Her voice expanded into large capitals because by a singular chance both

the neighbouring orchestras stopped momentarily together, and thus gave

her shout a fair field. The effect was startling. It startled Ellis. He

had not for an instant expected that she would consent. Never, dog

though he was, had he armed a girl out on any afternoon, to say nothing

of Sunday afternoon, and Knype's Wakes Sunday at that! He had talked

about girls at the club. He understood the theory. But the practice----

The foundation of England's greatness is that Englishmen hate to look

fools. The fear of being taken for a ninny will spur an Englishman to

the most surprising deeds of courage. Ellis said 'Good!' with apparent

enthusiasm, and arranged to be waiting for her at half-past two at the

Turk's Head. Then he left the saloon and struck out anew into the ocean.

He wanted to think it over.

Once, painful to relate, he had thoughts of failing to keep the

appointment. However, she was so jolly and frank. And what a fancy she

must have taken to him! No, he would see it through.

IV

If anybody had prophesied to Ellis that he would be driving out a Wakes

girl in a dogcart that Sunday afternoon he would have laughed at the

prophet; but so it occurred. He arrived at the Turk's Head at two

twenty-five. She was there before him, dressed all in blue, except the

white shoes and stockings, weighing herself on the machine in the yard.

She showed her teeth, told him she weighed nine stone one, and abruptly

asked him if he could drive. He said he could. She clapped her hands and

sprang off the machine. Her father had bought a new mare the day before,

and it was in the Turk's Head stable, and the yardman said it wanted

exercise, and there was a dogcart and harness idling about, and, in

short, Ellis should drive her to Sneyd Park, which she had long desired

to see.

Ellis wished to ask questions, but the moment did not seem auspicious.

In a few minutes the new mare, a high and somewhat frisky bay, with big

shoulders, was in the shafts of a high, green dogcart. When asked if he

could drive, Ellis ought to have answered: 'That depends--on the horse.'

Many men can tool a fifteen-year-old screw down a country lane who would

hesitate to get up behind a five-year-old animal (in need of exercise)

for a spin down Broad Street, Hanbridge, on Knype Wakes Sunday. Ellis

could drive; he could just drive. His father had always steadfastly

refused to keep horses, but the fathers of other dogs were more

progressive, and Ellis had had opportunities. He knew how to take the

reins, and get up, and give the office; indeed, he had read a handbook

on the subject. So he rook the reins and got up, and the Wakes girl got

up.

He chirruped. The mare merely backed.

'Give 'er 'er mouth,' said the yardman disgustedly.

'Oh!' said Ellis, and slackened the reins, and the mare pawed forward.

Then he had to turn her in the yard, and get her and the dogcart down

the passage. He doubted whether he should do it, for the passage seemed

a size too small. However, he did it, or the mare did it, and the entire

organism swerved across a portion of the footpath into Broad Street.

For quite a quarter of a mile down Broad Street Ellis blushed, and kept

his gaze between the mare's ears. However, the mare went beautifully.

You could have driven her with a silken thread, so it seemed. And then

the dog, growing accustomed to his prominence up there on the dogcart,

began to be a bit doggy. He knew the little thing's age and weight,

but, really, when you take a girl out for a Sunday spin you want more

information about her than that. Her asked her name, and her name was

Jenkins--Ada. She was the great Jenkins's daughter.

('Oh,' thought Ellis, 'the deuce you are!')

'Father's gone to Manchester for the day, and aunt's looking after me,'

said Ada.

'Do they know you've come out--like this?'

'Not much!' She laughed deliciously. 'How lovely it is!'

At Knype they drew up before the Five Towns Hotel and descended. The

Five Towns Hotel is the greatest hotel in North Staffordshire. It has

two hundred rooms. It would not entirely disgrace Northumberland Avenue.

In the Five Towns it is august, imposing, and unique. They had a

lemonade there, and proceeded. A clock struck; it was a near thing. No

more refreshments now until they had passed the three-mile limit!

Yes! Not two hundred yards further on she spied an ice-cream shop in

Fleet Road, and Ellis learnt that she adored ice-cream. The mare waited

patiently outside in the thronged street.

After that the pilgrimage to Sneyd was punctuated with ice-creams. At

the Stag at Sneyd (where, among ninety-and-nine dogcarts, Ellis's

dogcart was the brightest green of them all) Ada had another lemonade,

and Ellis had something else. They saw the Park, and Ada giggled

charmingly her appreciation of its beauty. The conversation throughout

consisted chiefly of Ada's teeth. Ellis said he would return by a

different route, and he managed to get lost. How anyone driving to

Hanbridge from Sneyd could arrive at the mining village of Silverton is

a mystery. But Ellis arrived there, and he ultimately came out at

Hillport, the aristocratic suburb of Bursley, where he had always lived

till the last year. He feared recognition there, and his fear was

justified. Some silly ass, a schoolmate, cried, 'Go it!' as the machine

bowled along, and the mischief was that the mare, startled, went it. She

went it down the curving hill, and the vehicle after her, like a kettle

tied to a dog's tail.

Ellis winked stoutly at Ada when they reached the bottom, and gave the

mare a piece of his mind, to which she objected. As they crossed the

railway-bridge a goods-train ran underneath and puffed smoke into the

mare's eyes. She set her ears back.

'Would you!' cried Ellis authoritatively, and touched her with the whip

(he had forgotten the handbook).

He scarcely touched her, but you never know where you are with any

horse. That mare, which had been a mirror of all the virtues all the

afternoon, was off like a rocket. She overtook an electric car as if it

had been standing still. Ellis sawed her mouth; he might as well have

sawed the funnel of a locomotive. He had meant to turn off and traverse

Bursley by secluded streets, but he perceived that safety lay solely in

letting her go straight ahead up the very steep slope of Oldcastle

Street into the middle of the town. It would be an amazing mare that

galloped to the top of Oldcastle Street! She galloped nearly to the top,

and then Ellis began to get hold of her a bit.

'Don't be afraid,' he said masculinely to Ada.

And, conscious of victory, he jerked the mare to the left to avoid an

approaching car....

The next instant they were anchored against the roots of a lamp-post.

When Ellis saw the upper half of the lamp-post bent down at right

angles, and pieces of glass covering the pavement, he could not believe

that he and his dogcart had done that, especially as neither the mare,

nor the dogcart, nor its freight, was damaged. The machine was merely

jammed, and the mare, satisfied, stood quiet, breathing rapidly.

But Ada Jenkins was crying.

And the car stopped a moment to observe. And then a number of

chapel-goers on their way to the Sytch Chapel, which the Carter family

still faithfully attended, joined the scene; and then a policeman.

Ellis sat like a stuck pig in the dogcart. He knew that speech was

demanded of him, but he did not know where to begin.

The worst thing of all was the lamp-post, bent, moveless, unnatural,

atrociously comic, accusing him.

The affair was over the town in a minute; the next morning it reached

Llandudno. Ellis Carter had been out on the spree with _a Wakes girl_ in

a dogcart on Sunday afternoon, and had got into such a condition that he

had driven into a lamp-post at the top of Oldcastle Street just as

people were going into chapel.

The lamp-post remained bent for three days--a fearful warning to all

dogs that doggishness has limits.

If it had not been a dogcart, and such a high, green dogcart; if it had

been, say, a brougham, or even a cab! If it had not been Sunday! And,

granting Sunday, if it had not been just as people were going into

chapel! If he had not chosen that particular lamp-post, visible both

from the market-place and St. Luke's Square! If he had only contrived to

destroy a less obtrusive lamp-post in some unfrequented street! And if

it had not been a Wakes girl--if the reprobate had only selected for his

guilty amours an actress from one of the touring companies, or even a

star from the Hanbridge Empire--yea, or even a local barmaid! But _a

Wakes girl_!

Ellis himself saw the enormity of his transgression. He lay awake

astounded by his own doggishness.

And yet he had seldom felt less doggy than during that trip. It seemed

to him that doggishness was not the glorious thing he had thought.

However, he cut a heroic figure at the dogs' club. Every admiring face

said: 'Well, you _have_ been going the pace! We always knew you were a

hot un, but, really----'

V

On the following Friday evening, when Ellis jumped off the car opposite

his home on the Hawkins, he saw in the road, halted, a train of vast and

queer-shaped waggons in charge of two traction-engines. They were

painted on all sides with the great name of Jenkins. They contained

Jenkins's roundabouts and shooting-saloons, on their way to rouse the

joy of life in other towns. And he perceived in front of the portico the

high, green dogcart and the lamp-post-destroying mare.

He went in. The family had come home that afternoon. Sundry of his

sisters greeted him with silent horror on their faces in the hall. In

the breakfast-room, which gave off the drawing-room, was his mother in

the attitude of an intent listener. She spoke no word.

And Ellis listened, too.

'Yes,' a very powerful and raucous voice was saying in the drawing-room,

'I reckoned I'd call and tell ye myself, Mister Carter, what I thought

on it. My gell, a motherless gell, but brought up respectable; sixth

standard at Whalley Range Board School; and her aunt a strict

God-fearing woman! And here your son comes along and gets hold of the

girl while her aunt's at the special service for Wakes folks in Bethesda

Chapel, and runs off with her in my dogcart with one of my hosses, and

raises a scandal all o'er the Five Towns. God bless my soul, mister! I

tell'n ye I hardly liked to open o' Monday afternoon, I was that

ashamed! And I packed Ada off to Manchester. It seems to me that if the

upper classes, as they call 'em--the immoral classes _I_ call 'em--'ud

look after themselves a bit instead o' looking after other people so

much, things might be a bit better, Mister Carter. I dare say you think

it's nothing as your son should go about ruining the reputation of any

decent, respectable girl as he happens to fancy, Mister Carter; but this

is what I say. I say----'

Mr. Carter was understood to assert, in his most pacific and pained

public-meeting voice, that he regretted, infinitely regretted----

Mrs. Carter, weeping, ran out of the breakfast-room.

And soon afterwards the traction-engines rumbled off, and the high,

green dogcart followed them.

Ellis sat spell-bound.

He heard the parlourmaid go into the drawing-room and announce, 'Tea is

ready, sir!' and then his father's dry cough.

And then the parlourmaid came into the breakfast-room: 'Tea is ready,

Mr. Ellis!'

Oh, the meal!

