ... after all your little

boy’s trouble. Perhaps you would allow me to give him at least ... a

shilling?”

The little boy in question, being brought by these words directly under

the influence of the heavy brows, dropped his eyes and relapsed

discreetly into the arms of Providence. For, gentleman though he was;

gentleman though he always strove to be, his heart beat in a cage of

mortal clay. The reward had dwindled from half a crown to a single

shilling. Did this sweeping reduction constitute so great a change in

the intrinsic nature of the sum as now to reconcile it with gentility?

It did not. His mother’s voice deprived the visionary coin of its last

value. One shilling melted, like the substance of life itself, to

nothing; a dead hope diffusing a sad autumnal odour; a memory to be

trodden underfoot like the beech leaves in the Burford garden. All that

was offered to him was a hard, dry hand that he moved mechanically up

and down like a pump handle and relinquished. As they passed into the

tepid outer sunlight and paid Miss Burford the final courtesies of

leave-taking, she said to Mrs. Holmroyd, “Pardon me.... I’m afraid I’ve

forgotten what name you gave. It was on my tongue when I came into the

room. Not Hanson? To be sure! Holmroyd! What was I thinking of!--You

don’t happen to know of a good servant, do you, Mrs. Holmroyd?” Mrs.

Holmroyd, to her great regret, did not. With a few more words of thanks

and superficial tributes to the mildness of the weather, they parted.

Mrs. Holmroyd, shepherding her children in front of her, moved towards

the garden gate. Miss Burford holding the door open no longer than

sufficed to show her the visitors’ backs, closed it with an alacrity and

silence almost sinister, and betook herself to the room just vacated at

such a rate as to reach its window before the gate had closed upon them;

from which point of vantage she subjected their persons to the dark and

searching scrutiny that in their presence politeness had denied her.

Nor did she relax the tightened guiders of her neck until they were no

longer visible, when she instantly let down the blinds and went in turn

to the seats her visitors had sat on; effacing the impress of their

bodies from the holland covers with a critical hand, and even stooping

to investigate the places where their feet had been. After which, and

many touches of adjustment to the furniture--so minute as to produce no

effect perceptible to any eye but hers, she left the room with an

expression of disgust and proceeded to seek an outlet for her

indignation in the kitchen.

Meanwhile Mrs. Holmroyd and her children walked back towards the town.

They had but shortly left the Rockery House behind them, and were indeed

still contained in the retrospective silence of their thoughts, when

they encountered two substantial men--City Fathers, one might have

guessed them at a glance--walking corporately abreast. The outer of

these two, who stepped momentarily off the kerb to offer Mrs. Holmroyd

better passage, having noted already the house they came from, bestowed

a keen glance of enquiry on them as they went by. A few moments later,

Oswald (stealing a backward look at these two figures that were so

reminiscent of yesterday) was much stirred by the fact that they were

come to a standstill before the very gate his own hand had just now

punctiliously closed, and he imparted the intelligence to his mother in

an excited undertone. Beryl spun round on her muff at once, and was not

less agitated with what she saw, exclaiming: “Mother, see! They’re both

looking after us.” Mrs. Holmroyd, walking with her head more consciously

erect, and a higher colour in her cheek, reproached her children gently

for the impropriety of an act whose tragic effect on Lot’s wife should

furnish a lesson for all time.

Within, her pride reiterated: “A Shilling!”

“ ... Perhaps you would allow me to give him at least ... a shilling.”

3

That same afternoon, shortly after the little school had resumed its

studies, there came a knock at Mrs. Holmroyd’s street door. All the

scholars looked up with one accord to cry in chorus: “Please, Mrs.

Holmroyd, there’s a knock at the door.” In which way they recited most

of the happenings in the house and neighbourhood. “Please, Mrs.

Holmroyd, somebody’s just put something through the letter-box.”

“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, the rag and bone man’s going by.” “Please, Mrs.

Holmroyd, there’s a milk cart.” From time to time, too, it was the

custom of their friends and relations to call during the course of

study, to ask if one or other of the students might be liberated to pay

some visit or to take a walk. A knock at the door, therefore, was always

pregnant with possibilities and very welcome, and Mrs. Holmroyd had

never any lack of volunteers to answer the summons on such occasions.

This afternoon she turned her eye on Oswald, who rose obedient to the

silent bidding and went downstairs. Filled with speculation, he opened

the front door. No daylight came in with it. A wall of darkness seemed

to seal the door-frame up and block his outlook to the street beyond. He

found himself beneath the shadow of a human shape which appeared to be

standing with its back towards the door, and as though made conscious of

its opening by the inward suction of air, turned round to proclaim

itself no less a personage than the gentleman who had moved off the

causeway this morning, and whom Oswald had seen (on looking back) with

his hand upon the gate of Briar Dene.

At close quarters, measured against a doorway that gave passage to

Oswald’s person with such liberal space to spare, he seemed enormously

enlarged. Across his waistcoat there swung a heavy chain of gold on a

level with Oswald’s forehead, revealed to view by the fact that both his

coat and overcoat were worn unbuttoned. He had a close-cropped

square-cut beard in which black hairs and grey contested on equal terms;

and his eyebrows, in which black still predominated, bore a striking

resemblance to those before which Oswald had lowered his gaze in the

holland-draped drawing-room this morning. “Now, my lad!” he addressed

Oswald, “Does Mrs. Holmroyd live here?” The voice though blunt and

businesslike was not unkindly. It dispensed unceremoniously with the

letter H in both “Holmroyd” and “here,” and yet seemed not altogether

devoid of a sort of authoritative substitute for the aspirate; a sort of

assumptive H in the speaker’s eye and bearing; as if his dignity could

not descend to humour the whims of words, which, for his usage must be

broad and free of finery, built for solid wear and tear like the boots

he stood in.

Oswald said politely that this was the house where Mrs. Holmroyd lived.

“Tell her,” the figure instructed him, “Councillor Burford would like a

word with her.”

Thereupon, by rights, Oswald should have invited the owner of the name

in a clear voice to enter, but whilst being perfectly lucid as to this

part of his duty he felt the most inexpressible helplessness for the

performance of it, being temporarily under the influence of the conduct

of Councillor Burford’s own maidservant in a similar predicament this

morning. Hardly knowing what precise step might now be expected of him

he therefore opened the door to its widest extent, and flattening

himself against the passage wall, by this means and a timid

supplication of eye besought the Councillor to enter--which the

Councillor did forthwith in a very deliberate and impressive manner,

filling the passage so completely that Oswald had for safety to turn his

nose sideways as the visitor brushed by. Nor could he, pinned against

the wall by the Councillor’s broad shoulders, extricate himself from

this painful position in order to close the door, for the Councillor,

taking stock of his new surroundings with the critical absorption

particular to a man of property, appeared to be oblivious of Oswald and

the obstruction his own figure caused. Nothing, Oswald knew, constituted

a grosser breach of politeness than to force one’s way past stationary

individuals, but the situation was rapidly becoming desperate, and at

last he was left with no alternative but to dive below the spreading

skirts of the overcoat, whence he emerged palpitating on the farther

side. Arrived there, it had been his purpose to throw open the parlour

door, but a simultaneous movement of the Councillor served to block this

avenue in turn, and Oswald solved a difficulty now become insuperable by

running upstairs.

“ ... Councillor Burford, mother.”

She assumed appropriate surprise. “Councillor Burford, Oswald? Are you

sure?” Yes. He was sure. So sure, indeed, that his head turned

uncontrollably towards the landing, expectant every moment of a heavy

tread. The look betrayed him to his mother, whom it prompted anxiously

to ask: “Where is Councillor Burford, Oswald?”--and reading the truth

from the open page of her son’s silence: “You’ve never left him standing

in the passage, dear? O, go down at once, Oswald, and show him into the

room.” Nevertheless her movements were so swift--or perhaps Oswald’s

descending footsteps lagged a little--that she greeted her visitor in

the passage before he had disappeared through the parlour door which

Oswald held open for him. The Councillor still wore his square felt

hat, as if imbued with the opinion that a passage entrance constituted

no integral part of a house, and that to uncover the head in such a

neutral space was a foolish waste of politeness; but he doffed it the

moment Mrs. Holmroyd came down the stairs, saying “Good afternoon,

ma’am,” in a voice that Oswald envied. “I’ve not called to intrude upon

your time, ma’am,” he said. “But from what my daughter tells me I

believe it’s you I’ve got to thank for bringing back that stud, and I

felt I must just look round on my way to business to let you know I’m

very much obliged. I rather fancy I met you as you was coming away from

my house this morning, but of course I hadn’t the pleasure of knowing

who you was, at the time.”

He broke the laws of grammar with the same resolute authoritative air

with which he disregarded aspirates, yet the sound of the fault was less

flagrant than any attempt at its written representation may convey. A

character of rugged confidence in himself condoned to some extent his

misuse of the mother-tongue, which he ordered with the brusque assurance

of one used to be obeyed, and without compromise treated language as his

servant and not his master.

“Of course ... you’d know I’d offered a reward,” he told Mrs. Holmroyd.

