Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Prince









THE HISTORY

OF

DAVID GRIEVE



BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

AUTHOR OF 'ROBERT ELSMERE,' ETC.

TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF MY MOTHER





CONTENTS

BOOK I CHILDHOOD

BOOK II YOUTH

BOOK III STORM AND STRESS

BOOK IV MATURITY




BOOK I CHILDHOOD




CHAPTER I


'Tak your hat, Louie! Yo're allus leavin summat behind yer.'

'David, yo go for 't,' said the child addressed to a boy by her
side, nodding her head insolently towards the speaker, a tall and
bony woman, who stood on the steps the children had just descended,
holding out a battered hat.

'Yo're a careless thing, Louie,' said the boy, but he went back and
took the hat.

'Mak her tie it,' said the woman, showing an antiquated pair of
strings. 'If she loses it she needna coom cryin for anudder. She'd
lose her yead if it wor loose.'

Then she turned and went back into the house. It was a smallish
house of grey stone, three windows above, two and a door below.
Dashes of white on the stone gave, as it were, eyebrows to the
windows, and over the door there was a meagre trellised porch, up
which grew some now leafless roses and honeysuckles. To the left of
the door a scanty bit of garden was squeezed in between the hill,
against which the house was set edgeways, and the rest of the flat
space, occupied by the uneven farmyard, the cart-shed and stable,
the cow-houses and duck-pond. This garden contained two shabby
apple trees, as yet hardly touched by the spring; some currant and
gooseberry bushes, already fairly green; and a clump or two of
scattered daffodils and wallflowers. The hedge round it was broken
through in various places, and it had a casual neglected air.

The children went their way through the yard. In front of them a
flock of some forty sheep and lambs pushed along, guarded by two
black short-haired collies. The boy, brandishing a long stick,
opened a gate deplorably in want of mending, and the sheep crowded
through, keenly looked after by the dogs, who waited meanwhile on
their flanks with heads up, ears cocked, and that air of
self-restrained energy which often makes a sheep-dog more human
than his master. The field beyond led to a little larch plantation,
where a few primroses showed among the tufts of long, rich grass,
and the drifts of last year's leaves. Here the flock scattered a
little, but David and the dogs were after them in a twinkling, and
the plantation gate was soon closed on the last bleating mother.
Then there was nothing more for the boy to do than to go up to the
top of the green rising ground on which the farm stood and see if
the gate leading to the moor was safely shut. For the sheep he had
been driving were not meant for the open moorland. Their feeding
grounds lay in the stone-walled fields round the homestead, and had
they strayed on to the mountain beyond, which was reserved for a
hardier Scotch breed, David would have been answerable. So he
strode, whistling, up the hill to have a look at that top gate,
while Louie sauntered down to the stream which ran round the lower
pastures to wait for him.

The top gate was fast, but David climbed the wall and stood there a
while, hands in his pockets, legs apart, whistling and looking.

'They can't see t' Downfall from Stockport to-day,' he was saying
to himself; 'it's coomin ower like mad.'

Some distance away in front of him, beyond the undulating heather
ground at his feet, rose a magnificent curving front of moor, the
steep sides of it crowned with black edges and cliffs of grit, the
outline of the south-western end sweeping finely up on the right to
a purple peak, the king of all the moorland round. No such colour
as clothed that bronzed and reddish wall of rock, heather, and
bilberry is known to Westmoreland, hardly to Scotland; it seems to
be the peculiar property of that lonely and inaccessible district
which marks the mountainous centre of mid-England--the district of
Kinder Scout and the High Peak. Before the boy's ranging eye spread
the whole western rampart of the Peak--to the right, the highest
point, of Kinder Low, to the left, 'edge' behind 'edge,' till the
central rocky mass sank and faded towards the north into milder
forms of green and undulating hills. In the very centre of the
great curve a white and surging mass of water cleft the mountain
from top to bottom, falling straight over the edge, here some two
thousand feet above the sea, and roaring downward along an almost
precipitous bed into the stream--the Kinder--which swept round the
hill on which the boy was standing, and through the valley behind
him. In ordinary times the 'Downfall,' as the natives call it, only
makes itself visible on the mountain-side as a black ravine of
tossed and tumbled rocks. But there had been a late snowfall on the
high plateau beyond, followed by heavy rain, and the swollen stream
was to-day worthy of its grand setting of cliff and moor. On such
occasions it becomes a landmark for all the country round, for the
cotton-spinning centres of New Mills and Stockport, as well as for
the grey and scattered farms which climb the long backs of moorland
lying between the Peak and the Cheshire border.

To-day, also, after the snow and rains of early April, the air was
clear again. The sun was shining; a cold, dry wind was blowing;
there were sounds of spring in the air, and signs of it on the
thorns and larches. Far away on the boundary wall of the farmland a
cuckoo was sitting, his long tail swinging behind him, his
monotonous note filling the valley; and overhead a couple of
peewits chased each other in the pale, windy blue.

The keen air, the sun after the rain, sent life and exhilaration
through the boy's young limbs. He leapt from the wall, and raced
back down the field, his dogs streaming behind him, the sheep, with
their newly dropped lambs, shrinking timidly to either side as he
passed. He made for a corner in the wall, vaulted it on to the
moor, crossed a rough dam built in the stream for sheep-washing
purposes, jumped in and out of the two grey-walled sheep-pens
beyond, and then made leisurely for a spot in the brook--not the
Downfall stream, but the Red Brook, one of its westerly
affluents--where he had left a miniature water-wheel at work the
day before. Before him and around him spread the brown bosom of
Kinder Scout; the cultivated land was left behind; here on all
sides, as far as the eye could see, was the wild home of heather
and plashing water, of grouse and peewit, of cloud and breeze.

The little wheel, shaped from a block of firwood, was turning
merrily under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a
neighbouring fall. David went down on hands and knees to examine
it. He made some little alteration in the primitive machinery of
it, his fingers touching it lightly and neatly, and then, delighted
with the success of it, he called Louie to come and look.

Louie was sitting a few yards further up the stream, crooning to
herself as she swung to and fro, and snatching every now and then
at some tufts of primroses growing near her, which she wrenched
away with a hasty, wasteful hand, careless, apparently, whether
they reached her lap or merely strewed the turf about her with
their torn blossoms. When David called her she gathered up the
flowers anyhow in her apron, and dawdled towards him, leaving a
trail of them behind her. As she reached him, however, she was
struck by a book sticking out of his pocket, and, stooping over
him, with a sudden hawk-like gesture, as he sprawled head
downwards, she tried to get hold of it.

But he felt her movement. 'Let goo!' he said imperiously, and,
throwing himself round, while one foot slipped into the water, he
caught her hand, with its thin predatory fingers, and pulled the
book away.

'Yo just leave my books alone, Louie. Yo do 'em a mischeef whaniver
yo can--an I'll not have it.'

He turned his handsome, regular face, crimsoned by his position and
splashed by the water, towards her with an indignant air. She
laughed, and sat herself down again on the grass, looking a very
imp of provocation.

'They're stupid,' she said, shortly. 'They mak yo a stupid gonner
ony ways.'

'Oh! do they?' he retorted, angrily. 'Bit I'll be even wi yo. I'll
tell yo noa moor stories out of 'em, not if yo ast iver so.'

The girl's mouth curled contemptuously, and she began to gather her
primroses into a bunch with an air of the utmost serenity. She was
a thin, agile, lightly made creature, apparently about eleven. Her
piercing black eyes, when they lifted, seemed to overweight the
face, whereof the other features were at present small and pinched.
The mouth had a trick of remaining slightly open, showing a line of
small pearly teeth; the chin was a little sharp and shrewish. As
for the hair, it promised to be splendid; at present it was an
unkempt, tangled mass, which Hannah Grieve, the children's aunt,
for her own credit's sake at chapel, or in the public street, made
occasional violent attempts to reduce to order--to very little
purpose, so strong and stubborn was the curl of it. The whole
figure was out of keeping with the English moorside, with the
sheep, and the primroses.

But so indeed was that of the boy, whose dark colouring was more
vivacious and pronounced than his sister's, because the red of his
cheek and lip was deeper, while his features, though larger than
hers, were more finely regular, and his eyes had the same piercing
blackness, the same all-examining keenness, as hers. The yellowish
tones of his worn fustian suit and a red Tam-o'-Shanter cap
completed the general effect of brilliancy and, as it were,
_foreignness_.

Having finished his inspection of his water-mill, he scrambled
across to the other side of the stream so as to be well out of his
sister's way, and, taking out the volume which was stretching his
pocket, he began to read it. It was a brown calf-bound book, much
worn, and on its title-page it bore the title of 'The Wars of
Jerusalem,' of Flavius Josephus, translated by S. Calmet, and a
date somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century. To this
antique fare the boy settled himself down. The two collies lay
couched beside him; a stone-chat perched on one or other of the
great blocks which lay scattered over the heath gave out his
clinking note; while every now and then the loud peevish cluck of
the grouse came from the distant sides of the Scout.

Titus was now making his final assault on the Temple. The Zealots
were gathered in the innermost court, frantically beseeching Heaven
for a sign; the walls, the outer approaches of the Sanctuary were
choked with the dying and the dead. David sat absorbed, elbows on
knees, his face framed in his hands. Suddenly the descent of
something cold and clammy on his bent neck roused him with a most
unpleasant shock.

Quick as lightning he faced round, snatching at his assailant; but
Louie was off, scudding among the bilberry hillocks with peals of
laughter, while the slimy moss she had just gathered from the edges
of the brook sent cold creeping streams into the recesses of
David's neck and shoulders. He shook himself free of the mess as
best he could, and rushed after her. For a long time he chased her
in vain, then her foot tripped, and he came up with her just as she
rolled into the heather, gathered up like a hedgehog against
attack, her old hat held down over her ears and face. David fell
upon her and chastised her; but his fisticuffs probably looked more
formidable than they felt, for Louie laughed provokingly all the
time, and when he stopped out of breath she said exultantly, as she
sprang up, holding her skirts round her ready for another flight,
'It's greened aw yur neck and yur collar--luvely! Doan't yo be
nassty for nothink next time!'

And off she ran.

'If yo meddle wi me ony moor,' he shouted after her fiercely, 'yo
see what I'll do!'

But in reality the male was helpless, as usual. He went ruefully
down to the brook, and loosening his shirt and coat tried to clean
his neck and hair. Then, extremely sticky and uncomfortable, he
went back to his seat and his book, his wrathful eyes taking
careful note meanwhile of Louie's whereabouts. And thenceforward he
read, as it were, on guard, looking up every other minute.

Louie established herself some way up the further slope, in a steep
stony nook, under two black boulders, which protected her rear in
case of reprisals from David. Time passed away. David, on the other
side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the
more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by
one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the
minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness.
All her resources were for the moment at an end. She could think of
no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew that she was
observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of primroses along
the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, and thrown them
away; she had found a grouse's nest among the dead fern, and,
contrary to the most solemn injunctions of uncle and keeper,
enforced by the direst threats, had purloined and broken an egg;
and still dinner-time delayed. Perhaps, too, the cold blighting
wind, which soon made her look blue and pinched, tamed her
insensibly. At any rate, she got up after about an hour, and coolly
walked across to David.

He looked up at her with a quick frown. But she sat down, and,
clasping her hands round her knees, while the primroses she had
stuck in her hat dangled over her defiant eyes, she looked at him
with a grinning composure.

'Yo can read out if yo want to,' she remarked.

'Yo doan't deserve nowt, an I shan't,' said David, shortly.

'Then I'll tell Aunt Hannah about how yo let t' lambs stray lasst
evenin, and about yor readin at neet.'

'Yo may tell her aw t' tallydiddles yo can think on,' was the
unpromising reply.

Louie threw all the scorn possible into her forced smile, and then,
dropping full-length into the heather, she began to sing at the top
of a shrill, unpleasing voice, mainly, of course, for the sake of
harrying anyone in her neighbourhood who might wish to read.

'Stop that squealing!' David commanded, peremptorily. Whereupon
Louie sang louder than before.

David looked round in a fury, but his fury was, apparently,
instantly damped by the inward conviction, born of long experience,
that he could do nothing to help himself. He sprang up, and thrust
his book into his pocket.

'Nobory ull mak owt o' yo till yo get a bastin twice a day, wi an
odd lick extra for Sundays,' he remarked to her with grim emphasis
when he had reached what seemed to him a safe distance. Then he
turned and strode up the face of the hill, the dogs at his heels.
Louie turned on her elbow, and threw such small stones as she could
discover among the heather after him, but they fell harmlessly
about him, and did not answer their purpose of provoking him to
turn round again.

She observed that he was going up to the old smithy on the side of
Kinder Low, and in a few minutes she got up and sauntered lazily
after him.

'T' owd smithy' had been the enchanted ground of David's childhood.
It was a ruined building standing deep in heather, half-way up the
mountain-side, and ringed by scattered blocks and tabular slabs of
grit. Here in times far remote--beyond the memory of even the
oldest inhabitant--the millstones of the district, which gave their
name to the 'millstone grit' formation of the Peak, were fashioned.
High up on the dark moorside stood what remained of the primitive
workshop. The fire-marked stones of the hearth were plainly
visible; deep in the heather near lay the broken jambs of the
window; a stone doorway with its lintel was still standing; and on
the slope beneath it, hardly to be distinguished now from the great
primaeval blocks out of which they had sprung and to which they
were fast returning, reposed two or three huge millstones. Perhaps
they bordered some ancient track, climbed by the millers of the
past when they came to this remote spot to give their orders; but,
if so, the track had long since sunk out of sight in the heather,
and no visible link remained to connect the history of this high
and lonely place with that of those teeming valleys hidden to west
and north among the moors, the dwellers wherein must once have
known it well. From the old threshold the eye commanded a
wilderness of moors, rising wave-like one after another, from the
green swell just below whereon stood Reuben Grieve's farm, to the
far-distant Alderley Edge. In the hollows between, dim tall
chimneys veiled in mist and smoke showed the places of the cotton
towns--of Hayfield, New Mills, Staleybridge, Stockport; while in
the far northwest, any gazer to whom the country-side spoke
familiarly might, in any ordinary clearness of weather, look for
and find the eternal smoke-cloud of Manchester.

So the deserted smithy stood as it were spectator for ever of that
younger, busier England which wanted it no more. Human life
notwithstanding had left on it some very recent traces. On the
lintel of the ruined door two names were scratched deep into the
whitish under-grain of the black weather-beaten grit. The upper one
ran: 'David Suveret Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863;' the lower, 'Louise
Stephanie Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863.' They were written in bold
round-hand, and could be read at a considerable distance. During
the nine months they had been there, many a rustic passer-by had
been stopped by them, especially by the oddity of the name
_Suveret_, which tormented the Derbyshire mouth.

In a corner of the walls stood something more puzzling still--a
large iron pan, filled to the brim with water, and firmly bedded on
a foundation of earth and stones. So still in general was the
shining sheltered round, that the branches of the mountain ash
which leant against the crumbling wall, the tufts of hard fern
growing among the stones, the clouds which sailed overhead, were
all delicately mirrored in it. That pan was David Grieve's dearest
possession, and those reflections, so magical, and so alive, had
contrived for him many a half-hour of almost breathless pleasure.
He had carried it off from the refuse-yard of a foundry in
the valley, where he had a friend in one of the apprentices.
The farm donkey and himself had dragged it thither on a certain
never-to-be-forgotten day, when Uncle Reuben had been on the other
side of the mountain at a shepherds' meeting in the Woodlands,
while Aunt Hannah was safely up to her elbows in the washtub. Boy's
back and donkey's back had nearly broken under the task, but there
the pan stood at last, the delight of David's heart. In a crevice
of the wall beside it, hidden jealously from the passer-by, lay the
other half of that perpetual entertainment it provided--a store of
tiny boats fashioned by David, and another friend, the lame
minister of the 'Christian Brethren' congregation at Clough End,
the small factory town just below Kinder, who was a sea-captain's
son, and with a knife and a bit of deal could fashion you any craft
you pleased. These boats David only brought out on rare occasions,
very seldom admitting Louie to the show. But when he pleased they
became fleets, and sailed for new continents. Here were the ships
of Captain Cook, there the ships of Columbus. On one side of the
pan lay the Spanish main, on the other the islands of the South
Seas. A certain tattered copy of the 'Royal Magazine,' with
pictures, which lay in Uncle Reuben's cupboard at home, provided
all that for David was to be known of these names and places. But
fancy played pilot and led the way; she conjured up storms and
islands and adventures; and as he hung over his pan high on the
Derbyshire moor, the boy, like Sidney of old, 'sailed the seas where
there was never sand'--the vast and viewless oceans of romance.




CHAPTER II


Once safe in the smithy, David recovered his temper. If Louie
followed him, which was probable, he would know better how to deal
with her here, with a wall at his back and a definite area to
defend, than he did in the treacherous openness of the heath.
However, just as he was settling himself down, with a sigh of
relief, between the pan and the wall, he caught sight of something
through one of the gaps of the old ruin which made him fling down
his book and run to the doorway. There, putting his fingers to his
mouth, he blew a shrill whistle along the side of the Scout. A bent
figure on a distant path stopped at the sound. It was an old man,
with a plaid hanging from his shoulders. He raised the stick he
held, and shook it in recognition of David's signal. Then resuming
his bowed walk, he came slowly on, followed by an old hound, whose
gait seemed as feeble as his master's.

David leant against the doorway waiting. Louie, meanwhile, was
lounging in the heather just below him, having very soon caught him
up.

'What d'yo want 'im for?' she asked contemptuously, as the
new-comer approached: 'he'd owt to be in th' sylum. Aunt Hannah says
he's gone that silly, he owt to be took up.'

'Well, he woan't be, then,' retorted David. 'Theer's nobory about as
ull lay a finger on 'im. He doan't do her no harm, nor yo noather.
Women foak and gells allus want to be wooryin soomthin.'

'Aunt Hannah says he lost his wits wi fuddlin,' repeated Louie
shrilly, striking straighter still for what she knew to be one of
David's tenderest points--his friendship for 'owd 'Lias Dawson,' the
queer dreamer, who, fifteen years before, had been the schoolmaster
of Frimley Moor End, and in local esteem 't' cliverest mon abeawt
t'Peak.'

David with difficulty controlled a hot inclination to fall upon his
sister once more. Instead, however, he affected not to hear her,
and shouted a loud 'Good mornin' to the old man, who was toiling up
the knoll on which the smithy stood.

'Lias responded feebly, panting hard the while. He sank down on a
stone outside the smithy, and for a while had neither breath nor
voice. Then he began to look about him; his heaving chest subsided,
and there was a rekindling of the strange blue eyes. He wore a high
white stock and neckcloth; his plaid hung round his emaciated
shoulders with a certain antique dignity; his rusty wideawake
covered hair still abundant and even curly, but snow-white; the
face, with its white eyebrows, was long, thin, and full of an
ascetic delicacy.

'Wal, Davy, my lad,' the old man said at last, with a sort of
pompous mildness; 'I winna blame yo for 't, but yo interrupted me
sadly wi yur whistlin. I ha been occupied this day wi business o'
_graat_ importance. His Majesty King Charles has been wi me
since seven o'clock this mornin. And for th' fust time I ha been
gettin reet to th' _bottom_ o' things wi him. I ha been
_probin_ him, Davy--probin him. He couldno riddle through wi
lees; I kept him to 't, as yo mun keep a horse to a jump--straight
an tight. I had it aw out about Strafford, an t'Five Members, an
thoose dirty dealins wi th' Irish devils! Yo should ha yerd it,
Davy--yo should, I'll uphowd yo!'

And placing his stick between his knees, the old man leant his
hands upon it, with a meditative and judicial air. The boy stood
looking down at him, a broad smile lighting up the dark and vivid
face. Old 'Lias supplied him with a perpetual 'spectacle' which
never palled.

'Coe him back, 'Lias, he's soomwheer about. Yo need nobbut coe him,
an he'll coom.'

'Lias looked fatuously pleased. He lifted his head and affected to
scan the path along which he had just travelled.

'Aye, I daur say he's not far.--Yor Majesty!'

And 'Lias laid his head on one side and listened. In a few seconds
a cunning smile stole over his lips.

'Wal, Davy, yo're in luck. He's noan so onwillin, we'st ha him here
in a twinklin. Yo may coe him mony things, but yo conno coe him
proud. Noa, as I've fund him, Charles Stuart has no soart o' pride
about him. Aye, theer yo are! Sir, your Majesty's obleeged an
humble servant!'

And, raising his hand to his hat, the old man took it off and swept
it round with a courtly deliberation. Then replacing it, he sat
with his face raised, as though to one standing near, his whole
attitude full of a careful and pompous dignity.

'Now then, yor Majesty,' said 'Lias grimly,' I'st ha to put that
question to yo, yance moor, yo wor noan so well pleased wi this
mornin. But yo shouldno be soa tender, mon! Th' truth can
do yo _noa_ harm, wheer yo are, an I'm nobbut askin for
_informashun's_ sake. Soa out wi it; I'st not use it agen yo.
_That--wee--bit--o'--damned--paper,_--man, what sent poor
Strafford to his eend--yo mind it?--aye, _'at yo do!_ Well,
now'--and the old man's tone grew gently seductive--_'explain
yursel._ We'n had _their_ tale,' and he pointed away to
some imaginary accusers. 'But yo mun trust an Englishman's sense o'
fair play. Say your say. We 'st gie yo a varra patient hearin.'

And with chin thrown up, and his half-blurred eyes blinking under
their white lashes, 'Lias waited with a bland imperativeness for the
answer.

'Eh?' said 'Lias at last, frowning and hollowing his hand to his
ear.

He listened another few seconds, then he dropped his hand sharply.

'What's 'at yo're sayin?' he asked hastily; ''at yo couldno help it,
not _whativer_--that i' truth yo had nothin to do wi't, no
moor than mysel--that yo wor _forcit_ to it--willy-nilly--by
them devils o' Parliament foak--by Mr. Pym and his loike, wi whom,
if God-amighty ha' not reckoned since, theer's no moor justice i'
His Kingdom than yo found i' yours?'

The words came out with a rush, tumbling over one another till they
suddenly broke off in a loud key of indignant scorn. Then 'Lias
fell silent a moment, and slowly shook his head over the inveterate
shuffling of the House of Stuart.

''Twinna do, man--'twinna do,' he said at last, with an air of
fine reproof. 'He wor your _friend_, wor that poor sinner
Strafford--your awn familiar friend, as t' Psalm says. I'm not
takin up a brief for him, t' Lord knows! He wor but meetin his
deserts, to _my_ thinkin, when his yed went loupin. But yo put
a black mark agen _yore_ name when yo signed that bit paper
for your awn skin's sake. Naw, naw, man, yo should ha lost your awn
yed a bit sooner fust. Eh, it wor base--it wor cooardly!'

'Lias's voice dropped, and he fell muttering to himself
indistinctly. David, bending over him, could not make out whether
it was Charles or his interlocutor speaking, and began to be afraid
that the old man's performance was over before it had well begun.
But on the contrary, 'Lias emerged with fresh energy from the gulf
of inarticulate argument in which his poor wits seemed to have lost
themselves awhile.

'But I'm no blamin yo awthegither,' he cried, raising himself, with
a protesting wave of the hand. 'Theer's naw mak o' mischief i' this
world, but t' _women_ are at t' bottom o't. Whar's that proud
foo of a wife o' yourn? Send her here, man; send her here! 'Lias
Dawson ull mak her hear reason! Now, Davy!'

And the old man drew the lad to him with one hand, while he raised
a finger softly with the other.

'Just study her, Davy, my lad,' he said in an undertone, which
swelled louder as his excitement grew, 'theer she stan's, by t' side
o' t' King. She's a gay good-lookin female, that I'll confess to,
but study her; look at her curls, Davy, an her paint, an her
nakedness. For shame, madam! Goo hide that neck o' yourn, goo hide
it, I say! An her faldaddles, an her jewles, an her ribbons. Is
that a woman--a French hizzy like that--to get a King out o'
trooble, wha's awready lost aw t' wits he wor born wi?'

And with sparkling eyes and outstretched arm 'Lias pointed sternly
into vacancy. Thrilled with involuntary awe the boy and girl looked
round them. For, in spite of herself, Louie had come closer, little
by little, and was now sitting cross-legged in front of 'Lias. Then
Louie's shrill voice broke in--

'Tell us what she's got on!' And the girl leant eagerly forward,
her magnificent eyes kindling into interest.

'What she's got on, my lassie? Eh, but I'm feart your yead, too, is
fu' o' gauds!--Wal, it's but nateral to females. She's aw in white
satin, my lassie,--an in her brown hair theer's pearls, an a blue
ribbon just howdin down t' little luve-locks on her forehead--an on
her saft neck theer's pearls again--not soa white, by a thoosand
mile, as her white skin--an t' lace fa's ower her proud shoothers,
an down her luvely arms--an she looks at me wi her angry eyes--Eh,
but she's a queen!' cried 'Lias, in a sudden outburst of
admiration. 'She hath been a persecutor o' th' saints--a varra
Jeezebel--the Lord hath put her to shame--but she's moor
sperrit--moor o't' blood o' kingship i' her little finger, nor
Charles theer in aw his body!'

And by a strange and crazy reversal of feeling, the old man sat in
a kind of ecstasy, enamoured of his own creation, looking into thin
air. As for Louie, during the description of the Queen's dress she
had drunk in every word with a greedy attention, her changing eyes
fixed on the speaker's face. When he stopped, however, she drew a
long breath.

'It's aw lees!' she said scornfully.

'Howd your tongue, Louie!' cried David, angrily.

But 'Lias took no notice. He was talking again very fast, but
incoherently. Hampden, Pym, Fairfax, Falkland--the great names
clattered past every now and then, like horsemen, through a maze of
words, but with no perceptible order or purpose. The phrases
concerning them came to nothing; and though there were apparently
many voices speaking, nothing intelligible could be made out.

When next the mists cleared a little from the old visionary's
brain, David gathered that Cromwell was close by, defending himself
with difficulty, apparently, like Charles, against 'Lias's
assaults. In his youth and middle age--until, in fact, an event of
some pathos and mystery had broken his life across, and cut him off
from his profession--'Lias had been a zealous teacher and a
voracious reader; and through the dreams of fifteen years the
didactic faculty had persisted and grown amazingly. He played
schoolmaster now to all the heroes of history. Whether it were
Elizabeth wrangling with Mary Stuart, or Cromwell marshalling his
Ironsides, or Buckingham falling under the assassin's dagger at
'Lias's feet, or Napoleon walking restlessly up and down the deck
of the 'Bellerophon,' 'Lias rated them every one. He was lord of a
shadow world, wherein he walked with kings and queens, warriors and
poets, putting them one and all superbly to rights. Yet so subtle
were the old man's wits, and so bright his fancy, even in
derangement, that he preserved through it all a considerable
measure of dramatic fitness. He gave his puppets a certain freedom;
he let them state their case; and threw almost as much ingenuity
into the pleading of it as into the refuting of it. Of late, since
he had made friends with Davy Grieve, he had contracted a curious
habit of weaving the boy into his visions.

'Davy, what's your opinion o' that?' or, 'Davy, my lad, did yo iver
hear sich clit-clat i' your life?' or again, 'Davy, yo'll not be
misled, surely, by sich a piece o' speshul-pleadin as that?'

So the appeals would run, and the boy, at first bewildered, and
even irritated by them, as by something which threw hindrances in
the way of the only dramatic entertainment the High Peak was likely
to afford him, had learnt at last to join in them with relish. Many
meetings with 'Lias on the moorside, which the old seer made alive
for both of them--the plundering of 'Lias's books, whence he had
drawn the brown 'Josephus' in his pocket--these had done more
than anything else to stock the boy's head with its present
strange jumble of knowledge and ideas. _Knowledge_, indeed, it
scarcely was, but rather the materials for a certain kind of
excitement.

'Wal, Davy, did yo hear that?' said 'Lias, presently, looking round
on the boy with a doubtful countenance, after Cromwell had given an
unctuous and highly Biblical account of the slaughter at Drogheda
and its reasons.

'How mony did he say he killed at that place?' asked the boy
sharply.

'Thoosands,' said Dawson, solemnly. 'Theer was naw mercy asked nor
gi'en. And those wha escaped knockin on t' yead were aw sold as
slaves--every mon jock o' them!'

A strong light of anger showed itself in David's face.

'Then he wor a cantin murderer! Yo mun tell him so! If I'd my way,
he'd hang for 't!'

'Eh, laddie, they were nowt but rebels an Papists,' said the old
man, complacently.

'Don't yo becall Papists!' cried David, fiercely, facing round upon
him. 'My mither wor a Papist.'

A curious change of expression appeared on 'Lias's face. He put his
hand behind his ear that he might hear better, turned a pair of
cunning eyes on David, while his lips pressed themselves together.

'Your mither wor a Papist? an your feyther wor Sandy Grieve. Ay,
ay--I've yeerd tell strange things o' Sandy Grieve's wife,' he said
slowly.

Suddenly Louie, who had been lying full length on her back in the
sun, with her hat over her face, apparently asleep, sat bolt
upright.

'Tell us what about her,' she said imperiously.

'Noa--noa,' said the old man, shaking his head, while a sort of
film seemed to gather over the eyes, and the face and features
relaxed--fell, as it were, into their natural expression of weak
senility, which so long as he was under the stress of his favourite
illusions was hardly apparent. 'But it's true--it's varra true--I've
yeerd tell strange things about Sandy Grieve's wife.'

And still aimlessly shaking his head, he sat staring at the
opposite side of the ravine, the lower jaw dropping a little.

'He knows nowt about it,' said David, roughly, the light of a
sombre, half-reluctant curiosity, which had arisen in his look,
dying down.

He threw himself on the grass by the dogs, and began teasing and
playing with them. Meanwhile Louie sat studying 'Lias with a
frowning hostility, making faces at him now and then by way of
amusement. To disappoint the impetuous will embodied in that small
frame was to commit an offence of the first order.

But one might as well make faces at a stone post as at old 'Lias
when his wandering fit was on him. When the entertainment palled,
Louie got up with a yawn, meaning to lounge back to the farm and
investigate the nearness of dinner. But, as she turned, something
caught her attention. It was the gleam of a pool, far away beyond
the Downfall, on a projecting spur of the moor.

'What d' yo coe that bit watter?' she asked David, suddenly
pointing to it.

David rolled himself round on his face, and took a look at the
bluish patch on the heather.

'It hasna got naw name,' he said, at a venture.

'Then yo're a stoopid, for it has,' replied Louie, triumphantly.
'It's t' _Mermaid_ Pool. Theer wor a Manchester mon at Wigsons'
last week, telling aw maks o' tales. Theer's a mermaid lives
in 't--a woman, I tell tha, wi' a fish's tail--it's in a book,
an he read it out, soa _theer_--an on Easter Eve neet she cooms
out, and walks about t' Scout, combin her hair--an if onybody sees
her an wishes for soomthin, they get it, sartin sure; an--'

'Mermaids is just faddle an nonsense,' interrupted David, tersely.

'Oh, is they? Then I spose books is faddle. Most on 'em are--t'
kind of books yo like--I'll uphowd yo!'

'Oh, is they?' said David, mimicking her. 'Wal, I like 'em, yo see,
aw t' same. I tell yo, mermaids is nonsense, cos I _know_ they
are. Theer was yan at Hayfield Fair, an the fellys they nearly
smashed t' booth down, cos they said it wor a cheat. Theer was just
a gell, an they'd stuffed her into a fish's skin and sewed 'er up;
an when yo went close yo could see t' stuffin runnin out of her. An
theer was a man as held 'er up by a wire roun her waist, an waggled
her i' t' watter. But t' foak as had paid sixpence to coom in, they
just took an tore down t' place, an they'd 'a dookt t' man an t'
gell boath, if th' coonstable hadn't coom. Naw, mermaids is faddle,'
he repeated contemptuously.

'Faddle?' repeated 'Lias, interrogatively.

The children started. They has supposed 'Lias was of doting and
talking gibberish for the rest of the morning. But his tone was
brisk and as David looked up he caught a queer flickering
brightness in the old man's eye, which showed him that 'Lias was
once more capable of furnishing amusement or information.

'What do they coe that bit watter, 'Lias?' he inquired, pointing to
it.

'That bit watter?' repeated 'Lias, eyeing it. A sort of vague
trouble came into his face, and his wrinkled hands lying on his
stick began to twitch nervously.

'Aye--theer's a Manchester man been cramming Wigsons wi tales--says
he gets 'em out of a book--'bout a woman 'at walks t' Scout Easter
Eve neet,--an a lot o' ninny-hommer's talk. Yo niver heer now about
it--did yo, 'Lias?'

'Yes, yo did, Mr. Dawson--now, didn't yo?' said Louis,
persuasively, enraged that David would never accept information
from her, while she was always expected to take it from him.

'A woman--'at walks t' Scout,' said 'Lias, uncertainly, flushing as
he spoke.

Then, looking tremulously from his companions to the pool, he said,
angrily raising his stick and shaking it at David, 'Davy, yo're
takin advantage--Davy, yo're doin what yo owt not. If my Margret
were here, she'd let yo know!'

The words rose into a cry of quavering passion. The children stared
at him in amazement. But as Davy, aggrieved, was defending himself,
the old man laid a violent hand on his arm and silenced him. His
eyes, which were black and keen still in the blanched face, were
riveted on the gleaming pool. His features worked as though under
the stress of some possessing force; a shiver ran through the
emaciated limbs.

'Oh! yo want to know abeawt Jenny Crum's pool, do yo?' he said at last
in a low agitated voice. 'Nobbut look, my lad!--nobbut look!--an see for
yoursen.'

He paused, his chest heaving, his eye fixed. Then, suddenly, he
broke out in a flood of passionate speech, still gripping David.

'_Passon Maine! Passon Maine!_--ha yo got her, th' owd woman?
Aye, aye--sure enough--'at's she--as yo're aw drivin afore
yo--hoontit like a wild beeast--wi her grey hair streamin, and her
hands tied--Ah!'--and the old man gave a wild cry, which startled
both the children to their feet. 'Conno yo hear her?--eh, but it's
enough to tear a body's heart out to hear an owd woman scream like
that!'

He stopped, trembling, and listened, his hand hollowed to his ear.
Louie looked at her brother and laughed nervously; but her little
hard face had paled. David laid hold of her to keep her quiet, and
shook himself free of 'Lias. But 'Lias took no notice of them now
at all, his changed seer's gaze saw nothing but the distance and
the pool.

'Are yo quite _sure_ it wor her, Passon?' he went on,
appealingly. 'She's nobbut owd, an it's a far cry fro her bit
cottage to owd Needham's Farm. An th' chilt might ha deed, and t'
cattle might ha strayed, and t' geyats might ha opened o'
theirsels! Yo'll not dare to speak agen _that_. They _might_?
Ay, ay, we aw know t' devil's strong; but she's eighty-one year
coom Christmas--an an--. Doan't, _doan't_ let t' childer see,
nor t' yoong gells! If yo let em see sich seets they'll breed
yo wolves, not babes! Ah!'

And again 'Lias gave the same cry, and stood half risen, his hands
on his staff, looking.

'What is it, 'Lias?' said David, eagerly; 'what is 't yo see?'

'Theer's my grandfeyther,' said 'Lias, almost in a whisper, 'an owd
Needham an his two brithers, an yoong Jack Needham's woife--her as
losst her babby--an yoong lads an lasses fro Clough End, childer
awmost, and t' coonstable, an Passon Maine--Ay--ay--yo've doon it!
Yo've doon it! She'll mak naw moor mischeef neets--she's gay quiet
now! T' watter's got her fasst enough!'

And, drawing himself up to his full height, the old man pointed a
quivering finger at the pool.

'Ay, it's got her--an your stones are tied fasst! Passon Maine says
she's safe--that yo'll see her naw moor--

    While holly sticks be green,
    While stone on Kinder Scoot be seen.

But _I_ tell yo, Passon Maine _lees!_ I tell yo t' witch ull
_walk_--t' witch ull _walk!_'

For several seconds 'Lias stood straining forward--out of
himself--a tragic and impressive figure. Then, in a moment, from
that distance his weird gift had been re-peopling, something else
rose towards him--some hideous memory, as it seemed, of personal
anguish, personal fear. The exalted seer's look vanished, the
tension within gave way, the old man shrank together. He fell back
heavily on the stone, hiding his face in his hands, and muttering
to himself.

The children looked at each other oddly. Then David, half afraid,
touched him.

'What's t' matter, 'Lias? Are yo bad?'

The old man did not move. They caught some disjointed words,--'cold--ay,
t' neet's cold, varra cold!'

''Lias!' shouted David.

'Lias looked up startled, and shook his head feebly.

'Are yo bad, 'Lias?'

'Ay!' said the old schoolmaster, in the voice of one speaking
through a dream--'ay, varra bad, varra cold--I mun--lig me down--a
bit.'

And he rose feebly. David instinctively caught hold of him, and led
him to a corner close by in the ruined walls, where the heather and
bilberry grew thick up to the stones. 'Lias sank down, his head fell
against the wall, and a light and restless sleep seemed to take
possession of him.

David stood studying him, his hands in his pockets. Never in all
his experience of him had 'Lias gone through such a performance as
this. What on earth did it mean? There was more in it than
appeared, clearly. He would tell Margaret, 'Lias's old wife, who
kept him and tended him like the apple of her eye. And he would
find out about the pool, anyway. _Jenny Crum's pool?_ What on
earth did that mean? The name had never reached his ears before. Of
course Uncle Reuben would know. The boy eyed it curiously, the
details of 'Lias's grim vision returning upon him. The wild
circling moor seemed suddenly to have gained a mysterious interest.

'Didn't I tell yo he wor gone silly?' said Louie, triumphantly, at
his elbow.

'He's not gone that silly, onyways, but he can freeten little
gells,' remarked David, dryly, instinctively putting out an arm,
meanwhile, to prevent her disturbing the poor sleeper.

'I worn't freetened,' insisted Louie; '_yo_ were! He may skrike
aw day if he likes--for aw I care. He'll be runnin into hedges
by dayleet soon. Owd churn-yed!'

'Howd your clatterin tongue!' said David, angrily, pushing her out
of the doorway. She lifted a loose sod of heather, which lay just
outside, flung it at him, and then took to her heels, and made for
the farm and dinner, with the speed of a wild goat.

David brushed his clothes, took a stroll with the dogs, and
recovered his temper as best he might. When he came back, pricked
by the state of his appetite, to see whether 'Lias had recovered
enough sanity to get home, he found the old man sitting up, looking
strangely white and exhausted, and fumbling, in a dazed way, for
the tobacco to which he always resorted at moments of nervous
fatigue. His good wife Margaret never sent him out without mended
clothes, spotless linen, and a paper of tobacco in his pocket. He
sat chewing it awhile in silence; David's remarks to him met with
only incoherent answers, and at last the schoolmaster got up and
with the help of his stick tottered off along the path by which he
had come. David's eyes followed the bent figure uneasily; nor did
he turn homeward till it disappeared over the brow.




CHAPTER III


Anyone opening the door of Needham Farm kitchen that night at eight
would have found the inmates at supper--a meagre supper, which
should, according to the rule of the house, have been eaten in
complete silence. Hannah Grieve, the children's aunt, and mistress
of the farm, thought it an offence to talk at meals. She had not
been so brought up.

But Louie this evening was in a state of nerves. The afternoon had
seen one of those periodical struggles between her and Hannah,
which did so much to keep life at Needham Farm from stagnating into
anything like comfort. The two combatants, however, must have taken
a certain joy in them, since they recurred with so much regularity.
Hannah had won, of course, as the grim self-importance of her
bearing amply showed. Louie had been forced to patch the
house-linen as usual, mainly by the temporary confiscation of her
Sunday hat, the one piece of decent clothing she possessed, and to
which she clung with a feverish attachment--generally, indeed,
sleeping with it beside her pillow. But, though she was beaten, she
was still seething with rebellion. Her eyes were red, but her
shaggy head was thrown back defiantly, and there was hysterical
battle in the expression of her sharply-tilted nose and chin.

'Mind yorsel,' cried Hannah angrily, as the child put down her
plate of porridge with a bang which made the housewife tremble for
her crockery.

'What's t' matter wi yo, Louie?' said Uncle Reuben, looking at her
with some discomfort. He had just finished the delivery of a long
grace, into which he had thrown much unction, and Louie's manners
made but an ill-fitting Amen.

'It's nasty!' said the child passionately. 'It's allus
porridge--porridge--porridge--porridge--an I hate it--an it's
bitter--an it's a shame! I wish I wor at Wigson's--'at I do!'

Davy glanced up at his sister under his eyebrows. Hannah scanned
her niece all over with a slow, observant scrutiny, as though she
were a dangerous animal that must be watched. Otherwise Louie might
have spoken to the wall for all the effect she produced. Reuben,
however, was more vulnerable.

'What d' yo want to be at Wigson's for?' he asked. 'Yo should
be content wi your state o' life, Louie. It's a sin to be
discontented--I've tellt yo so many times.'

'They've got scones and rhubarb jam for tea!' cried the child,
tumbling the news out as though she were bursting with it. 'Mrs.
Wigson, she's allus makin em nice things. She's kind, she is--she's
nice--she wouldn't make em eat stuff like this--she'd give it to
the pigs--'at she would!'

And all the time it was pitiful to see how the child was gobbling
up her unpalatable food, evidently from the instinctive fear, nasty
as it was, that it would be taken from her as a punishment for her
behaviour.

'Now, Louie, yo're a silly gell,' began Reuben, expostulating; but
Hannah interposed.

'I wudn't advise yo, Reuben Grieve, to go wastin your breath on
sich a minx. If I were yo, I'd keep it fur my awn eating.'

And she calmly put another slice of cold bacon on his plate, as
though reminding him of his proper business. Reuben fell silent and
munched his bacon, though he could not forbear studying his niece
every now and then uncomfortably. He was a tall, large-boned man,
with weakish eyes, sandy whiskers and beard, grown in a fringe
round his long face, and a generally clumsy and disjointed air. The
tremulous, uncertain movements of his hand as he stretched it out
for one article of food after another seemed to express the man's
character.

Louie went on gulping down her porridge. Her plate was just empty
when Hannah caught a movement of Reuben's fork. He was in the act
of furtively transferring to Louie a portion of bacon. But he could
not restrain himself from looking at Hannah as he held out the
morsel. Hannah's answering look was too much for him. The bacon
went into his mouth.

Supper over, Louie went out to sit on the steps, and Hannah
contemptuously forbore to make her come in and help clear away. Out
in the air, the child slowly quieted down. It was a clear, frosty
April night, promising a full moon. The fresh, nipping air blew on
the girl's heated temples and swollen eyes. Against her will
almost, her spirits came back. She swept Aunt Hannah out of her
mind, and began to plan something which consoled her. When would
they have their stupid prayers and let her get upstairs?

David meanwhile hung about the kitchen. He would have liked to ask
Uncle Reuben about the pool and 'Lias's story, but Hannah was
bustling about, and he never mentioned 'Lias in her hearing. To do
so would have been like handing over something weak, for which he
had a tenderness, to be worried.

But he rummaged out an old paper-covered guide to the Peak, which
he remembered to have been left at the farm one summer's day by a
passing tourist, who paid Hannah handsomely for some bread and
cheese. Turning to the part which concerned Clough End, Hayfield,
and the Scout, he found:--

'In speaking of the Mermaiden's Pool, it may be remarked that the
natives of several little hamlets surrounding Kinder Scout have
long had a tradition that there is a beautiful woman--an English
Hamadryad--lives in the side of the Scout; that she comes to bathe
every day in the Mermaid's Well, and that the man who has the good
luck to behold her bathing will become immortal and never die.'

David shut the book and fell pondering, like many another wiser
mortal before him, on the discrepancies of evidence. What was a
Hamadryad? and why no mention of Easter Eve? and what had it all to
do with the witch and Parson Maine and 'Lias's excitement?

Meanwhile, the thump made by the big family Bible as Hannah
deposited it on the table warned both him and the truant outside
that prayer-time had come. Louie came in noisily when she was
called, and both children lounged unwillingly into their appointed
seats.

Nothing but the impatience and indifference of childhood, however,
could have grudged Reuben Grieve the half-hour which followed.
During that one half-hour in the day, the mild, effaced man, whose
absent-minded ways and complete lack of business faculty were the
perpetual torment of his wife, was master of his house. While he
was rolling out the psalm, expounding the chapter, or 'wrestling'
in prayer, he was a personality and an influence even for the wife
who, in spite of a dumb congruity of habit, regarded him generally
as incompetent and in the way. Reuben's religious sense was strong
and deep, but some very natural and pathetically human instincts
entered also into his constant pleasure in this daily function.
Hannah, with her strong and harsh features settled into repose,
with her large hands, reddened by the day's work, lying idle in her
lap, sat opposite to him in silence; for once she listened to him,
whereas all day he had listened to her; and the moment made a daily
oasis in the life of a man who, in his own dull, peasant way, knew
that he was a failure, and knew also that no one was so well aware
of it as his wife.

With David and Louie the absorbing interest was generally to see
whether the prayer would be over before the eight-day clock struck
nine, or whether the loud whirr which preceded that event would be
suddenly and deafeningly let loose upon Uncle Reuben in the middle
of his peroration, as sometimes happened when the speaker forgot
himself. To-night that catastrophe was just avoided by a somewhat
obvious hurry through the Lord's Prayer. When they rose from their
knees Hannah put away the Bible, the boy and girl raced each other
upstairs, and the elders were left alone.

An hour passed away. Reuben was dozing peacefully in the
chimney-corner; Aunt Hannah had just finished putting a patch
on a pair of Reuben's trousers, was folding up her work and
preparing to rouse her slumbering companion, when a sound
overhead caught her ear.

'What's that chilt at now?' she exclaimed angrily, getting up and
listening. 'She'd owt ta been in bed long ago. Soomthin mischeevous,
I'll be bound. And lighting a dip beside her, she went upstairs
with a treacherously quiet step. There was a sound of an opening
door, and then Reuben downstairs was startled out of his snooze by
a sudden gamut of angry cries, a scurrying of feet, and Hannah
scolding loudly--

'Coom downstairs wi yo!--coom down an show your uncle what a figure
o' foon yo'n been makkin o' yorsel! I'st teach yo to burn three
candles down awbut to nothink 'at yo may bedizen yorsel in this
way. Coom along wi yo.'

There was a scuffle on the stairs, and then Hannah burst open the
door, dragging in an extraordinary figure indeed. Struggling and
crying in her aunt's grip was Louie. White trailing folds swept
behind her; a white garment underneath, apparently her nightgown,
was festooned with an old red-and-blue striped sash of some foreign
make. Round her neck hung a necklace of that gold filigree work
which spreads from Genoa all along the Riviera; her magnificent
hair hung in masses over her shoulders, crowned by the primroses of
the morning, which had been hurriedly twisted into a wreath by a
bit of red ribbon rummaged out of some drawer of odds-and-ends;
and her thin brown arms and hands appeared under the white
cloak--nothing but a sheet--which was being now trodden underfoot
in the child's passionate efforts to get away from her aunt. Ten
minutes before she had been a happy queen flaunting over her attic
floor in a dream of joy before a broken, propped-up looking-glass
under the splendid illumination of three dips, long since secreted
for purposes of the kind. Now she was a bedraggled, tear-stained
Fury, with a fierce humiliation and a boundless hatred glaring out
of the eyes, which in Aunt Hannah's opinion were so big as to be
'right down oogly.' Poor Louie!

Uncle Reuben, startled from his snooze by this apparition, looked
at it with a sleepy bewilderment, and fumbled for his spectacles.
'Ay, yo'd better luke at her close,' said Hannah, grimly, giving
her niece a violent shake as she spoke; 'I wor set yo should just
see her fur yance at her antics. Yo say soomtimes I'm hard on her.
Well, I'd ask ony pusson aloive if they'd put up wi this soart o'
thing--dressin up like a bad hizzy that waaks t' streets, wi
three candles--_three_, I tell yo, Reuben--flarin away, and the
curtains close to, an nothink but the Lord's mussy keepin 'em from
catchin. An she peacockin an gallivantin away enough to mak a cat
laugh!'

And Aunt Hannah in her enraged scorn even undertook a grotesque and
mincing imitation of the peacocking aforesaid. 'Let goo!' muttered
Louie between her shut teeth, and with a wild strength she at last
flung off her aunt and sprang for the door. But Hannah was too
quick for her and put her back against it. 'No--yo'll not goo till
your ooncle there's gien yo a word. He _shan't_ say I'm hard
on yo for nothink, yo good-for-nowt little powsement--he shall see
yo as yo are!'

And with the bitterness of a smouldering grievance, expressed in
every feature, Hannah looked peremptorily at her husband. He, poor
man, was much perplexed. The hour of devotion was past, and outside
it he was not accustomed to be placed in important situations.

'Louie--didn't yo know yo wor a bad gell to stay up and burn t'
candles, an fret your aunt?' he said with a feeble solemnity, his
look fixed on the huddled white figure against the mahogany press.

Louie stood with eyes resolutely cast down, and a forced smile,
tremulous, but insolent to a degree, slowly lifting up the corners
of her mouth as Uncle Reuben addressed her. The tears were still
running off her face, but she meant her smile to convey the
indomitable scorn for her tormentors which not even Aunt Hannah
could shake out of her.

Hannah Grieve was exasperated by the child's expression.

'Yo little sloot!' she said, seizing her by the arm again, and
losing her temper for good and all, 'yo've got your mither's bad
blude in yo--an it ull coom out, happen what may!'

'Hannah!' exclaimed Reuben, 'Hannah--mind yoursel.'

'My mither's _dead_,' said the child, slowly raising her dark,
burning eyes. 'My mither worn't bad; an if yo say she wor, yo're a
_beast_ for sayin it! I wish it wor yo wor dead, an my mither
wor here instead o' yo!'

To convey the concentrated rage of this speech is impossible. It
seemed to Hannah that the child had the evil eye. Even she quailed
under it.

'Go 'long wi yo,' she said grimly, in a white heat, while she
opened the door--'an the less yo coom into _my_ way for t'
future, the better.'

She pushed the child out and shut the door.

'Yo _are_ hard on her, Hannah!' exclaimed Reuben, in his
perplexity--pricked, too, as usual in his conscience.

The repetition of this parrot-cry, as it seemed to her, maddened
his wife.

'She's a wanton's brat,' she said violently; 'an she's got t'
wanton's blood.'

Reuben was silent. He was afraid of his wife in these moods. Hannah
began, with trembling hands, to pick up the contents of her
work-basket, which had been overturned in the scuffle.

Meanwhile Louie rushed upstairs, stumbling over and tearing her
finery, the convulsive sobs beginning again as soon as the tension
of her aunt's hated presence was removed.

At the top she ran against something in the dark. It was David, who
had been hanging over the stairs, listening. But she flung past
him.

'What's t' matter, Louie?' he asked in a loud whisper through the
door she shut in his face; 'what's th' owd crosspatch been slangin
about?'

But he got no answer, and he was afraid of being caught by Aunt
Hannah if he forced his way in. So he went back to his own room,
and closed, without latching, his door. He had had an inch of dip
to go to bed with, and had spent that on reading. His book was a
battered copy of 'Anson's Voyages,' which also came from 'Lias's
store, and he had been straining his eyes over it with enchantment.
Then had come the sudden noise upstairs and down, and his candle
and his pleasure had gone out together. The heavy footsteps of his
uncle and aunt ascending warned him to keep quiet. They turned into
their room, and locked their door as their habit was. David
noiselessly opened his window and looked out.

A clear moonlight reigned outside. He could distinguish the rounded
shapes, the occasional movements of the sheep in their pen to the
right of the farmyard. The trees in the field threw long shadows
down the white slope; to his left was the cart-shed with its black
caverns and recesses, and the branches of the apple-trees against
the luminous sky. Owls were calling in the woods below; sometimes a
bell round the neck of one of the sheep tinkled a little, and the
river made a distant background of sound.

The boy's heart grew heavy. After the noises in the Grieves' room ceased
he listened for something which he knew must be in the air, and caught
it--the sound of a child's long, smothered sobs. On most nights they
would not have made much impression on him. Louie's ways with her
brother were no more engaging than with the rest of the world; and she
was not a creature who invited consolation from anybody. David, too,
with his power of escape at any time into a world of books and dreams or
simply into the wild shepherd life of the moors, was often inclined to a
vague irritation with Louie's state of perpetual revolt. The food was
nasty, their clothes were ugly and scanty, Aunt Hannah was as hard as
nails--at the same time Louie was enough to put anybody's back up. What
did she get by it?--that was his feeling; though, perhaps, he never
shaped it. He had never felt much pity for her. She had a way of putting
herself out of court, and he was, of course, too young to see her life
or his own as a whole. What their relationship might mean to him was
still vague--to be decided by the future. Whatever softness there was in
the boy was at this moment called out by other people--by old 'Lias and
his wife; by Mr. Ancrum, the lame minister at Clough End; by the dogs;
hardly ever by Louie. He had grown used, moreover, to her perpetual
explosions, and took them generally with a boy's natural callousness.

But to-night her woes affected him as they had never done before.
The sound of her sobbing, as he stood listening, gradually roused
in him an unbearable restlessness. An unaccountable depression
stole upon him--the reaction, perhaps, from a good deal of mental
exertion and excitement in the day. A sort of sick distaste awoke
in him for most of the incidents of existence--for Aunt Hannah, for
Uncle Reuben's incomprehensible prayers, for the thought of the
long Puritanical Sunday just coming. And, in addition, the low
vibrations of that distant sobbing stirred in him again, by
association, certain memories which were like a clutch of physical
pain, and which the healthy young animal instinctively and
passionately avoided whenever it could. But to-night, in the dark
and in solitude, there were no distractions, and as the boy put his
head down on his arms, rolling it from side to side as though to
shake them off, the same old images pursued him--the lodging-house
room, and the curtainless iron bed in which he slept with his
father: reminiscences of some long, inexplicable anguish through
which that father had passed; then of his death, and his own lonely
crying. He seemed still to _feel_ the strange sheets in that
bed upstairs, where a compassionate fellow-lodger had put him the
night after his father died; he sat up again bewildered in the cold
dawn, filled with a home-sickness too benumbing for words. He
resented these memories, tried to banish them; but the nature on
which they were impressed was deep and rich, and, once shaken,
vibrated long. The boy trembled through and through. The more he
was ordinarily shed abroad, diffused in the life of sensation and
boundless mental curiosity, the blacker were these rare moments of
self-consciousness, when all the world seemed pain, an iron vice
which pinched and tortured him.

At last he went to his door, pulled it gently open, and with bare
feet went across to Louie's room, which he entered with infinite
caution. The moonlight was streaming in on the poor gauds, which
lay wildly scattered over the floor. David looked at them with
amazement. Amongst them he saw something glittering. He picked it
up, saw it was a gold necklace which had been his mother's, and
carefully put it on the little toilet table.

Then he walked on to the bed. Louie was lying with her face turned
away from him. A certain pause in the sobbing as he came near told
him that she knew he was there. But it began again directly, being
indeed a physical relief which the child could not deny herself. He
stood beside her awkwardly. He could think of nothing to say. But
timidly he stretched out his hand and laid the back of it against
her wet cheek. He half expected she would shake it off, but she did
not. It made him feel less lonely that she let it stay; the impulse
to comfort had somehow brought himself comfort. He stood there,
feeling very cold, thinking a whirlwind of thoughts about old
'Lias, about the sheep, about Titus and Jerusalem, and about
Louie's extraordinary proceedings--till suddenly it struck him that
Louie was not crying any more. He bent over her. The sobs had
changed into the long breaths of sleep, and, gently drawing away
his hand, he crept off to bed.




CHAPTER IV


It was Sunday afternoon, still cold, nipping, and sunny. Reuben
Grieve sat at the door of the farmhouse, his pipe in his hand, a
'good book' on his knee. Beyond the wall which bounded the farmyard
he could hear occasional voices. The children were sitting there,
he supposed. It gave him a sensation of pleasure once to hear a
shrill laugh, which he knew was Louie's. For all this morning,
through the long services in the 'Christian Brethren' chapel at
Clough End, and on the walk home, he had been once more pricked in
his conscience. Hannah and Louie were not on speaking terms. At
meals the aunt assigned the child her coarse food without a word,
and on the way to chapel and back there had been a stony silence
between them. It was evident, even to his dull mind, that the girl
was white and thin, and that between her wild temper and mischief
and the mirth of other children there was a great difference.
Moreover, certain passages in the chapel prayers that morning
had come home sharply to a mind whereof the only definite gift
was a true religious sensitiveness. The text of the sermon
especially--'Whoso loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how
shall he love God, whom he hath not seen?'--vibrated like an
accusing voice within him. As he sat in the doorway, with the sun
stealing in upon him, the clock ticking loudly at his back, and the
hens scratching round the steps, he began to think with much
discomfort about his dead brother and his brother's children.

As to his memories of the past, they may perhaps be transformed
here into a short family history, with some details added which
had no place in Reuben's mind. Twenty years before this present
date Needham--once Needham's--Farm had been held by Reuben's
father, a certain James Grieve. He had originally been a kind of
farm-labourer on the Berwickshire border, who, driven southwards in
search of work by the stress of the bad years which followed the
great war, had wandered on, taking a job of work here and another
there, and tramping many a score of weary miles between, till at
last in this remote Derbyshire valley he had found a final
anchorage. Needham Farm was then occupied by a young couple of
the name of Pierson, beginning life under fairly prosperous
circumstances. James Grieve took service with them, and they valued
his strong sinews and stern Calvinistic probity as they deserved.
But he had hardly been two years on the farm when his young
employer, dozing one winter evening on the shafts of his cart
coming back from Glossop market, fell off, was run over, and
killed. The widow, a young thing, nearly lost her senses with
grief, and James, a man of dour exterior and few words, set himself
to keep things going on the farm till she was able to look life in
the face again. Her sister came to be with her, and there, was a
child born, which died. She was left better provided for than most
women of her class, and she had expectations from her parents.
After the child's death, when the widow began to go about again,
and James still managed all the work of the farm, the neighbours
naturally fell talking. James took no notice, and he was not a man
to meddle with, either in a public-house or elsewhere. But
presently a crop of suitors for the widow began to appear, and it
became necessary also to settle the destiny of the farm. No one
outside ever knew how it came about, for Jenny Pierson, who was a
soft, prettyish creature, had given no particular sign; but one
Sunday morning the banns of James Grieve, bachelor, and Jenny
Pierson, widow, were suddenly given out in the Presbyterian chapel
at Clough End, to the mingled astonishment and disgust of the
neighbourhood.

Years passed away. James held his own for a time with any farmer of
the neighbourhood. But, by the irony of fate, the prosperity which
his industry and tenacity deserved was filched from him little by
little by the ill-health of his wife. She bore him two sons, Reuben
and Alexander, and then she sank into a hopeless, fretful invalid,
tormented by the internal ailment of which she ultimately died. But
the small farmer who employs little or no labour is lost without an
active wife. If he has to pay for the milking of his cows, the
making of his butter, the cooking of his food, and the nursing of
his children, his little margin of profit is soon eaten away; and
with the disappearance of this margin, existence becomes a blind
struggle. Even James Grieve, the man of iron will and indomitable
industry, was beaten at last in the unequal contest. The life at
the farm became bitter and tragic. Jenny grew more helpless and
more peevish year by year; James was not exactly unkind to her, but
he could not but revenge upon her in some degree that ruin of his
silent ambitions which her sickliness had brought upon him.

The two sons grew up in the most depressing atmosphere conceivable.
Reuben, who was to have the farm, developed a shy and hopeless
taciturnity under the pressure of the family chagrin and
privations, and found his only relief in the emotions and
excitements of Methodism. Sandy seemed at first more fortunate.
An opening was found for him at Sheffield, where he was apprenticed
to a rope-maker, a cousin of his mother's. This man died before
Sandy was more than halfway through his time, and the youth went
through a period of hardship and hand-to-mouth living which ended
at last in the usual tramp to London. Here, after a period of
semi-starvation, he found it impossible to get work at his own
trade, and finally drifted into carpentering and cabinet-making.
The beginnings of this new line of life were incredibly difficult,
owing to the jealousy of his fellow-workmen, who had properly
served their time to the trade, and did not see why an interloper
from another trade, without qualifications, should be allowed to
take the bread out of their mouths.

One of Sandy's first successes was in what was called a
'shop-meeting,' a gathering of all the employés of the firm he
worked for, before whom the North-countryman pleaded to be allowed
to earn his bread. The tall, finely grown, famished-looking lad
spoke with a natural eloquence, and here and there with a
Biblical force of phrase--the inheritance of his Scotch blood and
training--which astonished and melted most of his hearers. He was
afterwards let alone, and even taught by the men about him, in
return for 'drinks,' which swallowed up sometimes as much as a
third of his wages.

After two or three years he was fully master of his trade, an
admirable workman, and a keen politician to boot. All this time he
had spent his evenings in self-education, buying books with every
spare penny, and turning specially to science and mathematics. His
abilities presently drew the attention of the heads of the
Shoreditch firm for which he worked, and when the post of a foreman
in a West-end shop, in which they were largely interested, fell
vacant, it was their influence which put Sandy Grieve into the
well-paid and coveted post. He could hardly believe his own good
fortune. The letter in which he announced it to his father reached
the farm just as the last phase of his mother's long martyrdom was
developing. The pair, already old--James with work and anxiety, his
wife with sickness--read it together. They shut it up without a
word. Its tone of jubilant hope seemed to have nothing to do with
them, or seemed rather to make their own narrowing prospects look
more narrow, and the approach of the King of Terrors more black and
relentless, than before. Jenny lay back on her poor bed, with the
tears of a dumb self-pity running down her cheeks, and James's only
answer to it was conveyed in a brief summons to Sandy to come and
see his mother before the end. The prosperous son, broadened out of
knowledge almost by good feeding and good clothes, arrived. He
brought money, which was accepted without much thanks; but his
mother treated him almost as a stranger, and the dour James, while
not unwilling to draw out his account of himself, would look him up
and down from under his bushy grey eyebrows, and often interpose
with some sarcasm on his 'foine' ways of speaking, or his
'gen'leman's cloos.' Sandy was ill at ease. He was really anxious
to help, and his heart was touched by his mother's state; but
perhaps there was a strain of self-importance in his manner, a
half-conscious inclination to thank God that his life was not to be
as theirs, which came out in spite of him, and dug a gulf between
him and them. Only his brother Reuben, dull, pious, affectionate
Reuben, took to him, and showed that patient and wondering
admiration of the younger's cleverness, which probably Sandy had
reckoned on as his right from his parents also.

On the last evening of his stay--he had luckily been able to make
his coming coincide with an Easter three days' holiday--he was
sitting beside his mother in the dusk, thinking, with a relief
which every now and then roused in him a pang of shame, that in
fourteen or fifteen more hours he should be back in London, in the
world which made much of him and knew what a smart fellow he was,
when his mother opened her eyes--so wide and blue they looked in
her pinched, death-stricken face--and looked at him full.

'Sandy!'

'Yes, mother!' he said, startled--for he had been sunk in his own
thoughts--and laying his hand on hers.

'You should get a wife, Sandy.'

'Well, some day, mother, I suppose I shall,' he said, with a change
of expression which the twilight concealed.

She was silent a minute, then she began again, slow and feebly, but
with a strange clearness of articulation.

'If she's sick, Sandy, _doan't grudge it her._ Women 'ud die
fasster iv they could.'

The whole story of the slow consuming bitterness of years spoke
through those fixed and filmy eyes. Her son gave a sudden
irrepressible sob. There was a faint lightening in the little
wrinkled face, and the lips made a movement. He kissed her, and in
that last moment of consciousness the mother almost forgave him his
good clothes and his superior airs.

Poor Sandy! Looking to his after story, it seems strange that any
one should ever have felt him unbearably prosperous. About six
months after his mother's death he married a milliner's assistant,
whom he met first in the pit of a theatre, and whom he was already
courting when his mother gave him the advice recorded. She was
French, from the neighbourhood of Arles, and of course a Catholic.
She had come to London originally as lady's-maid to a Russian
family settled at Nice. Shortly after their arrival, her master
shot his young wife for a supposed intrigue, and then put an end to
himself. Naturally the whole establishment was scattered, and the
pretty Louise Suveret found herself alone, with a few pounds, in
London. Thanks to the kind offices of the book-keeper in the hotel
where they had been staying, she had been introduced to a milliner
of repute in the Bond Street region, and the results of a trial
given her, in which her natural Frenchwoman's gift and her acquired
skill came out triumphant, led to her being permanently engaged.
Thenceforward her good spirits--which had been temporarily
depressed, not so much by her mistress's tragic ending as by her
own unexpected discomfort--reappeared in all their native
exuberance, and she proceeded to enjoy London. She defended herself
first against the friendly book-keeper, who became troublesome, and
had to be treated with the most decided ingratitude. Then she
gradually built herself up a store of clothes of the utmost
elegance, which were the hopeless envy of the other girls employed
at Madame Catherine's. And, finally, she looked about for
serviceable acquaintances.

One night, in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, while 'The Lady of
Lyons' was going on, Sandy Grieve found himself next to a dazzling
creature, with fine black eyes, the smooth olive skin of the South,
white teeth, and small dimpled hands, hardly spoilt at all by her
trade. She had with her a plain girl-companion, and her manner,
though conscious and provocative, had that haughtiness, that
implied readiness to take offence, which is the _grisette's_
substitute for breeding. She was, however, affable to Sandy, whose
broad shoulders and handsome, well-to-do air attracted her
attention. She allowed him to get her a programme, to beguile her
into conversation, and, finally, to offer her a cup of coffee.
Afterwards he escorted the two to the door of their lodging, in one
of the streets off Theobald's Road, and walked home in a state of
excitement which astonished him.

This happened immediately before his visit to the farm and his
mother's death. During the six months after that event Sandy knew
the 'joy of eventful living.' He was establishing his own business
position, and he was courting Louise Suveret with alternations of
despair and flattered passion, which stirred the now burly,
full-blooded North-countryman to his depths. She let him escort her
to her work in the morning and take her home in the evening, and
she allowed him to give her as many presents of gloves, ribbons,
bonbons--for which last she had a childish passion--and the like,
as he pleased. But when he pressed her to marry him she generally
laughed at him. She was, in reality, observing her world,
calculating her chances, and she had several other strings to her
bow, as Sandy shrewdly suspected, though she never allowed his
jealousy any information to feed upon. It was simply owing to the
failure of the most promising of these other strings--a failure
which roused in Louise one of those white heats of passion
which made the chief flaw in her organisation, viewed as a
pleasure-procuring machine--that Sandy found his opportunity. In a
moment of mortal chagrin and outraged vanity she consented to marry
him, and three weeks afterwards he was the blissful owner of the
black eyes, the small hands, the quick tongue, and the seductive
_chiffons_ he had so long admired more or less at a distance.

Their marriage lasted six years. At first Louise found some
pleasure in arranging the little house Sandy had taken for her
in a new suburb, and in making, wearing, and altering the
additional gowns which their joint earnings--for she still worked
intermittently at her trade--allowed her to enjoy. After the first
infatuation was a little cooled, Sandy discovered in her a paganism
so unblushing that his own Scotch and Puritan instincts reacted in
a sort of superstitious fear. It seemed impossible that God
Almighty should long allow Himself to be flouted as Louise flouted
Him. He found also that the sense of truth was almost non-existent
in her, and her vanity, her greed of dress and admiration, was so
consuming, so frenzied, that his only hope of a peaceful life--as
he quickly realised--lay in ministering to it. Her will soon got
the upper hand, and he sank into the patient servant of her
pleasures, snatching feverishly at all she gave him in return with
the instinct of a man who, having sold his soul, is determined at
least to get the last farthing he can of the price.

They had two children in four years--David Suveret and Louise
Stephanie. Louise resented the advent of the second so intensely
that poor Sandy become conscious, before the child appeared, of a
fatal and appalling change in her relation to him. She had been
proud of her first-born--an unusually handsome and precocious
child--and had taken pleasure in dressing it and parading it before
the eyes of the other mothers in their terrace, all of whom she
passionately despised. But Louie nearly died of neglect, and the
two years that followed her birth were black indeed for Sandy. His
wife, he knew, had begun to hate him; in business his energies
failed him, and his employers cooled towards him as he grew visibly
less pushing and inventive. The little household got deeper and
deeper into debt, and towards the end of the time Louise would
sometimes spend the whole day away from home without a word of
explanation. So great was his nervous terror--strong, broad fellow
that he was--of that pent-up fury in her, which a touch might have
unloosed, that he never questioned her. At last the inevitable end
came. He got home one summer evening to find the house empty and
ransacked, the children--little things of five and two--sitting
crying in the desolate kitchen, and a crowd of loud-voiced,
indignant neighbours round the door. To look for her would have
been absurd. Louise was much too clever to disappear and leave
traces behind. Besides, he had no wish to find her. The hereditary
self in him accepted his disaster as representing the natural
retribution which the canny Divine vengeance keeps in store for
those who take to themselves wives of the daughters of Heth. And
there was the sense, too, of emerging from something unclean, of
recovering his manhood.

He took his two children and went to lodgings in a decent street
near the Gray's Inn Road. There for a year things went fairly well
with him. His boy and girl, whom he paid a neighbour to look after
during the day, made something to come home to. As he helped the
boy, who was already at school, with his lesson for the next day,
or fed Louie, perched on his knee, with the bits from his plate
demanded by her covetous eyes and open mouth, he got back, little
by little, his self-respect. He returned, too, in the evenings to
some of his old pursuits, joined a Radical club near, and some
science lectures. He was aged and much more silent than of yore,
but not unhappy; his employers, too, feeling that their man had
somehow recovered himself, and hearing something of his history,
were sorry for him, and showed it.

Then one autumn evening a constable knocked at his door, and,
coming in upon the astonished group of father and children,
produced from his pocket a soaked and tattered letter, and showing
Sandy the address, asked if it was for him. Sandy, on seeing it,
stood up, put down Louie, who, half undressed, had been having a
ride on his knee, and asked his visitor to come out on to the
landing. There he read the letter under the gas-lamp, and put it
deliberately into his pocket.

'Where is she?' he asked.

'In Lambeth mortuary,' said the man briefly--'picked up two hours
ago. Nothing else found on her but this.'

Half an hour afterwards Sandy stood by a slab in the mortuary, and,
drawing back a sheet which covered the burden on it, stood face to
face with his dead wife. The black brows were drawn, the small
hands clenched. What struck Sandy with peculiar horror was that one
delicate wrist was broken, having probably struck something in
falling. She--who in life had rebelled so hotly against the least
shadow of physical pain! Thanks to the bandage which had been
passed round it, the face was not much altered. She could not have
been long in the water. Probably about the time when he was walking
home from work, she--He felt himself suffocating--the bare
whitewashed walls grew dim and wavering.

