From that waking David rose and went about his work another man. As
he moved about in the shop or in the streets, he was conscious of a
gulf between his present self and his self of yesterday, which he
could hardly explain. Simply the whole atmosphere and temperature
of the soul was other, was different. He could have almost supposed
that some process had gone on within him during the unconsciousness
of sleep, of which he was now feeling the results; which had
carried him on, without his knowing it, to a point in the highroad
of life, far removed from that point where he had stood when his
talk with Ancrum began. That world of enervating illusion, that
'kind of ghastly dreaminess, 'as John Sterling called it, in which
since his return he had lived with Elise, was gone, he knew not
how--swept away like a cloud from the brain, a mist from the eyes.
The sense of catastrophe, of things irrevocable and irreparable,
the premature ageing of the whole man, remained-only the fever and
the restlessness were past. Memory, indeed, was not affected. In
some sort the scenes of his French experience would be throughout
his life a permanent element in consciousness; but the persons
concerned in them were dead-creatures of the past. He himself had
been painfully re-born, and Pimodan's wife had no present personal
existence for him. He turned himself deliberately to his old life,
and took up the interests of it again one by one, but, as he soon
discovered, with an insight, a power, a comprehension which had
never yet been his. A moral and spiritual life destined to a rich
development practically began for him with this winter--this awful
winter of the agony of France.
His thoughts were often occupied now with Louie, but in a saner
way. He could no longer, without morbidness, take on himself the
whole responsibility of her miserable marriage. Human beings after
all are what they make themselves. But the sense of his own share
in it, and the perception of what her future life was likely to be,
made him steadily accept beforehand the claims upon him which she
was sure to press.
He had written to her early in September, when the siege was
imminent, offering her money to bring her to England, and the
protection of his roof during the rest of the war. And by a still
later post than that which brought the news of Elise's marriage
arrived a scrawl from Louie, written from a country town near
Toulouse, whither she and Montjoie had retreated--apparently the
sculptor's native place.
The letter was full of complaints--complaints of the war, which was
being mismanaged by a set of rogues and fools who deserved
stringing to the nearest tree; complaints of her husband, who was a
good-for-nothing brute; and complaints of her own health. She was
expecting her confinement in the spring; if she got through
it--which was not likely, considering the way in which she was
treated--she should please herself about staying with such a man.
_He_ should not keep her for a day if she wanted to go.
Meanwhile David might send her any money he could spare. There was
not much of the six hundred left--_that_ she could tell him;
and she could not even screw enough for baby-clothes out of her
husband. Very likely there would not be enough to pay for a nurse
when her time came. Well, then she would be out of it--and a good
job too.
She wished to be remembered to Dora; and Dora was especially to be
told again that she needn't suppose St. Damian's was a patch on the
real Catholic churches, because it wasn't. She--Louie--had been at
the Midnight Mass in Toulouse Cathedral on Christmas Eve. That was
something like. And down in the crypt they had a 'Bethlehem'--the
sweetest thing you ever saw. There were the shepherds, and the wise
men, and the angels--dolls, of course, but their dresses were
splendid, and the little Jesus was dressed in white satin,
embroidered with gold--_old_ embroidery, tell Dora.
To this David had replied at once, sending money he could ill
spare, and telling her to keep him informed of her whereabouts.
But the months passed on, and no more news arrived. He wrote again
_via_ Bordeaux, but with no result, and could only wait
patiently till that eagle's grip, in which all French life was
stifled, should be loosened.
Meanwhile his relation to another human being, whose life had been
affected by the French episode, passed into a fresh phase. Two days
after the news of Elise's marriage had reached him, he and John had
just shut up the shop, and the young master was hanging over the
counter under the gas, heavily conning a not very satisfactory
business account.
John came in, took his hat and stick from a corner, and threw David
a gruff 'good night.'
Something in the tone struck David's sore nerves like a blow. He
turned abruptly--
'Look here, John! I can't stand this kind of thing much longer.
Hadn't we better part? You've learnt a lot here, and I'll see you
get a good place. You--you rub it in too long!'
John stood still, his big rough hands beginning to shake, his pink
cheeks turning a painful crimson.
'You--you never said a word to me!' he flung out at last,
incoherently, resentfully.
'Said a word to you? What do you mean? I told you the truth, and I
would have told you more, if you hadn't turned against me as though
I had been the devil himself. Do you suppose you are the only
person who came to grief because of that French time? _Good God!_'
The last words came out with a low exasperation. The young man
leant against the counter, looking at his assistant with bitter,
indignant eyes.