* * * * *

A FEUD

When Clive Timmis paused at the side-door of Ezra Brunt's great shop in

Machin Street, and the door was opened to him by Ezra Brunt's daughter

before he had had time to pull the bell, not only all Machin Street knew

it within the hour, but also most persons of consequence left in

Hanbridge on a Thursday afternoon--Thursday being early-closing day. For

Hanbridge, though it counts sixty thousand inhabitants, and is the chief

of the Five Towns--that vast, huddled congeries of boroughs devoted to

the manufacture of earthenware--is a place where the art of attending to

other people's business still flourishes in rustic perfection.

Ezra Brunt's drapery establishment was the foremost retail house, in any

branch of trade, of the Five Towns. It had no rival nearer than

Manchester, thirty-six miles off; and even Manchester could exhibit

nothing conspicuously superior to it. The most acutely critical shoppers

of the Five Towns--women who were in the habit of going to London every

year for the January sales--spoke of Brunt's as a 'right-down good

shop.' And the husbands of these ladies, manufacturers who employed from

two hundred to a thousand men, regarded Ezra Brunt as a commercial

magnate of equal importance with themselves. Brunt, who had served his

apprenticeship at Birmingham, started business in Machin Street in 1862,

when Hanbridge was half its present size and all the best shops of the

district were in Oldcastle, an ancient burg contiguous with, but holding

itself proudly aloof from, the industrial Five Towns. He paid eighty

pounds a year rent, and lived over the shop, and in the summer quarter

his gas bill was always under a sovereign. For ten years success

tarried, but in 1872 his daughter Eva was born and his wife died, and

from that moment the sun of his prosperity climbed higher and higher

into heaven. He had been profoundly attached to his wife, and, having

lost her he abandoned himself to the mercantile struggle with that

morose and terrible ferocity which was the root of his character. Of

rude, gaunt aspect, gruffly taciturn by nature, and variable in temper,

he yet had the precious instinct for soothing customers. To this day he

can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender solicitude

with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's ear his famous

stereotyped phrase: 'Are you receiving proper attention, madam?' From

the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which

allure the populace. He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he

found it. He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had

no signboard over his shop-front; and whereas the name of 'Bostocks,'

the huge cheap drapers lower down Machin Street, on the opposite side,

attacks you at every railway-station and in every tramcar, the name of

'E. Brunt' is to be seen only in a modest regular advertisement on the

front page of the _Staffordshire Signal_. Repose, reticence,

respectability--it was these attributes which he decided his shop should

possess, and by means of which he succeeded. To enter Brunt's, with its

silently swinging doors, its broad, easy staircases, its long floors

covered with warm, red linoleum, its partitioned walls, its smooth

mahogany counters, its unobtrusive mirrors, its rows of youths and

virgins in black, and its pervading atmosphere of quietude and

discretion, was like entering a temple before the act of oblation has

commenced. You were conscious of some supreme administrative influence

everywhere imposing itself. That influence was Ezra Brunt. And yet the

man differed utterly from the thing he had created. His was one of those

dark and passionate souls which smoulder in this harsh Midland district

as slag-heaps smoulder on the pit-banks, revealing their strange fires

only in the darkness.

In 1899 Brunt's establishment occupied four shops, Nos. 52, 56, 58, and

60, in Machin Street. He had bought the freeholds at a price which timid

people regarded as exorbitant, but the solicitors of Hanbridge secretly

applauded his enterprise and shrewdness in anticipating the enormous

rise in ground-values which has now been in rapid, steady progress there

for more than a decade. He had thrown the interiors together and rebuilt

the frontages in handsome freestone. He had also purchased several

shops opposite, and rumour said that it was his intention to offer these

latter to the Town Council at a low figure if the Council would cut a

new street leading from his premises to the Market Square. Such a scheme

would have met with general approval. But there was one serious hiatus

in the plans of Ezra Brunt--to wit, No. 54, Machin Street. No. 54,

separating 52 and 56, was a chemist's shop, shabby but sedate as to

appearance, owned and occupied by George Christopher Timmis, a mild and

venerable citizen, and a local preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist

Connexion. For nearly thirty years Brunt had coveted Mr. Timmis's shop;

more than twenty years have elapsed since he first opened negotiations

for it. Mr. Timmis was by no means eager to sell--indeed, his attitude

was distinctly a repellent one--but a bargain would undoubtedly have

been concluded had not a report reached the ears of Mr. Timmis to the

effect that Ezra Brunt had remarked at the Turk's Head that 'th' old

leech was only sticking out for every brass farthing he could get.' The

report was untrue, but Mr. Timmis believed it, and from that moment Ezra

Brunt's chances of obtaining the chemist's shop vanished completely.

His lawyer expended diplomacy in vain, raising the offer week by week

till the incredible sum of three thousand pounds was reached. Then Ezra

Brunt himself saw Mr. Timmis, and without a word of prelude said:

'Will ye take three thousand guineas for this bit o' property?'

'Not thirty thousand guineas,' said Mr. Timmis quietly; the stern pride

of the benevolent old local preacher had been aroused.

'Then be damned to you!' said Ezra Brunt, who had never been known to

swear before.

Thenceforth a feud existed, not less bitter because it was a feud in

which nothing was said and nothing done--a silent and implacable mutual

resistance. The sole outward sign of it was the dirty and stumpy

brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in between those massive

luxurious façades of stone which Ezra Brunt soon afterwards erected. The

pharmaceutical business of Mr. Timmis was not a very large one, and,

fiscally, Ezra Brunt could have swallowed him at a meal and suffered no

inconvenience; but in that the aged chemist had lived on just half his

small income for some fifty years past, his position was impregnable.

Hanbridge smiled cynically at this _impasse_ produced by an idle word,

and, recognising the equality of the antagonists, leaned neither to one

side nor to the other. At intervals, however, the legend of the feud was

embroidered with new and effective detail in the mouth of some inventive

gossip, and by degrees it took high place among those piquant social

histories which illustrate the real life of a town, and which parents

recount to their children with such zest in moods of reminiscence.

When George Christopher Timmis buried his wife, Ezra Brunt, as a near

neighbour, was asked to the funeral. 'The cortège will move at 1.30,'

ran the printed invitation, and at 1.15 Brunt's carriage was decorously

in place behind the hearse and the two mourning-coaches. The demeanour

of the chemist and the draper towards each other was a sublime answer to

the demands of the occasion; some people even said that the breach had

been healed, but these were not of the discerning.

The most active person at the funeral was the chemist's only nephew,

Clive Timmis, partner in a small but prosperous firm of majolica

manufacturers at Bursley. Clive, who was seldom seen in Hanbridge, made

a favourable impression on everyone by his pleasing, unaffected manner

and his air of discretion and success. He was a bachelor of thirty-two,

and lived in lodgings at Bursley. On the return of the funeral-party

from the cemetery, Clive Timmis found Brunt's daughter Eva in his

uncle's house. Uninvited, she had left her place in the private room at

her father's shop in order to assist Timmis's servant Sarah in the

preparation of that solid and solemn repast which must inevitably follow

every proper interment in the Five Towns. Without false modesty, she

introduced herself to one or two of the men who had surprised her at her

work, and then quietly departed just as they were sitting down to table

and Sarah had brought in the hot tea-cakes. Clive Timmis saw her only

for a moment, but from that moment she was his one thought. During the

evening, which he spent alone with his uncle, he behaved in every

particular as a nephew should, yet he was acting a part; his real self

roved after Ezra Brunt's daughter, wherever she might be. Clive had

never fallen in love, though several times in his life he had tried hard

to do so. He had long wished to marry--wished ardently; he had even got

into the way of regarding every woman he met--and he met many--in the

light of a possible partner. 'Can it be _she_? he had asked himself a

thousand times, and then answered half sadly, 'No.' Not one woman had

touched his imagination, coincided with his dream. It is strange that

after seeing Eva Brunt he forgot thus to interrogate himself. For a

fortnight, while he went his ways as usual, her image occupied his

heart, throwing that once orderly chamber into the wildest confusion;

and he let it remain, dimly aware of some delicious danger. He inspected

the image every night before he slept, and every morning when he awoke,

and made no effort to define its distracting charm; he knew only that

Eva Brunt was absolutely and in every detail unlike all other women. On

the second Sunday he murmured during the sermon: 'But I only saw her for

a minute.' A few days afterwards he took the tram to Hanbridge.

'Uncle,' he said, 'how should you like me to come and live here with

you? I've been thinking things out a bit, and I thought perhaps you'd

like it. I expect you must feel rather lonely now.'

The neat, fragrant shop was empty, and the two men stood behind the big

glass-fronted case of Burroughs and Wellcome's preparations. Clive's

venerable uncle happened to be looking into a drawer marked 'Gentianæ

Rad. Pulv.' He closed the drawer with slow hesitation, and then,

stroking his long white beard, replied in that deliberate voice which

seemed always to tremble with religious fervour:

'The hand of the Lord is in this thing, Clive. I have wished that you

might come to live here with me. But I was afraid it would be too far

from the works.'

'Pooh! that's nothing,' said Clive.

As he lingered at the shop door for the Bursley car to pass the end of

Machin Street, Eva Brunt went by. He raised his hat with diffidence, and

she smiled. It was a marvellous chance. His heart leapt into a throb

which was half agony and half delight.

'I am in love,' he said gravely.

He had just discovered the fact, and the discovery filled him with

exquisite apprehension.

If he had waited till the age of thirty-two for that springtime of the

soul which we call love, Clive had not waited for nothing. Eva was a

woman to enravish the heart of a man whose imagination could pierce the

agitating secrets immured in that calm and silent bosom. Slender and

scarcely tall, she belonged to the order of spare, slight-made women,

who hide within their slim frames an endowment of profound passion far

exceeding that of their more voluptuously-formed sisters, who never

coarsen into stoutness, and who at forty are as disturbing as at twenty.

At this date Eva was twenty-six. She had a rather small, white face,

which was a mask to the casual observer, and the very mirror of her

feelings to anyone with eyes to read its signs.

'I tell you what you are like,' said Clive to her once: 'you are like a

fine racehorse, always on the quiver.'

Yet many people considered her cold and impassive. Her walk and bearing

showed a sensitive independence, and when she spoke it was usually in

tones of command. The girls in the shop, where she was a power second

only to Ezra Brunt, were a little afraid of her, chiefly because she

poured terrible scorn on their small affectations, jealousies, and

vendettas. But they liked her because, in their own phrase, 'there was

no nonsense about' this redoubtable woman. She hated shams and

make-believes with a bitter and ruthless hatred. She was the heiress to

at least five thousand a year, and knew it well, but she never

encouraged her father to complicate their simple mode of life with the

pomps of wealth. They lived in a house with a large garden at Pireford,

which is on the summit of the steep ridge between the Five Towns and

Oldcastle, and they kept two servants and a coachman, who was also

gardener. Eva paid the servants good wages, and took care to get good

value therefor.

