"His brother came over from Darlington to see him yesterday evening, you

know."

"Yes. I just missed him."

The nurse gave a little bow as she moved up the road.

"Just going to the pillar-box," she explained. "Dreadful weather we're

having!"

He left her, feeling that he had made a new acquaintance.

"She's in love with a parson, I bet," he said to himself. And he had to

admit that she had charm--when off duty.

The news about Ingpen filled him with bright joy. Everything was going

well. Hilda would soon be home; George's eyes were not seriously wrong;

the awful funeral was over; and his friend was out of

danger--marvellously restored to him. Then he thought of the will. He

glanced about to see whether anybody of importance was observing him.

There was nobody. The coaches were a hundred yards in front. He drew

out the envelope containing the will, managed to extract the will from

the envelope, and opened the document,--not very easily because he was

holding his umbrella.

A small printed slip fluttered to the muddy pavement. He picked it up;

it was a printed form of attestation clause, seemingly cut from

Whitaker's Almanac:--"Signed by the testator (or testatrix as the case

may be) in the presence of us, both present at the same time," etc.

"She's got that right, anyhow," he murmured.

Then, walking along, he read the will of Auntie Hamps. It was quickly

spotted with raindrops.

At the house the blinds were drawn up, and the women sedately cheerful.

Maggie was actually teasing Bert about his new hat, and young Clara,

active among the preparations for tea for six, was intensely and

seriously proud at being included in the ceremonial party of adults.

She did not suspect that the adults themselves had a novel sensation of

being genuinely adult, and that the last representative of the older

generation was gone, and that this common sensation drew them together

rather wistfully.

"Oh! By the way, there's a telegram for you," said Maggie, as Minnie

left the dining-room after serving the last trayful of hot dishes and

pots.

Edwin took the telegram. It was from Hilda, to say that she and George

would return on the morrow.

"But what about the house being cleaned, and what about servants?" cried

Edwin, affecting, in order to conceal his pleasure, an annoyance which

he did not in the least feel.

"Oh! Mrs. Tams has been looking after the house--I shall go round and

see her after tea. I've got one servant for Hilda."

"You never told me anything about it," said Edwin, who was struck, by no

means for the first time, by the concealment which all the women

practised.

"Didn't I?" Maggie innocently murmured. "And then Minnie can go and

help if necessary until you're all settled again. Hadn't we better have

the gas lighted before we begin?"

And in the warm cosiness of the small, ugly, dining-room shortly to be

profaned by auctioneers and furniture-removers, amid the odours of tea

and hot tea-cakes, and surrounded by the family faces intimate, beloved,

and disdained, Edwin had an exciting vision of the new life with Hilda,

and the vision was shot through with sharp flitting thoughts of the once

gorgeous Auntie Hamps forlorn in the cemetery and already passing into

oblivion.

After tea, immediately the children had been sent home, he said,

self-consciously to Albert:

"I've got something for you."

And offered the will. Maggie and Clara were upstairs.

"What is it?"

"It's Auntie's will. Breeze had it. He gave it to me in the cemetery.

It seems he only knew this morning Auntie was dead. I think that was

why he came up."

"Well, I'm----!" Albert muttered.

His hand trembled as he opened the paper.

Auntie Hamps had made Edwin sole executor, and had left all her property

in trust for Clara's children. Evidently she had reasoned that Edwin and

Maggie had all they needed, and that the children of such a father as

Albert could only be effectually helped in one way, which way she had

chosen. The will was seven years old, and the astounding thing was that

she had drawn it herself, having probably copied some of the wording

from some source unknown. It was a wise if a rather ruthless will; and

its provisions, like the manner of making it, were absolutely

characteristic of the testatrix. Too mean to employ a lawyer, she had

yet had a magnificent gesture of generosity towards that Benbow brood

which she adored in her grandiose way. And further she had been clever

enough not to invalidate the will by some negligent informality. It was

as tight as if Julian Pidduck himself had drawn it.

And she had managed to put Albert in a position highly exasperating.

For he was both very pleased and very vexed. In slighting him, she had

aggrandized his children.

"What of it?" he asked nervously.

"It's all right so far as I'm concerned," said Edwin, with a short

laugh. And he was sincere, for he had no desire whatever to take a

share of his aunt's modest wealth. He shrank from the trusteeship, but

he knew that he could not avoid it, and he was getting accustomed to

power and dominion. Albert would have to knuckle down to him, and Clara

too.

Maggie and Clara came back together into the room, noticeably sisterly.

They perceived at once from the men's faces that they were in the

presence of a historic event.

"I say, Clary," Albert began; his voice quavered.

CHAPTER XX

THE DISCOVERY

I

Hilda showed her smiling, flattering face at the door of Edwin's private

office at a few minutes to one on Saturday morning, and she said:

"I had to go to the dressmaker's after my shopping, so I thought I might

as well call for you." She added with deference: "But I can wait if

you're busy."

True that the question of mourning had taken her to the dressmaker's,

and that the dressmaker lived in Shawport Lane, not four minutes from

the works; but such accidents had nothing to do with her call, which,

being part of a scheme of Hilda's, would have occurred in any case.

"I'm ready," said Edwin, pleased by the vision of his wife in the

stylish wide-sleeved black jacket and black hat which she had bought in

London. "What have you got in that parcel?"

"It's your new office-coat," Hilda replied, depositing on the desk the

parcel which had been partly concealed behind her muff. "I've mended

the sleeves."

"Aha!" Edwin lightly murmured. "Let's have a look at it."

His benevolent attitude towards the new office-coat surprised and

charmed her. Before her journey to London with George he would have

jealously resented any interfering hand among his apparel, but since her

return he had been exquisitely amenable. She thought, proud of herself:

"It's really quite easy to manage him. I never used to go quite the

right way about it."

Her new system, which was one of the results of contact with London and

which had been inaugurated a week earlier on the platform of Knype

station when she stepped down from the London train, consisted chiefly

in smiles, voice-control, and other devices to make Edwin believe in any

discussion that she fully appreciated his point of view. Often (she was

startled to find) this simulation had the unexpected result of causing

her actually to appreciate his point of view. Which was very curious.

London indeed had had its effect on Hilda. She had seen the Five Towns

from a distance, and as something definitely provincial. Having lived

for years at Brighton, which is almost a suburb of London, and also for

a short time in London itself, she could not think of herself as a

provincial, in the full sense in which Edwin, for example, was a

provincial. She had gone to London with her son, not like a staring and

intimidated provincial, but with the confidence of an initiate returning

to the scene of initiation. And once she was there, all her old

condescensions towards the dirty and primitive ingenuous Five Towns had

very quickly revived. She discovered Charlie Orgreave, the fairly

successful doctor in Ealing (a suburb rich in doctors), to be the

perfect Londoner, and Janet, no longer useless and forlorn, scarcely

less so. These two, indeed, had the air of having at length reached

their proper home after being born in exile. The same was true of

Johnnie Orgreave, now safely through the matrimonial court and married

to his blonde Adela (formerly the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson), whose

money had bought him a junior partnership in an important architectural

firm in Russell Square. Johnnie and Adela had come over from Bedford

Park to Ealing to see Hilda, and Hilda had dined with them at Bedford

Park at a table illuminated by crimson-shaded night-lights,--a repast

utterly different in its appointments and atmosphere from anything

conceivable in Trafalgar Road. The current Five Towns notion of Johnnie

and his wife as two morally ruined creatures hiding for the rest of

their lives in shame from an outraged public opinion, seemed merely

comic in Ealing and Bedford Park. These people referred to the Five

Towns with negligent affection, but with disdain, as to a community

that, with all its good qualities, had not yet emerged from barbarism.

They assumed that their attitude was also Hilda's, and Hilda, after a

moment's secret resentment, had indeed made their attitude her own.

When she mentioned that she hoped soon to move Edwin into a country

house, they applauded and implied that no other course was possible.

Withal, their respect, to say nothing of their regard, for Edwin, the

astute and successful man of business, was obvious and genuine. The two

brothers Orgreave, amid their possibly superficial splendours of

professional men, hinted envy of the stability of Edwin's trade

position. And both Janet and Adela, shopping with Hilda, showed her, by

those inflections and eyebrow-liftings of which women possess the

secret, that the wife of a solid and generous husband had quite as much

economic importance in London as in the Five Towns.

Thus when Hilda got into the train at Euston, she had in her head a plan

of campaign compared to which the schemes entertained by her on the

afternoon of the disastrous servants episode seemed amateurish and

incomplete. And also she was like a returning adventurer, carrying back

to his savage land the sacred torch of civilisation. She had perceived,

as never before, the superior value of the suave and refined social

methods of the metropolitan middle-classes, compared with the manners of

the Five Towns, and it seemed to her, in her new enthusiasm for the art

of life, that if she had ever had a difficulty with Edwin, her own

clumsiness was to blame. She saw Edwin as an instrument to be played

upon, and herself as a virtuoso. In such an attitude was necessarily a

condescension. Yet this condescension somehow did not in the least

affect the tenderness and the fever of her longing for Edwin. Her

excitement grew as the train passed across the dusky December plain

towards him. She thought of the honesty of his handshake and of his

wistful glance. She knew that he was better than any of the people she

had left,--either more capable, or more reliable, or more charitable, or

all three. She knew that most of the people she had left were at heart

snobs. "Am I getting a snob?" she asked herself. She had asked herself

the question before. "I don't care if it is snobbishness. I want

certain things, and I will have them, and they can call it what they

like." Like the majority of women, she was incapable of being

frightened by the names of her desires. She might be snobbish in one

part of her, but in another she had the fiercest scorn for all that

Ealing stood for. And in Edwin she admired nothing more than the fact

that success had not modified his politics, which were as downright as

they had ever been; she could not honestly say the same for herself; and

assuredly the Orgreaves could not say the same for themselves. In

politics, Edwin was an inspiration to her.

And when the train entered the fiery zone of industry, and slackened

speed amid the squalid twilit streets, and stopped at Knype station in

front of a crowd of local lowering faces and mackintoshed and gaitered

forms, and the damp chill of the Five Towns came in through the opened

door of the compartment, her heart fell, and she regretted the elegance

of Ealing. But simultaneously her heart was beating with ecstatic

expectation. She saw Edwin's face. It was a local face. He wore

mourning. He saw her; his eye lighted; his wistful smile appeared.

"Yes," she thought, "he is the same as my image of him. He is better

than any of them. I am safe. What a shame to have left him all alone!

He was quite right--there was no need for it. But I am so impulsive. He

must have suffered terribly with those Benbows, and shut out of his own

house too." ... His hand thrilled her. In the terrible sincerity and

outpouring of her kiss she sought to compensate him for all wrongs past

and future. Her joy in being near him again made her tingle. His

matter-of-fact calmness pleased her. She thought: "I know him, with his

matter-of-fact calmness!" "Hello, kid," Edwin addressed George with

man-to-man negligence. "Been looking after your mother?" George

answered like a Londoner. She had them side by side. It was the fact

that George had looked after her. London had matured him; he had picked

up a little Ealing. He was past Edwin's shoulder. Indeed he was

surprisingly near to being a man. She had both of them. On the

platform they surrounded her with their masculine protection. George's

secret deep respect for Edwin was not hidden from her.

And yet, all the time, in her joy, reliance, love, admiration, eating

him with her eyes, she was condescending to Edwin,--because she had

plans for his good. She knew better than he did what would be for his

good. And he was a provincial and didn't suspect it. "My poor boy!" she

had said gleefully in the cab, pulling suddenly at a loose button of the

old grey coat which he wore surreptitiously under his new black

overcoat. "My poor boy, what a state you are in!" implying in her tone

of affectionate raillery that without her he was a lost man. Through

this loose button, she was his mother, his good angel, his saviour. The

trifle had led to a general visitation of his wardrobe, conducted by her

with metropolitan skill in humouring his susceptibilities.

Edwin now tried on the new office-coat with the self-consciousness that

none but an odious dandy can avoid on such occasions.

"It seems warmer than it used to be," he said, pleased to have her

beholding him and interesting herself in him, especially in his office.

Her presence there, unless it happened to arouse his jealousy for his

business independence, always pleasurably excited him. Her muff on the

desk had the air of being the muff of a woman who was amorously

interested in him, but his relations with whom were not regularised by

the law or the church.

"Yes," said she. "I've put some wash-leather inside the lining at the

back."

"Why?"

"Well, didn't you say you felt the cold from the window, and it's bad

for your liver?"

Her glance said:

"Am I not a clever woman?"

And his replied:

"You are."

"That's the end of that, I hope, darling," she remarked, picking up the

old office-coat and dropping it with charming affected disgust into the

waste-paper basket.

He shouted for the clerk, who entered with some letters for signature.

Under the eyes of his wife Edwin signed them with the demeanour of a

secretary of state signing the destiny of provinces, while the clerk

respectfully waited.