“Five shillings was the sum I’d fixed in my mind. But my daughter tells

me she couldn’t prevail on you to accept nothing.” He paused there as

though to offer Mrs. Holmroyd an opening for any change of mind upon the

subject, and reading unaltered resolution on her lips passed on: “So

there’s no more to be said. Except that I’m very much obliged to you,

ma’am. Very much obliged, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Holmroyd expressed herself obliged in turn for the Councillor’s

visit, modestly renouncing at the same time all credit for the stud’s

recovery in favour of her son, upon whom the Councillor turned an eye

intended to be encouraging, but which, dissociated from any smile that

Oswald could discover, proved a heavier and more embarrassing burden

than his own eye could support without flinching; more especially as,

after a period of silent inspection, the Councillor apostrophized him

“Young man” with the enquiry, What school he went to?

The question involved some difficulty. Strictly speaking, Oswald went to

no school--as himself was painfully aware; being already arrived at the

outer fringe of that inward state of mind which shirks admission of the

shameful fact of being educated at home in conjunction with a younger

sister and infants of both sexes. All his schooling pertained to the

future. He looked beseechingly at his mother for guidance in perplexity.

“ ... Just at present,” Mrs. Holmroyd interposed, and never was the

sound of clarid water more welcome to thirsty soul than the gracious

clearness of her voice to Oswald, “he does not go to any school.”

Perhaps she felt as Oswald did the nakedness of the fact exposed thus

feebly to the scrutiny of the dark brows bent upon it, for she threw

over its frail limbs the phrase: “He is rather delicate.” It was a

phrase Oswald had heard before, and in the same conjunction, that served

as a sort of swaddling-cloth to truth. He stole a glance beneath his

lashes at the dark Councillor to see what effect the statement made upon

him; and, not without a certain pride to be possessed of such

indifferent health, assumed a posture of delicacy in keeping with it.

“He is only twelve,” he heard his mother say. “For the present I am

educating him at home ... where,” she forced her lips to add, “I have a

small school of my own. It is chiefly intended for delicate children who

need rather more care and consideration than could be given them

elsewhere.” The Councillor contributed a terse “Indeed!” in a voice

that seemed to own small sympathy with the needs of sickly childhood.

Oswald, still bearing the burden of the visitor’s regard, had an

uncomfortable belief that it lay on him with a degree of disapproval

only short of anger. At least the dark grey beard baffled him, giving

access to no human expression that Oswald’s eyes could decipher in the

rapid reference made to it. He therefore strove to reach the visitor’s

softer feelings by a demeanour of sadness.

“Later on ...” Oswald was relieved to hear his mother say, “he will (of

course) go to the Grammar School.” There was an air of fine

conclusiveness about the statement, and particularly about the

interpolated “of course” that surprised even Oswald. Never had he heard

his mother allude to his scholastic future in such emphatic terms. It

was true, then! Perhaps he would be going next term. There seemed

something so masculine and vigourous about the thought of going to the

Grammar School that delicacy seemed altogether incompatible with it.

Whereupon he threw aside his facial sadness and the wasted attitude

symbolic of weak health and assumed a convalescent, more heroic, mien

which (surely) could not fail to commend itself to a spectator of such

powerful discernment. But the Councillor only said “Indeed!” once more.

“What’s he going to make, ma’am?” he asked--a question so irrelevant and

difficult to answer that Oswald could but repeat it to himself with

silent lips, keeping a sharp eye on his mother’s face.

“It is rather early to think about that just yet,” Mrs. Holmroyd

remarked with indulgence.

“Not too early, if he means to make a good start, ma’am,” the Councillor

declared. “They can’t begin too young. That’s my opinion, and I begun

young myself--so I know. Make up your mind as soon as possible, m’lad,”

he said, addressing Oswald, “and then stick to it. No chopping and

changing. It’s the only way.”

The counsel was intended, doubtless, to display interest and good-will,

and to bestow upon the finder of the solitaire, in lieu of silver, some

solid piece of golden wisdom from one whose office lent a special weight

and value to what he uttered. But the words tapped Mrs. Holmroyd’s

conscience accusingly. They shocked her heart with a sudden alarm as

though her son’s life had been threatened by a passing cab.

“He sings in the choir at St. Saviour’s,” she made haste to say

defensively. “He is a voluntary member. And he helps me at home, too,”

she added, feeling that the earlier testimonial found less favour in the

Councillor’s eyes than she had hoped. “He is most useful to me.”

Oswald’s pride, stirred not less by this tribute to his usefulness,

overwelled the lips of silence all at once and became speech.

“I go errands on Friday,” he said, “and on Saturday as well.” He shaped

the words shyly, offering the information not to Councillor Burford,

whom he lacked courage directly to address, but (though not looking at

her) to his mother. “With the basket.”

“Errands, do you?” said the Councillor, his interest at once excited by

this practical and familiar word. “What sort of errands? Who for?”

“Only for me,” Mrs. Holmroyd answered quickly, with a flush that seemed

to wish to interpose itself between the present conversation and some

topic feared. But the fatal word “pork-pie” had already escaped from

Oswald’s custody, and the Councillor’s gaze, directed on her across the

upturned brim of his extended hat, seemed to demand an explanation. She

gave it hurriedly, her words stumbling somewhat in the act. “I do not

bake many. Only a few ... for those who, who care for home-made pies.”

“Pork-pies!” said the Councillor, tersely, but with interest. “What’s

the price of ’em?”

Of all questions it was the one she dreaded most.

“It depends,” she said evasively, “ ... upon the size. I make them in

several sizes. Some of my--” “customers” she could not bring her lips to

call them; “clients” was no woman’s word; “acquaintances” made the

commerce too promiscuous; “friends,” in this delicate connotation,

seemed the only title left to her. “Some of my friends prefer a large

pie, and some a small.”

“What’s the price of your small?” her visitor demanded.

She took a breath and murmured: “Eighteen pence.” Her eyelids flickered.

She hated prices more than pies. She could give; she found it hard to

take. To pay was gracious; to be paid, shameful.

“Eighteen pence,” repeated her visitor. He uttered the price so openly,

and with so little recognition of its shameful inner meaning, that her

heart took courage. And to this stolid Councillor figures were the

fundamental facts of life; the principle underlying all reality. He saw

no shame in them; they formed the basis of existence. They were, for

him, the test of character; the very making of a man. And if Mrs.

Holmroyd blushed--as blush she did--to breathe her eighteen pence, the

blush was wasted. Eighteen pence, the Councillor’s face appeared to

testify, was a very respectable, substantial, well-established figure; a

sum not to be despised or treated lightly even by a prosperous member of

the Daneborough Town Council. “Eighteen pence,” said he again, as if

this were a financial matter calling for deliberation. Mrs. Holmroyd’s

chief fear was that he would straightway place an order for a pie. Not

because his appetite persuaded, but because she had been good enough to

decline his proffered reward. But in this, too, her irresponsible finer

feelings played her false. For, having said “Ah!” and “Indeed!” with

great spaciousness, the Councillor directed his attention suddenly

towards his hat, as if it had spoken to him, and said: “But I mustn’t

detain you any longer, ma’am. You’ve your business to think of, and so

have I.” With which, wishing Mrs. Holmroyd good-afternoon, and thanking

her again (ma’am) he turned to go. Mrs. Holmroyd prompted her son:

“Oswald, dear ...” and Oswald, quitting the company of the chair his

politeness had brought forward for the Councillor’s reception, hastened

to reach the front door in advance of the departing figure. But the

broad shoulders and spreading overcoat effectually filled the passage,

to the obstruction of all politeness; and their visitor let himself out

without any rearward look. That he was not unaware of Oswald’s activity

in the back-draught of his ample skirts seemed indicated by the fact

that he left the door open behind him as though for this ensuing hand to

close, and betook himself gravely down the street.

4

On Friday, Councillor Burford called again. He did not present himself

as before, during academic hours, but on his way home to tea, which with

him, as with most of the City Fathers, was a substantial repast exhaling

the odours of hot meats. The little Spring Bank household was already

seated at its modest meal. The scholars were dispersed for the week-end;

the schoolroom was a place of echoes only, whispering round a defunct

fire in a shrinking grate. But the sitting-room beneath, despite the

patent scantiness of furniture, diffused a homely comfort; its walls and

ceiling reciprocating the flickers of a cheerful fire, small, but ruddy

red and stout of heart, that put out tongues of flame and piped, from

time to time, exuberant music through the bars on flageolets of smoke.

The solemn footsteps arrested at the street door caused the little

family to suspend its eating and seek each other’s eyes. Beryl cried:

“Who’s that!” Oswald stared mutely over his teacup. Mrs. Holmroyd said:

“I can’t think who it will be ... at this time. It is too early for the

post.” But she knew it was Councillor Burford. She laid a restraining

hand on Beryl’s wrist, already making preparations for a descent from

her high chair. “Oswald will go, dear.” She lit another gas.

“Now m’lad.”

Yes. It was Councillor Burford’s voice that echoed in the narrow

passage. Intuition had not deceived her.

“Is your mother at home?” Oswald’s answer was not audible, but they

heard a leisurely foot introduced into the passage, and straightway the

passage seemed to be choked with a gigantic presence rubbing both its

walls. Mrs. Holmroyd hastily set down her teacup, half turning to the

door. For Oswald had left this open, and the visitor, catching her eye

over the descending teacup, drew back with apologies.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. Your son didn’t tell me you was at tea.”

