I
James Peake and his wife, and Enoch Lovatt, his wife's half-sister's
husband, and Randolph Sneyd, the architect, were just finishing the
usual Saturday night game of solo whist in the drawing-room of Peake's
large new residence at Hillport, that unique suburb of Bursley. Ella
Peake, twenty-year-old daughter of the house, sat reading in an
arm-chair by the fire which blazed in the patent radiating grate. Peake
himself was banker, and he paid out silver and coppers at the rate of
sixpence a dozen for the brass counters handed to him by his wife and
Randolph Sneyd.
"I've made summat on you to-night, Lovatt," said Peake, with his broad
easy laugh, as he reckoned up Lovatt's counters. Enoch Lovatt's
principles and the prominence of his position at the Bursley Wesleyan
Chapel, though they did not prevent him from playing cards at his
sister-in-law's house, absolutely forbade that he should play for money,
and so it was always understood that the banker of the party should be
his financier, supplying him with counters and taking the chances of
gain or loss. By this kindly and ingenious arrangement Enoch Lovatt was
enabled to live at peace with his conscience while gratifying that
instinct for worldliness which the weekly visit to Peake's always
aroused from its seven-day slumber into a brief activity.
"Six shillings on my own; five and fourpence on you," said Peake.
"Lovatt, we've had a good night; no mistake." He laughed again, took
out his knife, and cut a fresh cigar.
"You don't think of your poor wife," said Mrs Peake, "who's lost over
three shillings," and she nudged Randolph Sneyd.
"Here, Nan," Peake answered quickly. "You shall have the lot." He
dropped the eleven and fourpence into the kitty-shell, and pushed it
across the table to her.
"Thank you, James," said Mrs Peake. "Ella, your father's given me eleven
and fourpence."
"Oh, father!" The long girl by the fire jumped up, suddenly alert. "Do
give me half-a-crown. You've no conception how hard up I am."
"You're a grasping little vixen, that's what you are. Come and give me a
light." He gazed affectionately at her smiling flushed face and tangled
hair.
When she had lighted his cigar, Ella furtively introduced her thin
fingers into his waistcoat-pocket, where he usually kept a reserve of
money against a possible failure of his trouser-pockets.
"May I?" she questioned, drawing out a coin. It was a four-shilling
piece.
"No. Get away."
"I'll give you change."
"Oh! take it," he yielded, "and begone with ye, and ring for something
to drink."
"You are a duck, pa!" she said, kissing him. The other two men smiled.
"Let's have a tune now, Ella," said Peake, after she had rung the bell.
The girl dutifully sat down to the piano and sang "The Children's Home."
It was a song which always touched her father's heart.
Peake was in one of those moods at once gay and serene which are
possible only to successful middle-aged men who have consistently worked
hard without permitting the faculty for pleasure to deteriorate through
disuse. He was devoted to his colliery, and his commercial acuteness
was scarcely surpassed in the Five Towns, but he had always found time
to amuse himself; and at fifty-two, with a clear eye and a perfect
digestion, his appreciation of good food, good wine, a good cigar, a
fine horse, and a pretty woman was unimpaired. On this night his
happiness was special; he had returned in the afternoon from a week's
visit to London, and he was glad to get back again. He loved his wife
and adored his daughter, in his own way, and he enjoyed the feminized
domestic atmosphere of his fine new house with exactly the same zest as,
on another evening, he might have enjoyed the blue haze of the
billiard-room at the Conservative Club. The interior of the drawing-room
realized very well Peake's ideals. It was large, with two magnificent
windows, practicably comfortable, and unpretentious. Peake despised, or
rather he ignored, the aesthetic crazes which had run through
fashionable Hillport like an infectious fever, ruthlessly decimating its
turned and twisted mahogany and its floriferous carpets and wall-papers.
That the soft thick pile under his feet would wear for twenty years, and
that the Welsbach incandescent mantles on the chandelier saved thirty
per cent, in gas-bills while increasing the light by fifty per cent.: it
was these and similar facts which were uppermost in his mind as he gazed
round that room, in which every object spoke of solid, unassuming luxury
and represented the best value to be obtained for money spent. He
desired, of a Saturday night, nothing better than such a room, a couple
of packs of cards, and the presence of wife and child and his two
life-long friends, Sneyd and Lovatt--safe men both. After cards were
over--and on Lovatt's account play ceased at ten o'clock--they would
discuss Bursley and Bursley folk with a shrewd sagacity and an intimate
and complete knowledge of circumstance not to be found in combination
anywhere outside a small industrial town. To listen to Sneyd and Mrs
Peake, when each sought to distance the other in tracing a genealogy,
was to learn the history of a whole community and the secret springs of
the actions which constituted its evolution.
