THE MISER'S DAUGHTER
Anna sat in the bay-window of the front parlour, her accustomed place
on Sunday evenings in summer, and watched Mr. Tellwright and Agnes
disappear down the slope of Trafalgar Road on their way to chapel.
Trafalgar Road is the long thoroughfare which, under many aliases, runs
through the Five Towns from end to end, uniting them as a river might
unite them. Ephraim Tellwright could remember the time when this part
of it was a country lane, flanked by meadows and market gardens. Now
it was a street of houses up to and beyond Bleakridge, where the
Tellwrights lived; on the other side of the hill the houses came only
in patches until the far-stretching borders of Hanbridge were reached.
Within the municipal limits Bleakridge was the pleasantest quarter of
Bursley--Hillport, abode of the highest fashion, had its own government
and authority--and to reside 'at the top of Trafalgar Road' was still
the final ambition of many citizens, though the natural growth of the
town had robbed Bleakridge of some of that exclusive distinction which
it once possessed. Trafalgar Road, in its journey to Bleakridge from
the centre of the town, underwent certain changes of character. First
came a succession of manufactories and small shops; then, at the
beginning of the rise, a quarter of a mile of superior cottages; and
lastly, on the brow, occurred the houses of the comfortable-detached,
semi-detached, and in terraces, with rentals from 25_l._ to 60_l._ a
year. The Tellwrights lived in Manor Terrace (the name being a last
reminder of the great farmstead which formerly occupied the western
hill side): their house, of light yellow brick, was two-storied, with a
long narrow garden behind, and the rent 30_l_. Exactly opposite was an
antique red mansion, standing back in its own ground--home of the
Mynors family for two generations, but now a school, the Mynors family
being extinct in the district save for one member. Somewhat higher up,
still on the opposite side to Manor Terrace, came an imposing row of
four new houses, said to be the best planned and best built in the
town, each erected separately and occupied by its owner. The nearest
of these four was Councillor Sutton's, valued at 60_l._ a year. Lower
down, below Manor Terrace and on the same side, lived the Wesleyan
superintendent minister, the vicar of St. Luke's Church, an alderman,
and a doctor.
It was nearly six o'clock. The sun shone, but gentlier; and the earth
lay cooling in the mild, pensive effulgence of a summer evening. Even
the onrush of the steam-car, as it swept with a gay load of passengers
to Hanbridge, seemed to be chastened; the bell of the Roman Catholic
chapel sounded like the bell of some village church heard in the
distance; the quick but sober tramp of the chapel-goers fell peacefully
on the ear. The sense of calm increased, and, steeped in this
meditative calm, Anna from the open window gazed idly down the
perspective of the road, which ended a mile away in the dim concave
forms of ovens suffused in a pale mist. A book from the Free Library
lay on her lap; she could not read it. She was conscious of nothing
save the quiet enchantment of reverie. Her mind, stimulated by the
emotions of the afternoon, broke the fetters of habitual
self-discipline, and ranged voluptuously free over the whole field of
recollection and anticipation. To remember, to hope: that was
sufficient joy.
In the dissolving views of her own past, from which the rigour and pain
seemed to have mysteriously departed, the chief figure was always her
father--that sinister and formidable individuality, whom her mind hated
but her heart disobediently loved. Ephraim Tellwright[1] was one of
the most extraordinary and most mysterious men in the Five Towns. The
outer facts of his career were known to all, for his riches made him
notorious; but of the secret and intimate man none knew anything except
Anna, and what little Anna knew had come to her by divination rather
than discernment. A native of Hanbridge, he had inherited a small
fortune from his father, who was a prominent Wesleyan Methodist. At
thirty, owing mainly to investments in property which his calling of
potter's valuer had helped him to choose with advantage, he was worth
twenty thousand pounds, and he lived in lodgings on a total expenditure
of about a hundred a year. When he was thirty-five he suddenly
married, without any perceptible public wooing, the daughter of a wood
merchant at Oldcastle, and shortly after the marriage his wife
inherited from her father a sum of eighteen thousand pounds. The pair
lived narrowly in a small house up at Pireford, between Hanbridge and
Oldcastle. They visited no one, and were never seen together except on
Sundays. She was a rosy-cheeked, very unassuming and simple woman, who
smiled easily and talked with difficulty, and for the rest lived
apparently a servile life of satisfaction and content. After five
years Anna was born, and in another five years Mrs. Tellwright died of
erysipelas. The widower engaged a housekeeper: otherwise his existence
proceeded without change. No stranger visited the house, the
housekeeper never gossiped; but tales will spread, and people fell into
the habit of regarding Tellwright's child and his housekeeper with
commiseration.
