THE CLOUD DEEPENS.
The storm burst, but the cloud did not disperse, it only closed in more
darkly over Redcross. At the same time, as the bank authorities had
foreseen, there was little or nothing of the wild, panic-stricken run on
the capital which heralds and intensifies many a bank's fall. The losers
went about their ordinary occupations. The Rector preached, presided
over meetings of the vestry and Christian Associations, and attended to
his sick. Doctor Millar looked after his sick. Colonel Russell even went
to the Literary Institute and read the newspapers as usual. Every one of
them wore his customary face, however abnormal the working of his heart.
The Redcross victims, and many another innocent man besides, behaved
like gentlemen, Englishmen, and Christians. There was neither outward
fuss nor fury.
The individual who came nearest to breaking down was naturally Mr.
Carey. The very forbearance with which he was treated cut to the quick
the honest man who had been the tool of fools and knaves, brazening out
their share of the business and contriving to escape with the least
damage of anybody. They had been impecunious, trading upon other
people's funds to begin with, and Carey's Bank's failure only left them
where they were originally, under circumstances in which no reasonable
person would expect redress from them. But poor James Carey, who had
been credulous and weak, was made of other stuff.
"I'm not easy about Carey," the little doctor confided to his wife. "He
was talking quite in a stupid, dazed way to Russell and me this morning.
Do you observe his eyes? Have you noticed the veins on his forehead and
his throat? I'm far from comfortable about him." (As if he felt
comfortable about anything at this period!) "I question much whether
he'll ever get over it."
The public of Redcross, who could remark the glassy look of the eyes,
though they might not be qualified to speak of the condition of the
veins, were still more struck by the immediate and melancholy effect the
bank's failure had on Mr. Carey, when their attention was drawn to Mrs.
Carey's behaviour. She was a woman who had seldom left her house save
for her daily drive, now she walked out with her husband every fine
afternoon. Her arm was drawn through his; but it was evident at the
merest glance that she was supporting his failing steps and not he hers.
She was a little, thin, somewhat wizened woman, but she looked equal to
the task she had set herself, if a strong will would do it. There was a
peculiarity to be seen in her eyes too, by those who could read the
sign. It was a fixed desperate determination to keep her husband and the
father of her children by sustaining his weakness with her strength, to
fight and vanquish the enemy whose icy touch was already on his heart
and brain.
But although there was little outward demonstration in Redcross, much
inner ferment and growing concern prevailed beneath the surface in what
had been considered the principal houses in Redcross--houses safe and
sure as they were honourable in their ascendancy in the past. After the
affairs of the bank were in the hands of liquidators, and it became
clear that the ruin was great and complete, hope had hardly a hole or
corner left to linger in, even in the hearts of the most simple and
sanguine. The impending changes which must follow became the talk of the
town, extending to circles far beyond that on which the blow had fallen.
Within the narrower limits, the anxious question what was to be done
became the one engrossing, breathless subject of the hour.
Some of the reforms and retrenchments were marked by the spasmodic haste
and severity which are apt to defeat themselves. These formed pendants
to the spurts of grovelling distrust and quaking care for one's own
welfare which caused Wilkins the butcher to send in his quarter's bill
before it was due to Colonel Russell, and have the debt discharged
within the hour. In like manner, Honeyman the grocer felt bound
delicately to intimate to the Careys that he declined to give the family
more than a week's credit. He was answered in a formally polite note
from Mrs. Carey to the effect that she had not intended to ask for any
longer credit thenceforth, but from that date she would pay ready money.
These offensively defensive acts and vulgar tokens that times were
changed got wind, and were discussed in awed, indignant whispers by the
mass of Wilkins's and Honeyman's fellow-townsmen.
There was little need to remind the poor Careys of their altered
circumstances, since it was in the Bank House that some of the spasmodic
sweeping reforms referred to had at once been practised by Mrs. Carey.
She had always been the ruling spirit in the house, and people now said
openly that it would have been well for everybody if she had been the
ruling spirit in the bank also. She was a woman with locally
aristocratic connections, of a more tangible kind than what constituted
the Millars' shadowy link with the county. Her brother was Sir Charles
Luxmore of Headley Grange, and her nephew had allied himself to the
peerage by marrying an Honourable Victoria Brackenridge. All the greater
the glaring recklessness and insolence of Honeyman to take the word into
his own mouth and refuse the Careys credit. At the same time Sir
Charles's place was nearer the town of Nenthorn than that of Redcross,
and he did not deal with Redcross tradesmen unless at election times. As
for his daughter-in-law, the Honourable Victoria, she came so seldom to
see her aunt-in-law that her face could not be said to be known in
Redcross streets, where she never entered even the "fancy shop" which
the other county ladies patronized occasionally in search of missing
shades of silks or wools.