The letter found upon her was the strangest appeal to his pity. Her
seducer had apparently left her; she was in dire straits, and there
was, it seemed, no one but Sandy in all London on whose compassion
she could throw herself. She asked him, callously, for money to
take her back to some Nice relations. They need only know what she
chose to tell them, as she calmly pointed out, and, once in Nice,
she could make a living. She would like to see her children, she
said, before she left, but she supposed he would have to settle
that. How had she got his address? From his place of business
probably, in some roundabout way.

Then what had happened? Had she been seized with a sudden
persuasion that he would not answer, that it was all useless
trouble; and in one of those accesses of blind rage by which her
clear, sharp brain-life was at all times apt to be disturbed, had
she rushed out to end it all at once and for ever? It made him
forgive her that she _could_ have destroyed herself--could
have faced that awful plunge--that icy water--that death-struggle
for breath. He gauged the misery she must have gone through by what
he knew of her sensuous love for comfort, for _bien-être_. He
saw her again as she had been that night at the theatre when they
first met,--the little crisp black curls on the temples, the
dazzling eyes, the artificial pearls round the neck, the slight
traces of powder and rouge on brow and cheek, which made her all
the more attractive and tempting to his man's eye--the pretty foot,
which he first noticed as she stepped from the threshold of the
theatre into the street. Nature had made all that, to bring her
work to this grim bed at last!

He himself died eighteen months afterwards. His acquaintances never
dreamt of connecting his death with his wife's, and the connection,
if it existed, would have been difficult to trace. Still, if little
David could have put his experiences at this time into words, they
might have thrown some light on an event which was certainly a
surprise to the small world which took an interest in Sandy Grieve.

There was a certain sound which remained all through his life
firmly fixed in David's memory, and which he never thought of
without a sense of desolation, a shiver of sick dismay, such as
belonged to no other association whatever. It was the sound of a
long sigh, brought up, as it seemed, from the very depths of being,
and often, often repeated. The thought of it brought with it a
vision of a small bare room at night, with two iron bedsteads, one
for Louie, one for himself and his father; a bit of smouldering
fire in a tiny grate, and beside it a man's figure bowed over the
warmth, thrown out dark against the distempered wall, and sitting
on there hour after hour; of a child, wakened intermittently by the
light, and tormented by the recurrent sound, till it had once more
burrowed into the bed-clothes deep enough to shut out everything
but sleep. All these memories belonged to the time immediately
following on Louise's suicide. Probably, during the interval
between his wife's death and his own, Sandy suffered severely from
the effects of strong nervous shock, coupled with a certain growth
of religious melancholy, the conditions for which are rarely
wanting in the true Calvinist blood. Owing to the privations and
exposure of his early manhood, too, it is possible that he was
never in reality the strong man he looked. At any rate, his fight
for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. The second
winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold; he was overworked,
and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day struck home. He
took to his bed with a chill, which turned to peritonitis; the
system showed no power of resistance, and he died.

On the day but one before he died, when the mortal pain was gone,
but death was absolutely certain, he sent post-haste for his
brother Reuben. Reuben he believed was married to a decent woman,
and to Reuben he meant to commend his children.

Reuben arrived, looking more bewildered and stupid than ever, pure
countryman that he was, in this London which he had never seen.
Sandy looked at him with a deep inward dissatisfaction. But what
could he do? His marriage had cut him off from his old friends, and
since its wreck he had had no energy wherewith to make new ones.

'I've never seen your wife, Reuben,' he said, when they had talked
awhile.

Reuben was silent a minute, apparently collecting his thoughts.

'Naw,' he said at last; 'naw. She sent yo her luve, and she hopes iv
it's the Lord's will to tak yo, that it ull foind yo prepared.'

He said it like a lesson. A sort of nervous tremor and shrinking
overspread Sandy's face. He had suffered so much through religion
during the last few months, that in this final moment of humanity
the soul had taken refuge in numbness--apathy. Let God decide. He
could think it out no more; and in this utter feebleness his terror
of hell--the ineradicable deposit of childhood and inheritance--had
passed away. He gathered his forces for the few human and practical
things which remained to him to do.

'Did she get on comfortable with father?' he asked, fixing Reuben
with his eyes, which had the penetration of death.

Reuben looked discomposed, and cleared his throat once or twice.

'Wal, it warn't what yo may call just coomfortable atween 'em. Naw,
I'll not say it wor.'

'What was wrong?' demanded Sandy.

Reuben fidgeted.

'Wal,' he said at last, throwing up his head in desperation, 'I
spose a woman likes her house to hersel when she's fust married. He
wor childish like, an mighty trooblesome times. An she's allus
stirrin, and rootin, is Hannah. Udder foak mus look aloive too.'

The conflict in Reuben's mind between his innate truthfulness and
his desire to excuse his wife was curious to see. Sandy had a
vision of his father sitting in his dotage by his own hearth, and
ministered to by a daughter-in-law who grudged him his years and
his infirmities, as he had grudged his wife all the troublesome
incidents of her long decay. But it only affected him now as it
bore upon what was still living in him, the one feeling which still
survived amid the wreck made by circumstance and disease.

'Will she be kind to _them?_' he said sharply, which a motion
of the head towards the children, first towards David, who sat
drooping on his father's bed, where for some ten or twelve hours
now he had remained glued, refusing to touch either breakfast or
dinner, and then towards Louie, who was on the floor by the fire,
with her rag dolls, which she was dressing up with smiles and
chatter in a strange variety of finery. 'If not, she shan't have
'em. There's time yet.'

But the grey hue was already on his cheek, his feet were already
cold. The nurse in the far corner of the room, looking up as he
spoke, gave him mentally 'an hour or two.'

Reuben flushed and sat bolt upright, his gnarled and wrinkled hands
trembling on his knees.

'She _shall_ be kind to 'em,' he said with energy. 'Gie 'em to
us, Sandy. Yo wouldna send your childer to strangers?'

The clannish instinct in Sandy responded. Besides, in spite of his
last assertion, he knew very well there was nothing else to be
done.

'There's money,' he said slowly. 'She'll not need to stint them of
anything. This is a poor place,' for at the word 'money' he noticed
that Reuben's eyes travelled with an awakening shrewdness over the
barely furnished room; 'but it was the debts first, and then I had
to put by for the children. None of the shop-folk or the fellows
at the club ever came here. We lived as we liked. There's an
insurance, and there's some savings, and there's some commission
money owing from the firm, and there's a bit investment Mr. Gurney
(naming the head partner) helped me into last year. There's
altogether about six hundred pound. You'll get the interest of it
for the children; it'll go into Gurneys', and they'll give five per
cent. for it. Mr. Gurney's been very kind. He came here yesterday,
and he's got it all. You go to him.'

He stopped for weakness. Reuben's eyes were round. Six hundred
pounds! Who'd have thought it of Sandy?--after that bad lot of a
wife, and he not thirty!

'An what d' yo want Davy to be, Sandy?'

'You must settle,' said the father, with a long sigh. 'Depends on
him what he turns to. If he wants to farm, he can learn with you,
and put in his money when he sees an opening. For the bit farms in
our part there'd be enough. But I'm feeart'(the old Derbyshire word
slipped out unawares)'he'll not stay in the country. He's too
sharp, and you mustn't force him. If you see he's not the farming
sort, when he's thirteen or fourteen or so, take Mr. Gurney's
advice, and bind him to a trade. Mr. Gurney'll pay the premiums for
him and he can have the balance of the money--for I've left him to
manage it all, for himself and Louie too--when he's fit to set up
for himself.--You and Hannah'll deal honest wi 'em?'

The question was unexpected, and as he put it with a startling
energy the dying man raised himself on his elbow, and looked
sharply at his brother.

'D' yo think I'd cheat yo, or your childer, Sandy?' cried Reuben,
flushing and pricked to the heart.

Sandy sank back again, his sudden qualm appeased. 'No,' he said, his
thoughts returning painfully to his son. 'I'm feeart he'll not stay
wi you. He's cleverer than I ever was, and I was the cleverest of
us all.'

The words had in them a whole epic of human fate. Under the prick
of them Reuben found a tongue, not now for his wife, but for
himself.

'It's not cliverness as ull help yo now, Sandy, wi your Maaker! and
yo feeace t' feeace wi 'un!' he cried. 'It's nowt but satisfacshun
by t' blood o' Jesus!'

Sandy made no answer, unless, indeed, the poor heart within made
its last cry of agony to heaven at the words. The sinews of the
spiritual as well as the physical man were all spent and useless.

'Davy,' he called presently. The child, who had been sitting
motionless during this talk watching his father, slid along the bed
with alacrity, and tucking his little legs and feet well away from
Sandy's long frame, put his head down on the pillow. His father
turned his eyes to him, and with a solemn, lingering gaze took in
the childish face, the thick, tumbled hair, the expression, so
piteous, yet so intelligent. Then he put up his own large hand, and
took both the boy's into its cold and feeble grasp. His eyelids
fell, and the breathing changed. The nurse hurriedly rose, lifted
up Louie from her toys, and put her on the bed beside him. The
child, disturbed in her play and frightened by she knew not what,
set up a sudden cry. A tremor seemed to pass through the shut lids
at the sound, a slight compression of pain appeared in the grey
lips. It was Sandy Grieve's last sign of life.

Reuben Grieve remembered well the letter he had written to his
wife, with infinite difficulty, from beside his brother's dead
body. He told her that he was bringing the children back with him.
The poor bairns had got nobody in the world to look to but their
uncle and aunt. And they would not cost Hannah a penny. For Mr.
Gurney would pay thirty pounds a year for their keep and bringing
up.

With what care and labour his clumsy fingers had penned that last
sentence so that Hannah might read it plain!

Afterwards he brought the children home. As he drove his light cart
up the rough and lonely road to Needham Farm, Louie cried with the
cold and the dark, and Davy, with his hands tucked between his
knees, grew ever more and more silent, his restless little head
turning perpetually from side to side, as though he were trying to
discover something of the strange, new world to which he had been
brought, through the gloom of the February evening.

Then at the sound of wheels outside in the lane, the back door of
the farm was opened, and a dark figure stood on the threshold.

'Yo're late,' Reuben heard. It was Hannah's piercing voice that
spoke. 'Bring 'em into t'back kitchen, an let 'em take their shoes off
afore they coom ony further.'

By which Reuben knew that it had been scrubbing-day, and that her
flagstones were more in Hannah's mind than the guests he had
brought her. He obeyed, and then the barefooted trio entered the
front kitchen together. Hannah came forward and looked at the
children--at David white and blinking--at the four-year-old Louie,
bundled up in an old shawl, which dragged on the ground behind her,
and staring wildly round her at the old low-roofed kitchen with the
terror of the trapped bird.

'Hannah, they're varra cold,' said Reuben--'ha yo got summat hot?'

'Theer'll be supper bime-by,' Hannah replied with decision. 'I've
naw time scrubbin-days to be foolin about wi things out o' hours.
I've nobbut just got straight and cleaned mysel. They can sit
down and warm theirsels. I conno say they feature ony of _yor_
belongins, Reuben.' And she went to put Louie on the settle by the
fire. But as the tall woman in black approached her, the child hit
out madly with her small fists and burst into a loud howl of
crying.

'Get away, nasty woman! _Nasty_ woman--ugly woman! Take me
away--I want my daddy,--I want my daddy.' And she threw herself
kicking on the floor, while, to Hannah's exasperation, a piece of
crumbling bun she had been holding tight in her sticky little hand
escaped and littered all the new-washed stones.

'Tak yor niece oop, Reuben, an mak her behave'--the mistress of the
house commanded angrily. 'She'll want a stick takken to her, soon,
_I_ can see.'

Reuben obeyed so far as he could, but Louie's shrieks only ceased
when, by the combined efforts of husband and wife, she had been put
to bed, so exhausted with rage, excitement, and the journey, that
sleep mercifully took possession of her just after she had
performed the crowning feat of knocking the tea and bread and
butter Reuben brought her out of her uncle's hand and all over the
room.

Meanwhile, David sat perfectly still in a chair against the wall,
beside the old clock, and stared about him; at the hams and bunches
of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling; at the chiffonnier, with
its red baize doors under a brass trellis-work; at the high wooden
settle, the framed funeral cards, and the two or three coloured
prints, now brown with age, which Reuben had hung up twenty years
before, to celebrate his marriage. Hannah was propitiated by the
boy's silence, and as she got supper ready she once or twice
noticed his fine black eyes and his curly hair.

'Yo can coom an get yor supper,' she said to him, more graciously
than she had spoken yet. 'It's a mussy yo doant goo skrikin like
your sister.'

'Thank you, ma'am,' said the little fellow, with a townsman's
politeness, hardly understanding, however, a word of her
north-country dialect--' I'm not hungry.--You've got a picture of
General Washington there, ma'am;' and, raising a small hand
trembling with nervousness and fatigue, he pointed to one of the
prints opposite.

'Wal, I niver,' said Hannah, with a stare of astonishment. 'Yo're a
quare lot--the two o' yer.'

One thing more Reuben remembered with some vividness in connection
with the children's arrival. When they were both at last
asleep--Louie in an unused room at the back, on an old wooden
bedstead, which stood solitary in a wilderness of bare boards;
David in a sort of cupboard off the landing, which got most of its
light and air from a wooden trellis-work, overlooking the
staircase--Hannah said abruptly to her husband, as they two were
going to bed, 'When ull Mr. Gurney pay that money?'

'Twice a year--so his clerk towd me--Christmas an Midsummer. Praps
we shan't want to use it aw, Hannah; praps we might save soom on it
for t' childer. Their keep, iv yo feed em on parritch, is nobbut a
fleabite, an they'n got a good stock o' cloos, Sandy's nurse towd
me.'

He looked anxiously at Hannah. In his inmost heart there was a
passionate wish to do his duty to Sandy's orphans, fighting with a
dread of his wife, which was the fruit of long habit and
constitutional weakness.

Hannah faced round upon him. It was Reuben's misfortune that
dignity was at all times impossible to him. Now, as he sat in his
shirt-sleeves and stocking-feet, flushed with the exertion of
pulling off his heavy boots, the light of the tallow candle falling
on his weak eyes with their red rims, on his large open mouth with
the conspicuous gap in its front teeth, and his stubby hair, he was
more than usually grotesque. 'As slamp an wobbly as an owd
corn-boggart,' so his neighbours described him when they wished to
be disrespectful, and the simile fitted very closely with the
dishevelled, disjointed appearance which was at all times
characteristic of him, Sundays or weekdays. No one studying the
pair, especially at such a moment as this--the _malaise_ of
the husband--the wife towering above him, her grey hair hanging
loose round her black brows and sallow face instinct with a rugged
and indomitable energy--could have doubted in whose hands lay the
government of Needham Farm.

'I'll thank yo not to talk nonsense, Reuben Grieve,' said his wife
sharply. 'D'yo think they're _my_ flesh an blood, thoose
childer? An who'll ha to do for 'em but me, I should loike to know?
Who'll ha to put up wi their messin an their dirt but _me_?
Twenty year ha yo an I been married, Reuben, an niver till
this neet did I ha to goo down on my knees an sweep oop after
scrubbin-day! Iv I'm to be moidered wi em, I'll be paid for 't.
Soa I let yo know--it's little enough.'

And Hannah took her payment. As he sat in the sun, looking back on
the last seven years, with a slow and dreaming mind, Reuben
recognised, using his own phrases for the matter, that the
children's thirty pounds had been the pivot of Hannah's existence.
He was but a small sheep farmer, with very scanty capital. By dint
of hard work and painful thrift, the childless pair had earned a
sufficient living in the past--nay, even put by a bit, if the
truth of Hannah's savings-bank deposits were known. But every
fluctuation in their small profits tried them sorely--tried
Hannah especially, whose temper was of the brooding and grasping
order. The _certainty_ of Mr. Gurney's cheques made them very
soon the most cheerful facts in the farm life. On two days in the
year--the 20th of June and the 20th of December--Reuben might be
sure of finding his wife in a good temper, and he had long shrewdly
suspected, without inquiring, that Hannah's savings-bank book,
since the children came, had been very pleasant reading to her.

Reuben fidgeted uncomfortably as he thought of those savings.
Certainly the children had not cost what was paid for them. He
began to be oddly exercised this Sunday morning on the subject of
the porridge Louie hated so much. Was it his fault or Hannah's if
the frugal living which had been the rule for all the remoter farms
of the Peak--nay, for the whole north country--in his father's
time, and had been made doubly binding, as it were, on the dwellers
in Needham Farm by James Grieve's Scotch blood and habits, had
survived under their roof, while all about them a more luxurious
standard of food and comfort was beginning to obtain among their
neighbours? Where could you find a finer set of men than the
Berwickshire hinds, of whom his father came, and who were reared on
'parritch' from year's end to year's end?

And yet, all the same, Reuben's memory was full this morning of
disturbing pictures of a little London child, full of town
daintiness and accustomed to the spoiling of an indulgent father,
crying herself into fits over the new unpalatable food, refusing it
day after day, till the sharp, wilful face had grown pale and
pinched with famine, and caring no more apparently for her aunt's
beatings than she did for the clumsy advances by which her uncle
would sometimes try to propitiate her. There had been a great deal
of beating--whenever Reuben thought of it he had a superstitious
way of putting Sandy out of his mind as much as possible. Many
times he had gone far away from the house to avoid the sound of the
blows and shrieks he was powerless to stop.

Well, but what harm had come of it all? Louie was a strong lass
now, if she were a bit thin and overgrown. David was as fine a boy
as anyone need wish to see.

_David?_

Reuben got up from his seat at the farm door, took his pipe out of
his pocket, and went to hang over the garden-gate, that he might
unravel some very worrying thoughts at a greater distance from
Hannah.

The day before he had been overtaken coming out of Clough End by Mr.
Ancrum, the lame minister. He and Grieve liked one another. If
there had been intrigues raised against the minister within the
'Christian Brethren' congregation, Reuben Grieve had taken no part
in them.

After some general conversation, Mr. Ancrum suddenly said, 'Will you
let me have a word with you, Mr. Grieve, about your nephew
David--if you'll not think me intruding?'

'Say on, sir--say on,' said Reuben hastily, but with an inward
shrinking.

'Well, Mr. Grieve, you've got a remarkable boy there--a curious and
remarkable boy. What are you going to do with him?'

'Do wi him?--me, sir? Wal, I doan't know as I've iver thowt mich
about it,' said Reuben, but with an agitation of manner that struck
his interrogator. 'He be varra useful to me on t' farm, Mr. Ancrum.
Soom toimes i' t' year theer's a lot doin, yo knaw, sir, even on a
bit place like ours, and he ha gitten a good schoolin, he ha.'

The apologetic incoherence of the little speech was curious. Mr.
Ancrum did not exactly know how to take his man.

'I dare say he's useful. But he's not going to be the ordinary
labourer, Mr. Grieve--he's made of quite different stuff, and, if I
may say so, it will pay you very well to recognise it in good time.
That boy will read books now which hardly any grown man of his
class--about here, at any rate--would be able to read. Aye, and
talk about them, too, in a way to astonish you!'

'Yes, I know 'at he's oncommon cliver wi his books, is Davy,'
Reuben admitted.

'Oh! it's not only that. But he's got an unusual brain and a
wonderful memory. And it would be a thousand pities if he were to
make nothing of them. You say he's useful, but--excuse me, Mr.
Grieve--he seems to me to spend three parts of his time in loafing
and desultory reading. He wants more teaching--he wants steady
training. Why don't you send him to Manchester,' said the minister
boldly, 'and apprentice him? It costs money, no doubt.'

And he looked interrogatively at Reuben. Reuben, however, said
nothing. They were toiling up the steep road from Clough End to the
high farms under the Scout, a road which tried the minister's
infirm limb severely; otherwise he would have taken more notice of
his companion's awkward flush and evident discomposure.

'But it would pay you in the long run,' he said, when they stopped
to take breath; 'it would be a capital investment if the boy lives,
I promise you that, Mr. Grieve. And he could carry on his education
there, too, a bit--what with evening classes and lectures, and the
different libraries he could get the use of. It's wonderful how all
the facilities for working-class education have grown in Manchester
during the last few years.'

'Aye, sir--I spose they have--I spose they have,' said Reuben,
uncomfortably, and then seemed incapable of carrying on the
conversation any further. Mr. Ancrum talked, but nothing more was
to be got out of the farmer. At last the minister turned back,
saying, as he shook hands, 'Well, let me know if I can be of any
use. I have a good many friends in Manchester. I tell you that's a
boy to be proud of, Mr. Grieve, a boy of promise, if ever there was
one. But he wants taking the right way. He's got plenty of mixed
stuff in him, bad and good. I should feel it anxious work, the next
few years, if he were my boy.'

Now it was really this talk which was fermenting in Reuben, and
which, together with the 'rumpus' between Hannah and Louie, had led
to his singularly disturbed state of conscience this Sunday
morning. As he stood, miserably pulling at his pipe, the whole
prospect of sloping field, and steep distant moor, gradually
vanished from his eyes, and, instead, he saw the same London room
which David's memory held so tenaciously--he saw Sandy raising
himself from his deathbed with that look of sudden distrust--'Now,
you'll deal honest wi 'em, Reuben?'

Reuben groaned in spirit. 'A boy to be proud of' indeed. It seemed
to him, now that he was perforce made to think about it, that he
had never been easy in his mind since Sandy's orphans came to the
house. On the one hand, his wife had had her way--how was he to
prevent it? On the other, his religious sense had kept pricking and
tormenting--like the gadfly that it was.

Who, in the name of fortune, was to ask Hannah for money to send
the boy to Manchester and apprentice him? And who was going to
write to Mr. Gurney about it without her leave? Once upset the
system of things on which those two half-yearly cheques depended,
how many more of them would be forthcoming? And how was Hannah
going to put up with the loss of them? It made Reuben shiver to
think of it.

Shouts from the lane behind. Reuben suddenly raised himself and
made for the gate at the corner of the farmyard. He came out upon
the children, who had been to Sunday school at Clough End since
dinner, and were now in consequence in a state of restless animal
spirits. Louie was swinging violently on the gate which barred the
path on to the moor. David was shying stones at a rook's nest
opposite, the clatter of the outraged colony to which it belonged
sounding as music in his ears.

They stared when they saw Reuben cross the road, sit down on a
stone beside David, and take out his pipe. David ceased throwing,
and Louie, crossing her feet and steadying herself as she sat on
the topmost bar of the gate by a grip on either side, leant hard on
her hands and watched her uncle in silence. When caught unawares by
their elders, these two had always something of the air of captives
defending themselves in an alien country.

'Wal, Davy, did tha have Mr. Ancrum in school?' began Reuben,
affecting a brisk manner, oddly unlike him.

'Naw. It wor Brother Winterbotham from Halifax, or soom sich name.'

'Wor he edifyin, Davy?'

'He wor--he wor--a leather-yed,' said David, with sudden energy,
and, taking up a stone again, he flung it at a tree trunk opposite,
with a certain vindictiveness as though Brother Winterbotham were
sitting there.

'Now, yo're not speakin as yo owt, Davy,' said Reuben reprovingly,
as he puffed away at his pipe and felt the pleasantness of the
spring sunshine which streamed down into the lane through the still
bare but budding branches of the sycamores.

'He _wor_ a leather-yed,' David repeated with emphasis. 'He
said it wor Alexander fought t' battle o' Marathon.'

Reuben was silent for a while. When tests of this kind were going,
he could but lie low. However, David's answer, after a bit,
suggested an opening to him.

'Yo've a rare deal o' book-larnin for a farmin lad, Davy. If yo wor
at a trade now, or a mill-hand, or summat o' that soart, yo'd ha
noan so mich time for readin as yo ha now.'

The boy looked at him askance, with his keen black eyes. His uncle
puzzled him.

'Wal, I'm not a mill-hand, onyways,' he said, shortly, 'an I doan't
mean to be.'

'Noa, yo're too lazy,' said Louie shrilly, from the top of the
gate. 'Theer's heaps o' boys no bigger nor yo, arns their ten
shillins a week.'

'They're welcome,' said David laconically, throwing another stone
at the water to keep his hand in. For some years now the boy had
cherished a hatred of the mill-life on which Clough End and the
other small towns and villages in the neighbourhood existed. The
thought of the long monotonous hours at the mules or the looms was
odious to the lad whose joys lay in free moorland wanderings with
the sheep, in endless reading, in talks with 'Lias Dawson.

'Wal, now, I'm real glad to heer yo say sich things, Davy, lad,'
said Reuben, with a curious flutter of manner. 'I'm real glad. So yo
take to the farmin, Davy? Wal, it's nateral. All yor forbears--all
on em leastways, nobbut yor feyther--got their livin off t' land.
It cooms nateral to a Grieve.'

The boy made no answer--did not commit himself in any way. He went
on absently throwing stones.

'Why doan't he larn a trade?' demanded Louie. 'Theer's Harry Wigson,
he's gone to Manchester to be prenticed. He doan't goo loafin round
aw day.'

Her sharp wits disconcerted Reuben. He looked anxiously at David.
The boy coloured furiously, and cast an angry glance at his sister.

'Theer's money wanted for prenticin,' he said shortly.

Reuben felt a stab. Neither of the children knew that they
possessed a penny. A blunt word of Hannah's first of all, about
'not gien 'em ony high noshuns o' theirsels,' aided on Reuben's
side by the natural secretiveness of the peasant in money affairs,
had effectually concealed all knowledge of their own share in the
family finances from the orphans.

He reached out a soil-stained hand, shaking already with incipient
age, and laid it on David's sleeve.

'Art tha hankerin after a trade, lad?' he said hastily, nay,
harshly.

David looked at his uncle astonished. A hundred thoughts flew
through the boy's mind. Then he raised his head and caught sight of
the great peak of Kinder Low in the distance, beyond the green
swells of meadowland,--the heathery slopes running up into its
rocky breast,--the black patch on the brown, to the left, which
marked the site of the smithy.

'No,' he said decidedly. 'No; I can't say as I am. I like t' farmin
well enough.'

And then, boy-like, hating to be talked to about himself, he shook
himself free of his uncle and walked away. Reuben fell to his pipe
again with a beaming countenance.

'Louie, my gell,' he said.

'Yes,' said the child, not moving.

'Coom yo heer, Louie.'

She unwillingly got down and came up to him. Reuben put down his
pipe, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. Out of it, with
difficulty, he produced a sixpence.

'Art tha partial to goodies, Louie?' he said, dropping his voice
almost to a whisper, and holding up the coin before her.

Louie nodded, her eyes glistening at the magnitude of the coin.
Uncle Reuben might be counted on for a certain number of pennies
during the year, but silver was unheard of.

'Tak it then, child, an welcome. If yo have a sweet tooth--an it's
t' way wi moast gells--I conno see as it can be onythin else but
Providence as gave it yo. So get yorsel soom bull's-eyes, Louie,
an--an'--he looked a little conscious as he slipped the coin into
her eager hand--'doan't let on ti your aunt! She'd think mebbe I
wor spoilin your teeth, or summat,--an, Louie--'

Was Uncle Reuben gone mad? For the first time in her life, as it
seemed to Louie, he was looking at what she had on, nay, was even
taking up her dress between his finger and thumb.

'Is thissen your Sunday frock, chilt?'

'Yes,' said the girl, flushing scarlet, 'bean't it a dishclout?'

And she stood looking down at it with passionate scorn. It was a
worn and patched garment of brown alpaca, made out of an ancient
gown of Hannah's.

'Wal, I'm naw judge i' these matters,' said Reuben, dubiously,
drawing out his spectacles. 'It's got naw holes 'at I can see, but
it's not varra smart, perhaps. Satan's varra active wi gells on
this pint o' dress--yo mun tak noatice o' that, Louie--but--listen
heer--'

And he drew her nearer to him by her skirt, looking cautiously up
and down the lane and across to the farm.

'If I get a good price for t' wool this year--an theer's a new
merchant coomin round, yan moor o' t' buyin soart nor owd Croker,
soa they say, I'st save yo five shillin for a frock, chilt. Yo can
goo an buy it, an I'st mak it straight wi yor aunt. But I mun get a
good price, yo know, or your aunt ull be fearfu' bad to manage.'

And he gazed up at her as though appealing to her common sense in
the matter, and to her understanding of both his and her situation.
Louie's cheeks were red, her eyes did not meet his. They looked
away, down towards Clough End.

'Theer's a blue cotton at Hinton's,' she said, hurriedly--'a
light-blue cotton. They want sixpence farthin,--but Annie Wigson
says yo could bate 'em a bit. But what's t' use?' she added, with a
sudden savage darkening of her bright look--'she'd tak it away.'

The tone gave Reuben a shock. But he did not rebuke it. For the
first time he and Louie were conspirators in the same plot.

'No, no, I'd see to 'at. But how ud yo get it made?' He was
beginning to feel a childish interest in his scheme.

'Me an Annie Wigson ud mak it oop fast enough. Theer are things I
can do for her; she'd not want no payin, an she's fearfu' good at
dressmakin. She wor prenticed two years afore she took ill.'

'Gie me a kiss then, my gell; doan't yo gie naw trooble, an we'st
see. But I mun get a good price, yo know.'

And rising, Reuben bent towards his niece. She rose on tiptoe, and
just touched his rough cheek. There was no natural childish
effusiveness in the action. For the seven years since she left her
father, Louie had quite unlearnt kissing.

Reuben proceeded up the lane to the gate leading to the moor. He
was in the highest spirits. What a mercy he had not bothered Hannah
with Mr. Ancrum's remarks! Why, the boy wouldn't go to a trade, not
if he were sent!

At the gate he ran against David, who came hastily out of the
farmyard to intercept him.

'Uncle Reuben, what do they coe that bit watter up theer?' and he
pointed up the lane towards the main ridge of the Peak. 'Yo
know--that bit pool on t' way to th' Downfall?'

The farmer stopped bewildered.

'That bit watter? What they coe that bit watter? Why, they coe it
t' Witch's Pool, or used to i' my yoong days. An for varra good
reason too. They drownded an owd witch theer i' my grand-feyther's
time--I've heerd my grandmither tell th' tale on't scores o' times.
An theer's aw mak o' tales about it, or used to be. I hannot yeerd
mony words about it o' late years. Who's been talkin to yo, Davy?'

Louie came running up and listened.

'I doan't know,' said the boy,--'what soart o' tales?'

'Why, they'd use to say th' witch walked, on soom neets i' th'
year--Easter Eve, most pertickerlerly--an foak wor feeart to goo
onywhere near it on those neets. But doan't yo goo listenin to
tales, Davy,' said Reuben, with a paternal effusion most rare with
him, and born of his recent proceedings; 'yo'll only freeten yorsel
o' neets for nothin.'

'What are witches?' demanded Louie, scornfully. 'I doan't bleeve in
'em.'

Reuben frowned a little.

'Theer wor witches yance, my gell, becos it's in th' Bible, an
whativer's in th' Bible's _true_,' and the farmer brought his
hand down on the top bar of the gate. 'I'm no gien ony judgment
about 'em nowadays. Theer wor aw mak o' queer things said
about Jenny Crum an Needham Farm i' th' owd days. I've heerd
my grandmither say it worn't worth a Christian man's while to
live in Needham Farm when Jenny Crum wor about. She meddled wi
everythin--wi his lambs, an his coos, an his childer. I niver seed
nothin mysel, so I doan't say nowt--not o' my awn knowledge. But I
doan't soomhow bleeve as it's th' Awmighty's will to freeten a
Christian coontry wi witches, _i' th' present dispensation_.
An murderin's a graat sin, wheder it's witches or oother foak.'

'In t' books they doan't coe it t' Witch's Pool at aw,' said Louie,
obstinately. 'They coe it t' _Mermaid's_ Pool.'

'An anoother book coes it a "Hammer-dry-ad,"' said David,
mockingly, 'soa theer yo are.'

'Aye, soom faddlin kind of a name they gie it--I know--those
Manchester chaps, as cooms trespassin ower t' Scout wheer they
aren't wanted. To hear ony yan o' _them_ talk, yo'd think
theer wor only three fellows like 'im cam ower i' three ships, an
two were drownded. T'aint ov ony account what they an their books
coe it.'

And Reuben, as he leant against the gate, blew his smoke
contemptuously in the air. It was not often that Reuben Grieve
allowed himself, or was allowed by his world, to use airs of
superiority towards any other human being whatever. But in the case
of the Manchester clerks and warehousemen, who came tramping over
the grouse moors which Reuben rented for his sheep, and were always
being turned back by keepers or himself--and in their case
only--did he exercise, once in a while, the commonest privilege of
humanity.

'Did yo iver know onybody 'at went up on Easter Eve?' asked David.

Both children hung on the answer.

Reuben scratched his head. The tales of Jenny Crum, once well known
to him, had sunk deep into the waves of memory of late years, and
his slow mind had some difficulty in recovering them. But at last
he said with the sudden brightening of recollection:

'Aye--of _coorse!_--I knew theer wor soom one. Yo know 'im,
Davy, owd 'Lias o' Frimley Moor? He wor allus a foo'hardy sort o'
creetur. But if he wor short o' wits when he gan up, he wor mich
shorter when he cam down. That wor a rum skit!--now I think on 't.
Sich a seet he wor! He came by here six o'clock i' th' mornin. I
found him hangin ower t' yard gate theer, as white an slamp as a
puddin cloth oop on eend; an I browt him in, an was for gien him
soom tay. An yor aunt, she gien him a warld o' good advice about
his gooins on. But bless yo, he didn't tak in a word o' 't. An for
th' tay, he'd naw sooner swallowed it than he runs out, as quick as
leetnin, an browt it aw up. He wor fairly clemmed wi' t' cold,--'at
he wor. I put in th' horse, an I took him down to t' Frimley
carrier, an we packed him i' soom rugs an straw, an soa he got
home. But they put him out o' t' school, an he wor months in his
bed. An they do tell me, as nobory can mak owt o' 'Lias Dawson
these mony years, i' th' matter o' brains. Eh, but yo shudno meddle
wi Satan.'

'What d'yo think he saw?' asked David, eagerly, his black eyes all
aglow.

'He saw t' woman wi t' fish's tail--'at's what he saw,' said Louie,
shrilly.

Reuben took no notice. He was sunk in silent reverie poking at his
pipe. In spite of his confidence in the Almighty's increased
goodwill towards the present dispensation, he was not prepared to
say for certain what 'Lias Dawson did or didn't see.

'Nobory should goo an meddle wi Satan,' he repeated slowly after an
interval; and then opening the yard gate he went off on his usual
Sunday walk over the moors to have a look at his more distant
sheep.

Davy stood intently looking after him; so did Louie. She had
clasped her hands behind her head, her eyes were wide, her look and
attitude all eagerness. She was putting two and two together--her
uncle's promise and the mermaid story as the Manchester man had
delivered it. You had but to see her and wish, and, according to
the Manchester man and his book, you got your wish. The child's
hatred of sermons and ministers had not touched her capacity for
belief of this sort in the least. She believed feverishly, and was
enraged with David for setting up a rival creed, and with her uncle
for endorsing it.

David turned and walked towards the farmyard. Louie followed him,
and tapped him peremptorily on the arm. 'I'm gooin up theer Easter
Eve--Saturday week'--and she pointed over her shoulder to the
Scout.

'Gells conno be out neets,' said David firmly; 'if I goo I can tell
yo.'

'Yo'll not goo without me--I'd tell Aunt Hannah!'

'Yo've naw moor sense nor rotten sticks!' said David, angrily.
'Yo'll get your death, an Aunt Hannah 'll be stick stock mad wi
boath on us. If I goo she'll niver find out.'

Louie hesitated a moment. To provoke Aunt Hannah too much might,
indeed, endanger the blue frock. But daring and curiosity
triumphed.

'I doan't care!' she said, tossing her head; 'I'm gooin.'

David slammed the yard gate, and, hiding himself in a corner of the
cowhouse, fell into moody meditations. It took all the tragic and
mysterious edge off an adventure he had set his heart on that Louie
should insist on going too. But there was no help for it. Next day
they planned it together.




CHAPTER V


'Reuben, ha yo seen t' childer?' inquired Aunt Hannah, poking her
head round the door, so as to be heard by her husband, who was
sitting outside cobbling at a bit of broken harness.

'Noa; niver seed un since dinner.'

'They went down to Clough End, two o'clock about, for t' bread, an
I've yerd nothin ov em since. Coom in to your tay, Reuben! I'll
keep nothin waitin for them! They may goo empty if they conno keep
time!'

Reuben went in. An hour later the husband and wife came out
together, and stood looking down the steep road leading to the
town.

'Just cast your eye on aw them stockins waitin to be mended,' said
Hannah, angrily, turning back to the kitchen, and pointing to a
chair piled with various garments. 'That's why she doon it, I spose.
I'll be even wi her! It's a poor soart of a supper she'll get this
neet, or he noather. An her stomach aw she cares for!'

Reuben wandered down into the road, strolled up and down for nearly
an hour, while the sun set and the light waned, went as far as the
corner by Wigson's farm, asked a passer-by, saw and heard nothing,
and came back, shaking his head in answer to his wife's shrill
interrogations.

'Wal, if I doan't gie Louie a good smackin,' ejaculated Hannah,
exasperated; and she was just going back into the house when an
exclamation from Reuben stopped her; instead, she ran out to him,
holding on her cap against the east wind.

'Look theer,' he said, pointing; 'what iver is them two up to?'

For suddenly he had noticed outside the gate leading into the field
a basket lying on the ground against the wall. The two peered at it
with amazement, for it was their own basket, and in it reposed the
loaves David had been told to bring back from Clough End, while on
the top lay a couple of cotton reels and a card of mending which
Louie had been instructed to buy for her aunt.

After a moment Reuben looked up, his face working.

'I'm thinkin, Hannah, they'n roon away!'

It seemed to him as he spoke that such a possibility had been
always in his mind. And during the past week there had been much
bad blood between aunt and niece. Twice had the child gone to bed
supperless, and yesterday, for some impertinence, Hannah had given
her a blow, the marks of which on her cheek Reuben had watched
guiltily all day. At night he had dreamed of Sandy. Since Mr.
Ancrum had set him thinking, and so stirred his conscience in
various indirect and unforeseen ways, Sandy had been a terror to
him; the dead man had gained a mysterious hold on the living.

'Roon away!' repeated Hannah scornfully; 'whar ud they roon to?
They're just at soom o' their divilments, 'at's what they are. An if
yo doan't tak a stick to boath on them when they coom back, _I
will_, soa theer, Reuben Grieve. Yo niver had no sperrit wi
'em--niver--and that's yan reason why they've grown up soa ramjam
full o' wickedness.'

It relieved her to abuse her husband. Reuben said nothing, but hung
over the wall, straining his eyes into the gathering darkness. The
wooded sides of the great moor which enclosed the valley to the
north were fading into dimness, and to the east, above the ridge of
Kinder Low, a young moon was rising. The black steep wall of the
Scout was swiftly taking to itself that majesty which all mountains
win from the approach of night. Involuntarily, Reuben held his
breath, listening, hungering for the sound of children's voices on
the still air. Nothing--but a few intermittent bird notes and the
eternal hurry of water from the moorland to the plain.

There was a step on the road, and a man passed whistling.

'Jim Wigson!' shouted Hannah, 'is that yo, Jim?'

The man opened the yard gate, and came through to them. Jim was the
eldest son of the neighbouring farmer, whose girls were Louie's
only companions. He was a full-blooded swaggering youth, with whom
David was generally on bad terms. David despised him for an oaf who
could neither read nor write, and hated him for a bully.

He grinned when Hannah asked him questions about the truants.

'Why, they're gone to Edale, th' yoong rascots, I'll uphowd yo!
There's a parcel o' gipsies there tellin fortunes, an lots o' foak
ha gone ower there to-day. You may mak your mind up they've gone to
Edale. That Louie's a limb, she is. She's got spunk enough to waak
to Lunnon if she'd a mind. Oh, they'll be back here soon enough,
trust 'em.'

I shut _my_ door at nine o'clock,' said Hannah, grimly. 'Them
as cooms after that, may sleep as they can.'

'Well, that'll be sharp wark for th' eyes if they're gone to Edale,'
said Jim, with a laugh. 'Its a good step fro here to Edale.'

'Aye, an soom o' 't bad ground,' said Reuben uneasily--'vara bad
ground.'

'Aye, it's not good walkin, neets. If they conno see their way when
they get to the top o' t' Downfall, they'll stay theer till it gets
mornin, if they've ony sort o' gumption. But, bless yo, it bean't
gooin to be a dark neet, '--and he pointed to the moon. 'They'll be
here afore yoo goo to bed. An if yo want onybody to help yo gie
Davy a bastin, just coo me, Mr. Grieve. Good neet to yo.'

Reuben fidgeted restlessly all the evening. Towards nine he went
out on the pretext of seeing to a cow that had lately calved and
was in a weakly state. He gave the animal her food and clean
litter, doing everything more clumsily than usual. Then he went
into the stable and groped about for a lantern that stood in the
corner.

He found it, slipped through the farmyard into the lane, and then
lit it out of sight of the house.

'It's bad ground top o' t' Downfall,' he said to himself,
apologetically, as he guiltily opened the gate on to the
moor--'varra bad ground.'

Hanna shut her door that night neither at nine nor at ten. For by
the latter hour the master of the house was still absent, and
nowhere to be found, in spite of repeated calls from the door and
up the lane. Hannah guessed where he had gone without much
difficulty; but her guess only raised her wrath to a white heat.
Troublesome brats Sandy's children had always been--Louie more
especially--but they had never perpetrated any such overt act of
rebellion as this before, and the dour, tyrannical woman was filled
with a kind of silent frenzy as she thought of her husband going
out to welcome the wanderers.

'It's a quare kind o' fatted calf they'll get when _I_ lay
hands on 'em,' she thought to herself as she stood at the front
door, in the cold darkness, listening.

Meanwhile David and Louie, high up on the side of Kinder Scout,
were speculating with a fearful joy as to what might be happening
at the farm. The manner of their escape had cost them much thought.
Should they slip out of the front door instead of going to bed? But
the woodwork of the farm was old and creaking, and the bolts and
bars heavy. They were generally secured before supper by Hannah
herself, and, though they might be surreptitiously oiled, the
children despaired--considering how close the kitchen was to the
front door--of getting out without rousing Hannah's sharp ears.
Other projects, in which windows and ropes played a part, were
discussed. David held strongly that he alone could have managed any
one of them, but he declined flatly to attempt them with a 'gell.'
In the same way he alone could have made his way up the Scout and
over the river in the dark. But who'd try it with a 'gell'?

The boy's natural conviction of the uselessness of 'gells' was
never more disagreeably expressed than on this occasion. But he
could not shake Louie off. She pinched him when he enraged her
beyond bounds, but she never wavered in her determination to go
too.

Finally they decided to brave Aunt Hannah and take the
consequences. They meant to be out all night in hiding, and in the
morning they would come back and take their beatings. David
comfortably reflected that Uncle Reuben couldn't do him much harm,
and, though Louie could hardly flatter herself so far, her tone,
also, in the matter was philosophical.

'Theer's soom bits o' owd books i' th' top-attic,' she said to
David; 'I'll leave 'em in t' stable, an when we coom home, I'll tie
'em on my back--under my dress--an she may leather away till
Christmas.'

So on their return from Clough End with the bread--about five
o'clock--they slipped into the field, crouching under the wall, so
as to escape Hannah's observation, deposited their basket by the
gate, took up a bundle and tin box which David had hidden that
morning under the hedge, and, creeping back again into the road,
passed noiselessly through the gate on to the moor, just as Aunt
Hannah was lifting the kettle off the fire for tea.

Then came a wild and leaping flight over the hill, down to the main
Kinder stream, across it, and up the face of the Scout--up, and up,
with smothered laughter, and tumbles and scratches at every step,
and a glee of revolt and adventure swelling every vein.

It was then a somewhat stormy afternoon, with alternate gusts of
wind and gleams of sun playing on the black boulders, the red-brown
slopes of the mountain. The air was really cold and cutting,
promising a frosty night. But the children took no notice of it.
Up, and on, through the elastic carpet of heather and bilberry, and
across bogs which showed like veins of vivid green on the dark
surface of the moor; under circling peewits, who fled before them,
crying with plaintive shrillness to each other, as though in
protest; and past grouse-nests, whence the startled mothers soared
precipitately with angry duckings, each leaving behind her a loose
gathering of eggs lying wide and open on the heather, those newly
laid gleaming a brighter red beside their fellows. The tin box and
its contents rattled under David's arm as he leapt and straddled
across the bogs, choosing always the widest jump and the stiffest
bit of climb, out of sheer wantonness of life and energy. Louie's
thin figure, in its skimp cotton dress and red crossover, her long
legs in their blue worsted stockings, seemed to fly over the moor,
winged, as it were, by an ecstasy of freedom. If one could but be
in two places at once--on the Scout--and peeping from some safe
corner at Aunt Hannah's wrath!

Presently they came to the shoulder whereon--gleaming under the
level light--lay the Mermaid's Pool. David had sufficiently
verified the fact that the tarn did indeed bear this name in the
modern guide-book parlance of the district. Young men and women,
out on a holiday from the big towns near, and carrying little red
or green 'guides,' spoke of the 'Mermaid's Pool' with the accent of
romantic interest. But the boy had also discovered that no
native-born farmer or shepherd about had ever heard of the name, or
would have a word to say to it. And for the first time he had
stumbled full into the deep deposit of witch-lore and belief still
surviving in the Kinder Scout district, as in all the remoter
moorland of the North. Especially had he won the confidence of a
certain 'owd Matt,' a shepherd from a farm high on Mardale Moor;
and the tales 'owd Matt' had told him--of mysterious hares coursed
at night by angry farmers enraged by the 'bedivilment' of their
stock, shot at with silver slugs, and identified next morning with
some dreaded hag or other lying groaning and wounded in her bed--of
calves' hearts burnt at midnight with awful ceremonies, while the
baffled witch outside flung herself in rage and agony against the
close-barred doors and windows--of spells and wise men--these
things had sent chills of pleasing horror through the boy's frame.
They were altogether new to him, in this vivid personal guise at
least, and mixed up with all the familiar names and places of the
district; for his childish life had been singularly solitary,
giving to books the part which half a century ago would have been
taken by tradition; and, moreover, the witch-belief in general had
now little foothold among the younger generation of the Scout, and
was only spoken of with reserve and discretion among the older men.

But the stories once heard had struck deep into the lad's quick and
pondering mind. Jenny Crum seemed to have been the latest of all
the great witches of Kinder Scout. The memory of her as a real and
awful personage was still fresh in the mind of many a grey-haired
farmer; the history of her death was well known; and most of the
local inhabitants, even the boys and girls, turned out, when you
came to inquire, to be familiar with the later legends of the Pool,
and, as David presently discovered, with one or more tales--for the
stories were discrepant--of 'Lias Dawson's meeting with the witch,
now fifteen years ago.

'_What_ had 'Lias seen? What would they see?' His flesh crept
deliciously.

'Wal, owd Mermaid!' shouted Louie, defiantly, as soon as she had
got her breath again. 'Are yo coomin out to-night? Yo'll ha coompany
if yo do.'

David smiled contemptuously and did not condescend to argue.

'Are yo coomin on?' he said, shouldering his box and bundle again.
'They'st be up after us if we doan't look out.'

And on they went, climbing a steep boulder-strewn slope above the
pool till they came to the 'edge' itself, a tossed and broken
battlement of stone, running along the top of the Scout. Here the
great black slabs of grit were lying fantastically piled upon each
other at every angle and in every possible combination. The path
which leads from the Hayfield side across the desolate tableland of
the Scout to the Snake Inn on the eastern side of the ridge, ran
among them, and many a wayfarer, benighted or mist-bound on the
moor, had taken refuge before now in their caverns and recesses,
waiting for the light, and dreading to find himself on the cliffs
of the Downfall.

But David pushed on past many hiding-places well known to him, till
the two reached the point where the mountain face sweeps backward
in the curve of which the Downfall makes the centre. At the outward
edge of the curve a great buttress of ragged and jutting rocks
descends perpendicularly towards the valley, like a ruined
staircase with displaced and gigantic steps.

Down this David began to make his way, and Louie jumped, and slid,
and swung after him, as lithe and sure-footed as a cat. Presently
David stopped. 'This ull do,' he said, surveying the place with a
critical eye.

They had just slid down a sloping chimney of rock, and were now
standing on a flat block, over which hung another like a penthouse
roof. On the side of the Downfall there was a projecting stone, on
which David stepped out to look about him.

Holding on to a rock above for precaution's sake, he reconnoitred
their position. To his left was the black and semicircular cliff,
down the centre of which the Downfall stream, now tamed and thinned
by the dry spring winds, was trickling. The course of the stream
was marked by a vivid orange colour, produced, apparently, in the
grit by the action of water; and about halfway down the fall a mass
of rock had recently slipped, leaving a bright scar, through which
one saw, as it were, the inner mass of the Peak, the rectangular
blocks, now thick, now thin, as of some Cyclopean masonry,
wherewith the earth-forces had built it up in days before a single
alp had yet risen on the face of Europe. Below the boy's feet a
precipice, which his projecting stone overhung, fell to the bed of
the stream. On this side at least they were abundantly protected.

On the moorside the steep broken ground of the hill came up to the
rocky line they had been descending, and offered no difficulty to
any sure-footed person. But no path ran anywhere near them, and
from the path up above they were screened by the grit 'edge'
already spoken of. Moreover, their penthouse, or half-gable, had
towards the Downfall a tolerably wide opening; but towards the moor
and the north there was but a narrow hole, which David soon saw
could be stopped by a stone. When he crept back into their
hiding-place, it pleased him extremely.

'They'll niver find us, if they look till next week!' he exclaimed
exultantly, and, slipping off the heavy bundle strapped on his
back, he undid its contents. Two old woollen rugs appeared--one a
blanket, the other a horse-rug--and wrapped up in the middle of
them a jagged piece of tarpaulin, a hammer, some wooden pegs, and
two or three pieces of tallow dip. Louie, sitting cross-legged in
the other corner, with her chin in her hands, looked on with her
usual detached and critical air. David had not allowed her much of
a voice in the preparations, and she felt an instinctive aversion
towards other people's ingenuities. All she had contributed was
something to while away the time, in the shape of a bag of
bull's-eyes, bought with some of the sixpence Uncle Reuben had
given her.

Having laid out his stores, David went to work. Getting out on the
projecting stone again, he laid the bit of tarpaulin along the
sloping edge of the rock which roofed them, pegged it down into
crevices at either end, and laid a stone to hold it in the middle.
Then he slipped back again, and, behold, there was a curtain
between them and the Downfall, which, as the dusk was fast
advancing, made the little den inside almost completely dark.

'What's t' good o' that?' inquired Louie, scornfully, more than
half inclined to put out a mischievous hand and pull it down again.

'Doan't worrit, an yo'll see,' returned David, and Louie's
curiosity got the better of her malice.

Stooping down beside her, he looked through the hole which opened
to the moor. His eye travelled down the hillside to the path far
below, just visible in the twilight to a practised eye, to the
river, to the pasture-fields on the hill beyond, and to the smoke,
rising above the tops of some unseen trees, which marked the site
of the farmhouse. No one in sight. The boy crawled out, and
searched the moor till he found a large flattish stone, which he
brought and placed against the opening, ready to be drawn quite
across it from inside.

Then he slipped back again, and in the glimmer of light which
remained groped for his tin box. Louie stooped over and eagerly
watched him open it. Out came a bottle of milk, some large slices
of bread, some oatcake, and some cheese. In the corner, recklessly
near the cheese, lurked a grease-bespattered lantern and a box of
matches. David had borrowed the lantern that afternoon from a
Clough End friend under the most solemn vows of secrecy, and he
drew it out now with a deliberate and special relish. When he had
driven a peg into a cranny of the rock, trimmed half a dip
carefully, lighted it, put it into the lantern, and hung the
lantern on the peg, he fell back on his heels to study the effect,
with a beaming countenance, filled all through with the essentially
human joy of contrivance.

'Now, then, d'yo see what that tarpaulin's for?' he inquired
triumphantly of Louie.

But Louie's mouth was conveniently occupied with a bull's-eye, and
she only sucked it the more vigorously in answer.

'Why, yo little silly, if it worn't for that we couldno ha no leet.
They'd see us from t' fields even, as soon as it's real dark.'

'Doan't bleeve it,' said Louie, laconically, in a voice much
muffled by bull's-eyes.

'Wal, yo needn't; I'm gooin to have my tea.'

And David, diving into the tin, brought out a hunch of bread and a
knob of cheese. The voracity with which he fell on them, soon, with
him also, stopped up the channels of speech. Louie, alarmed perhaps
by the rapidity with which the mouthfuls disappeared, slid up on
her heels and claimed her share. Never was there a more savoury
meal than that! Their little den with its curtain felt warm for the
moment after the keen air of the moor; the lantern light seemed to
shut them in from the world, gave them the sense of settlers
carving a home out of the desert, and milk which had been filched
from Aunt Hannah lay like nectar in the mouth.

After their meal both children crept out on to the moor to see what
might be going on in the world outside. Darkness was fast
advancing. A rising wind swept through the dead bracken, whirled
round the great grit boulders, and sent a shiver through Louie's
thin body.

'It's cowd,' she said pettishly; 'I'm gooin back.'

'Did yo spose it wor gooin to be warm, yo little silly? That's why
I browt t' rugs, of course. Gells never think o' nothin. It's
parishin cowd here, neets--fit to tie yo up in knots wi th'
rheumatics, like Jim Spedding, if yo doan't mind yorsel. It wor
only laying out a neet on Frimley Moor--poachin, I guess--'at
twisted Jim that way.'

Louie's countenance fell. Jim Spedding was a little crooked
greengrocer in Clough End, of whom she had a horror. The biting
hostile wind, which obliged her to hold her hat on against it with
both hands, the black moor at their feet, the grey sweep of sky,
the pale cloudy moon, the darkness which was fast enveloping
them--blotting out the distant waves of hill, and fusing the great
blocks of grit above them into one threatening mass--all these
became suddenly hateful to her. She went back into their den,
wrapped herself up in one of the tattered rugs, and crept sulkily
into a corner. The lantern gleamed on the child's huddled form, the
frowning brow, the great vixenish eyes. She had half a mind to run
home, in spite of Aunt Hannah. Hours to wait! and she loathed
waiting.

But gradually, as the rug warmed her, the passion for adventure and
mystery--the vision of the mermaid--the hope of the blue
cotton--reasserted themselves, and the little sharp face relaxed.
She began to amuse herself with hunting the spiders and beetles
which ran across the rocky roof above her head, or crept in and out
of the crevices of stone, wondering, no doubt, at this unbidden and
tormenting daylight. She caught one or two small blackbeetles in a
dirty rag of a handkerchief--for she would not touch them if she
could help it--and then it delighted her to push aside the curtain,
stretch her hand out into the void darkness, and let them fall into
the gulf below. Even if they could fly, she reflected, it must 'gie
'em a good start.'

Meanwhile, David had charged up the hill, filled with a sudden
curiosity to see what the top of the Scout might look like by
night. He made his way through the battlement of grit, found the
little path behind, gleaming white in the moonlight, because of the
quartz sheddings which wind and weather are forever teasing out of
the grit, and which drift into the open spaces; and at last, guided
by the sound and the gleam of water, he made out the top of the
Downfall, climbed a high peat bank, and the illimitable plateau of
the Scout lay wide and vast before him.

Here, on the mountain-top, there seemed to be more daylight left
than on its rocky sides, and the moon among the parting clouds
shone intermittently over the primeval waste. The top of the Peak
is, so to speak, a vast black glacier, whereof the crevasses are
great fissures, ebon-black in colour, sometimes ten feet deep, and
with ten feet more of black water at the bottom. For miles on
either side the ground is seamed and torn with these crevasses, now
shallower, now deeper, succeeding each other at intervals of a yard
or two, and it is they which make the crossing of the Peak in the
dark or in mist a matter of danger sometimes even for the native.
David, high on his bank, from which the black overhanging eaves
curled inwards beneath his feet to a sullen depth of water, could
see against the moonlit sky the posts which marked the track from
the Downfall to the Snake Inn on the Glossop Road. Miss that
track--a matter of some fifteen minutes' walk for the sturdy farmer
who knows it well--and you find yourself lost in a region which has
no features and no landmarks, where the earth lays snares for you
and the mists betray you, and where even in bright sunshine there
reigns an eternal and indescribable melancholy. The strangeness and
wildness of the scene entered the boy's consciousness, and brought
with them a kind of exaltation. He stood gazing; that inner life of
his, of which Louie, his constant companion, knew as good as
nothing, asserting itself.

For the real companions of his heart were not Louie or the boys
with whom he had joked and sparred at school; they were ideas,
images, sounds, imaginations, caught from books or from the talk of
old 'Lias and Mr. Ancrum. He had but to stand still a moment, as it
were, to listen, and the voices and sights of another world came
out before him like players on to a stage. Spaces of shining water,
crossed by ships with decks manned by heroes for whom the blue
distance was for ever revealing new lands to conquer, new
adventures to affront; the plumed Indian in his forest divining the
track of his enemy from a displaced leaf or twig; the Zealots of
Jehovah urging a last frenzied defence of Jehovah's Sanctuary
against the Roman host; and now, last of all, the gloom and flames,
the infernal palaces, the towering fiends, the grandiose and
lumbering war of 'Paradise Lost': these things, together with the
names and suggestions of 'Lias's talk--that whole crew of shining,
fighting, haranguing men and women whom the old dreamer was for
ever bringing into weird action on the moorside--lived in the boy's
mind, and in any pause of silence, as we have said, emerged and
took possession.

It was only that morning, in an old meal-chest which had belonged
to his grandfather, James Grieve, he had discovered the old
calf-bound copy of 'Paradise Lost,' which was now in one of his
pockets, balanced by 'Anson's Voyages' in the other. All the
morning he had been lying hidden in a corner of the sheepfold
devouring it, the rolling verse imprinting itself on the boy's
plastic memory by a sort of enchantment--

         Yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
    The seat of desolation, void of light,
    Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
    Casts pale and dreadful.

He chanted the words aloud, flinging them out in an ecstasy
of pleasure. Before him, as it seemed, there stretched that very
plain 'forlorn and wild,' with its black fissures and its
impenetrable horizons; the fitful moonlight stood for the
glimmering of the Tartarean flames; the remembered words and the
actual sights played into and fused with each other, till in the
cold and darkness the boy thrilled all through with that mingling
of joy and terror which is only possible to the creature of fine
gifts and high imagination.

Jenny Crum, too! A few more hours and he might see her face to
face--as 'Lias had seen her. He quaked a little at the thought, but
he would not have flinched for the world. _He_ was not going
to lose his wits, as 'Lias did; and as for Louie, if she were
frightened it would do her good to be afraid of something.

Hark! He turned, stooped, put his hand to his ear.

The sound he heard had startled him, turned him pale. But he soon
recovered himself. It was the sound of heavy boots on stones, and
it was brought to him by the wind, as it seemed, from far below.
Some one was coming after them--perhaps more than one. He thought
he heard a voice.

He leapt fissure after fissure like a young roe, fled to the top of
the Downfall and looked over. Did the light show through the
tarpaulin? Alack!--there must be a rent somewhere--for he saw a dim
glow-worm light beyond the cliff, on the dark rib of the mountain.
It was invisible from below, but any roving eye from the top would
be caught by it in an instant. In a second he had raced along the
edge, dived in and out of the blocks, guiding his way by a sort of
bat's instinct, till he reached the rocky stairway, which he
descended at imminent risk of his neck.

'Put your hand ower t'leet, Louie, till I move t'stone!'

The light disappeared, David crept in, and the two children
crouched together in a glow of excitement.

'Is't Uncle Reuben?' whispered Louie, pressing her face against the
side of the rocks, and trying to look through the chink between it
and the covering stone.

'Aye--wi a lantern. But there's talkin--theer's someone else. Jim
Wigson, mebbe.'

'If it's Jim Wigson,' said Louie, between her small, shut teeth,
'I'll bite him!'

'Cos yo're a gell! Gells and cats bite--they can't do nowt else!'

Whereupon Louie pinched him, and David, giving an involuntary kick
as he felt the nip, went into first a fit of smothered laughter,
and then seized her arm in a tight grip.

'Keep quiet, conno yo? Now they're coomin, an I bleeve they're
coomin this way!'

But after another minute's waiting, he was quite unable to obey his
own injunction and he crept out on the stone overlooking the
precipice to look.

'Coom back! They'll see yo.' cried Louie, in a shrill whisper; and
she caught him by the ankle.

David gave a kick. 'Let goo; if yo do 'at I shall fall an be kilt!'

She held her breath. Presently, with an exclamation, he knelt down
and looked over the edge of the great sloping block which served
them for roof.

'Wal, I niver! Theer's nobory but Uncle Reuben, an he's talkin to
hissel. Wal, this is a rum skit!'

And he stayed outside watching, in spite of Louie's angry commands
to him to come back into the den. David had no fears of being
discovered by Uncle Reuben. If it had been Jim Wigson it would have
been different.

Presently, on the path some sixty feet above them, but hidden from
them by the mass of tumbled rocks through which they had descended,
they heard someone puffing and blowing, a stick striking and
slipping on the stones, and weird rays of light stole down the
mountain-side, and in and out of the vast blocks with which it was
overstrewn.

'He's stopt up theer,' said David, creeping in under the gable, 'an
I mun hear what he's sayin. I'm gooin up nearer. If yo coom we'll
be caught.'

'Yo stoopid!' cried Louie. But he had crawled up the narrow chimney
they had come down by in a moment, and she was left alone. Her
spirit failed her a little. She daren't climb after him in the
dark.

David clambered in and out, the fierce wind that beat the side of
the mountain masking whatever sounds he may have made, till he
found himself directly under the place where Reuben Grieve sat,
slowly recovering his breath.

_'O Lord! O Lord!_ They're aw reet, Sandy--they're aw reet!'

The boy crouched down sharply under an overhanging stone, arrested
by the name--Sandy--his father's name.

Once or twice since he came to Kinder he had heard it on Uncle
Reuben's lips, once or twice from neighbours who had known James
Grieve's sons in their youth. But Sandy had left the farm early and
was little remembered, and the true story of Sandy's life was
unknown in the valley, though there were many rumours. What the
close and timid Reuben heard from Mr. Gurney, the head of Sandy's
firm, after Sandy's death, he told to no one but Hannah. The
children knew generally, from what Hannah often let fall when she
was in a temper, that their mother was a disgrace to them, but they
knew no more, and, with the natural instinct of forlorn creatures
on the defensive, studiously avoided the subject within the walls
of Needham Farm. They might question old 'Lias; they would suffer
many things rather than question their uncle and aunt.

But David especially had had many secret thoughts he could not put
away, of late, about his parents. And to hear his father's name
dropped like this into the night moved the lad strangely. He lay
close, listening with all his ears, expecting passionately, he knew
not what.

But nothing came--or the wind carried it away. When he was rested,
Reuben got up and began to move about with the lantern, apparently
throwing its light from side to side.

'David! Louie!'

The hoarse, weak voice, strained to its utmost pitch, died away on
the night wind, and a weird echo came back from the cliffs of the
Downfall.

There was no menace in the cry--rather a piteous entreaty. The
truant below had a strange momentary impulse to answer--to disclose
himself. But it was soon past, and instead, he crept well out of
reach of the rays which flashed over the precipitous ground about
him. As he did so he noticed the Mermaid's Pool, gleaming in a pale
ray of moonlight, some two hundred feet below. A sudden alarm
seized him, lest Reuben should be caught by it, put two and two
together and understand.

But Reuben was absorbed in a discomfort, half moral, half
superstitious, and nothing else reached the slow brain--which was
besides preoccupied by Jim Wigson's suggestion. After a bit he
picked up his stick and went on again. David, eagerly watching,
tracked him along the path which follows the ridge, and saw the
light pause once more close to the Downfall.

So far as the boy could see, his uncle made a long stay at a point
beyond the stream, the bed of which was just discernible, as a sort
of paler streak on the darkness.

'Why, that's about whar th' Edale path cooms in,' thought David,
wondering. 'What ud he think we'd be doin theer?'

Faint sounds came to him in a lull of the wind, as though Reuben
were shouting again--shouting many times. Then the light went
wavering on, defining in its course the curved ridge of the further
moor, till at last it made a long circuit downwards, disappearing
for a minute somewhere in the dark bosom of Kinder Low, about
midway between earth and sky. David guessed that Uncle Reuben must
be searching the smithy. Then it descended rapidly, till finally it
vanished behind the hill far below, which was just distinguishable
in the cloudy moonshine. Uncle Reuben had gone home.

David drew a long breath. But that patient quest in the dark--the
tone of the farmer's call--that mysterious word _Sandy_, had
touched the boy, made him restless. His mood grew a little flat,
even a little remorseful. The joy of their great adventure ebbed a
little.

However, he climbed down again to Louie, and found a dark elfish
figure standing outside their den, and dancing with excitement.

'Wouldn't yo like to ketch us--wouldn't yo?--wouldn't yo?'
screeched the child, beside herself. She too had been watching, had
seen the light vanish.

'Yo'll have t' parish up after yo if yo doan't howd your tongue,'
said David roughly.

And creeping into their den he relit the lantern. Then he pulled
out a watch, borrowed from the same friend who had provided the
lantern. Past nine. Two hours and more before they need think of
starting downwards for the Pool.

Louie condescended to come in again, and the stone was drawn close.
But how fierce the wind had grown, and how nipping was the air!
David shivered, and looked about for the rugs. He wrapt Louie in
the horse-rug, which was heaviest, and tucked the blanket round
himself.

'Howd that tight round yo,' he commanded, struck with an uneasy
sense of responsibility, as he happened to notice how starved she
looked, 'an goo to sleep if yo want to. I'll wake yo--I'm gooin to
read.'

Louie rolled the rug round her chrysalis-like, and then, disdaining
the rest of David's advice, sat bolt upright against the rock, her
wide-open eyes staring defiantly at all within their ken.

The minutes went by. David sat close up against the lantern,
bitterly cold, but reading voraciously. At last, however, a sharper
gust than usual made him look up and turn restive. Louie still sat
in the opposite corner as stiffly as before, but over the great
staring eyes the lids had just fallen, sorely against their owner's
will; the head was dropping against the rock; the child was fast
asleep. It occurred to David she looked odd; the face seemed so
grey and white. He instinctively took his own blanket and put it
over her. The silence and helplessness of her sleep seemed to
appeal to him, to change his mood towards her, for the action was
brotherly and tender. Then he pushed the stone aside and crept out
on to the moor.

There he stood for a while, with his hands in his pockets, marking
time to warm himself. How the wind bit to be sure!--and it would be
colder still by dawn.

The pool showed dimly beneath him, and the gruesome hour was
stealing on them fast. His heart beat quick. The weirdness and
loneliness of the night came home to him more than they had done
yet. The old woman dragged to her death, the hooting crowd, the
inexorable parson, the struggle in the water, the last gurgling
cry--the vision rose before him on the dark with an ever ghastlier
plainness than a while ago on the mountain-top. _How_ had 'Lias
seen her that the sight had changed him so? Did she come to him
with her drowned face and floating grey hair--grip him with her
cold hands? David, beginning to thrill in good earnest, obstinately
filled in the picture with all the horrible detail he could think
of, so as to harden himself. Only now he wished with all his heart
that Louie were safe at home.

An idea occurred to him. He smiled at it, turned it over, gradually
resolved upon it. She would lead him a life afterward, but what
matter?--let her!

From the far depths of the unseen valley a sound struck upwards,
piercing through the noises of river and wind. It was the clock of
Clough End church, tolling eleven.

Well, one could not stand perishing there another hour. He stooped
down and crawled in beside Louie. She was sleeping heavily, the
added warmth of David's blanket conducing thereto. He hung over
her, watching her breathing with a merry look, which gradually
became a broad grin. It was a real shame--she would be just mad
when she woke up. But mermaids were all stuff, and Jenny Crum would
'skeer' her to death. Just in proportion as the adventure became
more awesome and more real did the boy's better self awake. He grew
soft for his sister, while, as he proudly imagined, iron for
himself.

He crept in under the blanket carefully so as not to disturb her.
He was too tired and excited to read. He would think the hour out.
So he lay staring at the opposite wall of rock, at its crevices,
and creeping ants, at the odd lights and shadows thrown by the
lantern, straining his eyes every now and then, that he might be
the more sure how wide awake they were.

Louie stretched herself. What was the matter? Where was she? What
was that smell? She leant forward on her elbow. The lantern was
just going out, and smelt intolerably. A cold grey light was in the
little den. What? Where?

A loud wail broke the morning silence, and David, sleeping
profoundly, his open mouth just showing above the horse-rug, was
roused by a shower of blows from Louie's fists. He stirred
uneasily, tried to escape them by plunging deeper into the folds,
but they pursued him vindictively.

'Give ower!' he said at last, striking back at random, and then
sitting up he rubbed his eyes. There was Louie sitting opposite to
him, crying great tears of rage and pain, now rocking her ankle as
if it hurt her, and now dealing cuffs at him.

He hastily pulled out his watch. Half-past four o'clock!

'Yo great gonner, yo!' sobbed Louie, her eyes blazing at him
through her tears. 'Yo good-for-nowt, yo muffin-yed, yo donkey!' And
so on through all the words of reviling known to the Derbyshire
child. David looked extremely sheepish under them.

Then suddenly he put his head down on his knees and shook with
laughter. The absurdity of it all--of their preparations, of his
own terrors, of the disturbance they had made, all to end in this
flat and futile over-sleeping, seized upon him so that he could not
control himself. He laughed till he cried, while Louie hit and
abused him and cried too. But her crying had a different note, and
at last he looked up at her, sobered.

'Howd your tongue!--an doan't keep bully-raggin like 'at! What's t'
matter wi yo?'

For answer, she rolled over on the rock and lay on her face,
howling with pain. David sprang up and bent over her.

'What _iver's_ t' matter wi yo, Louie?'

But she kept him off like a wild cat, and he could make nothing of
her till her passion had spent itself and she was quiet again, from
sheer exhaustion.

Then David, who had been standing near, shivering, with his hands
in his pockets, tried again.

'Now, Louie, do coom home,' he said appealingly. 'I can find yo a
place in t' stable ull be warmer nor this. You be parished if yo
stay here.' For, ignorant as he was, her looks began to frighten
him.

Louie would have liked never to speak to him again. The thought of
the blue cotton and of her own lost chance seemed to be burning a
hole in her. But the stress of his miserable look drew her eyes
open whether she would or no, and when she saw him her self-pity
overcame her.