During all this period he was what is termed 'a good Wesleyan,'
preaching and teaching, and spending himself in the various activities
of Hanbridge chapel. For many years he had been circuit treasurer.
Among Anna's earliest memories was a picture of her father arriving
late for supper one Sunday night in autumn after an anniversary
service, and pouring out on the white tablecloth the contents of
numerous chamois-leather money-bags. She recalled the surprising
dexterity with which he counted the coins, the peculiar smell of the
bags, and her mother's bland exclamation, 'Eh, Ephraim!' Tellwright
belonged by birth to the Old Guard of Methodism; there was in his
family a tradition of holy valour for the pure doctrine: his father, a
Bursley man, had fought in the fight which preceded the famous
Primitive Methodist Secession of 1808 at Bursley, and had also borne a
notable part in the Warren affrays of '28, and the disastrous trouble
of the Fly-Sheets in '49, when Methodism lost a hundred thousand
members. As for Ephraim, he expounded the mystery of the Atonement in
village conventicles and grew garrulous with God at prayer-meetings in
the big Bethesda chapel; but he did these things as routine, without
skill and without enthusiasm, because they gave him an unassailable
position within the central group of the society. He was not, in fact,
much smitten with either the doctrinal or the spiritual side of
Methodism. His chief interest lay in those fiscal schemes of
organisation without whose aid no religious propaganda can possibly
succeed. It was in the finance of salvation that he rose supreme--the
interminable alternation of debt-raising and new liability which
provides a lasting excitement for Nonconformists. In the negotiation
of mortgages, the artful arrangement of appeals, the planning of
anniversaries and of mighty revivals, he was an undisputed leader. To
him the circuit was a 'going concern,' and he kept it in motion,
serving the Lord in committee and over statements of account. The
minister by his pleading might bring sinners to the penitent form, but
it was Ephraim Tellwright who reduced the cost per head of souls saved,
and so widened the frontiers of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Three years after the death of his first wife it was rumoured that he
would marry again, and that his choice had fallen on a young orphan
girl, thirty years his junior, who 'assisted' at the stationer's shop
where he bought his daily newspaper. The rumour was well-founded.
Anna, then eight years of age, vividly remembered the home-coming of
the pale wife, and her own sturdy attempts to explain, excuse, or
assuage to this wistful and fragile creature the implacable harshness
of her father's temper. Agnes was born within a year, and the pale
girl died of puerperal fever. In that year lay a whole tragedy, which
could not have been more poignant in its perfection if the year had
been a thousand years. Ephraim promptly re-engaged the old
housekeeper, a course which filled Anna with secret childish revolt,
for Anna was now nine, and accomplished in all domesticity. In another
seven years the housekeeper died, a gaunt grey ruin, and Anna at
sixteen became mistress of the household, with a small sister to
cherish and control. About this time Anna began to perceive that her
father was generally regarded as a man of great wealth, having few
rivals in the entire region of the Five Towns, Definite knowledge,
however, she had none: he never spoke of his affairs; she knew only
that he possessed houses and other property in various places, that he
always turned first to the money article in the newspaper, and that
long envelopes arrived for him by post almost daily. But she had once
heard the surmise that he was worth sixty thousand of his own, apart
from the fortune of his first wife, Anna's mother. Nevertheless, it
did not occur to her to think of her father, in plain terms, as a
miser, until one day she happened to read in the 'Staffordshire Signal'
some particulars of the last will and testament of William Wilbraham,
J.P., who had just died. Mr. Wilbraham had been a famous magnate and
benefactor of the Five Towns; his revered name was in every mouth; he
had a fine seat, Hillport House, at Hillport; and his superb horses
were constantly seen, winged and nervous, in the streets of Bursley and
Hanbridge. The 'Signal' said that the net value of his estate was
sworn at fifty-nine thousand pounds. This single fact added a definite
and startling significance to figures which had previously conveyed
nothing to Anna except an idea of vastness. The crude contrast between
the things of Hillport House and the things of the six-roomed abode in
Manor Terrace gave food for reflection, silent but profound.