Mrs. Carey had stooped considerably when she became the wife of Mr.
Carey of the bank, though the bank was nominally his own, and the Careys
were a highly respectable family of old standing in Redcross. When it
came to that, there had only been two generations of the Luxmores at
Headley Grange, and the original baronet's rise to the honours of
knighthood and a baronetage was due to his success and favour in high
places as a fashionable physician. Mrs. Carey had not been very young
at the date of her marriage, and her fortune was moderate enough, for
the moneyed strength of her grandfather and father had gone to found a
family and support a baronetage. Still, she had been accustomed to carry
herself, after she became Mrs. Carey, not in an obtrusive and offensive
manner, but in a quiet, well-bred way, as one who had been undeniably
better born and bred than her neighbours. Indeed, under any
circumstances she would have been a reserved woman, who would, in homely
parlance, have kept herself to herself.
This was the woman who, with an absence of any sense of proportion, and
an equal lack of humour, sometimes to be found in women of her class and
character, together with an excess of mingled fiery zeal and feverish
apprehension, hidden under a quiet exterior, took her measures on the
very day after the bank's failure. These measures made a thorough
exposure of the conclusion which she had arrived at, and subjected
herself and the whole family to immediate privations, for which they
were unprepared. They were injurious as well as useless and uncalled
for, and had a ludicrous side. Acting for Mr. Carey, she dismissed the
coachman and the gardener, paying them their month's wages which were
unearned. She let the valuable horses take their chance of casual
grooming and feeding, till they were sold off. She left the garden at
the most critical time of the year, as the old gardener said with tears
in his eyes, when the young vegetables were only coming into use, and
the whole fruit would be lost unless it were properly seen to. The wood
pigeons would have all the later seeds springing in the beds, and the
place on which he had bestowed so much time and labour would lie waste,
instead of providing a considerable part of the food of the household in
summer and autumn. "But there was never no sense in them ladies like
missus, no more in their sparing than in their spending." At one fell
swoop she dismissed her own maid, the cook, and the parlour-maid,
retaining only a young table-maid to "do" for the family.
Mrs. Carey had hitherto been an indulgent mother, but all at once she
told the scandalized university dandy and failure, Cyril, that he must
brush his own boots and help his schoolboy brothers to clean the knives,
if he were not satisfied with what a maid-of-all-work could accomplish
in these departments.
As for Ella and Phyllis, looking on aghast at the wholesale destruction
of what they had been accustomed to consider the ordinary comforts--not
to say the luxuries and refinements of their home--the girls were
informed that they were not to go back to Miss Burridge's, where their
quarters were paid in advance. The younger brothers might continue at
the Grammar School, because the fees were low; they would be kept out of
harm, and they could do nothing else to speak of. But Ella and Phyllis
had better lose no time in learning to make beds, sweep floors, and lay
tables. "For myself, I have your father to see to," said Mrs. Carey in
her somewhat deep and strong voice, the measured steadiness of which had
acquired a ringing vibration. "I do not mean to conceal from you that
Dr. Millar is apprehensive on your father's account, and I intend to
devote myself to him. We must pull him through and save him at any cost,
though his health and nerves may be shattered from this date, and he may
never be able to retrieve his losses and those of other people, which,
of course, press most heavily upon him. We can try at least for the
credit as well as the life which is so dear to us, and never have it
said for his sake, still more than for ours, that he was blind and
imposed upon, and then let himself slip out of the misery which he had
helped to bring about, while others who were not accountable were
condemned to pay the penalty."
Mrs. Carey would fain not have touched a farthing of the income allowed
the family till the bank's affairs were wound up--that winding-up which
Dr. Millar said might last throughout his life. She would willingly
have resigned the bulk of her small fortune in favour of the bank's
creditors, but marriage settlements and trustees are stubborn facts to
deal with. All she could do was to stint and punish herself and her
family in the manner described, and inasmuch as the stinting and
punishment were done in good faith, doubtless they would serve their
purpose and have their reward.