'I conno walk,' she said, with a sudden loud sob. 'It's my leg.'

'What's wrong wi't?' said David, inspecting it anxiously. 'It's got
th' cowd in't, that's what it is; it's th' rheumatics, I speck. Yak
howd on me, I'll help yo down.'

And with much coaxing on his part and many cries and outbursts on
hers he got her up at last, and out of the den. He had tied his tin
box across his back, and Louie, with the rugs wrapped about her,
clung, limping, and with teeth chattering, on to his arm. The child
was in the first throes of a sharp attack of rheumatism, and half
her joints were painful.

That was a humiliating descent! A cold grey morning was breaking
over the moor; the chimneys of the distant cotton-towns rose out of
mists, under a sky streaked with windy cloud. The Mermaid's Pool,
as they passed it, looked chill and mocking; and the world
altogether felt so raw and lonely that David welcomed the first
sheep they came across with a leap of the heart, and positively
hungered for a first sight of the farm. How he got Louie--in whose
cheeks the fever-spots were rising--over the river he never quite
remembered. But at last he had dragged her up the hill, through the
fields close to the house, where the lambs were huddling in the
nipping dawn beside their mothers, and into the farmyard.

The house rose before them grey and frowning. The lower windows
were shuttered; in the upper ones the blinds were pulled closely
down; not a sign of life anywhere. Yes; the dogs had heard them!
Such a barking as began! Jock, in his kennel by the front door,
nearly burst his chain in his joyful efforts to get at them; while
Tib, jumping the half-door of the out-house in the back yard, where
he had been curled up in a heap of bracken, leapt about them and
barked like mad.

Louie sank down crying and deathly pale on a stone by the stable
door.

'They'll hear that fast enoof,' said David, looking anxiously up at
the shut windows.

But the dogs went on barking, and nothing happened. Ten minutes of
chilly waiting passed away.

'Tak him away, _do!_' she cried, as Tib jumped up at her. 'No,
I woan't!--I woan't!'

The last words rose to a shriek, as David tried to persuade her to
go into the stable, and let him make her a bed in the straw. He
stood looking at her in despair. They had always supposed they
would be locked out; but surely the sleepers inside must hear the
dogs. He turned and stared at the house, hungering for some sign of
life in it. Uncle Reuben would hear them--Uncle Reuben would let
them in!

But the blinds of the top room never budged. Louie, with her head
against the stable-door, and her eyes shut, went on convulsively
sobbing, while Tibby sniffed about her for sympathy. And the bitter
wind coming from the Scout whistled through the yard and seemed to
cut the shivering child like a knife.

'I'll mak a clunter agen th' window wi some gravel,' said David at
last, in desperation. And he picked up a handful and threw it,
first cautiously, then recklessly. Yes!--at last a hand moved the
blind--a hand the children knew well, and a face appeared to one
side of it. Hannah Grieve had never looked so forbidding as at that
moment. The boy caught one glance of a countenance pale with wrath
and sleeplessness; of eyes that seemed to blaze at them through the
window; then the blind fell. He waited breathlessly for minute
after minute. Not a sound.

Furiously he stooped for more gravel, and flung it again and again.
For an age, as it seemed to him, no more notice was taken. At last,
there was an agitation in the blind, as though more than one person
was behind it. It was Hannah who lifted it again; but David thought
he caught a motion of her arm as though she were holding some one
else back. The lad pointed excitedly to Louie.

'She's took bad!' he shouted. 'Uncle Reuben!--Uncle Reuben!--coom
down an see for yorsel. If yo let her in, yo can keep me out as
long as yo like!'

Hannah looked at him, and at the figure huddled against the
stable-door--looked deliberately, and then, as deliberately, pulled
the blind down lower than before, and not a sign of Reuben
anywhere.

A crimson flame sprang to David's cheek. He rushed at the door, and
while with one hand he banged away at the old knocker, he thumped
with the other, kicking lustily the while at the panels, till
Louie, almost forgetting her pains in the fierce excitement of the
moment, thought he would kick them in. In the intervals of his
blows, David could hear voices inside in angry debate.

'Uncle Reuben!' he shouted, stopping the noise for a moment, 'Uncle
Reuben, Louie's turned sick! She's clemmed wi t' cold. If yo doan't
open th' door, I'll go across to Wigson's, and tell 'em as Louie's
parishin, an yo're bein th' death on her.'

The bolt shot back, and there stood Reuben, his red hair sticking
up wildly from his head, his frame shaking with unusual excitement.

'What are yo makin that roompus for, Davy?' began Reuben, with
would-be severity. 'Ha done wi yo, or I'll have to tak a stick to
yo.'

But the boy stood akimbo on the steps, and the old farmer shrank
before him, as David's black eye travelled past him to a gaunt
figure on the stairs.

'Yo'll tak noa stick to me, Uncle Reuben. I'll not put up wi it,
and yo know it. I'm goin to bring Louie in. We've bin on t' moor by
t' Pool lookin for th' owd witch, an we both on us fell asleep, an
Louie's took the rheumatics.--Soa theer.--Stan out o' t' way.'

And running back to Louie, who cried out as he lifted her up, he
half carried, half dragged her in.

'Why, she's like death,' cried Reuben. 'Hannah! summat hot--at
woonst.'

But Hannah did not move. She stood at the foot of the stairs,
barring the way, the chill morning light falling on her threatening
attitude, her grey dishevelled hair and all the squalid disarray of
her dress.

'Them as doos like beggar's brats,' she said grimly, 'may fare like
'em. _I_'ll do nowt for 'em.'

The lad came up to her, his look all daring and resolution--his
sister on his arm. But as he met the woman's expression, his lips
trembled, he suddenly broke down.

'Now, look here,' he cried, with a sob in his throat. 'I know we're
beggar's brats. I know yo hate th' seet on us. But I wor t' worst.
I'm t' biggest. Tak Louie in, and bully-rag me as mich as yo like.
Louie--_Louie_!' and he hung over her in a frenzy, 'wake up,
Louie!'

But the child was insensible. Fatigue, the excitement of the
struggle, the anguish of movement had done their work--she lay like
a log upon his arm.

'She's fainted,' said Hannah, recognising the fact with a sort of
fierce reluctance. 'Tak her up, an doan't stan blatherin theer.'

And she moved out of the way.

The boy gathered up the thin figure, and, stumbling over the
tattered rugs, carried her up by a superhuman effort.

Reuben leant against the passage wall, staring at his wife.

'Yo're a hard woman, Hannah--a hard woman,' he said to her under
his breath, in a low, shaken voice. 'An yo coed 'em beggar's
brats--oh Lord--Lord!'

'Howd your tongue, an blow up t' fire,' was all the reply she
vouchsafed him, and Reuben obeyed.

Meanwhile upstairs Louie had been laid on her bed. Consciousness
had come back, and she was moaning.

David stood beside her in utter despair. He thought she was going
to die, and he had done it. At last he sank down beside her, and
flinging an arm round her, he laid his hot cheek to her icy one.

'Louie, doan't--doan't--I'll tak yo away from here, Louie, when I
can. I'll tak care on yo, Louie. Doan't, Louie,--doan't!'

His whole being seemed rent asunder by sympathy and remorse. Uncle
Reuben, coming up with some hot gruel, found him sitting on the bed
beside his sister, on whom he had heaped all the clothing he could
find, the tears running down his cheeks.




CHAPTER VI


From that night forward, David looked upon the farm and all his
life there with other eyes.

Up till now, in spite of the perennial pressure of Hannah's
tyrannies, which, however, weighed much less upon him than upon
Louie, he had been--as he had let Reuben see--happy enough. The
open-air life, the animals, his books, out of all of them he
managed to extract a very fair daily sum of enjoyment. And he had
been content enough with his daily tasks--herding the sheep, doing
the rough work of the stable and cow-house, running Aunt Hannah's
errands with the donkey-cart to Clough End, helping in the
haymaking and the sheep-shearing, or the driving of stock to and
from the various markets Reuben frequented. All these things he had
done with a curious placidity, a detachment and yet readiness of
mind, as one who lends himself, without reluctance, to a life not
his own. It was this temper mainly, helped, no doubt, by his
unusual tastes and his share of foreign blood and looks, which had
set him apart from the other lads of his own class in the
neighbourhood. He had few friends of his own age, yet he was not
unpopular, except, perhaps, with an overbearing animal like Jim
Wigson, who instinctively looked upon other people's brains as an
offence to his own muscular pretensions.

But his Easter Eve struggle with Hannah closed, as it were, a
childhood, which, though hard and loveless, had been full of
compensations and ignorant of its own worst wants. It woke in him
the bitterness of the orphan dependant, who feels himself a burden
and loathes his dependence. That utter lack of the commonest
natural affection, in which he and Louie had been brought up--for
Reuben's timorous advances had done but little to redress the
balance--had not troubled him much, till suddenly it was writ so
monstrous large in Hannah's refusal to take pity on the fainting
and agonised Louie. Thenceforward every morsel of food he took at
her hands seemed to go against him. They were paupers, and Aunt
Hannah hated them. The fact had been always there, but it had never
meant anything substantial to him till now. Now, at last, that
complete dearth of love, in which he had lived since his father
died, began to react in revolt and discontent.

The crisis may have been long preparing, those words of his uncle
as to his future, as well as the incident of their locking out, may
have had something to say to it. Anyway, a new reflective temper
set in. The young immature creature became self-conscious, began to
feel the ferments of growth. The ambition and the restlessness his
father had foreseen, with dying eyes, began to stir.

Reuben's qualms returned upon him. On the 15th of May, he and David
went to Woodhead, some sixteen or seventeen miles off, to receive
the young stock from the Yorkshire breeders, which were to be
grazed on the farm during the summer. In general, David had taken
the liveliest interest in the animals, in the number and quality of
them, in the tariff to be paid for them, and the long road there
and back had been cheered for the farmer by the lad's chatter, and
by the athletic antics he was always playing with any handy gate or
tree which crossed their path.

'Them heifers ull want a deal o' grass puttin into 'em afoor
they'll be wuth onybody's buyin, Davy,' said Reuben, inspecting his
mixed herd with a critical eye from a roadside bank, as they
climbed the first hill on their return journey.

'Aye, they're a poor lot,' returned David, shortly, and walked on
as far in front of his uncle as might be, with his head in the air
and his moody look fixed on the distance.

'T' Wigsons ull be late gettin whoam,' began Reuben again, with an
uneasy look at the boy. 'Owd Wigson wor that full up wi yell when I
last seed him they'll ha a job to get him started straight this
neet.'

To this remark David had nothing at all to say, though in general
he had a keen neighbourly relish for the misdeeds of the Wigsons.
Reuben did not know what to make of him. However, a mile further on
he made another attempt:

'Lord, how those Yorkshire breeders did talk! Yo'd ha thowt they'd
throw their jaws off the hinges. An a lot o' gimcrack notions as
iver wor--wi their new foods, an their pills an strengthening
mixtures--messin wi cows as though they wor humans. Why conno they
leave God Awmighty alone? He can bring a calvin cow through beawt
ony o' their meddlin, I'll uphowd yo!'

But still not a word from the lad in front. Reuben might as well
have talked to the wall beside him. He had grown used to the boy's
companionship, and the obstinate silence which David still
preserved from hour to hour as they drove their stock homewards
made a sensible impression on him.

Inside the house there was a constant, though in general a silent,
struggle going on between the boy and Hannah on the subject of
Louie. Louie, after the escapade of Easter Eve, was visited with a
sharp attack of inflammatory rheumatism, only just stopping
short of rheumatic fever. Hannah got a doctor, and tended her
sufficiently while the worst lasted, partly because she was, after
all, no monster, but only a commonly sordid and hard-natured woman,
and partly because for a day or two Louie's state set her
pondering, perforce, what might be the effect on Mr. Gurney's
remittances if the child incontinently died. This thought
undoubtedly quickened whatever natural instincts might be left in
Hannah Grieve; and the child had her doctor, and the doctor's
orders were more or less followed.

But when she came downstairs again--a lanky, ghostly creature, much
grown, her fierce black eyes more noticeable than ever in her
pinched face--Hannah's appetite for 'snipin'--to use the expressive
Derbyshire word--returned upon her. The child was almost bullied
into her bed again--or would have been if David had not found ways
of preventing it. He realised for the first time that, as the young
and active male of the household, he was extremely necessary to
Hannah's convenience, and now whenever Hannah ill-treated Louie her
convenience suffered. David disappeared. Her errands were undone,
the wood uncut, and coals and water had to be carried as they best
could. As to reprisals, with a strong boy of fourteen, grown very
nearly to a man's height, Hannah found herself a good deal at a
loss. 'Bully-raggin' he took no more account of than of a shower of
rain; blows she instinctively felt it would have been dangerous to
attempt; and as to deprivation of food, the lad seemed to thrive on
hunger, and never whistled so loudly as when, according to Hannah's
calculations, he must have been as 'keen-bitten as a hawk.' For the
first time in her life Hannah was to some extent tamed. When there
was business about she generally felt it expedient to let Louie
alone.

But this sturdy protection was more really a matter of roused pride
and irritation on David's part than of brotherly love. It was the
tragedy of Louie Grieve's fate--whether as child or woman--that she
was not made to be loved. Whether _she_ could love, her story
will show; but to love her when you were close to her was always
hard. How different the days would have been for the moody lad, who
had at last learnt to champion her, if their common isolation and
dependence had but brought out in her towards him anything
clinging--anything confidential, any true spirit of comradeship! On
the contrary, while she was still ill in bed, and almost absolutely
dependent on what he might choose to do for her, she gibed and
flouted him past bearing, mainly, no doubt, for the sake of
breaking the tedium of her confinement a little. And when she was
about again, and he was defending her weakness from Aunt Hannah, it
seemed to him that she viewed his proceedings rather with a
malicious than a grateful eye. It amused and excited her to see him
stand up to Hannah, but he got little reward from her for his
pains.

She was, as it were, always watching him with a sort of secret
discontent. He did not suit her--was not congenial to her.
Especially was she exasperated now more than ever by his bookish
tastes. Possibly she was doubly jealous of his books; at any rate,
unless he had been constantly on his guard, she would have hidden
them, or done them a mischief whenever she could, in her teasing,
magpie way.

One morning, in the grey summer dawn, Louie had just wakened, and
was staring sleepily at the door, when, all of a sudden, it
opened--very quietly, as though pushed by some one anxious not to
make a noise--and Reuben's head looked round it. Louie, amazed,
woke up in earnest, and Reuben came stealthily in. He had his hat
and stick under his arm, and one hand held his boots, while he
stepped noiselessly in his stocking feet across the room to where
Louie lay--'Louie, are yo awake?'

The child stared up at him, seeing mostly his stubble of red hair,
which came like a grotesque halo between her and the wall. Then she
nodded.

'Doan't let yor aunt hear nothin, Louie. She thinks I'm gone out to
th' calves. But, Louie, that merchant I towd yo on came yesterday,
an he wor a hard un, he wor--as tough as nails, a sight worse nor
owd Croker to deal wi, ony day in th' week. I could mak nowt on
him--an he gan me sich a poor price. I darn't tak a penny on 't
from your aunt--noa, I darn't, Louie,--not if it wor iver so.
She'll be reet down mad when she knaws--an I'm real sorry about
that bit dress o' yourn, Louie.'

He stood looking down at her, his spectacles falling forward on his
nose, the corners of his mouth drooping--a big ungainly culprit.

For a second or two the child was quite still, nothing but the
black eyes and tossed masses of hair showing above the sheet. Then
the eyes blinked suddenly, and flinging out her hand at him with a
passionate gesture, as though to push him away, she turned on her
face and drew the bedclothes over her head.

'Louie!' he said--'Louie!'

But she made no sign, and, at last, with a grotesquely concerned
face, he went out of the room and downstairs, hanging his head.

Out of doors, he found David already at work in the cowhouse, but
as surly and uncommunicative as before when he was spoken to. That
the lad had turned 'agen his wark,' and was on his way to hate the
farm and all it contained, was plain even to Reuben. Why was he so
glum and silent--why didn't he speak up? Perhaps he would, Reuben's
conscience replied, if it were conveyed to him that he possessed a
substantial portion of six hundred pounds!

The boy knew that his uncle watched him--anxiously, as one watches
something explosive and incalculable--and felt a sort of contempt
for himself that nothing practical came of his own revolt and
discontent. But he was torn with indecision. How to leave
Louie--what to do with himself without a farthing in the
world--whom to go to for advice? He thought often of Mr. Ancrum,
but a fierce distaste for chapels and ministers had been growing on
him, and he had gradually seen less and less of the man who had
been the kind comrade and teacher of his early childhood. His only
real companions during this year of moody adolescence were his
books. From the forgotten deposit in the old meal-ark upstairs,
which had yielded 'Paradise Lost,' he drew other treasures by
degrees. He found there, in all, some tattered leaves--three or
four books altogether--of Pope's 'Iliad,' about half of Foxe's
'Martyrs'--the rest having been used apparently by the casual
nurses, who came to tend Reuben's poor mother in her last days,
to light the fire--a complete copy of Locke 'On the Human
Understanding,' and various volumes of old Calvinist sermons, which
he read, partly because his reading appetite was insatiable, partly
from a half-contemptuous desire to find out what it might be that
Uncle Reuben was always troubling his head about.

As to 'Lias Dawson, David saw nothing of him for many long weeks
after the scene which had led to the adventure of the Pool. He
heard only that 'Lias was 'bad,' and mostly in his bed, and feeling
a little guilty, he hardly knew why, the lad kept away from his old
friend.

Summer and the early autumn passed away. October brought a spell of
wintry weather; and one day, as he was bringing the sheep home, he
met old Margaret, 'Lias's wife. She stopped and accosted him.

'Why doan't yo coom and see 'Lias sometimes, Davy, my lad? Yo might
leeten him up a bit, an' he wants it, t' Lord knows. He's been
fearfu' bad in his sperrits this summer.'

The lad stammered out some sheepish excuses, and soon made his way
over to Frimley Moor. But the visits were not so much pleasure as
usual. 'Lias was very feeble, and David had a constant temptation to
struggle with. He understood that to excite 'Lias, to throw him
again into the frenzy which had begotten the vision of the Pool,
would be a cruel act. But all the same he found it more and more
difficult to restrain himself, to keep back the questions which
burnt on his tongue.

As for 'Lias, his half-shut eye would brighten whenever David
showed himself at the door, and he would point to a wooden stool on
the other side of the fire.

'Sit tha down, lad. Margret, gie him soom tay,' or 'Margret, yo'll
just find him a bit oatcake.'

And then the two would fall upon their books together, and the
conversation would glide imperceptibly into one of those scenes of
half-dramatic impersonation, for which David's relish was still
unimpaired.

But the old man was growing much weaker; his inventions had less
felicity, less range than of old; and the watchful Margaret, at her
loom in the corner, kept an eye on any signs of an undue
excitement, and turned out David or any other visitor, neck and
crop, without scruple, as soon as it seemed to her that her
crippled seer was doing himself a mischief. Poor soul! she had
lived in this tumult of 'Lias's fancies year after year, till the
solid world often turned about her. And she, all the while, so
simple, so sane--the ordinary good woman, with the ordinary woman's
hunger for the common blessings of life--a little love, a little
chat, a little prosaic well-being! She had had two sons--they were
gone. She had been the proud wife 'o' t' cliverest mon atwixt
Sheffield an Manchester,' as Frimley and the adjacent villages had
once expressed it, when every mother that respected herself sent
her children to 'Lias Dawson's school. And the mysterious chances
of a summer night had sent home upon her hands a poor incapable,
ruined in mind and body, who was to live henceforward upon her
charity, wandering amid the chaotic wreck and debris of his former
self.

Well, she took up her burden!

The straggling village on Frimley Moor was mainly inhabited by a
colony of silk hand-loom weavers--the descendants of French
prisoners in the great war, and employed for the most part by a
firm at Leck. Very dainty work was done at Frimley, and very
beautiful stuffs made. The craft went from father to son. All
Margaret's belongings had been weavers; but 'Lias, in the pride of
his schoolmaster's position, would never allow his wife to use the
trade of her youth. When he became dependent on her, Margaret
bought a disused loom from a cousin, had it mended and repaired,
and set to work. Her fingers had not forgotten their old cunning;
and when she was paid for her first 'cut,' she hurried home to
'Lias with a reviving joy in her crushed heart. Thenceforward, she
lived at her loom; she became a skilled and favoured worker, and
the work grew dear to her--first, because 'Lias lived on it, and,
next, because the bright roses and ribbon-patterns she wove into
her costly stuffs were a perpetual cheer to her. The moors might
frown outside, the snow might drift against the cottage walls:
Margaret had always something gay under her fingers, and threw her
shuttle with the more zest the darker and colder grew the
Derbyshire world without.

Naturally the result of this long concentration of effort had been
to make the poor soul, for whom each day was lived and fought, the
apple of Margaret's eye. So long as that bent, white form sat
beside her fire, Margaret was happy. Her heart sank with every
fresh sign of age and weakness, revived with every brighter hour.
He still lorded it over her often, as he had done in the days of
their prosperity, and whenever this old mood came back upon him,
Margaret could have cried for pleasure.

The natural correlative of such devotion was a drying up of
interest in all the world beside. Margaret had the selfishness of
the angelic woman--everything was judged as it affected her idol.
So at first she took no individual interest in David--he cheered up
'Lias--she had no other thought about him.

On a certain November day David was sitting opposite to 'Lias. The
fire burnt between them, and on the fire was a griddle, whereon
Margaret had just deposited some oatcakes for tea. The old man was
sitting drooped in his chair, his chin on his breast, his black
eyes staring beyond David at the wall. David was seized with
curiosity--what was he thinking about?--what did he see? There was
a mystery, a weirdness about the figure, about that hungry gaze,
which tormented him. His temptation returned upon him irresistibly.

'Lias,' he said, bending forward, his dark cheek flushing with
excitement, 'Louie and I went up, Easter Eve, to t' Pool, but we
went to sleep an saw nowt. What was't yo saw, 'Lias? Did yo see her
for sure?'

The old man raised his head frowning, and looked at the boy. But
the frown was merely nervous, he had heard nothing. On the other
hand, Margaret, whom David had supposed to be in the back kitchen,
but who was in reality a few steps behind him, mending something
which had gone wrong in her loom, ran forward suddenly to the fire,
and bending over her griddle somehow promptly threw down the tongs,
making a clatter and commotion, in the midst of which the cakes
caught, and old 'Lias moved from the fender, saying fretfully,

'Yo're that orkard wi things, Margret, yo're like a dog dancin.'

But in the bustle Margaret had managed to say to David, 'Howd your
tongue, noddle-yed, will yo?'

And so unexpected was the lightning from her usually mild blue eyes
that David sat dumbfounded, and presently sulkily got up to go.
Margaret followed him out and down the bit of garden.

And at the gate, when they were well out of hearing of 'Lias, she
fell on the boy with a torrent of words, gripping him the while
with her long thin hand, so that only violence could have released
him. Her eyes flamed at him under the brown woollen shawl she wore
pinned under her chin; the little emaciated creature became a fury.
What did he come there for, 'moiderin 'Lias wi his divilments'? If
he ever said a word of such things again, she'd lock the door on
him, and he might go to Jenny Crum for his tea. Not a bite or a sup
should he ever have in her house again.

'I meant no harm,' said the boy doggedly. 'It wor he towd me about
t' witch--it wor he as put it into our yeds--Louie an me.'

Margaret exclaimed. So it was he that got 'Lias talking about the
Pool in the spring! Some one had been 'cankin wi him about things
they didn't owt'--that she knew--'and she might ha thowt it wor'
Davy. For that one day's 'worritin ov him' she had had him on her
hands for weeks--off his sleep, and off his feed, and like a
blighted thing. 'Aye, it's aw play to yo,' she said, trembling all
through in her passion, as she held the boy--'it's aw play to yo
and your minx of a sister. An if it means deein to the old man
hissel, _yo_ don't care! "Margaret," says the doctor to me
last week, "if you can keep his mind quiet he may hang on a bit.
But you munna let him excite hissel about owt--he mun tak things
varra easy. He's like a wilted leaf--nobbut t'least thing will
bring it down. He's worn varra thin like, heart an lungs, and aw t'
rest of him." An d' yo think I'st sit still an see yo _murder_
him--the poor lamb--afore my eyes--me as ha got nowt else but him
i' t' wide warld? No--yo yoong varlet--goo an ast soom one else
about Jenny Crum if yo 're just set on meddlin wi divil's wark--but
yo'll no trouble my 'Lias.'

She took her hands off him, and the boy was going away in a
half-sullen silence, when she caught him again.

'Who towd yo about 'Lias an t' Pool, nobbut 'Lias hissel?'

'Uncle Reuben towd me summat.'

'Aye, Reuben Grieve--he put him in t' carrier's cart, an behaved
moor like a Christian nor his wife--I allus mind that o' Reuben
Grieve, when foak coe him a foo. Wal, I'st tell yo, Davy, an if
iver yo want to say a word about Jenny Crum in our house
afterwards, yo mun ha a gritstone whar your heart owt to be--that's
aw.'

And she leant over the wall of the little garden, twisting her
apron in her old, tremulous hands, and choking down the tears which
had begun to rise. Then, looking straight before her, and in a low,
plaintive voice, which seemed to float on hidden depths of grief,
she told her story.

It appeared that 'Lias had been 'queer' a good while before the
adventure of the Pool. But, according to his wife, 'he wor that
cliver on his good days, foak could mak shift wi him on his bad
days;' the school still prospered, and money was still plentiful.
Then, all of a sudden, the moorland villages round were overtaken
by an epidemic of spirit-rapping and table-turning. 'It wor sperrits
here, sperrits there, sperrits everywhere--t' warld wor gradely
swarmin wi 'em,' said Margaret bitterly. It was all started,
apparently, by a worthless 'felly' from Castleton, who had a great
reputation as a medium, and would come over on summer evenings to
conduct seances at Frimley and the places near. 'Lias, already in an
excitable, overworked state, was bitten by the new mania, and could
think of nothing else.

One night he and the Castleton medium fell talking about Jenny
Crum, the witch of Kinder Scout, and her Easter Eve performances.
The medium bet 'Lias a handsome sum that he would not dare face
her. 'Lias, piqued and wrathful, and 'wi moor yell on board nor he
could reetly stan,' took the bet. Margaret heard nothing of it. He
announced on Easter Eve that he was going to a brother in Edale for
the Sunday, and gave her the slip. She saw no more of him till the
carrier brought home to her, on the Sunday morning, a starved and
pallid object--'gone clean silly, an hutched thegither like an owd
man o' seventy--he bein fifty-six by his reet years.' With woe and
terror she helped him to his bed, and in that bed he stayed for
more than a year, while everything went from them--school and
savings, and all the joys of life.

'An yo'll be wantin to know, like t' rest o' 'em, what he saw!'
cried Margaret angrily, facing round upon the boy, whose face was,
indeed, one question.' "Margaret, did he tell tha what t' witch
said to un?"--every blatherin idiot i' th' parish asked me that, wi
his mouth open, till I cud ha stopped my ears an run wheniver I
seed a livin creetur. What do I keer?--what doos it matter to me
what he saw? I doan't bleeve he saw owt, if yo ast _me_. He
wor skeert wi his own thinkins, an th' cowd gripped him i' th'
in'ards, an twisted him as yo may twist a withe of hay--Aye! it wor
a _cruel_ neet. When I opened t' door i' t' early mornin, t'
garden wor aw black--th' ice on t' reservoir wor inches thick. Mony
a year afterwards t' foak round here ud talk o' that for an April
frost. An my poor 'Lias--lost on that fearfu Scout--sleepin out
wi'out a rag to cover him, an skeert soomhow--t'Lord or t'Devil
knows how! And then foak ud have me mak a good tale out o'
it--soomthin to gie 'em a ticklin down their backbane--soomthin to
pass an evenin--_Lord!'_

The wife's voice paused abruptly on this word of imprecation, or
appeal, as though her own passion choked her. David stood beside
her awkwardly, his eyes fixed on the gravel, wherewith one foot was
playing. There was no more sullenness in his expression.

Margaret's hand still played restlessly with the handkerchief. Her
eyes were far away, her mind absorbed by the story of her own fate.
Round the moorside, on which the cottage was built, there bent a
circling edge of wood, now aflame with all the colour of late
autumn. Against its deep reds and browns, Margaret's small profile
was thrown out--the profile already of the old woman, with the
meeting nose and chin, the hollow cheek, the maze of wrinkles round
the eyes. Into that face, worn by the labour and the grief of the
poor--into that bending figure, with the peasant shawl folded round
the head and shoulders--there had passed all the tragic dignity
which belongs to the simple and heartfelt things of human life, to
the pain of helpless affection, to the yearning of irremediable
loss.

The boy beside her was too young to feel this. But he felt more,
perhaps, than any other lad of the moorside could have felt. There
was, at all times, a natural responsiveness in him of a strange
kind, vibrating rather to pain than joy. He stood by her,
embarrassed, yet drawn to her--waiting, too, as it seemed to him,
for something more that must be coming.

'An then,' said Margaret at last, turning to him, and speaking more
quietly, but still in a kind of tense way, 'then, when 'Lias wor
took bad, yo know, Davy, I had my boys. Did yo ever hear tell o'
what came to 'em, Davy?'

The boy shook his head.

'Ah!' she said, catching her breath painfully, 'they're moast
forgotten, is my boys. 'Lias had been seven weeks i' his bed, an I
wor noan so mich cast down--i' those days I had a sperrit more 'n
most. I thowt th' boys ud keer for us--we'd gien em a good bringin
up, an they wor boath on 'em larnin trades i' Manchester. Yan
evenin--it wor that hot we had aw t' doors an windows open--theer
came a man runnin up fro t' railway. An my boys were kilt,
Davy--boath on 'em--i' Duley Moor Tunnel. They wor coomin to spend
Sunday wi us, an it wor an excursion train--I niver knew t' reets
on 't!'

She paused and gently wiped away her tears. Her passion had all
ebbed.

'An I thowt if I cud ha got 'em home an buried 'em, Davy, I could
ha borne it better. But they wor aw crushed, an cut about, an
riddlet to bits--they wudna let me ha em. And so we kep it fro
'Lias. Soomtimes I think he knows t' boys are dead--an then
soomtimes he frets 'at they doan't coom an see him. Fourteen year
ago! An I goo on tellin him they'll coom soon. An last week, when I
towd him it, I thowt to mysel it wor just th' naked truth!'

David leant over the gate, pulling at some withered hollyhocks
beside it. But when, after a minute of choking silence, Margaret
caught his look, she saw, though he tried to hide it, that his
black eyes were swimming. Her full heart melted altogether.

'Oh, Davy, I meant naw offence!' she said, catching him by the arm
again. 'Yo're a good lad, an yo're allus a welcome seet to that poor
creetur. But yo'll not say owt to trouble him again, laddie--will
yo? If he'd yeerd yo just now--but, by t' Lord's blessin, he did
na--he'd ha worked himsel up fearfu'! I'd ha had naw sleep wi him
for neets--like it wor i' th' spring. Yo munna--yo munna! He's all
I ha--his livin 's my livin, Davy--an when he's took away--why,
I'll mak shift soomhow to dee too!'

She let him go, and, with a long sigh, she lifted her trembling
hands to her head, put her frilled cap straight and her shawl. She
was just moving away, when something of a different sort struck her
sensitive soul, and she turned again. She lived for 'Lias, but she
lived for her religion too, and it seemed to her she had been
sinning in her piteous talk.

'Dinna think, Davy,' she said hurriedly, 'as I'm complainin o' th'
Lord's judgments. They're aw mercies, if we did but know. An He
tempers th' wind--He sends us help when we're droppin for sorrow.
It worn't for nothin He made us all o' a piece. Theer's good foak
i' th' warld--aye, theer is! An what's moor, theer's soom o' th'
best mak o' foak gooin about dressed i' th' worst mak o' clothes.
Yo'll find it out when yo want 'em.'

And with a clearing face, as of one who takes up a burden again and
adjusts it anew more easily, she walked back to the house.

David went down the lane homewards, whistling hard. But once, as he
climbed a stile and sat dangling his legs a moment on the top, he
felt his eyes wet again. He dashed his hand impatiently across
them. At this stage of youth he was constantly falling out with and
resenting his own faculty of pity, of emotion. The attitude of mind
had in it a sort of secret half-conscious terror of what feeling
might do with him did he but give it head. He did not want to
feel--feeling only hurt and stabbed--he wanted to enjoy, to take
in, to discover--to fling the wild energies of mind and body into
some action worthy of them. And because he had no knowledge to show
him how, and a wavering will, he suffered and deteriorated.

The Dawsons, indeed, became his close friends. In Margaret there
had sprung up a motherly affection for the handsome lonely lad; and
he was grateful. He took her 'cuts' down to the Clough End office
for her; when the snow was deep on the Scout, and Reuben and David
and the dogs were out after their sheep night and day, the boy
still found time to shovel the snow from Margaret's roof and cut a
passage for her to the road. The hours he spent this winter by her
kitchen fire, chatting with 'Lias, or eating havercakes, or helping
Margaret with some household work, supplied him for the first time
with something of what his youth was, in truth, thirsting for--the
common kindliness of natural affection.

But certainly, to most observers, he seemed to deteriorate. Mr.
Ancrum could make nothing of him. David held the minister at
arm's-length, and meanwhile rumours reached him that 'Reuben
Grieve's nevvy' was beginning to be much seen in the public-houses;
he had ceased entirely to go to chapel or Sunday school; and the
local gossips, starting perhaps from a natural prejudice against
the sons of unknown and probably disreputable mothers, prophesied
freely that the tall, queer-looking lad would go to the bad.

All this troubled Mr. Ancrum sincerely. Even in the midst of some
rising troubles of his own he found the energy to buttonhole Reuben
again, and torment him afresh on the subject of a trade for the
lad.

Reuben, flushed and tremulous, went straight from the minister to
his wife--with the impetus of Mr. Ancrum's shove, as it were, fresh
upon him. Sitting opposite to her in the back kitchen, while she
peeled her potatoes with a fierce competence and energy which made
his heart sick within him, Reuben told her, with incoherent
repetitions of every phrase, that in his opinion the time had come
when Mr. Gurney should be written to, and some of Sandy's savings
applied to the starting of Sandy's son in the world.

There was an ominous silence. Hannah's knife flashed, and the
potato-peelings fell with a rapidity which fairly paralysed Reuben.
In his nervousness, he let fall the name of Mr. Ancrum. Then Hannah
broke out. '_Some_ foo',' she knew, had been meddling, and she
might have guessed that fool was Mr. Ancrum. Instead of defending
her own position, she fell upon Reuben and his supporter with a
rhetoric whereof the moral flavour was positively astounding.
Standing with the potato-bowl on one hip and a hand holding the
knife on the other, she delivered her views as to David's laziness,
temper, and general good-for-nothingness. If Reuben chose to incur
the risks of throwing such a young lout into town-wickedness, with
no one to look after him, let him; she'd be glad enough to be shut
on him. But, as to writing to Mr. Gurney and that sort of talk, she
wasn't going to bandy words--not she; but nobody had ever meddled
with Hannah Grieve's affairs yet and found they had done well for
themselves.

'An I wouldna advise yo, Reuben Grieve, to begin now--no, I
wouldna. I gie yo fair noatice. Soa theer's not enough for t' lad
to do, Mr. Ancrum, he thinks? Perhaps he'll tak th' place an try?
I'd not gie him as mich wage as ud fill his stomach i' th'
week--noa, I'd not, not if yo wor to ask _me_--a bletherin
windy chap as iver I saw. I'd as soon hear a bird-clapper preach as
him--theer'd be more sense an less noise! An they're findin it out
down theer--we'st see th' back on him soon.'

And to Reuben, looking across the little scullery at his wife, at
the harsh face shaken with the rage which these new and intolerable
attempts of her husband to dislodge the yoke of years excited in
her, it was as though like Christian and Hopeful he were trying to
get back into the Way, and found that the floods had risen over it.

When he was out of her sight, he fell into a boundless perplexity.
Perhaps she was right, after all. Mr. Ancrum was a meddler and he
an ass. When next he saw David, he spoke to the boy harshly, and
demanded to know where he went loafing every afternoon. Then, as
the days went on, he discovered that Hannah meant to visit his
insubordination upon him in various unpleasant ways. There were
certain little creature comforts, making but small show on the
surface of a life of general abstinence and frugality, but which,
in the course of years, had grown very important to Reuben, and
which Hannah had never denied him. They were now withdrawn. In her
present state of temper with her better half, Hannah could not be
'fashed' with providing them. And no one could force her to brew him
his toddy at night, or put his slippers to warm, or keep his meals
hot and tasty for him, if some emergency among the animals made him
late for his usual hours--certainly not the weak and stammering
Reuben. He was at her mercy, and he chafed indescribably under her
unaccustomed neglect.

As for Mr. Ancrum, his own affairs, poor soul, soon became so
absorbing that he had no thoughts left for David. There were
dissensions growing between him and the 'Christian Brethren.' He
spoke often at the Sunday meetings--too often, by a great deal, for
the other shining lights of the congregation. But his much speaking
seemed to come rather of restlessness than of a fall 'experience,'
so torn, subtle, and difficult were the things he said. Grave
doubts of his doctrine were rising among some of the 'Brethren'; a
mean intrigue against him was just starting among others, and he
himself was tempest-tossed, not knowing from week to week whether
to go or stay.

Meanwhile, as the winter went on, he soon perceived that Reuben
Grieve's formidable wife was added to the ranks of his enemies. She
came to chapel, because for a Christian Brother or Sister to go
anywhere else would have been a confession of weakness in the face
of other critical and observant communities--such, for instance, as
the Calvinistic Methodists, or the Particular Baptists--not to be
thought of for a moment. But when he passed her, he got no greeting
from her; she drew her skirts aside, and her stony eye looked
beyond him, as though there were nothing on the road. And the
sharp-tongued things she said of him came round to him one by one.
Reuben, too, avoided the minister, who, a year or two before, had
brought fountains of refreshing to his soul, and in the business of
the chapel, of which he was still an elder, showed himself more
inarticulate and confused than ever. While David, who had won a
corner in Mr. Ancrum's heart since the days of their first
acquaintance at Sunday-school--David fled him altogether, and would
have none of his counsel or his friendship. The alienation of the
Grieves made another and a bitter drop in the minister's rising cup
of failure.

So the little web of motives and cross-motives, for the most part
of the commonest earthiest hue, yet shot every here and there by a
thread or two of heavenlier stuff, went spinning itself the winter
through round the unknowing children. The reports which had reached
Mr. Ancrum were true enough. David was, in his measure,
endeavouring to 'see life.' On a good many winter evenings the lad,
now nearly fifteen, and shooting up fast to man's stature, might
have been seen among the topers at the 'Crooked Cow,' nay, even
lending an excited ear to the Secularist speakers, who did their
best to keep things lively at a certain low public kept by one
Jerry Timmins, a Radical wag, who had often measured himself both
in the meeting-houses and in the streets against the local
preachers, and, according to his own following, with no small
success. There was a covered skittle-ground attached to this house
in which, to the horrid scandal of church and chapel, Sunday dances
were sometimes held. A certain fastidious pride, and no doubt a
certain conscience towards Reuben, kept David from experimenting in
these performances, which were made as demonstratively offensive to
the pious as they well could be without attracting the attention of
the police.

But at the disputations between Timmins and a succession of
religious enthusiasts, ministers and others, which took place on
the same spot during the winter and spring, David was frequently
present.

Neither here, however, nor at the 'Crooked Cow' did the company
feel the moody growing youth to be one of themselves. He would sit
with his pint before him, silent, his great black eyes roving round
the persons present. His tongue was sharp on occasion, and his
fists ready, so that after various attempts to make a butt of him
he was generally let alone. He got what he wanted--he learnt to
know what smoking and drinking might be like, and the jokes of the
taproom. And all by the help of a few shillings dealt out to him
this winter for the first time by Reuben, who gave them to him with
a queer deprecating look and an injunction to keep the matter
secret from Hannah. As to the use the lad made of them, Reuben was
as ignorant as he was of all other practical affairs outside his
own few acres.




CHAPTER VII


Spring came round again and the warm days of June. At Easter time
David had made no further attempts to meet with Jenny Crum on her
midnight wanderings. The whole tendency of his winter's mental
growth, as well perhaps of the matters brutally raised and crudely
sifted in Jerry Timmins's parlour, had been towards a harder and
more sceptical habit of mind. For the moment the supernatural had
no thrill in it for an intelligence full of contradictions. So the
poor witch, if indeed she 'walked,' revisited her place of pain
unobserved of mortal eye.

About the middle of June David and his uncle went, as usual, to
Kettlewell and Masholme, in Yorkshire, for the purpose of bringing
home from thence some of that hardier breed of sheep which was
required for the moorland, a Scotch breed brought down yearly to
the Yorkshire markets by the Lowland farmers beyond the border.
This expedition was an annual matter, and most of the farmers in
the Kinder Valley and thereabouts joined in it. They went together
by train to Masholme, made their purchases, and then drove their
sheep over the moors home, filling the wide ferny stretches and the
rough upland road with a patriarchal wealth of flocks, and putting
up at night at the village inns, while their charges strayed at
will over the hills. These yearly journeys had always been in
former years a joy to David. The wild freedom of the walk, the
change of scene which every mile and every village brought with it,
the resistance of the moorland wind, the spring of the moorland
turf, every little incident of the road, whether of hardship or of
rough excess, added fuel to the flame of youth, and went to build
up the growing creature.

This year, however, that troubling of the waters which was going on
in the boy was especially active during the Masholme expedition. He
kept to himself and his animals, and showed such a gruff
unneighbourly aspect to the rest of the world that the other
drivers first teased and then persecuted him. He fought one or two
pitched battles on the way home, showed himself a more respectable
antagonist, on the whole, than his assailants had bargained for,
and was thenceforward contemptuously sent to Coventry. 'Yoong man,'
said an old farmer to him once reprovingly, after one of these
"rumpuses," '_yor_ temper woan't mouldy wi keepin.' Reuben
coming by at the moment threw an unhappy glance at the lad, whose
bruised face and torn clothes showed he had been fighting. To the
uncle's mind there was a wanton, nay, a ruffianly look about him,
which was wholly new. Instead of rebuking the culprit, Reuben
slouched away and put as much road as possible between himself and
Davy.

One evening, after a long day on the moors, the party came, late in
the afternoon, to the Yorkshire village of Haworth. To David it was
a village like any other. He was already mortally tired of the
whole business--of the endless hills, the company, the bleak grey
weather. While the rest of the party were mopping brows and
draining ale-pots in the farmers' public, he was employing himself
in aimlessly kicking a stone about one of the streets, when he was
accosted by a woman of the shopkeeping class, a decent elderly
woman, who had come out for a mouthful of air, with a child
dragging after her.

'Yoong mester, yo've coom fro a distance, hannot yo?'

The woman's tone struck the boy pleasantly as though it had been a
phrase of cheerful music. There was a motherliness in it--a
something, for which, perhaps all unknown to himself, his secret
heart was thirsting.

'Fro Masholme,' he said, looking at her full, so that she could see
all the dark, richly coloured face she had had a curiosity to see;
then he added abruptly, 'We're bound Kinder way wi t' sheep--reet
t'other side o' t' Scout.'

The woman nodded. 'Aye, I know a good mony o' your Kinder foak.
They've coom by here a mony year passt. But I doan't know as I've
seen yo afoor. Yo're nobbut a yoong 'un. Eh, but we get sich a
sight of strangers here now, the yan fairly drives the tother out
of a body's mind.'

'Doos foak coom for t' summer?' asked David, lifting his eyebrows a
little, and looking round on the bleak and straggling village.

'Noa, they coom to see the church. Lor' bless ye!' said the good
woman, following his eyes towards the edifice and breaking into a
laugh, ''taint becos the church is onything much to look at. 'Taint
nowt out o' t' common that I knows on. Noa--but they coom along
o't' monument, an' Miss Bronte--Mrs. Nicholls, as should be, poor
thing--rayder.'

There was no light of understanding in David's face, but his
penetrating eyes, the size and beauty of which she could not help
observing, seemed to invite her to go on.

'You niver heerd on our Miss Bronte?' said the woman, mildly.
'Well, I spose not. She was just a bit quiet body. Nobbody
hereabouts saw mich in her. But she wrote bukes--tales, yo
know--tales about t' foak roun here; an they do say, them as has
read 'em, 'at they're terr'ble good. Mr. Watson, at t' Post Office,
he's read 'em, and he's allus promised to lend 'em me. But soomhow
I doan't get th' time. An in gineral I've naw moor use for a book
nor a coo has for clogs. But she's terr'ble famous, is Miss Bronte,
now--an her sisters too, pore young women. Yo should see t'
visitors' book in th' church. Aw t' grand foak as iver wor. They
cooms fro Lunnon a purpose, soom ov 'em, an they just takes a look
roun t' place, an writes their names, an goos away. Would yo like
to see th' church?' said the good-natured creature--looking at the
tall lad beside her with an admiring scrutiny such as every woman
knows she may apply to any male. 'I'm goin that way, an it's my
brother 'at has th' keys.'

David accompanied her with an alacrity which would have astonished
his usual travelling companions, and they mounted the straggling
village street together towards the church. As they neared it the
woman stopped and, shading her eyes against the sunlight, pointed
up to it and the parsonage.

'Noa, it's not a beauty, isn't our church. They do say our parson
ud like to have it pulled clean down an a new one built. Onyways,
they're goin to clear th' Brontes' pew away, an sich a rumpus as
soom o' t' Bradford papers have bin makin, and a gradely few o' t'
people here too! I doan't know t' reets on 't missel, but I'st be
sorry when yo conno see ony moor where Miss Charlotte an Miss Emily
used to sit o' Sundays--An theer's th' owd house. Yo used to be
'lowed to see Miss Charlotte's room, where she did her writin, but
they tell me yo can't be let in now. Seems strange, doan't it, 'at
onybody should be real fond o' that place? When yo go by it i'
winter, soomtimes, it lukes that lonesome, with t' churchyard
coomin up close roun it, it's enoof to gie a body th' shivers. But
I do bleeve, Miss Charlotte she could ha kissed ivery stone in 't;
an they do say, when she came back fro furrin parts, she'd sit an
cry for joy, she wor that partial to Haworth. It's a place yo do
get to favour soomhow,' said the good woman, apologetically, as
though feeling that no stranger could justly be expected to
sympathise with the excesses of local patriotism.

Did th' oother sisters write books?' demanded David, his eyes
wandering over the bare stone house towards which the passionate
heart of Charlotte Bronte had yearned so often from the land of
exile.

'Bless yo, yes. An theer's mony foak 'at think Miss Emily wor a
deol cliverer even nor Miss Charlotte. Not but what yo get a bad
noshun o' Yorkshire folk fro Miss Emily's bukes--soa I'm towd. Bit
there's rough doins on t' moors soomtimes, I'll uphowd yo! An Miss
Emily had eyes like gimlets--they seed reet through a body. Deary
me,' she cried, the fountain of gossip opening more and more, 'to
think I should ha known 'em in pinafores, Mr. Patrick an aw!'

And under the stress of what was really a wonder at the small
beginnings of fame--a wonder which much repetition of her story had
only developed in her--she poured out upon her companion the
history of the Brontes; of that awful winter in which three of that
weird band--Emily, Patrick, Anne--fell away from Charlotte's side,
met the death which belonged to each, and left Charlotte alone to
reap the harvest of their common life through a few burning years;
of the publication of the books; how the men of the Mechanics'
Institute (the roof of which she pointed out to him) went crazy
over 'Shirley'; how everybody about 'thowt Miss Bronte had bin
puttin ov 'em into prent,' and didn't know whether to be pleased or
pique; how, as the noise made by 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley' grew, a
wave of excitement passed through the whole countryside, and people
came from Halifax, and Bradford, and Huddersfield--aye, an Lunnon
soomtoimes '--to Haworth church on a Sunday, to see the quiet body
at her prayers who had made all the stir; how Mr. Nicholls, the
curate, bided his time and pressed his wooing; how he won her as
Rachel was won; and how love did but open the gate of death, and
the fiery little creature--exhausted by such an energy of living as
had possessed her from her cradle--sank and died on the threshold
of her new life. All this Charlotte Bronte's townswoman told simply
and garrulously, but she told it well because she had felt and
seen.

'She wor so sma' and nesh; nowt but a midge. Theer was no lasst in
her. Aye, when I heerd the bell tolling for Miss Charlotte that
Saturday mornin,' said the speaker, shaking her head as she moved
away towards the church, 'I cud ha sat down an cried my eyes out.
But if she'd ha seen me she'd ha nobbut said, "Martha, get your
house straight, an doan't fret for me!" She had sich a sperrit, had
Miss Charlotte. Well, now, after aw, I needn't go for t' keys, for
th' church door's open. It's Bradford early closin day, yo see, an
I dessay soom Bradford foak's goin over.'

So she marched him in, and there indeed was a crowd in the little
ugly church, congregated especially at the east end, where the
Brontes' pew still stood awaiting demolition at the hands of a
reforming vicar. As David and his guide came up they found a young
weaver in a black coat, with a sallow oblong face, black hair, high
collars, and a general look of Lord Byron, haranguing those about
him on the iniquity of removing the pews, in a passionate
undertone, which occasionally rose high above the key prescribed by
decorum. It was a half-baked eloquence, sadly liable to bathos,
divided, indeed, between sentences ringing with the great words
'genius' and 'fame,' and others devoted to an indignant
contemplation of the hassocks in the old pews, 'the touching and
well-worn implements of prayer,' to quote his handsome description
of them, which a meddlesome parson was about to 'hurl away,' out of
mere hatred for intellect and contempt of the popular voice.

But, half-baked or no, David rose to it greedily. After a few
moments' listening, he pressed up closer to the speaker, his broad
shoulders already making themselves felt in a crowd, his eyes
beginning to glow with the dissenter's hatred of parsons. In the
full tide of discourse, however, the orator was arrested by an
indignant sexton, who, coming quickly up the church, laid hold upon
him.

'No speechmakin in the church, if you _please_, sir. Move on
if yo're goin to th' vestry, sir, for I'll have to shut up
directly.'

The young man stared haughtily at his assailant, and the men and
boys near closed up, expecting a row. But the voice of authority
within its own gates is strong, and the champion of outraged genius
collapsed. The whole flock broke up and meekly followed the sexton,
who strode on before them to the vestry.

'William's a rare way wi un,' said his companion to David,
following her brother's triumph with looks of admiration. 'I thowt
that un wud ha bin harder to shift.'

David, however, turned upon her with a frown. '_'Tis_ a black
shame,' he said; 'why conno they let t' owd pew bide?'

'Ah, weel,' said the woman with a sigh, 'as I said afore, I'st be
reet sorry when Miss Charlotte's seat's gone. But yo conno ha
brawlin i' church. William's reet enough there.'

And beginning to be alarmed lest she should be raising up fresh
trouble for William in the person of this strange, foreign-looking
lad, with his eyes like 'live birds,' she hurried him on to the
vestry, where the visitors' books were being displayed. Here the
Byronic young man was attempting to pick a fresh quarrel with the
sexton, by way of recovering himself with his party. But he took
little by it; the sexton was a tough customer. When the local
press was shaken in his face, the vicar's hireling, a canny,
weather-beaten Yorkshireman, merely replied with a twist of the
mouth,

'Aye, aye, th' newspapers talk--there'd be soombody goin hoongry if
they didn't;' or--' Them 'at has to eat th' egg knaws best whether
it is addled or no--to my thinkin,' and so on through a string of
similar aphorisms which finally demolished his antagonist.

David meanwhile was burning to be in the fray. He thought of some
fine Miltonic sayings to hurl at the sexton, but for the life of
him he could not get them out. In the presence of that indifferent,
sharp-faced crowd of townspeople his throat grew hot and dry
whenever he thought of speaking.

While the Bradford party struggled out of the church, David, having
somehow got parted from the woman who had brought him in, lingered
behind, before that plain tablet on the wall, whereat the crowd
which had just gone out had been worshipping.

EMILY, aged 29.

ANNE, aged 27.

CHARLOTTE, in the 39th year of her age.

The church had grown suddenly quite still. The sexton was outside,
engaged in turning back a group of Americans, on the plea that
visiting hours were over for the day. Through the wide-open door
the fading yellow light streamed in, and with it a cool wind which
chased little eddies of dust about the pavement. In the dusk the
three names--black on the white--stood out with a stern and yet
piteous distinctness. The boy stood there feeling the silence--the
tomb near by--the wonder and pathos of fame, and all that thrill of
undefined emotion to which youth yields itself so hungrily.

The sexton startled him by tapping him on the shoulder. 'Time to go
home, yoong man. My sister she told me to say good neet to yer, and
she wishes yo good luck wi your journey. Where are yo puttin up?'

'At the "Brown Bess,"' murmured the boy ungraciously, and hurried
out. But the good man, unconscious of repulse and kindly disposed
towards his sister's waif, stuck to him, and, as they walked down
the churchyard together, the difference between the manners of
official and those of private life proved to be so melting to the
temper that even David's began to yield. And a little incident of
the walk mollified him completely. As they turned a corner they
came upon a bit of waste land, and there in the centre of an
admiring company was the sexton's enemy, mounted on a bit of wall,
and dealing out their deserts in fine style to those meddling
parsons and their underlings who despised genius and took no heed
of the relics of the mighty dead. The sexton stopped to listen when
they were nearly out of range, and was fairly carried away by the
'go' of the orator.

'Doan't he do it nateral!' he said with enthusiasm to David, after
a passage specially and unflatteringly devoted to himself. 'Lor'
bless yo, it don't hurt me. But I do loike a bit o' good speakin,
'at I do. If fine worrds wor penny loaves, that yoong gen'leman ud
get a livin aisy! An as for th' owd pew, I cud go skrikin about th'
streets mysel, if it ud do a ha'porth o' good.'

David's brow cleared, and, by the time they had gone a hundred
yards further, instead of fighting the good man, he asked a favour
of him.

'D'yo think as theer's onybody in Haworth as would lend me a seet
o' yan o' Miss Bronte's tales for an hour?' he said, reddening
furiously, as they stopped at the sexton's gate.

'Why to be sure, mon,' said the sexton cheerily, pleased with the
little opening for intelligent patronage. 'Coom your ways in, and
we'll see if we can't oblige yo. I've got a tidy lot o' books in my
parlour, an I can give yo "Shirley," I know.'

David went into the stone-built cottage with his guide, and was
shown in the little musty front room a bookcase full of books which
made his eyes gleam with desire. The half-curbed joy and eagerness
he showed so touched the sexton that, after inquiring as to the
lad's belongings, and remembering that in his time he had enjoyed
many a pipe and 'glass o' yell' with 'owd Reuben Grieve' at the
'Brown Bess,' the worthy man actually lent him indefinitely three
precious volumes--'Shirley,' 'Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography,'
and 'Nicholas Nickleby.'

David ran off hugging them, and thenceforward he bore patiently
enough with the days of driving and tramping which remained, for
the sake of the long evenings when in some lonely corner of moor
and wood he lay full length on the grass revelling in one or other
of his new possessions. He had a voracious way of tearing out the
heart of a book first of all, and then beginning it again with a
different and a tamer curiosity, lingering, tasting, and digesting.
By the time he and Reuben reached home he had rushed through all
three books, and his mind was full of them.

'Shirley' and 'Nicholas Nickleby' were the first novels of modern
life he had ever laid hands on, and before he had finished them he
felt them in his veins like new wine. The real world had been to
him for months something sickeningly narrow and empty, from which
at times he had escaped with passion into a distant dream-life of
poetry and history. Now the walls of this real world were suddenly
pushed back as it were on all sides, and there was an inrush of
crowd, excitement, and delight. Human beings like those he heard of
or talked with every day--factory hands and mill-owners, parsons,
squires, lads and lasses--the Yorkes, and Robert Moore, Squeers,
Smike, Kate Nickleby and Newman Noggs, came by, looked him in the
eyes, made him take sides, compare himself with them, join in their
fights and hatreds, pity and exult with them. Here was something
more disturbing, personal, and stimulating than that mere
imaginative relief he had been getting out of 'Paradise Lost,' or
the scenes of the 'Jewish Wars'!

By a natural transition the mental tumult thus roused led to a more
intense self-consciousness than any he had yet known. In measuring
himself with the world of 'Shirley' or of Dickens, he began to
realise the problem of his own life with a singular keenness and
clearness. Then--last of all--the record of Franklin's life,--of
the steady rise of the ill-treated printer's devil to knowledge and
power--filled him with an urging and concentrating ambition, and
set his thoughts, endowed with a new heat and nimbleness, to the
practical unravelling of a practical case.

They reached home again early on a May day. As he and Reuben,
driving their new sheep, mounted the last edge of the moor which
separated them from home, the Kinder Valley lay before them,
sparkling in a double radiance of morning and of spring. David
lingered a minute or two behind his uncle. What a glory of light
and freshness in the air--what soaring larks--what dipping
swallows! And the scents from the dew-steeped heather--and the
murmur of the blue and glancing stream!

The boy's heart went out to the valley--and in the same instant he
put it from him. An indescribable energy and exultation took
possession of him. The tide of will for which he had been waiting
all these months had risen; and for the first time he felt swelling
within him the power to break with habit, to cut his way.

But what first step to take? Whom to consult? Suddenly he
remembered Mr. Ancrum, first with shame, then with hope. Had he
thrown away his friend? Rumour said that things were getting worse
and worse at chapel, and that Mr. Ancrum was going to Manchester at
once.

He ran down the slopes of heather towards home as though he would
catch and question Mr. Ancrum there and then. And Louie? Patience!
He would settle everything. Meanwhile, he was regretfully persuaded
that if you had asked Miss Bronte what could be done with a
creature like Louie she would have had a notion or two.




CHAPTER VIII


'Reach me that book, Louie,' said David peremptorily; 'it ull be
worse for yo if yo don't.'

The brother and sister were in the smithy. Louie was squatting on
the ground with her hands behind her, her lips sharply shut as
though nothing should drag a word out of them, and her eyes blazing
defiance at David, who had her by the shoulder, and looked to the
full as fierce as she looked provoking.

'Find it!' was all she said. He had been absent for a few minutes
after a sheep that had got into difficulties in the Red Brook, and
when he returned, his volume of Rollin's 'Ancient History'--'Lias's
latest loan--which he had imprudently forgotten to take with him,
had disappeared.

David gave her an angry shake, on which she toppled over among the
fallen stones with an exasperating limpness, and lay there
laughing.

'Oh, very well,' said David, suddenly recovering himself; 'yo keep
yor secret. I'st keep mine, that's aw.'

Louie lay quiet a minute or two, laughing artificially at
intervals, while David searched the corners of the smithy, turning
every now and then to give a stealthy look at his sister.

The bait took. Louie stopped laughing, sat up, put herself
straight, and looked about her.

'Yo hain't got a secret,' she said coolly; 'I'm not to be took in wi
snuff that way.'

'Very well,' said David indifferently, 'then I haven't.'

And sitting down near the pan, he took out one of the little boats
from the hole near, and began to trim its keel here and there with
his knife. The occupation seemed to be absorbing.

Louie sat for a while, sucking at a lump of sugar she had swept
that morning into the _omnium gatherum_ of her pocket. At last
she took up a little stone and threw it across at David.

'What's yor silly old secret about, then?'

'Where's my book, then?' replied David, holding up the boat and
looking with one eye shut along the keel.

'Iv I gie it yer, an yor secret ain't wo'th it, I'll put soom o'
that watter down yor neckhole,' said Louie, nodding towards the
place.

'If yo don't happen to find yorsel in th' pan fust,' remarked David
unmoved.

Louie sucked at her sugar a little longer, with her hands round her
knees. She had thrown off her hat, and the May sun struck full on
her hair, on the glossy brilliance of it, and the natural curls
round the temples which disguised a high and narrow brow. She no
longer wore her hair loose. In passionate emulation of Annie
Wigson, she had it plaited behind, and had begged an end of blue
ribbon of Mrs. Wigson to tie it with, so that the beautiful arch of
the head showed more plainly than before, while the black eyes and
brows seemed to have gained in splendour and effectiveness, from
their simpler and severer setting. One could see, too, the length
of the small neck and of the thin falling shoulders. It was a face
now which made many a stranger in the Clough End streets stop and
look backward after meeting it. Not so much because of its beauty,
for it was still too thin and starved-looking for beauty, as
because of a singular daring and brilliance, a sense of wild and
yet conscious power it left behind it. The child had grown a great
piece in the last year, so that her knees were hardly decently
covered by the last year's cotton frock she wore, and her brown
sticks of arms were far beyond her sleeves. David had looked at her
once or twice lately with a new kind of scrutiny. He decided that
she was a 'rum-looking' creature, not the least like anybody else's
sister, and on the whole his raw impression was that she was plain.

'How'll I know yo'll not cheat?' she said at last, getting up and
surveying him with her arms akimbo.

'Can't tell, I'm sure,' was all David vouchsafed. 'Yo mum find out.'

Louie studied him threateningly.

'Weel, I'd be even wi yo soomhow,' was her final conclusion; and
disappearing through the ruined doorway, she ran down the slope to
where one of the great mill-stones lay hidden in the heather, and
diving into its central hole, produced the book, keenly watched the
while by David, who took mental note of the hiding-place.

'Naw then,' she said, walking up to him with her hands behind her
and the book in them, 'tell me yor secret.'

David first forcibly abstracted the book and made believe to box
her ears, then went back to his seat and his boat.

'Go on, can't yo!' exclaimed Louie, after a minute, stamping at
him.

David laid down his boat deliberately.

'Well, yo won't like it,' he said; 'I know that. But--I'm off to
Manchester, that's aw--as soon as I can goo; as soon as iver I can
hear of onything. An I'm gooin if I don't hear of onything. I'm
gooin onyways; I'm tired o' this. So now yo know.'

Louie stared at him.

'Yo ain't!' she said, passionately, as though she were choking.

David instinctively put up his hands to keep her off. He thought
she would have fallen upon him there and then and beaten him for
his 'secret.'

But, instead, she flung away out of the smithy, and David was left
alone and in amazement. Then he got up and went to look, stirred
with the sudden fear that she might have run off to the farm with
the news of what he had been saying, which would have precipitated
matters unpleasantly.

No one was to be seen from outside, either on the moor path or in
the fields beyond, and she could not possibly have got out of sight
so soon. So he searched among the heather and the bilberry
hummocks, till he caught sight of a bit of print cotton in a hollow
just below the quaint stone shooting-hut, built some sixty years
ago on the side of the Scout for the convenience of sportsmen.
David stalked the cotton, and found her lying prone and with her
hat, as usual, firmly held down over her ears. At sight of her
something told him very plainly he had been a brute to tell her his
news so. There was a strong moral shock which for the moment
transformed him.

He went and lifted her up in spite of her struggles. Her face was
crimson with tears, but she hit out at him wildly to prevent his
seeing them. 'Now, Louie, look here,' he said, holding her hands, 'I
didna mean to tell yo short and sharp like that, but yo do put a
body's back up so, there's no bearin it. Don't take on, Louie. I'll
coom back when I've found soomthin, an take yo away, too, niver
fear. Theer's lots o' things gells can do in Manchester--tailorin,
or machinin, or dress-makin, or soomthin like that. But yo must get
a bit older, an I must find a place for us to live in, so theer's
naw use fratchin, like a spiteful hen. Yo must bide and I must
bide. But I'll coom back for yo, I swear I will, an we'll get shut
on Aunt Hannah, an live in a little place by ourselves, as merry as
larks.'

He looked at her appealingly. Her head was turned sullenly away
from him, her thin chest still heaved with sobs. But when he
stopped speaking she jerked round upon him.

'Leave me behint, an I'll murder her!'

The child's look was demoniacal. 'No, yo won't,' said David,
laughing. 'I' th' fust place, Aunt Hannah could settle a midge like
yo wi yan finger. I' th' second, hangin isn't a coomfortable way o'
deein. Yo wait till I coom for yo, an when we'st ha got reet away,
an can just laugh in her face if she riles us,--_that_'ll
spite her mich moor nor murderin.'

The black eyes gleamed uncannily for a moment and the sobbing
ceased. But the gleam passed away, and the child sat staring at the
moorland distance, seeing nothing. There was such an unconscious
animal pain in the attitude, the pain of the creature that feels
itself alone and deserted, that David watched her in a puzzled
silence. Louie was always mysterious, whether in her rages or her
griefs, but he had never seen her sob quite like this before. He
felt a sort of strangeness in her fixed gaze, and with a certain
timidity he put out his arm and laid it round her shoulder. Still
she did not move. Then he slid up closer in the heather, and kissed
her. His heart, which had seemed all frostbound for months, melted,
and that hunger for love--home-love, mother-love--which was,
perhaps, at the very bottom of his moody complex youth, found a
voice.

'Louie, couldn't yo be nice to me soomtimes--couldn't yo just take
an interest, like, yo know--as if yo cared a bit--couldn't yo?
Other gells do. I'm a brute to yo, I know, often, but yo keep aggin
an teasin, an theer's niver a bit o' peace. Look here, Loo, yo give
up, an I'st give up. Theer's nobbut us two--nawbody else cares a
ha'porth about the yan or the tother--coom along! yo give up, an
I'st give up.'

He looked at her anxiously. There was a new manliness in his tone,
answering to his growing manliness of stature. Two slow tears
rolled down her cheeks, but she said nothing. She couldn't for the
life of her. She blinked, furiously fighting with her tears, and at
last she put up an impatient hand which left a long brown streak
across her miserable little face.

'Yo havn't got no trade,' she said. 'Yo'll be clemmed.' David
withdrew his arm, and gulped down his rebuff. 'No, I sha'n't,' he
said. 'Now you just listen here.' And he described how, the day
before, he had been to see Mr. Ancrum, to consult him about leaving
Kinder, and what had come of it.

He had been just in time. Mr. Ancrum, worn, ill, and harassed to
death, had been cheered a little during his last days at Clough End
by the appearance of David, very red and monosyllabic, on his
doorstep. The lad's return, as he soon perceived, was due simply to
the stress of his own affairs, and not to any knowledge of or
sympathy with the minister's miseries. But, none the less, there
was a certain balm in it for Mr. Ancrum, and they had sat long
discussing matters. Yes, the minister was going--would look out at
Manchester for an opening for David, in the bookselling trade by
preference, and would write at once. But Davy must not leave a
quarrel behind him. He must, if possible, get his uncle's consent,
which Mr. Ancrum thought would be given.

'I'm willing to lend you a hand, Davy,' he had said, 'for you're on
the way to no trade but loafing as you are now; but square it with
Grieve. You can, if you don't shirk the trouble of it.'

Whereupon Davy had made a wry face and said nothing. But to Louie
he expressed himself plainly enough.

'I'll not say owt to oather on 'em,' he said, pointing to the
chimneys of the farm, 'till the day I bid 'em good-bye. Uncle
Reuben, mebbe, ud be for givin me somethin to start wi, an Aunt
Hannah ud be for cloutin tin him over the head for thinkin of it.
No, I'll not be beholden to yan o' them. I've got a shillin or two
for my fare, an I'll keep mysel.'

'What wages ull yo get?' inquired Louie sharply.

'Nothin very fat, that's sure,' laughed David. 'If Mr. Ancrum can do
as he says, an find me a place in a book-shop, they'll, mebbe, gie
me six shillin to begin wi.'

'An what ull yo do wi 'at?'

'Live on't,' replied David briefly.

'Yo conno, I tell yo! Yo'll ha food an firin, cloos, an lodgin to
pay out o't. Yo conno do 't--soa theer.'

Louie looked him up and down defiantly. David was oddly struck with
the practical knowledge her remark showed. How did such a wild imp
know anything about the cost of lodging and firing?

'I tell yo I'll live on't,' he replied with energy; 'I'll get a room
for half a crown--two shillin, p'r'aps--an I'll live on sixpence a
day, see if I don't.'

'See if yo do!' retorted Louie, 'clemm on it more like.'

'That's all yo know about it, miss,' said David, in a tone,
however, of high good humour; and, stretching one of his hands down
a little further into his trousers pocket, he drew out a
paper-covered book, so that just the top of it appeared. 'Yo're
allus naggin about books. Well; I tell yo, I've got an idea out o'
thissen ull be worth shillins a week to me. It's about Benjamin
Franklin. Never yo mind who Benjamin Franklin wor; but he wor a
varra cute soart of a felly; an when he wor yoong, an had nobbut a
few shillins a week, he made shift to save soom o' them shillins,
becos he found he could do without eatin _flesh meat_, an that
wi bread an meal an green stuff, a mon could do very well, an save
soom brass every week. When I go to Manchester,' continued David
emphatically, 'I shall niver touch meat. I shall buy a bag o'
oatmeal like Grandfeyther Grieve lived on, boil it for mysel, wi a
sup o' milk, perhaps, an soom salt or treacle to gi it a taste. An
I'll buy apples an pears an oranges cheap soomwhere, an store 'em.
Yo mun ha a deal o' fruit when yo doan't ha meat. Fourpence!' cried
Davy, his enthusiasm rising, 'I'll live on _thruppence_ a day,
as sure as yo're sittin theer! Seven thruppences is one an nine;
lodgin, two shillin--three an nine. Two an three left over, for
cloos, firin, an pocket money. Why, I'll be rich before yo can look
roun! An then, o' coorse, they'll not keep me long on six shillings
a week. In the book-trade I'll soon be wuth ten, an moor!'

And, springing up, he began to dance a sort of cut and shuffle
before her out of sheer spirits. Louie surveyed him with a flushed
and sparkling face. The nimbleness of David's wits had never come
home to her till now.

'What ull I earn when I coom?' she demanded abruptly.

David stopped his cut and shuffle, and took critical stock of his
sister for a moment.

'Now, look here, Louie, yo're goin to stop where yo are, a good bit
yet,' he replied decidedly. 'Yo'll have to wait two year or so--moor
'n one, onyways,' he went on hastily, warned by her start and
fierce expression. 'Yo know, they can ha th' law on yo,' and he
jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the farm. 'Boys is all
reet, but gells can't do nothink till they're sixteen. They mun
stay wi th' foak as browt 'em up, an if they run away afore their
sixteenth birthday--they gets put in prison.'

David poured out his legal fictions hastily, three parts convinced
of them at any rate, and watched eagerly for their effect on Louie.

She tossed her head scornfully. 'Doan't b'lieve it. Yo're jest
tellin lees to get shut o' me. Nex summer if yo doan't send for me,
I'll run away, whativer yo may say. So yo know.'

'Yo're a tormentin thing!' exclaimed David, exasperated, and began
savagely to kick stones down the hill. Then, recovering himself, he
came and sat down beside her again.

