CHAPTER XVI

When David reached home that night he found a French letter

awaiting him. It was from Louie, still dated from the country town

near Toulouse, and announced the birth of her child--a daughter.

The letter was scrawled apparently from her bed, and contained some

passionate, abusive remarks about her husband, half finished, and

hardly intelligible. She peremptorily called on David to send her

some money at once. Her husband was a sot, and unfaithful to her.

Even now with his first child, he had taken advantage of her being

laid up to make love to other women. All the town cried shame on

him. The priest visited her frequently, and was all on her side.

Then at the end she wrote a hasty description of the child. Its

eyes were like his, David's, but it would have much handsomer

eyelashes. It was by far the best-looking child in the place, and

because everybody remarked on its likeness to her, she believed

Montjoie had taken a dislike to it. She didn't care, but it made

him look ridiculous. Why didn't he do some work, instead of letting

her and her child live like pigs? He could get some, if his dirty

pride would let him. It wasn't to be supposed, with this disgusting

Commune going on in Paris, and everybody nearly ruined, that anyone

would want statues--they had never even sold the Maenad--but

somebody had wanted him to do a monument, cheap, the other day for

a brother who had been killed in the war; and he wouldn't. He was

too fine. That was like him all over.

It was as though he could hear her flinging out the reckless

sentences. But he thought there were signs that she was pleased

with the baby--and he suddenly remembered her tyrannous passion for

the Mason child.

As to the money, he looked carefully into his accounts. For the

last six months he had been gathering every possible saving

together with a view to the History of Manchester, which he and

John had planned to begin printing in the coming autumn. It went

against him sorely to take from such a hoard for the purpose of

helping Jules Montjoie to an idler and easier existence. The fate

of his six hundred pounds burnt deep into a mind which at bottom

was well furnished with all the old Yorkshire and Scotch frugality.

However, he sent his sister money, and he gave up in thought that

fortnight's walking tour in the Lakes he had planned for his

holiday. He must just stay at home and see to business.

Then next morning, as it happened, he woke up with a sudden hunger

for the country--a vision before his eyes of the wide bosom of the

Scout, of fresh airs and hurrying waters, of the sheep among the

heather. His night had been restless; the whole of life seemed to

be again in debate--Lucy's figure, Dora's talk, chased and

tormented him. Away to the April moorland! He sprang out of bed

determined to take the first train to Clough End. He had not been

out of Manchester for months, and it was luckily a Saturday. Here

was this letter of Louie's too--he owed the news to Uncle Reuben.

Since Reuben's visit to Manchester, a year before, there had been

no communication between him and them. Six years! How would the

farm--how would Aunt Hannah look? There was a drawing in him this

morning towards the past, towards even the harsh forms and memories

of it, such as often marks a time of emotion and crisis, the moment

before a man takes a half-reluctant step towards a doubtful future.

But as he journeyed towards the Derbyshire border, he was not in

truth thinking of Dora's counsels or of Lucy Purcell at all. Every

now and then he lost himself in the mere intoxication of the

spring, in the charm of the factory valleys, just flushing into

green, through which the train was speeding. But in general his

attention was held by the book in his hand. His time for reading

had been much curtailed of late by the toils of his business. He

caught covetously at every spare hour.

The book was Bishop Berkeley's 'Dialogues.'

With what a medley of thoughts and interests had he been concerned

during the last four or five months! His old tastes and passions

had revived as we have seen, but unequally, with morbid gaps and

exceptions. In these days he had hardly opened a poet or a

novelist. His whole being shrank from them, as though it had been

one wound, and the books which had been to him the passionate

friends of his most golden hours, which had moulded in him, as it

were, the soul wherewith he had loved Elise, looked to him now like

enemies as he passed them quickly by upon the shelves.

But some of his old studies--German, Greek, science

especially--were the saving of him. Among some foreign books, for

instance, which he had ordered for a customer he came upon a copy

of some scientific essays by Littre. Among them was a survey of the

state of astronomical knowledge written somewhere about 1835, with

all the luminous charm which the great Positivist had at command.

David was captured by it, by the flight of the scientific

imagination through time and space, amid suns, planets and nebulae,

the beginnings and the wrecks of worlds. When he laid it down with

a sigh of pleasure, Ancrum, who was sitting opposite, looked up.

'You like your book, Davy?'

'Yes,' said the other slowly, staring out of the twilight window at

the gloom which passes for sky in Manchester. Then with another

long breath,--'It makes you a new heaven and a new earth!'

A similar impression, only even richer and more detailed, had been

left upon him by a volume of Huxley's 'Lay Sermons.' The world of

natural fact in its overpowering wealth and mystery was thus given

back to him, as it were, under another aspect than that torturing

intoxicating aspect of art--one that fortified and calmed. All his

scientific curiosities which had been so long laid to sleep

revived. His first returning joy came from a sense of the

inexhaustibleness and infinity of nature.

But very soon this renewed interest in science began to have the

bearing and to issue in the mental activities which, all unknown to

himself, had been from the beginning in his destiny. He could not

now read it for itself alone. That new ethical and spiritual

susceptibility, into which agony and loss had become slowly

transformed, dominated and absorbed all else. For some time, beside

his scientific books, there lay others from a class not hitherto

very congenial to him, that which contains the great examples in

our day, outside the poets, of the poetical or imaginative

treatment of ethics--Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin. At an age when most

young minds of intelligence amongst us are first seized by these

English masters, he had been wandering in French paths. 'Sartor

Resartus,' Emerson's 'Essays,' 'The Seven Lamps,' came to him now

with an indescribable freshness and force. Nay, a too great force!

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet

lived enough to realise all they tell us. When David, wandering at

night with Teufels-drockh through heaven and hell, felt at last the

hard sobs rising in his throat, he suddenly put the book and others

akin to it away from him. As with the poets so here. He must turn

to something less eloquent--to paths of thought where truth shone

with a drier and a calmer light.

But still the same problems! Since his Eden gates had closed

upon him, he had been in the outer desert where man has

wandered from the beginning, threatened with all the familiar

phantoms, illusions, mist-voices of human thought. What

was consciousness--knowledge--law? Was there any law--any

knowledge--any _I?_

Naturally he had long ceased to find any final sustenance or

pleasure in the Secularist literature, which had once convinced him

so easily. Secularism up to a certain point, it began to seem to

him, was a commonplace; beyond that point, a contradiction. If the

race should ever take the counsel of the Secularists, or of that

larger Positivist thought, of which English secularism is the

popular reflection, the human intellect would be a poorer

instrument with a narrower swing. So much was plain to him. For

nothing can be more certain than that some of the finest powers and

noblest work of the human mind have been developed by the struggle

to know what the Secularist declares is neither knowable nor worth

knowing.

Yet the histories of philosophy which he began to turn over were in

truth no more fruitful to him than the talk of the _Reasoner._

They stimulated his powers of apprehension and analysis; and the

great march of human debate from century to century touched his

imagination. But in these summaries of the philosophical field his

inmost life appropriated nothing. Once by a sort of reaction he

fell upon Hume again, pining for the old intellectual clearness of

impression, though it were a clearness of limit and negation. But

he had hardly begun the 'Treatise' or the 'Essays' before his soul

rose against them, crying for he knew not what, only that it was

for nothing they could give.

Then by chance a little Life of Berkeley, and upon it an old

edition of the works, fell into his hands. As he was turning over

the leaves, the 'Alciphron' so struck him that he turned to the

first page of the first volume, and evening after evening read the

whole through with a devouring energy that never flagged. When it

was over he was a different being. The mind had crystallised

afresh.

It was his first serious grapple with the fundamental problems of

knowledge. And, to a nature which had been so tossed and bruised in

the great unregarding tide of things, which had felt itself the

mere chattel of a callous universe, of no account or dignity either

to gods or men, what strange exaltation there was in the general

_suggestion_ of Berkeley's thought! The mind, the source of

all that is; the impressions on the senses, merely the speech of

the Eternal Mind to ours, a Visual Language, whereof man's

understanding is perpetually advancing, which has been indeed

contrived for his education; man, naturally immortal, king of

himself and of the senses, inalienably one--if he would but open

his eyes and see--with all that is Divine, true, eternal: the soul

that had been crushed by grief and self-contempt revived at the

mere touch of these vast possibilities like a trampled plant. Not

that it absorbed them yet, made them its own; but they made a

healing stimulating atmosphere in which it seemed once more

possible for it to grow into a true manhood. The spiritual

hypothesis of things was for the first time presented in such a way

as to take imaginative hold without exciting or harrowing the

feelings; he saw the world reversed, in a pure light of thought, as

Berkeley saw it, and all the horizon of things fell back.

Now--on this April afternoon--as the neighbourhood of Manchester

was left behind, as the long woodclad valleys and unpolluted

streams began to prophesy of Derbyshire and the Peak, David, his

face pressed against the window, fell into a dream with Berkeley

and with nature. Oh for knowledge! for verification! He began dimly

and passionately to see before him a life devoted to thought--a

life in which science after science should become the docile

instrument of a mind still pressing on and on into the shadowy

realm, till, in Berkeley's language, the darkness part, and it

'recover the lost region of light'!

But in the very midst of this overwhelming vision he said suddenly

to himself:

'There is another way--another answer--Dora's way and Ancrum's.'

Aye, the way of faith, which asks for no length of years in which

to win the goal, which is there at once--in the beat of a

wing--safe on the breast of God! He thought of it as he had seen it

illustrated in his friend and in Dora, with the mixture of

attraction and repulsion which, in this connection, was now more or

less habitual to him. The more he saw of Dora, the more he

wondered--at her goodness and her ignorance. Her positive dislike

to, and alienation from knowledge was amazing. At the first

indication of certain currents of thought he could see her soul

shrivelling and shrinking like a green leaf near flame. As he had

gradually realised, she had with some difficulty forgiven him the

attempt to cure Daddy's drinking through a doctor; that anyone

should think sin could be reached by medicine--it was in effect to

throw doubt on the necessity of God's grace! And she could not bear

that he should give her information from the books he read about

the Bible or early Christianity. His detached, though never

hostile, tone was clearly intolerable to her. She could not and

would not suffer it, would take any means of escaping it.

Then that Passion-week sermon she had taken him to hear; which had

so moved her, with which she had so sweetly and persistently

assumed his sympathy! The preacher had been a High Church Canon

with a considerable reputation for eloquence. The one o'clock

service had been crowded with business and professional men. David

had never witnessed a more tempting opportunity. But how hollow and

empty the whole result! What foolish sentimental emphasis, what

unreality, what contempt for knowledge, yet what a show of it!--an

elegant worthless jumble of Gibbon, Horace, St. Augustine, Wesley,

Newman and Mill, mixed with the cheap picturesque--with moonlight

on the Campagna, and sunset on Niagara--and leading, by the loosest

rhetoric, to the most confident conclusions. He had the taste of it

in his mouth still. Fresh from the wrestle of mind into which

Berkeley had led him, he fell into a new and young indignation with

sermon and preacher.