Tellwright had long ago retired from business, and three years after
the housekeeper died he retired, practically, from religious work, to
the grave detriment of the Hanbridge circuit. In reply to sorrowful
questioners, he said merely that he was getting old and needed rest,
and that there ought to be plenty of younger men to fill his shoes. He
gave up everything except his pew in the chapel. The circuit was
astounded by this sudden defection of a class-leader, a local preacher,
and an officer. It was an inexplicable fall from grace. Yet the
solution of the problem was quite simple. Ephraim had lost interest in
his religious avocations; they had ceased to amuse him, the old ardour
had cooled. The phenomenon is a common enough experience with men who
have passed their fiftieth year--men, too, who began with the true and
sacred zeal, which Tellwright never felt. The difference in
Tellwright's case was that, characteristically, he at once yielded to
the new instinct, caring naught for public opinion. Soon afterwards,
having purchased a lot of cottage property in Bursley, he decided to
migrate to the town of his fathers. He had more than one reason for
doing so, but perhaps the chief was that he found the atmosphere of
Hanbridge Wesleyan chapel rather uncongenial. The exodus from it was
his silent and malicious retort to a silent rebuke.
He appeared now to grow younger, discarding in some measure a certain
morose taciturnity which had hitherto marked his demeanour. He went
amiably about in the manner of a veteran determined to enjoy the brief
existence of life's winter. His stout, stiff, deliberate yet alert
figure became a familiar object to Bursley: that ruddy face, with its
small blue eyes, smooth upper lip, and short grey beard under the
smooth chin, seemed to pervade the streets, offering everywhere the
conundrum of its vague smile. Though no friend ever crossed his
doorstep, he had dozens of acquaintances of the footpath. He was not,
however, a facile talker, and he seldom gave an opinion; nor were his
remarks often noticeably shrewd. He existed within himself,
unrevealed. To the crowd, of course, he was a marvellous legend, and
moving always in the glory of that legend he received their wondering
awe--an awe tinged with contempt for his lack of ostentation and public
splendour. Commercial men with whom he had transacted business liked
to discuss his abilities, thus disseminating that solid respect for him
which had sprung from a personal experience of those abilities, and
which not even the shabbiness of his clothes could weaken.
Anna was disturbed by the arrival at the front door of the milk-girl.
Alternately with her father, she stayed at home on Sunday evenings,
partly to receive the evening milk and partly to guard the house. The
Persian cat with one ear preceded her to the door as soon as he heard
the clatter of the can. The stout little milk-girl dispensed one pint
of milk into Anna's jug, and spilt an eleemosynary supply on the step
for the cat. 'He does like it fresh, Miss,' said the milk-girl,
smiling at the greedy cat, and then, with a 'Lovely evenin',' departed
down the street, one fat red arm stretched horizontally out to balance
the weight of the can in the other. Anna leaned idly against the
doorpost, waiting while the cat finished, until at length the swaying
figure of the milk-girl disappeared in the dip of the road. Suddenly
she darted within, shutting the door, and stood on the hall-mat in a
startled attitude of dismay. She had caught sight of Henry Mynors in
the distance, approaching the house. At that moment the kitchen clock
struck seven, and Mynors, according to the rule of a lifetime, should
have been in his place in the 'orchestra' (or, as some term it, the
'singing-seat') of the chapel, where he was an admired baritone. Anna
dared not conjecture what impulse had led him into this extraordinary,
incredible deviation. She dared not conjecture, but despite herself
she knew, and the knowledge shocked her sensitive and peremptory
conscience. Her heart began to beat rapidly; she was in distress.
