MESHACH AND HANNAH
The little old bachelor and spinster were resting after dinner in the
back-parlour of their house near the top of Church Street. In that abode
they had watched generations pass and manners change, as one list
hearthrug succeeded another in the back-parlour. Meshach had been born
in the front bedroom, and he meant to die there; Hannah had also been
born in the front bedroom, but it was through the window of the back
bedroom that the housewife's soul would rejoin the infinite. The house,
which Meshach's grandfather, first of his line to emerge from the grey
mass of the proletariat, had ruined himself to build, was a six-roomed
dwelling of honest workmanship in red brick and tile, with a beautiful
pillared doorway and fanlight in the antique taste. It had cost two
hundred pounds, and was the monument of a life's ambition. Mortgaged by
its hard-pressed creator, and then sold by order of the mortgagee, it
had ultimately been bought again in triumph by Meshach's father, who
made thirty thousand pounds out of pots without getting too big for it,
and left it unspoilt to Meshach and Hannah. Only one alteration had ever
been made in it, and that, completed on Meshach's fiftieth birthday,
admirably exemplified his temperament. Because he liked to observe the
traffic in Church Street, and liked equally to sit in the back-parlour
near the hob, he had, with an oriental grandeur of self-indulgence,
removed the dividing wall between the front and the back parlours and
substituted a glass partition: so that he could simultaneously warm the
fire and keep an eye on the street. The town said that no one but
Meshach could have hit on such a scheme, or would have carried it out
with such an object: it crowned his reputation.
John Stanway's maternal uncle was one of those individuals whose
character, at once strong, egotistic, and peculiar, so forcibly
impresses the community that by contrast ordinary persons seem to be
without character; such men are therefore called, distinctively,
'characters'; and it is a matter of common experience that, whether
through the unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous
sense of propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they
usually bear names to match their qualities. Meshach Myatt! Meshach
Myatt! What piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and
to repeat for the pleasure of repetition! And what a vision of Meshach
their utterance conjured up! At sixty-four, stereotyped by age, fixed
and confirmed in singularity, Meshach's figure answered better than ever
to his name. He was slight of bone and spare in flesh, with a hardly
perceptible stoop. He had a red, seamed face. Under the small, pale blue
eyes, genial and yet frigid, there showed a thick, raw, red selvedge of
skin, and below that the skin was loose and baggy; the wrinkled eyelids,
instead of being shaped to the pupil, came down flat and perpendicular.
His nose and chin were witch-like, the nostrils large and elastic; the
lips, drawn tight together, curved downwards, indifferently captious; a
short white beard grew sparsely on the chin; the skin of the narrow neck
was fantastically drawn and creased. His limbs were thin, the knees and
elbows sharpened to a fine point; the hands very long, with blue, corded
veins. As a rule his clothes were a distressing combination of black and
dark blue; either the coat, the waistcoat, or the trousers would be
black, the rest blue; the trousers had the old-fashioned flap-pockets,
like a sailor's, with a complex apparatus of buttons. He wore loose
white cuffs that were continually slipping down the wrist, a starched
dickey, a collar of too lenient flexure, and a black necktie with a
'made' bow that was fastened by means of a button and button-hole under
the chin to the right; twenty times a day Meshach had to secure this
precarious cravat. Lastly, the top and bottom buttons of his waistcoat
were invariably loose.
He was of that small and lonely minority of men who never know ambition,
ardour, zeal, yearning, tears; whose convenient desires are capable of
immediate satisfaction; of whom it may be said that they purchase a
second-rate happiness cheap at the price of an incapacity for deep
feeling. In his seventh decade, Meshach Myatt could look back with calm
satisfaction at a career of uninterrupted nonchalance and idleness. The
favourite of a stern father and of fate, he had never done a hard day's
work in his life. When he and Hannah came into their inheritance, he
realised everything except the house and invested the proceeds in
Consols. With a roof, four hundred a year from the British Empire, a
tame capable sister, and notoriously good health, he took final leave of
care at the age of thirty-two. He wanted no more than he had. Leisure
was his chief luxury; he watched life between meals, and had time to
think about what he saw. Being gifted with a vigorous and original mind
that by instinct held formulas in defiance, he soon developed a
philosophy of his own; and his reputation as a 'character' sprang from
the first diffident, wayward expressions of this philosophy. Perceiving
that the town not unadmiringly deemed him odd, he cultivated oddity.