Yet, all the same, if you asked how man could best _live_,

apart from thinking, how the soul could put its foot on the

brute--where would Dora stand then? What if the true key to life

lay not in knowledge, but in _will_? What if knowledge in the

true sense was ultimately impossible to man, and if Christianity

not only offered, but could give him the one thing truly

needful--his own will, regenerate?

But with the first sight of the Clough End streets these high

debates were shaken from the mind.

He ran up the Kinder road, with its villanous paving of cobbles and

coal dust, its mills to the right, down below in the hollow,

skirting the course of the river, and its rows of workmen's homes

to the left, climbing the hill--in a tremor of excitement. Six

years! Would anyone recognize him? Ah! there was Jerry's 'public,'

an evil-looking weather-stained hole; but another name swung on the

sign; poor Jerry!--was he, too, gone the way of orthodox and

sceptic alike? And here was the Foundry--David could hardly prevent

himself from marching into the yard littered with mysterious odds

and ends of old iron which had been the treasure house of his

childhood. But no Tom--and no familiar face anywhere.

Yes!--there was the shoemaker's cottage, where the prayer-meeting

had been, and there, on the threshold, looking at the approaching

figure, stood the shoemaker's wife, the strange woman with the

mystical eyes. David greeted her as he came near. She stared at him

from under a bony hand put up against the sun, but did not

apparently recognise him; he, seized with sudden shyness, quickened

his pace, and was soon out of her sight.

In a minute or two he was at the Dye-works, which mark the limit of

the town, and the opening of the valley road. Every breath now was

delight. The steep wooded hills to the left, the red-brown shoulder

of the Scout in front, were still wrapt in torn and floating shreds

of mist. But the sun was everywhere--above in the slowly triumphing

blue, in the mist itself, and below, on the river and the fields.

The great wood climbing to his left was all embroidered on the

brown with palms and catkins, or broken with patches of greening

larch, which had a faintly luminous relief amid the rest. And the

dash of the river--and the scents of the fields! He leapt the wall

of the lane, and ran down to the water's edge, watching a dipper

among the stones in a passion of pleasure which had no words.

Then up and on again, through the rough uneven lane, higher and

higher into the breast of the Scout. What if he met Jim Wigson on

the way? What if Aunt Hannah, still unreconciled, turned him from

the door? No matter! Rancour and grief have no hold on mortals

walking in such an April world--in such an exquisite and sunlit

beauty. On! let thought and nature be enough! Why complicate and

cumber life with relations that do but give a foothold to pain, and

offer less than they threaten?

There is smoke rising from Wigson's, and figures moving in the

yard. Caution!--keep close under the wall. And here at last is

Needham farm, at the top of its own steep pitch, with the sycamore

trees in the lane beside it, the Red Brook sweeping round it to the

right, the rough gate below, the purple Scout mist-wreathed behind.

There are cows lowing in the yard, a horse grazes in the front

field; through the little garden gate a gleam of sun strikes on the

struggling crocuses and daffodils which come up year after year, no

man heeding them; there is a clucking of hens, a hurry of water, a

flood of song from a lark poised above the field. The blue smoke

rises into the misty air; the sun and the spring caress the rugged

lonely place.

With a beating heart David opened the gate into the field, walked

round the little garden, let himself into the yard, and with a

hasty glance at the windows mounted the steps and knocked.

No answer. He knocked again. Surely Aunt Hannah must be about

somewhere. Eleven o'clock; how quiet the house was!

This time there was a clatter of a chair on a flagged floor inside,

and a person with a slow laboured step came and opened.

It was Reuben. He adjusted his spectacles with difficulty, and

stared at the intruder.

'Uncle Reuben!--I thought it was such a fine day, I'd just run over

and see the old place, and bring you some news,' said David,

smiling and holding out his hand.

Reuben took it, stupefied. 'Davy,' he said, trembling. Then with a

sudden movement he whipped the door to behind him, and shut it

close.

'Whist!' he said, putting his old finger to his lip. 'T' servant's

just settlin her i' t' kitchen. She's noa ready yet--she's been

terr'ble bad th' neet. Coom yo here.' And he descended the steps

with infinite care, and led David to the wood-shed.

'Is Aunt Hannah ill?' asked David, astonished.

Reuben leant against the wall of the shed, and took off his

spectacles, as though to wipe them with his old and shaking hands.

Then David saw a sort of convulsion pass across his ungainly face.

'Aye,' he said, looking down, 'aye, she's broken is Hannah. Yo didna

knaw?'

'I've heard nothing.'

Reuben recounted the facts. Since her stroke of last spring, and

the partial recovery which had followed upon it, there had been

little apparent change, except perhaps in the direction of slowly

increasing weakness. She was a wreck, and likely to remain so.

Hardly anybody but Reuben could understand her now, and she rarely

let him out of her sight. He could not get time to attend to the

farm, was obliged to leave things to the hired man, and was in

trouble often about his affairs.

'Bit yo see, she hasna t' reet use of her speach,' he said,

excusing himself humbly to this handsome city nephew. 'An' she conno

gie ower snipin aw at onst. 'Twudna be human natur'. An't' gell's

worritin' an' I mun tell her what t' missis says.'

David asked if he might see her, or should he just turn back to the

town? Reuben protested, his hospitality and family feeling aroused,

his poor mind torn with conflicting motives.

'I believe she'd fratch if she didna see tha,' he said at last.

'A'll just goo ben, and ask.'

He went in, and David remained in the wood-shed, staring out at the

familiar scene, at Louie's window, at the steps where he and she

had fed the fowls together.

The door opened again, and Reuben reappeared on the steps, agitated

and beckoning.

David went in, stepping softly, holding his blue cloth cap in his

hand. In another instant he stood beside the old cushioned seat in

the kitchen, looking down at Hannah.

This Hannah! this his childhood's enemy! this shawled and shrunken

figure with the white parchment face and lantern cheeks!

He stooped to her and said something about why he had come. Reuben

listened wondering.

'Louie's married and got a babby--dosto hear, Hannah? And he--t'

lad--did yo iver see sich a yan for growin?'

He wished to be mildly jocular. Hannah's face did not move. She had

just touched her nephew with her cold wasted hand. Now she beckoned

to him to sit down at her right. He did so, and then for the first

time he could believe that Hannah, the old Hannah, was there beside

them. For as she slowly studied his dress, the Inverness cape then

as now a favourite garb in Manchester, the hand holding the cap,

refined since she saw it last by commerce with books and pens

rather than hurdles and sheep, the broad shoulders, the dark head,

her eye for the first time met his, full, and a weird thrill went

through him. For that eye--dulled, and wavering--was still Hannah.

The old hate was in it, the old grudge, all that had been at least

for him and Louie the inmost and characteristic soul of their

tyrant. He knew in an instant that she had in her mind the money of

which he and his sister had robbed her, and beyond that the

offences of their childhood, the infamy of their mother. If she

could, she would have hurled them all upon him. As it was, she was

silent, but that brooding eye, like a smouldering spark in her

blanched face, spoke for her.

Reuben tried to talk. But a weight lay on him and David. The gaunt

head in the coarse white nightcap turned now to one, now to the

other, pursued them phantom-like. Presently he insisted that his

nephew must dine, avoiding Hannah's look. David would much rather

have gone without; but Reuben, affecting joviality, called the

servant, and some food was brought. No attempt was made to include

Hannah in the meal. David supposed that it was now necessary to

feed her.

Reuben talked disjointedly of the neighbours and his stock, and

asked a few questions, without listening to the answers, about

David's affairs, and Louie's marriage. In Hannah's presence his

poor dull wits were not his own; he could in truth think of nothing

but her.

After the meal, however, when a draught of ale had put some heart

in him, he got up with an air of resolution.

'I mun goo and see what that felly's been doin' wi' th'

Huddersfield beeasts,' he said; 'wilta coom wi' me, Davy? Mary!'

He called the little maid. Hannah suddenly said something

incoherent which David could not understand. Reuben affected not to

hear.

'Mary, gie your mistress her dinner, like a good gell. An' keep t'

house-door open, soa 'at she can knock wi' t' stick if she wants

owt.'

He stood before her restless and ashamed, afraid to look at her.

Then he suddenly stooped and kissed her on the forehead. David felt

a lump in his throat. As he took leave of her the spell, as it

were, of Reuben's piteous affection came upon him. He saw nothing

but a dying and emaciated woman, and taking her hand in his, he

said some kind natural words.

The hand dropped from his like a stone. As he stood at the door

behind Reuben, the servant came forward with a plate of something

which she put down inside the fender. As she did so, she awkwardly

upset the fire-irons, which fell with a crash. Hannah started

upright in her chair, with a rush of half-articulate words,

grasping fiercely for her stick with glaring eyes. The servant, a

wild moorland lass, fled terrified, and at the 'house' door turned

and made a face at David.

Outside Reuben slowly mastered himself, and woke up to some real

interest in Louie's doings. David told him her story frankly, so

far as it could be separated from his own, and, pressed by Reuben's

questions, even revealed at last the matter of the six hundred

pounds. Reuben could not get over it. Sandy's "six hunderd pund"

which he had earned with the sweat of his brow, all handed over to

that minx Louie, and wasted by her and a rascally French husband in

a few months--it was more than he could bear.

'Aye, aye, marryin's varra weel,' he said impatiently. 'A grant tha

it's a great sin coomin thegither without marryin. But Sandy's six

hunderd pund! Noa, I conno abide sich wark.'

And he fell into sombre silence, out of which David could hardly

rouse him. Except that he said once, 'And we that had kep' it so

long. I'd better never ha gien it tha.' And clearly that was the

bitter thought in his mind. The sacrifice that had taxed all his

moral power, and, as he believed, brought physical ruin on Hannah,

had been for nothing, or worse than nothing. Neither he nor David

nor anyone was the better for it.

'I must go over the shoulder to Frimley,' said David at last. They

had made a half-hearted inspection of the stock in the home fields,

and were now passing through the gate on to the moor. 'I must see

Margaret Dawson again before I take the train back.'

Reuben looked astonished and shook his head as though he did not

remember anything about Margaret Dawson. He walked on beside his

nephew for a while in silence. The Red Brook was leaping and

dancing beside them, the mountain ashes were just bursting into

leaf, the old smithy was ahead of them on the heathery slope, and

to their left the Downfall, full and white, thundered over its

yellow rocks.

But they had hardly crossed the Red Brook to mount the peak beyond

when Reuben drew up.

'Noa'--he said restlessly--'noa. I mun goo back. T' gell's flighty

and theer's aw maks o' mischief i' yoong things.' He stood and held

his nephew by the hand, looking at him long and wistfully. As he

did so a calmer expression stole for an instant into the poor

troubled eyes.