John first shrank from them, then his own were drawn to meet them.
Even his slow perceptions, thus challenged, realised something of
the truth. He gave way--as David might have made him give way long
before, if his own misery had not made him painfully avoid any
fresh shock of speech.
'Well!' said John, slowly, with a mighty effort; 'I'll not lay it
agen you any more. I'll say that. But if you want to get rid of me,
you can. Only you'll be put to 't wi' t' printing.'
The two young fellows surveyed each other. Then suddenly David
said, pushing him to the door:
'You're a great ass, John--get out, and good night to you.'
But next day the atmosphere was cleared, and, with inexpressible
relief on both sides, the two fell back into the old brotherly
relation. Poor John! He kept an old photograph of Louie in a drawer
at his lodging, and, when he came home to bed, would alternately
weep over and denounce it. But, all the same, his interest in
David's printing ventures was growing keener and keener, and
whenever business had been particularly exciting during the day,
the performance with the photograph was curtailed or omitted at
night. Let no scorn, however, be thought, on that account, of the
true passion!--which had thriven on unkindness, and did but yield
to the slow mastery of time.
The war thundered on. To Manchester, and to the cotton and silk
industries of Lancashire generally, the tragedy of France meant on
the whole a vast boom in trade. So many French rivals crippled--so
much ground set free for English enterprise to capture--and,
meanwhile, high profits for a certain number at least of Manchester
and Macclesfield merchants, and brisk wages for the Lancashire
operatives, especially for the silk-weavers. This, with of course
certain drawbacks and exceptions, was the aspect under which the
war mainly presented itself to Lancashire. Meanwhile, amid these
teeming Manchester streets with their clattering lurries and
overflowing warehouses, there was at least one Englishman who took
the war hardly, in whom the spectacle of its wreck and struggle
roused a feeling which was all moral, human, disinterested.
What was Regnault doing? David kept a watch on the newspapers, of
which the Free Library offered him an ample store; but there was no
mention of him in the English press that he could discover, and
Barbier, of course, got nothing now from Paris.
Christmas was over. The last month of the siege, that hideous
January of frost and fire, rushed past, with its alternations of
famine within and futile battle without--Europe looking on appalled
at this starved and shivering Paris, into which the shells were
raining. At last--the 27th!--the capitulation! All was over; the
German was master in Europe, and France lay at the feet of her
conqueror.
Out to all parts streamed the letters which had been so long
delayed. Barbier and David, walking together one bitter evening
towards Barbier's lodgings, silent, with hanging heads, met the
postman on Barbier's steps, who held out a packet. The Frenchman
took it with a cry; the two rushed upstairs and fell upon the
letters and papers it contained.
There--while Barbier sat beside him, groaning over the conditions
of peace, over the enthronement of the Emperor-King at Versailles,
within sight of the statue of Louis Quatorze, now cursing '_ces
imbéciles du gouvernement!_' and now wiping the tears from his
old cheeks with a trembling hand--David read the news of the fight
of Buzenval, and the death of Regnault.
It seemed to him that he had always foreseen it--that from the very
beginning Regnault's image in his thought had been haloed with a
light of tragedy and storm--a light of death. His eyes devoured the
long memorial article in which a friend of Regnault's had given the
details of his last months of life. Barbier, absorbed in his own
grief, heard not a sound from the corner where his companion sat
crouched beneath the gas.
Everything--the death and the manner of it--was to him, as it were,
in the natural order--fitting, right, such as might have been
expected. His heart swelled to bursting as he read, but his eyes
were dry.
This, briefly, was the story which he read.
Henri Regnault re-entered Paris at the beginning of September. By
the beginning of October he was on active service, stationed now at
Asnieres, now at Colombes. In October or November he became engaged
to a young girl, with whom he had been for long devotedly in
love--ah! David thought of that sudden smile--the 'open door'!
Their passion, cherished under the wings of war, did but give
courage and heroism to both. Yet he loved most humanly! One
night, in an interval of duty, on leaving the house where his
_fiancee_ lived, he found the shells of the bombardment falling
fast in the street outside. He could not make up his mind to
go--might not ruin befall the dear house with its inmates at any
moment? So he wandered up and down outside for hours in the bitter
night, watching, amid the rattle of the shells and the terrified
cries of women and children from the houses on either side.