Perceiving also that it was sometimes astonished at the extent of his
information about hidden affairs, he cultivated mystery, the knowledge
of other people's business, and the trick of unexpected appearances. At
forty his fame was assured; at fifty he was an institution; at sixty an
oracle.
'Meshach's a mixture,' ran the local phrase; but in this mixture there
was a less tedious posturing and a more massive intellect than usually
go to the achievement of a provincial renown such as Meshach's. The
man's externals were deceptive, for he looked like a local curiosity who
might never have been out of Bursley. Meshach, however, travelled
sometimes in the British Isles, and thereby kept his ideas from
congealing. And those who had met him in trains and hotels knew that
porters, waiters, and drivers did not mistake his shrewdness for that of
a simpleton determined not to be robbed; that he wanted the right things
and had the art to get them; in short, that he was an expert in travel.
Like many old provincial bachelors, while frugal at home he could be
profuse abroad, exercising the luxurious freedom of the bachelor. In the
course of years it grew slowly upon his fellow pew-holders at the big
Sytch Chapel that he was worldly-minded and possibly contemptuous of
their codes; some, who made a specialty of smelling rats, accused him of
gaiety.
'You'd happen better get something extra for tea, sister,' said Meshach,
rousing himself.
'Why, brother?' demanded Hannah.
'Some sausage, happen,' Meshach proceeded.
'Is any one coming?' she asked.
'Or a bit of fish,' said Meshach, gazing meditatively at the fire.
Hannah rose and interrogated his face. 'You ought to have told me
before, brother. It's past three now, and Saturday afternoon too!' So
saying, she hurried anxiously into the kitchen and told the servant to
put her hat on.
'Who is it that's coming, brother?' she inquired later, with timid,
ravenous curiosity.
'I see you'll have it out of me,' said Meshach, who gave up mysteries as
a miser parts with gold. 'It's Arthur Twemlow from New York; and let
that stop your mouth.'
Thus, with the utterance of this name in the prim, archaic, stuffy
little back-parlour, Meshach raised the curtain on the last act of a
drama which had slumbered for fifteen years, since the death of William
Twemlow, and which the principal actors in it had long thought to be
concluded or suppressed.
The whole matter could be traced back, through a series of situations
which had developed one out of another, to the character of old Twemlow;
but the final romantic solution was only rendered possible by the
peculiarities of Meshach Myatt. William Twemlow had been one of those
men in whom an unbridled appetite for virtue becomes a vice. He loved
God with such virulence that he killed his wife, drove his daughter into
a fatuous marriage, and quarrelled irrevocably with his son. The too
sensitive wife died for lack of joy; Alice escaped to Australia with a
parson who never accomplished anything but a large family; and Arthur,
at the age of seventeen, precociously cursed his father and sought in
America a land where there were fewer commandments. Then old Twemlow
told his junior partner, John Stanway, that the ways of Providence were
past finding out. Stanway sympathised with him, partly from motives of
diplomacy, and partly from a genuine misunderstanding of the case; for
Twemlow, mild, earnest, and a generous supporter of charities, was much
respected in the town, and his lonely predicament excited compassion;
most people looked upon young Arthur as a godless and heartless
vagabond.