"Haven't you any news for me?" asked Peake, during a pause in the talk.
At the same moment the door opened and Mrs Lovatt entered. "Eh, Auntie
Lovatt," he went on, greeting her, "we'd given ye up." Mrs Lovatt
usually visited the Peakes on Saturday evenings, but she came later than
her husband.
"Eh, but I was bound to come and see you to-night, Uncle Peake, after
your visit to the great city. Well, you're looking bonny." She shook
hands with him warmly, her face beaming goodwill, and then she kissed
her half-sister and Ella, and told Sneyd that she had seen him that
morning in the market-place.
Mrs Peake and Mrs Lovatt differed remarkably in character and
appearance, though this did not prevent them from being passionately
attached to one another. Mrs Lovatt was small, and rather plain; content
to be her husband's wife, she had no activities beyond her own home. Mrs
Peake was tall, and strikingly handsome in spite of her fifty years,
with a brilliant complexion and hair still raven black; her energy was
exhaustless, and her spirit indomitable; she was the moving force of the
Wesleyan Sunday School, and there was not a man in England who could
have driven her against her will. She had a fortune of her own. Enoch
Lovatt treated her with the respect due to an equal who had more than
once proved herself capable of insisting on independence and equal
rights in the most pugnacious manner.
"Well, auntie," said Peake, "I've won eleven and fourpence to-night, and
my wife's collared it all from me." He laughed with glee.
"Eh, you should be ashamed!" said Mrs Lovatt, embracing the company in a
glance of reproof which rested last on Enoch Lovatt. She was a
Methodist of the strictest, and her husband happened to be chapel
steward. "If I had my way with those cards I'd soon play with them; I'd
play with them at the back of the fire. Now you were asking for news
when I came in, Uncle Peake. Have they told you about the new organ?
We're quite full of it at our house."
"No," said Peake, "they haven't."
"What!" she cried reproachfully. "You haven't told him, Enoch--nor you,
Nan?"
"Upon my word it never entered my head," said Mrs Peake.
"Well, Uncle Peake," Mrs Lovatt began, "we're going to have a new organ
for the Conference."
"Not before it's wanted," said Peake. "I do like a bit of good music at
service, and Best himself couldn't make anything of that old wheezer
we've got now."
"Is that the reason we see you so seldom at chapel?" Mrs Lovatt asked
tartly.
"I was there last Sunday morning."
"And before that, Uncle Peake?" She smiled sweetly on him.
Peake was one of the worldlings who, in a religious sense, existed
precariously on the fringe of the Methodist Society. He rented a pew,
and he was never remiss in despatching his wife and daughter to occupy
it. He imagined that his belief in the faith of his fathers was
unshaken, but any reference to souls and salvation made him exceedingly
restless and uncomfortable. He could not conceive himself crowned and
harping in Paradise, and yet he vaguely surmised that in the last result
he would arrive at that place and state, wafted thither by the prayers
of his womenkind. Logical in all else, he was utterly illogical in his
attitude towards the spiritual--an attitude which amounted to this: "Let
a sleeping dog lie, but the animal isn't asleep and means mischief."
He smiled meditatively at Mrs Lovatt's question, and turned it aside
with another.
"What about this organ?"
"It's going to cost nine hundred pounds," continued Mrs Lovatt, "and
Titus Blackhurst has arranged it all. It was built for a hall in
Birmingham, but the manufacturers have somehow got it on their hands.
Young Titus the organist has been over to see it, and he says it's a
bargain. The affair was all arranged as quick as you please at the
Trustees' meeting last Monday. Titus Blackhurst said he would give a
hundred pounds if eight others would do the same within a fortnight--it
must be settled at once. As Enoch said to me afterwards, it seemed, as
soon as Mr Blackhurst had made his speech, that we _must_ have that
organ. We really couldn't forshame to show up with the old one again at
_this_ Conference--don't you remember the funny speech the President
made about it at the last Conference, eleven years ago? Of course he was
very polite and nice with his sarcasm, but I'm sure he meant us to take
the hint. Now, would you believe, seven out of those eight subscriptions
were promised by Wednesday morning! I think that was just splendid!"
