In the big ugly morning-room at Court Heatherleigh six people sat
engaged with different degrees of interest on six ugly pieces of coarse
material which were being fashioned into serviceable garments for the
poor. The poor were an institution in Wortheton and so was charity:
both, like the big chimneys dominating the town, were things of usage;
all were in a sense interdependent, and had their headquarters at Court
Heatherleigh, which was the big house and belonged to the owner of the
big chimneys--the owner of most things in Wortheton, from the ugly brick
cottages in which his employees dwelt to, one might say, the employees
themselves. The Trades Unions had not penetrated the select privacy of
Wortheton as yet. If occasionally a voice was uplifted in discontent
and hinted at these things, it was speedily silenced; and life flowed on
tranquilly as it had before the grumbler raised his foolish protest; and
his place knew him no more. But each whisper was as a small stone flung
in a mill stream; and stones follow the law of aggregation till
eventually they dam the stream.
The six busy workers in Court Heatherleigh morning-room were the six
daughters of Mr Graynor, and their ages ranged from somewhere about
fifty to eighteen. Besides the daughters, two sons had swelled the
family. The younger of these had married indiscreetly, and died
indiscreetly with his wife somewhere abroad, bequeathing an indiscreet
son to his father because he had nothing else to leave behind him,
having departed from the family tradition that the end and aim of life
is to acquire wealth. He had acquired nothing beyond a wife and son;
but he had loved both these, and been beloved in turn, so that,
according to his views, he had prospered well: according to his brother
William's views, he had been a fool.
William carried on the family traditions, and would eventually succeed
his father as owner of the big chimneys, the family mansion, and the
guardianship of his numerous sisters. He was not married. No one
expected him to marry; he did not expect it of himself. No woman worthy
of William's attention had ever adventured across his path.
Of the sisters, Miss Agatha Graynor, who was the eldest of the family by
several years, took the lead in all things, social and domestic, and
ruled the household with a despotism that not even old Mr Graynor had
been known to question; though his wives--he had married twice--had
never been permitted such absolute authority. In his youth he had been
as despotic as Agatha; but he was an old man now, and weary; and his
daughter overawed him. The one being to whom he clung was his young
daughter. Prudence, the only child of his second wife; and after
Prudence, his scapegrace grandson, Bobby, then at college, held possibly
the strongest place in his tired affections.
They were two very human young people, Prudence and Bobby, with a
contempt for the Graynor traditions, and lacking the Graynor pride and
self-complacency, and all the other creditable characteristics of an
old, influential, commercial stock that had owned the greater part of
Wortheton for generations, and had come to regard themselves by reason
of local homage as personages of high importance in the land.
Prudence made one of the working party from a matter of compulsion;
charity of that nature bored her, and she hated sewing. Since leaving
school, where her happiest years had been spent, Miss Agatha had imposed
many irksome duties as a corrective for idleness: a healthy youthful
desire for pleasure and recreation affronted her; if she had experienced
such desires in her own youth she had forgotten them: possibly she had
not experienced them; people are born deficient in various respects and
in different degrees. Miss Agatha had always been Good: her young
half-sister was lacking in piety, and suffered from warm human impulses
which not infrequently led her into trouble and subsequent disgrace.
Also Prudence was pretty; the other five Miss Graynors were plain.
The pretty, bored little face bending over the plain sewing showed
mutinous in the sunlit brightness of the quiet room; the small fingers
were hot, and the needle was sticky and refused to pass through the
coarse material: it bent alarmingly, and, in response to a savage little
thrust from a determined steel thimble, snapped audibly in the silence.
Miss Agatha looked up with quick rebuke.
"Not again, Prudence? That is the second needle this morning."
She hunted in her basket for a fresh needle, and passed it down the line
to the rebellious worker in displeased silence. Prudence's blue eyes
snapped dangerously, but she made no spoken comment. She threaded the
new needle languidly, and then sat with it in her idle hands and stared
through the open French window to the inviting stretch of green lawn,
dotted with brilliant flower beds, which made tennis, or any other game,
thereon impossible, which was the reason, Bobby was wont to assert, why
his aunt insisted on their remaining. Bobby and Prudence would have
made a clean sweep of the bedding-out borders if they had been allowed
their will. Miss Agatha, looking up and observing this idleness, was on
the point of remonstrating when the door opened opportunely to admit a
visitor, and Prudence's delinquencies were forgotten in the business of
welcoming the arrival.
"My dear Mrs North!" Miss Agatha exclaimed, surprised, and rose
hastily and shook hands with the vicar's wife, who, warm and a little
flushed, greeted her effusively, and nodded affably to the train of
nondescript sisters, who all rose and remained standing until the
new-comer was seated, when they reseated themselves--all save Prudence;
she edged a little nearer to the open window, prepared for escape at the
first favourable moment.
"Such an astonishing thing has happened," Mrs North was saying
breathlessly to the monotonous accompaniment of the diligently-plied
needles. "That girl, Bessie Clapp, has come back. I saw her myself in
her mother's house."
Miss Agatha's thin cheek became instantly pink. She turned in her seat
and regarded her sisters with grave solicitude in her eyes.
"Priscilla, Alice, Mary, Matilda, _and_ Prudence, leave the room," she
said.
Four needles were promptly thrust into the unfinished work, and the four
sisters, who were echoes of Miss Agatha, and the youngest of whom was
thirty, rose obediently and followed slowly Prudence's more alert
retreat. When they had passed beyond sight of the window Miss Agatha
turned apologetically to her friend.
"Of course," she explained earnestly, "I couldn't discuss that subject
in front of the girls."
Mrs North, realising the delicacy of the position, generously
acquiesced.
"It was a little indiscreet of me," she allowed. "But I was never so
astounded in my life. And the girl's mother actually defends her. She
talks about `her own flesh and blood.' ... As though that makes any
difference! I knew you would be shocked. It's such a scandal in the
place. And to come back... where every one knows!"
"She can't stay," said Miss Agatha decidedly; and her thin lips
compressed themselves tightly, locking themselves upon the sentence as
it passed them. She pushed the work on the table aside and looked
fixedly at the vicar's wife. "We can't tolerate such a scandal in
Wortheton. We have to think of the people at the Works. That kind of
thing... it... We must set our faces against it."
"Of course," Mrs North agreed doubtfully. "That's why I came to you."
Every one came to Miss Agatha when an unpleasant situation had to be
faced: she faced it so resolutely, with the inflexibility of justice
untempered with mercy. Sin was sin. There were no intermediate shades
between black and white. Sin had to be uprooted. The moral prestige of
Wortheton demanded that all which was "not nice" must be eliminated from
its community.
And in a dingy room in a dingy little house in a dingier side street, a
girl with a beautiful face was thinking in her passionate discontent how
good it was to be a bird--a small feathered thing in a nest among the
branches of a fine old tree--anything rather than a human being.