'Very like a'st not see tha again, Davie. We niver know, Livin's

hard soomtimes--soa's deein, folks say. I'm often freet'nt of

deein'--but I should na be. Theer's noan so mich peace here, and we

_knaw_ that wi' the Lord theer's peace.'

He gave a long sigh--all his character was in it--so tortured was

it and hesitating.

They parted, and the young man climbed the hill, looking back often

to watch the bent figure on the lower path. The spell had somehow

vanished from the sunshine, the thrill from the moorland air. Life

was once more cruel, implacable.

He walked fast to Frimley, and made for the cottage of Margaret's

brother. He remembered its position of old.

A woman was washing in the 'house' or outer kitchen. She received

him graciously. The weekly money which in one way or another he had

never failed to pay since he first undertook it, had made him well

known to her and her husband. With a temper quite unlike that of

the characteristic northerner, she showed no squeamishness at all

about the matter. If it hadn't been for his help, they would just

have sent Margaret to the workhouse, she said bluntly; for they had

many mouths to feed, and couldn't have burdened themselves with an

extra one. She was quite 'silly' and often troublesome.

'Is she here?' David asked.

'Aye, if yo goo ben, yo'll find her,' said the woman, carelessly

pointing to an inner door. 'I conno ha her in here washin days, nor

the children noather.'

David opened the door pointed out to him. He found himself in a

rough weaving shed almost filled by a large hand-loom, with its

forest of woodwork rising to the ceiling, its rolls of perforated

pattern-paper, its great cylinders below, and many-coloured

shuttles to either hand. But to-day it stood idle, the weaver was

not at work. The room was stuffy but cold, and inexpressibly gloomy

in this silence of the loom.

Where was Margaret? After a minute's search, there, beyond the

loom, sitting by a fireless grate, was a little figure in a bedgown

and nightcap, poking with a stick amid the embers, and as it seemed

crooning to itself.

David made his way up to her, inexpressibly moved.

'Margaret!'

She did not know him in the least. She had a starved-looking cat on

her lap, which she was huddling against her breast. The face had

fallen away almost to nothing, so small and thin it was. She was

dirty and unkempt. Her still brown hair, once so daintily neat,

straggled out beneath her torn cap; her print bed-gown was pinned

across her, her linsey skirt was in holes; everywhere the same tale

of age neglected and unloved.

When David first stood before her she drew back with a terrified

look, still clutching the cat tightly. But, as he smiled at her,

with the tears in his eyes, speaking her name tenderly, her

frightened look relaxed, and she remained staring at him with the

shrinking furtive expression of a quite young child.

He knelt down beside her.

'Margaret, dear Margaret--don't you know me?'

She did not answer, but her wrinkled eyes, still blue and vaguely

sweet, wavered under his, and it seemed to him that every now and

then a shiver of cold ran through her old and frail body. He went

on gently, trying to recall her wandering senses. In vain. In the

middle she interrupted him with a piteous lip.

'They promised me a ribbon for't,' she said, complainingly, in a

hoarse, bronchitic voice, pointing to the animal she held, and to

its lean neck adorned with a collar of plaited string, on which

apparently she had just been busy, to judge from the odds and ends

of string lying about.

At the same moment David became aware of a couple of children

craning their heads round the corner of the loom to look, a loutish

boy about eleven, and a girl rather younger. At sight of them,

Margaret raised a cry of distress and alarm, with that helpless

indefinable note in the voice which shows that personality, in the

true sense, is no longer there.

'Go away!' David commanded.

The children did not stir, but grinned. He made a threatening

movement. Then the boy, as quick as lightning, put his tongue out

at Margaret, and caught hold of his sister, and they clattered off,

their mother in the next room scolding them out into the street

again.

And this the end of a creature all sacrifice, a life all affection!

He took her shivering hand in his.

'Margaret, listen to me. You shall be better looked after. I will

see to that. No one shall be unkind to you any more. If they won't

do it here, my--my--wife shall take care of you!'

He lifted her hand and kissed it, putting all the pity and bitter

indignation of his heart into the action. Margaret, seeing his

emotion, whimpered too; otherwise she was impassive.

He left her, went into the next room, and had a long energetic talk

with Margaret's sister-in-law. The woman, half ashamed, half

recalcitrant, in the end promised amendment. What business it was

of his she could not imagine; but the small weekly addition which

he offered to make to Margaret's payments, while it showed him a

greater fool than before, made it impossible to put his meddling

aside. She promised that Margaret should be brought into the warm,

that she should have better clothes, and that the children should

be kept from plaguing her.

Then he departed, and mounting the moor again, spent an hour or two

wandering among the boggy fissures of the top, or sitting on the

high edges of the heather, looking down over the dark and craggy

splendour of the hill immediately around and beneath him, on and

away through innumerable paling shades of distance to the blue

Welsh border. His speculative fervour was all gone. Reuben, Hannah,

Margaret, these figures of suffering and pain had brought him close

to earth again. The longing for a human hand in his, for a home,

wife, children to spend himself upon, to put at least for a while

between him and this unconquerable 'something which infects the

world,' became in this long afternoon a physical pain not to be

resisted. He thought more and more steadily of Lucy, schooling

himself, idealising her.

It was the Sunday before Whitsunday. David was standing outside a

trim six-roomed house in the upper part of the little Lancashire

town of Wakely, waiting for Lucy Purcell.

She came at last, flushed and discomposed, pulling the door hastily

to behind her.

They walked on a short distance, talking disconnectedly of the

weather, the mud, and the way on to the moor, till she said

suddenly:

'I wish people wouldn't be so good and so troublesome!'

'Did Robert wish to keep you at home?' inquired David, laughing.

'Well, he didn't want me to come out with--anybody but him,' she

said, flushing. 'And it's so bad, because one can't be cross. I

don't know how it is, but they're just the best people here that

ever walked!'

She looked up at him seriously, an unusual energy in her slight

face.

'What!--a town of saints?' asked David, mocking. It was so

difficult to take Lucy seriously.

She tossed her head and insisted.

Talking very fast, and not very consecutively, she gave him an

account, so far as she was able, of the life lived in this little

town, a typical Lancashire town of the smaller and more homogeneous

kind. All the people worked in two large spinning mills, or in a

few smaller factories representing dependent industries, such as

reed-making. Their work was pleasant to them. Lucy complained, with

the natural resentment of the idle who see their place in the world

jeopardised by the superfluous energy of the workers, that she

could never get the mill girls to say that the mill hours were too

long. The heat tried them, made appetites delicate, and lung

mischief common. But the only thing which really troubled them was

'half-time.' Socially everybody knew everybody. They were

passionately interested in each other's lives and in the town's

affairs. And their religion, of a strong Protestant type expressed

in various forms of Dissent, formed an ideal bond which kept the

little society together, and made an authority which all

acknowledged, an atmosphere in which all moved.

The picture she drew was, in truth, the picture of one of those

social facts on which perhaps the future of England depends. She

drew it girlishly, quite unconscious of its large bearings,

gossiping about this person and that, with a free expenditure of

very dogmatic opinion on the habits and ways which were not hers.

But, on the whole, the picture emerged, and David had never liked

her talk so well. The little self-centred thing had somehow been

made to wonder and admire; which is much for all of us.

And she, meanwhile, was instantly sensible that she was in a happy

vein, that she pleased. Her eyes danced under her pretty spring

hat. How proud she was to walk with him--that he had come all this

way to see her! As she shyly glanced him up and down, she would

have liked the village street to be full of gazers, and was almost

loth to leave the public way for the loneliness of the moor. What

other girl in Wakely had the prospect of such a young man to take

her out? Oh! would he ever, ever 'ask her'--would he even come

again?

At last, after a steep and muddy climb, through uninviting back

ways, they were out upon the moor. An apology for a moor in David's

eyes! For the hills which surround the valley of the Irwell, in

which Wakely lies, are, for the most part, green and rolling

ground, heatherless and cragless. Still, from the top they looked

over a wide and wind-blown scene, the bolder moors of Rochdale

behind them, and in front the long green basin in which the Irwell

rises. Along the valley bottoms lay the mills, with their

surrounding rows of small stone houses. Up on the backs of the

moors crouched the old farms, which have watched the mills come,

and will perhaps see them go; and here and there a grim-looking

colliery marked a fold of the hill. The landscape on a spring day

has a bracing bareness, which is not without exhilaration. The wind

blows freshly, the sun lies broadly on the hills. England, on the

whole at her busiest and best, spreads before you.

They were still on the top when it occurred to them that they had a

long walk in prospect--for they talked of getting to the source of

the Irwell--and that it was dinner-time. So they sat down under one

of the mortarless stone walls which streak the moors, and David

brought out the meal that was in his pockets. They ate with

laughter and chat. Pigeons passed overhead, going and coming from

an old farm about a hundred yards away; the sky above them had a

lark for voice singing his loudest; and in the next field a peewit

was wheeling and crying. The few trees in sight were struggling

fast into leaf. Nature even in this cold north was gay to-day and

young.

Suddenly, in the midst of their meal, by a natural caprice and

reaction of the mind, as David sat looking down on slate roofs and

bare winding valley, across the pale, rain-beaten grass of the

moor, all the northern English detail vanished from his eyes. For

one suffocating instant he saw nothing but a great picture gallery,

its dimly storied walls and polished floor receding into the

distance. In front Velazquez' 'Infanta,' and before it a figure

bent over a canvas. Every line and tint stood out. He heard the

light varying voice, caught the complex grace of the woman, the

strenuous effort of the artist.

Enough! He closed his eyes for one bitter instant; then raised them

again to England and to Lucy.

There under the wall, while they were still lingering in the sun,

he asked Lucy Purcell to be his wife. And Lucy, hardly believing

her own foolish ears, and in a whirl of bliss and exultation past

expression, nevertheless put on a few maidenly airs and graces,

coquetted a little, would not be kissed all at once, talked of her

father and the war that must be faced, and finally surrendered,

held up her scarlet cheek for her lord's caress, and then sat

speechless, hand in hand with him.

But Nature had its way. They rambled on, crossing the stone stiles

which link the bare green fields on the side of the moor. When a

stile appeared, Lucy would send him on in front, so that she might

mount decorously, and then descend trembling upon his hand.

Presently they came to a spot where the path crossed a little

streamlet, and then climbed a few rough steps in a steep bank, and

so across a stile at the top.

David ran up, leapt the stile, and waited. But he had time to study

the distant course of their walk, as well as the burnt and

lime-strewn grass about him, for no Lucy appeared. He leant over

the wall, and to his amazement saw her sitting on one of the stone

steps below, crying.

He was beside her in an instant. But he could not loosen the hands

clasped over her eyes.

'Oh, why did you do it?--why did you do it? I'm not good enough--I

never shall be good enough!'