Mrs. Holmroyd assured him that no apology was necessary, their tea being

nearly over--a statement that caused Beryl’s eyes to make a startled

tour of plates and dishes.

“Please come in, Mr. Burford, and excuse the tea-table. This is our only

room.”

“I aren’t going to disturb you,” said the Councillor, removing his hat,

which he appeared to have the habit of retaining until the last possible

moment. “I’m just on my way home to tea myself.” And saying this, as if

it implied a resolution to advance no further, he stepped across the

threshold and moved to the fireplace, where, planted firmly with his

broad back towards its blaze, and the square felt hat held out brim

uppermost in his large hand, he took a comprehensive survey of the

accessories of Mrs. Holmroyd’s table; the teapot, the hot water jug, the

jar of home-made jam, the sweet cake, the bread and butter and toast.

The regard was leisurely and undisguised, and yet (to do it justice) it

lacked all quality of rudeness. On the contrary, this overt look, which

no more respected the finnicking conventions of politeness than his lips

flattered language, or his dress paid toll to the follies of fashion,

possessed a character of reassurance, as though his eyes were not

displeased with what they saw. Indeed, one object on the table so far

attracted his admiration as to cause him to indicate it by means of a

movement of his hat.

“That’s a nice cream jug you’ve got there, ma’am.”

Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes fell upon it, and a flush (born not of

gratification alone) crept into her face.

“It belonged to my grandmother, Mr. Burford,” she said. She did not add

that it had belonged to someone else, less connected with the family,

since then, but the doleful thought was in her mind, and under pretext

of touching the admired object with a soft, appreciative finger, she

evaded the visitor’s glance. For there was something in the weight of it

disconcerting to sensitive memories. But the remark, surely, had been no

more than a coincidence.

“Do you use it every day then, ma’am?” the Councillor enquired.

She answered “Yes.... At least, nearly every day,” for Beryl was looking

at her now, and eyes of innocence shine with such insufferable wisdom at

times. “It makes a pleasant change.”

The Councillor remarked, “Indeed!” In its dryness and angularity the

word seemed curiously reminiscent of the figure of his daughter, who, as

if evoked by it, rose up ghostly between them. Mrs. Holmroyd understood

the significance of the comment. It implied that no such piece of silver

would be degraded into common service on Miss Burford’s table. But

whether she stood rebuked or favoured by the comparison nothing in the

Councillor’s face betrayed. He left the topic as abruptly as he had

approached it, and his next words showed him to be far away in thought.

“About those pies, ma’am. Did I understand you to say you was baking on

Fridays?”

A slight flush rose to Mrs. Holmroyd’s face as she acknowledged the task

and day.

“I thought I hadn’t been mistook,” said the Councillor. “I’ve been

talking it over with my daughter, and we’ve decided to give your pies a

trial. We’ll begin with a small one, to see how we like it. If that’s

satisfactory perhaps some time we’ll try another.”

There was a cautiousness about the order, intensified by its association

with Miss Burford--as if this hard-faced lady had been a witness of Mrs.

Holmroyd’s discomfiture--that stung her pride. But the offence

chargeable in the Councillor’s words seemed to infect his answer not at

all. He faced her with the straightforward mien of one neither intending

nor suspecting offence.

“Eighteen pence I think you said it was, ma’am,” the Councillor

remarked, and thrust a large hand into his trousers’ pocket, where some

loose coinage disturbed by its intrusion made a painful jingle.

“O, please do not trouble about that, Mr. Burford,” she protested,

“anytime will do. In fact, I would prefer....” What precisely she would

prefer remained unspoken. But the large hand groping in the spacious

pocket ceased its activities at once, as if (to be sure) Mrs. Holmroyd’s

suggestion were a wise one.

“Just as you like ma’am,” the Councillor obliged her. “You can have the

money now, or you can have it later. Why, as far as that goes,” he

reflected, “perhaps, if you’re agreeable, we might work it off by

contra. It’ll be as good a way as any. You’ll be wanting groceries, I

suppose. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice, sago, baking powder,”--he ran through

a glib list of domestic necessaries, including some prime Wiltshire and

several recommendable sorts of cheese. “I only keep the very best,

ma’am. It pays me, and it pays my customers best in the long run. I

don’t think I’ve been favoured with any of your custom up to the

present, but I shall always be happy to serve you. Or anybody. For

choice and quality I’ve a business that takes second place to none in

Daneborough.”

Mrs. Holmroyd betrayed a soft confusion in acknowledgment of her neglect

of the Councillor’s business. It was true she had had no dealings with

him up to the present. But she excused this apparent discourtesy by

alleging the smallness of her needs.

“That may be,” said the Councillor, obviously determined to see in their

smallness no bar to custom, “ ... but they mount up. Business is

business, and there’s no call for you to buy a pennorth more of me than

you want, just because I’ve a bigger stock to pick from. I’m ready to

supply the big orders, and I’m ready to supply the small. There’s no

difference in the quality whether you want much or little. If you’re

satisfied where you are, ma’am,” the Councillor said with a fine display

of magnanimity, “why! stay where you are. I don’t want to interfere with

nobody else’s trade.” Mrs. Holmroyd breathed her appreciation of this

laudable sentiment.

“But if,” he added, with a more decisive tone, as though perhaps afraid

his recent toleration might be misinterpreted, “you think there’s

anything in the grocery line could be improved on, why! I shall be glad

to see you, ma’am. There’s not many customers comes to me once but what

they come again. I aren’t in the habit of losing them.”

The matter was agreed. On the basis of a contra account established by

virtue of an eighteenpenny pie, Mrs. Holmroyd consented to give the

Burford shop a trial. His solicitation of her custom flattered vanity,

and his sturdy handling of the subject put her gratefully at ease. Where

herself approached the topic of her livelihood with shame, this borough

councillor marched squarely to the subject of business with a tread as

firm as that which took him to the Mansion House.

“And before I forget,” said the Councillor, rubbing a sleeve round the

circumference of his hat. “Did I understand you, or somebody else, to

say anything about a school?”

Profiting by the lesson just received, and the resolution built on it,

Mrs. Holmroyd lost no time in confessing her ownership of the little

school.

“What’s your terms, ma’am?” the Councillor enquired.

She was not yet, it seemed, so proficient in the new culture as to be

capable of quoting terms without hesitation and a momentary dropping of

the eyes. But she only dropped them to the table edge, which she stroked

with a soft motion of the hand as if to mitigate the harshness of the

sum mentioned. Thirty shillings, in short, the sum was.

“Per Term or Quarter, ma’am?” the Councillor asked her. She answered

“Term” with the added comment that, reckoned quarterly, the sum amounted

(virtually) to a pound. “How do you make that out?” the Councillor

corrected. “Three thirties is ninety; ninety’s four pound ten. There’s a

matter of ten shilling difference, ma’am.” She agreed instantly. To be

sure. Mr. Burford was quite right. Of course.... And stroked the table

edge again. It was another lesson in practicality that she must take to

heart. Actuated by which resolve, inasmuch as the Councillor’s last word

had been “Indeed!” and nothing more favourable to thirty shillings had

passed his beard since then, she said: “Of course ... in the event of

two pupils from one family....”

“Aye, but it isn’t two,” the Councillor disillusioned her promptly.

“It’s only one. In fact, it’s not even that. It’s an enquiry. That’s all

it is.” Mrs. Holmroyd quite understood the situation, and expected

nothing more of it than had actually transpired. At the same time, if

Mr. Burford thought that the terms mentioned were more, perhaps, than

those he had in mind would be disposed to entertain, she might consider

some small....

But to her disappointment the Councillor flatly withstood this hint of a

reduction; “Terms is terms, ma’am,” he said uncompromisingly. “And if

folks doesn’t feel inclined to pay ’em that’s no reason why you should

make ’em any less. It isn’t business. You could have as many pupils as

you liked if you’d take ’em for nothing.” He delivered the homily with

the terse satisfaction of a man who takes pride in his own common-sense,

displaying it for Mrs. Holmroyd’s edification as Miss Burford might have

shown the furniture reflective of her care. And Mrs. Holmroyd’s

agreement seemed so emphatically assumed in what he said that she could

do no other than assent to it, albeit this subscription to a fixed and

arbitrary price caused her dependence to quake as if the principle thus

put into her hand for self-defence had been a fire-arm which (even in

extremity) she doubted her courage to discharge. Nor was her faith in

its protectiveness increased when the Councillor, still talking over

his extended hat, went on to say that in the case under consideration

“Probably it wouldn’t make a ha’porth of difference if you reduced your

terms or not. There’s so many schools nowadays, ma’am. Here’s all the

Church schools and the Corporation schools and the English schools and

the Grammar School and private schools in every street. People can have

edjication for nothing nowadays, and when they can get it for nothing

it’s not very likely they want to pay for it.” Not, he explained in a

tone displaying some slight, but only slight, consideration for Mrs.