Alice's husband was a fool, impulsive and vain; and, despite
introductions, no congregation in Australia could be persuaded to listen
to his version of the gospel; Alice gave birth to more children than bad
sermons could keep alive, and soon the old man at Bursley was regularly
sending remittances to her. Twemlow desired fervently to do his duty,
and moreover the estrangement from his son increased his satisfaction in
dealing handsomely with his daughter; the son would doubtless learn from
the daughter how much he had lost by his impiety. Seven years elapsed
so, and then the parson gave up his holy calling and became a
tea-blender in Brisbane. Twemlow was shocked at this defection, which
seemed to him sacrilegious, and a chance phrase in a letter of Alice's
requesting capital for the new venture--a too assured demand, an
insufficient gratitude for past benefits, Alice never quite knew
what--brought about a second breach in the Twemlow family. The paternal
purse was closed, and perhaps not too early, for the improvidence of the
tea-blender and Alice's fecundity were a gulf whose depth no munificence
could have plumbed. Again John Stanway sympathised with the now
enfeebled old man. John advised him to retire, and Twemlow decided to
do so, receiving one-third of the net profits of the partnership
business during life. In two years he was bedridden and the miserable
victim of a housekeeper; but, though both Alice and Arthur attempted
reconciliation, some fine point of conscience obliged him to ignore
their overtures. John Stanway, his last remaining friend, called often
and chatted about business, which he lamented was far from being what it
ought to be. Twemlow's death was hastened by a fire at the works; it
happened that he could see the flames from his bedroom window; he
survived the spectacle five days. Before entering into his reward, the
great pietist wrote letters of forgiveness to Alice and Arthur, and made
a will, of which John Stanway was sole executor, in favour of Alice. The
town expressed surprise when it learnt that the estate was sworn at less
than a thousand pounds, for the dead man's share in the profits of
Twemlow & Stanway was no secret, and Stanway had been living in
splendour at Hillport for several years. John, when questioned by
gossips, referred sadly to Alice's husband and to the depredations of
housekeepers. In this manner the name and memory of the Twemlows were
apparently extinguished in Bursley.
But Meshach Myatt had witnessed the fire at the works; he had even
remained by the canal side all through that illuminated night; and an
adventure had occurred to him such as occurs only to the Meshach Myatts
of this world. The fire was threatening the office, and Meshach saw his
nephew John running to a place of refuge with a drawer snatched out of
an American desk; the drawer was loaded with papers and books, and as
John ran a small book fell unheeded to the ground. Meshach cried out to
John that he had dropped something, but in the excitement and confusion
of the fire his rather high-pitched voice was not heard. He left the
book lying where it fell; half-an-hour afterwards he saw it again,
picked it up, and put it in his pocket. It contained some interesting
informal private memoranda of the annual profits of the firm. Now
Meshach did not return the book to its owner. He argued that John
deserved to suffer for his carelessness in losing it, that John ought to
have heard his call, and that anyhow John would surely inquire for it
and might then be allowed to receive it with a few remarks upon the need
of a calm demeanour at fires; but John never did inquire for it.
When William Twemlow's will was proved a few weeks later, Meshach Myatt
made no comment whatever. From time to time he heard news of Arthur
Twemlow: that he had set up in New York as an earthenware and glassware
factor, that he was doing well, that he was doing extremely well, that
his buyer had come over to visit the more aristocratic manufactories at
Knype and Cauldon, that some one from Bursley had met Arthur at the
Leipzig Easter Fair and reported him stout, taciturn, and Americanised.
Then, one morning in Lord Street, Liverpool, fifteen years after the
death of old Twemlow and the misappropriation of the little book,
Meshach encountered Arthur Twemlow himself; Meshach was returning from
his autumn holiday in the Isle of Man, and Arthur had just landed from
the 'Servia.' The two men were mutually impressed by each other's skill
in nicely conducting an interview which ninety-nine people out of a
hundred would have botched; for they had last met as boy of seventeen
and man of forty. They lunched richly at the Adelphi, and gave news for
news. Arthur's buyer, it seemed, was dead, and after a day or two in
London Arthur was coming to the Five Towns to buy a little in person.