At last, worn out and frozen with cold, but still unable to
leave the spot, he knocked softly at the door he had left. The
_concierge_ came. 'Let me lie down awhile on your floor. Tell
no one.' Then, appeased by this regained nearness to her, and by
the sense that no danger could strike the one without warning the
other, he wrapped himself in his soldier's cloak and fell asleep.
In November he painted his last three water-colours--visions of the
East, painted for her, and as flower-bright as possible, 'because
flowers were scarce' in the doomed city.
December came. Regnault spent Christmas night at the advanced post
of Colombes. His captain wished to make him an officer. 'Thanks, my
captain,' said the young fellow of twenty-three; 'but if you have a
good soldier in me, why exchange him for an indifferent officer? My
example will be of more use to you than my commission.' Meanwhile
the days and nights were passed in Arctic cold. Men were frozen to
death round about him; his painter's hand was frostbitten. 'Oh! I
can speak with authority on cold!' he wrote to his _fiancee_;
'this morning at least I know what it is to spend the night on the
hard earth exposed to a glacial wind. Enough! _Je me rechaufferai
a votre foyer_. I love you--I love my country--that sustains.
Adieu!'
On the 17th, after a few days in Paris spent with her and some old
friends, he was again ordered to the front. On Thursday the fight
at Buzenval began with a brilliant success; in the middle of the
day his _fiancee_ still had news of him, brought by a servant.
Night fell. The battle was hottest in a wood adjoining the park of
Buzenval. Regnault and his painter-comrade Clairin were side by
side. Suddenly the retreat was sounded, and the same instant
Clairin missed his friend. He sought him with frenzy amid the trees
in the darkening wood, called to him, peered into the faces of the
dying--no answer! Ah! he must have been swept backwards by the rush
of the retreat--Clairin will find him again.
Three days later the lost was found--one among two hundred corpses
of National Guards carted into Pere Lachaise. Clairin, mad with
grief, held his friend in his arms--held, kissed the beautiful
head, now bruised and stained past even _her_ knowing, with
its bullet-wound in the temple.
On his breast was found a medal with a silver tear hanging from it.
She who had long worn it as a symbol of bereavement, in memory of
dear ones lost to her, had given it to him in her first joy. 'I will
reclaim it,' she had said, smiling, 'the first time you make me
weep!' It was all that was brought back to her--all except a
scrawled paper found in his pocket, containing some hurried and
almost illegible words, written perhaps beside his outpost fire.
'We have lost many men--we must remake
them--_better_--_stronger_. The lesson should profit us.
No more lingering amid facile pleasures! Who dare now live for
himself alone? It has been for too long the custom with us to
believe in nothing but enjoyment and all bad passions. We have
prided ourselves on despising everything good and worthy. No more
of such contempt!'
Then--so the story ended--four days later, on the very day of the
capitulation of Paris, Regnault was carried to his last rest. A
figure in widow's dress walked behind. And to many standing by,
amid the muffled roll of the drums and the wailing of the music, it
was as though France herself went down to burial with her son.
David got up gently and went across to Barbier, who was sitting
with his letters and papers before him, staring and stupefied, the
lower jaw falling, in a trance of grief.
The young man put down the newspaper he had been reading in front
of the old man.
'Read that some time; it will give you something to be proud of. I
told you I knew him--he was kind to me.'
Barbier nodded, not understanding, and sought for his spectacles
with shaking fingers. David quietly went out.
He walked home in a state of exaltation like a man still environed
with the emotion of great poetry or great music. He said very
little about Regnault in the days that followed to Ancrum or
Barbier, even to Dora, with whom every week his friendship was
deepening. But the memory of the dead man, as it slowly shaped
itself in his brooding mind, became with him a permanent and
fruitful element of thought. Very likely the Regnault whom he
revered, whose name was henceforth a sacred thing to him, was only
part as it were of the real Regnault. He saw the French artist with
an Englishman's eyes--interpreted him in English ways--the ways,
moreover, of a consciousness self-taught and provincial, however
gifted and flexible. Only one or two aspects, no doubt, of that
rich, self-tormented nature, reared amid the most complex movements
of European intelligence, were really plain to him. And those
aspects were specially brought home to him by his own mental
condition. No matter. Broadly, essentially, he understood.