Holmroyd’s academic feelings, that he was in favour of all this

Edjication himself. “It’s overdone, ma’am. There’s too much of it. It’s

a craze. People seems to think edjication’s going to be a cure for

everything. It’s not. What it does in nine cases out of ten is to fill

folks’ heads with nonsense. They’d rather waste their time learning

things they can’t understand and wouldn’t be no good to ’em if they did,

than turn to honest work and do the things they can. Where’s all the

domestic servants and shop assistants going to, ma’am, since

edjication’s been introduced? Here’s my daughter, ma’am. She gets a

servant in one day, and the girl’s mother comes to fetch her box the

next. Why? Just because my daughter expects to have things clean and

decent. Some day there won’t be any servants to be had. They’ll all be

milliners and school-teachers. That’s what edjication’s got to answer

for.”

In the instant of departure the observant eyes that had more than once

rested on Beryl’s solemnly uplifted face in their constant journeys

round the room, admitted her to a glance of definite recognition at

last.

“Your daughter, ma’am?” he made enquiry.

Mrs. Holmroyd, gratified with his notice of her child, said “Yes,” and

lit up the object of his attention with an indulgent smile as though

commending it under this favourable light to the Councillor’s regard.

“You’ve only these two, then,” Mr. Burford remarked; and when she had

confirmed the number: “Let’s see,” said he, “I think I’m right in

supposing you’ve lost your husband, ma’am?” If she had not answered him

by words, the look of sorrowing admission with which her face adapted

itself to the enquiry would have spoken for her.

“He has been dead ... nearly two years,” she said softly; and the

impulse proving too strong for her devotion to withstand, she could not

refrain from calling attention to the presentment of the best of

husbands.

“That is his photograph on the mantelpiece ... just behind you, Mr.

Burford. It does not do him justice.”

He turned hat in hand, and gazed a moment on it; she, intently watching.

But his only comment was an ultimate “Indeed!” which, truth to tell,

proved poor requital for the needs of love.

“I’ll bid you good evening, ma’am,” the Councillor said, turning from

this melancholy topic to matter of fact with evident relief. “Don’t

disturb yourself. I know my way out.” To Oswald, awaiting him in the

doorway he said, “Well m’lad! Have you thought any more about what I

told you? Have you made up your mind yet?”

With burning ears Oswald had to confess the shameful fact “Not yet,”

being so completely unprepared for a repetition of this perplexing

question as to have no other answer ready for it. “It’s time you did,”

the Councillor admonished him. “Every day you lose you’re letting some

smarter lad get a start of you.” It was a terrifying reflection, that

shook the fabric of Oswald’s peace of mind. He wished he could decide

whether their newly made acquaintance spoke sportively or in earnest.

But the square beard divulged no secrets, and for Oswald’s age humour is

as a locked door unless a smile be the key to it. The broad conciliar

figure launched itself from the doorway and merged its contours into the

gathering mist. Quick! Let this door be closed; let the closer of it

hasten back to the parlour; let him find his gloves, his muffler, cap

and overcoat, and begin without a moment’s waste to overtake this

constant stream of smarter boys whom each succeeding second of inertia

saw started on the road to fame ahead of him.

5

On Saturday there was no school. The restless movements of imprisoned

scholars, sniffing over slate and page like rabbits engaged upon green

food, gave way to the sound of water and the vigour of scrubbing-brushes

symbolic of the charwoman, who, wrapped in a large black shawl that her

wrinkled arms wound round about her from within, and treading painfully

on feet that years of imprudent intimacy with damp floorboards and

washhouse flagstones had made into repositories of rheumatism and

barometric pains, came each Saturday to scrub the schoolroom floor and

discharge those coarser duties to which Mrs. Holmroyd’s respectability

had not yet bowed. Once in each fortnight too, she came to undertake the

heavier washing, bearing underneath her shawl a pair of ancient pattens,

with which Oswald and Beryl indulged in glorious foretastes of their own

growth during the dinner hour. At eight o’clock, or earlier, a muffled

wrap bestowed upon the street door by the washerwoman’s knuckles through

their folds of shawl, announced her advent. Respectfully the street door

opened. A voice affirmed: “It’s only Me’m!” And feet were heard, most

punctiliously, to brush themselves upon the mat.

This knock, and voice, and these feet, were Elizabeth.

Her hair when she removed her faded bonnet of antiquity, was silvery

white. Her eyes were drawn, and the flesh falling away from them hung

below each iris in crescents of red. But the face was not withered, and

to those old enough to be conversant with the processes of age its

features showed clear traces of earlier beauty. The speaking voice that

issued from the sunken lips was singularly gentle and lent to her soft

enunciation of the word “mum” a quality not servile. Seldom did Mrs.

Holmroyd note the white head bent above her floor but that conscience

smote her for being the instigator of its task. These silver hairs shone

like prophetic texts to her, which with many an inward tremour she

applied to her own life, asking: “How will it be with me, when someday

my forces fail?” For she saw that the world demands, with stern

injustice, the hardest labour from the least fitted. The aged and the

weak, descending through the successive strata of more tolerable

occupations reserved for the strong and able, sink inevitably at last to

those uttermost depths of toil that only age and feebleness could stoop

to undertake. Elizabeth had no vices save a jug of ale for her midday

meal (that she fetched at the required moment from an adjacent hostel

beneath the all-sufficing shawl) and an intemperate thirst for work. Two

husbands had she buried in her time; each, in turn, a helpless burden on

her, and each as inconsolably lamented as if all virtue had died with

him. Now, in her declining strength, the only favour she asked of the

world was liberty to earn her bread. The only fear she had, was not of

work but that the world should disbelieve the working capabilities of

white hairs. More than anything she dreaded this aspersion on her

strength, and there was something tragic in the physical efforts her

frail form put forth to demonstrate its fitness for toil. She prayed to

die as she had lived; a worker. And yet, for all her protestations of

strength and her display of a spirit that seemed immortal, there were

signs that the flesh began to fail. Her eyes lacked their ancient

sharpness for spying cobwebs or penetrating corners. Her vaunted

scrubbing-hand, for all its vigour, suffered lapses and betrayed the

conscience it sought to serve, leaving inexplicable spots uncleansed,

that Mrs. Holmroyd’s self by stealth removed.

For years she had charred in Daneborough’s selectest circles, passing

from one domestic cataclysm to another with faith and enthusiasm

unimpaired; perpetually toiling on the dusty underside of the seamy

canvas of life, and so perverted by long habit that she had come to

regard blue mottled soap and pancheons for flesh-shrivelling water as

the insignia of some holy faith. Scarcely a kitchen of Daneborough but

she was acquainted with; scarcely a family but she had worked for. She

knew to its deeps the domestic economy of some scores of pretentious

houses, and those dread domestic secrets that society spends its life in

trying to conceal. The turned carpet, the patched stair, the worn

blanket, the frayed curtains, the niggard larder--she knew which

households suffered from these secret maladies, and could lay her

unhesitating hand upon the cupboards in which their skeletons were kept.

Among other members of the Corporation she had charred, at one time, for

the late lamented Alderman Bankett, until his relict--knowing by

personal experience the disabilities of old age, and suspecting that

Elizabeth could not, for all her protestations, remain much longer

exempt from them--mercifully discharged the charwoman’s white hairs from

work so much beyond their strength. And Elizabeth had charred for the

late Mrs. Burford and her daughter, too, until--in a moment of

unpardonable weakness--her pride could not deny itself the gratification

of imparting that, in her younger and more comely days, she had been

sought in marriage by the Councillor’s progenitor, and that had he but

pressed his suit a little longer Miss Burford might have acknowledged

Elizabeth for grandmother. The statement, being indisputably true,

served naturally as a paralyzer of relations. “From that time’m,”

Elizabeth confided to Mrs. Holmroyd, “it was no use me trying to suit

her. I could read it in her face. She never rested while she got shut of

me.”

With which the face of the enthusiast, rent with a hundred seams and

convulsed beyond recognition, would be flung into her apron--that shook

hugely and horribly with silent sobs. On Oswald this dramatic scene, not

infrequently enacted, had a marrow-curdling effect very disturbing to

the lower jaw and rendering deglutition difficult. What stirred him most

of all in this recital was the prepotent fact that the extinct founder

of the Burford fortunes had begun life with a handbell and muffin

basket. Baskets, in fact, seemed to lend foundation to more than half

the fortunes of the families of Daneborough. With such examples to

inspire him, what was there (aided by the sausage basket) himself might

not achieve?

“It’s true’m!” Elizabeth was wont to assure his mother, fearful lest so

wonderful a story might defraud her of the credit and the sympathy that

were her due. “It’s as true as I’m stood here. He asked me three times.

He asked me last time at the corner of Cattle Market. He had basket on

his arm and bell in his hand, and he puts basket down as it might be

there, and when I shakes my head he picks basket up again in a temper

and rung bell fit to break it. But would I have him? Not me’m! Not

likely. I wouldn’t have given up my two husbands for such a one as him.

Not if you’d paid me.”

And though Elizabeth might wrap tumultuous sobs in her tormented apron

to think how harshly she had been used by this

granddaughter-in-hypothesis, it must at least be admitted that such a

relationship, unsupported by anything in the table of affinities, was

one that exacted a niceness of handling beyond the competence of most

human nature to bestow upon it. Perhaps in acting as she did, Miss

Burford took the only human course; for if the enthusiast had so far

lost sight of the virtue of discretion as to impart such a confidence to

Councillor Burford’s daughter, was she likely to be less communicative

to servant-maids, whose obedient respect was hard enough to claim

already?