"I've asked Maggie to come up for the week-end," said Hilda carelessly,

when they were alone together, and Edwin was straightening the desk

preparatory to departure.

Since her return she had become far more friendly with Maggie than ever

before,--not because Maggie had revealed any new charm, but because she

saw in Maggie a victim of injustice. Nothing during the week had more

severely tested Hilda's new methods of intercourse with Edwin than the

disclosure of the provisions of Auntie Hamps's will, which she had at

once and definitely set down as monstrous. She simply could not

comprehend Edwin's calm acceptance of them, and a month earlier she

would have been bitter about it. It was not (she was convinced) that

she coveted money, but that she hated unfairness. Why should the

Benbows have all Auntie Hamps's possessions, and Edwin and Maggie, who

had done a thousand times more for her than the Benbows, nothing?

Hilda's conversation implied that the Benbows ought to be ashamed of

themselves, and when Edwin pointed out that their good luck was not

their fault, only a miracle of self-control had enabled her to say

nicely: "That's quite true," instead of sneering: "That's you all over,

Edwin!" When she learnt that Edwin would receive not a penny for his

labours as executor and trustee for the Benbow children, she was

speechless. Perceiving that he did not care for her to discourse upon

what she considered to be the wrong done to him, she discoursed upon the

wrong done to Maggie--Maggie who was already being deprived by the

wicked Albert of interest due to her. And Edwin had to agree with her

about Maggie's case. It appeared that Maggie also agreed with her about

Maggie's case. As for the Benbows, Hilda had not deigned to say one word

to them on the matter. A look, a tone, a silence, had sufficed to

express the whole of Hilda's mind to those Benbows.

"Oh!" said Edwin. "So Maggie's coming for the week-end, is she? Well,

that's not a bad scheme." He knew that Maggie had been very helpful

about servants, and that, the second servant having not yet arrived, she

would certainly do much more work in the house than she "made." He

pictured her and Hilda becoming still more intimate as they turned

sheets and blankets and shook pillows on opposite sides of beds, and he

was glad.

"Yes," said Hilda. "I've called there this morning."

"And what's she doing with Minnie?"

"We've settled all that," said Hilda proudly. Edwin had told her in

detail the whole story of Minnie, and she had behaved exactly as he had

anticipated. Her championship of Minnie had been as passionate as her

ruthless verdict upon Minnie's dead mistress. "The girl's aunt was there

when I called. We've settled she is to go to Stone, and Maggie and I

shall do something for her, and when it's all over I may take her on as

housemaid. Maggie says she probably wouldn't make a bad housemaid.

Anyhow it's all arranged for the present."

"Then Maggie'll be without a servant?"

"No, she won't. We shall manage that. Besides, I suppose Maggie won't

stay on in that house all by herself for ever! ... It's just the right

size, I see."

"Just!" said Edwin.

He was spreading over his desk a dust-sheet with a red scolloped edging

which Hilda had presented to him three days earlier.

She gazed at him with composed and justifiable self-satisfaction, as if

saying: "Leave absolutely to me everything in my department, and see how

smooth your life will be!"

He would never praise her, and she had a very healthy appetite for

praise, which appetite always went hungry. But now, instead of

resenting his niggardly reserve, she said to herself: "Poor boy! He

can't bring himself to pay compliments; that's it. But his eyes are

full of delicious compliments." She was happy, even if apprehensive for

the immediate future. There she was, established and respected in his

office, which was his church and the successful rival of her boudoir.

Her plans were progressing.

She approached the real business of her call:

"I was thinking we might have gone over to see Ingpen this afternoon."

"Well, let's."

Ingpen, convalescent, had insisted, two days earlier, on being removed

to his own house, near the village of Stockbrook, a few miles south of

Axe. The departure was a surprising example of the mere power of

volition on the part of a patient. The routine of hospital life had

exasperated the recovering soul of this priest of freedom to such a

point that doctor, matron, and friends had had to yield to a mere

instinct.

"There's no decent train to go, and none at all to come back until

nearly nine o'clock. And we can't cycle in this weather--at least I

can't, especially in the dark."

"Well, what about Sunday?"

"The Sunday trains are worse."

"What a ghastly line!" said Edwin. "And they have the cheek to pay five

per cent! I remember Ingpen telling me there was one fairish train into

Knype in the morning, and one out in the afternoon. And there wouldn't

be that if the Locomotive Superintendent didn't happen to live at Axe."

"It's a pity you haven't got a dog-cart, isn't it?" said Hilda, lightly

smiling. "Because then we could use the works horse now and then, and

it wouldn't really cost anything extra, would it?"

Her heart was beating perceptibly.

Edwin shook his head, agreeably, but with firmness.

"Can't mix up two different things like that!" he said.

She knew it. She was aware of the whole theory of horse-owning among

the upper trading-class in the Five Towns. A butcher might use his cob

for pleasure on Sundays--he never used it for pleasure on any other

day--but traders on a higher plane than butchers drew between the works

and the house a line which a works horse was not permitted to cross.

One or two, perhaps,--but not the most solid--would put a carter into a

livery overcoat and a shabby top-hat and describe him as a coachman

while on rare afternoons he drove a landau or a victoria picked up cheap

at Axe or Market Drayton. But the majority had no pretensions to the

owning of private carriages. The community was not in fact a carriage

community. Even the Orgreaves had never dreamed of a carriage. Old

Darius Clayhanger would have been staggered into profanity by the

suggestion of such a thing. Indeed, until some time after old

Clayhanger's death the printing business had been content to deliver all

its orders in a boy-pushed handcart. Only when Edwin discovered that,

for instance, two thousand catalogues on faced clay paper could not be

respectably delivered in a handcart, had he steeled himself to the

prodigious move of setting up a stable. He had found an entirely

trustworthy ostler-carter with the comfortable name of Unchpin, and, an

animal and a tradesman's covered cart having been bought, he had left

the affair to Unchpin. Naturally he had never essayed to drive the

tradesman's cart. And Edwin Clayhanger could not be seen on the

insecure box of a tradesman's cart. He had learnt nothing about horses

except that a horse should be watered before, and not after, being fed,

that shoeing cost a shilling a week and fodder a shilling a day, and

that a horse driven over a hundred and fifty miles a week was likely to

get "a bit over" at the knees. At home the horse and cart had always

been regarded as being just as exclusively a works item as the

printing-machines or the steam-engine.

"I suppose," said Hilda carefully, "you've got all the work one horse

can do?"

"And more."

"Well, then, why don't you buy another one?" She tried to speak

carelessly, without genuine interest.

"Yes, no doubt!" Edwin answered drily. "And build fresh stables, too."

"Haven't you got room for two?"

"Come along and look, and then perhaps you'll be satisfied."

Buzzers, syrens, and whistles began to sound in the neighbourhood. It

was one o'clock.

"Shall I? ... Your overcoat collar's turned up behind. Let me do it."

She straightened the collar.

They went out, through the clerk's office. Edwin gave a sideways nod to

Simpson. In the passage some girls and a few men were already hurrying

forth. None of them took notice of Edwin and Hilda. They all plunged

for the street as though the works had been on fire.

"They are in a hurry, my word!" Hilda murmured, with irony.

"And why shouldn't they be?" the employer protested almost angrily.

In the small yard stood the horseless cart, with "Edwin Clayhanger,

Lithographer and Steam Printer, Bursley," on both its sides. The stable

and cart-shed were in one penthouse, and to get to the stable it was

necessary to pass through the cart-shed. Unchpin, a fat man of forty

with a face marked by black seams, was bending over a chaff-cutter in

the cart-shed. He ignored the intruders. The stable consisted of one

large loose-box, in which a grey animal was restlessly moving.

"You see!" Edwin muttered curtly.

"Oh! What a beautiful horse! I've never seen him before."

"Her," Edwin corrected.

"Is it a mare?"

"So they say!"

"I never knew you'd got a fresh one."

"I haven't--yet. I've taken this one for a fortnight's trial, from

Chawner.... How's she doing, Unchpin?" he called to the cart-shed.

Unchpin looked round and stared.

"Bit light," he growled and turned back to the chaff-cutter, which he

seemed to be repairing.

"I thought so," said Edwin.

"But her's a good 'un," he added.

"But where's the old horse?" asked Hilda.

"With God," Edwin replied. "Dropped down dead last week."

"What of?"

Edwin shook his head.

"It's a privilege of horses to do that sort of thing," he said.

"They're always doing it."

"You never told me."

"Well, you weren't here, for one thing."

The mare inquisitively but cautiously put her muzzle over the door of

the box. Hilda stroked her. The animal's mysterious eyes, her

beautiful coat, her broad back, her general bigness relatively to Hilda,

the sound of her feet among the litter on the paving stones, the smell

of the stable,--these things enchanted Hilda.

"I should adore horses!" she breathed, half to herself, ecstatically;

and wondered whether she would ever be able to work her will on Edwin in

the matter of a dog-cart. She pictured herself driving the grey mare,

who had learnt to love her, in a flashing dog-cart, Edwin by her side on

the front-seat. Her mind went back enviously to Tavy Mansion and

Dartmoor. But she felt that Edwin had not enough elasticity to

comprehend the rapture of her dream. She foresaw nearly endless trouble

and altercation and chicane before she could achieve her end. She was

ready to despair, but she remembered her resolutions and took heart.

"I say, Unchpin," said Edwin. "I suppose this box couldn't be made into

two stalls?"

Unchpin on his gaitered legs clumped towards the stable, and gazed

gloomily into the box. When he had gazed for some time, he touched his

cap to Hilda.

"It could," he announced.

"Could you get a trap into the shed as well as the cart?"

"Ay! If ye dropped th' shafts o' th' trap under th' cart. What of it,

mester?"

"Nothing. Only missis is going to have this mare."

After a pause, Unchpin muttered:

"Missis, eh!"

Hilda had moved a little away into the yard. Edwin approached her,

flushing slightly, and with a self-consciousness which he tried to

dissipate with one wink. Hilda's face was set hard.

"I must just go back to the office," she said, in a queer voice.

She walked quickly, Edwin following. Simpson beheld their return with

gentle surprise. In the private office Hilda shut the door. She then

ran to the puzzled Edwin, and kissed him with the most startling

vehemence, clasping her arms--in one hand she still held the muff--round

his neck. She loved him for being exactly as he was. She preferred his

strange, uncouth method of granting a request, of yielding, of

flattering her caprice, to any politer, more conventional methods of the

metropolis. She thought that no other man could be as deeply romantic

as Edwin. She despised herself for ever having been misled by the

surface of him. And even the surface of him she saw now as it were,

through the prism of passionate affection, to be edged with the blending

colours of the rainbow. And when they came again out of the office,

after the sacred rite, and Edwin, as uplifted as she, glanced back

nevertheless at the sheeted desk and the safe and the other objects in

the room with the half-mechanical habitual solicitude of a man from whom

the weight of responsibility is never lifted, she felt saddened because

she could not enter utterly into his impenetrable soul, and live through

all his emotions, and comprehend like a creator the always baffling

wistfulness of his eyes. This sadness was joy; it was the aura of her

tremendous satisfaction in his individuality and in her triumph and in

the thought: "I alone stand between him and desolation."

II

"Wo!" exclaimed Hilda broadly, bringing the mare and the vehicle to a

standstill in front of the "Live and Let Live" inn in the main street of

the village of Stockbrook, which lay about a mile and a half off the

high road from the Five Towns to Axe. And immediately the mare stopped

she was enveloped in her own vapour.

"Ha!" exclaimed Edwin, with faint benevolent irony. "And no bones

broken!"

A man came out from the stable-yard.

The village of Stockbrook gave the illusion that hundreds of English

villages were giving that Christmas morning,--the illusion that its name

was Arcadia, that finality had been reached, and that the forces of

civilisation could go no further. More suave than a Dutch village,

incomparably neater and cleaner and more delicately finished than a

French village, it presented, in the still, complacent atmosphere of

long tradition, a picturesque medley of tiny architectures nearly every

aspect of which was beautiful. And if seven people of different ages

and sexes lived in a two-roomed cottage under a thatched roof hollowed

by the weight of years, without drains and without water, and also

without freedom, the beholder was yet bound to conclude that by some

mysterious virtue their existence must be gracious, happy, and in fact

ideal--especially on Christmas Day, though Christmas Day was also

Quarter Day--and that they would not on any account have it altered in

the slightest degree. Who could believe that fathers of families drank

away their children's bread in the quaint tap-room of that creeper-clad

hostel--a public-house fit to produce ecstasy in the heart of every

American traveller--"The Live and Let Live"? Who could have believed

that the Wesleyan Methodists already singing a Christmas hymn inside the

dwarf Georgian conventicle, and their fellow-Christians straggling under

the lych into the church-yard, scorned one another with an immortal

detestation, each claiming a monopoly in knowledge of the unknowable?