For the first time since their formal kiss he put his arms round

her. And as she, at last forced to look up, found herself close to

the face which, in its dark refinement and power, seemed to her

to-day so far, so wildly above her deserts, she saw it all

quivering and changed. Never had little Lucy risen to such a

moment; never again, perhaps, could she so rise. But in that

instant of passionate humility she had dropped healing and life

into a human heart.

Yet, was it Lucy he kissed?--Lucy he gathered in his arms? Or was

it not rather Love itself?--the love he had sought, had missed, but

must still seek--and seek?

BOOK IV MATURITY

CHAPTER I

'Daddy!' said a little voice.

The owner of it, a child of four, had pushed open a glass door, and

was craning his curly head through it towards a garden that lay

beyond.

'Yes, you rascal, what do you want now?'

'Daddy, come here!'

The voice had a certain quick stealthiness, through which, however,

a little tremor of apprehension might be detected.

David Grieve, who was smoking and reading in the garden, came up to

where his small son stood, and surveyed him.

'Sandy, you've been getting into mischief.'

The child laid hold of his father, dragged him into the little

hall, and towards the dining-room door. Arrived there, he stopped,

put a finger to his lip, and laid his head plaintively on one side.

'Zere's an _aw_ ful sight in zere, Daddy.'

'You monkey, what have you been up to?'

David opened the door. Sandy first hung back, then, in a sudden

enthusiasm, ran in, and pointed a thumb pink with much sucking at

the still uncleared dinner-table, which David and the child's

mother had left half an hour before.

'Zere's a pie!' he said, exultantly.

And a pie there was. First, all the salt-cellars had been upset

into the middle of the table, then the bits of bread left beside

the plates had been crumbled in, then--the joys of wickedness

growing--the mustard-pot had been emptied over the heap, some

bananas had been stuck unsteadily here and there to give it

feature, and finally, in a last orgie of crime, a cruet of vinegar

had been discharged on the whole, and the brown streams were now

meandering across the clean tablecloth.

'Sandy, you little wretch!' cried his father, 'don't you know that

you have been told again and again not to touch the things on the

table? Hold out your hand!'

Sandy held out a small paw, whimpered beforehand, but never ceased

all the time to watch his father with eyes which seemed to be

quietly on the watch for experiences.

David administered two smart pats, then rang the bell for the

housemaid. Sandy stationed himself on the rug opposite his father,

and looked at his reddened hand, considering.

'I don't seem to mind much, Daddy!' he said at last, looking up.

'No, sir. Daddy'll have to try and find something that you

_will_ mind.'

The tone was severe, and David did his best to frown. In reality

his eyes, under the frown, devoured his small son, and he had some

difficulty in restraining himself from kissing the hand he had just

slapped.

When the housemaid entered, however, she showed a temper which

would clearly have slapped Master Sandy without the smallest

compunction.

The little fellow stood and listened to her laments and

denunciations with the same grave considering eyes, slipped his

hand inside his father's for protection, watched, like one

enchained, the gradual demolition of the pie, and when it was all

gone, and the tablecloth removed, he gave a long sigh of relief.

'Say you're sorry, sir, to Jane, for giving her so much extra

trouble,' commanded his father.

'I'm soddy, Jane,' said the child, nodding to her; 'but it was a

p--_wecious_ pie, wasn't it?'

The mixture of humour and candour in his baby eye was irresistible.

Even Jane laughed, and David took him up and swung him on to his

shoulder.

'Come out, young man, into the garden, where I can keep an eye on

you. Oh! by the way, are you all right again?'

This inquiry was uttered as they reached the garden seat, and David

perched the child on his knee.

'Yes, I'm _bet_--ter,' said the child slowly, evidently

unwilling to relinquish the dignity of illness all in a moment.

'Well, what was the matter with you that you gave poor mammy such a

bad night?'

The child was silent a moment, pondering how to express himself.

'I was--I was a little sick outside, and a little _feelish_

inside'--he wavered on the difficult word. 'Mammy said I had the

wrong dinner yesterday at Aunt Dora's. Zere was plums--_lots_

o' plums!' said the child, clasping his hands on his knee, and

hunching himself up in a sudden ecstasy.

'Well, don't go and have the wrong dinner again at Aunt Dora's. I

must tell her to give you nothing but rice pudding.'

'Zen I shan't go zere any more,' said the child with determination.

'What, you love plums more than Aunt Dora?'

'No--o,' said Sandy dubiously, 'but plums is good!'

And, with a sigh of reminiscence, he threw himself back in his

father's arm, being, in fact, tired after his bad night and the

further excitement of the 'pie.' The thumb slipped into the pink

mouth, and with the other hand the child began dreamily to pull at

one of his fair curls. The attitude meant going to sleep, and David

had, in fact, hardly settled him, and drawn a light overcoat which

lay near over his small legs, before the fringed eyelids sank.

David held him tenderly, delighting in the weight, the warmth, the

soft even breath of his sleeping son. He managed somehow to relight

his pipe, and then sat on, dreamily content, enjoying the warm

September sunshine, and letting the book he had brought out lie

unopened.

The garden in which he sat was an oblong piece of ground, with a

central grass plat and some starved and meagre borders on either

hand. The gravel in the paths had blackened, so had the leaves of

the privets and the lilacs, so also had the red-brick walls of the

low homely house closing up the other end of the garden. Seventy

years ago this house had stood pleasantly amid fields on the

northern side of Manchester; its shrubs had been luxuriant, its

roses unstained. Now on every side new houses in oblong gardens had

sprung up, and the hideous smoke plague of Manchester had descended

on the whole district, withering and destroying.

Yet David had a great affection for his house, and it deserved it.

It had been built in the days when there was more elbow-room in the

world than now. The three sitting-rooms on the ground floor opened

sociably into each other, and were pleasantly spacious, and the one

story of bedrooms above contained, at any rate in the eyes of the

tenants of the house, a surprising amount of accommodation. When

all was said, however, it remained, no doubt, a very modest

dwelling, at a rent of somewhere about ninety pounds a year; but as

David sat contemplating it this afternoon, there rose in him again

the astonishment with which he had first entered upon it,

astonishment that he, David Grieve, should ever have been able to

attain to it.

'Sandy! come here directly! Where are you, sir?'

David heard the voice calling in the hall, and raised his own.

'Lucy! all right!--he's here.'

The glass door opened, and Lucy came out. She was very smartly

arrayed in a new blue dress which she had donned since dinner; yet

her looks were cross and tired.

'Oh, David, how stupid! Why isn't the child dressed? Just look what

an object! I sent Lizzie for him ten minutes ago, and she couldn't

find him.'

'Then Lizzie has even less brains than I supposed,' said David

composedly, 'seeing that she had only to look out of a back window.

What are you going to do with him?'

'Take him out with me, of course. There are the Watsons of

Fallowfield, they pestered me to bring him, and they're at home

Saturdays. And aren't you coming too?'

'Madam, you are unreasonable!' said David, smiling, and putting

down his pipe he laid an affectionate hand on his wife's arm. 'I

went careering about the world with you last Saturday and the

Saturday before, and this week end I must take for reading. There

is an Oxford man who has been writing me infuriated letters this

week because I won't let him know whether we will take up his

pamphlet or no. I must get that read, and a good many other things,

before to-morrow night.'

'Oh, I know!' said Lucy, pettishly. 'There's always something in the

way of what I want. Soon I shan't see anything of you at all; it

will be all business, and yet not a penny more to spend! Well,

then, give me Sandy.'

David hesitated.

'Do you think you'll take him?' he said, bending over the little

fellow. 'He doesn't look a bit himself to-day. It's those abominable

plums of Dora's!'

He spoke with fierceness, as though Dora had been the veriest

criminal.

'Well, but what nonsense!' cried Lucy; 'they don't upset other

children. I can't think what's wrong with him.'

'He isn't like other children; he's of a finer make,' said David,

laughing at his own folly, but more than half sincere in it all the

same.

Lucy laughed too, and was appeased. She bent down to look at him,

confessed that he was pale, and that she had better not take him

lest there should be catastrophes.

'Well, then, I must go alone,' she said, turning away

discontentedly. 'I don't know what's the good of it. Nobody cares to

see me without him or you.'

The last sentence came out with a sudden energy, and as she looked

back towards him he saw that her cheek was flushed.

'What, in that new gown?' he said, smiling, and looked her up and

down approvingly.

Her expression brightened.

'Do you like it?' she said, more graciously.

'Very much. You look as young as when I first teased you! Come here

and let me give you a "nip for new."'

She came docilely. He pretended to pinch the thin wrist she held

out to him, and then, stooping, lightly kissed it.

'Now go and enjoy yourself,' he said, 'and I'll take care of Sandy.

Don't tire yourself. Take a cab when you want one.'

She was moving away when a thought struck her.

'What are you going to say to Lord Driffield?'

A cloud crossed David's look. 'Well, what am I to say to him? You

don't really want to go, Lucy?'

In an instant the angry look came back.

'Oh, very well!' she cried. 'If you're ashamed of me, and don't care

to take me about with you, just say it, that's all!'

'As if I wanted to go myself!' he remonstrated. 'Why, I should be

bored to death; so would you. I don't believe there would be a

person in the house whom either of us would ever have seen before,

except Lord Driffield. And I can see Lord Driffield, and his books

too, in much more comfortable ways than by going to stay with him.'

Lucy stood silent a moment, trying to contain herself, then she

broke out:

'That is just like you!' she said in a low bitter voice; 'you won't take

any chance of getting on. It's always the way. People say to me that

you're so clever--that you're thought so much of in Manchester, you

might be anything you like. And what's the good?--that's what I think!

If you do earn more money you won't let us live any differently. It's

always, can't we do without this? and can't we do without that? And as

to knowing people, you won't take any trouble at all! Why can't we get

on, and make new friends, and be--be--as good as anybody? other people

do. I believe you think I should disgrace myself--I should put my knife

in my mouth, or something, if you took me to Lord Driffield's. I can

behave myself _perfectly_, thank you.'

And Lucy looked at her husband in a perfect storm of temper and

resentment. Her prettiness had lost much of its first bloom; the

cheek-bones, always too high, were now more prominent than in first

youth, and the whole face had a restless thinness which robbed it

of charm, save at certain rare moments of unusual moral or physical

well-being. David, meeting his wife's sparkling eyes, felt a pang

compounded of many mixed compunctions and misgivings.

'Look here, Lucy!' he said, laying down his pipe, and stretching

out his free hand to her, 'don't say those things. They hurt me, and

you don't mean them. Come and sit down a moment, and let's make up

our minds about Lord Driffield.'

Unwillingly she let herself be drawn down beside him on the garden

bench. These quarrels and reproaches were becoming a necessity and

a pleasure to her. David felt, with a secret dread, that the habit

of them had been growing upon her.

'I haven't done so very badly for you, have I?' he said

affectionately, as she sat down, taking her two gloved hands in his

one.

Lucy vehemently drew them away.