'It's not often I have any bother with my servants,' she would say, 'for

they know that if there is any trouble I would just as soon clear them

out and put on an apron and do the work myself.'

She was an accomplished house-mistress, and could bake her own bread: in

towns not one woman in a thousand can bake. With the coachman she had

little to do, for she could not rid herself of a sentimental objection

to the carriage--it savoured of 'airs'; when she used it she used it as

she might use a tramcar. It was her custom, every day except Saturday,

to walk to the shop about eleven o'clock, after her house had been set

in order. She had been thoroughly trained in the business, and had spent

a year at a first-rate shop in High Street, Kensington. Millinery was

her speciality, and she still watched over that department with a

particular attention; but for some time past she had risen beyond the

limitations of departments, and assisted her father in the general

management of the vast concern. In commercial aptitude she resembled the

typical Frenchwoman.

Although he was her father, Ezra Brunt had the wit to recognise her

talents, and he always listened to her suggestions, which, however,

sometimes startled him. One of them was that he should import into the

Five Towns a modiste from Paris, offering a salary of two hundred a

year. The old provincial stood aghast. He had the idea that all Parisian

women were stage-dancers. And to pay four pounds a week to a female!

Nevertheless, Mademoiselle Bertot--styled in the shop 'Madame'--now

presides over Ezra Brunt's dressmakers, draws her four pounds a week (of

which she saves two), and by mere nationality has given a unique

distinction and success to her branch of the business.

Eva occupied a small room opening off the principal showroom, and during

hours of work she issued thence but seldom. Only customers of the

highest importance might speak with her. She was a power felt rather

than seen. Employés who knocked at her door always did so with a certain

awe of what awaited them on the other side, and a consciousness that the

moment was unsuitable for levity. 'If you please, Miss Eva----'. Here

she gave audience to the 'buyers' and window-dressers, listened to

complaints and excuses, and occasionally had a secret orgy of afternoon

tea with one or two of her friends. None but these few girls--mostly

younger than herself, and remarkable only in that their dislike of the

snobbery of the Five Towns, though less fiercely displayed, agreed with

her own--really knew Eva. To them alone did she unveil herself, and by

them she was idolized.

'She is simply splendid when you know her--such a jolly girl!' they

would say to other people; but other people, especially other women,

could not believe it. They fearfully respected her because she was very

well dressed and had quantities of money. But they called her 'a curious

creature'; it was inconceivable to them that she should choose to work

in a shop; and her tongue had a causticity which was sometimes

exceedingly disconcerting and mortifying. As for men, she was shy of

them, and, moreover, she loathed the elaborate and insincere ritual of

deference which the average man practises towards women unrelated to

him, particularly when they are young and rich. Her father she adored,

without knowing it; for he often angered her, and humiliated her in

private. As for the rest, she was, after all, only six-and-twenty.

'If you don't mind, I should like to walk along with you,' Clive Timmis

said to her one Sunday evening in the porch of the Bethesda Chapel.

'I shall be glad,' she answered at once; 'father isn't here, and I'm all

alone.'

Ezra Brunt was indeed seldom there, counting in the matter of

attendance at chapel among what were called 'the weaker brethren.'

'I am going over to Oldcastle,' Clive explained calmly.

So began the formal courtship--more than a month after Clive had settled

in Machin Street, for he was far too discreet to engender by

precipitancy any suspicion in the haunts of scandal that his true reason

for establishing himself in his uncle's household was a certain rich

young woman who was to be found every day next door. Guided as much by

instinct as by tact, Clive approached Eva with an almost savage

simplicity and naturalness of manner, ignoring not only her father's

wealth, but all the feigned punctilio of a wooer. His face said: 'Let

there be no beating about the bush--I like you.' Hers answered: 'Good!

we will see.'

From the first he pleased her, and not least in treating her exactly as

she would have wished to be treated--namely, as a quite plain person of

that part of the middle class which is neither upper nor lower. Few men

in the Five Towns would have been capable of forgetting Ezra Brunt's

income in talking to Ezra Brunt's daughter. Fortunately, Timmis had a

proud, confident spirit--the spirit of one who, unaided, has wrested

success from the world's deathlike clutch. Had Eva the reversion of

fifty thousand a year instead of five, he, Clive, was still a prosperous

plain man, well able to support a wife in the position to which God had

called him.

Their walks together grew more and more frequent, and they became

intimate, exchanging ideas and rejoicing openly at the similarity of

those ideas. Although there was no concealment in these encounters,

still, there was a circumspection which resembled the clandestine. By a

silent understanding Clive did not enter the house at Pireford; to have

done so would have excited remark, for this house, unlike some, had

never been the rendezvous of young men; much less, therefore, did he

invade the shop. No! The chief part of their love-making (for such it

was, though the term would have roused Eva's contemptuous anger)

occurred in the streets; in this they did but follow the traditions of

their class. Thus, the idyll, so matter-of-fact upon the surface, but

within which glowed secret and adorable fires, progressed towards its

culmination. Eva, the artless fool--oh, how simple are the wisest at

times!--thought that the affair was hid from the shop. But was it

possible? Was it possible that in those tiny bedrooms on the third

floor, where the heavy evening hours were ever lightened with breathless

interminable recitals of what some 'he' had said and some 'she' had

replied, such an enthralling episode should escape discovery? The

dormitories knew of Eva's 'attachment' before Eva herself. Yet none knew

how it was known. The whisper arose like Venus from a sea of trivial

gossip, miraculously, exquisitely. On the night when the first rumour of

it traversed the passages there was scarcely any sleep at Brunt's, while

Eva up at Pireford slumbered as a young girl.

On the Thursday afternoon with which we began, Brunt's was deserted save

for the housekeeper and Eva, who was writing letters in her room.

'I saw you from my window, coming up the street,' she said to Clive,

'and so I ran down to open the door. Will you come into father's room?

He is in Manchester for the day, buying.

'I knew that,' said Timmis.

'How did you know?' She observed that his manner was somewhat nervous

and constrained.

'You yourself told me last night--don't you remember?'

'So I did.'

'That's why I sent the note round this morning to say I'd call this

afternoon. You got it, I suppose?'

She nodded thoughtfully.

'Well, what is this business you want to talk about?'

It was spoken with a brave carelessness, but he caught the tremor in her

voice, and saw her little hand shake as it lay on the table amid her

father's papers. Without knowing why he should do so, he stepped hastily

forward and seized that hand. Her emotion unmanned him. He thought he

was going to cry; he could not account for himself.

'Eva,' he said thickly, 'you know what the business is; you know, don't

you?'

She smiled. That smile, the softness of her hand, the sparkle in her

eye, the heave of her small bosom ... it was the divinest miracle!

Clive, manufacturer of majolica, went hot and then cold, and then his

wits were suddenly his own again.

'That's all right,' he murmured, and sighed, and placed on Eva's lips

the first kiss that had ever lain there.

'Dear boy,' she said later, 'you should have come up to Pireford, not

here, and when father was there.'

'Should I?' he answered happily. 'It just occurred to me all of a sudden

this morning that you would be here, and that I couldn't wait.'

'You will come up to-night and see father?'

'I had meant to.'

'You had better go home now.'

'Had I?'

She nodded, putting her lips tightly together--a trick of hers.

'Come up about half-past eight.'

'Good! I will let myself out.'

He left her, and she gazed dreamily at the window, which looked on to a

whitewashed yard. The next moment someone else entered the room with

heavy footsteps. She turned round a little startled.

It was her father.

'Why! You _are_ back early, father! How----' She stopped. Something in

the old man's glance gave her a premonition of disaster. To this day she

does not know what accident brought him from Manchester two hours sooner

than usual, and to Machin Street instead of Pireford.

'Has young Timmis been here?' he inquired curtly.

'Yes.'

'Ha!' with subdued, sinister satisfaction, 'I saw him going out. He

didna see me.' Ezra Brunt deposited his hat and sat down.

Intimate with all her father's various moods, she saw instantly and with

terrible certainty that a series of chances had fatally combined

themselves against her. If only she had not happened to tell Clive that

her father would be at Manchester this day! If only her father had

adhered to his customary hour of return! If only Clive had had the sense

to make his proposal openly at Pireford some evening! If only he had

left a little earlier! If only her father had not caught him going out

by the side-door on a Thursday afternoon when the place was empty!

Here, she guessed, was the suggestion of furtiveness which had raised

her father's unreasoning anger, often fierce, and always incalculable.

'Clive Timmis has asked me to marry him, father.'

'Has he!'

'Surely you must have known, father, that he and I were seeing each

other a great deal.'

'Not from your lips, my girl.'

'Well, father----' Again she stopped, this strong and capable woman,

gifted with a fine brain to organize and a powerful will to command. She

quailed, robbed of speech, before the causeless, vindictive, and

infantile wrath of an old man who happened to be in a bad temper. She

actually felt like a naughty schoolgirl before him. Such is the

tremendous influence of lifelong habit, the irresistible power of the

_patria potestas_ when it has never been relaxed. Ezra Brunt saw in

front of him only a cowering child. 'Clive is coming up to see you

to-night,' she went on timidly, clearing her throat.

'Humph! Is he?'

The rosy and tender dream of five minutes ago lay in fragments at Eva's

feet. She brooded with stricken apprehension upon the forms of

obstruction which his despotism might choose.

* * * * *

The next morning Clive and his uncle breakfasted together as usual in

the parlour behind, the chemist's shop.

'Uncle,' said Clive brusquely, when the meal was nearly finished, 'I'd

better tell you that I've proposed to Eva Brunt.'

Old George Timmis lowered the _Manchester Guardian_ and gazed at Clive

over his steel-rimmed spectacles.

'She is a good girl,' he remarked; 'she will make you a good wife. Have

you spoken to her father?'

'That's the point. I saw him last night, and I'll tell you what he said.

These were his words: "You can marry my daughter, Mr. Timmis, when your

uncle agrees to part with his shop!"'

'That I shall never do, nephew,' said the aged patriarch quietly and

deliberately.