The Rector was a widower. Hitherto he had kept an efficient housekeeper
and chaperon for his daughters, the elder of whom must now take the
housekeeper's place. He, too, put down what had served him for a
carriage. It was remarkable how uniformly the first idea of retrenchment
took this form in Redcross, but it was natural under the circumstances.
It was difficult to say at once what was to be cut down from a not very
extensive list of supernumeraries, unless one was prepared to make a
clean sweep like Mrs. Carey. The Rector had been simple enough in his
tastes and habits. He was a member of the Church of England Temperance
Society, and so had no valuable cellar of wine to dispose of. He did not
possess more silver plate than was wanted for the Rectory table. His
library contained no rare and costly books. The very carriage in
question was no more than one of those pony-phaetons with regard to
which Bishop Pattison appealed, in one of his letters from Melanesia to
his brethren in peaceful, pleasant country rectories and vicarages at
home, asking the astonished clergymen, with their clergywomen in the
background, if they really considered the clerical equipage, with its
modest expense, equivalent to a divine institution? The Rector proved
his freedom from the superstition by doing away with the phaeton and its
pair, and falling back, as he was a spare man, on an old pony which the
children had ridden by turns. Though he was not a book fancier, he had
entertained a fondness for art, and since he could not indulge in much
picture buying, had dabbled in old prints, of which he had rather a fine
collection. This all at once vanished along with the phaeton.
Bell Hewett, the second daughter, who was several years younger than her
sister Lucy, but had left Miss Burridge's some time before, and was as
far removed from a school-girl as Annie Millar herself, unexpectedly
appeared again on the familiar benches. She was not there as a junior
governess, she was not sufficiently clever or educated, since Miss
Burridge sought to work up to the new standards. Poor Bell was in her
old place, in her old classes, as a pupil once more, only she sat
looking deeply affronted, and nervously trying to make up for lost time,
among a set of young girls like May Millar.
There was not much difference made in Colonel Russell's establishment.
But this was caused by one of two things. There was the probability of
the establishment's soon being broken up, if its master succeeded in
getting a post which should enable him to return to India. On the other
hand, the second Mrs. Russell was too foolish and self-willed to
comprehend without a prolonged struggle how she and her babies could get
along unless they were fortified by every imaginable aid in the shape of
an expensive table, fine clothes, a couple of under nurses, and a boy in
buttons. Fanny Russell, the Colonel's grown-up daughter by his first
wife, looked sad enough over the prospect of her father's departure at
his age, with his shattered constitution, and over what was to become of
herself, left behind with the frivolous, unreasonable young stepmother
with whom Fanny had never been able to agree.
The Millars were still in the old quaintly spacious house with its great
bowery garden, for the plausible reason that Dr. Millar could not, on
the spur of the moment, find a purchaser or an available tenant. He took
some credit to himself for having more breadth of view and controlling
common sense than poor Mrs. Carey, otherwise he might have rushed off
and crammed his family into a small inconvenient house, for which, at
the same time, he would have had to pay rent, that was not called for,
unless in the form of rates and taxes, where his old house was
concerned. There might be something to say on the other side of the
question, but as yet that had not occurred to Dr. and Mrs. Millar.
However, the Doctor's brougham, like the Rector's phaeton, was a thing
of the past. He trudged manfully on foot to his patients. There are few
evils which do not offer some compensations. It really seemed as if the
Doctor's deprivation, which weighed heavily on his wife's mind, served
to divert it from other trials, by the degree to which it was occupied
in looking after her husband's changes of coats and boots, in order to
ward off evil consequences to his health.
The four girls were so engrossed with what had happened and was going to
happen to them from the failure of Mr. Carey's bank, that they had
largely lost sight of the first wooer in the family. This was strong
evidence of the extent to which their minds were filled by the rapid
descent of what they called poverty on themselves and their neighbours.
Rose and May ceased to have qualms of conscience when they caught sight
of Tom Robinson fishing in the Dewes, not knowing what desperate
promptings of despair might not suddenly lay hold of a rejected and
forlorn lover. They left off glancing covertly at him in his pew at
church, for the purpose of detecting the earliest symptoms of a broken
heart and a galloping consumption. Instead they speculated on whether
Bell Hewett would have had a new hat if it had not been for the bank's
failure; and whether her brother's absence from home was owing to his
having gone to London for the first look at the columns of the
advertising newspapers, and that he might be on the spot to apply in
person at the addresses given, and to haunt the agency offices, as young
men are represented doing in novels.