“I know what it is’m!” the enthusiast averred, withdrawing a withered,

shaking hand from out of the folds of her shawl, her lips writhing one

above the other in their efforts to retain composure and repress the

rising sob. “She’s done with me. She’s finished with me. She’ll never

let me work for her again. And I shan’t go and ask her’m. I shan’t beg.

I’d die sooner.”

“O, surely, surely!” Mrs. Holmroyd said, seeking to pour the vials of

hope and comfort on the stricken woman, “it is not so bad as that,

Elizabeth. There must be some mistake. You should not look on the dark

side of things.”

“She promised to let me know’m,” the shaking shawl replied. “I know what

that means. I know what it means to be let know. That’s what they all

say when they want to get shut of me. Everybody’s getting shut of me.”

Her reddening eyes swam down to the responsive shawl. “ ... _You’ll_ be

getting shut of me next’m.”

And the dreadfullest part about it was that beneath this fleshless,

bloodless sentiment, Mrs. Holmroyd descried the outline of the bony

skeleton of truth. Yet the precariousness of her own existence, that

should have taught her wisdom, taught her to be merciful instead.

Without mercy, indeed, how could she dare to hope? The eye of her

apprehension perceived Elizabeth as a terrible extension of her own

self, displaying in most poignant form the tragedy of her own desires

and fears. Never should this door be closed against her so long as her

failing limbs and lurid fervour had strength to reach it. Oswald and

Beryl she imbued with an ultra reverence for these silver hairs that

some dread day (who knows?) might be her very own. Always they addressed

the folded shawl and faded bonnet as Mrs. Betson, and asked her

scrupulously how she did, and were so deferent and well behaved that now

and again the ancient charwoman could not swallow her meat for the lump

in her throat, and set down her midday beer untasted on the table,

overcome with momentary gratitude for the kindness this household showed

her, and begging Mrs. Holmroyd:

“O, mum! Don’t get shut of me for Childer’s sake. I’d sooner be let know

by any place but this.”

6

Of all days in the week the one that Oswald and his sister loved the

best was Saturday. Sunday dwelt a day apart, rather to be respected than

beloved; unreckoned with the other friendly human days on which mankind

has freedom to enjoy itself. If rain must fall on any day, by all means

let it be a Sunday; piety being independent of the weather, and Sunday

bringing with it no market penny as Saturday did. For Saturday was

market day, and whilst the aged enthusiast charged herself with

responsibility for their home, Oswald and his sister went a marketing

with their mother, one on each side of her; Beryl on the inner side of

safety, Oswald on the outer and protective flank, preserving as a

gentleman should the guardian place each time they crossed from one

causeway to another by a manœuvre almost military in its precision. They

did not wear their Sunday best, but a modification sufficient to mark

the status of the day, for the cream of Daneborough’s housewifery would

be abroad with purses, grocery books and satchels, and Mrs. Holmroyd

looked forward as much to the taste of public pride in her two children

as the enthusiast looked forward to her midday ale. Each glance of

praise bestowed on Oswald or on Beryl went straight into her heart, like

the amber beverage into the enthusiast’s stomach, warming it and filling

the recipient with comfortable thoughts of God. She gave Him thanks to

find no children in all the town looking nicer than her own. Often when

they were thus out together, she would seek occasion to let them walk in

front of her that she might indulge motherhood to the full sight of

them, and let her eye feast on this treasure that belonged to her.

For this forenoon shopping furnished but a further instance of her

pride. Indeed, the next-door neighbour openly rebuked the prodigality

that chose to purchase at a time when all the proudest purses in

Daneborough were on parade, and said: “You’re very foolish, marm, excuse

me!” It was the next-door’s wiser way to fare forth late at night, when

Mrs. Holmroyd’s children lay abed, taking with her a carpet bag as if

departing on a visit to the sea-side. With this she attacked the market

at an hour when its powers of resistance began to flag; when the flaring

lamps of paraffin began to spit and falter, and the fishmongers, hoarse

with a whole day’s crying of “Now you fish buyers!” had ceased to fling

pump water over their weeping stalls, or with watering-cans to try and

coax the gaping cod and halibut back to life under the delusion that

they were in their native element once more. Instead, they now displayed

alacrity to thrust their flaccid remnants into any hesitating bass that

paused before them, or into the market perambulator that passed by,

charged with green vegetables and sleeping childhood, crying: “Here you

are, missus! It’s been waiting for you. Fresh from the sea. You needn’t

go any further for a bit of prime halibut.”

And the butchers too, in smocks that had been snowy white this morning,

but were daubed all over now with the bloody finger-smears betokening a

busy day, would be similarly reckless in their disposal of last legs and

beasts’ internals, before the market closed. Sometimes, approaching

midnight, if the application of an eye to Mrs. Holmroyd’s letter-box

revealed the glitter of an inward light, the next-door neighbour would

administer a muffled summons, on fire to claim the triumph of some

dubitable purchase at a price that should have stirred all righteous

ears to envy.

“There marm! And there! What do you say to that! And look you here! Is

that a piece of good fresh meat? Smell it marm. As fresh as when it was

killed. What do you think I paid? You’ll never guess.” And Mrs. Holmroyd

never guessed. She never even learned the first rudiments of the lesson

that the next-door neighbour’s rhapsodies essayed to teach her.

“You ought to come out marketing with me, marm!” the next-door neighbour

urged, filled in this hour of conquest with the proselytizer’s zeal.

“I’d learn you how to go about things. You’d soon pick it up. Pork, too,

marm. You’d buy it for half the price you pay at Waxford’s if only you’d

go at a proper time.”

It was the next-door neighbour’s pride, this nocturnal marketing. She

gloried in it. To feed on meat at pence per pound cheaper than the folly

of the morning buyers paid for it brought her more joy than a noble deed

does to the virtuous. Nor could she comprehend the curious obstinacy of

her neighbour, who, for all that Mrs. Holmroyd seemed to share her

triumph and applaud her wisdom, yet pursued each Saturday the trodden

path of error; going out in the forenoon with her children to buy her

Sunday’s dinner from the High Gate butcher, and her fish from the High

Gate fishmonger, and her vegetables from the High Gate greengrocer, all

of whom, in the next-door neighbour’s parlance: “makes you pay for the

gold lettering on their window, marm.” And it was useless that Mrs.

Holmroyd sought to let her heart believe she did these things, in some

sort, for her children’s sake. She did them, as the next-door neighbour

vexedly divined, for pride. Perhaps, in this, she was not totally to

blame. A culpable providence had scarcely helped her to be humble.

For when she came to Daneborough, she had, all told, no more than thirty

pounds, and of this sum the greater part transformed itself into the

Spring Bank home. But Providence, like an irritable teacher, alternately

too lenient and too firm, and so spoiling the character committed to its

care, inspired (in Mrs. Holmroyd’s favour) a frail annuitant to die.

This was a maternal great-aunt whose death advantaged Oswald’s mother by

the fabulous sum of eighty pounds, some shillings, and those odd pence

in which lawyers and business men of principle delight to prove

integrity. The reversion of this pittance that came to Mrs. Holmroyd not

a day too soon--for already the quarter’s rent was due--sufficed to set

the beneficiary’s fears at rest, restore her faith in heaven and place

Aunt Caroline among the saints.

In due course, the financial remains of Aunt Caroline were committed to

the bank. They were interred in the Banker’s Vault as eighty pounds,

some shillings and the scrupulous odd pence. But the deposit note that

Mrs. Holmroyd brought away as her certificate of burial was but for

seventy pounds. Already the awful process of decomposition was set in.

Before long, the mourner stood by the side of Aunt Caroline’s mortal

resting place once more, and the Deposit Note when she retired said

sixty-five. Now the wretched mourner began to see the true significance

of death and to wish Aunt Caroline were still alive.

For the knowledge of this money at the bank had wrought in her a curious

moral harm. It bred in her the feeling that her present life was

specious and deceitful, as if she were living it by too mean a standard

below the level of necessity. When she baked her pies or took the money

for the little school, the memory of this hidden store rebuked her. It

encouraged her to entertain a false ideal of independence. What were a

few pennies paid for better meat, measured against such a background at

the Bank? How could she deny her children milk and butter of the best or

shame them by unneedful shabbiness when this sponsive sum protested? It

lent a countenance to all her native generosities, to all those

beautiful impulses of love and kindness that overgrew transplanted

prudence like rank and native weeds. She was, all else before, a woman

and a mother. Of business she knew nothing. Least of all could she

comprehend that implacable form of business imposing the stern denial of

every better impulse. Perplexedly endeavouring to be practical, she

clung to the creed of her heart’s childhood: that kindness is a sort of

providential currency, purchasing what it gives; that the eternal Banker

never dishonours one promissary note of love, that the bread cast

fearlessly upon the waters will come back, as it is written, after many

days.