'Oh, if you mean to say,' she cried, her eyes flaming, 'that I had

no money, and ought just to be thankful for what I can get, just

_say it_, that's all.'

This time David flushed.

'I think, perhaps, you'd better go and pay your calls,' he said,

after a minute; 'we can talk about this letter some other time.'

Lucy sat silent her chest heaving. As soon as ever in these little

scenes between them he began to show resentment, she began to give

way.

'I didn't mean that,' she said, uncertainly, in a low voice looking

ready to cry.

'Well, then, suppose you don't say it,' replied David, after a

pause. 'If you'll try and believe it, Lucy, I don't want to go to

Lord Driffield's simply and solely because I am sure we should

neither of us enjoy it. Lady Driffield is a stuck-up sort of

person, who only cares about her own set and relations. We should

be patronised, we should find it difficult to be ourselves--there

would be no profit for anybody. Lord Driffield would be too busy to

look after us; besides, he has more power anywhere than in his own

house.'

'No one could patronise you,' said Lucy, firing up again.

'I don't know,' said David, with a smile and a stretch; 'I'm shy--on

other people's domains. If they'd come here I should know how to

deal with them.'

Lucy was silent for a while, twisting her mouth discontentedly.

David observed her. Suddenly he held out his hand to her again,

relenting.

'Do you really want to go so much, Lucy?'

'Of course I do,' she said, pouting, in a quick injured tone.

'It's--it's a chance, and I want to see what it's like; and I

should hardly have to buy anything new, unless it's a new bonnet,

and I can make that myself.'

David sat considering.

'Well!' he said at last, trying to stifle his sigh, 'I don't mind.

I'll write and accept.'

Lucy's eye gleamed. She edged closer to her husband.

'You won't mind very much? It's only two nights. Isn't Sandy

cramping your arm?'

'Oh, we shall get through, I dare say. No--the boy's all right. I

_say_'--with a groan--'shall I have to get a new dress suit?'

'Yes, of _course_,' said Lucy, with indignant eagerness.

'Well, then, if you don't go off, and let me earn some money, we

shall be in the Bankruptcy Court. Good-bye! I shall take the boy

into the study, and cover him up while I work.'

Lucy stood before him an instant, then stooped and kissed him on

the forehead. She would have liked to say a penitent word or two,

but there was still something hard and hot in her heart which

prevented her. Yet her husband, as he sat there, seemed to her the

handsomest and most desirable of men.

David nodded to her kindly, and sat watching her slim straight

figure as she tripped away from him across the garden and

disappeared into the house. Then he bent over Sandy and raised him

in his arms.

'Don't wake, Sandy!' he said softly, as the little man half opened

his eyes--'Daddy's going to put you to bye in the study.'

And he carried him in, the child breathing heavily against his

shoulder, and deposited his bundle on an old horsehair sofa in the

corner of his own room, turning the little face away from the

light, and wrapping up the bare legs.

Then he sat down to his work. The room in which he sat was made for

work. It was walled with plain deal bookcases, which were filled

from floor to ceiling, largely with foreign books, as the paper

covers testified.

For the rest, anyone looking round would have noticed a spacious

writing-table in the window, a large and battered armchair beside

the fire, a photograph of Lucy over the mantelpiece, oddly flanked

by an engraving of Goethe and the head of the German historian

Ranke, a folding cane chair which was generally used by Lucy

whenever she visited the room, and the horsehair sofa, whereon

Sandy was now sleeping amid a surrounding litter of books and

papers which only just left room for his small person. If there

were other chairs and tables, they were covered deep in literature

of one kind or another, and did not count. The large window looked

on the garden, and the room opened at the back into the

drawing-room, and at one side into the dining-room. On the rug

slept the short-haired black collie, whom David had once protected

from Louie's dislike--old, blind, and decrepit, but still beloved,

especially by Sandy, and still capable of barking a toothless

defiance at the outer world.

It was a room to charm a student's eyes, especially on this

September afternoon with its veiled and sleepy sun stealing in from

the garden, and David fell into his chair, refilled his pipe, and

stretched out his hand for a batch of manuscript which lay on his

table, with an unconscious sigh of satisfaction.

The manuscript represented a pamphlet on certain trade questions

by a young Oxford economist. For the firm of Grieve & Co., of

Manchester, had made itself widely known for some five years past

to the intelligence of northern England by its large and increasing

trade in pamphlets of a political, social, or economical kind. They

supplied mechanics' institutes, political associations, and

workmen's clubs; nay, more, they had a system of hawkers of their

own, which bade fair to extend largely. To be taken up by Grieve &

Co. was already an object to young politicians, inventors, or

social reformers, who might wish for one reason or another to bring

their names or their ideas before the working-class of the North.

And Grieve & Co. meant David, sitting smoking and reading in his

armchair.

He gave the production now in his hands some careful reading for

half an hour or more, then he suddenly threw it down.

'Stuff and nonsense!' he said to himself. 'The man has got the facts

about those Oldham mills wrong somehow, I'm certain of it. Where's

that letter I had last week?' and, jumping up, he took a bunch of

keys out of his pocket and opened a drawer in his writing-table.

The drawer contained mostly bundles of letters, and to the right

hand a number of loose ones recently received, and not yet sorted

or tied. He looked through these, found what he wanted, and was

about to close the drawer when his attention was caught by a thick

black note-book lying towards the back of it. He took it out,

reminded by it of something he had meant to do, and carried it off

with the Oldham letter to his chair. Once settled there again, he

turned himself to the confutation of his pamphleteer. But not for

long. The black book on his knee exercised a disturbing influence;

his under-mind began to occupy itself with it, and at last the

Oldham letter was hastily put down, and, taking out a pocket pen,

David, with a smile at his own delinquency, opened the black book,

turned over many closely written pages, and settled down to write

another.

The black book was his journal. He had kept it intermittently since

his marriage, rather as a journal of thought than as a journal of

events, and he had to add to it to-day some criticisms of a recent

book by Renan which had been simmering in his mind for a week or

two. Still it contained a certain number of records of events, and,

taken generally, its entries formed an epitome of everything of

most import--practical, moral, or intellectual--which had entered

into David Grieve's life during the eight years since his marriage.

For instance:--

'_April_ 10, 1876.--Our son was born this morning between

three and four o'clock, after more than three years of marriage,

when both of us had begun to despair a little. Now that he is come,

I am decidedly interested in him, but the paternal relation hardly

begins at birth, as the mother's does. The father, who has suffered

nothing, cannot shut his eyes to the physical ugliness and

weakness, the clash of pain and effort, in which the future man

begins; the mother, who has suffered everything, seems by a

special spell of nature to feel nothing after the birth but the

mystery and wonder of the _new creature_, the life born from her

life--flesh of her flesh--breath of her breath. Else why is

Lucy--who bears pain hardly, and had looked forward much less

eagerly to the child, I think, than I had--so proud and content

just to lie with the hungry creature beside her? while I am half

inclined to say, What! so little for so much?--and to spend so full

an energy in resenting the pains of maternity as an unmeaning blot

on the scheme of things, that I have none left for a more genial

emotion. Altogether, I am disappointed in myself as a father. I

seem to have no imagination, and at present I would rather touch a

loaded torpedo than my son.'

'_April 30_.--Lucy wishes to have the child christened at St.

Damian's, and, though it goes against me, I have made no objection.

And if she wishes it I shall go. It is not a question of one's own

personal consistency or sincerity. The new individuality seems to

me to have a claim in the matter, which I have no business to

override because I happen to think in this way or that. My son when

he grows up may be an ardent Christian. Then, if I had failed to

comply with the national religious requirement, and had let him go

unbaptized, because of my own beliefs or non-beliefs, he might, I

think, rightly reproach me: "I was helpless, and you took

advantage."

'Education is different. The duty of the parent to hand on what is

best and truest in his own mind to the child is clear. Besides,

the child goes on to carry what has been taught him into the

open _agora_ of the world's thought, and may there test its

value as he pleases. But the omission, in a sense irreparable,

of a definite and customary act like baptism from a child's

existence, when hereafter the omission may cause him a pang quite

disproportionate to any likes or dislikes of mine in the matter,

appears to me unjust.

'I talk as if Lucy were not concerned!--or Dora! In reality I shall

do as Lucy wills. Only they must not misunderstand me for the

future. If my son lives, his father will not hide his heart from

him.

'I notice for the first time that Lucy is anxious and troubled

about _her_ father. She would like now to be friends, and she

took care that the news of the child's birth should be conveyed to

him at once through a common acquaintance. But he has taken no

notice. In some natures the seeds of affection seem to fall only on

the sand and rock of the heart, where because they have "no depth

of earth they wither away;" while the seeds of hatred find the rich

and good ground, where they spring and grow a hundred-fold.'

'_December_ 8, 1877.--I have just been watching Sandy on the

rug between the two dogs--Tim, and the most adorable black and tan

_dachshund_ that Lord Driffield has just given me. Sandy had a

bit of biscuit, and was teasing his friends--first thrusting it

under their noses, and then, just as they were preparing to gulp,

drawing it back with a squeal of joy. The child's evident mastery

and sense of humour, the grave puzzled faces of the dogs, delighted

me. Then a whim seized me. I knelt down on the rug, and asked him

to give me some. He held out the biscuit and laid it against my

lips; I saw his eye waver; there was a gleam of mischief--the

biscuit was half snatched away, and I felt absurdly chagrined. But

in an instant the little face melted into the sweetest, keenest

smile, and he almost choked me in his eagerness to thrust the

biscuit down my throat. "Poor Daddy! Daddy _so_ hungry."

'I recall with difficulty that I once thought him ugly and

unattractive, poor little worm! On the contrary, it is quite clear

that, whatever he may be when he grows up--I don't altogether trust

his nose and mouth--for a child he is a beauty! His great brown

eyes--so dark and noticeable beneath the fair hair in the little

apple-blossom face--let you into the very heart of him. It is by no

means a heart of unmixed goodness. There is a curious aloofness in

his look sometimes, as of some pure intelligence beholding good and

evil with the same even speculative mind. But this strange mood

breaks up so humanly! he has such wiles--such soft wet kisses! such

a little flute of a voice when he wants to coax or propitiate you!'

'_March_ 1878.--My printing business has been growing very

largely lately. I have now worked out my profit-sharing scheme with

some minuteness, and yesterday the men, John, and I had a

conference. In part, my plan is copied from that of the "Maison

Leclaire," but I have worked a good deal of my own into it. Our

English experience of this form of industrial partnership has been

on the whole unfavourable; but, after a period of lassitude,

experiments are beginning to revive. The great rock ahead lies in

one's relation to the trade unions--one must remember that.

'To the practised eye the men to-day showed signs of accepting it

with cordiality, but the north-country man is before all things

cautious, and I dare say a stranger would have thought them cool

and suspicious. We meet again next week.