'Of course you won't, uncle. I shouldn't think of suggesting it. I'm

merely telling you what he said.' Clive laughed harshly. 'Why,' he

added, 'the man must be mad!'

'What did the young woman say to that?' his uncle inquired.

Clive frowned.

'I didn't see her last night,' he said. 'I didn't ask to see her. I was

too angry.'

Just then the post arrived, and there was a letter for Clive, which he

read and put carefully in his waistcoat pocket.

'Eva writes asking me to go to Pireford to-night,' he said, after a

pause. 'I'll soon settle it, depend on that. If Ezra Brunt refuses his

consent, so much the worse for him. I wonder whether he actually

imagines that a grown man and a grown woman are to be.... Ah well, I

can't talk about it! It's too silly. I'll be off to the works.'

When Clive reached Pireford that night, Eva herself opened the door to

him. She was wearing a gray frock, and over it a large white apron,

perfectly plain.

'My girls are both out to-night,' she said, 'and I was making some puffs

for the sewing-meeting tea. Come into the breakfast-room.... This way,'

she added, guiding him. He had entered the house on the previous night

for the first time. She spoke hurriedly, and, instead of stopping in

the breakfast-room, wandered uncertainly through it into the greenhouse,

to which it gave access by means of a French window. In the dark,

confined space, amid the close-packed blossoms, they stood together. She

bent down to smell at a musk-plant. He took her hand and drew her soft

and yielding form towards him and kissed her warm face.

'Oh, Clive!' she said. 'Whatever are we to do?'

'Do?' he replied, enchanted by her instinctive feminine surrender and

reliance upon him, which seemed the more precious in that creature so

proud and reserved to all others. 'Do! Where is your father?'

'Reading the _Signal_ in the dining-room.'

Every business man in the Five Towns reads the _Staffordshire Signal_

from beginning to end every night.

'I will see him. Of course he is your father; but I will just tell

him--as decently as I can--that neither you nor I will stand this

nonsense.'

'You mustn't--you mustn't see him.'

'Why not?'

'It will only lead to unpleasantness.'

'That can't be helped.'

'He never, never changes when once he has _said_ a thing. I know him.'

Clive was arrested by something in her tone, something new to him, that

in its poignant finality seemed to have caught up and expressed in a

single instant that bitterness of a lifetime's renunciation which falls

to the lot of most women.

'Will you come outside?' he asked in a different voice.

Without replying, she led the way down the long garden, which ended in

an ivy-grown brick wall and a panorama of the immense valley of

industries below. It was a warm, cloudy evening. The last silver tinge

of an August twilight lay on the shoulder of the hill to the left. There

was no moon, but the splendid watch-fires of labour flamed from ore-heap

and furnace across the whole expanse, performing their nightly miracle

of beauty. Trains crept with noiseless mystery along the middle

distance, under their canopies of yellow steam. Further off the

far-extending streets of Hanbridge made a map of starry lines on the

blackness. To the south-east stared the cold, blue electric lights of

Knype railway-station. All was silent, save for a distant thunderous

roar, the giant breathing of the forge at Cauldon Bar Ironworks.

Eva leaned both elbows on the wall and looked forth.

'Do you mean to say,' said Clive, 'that Mr. Brunt will actually stick by

what he has said?'

'Like grim death,' said Eva.

'But what's his idea?'

'Oh! how can I tell you?' she burst out passionately.

'Perhaps I did wrong. Perhaps I ought to have warned him earlier--said

to him, "Father, Clive Timmis is courting me!" Ugh! He cannot bear to be

surprised about anything. But yet he must have known.... It was all an

accident, Clive--all an accident. He saw you leaving the shop yesterday.

He would say he _caught_ you leaving the shop--_sneaking_ off like----'

'But, Eva----'

'I know--I know! Don't tell me! But it was that, I am sure. He would

resent the mere look of things, and then he would think and think, and

the notion of your uncle's shop would occur to him again, after all

these years. I can see his thoughts as plain ... My dear, if he had not

seen you at Machin Street yesterday, or if you had seen him and spoken

to him, all might have gone right. He would have objected, but he would

have given way in a day or two. Now he will never give way! I asked you

just now what was to be done, but I knew all the time that there was

nothing.'

'There is one thing to be done, Eva, and the sooner the better.'

'Do you mean that old Mr. Timmis must give up his shop to my father?

Never! never!'

'I mean,' said Clive quietly, 'that we must marry without your father's

consent.'

She shook her head slowly and sadly, relapsing into calmness.

'You shake your head, Eva, but it must be so.'

'I can't, my dear.'

'Do you mean to say that you will allow your father's childish whim--for

it's nothing else; he can't find any objection to me as a husband for

you, and he knows it--that you will allow his childish whim to spoil

your life and mine? Remember, you are twenty-six and I am thirty-two.'

'I can't do it! I daren't! I'm mad with myself for feeling like this,

but I daren't! And even if I dared I wouldn't. Clive, you don't know!

You can't tell how it is!'

Her sorrowful, pathetic firmness daunted him. She was now composed,

mistress again of herself, and her moral force dominated him.

'Then, you and I are to be unhappy all our lives, Eva?'

The soft influences of the night seemed to direct her voice as, after a

long pause, she uttered the words: 'No one is ever quite unhappy in all

this world.' There was another pause, as she gazed steadily down into

the wonderful valley. 'We must wait.'

'Wait!' echoed Clive with angry grimness. 'He will live for twenty

years!'

'No one is ever quite unhappy in all this world,' she repeated dreamily,

as one might turn over a treasure in order to examine it.

Now for the epilogue to the feud. Two years passed, and it happened

that there was to be a Revival at the Bethesda Chapel. One morning the

superintendent minister and the revivalist called on Ezra Brunt at his

shop. When informed of their presence, the great draper had an impulse

of anger, for, like many stouter chapel-goers than himself, he would

scarcely tolerate the intrusion of religion into commerce. However, the

visit had an air of ceremony, and he could not decline to see these

ambassadors of heaven in his private room. The revivalist, a cheery,

shrewd man, whose powers of organization were obvious, and who seemed to

put organization before everything else, pleased Ezra Brunt at once.

'We want a specially good congregation at the opening meeting to-night,'

said the revivalist. 'Now, the basis of a good congregation must

necessarily be the regular pillars of the church, and therefore we are

making a few calls this morning to insure the presence of our chief

men--the men of influence and position. You will come, Mr. Brunt, and

you will let it be known among your employés that they will please you

by coming too?'

Ezra Brunt was by no means a regular pillar of the Bethesda, but he had

a vague sensation of flattery, and he consented; indeed, there was no

alternative.

The first hymn was being sung when he reached the chapel. To his

surprise, he found the place crowded in every part. A man whom he did

not know led him to a wooden form which had been put in the space

between the front pews and the Communion-rail. He felt strange there,

and uneasy, apprehensive.

The usual discreet somnolence of the chapel had been disturbed as by

some indecorous but formidable awakener; the air was electric; anything

might occur. Ezra was astounded by the mere volume of the singing; never

had he heard such singing. At the end of the hymn the congregation sat

down, hiding their faces in expectation. The revivalist stood erect and

terrible in the pulpit, no longer a shrewd, cheery man of the world, but

the very mouthpiece of the wrath and mercy of God. Ezra's

self-importance dwindled before that gaze, till, from a renowned magnate

of the Five Towns, he became an item in the multitude of suppliants. He

profoundly wished he had never come.

'Remember the hymn,' said the revivalist, with austere emphasis:

'"My richest gain I count but loss,

And pour contempt on all my pride."'

The admirable histrionic art with which he intensified the consonants in

the last line produced a tremendous effect. Not for nothing was this man

cerebrated throughout Methodism as a saver of souls. When, after a

pause, he raised his hand and ejaculated, 'Let us pray,' sobs could be

heard throughout the chapel. The Revival had begun.

At the end of a quarter of an hour Ezra Brunt would have given fifty

pounds to be outside, but he could not stir; he was magnetized. Soon the

revivalist came down from the pulpit and stood within the

Communion-rail, whence he addressed the nearmost part of the people in

low, soothing tones of persuasion. Apparently he ignored Ezra Brunt, but

the man was convicted of sin, and felt himself melting like an icicle in

front of a fire. He recalled the days of his youth, the piety of his

father and mother, and the long traditions of a stern Dissenting

family. He had backslidden, slackened in the use of the means of grace,

run after the things of this world. It is true that none of his chiefest

iniquities presented themselves to him; he was quite unconscious of them

even then; but the lesser ones were more than sufficient to overwhelm

him. Class-leaders were now reasoning with stricken sinners, and Ezra,

who could not take his eyes off the revivalist, heard the footsteps of

those who were going to the 'inquiry-room' for more private counsel. In

vain he argued that he was about to be ridiculous; that the idea of him,

Ezra Brunt, a professed Wesleyan for half a century, being publicly

'saved' at the age of fifty-seven was not to be entertained; that the

town would talk; that his business might suffer if for any reason he

should be morally bound to apply to it too strictly the principles of

the New Testament. He was under the spell. The tears coursed down his

long cheeks, and he forgot to care, but sat entranced by the

revivalist's marvellous voice. Suddenly, with an awful sob, he bent and

hid his face in his hands. The spectacle of the old, proud man helpless

in the grasp of profound emotion was a sight to rend the heart-strings.

'Brother, be of good cheer,' said a tremulous and benign voice above

him. 'The love of God compasseth all things. Only believe.'

He looked up and saw the venerable face and long white beard of George

Christopher Timmis.

Ezra Brunt shrank away, embittered and ashamed.

'I cannot,' he murmured with difficulty.

'The love of God is all-powerful.'

'Will it make you part with that bit o' property, think you?' said Ezra

Brunt, with a kind of despairing ferocity.

'Brother,' replied the aged servant of God, unmoved, 'if my shop is in

truth a stumbling-block in this solemn hour, you shall have it.'

Ezra Brunt was staggered.

'I believe! I believe!' he cried.

'Praise God!' said the chemist, with majestic joy.

* * * * *

Three months afterwards Eva Brunt and Clive Timmis were married. It is

characteristic of the fine sentimentality which underlies the surface

harshness of the inhabitants of the Five Towns that, though No. 54

Machin Street was duly transferred to Ezra Brunt, the chemist retiring

from business, he has never rebuilt it to accord with the rest of his

premises. In all its shabbiness it stands between the other big dazzling

shops as a reminding monument.