'I doan't want to get shut on yo, Louie. But yo won't understand
nothin.'

He stopped, and began to bite at a stalk of heather, by way of
helping himself. His mind was full of vague and yet urgent thoughts
as to what became of girls in large towns with no one to look after
them, things he had heard said at the public-house, things he had
read. He had never dreamt of leaving Louie to Aunt Hannah's tender
mercies. Of course he must take her away when he could. She was his
charge, his belonging. But all the same she was a 'limb'; in his
opinion she always would be a 'limb.' How could he be sure of her
getting work, and who on earth was to look after her when he was
away?

Suddenly Louie broke in on his perplexities.

'I'll go tailorin,' she cried triumphantly. 'Now I know--it wor t'
Wigsons' cousin Em'ly went to Manchester; an she earned nine
shillin a week--nine shillin I tell yo, an found her own thread.
Yo'll be takin ten shillin, yo say, nex year? an I'll be takin
nine. That's nineteen shillin fur th' two on us. _Isn't_ it
nineteen shillin?' she said peremptorily, seizing his arm with her
long fingers.

'Well, I dessay it is,' said David, reluctantly. 'An precious tired
yo'll be o' settin stitchin mornin, noon, an neet. Like to see yo
do't.'

'I'd do it fur nine shillin,' she said doggedly, and sat looking
straight before her, with wide glittering eyes. She understood from
David's talk that, what with meal, apples, and greenstuff, your
'eatin' need cost you nothing. There would be shillings and
shillings to buy things with. The child who never had a copper but
what Uncle Reuben gave her, who passed her whole existence in
greedily coveting the unattainable and in chafing under the rule of
an iron and miserly thrift, felt suddenly intoxicated by this
golden prospect of illimitable 'buying.' And what could possibly
prevent its coming true? Any fool--such as 'Wigson's Em'ly'--could
earn nine shillings a week at tailoring; and to make money at your
stomach's expense seemed suddenly to put you in possession of a
bank on which the largest drawings were possible. It all looked so
ingenious, so feasible, so wholly within the grip of that
indomitable will the child felt tense within her.

So the two sat gazing out over the moorland. It was the first
summer day, fresh and timid yet, as though the world and the sun
were still ill-acquainted. Down below, over the sparkling brook, an
old thorn was quivering in the warm breeze, its bright thin green
shining against the brown heather. The larches alone had as yet any
richness of leaf, but the sycamore-buds glittered in the sun, and
the hedges in the lower valley made wavy green lines delightful to
the eye. A warm soft air laden with moist scents of earth and plant
bathed the whole mountain-side, and played with Louie's hair.
Nature wooed them with her best, and neither had a thought or a
look for her.

Suddenly Louie sprang up.

'Theer's Aunt Hannah shoutin. I mun goo an get t' coos.'

David ran down the hill with her.

'What'll yo do if I tell?' she inquired maliciously at the bottom.

'If yo do I shall cut at yance, an yo'll ha all the longer time to
be by yoursen.'

A darkness fell over the girl's hard shining gaze. She turned
abruptly, then, when she had gone a few steps, turned and came back
to where David stood whistling and calling for the dogs. She caught
him suddenly from behind round the neck. Naturally he thought she
was up to some mischief, and struggled away from her with an angry
exclamation. But she held him tight and thrust something hard and
sweet against his lips. Involuntarily his mouth opened and admitted
an enticing cake of butter-scotch. She rammed it in with her wiry
little hand so that he almost choked, and then with a shrill laugh
she turned and fled, leaping down the heather between the boulders,
across the brook, over the wall, and out of sight.

David was left behind, sucking. The sweetness he was conscious of
was not all in the mouth. Never that he could remember had Louie
shown him any such mark of favour.

Next day David was sent down with the donkey-cart to Clough End to
bring up some weekly stores for the family, Hannah specially
charging him to call at the post-office and inquire for letters. He
started about nine o'clock, and the twelve o'clock dinner passed by
without his reappearance.

When she had finished her supply of meat and suet-pudding, after a
meal during which no one of the three persons at table had uttered
a word, Louie abruptly pushed her plate back again towards Hannah.

'David!' was all she said.

'Mind your manners, miss,' said Hannah, angrily. 'Them as cooms
late gets nowt.' And, getting up, she cleared the table and put the
food away with even greater rapidity than usual. The kitchen was no
sooner quite clear than the donkey-cart was heard outside, and
David appeared, crimsoned with heat, and panting from the long tug
uphill, through which he had just dragged the donkey.

He carried a letter, which he put down on the table. Then he looked
round the kitchen.

'Aunt's put t' dinner away,' said Louie, shortly, ''cos yo came
late.'

David's expression changed. 'Then nex time she wants owt, she can
fetch it fro Clough End hersel,' he said violently, and went out.

Hannah came forward and laid eager hands on the letter, which was
from London, addressed in a clerk's hand.

'Louie!' she called imperatively, 'tak un out soom
bread-an-drippin.'

Louie put some on a plate, and went out with it to the cowhouse,
where David sat on a stool, occupying himself in cutting the pages
of a number of the _Vegetarian News,_ lent him in Clough End,
with trembling hands, while a fierce red spot burnt in either
cheek.

'Tak it away!' he said, almost knocking the plate out of Louie's
hands; 'it chokes me to eat a crumb o' hers.'

As Louie was bearing the plate back through the yard, Uncle Reuben
came by.' What's--what's 'at?' he said, peering shortsightedly at
what she held. Every month of late Reuben's back had seemed to grow
rounder, his sight less, and his wits of less practical use.

'Summat for David,' said Louie, shortly, ''cos Aunt Hannah woan't
gie him no dinner. But he woan't ha it.'

Reuben's sudden look of trouble was unmistakable. 'Whar is he?'

'I' th' coo-house.'

Reuben went his way, and found the dinnerless boy deep, or
apparently deep, in recipes for vegetable soups.

'What made yo late, Davy?' he asked him, as he stood over him.

David had more than half a mind not to answer, but at last he
jerked out fiercely, 'Waitin for th' second post, fust; then t'
donkey fell down half a mile out o' t' town, an th' things were
spilt. There was nobody about, an' I had a job to get 'un up at a'.'

Reuben nervously thrust his hands far into his coat-pockets.

'Coom wi me, Davy, an I'st mak yor aunt gie yer yor dinner.'

'I wouldn't eat a morsel if she went down on her bended knees to
me,' the lad broke out, and, springing up, he strode sombrely
through the yard and into the fields.

Reuben went slowly back into the house. Hannah was in the
parlour--so he saw through the half-opened door. He went into the
room, which smelt musty and close from disuse. Hannah was standing
over the open drawer of an old-fashioned corner cupboard, carefully
scanning a letter and enclosure before she locked them up.

'Is 't Mr. Gurney's money?' Reuben said to her, in a queer voice.

She was startled, not having heard him come in, but she put what
she held into the drawer all the more deliberately, and turned the
key.

'Ay, 't is.'

Reuben sat himself down on one of the hard chairs beside the table
in the middle of the room. The light streaming through the shutters
Hannah had just opened streamed in on his grizzling head and face
working with emotion.

'It's stolen money,' he said hoarsely. 'Yo're stealin it fro Davy.'

Hannah smiled grimly, and withdrew the key.

'I'm paying missel an yo, Reuben Grieve, for t' keep o' two
wuthless brats as cost moor nor they pays,' she said, with an
accent which somehow sent a shiver through Reuben. '_I_ don't
keep udder foaks' childer fur nothin.'

'Yo've had moor nor they cost for seven year,' said Reuben, with
the same thick tense utterance. 'Yo should let Davy ha it, an gie
him a trade.'

Hannah walked up to the door and shut it.

'I should, should I? An who'll pay for Louie--for your luvely limb
of a niece? It 'ud tak about that,' and she pointed grimly to the
drawer, 'to coover what she wastes an spiles i' t' yeer.'

'Yo get her work, Hannah. Her bit and sup cost yo most nothin. I
cud wark a bit moor--soa cud yo. Yo're hurtin me i' mi conscience,
Hannah--yo're coomin atwixt me an th' Lord!'

He brought a shaking hand down on the damask table-cloth among the
wool mats and the chapel hymn-books which adorned it. His long,
loose frame had drawn itself up with a certain dignity.

'Ha done wi your cantin!' said Hannah under her breath, laying her
two hands on the table, and stooping down so as to face him with
more effect. The phrase startled Reuben with a kind of horror.
Whatever words might have passed between them, never yet that he
could remember had his wife allowed herself a sneer at his
religion. It seemed to him suddenly as though he and she were going
fast downhill--slipping to perdition, because of Sandy's six
hundred pounds.

But she cowed him--she always did. She stayed a moment in the same
bent and threatening position, coercing him with angry eyes. Then
she straightened herself, and moved away.

'Let t' lad tak hisself off if he wants to,' she said, an iron
resolution in her voice. 'I told yo so afore--I woan't cry for 'im.
But as long as Louie's here, an I ha to keep her, I'll want that
money, an every penny on't. If it bean't paid, she may go too!'

'Yo'd not turn her out, Hannah?' cried Reuben, instinctively
putting out an arm to feel that the door was closed.

'_She_'d not want for a livin,' replied Hannah, with a bitter
sneer; 'she's her mither's child.'

Reuben rose slowly, shaking all over. He opened the door with
difficulty, groped his way out of the front passage, then went
heavily through the yard and into the fields. There he wandered by
himself for a couple of hours, altogether forgetting some newly
dropped lambs to which he had been anxiously attending. For months
past, ever since his conscience had been roused on the subject of
his brother's children, the dull, incapable man had been slowly
reconceiving the woman with whom he had lived some five-and-twenty
years, and of late the process had been attended with a kind of
agony. The Hannah Martin he had married had been a hard body
indeed, but respectable, upright, with the same moral instincts as
himself. She had kept the farm together--he knew that; he could not
have lived without her, and in all practical respects she had been
a good and industrious wife. He had coveted her industry and her
strong will; and, having got the use of them, he had learnt to put
up with her contempt for him, and to fit his softer nature to hers.
Yet it seemed to him that there had always been certain conditions
implied in this subjection of his, and that she was breaking them.
He could not have been fetching and carrying all these years for a
woman who could go on wilfully appropriating money that did not
belong to her,--who could even speak with callous indifference of
the prospect of turning out her niece to a life of sin.

He thought of Sandy's money with loathing. It was like the cursed
stuff that Achan had brought into the camp--an evil leaven
fermenting in their common life, and raising monstrous growths.

Reuben Grieve did not demand much of himself; a richer and more
spiritual nature would have thought his ideals lamentably poor.
But, such as they were, the past year had proved that he could not
fall below them without a dumb anguish, without a sense of shutting
himself out from grace. He felt himself--by his fear of his
wife--made a partner in Hannah's covetousness, in Hannah's cruelty
towards Sandy's children. Already, it seemed to him, the face of
Christ was darkened, the fountain of grace dried up. All those
appalling texts of judgment and reprobation he had listened to so
often in chapel, protected against them by that warm inward
certainty of 'election,' seemed to be now pressing against a bared
and jeopardised soul.

But if he wrote to Mr. Gurney, Hannah would never forgive him till
her dying day; and the thought of making her his enemy for good put
him in a cold sweat.

After much pacing of the upper meadows he came heavily down at last
to see to his lambs. Davy was just jumping the wall on to his
uncle's land, having apparently come down the Frimley path. When he
saw his uncle he thrust his hands into his pockets, began to
whistle, and came on with a devil-may-care swing of the figure.
They met in a gateway between two fields.

'Whar yo been, Davy?' asked Reuben, looking at him askance, and
holding the gate so as to keep him.

'To Dawson's,' said the boy, sharply.

Reuben's face brightened. Then the lad's empty stomach must have
been filled; for he knew that 'Dawsons' were kind to him. He
ventured to look at him more directly, and, as he did so, something
in the attitude of the proud handsome stripling reminded him of
Sandy--Sandy, in the days of his youth, coming down to show his
prosperous self at the farm. He put his large soil-stained hand on
David's shoulder.

'Goo yor ways in, Davy. I'll see yo ha your reets.'

David opened his eyes at him, astounded. There is nothing more
startling in human relations than the strong emotion of weak
people.

Reuben would have liked to say something else, but his lips opened
and shut in vain. The boy, too, was hopelessly embarrassed. At
last, Reuben let the gate fall and walked off, with downcast head,
to where, in the sheep-pen, he had a few hours before bound an
orphan lamb to a refractory foster-mother. The foster-mother's
resistance had broken down, she was lying patiently and gently
while the thin long-legged creature sucked; when it was frightened
away by Reuben's approach she trotted bleating after it. In his
disturbed state of feeling the parallel, or rather the contrast,
between the dumb animal and the woman struck home.




CHAPTER IX


But the crisis which had looked so near delayed!

Poor Reuben! The morning after his sudden show of spirit to David
he felt himself, to his own miserable surprise, no more courageous
than he had been before it. Yet the impression made had gone too
deep to end in nothingness. He contracted a habit of getting by
himself in the fields and puzzling his brain with figures--an
occupation so unfamiliar and exhausting that it wore him a good
deal; and Hannah, when he came in at night, would wonder, with a
start, whether he were beginning 'to break up.' But it possessed
him more and more. Hannah would not give up the money, but David
must have his rights. How could it be done? For the first time
Reuben fell to calculation over his money matters, which he did not
ask Hannah to revise. But meanwhile he lived in a state of
perpetual inward excitement which did not escape his wife. She
could get no clue to it, however, and became all the more
forbidding in the household the more she was invaded by this wholly
novel sense of difficulty in managing her husband.

Yet she was not without a sense that if she could but contrive to alter
her ways with the children it would be well for her. Mr. Gurney's cheque
was safely put away in the Clough End bank, and clearly her best policy
would have been to make things tolerable for the two persons on whose
proceedings--if they did but know it!--the arrival of future cheques in
some measure depended. But Hannah had not the cleverness which makes the
successful hypocrite. And for some time past there had been a strange
unmanageable change in her feelings towards Sandy's orphans. Since
Reuben had made her conscious that she was robbing them, she had gone
nearer to an active hatred than ever before. And, indeed, hatred in such
a case is the most natural outcome; for it is little else than the
soul's perverse attempt to justify to itself its own evil desire.

David, however, when once his rage over Hannah's latest offence had
cooled, behaved to his aunt much as he had done before it. He was
made placable by his secret hopes, and touched by Reuben's
advances--though of these last he took no practical account
whatever; and he must wait for his letter. So he went back
ungraciously to his daily tasks. Meanwhile he and Louie, on the
strength of the great _coup_ in prospect, were better friends
than they had ever been, and his consideration for her went up as
he noticed that, when she pleased, the reckless creature could keep
a secret 'as close as wax.'

The weeks, however, passed away, and still no letter came for
David. The shepherds' meetings--first at Clough End for the
Cheshire side of the Scout, and then at the 'Snake Inn' for the
Sheffield side--when the strayed sheep of the year were restored to
their owners, came and went in due course; sheep-washing and
sheep-shearing were over; the summer was halfway through; and still
no word from Mr. Ancrum.

David, full of annoyance and disappointment, was seething with
fresh plans--he and Louie spent hours discussing them at the
smithy--when suddenly an experience overtook him, which for the
moment effaced all his nascent ambitions, and entirely did away
with Louie's new respect for him.

It was on this wise.

Mr. Ancrum had left Clough End towards the end of June. The
congregation to which he ministered, and to which Reuben Grieve
belonged, represented one of those curious and independent
developments of the religious spirit which are to be found
scattered through the teeming towns and districts of northern
England. They had no connection with any recognised religious
community, but the members of it had belonged to many--to the
Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They were
mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side
with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of
English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various
features in the different sects from which they came--by the
hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the
looseness of the Congregationalists, or the coldness of the Church.
They had come together to seek the Lord in some way more intimate,
more moving, more effectual than any they had yet found; and in
this pathetic search for the 'rainbow gold' of faith they were
perpetually brought up against the old stumbling-blocks of the
unregenerate man,--the smallest egotisms, and the meanest vanities.
Mr. Ancrum, for instance, had come to the Clough End 'Brethren'
full of an indescribable missionary zeal. He had laboured for them
night and day, taxing his sickly frame far beyond its powers. But
the most sordid conspiracy imaginable, led by two or three of the
prominent members who thought he did not allow them enough share in
the evening meetings, had finally overthrown him, and he had gone
back to Manchester a bitterer and a sadder man.

After he left there was an interregnum, during which one or two of
the elder 'Brethren' taught Sunday school and led the Sunday
services. But at last, in August, it became known in Clough End
that a new minister for the 'Christian Brethren' had come down, and
public curiosity in the Dissenting circles was keen about him.
After a few weeks there began to be a buzz in the little town on
the subject of Mr. Dyson. The 'Christian Brethren' meeting-room, a
long low upper chamber formerly occupied by half a dozen
hand-looms, was crowded on Sundays, morning and evening, not only
by the Brethren, but by migrants from other denominations, and the
Sunday school, which was held in a little rickety garret off the
main room, also received a large increase of members. It was
rumoured that Mr. Dyson was specially successful with boys, and
that there was an 'awakening' among some of the lowest and roughest
of the Clough End lads.

'He ha sich a way wi un,' said a much-stirred mother to Reuben
Grieve, meeting him one day in the street, 'he do seem to melt your
varra marrow.'

Reuben went to hear the new man, was much moved, and came home
talking about him with a stammering unction, and many furtive looks
at David. He had tried to remonstrate several times on the lad's
desertion of chapel and Sunday school, but to no purpose. There was
something in David's half contemptuous, half obstinate silence on
these occasions which for a man like Reuben made argument
impossible. To his morbid inner sense the boy seemed to have
entered irrevocably on the broad path which leadeth to destruction.
Perhaps in another year he would be drinking and thieving. With a
curious fatalism Reuben felt that for the present, and till he had
made some tangible amends to Sandy and the Unseen Powers for
Hannah's sin, he himself could do nothing. His hands were unclean.
But some tremulous passing hopes he allowed himself to build on
this new prophet.

Meanwhile, David heard the town-talk, and took small account of it.
He supposed he should see the new-comer at Jerry's in time. Then if
folk spoke true there would be a shindy worth joining in.
Meanwhile, the pressure of his own affairs made the excitement of
the neighbourhood seem to him one more of those storms in the
Dissenting tea-cup, of which, boy as he was, he had known a good
many already.

One September evening he was walking down to Clough End, bound to
the reading-room. He had quite ceased to attend the 'Crooked Cow.'
His pennies were precious to him now, and he saved them jealously,
wondering scornfully sometimes how he could ever have demeaned
himself so far as to find excitement in the liquor or the company
of the 'Cow.' Half-way down to the town, as he was passing the
foundry, whence he had drawn the pan which had for so long made the
smithy enchanted ground to him, the big slouching appprentice who
had been his quondam friend and ally there, came out of the foundry
yard just in front of him. David quickened up a little.

'Tom, whar are yo goin?'

The other looked round at him uneasily.

'Niver yo mind.'

The youth's uncouth clothes were carefully brushed, and his fat
face, which wore an incongruous expression of anxiety and
dejection, shone with washing. David studied him a moment in
silence, then he said abruptly--

'Yo're goin prayer-meetin, that's what yo are.'

'An if I am, it's noa consarn o' yourn. Yo're yan o'
th'unregenerate; an I'll ask yo, Davy, if happen yo're goin town
way, not to talk ony o' your carnal talk to me. I'se got hindrances
enough, t' Lord knows.'

And the lad went his way, morosely hanging his head, and stepping
more rapidly as though to get rid of his companion.

'Well, I niver!' exclaimed David, in his astonishment. 'What's
wrong wi yo, Tom? Yo've got no more spunk nor a moultin hen. What's
getten hold o' yo?''

Tom hesitated a moment. '_Th' Lord!_' he burst out at last,
looking at Davy with that sudden unconscious dignity which strong
feeling can bestow for the moment on the meanest of mortals. 'He's
a harryin' me! I haven't slep this three neets for shoutin an
cryin! It's th' conviction o' _sin_, Davy. Th' devil seems a
howdin me, an I conno pull away, not whativer. T' new minister
says, 'Dunnot yo pull. Let Jesus do't all.' He's strang, He is.
'Yo're nobbut a worm.' But I've naw _assurance_, Davy, theer's
whar it is--I've naw assurance!' he repeated, forgetting in his
pain the unregenerate mind of his companion.

David walked on beside him wondering. When he had last seen Tom he
was lounging in a half-drunken condition outside the door of the
'Crooked Cow,' cracking tipsy jokes with the passers-by.

'Where is the prayer-meetin?' he inquired presently.

'In owd Simes's shed--an it's late too--I mun hurry.'

'Why, theer'll be plenty o' room in old Simes's shed. It's a fearfu
big place.'

'An lasst time theer was na stannin ground for a corn-boggart; an I
wudna miss ony o' Mr. Dyson's prayin, not for nothin. Good neet to
yo, Davy.'

And Tom broke into a run; David, however, kept up with him.

'P'raps I'll coom too,' he said, with a kind of bravado, when they
had passed the bridge and the Kinder printing works, and Clough End
was in sight.

Tom said nothing till they had breasted a hill, at the top of which
he paused panting, and confronted David.

'Noo yo'll not mak a rumpus, Davy,' he said, mistrustfully.

'An if do, can't a hundred or two o' yo kick me out?' asked David,
mockingly. 'I'll mak no rumpus. P'raps yor Mr. Dyson'll convert
me.'

And he walked on laughing.

Tom looked darkly at him; then, as he recovered his wind, his
countenance suddenly cleared. Satan laid a new snare for him--poor
Tom!--and into his tortured heart there fell a poisonous drop of
spiritual pride. Public reprobation applied to a certain order of
offences makes a very marketable kind of fame, as the author of
_Manfred_ knew very well. David in his small obscure way was
supplying another illustration of the principle. For the past year
he had been something of a personage in Clough End--having always
his wits, his book-learning, his looks, and his singular parentage
to start from.

Tom--the shambling butt of his comrades--began to like the notion
of going into prayer-meeting with David Grieve in tow; and even
that bitter and very real cloud of spiritual misery lifted a
little.

So they marched in together, Tom in front, with his head much
higher than before; and till the minister began there were many
curious glances thrown at David. It was a prayer-meeting for boys
only, and the place was crammed with them, of all ages up to
eighteen.

It was a carpenter's workshop. Tools and timber had been as far as
possible pushed to the side, and at the end a rough platform of
loose planks had been laid across some logs so as to raise the
preacher a little.

Soon there was a stir, and Mr. Dyson appeared. He was tall and
loosely built, with the stoop from the neck and the sallow skin
which the position of the cotton-spinner at work and the close
fluffy atmosphere in which he lives tend to develop. Up to six
months ago, he had been a mill-hand and a Wesleyan class-leader.
Now, in consequence partly of some inward crisis, partly of revolt
against an 'unspiritual' superintendent, he had thrown up mill and
Methodism together, and come to live on the doles of the Christian
Brethren at Clough End. He had been preaching on the moors already
during the day, and was tired out; but the pallor of the harsh face
only made the bright, commanding eye more noticeable. It ran over
the room, took note first of the numbers, then of individuals,
marked who had been there before, who was a new-comer. The audience
fell into order and quiet before it as though a general had taken
command.

He put his hands on his hips and began to speak without any
preface, somewhat to the boys' surprise, who had expected a prayer.
The voice, as generally happens with a successful revivalist
preacher, was of fine quality, and rich in good South Lancashire
intonations, and his manner was simplicity itself.

'Suppose we put off our prayer a little bit,' he said, in a
colloquial tone, his fixed look studying the crowded benches all
the while. 'Perhaps we'll have more to pray about by-and-by....
Well, now, I haven't been long in Clough End, to be sure, but I
think I've been long enough to get some notion of how you boys here
live--whether you work on the land, or whether you work in the
mills or in shops--I've been watching you a bit, perhaps you didn't
think it; and what I'm going to do to-night is to take your lives
to pieces--take them to pieces, an look close into them, as you've
seen them do at the mill, perhaps, with a machine that wants
cleaning. I want to find out what's wrong wi them, what they're
good for, whose work they do--_God's or the devil's_ ... First
let me take the mill-hands. Perhaps I know most about their life,
for I went to work in a cotton-mill when I was eight years old, and
I only left it six months ago. I have seen men and women saved in
that mill, so that their whole life afterwards was a kind of
ecstasy: I have seen others lost there, so that they became true
children of the devil, and made those about them as vile and
wretched as themselves. I have seen men grow rich there, and I have
seen men die there; so if there is anything I know in this world it
is how factory workers spend their time--at least, I think I know.
But judge for yourselves--shout to me if I'm wrong. Isn't it
somehow like this?'

And he fell into a description of the mill-hand's working day. It
was done with knowledge, sometimes with humour, and through it all
ran a curious undercurrent of half-ironical passion. The audience
enjoyed it, took the points, broke in now and then with comments as
the speaker touched on such burning matters as the tyranny of
overlookers, the temper of masters, the rubs between the different
classes of 'hands,' the behaviour of 'minders' to the 'piecers'
employed by them, and so on. The sermon at one time was more like a
dialogue between preacher and congregation. David found himself
joining in it involuntarily once or twice, so stimulating was the
whole atmosphere, and Mr. Dyson's eye was caught perforce by the
tall dark fellow with the defiant carriage of the head who sat next
to Tom Mullins, and whom he did not remember to have seen before.

But suddenly the preacher stopped, and the room fell dead silent,
startled by the darkening of his look. 'Ay,' he said, with stern
sharpness. 'Ay, that's how you live--them's the things you spend
your time and your minds on. You laugh, and I laugh--not a bad sort
of life, you think--a good deal of pleasure, after all, to be got
out of it. If a man must work he might do worse. _O you poor
souls!_'

The speaker stopped, as though mastering himself. His face worked
with emotion; his last words had been almost a cry of pain. After
the easy give and take of the opening, this change was electrical.
David felt his hand tremble on his knee.

'Answer me this!' cried the preacher, his nervous cotton-spinner's hand
outstretched. 'Is there any soul here among you factory lads who, when
he wakes in the morning, _ever thinks of saying a prayer?_ Not one of
you, I'll be bound! What with shovelling on one's clothes, and gulping
down one's breakfast, and walking half a mile to the mill, who's got
time to think about prayers? God must wait. He's always there above, you
think, sitting in glory. He can listen any time. Well, as you stand at
your work--all those hours!--is there ever a moment _then_ for putting
up a word in Jesus' ear--Jesus, Who died for sinners? Why, no, how
should there be indeed? If you don't keep a sharp eye on your work the
overlooker 'ull know the reason why in double-quick time!... But there
comes a break, perhaps, for one reason or another. Does the Lord get it?
What a thing to ask, to be sure! Why, there are other spinners close by,
waiting for rovings, or leaving off for "baggin," and a bit of talk and
a bad word or two are a deal more fun, and come easier than praying.
Half-past five o'clock at last--knocking-off time. Then you begin to
think of amusing yourselves. There's loafing about the streets, which
never comes amiss, and there's smoking and the public for you bigger
ones, and there's betting on Manchester races, and there's a bout of
swearing every now and then to keep up your spirits, and there are other
thoughts, and perhaps actions, for some of you, of which the less said
in any decent Christian gathering the better! And so bedtime comes round
again; still not a moment to think of God in--of the Judgment which has
come a day closer--of your sins which have grown a day heavier--of your
soul which has sunk a day further from heaven, a day nearer to hell? Not
one. You are dead tired, and mill-work begins so early. Tumble in--God
can wait. He has waited fourteen, or eighteen, or twenty years already!

'But you're not all factory hands here. I see a good many lads
I know come from the country--from the farms up Kinder or Edale
way. Well, I don't know so much about your ways as I do about
mills; but I know some, and I can guess some. _You_ are not shut
up all day with the roar of the machines in your ears, and the
cotton-fluff choking your lungs. You have to live harder, perhaps.
You've less chances of getting on in the world; but I declare to
you, if you're bad and godless--as some of you are--I think there's
a precious sight less excuse for you than there is for the
mill-hands!'

And with a startling vehemence, greater by far than he had shown in
the case of the mill-workers, he threw himself on the vices and the
callousness of the field-labourers. For were they not, day by day,
and hour by hour, face to face with the Almighty in His marvellous
world--with the rising of His sun, with the flash of His lightning,
with His clouds which dropped fatness, and with the heavens which
declare His glory? Nothing between them and the Most High, if they
would open their dull eyes and see! And more than that. Not a bit
of their life,' but had been dear to the Lord Jesus--but He had
spoken of it, taught from it, made it sacred. The shepherd herding
the sheep--how could he, of all men, forget and blaspheme the Good
Shepherd? The sower scattering the seed--how could he, of all men,
forget and blaspheme the Heavenly Sower? Oh, the crookedness of
sin! Oh, the hardness of men's hearts!

The secret of the denunciations which followed lay hidden deep in
the speaker's personal history. They were the utterances of a man
who had stood for years at the 'mules,' catching, when he could,
through the coarse panes of factory glass, the dim blue outlines of
distant moors. _Here_ were noise, crowd, coarse jesting, mean
tyrannies, uncongenial company--everything which a nervous,
excitable nature, tuned to poetry in the English way through
religion, most loathed; _there_ was beauty, peace, leisure for
thought, for holiness, for emotion.

Meanwhile the mind of David Grieve rose once or twice in angry
protest. It was not fair--it was unjust--and why did Mr. Dyson
always seem to be looking at him?--flinging at him all these
scathing words about farming people's sins and follies? He was
shaken and excited. Oratory, of any sort, never failed to stir him
extraordinarily. Once even he would have jumped up to speak, but
Tom Mullins's watchful hand closed on his arm. Davy shook it off
angrily, but was perforce reminded of his promise. And Mr. Dyson
was swift in all things. The pitiless sentences dropped; the
speaker, exhausted, wiped his brow and pondered a moment; and the
lads from the farms about, most of whom David knew by sight, were
left staring at the floor, some inclined to laugh by reaction,
others crimson and miserable.

Well; so God was everywhere forgotten--in the fields and in
the mill. The greedy, vicious hours went by, and God still
waited--waited. Would he wait for ever?

'_Nay!_'

The intense, low-spoken word sent a shiver through the room. The
revivalist passion had been mounting rapidly amongst the listeners,
and the revivalist sense divined what was coming. To his dying day
David, at least, never forgot the picture of a sinner's death
agony, a sinner's doom, which followed. As to the first, it was
very quiet and colloquial. The preacher dwelt on the tortured body,
the choking breath, the failing sight, the talk of relations and
friends round the bed.

'Ay, poor fellow, he'll not lasst mich longer; t' doctor's gien
him up--and a good thing too, for his sufferins are terr'ble to
see.'

'And your poor dying ears will catch what they say. Then will your
fear come upon you as a storm, and your calamity as a whirlwind.
Such a fear!

'Once, my lads--long ago--I saw a poor girl caught by her hair in
one of the roving machines in the mill I used to work at. Three
minutes afterwards they tore away her body from the iron teeth
which had destroyed her. But I, a lad of twelve, had seen her face
just as the thing caught her, and if I live to be a hundred I shall
never forget that face--that horrible, horrible fear convulsing it.

'But that fear, my boys, was as _nothing_ to the sinner's fear
at death! Only a few more hours--a few more minutes, perhaps--and
then _judgment_! All the pleasant loafing and lounging, all
the eating and drinking, the betting and swearing, the warm sun,
the kind light, the indulgent parents and friends left behind;
nothing for ever and ever but the torments which belong to sin, and
which even the living God can no more spare you and me if we die in
sin than the mill-engine, once set going, can spare the poor
creature that meddles with it.

'Well; but perhaps in that awful last hour you try to pray--to call
on the Saviour. But, alas! alas! prayer and faith have to be
learnt, like cotton-spinning. Let no man count on learning that
lesson for the asking. While your body has been enjoying itself in
sin, your soul has been dying--dying; and when at the last you bid
it rise and go to the Father, you will find it just as helpless as
your poor paralysed limbs. It cannot rise, it has no strength; it
cannot go, for it knows not the way. No hope; no hope. Down it
sinks, and the black waters of hell close upon it for ever!'

Then followed a sort of vision of the lost--delivered in short
abrupt sentences--the form of the speaker drawn rigidly up
meanwhile to its full height, the long arm outstretched. The
utterance had very little of the lurid materialism, the grotesque
horror of the ordinary ranter's hell. But it stole upon the
imagination little by little, and possessed it at last with an
all-pervading terror. Into it, to begin with, had gone the whole
life-blood and passion of an agonised soul. The man speaking had
himself graven the terrors of it on his inmost nature through many
a week of demoniacal possession. But since that original experience
of fire which gave it birth, there had come to its elaboration a
strange artistic instinct. Day after day the preacher had repeated
it to hushed congregations, and with every repetition, almost,
there had come a greater sharpening of the light and shade, a
keener sense of what would tell and move. He had given it on the
moors that afternoon, but he gave it better to-night, for on the
wild walk across the plateau of the Peak some fresh illustrations,
drawn from its black and fissured solitude, had suggested
themselves, and he worked them out as he went, with a kind of joy,
watching their effect. Yet the man was, in his way, a saint, and
altogether sincere--so subtle a thing is the life of the spirit.

In the middle, Tom Mullins, David's apprentice-friend, suddenly
broke out into loud groans, rocking himself to and fro on the form.
A little later, a small fair-haired boy of twelve sprang up from
the form where he had been sitting trembling, and rushed into the
space between the benches and the preacher, quite unconscious of
what he was doing.

'Sir!' he said; 'oh, sir!--please--I didn't want to say them bad
words this mornin; I didn't, sir; it wor t' big uns made me; they
said they'd duck me--an it do hurt that bad. Oh, sir, please!'

And the little fellow stood wringing his hands, the tears coursing
down his cheeks.

The minister stopped, frowning, and looked at him. Then a smile
broke on the set face, he stepped up to the lad, threw his arm
round him, and drew him up to his side fronting the room.

'My boy,' he said, looking down at him tenderly, 'you and I, thank
God, are still in the land of the _living_; there is still
time to-night--this very minute--to be saved! Ay, saved, for ever
and ever, by the blood of the Lamb. Look away from yourselves--away
from sin--away from hell--to the blessed Lord, that suffered and
died and rose again; just for what? For this only--that He might,
with His own pierced hands, draw every soul here to-night, and
every soul in the wide world that will but hear His voice, out of
the clutches of the devil, and out of the pains of hell, and gather
it close and safe into His everlasting arms!'

There was a great sob from the whole room. Rough lads from the
upland farms, shop-boys, mill-hands, strained forward, listening,
thirsting, responding to every word.

_Redemption--Salvation--_ the deliverance of the soul from
itself--thither all religion comes at last, whether for the ranter
or the philosopher. To the enriching of that conception, to the
gradual hewing it out in historical shape, have gone the noblest
poetry, the purest passion, the intensest spiritual vision of the
highest races, since the human mind began to work. And the
historical shape may crumble; but the need will last and the
travail will go on; for man's quest of redemption is but the
eternal yielding of the clay in the hands of the potter, the
eternal answer of the creature to the urging indwelling Creator.




CHAPTER X


Half an hour later, after the stormy praying and singing which had
succeeded Mr. Dyson's address, David found himself tramping up the
rough and lonely road leading to the high Kinder valley. The lights
of Clough End had disappeared; against the night sky the dark woody
side of Mardale Moor was still visible; beneath it sang the river;
a few stars were to be seen; and every now and then the windows of
a farm shone out to guide the wayfarer. But David stumbled on,
noticing nothing. At the foot of the steep hill leading to the farm
he stopped a moment, and leant over the gate. The little lad's cry
was in his ears.

Presently he leapt the gate impatiently, and ran up whistling.
Supper was over, but Hannah ungraciously brought him out some cold
bacon and bread. Louie hung about him while he ate, studying him
with quick furtive eyes.

'Whar yo bin?' she said abruptly, when Hannah had gone to the back
kitchen for a moment. Reuben was dozing by the fire over the local
paper.

'Nowhere as concerns yo,' said David, shortly. He finished his
supper and went and sat on the steps. The dogs came and put their
noses on his knees. He pulled absently at their coats, looking
straight before him at the dark point of Kinder Low.

'Whar yo bin?' said Louie's voice again in his ear. She had
squatted down on the step behind him.

'Be off wi yer,' said David, angrily, getting up in order to escape
her.

But she pursued him across the farmyard.

'Have yo got a letter?'

'No, I haven't.'

'Did yo ask at t' post-office?'

'No, I didn't.'

'An why didn't yo?'

'Because I didn't want--soa there--get away.' And he stalked off.
Louie, left behind, chewed the cud of reflection in the darkness.

Presently, to his great disgust, as he was sitting under a wall of
one of the pasture-fields, hidden, as he conceived, from all the
world by the night, he heard the rustle of a dress, the click of a
stone, and there was Louie dangling her legs above him, having
attacked him in the rear.

'Uncle Reuben's talkin 'is stuff about Mr. Dyson. I seed 'im gooin
passt Wigsons' this afternoon. He's nowt--he's common, he is.'

The thin scornful voice out of the dark grated on him intolerably.
He bent forward and shut his ears tight with both his hands. To
judge from the muffled sounds he heard, Louie went on talking for a
while; but at last there had been silence for so long, that he took
his hands away, thinking she must have gone.

'Yo've been at t' prayer-meetin, I tell yo, an yo're a great stupid
muffin-yed, soa theer.'

And a peremptory little kick on his shoulder from a substantial
shoe gave the words point.

He sprang up in a rage, ran down the hill, jumped over a wall or
two, and got rid of her. But he seemed to hear her elfish laugh for
some time after. As for himself, he could not analyse what had come
over him. But not even the attraction of an unopened parcel of
books he had carried home that afternoon from Clough End--a loan
from a young stationer he had lately made acquaintance with--could
draw him back to the farm. He sat on and on in the dark. And when
at last, roused by the distant sounds of shutting up the house, he
slunk in and up to bed, he tossed about for a long time, and woke
up often in the night. The tyrannous power of another man's faith
was upon him. He could not get Mr. Dyson out of his head. How on
earth could anybody be so _certain_? It was monstrous that any
one should be. It was canting stuff.

Still, next day, hearing by chance that the new-comer was going to
preach at a hamlet the other side of Clough End, he went, found a
large mixed meeting mostly of mill-hands, and the tide of
Revivalism rolling high. This time Mr. Dyson picked him out at
once--the face and head indeed were easily remembered. After the
sermon, when the congregation were filing out, leaving behind those
more particularly distressed in mind to be dealt with more
intimately in a small prayer-meeting by Mr. Dyson and a
prayer-leader, the minister suddenly stepped aside from a group of
people he was talking with, and touched David on the arm as he was
making for the door.

'Won't you stay?' he said peremptorily. 'Don't trifle with the Lord.'

And his feverish divining eyes seemed to look the boy through and
through. David flushed, and pushed past him with some inarticulate
answer. When he found himself in the open air he was half angry,
half shaken with emotion. And afterwards a curious instinct, the
sullen instinct of the wild creature shrinking from a possible
captor, made him keep himself as much as possible out of Mr.
Dyson's way. At the prayer-meetings and addresses, which followed
each other during the next fortnight in quick succession, David was
almost always present; but he stood at the back, and as soon as the
general function was over he fled. The preacher's strong will was
piqued. He began to covet the boy's submission disproportionately,
and laid schemes for meeting with him. But David evaded them all.

Other persons, however, succeeded better. Whenever the revivalist
fever attacks a community, it excites in a certain number of
individuals, especially women, an indescribable zeal for
proselytising. The signs of 'conviction' in any hitherto
unregenerate soul are marked at once, and the 'saved' make a prey
of it, showing a marvellous cunning and persistence in its pursuit.

One day a woman, the wife of a Clough End shoemaker, slightly known
to David, met him on the moors.

'Will yo coom to-night?' she said, nodding to him. 'Theer'll be
prayin' at our house--about half a dozen.'

Then, as the boy stopped, amazed and hesitating, she fixed him with
her shining ecstatic eyes.

'Awake, thou that sleepest,' she said under her breath, 'and Christ
shall give thee light.'

She had been carrying a bundle to a distant farm. A child was in
her arms, and she looked dragged and worn. But all the way down the
moor as she came towards him David had heard her singing hymns.

He hung his head and passed on. But in the evening he went, found
three or four other boys his own age or older, the woman, and her
husband. The woman sang some of the most passionate Methodist
hymns; the husband, a young shoemaker, already half dead of asthma
and bronchitis, told his 'experiences' in a voice broken by
incessant coughing; one of the boys, a rough specimen, known to
David as a van-boy from some calico-printing works in the
neighbourhood, prayed aloud, breaking down into sobs in the middle;
and David, at first obstinately silent, found himself joining
before the end in the groans and 'Amens,' by force of a contagious
excitement he half despised but could not withstand.

The little prayer-meeting, however, broke up somewhat in confusion.
There was not much real difference of opinion at this time in
Clough End, which was, on the whole, a strongly religious town.
Even the Churchmanship of it was decidedly evangelical, ready at
any moment to make common cause with Dissent against Ritualism, if
such a calamity should ever threaten the little community, and very
ready to join, more or less furtively, in the excitements of
Dissenting revivals. Jerry Timmins and his set represented the only
serious blot on what the pious Clough Endian might reasonably
regard as a fair picture. But this set contained some sharp
fellows--provided outlet for a considerable amount of energy of a
raw and roving sort, and, no doubt, did more to maintain the mental
equilibrium of the small factory-town than any enthusiast on the
other side would for a moment have allowed. The excitement which
followed in the train of a man like Mr. Dyson roused, of course, an
answering hubbub among the Timminsites. The whole of Jerry's circle
was stirred up, in fact, like a hive of wasps; their ribaldry grew
with what it fed on; and every day some new and exquisite method of
harrying the devout occurred to the more ingenious among them.

David had hitherto escaped notice. But on this evening, while
he and his half-dozen companions were still on their knees,
they were first disturbed by loud drummings on the shoemaker's
door, which opened directly into the little room where they
were congregated; and then, when they emerged into the street,
they found a mock prayer-meeting going on outside, with all the
usual 'manifestations' of revivalist fervour--sighs, groans,
shouts, and the rest of it--in full flow. At the sight of David
Grieve there were first stares and then shrieks of laughter.

'I say, Davy,' cried a drunken young weaver, sidling up to him on
his knees and embracing him from behind, 'my heart's real touched.
Gie me yor coat, Davy; it's better nor mine, Davy; and I'm yor
Christian brother, Davy.'

The emotion of this appeal drew uproarious merriment from the knot
of Secularists. David, in a frenzy, kicked out, so that his
assailant dropped him with a howl. The weaver's friends closed upon
the 'Ranters,' who had to fight their way through. It was not till
they had gained the outskirts of the town that the shower of stones
ceased, and that they could pause to take stock of their losses.
Then it appeared that, though all were bruised, torn, and furious,
some were inclined to take a mystical joy in persecution, and to
find compensation in certain plain and definite predictions as to
the eternal fate in store for 'Jerry Timmins's divils.' David, on
the other hand, was much more inclined to vent his wrath on his own
side than on the Timminsites.

'Why can't yo keep what yo're doin to yorsels?' he called out
fiercely to the knot of panting boys, as he faced round upon them
at the gate leading to the Kinder road. 'Yo're a parcel o'
fools--always chatterin and clatterin.'

The others defended themselves warmly. 'Them Timmins lot' were
always spying about. They daren't attack the large meetings, but
they had a diabolical way of scenting out the small ones. The
meetings at the shoemaker's had been undisturbed for some few
nights, then a Timminsite passing by had heard hymns, probably
listened at the keyhole, and of course informed the main body of
the enemy.

'They're like them nassty earwigs,' said one boy in disgust,
'they'll wriggle in onywheres.'

'Howd yor noise!' said David, peremptorily. 'If yo wanted to keep
out o' their way, yo could do't fasst enough.'

'How!' they inquired, with equal curtness.

'Yo needn't meet in th' town at aw. Theer's plenty o' places up on
t' moor,' and he waved his hand towards the hills behind him, lying
clear in the autumn moonlight.' Theer's th' owd smithy--who'd find
yo there?'

The mention of the smithy was received as an inspiration. There is
a great deal of pure romantic temper roused by these revivalistic
outbreaks in provincial England. The idea of the moors and the old
ruin as setting for a secret prayer-meeting struck the group of
excited lads as singularly attractive. They parted cheerfully upon
it, in spite of their bruises.

David, however, walked home fuming. The self-abandonment of the
revival had been all along wellnigh intolerable to him--and now,
that he should have allowed the Timminsites to know anything about
his prayers! He very nearly broke off from it altogether in his
proud disgust.

However he did ultimately nothing of the sort. As soon as he grew
cool again, he was as much tormented as before by what was at
bottom more an intellectual curiosity than a moral anguish. There
was _some_ moral awakening in it; he had some real qualms
about sin, some real aspirations after holiness, and, so far, the
self-consciousness which had first stirred at Haworth was deepened
and fertilised. But the thirst for emotion and sensation was the
main force at work. He could not make out what these religious
people meant by their 'experiences,' and for the first time he
wanted to make out. So when it was proposed to him to meet at the
smithy on a certain Saturday evening, he agreed.

Meanwhile, Louie was sitting up in bed every night, with her hands
round her sharp knees, and her black brows knit over David's
follies. It seemed to her he no longer cared 'a haporth' about
getting a letter from Mr. Ancrum, about going to Manchester, about
all those entrancing anti-meat schemes which were to lead so easily
to a paradise of free 'buying' for both of them. Whenever she tried
to call him back to these things he shook her off impatiently, and
their new-born congeniality to each other had been all swamped in
this craze for 'shoutin hollerin' people she despised with all her
heart. When she flew out at him, he just avoided her. Indeed, he
avoided her now at all times, whether she flew out or not. There
was an invincible heathenism about Louie, which made her the
natural enemy of any 'awakened' person.

The relation of the elders in the farm to the new development
in David was a curious one. Hannah viewed it with a secret
satisfaction. Christians have less time than other people--such,
at least, had been her experience with Reuben--to spend in
thirsting for the goods of this world. The more David went to
prayer-meetings, the less likely was he to make inadmissible
demands on what belonged to him. As for poor Reuben, he seemed to
have got his wish; while he and Hannah had been doing their best to
drive Sandy's son to perdition through a downward course of
'loafing,' God had sent Mr. Dyson to put Davy back on the right
road. But he was ill at ease; he watched the excitement, which all
the lad's prickly reticence could not hide from those about him,
with strange and variable feelings. As a Christian, he should have
rejoiced; instead, the uncle and nephew shunned each other more
than ever, and shunned especially all talk of the revival. Perhaps
the whole situation--the influence of the new man, of the local
talk, of the quickened spiritual life around him, did but aggravate
the inner strain in Reuben. Perhaps his wife's satisfaction, which
his sharpened conscience perceived and understood, troubled him
intolerably. At any rate, his silence and disquiet grew, and his
only pleasure lay, more than ever, in those solitary cogitations we
have already spoken of.

The 15th of October approached--as it happened, the Friday before
the smithy prayer-meeting. On that day of the year, according to
ancient and invariable custom, the Yorkshire stock--steers,
heifers, young horses--which are transferred to the Derbyshire
farms on the 15th of May, are driven back to their Yorkshire
owners, with all the fatness of Derbyshire pastures showing on
their sleek sides. Breeders and farmers meet again at Woodhead,
just within the Yorkshire border. The animals are handed over to
their owners, paid for at so much a head, and any preventible
damage or loss occurring among them is reckoned against the farmer
returning them, according to certain local rules.

As the middle of the month came nearer, Reuben began to talk
despondently to Hannah of his probable gains from his Yorkshire
'boarders.' It had been a cold wet summer; he was 'feart' the
owners would think he might have taken more care of some of the
animals, especially of the young horses, and he mentioned certain
ailments springing from damp and exposure for which he might be
held responsible. Hannah grew irritated and anxious. The receipts
from this source were the largest they could reckon upon in the
year. But the fields on which the Yorkshire animals pastured were
at some distance from the house; this department of the farm
business was always left wholly to Reuben; and, with much grumbling
and scolding, she took his word for it as to the probable lowness
of the sum he should bring back.

David, meanwhile, was sometimes a good deal puzzled by Reuben's
behaviour. It seemed to him that his uncle told some queer tales at
home about their summer stock. And when Reuben announced his
intention of going by himself to Woodhead, and leaving David at
home, the boy was still more astonished.

However, he was glad enough to be spared the tramp with a set of
people whose ways and talk were more and more uncongenial to him;
and after his uncle's departure he lay for hours hidden from Louie
among the heather, sometimes arguing out imaginary arguments with
Mr. Dyson, sometimes going through passing thrills of emotion and
fear. What was meant, he wanted to know, by '_the sense of
pardon'?_ Person after person at the prayer-meetings he had been
frequenting had spoken of attaining it with ecstasy, or of being
still shut out from it with anguish. But how, after all, did it
differ from pardoning yourself? You had only, it seemed to him, to
think very hard that you were pardoned, and the feeling came.
How could anybody tell it was more than that? David racked his
brain endlessly over the same subject. Who could be sure that
'experience' was not all moonshine? But he was as yet much too
touched and shaken by what he had been going through to draw any
trenchant conclusions. He asked the question, however, and therein
lay the great difference between him and the true stuff of
Methodism.

Meanwhile, in his excitement, he, for the first time, ceased to go
to the Dawsons' as usual. To begin with, they dropped out of a mind
which was preoccupied with one of the first strong emotions of
adolescence. Then, some one told him casually that 'Lias was more
ailing than usual, and that Margaret was in much trouble. He was
pricked with remorse, but just because Margaret would be sure to
question him, a raw shyness came in and held him back from the
effort of going.

On the Saturday evening David, having ingeniously given Louie the
slip, sped across the fields to the smithy. It was past five
o'clock, and the light was fading. But the waning gold of the
sunset as he jumped the wall on to the moor made the whole autumnal
earth about him, and the whole side of the Scout, one splendour.
Such browns and pinks among the withering ling; such gleaming
greens among the bilberry leaf; such reds among the turning ferns;
such fiery touches on the mountain ashes overhanging the Red Brook!
The western light struck in great shafts into the bosom of the
Scout; and over its grand encompassing mass hung some hovering
clouds just kindling into rosy flame. As the boy walked along he
saw and thrilled to the beauty which lay spread about him. His mood
was simple, and sweeter than usual. He felt a passionate need of
expression, of emotion. There was a true disquiet, a genuine
disgust with self at the bottom of him, and God seemed more than
imaginatively near. Perhaps, on this day of his youth, of all days,
he was closest to the Kingdom of Heaven.

At the smithy he found about a dozen persons, mostly youths, just
come out from the two or three mills which give employment to
Clough End, and one rather older than the rest, a favourite
prayer-leader in Sunday meetings. At first, everything felt
strange; the boys eyed one another; even David as he stepped in
among them had a momentary reaction, and was more conscious of the
presence of a red-haired fellow there with whom he had fought a
mighty fight on the Huddersfield expedition, than of any spiritual
needs.

However, the prayer-leader knew his work. He was slow and pompous;
his tone with the Almighty might easily have roused a hostile sense
of humour; but Dissent in its active and emotional forms kills the
sense of humour; and, besides, there was a real, ungainly power in
the man. Every phrase of his opening prayer was hackneyed; every
gesture uncouth. But his heart was in it, and religious conviction
is the most infectious thing in the world. He warmed, and his
congregation warmed with him. The wild scene, too, did its
part--the world of darkening moors spread out before them; the
mountain wall behind them; the October wind sighing round the
ruined walls; the lonely unaccustomed sounds of birds and water.
When he ceased, boy after boy broke out into more or less
incoherent praying. Soon in the dusk they could no longer see each
other's faces; and then it was still easier to break through
reserve.

At last David found himself speaking. What he said was at first
almost inaudible, for he was kneeling between the wall and the pan
which had been his childish joy, with his face and arms crushed
against the stones. But when he began the boys about pricked up
their ears, and David was conscious suddenly of a deepened silence.
There were warm tears on his hidden cheeks; but it pleased him
keenly they should listen so, and he prayed more audibly and
freely. Then, when his voice dropped at last, the prayer-leader
gave out the familiar hymn, 'Come, O thou Traveller unknown:'--

    Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
      Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
    My company before is gone,
      And I am left alone with Thee;
    With Thee all night I mean to stay,
    And wrestle till the break of day.

    Wilt thou not yet to me reveal
      Thy new unutterable name?
    Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell--
      To know it now resolved I am.
    Wrestling, I will not let thee go,
    Till I thy name, thy nature know.

                * * *

    'Tis Love! 'tis Love--thou lovest me!
      I hear thy whisper in my heart;
    The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
      Pure universal Love thou art;
    To me, to all, thy mercies move,
    Thy nature and thy name is Love.

Again and again the lines rose on the autumn air; each time the
hymn came to an end it was started afresh, the sound of it
spreading far and wide into the purple breast of Kinder Scout. At
last the painful sobbing of poor Tom Mullins almost drowned the
singing. The prayer-leader, himself much moved, bent over and
seized him by the arm.

'Look to Jesus, Tom. Lay hold on the Saviour. Don't think of your
sins; they're done away i' th' blood o' the Lamb. Howd Him fast.
Say, "I believe," and the Lord ull deliver yo.'

With a cry, the great hulking lad sprang to his feet, and clasped
his arms above his head--

'I do believe--I will believe. Help me, Lord Jesus. Oh, I'm saved!
I'm saved!' And he remained standing in an ecstasy, looking to the
sky above the Scout, where the red sunset glow still lingered.

'Hallelujah! hallelujah! Thanks be to God!' cried the
prayer-leader, and the smithy resounded in the growing darkness
with similar shouts. David was almost choking with excitement. He
would have given worlds to spring to Tom Mullins's side and
proclaim the same faith. But the inmost heart of him, his real
self, seemed to him at this testing moment something dead and cold.
No heavenly voice spoke to _him_, David Grieve. A genuine pang
of religious despair seized him. He looked out over the moor
through a gap in the stones. There was a dim path below; the fancy
struck him that Christ, the 'Traveller unknown,' was passing along
it. He had already stretched out His hand of blessing to Tom
Mullins.

'To me! to me, too!' David cried under his breath, carried away by
the haunting imagination, and straining his eyes into the dusk. Had
the night opened to his sight there and then in a vision of glory,
he would have been no whit surprised.

Hark!--what was that sound?

A weird scream rose on the wind. The startled congregation in the
smithy scrambled to their feet. Another scream, nearer apparently
than the first, and then a loud wailing, broken every few seconds
by a strange slight laugh, of which the distance seemed quite
indefinite. Was it close by, or beyond the Red Brook?

The prayer-leader turned white, the boys stood huddled round him in
every attitude of terror. Again the scream, and the little ghostly
laugh! Looking at each other wildly, the whole congregation broke
from the smithy down the hill. But the leader stopped himself.

'It's mebbe soom one in trouble,' he said manfully, every limb
trembling. 'We mun go and see, my lads.' And he rushed off in the
direction whence the first sound had seemed to come--towards the
Red Brook--half a dozen of the bolder spirits following. The rest
stood cowering on the slope under the smithy. David meanwhile had
climbed the ruined wall, and stood with head strained forward, his
eyes sweeping the moor. But every outline was sinking fast into the
gulf of the night; only a few indistinct masses--a cluster of
gorse-bushes, a clump of mountain ash--still showed here and there.

The leader made for one of these darker patches on the
mountain-side, led on always by the recurrent screams. He reached
it; it was a patch of juniper overhanging the Red Brook--when
suddenly from behind it there shot up a white thing, taller than
the tallest man, with nodding head and outspread arms, and such
laughter--so faint, so shrill, so evil, breaking midway into a
hoarse angry yell.

'_Jenny Crum! Jenny Crum!_' cried the whole band with one
voice, and, wheeling round, they ran down the Scout, joined by the
contingent from the smithy, some of them falling headlong among the
heather in their agony of flight, others ruthlessly knocking over
those in front of them who seemed to be in their way. In a few
seconds, as it seemed, the whole Scout was left to itself and the
night. Footsteps, voices, all were gone--save for one long peal of
most human, but still elfish, mirth, which came from the Red Brook.




CHAPTER XI


A dark figure sprang down from the wall of the smithy, leapt along
the heather, and plunged into the bushes along the brook. A cry in
another key was heard.

David emerged, dragging something behind him.

'Yo limb, yo! How dare yo, yo little beast? Yo impident little
toad!' And in a perfect frenzy of rage he shook what she held. But
Louie--for naturally it was Louie--wrenched herself away, and stood
confronting him, panting, but exultant.

'I freetened 'em! just didn't I? Cantin humbugs! "_Jenny Crum!
Jenny Crum!_"' And, mimicking the voice of the leader, she broke
again into an hysterical shout of laughter.

David, beside himself, hit out and struck her. It was a heavy blow
which knocked her down, and for a moment seemed to stun her. Then
she recovered her senses, and flew at him in a mad passion, weeping
wildly with the smart and excitement.

He held her off, ashamed of himself, till she flung away, shrieking
out--

'Go and say its prayers, do--good little boy--poor little babby.
Ugh, yo coward! hittin gells, that's all yo're good for.'

And she ran off so fast that all sight of her was lost in a few
seconds. Only two or three loud sobs seemed to come back from the
dark hollow below. As for the boy, he stopped a second to
disentangle his feet from the mop and the tattered sheet wherewith
Louie had worked her transformation scene. Then he dashed up the
hill again, past the smithy, and into a track leading out on to the
high road between Castleton and Clough End. He did not care where
he went. Five minutes ago he had been almost in heaven; now he was
in hell. He hated Louie, he hated the boys who had cut and run, he
loathed himself. No!--religion was not for such as he. No more
canting--no more praying--away with it! He seemed to shake all the
emotion of the last few weeks from him with scorn and haste, as he
ran on, his strong young limbs battling with the wind.

Presently he emerged on the high road. To the left, a hundred yards
away, were the lights of a wayside inn; a farm waggon and a pair of
horses standing with drooped and patient heads were drawn up on the
cobbles in front of it. David felt in his pockets. There was
eighteenpence in them, the remains of half-a-crown a strange
gentleman had given him in Clough End the week before for stopping
a runaway horse. In he stalked.

'Two penn'orth of gin--hot!' he commanded.

The girl serving the bar brought it and stared at him curiously.
The glaring paraffin lamp above his head threw the frowning brows
and wild eyes, the crimson cheeks, heaving chest, and tumbled hair,
into strong light and shade. 'That's a quare un!' she thought, but
she found him handsome all the same, and, retreating behind the
beer-taps, she eyed him surreptitiously. She was a raw country
lass, not yet stript of all her natural shyness, or she would have
begun to 'chaff' him.

'Another!' said David, pushing forward his glass. This time he
looked at her. His reckless gaze travelled over her coarse and
comely face, her full figure, her bare arms. He drank the glass she
gave him, and yet another. She began to feel half afraid of him,
and moved away. The hot stimulant ran through his veins. Suddenly
he felt his head whirling from the effects of it, but that horrible
clutch of despair was no longer on him. He raised himself defiantly
and turned to go, staggering along the floor. He was near the
entrance when an inner door opened, and the carter, who had been
gossiping in a room behind with the landlord, emerged. He started
with astonishment when he saw David.

'Hullo, Davy, what are yo after?'

David turned, nearly losing his balance as he did so, and clutching
at the bar for support. He found himself confronted with Jim
Wigson--his old enemy--who had been to Castleton with a load of hay
and some calves, and was on his way back to Kinder again. When he
saw who it was clinging to the bar counter, Jim first stared and
then burst into a hoarse roar of laughter.

'Coom here! coom here!' he shouted to the party in the back parlour.
'Here's a rum start! I do declare this beats cock-fighting!--this do.
Damn my eyes iv it doosn't! Look at that yoong limb. Why they towd me
down at Clough End this mornin he'd been took "serious" --took wi a
prayin turn--they did. Look at un! It ull tak 'im till to-morrow mornin
to know his yed from his heels. He! he! he! Yo're a deep un, Davy--yo
are. But yo'll get a bastin when Hannah sees yo--prayin or no prayin.'

And Jim went off into another guffaw, pointing his whip the while
at Davy. Some persons from the parlour crowded in, enjoying the
fun. David did not see them. He reached out his hand for the glass
he had just emptied, and steadying himself by a mighty effort,
flung it swift and straight in Jim Wigson's face. There was a crash
of fragments, a line of blood appeared on the young carter's chin,
and a chorus of wrath and alarm rose from the group behind him.
With a furious oath Jim placed a hand on the bar, vaulted it, and
fell upon the lad. David defended himself blindly, but he was dazed
with drink, and his blows and kicks rained aimlessly on Wigson's
iron frame. In a second or two Jim had tripped him up, and stood
over him, his face ablaze with vengeance and conquest.

'Yo yoong varmint--yo cantin yoong hypocrite! I'll teach yo to show
imperence to your betters. Yo bin allus badly i' want o' soombody
to tak yo down a peg or two. Now I'll show yo. I'll not fight yo,
but I'll flog yo--_flog yo_--d' yo hear?'

And raising his carter's whip he brought it down on the boy's back
and legs. David tried desperately to rise--in vain--Jim had him by
the collar; and four or five times more the heavy whip came down,
avenging with each lash many a slumbering grudge in the victor's
soul.

Then Jim felt his arm firmly caught. 'Now, Mister Wigson,' cried the
landlord--a little man, but a wiry--'yo'll not get me into trooble.
Let th' yoong ripstitch go. Yo've gien him a taste he'll not forget
in a week o' Sundays. Let him go.'

Jim, with more oaths, struggled to get free, but the landlord had
quelled many rows in his time, and his wrists were worthy of his
calling. Meanwhile his wife helped up the boy. David was no sooner
on his feet than he made another mad rush for Wigson, and it needed
the combined efforts of landlord, landlady, and servant-girl to
part the two again. Then the landlord, seizing David from behind by
'the scuft of the neck,' ran him out to the door in a twinkling.

'Go 'long wi yo! An if yo coom raisin th' divil here again, see iv I
don't gie yo a souse on th' yed mysel.' And he shoved his charge
out adroitly and locked the door.

David staggered across the road as though still under the impetus
given by the landlord's shove.

The servant-girl took advantage of the loud cross-fire of talk
which immediately rose at the bar round Jim Wigson to run to a
corner window and lift the blind. The boy was sitting on a heap of
stones for mending the road, looking at the inn. Other passers-by
had come in, attracted by the row, and the girl slipped out
unperceived, opened the side door, and ran across the road. It had
begun to rain, and the drops splashed in her face.

David was sitting leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the lighted
windows of the house opposite. The rays which came from them showed
her that his nose and forehead were bleeding, and that the blood
was dripping unheeded on the boy's clothes. He was utterly
powerless, and trembling all over, but his look 'gave her a turn.'

'Now, luke here,' she said, bending down to him. 'Yo jes go whoam.
Wigson, he'll be out direckly, an he'll do yo a hurt iv he finds
yo. Coom, I'll put yo i' the way for Kinder.'

And before he could gather his will to resist, she had dragged him
up with her strong countrywoman's arms and was leading him along
the road to the entrance of the lane he had come by.

'Lor, yo _are_ bleedin,' she said compassionately; 'he shud ha
thowt as how yo wor nobbut a lad--an it wor he begun aggin fust.
He's a big bully is Wigson.' And impulsively raising her apron she
applied it to the blood, David quite passive all the while. The
great clumsy lass nearly kissed him for pity.

'Now then,' she said at last, turning him into the lane, 'yo know
your way, an I mun goo, or they'll be raisin the parish arter me.
Gude neet to yo, an keep out o' Wigson's seet. Rest yursel a bit
theer--agen th' wall.'

And leaving him leaning against the wall, she reluctantly departed,
stopping to look back at him two or three times in spite of the
rain, till the angle of the wall hid him from view.

The rain poured down and the wind whistled through the rough lane.
David presently slipped down upon a rock jutting from the wall, and
a fevered, intermittent sleep seized him--the result of the spirits
he had been drinking. His will could oppose no resistance; he slept
on hour after hour, sheltered a little by an angle of the wall, but
still soaked by rain and buffeted by the wind.

When he awoke he staggered suddenly to his feet. The smart of his
back and legs recalled him, after a few moments of bewilderment, to
a mental torture he had scarcely yet had time to feel. He--David
Grieve--had been beaten--thrashed like a dog--by Jim Wigson! The
remembered fact brought with it a degradation of mind and body--a
complete unstringing of the moral fibres, which made even revenge
seem an impossible output of energy. A nature of this sort, with
such capacities and ambitions, carries about with it a sense of
supremacy, a natural, indispensable self-conceit which acts as the
sheath to the bud, and is the condition of healthy development.
Break it down and you bruise and jeopardise the flower of life.

Jim Wigson!--the coarse, ignorant lout with whom he had been, more
or less, at feud since his first day in Kinder, whom he had
despised with all the strength of his young vanity. By to-morrow
all Kinder would know, and all Kinder would laugh. 'What! yo
whopped Reuben Grieve's nevvy, Jim? Wal, an a good thing, too!
A lick now an again ud do _him_ noa harm--a cantankerous yoong
rascot--pert an proud, like t' passon's pig, I say.' David could
hear the talk to be as though it were actually beside him. It burnt
into his ear.

He groped his way through the lane and on to the moor--trembling
with physical exhaustion, the morbid frenzy within him choking his
breath, the storm beating in his face. What was that black mass to
his right?--the smithy? A hard sob rose in his throat. Oh, he had
been so near to an ideal world of sweetness, purity, holiness! Was
it a year ago?

With great difficulty he found the crossing-place in the brook, and
then the gap in the wall which led him into the farm fields. When
he was still a couple of fields off the house he heard the dogs
beginning. But he heard them as though in a dream.

At last he stood at the door and fumbled for the handle. Locked!
Why, what time could it be? He tried to remember what time he had
left home, but failed. At last he knocked, and just as he did so he
perceived through a chink of the kitchen shutter a light on the
scrubbed deal table inside, and Hannah's figure beside it. At
the sound of the knocker Hannah rose, put away her work with
deliberation, snuffed the candle, and then moved with it to the
door of the kitchen. The boy watched her with a quickly beating
heart and whirling brain. She opened the door.

'Whar yo bin?' she demanded sternly. 'I'd like to know what business
yo have to coom in this time o' neet, an your uncle fro whoam.
Yo've bin in mischief, I'll be bound. Theer's Louie coom back wi a
black eye, an jes because she woan't say nowt about it, I know as
it's yo are at t' bottom o' 't. I'm reg'lar sick o' sich doins in a
decent house. Whar yo bin, I say?'

And this time she held the candle up so as to see him. She had been
sitting fuming by herself, and was in one of her blackest tempers.
David's misdemeanour was like food to a hungry instinct.

'I went to prayer-meetin,' the lad said thickly. It seemed to him
as though the words came all in the wrong order.

Hannah bent forward and gave a sudden cry.

'Why, yo bin fightin! Yo're all ower blood! Yo bin fightin,
and I'll bet a thousand pund yo draw'd in Louie too. And
_sperrits_! Why, yo _smell_ o' sperrits! Yo're jes _reekin_
wi 'em! Wal, upon my word!'--and Hannah drew herself back,
flinging every slow word in his face like a blow. 'Yo feature
your mither, yo do, boath on you, pretty close. I allus said it ud
coom out i' yo too. Prayer-meetin! Yo yoong hypocrite! Gang your
ways! Yo may sleep i' th' stable; it's good enough liggin for yo
this neet.'

And before he had taken in her words she had slammed the door in
his face, and locked it. He made a feeble rush for it in vain.
Hannah marched back into the kitchen, listening instinctively first
to him left outside, and then for any sound there might be from
upstairs. In a minute or two she heard uneven steps going away; but
there was no movement in the room overhead. Louie was sleeping
heavily. As for Hannah, she sat down again with a fierce decision
of gesture, which seemed to vibrate through the kitchen and all it
held. Who could find fault with her? It would be a lesson to him.
It was not a cold night, and there was straw in the stable--a deal
better lying than such a boy deserved. As she thought of his
'religious' turn she shrugged her shoulders with a bitter scorn.

The night wore on in the high Kinder valley. The stormy wind and
rain beat in great waves of sound and flood against the breast of
the mountain; the Kinder stream and the Red Brook danced under the
heavy drops. The grouse lay close and silent in the sheltering
heather; even the owls in the lower woods made no sound. Still, the
night was not perfectly dark, for towards midnight a watery moon
rose, and showed itself at intervals between the pelting showers.

In the Dawsons' little cottage on Frimley Moor there were still
lights showing when that pale moon appeared. Margaret was watching
late. She and another woman sat by the fire talking under their
breaths. A kettle was beside her with a long spout, which sent the
steam far into the room, keeping the air of it moist and warm for
the poor bronchitic old man who lay close-curtained from the
draughts on the wooden bed in the corner.

The kettle sang, the fire crackled, and the wind shook the windows
and doors. But suddenly, through the other sounds, Margaret was
aware of an intermittent knocking--a low, hesitating sound, as of
some one outside afraid, and yet eager, to make himself heard.

She started up, and her companion--a homely neighbour, one of those
persons whose goodness had, perhaps, helped to shape poor
Margaret's philosophy of life--looked round with a scared
expression.

'Whoiver can it be, this time o' neet?' said Margaret--and she
looked at the old clock--'why, it's close on middle-neet!'

She hesitated a moment, then she went to the door, and bent her
mouth to the chink--

'Who are yo? What d' yo want?' she asked, in a distinct but low
voice, so as not to disturb 'Lias.

No answer for a minute. Then her ear caught some words from
outside. With an exclamation she unlocked the door and threw it
open.

'Davy! Davy!' she cried, almost forgetting her patient.

The boy clung to the lintel without a word.

'Coom your ways in!' she said peremptorily, catching him by the
sleeve. 'We conno ha no draughts on th' owd man.'

And she drew him into the light, and shut the door. Then as the
shaded candle and firelight fell on the tall lad, wavering now to
this side, now to that, as though unable to support himself, his
clothes dripping on the flags, his face deadly white, save for the
smears of blood upon it, the two women fell back in terror.

'Will yo gie me shelter?' said the boy, hoarsely; 'I bin lying hours
i' th' wet. Aunt Hannah turned me out.'

Margaret came close to him and looked him all over.

'What for did she turn yo out, Davy?'

'I wor late. I'd been fightin Jim Wigson, an she smelt me o' drink.'

And suddenly the lad sank down on a stool near, and laid his head
in his hands, as though he could hold it up no longer. Margaret's
blanched old face melted all in a minute.

'Howd 'un up quick!' she said to her companion, still in a whisper.
'He hanno got a dry thread on--and luke at that cut on his
yed--why, he'll be laid up for weeks, maybe, for this. Get his
cloos off, an we'll put him on my bed then.'