But after all the illusion of Arcadia was not entirely an illusion. In

this calm, rime-decked, Christmas-imbued village, with its motionless

trees enchanted beneath a vast grey impenetrable cloud, a sort of

relative finality had indeed been reached,--the end of an epoch that was

awaiting dissolution.

Edwin had not easily agreed to the project of shutting up house for the

day and eating the Christmas dinner with Tertius Ingpen. Although

customarily regarding the ritual of Christmas, with its family visits,

its exchange of presents, its feverish kitchen activity, its somewhat

insincere gaiety, its hours of boredom, and its stomachic regrets, as an

ordeal rather than a delight, he nevertheless abandoned it with

reluctance and a sense of being disloyal to something sacred. But the

situation of Ingpen, Hilda's strong desire and her teasing promise of a

surprise, and the still continuing dearth of servants had been good

arguments to persuade him.

And though he had left Trafalgar Road moody and captious, thinking all

the time of the deserted and cold home, he had arrived in Stockbrook

tingling and happy, and proud of Hilda,--proud of her verve, her

persistency, and her success. She had carried him very far on the wave

of her new enthusiasm for horse-traction. She had beguiled him into

immediately spending mighty sums on a dog-cart, new harness, rugs, a

driving-apron, and a fancy whip. She had exhausted Unchpin, upset the

routine of the lithographic business, and gravely overworked the mare,

in her determination to learn to drive. She had had the equipage out at

night for her lessons. On the other hand she had not in the least

troubled herself about the purchase of a second horse for mercantile

purposes, and a second horse had not yet been bought.

When she had announced that she would herself drive her husband and son

over to Stockbrook, Edwin had absolutely negatived the idea; but Unchpin

had been on her side; she had done the double journey with Unchpin, who

judged her capable and the mare (eight years old) quite reliable, and

who moreover wanted Christmas as much as possible to himself. And Hilda

had triumphed. Walking the mare uphill--and also downhill--she had

achieved Stockbrook in safety; and the conquering air with which she

drew up at the "Live and Let Live" was delicious. The chit's happiness

and pride radiated out from her. It seemed to Edwin that by the mere

strength of violition she had actually created the dog-cart and its

appointments, and the mare too! And he thought that he himself had not

lived in vain if he could procure her such sensations as her glowing

face then displayed. Her occasionally overbearing tenacity, and the

little jars which good resolutions several weeks old had naturally not

been powerful enough to prevent, were forgotten and forgiven. He would

have given all his savings to please her caprice, and been glad. A

horse and trap, or even a pair of horses and a landau, were a trifling

price to pay for her girlish joy and for his own tranquillity in his

beloved house and business.

"Catch me, both of you!" cried Hilda.

Edwin had got down, and walked round behind the vehicle to the footpath,

where George stood grinning. The stableman, in classic attitude, was at

the mare's head.

Hilda jumped rather wildly. It was Edwin who countered the shock of her

descent. The edge of her velvet hat knocked against his forehead,

disarranging his cap. He could smell the velvet, as for an instant he

held his wife--strangely acquiescent and yielding--in his arms, and

there was something intimately feminine in the faint odour. All Hilda's

happiness seemed to pass into him, and that felicity sufficed for him.

He did not desire any happiness personal to himself. He wanted only to

live in her. His contentment was profound, complete, rapturous.

And yet in the same moment, reflecting that Hilda would certainly have

neglected the well-being of the mare, he could say to the stableman:

"Put the rug over her, will you?"

"Hello! Here's Mr. Ingpen!" announced George, as he threw the coloured

rug on the mare.

Ingpen, pale and thickly enveloped, came slowly round the bend of the

road, waving and smiling. He had had a relapse, after a too early

sortie, and was recovering from it.

"I made sure you'd be about here," he said, shaking hands. "Merry

Christmas, all!"

"Ought you to be out, my lad?" Edwin asked heartily.

"Out? Yes. I'm as fit as a fiddle. And I've been ordered mild

exercise." He squared off gaily against George and hit the stout

adolescent in the chest.

"What about all your parcels, Hilda?" Edwin enquired.

"Oh! We'll call for them afterwards."

"Afterwards?"

"Yes. Come along--before you catch a chill." She winked openly at

Ingpen, who returned the wink. "Come along, dear. It's not far. We

have to walk across the fields."

"Put her up, sir?" the stableman demanded of Edwin.

"Yes. And give her a bit of a rub down," he replied absently,

remembering various references of Hilda's to a surprise. His heart

misgave him. Ingpen and Hilda looked like plotters, very intimate and

mischievous. He had a notion that living with a woman was comparable to

living with a volcano--you never knew when a dangerous eruption might

not occur.

Within three minutes the first and minor catastrophe had occurred.

"Bit sticky, this field path of yours," said Edwin, uneasily.

They were all four slithering about in brown clay under a ragged hedge

in which a few red berries glowed.

"It was as hard as iron the day before yesterday," said Hilda.

"Oh! So you were here the day before yesterday, were you? ... What's

that house there?" Edwin turned to Ingpen.

"He's guessed it in one!" Ingpen murmured, and then went off into his

characteristic crescendo laugh.

The upper part of a late eighteenth-century house, squat and square,

with yellow walls, black uncurtained windows, high slim chimney, and a

blue slate roof, showed like a gigantic and mysterious fruit in a clump

of variegated trees, some of which were evergreen.

"Ladderedge Hall, my boy," said Ingpen. "Seat of the Beechinors for

about a hundred years."

"'Seat', eh!" Edwin murmured sarcastically.

"It's been empty for two years," remarked Hilda brightly. "So we

thought we'd have a look at it."

And Edwin said to himself that he had divined all along what the

surprise was. It was astounding that a man could pass with such

rapidity as Edwin from vivid joy to black and desolate gloom. She well

knew that the idea of living in the country was extremely repugnant to

him, and that nothing would ever induce him to consent to it. And yet

she must needs lay this trap for him, prepare this infantile surprise,

and thereby spoil his Christmas, she who a few moments earlier had been

the embodiment of surrender in his arms! He said no word. He hummed a

few notes and glanced airily to right and left with an effort after

unconcern. The presence of Ingpen and the boy, and the fact of

Christmas, forbade him to speak freely. He could not suddenly stop and

drive his stick into the earth and say savagely:

"Now listen to me! Once for all, I won't have this country house idea!

So let it be understood,--if you want a row, you know how to get it."

The appearance of amity--and the more high-spirited the better--must be

kept up throughout the day. Nevertheless in his heart he challenged

Hilda desperately. All her good qualities became insignificant, all his

benevolent estimates of her seemed ridiculous. She was the impossible

woman. He saw a tremendous vista of unpleasantness, for her obstinacy

in warfare was known to him, together with her perfect lack of scruple,

of commonsense, and of social decency. He had made her a present of a

horse and trap--solely to please her--and this was his reward! The more

rope you gave these creatures, the more they wanted! But he would give

no more rope. Compromise was at an end. The battle would be joined that

night.... In his grim and resolute dejection there was something almost

voluptuous. He continued to glance airily about, and at intervals to

hum a few notes.

Over a stile they dropped into a rutty side-road, and opposite was the

worn iron gate of Ladderedge Hall, with a house-agent's board on it. A

short curved gravel drive, filmed with green, led to the front-door of

the house. In front were a lawn and a flower-garden, beyond a paddock,

and behind a vegetable garden and a glimpse of stabling; a compact

property! Ingpen drew a great key from his pocket. The plotters were

all prepared; they took their victim for a simpleton, a ninny, a lamb!

In the damp echoing interior Edwin gazed without seeing, and heard as in

a dream without listening. This was the hall, this the dining-room, this

the drawing-room, this the morning-room.... White marble mantelpieces,

pre-historic grates, wall-paper hanging in strips, cobwebs, uneven

floors, scaly ceilings, the invisible vapour of human memories! This

was the kitchen, enormous; then the larder, enormous, and the scullery

still more enormous (with a pump-handle flanking the slopstone)! No

water. No gas. And what was this room opening out of the kitchen? Oh!

That must be the servants' hall.... Servants' hall indeed! Imagine

Edwin Clayhanger living in a "Hall," with a servants' hall therein!

Snobbishness unthinkable! He would not be able to look his friends in

the face.... On the first floor, endless bedrooms, but no bath-room.

Here, though, was a small bedroom that would make a splendid

bath-room.... Ingpen, the ever expert, conceived a tank-room in the

roof, and traced routes for plumbers' pipes. George, excited, and

comprehending that he must conduct himself as behoved an architect, ran

up to the attic floor to study on the spot the problem of the tank-room,

and Ingpen followed. Edwin stared out of a window at the prospect of

the Arcadian village lying a little below across the sloping fields.

"Come along, Edwin," Hilda coaxed.

Yes, she had pretended a deep concern for the welfare of the suffering

feckless bachelor, Tertius Ingpen. She had paid visit after visit in

order to watch over his convalescence. Choosing to ignore his scorn for

all her sex, she had grown more friendly with him than even Edwin had

ever been. Indeed by her sympathetic attentions she had made Edwin seem

callous in comparison. And all the time she had merely been pursuing a

private design--with what girlish deceitfulness.

In the emptiness of the house the voices of Ingpen and George echoed

from above down the second flight of stairs.

"No good going to the attics," muttered Edwin, on the landing.

Hilda, half cajoling, half fretful, protested:

"Now, Edwin, don't be disagreeable."

He followed her on high, martyrised. The front wall of the house rose

nearly to the top of the attic windows, screening and darkening them.

"Cheerful view!" Edwin growled.

He heard Ingpen saying that the place could be had on a repairing lease

for sixty-five pounds a year, and that perhaps L1,200 would buy it.

Dirt cheap.

"Ah!" Edwin murmured. "I know those repairing leases. L1,000 wouldn't

make this barn fit to live in."

He knew that Ingpen and Hilda exchanged glances.

"It's larger than Tavy Mansion," said Hilda.

Tavy Mansion! There was the secret! Tavy Mansion was at the bottom of

her scheme. Alicia Hesketh had a fine house, and Hilda must have a

finer. She, Hilda, of all people, was a snob. He had long suspected it.

He rejoined sharply: "Of course it isn't larger than Tavy Mansion! It

isn't as large."

"Oh! Edwin. How can you say such things!"

In the portico, as Ingpen was re-locking the door, the husband said

negligently, superiorly, cheerfully:

"It's not so bad. I expect there's hundreds of places like this up and

down the country--going cheap."

The walk back to the "Live and Let Live" was irked by constraint,

against which everyone fought nobly, smiling, laughing, making remarks

about cockrobins, the sky, the Christmas dinner.

"So I hear it's settled you're going to London when you leave school,

kiddie," said Tertius Ingpen, to bridge over a fearful hiatus in the

prittle-prattle.

George, so big now and so mannishly dressed as to be amused and not a

bit hurt by the appellation "kiddie," confirmed the statement in his

deepening voice.

Edwin thought:

"It's more than _I_ hear, anyway!"

Hilda had told him that during the visit to London the project for

articling George to Johnnie Orgreave had been revived, but she had not

said that a decision had been taken. Though Edwin from careful pride

had not spoken freely--George being Hilda's affair and not his--he had

shown no enthusiasm. Johnnie Orgreave had sunk permanently in his

esteem--scarcely less so than Jimmie, whose conjugal eccentricities had

scandalised the Five Towns and were achieving the ruin of the Orgreave

practice; or than Tom, who was developing into a miser. Moreover, he

did not at all care for George going to London. Why should it be

thought necessary for George to go to London? The sagacious and

successful provincial in Edwin was darkly jealous of London, as a rival

superficial and brilliant. And now he learnt from Ingpen that George's

destiny was fixed.... A matter of small importance, however!

Did "they" seriously expect him to travel from Ladderedge Hall to his

works, and from his works to Ladderedge Hall every week-day of his life?

He laughed sardonically to himself.

Out came the sun, which George greeted with a cheer. And Edwin, to his

own surprise, began to feel hungry.

III

"I shan't take that house, you know," said Edwin, casually and yet

confidentially, in a pause which followed a long analysis, by Ingpen, of

Ingpen's sensations in hospital before he was out of danger.

They sat on opposite sides of a splendid extravagant fire in Ingpen's

dining-room.

Ingpen, sprawling in a shabby, uncomfortable easychair, and flushed with

the activity of digestion, raised his eyebrows, squinted down at the

cigarette between his lips, and answered impartially:

"No. So I gather. Of course you must understand it was Hilda's plan to

go up there. I merely fell in with it,--simplest thing to do in these

cases!"

"Certainly."

Thus they both condescended to the feather-headed capricious woman,

dismissed her, and felt a marked access of sincere intimacy on a plane

of civilisation exclusively masculine.

In the succeeding silence of satisfaction and relief could be heard

George, in the drawing-room above, practising again the piano part of a

Haydn violin sonata which he had very nervously tried over with Ingpen

while they were awaiting dinner.