* * * * *

PHANTOM

I

The heart of the Five Towns--that undulating patch of England covered

with mean streets, and dominated by tall smoking chimneys, whence are

derived your cups and saucers and plates, some of your coal, and a

portion of your iron--is Hanbridge, a borough larger and busier than its

four sisters, and even more grimy and commonplace than they. And the

heart of Hanbridge is probably the offices of the Five Towns Banking

Company, where the last trace of magic and romance is beaten out of

human existence, and the meaning of life is expressed in balances,

deposits, percentages, and overdrafts--especially overdrafts. In a fine

suite of rooms on the first floor of the bank building resides Mr.

Lionel Woolley, the manager, with his wife May and their children. Mrs.

Woolley is compelled to change her white window-curtains once a week

because of the smuts. Mr. Woolley, forty-five, rather bald, frigidly

suave, positive, egotistic, and pontifical, is a specimen of the man of

business who is nothing else but a man of business. His career has been

a calculation from which sentiment is entirely omitted; he has no

instinct for the things which cannot be defined and assessed. Scarcely a

manufacturer in Hanbridge but who inimically and fearfully regards Mr.

Woolley as an amazing instance of a creature without a soul; and the

absence of soul in a fellow-man must be very marked indeed before a

Hanbridge manufacturer notices it. There are some sixty thousand

immortal souls in Hanbridge, but they seldom attract attention.

Yet Mr. Woolley was once brought into contact with the things which

cannot be defined and assessed; once he stood face to face with some

strange visible resultant of those secret forces that lie beyond the

human ken. And, moreover, the adventure affected the whole of his

domestic life. The wonder and the pathos of the story lie in the fact

that Nature, prodigal though she is known to be, should have wasted the

rare and beautiful visitation on just Mr. Woolley. Mr. Woolley was

bathed in romance of the most singular kind, and the precious fluid ran

off him like water off a duck's back.

II

Ten years ago on a Thursday afternoon in July, Lionel Woolley, as he

walked up through the new park at Bursley to his celibate rooms in Park

Terrace, was making addition sums out of various items connected with

the institution of marriage. Bursley is next door to Hanbridge, and

Lionel happened then to be cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank. He

had in mind two possible wives, each of whom possessed advantages which

appealed to him, and he was unable to decide between them by any

mathematical process. Suddenly, from a glazed shelter near the empty

bandstand, there emerged in front of him one of the delectable creatures

who had excited his fancy. May Lawton was twenty-eight, an orphan, and a

schoolmistress. She, too, had celibate rooms in Park Terrace, and it

was owing to this coincidence that Lionel had made her acquaintance six

months previously. She was not pretty, but she was tall, straight, well

dressed, well educated, and not lacking in experience; and she had a

little money of her own.

'Well, Mr. Woolley,' she said easily, stopping for him as she raised her

sunshade, 'how satisfied you look!'

'It's the sight of you,' he replied, without a moment's hesitation.

He had a fine assured way with women (he need not have envied a curate

accustomed to sewing meetings), and May Lawton belonged to the type of

girl whose demeanour always challenges the masculine in a man. Gazing at

her, Lionel was swiftly conscious of several things: the piquancy of her

snub nose, the brightness of her smile, at once defiant and wistful, the

lingering softness of her gloved hand, and the extraordinary charm of

her sunshade, which matched her dress and formed a sort of canopy and

frame for that intelligent, tantalizing face. He remembered that of late

he and she had grown very intimate; and it came upon him with a shock,

as though he had just opened a telegram which said so, that May, and not

the other girl, was his destined mate. And he thought of her fortune,

tiny but nevertheless useful, and how clever she was, and how

inexplicably different from the rest of her sex, and how she would adorn

his house, and set him off, and help him in his career. He heard himself

saying negligently to friends: 'My wife speaks French like a native. Of

course, my wife has travelled a great deal. My wife has thoroughly

studied the management of children. Now, my wife does understand the art

of dress. I put my wife's bit of money into so-and-so.' In short, Lionel

was as near being in love as his character permitted.

And while he walked by May's side past the bowling-greens at the summit

of the hill, she lightly quizzing the raw newness of the park and its

appurtenances, he wondered, he honestly wondered, that he could ever

have hesitated between May Lawton and the other. Her superiority was too

obvious; she was a woman of the world! She.... In a flash he knew that

he would propose to her that very afternoon. And when he had suggested

a stroll towards Moorthorne, and she had deliciously agreed, he was

conscious of a tumultuous uplifting and splendid carelessness of

spirits. 'Imagine me bringing it to a climax to-day,' he reflected,

profoundly pleased with himself. 'Ah well, it will be settled once for

all!' He admired his own decision; he was quite struck by it. 'I shall

call her May before I leave her,' he thought, gazing at her, and

discovering how well the name suited her, with its significances of

alertness, geniality, and half-mocking coyness.

'So school is closed,' he said, and added humorously: '"Broken up" is

the technical term, I believe.'

'Yes,' she answered, 'and I had walked out into the park to meditate

seriously upon the question of my holiday.'

She caught his eye in a net of bright glances, and romance was in the

air. They had crossed a couple of smoke-soiled fields, and struck into

the old Hanbridge road just below the abandoned toll-house with its

broad eaves.

'And whither do your meditations point?' he demanded playfully.

'My meditations point to Switzerland,' she said. 'I have friends in

Lausanne.'

The reference to foreign climes impressed him.

'Would that I could go to Switzerland too!' he exclaimed; and privately:

'Now for it! I'm about to begin.'

'Why?' she questioned, with elaborate simplicity.

At the moment, as they were passing the toll-house, the other girl

appeared surprisingly from round the corner of the toll-house, where the

lane from Toft End joins the highroad. This second creature was smaller

than Miss Lawton, less assertive, less intelligent, perhaps, but much

more beautiful.

Everyone halted and everyone blushed.

'May!' the interrupter at length stammered.

'May!' responded Miss Lawton lamely.

The other girl was named May too--May Deane, child of the well-known

majolica manufacturer, who lived with his sons and daughter in a

solitary and ancient house at Toft End.

Lionel Woolley said nothing until they had all shaken hands--his famous

way with women seemed to have deserted him--and then he actually stated

that he had forgotten an appointment, and must depart. He had gone

before the girls could move.

When they were alone, the two Mays fronted each other, confused,

hostile, almost homicidal.

'I hope I didn't spoil a _tête-à-tête_,' said May Deane, stiffly and

sharply, in a manner quite foreign to her soft and yielding nature.

The schoolmistress, abandoning herself to an inexplicable but

overwhelming impulse, took breath for a proud lie.

'No,' she answered; 'but if you had come three minutes earlier----'

She smiled calmly.

'Oh!' murmured May Deane, after a pause.

III

That evening May Deane returned home at half-past nine. She had been

with her two brothers to a lawn-tennis party at Hillport, and she told

her father, who was reading the _Staffordshire Signal_ in his accustomed

solitude, that the boys were staying later for cards, but that she had

declined to stay because she felt tired. She kissed the old widower

good-night, and said that she should go to bed at once. But before

retiring she visited the housekeeper in the kitchen in order to discuss

certain household matters: Jim's early breakfast, the proper method of

washing Herbert's new flannels (Herbert would be very angry if they were

shrunk), and the dog-biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled, she

went to her room, drew the blind, lighted some candles, and sat down

near the window.

She was twenty-two, and she had about her that strange and charming

nunlike mystery which often comes to a woman who lives alone and

unguessed-at among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one, save

the servants and herself, ever entered it. Mr. Deane and Jim and Bertie

might glance carelessly through the open door in passing along the

corridor, but had they chanced in idle curiosity to enter, the room

would have struck them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have

exclaimed with momentary interest, 'So this is May's room!' And some

hint that May was more than a daughter and sister--a woman, withdrawn,

secret, disturbing, living her own inner life side by side with the

household life--might have penetrated their obtuse paternal and

fraternal masculinity. Her beautiful face (the nose and mouth were

perfect, and at either extremity of the upper lip grew a soft down), her

dark hair, her quiet voice and her gentle acquiescence (diversified by

occasional outbursts of sarcasm), appealed to them and won them; but

they accepted her as something of course, as something which went

without saying. They adored her, and did not know that they adored her.

May took off her hat, stuck the pins into it again, and threw it on the

bed, whose white and green counterpane hung down nearly to the floor on

either side. Then she lay back in the chair, and, pulling away the

blind, glanced through the window; the moon, rather dim behind the

furnace lights of Red Cow Ironworks, was rising over Moorthorne. May

dropped the blind with a wearied gesture, and turned within the room,

examining its contents as if she had not seen them before: the wardrobe,

the chest of drawers, which was also a dressing-table, the washstand,

the dwarf book-case with its store of Edna Lyalls, Elizabeth Gaskells,

Thackerays, Charlotte Yonges, Charlotte Brontës, a Thomas Hardy or so,

and some old school-books. She looked at the pictures, including a

sampler worked by a deceased aunt, at the loud-ticking Swiss clock on

the mantelpiece, at the higgledy-piggledy photographs there, at the new

Axminster carpet, the piece of linoleum in front of the washstand, and

the bad joining of the wallpaper to the left of the door. She missed

none of the details which she knew so well, with such long monotonous

intimacy, and sighed.

Then she got up from the chair, and, opening a small drawer in the chest

of drawers, put her hand familiarly to the back and drew forth a

photograph. She carried the photograph to the light of the candles on

the mantelpiece, and gazed at it attentively, puckering her brows. It

was a portrait of Lionel Woolley. Heaven knows by what subterfuge or

lucky accident she had obtained it, for Lionel certainly had not given

it to her. She loved Lionel. She had loved him for five years, with a

love silent, blind, intense, irrational, and too elemental to be

concealed. Everyone knew of May's passion. Many women admired her taste;

a few were shocked and puzzled by it. All the men of her acquaintance

either pitied or despised her for it. Her father said nothing. Her

brothers were less cautious, and summed up their opinion of Lionel in

the curt, scornful assertion that he showed a tendency to cheat at

tennis. But May would never hear ill of him; he was a god to her, and

she could not hide her worship. For more than a year, until lately, she

had been almost sure of him, and then came a faint vague rumour

concerning Lionel and May Lawton, a rumour which she had refused to take

seriously. The encounter of that afternoon, and Miss Lawton's triumphant

remark, had dazed her. For seven hours she had existed in a kind of

semi-conscious delirium, in which she could perceive nothing but the

fatal fact, emerging more clearly every moment from the welter of her

thoughts, that she had lost Lionel. Lionel had proposed to May Lawton,

and been accepted, just before she surprised them together; and Lionel,

with a man's excusable cowardice, had left his betrothed to announce

the engagement.