And between them they dragged him up, and Margaret began to strip
off his jacket. As they held him--David surrendering himself
passively--the curtain of the bed was drawn back, and 'Lias,
raising himself on an elbow, looked out into the room. As he caught
sight of the group of the boy and the two women, arrested in their
task by the movement of the curtain, the old man's face expressed,
first a weak and agitated bewilderment, and then in an instant it
cleared.

His dream wove the sight into itself, and 'Lias knew all about it.
His thin long features, with the white hair hanging about them,
took an indulgent amused look.

'_Bony_--eh, Bony, is that _yo_, man? Eh, but yo're cold
an pinched, loike! A gude glass o' English grog ud not come amiss
to yo. An your coat, an your boots--what is 't drippin? _Snaw?
_ Yo make a man's backbane freeze t' see yo. An there's hot wark
behind yo, too. Moscow might ha warmed yo, I'm thinkin, an--'

But the weak husky voice gave way, and 'Lias fell back, still
holding the curtain, though, in his emaciated hand, and straining
his dim eyes on David. Margaret, with tears, ran to him, tried to
quiet him and to shut out the light from him again. But he pushed
her irritably aside.

'No, Margaret,--doan't intrude. What d' yo know about it? Yo know
nowt, Margaret. When did yo iver heer o' the Moscow campaign? Let
me be, woan't yo?'

But perceiving that he would not be quieted, she turned him on his
pillows, so that he could see the boy at his ease.

'He's bin out i' th' wet, 'Lias dear, has Davy,' she said; 'and it's
nobbut a clashy night. We mun gie him summat hot, and a place to
sleep in.'

But the old man did not listen to her. He lay looking at David, his
pale blue eyes weirdly visible in his haggard face, muttering to
himself. He was still tramping in the snow with the French army.

Then, suddenly, for the first time, he seemed troubled. He stared
up at the pale miserable boy who stood looking at him with
trembling lips. His own face began to work painfully, his dream
struggled with recognition.

Margaret drew David quickly away. She hurried him into the further
corner of the cottage, where he was out of sight of the bed. There
she quickly stripped him of his wet garments, as any mother might
have done, found an old flannel shirt of 'Lias's for him, and,
wrapping him close in a blanket, she made him lie down on her own
bed, he being now much too weak to realise what was done with him.
Then she got an empty bottle, filled it from the kettle, and put it
to his feet; and finally she brought a bowlful of warm water and a
bit of towel, and, sitting down by him, she washed the blood and
dirt away from his face and hand, and smoothed down the tangled
black hair. She, too, noticed the smell of spirits, and shook her
head over it; but her motherliness grew with every act of service,
and when she had made him warm and comfortable, and he was dropping
into the dead sleep of exhaustion, she drew her old hand tenderly
across his brow.

'He do feature yan o' my own lads so as he lies theer,' she said
tremulously to her friend at the fire, as though explaining
herself. 'When they'd coom home late fro wark, I'd use to hull 'em
up so mony a time. Ay, I'd been woonderin what had coom to th' boy.
I thowt he'd been goin wrang soomhow, or he'd ha coom aw these
weeks to see 'Lias an me. It's a poor sort o' family he's got. That
Hannah Grieve's a hard un, I'll uphowd yo. Theer's a deal o' her
fault in 't, yo may mak sure.'

Then she went to give 'Lias some brandy--he lived on little else
now. He dropped asleep again, and, coming back to the hearth, she
consented to lie down before it while her friend watched. Her
failing frame was worn out with nursing and want of rest, and she
was soon asleep.

When Davy awoke the room was full of a chill daylight. As he moved
he felt himself stiff all over. The sensation brought back memory,
and the boy's whole being seemed to shrink together. He burrowed
first under his coverings out of the light, then suddenly he sat up
in bed, in the shadow of the little staircase--or rather
ladder--which led to the upper story, and looked about him.

The good woman who had shared Margaret's watch was gone back to her
own home and children. Margaret had made up the fire, tidied the
room, and, at 'Lias's request, drawn up the blinds. She had just
given him some beef-tea and brandy, sponged his face, and lifted
him on his pillows. There seemed to be a revival of life in the old
man, death was for the moment driven back; and Margaret hung over
him in an ecstasy, the two crooning together. David could see her
thin bent figure--the sharpened delicacy of the emaciated face set
in the rusty black net cap which was tied under the chin, and fell
in soft frills on the still brown and silky hair. He saw her
weaver's hand folded round 'Lias's, and he could hear 'Lias
speaking in a weak thread of a voice, but still sanely and
rationally. It gave him a start to catch some of the words--he had
been so long accustomed to the visionary 'Lias.

'Have yo rested, Margaret?'

'Ay, dear love, three hours an moor. Betsy James wor here; she saw
yo wanted for nowt. She's a gude creetur, ain't she, 'Lias?'

'Ay, but noan so good as my Margaret,' said the old man, looking at
her wistfully.' But yo'll wear yorsel down, Margaret; 'yo've had no
rest for neets. Yo're allus toilin' and moilin', an I'm no worth
it, Margaret.'

The tears gushed to the wife's eyes. It was only with the nearness
of death that 'Lias seemed to have found out his debt to her. To
both, her lifelong service had been the natural offering of the
lower to the higher; she had not been used to gratitude, and she
could not bear it.

'Dear heart! dear love!' David heard her say; and then there came
to his half-reluctant ear caresses such as a mother gives her
child. He laid his head on his knees, trying to shut them out. He
wished with a passionate and bitter regret that he had not been so
many weeks without coming near these two people; and now 'Lias was
going fast, and after to-day he would see them both no more--for
ever?

Margaret heard him moving, and nodded back to him over her
shoulder.

'Yo've slept well, Davy,--better nor I thowt yo would. Your cloos
are by yo--atwixt yo an t'stairs.'

And there he found them, dry and brushed. He dressed hastily and
came forward to the fire. 'Lias recognised him feebly, Margaret
watching anxiously to see whether his fancies would take him again.
In this tension of death and parting his visions had become almost
more than she could bear. But 'Lias lay quiet.

'Davy wor caught i' th' rain, and I gave him a bed,' she explained
again, and the old man nodded without a word.

Then as she prepared him a bowl of oatmeal she stood by the fire
giving the boy motherly advice. He must go back home, of course,
and never mind Hannah; there would come a time when he would get
his chance like other people; and he mustn't drink, for, 'i' th'
first place, drink wor a sad waste o' good wits,' and David's were
'better'n most;' and in the second, 'it wor a sin agen the Lord.'

David sat with his head drooped in his hand apparently listening.
In reality, her gentle babble passed over him almost unheeded. He
was aching in mind and body; his strong youth, indeed, had but just
saved him from complete physical collapse; for he had lain an
indefinite time on the soaking moor, till misery and despair had
driven him to Margaret's door. But his moral equilibrium was
beginning to return, in virtue of a certain resolution, the one
thing which now stood between him and the black gulf of the night.
He ate his porridge and then he got up.

'I mun goo, Margaret.'

He would fain have thanked her, but the words choked in his throat.

'Ay, soa yo mun, Davy,' said the little body briskly. 'If theer's an
onpleasant thing to do it's best doon quickly--yo mun go back and
do your duty. Coom and see us when yo're passin again. An say
good-bye to 'Lias. He's that wick this mornin--ain't yo, 'Lias?'

And with a tender cheerfulness she ran across to 'Lias and told him
Davy was going.

'Good-bye, Davy, my lad, good-bye,' murmured the old man, as he
felt the boy's strong fingers touching his. 'Have yo been readin
owt, Davy, since we saw yo? It's a long time, Davy.'

'No, nowt of ony account,' said David, looking away.

'Ay, but yo mun keep it up. Coom when yo like; I've not mony books,
but yo know yo can have 'em aw. I want noan o' them now, do I,
Marg'ret? But I want for nowt--nowt. Dyin 's long, but it's
varra--varra peaceful. Margaret!'

And withdrawing his hand from Davy, 'Lias laid it in his wife's with
a long, long sigh. David left them so. He stole out unperceived by
either of them.

When he got outside he stood for a moment under the sheltering
sycamores and laid his cheek against the door. The action contained
all he could not say.

Then he sped along towards the farm. The sun was rising through the
autumn mists, striking on the gold of the chestnuts, the red of the
cherry trees. There were spaces of intense blue among the rolling
clouds, and between the storm past and the storm to come the whole
moorland world was lavishly, garishly bright.

He paused at the top of the pasture-fields to look at the farm.
Smoke was already rising from the chimney. Then Aunt Hannah was up,
and he must mind himself. He crept on under walls, till he got to
the back of the farmyard. Then he slipped in, ran into the stable,
and got an old coat of his left there the day before. There was a
copy of a Methodist paper lying near it. He took it up and tore it
across with passion. But his rage was not so much with the paper.
It was his own worthless, unstable, miserable self he would have
rent if he could. The wreck of ideal hopes, the defacement of that
fair image of itself which every healthy youth bears about with it,
could not have been more pitifully expressed.

Then he looked round to see if there was anything else that he
could honestly take. Yes--an ash stick he had cut himself a week or
two ago. Nothing else--and there was Tibby moving and beginning to
bark in the cowhouse.

He ran across the road, and from a safe shelter in the fields on
the farther side he again looked back to the farm. There was
Louie's room, the blind still down. He thought of his blow of the
night before--of his promises to her. Aye, she would fret over his
going--he knew that--in her own wild way. She would think he had
been a beast to her. So he had--so he had! There surged up in his
mind inarticulate phrases of remorse, of self-excuse, as though he
were talking to her.

Some day he would come back and claim her. But when? His
buoyant self-dependence was all gone. It had nothing to do with
his present departure. That came simply from the fact that it was
_impossible_ for him to go on living in Kinder any longer--he
did not stop to analyse the whys and wherefores.

But suddenly a nervous horror of seeing anyone he knew, now that
the morning was advancing, startled him from his hiding-place. He
ran up towards the Scout again, so as to make a long circuit round
the Wigsons' farm. As he distinguished the walls of it a shiver of
passion ran through the young body. Then he struck off straight
across the moors towards Glossop.

One moment he stood on the top of Mardale Moor. On one side of him
was the Kinder valley, Needham Farm still showing among its trees;
the white cataract of the Downfall cleaving the dark wall of the
Scout, and calling to the runaway in that voice of storm he knew so
well; the Mermaid's Pool gleaming like an eye in the moorland. On
the other side were hollow after hollow, town beyond town, each
with its cap of morning smoke. There was New Mills, there was
Stockport, there in the far distance was Manchester.

The boy stood a moment poised between the two worlds, his ash-stick
in his hand, the old coat wound round his arm. Then at a bound he
cleared a low stone wall beside him and ran down the Glossop road.

Twelve hours later Reuben Grieve climbed the long hill to the farm.
His wrinkled face was happier than it had been for months, and his
thoughts were so pleasantly occupied that he entirely failed to
perceive, for instance, the behaviour of an acquaintance, who
stopped and started as he met him at the entrance of the Kinder
lane, made as though he would have spoken, and, thinking better of
it, walked on. Reuben--the mendacious Reuben--had done very well
with his summer stock--very well indeed. And part of his earnings
was now safely housed in the hands of an old chapel friend, to whom
he had confided them under pledge of secrecy. But he took a
curious, excited pleasure in the thought of the 'poor mouth' he was
going to make to Hannah. He was growing reckless in his passion for
restitution--always provided, however, that he was not called upon
to brave his wife openly. A few more such irregular savings, and,
if an opening turned up for David, he could pay the money and pack
off the lad before Hannah could look round. He could never do it
under her opposition, but he thought he could do it and take the
consequences--he _thought_ he could.

He opened his own gate. There on the house doorstep stood Hannah,
whiter and grimmer than ever.

'Reuben Grieve,' she said quickly, 'your nevvy's run away. An if yo
doan't coom and keep your good-for-nothin niece in her place, and
make udder foak keep a civil tongue i' their head to your wife,
I'll leave your house this neet, as sure as I wor born a Martin!'

Reuben stumbled into the house. There was a wild rush downstairs,
and Louie fell upon him, David's blow showing ghastly plain in her
white quivering face.

'Whar's Davy?' she said. 'Yo've got him!--he's hid soomwhere--yo
know whar he is! I'll not stay here if yo conno find him! It wor
_her_ fault'--and she threw out a shaking hand towards her
aunt--'she druv him out last neet--an Dawsons took him in--an
iverybody's cryin shame on her! And if yo doan't mak her find
him--she knows where he is--I'll not stay in this hole!--I'll kill
her!--I'll burn th' house!--I'll--'

The child stopped--panting, choked--beside herself.

Hannah made a threatening step, but at her gesture Reuben sprang
up, and seizing her by both wrists he looked at her from a height,
as a judge looks. Never had those dull eyes met her so before.

'Woman!' he cried fiercely. 'Woman! what ha yo doon wi Sandy's son?'




BOOK II YOUTH




CHAPTER I


A tall youth carrying a parcel of books under his arm was hurrying
along Market Place, Manchester. Beside him were covered flower
stalls bordering the pavement, in front of him the domed mass of
the Manchester Exchange, and on all sides he had to push his way
through a crowd of talking, chaffering, hurrying humanity.
Presently he stopped at the door of a restaurant bearing the
idyllic and altogether remarkable name--there it was in gilt
letters over the door--of the 'Fruit and Flowers Parlour.' On the
side post of the door a bill of fare was posted, which the young
man looked up and down with careful eyes. It contained a strange
medley of items in all tongues--

         'Marrow pie
  _Haricots à la Lune de Miel_
  _Vol-au-Vent à la bonne Santo:_
        Tomato fritters
        Cheese 'Ticements
       _Salad saladorum_'

And at the bottom of the _menu_ was printed in bold red
characters,

  'No meat, no disease. _Ergo_, no meat, no sin.
  Fellow-citizens, leave your carnal foods,
  and try a more excellent way.
  I. E. Push the door and walk in.
  The Fruit and Flowers Parlour
  invites everybody and overcharges nobody.'

The youth did not trouble, however, to read the notice. He knew it
and the 'Parlour' behind it by heart. But he moved away, pondering
the _menu_ with a smile.

In his amused abstraction--at the root of which lay the appetite of
eighteen--he suddenly ran into a passer-by, who stumbled against a
shop window with an exclamation of pain. The youth's attention was
attracted and he stopped awkwardly.

'People of your height, young man, should look before them,' said
the victim, rubbing what seemed to be a deformed leg, while his
lips paled a little.

'Mr. Ancrum,' cried the other, amazed.

'Davy!'

The two looked at each other. Then Mr. Ancrum gripped the lad's
arm.

'Help me along, Davy. It's only a bruise. It'll go off. Where are
you going?'

'Up Piccadilly way with a parcel,' said Davy, looking askance at
his companion's nether man. 'Did I knock your bad leg, sir?'

'Oh no, nothing--never mind. Well now, Davy, this is
queer--decidedly queer. Four years!--and we run against each other
in Market Street at last. Tell me the truth, Davy--have you long
ago given me up as a man who could make promises to a lad in
difficulties and forget 'em as soon as he was out of sight? Say it
out, my boy.'

David flushed and looked down at his companion with some
embarrassment. Their old relation of minister and pupil had left a
deep mark behind it. Moreover, in the presence of that face of Mr.
Ancrum's, a long, thin, slightly twisted face, with the stamp
somehow of a tragic sincerity on the eyes and mouth, it was
difficult to think as slightingly of his old friend as he had done
for a good while past, apparently with excellent reason.

'I supposed there was something the matter,' he blurted out at
last.

'Well, never mind, Davy,' said the other, smiling sadly. 'We can't
talk here in this din. But now I've got you, I keep you. Where are
you?'

'I'm in Half Street, sir--Purcell's, the bookseller.'

'Don't know him. I never go into a shop. I have no money. Are you
apprentice there?'

'Well, there was no binding. I'm assistant. I do a lot of business
one way and another, buying and selling both.'

'How long have you been in Manchester?'

'Four years, sir.'

The minister looked amazed.

'And I have been here, off and on, for the last three. How have we
missed each other all that time? I made inquiries at Clough End,
when--ah, well, no matter; but it was too late. You had decamped,
no one could tell me anything.'

David walked on beside his companion, silent and awkward. The
explanation seemed a lame one. Mr. Ancrum had left Clough End in
May, promising to look out for a place for the lad at once, and to
let him know. Six whole months elapsed between that promise and
David's own departure. Yes, it was lame; but it was so long ago,
and so many things had happened since, that it did not signify.
Only he did not somehow feel much effusion in meeting his old
friend and playfellow again.

'Getting on, Davy?' said Ancrum presently, looking the lad up and
down.

David made a movement of the shoulders which the minister noticed.
It was both more free and more graceful than ordinary English
gesture. It reawakened in Ancrum at once that impression of
something alien and unusual which both David and his sister had
often produced in him while they were still children.

'I don't know,' said the boy slowly; and then, after a hesitation
or two, fell silent.

'Well, look here,' said Ancrum, stopping short; 'this won't do for
talk, as I said before; but I must know all about you, and I must
tell you what I can about myself. I lodge in Mortimer Road, you
know, up Fallowfield way. You can get there by tram in twenty
minutes; when will you come and see me? To-night?'

The lad thought a moment.

'Would Wednesday night do, sir? I--I believe I'm going to the music
to-night.'

'What, to the "Elijah," in the Free Trade Hall? Appoint me a place
to meet--we'll go together--and you shall come home to supper with
me afterwards.'

David flushed and looked straight before him.

'I promised to take two young ladies,' he said, after a moment,
abruptly.

'Oh!' said Mr. Ancrum, laughing. 'I apologise. Well, Wednesday
night, then.--Don't you forget, Davy--half-past seven? Done.
_Fourteen_, Mortimer Road. Good-bye.'

And the minister turned and retraced his steps towards Market
Place. He walked slowly, like one much preoccupied, and might have
run into fresh risks but for the instinctive perception of most
passers-by that he was not a person to be hustled. Suddenly he
laughed out--thinking of David and his 'young ladies,' and
comparing the lad's admission with his former attitude towards
'gells.' Well, time had but wrought its natural work. What
a brilliant noticeable creature altogether--how unlike the
ordinary run of north-country lads! But that he had been from the
beginning--the strain of some nimbler blood had always shown
itself.

Meanwhile, David made his way up Piccadilly--did some humourist
divert himself, in days gone by, with dropping a shower of London
names on Manchester streets?--and deposited his parcel. Then the
great clock of the Exchange struck twelve, and the Cathedral
followed close upon it, the sounds swaying and vibrating above the
crowds hurrying through Market Street. It was a damp October day.
Above, the sky was hidden by a dark canopy of cloud and smoke; the
Cathedral on its hill rose iron-black above the black streets and
river; black mud encrusted all the streets, and bespattered those
that walked in them. Nothing more dreary than the smoke-grimed
buildings on either hand, than the hideous railway station across
the bridge, or the mud-sprinkled hoardings covered with flaring
advertisements, which led up to the bridge, could be well imagined.
Manchester was at its darkest and grimmest.

But as David Grieve walked back along Market Street his heart
danced within him. Neither mud nor darkness, neither the squalor of
the streets, nor the penetrating damp of the air, affected him at
all. The crowd, the rush of life about him, the gas in the shops,
the wares on which it shone, the endless faces passing him, the
sense of hurry, of business, of quick living--he saw and felt
nothing else; and to these his youth was all atune.

Arrived in Market Place again he made his way with alacrity to the
'Parlour.' For it was dinner time; he had a free half-hour, and
nine times out of ten he spent it at the 'Parlour.'

He walked in, put his hat on its accustomed peg, took his seat at a
table near the door, and looked round for some one. The low
widespreading room was well filled, mostly with clerks and shopmen;
the gas was lit because of the darkness outside, and showed off the
gay panels on the walls filled with fruit and flower subjects, for
which Adrian O'Connor Lomax, commonly called 'Daddy,' the owner of
the restaurant, had given a commission to some students at the
Mechanics' Institute, and whereof he was inordinately proud. At the
end of the room near the counter was a table occupied by about half
a dozen young men, all laughing and talking noisily, and beside
them shouting, gesticulating, making dashes, now for one, now for
another--was a figure, which David at once set himself to watch,
his chin balanced on his hand, his eyes dancing. It was the thin
tall figure of an oldish man in a long frock-coat, which opened in
front over a gaily flowered silk waistcoat. On the bald crown of
his head he wore a black skull cap, below which certain grotesque
and scanty tails of fair hair, carefully brushed, fell to his
shoulders. His face was long and sharply pointed, and the surface
of it bronzed and wrinkled by long exposure, out of all likeness to
human skin. The eyes were weirdly prominent and blue; the gestures
had the deliberate extravagance of an actor; and the whole man
recalled a wizard of pantomime.

David had hardly time to amuse himself with the 'chaffing' of
Daddy, which was going on, and which went on habitually at the
Parlour from morning till night, when Daddy perceived a new-comer.

He turned round sharp upon his heels, surveyed the room with the
frown of a general.

'Ah!' he said with a theatrical air, as he made out the lad at the
further table. 'Gentlemen, I let you off for the present,' and
waving his hand to them with an indulgent self-importance, which
provoked a roar of laughter, he turned and walked down the
restaurant, with a quick swaying gait, to where David sat.

David made room for him in a smiling silence. Lomax sat down, and
the two looked at each other.

'Davy,' said Daddy severely, 'why weren't you here yesterday?'

'When did you begin opening on Sundays, Daddy?' said the youth,
attacking a portion of marrow pie, which had just been laid before
him, his gay curious eyes still wandering over Daddy's costume,
which was to-day completed by a large dahlia in the buttonhole, as
grotesque as the rest.

'Ah bedad, but I'm losing my memory entirely;--and you know it, you
varmint. Well then, it was Saturday you weren't here.'

'You're about right there. I was let off early, and got a walk out
Ramsbottom way with a fellow. I hadn't stretched my legs for two
months, and--I'll confess to you, Daddy--that when we got down from
the moor, I was--overtaken--as the pious people say--by a mutton
chop.'

The lad looked up at him laughing. Daddy surveyed him with chagrin.

'I knew you were a worthless lukewarm sort of a creature.
Flesh-eating's as bad as drink for them that have got it in 'em.
It'll come out. Well, go your ways! _You'll_ never be Prime
Minister.'

'Don't distress yourself, Daddy. As long as marrow pies are good, I
shall eat 'em--you may count on that. What's that cheese affair
down there?' and he pointed towards the last item but one in the
bill of fare. Instead of answering, the old man turned on his seat,
and called to one of the waitresses near. In a second David had a
'Cheese 'Ticement' before him, at which he peered curiously. Daddy
watched him, not without some signs of nervousness.

'Daddy,' said David, calmly looking up, 'when I last saw this
article it was called "Welsh rabbit."'

'Davy, you've no soul for fine distinctions,' said the other
hastily. 'Change the subject. How have my _dear_ brother-in-law
and you been hitting it off lately?'

David went on with his ''Ticement,' the corners of his mouth
twitching, for a minute or so, then he raised his head and slowly
shook it, looking Daddy in the face.

'We shall bear up when we say good-bye, Daddy, and I don't think
that crisis is far off. It would have come long ago, only I do
happen to know a provoking deal more about books than any assistant
he ever had before. Last week I picked him up a copy of "Bells and
Pomegranates" for one and nine, and he sold it next day for two
pound sixteen. There's business for you, Daddy. That put off our
breach at least a fortnight, but unless I discover a first folio of
Shakespeare for sixpence between now and then, I don't see what's
to postpone the agony after that--and if I did I should probably
speculate in it myself. No, Daddy, it's coming to the point, as the
tiger said when he reached the last joint of the cow's tail. And
it's your fault.'

'My fault, Davy,' said Lomax, half tremulous, half delighted,
drawing a chair close up to the table that he might lose nothing of
the youth's confidences. 'What d'ye mean by that, ye spalpeen?'

'Well, wasn't it you took me to the Hall of Science, Daddy, and
couldn't keep a quiet tongue in your head about it afterwards?
Wasn't it you lent me the "Secularist," which got me into the worst
rumpus of the season? Oh, Daddy, you're a bad un!'

And the handsome lad leant back in his chair, stretching his long
legs and studying Daddy with twinkling eyes. As for Lomax, he
received the onslaught with a curious mixture of expressions, in
which a certain malicious pleasure, crossed by an uneasy sense of
responsibility, was the most prominent. He sat drumming on the
table, his straggling beard falling forward on to his chest, his
mouth pursing itself up. At last he threw back his head with
energy.

'I'll not excuse myself, Davy; you're well out of it. You'll be a
great man yet--always provided you can manage yourself in the
matter of flesh meat. It was to come one way or the other--you
couldn't put up much longer with such a puke-stocking as my
precious brother-in-law. (That's one of the great points of
Shakespeare, Davy, my lad--perhaps you haven't noticed it--you get
such a ruck of bad names out of him for the asking! Puke-stocking
is good--real good. If it wasn't made for a sanctimonious
hypocrite of a Baptist like Purcell it ought to have been.)
And "Spanish-pouch" too! Oh, I love "Spanish-pouch"! When I've
called a man "Spanish-pouch", I'm the better for it, Davy--the
bile's relieved.'

'Thank you, Daddy; I'll remember the receipt. I say, were you ever
in Purcell's shop?'

'Purcell's shop? Why, of course I was, you varmint! Wasn't it there
I met my Isabella, his sister? Ah, the poor thing! He led her a
life; and when I was his assistant I took sides with her--that was
the beginning of it all. At first we hadn't got on so badly--I had
a pious fit on myself in those days--but one day at tea, I had been
making free--taking Isabella's part. There had been a neighbour
there, and the laugh had been against him. Well, after tea, we
marched back to the shop, and says he to me, as black as thunder,
"I'm quite willing, Lomax, to be your Christian brother in here:
when we're in society I'd have you remember it's different. You
should know your place."

'"Oh, should I?" says I. (Isabella had been squeezing my hand under
the table and I didn't care what I said.) "Well, you'd better find
some one as will, and be d--d to your Christian brotherhood." And
I took my cap up and marched out, leaving him struck a pillar of
salt with surprise, and that mad!--for we were in the middle of
issuing the New Year's catalogue, and he'd left most of it to me.
And three weeks after--'

Daddy rose quivering with excitement, put his thumbs into his
waistcoat pocket, and bent over the back of his chair towards
David. As he stood there, on tiptoe, the flaps of the long coat
falling back from him like wings, his skull-cap slightly awry, two
red spots on either wrinkled cheek, and every feature of the sharp
brown face alive with the joy of his long-past vengeance, he was
like some strange perching bird.

'--Three weeks after, Davy, I married my Isabella under his
puritanical nose, at the chapel across the way; and the bit of
spite in it--bedad!--it was like mustard to beef. (Pish! what am I
about!) And I set up shop almost next door to the chapel, and took
the trade out of his mouth, and enjoyed myself finely for six
months. At the end of that time he gave out that the neighbourhood
was too "low" for him, and he moved up town. And though I've been
half over the world since, I've never ceased to keep an eye on him.
I've had a finger in more pies of his than he thinks for!'

And Daddy drew himself up, pressing his hands against his sides,
his long frame swelling out, as it seemed, with sudden passion.
David watched him with a look half sympathetic, half satirical.

'I don't see that he did you much harm, Daddy.'

'Harm!' said the little man, irascibly. 'Harm! I must say you're
uncommon slow at gripping a situation, Davy. I'd my wife's score to
settle, too, I tell you, as well as my own. He'd sat on his poor
easy-going sister till she hadn't a feature left. I knew he had.
He's made up of all the mean vices--and at the same time, if you
were to hear him at a prayer meeting, you'd think that since Enoch
went up to heaven the wrong way, the world didn't happen to have
been blessed with another saint to match Tom Purcell.' And, stirred
by his own eloquence, Daddy looked down frowning on the youth
before him.

'What made you give up the book-trade, Daddy?' asked David, with a
smile.

It was like the pricking of a bladder. Daddy collapsed in a moment.
Sitting down again, he began to arrange his coat elaborately over
his knees, as though to gain time.

'David, you're an inquisitive varmint,' he said at last, looking up
askance at his companion.' Some one's been telling you tales,
by the look of you. Look here--if Tom Purcell's a blathering
hypocrite, that is not the same thing precisely as saying that
Adrian O'Connor Lomax is a perfect specimen of the domestic
virtues. Never you mind, my boy, what made me give up bookselling.
I've chucked so many things overboard since, that it's hardly worth
inquiring. Try any trade you like and Daddy'll be able to give you
some advice in it--that's the only thing that concerns you. Well
now, tell me--' and he turned round and put his elbows on the
table, leaning over to David--'When are you coming away, and what
are your prospects?'

'I told you about a fortnight would see it out, Daddy. And there's
a little shop in--But it's no good, Daddy. You can't keep secrets.'

The old man turned purple, drew himself up, and looked fiercely at
David from behind his spectacles. But in a second his mood changed
and he stretched his hand slowly out across the table.

'On the honour of a Lomax,' he said solemnly.

There was a real dignity about the absurd action which melted
David. He shook the hand and repeated him. Leaning over he
whispered some information in Daddy's ear, Daddy beamed. And in the
midst of the superfluity of nods and winks that followed David
called for his bill.

The action recalled Daddy to his own affairs, and he looked on
complacently while David paid.

''Pon my word, Davy, I can hardly yet believe in my own genius.
Where else, my boy, in this cotton-spinning hole, would you find a
dinner like that for sixpence? Am I a benefactor to the species,
sir, or am I not?'

'Looks like it, Daddy, by the help of Miss Dora.'

'Aye, aye,' said the old man testily,--'I'll not deny that Dora's
useful to the business. But the _inspiration_, Davy, 's all
mine. You want genius, my boy, to make a tomfool of yourself like
this,' and he looked himself proudly up and down. 'Twenty customers
a week come here for nothing in the world but to see what new rigs
Daddy may be up to. The invention--the happy ideas, man, I throw
into one day of this place would stock twenty ordinary businesses.'

'All the same, Daddy, I've tasted Welsh rabbit before,' said David
drily, putting on his hat.

'I scorn your remark, sir. It argues a poorly furnished mind. Show
me anything new in this used-up world, eh? but for the name and the
dishing up--Well, good-bye, Davy, and good luck to you!'

David made his way across Hanging Ditch to a little row of houses
bearing the baldly appropriate name of Half Street. It ran along
the eastern side of the Cathedral close. First came the houses,
small, irregular, with old beams and projections here and there,
then a paved footway, then the railings round the close. In full
view of the windows of the street rose the sixteenth-century
church which plays as best it can the part of Cathedral to
Manchester. Round it stretched a black and desolate space paved
with tombstones. Not a blade of grass broke the melancholy of those
begrimed and time-worn slabs. The rain lay among them in pools,
squalid buildings overlooked them, and the church, with its
manifest inadequacy to a fine site and a great city, did but little
towards overcoming the mean and harsh impression made--on such a
day especially--by its surroundings.

David opened the door of a shop about halfway up the row. A bell
rang sharply, and as he shut the outer door behind him, another at
the back of the shop opened hastily, and a young girl came in.

'Mr. Grieve, father's gone out to Eccles to see some books a
gentleman wants him to buy. If Mr. Stephens comes, you're to tell
him father's found him two or three more out of the list he sent.
You know where all his books are put together, if he wants to see
them, father says.'

'Yes, thank you, Miss Purcell, I do. No other message?'

'No.' The speaker lingered. 'What time do we start for the music
to-night? But you'll be down to tea?'

'Certainly, if you and Miss Dora don't want it to yourselves.' The
speaker smiled. He was leaning on the counter, while the girl stood
behind it.

'Oh dear, no!' said Miss Purcell with a half-pettish gesture. 'I
don't know what to talk to Dora about now. She thinks of nothing
but St. Damian's and her work. It's worse than father. And, of
course, I know she hasn't much opinion of _me_. Indeed, she's
always telling me so--well, not exactly--but she lets me guess fast
enough.'

The speaker put up two small hands to straighten some of the
elaborate curls and twists with which her pretty head was crowned.
There was a little consciousness in the action. The thought of her
cousin had evidently brought with it the thought of some of those
things of which the stern Dora disapproved.

David looked at the brown hair and the slim fingers as he was meant
to look at them. Yet in his smiling good humour there was not a
trace of bashfulness or diffidence. He was perfectly at his ease,
with something of a proud self-reliant consciousness in every
movement; nothing in his manner could have reminded a spectator of
the traditional apprentice making timid love to his master's
daughter.

'I've seen you stand up to her though,' he said laughing. 'It's like
all pious people. Doesn't it strike you as odd that they should
never be content with being pious for themselves?'

He looked at her with bright sarcastic eyes.

'Oh, I know what you mean!' she said with an instant change of
tone; 'I didn't mean anything of the sort. I think it's shocking of
you to go to that place on Sundays--so there, Mr. Grieve.'

She threw herself back defiantly against the books which walled the
shop, her arms folded before her. The attitude showed the long
throat, the rounded bust, and the slender waist compressed with
some evident rigour into a close-fitting brown dress. That Miss
Purcell thought a great deal of the fashion of her hair, the style
of her bodices, and the size of her waist was clear; that she was
conscious of thinking about them to good purpose was also plain.
But on the whole the impression of artificiality, of something
over-studied and over-done which the first sight of her generally
awakened, was soon, as a rule, lost in another more attractive--in
one of light, tripping youth, perfectly satisfied with itself and
with the world.

'I don't think you know much about the place,' he said quietly,
still smiling.

She flushed, her foolish little sense of natural superiority to
'the assistant' outraged again, as it had been outraged already a
hundred times since she and David Grieve had met.

'I know quite as much as anybody need know--any respectable
person--' she maintained angrily. 'It's a low, disgraceful
place--and they talk wicked nonsense. Everyone says so. It doesn't
matter a bit where Uncle Lomax goes--he's mad--but it is a shame he
should lead other people astray.'

She was much pleased with her own harangue, and stood there
frowning on him, her sharp little chin in the air, one foot beating
the ground.

'Well, yes, really,' said David in a reflective tone; 'one would
think Miss Dora had her hands full at home, without--'

He looked up, significantly, smiling. Lucy Purcell was enraged
with him--with his hypocritical sympathy as to her uncle's
misdoings--his avoidance of his own crime.

'It's not uncle at all, it's you!' she cried, with more logic than
appeared. 'I tell you, Mr. Grieve, father won't stand it.'

The young man drew himself up from the counter.

'No,' he said with great equanimity, 'I suppose not.'

And taking up a parcel of books from the counter he turned away.
Lucy, flurried and pouting, called after him.

'Mr. Grieve!'

'Yes.'

'I--I didn't mean it. I _hope_ you won't go. I know father's
hard. He's hard enough with me.'

And she raised her hands to her flushed face. David was terribly
afraid she was going to cry. Several times since the orphan girl of
seventeen had arrived from school three months before to take her
place in her father's house, had she been on the point of confiding
her domestic woes to David Grieve. But though under the terms of
his agreement with her father, which included one meal in the back
parlour, the assistant and she were often thrown together, he had
till now instinctively held her aloof. His extraordinary good looks
and masterful energetic ways had made an impression on her
schoolgirl mind from the beginning. But for him she had no
magnetism whatever. The little self-conceited creature knew it, or
partially knew it, and smarted under it.

Now, he was just beginning an awkward sentence, when there was a
sound at the outer door. With another look at him, half shy, half
appealing, Lucy fled. Conscious of a distinct feeling of relief,
David went to attend to the customer.




CHAPTER II


The customer was soon content and went out again into the rain.
David mounted a winding iron stair which connected the downstairs
shop with an upper room in which a large proportion of the books
were stored. It was a long, low, rambling place made by throwing
together all the little bits of rooms on the first floor of the old
house. One corner of it had a special attraction for David. It was
the corner where, ranged partly on the floor, partly on the shelves
which ran under the windows, lay the collection of books that
Purcell had been making for his customer, Mr. Stephens.

Out of that collection Purcell's assistant had extracted a very
varied entertainment. In the first place it had amused him to watch
the laborious pains and anxiety with which his pious employer had
gathered together the very sceptical works of which Mr. Stephens
was in want, showing a knowledge of contents, and editions, and
out-of-the-way profanities, under the stimulus of a paying
customer, which drew many a sudden laugh from David when he was
left to think of it in private.

In the next place the books themselves had been a perpetual feast
to him for weeks, enjoyed all the more keenly because of the
secrecy in which it had to be devoured. The little gathering
represented with fair completeness the chief books of the French
'philosophers,' both in the original French, and in those English
translations of which so plentiful a crop made its appearance
during the fifty years before and after 1800. There, for instance,
lay the seventy volumes of Voltaire. Close by was an imperfect copy
of the Encyclopaedia, which Mr. Stephens was getting cheap; on the
other side a motley gathering of Diderot and Rousseau; while
Holbach's 'System of Nature,' and Helvetius 'On the Mind,' held
their rightful place among the rest.

Through these books, then, which had now been on the premises for
some time--Mr. Stephens being a person of uncertain domicile, and
unable as yet to find them a home--David had been freely ranging.
Whenever Purcell was out of the way and customers were slack, he
invariably found his way to this spot in the upper room. There,
with his elbows on the top of the bookcase which ran under the
window, and a book in front of him--or generally two, the original
French and a translation--he had read Voltaire's tales, a great
deal of the Encyclopaedia, a certain amount of Diderot, for whom he
cherished a passionate admiration, and a much smaller smattering of
Rousseau. At the present moment he was grappling with the
'Dictionnaire Philosophique,' and the 'Système de la Nature,'
fortified in both cases by English versions.

The gloom of the afternoon deepened, and the increasing rain had
thinned the streets so much that during a couple of hours David had
but three summonses from below to attend to. For the rest of the
time he was buried in the second volume of the 'Dictionnaire
Philosophique,' now skipping freely, now chewing and digesting, his
eyes fixed vacantly on the darkening church outside. Above all, the
article on _Contradictions_ had absorbed and delighted him.
There are few tones in themselves so fascinating to the nascent
literary sense as this mock humility tone of Voltaire's. And in
David's case all that passionate sense of a broken bubble and a
scattered dream, which had haunted him so long after he left
Kinder, had entered into and helped toward his infatuation with
his new masters. They brought him an indescribable sense of
freedom--omniscience almost.

For instance:--

'We must carefully distinguish in all writings, and especially in
the sacred books, between real and apparent contradictions.
Venturous critics have supposed a contradiction existed in that
passage of Scripture which narrates how Moses changed all the
waters of Egypt into blood, and how immediately afterwards the
magicians of Pharaoh did the same thing, the book of Exodus
allowing no interval at all between the miracle of Moses and the
magical operation of the enchanters. Certainly it seems at first
sight impossible that these magicians should change into blood what
was already blood; but this difficulty may be avoided by supposing
that Moses had allowed the waters to reassume their proper nature,
in order to give time to Pharaoh to recover himself. This
supposition is all the more plausible, seeing that the text, if it
does not favour it expressly, is not opposed to it.

'The same sceptics ask how when all the horses had been killed by
the hail in the sixth plague Pharaoh could pursue the Jews with
cavalry. But this contradiction is not even apparent, because the
hail, which killed all the horses in the fields, could not fall
upon those which were in the stables.'

And so on through a long series of paragraphs, leading at last to
matters specially dear to the wit of Voltaire, the contradictions
between St. Luke and St. Matthew--in the story of the census of
Quirinus, of the Magi, of the massacre of the Innocents, and what
not--and culminating in this innocent conclusion:--

'After all it is enough that God should have deigned to reveal to us
the principal mysteries of the faith, and that He should have
instituted a Church in the course of time to explain them. All
these contradictions, so often and so bitterly brought up against
the Gospels, are amply noticed by the wisest commentators; far from
harming each other, one explains another; they lend each other a
mutual support, both in the concordance and in the harmony of the
four Gospels.'

David threw back his head with a laugh which came from the very
depths of him. Then, suddenly, he was conscious of the church
standing sombrely without, spectator as it seemed of his thoughts
and of his mirth. Instantly his youth met the challenge by a rise
of passionate scorn! What! a hundred years since Voltaire, and
mankind still went on believing in all these follies and fables, in
the ten plagues, in Balaam's ass, in the walls of Jericho, in
miraculous births, and Magi, and prophetic stars!--in everything
that the mockery of the eighteenth century had slain a thousand
times over. Ah, well!--Voltaire knew as well as anybody that
superstition is perennial, insatiable--a disease and weakness of
the human mind which seems to be inherent and ineradicable. And
there rose in the boy's memory lines he had opened upon that
morning in a small Elizabethan folio he had been cataloguing with
much pains as a rarity--lines which had stuck in his mind--

    Vast superstition! glorious style of weakness,
    Sprung from the deep disquiet of man's passion
    To dissolution and despair of Nature!--

He flung them out at the dark mass of building opposite, as though
he were his namesake flinging at Goliath. Only a few months before
that great church had changed masters--had passed from the hands of
an aristocratic and inaccessible bishop of the old school into
those of a man rich in all modern ideas and capacities, full of
energy and enthusiasm, a scholar and administrator both. And
_he_ believed all those absurdities, David wanted to know?
Impossible! No honest man could, thought the lad defiantly, with
the rising colour of crude and vehement feeling, when his attention
had been once challenged, and he had developed mind enough to know
what the challenge meant.

Except, perhaps, Uncle Reuben and Dora Lomax, and people like that.
He stood thinking and staring out of window, one idea leading to
another. The thought of Reuben brought with it a certain softening
of mood--the softening of memory and old association. Yes, he would
like to see Uncle Reuben again--explain to him, perhaps, that old
story--so old, so distant!--of his running away. Well, he
_would_ see him again, as soon as he got a place of his own,
which couldn't be long now, whether Purcell gave him the sack or
not. Instinctively, he felt for that inner pocket, which held his
purse and his savings-bank book. Yes, he was near freedom now,
whatever happened!

Then it occurred to him that it was unlucky he should have stumbled
across Mr. Ancrum just at this particular juncture. The minister,
of course, had friends at Clough End still. And he, David, didn't
want Louie down upon him just yet--not just yet--for a month or
two.

Then the smile which had begun to play about the mouth suddenly
broadened into a merry triumph. When Louie knew all about him and his
contrivances these last four years, wouldn't she be mad! If she were to
appear at this moment, he could tell her that she wore a pink dress at
the 'wake' last week,--when she was at chapel last,--what young men were
supposed to be courting her since the summer, and a number of other
interesting particulars--

'Mr. Grieve! Tea!'

His face changed. Reluctantly shutting his book and putting it into
its place, he took his way to the staircase.

As David opened the swing door leading to the Purcells' parlour at
the back of the shop he heard Miss Purcell saying in a mournful
voice, 'It's no good, Dora; not a haporth of good. Father won't let
me. I might as well have gone to prison as come home.'

The assistant emerged into the bright gaslight of the little room
as she spoke. There was another girl sitting beside Lucy, who got
up with a shy manner and shook hands with him.

'Will you take your tea, Mr. Grieve?' said Lucy, with a pettish
sigh, handing it to him, and then throwing herself vehemently back
in her hostess's chair, behind the tea tray. She let her hands hang
over the arms of it--the picture of discontent. The gaslight showed
her the possessor of bright brown eyes, under fine brows slenderly
but clearly marked, of a pink and white skin slightly freckled, of
a small nose quite passable, but no ways remarkable, of a dainty
little chin, and a thin-lipped mouth, slightly raised at one
corner, and opening readily over some irregular but very white
teeth. Except for the eyes and eyebrows the features could claim
nothing much in the way of beauty. Yet at this moment of
seventeen--thanks to her clear colours, her small thinness, and the
beautiful hair so richly piled about her delicate head--Lucy
Purcell was undeniably a pretty girl, and since her arrival in
Manchester she had been much more blissfully certain of the fact
than she had ever succeeded in being while she was still under the
repressive roof of Miss Pym's boarding-school for young ladies,
Pestalozzi House, Blackburn.

David sat down, perceiving that something had gone very wrong, but
not caring to inquire into it. His whole interest in the Purcell
household was, in fact, dying out. He would not be concerned with
it much longer.

So that, instead of investigating Miss Purcell's griefs, he asked
her cousin whether it had not come on to rain. The girl opposite
replied in a quiet, musical voice. She was plainly dressed in a
black hat and jacket; but the hat had a little bunch of cowslips to
light it up, and the jacket was of an ordinary fashionable cut.
There was nothing particularly noticeable about the face at first
sight, except its soft fairness and the gentle steadfastness of the
eyes. The movements were timid, the speech often hesitating. Yet
the impression which, on a first meeting, this timidity was apt to
leave on a spectator was very seldom a lasting one. David's idea of
Miss Lomax, for instance, had radically changed during the three
months since he had made acquaintance with her.

Rain, it appeared, _had_ begun, and there must be umbrellas
and waterproofs for the evening's excursion. As the two others were
settling at what time David Grieve and Lucy should call for Dora in
Market Place, Lucy woke up from a dream, and broke in upon them.

'And, Dora, you know, I _could_ have worn that dress with the
narrow ribbons I showed you last week. It's all there--upstairs--in
the cupboard--not a crease in it!'

Dora could not help laughing, and the laugh sent a charming light
into her grey, veiled eyes. The tone was so inexpressibly doleful,
the manner so childish. David smiled too, and his eyes and Dora's
met in a sort of friendly understanding--the first time, perhaps,
they had so met. Then they both turned themselves to the task of
consolation. The assistant inquired what was the matter.

'I wanted her to go with me to the dance at the Mechanics'
Institute next week,' said Dora. 'Mrs. Alderman Head would have
taken us both. It's very nice and respectable. I didn't think uncle
would mind. But Lucy's sure he will.'

'Sure! Of course I'm sure,' said Lucy sharply. 'I've heard him talk
about dancing in a way to make anybody sick. If he only knew all
the dancing we had at Pestalozzi House!'

'Does he think all dancing wrong?' inquired David.

'Yes--unless it's David dancing before the Ark, or some such
nonsense,' replied Lucy, with the same petulant gloom.

David laughed out. Then he fell into a brown study, one hand
playing with his tea-cup, an irrepressable smile still curving
about his mouth. Dora, observing him across the table, could not
but remember other assistants of Uncle Purcell whom she has seen
sitting in that same place, and the airs which Miss Purcell in her
rare holidays had given herself towards those earlier young men.
And now, this young man, whenever Purcell himself was out of the
way, was master of the place. Anyone could see that, so long as he
was there, Lucy was sensitively conscious of him in all that she
said or did.

She did not long endure his half-mocking silence now.

'You see, Dora,' she began again, with an angry glance towards
him, 'father's worse than ever just now. He's been so aggravated.'

'Yes,' said Dora timidly. She perfectly understood what was meant,
but she shrank from pursuing the subject. But David looked up.

'I should be very sorry, I'm sure, Miss Purcell, to get in your way
at all, or cause you any unpleasantness, if that's what you mean. I
don't think you'll be annoyed with me long.'

He spoke with a boyish exaggerated dignity. It became him, however,
for his fine and subtle physique somehow supported and endorsed it.

Both girls started. Lucy looked suddenly as miserable as she had
before looked angry. But in her confused state of feeling she
renewed her attack.

'I don't understand anything about it,' she said, with plaintive
incoherence. 'Only I can't _think_ why people should always be
making disturbances. Dora! Doesn't _everybody_ you know think
it wicked to go to the Hall of Science?'

She drew herself up peremptorily. David resumed the half smiling,
half meditative attitude which had provoked her before. Dora looked
from one to the other, a pure bright color rising in her cheek.

'I don't know anything about that,' she said in a low voice. 'I
don't think that would matter, Lucy. But, oh, I do wish father
wouldn't go--and Mr. Grieve wouldn't go.'

Her voice and hand shook. Lucy looked triumphantly at David.
Instinctively she realised that, especially of late, David had come
to feel more respectfully towards Dora than she had ever succeeded
in making him feel towards herself. In the beginning of their
acquaintance he had often launched into argument with Dora about
religious matters, especially about the Ritualistic practices in
which she delighted. The lad, overflowing with his Voltaire and
d'Holbach, had not been able to forbear, and had apparently taken a
mischievous pleasure in shocking a bigot--as he had originally
conceived Lucy Purcell's cousin to be. The discussion, indeed, had
not gone very far. The girl's horror and his own sense of his
position and its difficulties had checked them in the germ.
Moreover, as has been said, his conception of Dora had gradually
changed on further acquaintance. As for her, she had now for a long
time avoided arguing with him, which made her outburst on the
present occasion the more noticeable.

He looked up quickly.

'Miss Lomax, how do you suppose one makes up one's mind--either
about religion or anything else? Isn't it by hearing both sides?'

'Oh, no--no!' she said, shrinking. 'Religion isn't like anything
else. It's by--by growing up into it--by thinking about it--and
doing what the Church tells you. You come to _know_ it's true.'

That the Magi and Balaam's ass are true! What folly! But somehow
even his youthful ardour could not say it, so full of pure and
tremulous pain was the gaze fixed upon him. And, indeed, he had no
time for any answer, for she had just spoken when the bell of the
outer door sounded, and a step came rapidly through the shop.

'Father!' said Lucy, lifting the lid of the teapot in a great
hurry. 'Oh, I wonder if the tea's good enough.'

She was stirring it anxiously with a spoon, when Purcell entered, a
tall heavily built man, with black hair, a look of command, and a
step which shook the little back room as he descended into it. He
touched Dora's hand with a pompous politeness, and then subsided
into his chair opposite Lucy, complaining about the weather, and
demanding tea, which his daughter gave him with a timid haste,
looking to see whether he were satisfied as he raised the first
spoonful to his lips.

'Anything worth buying?' said David to his employer. He was leaning
back in his chair, with his arm round the back of another. Again
Dora was reminded by contrast of some of the nervous lads she had
seen in that room before, scarcely daring to eat their tea under
Purcell's eye, flying to cut him bread, or pass him the sugar.

'No,' said Purcell curtly.

'And a great price, I suppose?'

Purcell looked up. Apparently the ease of the young man's tone and
attitude put the finishing stroke to an inward process already far
advanced.

'The price, I conceive, is _my_ business,' he said, in his
most overbearing manner. 'When you have to pay, it will be yours.'

David flushed, without, however, changing his position, and Lucy
made a sudden commotion among the teacups.

'Father,' she said, with a hurried agitation which hardly allowed
her to pick up the cup she had thrown over, 'Dora and I want to
speak to you. You mustn't talk business at tea. Oh, I _know_
you won't let me go; but I _should_ like it, and Dora's come
to ask. I shouldn't want a new dress, and it will be _most_
respectable, everyone says; and I _did_ learn dancing at
school, though you didn't know it. Miss Georgina said it was stuff
and nonsense, and I must--'

'What _is_ she talking about?' said Purcell to Dora, with an
angry glance at Lucy.

'I want to take her to a dance,' said Dora quietly, 'if you would
let her come. There's one at the Mechanics' Institute next week,
given by the Unicorn benefit society. Mrs. Alderman Head said I
might go with her, and Lucy too if you'll let her come. I've got a
ticket.'

'I'm much obliged to Mrs. Alderman Head,' said Purcell
sarcastically. 'Lucy knows very well what I think of an unchristian
and immodest amusement. Other people must decide according to their
conscience, _I_ judge nobody.'

At this point David got up, and disappeared into the shop.

'Oh yes, you do judge, uncle,' cried Dora, roused at last, and
colouring. 'You're always judging. You call everything unchristian
you don't like, whether its dancing, or--or--early celebration, or
organ music, or altar-cloths. But you can't be always right--nobody
can.'

Purcell surveyed her with a grim composure.

'If you suppose I make any pretence to be infallible, you are quite
mistaken,' he said, with slow solemnity--no one in disclaiming
Papistry could have been more the Pope--'I leave that to your
priests at St. Damian's, Dora. But there _is_ an infallible
guide, both for you and for me, and that's the Holy Scriptures. If
you can show me any place where the _Bible_ approves of
promiscuous dancing between young Christian men and women, or of a
woman exposing her person for admiration's sake, or of such vain
and idle talking as is produced by these entertainments, I will let
Lucy go. But you can't. "Whose adorning let it not be--"'

And he quoted the Petrine admonition with a harsh triumphant
emphasis on every syllable, looking hard all the time at Dora, who
had risen, and stood confronting him in a tremor of impatience and
disagreement.

'Father Russell--' she began quickly, then changed her form of
expression--'Mr. Russell says you can't settle things by just
quoting a text. The Bible has to be explained, he says.'

Purcell's eyes flamed. He launched into a sarcastic harangue,
delivered in a strong thick voice, on the subject of 'Sacerdotalism,'
'priestly arrogance,' 'lying traditions,' 'making the command of
God of no effect,' and so forth. While his sermon rolled along,
Dora stood nervously tying her bonnet strings, or buttoning her
gloves. Her heart was full of a passionate scorn. Beside the
bookseller's muscular figure and pugnacious head she saw with
her mind's eye the spare forms and careworn faces of the young
priests at St. Damian's. Outraged by this loud-voiced assurance,
she called to mind the gentleness, the suavity, the delicate
consideration for women which obtained among her friends.

'There's not a pin to choose,' Purcell wound up, brutally, 'between
you and that young infidel in there,' and he jerked his thumb
towards the shop. 'It all comes of pride. He's bursting with his own
wisdom,--you will have the "Church" and won't have the Bible.
What's the Church!--a pack of sinners, and a million sinners are no
better than one.'

'Good-bye, Lucy,' said Dora, stooping to kiss her cousin, and not
trusting herself to speak. 'Call for me at the quarter.'

Lucy hardly noticed her kiss, she sat with her elbows on the table,
holding her little chin disconsolately, something very like tears
in her eyes. In the first place, she was reflecting dolefully that
it was all true--she was never to have any amusement like other
girls--never to have any good of her life; she might as well be a
nun at once. In the second, she was certain her father meant to
send young Grieve away, and the prospect drew a still darker pall
over a prospect dark enough in all conscience before.

Purcell opened the door for Dora more punctiliously than usual, and
came back to the hearthrug still inflated as it were with his own
eloquence. Meanwhile Lucy was washing up the tea things. The little
servant had brought her a bowl of water and an apron, and Lucy was
going gingerly through an operation she detested. Why shouldn't
Mary Ann do it? What was the good of going to school and coming
back with Claribel's songs and Blumenthal's _Deux Anges_ lying
on the top of your box,--with a social education, moreover, so
advanced that the dancing--mistress had invariably made you waltz
alone round the room for the edification and instruction of the
assembled company,--if all you had to do at home was to dust and
wash up, and die with envy of girls with reprobate fathers? As she
pondered the question, Lucy began to handle the cups with a more
and more unfriendly energy.

'You'll break some of that china, Lucy!' said Purcell, at last
disturbed in his thoughts. 'What's the matter with you?'

'Nothing!' said Lucy, taking, however, a saucer from the line as
she spoke so viciously that the rest of them slipped with a clatter
and only just escaped destruction.

'Mind what you're about,' cried Purcell angrily, fearing for the
household stuff that had been in the establishment so much longer
and was so much more at home there than Lucy.

'I know what it is,' he said, looking at her severely, while his
great black presence seemed to fill the little room. 'You've lost
your temper because I refused to let you go to the dance.'

Lucy was silent for a moment, trying to contain herself; then she
broke out like a child, throwing down her apron, and feeling for
her handkerchief.

'It's _too_ bad--it's _too_ bad--I'd rather be Mary
Ann--_she's_ got friends, and evenings out--and--and parties
sometimes; and I see nobody, and go nowhere. What did you have me
home for at all?'

And she sat down and dried her eyes piteously. She was in real
distress, but she liked a scene, and Purcell knew her peculiarities.
He surveyed her with a sort of sombre indulgence.

'You're a vain child of this world, Lucy. If I didn't keep a
look-out on you, you'd soon go rejoicing down the broad way. What
do you mean about amusements? There's the missionary tea to-morrow
night, and the magic-lantern at the schools on Saturday.'

Lucy gave a little hysterical laugh.

'Well,' said Purcell loudly, 'there'll be plenty of young people
there. What have you got to say against them?'

'A set of _frights_ and _gawks_,' said Lucy, sitting bolt
upright in a state of flat mutiny, and crushing her handkerchief on
her knee between a pair of trembling hands. 'The way they do their
hair, and the way they tie their ties, and the way they put a chair
for you--it's enough to make one faint. At the Christmas treat
there was one young man asked me to trim his shirt-cuffs for him
with scissors he took out of his pocket. I told him _I_
wasn't his nurse, and people who weren't dressed ought to stay at
home. You should have seen how he and his sister glared at me
afterwards. I don't care! None of the chapel people like me--I know
they don't, and I don't want them to, and I wouldn't _marry_
one of them.'

The gesture of Lucy's curly head was superb.

'It seems to me,' said Purcell sarcastically, 'that what you mostly
learnt at Blackburn was envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. As
to marrying, child, the less you think of it for the present the
better, till you get more sense.'

But the eyes which studied her were not unkindly. Purcell liked
this slim red and white creature who belonged to him, whose
education had cost him hard money which it gave him pleasure to
reckon up, and who promised now to provide him with a fresh field
for the management and the coarse moral experiment which he loved.
She would be restive at first, but he would soon break her in. The
idea that under her folly and childishness she might possibly
inherit some of his own tenacity never occurred to him.

'I can't imagine,' said Lucy inconsequently, with eyes once more
swimming, 'why you can't let me do what Dora does! She's _much_
better than I am. She's a saint, she is. She's always going to
church; she's always doing things for poor people; she never thinks
about herself, or whether she's pretty, or--Why shouldn't I dance
if she does?'

Purcell laughed.

'Aye!' he said grimly, 'that's the Papistical way all over. So many
services, so much fasting, so much money, so much knocking under to
your priest, so much "church work"--and who cares a brass farthing
what you do with the rest of your time? Do as I tell you, and dance
away! But I tell you, Christianity wants _a new heart_!'

And the bookseller looked at his daughter with a frowning severity.
Conversation of this kind was his recreation, his accomplishment,
so to speak. He had been conducting a difficult negotiation all day
of the diamond-cut-diamond order, and was tired out and disgusted
by the amount of knowledge of books which even a gentleman may
possess. But here was compensation. A warm hearthrug, an unwilling
listener, and this sense of an incomparable soundness of view,--he
wanted nothing more to revive him, unless, indeed, it were a larger
audience.

As for Lucy, as she looked up at her father, even her childish
intelligence rose to a sense of absurdity. As if Dora hadn't a new
heart; as if Dora thought it was enough to go to church and give
sixpences in the offertory!

But her father overawed her. She had been left motherless at ten
years old, and brought up since away from home, except for
holidays. At the bottom of her she was quite conscious that she
knew nothing at all about this big contemptuous person, who ordered
her about and preached to her, and never let himself be kissed and
played with and coaxed as other girls' fathers did.

So she went on with her washing up in a crushed silence, very sorry
for herself in a vague passionate way, the corners of her mouth
drooping. Purcell too fell into a reverie, the lower jaw pushed
forward, one hand playing with the watch-chain which adorned his
black suit.

'Did you give Grieve that message?' he asked at last.

Lucy, still sulky, nodded in reply.

'What time did he come in from dinner?'

'On the stroke of the half-hour,' said Lucy quickly. 'I think he
keeps time better than anybody you ever had, father.'

'Insolent young whelp!' said Purcell in a slow, deliberate voice.
'He was at that place again yesterday.'

'Yes, I know he was,' said Lucy, with evident agitation. 'I told him
he ought to have been ashamed.'

'Oh, you talked to him, did you? What business had you to do that,
I wonder? Well, what did he say?'

'He said--well, I don't know what he said. He don't seem to think
it matters to anybody where he goes on Sunday!'

'Oh, indeed--don't he? I'll show him some cause to doubt the truth
of that proposition,' said Purcell ponderously; 'or I'll know the
reason why.'

Lucy looked unhappy, and said nothing for a minute or two. Then she
began insistently, 'Well, _does_ it matter to you?'

This deplorable question--viewed from the standpoint of a Baptist
elder--passed unnoticed, for with the last words the shop-bell
rang, and Purcell went off, transformed on the instant into the
sharp, attentive tradesman.

Lucy sat wiping her cups mechanically for a little while. Then,
when they were all done, and Mary Ann had been loftily commanded to
put them away, she slipped upstairs to her own room, a little attic
at the top of the house. Here she went to a deal press, which had
been her mother's, opened it, and took out a dress which hung in a
compartment by itself, enveloped in a holland wrapper, lest
Manchester smuts should harm it. She undid the wrapper, and laid it
on the bed. It was an embroidered white muslin, adorned with lace
and full knots of narrow pink ribbon.

'What a trouble I had to get the ribbon just that width,' she
thought to herself ruefully, 'and everybody said it was so uncommon.
I might as well give it Dora. I don't believe I shall ever wear it.
I don't know what'll become of me. I don't get any chances.'

And shaking her head mournfully from side to side, she sat on
beside the dress, in the light of her solitary candle, her hands
clasped round her knee, the picture of girlish despair, so far as
anything so daintily gowned, and shoed, and curled, could achieve
it. She was thinking drearily of some people who were coming to
supper, one of her father's brother elders at the chapel, Mr.
Baruch Barton, and his daughter. Mr. Barton had a specialty for the
prophet Zephaniah, and had been several times shocked because Lucy
could not help him out with his quotations from that source. His
daughter, a little pinched asthmatic creature, in a dress whereof
every gore and seam was an affront to the art of dressmaking, was
certainly thirty, probably more. And between thirty and the
Psalmist's limit of existence, there is the very smallest
appreciable difference, in the opinion of seventeen. What
_could_ she have to say to Emmy Barton? Lucy asked herself.
She began yawning from sheer dulness, as she thought of her. If it
were only time to go to bed!

Suddenly she heard a sound of raised voices in the upper shop on
the floor below. What could it be? She started up. 'Mr. Grieve and
father quarrelling!' She knew it must come to that!

She crept down the stairs with every precaution possible till she
came to the door behind which the loud talk which had startled her
was going on. Here she listened with all her ears, but at first to
very little purpose. David was speaking, but so rapidly, and
apparently so near to the other end of the room, that she could
hear nothing. Then her father broke in, and by dint of straining
very hard, she caught most of what he said before the whole
colloquy came abruptly to an end. She heard Purcell's heavy tread
descending the little iron spiral staircase leading from the lower
shop to the upper. She heard David moving about, as though he were
gathering up books and papers, and then, with a loud childish sob
which burst from her unawares, she ran upstairs again to her own
room.

'Oh, he's going, he's going!' she cried under her breath, as she
stood before the glass winking to keep the tears back, and biting
her handkerchief hard between her little white teeth. 'Oh, what
shall I do? what shall I do? It'll be always the same; just when
anyone _might_ like me, it all stops. And he won't care one
little, little bit. He'll never think of me again. Oh, I do think
somebody might care about me--might be sorry for me!'

And she locked her hands tight before her, and stared at the glass,
while the tears forced their way. But all the time she was noticing
how prettily she stood, how slim she was. And though she smarted,
she would not for the world have been without her smart, her
excitement, her foolish secret, which, for sheer lack of something
to do and think about, had suddenly grown to such magnitude in her
eyes. It was hard to cherish a hopeless passion for a handsome
youth, without a halfpenny, who despised you, but it was infinitely
better than to have nothing in your mind but Emmy Barton and the
prophet Zephaniah. Nay, as she washed her hands and smoothed her
dress and hair with trembling fingers, she became quite friendly
with her pain--in a sense, even proud of it, and jealous for
it. It was a sign of mature life--of something more than mere
school-girlishness. Like the lover in the Elizabethan sonnet, 'She
had been vexed, if vexed she had not been!'




CHAPTER III


'Come in, David,' said Mr. Ancrum, opening the door of his little
sitting-room in Mortimer Street. 'You're rather late, but I don't
wonder. Such a wind! I could hardly stand against it myself. But,
then, I'm an atomy. What, no top-coat in such weather! What do you
mean by that, sir? You're wet through. There, dry yourself.'

David, with a grin at Mr. Ancrum's unnecessary concern for him,
deposited himself in the carpet chair which formed the minister's
only lounge, and held out his legs and arms to the blaze. He was
wet indeed, and bespattered with the blackest mud in the three
kingdoms. But the battle with wind and rain had so brought into
play all the physical force of him, had so brightened eye and
cheek, and tossed the black hair into such a fine confusion, that,
as he sat there bending over the glow of the fire, the crippled man
opposite, sickly with long confinement and over-thinking, could not
take his eyes from him. The storm with all its freshness, youth
with all its reckless joy in itself, seemed to have come in with
the lad and transformed the little dingy room.

'What do you wear trash like that for in a temperature like this?'
said the minister, touching his guest's thin and much-worn coat.
'Don't you know, David, that your health is money? Suppose you get
lung trouble, who's to look after you?'

'It don't do me no harm, sir. I can't get into my last year's coat,
and I couldn't afford a new one this winter.'

'What wages do you earn?' asked Ancrum. His manner was a curious
mixture of melancholy gentleness and of that terse sharpness in
practical things which the south country resents and the north
country takes for granted.

'Eighteen shillings a week, since last November, sir.'

'That ought to be enough for a top-coat, you rascal, with only
yourself to feed,' said Mr. Ancrum, stretching himself in his hard
armchair, so as to let his lame leg with its heavy boot rest
comfortably on the fender. David had noticed at first sight of him
that his old playfellow had grown to look much older than in the
Clough End days. His hair was nearly white, and lay in a large
smooth wave across the broad brow. And in that brow there were deep
furrows, and many a new and premature line in the hollow cheeks.
Something withering and blighting seemed to have passed over the
whole man since those Sunday school lessons in the Christian
Brethren's upper room, which David still remembered so well. But
the eyes with their irresistible intensity and force were the same.
In them the minister's youth--he was not yet thirty-five--still
spoke, as from a last stronghold in a failing realm. They had a
strange look too, the look as of a secret life, not for the
passer-by.

David smiled at Ancrum's last remark, and for a moment or two
looked into the fire without speaking.

'Well, if I'd bought clothes or anything else this winter, I should
be in a precious worse hole than I am,' he said reflectively.

'Hole? What's wrong, Davy?'

'My master gave me the sack Monday.'

'Humph!' said Ancrum, surveying him. 'Well, you don't look much cast
down about it, I must say.'

'Well, you see, I'd laid my plans,' said the young man, an
irrepressible gaiety and audacity in every feature. 'It isn't as
though I were taken by surprise.'

'Plans for a new place, I suppose?'

'No; I have done with that. I am going to set up for myself. I know
the trade, and I've got some money.'

'How old are you, Davy?'

'Just upon twenty,' said the lad, quietly.

The minister pursed up his lips and whistled a little.

'Well, that's bold,' he said. 'Somehow I like it, though by all the
laws of prudence I ought to jump down your throat for announcing
such a thing. But how did you get your money? and what have you
been doing these four years? Come, I'm an old friend,--though I
dare say you don't think me much of a fellow. Out with it! Pay me
anyway for all those ships I made you long ago.'

And he held out his blanched hand, little more now than skin and
bone. David put his own into it awkwardly enough. At this period of
his life he was not demonstrative.

The story he had to tell was, to Ancrum's thinking, a remarkable
one. He had come into Manchester on an October evening with five
shillings and threepence in his pocket. From a point on the
south-western border of the city he took a 'bus for Deansgate and
Victoria Street. As he was sitting on the top, feeding his eyes on
the lights and the crowd of the streets, but wholly ignorant where
to go and what first step to take, he fell into talk with a decent
working-man and his wife sitting beside him. The result of the talk
was that they offered him shelter at fourpence a night. He
dismounted with them at Blackfriars Bridge, and they made their way
across the river to a street in Salford, where he lodged with them
for a week. During that week he lived on oatmeal and an occasional
baked potato, paying his hostess eighteenpence additional for the
use of her fire, and the right to sit in her kitchen when he was
not tramping about in search of work. By the end of the week he had
found a post as errand-boy at a large cheap bookseller's and
stationer's in Deansgate, at eight shillings a week, his good
looks, manner, and education evidently helping him largely, as Mr.
Ancrum could perceive through the boy's very matter-of-fact account
of himself. He then made an agreement for bed, use of fire, and
kitchen, with his new friends at four shillings a week, and by the
end of six months he was receiving a wage of fourteen shillings as
salesman and had saved close on five pounds.

'Well, now, come, how did you manage that, Davy?' said Mr. Ancrum,
interrupting. 'Don't run on in that fashion. Details are the only
interesting things in life, and details I'll have. You must have
found it a precious tight fit to save that five pounds.'

Whereupon David, his eye kindling, ran out Benjamin Franklin and
the 'Vegetarian News,' his constant friends from the first day of
his acquaintance with the famous autobiography till now, in spite
of such occasional lapses into carnal feeding as he had confessed
to Daddy. In a few minutes Ancrum found himself buried in 'details'
as to 'flesh-forming' and 'bone-forming' foods, as to nitrogen and
albumen, as to the saving qualities of fruit, and Heaven knows what
besides. Long before the enthusiast had spent his breath or his
details, the minister cried 'Enough!'

'Young materialist,' he said growling, 'what do you mean at your age
by thinking so much about your body?'

'It wasn't my body, sir,' said David, simply, 'it was just business.
If I had got ill, I couldn't have worked; if I had lived like other
chaps, I couldn't have saved. So I had to know something about it,
and it wasn't bad fun. After a bit I got the people I lodged with
to eat a lot of the things I eat--and that was cheaper for me of
course. The odd thing about vegetarianism is that you come not to
care a rap what you eat. Your taste goes somehow. So long as you're
nourished and can do your work, that's all you want.'

The minister sat studying his visitor a minute or two in silence,
though the eyes under the care-worn brow were bright and restless.
Any defiance of the miserable body was in itself delightful to a
man who had all but slain himself many times over in the soul's
service. He, too, had been living on a crust for months, denying
himself first this, then that ingredient of what should have been
an invalid's diet. But it had been for cause--for the poor--for
self-mortification. There was something just a little jarring to
the ascetic in this contact with a self-denial of the purely
rationalistic type, so easy--so cheerful--put forward without the
smallest suspicion of merit, as a mere business measure.

David resumed his story. By the end of another six months it
appeared that he had grown tired of his original shop, with its
vast masses of school stationery and cheap new books. As might have
been expected from his childish antecedents, he had been soon laid
hold of by the old bookstalls, had read at them on his way from
work, had spent on them all that he could persuade himself to spare
from his hoard, and in a year from the time he entered Manchester,
thanks to wits, reading, and chance friendships, was already a
budding bibliophile. Slates and primers became suddenly odious to a
person aware of the existence of Aldines and Elzevirs, and bitten
with the passion, then just let loose on the book-buying world, for
first editions of the famous books of the century. Whenever that
sum in the savings bank should have reached a certain height, he
would become a second-hand bookseller with a stall. Till then he
must save more and learn his trade. So at the end of his first year
he left his employers, and by the help of excellent recommendations
from them got the post of assistant in Purcell's shop in Half
Street, at a rise of two shillings, afterwards converted into four
shillings a week.