'I must explain the thing to Lucy--it is her right. She may resent

it vehemently, as she did my refusal, in the autumn, to take

advantage of that London opening. It will, of course, restrict our

income just as it was beginning to expand quickly. I have left

myself adequate superintendence wages, a bonus on these wages

calculated in the same way as that of the men, a fixed percentage

on the capital already employed in the business and a nominal

thirty per cent, of the profits. But I can see plainly that however

the business extends, we--she and I--shall never "make our fortune"

out of it. For beyond the fifty per cent, of the profits to be

employed in bonuses on wages, and the twenty per cent, set aside

for the benefit and pension society, my thirty per cent, must

provide me with what I want for various purposes connected with the

well-being of the workers, and for the widening of our operations

on the publishing side, in a more or less propagandist spirit.

'My bookselling business proper is, of course, at present outside

the scheme, and I do not see very well how anything of the kind can

be applied to it. This will be a comfort to Lucy; and just now the

trade both in old and foreign books is prosperous and brings me in

large returns. But I cannot disguise from myself that the other

experiment is likely to absorb more and more of my energies

in the future. I have from sixty to eighty men now in the

printing-office--a good set, take them altogether. They have been

gradually learning to understand me and my projects. The story of

what Leclaire was able to do for the lives and characters of his

men is wonderful!

'My poor little wife! I try to explain these things to her, but she

thinks that I am merely making mad experiments with money, teaching

workmen to be "uppish" and setting employers against me. When in my

turn I do my best to get at what she means by "getting on," I find

it comes to a bigger house, more servants, a carriage, dinner

parties, and, generally, a move to London, bringing with it a

totally new circle of acquaintance who need never know exactly what

she or I rose from. She does not put all this into words, but I

think I have given it accurately.

'And I should yield a great deal more than I do if I had any

conviction that these things, when got, would make her happy. But

every increase in our scale of living since we began has seemed

rather to make her restless, and fill her with cravings which yet

she can never satisfy. In reality she lives by her affections, as

most women do. One day she wants to lose sight of everyone who knew

her as Purcell's daughter, or me as Purcell's assistant; the next

she is fretting to be reconciled to her father. In the same way,

she thinks I am hard about money; she sees no attraction in the

things which fill me with enthusiasm; but at the same time, if I

were dragged into a life where I was morally starved and

discontented, she would suffer too. No, I must steer through--judge

for her and myself--and make life as pleasant to her in little ways

as it can be made.

'Ah! the gospel of "getting on"--it fills me with a kind of rage.

There is an essential truth in it, no doubt, and if I had not been

carried away by it at one time, I should have far less power over

circumstances than I now have. But to square the whole of this

mysterious complex life to it--to drop into the grave at last,

having missed, because of it, all that sheds dignity and poetry on

the human lot, all that makes it worth while or sane to hope in a

destiny for man diviner and more lasting than appears--horrible!

'Yet Lucy may rightly complain of me. I get dreamy--I

procrastinate. And it is unjust to expect that her ideal of social

pleasure should be the same as mine. I ought to--and I will--make

more effort to please her.'

'_July_ 1878.--I am in Paris again. Yesterday afternoon I

wandered about looking at those wrecks of the Commune which yet

remain. The new Hotel de Ville is rising, but the Tuileries still

stands charred and ruined against the sky, an object lesson for

Belleville. I walked up to the Arc de l'Etoile, and coming back I

strolled into a little leafy open-air restaurant for a cup of

coffee. Suddenly I recognised the place--the fountain--a largo

quicksilver ball--a little wooden pavilion festooned with coloured

lamps. It was as though eight years were wiped away.

'I could not stay there. But the shock soon subsided. There is

something bewildering, de-personalising, in the difference between

one stage of life and another. In certain moods I feel scarcely a

thread of identity between my present self and myself of eight

years ago.

'This morning I have seen Louie, after an interval of three years.

Montjoie keeps out of my way, and, as a matter of fact, I have

never set eyes on him since I passed him close to the Auteuil

station in July 1870. From Louie's account, he is now a confirmed

drunkard, and can hardly ever be got to do any serious work. Yet

she brought me a clay study of their little girl which he threw off

in a lucid interval two or three months ago, surely as good as

anybody or anything, astonishingly delicate and true. Just now,

apparently, he has a bad fit on, and but for my allowance to her

she tells me they would be all but destitute. It is remarkable to

see how she has taken possession of this money and with what

shrewdness she manages it. I suspect her of certain small Bourse

speculations--she has all the financial slang on the tip of her

tongue--but if so, they succeed. For she keeps herself and the

child, scornfully allows him so much for his pocket in the week,

and even, as I judge from the consideration she enjoys in the

church she frequents, finds money for her own Catholic purposes.

'Louie a fervent Catholic and an affectionate mother! The mixture

of old and new in her--the fresh habits of growth imposed on the

original plant--startle me at every turn. Her Catholicism, which

resolves itself, perhaps, into the cult of a particular church and

of two or three admirable and sagacious priests, seems to me one

long intrigue of a comparatively harmless kind. It provides her

with enemies, allies, plots, battles, and surprises. It ministers,

too, to her love of colour and magnificence--a love which implies

an artistic sense, and would have been utilised young if she had

belonged to an artistic family.

'But just as I am adapting myself to the new Louie the old

reappears! She was talking to me yesterday of her exertions at

Easter for the Easter decorations, and describing to me in

superlatives the final splendour of the results, and the

compliments which had been paid her by one or two of the clergy,

when the name of a lady who seems to have been connected with the

church longer than Louie has, and is evidently her rival in various

matters of pious service and charitable organisation, came to her

lips. Instantly her face flamed, and the denunciation she launched

was quite in the old Clough End and Manchester vein. I was to

understand that this person was a mean, designing, worthless

creature, a hideous object besides, and "made up," and as to her

endeavours to ingratiate herself with Father this and Father that,

the worst motives were hinted at.

'Another little incident struck me more painfully still. Her

devotion to the little Cecile is astonishing. She is miserable when

the child has a finger-ache, and seems to spend most of her time in

dressing and showing her off. Yet I suspect she is often irritable

and passionate even with Cecile; the child has a shrinking quiet

way with her which is not natural. And to-day, when she was in the

middle of cataloguing Montjoie's enormities, and I was trying to

restrain her, remembering that Cecile was looking at a book on the

other side of the room, she suddenly called to the child

imperiously:

'"Cecile! come here and tell your uncle what your father is!"

'And, to my horror, the little creature walked across to us, and,

as though she were saying a lesson, began to _debiter_ a set

speech about her father's crimes and her mother's wrongs,

containing the wildest abuse of her father, and prompted throughout

by the excited and scarlet Louie. I tried to stop it; but Louie

only pushed me away. The child rose to her part, became perfectly

white, declaimed with a shrill fury, indescribably repulsive, and

at the end sank into a chair, hardly able to stand. Then Louie

covered her with kisses, made me get wine for her, and held her

cradled in her arms till it was time for them to go.

'On the way downstairs, when Cecile was in front of us, I spoke my

mind about this performance in the strongest way. But Louie only

laughed at me. "It shall be quite plain that she is _mine_ and

not his! I don't run away from him; I keep him from dying on the

streets like a dog; but his child and everyone else shall know what

he is."

'It is a tigress passion. Poor little child!--a thin, brown,

large-eyed creature, with rather old, affected manners, and a small

clinging hand.'

'_July_ 4 _th_.--Father Lenoir, Louie's director, has

just been to call upon me; Louie insisted on my going to a festival

service at St. Eulalie this morning, and introduced me to him--an

elderly, courteous, noble-faced priest of a fine type. He was

discreet, of course, and made me feel the enormous difference that

exists between an outsider and a member of the one flock. But I

gathered that the people among whom she is now thrown perfectly

understand Louie. By means of the subtle and powerful discipline of

the Church, a discipline which has absorbed the practical wisdom of

generations, they have established a hold upon her. And they work

on her also through the child. But he gave me to understand that

there had been crises; that the opportunities for and temptations

to dissolute living which beset Montjoie's wife were endless; and

it was a marvel that under such circumstances a being so wild had

yet kept straight.

'I shook him warmly by the hand at parting, and thanked him from my

heart. He somewhat resented my thanks, I thought. They imported,

perhaps, a personal element into what he regards as a matter of

pure ecclesiastical practice and duty.'

'_December_ 25 _th_, 1878.--Lucy is still asleep; the

rest of the house is just stirring. I am in my study looking out on

the snowy garden and the frosted trees, which are as yet fair and

white, though in a few hours the breath of Manchester will have

polluted them.

'Last night I went with Lucy and Dora to the midnight service at

St. Damian's. It pleased them that I went; and I thought the

service, with its bells, its resonant _Adeste fideles_, and

its white flowers, singularly beautiful and touching. And yet, in

truth, I was only happy in it because I was so far removed from it;

because the legend of Bethlehem and the mythology of the Trinity

are no longer matters of particular interest or debate with me;

because after a period of three-fourths assent, followed by one

lasting over years of critical analysis and controversial reading,

I have passed of late into a conception of Christianity far more

positive, fruitful, and human than I have yet held. I would fain

believe it the Christianity of the future. But the individual must

beware lest he wrap his personal thinking in phrases too large for

it.

'Yet, at least, one may say that it is a conception which has been

gaining more and more hold on the minds of those who during the

present century have thought most deeply, and laboured most

disinterestedly in the field of Christian antiquity--who have

sought with most learning and with fewest hindrances from

circumstance to understand Christianity, whether as a history or as

a philosophy.

'I have read much German during the past year, and of late a book

reviewing the whole course of religious thought in Germany since

Schleiermacher, with a mixture of exhaustive information and

brilliant style most unusual in a German, has absorbed all my spare

hours. Such a movement!--such a wealth of collective labour and

individual genius thrown into it--producing offshoots and echoes

throughout the world, transforming opinion with the slow

inevitableness which belongs to all science, possessing already a

great past and sure of a great future.

'In the face of it, our orthodox public, the contented ignorance of

our clergy, the solemn assurance of our religious press--what

curious and amazing phenomena! Yet probably the two worlds have

their analogues in every religion; and what the individual has to

learn in these days at once of outward debate and of unifying

social aspiration, is "to dissent no longer with the heat of a

narrow antipathy, but with the quiet of a large sympathy."'

CHAPTER II

A few days after Lord Driffield's warm invitation to Mr. and Mrs.

David Grieve to spend an October Saturday-to-Monday at Benet's Park

had been accepted, Lucy was sitting in the September dusk putting

some frills into Sandy's Sunday coat, when the door opened and Dora

walked in.

'You do look done!' said Lucy, as she held up her cheek to her

cousin's salutation. 'What have you been about?'

'They kept me late at the shop, for a Saturday,' said Dora, with a

sigh of fatigue, 'and since then I've been decorating. It's the

Dedication Festival to-morrow.'