She tore up the photograph, put the fragments in the grate, and set a

light to them.

Her father's step sounded on the stairs; he hesitated, and knocked

sharply at her door.

'What's burning, May?'

'It's all right, father,' she answered calmly, 'I'm only burning some

papers in the fire-grate.'

'Well, see you don't burn the house down.'

He passed on.

Then she found a sheet of notepaper, and wrote on it in pencil, using

the mantelpiece for a desk: 'Dear home. Good-night, good-bye.' She

cogitated, and wrote further: 'Forgive me.--MAY.'

She put the message in an envelope, and wrote on the envelope 'Jim,' and

placed it prominently in front of the clock. But after she had looked at

it for a minute, she wrote 'Father' above Jim, and then 'Herbert' below.

There were noises in the hall; the boys had returned earlier than she

expected. As they went along the corridor and caught a glimpse of her

light under the door, Jim cried gaily: 'Now then, out with that light! A

little thing like you ought to be asleep hours since.'

She listened for the bang of their door, and then, very hurriedly, she

removed her pink frock and put on an old black one, which was rather

tight in the waist. And she donned her hat, securing it carefully with

both pins, extinguished the candles, and crept quietly downstairs, and

so by the back-door into the garden. Carlo, the retriever, came halfway

out of his kennel and greeted her in the moonlight with a yawn. She

patted his head and ran stealthily up the garden, through the gate, and

up the waste green land towards the crown of the hill.

IV

The top of Toft End is the highest land in the Five Towns, and from it

may be clearly seen all the lurid evidences of manufacture which sweep

across the borders of the sky on north, east, west, and south.

North-eastwards lie the moorlands, and far off Manifold, the 'metropolis

of the moorlands,' as it is called. On this night the furnaces of Red

Cow Ironworks, in the hollow to the east, were in full blast; their

fluctuating yellow light illuminated queerly the grass of the fields

above Deane's house, and the regular roar of their breathing reached

that solitary spot like the distant rumour of some leviathan beast

angrily fuming. Further away to the south-west the Cauldon Bar Ironworks

reproduced the same phenomena, and round the whole horizon, near and

far, except to the north-east, the lesser fires of labour leapt and

flickered and glinted in their mists of smoke, burning ceaselessly, as

they burned every night and every day at all seasons of all years. The

town of Bursley slept in the deep valley to the west, and vast Hanbridge

in the shallower depression to the south, like two sleepers accustomed

to rest quietly amid great disturbances; the beacons of their Town Halls

and churches kept watch, and the whole scene was dominated by the

placidity of the moon, which had now risen clear of the Red Cow furnace

clouds, and was passing upwards through tracts of stars.

Into this scene, climbing up from the direction of Manifold, came Lionel

Woolley, nearly at midnight, having walked some eighteen miles in a

vain effort to re-establish his self-satisfaction by a process of

reasoning and ingenious excuses. Lionel felt that in the brief episode

of the afternoon he had scarcely behaved with dignity. In other words,

he was fully and painfully aware that he must have looked a fool, a

coward, an ass, a contemptible and pitiful person, in the eyes of at

least one girl, if not of two. He did not like this--no man would have

liked it; and to Lionel the memory of an undignified act was acute

torture. Why had he bidden the girls adieu and departed? Why had he, in

fact, run away? What precisely would May Lawton think of him? How could

he explain his conduct to her--and to himself? And had that worshipping,

affectionate thing, May Deane, taken note of his confusion--of the

confusion of him who was never confused, who was equal to every occasion

and every emergency? These were some of the questions which harried him

and declined to be settled. He had walked to Manifold, and had tea at

the Roebuck, and walked back, and still the questions were harrying; and

as he came over the hill by the field-path, and descried the lone house

of the Deanes in the light of the Red Cow furnaces and of the moon, the

worship of May Deane seemed suddenly very precious to him, and he could

not bear to think that any stupidity of his should have impaired it.

Then he saw May Deane walking slowly across the field, close to an

abandoned pit-shaft, whose low protecting circular wall of brick was

crumbling to ruin on the side nearest to him.

She stopped, appeared to gaze at him intently, turned, and began to

approach him. And he too, moved by a mysterious impulse which he did not

pause to examine, swerved, and quickened his step in order to lessen the

distance between them. He did not at first even feel surprise that she

should be wandering solitary on the hill at that hour. Presently she

stood still, while he continued to move forward. It was as if she drew

him; and soon, in the pale moonlight and the wavering light of the

furnaces, he could decipher all the details of her face, and he saw that

she was smiling fondly, invitingly, admiringly, lustrously, with the old

undiminished worship and affection. And he perceived a dark

discoloration on her right cheek, as though she had suffered a blow,

but this mark did not long occupy his mind. He thought suddenly of the

strong probability that her father would leave a nice little bit of

money to each of his three children; and he thought of her beauty, and

of her timid fragility in the tight black dress, and of her immense and

unquestioning love for him, which would survive all accidents and

mishaps. He seemed to sink luxuriously into this grand passion of hers

(which he deemed quite natural and proper) as into a soft feather-bed.

To live secure in an atmosphere of exhaustless worship; to keep a fount

of balm and admiration for ever in the house, a bubbling spring of

passionate appreciation which would be continually available for the

refreshment of his self-esteem! To be always sure of an obedience blind

and willing, a subservience which no tyranny and no harshness and no

whim would rouse into revolt; to sit on a throne with so much beauty

kneeling at his feet!

And the possession of her beauty would be a source of legitimate pride

to him. People would often refer to the beautiful Mrs. Woolley.

He felt that in sending May Deane to interrupt his highly emotional

conversation with May Lawton Providence had watched over him and done

him a good turn. May Lawton had advantages, and striking advantages, but

he could not be sure of her. The suspicion that if she married him she

would marry him for her own ends caused him a secret disquiet, and he

feared that one day, perhaps one morning at breakfast, she might take it

into her intelligent head to mock him, to exercise upon him her gift of

irony, and to intimate to him that if he fancied she was his slave he

was deceived. That she sincerely admired him he never for an instant

doubted. But----

And, moreover, the unfortunate episode of the afternoon might have

cooled her ardour to freezing-point.

He stood now in front of his worshipper, and the notion crossed his mind

that in after-years he could say to his friends: 'I proposed to my wife

at midnight under the moon. Not many men have done that.'

'Good-evening,' he ventured to the girl; and he added with bravado:

'We've met before to-day, haven't we?'

She made no reply, but her smile was more affectionate, more inviting,

than ever.

'I'm glad of this opportunity--very glad,' he proceeded. 'I've been

wanting to ... You must know, my dear girl, how I feel....'

She gave a gesture, charming in its sweet humility, as if to say: 'Who

am I that I should dare----'

And then he proposed to her, asked her to share his life, and all that

sort of thing; and when he had finished he thought, 'It's done now,

anyway.'

Strange to relate, she offered no immediate reply, but she bent a little

towards him with shining, happy eyes. He had an impulse to seize her in

his arms and kiss her, but prudence suggested that he should defer the

rite. She turned and began to walk slowly and meditatively towards the

pit-shaft. He followed almost at her side, but a foot or so behind,

waiting for her to speak. And as he waited, expectant, he looked at her

profile and reflected how well the name May suited her, with its

significances of shyness and dreamy hope, and hidden fire and the

modesty of spring.

And while he was thus savouring her face, and they were still ten yards

from the pit-shaft, she suddenly disappeared from his vision, as it were

by a conjuring trick. He had a horrible sensation in his spinal column.

He was not the man to mistrust the evidence of his senses, and he knew,

therefore, that he had been proposing to a phantom.

V

The next morning--early, because of Jim's early breakfast--when May

Deane's disappearance became known to the members of the household, Jim

had the idea of utilizing Carlo in the search for her. The retriever

went straight, without a fault, to the pit-shaft, and May was discovered

alive and unscathed, save for a contusion of the face and a sprain in

the wrist.

Her suicidal plunge had been arrested, at only a few feet from the top

of the shaft, by a cross-stay of timber, upon which she lay prone. There

was no reason why the affair should be made public, and it was not. It

was suppressed into one of those secrets which embed themselves in the

history of families, and after two or three generations blossom into

romantic legends full of appropriate circumstantial detail.

Lionel Woolley spent a woeful night at his rooms. He did not know what

to do, and on the following day May Lawton encountered him again, and

proved by her demeanour that the episode of the previous afternoon had

caused no estrangement. Lionel vacillated. The sway of the

schoolmistress was almost restored, and it would have been restored

fully had he not been preoccupied by a feverish curiosity--the curiosity

to know whether or not May Deane was dead. He felt that she must indeed

be dead, and he lived through the day expectant of the news of her

sudden decease. Towards night his state of mind was such that he was

obliged to call at the Deanes'. May heard him, and insisted on seeing

him; more, she insisted on seeing him alone in the breakfast-room, where

she reclined, interestingly white, on the sofa. Her father and brothers

objected strongly to the interview, but they yielded, afraid that a

refusal might induce hysteria and worse things.

And when Lionel Woolley came into the room, May, steeped in felicity,

related to him the story of her impulsive crime.

'I was so happy,' she said, 'when I knew that Miss Lawton had deceived

me.' And before he could inquire what she meant, she continued rapidly:

'I must have been unconscious, but I felt you were there, and something

of me went out towards you. And oh! the answer to your question--I heard

your question; the real _me_ heard it, but that _something_ could not

speak.'

'My question?'

'You asked a question, didn't you?' she faltered, sitting up.

He hesitated, and then surrendered himself to her immense love and sank

into it, and forgot May Lawton.

'Yes,' he said.

'The answer is yes. Oh, you must have known the answer would be yes! You

did know, didn't you?'

He nodded grandly.

She sighed with delicious and overwhelming joy.

In the ecstasy of the achievement of her desire the girl gave little

thought to the psychic aspect of the possibly unique wooing.

As for Lionel, he refused to dwell on it even in thought. And so that

strange, magic, yearning effluence of a soul into a visible projection

and shape was ignored, slurred over, and, after ten years of domesticity

in the bank premises, is gradually being forgotten.