Ingpen said suddenly:

"I say, old chap! Why have you never mentioned that you happened to

meet a certain person in my room at Hanbridge that night you went over

there for me?" He frowned.

Edwin had a thrill, pleasurable and apprehensive, at the prospect of a

supreme confidence.

"It was no earthly business of mine," he answered lightly. But his tone

conveyed: "You surely ought to be aware that my loyalty and my

discretion are complete."

And Ingpen, replying to Edwin's tone, said with a simple directness that

flattered Edwin to the heart:

"Naturally I knew I was quite safe in your hands.... I've reassured the

lady." Ingpen smiled slightly.

Edwin was too proud to tell Ingpen that he had not said a word to Hilda,

and Ingpen was too proud to tell Edwin that he assumed as much.

At that moment Hilda came into the room, murmuring a carol that some

children of Stockbrook had sung on the doorstep during dinner.

"Don't be afraid--I'm not going to interrupt. I know you're in the

thick of it," said she archly, not guessing how exactly truthful she

was.

Ingpen, keeping his presence of mind in the most admirable manner,

rejoined with irony:

"You don't mean to say you've finished already explaining to Mrs. Dummer

how she ought to run my house for me!"

"How soon do you mean to have this table cleared?" asked Hilda.

The Christmas dinner, served by a raw girl in a large bluish-white

pinafore, temporarily hired to assist Mrs. Dummer the housekeeper, had

been a good one. Its only real fault was that it had had a little too

much the air of being a special and mighty effort; and although it owed

something to Hilda's parcels, Ingpen was justified in the

self-satisfaction which he did not quite conceal as a bachelor host.

But now, under Hilda's quizzing gaze, not merely the table but the room

and the house sank to the tenth-rate. The coarse imperfections of the

linen and the cutlery grew very apparent; the disorder of bottles and

glasses and cups recalled the refectory of an inferior club. And the

untidiness of the room, heaped with accumulations of newspapers,

magazines, documents, books, boxes and musical-instrument cases, loudly

accused the solitary despot whose daily caprices of arrangement were

perpetuated and rendered sacred by the ukase that nothing was to be

disturbed. Hilda's glinting eyes seemed to challenge each corner and

dark place to confess its shameful dirt, and the malicious poise of her

head mysteriously communicated the fact that in the past fortnight she

had spied out every sinister secret in the whole graceless, primitive

wigwam.

"This table," retorted Ingpen bravely, "is going to be cleared when it

won't disturb me to have it cleared."

"All right," said Hilda. "But Mrs. Dummer does want to get on with her

washing-up."

"Look here, madam," Ingpen replied. "You're a little ray of sunshine,

and all that, and I'm the first to say so; but I'm not your husband."

He made a warning gesture. "Now don't say you'd be sorry for any woman

I was the husband of. Think of something more original." He burst out

laughing.

Hilda went to the window and looked out at the fading day.

"Please, I only popped in to say it's nearly a quarter to three, and

George and I will go down to the inn and bring the dog-cart up here. I

want a little walk. We shan't get home till dark as it is."

"Oh! Chance it and stop for tea, and all will be forgiven."

"Drive home in the dark? Not much!" Edwin murmured.

"He's afraid of my driving," said Hilda.

When Edwin and Ingpen were alone together once more, Ingpen's expression

changed back instantly to that which Hilda had disturbed, and Edwin's

impatience, which had uneasily simmered during the interruption, began

to boil.

"Her husband's in a lunatic asylum, I may tell you," said Ingpen.

"Whose?"

"The young woman's in question."

For Edwin, it was as if a door had opened in a wall and disclosed a vast

unsuspected garden of romance.

"Really!"

"Yes, my boy," Ingpen went on, quietly, with restraint, but not without

a naive and healthy pride in the sudden display of the marvellous

garden. "And I didn't meet her at a concert, or on the Grand Canal, or

anything of that sort. I met her in a mill at Oldham while I was doing

my job. He was the boss of the mill; I walked into an office and he was

lying on the floor on the flat of his back, and she was wiping her feet

on his chest. He was saying in a very anxious tone: 'You aren't half

wiping them. Harder! Harder!' That was his little weakness, you see.

He happened to be convinced that he was a doormat. She had been hiding

the thing for weeks, coming with him to the works, and so on, to calm

him." Ingpen spoke more quickly and excitedly: "I never saw a more

awful thing in my life! I never saw a more awful thing in my life! And

coming across it suddenly, you see.... There was something absolutely

odious in him lying down like that, and her trying to soothe him in the

way he wanted. You should have seen the serious expression of his face,

simply bursting with anxiety for her to wipe her boots properly on him.

And her face when she caught sight of me. Oh! Dreadful! Dreadful!"

Ingpen paused, and then continued calmly: "Of course I soon tumbled to

it. For the matter of that, it didn't want much tumbling to. He went

raving mad the same afternoon. And he's been more or less raving mad

ever since."

"What a ghastly business.... Any children?"

"No, thank God!" Ingpen answered with fresh emotion. "But don't you

forget that she's still the wife of that lunatic, and he'll probably

live for ever. She's tied up to him just as if she was tied up to a

post. Those are our Divorce Laws! Isn't it appalling? Isn't it

inconceivable? Just think of the situation of that woman!" Ingpen

positively glared at Edwin in the intensity of his indignation.

"Awful!" Edwin murmured.

"Quite alone in the world, you know!" said Ingpen. "I'm hanged if I know

what she'd have done without me. She hadn't a friend--at any rate she

hadn't a friend with a grain of sense. Astonishing how solitary some

couples are! ... It aged her frightfully. She's much younger than she

looks. Happily there was a bit of money--enough in fact."

Deeply as Edwin had been impressed by his romantic discovery of a woman

in Ingpen's room at Hanbridge, he was still more impressed by it now.

He saw the whole scene again, and saw it far more poetically. He accused

himself of blindness, and also of a certain harshness of attitude

towards the woman. He endowed her now with wondrous qualities. The

adventure, in its tragicalness and its clandestine tenderness, was

enchanting. How exquisite must be the relations between Ingpen and the

woman if without warning she could go to his lair at night and wait

confidently for his return! How divine the surprise for him, how ardent

the welcome! He envied Ingpen. And also he admired him, for Ingpen had

obviously conducted the affair with worthy expertise. And he had known

how to win devotion.

With an air of impartiality Ingpen proceeded:

"You wouldn't see her quite at her best, I'm afraid. She's very shy--and

naturally she'd be more shy than ever when you saw her. She's quite a

different woman when the shyness has worn off. The first two or three

times I met her I must say I didn't think she was anything more than a

nice well-meaning creature,--you know what I mean. But she's much more

than that. Can't play, but I believe she has a real feeling for music.

She has time for reading, and she does read. And she has a more

masculine understanding than nearly any other woman I've ever come

across."

"You wait a bit!" thought Edwin. This simplicity on the part of a

notable man of the world pleased him and gave him a comfortable sense of

superiority.

Aloud he responded sympathetically:

"Good! ... Do I understand she's living in the Five Towns now?"

"Yes," said Ingpen, after a hesitation. He spoke in a peculiar,

significant voice, carefully modest. The single monosyllable conveyed

to Edwin: "I cannot deny it. I was necessary to this woman, and in the

end she followed me!"

Edwin was impressed anew by the full revelation of romance which had

concealed itself in the squalid dailiness of the Five Towns.

"In fact," said Ingpen, "you never know your luck. If she'd been free I

might have been fool enough to get married."

"Why do you say a thing like that?"

"Because I think I should be a fool to marry." Ingpen tapping his front

teeth with his finger-nail, spoke reflectively, persuasively, and with

calm detachment.

"Why?" asked Edwin, persuasively also, but nervously, as though the

spirit of adventure in the search for truth was pushing him to fatal

dangers.

"Marriage isn't worth the price--for me, that is. I daresay I'm

peculiar." Ingpen said this quite seriously, prepared to consider

impartially the proposition that he was peculiar. "The fact is, my boy,

I think my freedom is worth a bit more than I could get out of any

marriage."

"That's all very well," said Edwin, trying to speak with the same

dispassionate conviction as Ingpen, and scarcely succeeding. "But look

what you miss! Look how you live!" Almost involuntarily he glanced

with self-complacence round the unlovely, unseemly room, and his glance

seemed to penetrate ceilings and walls, and to discover and condemn the

whole charmless house from top to bottom.

"Why? What's the matter with it?" Ingpen replied uneasily; a slight

flush came into his cheeks. "Nobody has a more comfortable bed or more

comfortable boots than I have. How many women can make coffee as good

as mine? No woman ever born can make first-class tea. I have all I

want."

"No, you don't. And what's the good of talking about coffee, and tea,

and beds?"

"Well, what else is there I want that I haven't got? If you mean fancy

cushions and draperies, no, thanks!"

"You know what I mean all right.... And then 'freedom' as you say.

What do you mean by freedom?"

"I don't specially mean," said Ingpen, tranquil and benevolent, "what I

may call physical freedom. I'd give that up. I like a certain amount

of untidiness, for instance, and I don't think an absence of dust is the

greatest thing in the world; but I wouldn't in the least mind giving all

that up. It wouldn't really matter to me. What I won't give up is my

intellectual freedom. Perhaps I mean intellectual honesty. I'd give up

even my intellectual freedom if I could be deprived of it fairly and

honestly. But I shouldn't be. There's almost no intellectual honesty in

marriage. There can't be. The entire affair is a series of compromises,

chiefly base on the part of the man. The alternative is absolute

subjection of the woman, which is offensive. No woman not absolutely a

slave ever hears the truth except in anger. You can't say the same

about men, and you know it. I'm not blaming; I'm stating. Even

assuming a married man gets a few advantages that I miss, they're all

purely physical----"

"Oh no! Not at all."

"My boy," Ingpen insisted, sitting up, and gazing earnestly at Edwin.

"Analyse them down, and they're all physical--all! And I tell you I

won't pay the price for them. I won't. I've no grievance against

women; I can enjoy being with women as much as anybody, but I won't--I

will not--live permanently on their level. That's why I say I might

have been fool enough to get married. It's quite simple."

"Hm!"

Edwin, although indubitably one of those who had committed the vast

folly of marriage, and therefore subject to Ingpen's indictment, felt

not the least constraint, nor any need to offer an individual defence.

Ingpen's demeanour seemed to have lifted the argument above the

personal. His assumption that Edwin could not be offended was

positively inspiring to Edwin. The fear of truth was exorcised.

Freedom of thought existed in that room in England. Edwin reflected:

"If he's right and I'm condemned accordingly,--well, I can't help it.

Facts are facts, and they're extremely interesting."

He also reflected:

"Why on earth can't Hilda and I discuss like that?"

He did not know why, but he profoundly and sadly knew that such

discussion would be quite impossible with Hilda.

The red-hot coals in the grate subsided together.

"And I'll tell you another thing----" Ingpen commenced.

He was stopped by the entrance of Mrs. Dummer, a fat woman, with an old

japanned tray. Mrs. Dummer came in like a desperate forlorn hope. Her

aged, grim, and yet somewhat hysterical face seemed to say: "I'm going

to clear this table and get on with my work, even if I die for it at the

hands of a brutal tyrant." Her gestures as she made a space for the

tray and set it down on the table were the formidable gestures of the

persecuted at bay.

"Mrs. Dummer," said Ingpen, in a weak voice, leaning back in his chair,

"would you mind fetching me my tonic off my dressing-table? I've

forgotten it."

"Bless us!" exclaimed Mrs. Dummer.

As she had hurried out, Ingpen winked placidly at Edwin in the room in

which the shadows were already falling.

Nevertheless, when the dog-cart arrived at the front-door, Ingpen did

seem to show some signs of exhaustion. Hilda would not get down. She

sent word into the house by George that the departure must occur at

once. Ingpen went out with Edwin, plaintively teased Hilda about the

insufferable pride of those who sit in driving-seats, and took leave of

her with the most punctilious and chivalrous ceremonial, while Hilda

inscrutably smiling bent down to him with condescension from her perch.

"I'll sit behind going home, I think," said Edwin. "George, you can sit

with your mother."

"Tchik! Tchik!" Hilda signalled.

The mare with a jerk started off down the misty and darkening road.