7

Councillor Burford’s shop stood in the High Gate almost opposite to the

Bank so familiar to Mrs. Holmroyd’s fears, and but a stone’s throw from

the Mansion House, of whose severe detachment and superiority it seemed

to have borrowed not a little. Two bayed and consequential windows, each

endowed with the abdominous convexity of an alderman, imposed their

corpulence upon the pavement, and, scorning the meretricious finery of

modern trade, attested a sober, well-established business. Nothing in

the shop’s external features had been changed since the death of the

first Burford, who might have risen from his cubicle in the cemetery and

walked to his ancient place of business in the High Gate without

suspecting that twenty years rather than one night had passed since last

he hung his hat behind the counter and tied the strings of his apron

into a concise bow across the pit of his stomach. This resistance of the

shop to popular encroachment formed no small part of its proprietor’s

pride. Just as the next door neighbour vaunted her nocturnal marketing,

and Mrs. Holmroyd drew satisfaction from purchases made by day, so the

Councillor reposed pride in his unaltered windows transected into a

multitude of panes that spoke their owner’s long descent and attested an

unbroken business lineage of fifty years. For the ostentatious nakedness

of plate-glass that defiled so many frontages competing with his own he

had no more tolerance than for a woman indecorously underclad, whose

immodesty displayed more breast than bodice. The vulgar tendencies of

contemporary trade, flaunting its wares without reserve before the eyes

of all and sundry in a shameless effort to seduce inconstant custom and

tempt those feeble-minded purchasers whose judgment fell before

profusion, he steadfastly opposed. Business was no affair of trumpery

window-dressing and unblushing price-tickets that ogled every passer-by.

These things prostituted it. Quality did not lift its skirt in public

places and show ankles of seductive cheapness to lure debased admirers.

Quality, like a prudent woman, stayed indoors, displaying herself alone

to those imbued with her own virtue that sought her there. The soul of

business, in the Councillor’s conception, dwelt not in conflict but in

character. Its foundations were personality. Customers had recourse to

him as clients interviewed a doctor; seeking qualities and prices from

the lips of his experience, and accepting the value of his judgment in

all the things he dealt in, before their own. The big bowed windows,

that might have been loquacious with labels, preserved instead the grave

discretion of a surgery; such goods as they acknowledged were

communicated soberly to the world without other recommendation than

themselves. Yet in case these sober utterances might fail to make

impression on the thoughtless, above the door--in characters for all to

read--was gilded the date of the shop’s establishment, proclaiming

without a doubt that here was no mere upstart trade.

But though the Councillor’s pride took stand unyielding before this

frontage, and he said “It shan’t be done no different whilst I’m alive,”

by which he made allusion to his son, who had betrayed at one time,

tepid indications of a leaning towards plate glass, his pride (on the

other hand) swelled with the consciousness of those internal

modifications that bespoke the business’s expansion. The living room

behind the shop wherein the Burford family ate their dinner when the

Councillor was a boy and the Councillor’s father carving the midday meal

could keep an eye upon the counter through a sort of retail hagioscope

or one-pane window, prepared to wipe the gravy from his mouth at any

moment on the appearance of a customer and pass into the shop, still

masticating with a certain grandeur as he served,--all this was swept

away, and but a transverse girder demarked the line once drawn between

domesticity and trade.

Elizabeth remembered well these early premises and had often been

served across the counter by the one-time aspirant for her hand, whose

passion, constrained by marriage and the declining fortune of the

once-desired, lost itself at last like an indistinguishable tributary in

the broad delta of business dealing. His eye towards the end, could rest

upon the faded object of his earlier adoration with the dilute

politeness for a casual customer, taking her coppers and talking of the

weather visible beyond his windows as though no other topic had ever

come between them, whatever his inner thoughts might be. Thus it fares

with all romance, that is either slain or outlives itself. And there is

no more painful spectacle than a superannuated passion propped on

reality and crippled with the rheumatism of disillusionment. Yet when

the founder of the Burford business died, Elizabeth craved respite from

her day’s employment to see his body taken back to earth, standing by

the cemetery gates whilst tears more frequent than the minute bell

dropped on her faded shawl. Hers was the last eye, indeed, to look upon

the coffin before the clods obscured it.

God bless us, what have we here but pride again? What took her to the

cemetery but her pride, agreeably garbed in weeds of sentiment, “to see

the last of him” and replenish its meagre store with the memory that

this occupant of a polished coffin had more than once besought her

wrinkled hand, and that had but her hand been less exclusive she might

have wept beneath a widow’s veil and gone home in a pair-coach to spill

tears over funeral biscuits instead of trudging on tired feet to the

wash-tub?

Her loyalty towards the dead man took the form of a pious doubt of his

son’s ability to succeed him. “He’ll never be his father,” was her

expressed opinion. “He’s nothing of his father in him.” And at that

time, perhaps, there seemed some ground for the prediction. “The Shop,”

old Joseph Burford might have affirmed in the historic language of a

deceased monarch, “c’est moi.” He had made it. He was it. All the

majesty of the business seemed incorporate in his own person. When he

quitted the counter to take his meals the shop assumed an empty and

uncertain air, like a face with its mouth open. The younger Burford

seemed no substitute for the elder, whose delegated authority he wielded

with such diffidence as to deprive the instrument of its function. It

was too obvious that he shone by reflected light, deriving the greater

part of lustre from his father’s eye, whose brightness also extinguished

him. Even in the weighing of a pound of tea or the rashering of bacon,

the paternal optic hovered hawklike over his uncertainty, ready to

pounce upon a fault. The younger Burford expressed a cypher in the shop.

Customers of standing asked the elder Burford how he did, and asked the

younger Burford (in the elder’s absence) how his father did. They never

asked the younger Burford how the younger did, for there seemed as yet

nothing sufficiently established about his identity to justify

solicitude.

But with his father’s death a noticeable change was wrought in him. He

assumed his father’s gold watch; his father’s apron; his father’s

trenchant tones and authoritative eye. The transition was rapid. From

the moment that he became the accredited recipient of condolences on his

father’s death, making subdued but suitable acknowledgment; imparting to

customers the circumstances of his father’s illness and latest hours;

his age, and the length of time he had been established in

business--which, he took the opportunity to assure them gravely, would

“be carried on as usual, with the same regard to quality”--the younger

Burford disappeared. It seemed almost as if the son were buried, rather

than the father. When customers enquired for “Mr. Burford” it was the

son who looked up from his counter with acknowledgment of the name. His

figure, gradually expanding, absorbed and incorporated the business as

his father’s had done before. When he was out of it the shop seemed

empty. From his presence teas and coffees drew such authenticity as they

had; hams lacked all virtue unless he handled them; customers lent no

confidence to bacon until the Burford hands had laid their blessing on

it, with the unction of a bishop. The mechanical laudations of his

hirelings behind the counter fell flat and lukewarm by comparison with

the master’s manner. When they displayed a piece of “rolled” or “smoked”

their tepid commendations seemed to diffuse dubiety on both sides of the

counter. “Thank you ... but I’ll wait for Mr. Burford. Mr. Burford knows

exactly what I want,” was a frequent formula. The assistants were

resigned to it. They even seemed to await it and welcome it when it

came, as a merciful solution of their difficulties; thankful to lay the

merchandise down and escape the responsibility imposed by it. Not

infrequently they prompted customers whose hesitation increased their

own: “Perhaps you’d like to see Mr. Burford. He’ll be at liberty in a

moment....” and looked unfeignedly grateful when the recommendation was

accepted.

Thus the second Burford came in time to be the repository of hundreds of

domestic tastes and idiosyncracies, as a lawyer comes to know the

secrets of his clients. He knew whose palate exacted fat bacon, and

whose streaked; who favoured chicory; whose taste in teas inclined to

China or Ceylon; what cheeses, and the state of their maturity,

respective customers demanded, with a wide discrimination in tinned

merchandise, jams, biscuits and dried fruits. Long before the elder

Burford’s death he had taken unto himself a wife and become the father

of a son and daughter. His wife’s death in some sort paved the way to a

municipal career, which he appeared to choose as an alternative to

re-marriage. Certainly he could have espoused no second wife more fitted

to consolidate his business. The smallest article he sold seemed stamped

with the integrity of the Council Chamber. To be served by a

full-blooded Councillor, and ma’amed augustly by a City Father is not

displeasing to the populace. For the expenditure of a trifle it might

feel itself in contact with the Mansion House and enjoy a brief intimacy

with the power that imposed the rates. Elizabeth’s prediction was

disproved. Old Joseph Burford’s son had over-stepped his father. Some

day the Parish Church bells would peal and he would walk behind the

mace, no longer Mr. Councillor, but Mr. Mayor.

8

The shop was familiar enough to Mrs. Holmroyd. Scarce a Saturday but she

had passed its windows and bestowed a glance upon the merchandise

displayed behind its many panes. She had never shopped there, however,

and the consciousness of this, added to the consciousness that her visit

was expected, seemed to imbue this errand with something of formality. A

slight, but perceptible, feeling of nervousness crept over her as she

opened the old-fashioned door, glazed and checkered like the windows on

each side of it, and led her family across the threshold. In the earlier

days of the Councillor’s father a dribbling bell on a loose neck would

have announced her entry with insensate laughter. Before his death this

obsolescent sentinel of custom had already given way to a spring gong.