Meshach inquired about Alice in Australia, and was told that things were
in a specially bad way with the tea-blender. He said that you couldn't
cure a fool, and remarked casually upon the smallness of the amount left
by old Twemlow. Arthur, unaware that Meshach Myatt was raising up an
idea which for fifteen years had been buried but never forgotten in his
mind, answered with nonchalance that the amount certainly was rather
small. Arthur added that in his dying letter of forgiveness to Alice the
old man had stated that his income from the works during the last years
of his life had been less than two hundred per annum. Meshach worked his
shut thin lips up and down and then began to discuss other matters. But
as they parted at Lime Street Station the observer of life said to
Arthur with presaging calm: 'You'll be i' th' Five Towns at the end of
the week. Come and have a cup o' tea with me and Hannah on Saturday
afternoon. The old spot, you know it, top of Church Street. I've
something to show you as 'll interest you.' There was a pause and an
interchange of glances. 'Right!' said Arthur Twemlow. 'Thank you! I'll
be there at a quarter after four or thereabouts.' 'It's like as if what
must be!' Meshach murmured to himself with almost sad resignation, in
the enigmatic idiom of the Five Towns. But he was highly pleased that
he, the first of all the townsfolk, should have seen Arthur Twemlow
after twenty-five years' absence.
When Hannah, in silk, met the most interesting and disconcerting
American stranger in the lobby, the sound and the smell of Bursley
sausage frizzling in the kitchen added a warm finish to her confused
welcome. She remembered him perfectly, 'Eh! Mr. Arthur,' she said, 'I
remember you that _well_....' And that was all she could say, except:
'Now take off your overcoat and do make yourself at home, Mr. Arthur.'
'I guess I know _you_,' said Twemlow, touched by the girlish shyness,
the primeval innocence, and the passionate hospitality of the little
grey-haired thing.
As he took off his glossy blue overcoat and hung it up he seemed to fill
the narrow lobby with his large frame and his quiet but penetrating
attractive American accent. He probably weighed fourteen stone, but the
elegance of his suit and his boots, the clean-shaven chin, the fineness
of the lines of the nose, and the alert eyes set back under the temples,
redeemed him from grossness. He looked under rather than over forty; his
brown hair was beginning to recede from the forehead, but the heavy
moustache, which entirely hid his mouth and was austerely trimmed at the
sides, might have aroused the envy of a colonel of hussars.
'Come in, wut,'[1] cried Meshach impatiently from the hob, 'come in and
let's be pecking a bit,' and as Arthur and Hannah entered the parlour,
he added: 'She's gotten sausages for you. She would get 'em, though I
told her you'd take us as you found us. I told her that. But
women--well, you know what they are!'
[1] _Wut_ = wilt.
'Eh, Meshach, Meshach!' the old damsel protested sadly, and escaped into
the kitchen.
And when Meshach insisted that the guest should serve out the sausages,
and Hannah, passing his tea, said it was a shame to trouble him, Twemlow
slipped suddenly back into the old life and ways and ideas. This
existence, which he thought he had utterly forgotten, returned again and
triumphed for a time over all the experiences of his manhood; it alone
seemed real, honest, defensible. Sensations of his long and restless
career in New York flashed through his mind as he impaled Hannah's
sausages in the curious parlour--the hysteric industry of his
girl-typist, the continuous hot-water service in the bedroom of his
glittering apartment at the Concord House, youthful nights at Coster and
Bial's music-hall, an insanely extravagant dinner at Sherry's on his
thirtieth birthday, a difficulty once with an emissary of Pinkerton, the
incredible plague of flies in summer. And during all those racing years
of clangour and success in New York, the life of Bursley,
self-sufficient and self-contained, had preserved its monotonous and
slow stolidity. Bursley had become a museum to him; he entered it as he
might have entered the Middle Ages, and was astonished to find that
beautiful which once he had deemed sordid and commonplace. Some of the
streets seemed like a monument of the past, a picturesque survival; the
crate-floats, drawn by swift shaggy ponies and driven by men who
balanced themselves erect on two thin boards while flying round corners,
struck him as the quaintest thing in the world.
'And what's going on nowadays in old Bosley, Miss Myatt?' he asked
expansively, trying to drop his American accent and use the dialect.
'Eh, bless us!' exclaimed Hannah, startled. 'Nothing ever happens here,
Mr. Arthur.'
He felt that nothing did happen there.