'Well, the festivals don't do _you_ any good,' said Lucy,

emphatically; 'they always tire you to death. When you do get to

church, I don't believe you can enjoy anything. Why don't you let

other people have a turn now, after all these years? There's Miss

Barham, and Charlotte Corfield, and Mrs. Willan--they'd all do a

great deal more if you didn't do so much. I know that.'

Lucy's cool bright eye meant, indeed, that she had heard some

remarks made of late with regard to Dora's position at St. Damian's

somewhat unfavourable to her cousin. It was said that she was

jealous of co-operation or interference on the part of new members

of the congregation in the various tasks she had been accustomed

for years past to lay upon herself in connection with the church.

She was universally held to be extraordinarily good; but both in

the large shop, where she was now forewoman, and at St. Damian's,

people were rather afraid of her, and inclined to head oppositions

to her. A certain severity had grown upon her; she was more

self-confident, though it was a self-confidence grounded always on

the authority of the Church; and some parts of the nature which at

twenty had been still soft and plastic were now tending to

rigidity.

At Lucy's words she flushed a little.

'How can they know as well as I what has to be done?' she said with

energy. 'The chancel screen is _beautiful_, Lucy--all yellow

fern and heather. You must go to-morrow, and take Sandy.'

As she spoke she threw off her waterproof and unloosed the strings

of her black bonnet. Her dark serge dress with its white turn-down

collar and armlets--worn these last for the sake of her embroidery

work--gave her a dedicated conventual look. She was paler than of

old; the eyes, though beautiful and luminous, were no longer young,

and lines were fast deepening in the cheeks and chin, with their

round childish moulding. What had been _naivete_ and tremulous

sweetness at twenty, was now conscious strength and patience. The

countenance had been fashioned--and fashioned nobly--by life; but

the tool had cut deep, and had not spared the first grace of the

woman in developing the saint. The hands especially, the long thin

hands defaced by the labour of years, which met yours in a grasp so

full of purpose and feeling, told a story and symbolised a

character.

'David won't come,' said Lucy, in answer to Dora's last remark; 'he

hardly ever goes anywhere now unless he hears of some one going to

preach that he thinks he'll like.'

'No--I know,' said Dora. A shade came over her face. The attitude

of David Grieve towards religion during the last four or five years

represented to her the deep disappointment of certain eager hopes,

perhaps one might almost call them ambitions, of her missionary

youth. The disappointment had brought a certain bitterness with it,

though for long years she had been sister and closest friend to

both David and his wife. And it had made her doubly sensitive with

regard to Lucy, whom she had herself brought over from the Baptist

communion to the Church, and Sandy, who was her godchild.

After a pause, she hesitatingly brought a small paper book out of

the handbag she carried.

'I brought you this, Lucy. Father Russell sent it you. He thinks it

the best beginning book you can have. He always gives it in the

parish; and if the mothers will only use it, it makes it so much

easier to teach the children when they come to Sunday school.'

Lucy took it doubtfully. It was called 'The Mother's Catechism;'

and, opening it, she saw that it contained a series of questions

and answers, as between a mother and a child.

'I don't think Sandy would understand it,' she said, slowly, as she

turned it over.

'Oh yes, he would!' said Dora, eagerly. 'Why, he's nearly five,

Lucy. It's really time you began to teach him something--unless you

want him to grow up a little heathen!'

The last words had a note of indignation. Lucy took no notice. She

was still turning over the book.

'And I don't think David will like it,' she said, still more slowly

than before.

Dora flushed.

'He can't want to keep Sandy from being taught any religion at all!

It wouldn't be fair to you--or to the child. And if he won't do it,

if he isn't certain enough about what he thinks, how can he mind

your doing it?'

'I don't know,' said Lucy, and paused. 'I sometimes think,' she went

on, with more energy, 'that David will be quite different some day

from what he has been. I'm sure he'll want to teach Sandy.'

'He's got nothing to teach him!' cried Dora. Then she added in

another voice--a voice of wounded feeling--'If he was to be brought

up an atheist, I don't think David ought to have asked me to be

godmother.'

'He shan't be brought up an atheist,' exclaimed Lucy startled.

Then, feeling the subject too much for her--for it provoked in her

a mingled train of memories which she had not words enough to

express--she turned back to her work, leaving the book on the table

and the discussion pending.

'David's dreadfully late,' she said, discontentedly, looking at the

clock.

'Where is he?'

'Down in Ancoats, I expect. He told me he had a committee there

to-day after work, about those houses he's going to pull down. He's

got Mr. Buller and Mr. Haycraft--and'--Lucy named some half-dozen

more rich and well-known men--'to help him, and they're going to

pull down one of the worst bits of James Street, David says, and

build up new houses for working people. He's wild about it. Oh, I

know we'll have no money at all left soon!' cried Lucy indignantly,

with a shrug of her small shoulders.

Dora smiled at what seemed to her a childish petulance.

'Why, I'm sure you've got everything very nice, Lucy, and all you

want.'

'No, indeed, I _haven't_ got all I want,' said Lucy, looking

up and frowning; 'I never shall, neither. I want David to be--to

be--like everybody else. He might be a rich man to-morrow if he

wouldn't have such ideas. He doesn't think a bit about me and

Sandy. I told you what would happen when he made that division

between the bookselling and the printing, and took up with

those ideas about the men. I knew he'd come not to care about

the bookselling. And I was _perfectly_ right! There's that

printing-office getting bigger and bigger, and crowds of men

waiting to be taken on, and such a lot of business doing as never

was. And are we a bit the richer? Not a penny--or hardly. It's

sickening to hear the way people talk about him! Why, they say the

last election wouldn't have been nearly so good for the Liberals

all about the North if it hadn't been for the things he's always

publishing and the two papers he started last year. He might be a

member of Parliament any day, and he wouldn't be a member of

Parliament--not he! He told me he didn't care twopence about it.

No, he doesn't care for anything but just taking _our_ money

and giving it to other people--there! You may say what you like,

but it's true.'

The wilful energy with which Lucy spoke the last words transformed

the small face--brought out the harder lines on it.

'Well, I never know what it is that _you_ want exactly,' said

Dora. 'I don't think you do yourself.'

Lucy stitched silently, her thin red lips pressed together. She

knew perfectly well what she wanted, only she was ashamed to

confess it to the religious and ascetic Dora. Her ideal of living

was filled in with images and desires abundantly derived from

Manchester life, where every day she saw people grow rich rapidly,

and rise as a matter of course into that upper region of gentility,

carriages, servants, wines, and grouse-moors, whither, ever since

it had become plain to her that David could, if he chose, easily

place her there, it had been her constant craving to go. Other

people came to be gentlefolks and lord it over the land--why not

they? It made her mad, as she had said to Dora, to see _their_

money--their very own money--chucked away to other people, and they

getting no good of it, and remaining mere working booksellers and

printers as before.

'Why don't you go and help him?' said Dora suddenly. 'Perhaps if

you were to go right in and see what he's doing, you wouldn't mind

it so much. You might get to like it. He doesn't want to keep

everything to himself--he wants to share with those that need. If

there were a good many others like that, perhaps there'd be fewer

awful things happening down at Ancoats.'

A sigh rose to her lips. Her beautiful eyes grew sad.

'Well, I did try once or twice,' said Lucy, pettishly, 'but I've

always told you that sort of thing isn't in my line. Of course I

understand about giving away, and all that. But he'll hardly let

you give away at all! He says it's pauperising the people. And the

things he wants me to do--I never seem to do 'em right, and I can't

get to care a bit about them.'

The tone in her voice betrayed a past experience which had been in

some way trying and discouraging to a fine natural vanity.

Dora did not answer. She played absently with the little book on

the table.

'Oh! but he's going to let us accept the invitation to Benet's

Park--I didn't tell you that,' said Lucy suddenly, her face

clearing.

Dora was startled.

'Why, I thought you told me he wouldn't go?'

'So I did. But--well, I let out!' said Lucy, colouring.

He's changed his mind. But I'm rather in a fright, Dora, though I

don't tell him. Think of that big house and all those servants--I'm

more frightened of _them_ than of anybody! I say, _do_ you think

my new dresses'll do? You'll come up and look at them, won't you?

Not that you're much use about dresses.'

Dora was profoundly interested and somewhat bewildered. That her

little cousin Lucy, Purcell's daughter and Daddy's niece, should be

going to stay as an invited guest in a castle, with an earl and

countess, was very amazing. Was it because the Radicals had got the

upper hand so much at the election? She could not understand it,

but some of her old girlishness, her old interest in small womanish

trifles, came back upon her, and she discussed the details of what

Lucy might expect so eagerly that Lucy was quite delighted with

her.

In the middle of their talk a step was heard in the hall.

'Ah, there he is!' said Lucy; 'now we'll ring for supper, and I'll

go and get ready.'

Dora sat alone for a few minutes, and then David came in.

'Ah! Dora, this is nice. Lucy says you will stay to supper. We get

so busy, you and I, we see each other much too seldom.'

He spoke in his most cordial, brotherly tone, and, standing on the

rug with his back to the fire, he looked down upon her with evident

pleasure.

As for her, though the throb of her young passion had been so soon

and so sternly silenced, it was still happiness to her to be in the

same room with David Grieve, and any unusual kindness from him, or

a long talk with him, would often send her back to her little room

in Ancoats stored with a cheerful warmth of soul which helped her

through many days. For of late years she had been more liable than

of old to fits of fretting--fretting about her father, about her

own sins and other people's, about the little worries of her

Sunday-school class, or the little rubs of church work. The

contact with a nature so large and stimulating, though sometimes

it angered and depressed her through the influence of religious

considerations, was yet on the whole of infinite service to her, of

more service than she knew.

'Have you forgiven me for upsetting Sandy?' she asked him, with a

smile.

'I'm on the way to it. I left him just now prancing about Lucy's

bed, and making an abominable noise. She told him to be quiet,

whereupon he indignantly informed her that he was "a dwagon hunting

wats." So I imagine he hasn't had "the wrong dinner" to-day.'

They both laughed.

'And you have been in Ancoats?'

'Yes,' said David, tossing back his black hair with an animated

gesture, and thrusting his hands into his pockets. 'Yes--we are

getting on. We have got the whole of that worst James Street court

into our hands. We shall begin pulling down directly, and the plans

for the new buildings are almost ready. And we have told all the

old tenants that they shall have a prior claim on the new rooms if

they choose to come back. Some will; for a good many others of

course we shall be too respectable, though I am set on keeping the

plans as simple and the rents as low as possible.'

Dora sat looking at him with somewhat perplexed eyes.

Her Christianity had been originally of the older High Church type,

wherein the ideal of personal holiness had not yet been fused with

the ideal of social service. The care of the poor and needy was, of

course, indispensable to the Christian life; but she thought first

and most of bringing them to church, and to the blessing and

efficacy of the sacraments; then of giving them money when they

were sick, and assuring to them the Church's benediction in dying.