But even though the spring gong struck but once, that once (with the

growth of custom) became so continuous and distracting that it was

dispensed with, like its predecessor. Now only the door interposed

between the counter and the outer world, but the present proprietor

clung tenaciously to this as to a last tradition of self-respecting

trade, and stubbornly opposed the growing fashion of the open frontage

that made a place of business as common as the street, and gave

admission to dogs with no manners to speak of, and the undesired.

Already the two counters coped busily with their Saturday morning’s

trade, and the half dozen high, uncomfortable chairs were occupied by

parcels, sitters, or umbrellas.

Councillor Burford occupied the place of honour behind the first counter

on the right hand side of the door, over which he presided in solitary

state, merely snapping his fingers for assistance when he needed it.

With his Saturday’s white apron tied round his ample midway, and wearing

his Saturday’s white shirt, its sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and

the V-shaped opening in his waistcoat cut deep enough to let two studs

be seen, he displayed a strong resemblance to his late father. Upon his

nose at its lowermost extremity sat a gold pince-nez, whose function at

first sight seemed scarcely apparent inasmuch as its lenses oscillated a

couple of inches below his eyes, and he appeared to look at everything

and everybody above them. These glasses were a phase of Councillor

Burford with which Mrs. Holmroyd and her family had not yet made

acquaintance, but they were well known to all frequenters of the shop

and members of the Council Chamber. Now and again he lifted them from

his nose, which they straddled precariously like an indifferent rider on

a steed too big for him, and raised them with a gesture of deliberation

as though, once these hindrances to sight had been removed, his

unobstructed judgment could clearly see. Judgment thus afforded the

sight it looked for, he replaced them on the extremity of his nose,

where a visible groove on each side of it was by long usage fretted for

their reception. But lengthy deliberation seemed not a pronounced

characteristic of the Councillor, whose decisions appeared to need no

distant seeking, but were all ready for immediate delivery like the

goods he sold, and required only to be served out. At the time of Mrs.

Holmroyd’s entrance he was engaged in conversation with the wife of the

Hill Street Doctor whose son sang in St. Saviour’s choir. A biscuit

canister stood upon the counter, on which his bared forearm rested with

an air of confidence.

For one thing Councillor Burford never was. He never was servile. He was

none of your bowers and scrapers, your handwashers and wringers of

aprons. His politeness bore ever a certain air of brusquerie; his

brusquerie a certain character of politeness. The two qualities were

inseparable in him. He addressed his customers with a voice only less

peremptory than that in which he spoke to his assistants. It was rare

that he lowered it. His phrases, terse and trenchant for the most part,

were sliced with the blade of sharp decision and served in such a way as

he would stab the knife into a slab of butter and offer its point to

some hesitating patron with a curt: “Try it yourself, ma’am.” And his

ma’ams made no invidious distinctions. He never shirked them even to

aprons and shawls, nor by slurring sought to disown their utterance. On

the contrary, when Councillor Burford said “Ma’am” the word cut through

the shop and had a curious effect of emphasizing the utterer’s own

importance rather than acknowledging hers to whom it was addressed. His

“ma’ams” implicated nothing personal; they subscribed simply to a

convention and compromised his own respect no more than the “dearly

beloved brethren” of the pulpit commits the preacher to love his fellow

men.

Behind the counter on the opposite side of the shop facing his father,

the younger Burford served, and assisted reminiscent history to repeat

herself. Here, save for a little march in time and some internal change,

all was as it had been in the ancient Burford days. Dignity and

self-importance turned automatically to the right; modesty and

vacillation, after a spasmodic moment, shrunk to the left, or hung

irresolutely on their heel before the communicating counter served by

mere assistants, who took the dregs of custom, packed up consolidated

groceries, and hurried to their master’s elbow at the cracking of his

thumb and finger. It was instructive to note how completely the

Councillor’s personality permeated his shop; how it controlled and

actuated the movements of his helpers, as if they had been prolongations

of his own limbs rather than independent human beings. Despite his

thirty years the younger Burford had been trained in such subjection to

the elder’s word, referring every doubt to the paternal certitude, that

within the precincts of the shop he seemed to doff all individuality

with his coat and hung his judgment meekly on his father’s nod, just as

he committed his coat to the hook behind the private office door.

Merchandise confided surreptitiously to his inspection from time to time

by doubting assistants was not less dubiously eyed by him, and, after

mysterious whisperings behind a hand, taken up to the high altar to be

passed or vetoed by a terse pronouncement on the Master’s part.

The junior Burford had just been up to the chief counter to collect

authority for the disposal of a box of fairy candles when Mrs. Holmroyd

entered the shop. Noting this unfamiliar presence he accosted her

politely on his way back to the subordinate counter with the enquiry:

“Are you being attended to, Madam?” His voice, though aspiring to a

higher plane of culture than his father’s, lacked the parental ring. It

had no timbre of self-confidence, and its politeness was plainly but a

servile substitute for personality--to which he would not dare to aspire

during his father’s life. He used the unabbreviated “Madam” with an air

of such repression as made the two syllables sound feeble by contrast

with his father’s one. Mrs. Holmroyd was on the point of making answer

to the younger Burford--“Mr. Arry,” as he was designated in the

shop--when the Councillor, still reposing his sleeveless forearm over

the biscuit canister, raised his voice out of the general level of his

conversation with the doctor’s wife to say: “I’m attending to Mrs.

Holmroyd myself in a moment.” The announcement appeared to catch the

younger Burford in the back. With a hurried murmur of apology he quitted

Mrs. Holmroyd and obliterated himself behind his counter. After a few

brief moments the doctor’s wife departed, bestowing an intent regard on

Mrs. Holmroyd and her children, that seemed to ask of memory if these

were patients of her husband or not. Oswald plucked his mother’s sleeve

and drew her ear towards his lips that he might whisper who this

rustling lady was who passed them in a waft of petticoats and scent.

Already the Councillor, pushing the biscuit tin dismissively aside with

the utterance of a name that caused it to be run for by a white apron

and borne away across the shop, invited Mrs. Holmroyd: “Now ma’am!”

He stood awaiting her, all business; overlooking his precarious glasses

that shook to the least word or gesture; his pencil and duplex

entry-book in hand. Mrs. Holmroyd advanced to the counter, her children

following, and unwound the little paper scroll enumerating their week’s

supplies. The list was not a long one. It struck her painfully, in fact,

as being too curt and unimportant for the impressive attention bestowed

upon it. Its end came with startling abruptness, particularly as the

pencil had taken up an expectant posture on a fresh line, and the

Councillor’s voice demanded: “And the next, ma’am.” There was no next.

She murmured her regret, with a gentle air of cogitation that seemed to

seek requirements overlooked. The Councillor, still holding the pencil

to his note-book, peered over his gold-rimmed pince-nez into space, as

if lending his own more active and qualified mind for the assistance of

her introspection and prompted memory with such articles as his wide

experience taught him a housewife might be likely to require.

“Soap, ma’am? No soap. Candles? No candles. Dried fruit? No dried fruit.

Currants? Raisins? Sultanas?”

All these, he gave assurance were of the very best. Her conscience smote

her in the end to let so many best of things go by, as though she were

insensible to quality; and feeling at length that some more suitable

acknowledgment of the Councillor’s trouble on her behalf was called for

than unvarying negation, she let a wavering choice be seen at the

suggestion of a cream-cheese.

“Fresh in from the country this morning, ma’am!” the Councillor

affirmed. “The very best. You won’t be disappointed. I can recommend

them.” His thumb and finger snapped like the hammer of a pistol.

“Fletcher!--Two cream cheeses for this lady to look at. Large and small.

Sharp.”

One of the white aprons thus apostrophized, pushed another obstructive

apron flat against the wall and bore the ordered cheeses to the head

counter, each outspread upon a hand. The Councillor, slipping his pencil

behind an ear, turned up the green rush wrapping with fingers of

expressive admiration, and displayed the delectable texture of cool

cream to Mrs. Holmroyd’s gaze with a gesture so convincing that refusal

was unthinkable. She thanked him. They looked lovely. She would take

one.

“A large one, ma’am?”

In the matter of pork pies the Councillor had betrayed no hesitation. He

had said, as Mrs. Holmroyd’s recollection quickly prompted her “Let’s

begin with a small one.” But in respect of cheeses he posed the question

with the larger in his hand, as if her answer were assured, and she

chose “the large one, please.” It seemed that all the practical lessons

learned from Councillor Burford counted for nothing when she tried to

put them into practice against their master.

His busy pencil added up the items of her bill. “Sixteen and ninepence,

ma’am.” She laid down a sovereign, that left her softly as if it had

been a sigh. He rang it on the counter, caught it dexterously again and

rapped it smartly into the till. “Sixteen and nine, and three’s

seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Nineteen and six. And six’s Twenty. Thank

you, ma’am. Rather better weather again this morning. The things shall

be sent on to you at once. Boy!”

Up to this moment the Councillor had gazed at Mrs. Holmroyd’s two

children with an eye so distant and rejective that, for all the

recognition it paid them, they might have been at home. But as their

mother turned to go, he raised the wagging pince-nez from his nose, and

extending it indicatively across the counter in their direction, asked:

“Do you young people know the way to eat sweets?”