Inevitably Tom Robinson's recent intercourse with the family had been
confined to a formal call or two, awkward and unpleasant to all
concerned. Only Dr. Millar brought him into the conversation
occasionally, dealing with his name in the spirit of a faithful
partisan. "That good fellow Robinson did not draw out a farthing of his
deposit at the bank after disquieting rumours must have reached him.
Carey tells me that Robinson, in place of seeking to be reassured, did
his best to reassure him, Carey; told him never to mind him, he could
lie out of the money; he was willing to let others who had more need be
paid first. Ah! well, it is good to have it in your power to be both
just and generous, and it is still better to have a heart to use the
power. Robinson has acted handsomely throughout, in short, like the
gentleman he is. I wonder if his behaviour on this occasion will weigh
with snobs against the iniquity of his having a shop. I thought
Thackeray had done something to demolish similar rubbish when he
described the young cads who gave the schoolboy Dobbin the nickname
'Figs.'"
The speaker was guilty of glaring rather fiercely at his daughters,
assembled for afternoon tea. They became eminently innocent and
meek-looking on the instant, but when the sisterhood were left to
themselves Annie delivered her opinion with admirable fairness and
candour.
"I am sure I am glad that Tom Robinson should behave himself like a
gentleman, but that does not make his trade a profession fit for a
gentleman, neither does it render the man, with his lack of ambition and
his commonplaceness and dulness, an interesting specimen of humanity."
"Not a man that a woman would care to die for," said Rose, wrinkling her
forehead and crumpling up her nose till her face was half its natural
length. "Oh, I say, think of any woman being so infatuated as to be
willing to die for an insignificant, foxy-headed, well-bred shopkeeper!"
"Don't be slangy, Rose," Annie rebuked her sister.
"Still I am very glad," said Dora's soft voice quite distinctly, and
while she blushed furiously she reared her little neck with an
unconscious gesture. It said plainly, "Yes, I am glad that the man who
sought me for his wife has shown himself liberal and merciful, so that I
can always think of him and his wishes with respect and gratitude."
"And so am I glad," agreed May warmly. "It is so nice that 'Robinson's'
has not made its master grasping and greedy."
"I don't know that rapacity is confined to trade," admitted Annie. "You
ought to know, May, for you have a good deal of intercourse with royalty
in your reading; but I have a notion that it has been the distinguishing
characteristic of a good many kings and emperors."
Annie and Rose had grown more and more eager to take up their burdens
from the first day they were aware that there were burdens for them to
take up. They were becoming positively enamoured of pushing their
fortunes and encountering adventures--not in the least understanding, in
spite of their bright wits, what the burdens, fortunes, adventures might
mean. The two sisters' enthusiasm was just kept within bounds by two
drags on its quicksilver quality. These laggard spirits, Dora and May,
weighed upon their more enterprising companions. Neither could Annie and
Rose quite shut their eyes to the increase of wrinkles on their father's
face, and to their mother's red eyes when she came down of a morning.
If it had not been for these small drawbacks, it is to be feared that
Annie and Rose would have arrived at such a height of _tête exaltée_
that they would have begun to rejoice in their own and their neighbours'
misfortunes. There was something so fresh and exciting in looking about
for openings and careers, in calculating how they were to earn their
bread--which would taste so sweet to those who earned it--and at the
same time save money. They were not quite so insane as to propose to
amass fortunes and fling them into the gulf caused by the crumbling away
of the late bank in order to redeem their father's pledge as a
shareholder. But surely in the course of a year or two they might help
him, and generally assist in keeping the old folks at home in state and
bounty.
Annie and Rose looked on working for themselves in a very different
light from that in which they regarded Tom Robinson's sticking to his
father's and grandfather's shop. To be sure, they did not start with any
intention of keeping shops. Even if they had done so, the descent might
have been redeemed by a dash of sentiment and romance which did not
apply in the least to a man with only himself to look to, a man of
independent means to boot, who had forgotten what was expected from a
gentleman.
There was no danger of Dora or May's being infected with their sisters'
frame of mind. Dora and May were mortally ashamed of themselves. They
feared they were not of the stuff of which heroines--not to say
martyrs--were made. They looked back almost as fondly and sadly as their
mother looked on the old state of matters. They dreaded with a shrinking
terror going away from home, leaving their people, facing the cold,
critical world, being left to their own slender resources. It was bad
enough in Dora, but it was really dreadfully disappointing in May, with
her youthful learning, to have so little spirit and courage; still so it
was, and in the meantime there was no help for it. Dora might have been
glad for purely personal reasons to get away from Redcross for a time;
but she was not thrown into Tom Robinson's company, and the fact of his
refusal had been kept so quiet by the Millars that, unless he himself
betrayed it, which was not likely, the greatest gossip in the place
could only suspect the truth.