He is a man of business, and she, with her fading beauty, her ardent,

continuous worship of the idol, her half-dozen small children, the

eldest of whom is only eight, and the white window-curtains to change

every week because of the smuts--do you suppose she has time or

inclination to ponder upon the theory of the subliminal consciousness

and kindred mysteries?

* * * * *

TIDDY-FOL-LOL

It was the dinner-hour, and a group of ragged and clay-soiled apprentice

boys were making a great noise in the yard of Henry Mynors and Co.'s

small, compact earthenware manufactory up at Toft End. Toft End caps the

ridge to the east of Bursley; and Bursley, which has been the home of

the potter for ten centuries, is the most ancient of the Five Towns in

Staffordshire. The boys, dressed for the most part in shirt, trousers,

and boots, all equally ragged and insecure, were playing at prison-bars.

Soon the game ended abruptly in a clamorous dispute upon a point of law,

and it was not recommenced. The dispute dying a natural death, the

tireless energies of the boys needed a fresh outlet. Inspired by a

common instinct, they began at once to bait one of their number, a

slight youngster of twelve years, much better clothed than the rest, who

had adventurously strolled in from a neighbouring manufactory. This

child answered their jibes in an amiable, silly, drawling tone which

seemed to justify the epithet 'Loony,' frequently applied to him. Now

and then he stammered; and then companions laughed loud, and he with

them. It was known that several years ago he had fallen down a flight of

stone steps, alighting on the back of his head, and that ever since he

had been deaf of one ear and under some trifling mental derangement. His

sublime calmness under their jests baffled them until the terrible

figure of Mr. Machin, the engine-man, standing at the door of the

slip-house, caught their attention and suggested a plan full of joyous

possibilities. They gathered round the lad, and, talking in subdued

murmurs, unanimously urged him with many persuasions to a certain course

of action. He declined the scheme, and declined again. Suddenly a boy

shouted:

'Thee dars' na'!'

'I dare,' was the drawled, smiling answer.

'I tell thee thee dars' na'!'

'I tell thee I dare.' And thereupon he slowly but resolutely set out

for the slip-house door and Mr. Machin.

Eli Machin was beyond doubt the most considerable employé on Clarke's

'bank' (manufactory). Even Henry Clarke approached him with a

subtly-indicated deference, and whenever Silas Emery, the immensely rich

and miserly sleeping partner in the firm, came up to visit the works,

these two old men chatted as old friends. In a modern earthenware

manufactory the engine-room is the source of all activity, for, owing to

the inventive genius of a famous and venerable son of the Five Towns,

steam now presides at nearly every stage in the long process of turning

earth into ware. It moves the pug-mill, the jollies, and the marvellous

batting machines, dries the unfired clay, heats the printers' stoves,

and warms the offices where the 'jacket-men' dwell. Coal is a tremendous

item in the cost of production, and a competent, economical engine-man

can be sure of good wages and a choice of berths; he is desired like a

good domestic servant. Eli Machin was the prince of engine-men. His

engine never went wrong, his coal bills were never extravagant, and

(supreme virtue!) he was never absent on Mondays. From his post in the

slip-house he watched over the whole works like a father, stern, gruff,

forbidding, but to be trusted absolutely. He was sixty years old, and

had been 'putting by' for nearly half a century. He lived in a tiny

villa-cottage with his bed-ridden, cheerful wife, and lent small sums on

mortgage of approved freeholds at 5 per cent.--no more and no less.

Secure behind this rampart of saved money, he was the equal of the King

on the throne. Not a magnate in all the Five Towns who would dare to be

condescending to Eli Machin. He had been a sidesman at the old church. A

trades-union had once asked him to become a working-man candidate for

the Bursley Town Council, but he had refused because he did not care for

the possibility of losing caste by being concerned in a strike. His

personal respectability was entirely unsullied, and he worshipped this

abstract quality as he worshipped God.

There was only one blot--but how foul!--on Eli Machin's career, and that

had been dropped by his daughter Miriam, when, defying his authority,

she married a scene-shifter at Hanbridge Theatre. The atrocious idea of

being connected with the theatre had rendered him speechless for a

time. He could but endure it in the most awful silence that ever hid

passionate feeling. Then one day he had burst out, 'The wench is no

better than a tiddy-fol-lol!' Only this solitary phrase--nothing else.

What a tiddy-fol-lol was no one quite knew; but the word, getting about,

stuck to him, and for some weeks boys used to shout it after him in the

streets, until he caught one of them, and in thirty seconds put an end

to the practice. Thenceforth Miriam, with all hers, was dead to him.

When her husband expired of consumption, Eli Machin saw the avenging arm

of the Lord in action; and when her boy grew to be a source of painful

anxiety to her, he said to himself that the wrath of Heaven was not yet

cooled towards this impious daughter. The passage of fifteen years had

apparently in no way softened his resentment.

The challenged lad in Mynors' yard slowly approached the slip-house

door, and halted before Eli Machin, grinning.

'Well, young un,' the old man said absently, 'what dost want?'

'Tiddy-fol-lol, grandfeyther,' the child drawled in his silly,

irritating voice, and added: 'They said I darena say it to ye.'

Without and instant's hesitation Eli Machin raised his still powerful

arm, and, catching the boy under the ear, knocked him down. The other

boys yelled with unaffected pleasure and ran away.

'Get up, and be off wi' ye. Ye dunna belong to this bank,' said Eli

Machin in cold anger to the lad. But the lad did not stir; the lad's

eyes were closed, and he lay white on the stones.

Eli Machin bent down, and peered through his spectacles at the prone

form upon which the mid-day sun was beating.

'It's Miriam's boy!' he ejaculated under his breath, and looked round as

if in inquiry--the yard was empty. Then with quick decision he picked up

this limp and inconvenient parcel of humanity and hastened--ran--with it

out of the yard into the road.

Down the road he ran, turned to the left into Clowes Street, and stopped

before a row of small brown cottages. At the open door of one of these

cottages a woman sat sewing. She was rather stout and full-bosomed,

with a fair, fresh face, full of sense and peace; she looked under

thirty, but was older.

'Here's thy Tommy, Miriam,' said Eli Machin shortly. 'He give me some of

his sauce, and I doubt I've done him an injury.'

The woman dropped her sewing.

'Eh, dear!' she cried, 'is that lad o' mine in mischief again? I do hope

he's no limb brokken.'

'It in'na that,' said the old man, 'but he's dazed-like. Better lay him

on th' squab.'

She calmly took Tommy and placed him gently down on the check-covered

sofa under the window. 'Come in, father, do.'

The man obeyed, astonished at the entire friendliness of this daughter,

whom, though he had frequently seen her, he had never spoken to for more

than ten years. Her manner, at once filial and quite natural, perfectly

ignored the long breach, and disclosed no trace of animosity.

Father and daughter examined the unconscious child. Pale, pulseless,

cold, he lay on the sofa like a corpse except for the short, faint

breaths which he drew through his blue lips.

'I doubt I've killed him,' said Eli.

'Nay, nay, father!' And her face actually smiled. This supremacy of the

soul against years of continued misfortune lifted her high above him,

and he suddenly felt himself an inferior creature.

'I'll go for th' doctor,' he said.

'Nay! I shall need ye.' And she put her head out of the window. 'Mrs.

Walley, will ye let your Lucy run quick for th' club doctor? my Tommy's

hurt.'

The whole street awoke instantly from its nap, and in a few moments

every door was occupied. Miriam closed her own door softly, as though

she might wake the boy, and spoke in whispers to people through the

window, finally telling them to go away. When the doctor came, half an

hour afterwards, she had done all that she knew for Tommy, without the

slightest apparent result.

'What is it?' asked the doctor curtly, as he lifted the child's thin and

lifeless hand.

Eli Machin explained that he had boxed the boy's ear.

'Tommy was impudent to his grandfather,' Miriam added hastily.

'Which ear?' the doctor inquired. It was the left. He gazed into it,

and then raised the boy's right leg and arm. 'There is no paralysis,' he

said. Then he felt the heart, and then took out his stethoscope and

applied it, listening intently.

'Canst hear owt?' the old man said.

'I cannot,' he answered.

'Don't say that, doctor--don't say that! said Miriam, with an accent of

appeal.

'In these cases it is almost impossible to tell whether the patient is

alive or dead. We must wait. Mrs. Baddeley, make a mustard plaster for

his feet, and we will put another over the heart.' And so they waited

one hour, while the clock ticked and the mustard plasters gradually

cooled. Then Tommy's lips parted.

After another half-hour the doctor said:

'I must go now; I will come again at six. Do nothing but apply fresh

plasters. Be sure to keep his neck free. He is breathing, but I may as

well be plain with you--there is a great risk of your child dying in

this condition.'

Neighbours were again at the window, and Miriam drew the blind, waving

them away. At six o'clock the doctor reappeared. 'There is no change,'

he remarked. 'I will call in before I go to bed.'

When he lifted the latch for the third time, at ten o'clock, Eli Machin

and Miriam still sat by the sofa, and Tommy still lay thereon, moveless,

a terrible enigma. But the glass lamp was lighted on the mantelpiece,

and Miriam's sewing, by which she earned a livelihood, had been hidden

out of sight.

'There is no change,' said the doctor. 'You can do nothing except hope.'

'And pray,' the calm mother added.

Eli neither stirred nor spoke. For nine hours he had absolutely

forgotten his engine. He knew the boy would die.

The clock struck eleven, twelve, one, two, three, each time fretting the

nerves of the old man like a rasp. It was the hour of summer dawn. A

cold gray light fell unkindly across the small figure on the sofa.

'Open th' door a bit, father,' said Miriam. 'This parlour's gettin'

close; th' lad canna breathe.'

'Nay, lass,' Eli sighed, as he stumbled obediently to the door. 'The

lad'll breathe no more. I've killed him i' my anger.' He frowned

heavily, as though someone was annoying him.

'Hist!' she exclaimed, when, after extinguishing the lamp, she returned

to her boy's side. 'He's reddened--he's reddened! Look thee at his

cheeks, father!' She seized the child's inert hands and rubbed them

between her own. The blood was now plain in Tommy's face. His legs

faintly twitched. His breathing was slower. Miriam moved the coverlet

and put her head upon his heart. 'It's beating loud, father,' she cried.

'Bless God!'

Eli stared at the child with the fixity of a statue. Then Tommy opened

his eyes for an instant. The old man groaned. Tommy looked vacantly

round, closed his eyes again, and was unmistakably asleep. He slept for

one minute, and then waked. Eli involuntarily put a hand on the sofa.