The young people, awed by the sudden application of that smileless eye,

and embarrassed by turbulent desires, hung their heads with one accord.

Oswald contributed a whispered “thank you.”

The Councillor prized the stopper of a big glass bottle, loosened the

stubborn contents with the point of a great knife, and thrust his hand

within the flask as far as the swelling forearm flesh would let him,

with a great action of liberality--as if there were no limit to what

generosity desired to bring forth. Once or twice, in the endeavour to

dislodge these refractory sweetmeats, he smote the bottle with a

resounding flat hand and shook it forcefully. It was therefore not

devoid of a sense of disappointment to Oswald and his sister that after

such promising preliminaries no more than half a dozen sweetmeats

rewarded the Councillor’s labours on their behalf. But he dispensed

these across the counter, three into each politely upturned palm, with

an air of condescension that restored magnificence to the offering,

saying, as though to allay Mrs. Holmroyd’s unspoken fears:

“These’ll do them no harm, ma’am. They’re genuine boiled sweets. You

can’t beat ’em. All pure sugar. Fourpence ha’penny a pound. The very

best.”

She thanked the donor warmly and prompted her children, “What do you say

to Mr. Burford?” They said “Thank you” in turn, still under the

conflicting emotions stirred by the gift.

“Good morning ma’am.--Now ma’am?”

The second Ma’am was directed to Mrs. Holmroyd’s successor. No allusion

had been made to the pork pie. Mrs. Holmroyd’s pride was glad of that,

having been haunted by the fear that this subject might be raised in

public to her discomfiture. She left the shop with a feeling of curious

satisfaction for something accomplished; for some purpose--she knew not

what--achieved.

9

Left to the milk pudding, hash and peeled potatoes in the kitchen; her

pail, scrubbing brush and marbled soap in the schoolroom upstairs, the

enthusiast had not passed the morning without incident. More than once,

under stimulus of what she had to tell, she hurried to the front door,

and screening her red eyelids with a steaming hand against the sunlight

that mixed imperfectly with the November air, she gazed long and

earnestly down the street, as if, by the sheer intensity of her regard,

she sought to bring her tardy mistress home. The moment Mrs. Holmroyd

crossed the doorstep, Elizabeth appeared at the passage end; her arms

and apron in such commotion as might have been occasioned by a high

wind.

“O’m! What do you think! You’ll never guess!”

At first sight the emotions agitating the aged figure appeared to Mrs.

Holmroyd’s eyes so tragic that she had a momentary sinking of the heart.

But Elizabeth’s countenance, shaking off the conflicting moods that

mobbed it, emerged from the momentary tumult with such a look of triumph

as gave her back half a score of her most active years. She seemed

revitalized; her face shone with the high serenity of a saucepan lid.

“Miss Burford’s been. I’m to go and char for her on Tuesday.” “O’m!” she

exclaimed, discarding the impediment of her coarse apron and uplifting

both hands to heaven. “I wish you could ’a seen her face when I opened

door. You never saw anybody so took aback in all your born days’m. She

hadn’t a word to say for herself. She went all colours. She could ’a

dropped. She says, ‘Dear me! What!... Why, is that you Elizabeth?’ ‘Aye,

it’s me’m,’ I tells her. ‘I thought you’d given up going out working,’

she says after a bit. ‘I should ’a done,’ I says, ‘if _some_ folks had

had their way wi’ me’m. But I’ve a few friends left’m. I’ve never wanted

a day’s work since you said you’d let me know.’ She coughs aside of her

hand and says: ‘I’m glad to hear it, and to see you looking so well.’”

“ ... And then’m, she asks if you was in, and I tells her you wasn’t,

and she says: ‘So you work for Mrs. Holmroyd, then?’ and I says: ‘I

haven’t missed a Saturday with her for many a week. And Monday’s once a

fortnight, regular.’ She says: ‘O’ and ‘Really’ and ‘Indeed.’ ‘What was

I doing on Tuesday?’ I tells her Nothing as I knew of’m, and she says:

‘Do you care to come and work for me?’ ‘Not unless I’m wanted,’ I

answers. ‘I don’t care to go nowheres until I’m asked’m.’ O’m! It would

’a done you good to see look she gied me. I know her. I haven’t spring

cleaned beside of her for nothing. She would ’a liked to toss her head

up and walk away, but she swallows her pride and says: ‘There’s no

question of you not being wanted.’

“Aye ...” the enthusiast continued, “ ... and I knew in a minute what

was cause of her asking me. Servant’s left her. She’s all with herself.

She wouldn’t ’a had me back without she was forced. She hasn’t

forgotten’m. And she hasn’t forgiven. She didn’t say a word about it to

me, and I didn’t to her, but it was in her eye all time.”

The triumph consequent upon Miss Burford’s visit so thrilled and

occupied Elizabeth that the primary object of her calling was quite lost

sight of. Her reading of Miss Burford’s mind did credit to her eyesight.

The discovery of this claimant to her grandfather’s misplaced fancy in

Mrs. Holmroyd’s house was indeed a matter of unpalatable surprise to

Councillor Burford’s daughter, who had derived deceptive security from

the charwoman’s absence, deeming a danger lessened that is not seen. But

here, to her mortification, she found the enemy entrenched in the least

suspected place of all. For the safeguard of a grandeur that might

otherwise foolishly compromise itself, she would have liked to know how

much of the secret of the first Burford’s ridiculous attempts at

misalliance had been imparted to this newcomer. Some knowledge of the

situation was, in fact, essential to her future line of conduct with

Mrs. Holmroyd. If the secret were inviolable (which she had too small a

faith in the integrity of her sex to suppose) dignity might assert

itself; if betrayed, then dignity would need to be diluted with a little

diplomatic friendship. People who possess secrets to our disadvantage

cannot be altogether treated as strangers.

As for the real object of Miss Burford’s visit....

“Lor’m!” the enthusiast exclaimed when Mrs. Holmroyd ventured to enquire

concerning it at last, “ ... I thought I’d told you. She came about the

pie.”

The pie?

“She won’t be wanting it’m. Leastways, not this week. She said it was

her father’s mistake. She’d told him, but men was all alike. She didn’t

know what her father wanted to meddle with such things for. He’d nothing

to do with it. She’ll take a small pie next week instead, if it’s all

the same to you.”

Next week. If it was all the same to her.

The pie that was already made. The extra-large small pie for eighteen

pence with which Mrs. Holmroyd had sought to propitiate this new

customer and extend the boundaries of her hopes. The pie that had been

her justification for this visit to the Bank and to the Burford shop

this morning. Oswald and Beryl, staggered by the tidings, yet knowing

not what precise attitude to adopt in face of it, studied their mother’s

countenance as if it were a sum.

She was very dignified. She let no sign be seen. Drawing off her gloves

with sweet serenity she thanked Elizabeth for delivering the message. “I

am so glad Miss Burford called and that you are to work for her again. I

always said it had been a mistake, Elizabeth.”

But Miss Burford’s was not the only mind that the new conjunction of

relationships had troubled. Mrs. Holmroyd, too, saw elements in this

re-shaping future to vex her peace. Not less than the hard-faced

daughter of the Councillor had she a secret ambry of the soul to guard,

hiding its bony relics from the eyes of men. And before the enthusiast

took leave that night, though swathed already in the faded shawl and

bowed to the attitude of humble resignation for the attended sacrament

of silver, Mrs. Holmroyd took advantage of the pious curtsey and

murmuring lips of gratitude to breathe the name “Elizabeth!” with a

lowered urgent voice.

“Mum?” responded the enthusiast.

“If you go to Miss Burford’s on Tuesday ... you will be sure ... not to

say a Word.”

“What about’m?”

“About the.... About the service you did for me the other week.”

“Service?” enquired the enthusiast, perplexedly. “You don’t mean ...

cream jug’m?”

“Hush, Elizabeth!” Mrs. Holmroyd turned an apprehensive face towards the

kitchen door, left partly open behind her. “It is strictly between

ourselves.”

“Lor’m!” the enthusiast consoled her, “I’d clean forgot while you

reminded me. It’s not the first time I’ve fetched things back for

people--yes, and put ’em in for them as well. I did it regular for Mrs.

Coldthorpe, and never breathed a word to nobody. _She_ could trust me’m.

She’d no need to warn me. You’re the first that ever has.”

More and more disquieted with the enthusiast’s evasion of her fears,

Mrs. Holmroyd felt a dreadful apprehension seize her.

“Elizabeth.... Have you broken your word to me! Have you told ... anyone

already?”

To her dismay signs of agitation began to invest the shawl. It heaved

convulsively.

“I know what it is’m!” she heard a suffocated voice exclaim. “You’re

wanting an excuse to get rid of me. I’ve seen it coming on. You’ve never

been same since you called at Rockery House. She must ’a told you

something then. You’ve made it up betwixt you.”

At which the shawl, overcome with its own emotion, danced grotesquely as

if it blew, empty, on a clothes line; nor could it be prevailed upon to

partake of comfort until the rejected pie was insinuated beneath its

fringe, when the tears of reproach changed their grief to gratitude, and

the sobs became articulate enough to cry:

“O! mum. You’re too good to me. I don’t deserve it. You’ve only got to

say the Word and I won’t go there at all.”