'Same here as elsewhere,' said Meshach. 'People living, and getting
childer to worry 'em, and dying. Nothing'll cure 'em of it seemingly. Is
there anything different to that in New York? Or can they do without
cemeteries?'
Twemlow laughed, and again he had the illusion of having come back to
reality after a long, hurried dream. 'Nothing seems to have changed
here,' he remarked idly.
'Nothing changed!' said Meshach. 'Nay, nay! We're up in the world. We've
got the steam-car. And we've got public baths. We wash oursen nowadays.
And there's talk of a park, and a pond with a duck on it. We're moving
with the times, my lad, and so's the rates.'
It gave him pleasure to be called 'my lad' by old Meshach. It was
piquant to him that the first earthenware factor in New York, the
Jupiter of a Fourteenth Street office, should be addressed as a
stripling. 'And where is the park to be?' he suavely inquired.
'Up by the railway station, opposite your father's old works as
was--it's a row of villas now.'
'Well,' said Twemlow. 'That sounds pretty nice. I believe I'll get you
to come around with me and show off the sights. Say!' he added suddenly,
'do you remember being on that works one day when my poor father was on
to me like half a hundred of bricks, and you said, "The boy's all right,
Mr. Twemlow"? I've never forgotten that. I've thought of it scores of
times.'
'Nay!' Meshach answered carelessly, 'I remember nothing o' that.'
Twemlow was dashed by this oblivion. It was his memory of the minute
incident which more than anything else had encouraged him to respond so
cordially to Meshach's advances in Liverpool; for he was by no means
facile in social intercourse. And Meshach had rudely forgotten the
affecting scene! He felt diminished, and saw in the old bachelor a
personification of the blunt independent spirit of the Five Towns.
* * * * *
'Milly's late to-day,' said Hannah to her brother, timorously breaking
the silence which ensued.
'Milly?' questioned Twemlow.
'Millicent her proper name is,' Hannah said quickly, 'but we call her
Milly. My nephew's youngest.'
'Yes, of course,' Twemlow commented, when the Myatt family-tree had been
sketched for him by the united effort of brother and sister, 'I
recollect now you told me in Liverpool that Mr. Stanway was married. Who
did he marry?'
Meshach Myatt pushed back his chair and stood up. 'John catched on to
Knight's daughter, the doctor at Turnhill,' he said, reaching to a
cigar-cabinet on the sideboard. 'Best thing he ever did in his life.
John's among the better end of folk now. People said it were a
come-down for her, but Leonora isn't the sort that comes down. She's got
blood in her. _That_!' He snapped his fingers. 'She's a good bred 'un.
Old Knight's father came from up York way. Ah! She's a cut above Twemlow
& Stanway, is Leonora.'
Twemlow smiled at this persistence of respect for caste.
'Have a weed,' said Meshach, offering him a cigar. 'You'll find it all
right; it's a J.S. Murias. Yes,' he resumed, 'maybe you don't remember
old Knight's sister as had that far house up at Hillport? When she died
she left it to Leonora, and they've lived there this dozen year and
more.'
'Well, I guess she's got a handsome name to her,' Twemlow remarked
perfunctorily, rising and leaving Hannah alone at the table.
'And she's the handsomest woman in the Five Towns: that I do know,' said
Meshach as, in the grand manner of a connoisseur, he lighted his cigar.
'And her was forty, day afore yesterday,' he added with caustic
emphasis.
'Meshach!' cried Hannah, 'for shame of yourself!' Then she turned to
Twemlow smiling and blushing a little. 'Oughtn't he? Eh, but Mrs. John's
a great favourite of my brother's. And I'm sure her girls are very good
and attentive. Not a day but one or another of them calls to see me, not
a day. Eh, if they missed a day I should think the world was coming to
an end. And I'm expecting Milly to-day. What's made the dear child so
late----'
'I will say this for John,' asserted Meshach, as though the little
housewife had not been speaking, 'I will say this for John,' he
repeated, settling himself by the hob. 'He knew how to pick up a d----d
fine woman.'
'Meshach!' Hannah expostulated again.