IV

The second and major catastrophe occurred very soon after the arrival in

Trafalgar Road. It was three-quarters of an hour after sunset and the

street lamps were lighted. Unchpin, with gloomy fatalism, shivered

obscurely in the dark porch, waiting to drive the dog-cart down to the

stable. Hilda had requested his presence; it was she also who had got

him to bring the equipage up to the house in the morning. She had

implied, but not asserted, that to harness the mare and trot up to

Bleakridge was the work of a few minutes, and that a few minutes' light

labour could make no real difference to Unchpin's Christmas Day. Edwin,

descrying Unchpin in the porch, saw merely a defenceless man who had

been robbed of the most sacred holiday of the year in order to gratify

the selfish caprice of an overbearing woman. When asked how long he had

been in the porch, Unchpin firmly answered that he had been there since

three o'clock, the hour appointed by Mrs. Clayhanger. Edwin knew

nothing of this appointment, and in it he saw more evidence of Hilda's

thoughtless egotism. He perceived that he would be compelled to stop

her from using his employees as her private servants, and that the

prohibition would probably cause trouble. Hilda demanded curtly of

Unchpin why he had not waited in the warm kitchen, according to

instructions, instead of catching his death of cold in the porch. The

reply was that he had rung and knocked fifteen times without getting a

response.

At this Hilda became angry, not only with Emmie, the defaulting servant,

but with the entire servant class and with the world. Emmie, the new

cook, and temporarily the sole resident servant, was to have gone to

Maggie's for her Christmas dinner, and to have returned at half past two

without fail in order to light the drawing-room fire and prepare for

tea-making. But, Maggie at the last moment having decided to go to

Clara's for the middle of the day, Emmie was told to go with her and be

as useful as she could at Mrs. Benbow's until a quarter past two.

"I hope you've got your latch-key, Edwin," said Hilda threateningly, as

if ready to assume that with characteristic and inexcusable negligence

he had left his latch-key at home.

"I have," he said drily, drawing the key from his pocket.

"Oh!" she muttered, as if saying: "Well, after all, you're no better

than you ought to be." And took the key.

While she opened the door, Edwin surreptitiously gave half a crown to

Unchpin, who was lighting the carriage-lamps.

George, with the marvellous self-preserving instinct of a small animal

unprotected against irritated prowling monsters, had become invisible.

The front-doorway yawned black like the portal of a tomb. The place was

a terrible negation of Christmas. Edwin felt for the radiator; it was

as cold to the touch as a dead hand. He lit the hall-lamp, and the

decorations of holly and mistletoe contrived by Hilda and George with

smiles and laughter on Christmas Eve stood revealed as the very symbol

of insincerity. Without taking off his hat and coat, he went into the

unlighted glacial drawing-room, where Hilda was kneeling at the grate

and striking matches. A fragment of newspaper blazed, and then the

flame expired. The fire was badly laid.

"I'm sick of servants!" Hilda exclaimed with fury. "Sick! They're all

alike!" Her tone furiously blamed Edwin and everybody.

And Edwin knew that the day was a pyramid of which this moment was the

dreadful apex. At intervals during the drive home Hilda had talked

confidentially to George of the wondrous things he and she could do if

they only resided in the country--things connected with flowers,

vegetables, cocks, hens, ducks, cows, rabbits, horses. She had sketched

out the life of a mistress of Ladderedge Hall, and she had sketched it

out for the benefit of the dull, hard man sitting behind. Her voice, so

persuasive and caressing to George, had been charged with all sorts of

accusations against the silent fellow whose back now and then collided

with hers. She had exasperated him. She had wilfully and deliberately

exasperated him.... Her treatment of Unchpin, her childish outburst

concerning servants, her acutely disagreeable demeanour, all combined

now to exhaust the poor remainder of Edwin's patience. Not one word had

been said about Ladderedge Hall, but Ladderedge Hall loomed always

between them. Deadly war was imminent. Let it come! He would prefer

war to a peace which meant for him nothing but insults and injustice.

He would welcome war. He turned brusquely and lit the chandelier. On

the table beneath it lay the writing-case that Hilda had given to

George, and the edition of Matthew Arnold that she had given to Edwin,

for a Christmas present. One of Edwin's Christmas presents to her, an

ermine stole, she was wearing round her neck. Tragic absurdities, these

false tokens of love.... There they were, both of them in full street

attire, she kneeling at the grate and he standing at the table, in the

dank drawing-room which now had no resemblance to a home.

Edwin said with frigid and disdainful malevolence:

"I wish you could control yourself, Hilda. The fact that a servant's a

bit late on Christmas Day is no reason for you to behave like a spoilt

child. You're offensive."

His words, righteously and almost murderously resentful, seemed to

startle and frighten the very furniture, which had the air of waiting,

enchanted, for disaster.

Hilda turned her head and glared at Edwin. She threw back her

shoulders, and her thick eyebrows seemed to meet in a passionate frown.

"Yes," she said, with her clear, stinging articulation. "That's just

like you, that is! I lend my servant to your sister. She doesn't send

her back,--and it's my fault! I should have thought the Benbows twisted

you round their little finger enough, without you having to insult me

because of them. Goodness knows what tricks they didn't play to get

your Aunt's money--every penny of it! And now they make you do all the

work of the estate, for their benefit, and of course you do it like a

lamb! You can never spare a minute from the works for me, but you can

spare hours and hours for Auntie Hamps's estate and the Benbows! It's

always like that." She paused and spoke more thickly: "But I don't see

why you should insult me on the top of it!"

Her features went awry. She sobbed.

"You make me ill!" said Edwin savagely.

He walked out of the room and pulled the door to.

George was descending the stairs.

"Where are you going to, uncle?" demanded George, as Edwin opened the

front-door.

"I'm going down to see Auntie Maggie," Edwin answered, forcing himself

to speak very gently. "Tell your mother if she asks." The boy guessed

the situation. It was humiliating that he should guess it, and still

more humiliating to be compelled to make use of him in the fatal affair.

V

He walked at a moderate pace down Trafalgar Road. He did not know where

he was going. Certainly he was not going to see Maggie. He had invented

the visit to Maggie instantly in answer to George's question, and he

could not understand why he had invented it. Maggie would be at

Clara's; and, in a misfortune, he would never go to Clara's; only when

he was successful and triumphant could he expose himself to the Benbows.

The weather was damp and chill without rain. The chilliness was rather

tonic and agreeable to his body, and he felt quite warm, though on

getting down from the dog-cart a few minutes earlier he had been cold

almost to the point of numbness. He could not remember how, nor when,

the change had occurred.

Every street lamp was the centre of a greenish-grey sphere, which

presaged rain as though the street-lamp were the moon. The pavements

were greasy with black slime, the road deep in lamp-reflecting mire

through which the tram-lines ran straight and gleaming. Far down the

slope a cage of light moving obscurely between the glittering avenue of

lamps indicated the steam-tram as it lifted towards the further hill

into the heart of the town. Where the lamps merged together and

vanished, but a little to the left, the illuminated dial of the clock in

the Town Hall tower glowed in the dark heavens. The street was

deserted; no _Signal_ boys, no ragged girls staring into sweet shops, no

artisans returning from work, no rattling carts, no vehicles of any kind

save the distant tram. All the little shops were shut; even the little

greengrocer's shop, which never closed, was shut now, and its customary

winter smell of oranges and apples withdrawn. The little inns, not yet

open, showed through their lettered plate windows one watching jet of

gas amid blue-and-red paper festoons and bunches of holly. The gloomy

fronts of nearly all the houses were pierced with oblongs of light on

which sometimes appeared transient shadows of human beings. A very few

other human beings, equally mysterious, passed furtive and baffling up

and down the slope. Melancholy, familiar, inexplicable, and

piteous--the melancholy of existence itself--rose like a vapour out of

the sodden ground, ennobling all the scene. The lofty disc of the Town

Hall clock solitary in the sky was somehow so heart-rending, and the

lives of the people both within and without the houses seemed to be so

woven of futility and sorrow, that the menace of eternity grew

intolerable.

Edwin's brain throbbed and shook like an engine-house in which the

machinery was his violent thoughts. He no longer saw his marriage as a

chain of disconnected episodes; he saw it as a drama the true meaning of

which was at last revealed by the climax now upon him. He had had many

misgivings about it, and had put them away, and they all swept back

presenting themselves as a series of signs that pointed to inevitable

disaster. He had been blind, from wilfulness or cowardice. He now had

vision. He had arrived at honesty. He said to himself, as millions of

men and women have said to themselves, with awestruck calm: "My marriage

was a mistake." And he began to face the consequences of the admission.

He was not such a fool as to attach too much importance to the immediate

quarrel, nor even to the half-suppressed but supreme dissension

concerning a place of residence. He assumed, even, that the present

difficulties would somehow, with more or less satisfaction, be adjusted.

What, however, would not and could not be adjusted was the temperament

that produced them. Those difficulties, which had been preceded by

smaller difficulties, would be followed by greater. It was inevitable.

To hope otherwise would be weakly sentimental, as his optimism during

the vigil in Auntie Hamps's bedroom had been weakly sentimental. He

must face the truth: "She won't alter her ways--and I shan't stand

them." No matter what their relations might in future superficially

appear to be, their union was over. Or, if it was not actually over, it

soon would be over, for the forces to shatter it were uncontrollable and

increasing in strength.

"Of course she can't help being herself!" he said impartially. "But

what's that got to do with me?"

His indictment of his wife was terrific and not to be answered. She had

always been a queer girl. On the first night he ever saw her, she had

run after him into his father's garden, and stood with him in the

garden-porch that he had since done away with, and spoken to him in the

strangest manner. She was abnormal. The dismal and perilous adventure

with George Cannon could not have happened to a normal woman. She could

not see reason, and her sense of justice was non-existent. If she

wanted a thing she must have it. In reality she was a fierce and

unscrupulous egotist, incapable of understanding a point of view other

than her own. Imagine her bursting out like that about Auntie Hamps's

will! It showed how her mind ran. That Auntie Hamps had an absolute

right to dispose of her goods as she pleased; that there was a great

deal to be said for Auntie Hamps's arrangements; that in any case the

Benbows were not to blame; that jealousy was despicable and the mark of

a mean mind; that the only dignified course for himself was to execute

the trust imposed upon him without complaining,--these things were

obvious; but not to her! No human skill could ever induce her to grant

them. She did not argue,--she felt; and the disaster was that she did

not feel rightly.... Imagine her trying to influence Ingpen's

housekeeping, to worry the man,--she the guest and he the host! What

would she say if anybody played the same game on her?...

She could not be moderate. She expected every consideration from

others, but she would yield none. She had desired a horse and trap.

She had received it. And how had she used the gift? She had used it in

defiance of the needs of the works. She had upset everybody and

everything, and assuredly Unchpin had a very legitimate grievance....

She had said that she could not feel at home in her own house while the

house belonged to Maggie. Edwin had obediently bought the house,--and

now she wanted another house. She scorned her husband's convenience and

preferences, and she wanted a house that was preposterously

inaccessible. The satisfaction of her caprice for a dog-cart had not in

the slightest degree appeased her egotism. On the contrary it had

further excited her egotism and sharpened its aggressiveness. And by

what strange infantile paths had she gone about the enterprise of

shifting Edwin into the country! Not a frank word to Edwin of the house

she had found and decided upon! Silly rumours of a "surprise!" And she

had counted upon the presence of Ingpen to disarm Edwin and to tie his

hands. The conspiracy was simply childish. And because Edwin had at

once shown his distaste for her scheme, she had taken offence. Her

acrimony had gradually increased throughout the day, hiding for a time

under malicious silences and enigmatic demeanours, darting out in

remarks to third persons and drawing back, and at last displaying itself

openly, cruelly, monstrously. The injustice of it all passed belief.

There was no excuse for Hilda, and there never would be any excuse for

her. She was impossible; she would be still more impossible. He did

not make her responsible; he admitted that she was not responsible. But

at the same time, with a disdainful and cold resentment, he condemned

and hated her.

He recalled Ingpen's: "I won't pay the price."

"And I won't!" he said. "The end has come!"

He envied Ingpen.

And there flitted through his mind the dream of liberty--not the liberty

of ignorant youth, but liberty with experience and knowledge to use it.

Ravishing prospect! Marriage had advantages. But he could retain those

advantages in freedom. He knew what a home ought to be; he had the

instinct of the interior; he considered that he could keep house as well

as any woman, and better than most; he was not, in that respect, at all

like Ingpen, who suffered from his inability to produce and maintain

comfort.... He remembered Ingpen's historic habitual phrase about the

proper place for women,--"behind the veil." It was a phrase which

intensely annoyed women; but nevertheless how true! And Ingpen had put

it into practice. Ingpen, even in the banal Five Towns, had shown the

way.... He saw the existence of males, with its rationality and its

dependableness, its simplicity, its directness, its honesty, as

something ideal. And as he pictured such an existence--with or without

the romance of mysterious and interesting creatures ever modestly

waiting for attention behind the veil--further souvenirs of Hilda's

wilful naughtiness and injustice rushed into his mind by thousands; in

formulating to himself his indictment against her, he had overlooked

ninety per cent of them; they were endless, innumerable. He marshalled

them again and again, with the fiercest virulence, the most sombre

gloom, with sardonic, bitter pleasure.