Tommy gazed at him, and, with the most heavenly innocent smile of

recognition, lightly touched his grandfather's hand. Then he turned over

on his right side. In the anguish of sudden joy Eli gave a deep, piteous

sob. That smile burnt into him like a coal of fire.

'Now for the beef-tea,' said Miriam, crying.

'Beef-tea?' the boy repeated after her, mildly questioning.

'Yes, my poppet,' she answered; and then aside, 'Father, he can hear i'

his left ear. Did ye notice it?'

'It's a miracle--a miracle of God!' said Eli.

In a few hours Tommy was as well as ever--indeed, better; not only was

his hearing fully restored, but he had ceased to stammer, and the thin,

almost imperceptible cloud upon his intellect was dissipated. The doctor

expressed but little surprise at these phenomena, and, in fact, stated

that similar things had occurred often before, and were duly written

down in the books of medicine. But Eli Machin's firm, instinctive faith

that Providence had intervened will never be shaken.

Miriam and Tommy now live in the villa-cottage with the old people.

* * * * *

THE IDIOT

William Froyle, ostler at the Queen's Arms at Moorthorne, took the

letter, and, with a curt nod which stifled the loquacity of the village

postman, went at once from the yard into the coach-house. He had

recognised the hand-writing on the envelope, and the recognition of it

gave form and quick life to all the vague suspicions that had troubled

him some months before, and again during the last few days. He felt

suddenly the near approach of a frightful calamity which had long been

stealing towards him.

A wire-sheathed lantern, set on a rough oaken table, cast a wavering

light round the coach-house, and dimly showed the inner stable. Within

the latter could just be distinguished the mottled-gray flanks of a fat

cob which dragged its chain occasionally, making the large slow

movements of a horse comfortably lodged in its stall. The pleasant odour

of animals and hay filled the wide spaces of the shed, and through the

half-open door came a fresh thin mist rising from the rain-soaked yard

in the November evening.

Froyle sat down on the oaken table, his legs dangling, and looked again

at the envelope before opening it. He was a man about thirty years of

age, with a serious and thoughtful, rather heavy countenance. He had a

long light moustache, and his skin was a fresh, rosy salmon colour; his

straw-tinted hair was cut very short, except over the forehead, where it

grew full and bushy. Dressed in his rough stable corduroys, his forearms

bare and white, he had all the appearance of the sturdy Englishman, the

sort of Englishman that crosses the world in order to find vent for his

taciturn energy on virgin soils. From the whole village he commanded and

received respect. He was known for a scholar, and it was his scholarship

which had obtained for him the proud position of secretary to the

provident society styled the Queen's Arms Slate Club. His respectability

and his learning combined had enabled him to win with dignity the hand

of Susie Trimmer, the grocer's daughter, to whom he had been engaged

about a year. The village could not make up its mind concerning that

match; without doubt it was a social victory for Froyle, but everyone

wondered that so sedate and sagacious a man should have seen in Susie a

suitable mate.

He tore open the envelope with his huge forefinger, and, bending down

towards the lantern, began to read the letter. It ran:

'OLDCASTLE STREET,

'BURSLEY.

'DEAR WILL,

'I asked father to tell you, but he would not. He said I must

write. Dear Will, I hope you will never see me again. As you will

see by the above address, I am now at Aunt Penrose's at Bursley.

She is awful angry, but I was obliged to leave the village because

of my shame. I have been a wicked girl. It was in July. You know

the man, because you asked me about him one Sunday night. He is no

good. He is a villain. Please forget all about me. I want to go to

London. So many people know me here, and what with people coming

in from the village, too. Please forgive me.

'S. TRIMMER.'

After reading the letter a second time, Froyle folded it up and put it

in his pocket. Beyond a slight unaccustomed pallor of the red cheeks, he

showed no sign of emotion. Before the arrival of the postman he had been

cleaning his master's bicycle, which stood against the table. To this he

returned. Kneeling down in some fresh straw, he used his dusters slowly

and patiently--rubbing, then stopping to examine the result, and then

rubbing again. When the machine was polished to his satisfaction, he

wheeled it carefully into the stable, where it occupied a stall next to

that of the cob. As he passed back again, the animal leisurely turned

its head and gazed at Froyle with its large liquid eyes. He slapped the

immense flank. Content, the animal returned to its feed, and the

weighted chain ran down with a rattle.

The fortnightly meeting of the Slate Club was to take place at eight

o'clock that evening. Froyle had employed part of the afternoon in

making ready his books for the event, to him always so solemn and

ceremonious; and the affairs of the club were now prominent in his mind.

He was sorry that it would be impossible for him to attend the meeting;

fortunately, all the usual preliminaries were complete.

He took a piece of notepaper from a little hanging cupboard, and,

sprawling across the table, began to write under the lantern. The pencil

seemed a tiny toy in his thick roughened fingers:

'_To Mr. Andrew McCall, Chairman Queen's Arms Slate Club._

'DEAR SIR,

'I regret to inform you that I shall not be at the meeting

to-night. You will find the books in order....'

Here he stopped, biting the end of the pencil in thought. He put down

the pencil and stepped hastily out of the stable, across the yard, and

into the hotel. In the large room, the room where cyclists sometimes

took tea and cold meat during the summer season, the long deal table

and the double line of oaken chairs stood ready for the meeting. A fire

burnt warmly in the big grate, and the hanging lamp had been lighted. On

the wall was a large card containing the rules of the club, which had

been written out in a fair hand by the schoolmaster. It was to this card

that Froyle went. Passing his thumb down the card, he paused at Rule

VII.:

'Each member shall, on the death of another member, pay 1s. for

benefit of widow or nominee of deceased, same to be paid within

one month after notice given.'

'Or nominee--nominee,' he murmured reflectively, staring at the

card. He mechanically noticed, what he had noticed often before

with disdain, that the chairman had signed the rules without the

use of capitals.

He went back to the dusk of the coach-house to finish his letter,

still murmuring the word 'nominee,' of whose meaning he was not

quite sure:

'I request that the money due to me from the Slate Club on my death

shall be paid to my nominee, Miss Susan Trimmer, now staying with

her aunt, Mrs. Penrose, at Bursley.

'Yours respectfully,

'WILLIAM FROYLE.'

After further consideration he added:

'P.S.--My annual salary of sixpence per member would be due at the

end of December. If so be the members would pay that, or part of

it, should they consider the same due, to Susan Trimmer as well, I

should be thankful.--Yours resp, W.F.'

He put the letter in an envelope, and, taking it to the large room, laid

it carefully at the end of the table opposite the chairman's seat. Once

more he returned to the coach-house. From the hanging cupboard he now

produced a piece of rope. Standing on the table he could just reach, by

leaning forward, a hook in the ceiling, that was sometimes used for the

slinging of bicycles. With difficulty he made the rope fast to the hook.

Putting a noose on the other end, he tightened it round his neck. He

looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor in order to judge whether

the rope was short enough.

'Good-bye, Susan, and everyone,' he whispered, and then stepped off the

table.

The tense rope swung him by his neck halfway across the coach-house. He

swung twice to and fro, but as he passed under the hook for the fifth

time his toes touched the floor. The rope had stretched. In another

second he was standing firm on the floor, purple and panting, but

ignominiously alive.

'Good-even to you, Mr. Froyle. Be you committing suicide?' The tones

were drawling, uncertain, mildly astonished.

He turned round hastily, his hands busy with the rope, and saw in the

doorway the figure of Daft Jimmy, the Moorthorne idiot.

He hesitated before speaking, but he was not confused. No one could have

been confused before Daft Jimmy. Neither man nor woman in the village

considered his presence more than that of a cat.

'Yes, I am,' he said.

The middle-aged idiot regarded him with a vague, interested smile, and

came into the coach-house.

'You'n gotten the rope too long, Mr. Froyle. Let me help you.'

Froyle calmly assented. He stood on the table, and the two rearranged

the noose and made it secure. As they did so the idiot gossiped:

'I was going to Bursley to-night to buy me a pair o' boots, and when I

was at top o' th' hill I remembered as I'd forgotten the measure o' my

feet. So I ran back again for it. Then I saw the light in here, and I

stepped up to bid ye good-evening.'

Someone had told him the ancient story of the fool and his boots, and,

with the pride of an idiot in his idiocy, he had determined that it

should be related of himself.

Froyle was silent.

The idiot laughed with a dry cackle.

'Now you go,' said Froyle, when the rope was fixed.

'Let me see ye do it,' the idiot pleaded with pathetic eyes.

'No; out you get!'

Protesting, the idiot went forth, and his irregular clumsy footsteps

sounded on the pebble-paved yard. When the noise of them ceased in the

soft roadway, Froyle jumped off the table again. Gradually his body,

like a stopping pendulum, came to rest under the hook, and hung

twitching, with strange disconnected movements. The horse in the stable,

hearing unaccustomed noises, rattled his chain and stamped about in the

straw of his box.

Furtive steps came down the yard again, and Daft Jimmy peeped into the

coach-house.

'He done it! he done it!' the idiot cried gleefully. 'Damned if he

hasna'.' He slapped his leg and almost danced. The body still twitched

occasionally. 'He done it!'

'Done what, Daft Jimmy? You're making a fine noise there! Done what?'

The idiot ran out of the stable. At the side-entrance to the hotel stood

the barmaid, the outline of her fine figure distinct against the light

from within.

The idiot continued to laugh.

'Done what?' the girl repeated, calling out across the dark yard in

clear, pleasant tones of amused inquiry. 'Done what?'

'What's that to you, Miss Tucker?'

'Now, none of your sauce, Daft Jimmy! Is Willie Froyle in there?'

The idiot roared with laughter.

'Yes, he is, miss.'

'Well, tell him his master wants him. I don't want to cross this mucky,

messy yard.'

'Yes, miss.'

The girl closed the door.

The idiot went into the coach-house, and, slapping William's body in a

friendly way so that it trembled on the rope, he spluttered out between

his laughs:

'Master wants ye, Mr. Froyle.'

Then he walked out into the village street, and stood looking up the

muddy road, still laughing quietly. It was quite dark, but the moon

aloft in the clear sky showed the highway with its shining ruts leading

in a straight line over the hill to Bursley.

'Them shoes!' the idiot ejaculated suddenly. 'Well, I be an idiot, and

that's true! They can take the measure from my feet, and I never thought

on it till this minute!'

Laughing again, he set off at a run up the hill.

* * * * *