But thenceforward, just as Elise Delaunay had stood to him in the
beginning for French art and life, and that ferment in himself
which answered to them, so now in her place stood Regnault with
those stern words upon his young and dying lips--'We have lost many
men--we must remake them--better! Henceforward let no one dare live
unto himself.' The Englishman took them into his heart, that
ethical fibre in him, which was at last roused and dominant,
vibrating, responding. And as the poignant images of death and
battle faded he saw his hero always as he had seen him last--young,
radiant, vigorous, pointing to the dawn behind Notre-Dame.
All life looked differently to David this winter. He saw the
Manchester streets and those who lived in them with other
perceptions. His old political debating interests, indeed, were
comparatively slack; but persons--men and women, and their
stories--for these he was instinctively on the watch. His eye
noticed the faces he passed as it had never yet done--divined in
them suffering, or vice, or sickness. All that he saw at this
moment he saw tragically. The doors set open about him were still,
as Keats, himself hurried to his end by an experience of passion,
once expressed it, 'all dark,' and leading to darkness. There were
times when Dora's faith and Ancrum's mysticism drew him
irresistibly; other times when they were almost as repulsive to him
as they had ever been, because they sounded to him like the formula
of people setting out to explain the world 'with a light heart,' as
Ollivier had gone to war.
But whether or no it could be explained, this world, he could not
now help putting out his hand to meddle with and mend it; his mind
fed on its incidents and conditions. The mill-girls standing on the
Ancoats pavements; the drunken lurryman tottering out from the
public-house to his lurry under the biting sleet of February; the
ragged barefoot boys and girls swarming and festering in the slums;
the young men struggling all about him for subsistence and
success--these for the first time became realities to him, entered
into that pondering of 'whence and whither' to which he had been
always destined, and whereon he was now consciously started.
And as the months went on, his attention was once more painfully
caught and held by Dora's troubles and Daddy's infirmities. For
Daddy's improvement was short-lived. A bad relapse came in
November; things again went downhill fast; the loan contracted in
the summer had to be met, and under the pressure of it Daddy only
became more helpless and disreputable week by week. And now, when
Doctor Mildmay went to see him, Daddy, crouching over the fire,
pretended to be deaf, and 'soft' besides. Nothing could be got out
of him except certain grim hints that his house was his own till he
was turned out of it. 'Looks pretty bad this time,' said the doctor
to David once as he came out discomfited. 'After all, there's not
much hope when the craving returns on a man of his age, especially
after some years' interval.'
Daddy would sometimes talk frankly enough to David. At such times
his language took an exasperating Shakespearean turn. He was
abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques--as a man much
buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets of life. Purcell
stood generally for 'the enemy;' and to Purcell his half-mad fancy
attributed most of his misfortunes. It was Purcell who had
undermined his business, taken away his character, and driven him
back to drink. David did not believe much of it, and told him so.
Then, roused to wrath, the young man would speak his mind plainly
as to Dora's sufferings and Dora's future. But to very little
purpose.
'Aye, you're right--you're right enough,' said the old man to him
on one of these occasions, with a wild, sinister look. 'Cordelia'll
hang for 't. If you want to do her any good, you must turn old Lear
out--send him packing, back to the desert where he was before.
There's elbow-room there!'
David looked up startled. The thin bronzed face had a restless
flutter in it. Before he could reply Daddy had laid a hand on his
shoulder.
'Davy, why don't you drink?'
'What do you mean?' said the young man, flushing.
'Davy, you've been as close as wax; but Daddy can see a thing or
two when he chooses. Ah, you should drink, my lad. Let people
prate--why shouldn't a man please himself? It's not the beastly
liquor--that's the worst part of it--it's the _dreams,_ my
lad, "the dreams that come." They say ether does the business
cheapest. A teaspoonful--and you can be alternately in Paradise and
the gutter four times a day. But the fools here don't know how to
mix it.'
As he spoke the door opened, and there stood Dora on the threshold.
She had just come back from a Lenten service; her little worn
prayer-book was in her hand. She stood trembling, looking at them
both--at David's tight, indignant lips--at her father's excitement.
Daddy's eye fell on her prayer-book, and David, looking up, saw a
quick cloud of distaste, aversion, pass over his weird face.