In the hollow where Trafalgar Road begins to be known as Duck Bank, he

turned to the left and, crossing the foot of Woodisun Bank, arrived at

one of the oldest quarters of the town, where St. Luke's Church stands

in its churchyard amid a triangle of little ancient houses. By the

light of a new and improved gas-lamp at the churchyard gates could be

seen the dark silhouette of the Norman tower and the occasional white

gleam of gravestones.

One solitary couple, arm-in-arm, and bending slightly towards each

other, came sauntering in the mud past the historic National Schools

towards the illumination of the lamp. The man was a volunteer, with a

brilliant vermilion tunic, white belt, and black trousers; he wore his

hat jauntily and carried a diminutive cane; pride was his warm overcoat.

The girl was stout and short, with a heavily flowered hat and a dark

amorphous cloak; under her left arm she carried a parcel. They were

absorbed in themselves. Edwin discerned first the man's face, in which

was a gentle and harmless coxcombry, and then the girl's face, ecstatic,

upward-gazing, seeing absolutely naught but the youth.... It was Emmie's

face, as Edwin perceived after a momentary doubt due to his

unfamiliarity with the inhabitants of his own house. Emmie, so

impatiently and angrily awaited by her mistress, had lost her head about

a uniform. Emmie, whose place was in the kitchen among saucepans and

crockery, dish-clouts and brushes, had escaped into another realm, where

time is not. That she had no immediate intention of returning to her

kitchen was shown by the fact that she was moving deliberately in a

direction away from it. She was not pretty, for Hilda had perforce long

since ceased to insist upon physical charm in her servants. She was not

even young,--she was probably older than the adored soldier. But her

rapt ecstasy, her fearful bliss, made a marvellous sight, rendered

touching by the girl's coarse gawkiness.

It seemed lamentable, pathetic, to Edwin that destiny should not permit

her to remain forever in that dream. "Can it be possible," he thought,

"that a creature capable of such surpassing emotion is compelled to cook

my bacon and black my boots?"

The couple, wordless, strolled onwards, sticking close to the railings.

The churchyard was locked, but Emmie and the soldier were doing the best

they could to satisfy that instinct which in the Five Towns seems to

drive lovers to graves for their pleasure. The little houses cast here

and there a blind yellow eye on the silent and tranquil scene. Edwin

turned abruptly back into Woodisun Bank, feeling that he was a disturber

of the peace.

Suddenly deciding to walk up to Hillport "for the sake of exercise," he

quickened his pace. After a mile and a half, when he had crossed the

railway at Shawport and was on the Hillport rise, and the Five Towns had

begun to spread out in a map behind him, he noticed that he was

perspiring. He very seldom perspired, and therefore he had the

conviction that the walk was "doing him good." He felt exhilarated, and

moved still faster.

His mood was now changed. The spectacle of Emmie and the soldier had

thrown him violently out of resentment into wonder. His indignation was

somewhat exhausted, and though he tried again and again to flick it back

into full heat and activity, he could not. He kept thinking of the

moment in the morning when, standing ready to jump from the dog-cart,

his wife had said: "Catch me, both of you," and he recalled vividly the

sensation of her acquiescence, her momentary yielding--imperceptible yet

unforgettable--as he supported her strongly in his arms; and with this

memory was mingled the smell of velvet. Strange that a woman so harsh,

selfish and overbearing, could thus contradict her whole character in an

instant of surrender! Was she in that gesture confiding to him the

deepest secret? ... Rubbish! But now he no longer looked down on her

disdainfully. Honesty made him admit that it was puerile to affect

disdain of an individuality so powerful and so mysterious. If she was a

foe, she was at any rate a dangerous fighter, and not to be played with.

And yet she could be a trifle, a wisp of fragile flesh in his arms!

He saw the beatific face of Emmie against the churchyard gates under the

lamp.... Why not humour Hilda? Why not let her plant their home

according to her caprice? ... Certainly not! Never would he do it! Why

should he? Time after time he angrily rejected the idea. Time after

time it returned. What did it matter to Hilda where she lived? And had

he not bought their present house solely in order to please her? The

first consideration in choosing a home ought to be and must be the

consideration of business convenience.... Yet, what did it matter to

him where his home was? (He remembered a phrase of Ingpen's: "I don't

live on that plane.") Could he not adapt himself? He dreamt of very

rapid transit between Ladderedge Hall and the works. Motor-cars had

just become lawful; but he had never happened to see one, though he had

heard of several in the district, or passing through. His imagination

could not rise so high as a motor-car. That he could ever use or

possess one did not even occur to him. He thought only of a

fast-trotting horse, and a trap with indiarubber tyres; himself the

driver; sometimes Hilda the driver.... An equipage to earn renown in

the district. "Clayhanger's trap,"--"He drives in from Ladderedge in

thirty-five minutes. The horse simply won't walk; doesn't know how to!"

And so on. He had heard such talk of others. Why should not others

hear it of him? ... Then, the pleasure, the mere pleasure--call it

sensual or what you like--of granting a caprice to the capricious

creature! If a thing afforded her joy, why not give it? ... To see her

in the role of mistress of a country-house, delicately horsey, excited

about charitable schemes, protecting the poor, working her will upon

gardeners and grooms, stamping her foot in the violence of her

resolution to have her own way, offering sugar to a horse, nursing a

sick dog! Amusing; Agreeable! ... And all that activity of hers a mere

dependence of his own! Flattering to his pride! ... He could afford it

easily, for he was richer even than his wife supposed. To let the

present house ought not to be difficult. To sell it advantageously

ought not to be impossible. In this connection, he thought, though not

seriously, of Tom Swetman, who had at last got himself engaged to one of

those Scandinavian women about whom he had been chaffed for years; Tom

would be wanting an abode, and probably a good one.

He was carried away by his own dream. To realise that dream he had only

to yield, to nod negligently, to murmur with benevolent tolerance: "All

right. Do as you please." He would have nothing to withdraw, for he

had uttered no refusal. Not a word had passed between them as to

Ladderedge Hall since they had quitted it. He had merely said that he

did not like it,--"poured cold water on it" as the phrase was. True,

his demeanour had plainly intimated that he was still opposed in

principle to the entire project of living in the country; but a

demeanour need not be formally retracted; it could be negatived without

any humiliation....

No, he would never yield, though yielding seemed to open up a pleasant,

a delicious prospect. He could not yield. It would be wrong, and it

would be dangerous, to yield. Had he not already quite clearly argued

out with himself the whole position? And yet why not yield? ... He was

afraid as before a temptation.

He re-crossed the railway, and crossed Fowlea Brook, a boundary, back

into the borough. The dark path lay parallel with the canal, but below

it. He had gone right through Hillport and round Hillport Marsh and

returned down the flank of the great ridge that protects the Five Towns

on the West. He could not recollect the details of the walk; he only

knew that he had done it all, that time and the miles had passed with

miraculous rapidity, and that his boots were very muddy. A change in

the consistency of the mud caused him to look up at the sky, which was

clearing and showed patches of faint stars. A frost had set in, despite

the rainy prophecy of street-lamps. In a few moments he had climbed the

short steep curving slope on to the canal-bridge. He was breathless and

very hot.

He stopped and sat on the parapet. In his school-days he had crossed

this bridge twice a day on the journey to and from Oldcastle. Many

times he had lingered on it. But he had forgotten the little episodes

of his schooldays, which seemed now almost to belong to another

incarnation. He did, however, recall that as a boy he could not sit on

the parapet unless he vaulted up to it. He thought he must have been

ridiculously small and boyish. The lights of Bursley, Bleakridge,

Hanbridge and Cauldon hung round the eastern horizon in an arc. To the

north presided the clock of Bursley Town Hall, and to the south the

clock of Cauldon Church; but both were much too far off to be

deciphered. Below and around the Church clock the vague fires of

Cauldon Bar Ironworks played, and the tremendous respiration of the

blast-furnaces filled the evening. Beneath him gleamed the foul water

of the canal.... He trembled with the fever that precedes a supreme

decision. He trembled as though he was about to decide whether or not

he would throw himself into the canal. Should he accept the

country-house scheme? Ought he to accept it? The question was not

simply that of a place of residence,--it concerned all his life.

He admitted that marriage must be a mutual accommodation. He was, and

always had been, ready to accommodate. But Hilda was unjust,

monstrously unjust. Of that he was definitely convinced.... Well,

perhaps not monstrously unjust, but very unjust. How could he excuse

such injustice as hers? He obviously could not excuse it.... On

previous occasions he had invented excuses for her conduct, but they

were not convincing excuses. They were compromises between his

intellectual honesty and his desire for peace. They were, at bottom,

sentimentalism.

And then there flashed into his mind, complete, the great discovery of

all his career. It was banal; it was commonplace; it was what everyone

knew. Yet it was the great discovery of all his career. If Hilda had

not been unjust in the assertion of her own individuality, there could

be no merit in yielding to her. To yield to a just claim was not

meritorious, though to withstand it would be wicked. He was objecting

to injustice as a child objects to rain on a holiday. Injustice was a

tremendous actuality! It had to be faced and accepted. (He himself was

unjust. At any rate he intellectually conceived that he must be unjust,

though honestly he could remember no instance of injustice on his part.)

To reconcile oneself to injustice was the master achievement. He had

read it; he had been aware of it; but he had never really felt it till

that moment on the dark canal-bridge. He was awed, thrilled by the

realisation. He longed ardently to put it to the test. He did put it

to the test. He yielded on the canal-bridge. And in yielding, it

seemed to him that he was victorious.

He thought confidently and joyously:

"I'm not going to be beaten by Hilda! And I'm not going to be beaten by

marriage. Dashed if I am! A nice thing if I had to admit that I wasn't

clever enough to be a husband!"

He was happy, but somewhat timorously so. He had the sense to suspect

that his discovery would scarcely transform marriage into an everlasting

Eden, and that serious trouble would not improbably recur. "Marriage

keeps on all the time till you're dead!" he said to himself. But he

profoundly knew that he had advanced a stage, that he had acquired new

wisdom and new power, and that no danger in the future could equal the

danger that was past.

He thought:

"I know where I am!"

It had taken him years to discover where he was. Why should the

discovery occur just then? He could only suppose that the cumulative

battering of experience had at length knocked a hole through his thick

head, and let saving wisdom in. The length of time necessary for the

operation depended upon the thickness of the head. Some heads were

impenetrable and their owners came necessarily to disaster. His head

was probably of an average thickness.

When he got into Trafalgar Road, at the summit of Bleakridge, he

hesitated to enter his own house, on account of the acute social

difficulties that awaited him there, and passed it like a beggar who is

afraid. One by one he went by all the new little streets of cottages

with drawing-rooms--Millett Street, Wilcox Street, Paul Street, Oak

Street, Hulton Street,--and the two old little streets, already partly

changed--Manor Street and Higginbotham Street. Those mysterious

newcoming families from nowhere were driving him out--through the agency

of his wife! The Orgreaves had gone, and been succeeded by excellent

people with whom it was impossible to fraternise. There were rumours

that in view of Tom Swetnam's imminent defection the Swetnam household

might be broken up and the home abandoned. The Suttons, now that

Beatrice Sutton had left the district, talked seriously of going. Only

Dr. Sterling was left on that side of the road, and he stayed because he

must. The once exclusive Terraces on the other side were losing their

quality. Old Darius Clayhanger had risen out of the mass, but he was

fiercely exceptional. Now the whole mass seemed to be rising, under the

action of some strange leaven, and those few who by intelligence, by

manners, or by money counted themselves select were fleeing as from an

inundation.

Edwin had not meant to join in the exodus. But he too would join it.

Destiny had seized him. Let him be as democratic in spirit as he would,

his fate was to be cut off from the democracy, with which, for the rest,

he had very little of speech or thought or emotion in common, but in

which, from an implacable sense of justice, he was religiously and

unchangeably determined to put his trust.

He braced himself, and, mounting the steps of the porch, felt in his

pocket for his latchkey. It was not there. Hilda had taken it and not

returned it. She never did return it when she borrowed it, and probably

she never would. He had intended to slip quietly into the house, and

prepare if possible an astute opening to minimise the difficulty of the

scenes which must inevitably occur. For his dignity would need some

protection. In the matter of his dignity, he wished that he had not

said quite so certainly to Ingpen: "I shan't take that house."

With every prim formality, Emmie answered his ring. She was wearing the

mask and the black frock and the white apron and cap of her vocation.

Not the slightest trace of the beatified woman in the flowered hat under

the lamp at the gates of the churchyard! No sign of a heart or of

passion or of ecstasy! Incredible creatures--they were all incredible!

He thought, nervous:

"I shall meet Hilda in half a second."

George ran into the hall, wearing his new green shade over his eyes.

"Here he is, mother!" cried George. "I say, nunks, Emmie brought up a

parcel for you from Uncle Albert, and Auntie Clara. Here it is. It

wasn't addressed outside, so I opened it."