'And I've been there three years--very near,' said David,
straightening himself with a little nervous gesture peculiar to
him. 'If you'd been anywhere about, sir, you'd have wondered how I
could have stayed so long. But I wanted to learn the trade and I've
learnt it--no thanks to old Purcell.'

'What was wrong with him?'

'Mostly brains!' said the lad, with a scornful but not unattractive
conceit. 'He was a hard master to live with--that don't matter. But he
is a fool! I don't mean to say he don't know a lot about some
things--but he thinks he knows everything--and he don't. And he'll not
let anyone tell him--not he! Once, if you'll believe it, he got the
Aldine Virgil of 1501, for twenty-five shillings--came from a gentleman
out Eccles way--a fellow selling his father's library and didn't know
bad from good,--real fine tall copy,--binding poor,--but a _stunner_
take it altogether--worth twenty pounds to Quaritch or Ellis, any day.
Well, all I could do, he let a man have it for five shillings profit
next day, just to spite me, I believe, because I told him it was a good
thing. Then he got sick about that, I believe, though he never let out,
and the next time he found anything that looked good,--giminy!--but he
put it on. Now you know, sir'--Mr. Ancrum smiled at the confidential
eagerness of the expert--'you know, sir, it's not many of those Venice
or Florence Dantes that are worth anything. If you get the first edition
of Landino's 'Commentary,' or the other man's, Imola's, isn't it--'

The minister lifted his eyebrows--the Italian came out pat, and, so
far as he knew, right--

'Well, of course, _they're_ worth money--always fetch
their price. But the later editions are no good at all--nobody but a
gentleman-collector, very green, you know, sir'--the twinkle in the
boy's eye showed how much his subject was setting him at his
ease--'would be bothered with them. Well, if he didn't get hold of
an edition of 1540 or so--worth about eight shillings, and dear at
that--and send it up to one of the London men as a good thing. He
makes me pack it and send it and _register_ it--you might have
thought it was the Mazarin Bible, bar size. And then, of course,
next day, down comes the book again flying, double quick. I kept
out of his way, post-time! But I'd have given something to see the
letter he got.'

And David, rising, put his hands in his pockets, and stood before
the fire chuckling with irrepressible amusement.

'Well, then you know there's the first editions of Rousseau--not a
bit rare, as rare goes--lucky if you get thirty shillings for the
"Contrat Social," or the "Nouvelle Heloise," even good copies--'

Again the host's eyebrows lifted. The French names ran remarkably;
there was not the least boggling over them. But he said nothing,
and David rattled on, describing, with a gusto which never failed,
one of Purcell's book-selling enormities after another. It was
evident that he despised his master with a passionate contempt. It
was evident also that Purcell had shown a mean and unreasoning
jealousy of his assistant. The English tradesman inherits a
domineering tradition towards his subordinates, and in Purcell's
case, as we know, the instincts of an egotistical piety had
reinforced those of the employer. Yet Mr. Ancrum felt some sympathy
with Purcell.

'Well, Davy,' he said at last, 'so you were too 'cute for your man,
that's plain. But I don't suppose he put it on that ground when he
gave you the sack?'

And he looked up, with a little dry smile.

'No!' cried David, abruptly. 'No! not he. If you go and ask
_him_ he'll tell you he sent me off because I would go to the
Secularist meetings at the Hall of Science, and air myself as an
atheist; that's his way of putting it. And it was doing him harm
with his religious customers! As if I was going to let him dictate
where I went on Sundays!'

'Of course not,' said Ancrum, with a twist of his oddly shaped
mouth. 'Even the very youngest of us might sometimes be the better
for advice; but, hang it, let's be free--free to "make fools of
ourselves," as a wise man hath it. Well, Davy, no offence,' for his
guest had flushed suddenly. 'So you go to the Hall of Science? Did
you hear Holyoake and Bradlaugh there the other night? You like
that kind of thing?'

'I like to hear it,' said the lad, stoutly, meeting his old
teacher's look, half nervously, half defiantly. 'It's a great deal
more lively than what you hear at most churches, sir. And why
shouldn't one hear everything?'

This was not precisely the tone which the same culprit had adopted
towards Dora Lomax. The Voltairean suddenly felt himself to be
making excuses--shabby excuses--in the presence of somebody
connected, however distantly, with _l'infame_. He drew himself
up with an angry shake of his whole powerful frame.

'Oh, why not?' said Ancrum, with a shrug, 'if life's long
enough'--and he absently lifted and let fall a book which lay on
the table beside him; it was Newman's 'Dream of Gerontius'--'if
life's long enough, and--happy enough! Well, so you've been
learning French, I can hear. Teaching yourself?'

'No; there's an old Frenchman, old Barbier--do you know him, sir?
He gives lessons at a shilling an hour. Very few people go to him
now; they want younger men. And there's lot's of them about. But
old Barbier knows more about books than any of them, I'll be bound.'

'Has he introduced you to French novels? I never read any; but
they're bad, of course--must be. In all those things I'm a
Britisher and believe what the Britishers say.'

'We're just at the end of "Manon Lescaut,"' said David, doggedly.
'And partly with him, partly by myself, I've read a bit of
Rousseau--and a good lot of Diderot,--and Voltaire.'

David threw an emphasis into the last name, which was meant to
atone to himself for the cowardice of a few minutes before. The old
boyish feeling towards Mr. Ancrum, which had revived in him when he
entered the room, had gradually disappeared again. He bore the
minister no real grudge for having forgotten him, but he wished it
to be clearly understood that the last fragments of the Christian
Brethren yoke had dropped from his neck.

'Ah! don't know anything about them,' said Ancrum, slowly; 'but
then, as you know, I'm a very ignorant person. Well, now, was it
Voltaire took you to the secularists, or the secularists to
Voltaire?'

David laughed, but did not give a reply immediately.

'Well, never mind,' said the minister, 'All Christians are fools, of
course--that's understood.--Is that all you have been learning
these four years?'

'I work at Latin every morning,' said David, very red, and on his
dignity. 'I've begun Greek, and I go to the science classes,
mathematics and chemistry, at the Mechanics' Institute.'

Mr. Ancrum's face softened.

'Why, I'll be bound you have to go to work pretty early, Davy?'

'Seven o'clock, sir, I take the shutters down. But I get an hour
and a half first, and three hours in the evening. This winter I've
got through the "Aeneid," and Horace's "Epistles" and "Ars
Poetica." Do you remember, sir?'--and the lad's voice grew sharp
once more, tightening as it were under the pressure of eagerness
and ambition from beneath--'do you remember that Scaliger read the
"Iliad" in twenty days, and was a finished Greek scholar in two
years? Why can't one do that now?'

'Why shouldn't you?' said Mr. Ancrum, looking up at him. 'Who helps
you in your Greek?'

'No one; I get translations.'

'Well, now, look here, Davy. I'm an ignorant person, as I told you,
but I learnt some Latin and Greek at Manchester New College. Come
to me in the evenings, and I'll help you with your Greek, unless
you've got beyond me. Where are you?'

The budding Scaliger reported himself. He had read the 'Anabasis,'
some Herodotus, three plays of Euripides, and was now making some
desperate efforts on Aeschylus and Sophocles. Any Plato? David made
a face. He had read two or three dialogues in English; didn't want
to go on, didn't care about him. Ah! Ancrum supposed not.

'Twelve hours' shop,' said the minister reflecting, 'more or less,--two
hours' work before shop,--three hours or so after shop; that's what you
may call driving it hard. You couldn't do it, Richard Ancrum,' and he
shook his head with a whimsical melancholy. 'But you were always a poor
starveling. Youth that _is_ youth's tough. Don't tell me, sir,' and he
looked up sharply, 'that you don't amuse yourself. I wouldn't believe
it. There never was a man built like you yet that didn't amuse himself.'

David smiled, but said nothing.

'Billiards?'

'No, sir.'

'Betting?'

'No, sir. They cost money.'

'Niggardly dog! Drink?--no, I'll answer that for myself.'

The minister dropped his catechism, and sat nursing his lame leg
and thinking. Suddenly he broke out with, 'How many young women are
you in love with, David?'

David showed his white teeth.

'I only know two, sir. One's my master's daughter--she's rather a
pretty girl, I think--'

'That'll do. You're not in love with her. Who's the other?'

'The other's Mr. Lomax's daughter,--Lomax of the Parlour, that
queer restaurant, sir, in Market Place. She--well, I don't know how
to describe her. She's not good-looking--at least, I don't think
so,' he added dubiously. 'She's very High Church, and fasts all
Lent. I think she does Church embroidery.'

'And doesn't think any the better of you for attending the Hall of
Science? Sensible girl! Still, when people mean to fall in love,
they don't think twice of that sort of thing. I make a note of
Lomax's daughter. Ah! enter supper. David, if you let any 'ism
stand between you and that veal pie, I despair of your future.'

David, however, in the course of the meal, showed himself as
superior to narrowness of view in the matter of food-stuffs as in
other matters. The meal went merrily. Mr. Ancrum dropped his
half-sarcastic tone, and food, warmth, and talk loosened the lad's
fibres, and made him more and more human, handsome, and attractive.
Soon his old friend knew all that he wanted to know,--the sum David
had saved--thirty pounds in the savings-bank--the sort of stock he
meant to set up, the shop he had taken--with a stall, of course--no
beginner need hope to prosper without a stall. Customers must be
delicately angled for at a safe distance--show yourself too much,
and, like trout, they flashed away. See everything, force nothing.
Let a book be turned over for nineteen days, the chances were that
on the twentieth you would turn over the price. As to expecting the
class of cheap customers to commit themselves by walking into a
shop, it was simple madness. Of course, when you were 'established,'
that was another matter.

By the help of a certain wealthy Unitarian, one Mr. Doyle, with
whom he had made friends in Purcell's shop, and whom he had boldly
asked for the use of his name as a reference, the lad had taken--so
it appeared--a small house in Potter Street, a narrow but
frequented street in the neighbourhood of Deansgate and all the
great banks and insurance offices in King Street. His shop took up
the ground floor. The two floors above were let, and the tenants
would remain. But into the attics and the parlour kitchen behind
the shop, he meant, ultimately, when he could afford it, to put
himself and his sister. He could only get the house on a yearly
tenancy, as it and the others near it were old, and would probably
be rebuilt before long. But meanwhile the rent was all the lower
because of the insecurity of tenure.

At the mention of the boy's sister, Ancrum looked up with a start.

'Ah, to be sure! What became of that poor child after you left? The
Clough End friends who wrote to me of your disappearance had more
pity for her, Davy, than they had for you.'

A sudden repulsion and reserve darkened the black eyes opposite.

'There was no helping it,' he said with hasty defiance. There was a
moment's silence. Then a wish to explain himself rose in David.

'I couldn't have stayed, sir,' he said, with a curious
half-reproachful accent. 'I told you about how it was before you
left. And there were other things. I should have cut my own throat
or some one else's if it had gone on. But I haven't forgotten
Louie. You remember Tom Mullins at the foundry. He's written me
every month. I paid him for it. I know all about Louie, and they
don't know anything about me. They think I'm in America.'

His eyes lit again with the joy of contrivance.

'Is that kind, Davy?'

'Yes, sir--' and for the first time the minister heard in the boy's
voice the tone of a man's judgment. 'I couldn't have Louie on me
just yet. I was going to ask you, sir, not to tell the people at
Clough End you've seen me. It would make it very hard. You know
what Louie is--and she's all right. She's learnt a trade.'

'What trade?'

'Silk-weaving--from Margaret Dawson.'

'Poor soul--poor saint! There'd be more things than her trade to be
learnt from Margaret Dawson if anyone had a mind to learn them.
What of 'Lias?'

'Oh, he died, sir, a week after I left.' The lad's voice dropped.
Then he added slowly, looking away, 'Tom said he was very quiet--he
didn't suffer much--not at the end.'

'Aye, the clouds lift at sunset,' said Mr. Ancrum in an altered
tone; 'the air clears before the night!'

His head fell forward on his breast, and he sat drumming on the
table. They had finished supper, the little, bustling landlady had
cleared away, and Davy was thinking of going. Suddenly the minister
sprang up and stood before the fire, looking down at his guest.

'Davy, do you want to know why I didn't write to you? I was ill
first--very ill; then--_I was in hell!_'

David started. Into the thin, crooked face, with the seeking eyes,
there had flashed an expression--sinister, indescribable, a sort of
dumb rage. It changed the man altogether.

'I was in hell!' he repeated slowly. 'I know no more about it. Other
people may tell you, perhaps, if you come across them--I can't.
There were days at Clough End--always a certain number in the
year--when this earth slipped away from me, and the fiends came
about me, but this was months. They say I was overdone in the
cotton famine years ago just before I came to Clough End. I got
pneumonia after I left you that May--it doesn't matter. When I knew
there was a sun again, I wrote to ask about you. You had left
Kinder and gone--no one knew where.'

David sat nervously silent, not knowing what to say, his mind
gradually filling with the sense of something tragic, irreparable.
Mr. Ancrum, too, stood straight before him, as though turned to
stone. A t last David got up and approached him. Had Ancrum been
looking he must have been touched by the change in the lad's
expression. The hard self-reliant force of the face had melted into
feeling.

'Are you better now, sir? I knew you must have been ill,' he
stammered.

Ancrum started as though just wakened.

'Ill? Yes, I was pretty bad,' he said briskly, and in his most
ordinary tone, though with a long breath.' But I'm as fit as
anything now. Good night, Davy, good night. Come a walk with me
some day? Sunday afternoon? Done. Here, write me your new address.'

The tall form and curly black head disappeared, the little
lodging-house room, with its round rosewood table, its horsehair
sofa, its chiffonnier, and its prints of 'Sport at Balmoral' and
'The Mother's Kiss,' had resumed the dingy formality of every day.

The minister sank into his seat and held his hands out over the
blaze. He was in pain. All life was to him more or less a struggle
with physical ill. But it was not so primarily that he conceived
it. The physical ill was nothing except as representing a
philosophical necessity.

That lad, with all his raw certainties--of himself, his knowledge,
his Voltaire--the poor minister felt once or twice a piteous
envy of him, as he sat on through the night hours. Life was
ill-apportioned. The poor, the lonely, the feeble--it is they who
want certainty, want hope most. And because they are lonely and
feeble, because their brain tissues are diseased, and their life
from no fault of their own unnatural, nature who has made them
dooms them to despair and doubt. Is there any 'soul,' any
'personality' for the man who is afflicted and weakened with
intermittent melancholia? Where is his identity, where his
responsibility? And if there is none for him, how does the accident
of health bestow them on his neighbour?

Questions of this sort had beset Richard Ancrum for years. On the
little book-table to his right lay papers of Huxley's, of
Clifford's, and several worn volumes of mental pathology. The
brooding intellect was for ever raising the same problem, the same
spectre world of universal doubt, in which God, conscience, faith,
were words without a meaning.

But side by side with the restlessness of the intellect there had
always gone the imperious and prevailing claim of temperament.
Beside Huxley and Clifford, lay Newman's 'Sermons' and 'Apologia,'
and a little High Church manual of self-examination. And on the
wall above the book-table hung a memorandum-slate on which were a
number of addresses and dates--the addresses of some forty boys
whom the minister taught on Sunday in one of the Unitarian Sunday
schools of Manchester, and visited in the week. The care and
training of street arabs had been his passion when he was still a
student at Manchester New College. Then had come his moment of
utterance--a thirst for preaching, for religious influence; though
he could not bring himself to accept any particular shibboleth or
take any kind of orders. He found something congenial for a time to
a deep though struggling faith in the leadership of the Christian
Brethren. Now, however, something had broken in him; he could
preach no more. But he could go back to his old school; he could
teach his boys on Sundays and week days; he could take them out
country walks in spite of his lame limb; he could deny himself even
the commonest necessaries of life for their sake; he could watch
over each of them with a fervour, a moral intensity which wore him
out. In this, in some insignificant journalism for a religious
paper, and in thinking, he spent his life.

There had been a dark page in his history. He had hardly left
Manchester New College when he married suddenly a girl of some
beauty, but with an undeveloped sensuous temperament. They were to
live on a crust and give themselves to the service of man. His own
dream was still fresh when she deserted him in the company of one
of his oldest friends. He followed them, found them both in black
depths of remorse, and took her back. But the strain of living
together proved too much. She implored him to let her go and earn
her living apart. She had been a teacher, and she proposed to
return to her profession. He saw her established in Glasgow in the
house of some good people who knew her history, and who got her a
post in a small school. Then he returned to Manchester and threw
himself with reckless ardour into the work of feeding the hungry,
and nursing the dying, in the cotton famine. He emerged a broken
man, physically and morally, liable thenceforward to recurrent
crises of melancholia; but they were not frequent or severe enough
to prevent his working. He was at the time entirely preoccupied
with certain religious questions, and thankfully accepted the call
to the little congregation at Clough End.

Since then he had visited his wife twice every year. He was
extremely poor. His family, who had destined him for the
Presbyterian ministry, were estranged from him; hardly anyone in
Manchester knew him intimately; only in one house, far away in the
Scotch lowlands, were there two people, who deeply loved and
thoroughly understood him. There he went when his dark hours came
upon him; and thence, after the terrible illness which overtook him
on his leaving Clough End, he emerged again, shattered but
indomitable, to take up the battle of life as he understood it.

He was not an able nor a literary man. His mind was a strange
medley, and his mental sight far from clear. Of late the study of
Newman had been a revelation to him. But he did not cease for that
to read the books of scientific psychology which tortured him--the
books which seemed to make of mind a function of matter, and man
the slave of an immoral nature.

The only persistent and original gift in him--yet after all it is
the gift which for ever divides the sheep from the goats--was that
of a 'hunger and thirst after righteousness.'




CHAPTER IV


It was towards noon on a November day, and Dora Lomax sat working
at her embroidery frame in the little sitting-room overlooking
Market Place. The pale wintry sun touched her bent head, her deftly
moving hand, and that device of the risen Christ circled in golden
flame on which she was at work. The room in which she sat was old
and low; the ceiling bulged here and there, the floor had
unexpected slopes and declivities. The furniture was of the
cheapest, the commonest odds and ends of a broker's shop, for the
most part. There was the usual horsehair suite, the usual cheap
sideboard, and dingy druggeting of a large geometrical pattern. But
amid these uninviting articles there were a few things which gave
the room individuality--some old prints of places abroad, of
different shapes and sizes, which partly disguised the blue and
chocolate paper on the walls; some bits of foreign carving, Swiss
and Italian; some eggs and shells and stuffed birds, some of these
last from the Vosges, some from the Alps; a cageful of canaries,
singing their best against the noise of Manchester; and, lastly, an
old bookcase full of miscellaneous volumes, mostly large and
worthless 'sets' of old magazines and encyclopaedias, which
represented the relics of Daddy's bookselling days.

The room smelt strongly of cooking, a mingled odour of boiling
greens and frying onions and stored apples which never deserted it,
and produced a constant slight sense of nausea in Dora, who, like
most persons of sedentary occupation, was in matters of eating and
digestion somewhat sensitive and delicate. From below, too, there
seemed to spread upwards a general sense of bustle and disquiet.
Doors banged, knives and plates rattled perpetually, the great
swing-door into the street was for ever opening and shutting, each
time shaking the old, frail house with its roughly built additions
through and through, and there was a distant skurry of voices that
never paused. The restaurant indeed was in full work, and Daddy's
voice could be heard at intervals, shouting and chattering. Dora
had been at work since half-past seven, marketing, giving orders,
making up accounts, writing bills of fare, and otherwise organising
the work of the day. Now she had left the work for an hour or two
to her father and the stout Lancashire cook with her various
handmaidens. Daddy's irritable pride liked to get her out of the
way and make a lady of her as much as she would allow, and in her
secret heart she often felt that her embroidery, for which she was
well paid as a skilled and inventive hand, furnished a securer
basis for their lives than this restaurant, which, in spite of its
apparent success, was a frequent source of dread and discomfort to
her. The money obligation it involved filled her sometimes with a
kind of panic. She knew her father so well!

Now, as she sat absorbed in her work, sewing her heart into it, for
every stitch in it delighted not only her skilled artistic sense
but her religious feeling, little waves of anxious thought swept
across her one after another. She was a person of timid and
brooding temperament, and her father's eccentricities and past
history provided her with much just cause for worry. But to-day she
was not thinking much of him.

Again and again there came between her and her silks a face, a face
of careless pride and power, framed in strong waves of black hair.
It had once repelled her quite as much as it attracted her. But at
any rate, ever since she had first seen it, it had taken a place
apart in her mind, as though in the yielding stuff of memory and
feeling one impression out of the thousands of every day had,
without warning, yet irrevocably, stamped itself deeper than the
rest. The owner of it--David Grieve--filled her now, as always,
with invincible antagonisms and dissents. But still the thought of
him had in some gradual way become of late part of her habitual
consciousness, associated always, and on the whole painfully
associated, with the thought of Lucy Purcell.

For Lucy was such a little goose! To think of the way in which she
had behaved towards young Grieve in the fortnight succeeding his
notice to quit, before he finally left Purcell's service, made Dora
hot all over. How could Lucy demean herself so? and show such
tempers and airs towards a man who clearly did not think anything
at all about her? And now she had flung herself upon Dora,
imploring her cousin to help her, and threatening desperate things
unless she and David were still enabled to meet. And meanwhile
Purcell had flatly forbidden any communication between his
household and the young reprobate he had turned out, whose
threatened prosperity made at this moment the angry preoccupation
of his life.

What was Dora to do? Was she to aid and abet Lucy, against her
father's will, in pursuing David Grieve? And if in spite of all
appearances the little self-willed creature succeeded, and Dora
were the means of her marrying David, how would Dora's conscience
stand? Here was a young man who believed in nothing, and openly
said so, who took part in those terrible atheistical meetings and
discussions, which, as Father Russell had solemnly said, were like
a plague-centre in Manchester, drawing in and corrupting soul after
soul. And Dora was to help in throwing her young cousin, while she
was still almost a child with no 'Church principles' to aid and
protect her, into the hands of this enemy of the Lord and His
Church?

Then, when it came to this point, Dora would be troubled and drawn
away by memories of young Grieve's talk and ways, of his dashes
into Market Place to see Daddy since he had set up for himself, of
his bold plans for the future which delighted Daddy and took her
breath away; of the flash of his black eyes; the triumphant energy
of his youth; and those indications in him, too, which had so
startled her of late since they--she and he--had dropped the futile
sparrings in which their acquaintance began, of an inner softness,
a sensitive magnetic something--indescribable.

Dora's needle paused in mid-air. Then her hand dropped on her lap.
A slight but charming smile--born of youth, sympathy, involuntary
admiration--dawned on her face. She sat so for a minute or two lost
in reminiscence.

The clock outside struck twelve. Dora with a start felt along the
edge of her frame under her work and brought out a book. It was a
little black, worn manual of prayers for various times and
occasions compiled by a High Church dignitary. For Dora it had a
talismanic virtue. She turned now to one of the 'Prayers for
Noonday,' made the sign of the cross, and slipped on to her knees
for an instant. Then she rose happily and went back to her work. It
was such acts as this that made the thread on which her life of
mystical emotion was strung.

But her father was a Secularist of a pronounced type, and her
mother had been a rigid Baptist, old-fashioned and sincere, filled
with a genuine horror of Papistry and all its ways.

Adrian O'Connor Lomax, to give Daddy his whole magnificent name,
was the son of a reed-maker, of Irish extraction, at Hyde, and was
brought up at first to follow his father's trade--that of making
the wire 'reed,' or frame, into which the threads of the warp are
fastened before weaving. But such patient drudgery, often
continued, as it was in those days, for twelve and fourteen hours
out of the twenty-four, was gall and wormwood to a temperament like
Daddy's. He developed a taste for reading, fell in with Byron's
poems, and caught the fever of them; then branched out into
politics just at the time of the first Reform Bill, when all over
Lancashire the memory of Peterloo was still burning, and when men
like Henry Hunt and Samuel Bamford were the political heroes of
every weaver's cottage. He developed a taste for itinerant
lecturing and preaching, and presently left his family and tramped
to Manchester.

Here after many vicissitudes--including an enthusiastic and on the
whole creditable participation, as an itinerant lecturer, in the
movement for the founding of Mechanics' Institutes, then spreading
all over the north--Daddy, to his ill-fortune, came across his
future brother-in-law, the bookseller Purcell. At the moment Daddy
was in a new and unaccustomed phase of piety. After a period of
revolutionary spouting, in which Byron, Tom Paine, and the various
publications of Richard Carlile had formed his chief scriptures, a
certain Baptist preacher laid hold of the Irishman's mercurial
sense. Daddy was awakened and converted, burnt his Byron and his
Tom Paine in his three-pair back with every circumstance of insult
and contumely, and looked about for an employer worthy of one of
the elect. Purcell at the time had a shop in one of the main
streets connecting Manchester and Salford; he was already an elder
at the chapel Daddy frequented; the two made acquaintance and Lomax
became Purcell's assistant. At the moment the trade offered to him
attracted Daddy vastly. He had considerable pretensions to
literature; was a Shakespearian, a debater, and a haunter of a
certain literary symposium, held for a long time at one of the old
Manchester inns, and attended by most of the small wits and poets
of a then small and homely town. The gathering had nothing saintly
about it; free drinking went often hand in hand with free thought;
Daddy's infant zeal was shocked, but Daddy's instincts were
invincible, and he went.

The result of the bookselling experiment has been already told by
Daddy himself. It was, of course, inevitable. Purcell was then a
young man, but in his dealings with Daddy he showed precisely the
same cast-iron self-importance, the same slowness of brain coupled
with the same assumptions of an unbounded and righteous authority,
the same unregenerate greediness in small matters of gain and loss
which now in his later life had made him odious to David Grieve.
Moreover, Daddy, by a happy instinct, had at once made common cause
with Purcell's downtrodden sister, going on even, as his passionate
sense of opposition developed, to make love to the poor humble
thing mainly for the sake of annoying the brother. The crisis came;
the irritated tyrant brought down a heavy hand, and Daddy and
Isabella disappeared together from the establishment in Chapel
Street.

By the time Daddy had set up as the husband of Purcell's sister in
a little shop precisely opposite to that of his former employer, he
had again thrown over all pretensions to sanctity, was, on the
contrary, convinced afresh that all religion was one vast perennial
imposture, dominated, we may suppose, in this as in most other
matters, by the demon of hatred which now possessed him towards his
brother-in-law. His wife, poor soul, was beginning to feel herself
tied for good to the tail of a comet destined to some mad career or
other, and quite uncontrollable by any efforts of hers. Lomax had
married her for the most unpromising reasons in the world, and he
soon tired of her, and of the trade, which required a sustained
effort, which he was incapable of giving. As long as Purcell
remained opposite, indeed, hate and rivalry kept him up to the
mark. He was an attractive figure at that time, with his long fair
hair and his glancing greenish eyes; and his queer discursive talk
attracted many a customer, whom he would have been quite competent
to keep had his character been of the same profitable stuff as his
ability.

But when Purcell vanished across the river into Manchester, the
zest of Daddy's bookselling enterprise departed also. He began to
neglect his shop, was off here and there lecturing and debating,
and when he came back again it was plain to the wife their scanty
money had been squandered on other excesses than those of talk. At
last the business fell to ruins, and debts pressed. Then suddenly
Daddy was persuaded by a French commercial traveller to take up his
old trade of reed-making, and go and seek employment across the
Channel, where reed-makers were said to be in demand.

In ecstasy at the idea of travel thus presented to him, Daddy
devoured what books about France he could get hold of, and tried to
teach himself French. Then one morning, without a word to his wife,
he stole downstairs and out of the shop, and was far on the road to
London before his flight was discovered. His poor wife shed some
tears, but he had ceased to care for her she believed, largely
because she had brought him no children, and his habits had begun
to threaten to lead her with unpleasant rapidity to the workhouse.
So she took comfort, and with the help of some friends set up a
little stationery and fancy business, which just kept her alive.

Meanwhile Lomax found no work in Picardy, whither he had first
gone, and ultimately wandered across France to Alsace, in search of
bread, a prey to all possible hardships and privations. But nothing
daunted him. The glow of adventure and romance was on every
landscape. Cathedrals, forests, the wide river-plains of central
France, with their lights and distances,--all things on this new
earth and under these new heavens 'haunted him like a passion.' He
travelled in perpetual delight, making love no doubt here and there
to some passing Mignon, and starving with the gayest of hearts.

At Mulhausen he found work, and being ill and utterly destitute,
submitted to it for a while. But as soon as he had got back his
health and saved some money, he set out again, walking this time,
staff in hand, over the whole Rhine country and into the
Netherlands. There in the low Dutch plains he fell ill again, and
the beauty of the Rhineland was no longer there to stand like a
spell between him and the pains of poverty. He seemed to come to
himself, after a dream in which the world and all its forms had
passed him by 'apparelled in celestial light.' And the process of
self-finding was attended by some at least of those salutary pangs
which eternally belong to it. He suddenly took a resolution, crept
on board a coal smack going from a Dutch port to Grimsby, toiled
across Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and appeared one evening, worn
to a shadow, in his wife's little shop in Salford.

He was received as foolish women in whom there is no ineradicable
taint of cruelty or hate will always receive the prodigal who
returns. And when Daddy had been fed and clothed, he turned out for
a time to be so amiable, so grateful a Daddy, such good company, as
he sat in the chair by his wife's fire and told stories of his
travels to her and anybody else who might drop in, that not only
the wife but the neighbourhood was appeased. His old friends came
back to him, he began to receive overtures to write in some of the
humbler papers, to lecture on his adventures in the Yorkshire and
Lancashire towns. Daddy expanded, harangued, grew daily in good
looks and charm under his wife's eyes.

At last one day the papers came in with news of Louis Philippe's
overthrow. Daddy grew restless, and began to study the foreign news
with avidity. Revolution spread, and what with democracy abroad and
Chartism at home, there was more stimulus in the air than such
brains as Daddy's could rightly stand. One May day he walked into
the street, looked hesitatingly up and down it, shading his eyes
against the sun. Then with a shake of his long hair, as of one
throwing off a weight, he drew his hat from under his arm, put it
on, felt in his pockets, and set off at a run, head downwards,
while poor Isabella Lomax was sweeping her kitchen. During the next
few days he was heard of, rumour said, now here, now there, but one
might as well have attempted to catch and hold the Pied Piper.

He was away for rather more than twenty months. Then one day, as
before, a lean, emaciated, sun-browned figure came slowly up the
Salford street, looking for a familiar door. It was Daddy. He went
into the shop, which was empty, stared, with a countenance in which
relief and repulsion were oddly mingled, at the boxes of
stationery, at the dusty counter with its string and glass cases,
when suddenly the inside door, which was standing ajar, was pushed
stealthily inwards, and a child stood in the doorway. It was a
tottering baby of a year old, holding in one fat hand a crust of
bread which it had been sucking. When it saw the stranger it looked
at him gravely for a second. Then without a trace of fear or
shyness it came forward, holding up its crust appealingly, its rosy
chin and lips still covered with bread-crumbs.

Daddy stared at the apparition, which seemed to him the merest
witchcraft. For it was _himself_, dwarfed to babyhood and
pinafores. His eyes, his prominent brow, his colour, his trick of
holding the head--they were all there, absurdly there.

He gave a cry, which was answered by another cry from behind. His
wife stood in the door. The stout, foolish Isabella was white to
the lips. Even she felt the awe, the poetry of the moment.

'Aye,' she said, trembling. 'Aye! it's yourn. It was born seven
months after yo left us.'

Daddy, without greeting his wife, threw himself down by the babe,
and burst into tears. He had come back in a still darker mood than
on his first return, his egotistical belief in himself more rudely
shaken than ever by the attempts, the failures, the miseries of the
last eighteen months. For one illuminating moment he saw that he
was a poor fool, and that his youth was squandered and gone. But in
its stead, there--dropped suddenly beside him by the forgiving
gods--stood this new youth sprung from his, and all his own, this
child--Dora.

He took to her with a passion which the trembling Isabella thought
a great deal too excessive to last. But though the natural Daddy
very soon reappeared, with all the aggravating peculiarities which
belonged to him, the passion did last, and the truant strayed no
more. He set up a small printing business with the help of some old
customers--it was always characteristic of the man that, be his
failings what they might, he never lacked friends--and with
lecturing and writing, and Isabella's shop, they struggled on
somehow. Isabella's life was hard enough. Daddy was only good when
he was happy; and at other times he dipped recklessly into vices
which would have been the ruin of them all had they been
persistent. But by some kind fate he always emerged, and more and
more, as years went on, owing to Dora. He drank, but not
hopelessly; he gambled, but not past salvation; and there was
generally, as we have said, some friend at hand to pick the poor
besmirched featherbrain out of the mire.

Dora grew up not unhappily. There were shifts and privations to put
up with; there were stormy days when life seemed a hurricane of
words and tears. But there were bright spaces in between, when
Daddy had good resolutions, or a little more money than usual; and
with every year the daughter instinctively knew that her spell over
her father strengthened. She was on the whole a serious child, with
fair pale hair, much given to straying in long loose ends about her
prominent brow and round cheeks. Yet at the Baptist school, whither
she was sent, she was certainly popular. She had a passion for the
little ones; and her grey-blue eyes, over which in general the
fringed lids drooped too much, had a charming trick of sudden
smiles, when the soft soul behind looked for an instant clearly and
blithely out. At home she was a little round-shouldered drudge in
her mother's service. At chapel she sat very patiently and happily
under a droning minister, and when the inert and despondent
Isabella would have let most of her religious duties drop, in the
face of many troubles and a scoffing husband, the child of fourteen
gently and persistently held her to them.

At last, however, when Dora was seventeen, Isabella died of cancer,
and Daddy, who had been much shaken and terrified by her sufferings
in her last illness, fell for a while into an irritable melancholy,
from which not even Dora could divert him. It was then that he
seemed for the first time to cross the line which had hitherto
divided him from ruin. The drinking at the White Horse, where the
literary circle met of which Lomax had been so long an ornament,
had been of late going from bad to worse. The households of the
wits concerned were up in arms; neighbourhood and police began to
assert themselves. One night the trembling Dora waited hour after
hour for her father. About midnight he staggered in, maddened with
drink and fresh from a skirmish with the police. Finding her there
waiting for him, pale and silent, he did what he had never done
before under any stress of trouble--struck and swore at her. Dora
sank down with a groan, and in another minute Lomax was dashing his
head against the wall, vowing that he would beat his brains out. In
the hours that followed, Dora's young soul was stretched as it were
on a rack, from which it rose, not weakened, but with new powers
and a loftier stature. All her girlish levities and illusions
seemed to drop away from her. She saw her mission, and took her
squalid Oedipus in charge.

Next morning she went to some of her father's friends, unknown to
Daddy, and came back with a light in her blanched face, bearing the
offer of some work on a Radical paper at Leicester. Daddy, now
broken and miserable, submitted, and off they went.

At Leicester the change of moral and physical climate produced for
a while a wonderful effect. Daddy found himself marvellously at
ease among the Secularist and Radical stockingers of the town, and
soon became well known to them as a being half butt, half oracle.
Dora set herself to learn dressmaking, and did her best to like the
new place and the new people. It was at Leicester, a place seething
with social experiment in its small provincial way, with
secularism, Owenism, anti-vaccination, and much else, that Lomax
fell a victim to one 'ism the more--to vegetarianism. It was there
that, during an editorial absence, and in the first fervour of
conversion, Daddy so belaboured a carnivorous world in the columns
of the 'Penny Banner' for which he worked, and so grotesquely and
persistently reduced all the problems of the time to terms of
nitrogen and albumen, that curt dismissal came upon him, and for a
time Dora saw nothing but her precarious earnings between them and
starvation. It was then also that, by virtue of that queer charm he
could always exercise when he pleased, he laid hold on a young
Radical manufacturer and got out of him a loan of 200 pounds for
the establishment of a vegetarian restaurant wherein Leicester was
to be taught how to feed.

But Leicester, alas! remained unregenerate. In the midst of Daddy's
preparations a commercial traveller, well known both to Manchester
and Leicester, repeated to him one day a remark of Purcell's, to
the effect that since Daddy's migration Manchester had been well
rid of a vagabond, and he, Purcell, of a family disgrace. Daddy,
bursting with fatuous rage, and possessed besides of the wildest
dreams of fortune on the strength of his 200 pounds, straightway
made up his mind to return to Manchester, 'pull Purcell's nose,' and
plant himself and his prosperity that was to be in the bookseller's
eyes. He broke in upon Dora at her work, and poured into her
astonished ears a stream of talk, marked by a mad inventiveness,
partly in the matter of vegetarian receipts, still more in that of
Purcell's future discomforts. When Daddy was once launched into a
subject that suited him, he was inexhaustible. His phrases flowed
for ever; of words he was always sure. Like a certain French talker,
'his sentences were like cats: he showered them into air and they
found their feet without trouble.'

Dora sat through it, bewildered and miserable. Go back to
Manchester where they had been so unhappy, where the White Horse
and its crew were waiting for her father, simply to get into debt
and incur final ruin for the sake of a mad fancy she humoured but
could not believe in, and a still madder thirst for personal
vengeance on a man who was more than a match for anything Daddy
could do! She was in despair.

But Daddy was obdurate, brutal in his determination to have his
way; and when she angered him with her remonstrances, he turned
upon her with an irritable--

'I know what it is--damn it! It's that Puseyite gang you've taken up
with--you think of nothing but them. As if you couldn't find antics
and petticoats and priests in Manchester--they're everywhere--like
weeds. Wherever there's a dunghill of human credulity they swarm.'

Dora looked proudly at her father, as though disdaining to reply,
gentle creature that she was; then she bent again over her work,
and a couple of tears fell on the seam she was sewing.

Aye, it was true enough. In leaving Leicester, after these two years,
she was leaving what to her had been a spiritual birthplace,--tearing
asunder a new and tender growth of the soul.

This was how it had come about.

On her first arrival in Leicester, in a _milieu_, that is to
say, where at the time 'Gavroche,' as M. Renan calls him--the
street philosopher who is no less certain and no more rational than
the street preacher--reigned supreme, where her Secularist father
and his associates, hot-headed and early representatives of a phase
of thought which has since then found much abler, though hardly
less virulent, expression in such a paper, say, as the 'National
Reformer,' were for ever rending and trampling on all the current
religious images and ideas, Dora shrank into herself more and more.
She had always been a Baptist because her mother was. But in her
deep reaction against her father's associates, the chapel which she
frequented did not now satisfy her. She hungered for she knew not
what, certain fastidious artistic instincts awakening the while in
unexpected ways.

Then one Easter Eve, as she came back from an errand into the
outskirts of the town, she passed a little iron church standing in
a very poor neighbourhood, where, as she knew, a 'Puseyite' curate
in charge officiated, and where a good many disturbances which had
excited the populace had taken place. She went in. The curate, a
long, gaunt figure, of a familiar monkish type, was conducting
'vespers' for the benefit of some twenty hearers, mostly women in
black. The little church was half decorated for Easter, though the
altar had still its Lenten bareness. Something in the ordering of
the place, in its colours, its scents, in the voice of the priest,
in the short address he delivered after the service, dwelling in a
tone of intimate emotion, the tone of the pastor to the souls he
guides and knows, on the preparation needful for the Easter
Eucharist, struck home to Dora. Next day she was present at the
Easter festival. Never had religion spoken so touchingly to her
before as through these hymns, these flowers, this incense, this
Eucharistic ceremonial wherein--being the midday celebration--the
congregation were merely hushed spectators of the most pathetic and
impressive act in the religious symbolism of mankind. In the dark
corner where she had hidden herself, Dora felt the throes of some
new birth within her. In six weeks from that time she had been
admitted, after instruction, to the Anglican communion.

Thenceforward another existence began for this child of English
Dissent, in whom, however, some old Celtic leaven seems to have
always kept up a vague unrest, till the way of mystery and poetry
was found.

Daddy--the infidel Daddy--stormed a good deal, and lamented himself
still more, when these facts became known to him. Dora had become a
superstitious, priest-ridden dolt, of no good to him or anyone else
any more. What, indeed, was to become of him? Natural affection
cannot stand against the priest. A daughter cannot love her father
and go to confession. Down with the abomination--_écrasez
l'infame!_

Dora smiled sadly and went her way. Against her sweet silent
tenacity Daddy measured himself in vain. She would be a good
daughter to him, but she would be a good churchwoman first. He
began to perceive in her that germ of detachment from things
earthly and human which all ceremonialism produces, and in a sudden
terror gave way and opposed her no more. Afterwards, in a curious
way, he came even to relish the change in her. The friends it
brought her, the dainty ordering of the little flower-decked
oratory she made for herself in one corner of her bare attic room,
the sweet sobriety and refinement which her new loves and
aspirations and self-denials brought with them into the house,
touched the poetical instincts which were always dormant in the
queer old fellow, and besides flattered some strong and secret
ambitions which he cherished for his daughter. It appeared to him
to have raised her socially, to have made a lady of her--this
joining the Church. Well, the women must have some religious bag or
other to run their heads into, and the Church bag perhaps was the
most seemly.

On the day of their return to Manchester, Daddy, sitting with
crossed arms and legs in a corner of the railway carriage, might
have sat for a fairy-book illustration of Rumpelstiltzchen. His old
peaked hat, which he had himself brought from the Tyrol, fell
forward over his frowning brow, his cloak was caught fiercely about
him, and, as the quickly-passing mill-towns began to give notice of
Manchester as soon as the Derbyshire vales were left behind, his
glittering eyes disclosed an inward fever--a fever of contrivance
and of hate. He was determined to succeed, and equally determined
to make his success Purcell's annoyance.

Dora sat opposite, with her bird-cage on her knee, looking sad
weary. She had left behind, perhaps for ever, the dear friends who
had opened to her the way of holiness, and guided her first steps.
Her eyes filled with tears of gratitude and emotion as she thought
of them.

Two things only were pleasant to remember. One was that the Church
embroidery she had begun in her young zeal at Leicester, using her
odds and ends of time, to supplement the needs of a struggling
church depending entirely on voluntary contributions, was now
probably to become her trade. For she had shown remarkable aptitude
for it; and she carried introductions to a large church-furniture
shop in Manchester which would almost certainly employ her.

The other was the fact that somewhere in Manchester she had a
girl-cousin--Lucy Purcell--who must be about sixteen. Purcell had
married after his migration to Half Street; his wife proved to be
delicate and died in a few years; this little girl was all that was
left to him. Dora had only seen her once or twice in her life. The
enmity between Lomax and Purcell of course kept the families apart,
and, after her mother's early death, Purcell sent his daughter to a
boarding-school and so washed his hands of the trouble of her
bringing up. But in spite of these barriers Dora well remembered a
slim, long-armed schoolgirl, much dressed and becurled, who once in
a by-street of Salford had run after her and, looking round
carefully to see that no one was near, had thrust an eager face
into hers and kissed her suddenly. 'Dora,--is your mother better? I
wish I could come and see you. Oh, it's horrid of people to
quarrel! But I mustn't stay,--some one'll see, and I should just
catch it! Good-bye, Dora!' and so another kiss, very hasty and
frightened, but very welcome to the cheek it touched.

As they neared Manchester, Dora, in her loneliness of soul, thought
very tenderly of Lucy--wondered how she had grown up, whether she
was pretty and many other things. She had certainly been a pretty
child. Of course they must know each other and be friends. Dora
could not let her father's feud come between her and her only
relation. Purcell might keep them apart; but she would show him she
meant no harm; and she would bring her father round--she would and
must.

Two years had gone by. Of Daddy's two objects in leaving Leicester,
one had so far succeeded better than any rational being would have
foreseen.

On the first morning after their arrival he went out, giving Dora
the slip lest she might cramp him inconveniently in his decision;
and came back radiant, having taken a deserted seed-shop in Market
Place, which had a long, irregular addition at the back, formerly a
warehouse, providentially suited, so Daddy declared, to the
purposes of a restaurant. The rent he had promised to give seemed
to Dora a crime, considering their resources. The thought of it,
the terror of the servants he was engaging, the knowledge of the
ridicule and blame with which their old friends regarded her
father's proceedings, these things kept the girl awake night after
night.

But he would hear no remonstrances, putting all she had to say
aside with an arrogant boastfulness, which never failed.

In they went. Dora set her teeth and did her best, keeping as
jealous a watch on the purse-strings as she could, and furnishing
their three rooms above the shop for as few shillings as might be,
while Daddy was painting and decorating, composing _menus_,
and ransacking recipes with the fever of an artist, now writing
letters to the Manchester papers, or lecturing to audiences in the
Mechanics' Institute and the different working men's clubs, and now
plastering the shop-front with grotesque labels, or posing at his
own doorway and buttonholing the passers-by in the Tyrolese
brigand's costume which was his favourite garb.

The thing took. There is a certain mixture of prophet and
mountebank which can be generally counted upon to hit the popular
fancy, and Daddy attained to it. Moreover, the moment was
favourable. After the terrible strain of the cotton-famine and the
horrors of the cholera, Manchester was prosperous again. Trade was
brisk, and the passage of the new Reform Bill had given a fresh
outlet and impulse to the artisan mind which did but answer to the
social and intellectual advance made by the working classes since
'32. The huge town was growing fast, was seething with life,
with ambitions, with all the passions and ingenuities that
belong to gain and money-making and the race for success. It
was pre-eminently a city of young men of all nationalities,
three-fourths constantly engaged in the _chasse_ for money,
according to their degrees--here for shillings, there for
sovereigns, there for thousands. In such a _milieu_ any man
has a chance who offers to deal afresh on new terms with those
daily needs which both goad and fetter the struggling multitude at
every step. Vegetarianism had, in fact, been spreading in
Manchester; one or two prominent workmen's papers were preaching
it; and just before Daddy's advent there had been a great dinner in
a public hall, where the speedy advent of a regenerate and
frugivorous mankind, with length of days in its right hand, and a
captivating abundance of small moneys in its waistcoat pocket, had
been freely and ardently prophesied.

So Daddy for once seized the moment, and succeeded like the veriest
Philistine. On the opening day the restaurant was crowded from
morning till night. Dora, with her two cooks in the suffocating
kitchen behind, had to send out the pair of panting, perspiring
kitchen-boys again and again for fresh supplies; while Daddy, at
his wits' end for waiters, after haranguing a group of customers on
the philosophy of living, amid a tumult of mock cheers and
laughter, would rush in exasperated to Dora, to say that
_never_ again would he trust her niggardly ways--she would be
the ruin of him with her economies.

When at night the doors were shut at last on the noise and the
crowd, and Daddy sat, with his full cash-box open on his knee,
while the solitary gaslight that remained threw a fantastic and
colossal shadow of him over the rough floor of the restaurant, Dora
came up to him dropping with fatigue. He looked at her, his gaunt
face working, and burst into tears.

'Dora, we never had any money before, not when--when--your mother
was alive.'

And she knew that by a strange reaction there had come suddenly
upon him the memory of those ghastly months when she and he through
the long hours of every day had been forced--baffled and
helpless--to watch her mother's torture, and when the sordid
struggle for daily bread was at its worst, robbing death of all its
dignity, and pity of all its power to help.

Do what she would, she could hardly get him to give up the money
and go to bed. He was utterly unstrung, and his triumph for the
moment lay bitter in the mouth.

It was now two years since that opening day. During that time the
Parlour had become a centre after its sort--a scandal to some and a
delight to others. The native youth got his porridge, and apple
pie, and baked potato there; but the place was also largely haunted
by the foreign clerks of Manchester. There was, for instance, a
company of young Frenchmen who lunched there habitually, and in
whose society the delighted Daddy caught echoes from that
unprejudiced life of Paris or Lyons, which had amazed and
enlightened his youth. The place assumed a stamp and character. To
Daddy the development of his own popularity, which was like the
emergence of a new gift, soon became a passion. He deliberately
'ran' his own eccentricities as part of the business. Hence his
dress, his menus, his advertisements, and all the various antics
which half regaled, half scandalised the neighbourhood. Dora
marvelled and winced, and by dint of an habitual tolerance retained
the power of stopping some occasional enormity.

As to finances, they were not making their fortune; far from it;
but to Dora's amazement, considering her own inexperience and her
father's flightiness, they had paid their way and something more.
She was no born woman of business, as any professional accountant
examining her books might have discovered. But she had a passionate
determination to defraud no one, and somehow, through much toil her
conscience did the work. Meanwhile every month it astonished her
freshly that they two should be succeeding! Success was so little
in the tradition of their tattered and variegated lives. Could it
last? At the bottom of her mind lay a constant presentiment of new
change, founded no doubt on her knowledge of her father.

But outwardly there was little to justify it. The craving for drink
seemed to have left him altogether--a not uncommon effect of this
particular change of diet. And his hatred of Purcell, though in
itself it had proved quite unmanageable by all her arts, had done
nobody much harm. In a society dependent on law and police there
are difficulties in the way of a man's dealing primitively with his
enemy. There had been one or two awkward meetings between the two
in the open street; and at the Parlour, among his special
intimates, Daddy had elaborated a Purcell myth of a Pecksniffian
character which his invention perpetually enriched. On the whole,
however, it was in his liking for young Grieve, originally a casual
customer at the restaurant, that Dora saw the chief effects of the
feud. He had taken the lad up eagerly as soon as he had discovered
both his connection with Purcell and his daring rebellious temper;
had backed him up in all his quarrels with his master; had taken
him to the Hall of Science, and introduced him to the speakers
there; and had generally paraded him as a secularist convert,
snatched from the very jaws of the Baptist.

And now!--now that David was in open opposition, attracting
Purcell's customers, taking Purcell's water, Daddy was in a tumult
of delight: wheeling off old books of his own, such as 'The Journal
of Theology' and the 'British Controversialist,' to fill up David's
stall, running down whenever business was slack to see how the lad
was getting on; and meanwhile advertising him with his usual
extravagance among the frequenters of the Parlour.

All through, however, or rather since Miss Purcell had returned
from school, Dora and her little cousin Lucy had been allowed to
meet. Lomax saw his daughter depart on her visits to Half Street,
in silence; Purcell, when he first recognised her, hardly spoke to
her. Dora believed, what was in fact the truth, that each regarded
her as a means of keeping an eye on the other. She conveyed
information from the hostile camp--therefore she was let alone.




CHAPTER V


'Why--Lucy!'

Dora was still bending over her work when a well-known tap at the
door startled her meditations.

Lucy put her head in, and, finding Dora alone, came in with a look
of relief. Settling herself in a chair opposite Dora, she took off
her hat, smoothed the coils of hair to which it had been pinned,
unbuttoned the smart little jacket of pilot cloth, and threw back
the silk handkerchief inside; and all with a feverish haste and
irritation as though everything she touched vexed her.

'What's the matter, Lucy?' said Dora, after a little pause. At the
moment of Lucy's entrance she had been absorbed in a measurement.

'Nothing!' said Lucy quickly. 'Dora, you've got your hair loose!'

Dora put up her hand patiently. She was accustomed to be put to
rights. It was characteristic at once of her dreaminess and her
powers of self-discipline that she was fairly orderly, though she
had great difficulty in being so. Without a constant struggle, she
would have had loose plaits and hanging strings about her always.
Lucy's trimness was a perpetual marvel to her. It was like the
contrast between the soft indeterminate lines of her charming face
and Lucy's small, sharply cut features.

Lucy, still restless, began tormenting the feather in her hat.

'When are you going to finish that, Dora?' she asked, nodding
towards the frame.

'Oh it won't be very long now,' said Dora, putting her head on one
side that she might take a general survey, at once loving and
critical, of her work.

'You oughtn't to sit so close at it,' said Lucy decidedly; 'you'll
spoil your complexion.'

'I've none to spoil.'

'Oh, yes, you have, Dora--that's so silly of you. You aren't sallow
a bit. It's pretty to be pale like that. Lots of people say so--not
quite so pale as you are sometimes, perhaps--but I know why
_that_ is,' said Lucy, with a half-malicious emphasis.

A slight pink rose in Dora's cheeks, but she bent over her frame
and said nothing.

'Does your clergyman _tell_ you to fast in Lent, Dora--who
tells you?'

'The Church!' replied Dora, scandalised and looking up with bright
eyes. 'I wish you understood things a little more, Lucy.'

'I can't,' said Lucy, with a pettish sigh, 'and I don't care
twopence!'

She threw herself back in her rickety chair. Her arm dropped over
the side, and she lay staring at the ceiling. Dora went on with her
work in silence for a minute, and then looked up to see a tear
dropping from Lucy's cheek on to the horsehair covering of the
chair.

'Lucy, what _is_ the matter?--I knew there was something
wrong!'

Lucy sat up and groped energetically for her handkerchief.

'You wouldn't care,' she said, her lips quivering--'nobody cares!'

And, sinking down again, she hid her face and fairly burst out
sobbing. Dora, in alarm, pushed aside her frame and tried to caress
and console her. But Lucy held her off, and in a second or two was
angrily drying her eyes.

'Oh, you can't do any good, Dora--not the least good. It's
father--you know well enough what it is--I shall never get on with
father if I live to be a hundred!'

'Well, you haven't had long to try in,' said Dora, smiling.

'Quite long enough to know,' replied Lucy, drearily. 'I know I shall
have a horrid life--I must. Nobody can help it. Do you know we've
got another shopman, Dora?'

The tone of childish scorn she threw into the question was
inimitable. Dora with difficulty kept from laughing.

'Well, what's he like?' '_Like?_ He's like--like nothing,'
said Lucy, whose vocabulary was not extensive. 'He's fat and
ugly--wears spectacles. Father says he's a treasure--to me--and
then when they're in the shop I hear him going on at him like
anything for being a stupid. And I have to give the creature tea
when father's away, to clear up after him as though he were a
school-child. And father gets in a regular passion if I ask him
about the dance and there's a missionary tea next week, and he's
made me take a table--and he wants me to teach in Sunday
School--and the minister's wife has been talking to him about my
dress--and--and--No, I _can't_ stand it, Dora--I can't and I
won't!'

And Lucy, gulping down fresh tears, sat intensely upright, and
looked frowningly at Dora as though defying her to take the matter
lightly.

Dora was perplexed. Deep in her dove-like soul lay the fiercest
views about Dissent--that rent in the seamless vesture of Christ,
as she had learnt to consider it. Her mother had been a Baptist
till her death, she herself till she was grown up. But now she
had all the zeal--nay, even the rancour--of the convert. It
was one of her inmost griefs that her own change had not come
earlier--before her mother's death. Then perhaps her mother, her
poor--poor--mother, might have changed with her. It went against
her to urge Lucy to make herself a good Baptist.

'It's no wonder Uncle Tom wants you to do what he likes,' she said
slowly. 'But if you don't take the chapel, Lucy--if you want
something different, perhaps--'

'Oh, I don't want any _church_, thank you.' cried Lucy, up in
arms. 'I don't want _anybody_ ordering me about. Why can't I go
my own way a bit, and amuse myself as I please? It is _too_,
too bad!'

Dora did not know what more to say. She went on with her work,
thinking about it all. Suddenly Lucy astonished her by a question
in another voice.

'Have you seen Mr. Grieve's shop, Dora?'

Dora looked up.

'No. Father's been there a good many times. He says it's capital
for a beginning and he's sure to get on fast. There's one or two
very good sort of customers been coming lately. There's the Earl of
Driffield, I think it is--don't you remember, Lucy, it was he gave
that lecture with the magic lantern at the Institute you and I went
to last summer. He's a queer sort of gentleman. Well, he's been
coming several times and giving orders. And there's some of the
college gentlemen; oh, and a lot of others. They all seem to think
he's so clever, father says--'

'I know the Earl of Driffield quite well,' said Lucy loftily, 'He
used to be always coming to our place, and I've tied up his books
for him sometimes. I don't see what's good of being an earl--not to
go about like that. And father says he's got a grand place near
Stalybridge too. Well, if _he's_ gone to Mr. Grieve, father'll
be just mad.' Lucy pursed up her small mouth with energy. Dora
evaded the subject.

'He says when he's quite settled,' she resumed presently, 'we're to
go and have supper with him for a house-warming.'

Lucy looked ready to cry again.

'He couldn't ask me--of course he couldn't,' she said,
indistinctly. 'Dora--Dora!'

'Well? Oh, don't mix up my silks, Lucy; I shall never get them
right again.'

Lucy reluctantly put them down.

'Do you think, Dora, Mr. Grieve cares anything at all about me?'
she said at last, hurrying out the words, and looking Dora in the
face, very red and bold.

Dora laughed outright.

'I knew you were going to ask that!' she said. 'Perhaps I've been
asking myself!'

Lucy said nothing, but the tears dropped again down her cheeks and
on to her small quivering hands--all the woman awake in her.

Dora pushed her frame away, and put her arm round her cousin, quite
at a loss what to say for the best.

Another woman would have told Lucy plumply that she was a little
fool; that in the first place young Grieve had never shown any
signs of making love to her at all; and that, in the second, if he
had, her father would never let her marry him without a struggle
which nobody could suppose Lucy capable of waging with a man like
Purcell. It was all a silly fancy, the whim of a green girl, which
would make her miserable for nothing. Mrs. Alderman Head, for
instance, Dora's chaperon for the Institute dance, the sensible,
sharp-tongued wife of a wholesale stationer in Market Street, would
certainly have taken this view of the matter, and communicated it
to Lucy with no more demur than if you had asked her, say, for her
opinion on the proper season for bottling gooseberries. But Dora,
whose inmost being was one tremulous surge of feeling and emotion,
could not approach any matter of love and marriage without a
thrill, without a sense of tragedy almost. Besides, like Lucy, she
was very young still--just twenty--and youth answers to youth.

'You know Uncle Tom wouldn't like it a bit, Lucy,' she began in her
perplexity.

'I don't care!' cried Lucy, passionately. 'Girls can't marry to
please their fathers. I should have to wait, I suppose. I would get
my own way somehow. But what's the good of talking about it, Dora?
I'm sick of thinking about it--sick of everything. He'll marry
somebody else--I know he will--and I shall break my heart, or--'

'Marry somebody else, too,' suggested Dora slyly.

Lucy drew herself angrily away, and had to be soothed into
forgiving her cousin. The child had, in fact, thought and worried
herself by now into such a sincere belief in her own passion, that
there was nothing for it but to take it seriously. Dora yielded
herself to Lucy's tears and her own tenderness. She sat pondering.

Then, suddenly, she said something very different from what Lucy
expected her to say.

'Oh! if I could get him to go and talk to Father Russell! He's so
wonderful with young men.'

Her hand dropped on to her knee; she looked away from Lucy out of
the window, her sweet face one longing.

Lucy was startled, and somewhat annoyed. In her disgust with her
father and her anxiety to attract David's notice, she had so
entirely forgotten his religious delinquencies, that it seemed
fussy and intrusive on Dora's part to make so much of them. She
instinctively resented, too, what sounded to her like a tone of
proprietary interest. It was not Dora that was his friend--it was
she!

'I don't see what you have to do with his opinions, Dora,' she said
stiffly; 'he isn't rude to you now as he used to be. Young men are
always wild a bit at first.'

And she tossed her head with all the worldly wisdom of seventeen.

Dora sighed and was silent. She fell to her work again, while Lucy
wandered restlessly about the room. Presently the child stopped
short.

'Oh! look here, Dora--'

'Yes.'

'Do come round with me and look at some spring patterns I've got.
You might just as well. I know you've been slaving your eyes out,
and it's a nice day.'

Dora hesitated, but finally consented. She had been at work for
many hours in hot rooms, and meant to work a good many more yet
before night. A break would revive her, and there was ample time
before the three o'clock dinner which she and her father took
together after the midday rush of the restaurant was over. So she
put on her things.

On their way Dora looked into the kitchen. Everything was in full
work. A stout, red-faced woman was distributing and superintending.
On the long charcoal stove which Daddy under old Barbier's advice
had just put up, on the hot plates near, and the glowing range in
the background, innumerable pans were simmering and steaming. Here
was a table covered with stewed fruits; there another laden with
round vegetable pies just out of the oven--while a heap of tomatoes
on a third lent their scarlet to the busy picture. Some rays of
wintry sun had slipped in through the high windows, and were
contending with the steam of the pies and the smoke from the
cooking. And in front of all on an upturned box sat a pair of
Lancashire lasses, peeling apples at lightning speed, yet not so
fast but they could laugh and chat the while, their bright eyes
wandering perpetually through the open serving hatches which ran
along one side of the room, to the restaurant stretching beyond,
with its rows of well-filled tables and its passing waitresses in
their white caps and aprons.

Dora slipped in among them in her soft deprecating way, smiling at
this one and that till she came to the stout cook. There she
stopped and asked something. Lucy, standing at the door, saw the
huge woman draw a corner of her apron across her eyes.

'What did you want, Dora?' she inquired as her cousin rejoined her.

'It's her poor boy. He's in the Infirmary and very bad. I'm sure
they think he's dying. I wanted to send her there this morning and
do her work, but she wouldn't go. There's no more news--but we
mustn't be long.'

She walked on, evidently thinking with a tender absorption of the
mother and son, while Lucy was conscious of her usual impatience
with all this endless concern for unknown people, which stood so
much in the way of Dora's giving her full mind to her cousin's
affairs.

Yet, as she knew well, Sarah, the stout cook, had been the chief
prop of the Parlour ever since it opened. No other servant had
stayed long with Daddy. He was too fantastic and exacting a master.
She had stayed--for Dora's sake--and, from bearing with him, had
learnt to manage him. When she came she brought with her a sickly,
overgrown lad, the only son of her widowhood, to act as
kitchen-boy. He did his poor best for a while, his mother in truth
getting through most of his work as well as her own, while Dora,
who had the weakness for doctoring inherent in all good, women,
stuffed him with cod-liver oil and 'strengthening mixtures.' Then
symptoms of acute hip-disease showed themselves, and the lad was
admitted to the big Infirmary in Piccadilly. There he had lain for
some six or eight weeks now, toiling no more, fretting no more,
living on his mother's and Dora's visits, and quietly loosening one
life-tendril after another. During all this time Dora had thought
of him, prayed for him, taught him--the wasted, piteous creature.

When they arrived at Half Street, they let themselves in by the
side-door, and Lucy hurried her cousin into the parlour that there
might be no meeting with her father, with whom she was on decidedly
uncomfortable terms.

The table in the parlour was strewn with patterns from several
London shops. To send for them, examine them, and imagine what they
would look like when made up was now Lucy's chief occupation. To
which might be added a little strumming on the piano, a little
visiting--not much, for she hated most of her father's friends, and
was at present too closely taken up with self-pity and speculations
as to what David Grieve might be doing to make new ones--and a
great deal of ordering about of Mary Ann.

Dora sat down, and Lucy pounced on one pattern after another,
folding them between her fingers and explaining eagerly how this or
that would look if it were cut so, or trimmed so. 'Oh, Dora,
look--this pink gingham with white spots! Don't you think it's a
love? And, you know, pink always suits me, except when it's a
blue-pink. But you don't call that a blue-pink, do you? And yet it
isn't salmon, certainly--it's something between. It _ought_ to
suit me, but I declare--' and suddenly, to Dora's dismay, the
child flung down the patterns she held with a passionate
vehemence--'I declare nothing seems to suit me now! Dora!'--in
a tone of despair--'_Dora!_ don't you think I'm going off? My
complexion's all dull, and--and--why I might be thirty!' and
running over to the glass, draped in green cut-paper, which adorned
the mantelpiece, Lucy stood before it examining herself in an
agony. And, indeed, there was a change. A touch of some withering
blight seemed to have swept across the whole dainty face, and taken
the dewy freshness from the eyes. There was fever in it--the fever
of fret and mutiny and of a starved self-love.

Dora looked at her cousin with less patience than usual--perhaps
because of the inevitable contrast between Lucy's posings and the
true heartaches of the world.

'Lucy, what nonsense! You're just a bit worried, and you make such
a lot of it. Why can't you be patient?'

'Because I can't!' said Lucy, sombrely, dropping into a chair, and
letting her arm fall over the back. 'It's all very well, Dora. You
aren't in love with a man whom you never see, and whom your father
has a spite on! And you won't do anything to help me--you won't
move a finger. And, of _course,_ you might!'

'What could I do, Lucy?' cried Dora, exasperated. 'I can't go and
ask young Grieve to marry you. I do wish you'd try and put him out
of your head, that I do. You're too young, and he's got his
business to think about. And while Uncle Tom's like this, I can't
be always putting myself forward to help you meet him. It would be
just the way to make him think something bad--to make him
suspect--'

'Well, and why shouldn't he suspect?' said Lucy, obstinately, her
little mouth set and hard; 'it's all rubbish about girls leaving it
all to the men. If a girl doesn't show she cares about a man, how's
he to know--and when she don't meet him--and when her father keeps
her shut up--_shameful!'_

She flung the word out through her small, shut teeth, the brows
meeting over her flashing eyes.

'Oh! it's shameful, is it--eh, Miss Purcell?' said a harsh,
mimicking voice coming from the dark passage leading into the shop.

Lucy sprang up in terror. There on the steps stood her father,
bigger, blacker, more formidable than he had ever been in the eyes
of the two startled girls. All unknown to them, the two doors which
parted them from the shop had been slightly ajar, and Purcell,
catching their voices as they came in, and already on the watch for
his daughter, had maintained a treacherous quiet behind them. Now
he was entirely in his element. He surveyed them both with a dark,
contemptuous triumph. What fools women were to be sure!

As he descended the two steps into the parlour the floor shook
under his heavy tread. Dora had instinctively thrown her arm round
Lucy, who had begun to cry hysterically. She herself was very pale,
but after the first start she looked her uncle in the face.

'Is it you that's been teaching Lucy these _beautiful_
sentiments?' said Purcell, with ironical emphasis, stopping a yard
from them and pointing at Dora, 'and do you get 'em from St.
Damian's?'

Dora threw up her head, and flushed. 'I get nothing from St.
Damian's that I'm ashamed of,' she said in a proud voice, 'and I've
done nothing with Lucy that I'm ashamed of.'

'No, I suppose not,' said Purcell dryly; 'the devil don't deal much
in shame. It's a losing article.'

Then he looked at Lucy, and his expression suddenly changed. The
flame beneath leapt to sight. He caught her arm, dragged her out of
Dora's hold, and shook her as one might shake a kitten.

'Who were you talking of just now?' he said to her, holding her by
both shoulders, his eyes blazing down upon her.

Lucy was much too frightened to speak. She stood staring back at
him, her breast heaving violently.

Dora came forward in indignation.

'You'll get nothing out of her if you treat her like that,' she
said, with spirit, 'nor out of me either.'

Purcell recovered himself with difficulty. He let Lucy go, and
walking up to the mantelpiece stood there, leaning his arm upon it,
and looking at the girls from under his hand.

'What do I want to get out of you?' he said, with scorn. 'As if I
didn't know already everything that's in your silly minds! I
guessed already, and now that you have been so obliging as to let
your secrets out under my very nose--I _know!_ That chit
there'--he pointed to Lucy--all his gestures had a certain
theatrical force and exaggeration, springing, perhaps, from his
habit of lay preaching--'imagines she going to marry the young
infidel I gave the sack to a while ago. Now don't she? Are you
going to say no to that?'

His loud challenge pushed Dora to extremities, and it was all left
to her. Lucy was sobbing on the sofa.

'I don't know what she imagines,' said Dora, slowly, seeking in
vain for words; the whole situation was so ridiculous. 'Are you
going to prevent her falling in love with the man she chooses?'

'_Certainly!_' said Purcell, with mocking emphasis.
'Certainly--since she chooses wrong. The only concern of the godly
in these matters is to see that their children are not yoked with
unbelievers. Whenever I see that young reprobate in the street now,
I smell _the pit_. And it'll not be long before the Lord
tumbles him into it; there's an end comes to such devil's fry as
that. Oh, they may prosper and thrive, they may revile the children
of the Lord, they may lift up the hoof against the poor Christian,
but the time comes--_the time comes._'

His solemnity, at once unctuous and full of vicious meaning, only
irritated Dora. But Lucy raised herself from the sofa, and looked
suddenly round at her father. Her eyes were streaming, her hair in
disorder, but there was a suspicion and intelligence in her look
which seemed to give her back self-control. She watched eagerly for
what her father might say or do next.

As soon as he saw her sitting up he walked over to her and took her
again by the shoulder.

'Now look here,' he said to her, holding her tight, 'let's finish
with this. That young man's the Lord's enemy--he's my enemy--and
I'll teach him a lesson before I've done. But that's neither here
nor there. You understand this. If you ever walk out of this door
with him, you'll not walk back into it, with him or without him.
I'd have done with you, and _my money_'ld have done with you.
But there'--and Purcell gave a little scornful laugh, and let her
go with a push--'_he_ don't care twopence about you--I'll say
that for him.'

Lucy flushed fiercely, and getting up began mechanically to smooth
her hair before the glass, with wild tremulous movements, will and
defiance settling on her lip, as she looked at herself and at the
reflection of her father.

'And as for you, Miss Lomax,' said Purcell deliberately, standing
opposite Dora, 'you've been aiding and abetting somehow--I don't
care how. I don't complain. There was nothing better to be expected
of a girl with your parentage and bringing up, and a Puseyite into
the bargain. But I warn you you'll go meddling here once too often
before you've done. If you'll take my advice you'll let other
people's business alone, and _mind your own_. Them that have
got Adrian Lomax on their hands needn't go poaching on their
neighbours for something to do.'

He spoke with a slow, vindictive emphasis, and Dora shrank and
quivered as though he had struck her. Then by a great effort--the
effort of one who had not gone through a close and tender training
of the soul for nothing--she put from her both her anger and her
fear.

'You're cruel to father,' she said, her voice fluttering; 'you might
be thinking sometimes how straight he's kept since he took the
Parlour. And I don't believe young Grieve means any harm to you or
anybody--and I'm sure I don't.'

A sob rose in her throat. Anybody less crassly armoured in
self-love than Purcell must have been touched. As for him, he
turned on his heel.

'I'll protect myself, thank you,' he said dryly;' and I'll judge
for myself. You can do as you like, and Lucy too, so long as she
takes the consequences. Do you understand, Lucy?'

'Yes,' said Lucy, facing round upon him, all tremulous passion and
rebellion, but she could not meet his fixed, tyrannical eye. Her
own wavered and sank. Purcell enjoyed the spectacle of her for a
second or two, smiled, and went.

As soon as he was gone, Lucy dragged her cousin to the stairs, and
never let her go till Dora was safe in her room and the door
bolted.

Dora implored to be released. How could she stay in her uncle's
house after such a scene? and she must get home quickly anyway, as
Lucy knew.