It was a small comfort to the unheroic pair, and perhaps to Annie and
Rose also, though they did not consciously take it into account, that
all the older professional men in the town, the leaders and those who
were on most intimate terms, were "in the same boat," as Dr. Millar had
said. But there was a family named Dyer lately settled at Redcross, a
semi-retired stockbroker, with his wife and daughters, who had come from
London to occupy Redcross Manor-house--naturally they had nothing to do
with Carey's Bank, and were still supposed to be rolling in wealth, as
they had been reported from the first. However, there was a notion that
the Dyers' riches had not been acquired in any very refined fashion.
Cyril Carey had always insisted, as he settled his collar and twirled
his cane, that stockbroker was simply pawnbroker writ large. Anyhow the
Dyers were not so distinguished in mind and manners as they were
wealthy. Old conservative folks sighed at the idea of Redcross
Manor-house, which had belonged to the Cliftons from time immemorial,
till the last Clifton fell into the hands of the Jews before he was
twenty, and was driven to break the entail by the time he was forty,
passing to a family of Dyers. The best that could be said of them was,
that the old people were comparatively inoffensive and the young were
presentable. They were inclined to be friendly with the town--it might
be till they could secure a footing with the county people, if that were
possible. They dressed well, thanks to their milliners and dressmakers,
kept a good table, a good stable, and a good staff of domestics, and
furnished Redcross--especially young Redcross--with country-house
hospitalities and gay gatherings, which they would otherwise have
lacked. Yet fanatics of young people like Annie and Rose Millar, who
were persuaded that they were now well acquainted with a reverse of
fortune, began to behave as if they considered it was no longer the
_crême de la crême_ of human experience to amass and retain a fortune.
They began to pity the rampantly prosperous family for the lack on their
part of any knowledge of life's vicissitudes, with their trumpet call to
earnest effort and supreme self-devotion--all that makes man or woman
worthy of the name. As for the younger Dyers, they were content to echo
the sentiments of their mouthpiece, the head of their house. He spoke in
the privacy of his family with a half-affable, half-contemptuous concern
for those unfortunate beggars of uppish Redcross townspeople who had all
come to smash by the failure of one paltry twopenny-halfpenny local
bank.
The Millars were constantly hearing of fresh examples of hardship, and
courage to meet the hardship, piquing and inciting them to enterprise
and self-sacrifice on their own account. Now it would be May, who would
come in from Miss Burridge's with a blanched face, crying, "Oh! you
girls, do you know Ella Carey has gone and is not coming back again?
Phyllis is crying her eyes out, because she and Ella were never
separated before. No, Ella has not gone to be a lady-help, as she
thought she might do, after she had got a little more practice in
washing dishes and peeling potatoes. It is nothing bad, except that she
is gone for good and all, and it has been so sudden. And Mrs. Carey says
Ella is not to come back. One of her sisters, the one without children,
Mrs. Tyrrel, wrote and offered to take either of the girls. And what do
you think Mrs. Carey said? That Ella must go, because if she went there
would be a mouth less to feed. She was sorry, because she said it was
giving up Ella, and she told her she must not expect to have much more
to do with Phyllis and the rest of them at home, for it would be out of
the question, in the different circumstances of the Tyrrels and Careys,
for them to carry on frequent or intimate intercourse. Ella would have
refused if she had dared, for she is so fond of Phyllis and all of them,
even of her mother, though she has grown very hard since the bank
failed. She used to let the girls have their own way. Don't you
remember, Rose, she allowed us to dress up for charades out of her
wardrobe? Why, you once wore her wedding-gown pinned up round you. But
Mrs. Carey would not give Ella any choice. She repeated that there would
be one mouth the less to feed. She said Ella was the elder, and it was
her duty to her father and his creditors to go. So all poor Ella's
things were sought out and packed up last night--the letter only came
yesterday. She has had no time to bid Rose and me, or any of her other
friends, good-bye. She started with Cyril early this morning, and I
don't know what Phyllis will do without her."