Aware that her father and sister had left her alone, did he mean to
call? It was absolutely impossible, yet she feared it, and blushed,
all solitary there in the passage, for shame. Now she heard his sharp,
decided footsteps, and through the glazed panels of the door she could
see the outline of his form. He stopped; his hand was on the gate, and
she ceased to breathe. He pushed the gate open, and then, at the
whisper of some blessed angel, he closed it again and continued his way
up the street. After a few moments Anna carried the milk into the
kitchen, and stood by the dresser, moveless, each muscle braced in the
intensity of profound contemplation. Gradually the tears rose to her
eyes and fell; they were the tincture of a strange and mystic joy, too
poignant to be endured. As it were under compulsion she ran outside,
and down the garden path to the low wall which looked over the grey
fields of the valley up to Hillport. Exactly opposite, a mile and a
half away, on the ridge, was Hillport Church, dark and clear against
the orange sky. To the right, and nearer, lay the central masses of
the town, tier on tier of richly-coloured ovens and chimneys. Along
the field-paths couples moved slowly. All was quiescent, languorous,
beautiful in the glow of the sun's stately declension. Anna put her
arms on the wall. Far more impressively than in the afternoon she
realised that this was the end of one epoch in her career and the
beginning of another. Enthralled by austere traditions and that stern
conscience of hers, she had never permitted herself to dream of the
possibility of an escape from the parental servitude. She had never
looked beyond the horizons of her present world, but had sought
spiritual satisfaction in the ideas of duty and sacrifice. The worst
tyrannies of her father never dulled the sense of her duty to him; and,
without perhaps being aware of it, she had rather despised love and the
dalliance of the sexes. In her attitude towards such things there had
been not only a little contempt but also some disapproval, as though
man were destined for higher ends. Now she saw, in a quick revelation,
that it was the lovers, and not she, who had the right to scorn. She
saw how miserably narrow, tepid, and trickling the stream of her life
had been, and had threatened to be. Now it gushed forth warm,
impetuous, and full, opening out new and delicious vistas. She lived;
and she was finding the sight to see, the courage to enjoy. Now, as
she leaned over the wall, she would not have cared if Henry Mynors
indeed had called that night. She perceived something splendid and
free in his abandonment of habit and discretion at the bidding of a
desire. To be the magnet which could draw that pattern and exemplar of
seemliness from the strict orbit of virtuous custom! It was she, the
miser's shabby daughter, who had caused this amazing phenomenon. The
thought intoxicated her. Without the support of the wall she might
have fallen. In a sort of trance she murmured these words: 'He loves
me.'
This was Anna Tellwright, the ascetic, the prosaic, the impassive.
After an interval which to her was as much like a minute as a century,
she went back into the house. As she entered by the kitchen she heard
an impatient knocking at the front door.
'At last,' said her father grimly, when she opened the door. In two
words he had resumed his terrible sway over her. Agnes looked timidly
from one to the other and slipped past them into the house.
'I was in the garden,' Anna explained. 'Have you been here long?' She
tried to smile apologetically.
'Only about a quarter of an hour,' he answered, with a grimness still
more portentous.
'He won't speak again to-night,' she thought fearfully. But she was
mistaken. After he had carefully hung his best hat on the hat-rack, he
turned towards her, and said, with a queer smile:
'Ye've been day-dreaming, eh, Sis?'
'Sis' was her pet name, used often by Agnes, but by her father only at
the very rarest intervals. She was staggered at this change of front,
so unaccountable in this man, who, when she had unwittingly annoyed
him, was capable of keeping an awful silence for days together. What
did he know? What had those old eyes seen?
'I forgot,' she stammered, gathering herself together happily, 'I
forgot the time.' She felt that after all there was a bond between
them which nothing could break--the tie of blood. They were father and
daughter, united by sympathies obscure but fundamental. Kissing was
not in the Tellwright blood, but she had a fleeting wish to hug the
tyrant.
[1] Tellwright: tile-wright, a name specially characteristic of, and
possibly originating in, this clay-manufacturing district.