Something in the excellence of Meshach's cigars, in his way of calling a
woman fine, in the dry, aloof masculinity of his attitude towards
Hannah, gave Twemlow to reflect that in the fundamental deeps of
experience New York was perhaps not so far ahead of the old Five Towns
after all.
There was a fluttering in the lobby, and Millicent ran into the parlour,
hurriedly, negligently.
'I can't stay a minute, auntie,' the vivacious girl burst out in the
unmistakable accents of condescending pertness, and then she caught
sight of the well-dressed, good-looking man in the corner, and her
bearing changed as though by a conjuring trick. She flushed sensitively,
stroked her blue serge frock, composed her immature features to the
mask of the finished lady paying a call, and summoned every faculty to
aid her in looking her best. 'So this chit is the daughter of our
admired Leonora,' thought Twemlow.
'I suppose you don't remember old Mr. Twemlow, my dear?' said Hannah
after she had proudly introduced her niece.
'Oh, auntie! how silly you are! Of course I remember him quite well. I
really can't stay, auntie.'
'You'll stay and drink this cup of tea with me,' Hannah insisted firmly,
and Milly was obliged to submit. It was not often that the old lady
exercised authority; but on that afternoon the famous New York visitor
was just as much an audience for Hannah as for Hannah's greatniece.
Twemlow could think of nothing to say to this pretty pouting creature
who had rushed in from a later world and dissipated the atmosphere of
mediævalism, and so he addressed himself to Meshach upon the eternal
subject of the staple trade. The women at the table talked quietly but
self-consciously, and Twemlow saw Milly forced to taste parkin after
three refusals. Even while still masticating the viscid unripe parkin,
Milly rose to depart. She bent down and dutifully grazed with her lips
the cheek of the parkin-maker. 'Good-bye, auntie; good-bye, uncle.' And
in an elegant, mincing tone, 'Good afternoon, Mr. Twemlow.'
'I suppose you've just got to be on time at the next place?' he said
quizzically, smiling at her vivid youth in spite of himself. 'Something
very important?'
'Oh, very important!' she laughed archly, reddening, and then was gone;
and Aunt Hannah followed her to the door.
'What th' old folks lose,' murmured Meshach, apparently to the fire, as
he put his half-consumed cigar into a meerschaum holder, 'goes to the
profit of young Burgess, as is waiting outside the Bank at top o' th'
Square.'
'I see,' said Twemlow, and thought primly that in his day such laxities
were not permitted.
Hannah and the servant cleared the tea-table, and the two men were left
alone, each silently reducing an J.S. Murias to ashes. Meshach seemed to
grow smaller in his padded chair by the hob, to become torpid, and to
lose that keen sense of his own astuteness which alone gave zest to his
life. Arthur stared out of the window at the confined backyard. The
autumn dusk thickened.
Suddenly Meshach sprang up and lighted the gas, and as he adjusted the
height of the flame, he remarked casually: 'So your sister Alice is as
poorly off as ever?'
Twemlow assented with a nod. 'By the way,' he said, 'you told me on
Wednesday you had something interesting to show me.'
Meshach made no answer, but picked up the poker and struck several times
a large pewter platter on the mantelpiece.
'Do you want anything, brother?' said Hannah, hastening into the room.
'Go up into my bedroom, sister, and in the left-hand pigeon-hole in the
bureau you'll see a little flat tissue-paper parcel. Bring it me. It's
marked J.S.'
'Yes, brother,' and she departed.
'You said as your father had told your sister as he never got no more
than two hundred a year from th' partnership after he retired.'
'Yes,' Twemlow replied. 'That's what she wrote me. In fact she sent me
the old chap's letter to read. So I reckoned it cost him most all he got
to live.'
'Well,' the old man said, and Hannah returned with the parcel, which he
carefully unwrapped. 'That'll do, sister.' Hannah disappeared. 'Sithee!'
He mysteriously drew Arthur's attention to a little green book whose
cover still showed traces of mud and water.
'And what's this?' Twemlow asked with assumed lightness.