"Well, well!" exclaimed Peake, genuinely amazed at this proof of
religious vitality. "Who are the subscribers?"
"I'm one," said Enoch Lovatt, quietly, but with unconcealed pride.
"And I'm another," said Mrs Lovatt. "Bless you, I should have been
ashamed of myself if I hadn't responded to such an appeal. You may say
what you like about Titus Blackhurst--I know there's a good many that
don't like him--but he's a real good sort. I'm sure he's the best Sunday
School superintendent we ever had. Then there's Mr Clayton-Vernon, and
Alderman Sutton, and young Henry Mynors and--"
"And Eardley Brothers--they're giving a hundred apiece," put in Lovatt,
glancing at Randolph Sneyd.
"I wish they'd pay their debts first," said Peake, with sudden
savageness.
"They're all right, I suppose?" said Sneyd, interested, and leaning over
towards Peake.
"Oh, they're all _right_," Peake said testily. "At least, I hope so,"
and he gave a short, grim laugh. "But they're uncommon slow payers. I
sent 'em in an account for coal only last week--three hundred and fifty
pound. Well, auntie, who's the ninth subscriber?"
"Ah, that's the point," said Enoch Lovatt. "The ninth isn't
forthcoming."
Mrs Lovatt looked straight at her sister's husband. "We want you to be
the ninth," she said.
"Me!" He laughed heartily, perceiving a broad humour in the suggestion.
"Oh, but I mean it," Mrs Lovatt insisted earnestly. "Your name was
mentioned at the trustees' meeting, wasn't it, Enoch?"
"Yes," said Lovatt, "it was."
"And dost mean to say as they thought as I 'ud give 'em a hundred pound
towards th' new organ?" said Peake, dropping into dialect.
"Why not?" returned Mrs Lovatt, her spirit roused. "I shall. Enoch will.
Why not you?"
"Oh, you're different. You're _in_ it."
"You can't deny that you're one of the richest pew-holders in the
chapel. What's a hundred pound to you? Nothing, is it, Mr Sneyd? When Mr
Copinger, our superintendent minister, mentioned it to me yesterday, I
told him I was sure you would consent."
"You did?"
"I did," she said boldly.
"Well, I shanna'."
Like many warm-hearted, impulsive and generous men, James Peake did not
care that his generosity should be too positively assumed. To take it
for granted was the surest way of extinguishing it. The pity was that
Mrs Lovatt, in the haste of her zeal for the amelioration of divine
worship at Bursley Chapel, had overlooked this fact. Peake's manner was
final. His wife threw a swift glance at Ella, who stood behind her
father's chair, and received a message back that she too had discerned
finality in the tone.
Sneyd got up, and walking slowly to the fireplace emitted the casual
remark: "Yes, you will, Peake."
He was a man of considerable education, and though in neither force nor
astuteness was he the equal of James Peake, it often pleased him to
adopt towards his friend a philosophic pose--the pose of a seer, of one
far removed from the trivial disputes in which the colliery-owner was
frequently concerned.
"Yes, you will, Peake," he repeated.
"I shanna', Sneyd."
"I can read you like a book, Peake." This was a favourite phrase of
Sneyd's, which Peake never heard without a faint secret annoyance. "At
the bottom of your mind you mean to give that hundred. It's your duty to
do so, and you will. You'll let them persuade you."
"I'll bet thee a shilling I don't."
"Done!"
"Ssh!" murmured Mrs Lovatt, "I'm ashamed of both of you, betting on such
a subject--or on any subject," she added. "And Ella here too!"
"It's a bet, Sneyd," said Peake, doggedly, and then turned to Lovatt.
"What do you say about this, Enoch?"
But Enoch Lovatt, self-trained to find safety in the middle, kept that
neutral and diplomatic silence which invariably marked his demeanour in
the presence of an argument.
"Now, Nan, you'll talk to James," said Mrs Lovatt, when they all stood
at the front-door bidding good-night.
"Nay, I've nothing to do with it," Mrs Peake replied, as quickly as at
dinner she might have set down a very hot plate. In some women profound
affection exists side by side with a nervous dread lest that affection
should seem to possess the least influence over its object.