She put out some supper, and pressed David to stay. He did so in
the vain hope of keeping Daddy at home. But the old vagrant was too
clever for both of them. When David at last got up to go, Daddy
accompanied him downstairs, and stood in the doorway looking up
Market Place till David had disappeared in the darkness. Then with
a soft and cunning hand he drew the door to behind him, and stood a
moment lifting his face to the rack of moonlit cloud scudding
across the top of the houses opposite. As he did so, he drew a long
breath, with the gesture of one to whom the wild airs of that upper
sky, the rush of its driving wind, were stimulus and delight. Then
he put down his head and stole off to the right, towards the old
White Inn in Hanging Ditch, while Dora was still listening in
misery for his return step upon the stairs.
A week later Dora, not knowing how the restaurant could be kept
going any longer, and foreseeing utter bankruptcy and ruin as soon
as the shutters should be up, took her courage in both hands,
swallowed all pride, and walked up to Half Street to beg help of
Purcell. After all he was her mother's brother. In spite of that
long feud between him and Daddy, he would surely, for his own
credit's sake, help them to escape a public scandal. For all his
rodomontade, Daddy had never done him any real harm that she could
remember.
So she opened the shop door in Half Street, quaking at the sound of
the bell she set in motion, and went in.
Twenty minutes afterwards she came out again, looking from side to
side like a hunted creature, her veil drawn close over her face.
She fled on through Market Place, across Market Street and St.
Ann's Square, and through the tall dark warehouse streets
beyond--drawn blindly towards Potter Street and her only friend.
David was putting out some books on the stall when he looked up and
saw her. Perceiving that she was weeping and breathless, he asked
her into the back room, while John kept guard in the shop.
There she leant against the mantelpiece, shaking from head to foot,
and wiping away her tears. He soon gathered that she had been to
Purcell, and that Purcell had dismissed her appeal with every
circumstance of cold and brutal insult. The sooner her father was
in the workhouse or the lunatic asylum, and she in some nunnery or
other, the sooner each would be in their right place. He was a
vagabond, and she a Papist--let them go where they belonged. He was
not going to spend a farthing of his hard-earned money to help
either of them to impose any further on the world. And then he let
fall a word or two which showed her that he had probably been at
the bottom of some merciless pressure lately applied to them by one
or two of their chief creditors. The bookseller's hour was come,
and he was looking on at the hewing of his Agag with the joy of the
righteous. So might the Lord avenge him of all his enemies.
Dora could hardly give an account of it. The naked revelation of
Purcell's hate, of so hard and vindictive a soul, had worked upon
her like some physical horror. She had often suspected the truth,
but now that it was past doubting, the moral shock was terrible to
this tender mystical creature, whose heart by day and night lived a
hidden life with the Crucified and with His saints. Oh, how could
he, how could anyone, be so cruel? her father getting an old man!
and she, who had never quarrelled with him--who had nursed Lucy! So
she wailed, gradually recovering her poor shaken soul--calming it,
indeed, all the while out of sight, with quick piteous words of
prayer and submission.
David stood by, pale with rage and sympathy. But what could he do?
He was himself in the midst of a hard struggle, and had neither
money nor credit available. They parted at last, with the
understanding that he was to go and consult Ancrum, and that she
was to go to her friends at St. Damian's.
Till now poor Dora had carefully refrained from bringing her
private woes into relation with her life in and through St.
Damian's. Within that enchanted circle, she was another being with
another existence. There she had never asked anything for herself,
except the pardon and help of God, before His altar, and through
His priests. Rather she had given--given all that she had--her
time, such as she could spare from Daddy and her work, to the
Sunday-school and the sick; her hard-won savings on her clothes,
and on the extra work, for which she would often sit up night after
night when Daddy believed her asleep, to the poor and to the
services of the Church. There she had a position, almost an
authority of her own--the authority which comes of self-spending.
But now this innocent pride must be humbled. For the sake of her
father, and of those to whom they owed money they could not pay,
she must go and ask--beg instead of giving. All she wanted was
time. Her embroidery work was now better paid than ever. If the
restaurant were closed she could do more of it. In the end she
believed she could pay everybody. But she must have time. Yes, she
would go to Father Vernon that night! He would understand, even if
he could not help her.
Alas! Next morning David was just going out to dinner, when a
message was brought him from Market Place. He started off thither
at a run, and found a white and gasping Dora wandering restlessly
up and down the upper room; while Sarah, the old Lancashire cook,
very red and very tearful, followed her about trying to administer
consolation. Daddy had disappeared. After coming in about eleven
the night before and going noisily to his room--no doubt for the
purpose of deluding Dora--he must have stolen down again and made
off without being either seen or heard by anybody. Even the
policeman on duty in Market Place had noticed nothing. He had taken
what was practically the only money left them in the world--about
twenty pounds--from Dora's cashbox, and some clothes, packing these
last in a knapsack which still remained to him from the foreign
tramps of years before.