He indicated the hall-table, on which, in a bed of tissue paper and

brown paper, lay a dreadful flat ink-stand of blue glass and bronze,

with a card: "Best wishes to Edwin from Albert and Clara."

George and Edwin gazed at each other with understanding.

"Just my luck isn't it, sonny?" said Edwin. "It's worse than last

year's."

"You poor dear!" said Hilda, appearing, all smiles and caressing

glances. She was in a pale grey dress. "Whatever shall you do with it?

You know you'll have to put it on view when they come up. Emmie----" to

the maid vanishing into the kitchen--"We'll have supper now."

"Yes," said Edwin to himself, with light but sardonic tolerance. "Yes,

my lady. You're all smiles because you're bent on getting Ladderedge

Hall out of me. But you don't know what a near shave you've had of

getting something else."

He was elated. The welcome of his familiar home was beautiful to him.

And the incalculable woman with a single gesture had most unexpectedly

annihilated the unpleasant past and its consequences. He could yield

upon the grand contention how and when he chose. He had his

acquiescence waiting like a delightful surprise for Hilda. As he looked

at her lovingly, with all her crimes of injustice thick upon her, he

clearly realised that he saw her as no other person saw her, and that

because it was so she in her entirety was indispensable to him. And

when he tried to argue impartially and aloofly with himself about rights

and wrongs, asinine reason was swamped by an entirely irrational and

wise joy in the simple fact of the criminal's existence.

VI

In the early spring of 1897 there was an evening party at the

Clayhangers'. But it was not called a party; it was not even called a

reception. The theory of the affair was that Hilda had "just asked a

few people to come in, without any fuss." The inhabitants of the Five

Towns had, and still have, an aversion for every sort of formal

hospitality, or indeed for any hospitality other than the impulsive and

the haphazard. One or two fathers with forceful daughters agitated by

newly revealed appetites in themselves, might hire a board-schoolroom in

January, and give a dance at which sharp exercise and hot drinks alone

kept bodies warm in the icy atmosphere. Also musical and dramatic

societies and games clubs would have annual conversaziones and dances,

which however were enterprises of cooeperation rather than of

hospitality. Beyond these semi-public entertainments there was almost

nothing, in the evening, save card-parties and the small regular

reunions of old friends who had foregathered on a certain night of the

week for whiskey or tea and gossip ever since the beginning of time, and

would continue to do so till some coffin or other was ordered. Every

prearranged assemblage comprising more than two persons beyond the

family was a "function"--a term implying both contempt and respect for

ceremonial; and no function could be allowed to occur without an excuse

for it,--such as an anniversary. The notion of deliberately cultivating

human intercourse for its own sake would have been regarded as an

affectation approaching snobbishness. Hundreds of well-to-do and

socially unimpeachable citizens never gave or received an invitation to

a meal. The reason of all this was not meanness, for no community

outside America has more generous instincts than the Five Towns; it was

merely a primitive self-consciousness striving to conceal itself beneath

breezy disdain for those more highly developed manners which it read

about with industry and joy in the weekly papers, but which it lacked

the courage to imitate.

The break-up of the Orgreave household had been a hard blow to the cult

of hospitality in Bleakridge. Lane End House in the old days was a

creative centre of hospitality; for the force of example, the desire to

emulate, and the necessity of paying in kind for what one has permitted

oneself to receive will make hosts of those who by their own initiative

would never have sent out an invitation. When the Orgreaves vanished,

sundry persons in Bleakridge were discouraged,--and particularly Edwin

and Hilda, whose musical evenings had never recovered from the effect of

the circumstances of the first one. They entertained only by fits and

starts, when Hilda happened to remember that she held a high position in

the suburb. Hilda was handicapped by the fact that she could not easily

strike up friendships with other women. She had had one friend, and

after Janet's departure she had fully confided in no woman. Moreover it

was only at intervals that Hilda felt the need of companionship. Her

present party was due chiefly to what Edwin in his more bitter moods

would have called snobbishness,--to-wit, partly a sudden resolve not to

be outshone by the Swetnams, who in recent years, as the younger

generation of the family grew up, had beyond doubt increased their

ascendancy; and partly the desire to render memorable the last months of

her residence in Bleakridge.

The list of Hilda's guests, and the names absent from it, gave an

indication of the trend of social history. The Benbows were not asked;

the relations of the two families remained as friendly as ever they

were, but the real breach between them, caused by profound differences

of taste and intelligence, was now complete. Maggie would have been

asked, had she not refused in advance, from a motive of shyness. In all

essential respects Maggie had been annexed by Clara and Albert. She had

given up Auntie Hamps's house (of which the furniture had been either

appropriated or sold) and gone to live with the Benbows as a working

aunt,--this in spite of Albert's default in the matter of interest; she

forewent her rights, slept in a small room with Amy, paid a share of the

household expenses, and did the work of a nursemaid and servant

combined--simply because she was Maggie. She might, had she chosen,

have lived in magnificence with the Clayhangers, but she would not face

the intellectual and social strain of doing so. Jim Orgreave was not

invited; briefly he had become impossible, though he was still

well-dressed. More strange--Tom Orgreave and his wife had only been

invited after some discussion, and had declined! Tom was growing

extraordinarily secretive, solitary, and mysterious. It was reported

that Mrs. Tom had neither servant nor nursemaid, and that she dared not

ask her husband for money to buy clothes. Yet Edwin and Tom when they

met in the street always stopped for a talk, generally about books.

Daisy Marrion, who said openly that Tom and Mrs. Tom were a huge

disappointment to everybody, was invited and she accepted. Janet

Orgreave had arrived in Bursley on a visit to the Clayhangers on the

very day of the party. The Cheswardines were asked, mainly on account

of Stephen, whose bluff, utterly unintellectual, profound good-nature,

and whose adoration of his wife, were gradually endearing him to the

perceptive. Mr. and Mrs. Fearns were requested to bring their daughter

Annunciata, now almost marriageable, and also Mademoiselle Renee

Souchon, the French governess, newly arrived in the district, of the

Fearns younger children. Folks hinted their astonishment that Alma

Fearns should have been imprudent enough to put so exotic a woman under

the same roof with her husband. Ingpen needed no invitation; nothing

could occur at the Clayhangers' without him. Doctor Stirling was the

other mature bachelor. Finally in the catalogue were four Swetnams, the

vigorous and acute Sarah (who was a mere acquaintance), aged

twenty-five, Tom Swetnam, and two younger brothers. Tom had to bring

with him the prime excuse for the party,--namely, Miss Manna Hoest of

Copenhagen, to whom Hilda intended to show that the Swetnams were not

the only people on earth. There were thus eight women, eight men (who

had put on evening dress out of respect for the foreigner), and George.

At eleven o'clock, when the musical part of the entertainment was over,

Miss Hoest had already fully secured for herself the position which

later she was to hold as the wife of Tom Swetnam. Bleakridge had been

asked to meet her and inspect her, and the opinion of Bleakridge was

soon formed that Copenhagen must be a wondrous and a romantic place and

that Tom Swetnam knew his way about. In the earliest years when the

tourist agencies first discovered the advertising value of the phrase

"Land of the Midnight Sun," Tom the adventurous had made the

Scandinavian round trip, and each subsequent Summer he had gone off

again in the same direction. The serpents of the Hanbridge and the

Bursley Conservative clubs, and of the bar of the Five Towns Hotel, had

wagered that there was a woman at the bottom of it. There was. He had

met her at Marienlyst, the watering-place near Helsingor (called by the

tourist agencies Elsinore). Manna Hoest was twenty-three, tall and

athletically slim, and more blonde than any girl ever before seen in the

Five Towns. She had golden hair and she wore white. It was understood

that she spoke Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. She talked French with

facility to Renee Souchon. And Tom said that her knowledge of German

surpassed her knowledge of either French or English. She spoke English

excellently, with a quaint, endearing accent, but with correctness.

Sometimes she would use an idiom (picked up from the Swetnam boys),

exquisitely unaware that it was not quite suited to the lips of a young

woman in a strange drawing-room; her innocence, however, purified it.

She sang classical songs in German, with dramatic force, and she could

play accompaniments. She was thoroughly familiar with all the music

haltingly performed by Ingpen, Janet, Annunciata, and young George.

Ingpen was very seriously interested in her views thereon. She knew

about the French authors from whose works Renee Souchon chose her

recitations. And standing up at the buffet table in the dining-room, she

had fabricated astounding sandwiches in the Danish style. She stated

that Danish cooks reckoned ninety-three sorts of sandwiches. She said

in her light, eager voice, apropos of cooking: "There is one thing I

cannot understand. I cannot understand why you English throw your

potatoes to melt in cold water for an hour before you boil them." "Nor

I!" interjected Renee Souchon. No other woman standing round the table

had ever conceived the propriety of boiling potatoes without first

soaking them in cold water, and Manna was requested to explain.

"Because," she said, "it--it lets go the salts of potassium which are so

necessary for the pheesical deve*lop*ment of the body." Whereupon

Tertius Ingpen had been taken by one of his long _crescendo_ laughs, a

laugh that ended by his being bent nearly double below the level of the

table. Everybody was much impressed, and Ingpen himself not the least.

Ingpen wondered what a girl so complex could see in a man like Tom

Swetnam, who, although he could talk about the arts, had no real feeling

for any of them.

But what impressed the company even more than Miss Hoest's

accomplishments was the candid fervour of her comprehensive interest in

life, which was absolutely without self-consciousness or fear. She

talked with the same disarming ingenuous eager directness to hard-faced

Charles Fearns, the secret rake; to his wife, the ageing and sweetly-sad

mother of a family; to Renee Souchon, who despite her plainness and her

rumoured bigotry seemed to attract all the men in the room by something

provocative in her eye and the carriage of her hips; to the simple and

powerful Stephen Cheswardine; to Vera, the delicious and elegant cat; to

Doctor Stirling with his Scotch mysticism, and to Tertius Ingpen the

connoisseur and avowed bachelor. She spoke to Hilda, Janet and Daisy

Marrion as one member of a secret sisterhood to other members, to

Annunciata as a young girl, and to George as an initiated sister. She

left them to turn to Edwin with a trustful glance as to one whose

special reliability she had divined from the first. "Have a liqueur,

Miss Hoest," Edwin enjoined her. In a moment she was sipping

Chartreuse. "I love it!" she murmured.

But somehow beneath all such freedoms and frankness she did not cease to

be a maiden with reserves of mystery. Her assumption that nobody could

misinterpret her demeanour was remarkable to the English observers, and

far more so to Renee Souchon. All gazed at her piquant blonde face,

scarcely pretty, with its ardent restless eyes, and felt the startling

compliment of her quick, searching sympathy. And she, tinglingly aware

of her success, proved easily equal to the ordeal of it. Only at rare

intervals did she give a look at the betrothed, as if for confirmation

of her security. As for Tom, he was positively somewhat unnerved by the

brilliance of the performance. He left her alone, without guidance, as

a ring-master who should stand aside during a turn and say: "See this

marvel! I am no longer necessary." When people glanced at him after

one of her effects, he would glance modestly away, striving to hide from

them his illusion that he himself had created the bewitching girl. At

half past eleven, when the entire assemblage passed into the

drawing-room, she dropped on to the piano-stool and began a Waldteufel

waltz with irresistible seductiveness.

Hilda's heart leaped. In a minute the carpet was up, and the night,

which all had supposed to be at an end, began.

At nearly one o'clock in the morning the party was moving strongly by

its own acquired momentum and needed neither the invigoration nor the

guidance which hosts often are compelled to give. Hilda, having

finished a schottische with Dr. Stirling, missed Janet from the

drawing-room. Leaving the room in search of her, she saw Edwin with Tom

Swetnam and the glowing Manna at the top of the stairs.

"Hello!" she called out. "What are you folks doing?"

Manna's light laugh descended like a shower of crystals.

"Just taking a constitutional," Edwin answered.

Hilda waved to them in passing. She was extremely elated. Among other

agreeable incidents was the success of her new black lace frock.

Edwin's voice pleased her,--it was so calm, wise, and kind, and at the

same time mysteriously ironical. She occasionally admitted, at the

sound of that voice when Edwin was in high spirits, that she had never

been able to explore completely the more withdrawn arcana of his nature.

He had behaved with perfection that evening. She admitted that he was

the basis of the evening, that without him she could never have such

triumphs. It was strange that a man by spending so many hours per day

at a works could create the complicated ease and luxury of a home. She

perceived how steadily and surely he had progressed since their

marriage, and how his cautiousness always justified itself, and how he

had done all that he had said he would do. And she had a vision of that

same miraculous creative force of his at work, by her volition, in the

near future upon Ladderedge Hall. Her mood became a strange compound of

humility before him and of self-confident pride in her own power to

influence him.