"She must do the best she can," said Annie promptly, "and occupy herself
with something better than gossiping with you when she chances to meet
you coming from school. I suppose that was the manner in which you heard
all this; I don't think Mrs. Carey will approve of such a waste of
time."
"But, Annie," pled May, with her dark eyes ready to brim over, "poor
Phyllis has only me now, and she has a great many messages to go,
because their single servant has so much work to do in the house that
she cannot get out marketing. Mrs. Carey is always walking or sitting
with Mr. Carey. If it were not so, Phyllis is sure that her mother would
go out and not mind taking the market-basket herself--a rough, heavy
market-basket. The Careys' servants used to complain because one of them
was expected to carry it in the mornings. Phyllis is glad to let me have
it sometimes, her arms get tired and ache so. You see Jack and Dick are
not often home from school in time, and then they have the boots and
knives to clean. Cyril would carry it for her after it was dark, but
Mrs. Carey won't let her go out then, and sends her off to bed that she
may get up earlier for what she has to do in the morning."
That rough market-basket over which the Careys' former servants had
grumbled, was like a badge of honour in certain shining eyes--far more
so than Thirza Dyer's thoroughbred, or Camilla and Gussy Dyer's
exquisite hats and dainty parasols. Even Annie Millar was not too old or
too wise to refrain from wishing that Mrs. Millar, who still would not
let her daughters soil their fingers if she could help it, had sent them
out marketing in their native town, each in her turn flourishing a
market-basket.
At another time it would be Rose who would arrive flushed and breathless
with the great piece of news that Ned Hewett had taken the post of
station-master at a small station somewhere on the Yorkshire moors. He
had done it when nothing else turned up, without waiting to consult his
father. But the Rector had not forbidden him when he heard. Steadiness
and punctuality had always been Ned's strong points, so that, though he
had not taken his degree at the university, and his old masters had said
they were not surprised to hear it, he might be trusted not to wreck
trains, slay their passengers, and find himself tried for manslaughter.
The difficulty was to fancy a big, slow fellow like Ned rushing here and
there in a noisy, fussy little station. After all, it would only be
noisy and fussy at long intervals, and on rare occasions, "somewhere on
the Yorkshire moors." Ned might have time and space to walk about in.
But what of the uniform? Would the poor boy--they had all known him as a
boy--who had once cherished the notion of going into the army, have to
wear a railway company's coat and a station-master's cap? How funny it
sounded! Well, not altogether funny. There were Dora and May crying at
the bare anticipation. If they were ever on the Yorkshire moors, and had
to greet Ned in this extraordinary guise, it would be awkward for all
parties, to say the least. What were they thinking of? Of course they
would be proud to greet him when he was twice the man that he had ever
been. No doubt Cyril Carey would be glad to have Ned's chance; Cyril,
who had renounced his delicate plush vests and Indian gold chains and
charms, his loitering and dawdling, and taken to a shabby shooting-suit
and spade-husbandry. He was getting rid of his time and keeping out of
his mother's way by digging aimlessly in the garden. He was inquiring,
in a desultory fashion, all over Redcross for any opening in an office
which he could fill. He was not likely to find such an opening unless
it were made for him out of charity. He had not been trained to office
work, and he was far from having Ned Hewett's reputation for steadiness
and punctuality. If Tom Robinson should be the charitable man and ask
Cyril, a schoolfellow and college chum, to help him with his accounts,
the head of "Robinson's" would have to be at the trouble of running up
every column of figures over again. Cyril might ride to hounds and row
in a boat-race with the best; he might even have some elegant
acquaintance with the renaissance and old French, and be capable of
distinguishing himself in stately Latin verse, though that sounded more
than doubtful when he had been plucked at his university--the
inhabitants of Redcross did not, as a rule, pretend to be judges in such
matters. What they did know, because it had oozed out some time before,
was that Cyril Carey, though a banker's son, was lamentably weak in
arithmetic, and his handwriting would have been held a disgrace to any
shop-boy.
Money was required to start lads in the world in the humblest fashion.
Ned Hewett wanted an outfit, and if possible furniture for his
station-house, that he might not begin on credit. Even girls, though
they had been a good deal set aside in such consideration, could not
enter on an independent career without money any more than boys could.
The Millars were therefore thankful that Mrs. Millar had a little money
of her own, not above a hundred and fifty pounds a year, settled upon
her from the first, by one of those marriage contracts which are so hard
to break, and she could use it to supply what was needed for the girls,
who were going into the world with such dauntless spirits and light
hearts.