The efforts made by Dora, David, and Ancrum, whom David called in
to help, to track the fugitive, were quite useless. Daddy had
probably disguised himself, for he had all the tricks of the
adventurer, and could 'make up' in former days so as to deceive
even his own wife.
Strange outbreak of a secret ineradicable instinct! He had been
Dora's for twenty years. But life with her at Leicester, and during
their first years at Manchester, had thriven too evenly, and in the
end the old wanderer had felt his blood prick within him, and the
mania of his youth revive. His business had grown hateful to him;
it was probably the comparative monotony of success which had first
reawakened the travel-hunger--then restlessness, conflict, leading
to drink, and, finally, escape.
'He will come back, you know,' said Dora one night, sharply, to
David. 'He served my mother so many times. But he always came back.'
They were sitting together in the shuttered and dismantled
restaurant. There was to be a sale on the premises on the morrow,
and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of
the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from
upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who
had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was
realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still
leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had
met the creditors for her. There had been a composition, and she
had insisted upon working off to the best of her power whatever sum
might remain after the possession and goodwill had been sold. She
could live on a crust, and she was sure of continuous work both for
the great church-furniture shop in Manchester which had hitherto
employed her and also for the newly established School of Art
Needlework at Kensington. As an embroideress there were few more
delicately trained eyes and defter hands than hers in England.
When she spoke of her father's coming back, David was seized with
pity. She could not sit down in these days when her work was out of
her hands. Perpetual movement seemed her only relief. The face,
that seemed so featureless but was so expressive, had lost its
sweet, shining look; the mouth had the pucker of pain; and she had
piteous startled ways quite unlike her usual soft serenity.
'Oh, yes, he will come back--some time,' he said, to comfort her.
'I don't doubt that--never. But I wonder how he could go like
that--how he had the heart! I did think he cared for me. I wasn't
ever nasty to him--at least, I don't remember. Perhaps he thought I
was. But only we two--and always together--since mother died!'
She began to tidy some of the lots, to tie some of the bundles of
odds and ends together more securely--talking all the while in a
broken way. She was evidently bewildered and at sea. If she could
have remembered any misconduct of her own, it seemed to David, it
would have been a relief to her. Her faith taught her that love was
all-powerful--but it had availed her nothing!
The sale came; and the goodwill of the Parlour was sold to a man
who was to make a solid success of what with Daddy had been a
half-crazy experiment.
Dora went to live in Ancoats, that teeming, squalid quarter which
lies but a stone's-throw from the principal thoroughfares and
buildings of Manchester, and in its varieties of manufacturing life
and population presents types which are all its own. Here are the
cotton operatives who work the small proportion of mills still
remaining within the bounds of Manchester--the spinners, minders,
reelers, reed-makers, and the rest; here are the calico-printers
and dyers, the warehousemen and lurrymen; and here too are the
sellers of 'fents,' and all the other thousand and one small trades
and occupations which live on and by the poor. The quarter has one
broad thoroughfare or lung, which on a sunny day is gay, sightly,
and alive; then to north and south diverge the innumerable low
red-brick streets where the poor live and work; which have none,
however, of the trim uniformity which belongs to the workers'
quarters of the factory towns pure and simple. Manchester in its
worst streets is more squalid, more haphazard, more nakedly poor
even than London. Yet, for all that, Manchester is a city with a
common life, which London is not. The native Lancashire element,
lost as it is beneath many supervening strata, is still there and
powerful; and there are strong well-defined characteristic
interests and occupations which bind the whole together.
Here Dora settled with a St. Damian's girl friend, a shirt-maker.
They lived over a sweetshop, in two tiny rooms, in a street even
more miscellaneous and half-baked than its neighbours. Outside was
ugliness; inside, unremitting labour. But Dora soon made herself
almost happy. By various tender shifts she had saved out of the
wreck in Market Place Daddy's bits of engravings and foreign
curiosities, his Swiss carvings and shells, his skins and stuffed
birds; very moth-eaten and melancholy these last, but still safe.
There, too, was his chair; it stood beside the fire; he had but to
come back to it. Many a time in the week did she suddenly rise that
she might go to the door and listen; or crane her head out of
window, agitated by a figure, a sound, as her mother had done
before her.