The modern fuss about overcrowded houses and insanitary

conditions--the attack on bricks and mortar--the preaching of

temperance, education, thrift--these things often seemed to

Christian people of Dora's type and day, if they spoke their true

minds, to be tinged with atheism and secularism. They were jealous

all the time for something better. They instinctively felt that the

preeminence of certain ideas, most dear to them, was threatened by

this absorption in the detail of the mere human life.

Something of this it was that passed vaguely through Dora's mind as

she sat listening to David's further talk about his Ancoats scheme;

and at last, influenced, perhaps, by a half-conscious realisation

of her demur--it was only that--he let it drop.

'What is that book?' he said, his quick eye detecting the little

paper-covered volume on Lucy's table. And, stepping forward, he

took it up.

Dora unexpectedly found her voice a little husky as she replied,

and had to clear her throat.

'It is a book I brought for Lucy. Sandy is a baptized Christian,

David. Lucy wants to teach him, so I brought her this little

Catechism, which Father Russell recommends.'

David turned the book over in silence. He read a passage concerning

the Virgin Mary; another, in which the child asked about the number

and names of the Archangels, gave a detailed answer; another in

which Dissenters were handled with an acrimony which contrasted

with a general tone of sweetness and unction.

David laid it down on the mantelpiece.

'No, Dora, I can't have Sandy taught out of this.'

He spoke with dignity, but with an endeavour to make his tone as

gentle as possible.

Dora was silent a moment; then she broke out:

'What will you teach him, then? Is he to be a Christian at all?'

'In a sense, yes; with all my heart, yes! so far, at least, as his

father has any share in the matter.'

'And is his mother to have no voice?' Dora went on with growing

bitterness and hurry. 'And as for me--why did you let me be his

godmother? I take it seriously, and I may do nothing.'

'You may do everything,' he said, sitting down beside her, 'except

teach him extreme matter of this kind, which, because I am what I

am, will make a critic of the child before his time. I am not a

bigot, Dora! I shall not interfere with Lucy; she would not teach

him in this way. She talks to him; and she instinctively feels for

me, and what she says comes softly and vaguely to him. It is

different with things like this, set down in black and white, and

to be learnt by heart. You must remember that half of it seems to

me false history, and some of it false morals.'

He looked at her anxiously. The jarring note was hateful to him. He

had always taken for granted that Lucy was under Dora's influence

religiously--had perhaps made it an excuse for a gradual withdrawal

of his inmost mind from his wife, which in reality rested on quite

other reasons. But his heart was full of dreams about his son. He

could not let Dora have her way there.

'Oh, how different it is,' cried Dora, in a low, intense voice,

twining her hands together, 'from what I once thought!'

'No!' he said, vehemently, 'there is no real difference between you

and me--there never can be; teach Sandy to be good and to love you!

That's what I should like!'

His eyes were full of emotion, but he smiled. Dora, however, could

not respond. The inner tension was too strong. She turned away, and

began fidgeting with Lucy's workbag.

Then a small voice and a preparatory turmoil were heard outside.

'Auntie Dora! Auntie Dora!' cried Sandy, rushing in with a hop,

skip, and a jump, and flourishing a picture-book, 'look at zese

pickers! Dat's a buffalo--most es _tror_ nary animal, the

buffalo!'

'Come here, rascal!' called his father, and the child ran up to

him. David knelt to look at the picture, but the little fellow

suddenly dropped it and his interest in it, in a way habitual to

him, twined one arm round his father's neck, laid his cheek against

David's, crossed one foot over the other, and, thumb in mouth,

looked Dora up and down with his large, observant eyes.

Dora, melted, wooed him to come to her. Her adoration of him was

almost on a level with David's. Sandy took a minute to think

whether he should leave his father. Then he climbed her knee, and

patronised her on the subject of buffaloes and giraffes--'I tan't

'splain everything to you, Auntie Dora; you'll now when you're

older'--till Lucy and supper came together. And supper was

brightened both by Lucy's secret content in the prospect of the

Benet's Park visit and by the child's humours. When Dora said good

night to her host, their manner to each other had its usual

fraternal quality. Nevertheless, the woman carried away with her

both resentment and distress.

About a fortnight later David and Lucy started one fine October

afternoon for Benet's Park. The cab was crowded with Lucy's

luggage, and David, in new clothes to please his wife, felt

himself, as the cab door closed upon them, a trapped and miserable

man.

What had possessed Lord Driffield to send that unlucky note? For

Lord Driffield himself David had a grateful and real affection.

Ever since that whimsical scholar had first taken kindly notice of

the boy-tradesman, there had been a growing friendship between the

two; and of late years Lord Driffield's interest in David's

development and career had become particularly warm and cordial. He

had himself largely contributed to the subtler sides of that

development, had helped to refine the ambitions and raise the

standards of the growing intellect; his advice, owing to his

lifelong commerce with and large possession of books, had often

been of great practical use to the young man; his library had for

years been at David's service, both for reference and borrowing;

and he had supplied his favourite with customers and introductions

in a large percentage of the University towns both at home and

abroad, a social _milieu_ where Lord Driffield was more at

home and better appreciated than in any other. The small delicately

featured man, whose distinguished face, with its abundant waves of

silky hair--once ruddy, now a goldenish white--presided so oddly

over an incorrigible shabbiness of dress, had become a familiar

figure in David's life. Their friendship, of course, was limited to

a very definite region of thought and relation; but they

corresponded freely, when they were apart, on matters of

literature, bibliography, sometimes of politics; and no sooner was

the Earl at Benet's Park than David had constant calls from him in

his office at the back of the now spacious and important

establishment in Prince's Street.

But Lord Driffield, as we know, had managed his mind better than

his marriage, and his _savoir vivre_ was no match for his

learning. He bore his spouse and his country-gentleman life

patiently enough in general; but every now and then he fell into

exasperation. His wife flooded him too persistently, perhaps, with

cousins and grandees of the duller sort, whose ideas seemed to him

as raw as their rent-rolls were large--till he rebelled. Then he

would have _his_ friends; selecting them more or less at

random from up and down the ranks of literature and science, till

Lady Driffield raised her eyebrows, invited a certain number of her

own set to keep her in countenance, and made up her mind to endure.

At the end of the ordeal Lord Driffield generally made the rueful

reflection that it had not gone off well. But he felt the better

and digested the better for the self-assertion of it, and it was

periodically renewed.

David and Lucy Grieve had been asked in some such moment of

domestic annoyance. The Earl had seen 'Grieve's wife' twice, and

hastily remembered that she seemed 'a presentable little person.'

He was constitutionally indifferent to and contemptuous of women.

But he imagined that it would please David to bring his wife; and

he was perhaps tolerably certain, since no one, be he rake or

savant, possesses an historical name and domain without knowing it,

that it would please the bookseller's wife to be invited.

David suspected a good deal of this, for he knew his man pretty

well. As he sat opposite to Lucy in the railway carriage--

first-class, since she felt it incongruous to go in anything

else--he recalled certain luncheons at Benet's Park, when

he had been doing a bit of work in the library during the family

sojourn. Certainly Lucy did not realise at all how formidable these

aristocratic women could be!

And his pride--at bottom the workman's pride--was made

uncomfortable by his wife's _newness_. New hat, new dress, new

gloves! Himself too! It annoyed him that Lady Driffield should be

so plainly informed that great pains had been taken for her. He

felt irritable and out of gear. Being neither self-conscious nor

awkward, he became both for the moment, out of sympathy with Lucy.

Yet Lucy was supremely happy as they sped along to Stalybridge.

Suppose her father heard of it! She could no doubt insure his

knowing; but it might set his back up still more, make him more mad

than before with her and David. Eight years and more since he had

spoken to her, and the other day, when he had seen her coming in

Deansgate, he had crossed to the other side of the street!--Were

those sleeves of her evening dress quite right? They were not

caught down, she thought, quite in the right place. No doubt there

would be time before dinner to put in a stitch. And she did hope

that pleat from the neck would look all right. It was peculiar, but

Miss Helby had assured her it was much worn. Would there be many

titled people, she wondered, and would all the ladies wear

diamonds? She thought disconsolately of the little black enamelled

locket and the Roman pearls, which were all the adornments she

possessed.

After a short journey they alighted at their station as the dusk

was beginning.

'Are you for Benet's Park, m'm?' said the porter to Lucy. 'All

right!--the carriage is just outside.'

Lucy held herself an inch taller, and waited for David to come back

from the van with their two new portmanteaus.

Meanwhile she noticed two other groups of people, whose bags and

rugs were being appropriated by a couple of powdered footmen--a

husband and wife, and a tall military-looking man accompanied by

two ladies. The two ladies belonged to the height of fashion--of

that Lucy was certain, as she stole an intimidated glance at the

cut of their tailor-made gowns and the costliness of the fur cloak

which one of them carried. As for the other lady, could she also be

on her way to Benet's Park--with this uncouth figure, this mannish

height and breadth, this complete lack of waist, these large arms

and hands, and the over-ample garments and hat, of green cashmere

slashed with yellow, in which she was marvellously arrayed? Yet she

seemed entirely at her ease, which was more than Lucy was, and her

little dark husband was already talking with the tall ladies.

David, having captured the luggage, was accosted by one of the

footmen, who then came up to Lucy and took her bag. She and David

followed in his wake, and found themselves mingling with the other

five persons, who were clearly to be their fellow-guests.

As they stood outside the station door, the elder of the two ladies

turned and ran a scrutinising eye over Lucy and the person in sage

green following her; then she said rapidly to the gentleman with

her:

'Now, remember Mathilde can't go outside, and I prefer to have her

with me.'

'Well I suppose there'll be room in the omnibus,' said he, shortly.

'I shall go in the dog-cart and get a smoke. By George! those are

good horses of Driffield's! And they are not the pair I sent him

over from Ireland in the autumn either.'

He went down the steps, patted and examined the horses, and threw a

word or two to the coachman. Lucy, palpitating with excitement and

alarm, felt a corresponding awe of the person who could venture

such familiarities even with the servants and live-stock of Benet's

Park.

The servant let down the steps of the smart omnibus with its

impatient steeds. The two tall ladies got in.

'Mathilde!' called the elder.

A little maid, dressed in black, and carrying a large dressing-bag,

hurried down the steps before the remaining guests, and was helped

in by the footman. The lady in sage green smiled at her husband--a

sleepy, humorous smile. Then she stepped in, the footman touching

his hat to her as though he knew her.

'Any maid, m'm?' said the man to Lucy, as she was following.

'No--oh _no!_' said Lucy, stumbling in. 'Give me my bag,

please.'

The man gave it to her, and timidly looking round her she settled

herself in the smallest space and the remotest corner she could.

When the carriage rolled off, the lady in green looked out of

window for a while at the dark flying fields and woods, over which

the stars were beginning to come out.