In the boudoir Janet was reclining in the sole easy chair. Dressed in

grey (she had abandoned white), she was as slim as ever, and did not

look her age. With face flushed, eyes glinting under drooping lids, and

bosom heaving rather quickly, she might have passed in the half-light

for a young married woman still under the excitement of matrimony,

instead of a virgin of forty.

"I was so done up I had to come and hide myself!" she murmured in a

dreamy tone.

"Well, of course you've had the journey to-day and everything..."

"I never did come across such a dancer as Charles Fearns!" Janet went

on.

"Yes," said Hilda, standing with her back to the fire, with one hand on

the mantelpiece. "He's a great dancer--or at least he makes you think

so. But I'm sure he's a bad man."

"Yes, I suppose he is!" Janet agreed with a sigh.

Neither of the women spoke for a moment, and each looked away.

Through the closed door came the muffled sound of the piano, played by

Annunciata. No melody was distinguishable,--only the percussion of the

bass chords beating out the time of a new mazurka. It was as if the

whole house faintly but passionately pulsed in the fever of the dance.

"I see you've got a Rossetti," said Janet at last, fingering a blue

volume that lay on the desk.

"Edwin gave it me," Hilda replied. "He's gradually giving me all my

private poets. But somehow I haven't been able to read much lately. I

expect it's the idea of moving into the country that makes me restless."

"But is it settled, all that?"

"Of course it's settled, my dear. I'm determined to take him away--"

Hilda spoke of her husband as of a parcel or an intelligent bear on a

chain, as loving wives may--"right out of all this. I'm sure it will be

a good thing for him. He doesn't mind, really. He's promised me. Only

he wants to make sure of either selling or letting this house first.

He's always very cautious, Edwin is. He simply hates doing a thing

straight off."

"Yes, he is rather that way inclined," said Janet.

"I wanted him to take Ladderedge at once, even if we didn't move into

it. Anyhow we couldn't move into it immediately, because of the repairs

and things. They'll take a fine time, I know. We can get it for sixty

pounds a year. And what's sixty pounds more or less to Edwin? It's no

more than what the rent of this house would be. But no, he wouldn't!

He must see where he stands with this house before he does anything

else! You can't alter him, you know!"

The door was cautiously pushed, and Ingpen entered.

"So you're discussing her!" he said, low, with a satiric grin.

"Discussing who?" Hilda sharply demanded.

"You know."

"Tertius," said Hilda, "you're worse than a woman."

He giggled with delight.

"I suppose you mean that to be very severe."

"If you want to know, we were talking about Ladderedge."

"So apologise!" added Janet, sitting up.

Ingpen's face straightened, and he began to tap his teeth with his

thumb.

"Curious! That's just what I came in about. I've been trying to get a

chance to tell you all the evening. There's somebody else after

Ladderedge, a man from Axe. He's been to look over it twice this week.

I thought I'd tip you the wink."

Hilda stood erect, putting her shoulders back.

"Have you told Edwin?" she asked very curtly.

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He said it was only a dodge of the house-agent's to quicken things up."

"And do you think it is?"

"Well, I doubt it," Ingpen answered apprehensively. "That's why I wanted

to warn you--his lordship being what he is."

Voices, including Edwin's, could be heard in the hall.

"Here, I'm not going to be caught conspiring with you!" Ingpen

whispered. "It's more than my place is worth." And he departed.

The voices receded, and Hilda noiselessly shut the door. Everything was

now changed for her by a tremendous revulsion. The beating of the

measure of the mazurka seemed horrible and maddening. Her thought was

directed upon Edwin with the cold fury of which only love is capable.

It was not his fault that some rival was nibbling at Ladderedge, but it

was his fault that Ladderedge should still be in peril. She saw all her

grandiose plan ruined. She felt sure that the rival was powerful and

determined, and that Edwin would let him win, either by failing to bid

against him, or by mere shilly-shallying. Ladderedge was not the only

suitable country residence in the county; there were doubtless many

others; but Ladderedge was just what she wanted, and--more important

with her--it had become a symbol. She had a misgiving that if they did

not get Ladderedge they would remain in Trafalgar Road, Bursley, for

ever and ever. Yet, angry and desperate though she was, she somehow did

not accuse and arraign Edwin--any more than she would have accused and

arraigned a climate. He was in fact the climate in which she lived. A

moment ago she had said: "You can't alter him!" But now all the energy

of her volition cried out that he must be altered.

"My girl," she said, turning to Janet, "do you think you can stand a

scene to-morrow?"

"A scene?" Janet repeated the word guardedly. The look on Hilda's face

somewhat alarmed her.

"Between Edwin and me. I'm absolutely determined that we shall take

Ladderedge, and I don't care how much of a row we have over it."

"It isn't as bad as all that?" Janet softly murmured, with her skill to

soothe.

"Yes it is!" said Hilda violently.

"I was wondering the other day, after one of your letters," Janet

proceeded gently, "why after all you were so anxious to go into the

country. I thought you wanted Edwin to be on the Town Council or

something of that kind. How can he do that if you're right away at a

place like Stockbrook?"

"So I should like him to be on the Town Council! But all I really want

is to get him away from his business. You don't know, Janet!" she spoke

bitterly, and with emotion. "Nobody knows except me. He'll soon be the

slave of his business if he keeps on. Oh! I don't mean he stays at

nights at it. He scarcely ever does. But he's always thinking about it.

He simply can't bear being a minute late for it, everything must give

way to it,--he takes that as a matter of course, and that's what annoys

me, especially as there's no reason for it, seeing how much he trusts

Big James and Simpson. I believe he'd do anything for Big James. He'd

listen to Big James far sooner than he'd listen to me.... Disagreeable

fawning old man, and quite stupid. Simpson isn't so bad. I tell you

Edwin only looks on his home as a nice place to be quiet in when he

isn't at the works. I've never told him so, and I don't think he

suspects it, but I will tell him one of these days. He's very good,

Edwin is, in all the little things. He always tries to be just. But he

isn't just in the big thing. He's most frightfully unjust. I sometimes

wonder where he imagines I come in. Of course he'd do any mortal thing

for me--except spare half a minute from the works.... What do I care

about money? I don't care that much about money. When there's money I

can spend it, that's all. But I'd prefer to be poor, and him to be rude

and cross and impatient--which he scarcely ever is--than have this

feeling all the time that it's the works first, and everything else

second. I don't mind for myself--no, really I don't, at least very

little! But I do mind for him. I call it humiliating for a man to get

like that. It puts everything upside down. Look at Stephen

Cheswardine, for instance. There's a pretty specimen! And Edwin'll be

as bad as him soon."

"But everyone says how fond Stephen is of his wife!"

"And isn't Edwin fond of me? Stephen Cheswardine despises his

wife--only he can't do without her. That's all. And he treats her

accordingly. And I shall be the same."

"Oh! Hilda!'

"Yes, I shall. Yes, I shall. But I won't have it. I'd as lief be

married to a man like Charles Fearns. He isn't a slave to his business

anyhow. I shall get Edwin further away. And when I've got him away I

shall see he doesn't go to the works on Saturdays, too. I've quite made

up my mind about that. And if he isn't on the Town Council he can be on

the County Council--that's quite as good, I hope!"

Never before had Hilda spoken so freely to anyone, not even to Janet.

Fierce pride had always kept her self-contained. But now she had no

feeling of shame at her outburst. Tears stood in her eyes--and yet she

faced Janet, making no effort to hide them.

"My dear!" breathed the deprecating Janet, shocked out of her tepid

virginal calm by a revelation of conjugal misery such as had never been

vouchsafed to her. She was thinking: "How can the poor thing face her

guests after this? Everybody will see that something's happened--it

will be awful! She really ought to think of her position."

There was a silence.

The door opened with a sharp sound, and Hilda turned away her head as

from the suddenly visible mouth of a cannon. The music could be heard

plainly, and beneath it the dull shuffling of feet on the bare boards of

the drawing-room. Manna Hoest came in radiant, followed by Edwin and

Tom Swetnam.

"Well, Hilda," said Edwin, with a slight timid constraint. "I've got

rid of your house for you. Here are the deluded victims."

"We have seen every corner of it, Mrs. Clayhanger," said Manna Hoest,

enthusiastically. "It is lovely. But how can you wish to leave it? It

is so practical!"

Perceiving the agitation of Hilda's face, Edwin added in a lower voice

to his wife:

"I thought I wouldn't say anything until it was settled, for fear you

might be let in for a disappointment. He'll buy it if I leave fifteen

hundred on mortgage. So I shall. But of course he wanted her to have a

good look at it first."

"How unfair I am!" thought Hilda, as she made some banal remark to Miss

Hoest. "Don't I know I can always rely on him?"

"Mr. Clayhanger made us promise not to----" Miss Hoest began to explain.

"It was just like him!" Hilda interrupted, smiling.

She had a strong desire to jump at Edwin and kiss him. She was saved.

Her grandiose plan would proceed. The house sold, Edwin was bound to

secure Ladderedge Hall against no matter what rival; and he would do it.

But it was the realisation of her power over her husband that gave her

the profoundest joy.

About an hour later, when everyone felt that the party was over, the

guests, reluctant to leave, and excited afresh by the news that the

house had changed hands during the revel, were all assembled in the

drawing-room. A few were seated on the chairs which, with the tables,

had been pushed against the walls. George had squatted on the carpet

rolled up into the hearth, where the fire was extinct; he was not

wearing his green shade. The rest were grouped around Manna Hoest in

the middle of the room.

Miss Hoest, the future mistress of the abode, was now more than ever the

centre of regard. Apparently as fresh as at the start, and picking

delicately at a sweet biscuit, the flushed blonde stood answering

questions about her views on England and especially on the Five Towns.

She was quite sure of herself, and utterly charming in her confidence.

Annunciata Fearns envied her acutely. The other women were a little

saddened by the thought of all the disillusions that inevitably lay

before her. It was touching to see her glance at Tom Swetnam, convinced

that she understood him to the core, and in him all the psychology of

his sex.

"Everybody knows," she was saying, "that the English are the finest

nation, and I think the Five Towns are much more English than London.

That's why I adore the Five Towns. You do not know how English you are

here. It makes me laugh because you are so English, and you do not know

it. I love you."

"You're flattering us," said Stephen Cheswardine, enchanted with the

girl.

Everybody waited in eager delight for her next words. Such tit-bits of

attention and laudation did not often fall to the district. It occurred

to people that after all the local self-conceit might not be entirely

unjustified.

"Ah!" Manna pouted. "But you have spots!"

"Spots!" repeated young Paul Swetnam, amid a general laugh.

She turned to him: "You said there were no spots on Knype Football Club,

did you not? Well, there is a spot on you English. You are dreadfully

exasperating to us Danes. Oh, I mean it! You are exasperating because

you will not show your feelings!"

"Tom, that must be one for you," said Charlie Fearns.

"We're too proud," said Dr. Stirling.

"No," replied Manna maliciously. "It is not pride. You are afraid to

show your feelings. It is because you are cowards--in that!"

"We aren't!" cried Hilda, inspired. And yielding to the temptation

which had troubled her incessantly ever since she left the boudoir, she

put her arms round Edwin and kissed him. "So there!"

"Loud applause!" said young George on the roll of carpet. He said it

kindly, but with a certain superiority, perhaps due to the facts that he

was wearing a man's "long trousers" for the first time that night, and

that he regarded himself as already almost a Londoner. There was some

handclapping.

Edwin's eyes had seduced Hilda. Looking at them surreptitiously she had

suddenly recalled another of his tricks,--tricks of goodness. When she

had told him one evening that Minnie was prematurely the mother of a

girl, he had said: "Well, we'll put L130 in the savings bank for the

kid." "L130? Whatever are you talking about?" "L130. I received it

from America this very morning as ever is." And he showed her a draft

on Brown, Shipley & Co. He said 'from America.' He was too delicate to

say 'from George Cannon.' It had been a triumphant moment for him. And

now, as before them all Hilda held him to her, the delicious thought

that she had power over him, that she was shaping the large contours of

his existence, made her feel solemn in her bliss. And yet

simultaneously she was reflecting with a scarcely perceptible hardness:

"It's each for himself in marriage after all, and I've got my own way."

And then she noticed the whiteness of his shirt-front under her chin,

and that reminded her of his mania for arranging his linen according to

his own ideas in his own drawer, and the absurd tidiness of his linen;

and she wanted to laugh.

"What a romance she has made of my life!" thought Edwin, confused and

blushing, as she loosed him. And though he looked round with affection

at the walls which would soon no longer be his, the greatness of the

adventure of existence with this creature, to him unique, and the

eternal expectation of some new ecstasy, left no room in his heart for a

regret.

He caught sight of Ingpen alone in a corner by the piano, nervously

stroking his silky beard. The memory of the secret woman in Ingpen's

room came back to him. Without any process of reasoning, he felt very

sorry for both of them, and he was aware of a certain condescension in

himself towards Ingpen.