Then her religious life was free to expand as it had never been
yet. Very soon, in Passion Week, she and her friend had gathered a
prayer-meeting of girls, hands from the mill at the end of the
street. They came for twenty minutes in the dinner-hour,
delicate-faced comely creatures many of them, with their shawls
over their heads: Dora prayed and sang with them, a soft tremulous
passion in every word and gesture. They thought her a saint--began
to tell her their woes and their sins. In the evenings and on
Sunday she lived in the coloured and scented church, with its
plaintive music, its luminous altar, its suggestions both of a
great encompassing church order of undefined antiquity and infinite
future, and of a practical system full of support for individual
weakness and guidance for the individual will. The beauty of the
ceremonial appealed to those instincts in her which found other
expression in her glowing embroideries; and towards the church
order, with its symbols, observances, mysteries, the now solitary
girl felt a more passionate adoration, a more profound humility,
than ever before. Nothing too much could be asked of her. During
Lent, but for the counsels of Father Russell himself, a shrewd man,
well aware that St. Damian's represented the one Anglican oasis in
an incorrigibly moderate Manchester, even her serviceable and
elastic strength would have given way, so hard she was to that poor
'sister the body,' which so many patient ages have gone to perfect
and adjust.
Half of the romance, the poetry of her life, lay here; the other
half in her constant expectation of her father, and in the visits
of David Grieve. Once a week at least David mounted to the little
room where the two girls sat working; sometimes now, oh joy! he
went to church with her; sometimes he made her come out to Eccles,
or Cheadle, or the Irwell valley for a walk. She used various
maidenly arts and self-restraints to prevent scandal. At home she
never saw him alone, and she now never went to Potter Street.
Still, out of doors they were often alone. There was no
concealment, and the persons who took notice assumed that they were
keeping company and going to be married. When such things were said
to Dora she met them with a sweet and quiet denial, at first
blushing, then with no change at all of look or manner.
Yet the girl who lived with her knew that the first sound of
David's rap on the door below sent a tremor through the figure
beside her, that the slight hand would go up instinctively to the
coiled hair, straightening and pinning, and that the smiling,
listening, sometimes disputing Dora who talked with David Grieve
was quite different from the dreamy and ascetic Dora who sat beside
her all day.
Why did David go? As a matter of fact, with every month of this
winter and spring, Dora's friendship became more necessary to him.
All the brotherly feeling he would once so willingly have spent on
Louie, he now spent on Dora. She became in truth a sister to him.
He talked to her as he would have done to Louie had she been like
Dora. No other relationship ever entered his mind; and he believed
that he was perfectly understood and met in the same way.
Both often spoke of Lucy, towards whom David in this new and graver
temper felt both kindly and gratefully. She, poor child, wrote to
Dora from time to time letters full of complaints of her father and
of his tyranny in keeping her away from Manchester. He indeed
seemed to have taken a morbid dislike to his daughter, and what
company he wanted he got from the widow, whom yet he had never made
up his mind to marry. Lucy chafed and rebelled against the
perpetual obstacles he placed in the way of her returning home, but
he threatened to make her earn her own living if she disobeyed him,
and in the end she always submitted. She poured herself out
bitterly, however, to Dora, and Dora was helplessly sorry for her,
feeling that her idle wandering life with the various aunts and
cousins she boarded with was excessively bad for her--seeing that
Lucy was not of the stuff to fashion new duties or charities for
herself out of new relations--and that the small, vain, and yet
affectionate nature ran an evil chance of ultimate barrenness and
sourness.
But what could she do? In every letter there was some mention of
David Grieve or request for news about him. About the visit to
Paris Dora had written discreetly, telling only what she knew, and
nothing of what she guessed. In reality, as the winter passed on,
Dora watched him more and more closely, waiting for the time when
that French mystery, whatever it was, should have ceased to
overshadow him, and she might once more scheme for Lucy. He must
marry--that she knew!--whatever he might think. Anyone could see
that, with the returning spring, in spite of her friendship and
Ancrum's, he felt his loneliness almost intolerable. It was clear,
too, as his manhood advanced, that he was naturally drawn to women,
naturally dependent on them. In spite of his great intelligence, to
her so formidable and mysterious, Dora had soon recognised, as
Elise had done, the eager, clinging, confiding temper of his youth.
And beneath the transformation of passion and grief it was still
there--to be felt moving often like a wounded thing.