Lucy took no notice at all of what she was saying.

'Look here.' she said, breaking into the middle of Dora's appeal,
and speaking in an excited whisper--'he's going to do him a
mischief. I'm certain he is. That's how he looks when he's going to
pay some one out. Now, what's he going to do? I'll know
somehow--trust me!'

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her arms behind her,
supporting her, her little feet beating each other restlessly--a
hot, vindictive anger speaking from every feature, every movement.
The pretty chit of seventeen seemed to have disappeared. Here was
every promise of a wilful and obstinate woman, with more of her
father's stuff in her than anyone could have yet surmised.

A pang rose in Dora. She rose impulsively, and throwing herself
down by Lucy, drew the ruffled, palpitating creature into her arms.

'Oh, Lucy, isn't it only because you're angry and vexed, and
because you want to fight Uncle Purcell? Oh, don't go on just for
that! When we're--we're Christians, we mustn't want our own way--we
must give it up--_we must give it up._' Her voice sank in a
burst of tears, and she drooped her head on Lucy's, kissing her
cousin's brown hair.

Lucy extricated herself with a movement of impatience.

'When one _loves_ anybody,' she said, sitting very upright and
twisting her fingers together, 'one must stick to him!'

Dora started at the word 'love.' It seemed to her a profanation.
She dried her eyes, and got up to go without another word.

'Well, Dora,' said Lucy, frowning, 'and so you'll do nothing for
me--_nothing_?'

Dora stood a moment in a troubled silence. Then she turned, and
took gentle hold of her cousin.

'If I get a chance, Lucy, I'll try and find out whether he's
thinking of marrying at all. And if he isn't--and I'm sure he
isn't--will you give it all up, and try and live comfortable with
Uncle Purcell, and think of something else?'

Her eyes had a tender, nay a passionate entreaty in them.

'No!' said Lucy with energy; 'but I'll very likely drown myself in
the river some fine night.'

Dora still held her, standing above her, and looking down at her,
trying hard to read her true mind. Lucy bore it defiantly for a
minute; then suddenly two large tears rose. A quiver passed over
Dora's face; she kissed her cousin quickly, and went towards the
door.

'And I'll find out what father's going to do, or my name isn't what
it is!' said the girl behind her, in a shrill, shaking voice, as
she closed the door.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dora ran back to Market Place, filled with a presentiment that she
was late, though the hand of the Cathedral clock was still far from
three.

At the side door stood a woman with a shawl over her head, looking
distractedly up the street.

'Oh, Miss Dora! Miss Dora! they've sent. He's gooin--gooin quick.
An' he keeps wearyin' for "mither an' Miss Dora."'

The powerful scarred face had the tremulous helplessness of grief.
Dora took her by the arm.

'Let us run, Sarah--at once. Oh, never mind the work!'

The two women hurried through the crowded Saturday streets. But
halfway up Market Street Sarah stopped short, looking round her in
an agony.

'Theer's his feyther, Miss Dora. Oh, he wor a bad 'un to me, but he
had allus a soft spot for t' lad. I'd be reet glad to send worrud.
He wor theer in the ward, they tell't me, last week.'

Three years before she had separated from her husband, a sawyer, by
mutual consent. He was younger than she, and he had been grossly
unfaithful to her; she came of a good country stock and her
daleswoman's self-respect could put up with him no longer. But she
had once been passionately in love with him, and, as she said, he
had been on the whole kind to the boy.

'Where is he?' said Dora.

'At Mr. Whitelaw's yard, Edgell Street, Great Ancoats.'

They had just entered the broad Infirmary Square. Dora, looking
round her in perplexity, suddenly saw coming towards them the tall
figure of David Grieve. The leap of the heart of which she was
conscious through all her preoccupation startled her. But she went
up to him without a moment's hesitation. David, swinging along as
though Manchester belonged to him, found himself arrested and,
looking down, saw Dora's pale and agitated face.

'Mr. Grieve, will you help me?'

She drew him to the side and explained as quickly as she could.
Sarah stood by, and threw in directions.

'He'll be to be found at Mr. Whitelaw's yard--Edgell Street--an'
whoever goos mun just say to him, "Sarah says to tha--Wilt tha
coom, or wilt tha not coom?--t' lad's deein."'

She threw out the words with a sombre simplicity and force, then,
her whole frame quivering with impatience, she crossed the road to
the Infirmary without waiting for Dora.

'Can you send some one?' said Dora.

'I will go myself at once. I'll find the man if he's there, and
bring him. You leave it to me.'

He turned without more ado, broke into a run, and disappeared round
the corner of Oldham Street.

Dora crossed to the Infirmary, her mind strangely divided for a
moment between the solemn image of what was coming, and the
vibrating memory of something just past.

But, once in the great ward, pity and death possessed her wholly.
He knew them, the poor lad--made, as it seemed, two tremulous
movements,--once, when his mother's uncontrollable crying passed
into his failing ear--once when Dora's kiss was laid upon his
hollow temple. Then again he lay unconscious, drawing gently to the
end.

Dora knelt beside him praying, his mother on the other side, and
the time passed. Then there were sounds about the bed, and looking
up, Dora saw two figures approaching. In front was a middle-aged
man, with a stupid, drink-stained face. He came awkwardly and
unsteadily up to the bedside, almost stumbling over his wife, and
laying his hand on the back of a chair to support himself. He
brought with him an overpowering smell of beer, and Dora thought as
she looked at him that he had only a very vague idea of what was
going on. His wife took no notice of him whatever.

Behind at some little distance, his hat in his hand, stood David
Grieve. Why did he stay? Dora could not get him out of her mind.
Even in her praying she still saw the dark, handsome head and lithe
figure thrown out against the whiteness of the hospital walls.

There was a slight movement in the bed, and the nurse, standing
beside the boy, looked up and made a quick sign to the mother. What
she and Dora saw was only a gesture as of one settling for sleep.
Without struggle and without fear, the little lad who had never
lived enough to know the cost of dying, went the way of all flesh.

'They die so easily, this sort,' said the nurse to Dora, as she
tenderly closed the patient eyes; 'it's like a plant that's never
rooted.'

       *       *       *       *       *

A few minutes later Dora was blindly descending the long stairs.
The mother was still beside her dead, making arrangements for the
burial. The father, sobered and conscious, had already slouched
away. But at the foot of the stairs Dora, looking round, saw that
David was just behind her.

He came out with her.

'He was drunk when I found him,' he explained, 'he had been drinking
in the dinner hour. I had him by the arm all the way, and thought I
had best bring him straight in. And then--I had never seen anyone
die,' he said simply, a curious light in his black eyes.

Dora, still choked with tears, could not speak. With shaking hands
she searched for a bit of veil she had with her to hide her eyes
and cheeks. But she could not find it.

'Don't go down Market Street,' he said, after a shy look at her.
'Come this way, there isn't such a crowd.'

And turning down Mosley Street, all the way he guided her through
some side streets where there were fewer people to stare. Such
forethought, such gentleness in him were quite new to her. She
gradually recovered herself, feeling all the while this young
sympathetic presence at her side--dreading lest it should desert
her.

He meanwhile was still under the tremor and awe of the new
experience. So this was dying! He remembered 'Lias holding
Margaret's hand. _'Deein's long--but it's varra, varra peaceful.
'_ Not always, surely! There must be vigorous, tenacious souls
that went out with tempests and agonies; and he was conscious of a
pang of fear, feeling himself so young and strong.

Presently he led her into St. Ann's Square, and then they shook
hands. He hurried off to his business, and she remained standing a
moment on the pavement outside the church which makes one side of
the square. An impulse seized her--she turned and went into the
church instead of going home.

There, in one of the old oak pews where the little tarnished plates
still set forth the names of their eighteenth-century owners, she
fell on her knees and wrestled with herself and God.

She was very simple, very ignorant, but religion, as religion can,
had dignified and refined all the elements of character. She said
to herself in an agony--that he _must_ love her--that she had
loved him in truth all along. And then a great remorse came upon
her--the spiritual glory she had just passed through closed round
her again. What! she could see the heaven opened--the Good Shepherd
stoop to take his own--and then come away to feel nothing but this
selfish, passionate craving? Oh, she was ashamed, she loathed
herself!

_Lucy!_--Lucy had no claim! should have no claim! He did not
care for her.

Then again the pale dead face would flash upon her with its
submissive look,--so much gratitude for so little, and such a
tender ease in dying! And she possessed by all these bad and
jealous feelings, these angry desires, fresh from such a presence!

_'Oh! Lamb of God--Lamb of God--that takest away the sins of the
world!'_




CHAPTER VI


And David, meanwhile, was thinking of nothing in the world but the
fortunes of a little shop, about twelve feet square, and of the
stall outside that shop. The situation--for a hero--is certainly
one of the flattest conceivable. Nevertheless it has to be faced.
If, however, one were to say that he had marked none of Lucy
Purcell's advances, that would be to deny him eyes as well as
susceptibilities. He had, indeed, said to himself in a lordly way
that Lucy Purcell was a regular little flirt, and was beginning
those ways early. But a certain rough young modesty, joined with a
sense of humour at his own expense, prevented him from making any
more of it, and he was no sooner in his own den watching for
customers than Lucy vanished from his mind altogether. He thought
much more of Purcell himself, with much vengeful chuckling and
speculation.

As for Dora, he had certainly begun to regard her as a friend. She
had sense and experience, in spite of her Ritualism, whereas Lucy
in his eyes had neither. So that to run into the Parlour, after
each new day was over, and discuss with Daddy and her the ups and
downs, the fresh chances and prospects of his infant business, was
pleasant enough. Daddy and he met on the common ground of wishing
to make the world uncomfortable for Purcell; while Dora supplied
the admiring uncritical wonder, in which, like a warm environment,
an eager temperament expands, and feels itself under the stimulus
more inventive and more capable than before.

But marrying! The lad's careless good-humoured laugh under Ancrum's
probings was evidence enough of how the land lay. Probably at the
bottom of him, if he had examined, there lay the instinctive
assumption that Dora was one of the girls who are not likely to
marry. Men want them for sisters, daughters, friends--and then go
and fall in love with some minx that has a way with her.

Besides, who could be bothered with 'gells,' when there was a stall to
be set out and a career to be made? With that stall, indeed, David was
truly in love. How he fingered and meddled with it!--setting out the
cheap reprints it contained so as to show their frontispieces, and
strewing among them, in an artful disorder, a few rare local pamphlets,
on which he kept a careful watch, either from the door or from inside.
Behind these, again, within the glass, was a precious shelf, containing
in the middle of it about a dozen volumes of a kind dear to a
collector's eye--thin volumes in shabby boards, then just beginning to
be sought after--the first editions of nineteenth-century poets. For
months past David had been hoarding up a few in a corner of his little
lodging, and on his opening day they decoyed him in at least five
inquiring souls, all of whom stayed to talk a bit. There was a 'Queen
Mab;' and a 'Lyrical Ballads;' an 'Endymion;' a few Landors thrown in,
and a 'Bride of Abydos'--this last not of much account, for its author
had the indiscretion, from the collector's point of view, to be famous
from the beginning, and so to flood the world with large editions.

Round and about these dainty morsels were built in with
solid rubbish, with Daddy's 'Journals of Theology,' 'British
Controversialist,' and the rest. In one top corner lurked a few
battered and cut-down Elzevirs, of no value save to the sentiment
of the window, while a good many spaces were filled up with some
new and attractive editions of standard books just out of
copyright, contributed, these last, by the enterprising traveller
of a popular firm, from whom David had them on commission.

Inside, the shop was of the roughest: a plank or two on a couple of
trestles served for a counter, and two deal shelves, put up by
David, ran along the wall behind. The counter held a few French
scientific books, very fresh, and 'in the movement,' the result of
certain inquiries put by old Barbier to a school friend of his, now
professor at the Sorbonne--meant to catch the 'college people;'
while on the other side lay some local histories of neighbouring
towns and districts, a sort of commodity always in demand in a
great expanding city, where new men have risen rapidly and families
are in the making. For these local books the lad had developed an
astonishing _flair_. He had the geographical and also the
social instincts which the pursuit of them demands.

On his first day David netted in all a profit of seventeen
shillings and twopence, and at night he curled himself up on a
mattress in the little back kitchen, with an old rug for covering
and a bit of fire, and slept the sleep of liberty.

In a few days more several of the old-established book-buyers of
the town, a more numerous body, perhaps, in Manchester than in
other northern centres, had found him out; a certain portly and
wealthy lady, connected with one of the old calico-printing
families, a person of character, who made a hobby of Lancashire
Nonconformity, had walked into the shop, and given the boyish owner
of it much good advice and a few orders; the Earl of Driffield had
looked in, and, caught by the lures of the stall, customers had
come from the most unlikely quarters, desiring the most
heterogeneous wares. The handsome, intelligent young fellow, with
his out-of-the-way strains of knowledge, with his frank
self-conceit and his equally frank ignorance, caught the fancy of
those who stayed to talk with him. A certain number of persons had
been already taken with him in Purcell's shop, and were now vastly
amused by the lad's daring and the ambitious range of his first
stock.

As for Lord Driffield, on the first occasion when he had dropped in
he had sat for an hour at least, talking and smoking cigarettes
across David's primitive counter.

This remarkable person, of whom Lucy thought so little, was well
known, and had been well known, for a good many years, to the
booksellers of Manchester and Liverpool. As soon as the autumn
shooting season began, Purcell, for instance, remembered Lord
Driffield, and began to put certain books aside for him. He
possessed one of the famous libraries of England, and he not only
owned but read. Scholars all over Europe took toll both of his
books and his brains. He lived to collect and to be consulted.
There was almost nothing he did not know, except how to make a book
for himself. He was so learned that he had, so to speak, worked
through to an extreme modesty. His friends, however, found nothing
in life so misleading as Lord Driffield's diffidence.

At the same time Providence had laid upon him a vast family estate,
and an aristocratic wife, married in his extreme youth to please
his father. Lady Driffield had the ideas of her caste, and when
they came to their great house near Stalybridge, in the autumn, she
insisted on a succession of proper guests, who would shoot the
grouse in a proper manner, and amuse her in the evenings. For, as
she had no children, life was often monotonous, and when she was
bored she had a stately way of making herself disagreeable to Lord
Driffield. He therefore did his best to content her. He received
her guests, dined with them in the evenings, and despatched them to
the moors in the morning. But between those two functions he was
his own master; and on the sloppy November afternoons he might
as often as not be seen trailing about Manchester or Liverpool,
carrying his slouching shoulders and fair spectacled face
into every bookseller's shop, good, bad, and indifferent, or
giving lectures, mostly of a geographical kind, at popular
institutions--an occupation in which he was not particularly
effective.

David had served him, once or twice, in Half Street, and had sent a
special notice of his start and his intentions to Benet's Park, the
Driffields' 'place.' Lord Driffield's first visit left him
quivering with excitement, for the earl had a way of behaving as
though everybody else were not only his social, but his
intellectual equal--even a lad of twenty, with his business to
learn. He would sit pleasantly smoking and asking questions--a
benevolent, shabby person, eager to be informed. Then, when David
had fallen into the trap, and was holding forth--proud, it might
be, of certain bits of knowledge which no one else in Manchester
possessed--Lord Driffield would throw in a gentle comment, and then
another and another, till the trickle became a stream, and the
young man would fall blankly listening, his mouth opening wider and
wider. When it was over, and the earl, with his draggled umbrella,
his disappeared, David sat, crouched on his wooden stool, consumed
with hot ambition and wonder. How could a man know so much--and an
earl, who didn't want it? For a few hours, at any rate, his
self-conceit was dashed. He realised dimly what it might be to know
as the scholar knows. And that night, when he had shut the
shutters, he vowed to himself, as he gathered his books about him,
that five hours was enough sleep for a strong man; that
_learn_ he must and should, and that some day or other he
would hold his own, even with Lord Driffield.

How he loved his evenings--the paraffin lamp glaring beside him,
the crackling of the coal in his own fire, the book on his knee!
Ancrum had kept his promise, and was helping him with his Greek;
but his teaching hardly kept pace with the boy's enthusiasm
and capacity. The _voracity_ with which he worked at his
Thucydides and Homer left the lame minister staring and sighing.
The sound of the lines, the roll of the _oi_'s and _ou_'s
was in David's ear all day, and to learn a dozen irregular verbs in
the interval between two customers was like the gulping of a
dainty.

Meanwhile, as he collected his English poets he read them. And
here was a whole new world. For in his occupation with the
Encyclopaedists he had cared little for poetry. The reaction
against his Methodist fit had lasted long, had developed a certain
contempt for sentiment, a certain love for all sharp, dry,
calculable things, and for the tone of _irony_ in particular.
But in such a nature such a phase was sure to pass, and it was
passing. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson--now he was making
acquaintance piecemeal with them all, as the precious volumes
turned up, which he was soon able to place with a precision which
tore them too soon out of his hands. The Voltairean temper in him
was melting, was passing into something warmer, subtler, and more
restless.

But he was not conscious of it. He was as secular, as cocksure, as
irritating as ever, when Ancrum probed him on the subject of the
Hall of Science or the various Secularist publications which he
supported.

'Do you call yourself an atheist now, David?' said Ancrum one day,
in that cheerful, half-ironic tone which the young bookseller
resented.

'I don't call myself anything,' said David, stoutly. 'I'm all for
this world; we can't know anything about another. At least, that's
my opinion, sir--no offence to you.'

'Oh, dear me, no offence! There have been a _few_
philosophers, you know, Davy, since Voltaire. There's a person
called Kant; I don't know anything about him, but they tell me he
made out a very pretty case, on the practical side anyway, for a
God and immortality. And in England, too, there have been two or
three persons of consequence, you remember, like Coleridge and John
Henry Newman, who have thought it worth while to believe a little.
But you don't care about that?'

The lad stood silent a moment, his colour rising, his fine lip
curling. Then he burst out:

'What's the good of thinking about things by the wrong end? There's
such a lot to read!'

And with a great stretch of all his young frame he fell back on the
catalogue he was looking through, while Ancrum went on turning over
a copy of 'The Reasoner,' a vigorous Secularist paper of the day,
which he had found on the counter, and which had suggested his
question.

_Knowledge--success:_ it was for these that David burned, and
he laid rapid hands upon them. He had a splendid physique, and at
this moment of his youth he strained it to the utmost. He grudged
the time for sleep and meals, and on Saturday afternoons, the
early-closing day of Manchester, he would go out to country sales,
or lay plans for seeing the few considerable libraries--Lord
Driffield's among them--which the neighbouring districts possessed.
On Sunday he read from morning till night, and once or twice his
assistant John, hammering outside for admittance in the winter
dark, wakened the master of the shop from the rickety chair where
he had fallen asleep over his books in the small hours of the
morning.

His assistant! It may well be asked what a youth of twenty, setting
up on thirty pounds capital in a small shop, wanted with an
assistant before he had any business to speak of. The story is a
curious one.

Some time in the previous summer Daddy had opened a smoking and
debating room at the Parlour, by way of keeping his _clientele_
together and giving a special character to the place. He had
merely boarded off a bit of the original seed warehouse, put in
some rough tables and chairs, and a few newspapers. But by a
conjunction of circumstances the place had taken a Secularist
character, and the weekly debates which Daddy inaugurated were,
for a time at least, well attended. Secularism, like all other
forms of mental energy, had lately been active in Manchester;
there had been public discussions between Mr. Holyoake and
Mr. Bradlaugh as to whether Secularism were necessarily atheistic
or no. Some of the old newspapers of the movement, dating from
Chartist days, had recently taken a new lease of life; and
combined with the protest against theology was a good deal of
co-operative and republican enthusiasm. Lomax, who had been a
Secularist and an Owenite for twenty years, and who was a
republican to boot, threw himself into the _melee_, and the
Parlour debates during the whole of the autumn and winter of '69-70
were full of life, and brought out a good many young speakers,
David Grieve among them. Indeed, David was for a time the leader of
the place, so ready was his gift, so confident and effective his
personality.

On one occasion in October he was holding forth on 'Science--the
true Providence of Life.' The place was crowded. A well-known
Independent had been got hold of to answer the young Voltairean,
and David was already excited, for his audience was plying him with
interruptions, and taxing to the utmost a natural debating power.

In the midst of it a printer's devil from the restaurant outside, a
stout, stupid-looking lad, found his way in, and stood at the door
listening. The fine classical head of the speaker, the beautiful
voice, the gestures so free and flowing, the fire and fervour of
the whole performance--these things left him gaping.

'Who's that?' he ventured to inquire of a man near him, a calico
salesman, well known in the Salford Conservative Association, who
had come to support the Independent speaker.

The man laughed.

'That's young Grieve, assistant to old Purcell, Half Street. He
talks a d--d lot of stuff--blasphemous stuff, too; but if
somebody'd take and teach him and send him into Parliament, some
day he'd make 'em skip, I warrant yo. I never heard onybody frame
better for public speaking, and I've heard a lot.'

The printer's devil stayed and stared through the debate. Then,
afterwards, he began to haunt the paths of this young Satan, crept
up to him in the news-room, skulked about him in the restaurant. At
last David took notice of him, and they made friends.

'Have you got anybody belonging to you?' he asked him shortly.

'No,' said the boy. 'Father died last spring; mother was took with
pleurisy in November--'

But the words stuck in his throat, and he coughed over them.

'All right,' said David; 'come for a walk Sunday afternoon?'

So a pretty constant companionship sprang up between them. John
Dalby came of a decent stock, and was still, as it were, under the
painful and stupefying surprise of those bereavements which had
left him an orphan. His blue eyes looked bewilderment at the world;
he was bullied by the compositors he worked under. Sometimes he had
violent fits of animal spirits, but in general he was dull and
silent, and no one could have guessed that he often read poetry and
cried himself to sleep in the garret where he lodged. Physically he
was a great, overgrown creature, not, in truth, much younger than
David. But while David was already the man, John was altogether in
the tadpole-stage--a being of large, ungainly frame, at war with
his own hands and feet, his small eyes lost in his pink, spreading
cheeks, his speech shy and scanty. Yet, such as he was, David found
a use for him. Temperaments of the fermenting, expansive sort want
a listener at the moment of early maturity, and almost any
two-legged thing with the listener's gift will do. David worked off
much steam on the Saturday or Sunday afternoons, when the two would
push out into the country, walking some twenty miles or so for the
sheer joy of movement. While the one talked and declaimed,
ploughing his violent way through the soil of his young thought,
the other, fat and silent, puffed alongside, and each in his own
way was happy.

Just about the time David was dismissed by Purcell, John's
apprenticeship came to an end. When he heard of the renting of the
shop in Potter Street, he promptly demanded to come as assistant.

'Don't be a fool!' said David, turning upon him; 'what should I want
with an assistant in that bit of a place? And I couldn't pay you,
besides, man.'

'Don't mind that,' said John, stoutly. 'I'd like to learn the trade.
Perhaps you'll set up a printing business by-and-by. Lots of
booksellers do. Then I'll be handy.'

'And how the deuce are you going to live?' cried David, somewhat
exasperated by these unpractical proposals. 'You're not exactly a
grasshopper;' and his eye, half angry, half laughing, ran over
John's plump person.

To which John replied, undisturbed, that he had got four pounds
still of the little hoard his mother had left him, and, judging by
what David had told him of his first months in Manchester, he could
make that last for living a good while. When he had learnt
something of the business with David, he would move on--trust him.

Whereupon David told him flatly that _he_ wasn't going to help
him waste his money, and sent him about his business.

On the very day, however, that David opened, he was busy in the
shop, when he saw John outside at the stall, groaning under a
bundle.

'It's Mr. Lomax ha sent you this,' said the lad, calmly, 'and I'm to
put it up, and tell him how your stock looks.'

The bundle contained Daddy's contributions to young Grieve's
window, which at the moment were very welcome; and David in his
gratitude instructed the messenger to take back a cordial message.
The only notice John took was to lift up two deal shelves that were
leaning against the wall of the shop, and to ask where they were to
go.

And, say what David would, he stuck, and would not be got rid of.
With the Lancashire accent he had also the Lancashire persistence,
and David after a while gave in, consented that he should stay for
some weeks, at any rate, and then set to work to teach him, in a
very impatient and intermittent way. For watching and bargaining at
the stall, at any rate, for fetching and carrying, and for all that
appertains to the carrying and packing of parcels, John presently
developed a surprising energy. David's wits were thereby freed for
the higher matters of his trade, while John was beast of burden.
The young master could work up his catalogues, study his famous
collections, make his own bibliographical notes, or run off here
and there by 'bus or train in quest of books for a customer; he
could swallow down his Greek verbs or puzzle out his French for
Barbier in the intervals of business; the humbler matters of the
shop prospered none the less.

Meanwhile both lads were vegetarians and teetotalers; both lived as
near as might be on sixpence a day; and an increasing portion of
the Manchester world--of that world, at any rate, which buys
books--began, as the weeks rolled on, to take interest in the pair
and their venture.

Christmas came, and David made up his accounts. He had turned over
the whole of his capital in six weeks, had lived and paid his rent,
and was very nearly ten pounds to the good. On the evening when he
made this out he sat jubilantly over the fire, thinking of Louie.
Certainly it would be soon time for him to send for Louie at this
rate. Yet there were _pros_ and _cons_. He would have to
look after her when she did come, and there would be an end of his
first freedom. And what would she find to do?

Silk-weaving had been decaying year by year in Manchester, and for
hand-loom weaving, at any rate, there was no opening at all.

No matter! With his prosperity there came a quickening of the sense
of kinship, which would not let him rest. For the first time for
many years he thought often of his father. Who and what had his
mother been? Why had Uncle Reuben never spoken of his parents, save
that one tormented word in the dark? Why, his father could not have
been thirty when he died! Some day he would make Uncle Reuben tell
all the story--he would know, too, where his father was buried.

And meanwhile, in a few more weeks, he would write to Kinder. He
would be good to Louie--he decidedly meant that she should have a
good time. Perhaps she had grown out of her tricks by now. Tom said
she was thought to be uncommon handsome. David made a little face
as he remembered that. She would be all the more difficult to
manage.

Yet all the time David Grieve's prosperity was the most insecure
growth imaginable.

One evening Lucy rushed in late to see Dora.

'Oh, Dora! Dora! Put down your work at once and listen to me.' Dora
looked up in amazement, to see Lucy's little face all crimson with
excitement and resolution.

'Dora, I've found it all out: he's going to buy the house over Mr.
Grieve's head, and turn him into the street, just as he's got
nicely settled. Oh! he's done it before, I can tell you. There was
a man higher up Half Street he served just the same. He's got the
money, and he's got the spite. Well now, Dora, it's no good
staring. Has Mr. Grieve been up here lately?'

'No; not lately,' said Dora, with an involuntary sigh. 'Father's
been to see him. He says he's that busy he can't come out. But,
Lucy, how do you know all this?'

Whereupon, at first, Lucy wouldn't tell; but being at bottom
intensely proud of her own cleverness at last confessed. She had
been for long convinced that her father meant mischief to young
Grieve, and had been on the watch. A little listening at doors
here, and a little prying into papers there, had presently given
her the clue. In a private drawer, unlocked by chance, she had
found a solicitor's letter containing the full description of No.
15 Potter Street, and of some other old houses in the same street,
soon to be sold and rebuilt. The description contained notes of
price and date in her father's hand. That very evening the
solicitor in question had come to see her father. She had been
sent upstairs, but had managed to listen all the same. The
purchase--whatever it was--was to be concluded 'shortly.' There had
been much legal talk, and her father had seemed in a particularly
good temper when Mr. Vance went away.

'Well now, look here,' said Lucy, frowning and biting her lips; 'I
shall just go right on and see him. I thought I might have found
him here. But there's no time to lose.'

Dora had bent over her frame again, and her face was hidden.

'Why, it's quite late,' she said, slowly; 'the shop will be shut up
long ago.'

'I don't care--I don't care a bit,' cried Lucy. 'One can't think
about what's proper. I'm just going straight away.'

And she got up feverishly, and put on her hat again.

'Why can't you tell father and send him? He's downstairs in the
reading-room,' said Dora.

'I'll go myself, Dora, thank you,' said Lucy, with an obstinate
toss of her head, as she stood before the old mirror over the
mantelpiece. 'I dare say you think I'm a very bold girl. It don't
matter.'

Then for a minute she became absorbed in putting one side of her
hair straight. Dora, from behind, sat looking at her, needle in
hand. The gaslight fell on her pale, disturbed face, showed for an
instant a sort of convulsion pass across it which Lucy did not see.
Then she drew her hand along her eyes, with a low, quivering
breath, and went back to her work.

As Lucy opened the door, however, a movement of anxiety, of
conscience, rose in Dora.

'Lucy, shall I go with you?'

'Oh, no,' said Lucy, impatiently. 'I know what's what, thank you,
Dora. I'll take care of myself. Perhaps I'll come back and tell you
what he says.'

And she closed the door behind her. Dora did not move from her
work; but her hand trembled so that she made several false stitches
and had to undo them.

Meanwhile Lucy sped along across Market Street and through St.
Ann's Square. Her blood was up, and she could have done anything,
braved anybody, to defeat her father and win a smile from David
Grieve. Yet, as she entered Potter Street, she began to quake a
little. The street was narrow and dark. On one side the older
houses had been long ago pulled down and replaced by tall
warehouses, which at night were a black and towering mass, without
a light anywhere. The few shops opposite closed early, for in the
office quarter of Manchester there is very little doing after
office hours, when the tide of life ebbs outwards.

Lucy looked for No. 15, her heart beating fast. There was a light
in the first floor, but the shop-front was altogether dark. She
crossed the street, and, lifting a shaking hand, rang the bell of
the very narrow side door.

Instantly there were sounds inside--a step--and David stood on the
threshold.

He stared in amazement at his unwonted visitor.

'Oh, Mr. Grieve--please--I've got something to tell you. Oh, no, I
won't come in--we can stand here, please, out of the wind. But
father's going to buy this place over your head, and I thought I'd
better come and tell you. He'll be pretty mad if he thinks I've let
out; but I don't care.'

She was leaning against the wall of the passage, and David could
just see the defiance and agitation on her face by the light of the
gas-lamp outside.

He himself gave a low whistle.

'Well, that's rather strong, isn't it, Miss Purcell?'

'It's mean--it's abominable,' she cried. 'I vowed I'd stop it. But I
don't know what he'll do to me--kill me, most likely.'

'Nobody shall do anything to you,' said David, decidedly. 'You're a
brick. But look here--can you tell me anything more?'

She commanded herself with great difficulty, and told all she knew.
David leant against the wall beside her, twisting a meditative lip.
The situation was ominous, certainly. He had always known that his
tenure was precarious, but from various indications he had supposed
that it would be some years yet before his side of the street was
much meddled with. That old fox! He must go and see Mr. Ancrum.

A passion of hate and energy rose within him. Somehow or other he
would pull through.

When Lucy had finished the tale of her eavesdroppings, the young
fellow shook himself and stood erect.

'Well, I _am_ obliged to you, Miss Purcell. And now I'll just
go straight off and talk to somebody that I think'll help me. But
I'll see you to Market Street first.'

'Oh!--somebody will see us!' she cried in a fever, 'and tell father.'

'Not they; I'll keep a look out.'

Then suddenly, as they walked along together, a great shyness fell
upon them both. Why had she done this thing, and run the risk of
her father's wrath? As David walked beside her, he felt for an
instant, through all his gratitude, as though some one had thrown
a lasso round him, and the cord were tightening. He could not
have explained the feeling, but it made him curt and restive,
absorbed, apparently, in his own thoughts. Meanwhile Lucy's heart
swelled and swelled. She _did_ think he would have taken her news
differently--have made more of it and her. She wished she had never
come--she wished she had brought Dora. The familiar consciousness
of failure, of insignificance, returned, and the hot tears rose in
her eyes.

At Market Street she stopped him hurriedly.

'Don't come any farther. I can get home.'

David, meanwhile, was saying to himself that he was a churlish
brute; but for the life of him he could not get out any pretty
speeches worthy of the occasion.

'I'm sure I take it most kind of you, Miss Purcell. There's nothing
could have saved me if you hadn't told. And I don't know whether I
can get out of it now. But if ever I can do anything for you, you
know--'

'Oh, never mind!--never mind!' she said, incoherently, stabbed by
his constraint. 'Good night.'

And she ran away into the darkness, choked by the sorest tears she
had ever shed.

David, meanwhile, went on his way to Ancrum, scourging himself. If
ever there was an ungrateful cur, it was he! Why could he find
nothing nice to say to that girl in return for all her pluck? Of
course she would get into trouble. Coming to see him at that time
of night, too! Why, it was splendid!

Yet, all the same, he knew perfectly well that if she had been
there beside him again, he would have been just as tongue-tied as
before.




CHAPTER VII


On the following night David walked into the Parlour about eight
o'clock, hung up his hat with the air of an emperor, and looked
round for Daddy.

'Look here, Daddy! I've got something to say to you, but not down
here: you'll be letting out my private affairs, and I can't stand
that.'

'Well, come upstairs then, you varmint! You're a poor sort of
fellow, always suspecting your friends. Come up--come up with you!
I'll humour you!'

And Daddy, bursting with curiosity, led the way upstairs to Dora's
sitting-room. Dora was moving about amid a mass of silks, which lay
carefully spread out on the table, shade melting into shade,
awaiting their transference to a new silk case she had been busy
upon.

As the door opened she look up, and when she saw David her face
flushed all over.

Daddy pushed the lad in.

'Dora, he's got some news. Out with it, sir!'

And he stood opposite the young fellow, on tiptoe, quivering with
impatience.

David put both hands in his pockets, and looked out upon them,
radiant.

'I think,' he said slowly, 'I've scotched old Purcell this time. But
perhaps you don't know what he's been after?'

'Lucy was in here last night,' said Dora, hesitating; 'she told me
about it.'

'Lucy!' cried Daddy, exasperated. 'What have you been making secrets
about? I'll have no secrets from me in this house, Dora. Why, when
Lucy tells you something important, is it all hidden up from me?
Nasty close ways!'

And he looked at her threateningly.

Nothing piqued the old Bohemian so much as the constant assumption
of the people about him that he was a grown-up baby, of no
discretion at all. That the assumption was true made no difference
whatever to the irritating quality of it.

Dora dropped her head a little, but said nothing. David interposed:

'Well, now _I'll_ tell you all about it.'

His tone was triumph itself, and he plunged into his story. He
described what Purcell had meant to do, and how nearly he had done
it. In a month, if the bookseller had had his way, his young rival
would have been in the street, with all his connection to make over
again. At the moment there was not another corner to be had, within
David's means, anywhere near the centre of the town. It would have
meant a completely fresh beginning, and temporary ruin.

But he had gone to Ancrum. And Ancrum and he had bethought them of
the rich Unitarian gentleman who had been David's sponsor when he
signed his agreement.

There and then, at nine o'clock at night, Ancrum had gone off to
Higher Broughton, where the good man lived, and laid the case
before him. Mr. Doyle had taken the night to think it over, and the
following morning he had paid a visit to his lawyer.

'He and his wife thought it a burning shame, he told Mr. Ancrum;
and, besides, he's been buying up house property in Manchester for
some time past, only we couldn't know that--that was just luck. He
looked upon it as a good chance both for him and for me. He told
his lawyer it must be all settled in three hours, and he didn't
mind the price. The lawyer found out that Purcell was haggling,
went in to win, put the cash down, and here in my pocket I've got
the fresh agreement between me and Mr. Doyle--three months' notice
on either side, and no likelihood of my being turned out, if I want
to stay, for the next three or four years. Hurrah!'

And the lad, quite beside himself with jubilation, raised the blue
cap he held in his hand, and flung it round his head. Dora stood
and looked at him, leaning lightly against the table, her arms
behind her. His triumph carried her away; her lips parted in a
joyous smile; her whole soft, rounded figure trembled with
animation and sympathy.

As for Daddy, he could not contain himself. He ran to the top of
the stairs, and sent a kitchen-boy flying for a bottle of
champagne.

'Drink, you varmint, drink!' he said, when the liquor came, 'or I'll
be the death of you! Hold your tongue, Dora! Do you think a man can
put up with temperance drinks when his enemy's smitten hip and
thigh? Oh, you jewel, David, but you'll bring him low, lad--you'll
bring him low before you've done--promise me that. I shall see him
a beggar yet, lad, shan't I? Oh, nectar!'

And Daddy poured down his champagne, apostrophising it and David's
vengeance together.

Dora looked distressed.

'Father--Lucy! How can you say such things?'

'Lucy--eh?--Lucy? She won't be a beggar. She'll marry; she's got a
bit of good looks of her own. But, David, my lad, what was it you
were saying? How was it you got wind of this precious business?'

David hesitated.

'Well, it was Miss Purcell told me,' he said. 'She came to see me at
my place last evening.'

He drew himself together with a little nervous dignity, as though
foreseeing that Daddy would make remarks.

'Miss Purcell!--what, Lucy?--_Lucy? Upon_ my word, Davy! Why,
her father'll wring her neck when he finds it out. And she came to
warn you?'

Daddy stood a moment taking in the situation, then, with a queer
grin, he walked up to David and poked him in the ribs.

'So there were passages--eh, young man--when you were up there?'

The young fellow straightened himself, with a look of annoyance.

'Nothing of the sort, Daddy; there were no passages. But Miss
Lucy's done me a real friendly act, and I'd do the same for her any
day.'

Dora had sat down to her silks again. As David spoke she bent
closely over them, as though the lamp-light puzzled her usually
quick perception of shade and quality.

As for Daddy, he eyed the lad doubtfully.

'She's got a pretty waist and a brown eye, Davy, and she's
seventeen.'

'She may be for me,' said David, throwing his head back and
speaking with a certain emphasis and animation. 'But she's a little
brick to have given me notice of this thing.'

The warmth of these last words produced more effect on Daddy than
his previous denials.

'Dora,' he said, looking round--'Dora, do you believe the varmint?
All the same, you know, he'll be for marrying soon. Look at him!'
and he pointed a thin theatrical finger at David from across the
room.' When I was his make I was in love with half the girls in the
place. Blue eyes here--brown eyes there--nothing came amiss to me.'

'Marrying!' said David, with an impatient shrug of the shoulders,
but flushing all over. 'You might wait, I think, till I've got
enough to keep one on, let alone two. If you talk such stuff,
Daddy, I'll not tell you my secrets when there are any to tell.'

He tried to laugh it off; but Dora's grey eye, glancing timidly
round at him, saw that he was in some discomfort. There was a
bright colour in _her_ cheek too, and her hand touched her
silks uncertainly.

'Thank you for nothing, sir,' said Daddy, unabashed. 'Trust an
old hound like me for scenting out what he wants. But, go along
with you! I'm disappointed in you. The young men nowadays have
got no _blood_! They're made of sawdust and brown paper. The
world was our orange, and we sucked it. Bedad, we did! But
_you_--cold-blooded cubs--go to the devil, I tell you, and
read your Byron!'

And, striking an attitude which was a boisterous reminiscence of
Macready, the old wanderer flung out the lines:

  'Alas! when mingling souls forget to blend,
  Death hath but little left him to destroy.
  Ah! happy years! Once more, who would not be a boy?'

David laughed out. Daddy turned petulantly away, and looked out of
window. The night was dreary, dark, and wet.

'Dora!'

'Yes, father.'

'Manchester's a damned dull hole. I'm about tired of it.'

Dora started, and her colour disappeared in an instant. She got up
and went to the window.

'Father, you know they'll be waiting for you downstairs,' she said,
putting her hand on his shoulder. 'They always say they can't get on
without you on debating nights.'

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Daddy, throwing off the hand. But he
looked mollified. The new reading-room was at present his pet
hobby; his interest in the restaurant proper had dropped a good
deal of late, or so Dora's anxiety persuaded her.

'It's quite true,' said David. 'Go and start 'em, Daddy, and I'll
come down soon and cut in. I feel as if I could speak the roof off
to-night, and I don't care a hang about what! But first I've got
something to say to Miss Dora. I want to ask her a favour.'

He came forward smiling. She gave him a startled look, but her
eyes--poor Dora!--could not light on him now without taking a new
brightness. How well his triumph sat on him! How crisply and
handsomely his black hair curled above his open brow!

'More secrets,' growled Daddy.

'Nothing of any interest, Daddy. Miss Dora can tell you all about
it, if she cares. Now go along! Start 'em on the Bishop of
Peterborough and the Secularists. I've got a lot to say about that.'

He pushed Daddy laughingly to the door, and came back again to
where Dora was once more grappling with her silks. Her expression
had changed again. Oh! she had so many things to open to him, if
only she could find the courage.

He sat down and looked at a bit of her embroidery, which lay
uncovered beside her on the frame.

'I say, that is fine work!' he said, wondering. 'I hope you get well
paid for it, Miss Dora. You ought. Well, now, I do want to ask your
advice. This business of the house has set me thinking about a lot
of things.'

He lay back in his chair, with his hands in his pockets, and threw
one leg over the other. He was in such a state of nervous
excitement, Dora could see, that he could hardly keep himself
still.

'Did I ever tell you about my sister? No, I know I haven't. I've
kept it dark. But now I'm settled I want to have her to live with
me. There's no one but us two, except the old uncle and aunt that
brought us up. I must stick to her--and I mean to. But she's not
like other girls. She's a queer one.'

He stopped, frowning a little as the recollections of Louie rushed
across him, seeking for words in which to draw her. And directly he
paused, Dora, who had dropped her silks again in her sudden
astonishment, burst into questions. How old was his sister? Was she
in Manchester? Had she a trade? Her soul was full of a warm,
unexpected joy, her manner was eager--receptive. He took up his
parable and told the story of his childhood and Louie's at the
farm. His black eye kindled as he looked past Dora into the
past--into the bosom of the Scout. Owing partly to an imaginative
gift, partly to his reading habit, when he was stimulated--when he
was, as it were, talking at large, trying to present a subject as a
whole, to make a picture of it--he rose into ways of speech quite
different from those of his class, and different from his own
dialect of every day. This latent capacity for fine expression was
mostly drawn out at this time by his attempts at public speaking.
But to-night, in his excitement, it showed in his talk, and Dora
was bewildered. Oh, how clever he was! He talked like a book--just
like a book. She pushed her chair back from the silks, and sat
absorbed in the pleasure of listening, environed too by the happy
thought that he was making a friend of her, giving her--plain,
insignificant, humble Dora Lomax--his confidence.

As for him, the more he talked the more he enjoyed talking. Never
since he came to Manchester had he fallen into such a moment of
unburdenment, of intimacy, or something like it, with any human
being. He had talked to Ancrum and to John. But that was quite
different. No man confides in a woman as he confides in a man. The
touch of difference of sex gives charm and edge, even when, as was
the case here, the man has no thrill whatever in his veins, and no
thought of love-making in his head.

'You must have been very fond of your sister,' Dora said at last,
tremulously. 'You two all alone--and no mother.'

Somehow the soft sentiment in her words and tone struck him
suddenly as incongruous. His expression changed.

'Oh, I don't know,' he said, with a sort of laugh, not a very
bright one. 'Don't you imagine I was a pattern brother; I was a
brute to her lots of times. And Louie--ah, well, you'll see for
yourself what she's like; she's a queer customer sometimes. And now
I'll tell you what I wanted to ask you, Miss Dora. You see, if
Louie comes it won't do for her to have no employment, after she's
had a trade all day; and she won't take to mine--she can't abide
books.'

And he explained to her his perplexities--the ebbing of the silk
trade from Manchester, and so on. He might hire a loom, but Louie
would get no work. All trades have their special channels, and keep
to them.

So it had occurred to him, if Louie was willing, would Dora take
her as an apprentice, and teach her the church work? He would be
quite ready to pay for the teaching; that would be only fair.

'Teach her my work!' cried Dora, instinctively drawing back. 'Oh, I
don't think I could.'

He coloured, and misunderstood her. In a great labour-hive like
Lancashire, with its large and small industries, the native ear is
very familiar with the jealous tone of the skilled worker,
threatened with competition in a narrow trade.

'I didn't mean any offence,' he said, with a little stiffness. 'I
don't want to take the bread out of anybody's mouth. If there isn't
work to be had, you've only to say so, Miss Dora.'

'Oh, I didn't mean that,' she cried, wounded in her turn. 'There's
plenty of work. At the shop last week they didn't know what to do
for hands. If she was clever at it, she'd get lots of work. But--'

She laid her hand on her frame lovingly, not knowing how to explain
herself, her gentle brows knitting in the effort of thought.

Her work was so much more to her than ordinary work paid for in
ordinary coin. Into these gorgeous altar-cloths, or these delicate
wrappings for chalice and paten, she stitched her heart. To work at
them was prayer. Jesus, and His Mother, and the Saints; it was with
them she communed as her stitches flowed. She sat in a mystic, a
heavenly world. And the silence and solitude of her work made one
of its chief charms. And now to be asked to share it with a strange
girl, who could not love it as she did, who would take it as hard
business--never to be alone any more with her little black book and
her prayers!

And then she looked up, and met a young man's half-offended look,
and a shy, proud eye, in which the nascent friendship of five
minutes before seemed to be sinking out of sight.

'Oh yes, I will,' she cried. 'Of course I will. It just sounded a
bit strange to me at first. I've been so used to be alone always.'

But he demurred now--wished stiffly to take back his proposal. He
did not want to put upon her, and perhaps, after all, Louie would
have her own notions.

But she could not bear it, and as he retreated she pressed forward.
Of course there was work. And it would be very good for her, it
would stir her up to take a pupil; it was just her old-maidish
ways--it had startled her a bit at first.

And then, her reserve giving ay more and more as her emotion grew,
she confessed herself at last completely.

'You see, it's not just _work_ to me, and it's not the money,
though I'm glad enough for that; but it's for the church; and I'd
live on a crust, and do it for nothing, if I could!'

She looked up at him--that ardent dream-life of hers leaping to the
eyes, transforming the pale face.

David sat silent and embarrassed. He did not know what to say--how
to deal with this turn in the conversation.

'Oh, I know you think I'm just foolish,' she said, sadly, taking up
her needle. 'You always did; but I'll take your sister--indeed I
will.'

'Perhaps you'll turn her your way of thinking,' said David, with a
little awkward laugh, looking round for his hat. 'But Louie isn't an
easy one to drive.'

'Oh, you can't drive people!' cried Dora, flushing; 'you can't, and
you oughtn't. But if Father Russell talked to her she might like
him--and the church. Oh, Mr. Grieve, won't you go one Sunday and
hear him--won't you--instead of--'

She did not finish her sentence, but David finished it for her:
'Instead of going to the Hall of Science? Well, but you know, Miss
Dora, I being what I am, I get more good out of a lecture at the
Hall of Science than I should out of Father Russell. I should be
quarrelling with him all the time, and wanting to answer him.'

'Oh, you couldn't,' said Dora eagerly, 'he's so good, and he's a
learned man--I'm sure he is. Mr. Foss, the curate, told me they
think he'll be a bishop some day.'

'All the better for him,' said David, unmoved. 'It don't make any
difference to me. No, Miss Dora, don't you fret yourself about me.
Books are my priests.'

He stood over her, his hands on his sides, smiling.

'Oh, no!' cried Dora, involuntarily. 'You mustn't say that. Books
can't bring us to God.'

'No more can priests,' he said, with a sudden flash of his dark
eyes, a sudden dryness of his tone. 'If there is a God to bring us
to--prove me that first, Miss Dora. But it's a shame to say these
things to you--that it is--and I've been worrying you a deal too
much about my stupid affairs. Good night. We'll talk about Father
Russell again another time.'

He ran downstairs. Dora went back to her frame, then pushed it away
again, ran eagerly to the window, and pulled the blind aside. Down
below in the lighted street, now emptying fast, she saw the tall
figure emerge, saw it run down the street, and across St. Mary's
Gate. She watched it till it disappeared; then she put her hands
over her face, and leant against the window-frame weeping. Oh, what
a sudden descent from a moment of pure joy! How had the jarring
note come? They had been put wrong with each other; and perhaps,
after all, he would be no more to her now than before. And she had
seemed to make such a leap forward--to come so near to him.

'Oh! I'll just be good to his sister,' she said to herself
drearily, with an ache at her heart that was agony.

Then she thought of him as he had sat there beside her; and
suddenly in her pure thought there rose a vision of herself in his
arms, her head against his broad shoulder, her hand stealing round
his neck. She moved from the window and threw herself down in the
darkest corner of the room, wrestling desperately with what seemed
to her a sinful imagination. She ought not to think of him at all;
she loathed herself. Father Russell would tell her she was wicked.
He had no faith--he was a hardened unbeliever--and she could not
make herself think of that at all--could not stop herself from
wanting--_wanting_ him for her own, whatever happened.

And it was so foolish too, as well as bad; for he hadn't an idea of
falling in love with anybody--anyone could see that. And she who
was not pretty, and not a bit clever--it was so likely he would
take a fancy to her! Why, in a few years he would be a big man, he
would have made a fortune, and then he could take his pick.

'Oh! and Lucy--Lucy would _hate_ me.'

But the thought of Lucy, instead of checking her, brought with it
again a wild gust of jealousy. It was fiercer than before, the
craving behind it stronger. She sat up, forcing back her tears, her
whole frame tense and rigid. Whatever happened he would
_never_ marry Lucy! And who could wish it? Lucy was just a
little, vain, selfish thing, and when she found David Grieve
wouldn't have her, she would soon forget him. The surging longing
within refused, proudly refused, to curb itself--for Lucy's sake.

Then the bell of St. Ann's slowly began to strike ten o'clock. It
brought home to her by association one of the evening hymns in the
little black book she was frequently accustomed to croon to herself
at night as she put away her work:

  O God who canst not change nor fail,
  Guiding the hours as they roll by,
  Brightening with beams the morning pale,
  And burning in the mid-day sky!

  Quench thou the fires of hate and strife,
  The wasting fever of the heart;
  From perils guard our feeble life,
  And to our souls thy peace impart.

The words flowed in upon her, but they brought no comfort, only a
fresh sense of struggle and effort. Her Christian peace was gone.
She felt herself wicked, faithless, miserable.

Meanwhile, in the stormy night outside, David was running and
leaping through the streets, flourishing his stick from side to
side in cut and thrust with an imaginary enemy whenever the main
thoroughfares were left behind, and he found himself in some dark
region of warehouses, where his steps echoed, and he was king alike
of roadway and of pavement.

The wind, a stormy north-easter, had risen since the afternoon.
David fought with it, rejoiced in it. After the little hot
sitting-room, the stinging freshness, the rough challenge of the
gusts, were delicious to him. He was overflowing with spirits, with
health, with exultation.

As he thought of Purcell he could hardly keep himself from shouting
aloud. If he could only be there to see when Purcell learnt how he
had been foiled! And trust Daddy to spread a story which would
certainly do Purcell no good! No, in that direction he felt that he
was probably safe from attack for a long time to come. Success
beckoned to him; his enemy was under foot; his will and his gifts
had the world before them.

Father Russell indeed! Let Dora Lomax set him on. His young throat
filled with contemptuous laughter. As a bookseller, _he_ knew
what the clergy read, what they had to say for themselves. How much
longer could it go on, this solemn folly of Christian superstition?
'Just give us a good Education Bill, and we shall see!'

Then, as he fell thinking of his talk with Dora and Lomax, he
wished impatiently that he had been even plainer with Daddy about
Lucy Purcell. With regard to her he felt himself caught in a
tangled mesh of obligation. He must, somehow, return her the
service she had done him. And then all the world would think he was
making up to her and wanted to marry her. Meanwhile--in the midst
of real gratitude, a strong desire to stand between her and her
father, and much eager casting about for some means of paying her
back--his inner mind was in reality pitilessly critical towards
her. Her overdone primness and neatness, her fashionable frocks, of
which she was so conscious, her horror of things and people that
were not 'nice,' her contented ignorance and silly chattering
ways--all these points of manner and habit were scored against her
in his memory. She had become less congenial to him rather than
more since he knew her first. All the same, she was a little brick,
and he would have liked one minute to kiss her for her pluck, make
her some lordly present, and the next--never to see her again!

In reality his mind at this moment was filling with romantic images
and ideals totally remote from anything suggested by his own
everyday life. A few weeks before, old Barbier, his French master,
had for the first time lent him some novels of George Sand's. David
had carried them off, had been enchanted to find that he could now
read them with ease and rapidity, and had plunged straightway into
the new world thus opened to him with indescribable zest and
passion. His Greek had been neglected, his science laid aside.
Night after night he had been living with Valentine, with Consuelo,
with Caroline in 'Le Marquis de Villemer.' His poetical reading of
the winter had prepared the way for what was practically his first
introduction to the modern literature of passion. The stimulating
novelty and foreignness of it was stirring all his blood. George
Sand's problems, her situations, her treatment of the great
questions of sex, her social and religious enthusiasms--these
things were for the moment a new gospel to this provincial
self-taught lad, as they had been forty years before to the youth
of 1830. Under the vitalising touch of them the man was fast
developing out of the boy; the currents of the nature were
setting in fresh directions. And in such a mood, and with such
preoccupations, how was one to bear patiently with foolish,
friendly fingers, or with uncomfortable thoughts of your own,
pointing you to _Lucy Purcell?_ With the great marriage-night
scene from 'Valentine' thrilling in your mind, how was it possible
to think of the prim self-conceit, the pettish temper and mincing
airs of that little person in Half Street without irritation?

No, no! _The unknown, the unforeseen!_ The young man plunged
through the rising storm, and through the sleety rain, which had
begun to beat upon him, with face and eyes uplifted to the night.
It was as though he searched the darkness for some form which, even
as he looked, began to take vague and luminous shape there.

Next morning Daddy, in his exultation, behaved himself with some
grossness towards his enemy. About eleven o'clock he became
restless, and began patrolling Market Place, passing every now and
then up the steps into the narrow passage of Half Street, and so
round by the Cathedral and home. He had no definite purpose, but
'have a squint at Tom,' under the circumstances, he must, some way
or other.

And, sure enough, as he was coming back through Half Street on one
of his rounds, and was within a few yards of Purcell's window, the
bookseller came out with his face set in Daddy's direction.
Purcell, whose countenance, so far as Daddy could see at first
sight, was at its blackest and sourest, and whose eyes were on the
ground, did not at once perceive his adversary, and came stern on.

The moment was irresistible. Laying his thumbs in his waistcoat
pocket, and standing so as to bar his brother-in-law's path, Daddy
launched a few unctuous words in his smoothest voice.

'Tom, me boy, thou hast imagined a device which thou wast not able
to perform. But the Lord, Tom, hath made thee turn thy back. And
they of thy own household, Tom, have lifted up the heel against
thee.'

Purcell, strong, dark-browed fellow that he was, wavered and
blenched for a moment under the surprise of this audacious attack.
Then with an oath he put out his hand, seized Daddy's thin
shoulder, flung him violently round, and passed him.

'Speak to me again in the street, you scoundrel, and I'll give you
in charge!' he threw behind him, as he strode on just in time to
avoid a flight of street-arabs, who had seen the scuffle from a
distance and were bearing down eagerly upon him.

Daddy went home in the highest spirits, stepping jauntily along
like a man who has fulfilled a mission. But when he came to boast
himself to Dora, he found to his chagrin that he had only earned a
scolding. Dora flushed up, her soft eyes all aflame.

'You've done nothing but mischief, father,' said Dora, bitterly.
'How _could_ you say such things? You might have left Uncle
Tom to find out for himself about Lucy. He'll be mad enough without
your stirring him up. Now he'll forbid her to come here, or see me
at all. I don't know what'll become of that child; and whatever
possessed you to go aggravating him worse and worse I can't think.'

Daddy blinked under this, but soon recovered himself. No one, he
vowed, could be expected to put up for ever with Purcell's mean
tricks. He had held his tongue for twenty-one years, and now he had
paid back one _little_ text in exchange for the hundreds
wherewith Purcell had been wont to break his bones for him in past
days. As for Dora, she hadn't the spirit of a fly.

'Well, I dare say I am afraid,' said Dora, despondently. 'I saw
Uncle Tom yesterday, too, and he gave me a look made me feel cold
down my back. I don't like anybody to hate us like that, father.
Who knows--'

A tremor ran through her. She gave her father a piteous, childish
look. She had the timidity, the lack of self-confidence which seems
to cling through life to those who have been at a disadvantage with
the world in their childhood and youth. The anger of a man like
Purcell terrified her, lay like a nightmare on a sensitive and
introspective nature.

'Pish!' said Daddy, contemptuously; 'I should like to know what harm
he can do us, now that I've turned so d--d respectable. Though it
is a bit hard on a man to have to keep so in order to spite his
brother-in-law.'

Dora laughed and sighed. She came up to her father's chair, put his
hair straight, re-tied his tie, and then kissed him on the cheek.

'Father, you're not getting tired of the Parlour?' she said,
unsteadily. He evaded her downward look, and tried to shake her
off.

'Don't I slave for you from morning till night, you thankless chit,
you? And don't you begrudge me all the little amusements which turn
the tradesman into the man and sweeten the pill of bondage--eh, you
poor-souled thing?'

Her eyes, however, drew his after them, whether he would or no, and
they surveyed each other--he uneasily hostile; she sad. She slowly
shook her head, and he perfectly understood what was in her mind,
though she did not speak. He _had_ been extremely slack at
business lately; the month's accounts made up that morning had been
unusually disappointing; and twice during the last ten days Dora
had sat up till midnight to let her father in, and had tried with
all the energy of a sinking heart to persuade herself that it was
accident, and that he was only excited, and not drunk.

Now, as she stood looking at him, suddenly all the horror of those
long-past days came back upon her, thrown up against the peace of
the last few years. She locked her hands round his neck with a
vehement pathetic gesture.

'Father, be good to me! don't let bad people take you away from
me--don't, father--you're all I have--all I ever shall have.'

Daddy's green eyes wavered again uncomfortably.

'Stuff!' he said, irritably. 'You'll get a husband directly, and
think no more of me than other girls do when the marrying fit takes
'em. What are you grinning at now, I should like to know?'

For she was smiling--a light tremulous smile which puzzled him.

'At you, father. You'll have to keep me whether you like it or no.
For I'm not a marrying sort.'

She looked at him with a curious defiance, her lip twitching.

'Oh, we know all about that!' said Daddy, impatiently, adding in a
mincing voice, '"I will not love; if I do hang me; i' faith I will
not." No, my pretty dear, not till the "wimpled, whining, purblind,
wayward boy" comes this road--oh, no, not till next time! Quite so.'

She let him rail, and said nothing. She sat down to her work; he
faced round upon her suddenly, and said, frowning:

'What do you mean by it, eh? You're as good-looking as anybody!'

'Well, I want you to think it, father,' she said, affectionately,
raising her eyes to his. A mother must have seen the shrinking
sadness beneath the smile. What Daddy saw was simply a rounded
girlish face, with soft cheeks and lips which seemed to him made
for kissing; nothing to set the Thames on fire, perhaps, but why
should she run herself down? It annoyed him, touched his vanity.

'Oh, I dare say!' he said to her, roughly, with an affected
brutality. 'But you'll be precious disappointed if some one else
doesn't think so too. Don't tell me!'

She bent over her frame without speaking. But her heart filled with
bitterness, and a kind of revolt against her life.

Meanwhile her conscience accused her about Lucy. Lucy must have got
herself into trouble at home, that she was sure of. And it was
unlike her to keep it to herself--not to come and complain.

Some days--a week--passed. But Dora dared not venture herself into
her uncle's house after Daddy's escapade, and she was, besides,
much pressed with her work. A whole set of altar furniture for a
new church at Blackburn had to be finished by a given day.

The affairs of the Parlour troubled her, and she got up long before
it was light to keep the books in order and to plan for the day.
Daddy had no head for figures, and he seemed to her to be growing
careless about expenses. Her timid, over-anxious mind conjured up
the vision of a slowly rising tide of debt, and it haunted her all
day. When she went to her frame she was already tired out, and yet
there she sat over it hour after hour.

Daddy was blind. But Sarah, the stout cook, who worshipped her,
knew well enough that she was growing thin and white.

'If yo doan't draw in yo'll jest do yoursel a mischief,' she said
to her, angrily. 'Yo're nowt but a midge onyways, and a body 'll
soon be able to see through yo.'

'I shall be all right, Sarah,' Dora would say.

'Aye, we'st aw on us be aw reet in our coffins,' returned the irate
Sarah. Then, melting into affection, 'Neaw, honey, be raysonable,
an' I'st just run round t' corner, an' cook you up a bit o' meat
for your supper. Yo git no strength eawt i' them messin things yo
eat. Theer's nowt but wind in em.'

But not even the heterodox diet with which, every now and then,
Dora for peace' sake allowed herself to be fed, behind Daddy's
back, put any colour into her cheeks. She went heavily in these
days, and the singularly young and childish look which she had kept
till now went into gradual eclipse.

David Grieve dropped in once or twice during the week to laugh and
gossip about Purcell with Daddy. Thanks to Daddy's tongue, the
bookseller's plot against his boy rival was already known to a
large circle of persons, and was likely to cost him customers.

Whenever she heard the young full voice below or on the stairs,
Dora would, as it were, draw herself together--stand on her
defence. Sometimes she asked him eagerly about his sister. Had he
written? No; he thought he would still wait a week or two. Ah,
well, he must let her know.

And, on the whole, she was glad when he went, glad to get to bed
and sleep. Being no sentimental heroine, she was prosaically
thankful that she kept her sleep. Otherwise she must have fallen
ill, and the accounts would have gone wrong.

At last one evening came a pencil note from Lucy, in these terms:

'You may come and see me, father says. I've been ill.--LUCY.'

In a panic Dora put on her things and ran. Mary Ann, the little
hunted maid, let her in, looking more hunted and scared than usual.
Miss Lucy was better, she said, but she had been 'terr'ble bad.'
No, she didn't know what it was took her. They'd got a nurse for
her two nights, and she, Mary Ann, had been run off her legs.

'Why didn't you send for me?' cried Dora, and hurried up to the
attic. Purcell did not appear.

Lucy was waiting for her, looking out eagerly from a bank of
pillows.

Dora could not restrain an exclamation which was almost a cry. She
could not have believed that anyone could have changed so in ten
days. Evidently the acute stage--whatever had been the illness--was
past. There was already a look of convalescence in the white face,
with its black-rimmed eyes and peeling lips. But the loss of flesh
was extraordinary for so short a time. The small face was so
thinned and blanched that the tangled masses of golden-brown hair
in which it was framed seemed ridiculously out of proportion to it;
the hand playing with some grapes on the counterpane was of a
ghostly lightness.

Dora was shocked almost beyond speaking. She stood holding Lucy's
hand, and Lucy looked up at her, evidently enjoying her
consternation, for a smile danced in her hollow eyes.

'Lucy, _why_ didn't you send for me?'

'Because I was so feverish at first. I was all light-headed, and
didn't know where I was; and then I was so weak I didn't care about
anything,' said Lucy, in a small thread of a voice.

'What was it?'

'Congestion of the lungs,' said the girl, with pride. 'They just
stopped it, or you'd be laying me out now, Dora. Dr. Alford told
father I was dreadful run-down or I'd never have taken it. I'm to
go to Hastings. Father's got a cousin there that lets lodgings.'

'But how did you get so ill, Lucy?'

Lucy was silent a bit. Then she said:

'Sit down close here. My voice is so bad still.'

Dora sat close to her pillow, and bent over, stroking her hands
with emotion. The fright of her entrance was still upon her.

'Well, you know,' she said in a hoarse whisper, 'father found out
about me and Mr. Grieve--I don't know how, but it was one morning.
I was sitting in here, and he came in all white, with his eyes
glaring. I thought he was going to kill me, and I was that
frightened, I watched my chance, and ran out of the door and along
into Mill Gate as fast as I could to get away from him; and then I
thought I saw him coming after me, and I ran on across the bridge
and up Chapel Street a long, long way. I was in a terrible fright,
and mad with him besides. I declared to myself I'd never come back
here. Well, it was pouring with rain, and I got wet through. Then I
didn't know where to go, and what do you think I did? I just got
into the Broughton tram, and rode up and down all day! I had a
shilling or two in my pocket, and I waited and dodged a bit at
either end, so the conductor shouldn't find out. And that was what
did it--sitting in my wet things all day. I didn't think anything
about dinner, I was that mad. But when it got dark, I thought of
that girl--you know her, too--Minnie Park, that lives with her
brother and sells fents, up Cannon Gate. And somehow I dragged up
there--I thought I'd ask her to take me in. And what happened I
don't rightly know. I suppose I was took with a faint before I
could explain anything, for I was shivering and pretty bad when I
got there. Anyway, she put me in a cab and brought me home; and I
don't remember anything about it, for I was queer in the head very
soon after they got me to bed. Oh, I _was_ bad! It was just a
squeak, '--said Lucy, her voice dropping from exhaustion; but her
eyes glittered in her pinched face with a curious triumph,
difficult to decipher.

Dora kissed her tenderly, and entreated her not to talk; she was
sure it was bad for her. But Lucy, as usual, would not be managed.
She held herself quite still, gathering breath and strength; then
she began again:

'If I'd died, perhaps _he'd_ have been sorry. You know who I
mean. It was all along of him. And father 'll never forgive
me--never. He looks quite different altogether somehow. Dora!
you're not to tell him anything till I've got right away. I
think--I think--I _hate_ him!'

And suddenly her beautiful brown eyes opened wide and fierce.

Dora hung over her, a strange, mingled passion in her look. 'You
poor little thing!' she said slowly, with a deep emphasis,
answering not the unreal Lucy of those last words, but the real
one, so pitifully evident beneath.

'But look here, Dora; when I'm gone away, you _may_ tell him,
you _must_ tell him, Dora,' said the child, imperiously. 'I'd
not have him see me now for anything. I made Mary Ann put all the
glasses away. I don't want to remember what a fright I am. But at
Hastings I'll soon get well; and--and remember, Dora, you
_are_ to tell him. I'd like him to know I nearly caught my
death that day, and that it was all along of him!'

She laid her hands across each other on the sheet with a curious
sigh of satisfaction, and was quiet for a little, while Dora held
her hand. But it was not long before the stillness broke up in
sudden agitation. A tremor ran through her, and she caught Dora's
fingers. In her weakness she could not control herself, and her
inmost trouble escaped her.

'Oh, Dora, he wasn't kind to me, not a bit--when I went to tell him
that night. Oh! I cried when I came home. I _did_ think he'd
have taken it different.'

'What did he say?' asked Dora, quietly. Her face was turned away
from Lucy, but she still held her hand.

'Oh, I don't know!' said Lucy, moving her head restlessly from side
to side and gulping down a sob. 'I believe he was just sorry it was
_me_ he'd got to thank. Oh, I don't know!--I don't know!--very
likely he didn't mean it.'

She waited a minute, then she began again:

'Oh of course you think I'm silly; and that I'd have much more
chance if I turned proud, and pretended I didn't care. I know some
girls _say_ they'd never let a man know they cared for him
first. I don't believe in 'em! But I don't care. I can't help it.
It's my way. But, Dora, look here!'

The tears gathered thick in her eyes. Dora, bending anxiously over
her, was startled by the change of expression in her. From what
depths of new emotion had the silly Lucy caught the sweetness which
trembled for a moment through every line of her little trivial
face?

'You know, Dora, it was all nonsense at the beginning. I just
wanted some one to amuse myself with and pay me attentions. But it
isn't nonsense now. And I don't want him all for myself. Friday
night I thought I was going to die. I don't care whether the doctor
did or not; _I_ did. And I prayed a good deal. It was queer
praying, I dare say. I was very light-headed, but I thanked God I
loved him, though--though--he didn't care about me; and I thought
if I did get well, and he were to take a fancy to me, I'd show him
I could be as nice as other girls. I wouldn't want everything for
myself, or spend a lot of money on dress.'

She broke off for want of breath. This moral experience of hers was
so new and strange to her that she could hardly find words in which
to clothe it.

Dora had slipped down beside her and buried her face in the bed.
When Lucy stopped, she still knelt there in a quivering silence.
But Lucy could not bear her to be silent--she must have sympathy.

'Aren't you glad, Dora?' she said presently, when she had gathered
strength again. 'I thought you'd be glad. You've always wanted me to
turn religious. And--and--perhaps, when I get well and come back,
I'll go with you to St. Damian's, Dora. I don't know what it is. I
suppose it's caring about somebody--and being ill--makes one feel
like this.'

And, drawing herself from Dora's hold, she turned on her side, put
both her thin hands under her cheek, and lay staring at the window
with a look which had a certain dreariness in it.

Dora at last raised herself. Lucy could not see her face. There was
in it a sweet and solemn resolution--a new light and calm.

'Dear Lucy,' she said, tremulously, laying her cheek against her
cousin's shoulder, 'God speaks to us when we are unhappy--that was
what you felt. He makes everything a voice to call unto Himself.'

Lucy did not answer at once. Then suddenly she turned, and said
eagerly:

'Dora, did you ever ask him--did you ever find out--whether he was
thinking about getting married? You said you would.'

'He isn't, Lucy. He was vexed with father for speaking about it. I
think he feels he must make his way first. His business takes him
up altogether.'

Lucy gave an irritable sigh, closed her eyes, and would talk no
more. Dora stayed with her, and nursed her through the evening.
When at last the nurse arrived who was to take charge of her
through the night, Lucy pulled Dora down to her and said, in a
hoarse, excitable whisper:

'_Mind_ you tell him--that I nearly died--that father'll
never be the same to me again--and it was all for him! You needn't
say _I_ said so.'

Late that night Dora stood long at her attic-window in the roof
looking out at the April night. From a great bank of clouds to the
east the moon was just appearing, sending her light along the windy
streamers which, issuing from the main mass, spread like wide open
fingers across the inner heaven. Opposite there was an old timbered
house, one of the few relics of an earlier Manchester, which still,
in the very centre of the modern city, thrusts out its broad eaves
and overhanging stories beyond the line of the street. Above and
behind it, roof beyond roof, to the western limit of sight, rose
block after block of warehouses, vast black masses, symbols of the
great town, its labours and its wealth; far to the right, closing
the street, the cathedral cut the moonlit sky; and close at hand
was an old inn, with a wide archway, under which a huge dog lay
sleeping.

Town and sky, the upper clouds and stars, the familiar streets and
buildings below--to-night they were all changed for Dora, and it
was another being that looked at them. In all intense cases of
religious experience the soul lies open to 'voices'--to impressions
which have for it the most vivid and, so to speak, physical
reality. Jeanne d'Arc's visions were but an extreme instance of
what humbler souls have known in their degree in all ages. The
heavenly voices speak, and the ear actually hears. So it was with
Dora. It seemed to her that she had been walking in a feverish
loneliness through the valley of the shadow of death; that one like
unto the Son of Man had drawn her thence with warning and rebuke,
and she was now at His feet, clothed and in her right mind. Words
were in her ear, repeated again and again--peremptory words which
stabbed and healed at once: _'Daughter, thou shalt not covet. I
have refused thee this gift. If it be My will to give it to
another, what is that to thee? Follow thou Me.'_

As she sank upon her knees, she thought of the confession she would
make on Sunday--of the mysterious sanctity and sweetness of the
single life--of the vocation of sacrifice laid upon her. There rose
in her a kind of ecstasy of renunciation. Her love--already so
hopeless, so starved!--was there simply that she might offer it
up--burn it through and through with the fires of the spirit.