Meshach gave him the history of his adventure at the fire, and then
laboriously displayed and expounded the contents of the book, peering
into the yellow pages through the steel-rimmed spectacles which he had
put on for the purpose.
'And you've kept it all this time?' said Twemlow.
'I've kept it,' answered the old man grimly, and Twemlow felt that that
was precisely what Meshach Myatt might have been expected to do.
'See,' said Meshach, and their heads were close together,' that's the
year before your father's death--eight hundred and ninety-two pounds.
And year afore that--one thousand two hundred and seven pounds. And year
afore that--bless us! Have I turned o'er two pages at once?' And so he
continued.
Twemlow's heart began to beat heavily as Meshach's eyes met his. He
seemed to see his father as a pathetic cheated simpleton, and to hear
the innumerable children of his sister crying for food; he remembered
that in the old Bursley days he had always distrusted John Stanway, that
conceited fussy imposing young man of twenty-two whom his father had
taken into partnership and utterly believed in. He forgot that he had
hated his father, and his mind was obsessed by a sentimental and pure
passion for justice.
'Say! Mr. Myatt,' he exclaimed with sudden gruffness, 'do you suggest
that John Stanway didn't do my father right?'
'My lad, I'm doing no suggesting.... You can keep the book if you've a
mind to. I've said nothing to no one, and if I had not met you in
Liverpool, and you hadn't told me that your sister was poorly off again,
happen I should ha' been mum to my grave. But that's how things turn
out.'
'He's your own nephew, you know,' said Twemlow.
'Ay!' said the old man, 'I know that. What by that? Fair's fair.'
Meshach's tone, frigidly jocular, almost frightened the American.
'According to you,' said he, determined to put the thing into words,
'your nephew robbed my father each year of sums varying from one to
three hundred pounds--that's what it comes to.'
'Nay, not according to me--according to that book, and what your father
told your sister Alice,' Meshach corrected.
'But why should he do it? That's what I want to know.'
'Look here,' said Meshach quietly, resuming his chair. 'John's as good a
man of business as you'd meet in a day's march. But never sin' he
handled money could he keep off stocks and shares. He speculates, always
has, always will. And now you know it--and 'tisn't everybody as does,
either.'
'Then you think----'
'Nay, my lad, I don't,' said Meshach curtly.
'But what ought I to do?'
Meshach cackled in laughter. 'Ask your sister Alice,' he replied, 'it's
her as is interested, not you. You aren't in the will.'
'But I don't want to ruin John Stanway,' Twemlow protested.
'Ruin John!' Meshach exclaimed, cackling again. 'Not you! We mun have no
scandals in th' family. But you can go and see him, quiet-like, I
reckon. Dost think as John'll be stuck fast for six or seven hundred, or
eight hundred? Not John! And happen a bit of money'll come in handy to
th' old parson tea-blender, by all accounts.'
'Suppose my father--made some mistake--forgot?'
'Ay!' said Meshach calmly. 'Suppose he did. And suppose he didna'.'
'I believe I'll go and talk to Stanway,' said Twemlow, putting the book
in his pocket. 'Let me see. The works is down at Shawport?'
'On th' cut,'[2] said Meshach.
[2] Cut = canal.
'I can say Alice had asked me to look at the accounts. Oh! Perhaps I can
straighten it out neat----' He spoke cheerfully, then stopped. 'But it's
fifteen years ago!'
'Fifteen!' said Meshach with gravity.
'I'm d----d if I can make you out!' thought Twemlow as he walked along
King Street towards the steam-tram for Knype, where he was staying at
the Five Towns Hotel. Hannah had sped him, with blushings, and rustlings
of silk, from Meshach's door. 'I'm d----d if I can make you out,
Meshach.' He said it aloud. And yet, so complex and self-contradictory
is the mind's action under certain circumstances, he could make out
Meshach perfectly well; he could discern clearly that Meshach had been
actuated partly by the love of chicane, partly by a quasi-infantile
curiosity to see what he should see, and partly by an almost biblical
sense of justice, a sense blind, callous, cruel.