Lucy should never know, and David should never know. Unconsciously,
sweet soul, there was a curious element of spiritual arrogance
mingled with this absolute surrender of the one passionate human
desire her life was ever to wrestle with. The baptised member of
Christ's body could not pursue the love of David Grieve, could not
marry him as he was now, without risk and sin. But Lucy--the child
of schism, to whom the mysteries of Church fellowship and
sacramental grace were unknown--for her, in her present exaltation,
Dora felt no further scruples. Lucy's love was clearly 'sent' to
her; it was right, whether it were ultimately happy or no, because
of the religious effect it had already had upon her.

The human happiness Dora dared no longer grasp at for herself she
yearned now to pour lavishly, quickly, into Lucy's hands. Only
so--such is our mingled life!--could she altogether still,
violently and by force, a sort of upward surge of the soul
which terrified her now and then. A mystical casuistry, bred
in her naturally simple nature by the subtle influences of a
long-descended Christianity, combined in her with a piteous human
instinct. When she rose from her knees she was certain that she
would never win and marry David Grieve; she was equally certain
that she would do all in her power to help little Lucy to win and
marry him.

So, like them of old, she pressed the spikes into her flesh, and
found a numbing consolation in the pain.




CHAPTER VIII


Some ten days more elapsed before Lucy was pronounced fit to travel
south. During this time Dora saw her frequently, and the bond
between the two girls grew much closer than before. On the one
hand, Lucy yielded herself more than she had ever done yet to
Dora's example and persuasion, promised to go to church and see at
least what it was like when she got to Hastings, and let Dora
provide her with some of her favourite High Church devotional
books. On the other, it was understood between them that Dora would
look after Lucy's interests, and keep her informed how the land lay
while she was in the south, and Lucy, with the blindness of
self-love, trusted herself to her cousin without a suspicion or a
qualm.

While she was tending Lucy, Dora never saw Purcell but twice, when
she passed him in the little dark entry leading to the private part
of the house, and on those occasions he did not, so far as she
could perceive, make any answer whatever to her salutation. He was
changed, she thought. He had always been a morose-looking man, with
an iron jaw; but now there was a fixed venom and disquiet, as well
as a new look of age, in the sallow face, which made it doubly
unpleasing. She would have been sorry for his loneliness and his
disappointment in Lucy but for the remembrance of his mean plot
against David Grieve, and for a certain other little fact. A
middle-aged woman, in a dowdy brown-stuff dress and black mantle,
had begun to haunt the house. She sat with Purcell sometimes in the
parlour downstairs, and sometimes he accompanied her out of doors.
Mary Ann reported that she was a widow, a Mrs. Whymper, who
belonged to the same chapel that Purcell did, and who was supposed
by those who knew to have been making up to him for some time.

'And perhaps she'll get him after all,' said the little ugly maid,
with a grin. 'Catch me staying then, Miss Dora! It's bad enough as
it is.'

On one occasion Dora came across the widow, waiting in the little
sitting-room. She was an angular person, with a greyish-brown
complexion, a prominent mouth and teeth, and a generally snappish,
alert look. After a few commonplaces, in which Mrs. Whymper was
clearly condescending, she launched into a denunciation of Lucy's
ill behaviour to her father, which at last roused Dora to defence.
She waxed bold, and pointed out that Lucy might have been managed
if her father had been a little more patient with her, had allowed
her a few ordinary amusements, and had not insisted in forcing her
at once, fresh from school, into ways and practices she did not
naturally like, while she had never been trained to them by force
of habit.

'Hoity toity, Miss!' said the widow, bridling, 'young people are
very uppish nowadays. They never seem to remember there is such a
thing as the fifth commandment. In _my_ young days what a
father said was law, and no questions asked; and I've seen many a
Lancashire man take a stick to his gell for less provocation than
this gell's given her feyther! I wonder at you, Miss Lomax, that I
do, for backing her up. But I'm afraid from what I hear you've been
taking up with a lot of Popish ways.'

And the woman looked her up and down with an air which plainly said
that she was on her own ground in that parlour, and might say
exactly what she pleased there.

'If I have, I don't see that it matters to you,' said Dora quietly,
and retreated.

Yes, certainly, a stepmother looked likely! Lucy in her bedroom
upstairs knew nothing, and Dora decided to tell her nothing till
she was stronger. But this new development made the child's future
more uncertain than ever.

On the day before her departure for Hastings, Lucy came out for a
short walk, by way of hardening herself for the journey. She walked
round the cathedral and up Victoria Street, and then, tired out
with the exertion, she made her way in to Dora, to rest. Her face
was closely hidden by a thick Shetland veil, for, in addition to
her general pallor and emaciation, her usually clear and brilliant
skin was roughened and blotched here and there by some effect of
her illness; she could not bear to look at herself in the glass,
and shrank from meeting any of her old acquaintances. It was,
indeed, curious to watch the effect of the temporary loss of beauty
upon her; her morbid impatience under it showed at every turn. But
for it, Dora was convinced that she must and would have put herself
in David Grieve's way again before leaving Manchester. As it was,
she was still determined not to let him see her.

She came in, much exhausted, and threw herself into Daddy's
arm-chair with groans of self-pity. Did Dora think she would ever
be strong again--ever be anything but an ugly fright? It was hard
to have all this come upon you, just through doing a service to
some one who didn't care.

'Hasn't he heard yet that I've been ill?' she inquired petulantly.

No; Dora did not think he had. Neither she nor Daddy had seen him.
He must have been extra busy. But she would get Daddy to ask him up
to supper directly, and tell him all about it.

'And then, perhaps,' she said, looking up with a sweet, intense
look--how little Lucy was able to decipher it!--'perhaps he may
write a letter.'

Lucy was cheered by this suggestion, and sat looking out of window
for a while, idly watching the passers-by. But she could not let
the one topic that absorbed her mind alone for long, and soon she
was once more questioning Dora in close detail about David Grieve's
sister and all that he had said about her. For, by way of obliging
the child to realise some of the inconvenient burdens and
obligations which were at that moment hanging round the young
bookseller's neck, and making the very idea of matrimony ridiculous
to him, Dora had repeated to her some of his confidences about
himself and Louie. Lucy had not taken them very happily. Everything
that turned up now seemed only to push her further out of sight and
make her more insignificant. She was thirsting, with a woman's
nascent passion and a schoolgirl's vanity, to be the centre and
heroine of the play; and here she was reduced to the smallest and
meanest of parts--a part that caught nobody's eye, do what she
would.

Suddenly she broke off what she was saying, and called to Dora:

'_Do_ you see that pair of people, Dora? Come--come at once!
What an extraordinary-looking girl!'

Dora turned unwillingly, being absorbed in a golden halo which she
had set herself to finish that day; then she dropped her needle,
and pushed her stool back that she might see better. From the
cathedral end of Market Place an elderly grey-haired man and a
young girl were advancing along the pavement towards the Parlour.
As they passed, the flower-sellers at the booths were turning to
look at them, some persons in front of them were turning back, and
a certain number of errand boys and other loungers were keeping
pace with them, observing them. The man leant every now and then on
a thick stick he carried, and looked uncertainly from house to
house. He had a worn, anxious expression, and the helpless
movements of short sight. Whenever he stopped the girl moved on
alone, and he had to hurry after her again to catch her up. She,
meanwhile, was perfectly conscious that she was being stared at,
and stared in return with a haughty composure which seemed to draw
the eyes of the passers-by after it like a magnet. She was very
tall and slender, and her unusual height made her garish dress the
more conspicuous. The small hat perched on her black hair was all
bright scarlet, both the felt and the trimming; under her jacket,
which was purposely thrown back, there was a scarlet bodice, and
there was a broad band of scarlet round the edge of her black
dress.

Lucy could not take her eyes off her.

'Did you _ever_ see anybody so handsome, Dora? But what a
fast, horrid creature to dress like that! And just look at her; she
won't wait for the old man, though he's calling to her--she goes on
staring at everybody. They'll have a crowd, presently! Why, they're
coming _here!_'

For suddenly the girl stopped outside the doorway below, and
beckoned imperiously to her companion. She said a few sharp words
to him, and the pair upstairs felt the swing-door of the restaurant
open and shut.

Lucy, forgetting her weakness, ran eagerly to the sitting-room door
and listened.

There was a sound of raised voices below, and then the door at the
foot of the stairs opened, and Daddy was heard shouting.

'There--go along upstairs. My daughter, she'll speak to you. And
don't you come back this way--a man can't be feeding Manchester and
taking strangers about, all in the same twinkling of an eye, you
know, not unless he happens to have a few spare bodies handy, which
ain't precisely my case. My daughter 'll tell you what you want to
know, and show you out by the private door. Dora!'

Dora stood waiting rather nervously at the sitting-room door. The
girl came up first, the old man behind her, bewildered and groping
his way.

'We're strangers here--we want somebody to show us the way. We've
been to the book-shop in Half Street, and they sent us on here.
They were just brutes to us at that book-shop,' said the girl, with
a vindictive emphasis and an imperious self-possession which fairly
paralysed Lucy and Dora. Lucy's eyes, moreover, were riveted on her
face, on its colour, its fineness of feature, its brilliance and
piercingness of expression. And what was the extraordinary likeness
in it to something familiar?

'Why!' said Dora, in a little cry, 'aren't you Mr. David Grieve's
sister?'

For she had traced the likeness before Lucy. 'Oh, it must be!'

'Well, I am his sister, if you want to know,' said the stranger,
looking astonished in her turn. 'He wrote to me to come up. And I
lent the letter to uncle to read--that's his uncle--and he went and
lost it somehow, fiddling about the fields while I was putting my
things together. And then we couldn't think of the proper address
there was in it--only the name of a man Purcell, in Half Street,
that David said he'd been with for two years. So we went there to
ask; and, _my!_--weren't they rude to us! There was an ugly
black man there chivied us out in no time--wouldn't tell us
anything. But as I was shutting the door the shopman whispered to
me, "Try the Parlour--Market Place." So we came on here, you see.'

And she stared about her, at the room, and at the girls, taking in
everything with lightning rapidity--the embroidery frame, Lucy's
veil and fashionably cut jacket, the shabby furniture, the queer
old pictures.

'Please come in,' said Dora civilly, 'and sit down. If you're
strangers here, I'll just put on my hat and take you round. Mr.
Grieve's a friend of ours. He's in Potter Street. You'll find him
nicely settled by now. This is my cousin, Mr. Purcell's daughter.'

And she ran upstairs, leaving Lucy to grapple with the new-comers.

The two girls sat down, and eyed each other. Reuben stood patiently
waiting.

'Is the man at Half Street your father?' asked the new-comer,
abruptly.

'Yes,' said Lucy, conscious of the strangest mingling of admiration
and dislike, as she met the girl's wonderful eyes.

'Did he and Davy fall out?'

'They didn't get on about Sundays,' said Lucy, unwillingly, glad of
the sheltering veil which enabled her to hold her own against this
masterful creature.

'Is your father strict about chapel and that sort of thing?'

Lucy nodded. She felt an ungracious wish to say as little as
possible.

David's sister laughed.

'Davy was that way once--just for a bit--afore he ran away,
_I_ knew he wouldn't keep it on.'

Then, with a queer look over her shoulder at her uncle, she
relapsed into silence. Her attention was drawn to Dora's frame, and
she moved up to it, bending over it and lifting the handkerchief
that Dora had thrown across it.

'You mustn't touch it!' said Lucy, hastily, provoked, she knew not
why, by every movement the girl made. 'It's very particular work.'

'I'm used to fine things,' said the other, scornfully. 'I'm a
silk-weaver--that's my trade--all the best brocades, drawing-room
trains, that style of thing. If you didn't handle _them_
carefully, you'd know it. Yes, she's doing it well,' and the
speaker put her head down and examined the work critically. 'But it
must go fearful slow, compared to a loom.'

'She does it splendidly,' said Lucy, annoyed; 'she's getting quite
famous for it. That's going to a great church up in London, and
she's got more orders than she can take.'

'Does she get good pay?' asked the girl eagerly.

'I don't know,' replied Lucy shortly.

'Because, if there's good pay,' said the other, examining the work
again closely, 'I'd soon learn it--why I'd learn it in a week, you
see! If I stay here I shan't get no more silk-weaving. And of
course I'll stay. I'm just sick of the country. I'd have come up
long ago if I'd known where to find Davy.'

'I'm ready,' said Dora in a constrained voice beside her.

Louie Grieve looked up at her.

'Oh, you needn't look so glum!--I haven't hurt it. I'm used to good
things, stuffs at two guineas a yard, and the like of that. What
money do you take a week?' and she pointed to the frame.

Something in the tone and manner made the question specially
offensive. Dora pretended not to hear it.

'Shall we go now?' she said, hurriedly covering her precious work
up from those sacrilegious fingers and putting it away.

'Lucy, you ought to be going home.'

'Well, I will directly,' said Lucy. 'Don't you bother about me.'

They all went downstairs. Lucy put up her veil, and pressed her
face against the window, watching for them. As she saw them cross
Market Street, she was seized with hungry longing. She wanted to be
going with them, to talk to him herself--to let him see what she
had gone through for him. It would be months and months, perhaps,
before they met again. And Dora would see him--his horrid
sister--everyone but she. He would forget all about her, and she
would be dull and wretched at Hastings.

But as she turned away in her restless pain, she caught sight of
her changed face in the cracked looking-glass over the mantelpiece.
Her white lips tightened. She drew down her veil, and went home.

Meanwhile Dora led the way to Potter Street. Louie took little
notice of any attempts to talk to her. She was wholly engaged in
looking about her and at the shops. Especially was she attracted by
the drapers' windows in St. Ann's Square, pronouncing her opinion
loudly and freely as to their contents.

Dora fell meditating. Young Grieve would have his work cut out for
him, she thought, if this extraordinary sister were really going to
settle with him. She was very like him--strangely like him. And yet
in the one face there was a quality which was completely lacking in
the other, and which seemed to make all the difference. Dora tried
to explain what she meant to herself, and failed.

'Here's Potter Street,' she said, as they turned into it. 'And
that's his shop--that one with the stall outside. Oh, there he is!'

David was in fact standing on his step talking to a customer who
was turning over the books outside.

Louie looked at him. Then she began to run. Old Grieve too, crimson
all over, and evidently much excited, hurried on. Dora fell behind,
her quick sympathies rising.

'They won't want me interfering,' she said, turning round.

'I'll just go back to my work.'

Meanwhile, in David's little back room, which he had already swept
and garnished--for after his letter of the night before, he had
somehow expected Louie, to rush upon him by the earliest possible
train--the meeting of these long-sundered persons took place.

David saw Reuben come in with amazement.

'Why, Uncle Reuben! Well, I'm real glad to see you. I didn't think
you'd have been able to leave the farm. Well, this is my bit of a
place, you see. What do you think of it?'

And, holding his sister by the hand, the young fellow looked
joyously at his uncle, pride in his new possessions and the
recollection of his destitute childhood rushing upon him together
as he spoke.

'Aye, it's a fine beginning yo've made, Davy,' said the old man,
cautiously looking round, first at the little room, with its neat
bits of new furniture in Louie's honour, and then through the glass
door at the shop, which was now heavily lined with books. 'Yo wor
allus a cliver lad, Davy. A' think a'll sit down.'

And Reuben, subsiding into a chair, fell forthwith into an
abstraction, his old knotted hands trembling a little on his knees.

Meanwhile David was holding Louie at arm's-length to look at her.
He had kissed her heartily when she came in first, and now he was
all pleasure and excitement.

''Pon my word, Louie, you've grown as high as the roof! I say,
Louie, what's become of that smart pink dress you wore at last
"wake," and of that overlooker, with the moustaches, from New
Mills, you walked about with all day?'

She stared at him open-mouthed.

'What do you mean by that?' she said, quickly.

David laughed out.

'And who was it gave Jim Wigson a box on the ears last fifth of
November, in the lane just by the Dye-works, eh, Miss Louie?--and danced
with young Redway at the Upper Mill dance, New Year's Day?--and had
words with Mr. James at the office about her last "cut," a fortnight
ago--eh, Louie?'

'What _ever_ do you mean?' she said, half crossly, her colour
rising. 'You've been spying on me.'

She hated to be mystified. It made her feel herself in some one
else's power; and the wild creature in her blood grew restive.

'Why, I've known all about you these four years!' the lad began,
with dancing eyes. Then suddenly his voice changed, and dropped: 'I
say, look at Uncle Reuben!'

For Reuben sat bent forward, his light blurred eyes looking out
straight before him, with a singular yet blind intentness, as
though, while seeing nothing round about him, they passed beyond
the walls of the little room to some vision of their own.

'I don't know whatever he came for,' began Louie, as they both
examined him.

'Uncle Reuben,' said David, going up to him and touching him on the
shoulder, 'you look tired. You'll be wanting some dinner. I'll just
send my man, John Dalby, round the corner for something.'

And he made a step towards the door, but Reuben raised his hand.

'Noa, noa, Davy! Shut that door, wiltha?'

David wondered, and shut it.

Then Reuben gave a long sigh, and put his hand deep into his coat
pocket, with the quavering, uncertain movement characteristic of
him.

'Davy, my lad, a've got summat to say to tha.'

And with many hitches, while the others watched him in
astonishment, he pulled out of his pocket a canvas bag and put it
down on an oak stool in front of him. Then he undid the string of
it with his large awkward fingers, and pushed the stool across to
David.

'Theer's sixty pund theer, Davy--sixty pund! Yo can keawnt it--it's
aw reet. A've saved it for yo, this four year--four year coom lasst
Michaelmas Day. Hannah nor nobory knew owt abeawt it. But it's
yourn--it's yor share, being t' half o' Mr. Gurney's money. Louie's
share--that wor different; we had a reet to that, she bein a growin
girl, and doin nowt mich for her vittles. Fro the time when yo
should ha had it--whether for wages or for 'prenticin--an yo
_could_ na ha it, because Hannah had set hersen agen it,--a
saved it for tha, owt o' t' summer cattle moastly, without tellin
nobory, so as not to mak words.'

David, bewildered, had taken the bag into his hand. Louie's eyes
were almost out of her head with curiosity and amazement. '_Mr.
Gurney's money!_' What did he mean? It was all double-Dutch to
them.

David, with an effort, controlled himself, being now a man and a
householder. He stood with his back against the shop door, his gaze
fixed on Reuben.

'Now, Uncle Reuben, I don't understand a bit of what you've been
saying, and Louie don't either. Who's Mr. Gurney? and what's his
money?'

Unconsciously the young man's voice took a sharp, magisterial note.
Reuben gave another long sigh. He was now leaning on his stick,
staring at the floor.

'Noa,--a' know yo doan't understan; a've got to tell tha--'at's t'
worst part on 't. An I'm soa bad at tellin. Do yo mind when yor
feyther deed, Davy?' he said suddenly, looking up.

David nodded,--a red flush of presentiment spread itself over his
face--his whole being hung on Reuben's words.

'He sent for me afore he deed,' continued Reuben, slowly; 'an he
towd me aw about his affairs. Six hunderd pund he'd got
saved--_six-hunderd-pund!_ Aye, it wor a lot for a yoong mon
like him, and after sich a peck o' troobles! And he towd me Mr.
Gurney ud pay us th' interest for yor bringin-up--th' two on yo; an
whan yo got big, Davy, I wor to tak keawnsel wi Mr. Gurney, an, if
yo chose for t' land, yo were to ha yor money for a farm, when yo
wor big eneuf, an if yo turned agen th' land, yo wor to be
'prenticed to soom trade, an ha yor money when yo wanted it,--Mr.
Gurney bein willin. An I promised him I'd deal honest wi his
childer, an--'

Reuben paused painfully. He was wrestling with his conscience, and
groping for words about his wife. The brother and sister sat
open-mouthed, pale with excitement, afraid of losing a single
syllable.

'An takkin it awthegither,' he said, bringing each word out with an
effort, 'I doan't think, by t' Lord's mercy, as I've gone soa mich
astray, though I ha been mich troobled this four year wi thowts o'
Sandy--my brither Sandy--an wi not knowin wheer yo wor gone, Davy.
Bit yo seem coom to an honest trade--an Louie theer ha larnt a
trade too,--an addle't a bit money,--an she's a fine-grown lass--'

He turned a slow, searching look upon her, as though he were
pleading a cause before some unseen judge.

'An theer's yor money, Davy. It's aw th' same, a'm thinkin, whether
yo get it fro me or fro Mr. Gurney. An here--'

He rose, and unbuttoning his inner coat, fumbled in the pocket of
it till he found a letter.

'An here is a letter for Mr. Gurney. If yo gie me a pen, Davy, I'll
write in to 't yor reet address, an put it in t' post as I goo to
t' station. I took noatice of a box as I coom along. An then--'

He stood still a moment pondering, one outspread hand on the
letter.

'An then theer's nowt moor as a can remember,--an your aunt ull be
wearyin; an it's but reet she should know now, at wonst, abeawt t'
money a've saved this four year, an t' letter to Mr. Gurney. Yo
understan--when yor letter came this mornin--t'mon browt it up to
Louie abeawt eight o'clock--she towd me fust out i' th' yard--an I
said to her, 'Doan't you tell yor aunt nowt abeawt it, an we'st meet
at t' station.' An I made soom excuse to Hannah abeawt gooin ower
t' Scout after soom beeasts--an--an--Louie an me coom thegither.'

He passed his other hand painfully across his brow. The travail of
expression, the moral struggle of the last twenty-four hours,
seemed to have aged him before them.

David sat looking at him in a stupefied silence. A light was
breaking in upon him, transfiguring, combining, interpreting a
hundred scattered remembrances of his boyhood. But Louie, the
instant her uncle stopped, broke into a siring of questions, shrill
and breathless, her face quite white, her eyes glittering. Reuben
seemed hardly to hear her, and in the middle of them David said
sharply,

'Stop that, Louie, and let me talk to Uncle Reuben!'

He drew the letter from under Reuben's fingers, and went on,
steadily looking up into his uncle's face:

'You'll let me read it, uncle, and I'll get you a pen directly to
put in the address. But first will you tell us about father? You
never did--you nor Aunt Hannah. And about mother, too?'

He said the last words with difficulty, having all his life been
pricked by a certain instinct about his mother, which had, however,
almost nothing definite to work upon. Reuben thought a minute, then
sat down again patiently.

'Aye, a'll tell tha. Theer's nobory else can. An tha ought to know,
though it'll mebbe be a shock to tha.'

And, with his head resting against his stick, he began to tell the
story of his brother and his brother's marriage as he remembered
it.

First came the account of Sandy's early struggles, as Sandy himself
had described them on that visit which he had paid to the farm in
the first days of his prosperity; then a picture of his ultimate
success in business, as it had appeared to the dull elder brother
dazzled by the younger's 'cliverness.'

'Aye, he might ha been a great mon; he might ha coom to varra high
things, might Sandy,' said Reuben solemnly, his voice suddenly
rising, 'bit for th' hizzy that ruined him!'

Both his hearers made an involuntary movement. But Reuben had now
lost all count of them. He was intent on one thing, and capable
only of one thing. They had asked him for his story, and he was
telling it, with an immense effort of mind, recovering the past as
best he could, and feeling some of it over again intensely.

So when he came to the marriage, he told the story like one
thinking it out to himself, with an appalling plainness of phrase.
It was, of course, impossible for him to _explain_ Sandy's
aberration--there were no resources in him equal to the task.
Louise Suveret became in his account what she had always remained
in his imagination since Sandy's employers told him what was known
of her story--a mere witch and devil, sent for his brother's
perdition. All his resentment against his brother's fate had passed
into his hatred of this creature whom he had never seen. Nay, he
even held up the picture of her hideous death before her children
with a kind of sinister triumph. So let the ungodly and the harlot
perish!

David stood opposite to the speaker all the while, motionless, save
for an uneasy movement here and there when Reuben's words grew more
scripturally frank than usual. Louie's face was much more positive
than David's in what it said. Reuben and Reuben's vehemence annoyed
and angered her. She frowned at him from under her black brows. It
was evident that he, rather than his story, excited her.

'An we buried him aw reet an proper,' said Reuben at last, wiping
his brow, damp with this unwonted labour of brain and tongue. 'Mr.
Gurney he would ha it aw done handsome; and we put him in a corner
o' Kensal Green, just as close as might be to whar they'd put her
after th' crowner had sat on her. Yor feyther had left word, an Mr.
Gurney would ha nowt different. But it went agen me--aye, it
_did_--to leave him wi _her_ after aw!'

And falling suddenly silent, Reuben sat wrapped in a sombre mist of
memory.

Then Louie broke out, rolling and unrolling the ribbons of her hat
in hot fingers.

'I don't believe half on't--I don't see how you could know--nor Mr.
Gurney either.'

Reuben looked round bewildered. Louie got up noisily, went to the
window and threw it open, as though oppressed by the narrowness of
the room.

'No, I don't,' she repeated, defiantly--'I don't believe the half
on't. But I'll find out some day.'

She leaned her elbows on the sill, and, looking out into the
squalid bit of yard, threw a bit of grit that lay on the window at
a cat that sat sleepily blinking on the flags outside.

Reuben rose heavily.

'Gie me pen and ink, Davy, an let me go.'

The young man brought it him without a word. Reuben put in the
address.

'Ha yo read it, Davy?'

David started. In his absorption he had forgotten to read it.

'I wor forced to write it i' the top sheepfold,' Reuben began to
explain apologetically, then stopped suddenly. Several times he had
been on the point of bringing Hannah into the conversation, and had
always refrained. He refrained now. David read it. It was written
in Reuben's most laborious business style, and merely requested
that Mr. Gurney would now communicate with Sandy's son direct on
the subject of his father's money. He had left Needham Farm, and
was old enough to take counsel himself with Mr. Gurney in future as
to what should be done with it.

Reuben looked over David's shoulder as he read.

'An Louie?' he said uncertainly, at the end, jerking his thumb
towards her.

'I'm stayin here,' said Louie peremptorily, still looking out of
window.

Reuben said nothing. Perhaps a shade of relief lightened his old
face.

When the letter was handed back to him, he sealed it and put it
into his pocket, buttoning up his coat for departure.

'Yo wor talkin abeawt dinner, Davy--or summat,' said the old man,
courteously.' Thankee kindly. I want for nowt. I mun get home--I
mun get home.'

Louie, standing absorbed in her own excited thoughts, could hardly
be disturbed to say good-bye to him. David, still in a dream, led
him through the shop, where Reuben peered about him with a certain
momentary curiosity.

But at the door he said good-bye in a great hurry and ran down the
steps, evidently impatient to be rid of his nephew.

David turned and came slowly back through the little piled-up shop,
where John, all eyes and ears, sat on a high stool in the corner,
into the living room.

As he entered it Louie sprang upon him, and seizing him with both
hands, danced him madly round the little space of vacant boards,
till she tripped her foot over the oak stool, and sank down on a
chair, laughing wildly.

'How much of that money am I going to have?' she demanded suddenly,
her arms crossed over her breast, her eyes brilliant, her whole
aspect radiant and exulting.

David was standing over the fire, looking down into it, and made no
answer. He had disengaged himself from her as soon as he could.

Louie waited a while; then, with a contemptuous lip and a shrug of
the shoulders, she got up.

'What's the good of worriting about things, I'd like to know? You
won't do 'em no good. Why don't you think about the money? My word,
won't Aunt Hannah be mad! How am I to get my parcels from the
station, and where am I to sleep?'

'You can go and see the house,' said David, shortly. 'The lodgers
upstairs are out, and there's the key of the attic.'

He threw it to her, and she ran off. He had meant to take her in
triumphal progress through the little house, and show her all the
changes he had been making for her benefit and his own. But a gulf
had yawned between them. He was relieved to see her go, and when he
was left alone he laid his arms on the low mantelpiece and hid his
face upon them. His mother's story, his father's fate, seemed to be
burning into his heart.

Reuben hurried home through the bleak March evening. In the train
he could not keep himself still, fidgeting so much that his
neighbours eyed him with suspicion, and gave him a wide berth. As
he started to walk up to Kinder a thin, raw sleet came on. It drove
in his face, chilling him through and through, as he climbed the
lonely road, where the black moorland farms lay all about him, seen
dimly through the white and drifting veil of the storm. But he was
conscious of nothing external. His mind was absorbed by the thought
of his meeting with Hannah, and by the excited feeling that one of
the crises of his timid and patient life was approaching. During
the last four years they had been very poor, in spite of Mr.
Gurney's half-yearly cheque, partly because of the determination
with which he had stuck to his secret saving. Hannah would think
they were going now to be poorer still, but he meant to prove to
her that what with Louie's departure and the restoration of their
whole income to its natural channels, there would not be so much
difference. He conned his figures eagerly, rehearsing what he would
say. For the rest he walked lightly and briskly. The burden of his
brother's children had dropped away from him, and in those strange
inner colloquies of his he could look Sandy in the face again.

Had Hannah discovered his flight, he wondered? Some one he was
afraid, might have seen him and Louie at the station and told
tales. He was not sure that one of the Wigsons had not been hanging
about the station yard. And that letter of David's to Louie, which
in his clumsy blundering way he had dropped somewhere about the
farm buildings or the house, and had not been able to find again!
It gave him a cold sweat to think that in his absence Hannah might
have come upon it and drawn her own conclusions. As he followed out
this possibility in his mind, his step quickened till it became
almost a run.

Aye, and Hannah had been ailing of late--there had been often
'summat wrang wi her.' Well, they were both getting into years.
Perhaps now that Louie with her sharp tongue and aggravating ways
was gone, now that there was only him to do for, Hannah would take
things easier.

He opened the gate into the farmyard and walked up to the house
door with a beating heart. It struck him as strange that the front
blinds were not drawn, for it was nearly dark and the storm beat
against the windows. There was a glimmer of fire in the room, but
he could see nothing clearly. He turned the handle and went into
the passage, making a clatter on purpose. But nothing stirred in
the house, and he pushed open the kitchen door, which stood ajar,
filled with a vague alarm.

Hannah was sitting in the rocking-chair, by the fire. Beside her
was the table partly spread with tea, which, however, had been
untouched. At Reuben's entrance she turned her head and looked at
him fixedly. In the dim light--a mixture of the dying fire and of
the moonlight from outside--he could not see her plainly, but he
felt that there was something strange, and he ran forward to her.

'Hannah, are yo bad?--is there owt wrang wi yo?'

Then his seeking eye made out a crumpled paper in her left hand,
and he knew at once that it must be Davy's letter.

Before he could speak again she gave him a push backward with her
free hand, and said with an effort:

'Where's t' gell?'

'Louie? She's left i' Manchester. A've found Davy, Hannah.'

There was a pause, after which he said, trembling:

'Shall I get yo summat, Hannah?'

A hoarse voice came out of the dark:

'Ha doon wi yo! Yo ha been leein to me. Yo wor seen at t' station.'

Reuben sat down.

'Hannah,' he said, 'yo mun just listen to me.'

And taking his courage in both hands, he told everything without a
break: how he had been 'feeart' of what Sandy might say to him 'at
th' joodgment,' how he had saved and lied, and how now he had seen
David, had written to Mr. Gurney, and stopped the cheques for good
and all.

When he came to the letter to Mr. Gurney, Hannah sat suddenly
upright in her chair, grasping one arm of it.

'It shall mak noa difference to tha, a tell tha,' he cried hastily,
putting up his hand, fearing he knew not what, 'nobbut a few
shillins ony way. I'll work for tha an mak it up.'

She made a sound which turned him cold with terror--a sound of
baffled weakness, pain, vindictive passion all in one--then she
fell helplessly to one side in her chair, and her grey head dropped
on her shoulder.

In another moment he was crying madly for help in the road outside.
For long there was no answer--only the distant roar of the Downfall
and the sweep of the wind. Then a labourer, on the path leading to
the Wigsons' farm, heard and ran up.

An hour later a doctor had been got hold of, and Hannah was lying
upstairs, tended by Mrs. Wigson and Reuben.

'A paralytic seizure,' said the doctor to Reuben. 'This woman says
she's been failing for some time past. She's lived and worked hard,
Mr. Grieve; _you_ know that. And there's been some shock.'

Reuben explained incoherently. The doctor did not understand, and
did not care, being a dull man and comparatively new to the place.
He did what he could, said she would recover--oh, yes, she would
recover; but, of course, she could never be the same woman again.
Her working days were done.

A servant came over from Wigsons' to sit up with Reuben, Mrs.
Wigson being too delicate to undertake it. The girl went to lie
down first for an hour or two in the room across the landing, and
he was left alone in the gaunt room with his wife. Poor quailing
soul! As he sat there in the windy darkness, hour after hour,
open-mouthed and open-eyed, he was steeped in terror--terror of the
future, of its forlornness, of his own feebleness, of death. His
heart clave piteously to the unconscious woman beside him, for he
had nothing else. It seemed to him that the Lord had indeed dealt
hardly with him, thus to strike him down on the day of his great
atonement!




CHAPTER IX


No news of the catastrophe at Needham Farm reached the brother and
sister in Potter Street. The use of the pen had always been to
Reuben one of the main torments and mysteries of life, and he had
besides all those primitive instincts of silence and concealment
which so often in the peasant nature accompany misfortune. His
brain-power, moreover, was absorbed by his own calamity and by the
changes in the routine of daily life which his wife's state brought
upon him, so that immediately after his great effort of reparation
towards them--an effort which had taxed the whole man physically
and mentally--his brother's children and their affairs passed for a
while strangely and completely from his troubled mind.

Meanwhile, what a transformation he had wrought in their fortunes!
When the shock of his parents' story had subsided in him, and that
other shock of jarring temperaments, which the first hour of
Louie's companionship had brought with it, had been for the time
forgotten again in the stress of plans and practical detail, David
felt to the full the exhilaration of his new prospects. He had
sprung at a leap, as it seemed to him, from the condition of the
boy-adventurer to that of the man of affairs. And as he looked back
upon their childhood and realised that all the time, instead of
being destitute and dependent orphans, they and their money had
really been the mainstay of Hannah and the farm, the lad seemed to
cast from him the long humiliation of years, to rise in stature and
dignity. That old skinflint and hypocrite, Aunt Hannah! With the
usual imperfect sympathy of the young he did not much realise
Reuben's struggle. But he bore his uncle no grudge for these years'
delay. The contrivances and hardships of his Manchester life had
been, after all, enjoyment. Without them and the extravagant
self-reliance they had developed in him his pride and ambition
would have run less high. And at this moment the nerve and savour
of existence came to him from pride and from ambition.

But first of all he had to get his money. As soon as Mr. Gurney's
answer to Reuben's letter came, David took train for London, made
his way to the great West-End shop which had employed his father,
and saw the partner who had taken charge of Sandy's money for so
long. Mr. Gurney, a shrewd and pompous person, was interested in
seeing Grieve's son, inquired what he was about, ran over the terms
of a letter to himself, which he took out of a drawer, and then,
with a little flourish as to his own deserts in the matter of the
guardianship of the money--a flourish neither unnatural nor
unkindly--handed over to the lad both the letter and a cheque on a
London bank, took his receipt, talked a little, but with a blunted
memory, about the lad's father, gave him a little general business
advice, asked whether his sister was still alive, and bade him good
morning. Both were satisfied, and the young man left the office
with the cheque lying warm in his pocket, looking slowly and
curiously round the shop where his father had earned it, as he
walked away.

Outside he found himself close to Trafalgar Square, and, striking
down to the river, he went to sit on the Embankment and ponder the
enclosures which Mr. Gurney had given him. First he took out the
cheque, with infinite care, lest the breeze on the Embankment
should blow it out of his hand, and spread it on his knee.
600 pounds! As he stared at each letter and flourish his eyes
widened anew; and when he looked up across the grey and misty river,
the figures still danced before him, and in his exultation he
could have shouted the news to the passers-by. Then, when the
precious paper had been safely stowed away again, he hesitatingly
took out the other--his father's dying memorandum on the subject of
his children, so he had understood Mr. Gurney. It was old and brown;
it had been written with anguish, and it could only be deciphered
with difficulty. There had been no will properly so called. Sandy
had placed more confidence in 'the firm' than in the law, and had
left behind him merely the general indication of his wishes in the
hands of the partner who had specially befriended him. The
provisions of it were as Sandy had described them to Reuben on his
deathbed. Especially did the father insist that there should be
no artificial restriction of age. 'I wanted money most when I was
nineteen, and I could have used it just as well then as I could at
any later time.'

So he might have been a rich man at least a year earlier. Well,
much as he had loathed Purcell, he was glad, on the whole, that
things were as they were. He had been still a great fool, he
reflected, a year ago.

Then, as to Louie, the letter ran: 'Let Davy have all the money, and
let him manage for her. I won't divide it; he must judge. He may
want it all, and it may be best for them both he should have it.
He's got a good heart; I know that; he'll not rob his sister. I lay
it on him, now I'm dying, to be patient with her, and look after
her. She's not like other children. But it's not her fault; it was
born in her. Let him see her married to a decent man, and then give
her what's honestly hers. That little lad has nursed me like a
woman since I've been ill. He was always a good lad to me, and I'd
like him to know when he's grown up that his father loved him--'

But here the poor laboured scrawl came to an end, save for a few
incoherent strokes. David thrust it back into his pocket. His cheek
was red; his eyes burnt; he sat for long, with his elbows on his
knees, staring at the February river. The choking, passionate
impulse to comfort his father he had felt so often as a child was
there again, by association, alive and piteous.

Suddenly he woke up with a start. There, to either hand, lay the
bridges, with the moving figures atop and the hurrying river below.
And from one of them his mother had leapt when she destroyed
herself. In the trance of thought that followed, it was to him as
though he felt her wild nature, her lawless blood, stirring within
him, and realised, in a fierce, reluctant way, that he was hers as
well as his father's. In a sense, he shared Reuben's hatred; for
he, best of all, knew what she had made his father suffer. Yet the
thought of her drew his restless curiosity after it. Where did she
come from? Who were her kindred? From the south of France, Reuben
thought. The lad's imagination travelled with difficulty and
excitement to the far and alien land whence half his being had
sprung. A few scraps of poetry and history recurred to him--a
single tattered volume of 'Monte Cristo,' which he had lately
bought with an odd lot at a sale--but nothing that suggested to his
fancy anything like the peasant farm in the Mont Ventoux, within
sight of Arles, where Louise Suveret's penurious childhood had been
actually cradled.

Two o'clock struck from the belfry of St. Paul's, looming there to
his left in the great bend of the river. At the sound he shook off
all his thoughts. Let him see something of London. He had two hours
and a half before his train from Euston. Westminster first--a hasty
glance; then an omnibus to St. Paul's, that he might look down upon
the city and its rush; then north. He had a map with him, and his
quick intelligence told him exactly how to use his time to the best
advantage. Years afterwards he was accustomed to look back on this
hour spent on the top of an omnibus, which was making its difficult
way to the Bank through the crowded afternoon streets, as one of
the strong impressions of his youth. Here was one centre of things:
Westminster represented another; and both stood for knowledge,
wealth, and power. The boy's hot blood rose to the challenge. His
foot was on the ladder, and many men with less chances than he had
risen to the top. At this moment, small Manchester tradesman that
he was, he had the constant presentiment of a wide career.

That night he let himself into his own door somewhere about nine
o'clock. What had Louie been doing with herself all day? She was to
have her first lesson from Dora Lomax; but she must have been dull
since, unless Dora had befriended her.

To his astonishment, as he shut the door he heard voices in
the kitchen--Louie and _John_. John, the shy, woman-hating
creature, who had received the news of Louie's expected advent in a
spirit of mingled irritation and depression--who, after his first
startled look at her as she passed through the shop, seemed to
David to have fled the sight of her whenever it was possible!

Louie was talking so fast and laughing so much that neither of them
had heard David's latchkey, and in his surprise the brother stood
still a moment in the dark, looking round the kitchen-door, which
stood a little open. Louie was sitting by the fire with some yards
of flowered cotton stuff on her knee, at which she was sewing; John
was opposite to her on the oak stool, crouched over a box of nails,
from which he was laboriously sorting out those of a certain size,
apparently at her bidding, for she gave him sharp directions from
time to time. But his toil was intermittent, for whenever her
sallies were louder or more amusing than usual his hand paused, and
he sat staring at her, his small eyes expanding, a sympathetic grin
stealing over his mouth.

It seemed to David that she was describing her lover of the winter;
he caught her gesture as she illustrated her performance with Jim
Wigson--the boxing of the amorous lout's ears in the lane by the
Dye-works. Her beautiful curly black hair was combed to-night into
a sort of wild halo round her brow and cheeks, and in this
arrangement counteracted the one fault of the face--a slightly
excessive length from forehead to chin. But the brilliance of the
eyes, the redness of the thin lips over the small and perfect
teeth, the flush on the olive cheek, the slender neck, the
distinction and delicacy of every sweeping line and curve--for the
first time even David realised, as he stood there in the dark, that
his sister was an extraordinary beauty. Strange! Her manner and
voice had neither natural nor acquired refinement; and yet in the
moulding of the head and face there was a dignity and perfection--a
touch, as it were, of the grand style--which marked her out in a
northern crowd and riveted the northern eye. Was it the trace of
another national character, another civilisation, longer descended,
less mixed, more deeply graven than ours?

But what was that idiot John doing here?--the young master wanted
to know. He coughed loudly and hung up his hat and his stick, to
let them hear that he was there. The pair in the kitchen started.
Louie sprang up, flung down her work, and ran out to him.

'Well,' said she breathlessly, 'have you got it?'

'Yes.'

She gave a little shriek of excitement.

'Show it then.'

'There's nothing to show but a cheque. It's all right. Is there
anything for supper?'

'There's some bread and cheese and cold apple-pie in there,' said
Louie, annoyed with him already; then, turning her head over her
shoulder, 'Mr. Dalby, I'll trouble you to get them out.'

With awkward alacrity John flew to do her bidding. When the lad had
ransacked the cupboard and placed all the viands it contained on
the table, he looked at David. That young man, with a pucker in his
brow, was standing by the fire with his hands in his pockets,
making short answers to Louie's sharp and numerous questions.

'That's all I can find,' said John. 'Shall I run for something?'

'Thanks,' said David, still frowning, and sat him down, 'that 'll
do.'

Louie made a face at John behind her brother's back. The assistant
slowly flushed a deep red. In this young fellow, with his money
buttoned on his breast, both he and Louie for the first time
realised the master.

'Well, good night,' he said, hesitating, 'I'm going.'

David jumped up and went with him into the passage.

'Look here,' he said abruptly, 'you and I have got some business to
talk to-morrow. I'm not going to keep you slaving here for nothing
now that I can afford to pay you.'

'Are you going to turn me off?' said the other hastily.

David laughed. The cloud had all cleared from his brow.

'Don't be such a precious fool!' he said. 'Now be off--and seven
sharp. I must go at it like ten horses to-morrow.'

John disappeared into the night, and David went back to his sister.
He found her looking red and excited, and sewing energetically.

'Look here!' she said, lifting a threatening eye to him as he
entered the room. 'I'm not going to be treated like a baby. If you
don't tell me all about that money, I'll write to Mr. Gurney
myself. It's part of it mine, and _I'll know_, so there!'

'I'll tell you everything,' he said quietly, putting a hand into
his coat pocket before he sat down to his supper again. 'There's the
cheque--and there's our father's letter,--what Mr. Gurney gave me.
There was no proper will--this was instead.'

He pretended to eat, but in reality he watched her anxiously as she
read it. The result was very much what he had expected. She ran
breathlessly through it, then, with a look all flame and fury, she
broke out--

'Up _on_ my word! So you're going to take it all, and I'm to be
beholden to you for every penny. I'd like to see myself!'

'Now look here, Louie,' he said, firmly, pushing back his chair
from the table, 'I want to explain things to you. I should like to
tell you all about my business, and what I think of doing, and then
you can judge for yourself. I'll not rob you or anyone.'

Whereupon with a fierce gesture she caught up her work again, and
he fell into long and earnest talk, setting his mind to the task.
He explained to her that the arrival of this money--this
capital--made just all the difference, that the whole of it would
be infinitely more useful to him than the half, and that he
proposed to employ it both for her benefit and his own. He had
already cleared out the commission agent from the first floor, and
moved down the lodgers--a young foreman and his wife--from the
attics to the first-floor back. That left the two attics for
himself and Louie, and gave him the front first-floor room, the
best room in the house, for an extension of stock.

'Why don't you turn those people out altogether?' said Louie,
impatiently.' They pay very little, and you'll be wanting that room
soon, very like.'

'Well, I shall get it soon,' said David bluntly; 'but I can't get it
now. Mrs. Mason's bad; she going to be confined.'

'Well, I dare say she is!' cried Louie. 'That don't matter; she
isn't confined yet.'

David looked at her in amazement. Then his face hardened.

'I'm not going to turn her out, I tell you,' he said, and
immediately returned to his statement. Well, there were all sorts
of ways in which he might employ his money. He might put up a shed
in the back yard, and get a printing-press. He knew of a press and
a very decent fount of type, to be had extremely cheap. John was a
capital workman, and between them they might reprint some of the
scarce local books and pamphlets, which were always sure of a sale.
As to his stock, there were endless possibilities. He knew of a
collection of rare books on early America, which belonged to a
gentleman at Cheadle. He had been negotiating about them for some
time. Now he would close at once; from his knowledge of the market
the speculation was a certain one. He was also inclined to largely
increase his stock of foreign books, especially in the technical
and scientific direction. There was a considerable opening, he
believed, for such books in Manchester; at any rate, he meant to
try for it. And as soon as ever he could he should learn German.
There was a fellow--a German clerk--who haunted the Parlour, who
would teach him in exchange for English lessons.

So, following a happy instinct, he opened to her all his mind, and
talked to her as though they were partners in a firm. The event
proved that he could have done nothing better. Very early in his
exposition she began to put her wits to his, her irritation
dropped, and he was presently astonished at the intelligence she
showed. Every element almost in the problems discussed was
unfamiliar to her, yet after a while a listener coming in might
have thought that she too had been Purcell's apprentice, so nimbly
had she gathered up the details involved, so quick she was to see
David's points and catch his phrases. If there was no moral
fellowship between them, judging from to-night, there bade fair to
be a comradeship of intelligence.

'There now,' he said, when he had come to the end of his budget,
'you leave your half of the money to me. Mind, I agree it's your
half, and I'll do the best I can with it. I'll pay you interest on
it for two years, and I'll keep you. Then we'll see. And if you
want to improve yourself a bit, instead of going to work at once,
I'll pay for teachers. And look here, we'll keep good friends over
it.'

His keen eyes softened to a charming, half-melancholy smile. Louie
took no notice; she was absorbed in meditation; and at the end of
it, she said with a long breath--

'Well, you may have it, and I'll keep an eye on the accounts. But
you needn't think I'll sit at home "improving" myself: Not I. I'll
do that church-work. That girl gave me a lesson this morning, and
I'm going again to-morrow.'

David received the news with satisfaction, remarking heartily that
Dora Lomax was a real good sort, and if it weren't for her the
Parlour and Daddy would soon be in a fix. He told the story of the
Parlour, dwelling on Dora's virtues.

'But she is a crank, though!' said Louie. 'Why, if you make free
with her things a bit, or if you call 'em by the wrong names,
she'll fly at you! How's anybody to know what they're meant for?'

David laughed, and got up to get some books he was repairing. As he
moved away he looked back a moment.

'I say, Louie,' he began, hesitating, 'that fellow John's worked for
me like a dozen, and has never taken a farthing from me. Don't you
go and make a fool of him.'

A flush passed over Louie's face. She lifted her hand and tucked
away some curly ends of long hair that had fallen on her shoulders.

'He's like one of Aunt Hannah's suet rolies,' she said, after a
minute, with a gleam of her white teeth. 'Seems as if some one had
tied him in a cloth and boiled him that shape.'

Neither of them cared to go to bed. They sat up talking. David was
mending, sorting, and pricing a number of old books he had bought
for nothing at a country sale. He knew enough of bookbinding to do
the repairing with much skill, showing the same neatness of finger
in it that he had shown years ago in the carving of toy boats and
water-wheels. Louie went on with her work, which proved to be a
curtain for her attic. She meant to have that room nice, and she
had been out buying a few things, whereby David understood--as
indeed Reuben had said--that she had some savings. Moreover, with
regard to certain odd jobs of carpentering, she had already pressed
John into her service, which explained his lingering after hours,
and his eagerness among the nails. As to the furniture David had
bought for her, on which, in the intervals of his busy days, he had
spent some time and trouble, and of which he was secretly proud,
humble and cheap as it was--she took it for granted. He could not
remember that she had said any 'thank you's' since she came.

Still, youth and comradeship were pleasant. The den in which they
sat was warm with light and fire, and was their own. Louie's
exultation, too, in their change of fortune, which flashed out of
her at every turn, was infectious, and presently his spirits rose
with hers, and the two lost themselves in the excitement of large
schemes and new horizons.

After a time he found himself comparing notes with her as to that
far-off crisis of his running away.

'I suppose you heard somehow about Jim Wigson and me?' he asked
her, his pulse quickening after all these years.

She nodded with a little grin. He had already noticed, by the way,
that she, while still living among the moors, had almost shaken
herself free of the Kinder dialect, whereas it had taken quite a
year of Manchester life to rub off his own Doric.

'Well, you didn't imagine'--he went on--'I was going to stop after
that? I could put a knife between Jim's ribs now when I think of
it!'

And, pushing his book away from him, he sat recalling that long
past shame, his face, glowing with vindictive memory, framed in his
hands.

'I don't see, though, what you sneaked off for like that after all
you'd promised me,' she said with energy.

'No, it was hard on you,' he admitted. 'But I couldn't think of any
other way out. I was mad with everybody, and just wanted to cut and
run. But before I hit on that notion about Tom'(he had just been
explaining to her in detail, not at all to her satisfaction, his
device for getting regular news of her)'I used to spend half my
time wondering what you'd do. I thought, perhaps, you'd run away
too, and that would have been a kettle of fish.'

'I did run away,' she said, her wild eyes sparkling--'twice.'

'Jiminy!' said David with a schoolboy delight, 'let's hear!'

Whereupon she took up her tale and told him a great deal that was
still quite unknown to him. She told it in her own way with
characteristic blindnesses and hardnesses, but the truth of it was
this. The very day after David's departure she too had run away, in
spite of the fact that Hannah was keeping her in something very
like imprisonment. She supposed that David had gone to Manchester,
and she meant to follow him there. But she had been caught begging
the other side of Glossop by a policeman, who was a native of
Clough End and knew all about her.

'He made me come along back, but he must have got the mark on his
wrist still where I bit him, I should think,' remarked Miss Louie,
with a satisfaction untouched apparently by the lapse of time.

The next attempt had been more serious. It was some months
afterwards, and by this time she was in despair about David, and
had made up her passionate mind that she would never see him again.
But she loathed Hannah more and more, and at last, in the middle of
a snowy February, the child determined to find her way over the
Peak into the wild valley of the Woodlands, and so to Ashopton and
Sheffield, in which last town she meant to go to service. But in
the effort to cross the plateau of the Peak she very nearly lost
her life. Long before she came in sight of the Snake Inn, on the
Woodlands side, she sank exhausted in the snow, and, but for some
Frimley shepherds who were out after their sheep, she would have
drawn her last breath in that grim solitude. They carried her down
to Frimley and dropped her at the nearest shelter, which happened
to be Margaret Dawson's cottage.

Margaret was then in the first smart of her widowhood. 'Lias was
just dead, and she was withering physically and mentally under the
heart-hunger of her loss. The arrival of the pallid, half-conscious
child--David's sister, with David's eyes--for a time distracted and
appeased her. She nursed the poor waif, and sent word to Needham
Farm. Reuben came for the girl, and Margaret, partly out of
compassion, partly out of a sense of her own decaying strength,
bribed her to go back home by the promise of teaching her the
silk-weaving.

Louie learnt the trade with surprising quickness, and as she shot
up in stature and her fingers gained in cunning and rapidity,
Margaret became more bowed, helpless and 'fond,' until at last
Louie did everything, brought home the weft and warp, set it up,
worked off the 'cuts,' and took them to the warehouse in Clough End
to be paid; while Margaret sat in the chimney corner, pining
inwardly for 'Lias and dropping deeper day by day into the gulf of
age. By this time of course various money arrangements had been
made between them, superintended by Margaret's brother, a weaver in
the same village who found it necessary to keep a very sharp eye on
this girl-apprentice whom Margaret had picked up. Of late Louie had
been paying Margaret rent for the loom, together with a certain
percentage on the weekly earnings, practically for 'goodwill.' And
on this small sum the widow had managed to live and keep her home,
while Louie launched gloriously into new clothes, started a
savings-bank book, and snapped her fingers for good and all at
Hannah, who put up with her, however, in a sour silence because of
Mr. Gurney's cheques.

'And Margaret can't do _anything_ for herself now?' asked
David. He had followed the story with eagerness. For years the
remembrance had rankled in his mind how during his last months at
Kinder, when 'Lias was dying, and the old pair were more in want
than ever of the small services he had been accustomed to render
them, he had forgotten and neglected his friends because he had
been absorbed in the excitements of 'conversion,' so that when Tom
Mullins had told him in general terms that his sister Louie was
supporting both Margaret and herself, the news had soothed a
remorse.

'I should just think not!' said Louie in answer to his question.
'She's gone most silly, and she hasn't got the right use of her
legs either.'

'Poor old thing!' said David softly, falling into a dream. He was
thinking of Margaret in her active, happy days when she used to
bake scones for him, or mend his clothes, or rate him for
'worriting' 'Lias. Then wakening up he drew the book he was binding
towards him again. 'She must have been precious glad to have you to
do for her, Louie,' he said contentedly.

'Do for her?' Louie opened her eyes. 'As if I could be worrited with
her! I had my work to do, thank you. There was a niece used to come
in and see to her. She used to get in my way dreadful sometimes.
She'd have fits of thinking she could work the loom again, and I'd
have to keep her away--regular _frighten_ her.'

David started.

'Who'll work the loom now?' he asked; his look and tone altering to
match hers.

'I'm sure I don't know,' said Louie, carelessly. 'Very like she'll
not get anyone. The work's been slack a long while.'

David suddenly drew back from his bookbinding.

'When did you let her know, Louie--about me?' he asked quickly.

'Let her know? Who was to let her know? Your letter came eight
o'clock and our train started half-past ten. I'd just time to pitch
my things together and that was about all.'

'And you never sent, and you haven't written?'

'You leave me alone,' said the girl, turning instantly sulky under
his tone and look. 'It's nowt to you what I do.'

'Why!' he said, his voice shaking, 'she'd be waiting and
waiting--and she's got nothing else to depend on.'

'There's her brother,' said Louie angrily, 'and if he won't take
her, there's the workhouse. They'll take her there fast enough, and
she won't know anything about it.'

'The _workhouse_!' cried David, springing up, incensed past
bearing by her callous way. 'Margaret that took you in out of the
snow!--you said it yourself. And you--you'd not lift a finger--not
you--you'd not even give her notice--"chuck her into the
workhouse--that's good enough for her!" It's _vile_,--that's
what it is!'

He stood, choked by his own wrath, eyeing her fiercely--a young
thunder god of disdain and condemnation.

Louie too got up--gathering up her work round her--and gave him
back his look with interest before she flung out of the room.

'Keep a civil tongue in your head, sir, or I'll let you know,' she
cried. 'I'll not be called over the coals by you nor nobody. I'll do
what I _please_,--and if you don't like it you can do the
other thing--so there--now you know!'

And with a nod of the utmost provocation and defiance she banged
the door behind her and went up to bed.

David flung down the pen with which he had been lettering his books
on the table, and, drawing a chair up to the fire, he sat moodily
staring into the embers. So it was all to begin again--the long
wrangle and jar of their childhood. Why had he broken silence and
taken this burden once more upon his shoulders? He had a moment of
passionate regret. It seemed to him more than he could bear. No
gratitude, no kindness; and this fierce tongue!

After a while he fetched pen and paper and began to write on his
knee, while his look kindled again. He wrote to Margaret, a letter
of boyish effusion and affection, his own conscience quickened to
passion by Louie's lack of conscience. He had never forgotten her,
he said, and he wished he could see her again. She must write, or
get some one to write for her--and tell him what she was going to
do now that Louie had left her. He had been angry with Louie for
coming away without sending word. But what he wanted to say was
this: if Margaret could get no one to work the loom, he, David,
would pay her brother four shillings a week, for six months
certain, towards her expenses if he would take her in and look
after her. She must ask somebody to write at once and say what was
to be done. If her brother consented to take her, David would send
a post-office order for the first month at once. He was doing well
in his business, and there would be no doubt about the payments.

He made his proposal with a haste and impulsiveness very unlike the
cool judgment he had so far shown in his business. It never
occurred to him to negotiate with the brother who might be quite
well able to maintain his sister without help. Besides he
remembered him as a hard man of whom both Margaret and 'Lias--soft,
sensitive creatures--were both more or less afraid. No, there
should be no doubt about it--not a day's doubt, if he could help
it! He could help, and he would; and if they asked him more he
would give it. Nearly midnight! But if he ran out to the General
Post Office it would be in time.

When he had posted it and was walking home, his anger was all gone.
But in its stead was the smart of a baffled instinct--the hunger
for sympathy, for love, for that common everyday life of the
affections which had never been his, while it came so easily to
other people.

In his chafing distress he felt the curb of something unknown
before; or, rather, what had of late taken the pleasant guise of
kinship and natural affection assumed to-night another and a
sterner aspect, and in this strait of conduct, that sheer
'imperative' which we carry within us made itself for the first
time heard and realised.

'I have done my duty and must abide by it. I _must_ bear with
her and look after her.'

Why?

'Because my father laid it on me?'--

And because there is a life within our life which urges and
presses?--because we are 'not our own'? But this is an answer which
implies a whole theology. And at this moment of his life David had not a
particle or shred of theology about him. Except, indeed, that, like
Voltaire, he was graciously inclined to think a First Cause probable.

Next day this storm blew over, as storms do. Louie came down early
and made the porridge for breakfast. When David appeared she
carried things off with a high hand, and behaved as if nothing had
happened; but anyone accustomed to watch her would have seen a
certain quick nervousness in her black, wild bird's eyes. As for
David, after a period of gruffness and silence, he passed by
degrees into his usual manner. Louie spent the day with Dora, and
he went off to Cheadle to conclude the purchase of that collection
of American books he had described to Louie. But first, on his way,
he walked proudly into Heywood's bank and opened an account there,
receiving the congratulations of an old and talkative cashier, who
already knew the lad and was interested in his prospects, with the
coolness of one who takes good fortune as his right.

In the afternoon he was busy in the shop--not too busy, however, to
notice John. What ailed the lad? While he was inside, as soon as
the door did but creak in the wind he sprang to open it, but for
the most part he preferred to stand outside watching the stall and
the street. When Louie appeared about five o'clock--for her hours
with Dora were not yet regular--he forthwith became her slave. She
set him to draw up the fire while she got the tea, and then,
without taking any notice of David, she marched John upstairs to
help her hang her curtains, lay her carpet, and nail up the
coloured fashion plates and newspaper prints of royalties or
beauties with which she was adorning the bare walls of the attic.

When all her additions had been made to David's original stock;
when the little deal dressing-table and glass had been draped in
the cheapest of muslins over the pinkest of calicoes; when the
flowery curtains had been tied back with blue ribbons; when the
china vases on the mantelpiece had been filled with nodding plumes
of dyed grasses, mostly of a rosy red; and a long glass in a
somewhat damaged condition, but still presenting enough surface to
enable Miss Louie to study herself therein from top to toe, had
been propped against the wall; there was and could be nothing in
the neighbourhood of Potter Street, so John reflected, as he
furtively looked about him, to vie with the splendours of Miss
Grieve's apartment. There was about it a sensuousness, a deliberate
quest of luxury and gaiety, which a raw son of poverty could feel
though he could not put it into words. No Manchester girl he had
ever seen would have cared to spend her money in just this way.

'Now that's real nice, Mr. Dalby, and I'm just obliged to you,'
said Louie, with patronising emphasis, as she looked round upon his
labours. 'I do like to get a man to do things for you--he's got some
strength in him--not like a gell!'

And she looked down at herself and at the long, thin-fingered hand
against her dress, with affected contempt. John looked at her too,
but turned his head away again quickly.

'And yet you're pretty strong too, Miss,' he ventured.

'Well, perhaps I am,' she admitted; 'and a good thing too, when you
come to think of the rough time I had over there'--and she jerked
her head behind her--'ever since Davy ran away from me.'

'Ran away from you, Miss?'

She nodded, pressing her lips together with the look of one who
keeps a secret from the highest motives. But she brought two
beautiful plaintive eyes to bear on John, and he at once felt sure
that David's conduct had been totally inexcusable.

Then suddenly she broke into a laugh. She was sitting on the edge
of the bed, swinging her feet lightly backwards and forwards.

'Look here!' she said, dropping her voice, and looking round at the
door. 'Do you know a lot about Davy's affairs?--you 're a great
friend of his, aren't you?'

'I s'pose so,' said the lad, awkwardly.

'Well, has he been making up to anybody that you know of?'

John's invisible eyebrows stretched considerably. He was so
astonished that he did not readily find an answer.

'Why, of course, I mean,' said Louie, impatiently, 'is he _in
love_ with anybody?'

'Not that I know of, Miss.'

'Well, then, there's somebody in love with _him_,' said Louie,
maliciously; 'and some day, Mr. Dalby, if we get a chance, perhaps
I'll tell you all about it.'

The charming confidential smile she threw him so bewildered the lad
that he hardly knew where he was.

But an exasperated shout of 'John' from the stairs recalled him,
and he rushed downstairs to help David deal with a cargo of books
just arrived.

That evening David ran up to the Parlour for half an hour, to have
a talk with Daddy and find out what Dora thought of Louie. He had
sent a message by Louie about Reuben's revelations, and it occurred
to him that since Daddy had not been to look him up since, that
incalculable person might be offended that he had not brought his
great news in person. Besides, he had a very strong curiosity to
know what had happened after all to Lucy Purcell, and whether
anything had been commonly observed of Purcell's demeanour under
the checkmate administered to him. For the past few days he had
been wholly absorbed in his own affairs, and during the previous
week he had seen nothing of either Daddy or Dora, except that at a
casual meeting in the street with Daddy that worthy had described
his attack on Purcell with a gusto worthy of his Irish extraction.

He found the restaurant just shutting, and Daddy apparently on the
wing for the 'White Horse' parlour, to judge from the relief which
showed in Dora's worn look as she saw her father lay down his hat
and stick again and fall 'chaffing' with David.

For, with regard to David's change of position, the landlord of the
Parlour was in a very testy frame of mind.

'Six hundred pounds!' he growled, when the young fellow sitting
cross-legged by the fire had made an end of describing to them both
his journey to London. 'H'm, _your_ fun's over: any fool can do
on six hundred pounds!'

'Thank you, Daddy,' said the lad, with a sarcastic lip. 'As for you,
I wonder _you_ have the face to talk! Who's coining money
here, I should like to know?'

Dora looked up with a start. Her father met her look with a certain
hostility and an obstinate shake of his thin shoulders.

'Davy, me boy, you're that consated by now, you'll not be for
taking advice. But I'll give it you, bedad, to take or to leave!
Never pitch your tent, sir, where you can't strike it when you want
to! But there's where your beastly money comes in. Nobody need look
to you now for any comprehension of the finer sentiments of man.'

'What do you mean, Daddy?'

'Never you mind,' said the old vagrant, staring sombrely at the
floor--the spleen in person. 'Only I want my _freedom_, I tell
you--and a bit of air, sometimes--and by gad I'll have 'em!'

And throwing back his grey head with a jerk he fixed an angry eye
on Dora. Dora had grown paler, but she said nothing; her fingers
went steadily on with her work; from early morning now till late
night neither they nor she were ever at rest. After a minute's
silence Lomax walked to the door, flung a good-night behind him and
disappeared.

Dora hastily drew her hand across her eyes, then threaded her
needle as though nothing had happened. But David was perplexed and
sorry. How white and thin she looked, to be sure! That old lunatic
must be worrying her somehow.

He moved his chair nearer to Dora.

'Is there anything wrong, Miss Dora?' he asked her, dropping his
voice.

She looked up with a quick gratitude, his voice and expression
putting a new life into her.

'Oh! I don't know,' she said, gently and sadly. 'Father's been very
restless these last few weeks. I can't keep him at home. And I'm
not always dull like this. I've done my best to cheer him up. And I
don't think there's much amiss with the Parlour--yet--only the
outgoings are so large every day. I'm always feeart--'

She paused, and a visible tremor ran through her. David's quick eye
understood the signs of strain and fatigue, and he felt a brotherly
pity for her--a softer, more normal feeling than Louie had ever
called out in him.

'I say,' he said heartily, 'if there's anything I can do, you'll let
me know, wont you?'

She smiled at him, and then turned to her work again in a hurry,
afraid of her own eyes and lips, and what they might be saying.

'Oh! I dare say I fret myself too much,' she said, with the tone of
one determined to be cheered. And, by way of protecting her own
quivering heart, she fell upon the subject of Louie. She showed the
brother some of Louie's first attempts--some of the stitches she
had been learning.

'She's that quick!' she said, wondering. 'In a few days I'm going to
trust her with that,' and she pointed to a fine old piece of
Venetian embroidery, which had to be largely repaired before it
could be made up into an altar-cloth and presented to St. Damian's
by a rich and devoted member of the congregation.

'Does she get in your way?' the brother inquired.

'N-o,' she said in a low voice, paying particular attention to a
complicated stitch. 'She'll get used to me and the work soon. She'll
make a first-rate hand if she's patient a bit. They'll be glad to
take her on at the shop.'

'But you'll not turn her out? You'll let her work here, alongside
of you?' said the young man eagerly. He had just met Louie, in the
dark, walking up Market Street with a seedy kind of gentleman, who
he had reason to know was a bad lot. John was off his head about
her, and no longer of much use to anybody, and in these few days
other men, as it seemed to him, had begun to hang about. The
difficulties of his guardianship were thickening upon him, and he
clung to Dora's help.

'No; I'll not turn her out. She may work here if she wants to,'
said Dora, with the same slowness.

And all the time she was saying to herself passionately that, if
Louie Grieve had not been his sister, she should _never_ have
set foot in that room again! In the two days they had been together
Louie had outraged almost every feeling the other possessed. And
there was a burning dread in Dora's mind that even the secret of
her heart of hearts had been somehow discovered by the girl's
hawk-like sense. But she had promised to help him, and she would.

'You must let me know what I owe you for teaching her and
introducing her,' said David firmly. 'Yes, you must, Miss Dora. It's
business, and you mustn't make any bones about it. A girl doesn't
learn a trade and get an opening found her for nothing.'

'Oh no, nonsense!' she said quickly, but with decision equal to his
own. 'I won't take anything. She don't want much teaching; she's so
clever; she sees a thing almost before the words are out of your
mouth. Look here, Mr. Grieve, I want to tell you about Lucy.'

She looked up at him, flushing. He, too, coloured.

'Well,' he said; 'that's what I wanted to ask you.'

She told him the whole story of Lucy's flight from her father, of
her illness and departure, of the probable stepmother.

'Old brute!' said David between his teeth. 'I say, Miss Dora, can
nothing be done to make him treat her decently?'

His countenance glowed with indignation and disgust. Dora shook her
head sadly.

'I don't see what anyone can do; and the worst of it is she'll be
such a long while getting over it. I've had a letter from her this
morning, and she says the Hastings doctor declares she must stay
there a year in the warm and not come home at all, or she'll be
going off in a decline. I know Lucy gets nervous about herself, but
it do seem bad.'

David sat silent, lost in a medley of feelings, most of them
unpleasant. Now that Lucy Purcell was at the other end of England,
both her service to him and his own curmudgeon behaviour to her
loomed doubly large.

'I say, will you give me her address?' he said at last. 'I've got a
smart book I've had bound for her. I'd like to send it her.'

Dora went to the table and wrote it for him. Then he got up to go.

'Upon my word, you do look tired,' he broke out. 'Can't you go to
bed? It is hard lines.'

Which last words applied to that whole situation of hers with her
father which he was beginning dimly to discern. In his boyish
admiration and compassion he took both her hands in his. Dora
withdrew them quickly.

'Oh, I'll pull through!' she said, simply, and he went.

When she had closed the door after him she stood looking at the
clock with her hands clasped in front of her.

'How much longer will father be?' she said, sighing. 'Oh, I think I
told him all Lucy wanted me to say; I think I did.'




CHAPTER X


Three or four months passed away. During that period David had built
up a shed in his back yard and had established a printing-press
there, with a respectable, though not extensive, fount of
type--bought, all of it, secondhand, and a bargain. John and
he spent every available moment there, and during their first
experiments would often sit up half the night working off the
sheets of their earliest productions, in an excitement which took
no count of fatigue. They began with reprinting some scarce local
tracts, with which they did well. Then David diverged into a
Radical pamphlet or two on the subject of the coming Education
Bill, finding authors for them among the leading ministers of the
town; and these timely wares, being freely pushed on the stall, on
the whole paid their expenses, with a little profit to spare--the
labour being reckoned at nothing. And now David was beginning to
cherish the dream of a new history of Manchester, for which among
his own collections he already possessed a great deal of fresh
material. But that would take time and money. He must push his
business a bit further first.

That business, however, was developing quite as rapidly as the two
pairs of arms could keep pace with it. Almost everything the young
fellow touched succeeded. He had instinct, knowledge, a growing
tact, and an indomitable energy, and these are the qualities which
make, which are in themselves, success. The purchase of the
collection at Cheadle, bearing on the early history of American
states and towns, not only turned out well in itself, but brought
him to the notice of a big man in London, who set the clever and
daring beginner on several large quests both in Lancashire and
Yorkshire by which both profited considerably. In another direction
he was extending his stock of foreign scientific and technical
books, especially such as bore upon the industries of Northern
England. Old Barbier, who took a warmer and warmer interest in his
pupil's progress, kept him constantly advised as to French books
through old friends of his own in Paris, who were glad to do the
exile a kindness.

'But why not run over to Paris for yourself, form some connections,
and look about you?' suggested Barbier.

Why not, indeed? The young man's blood, quick with curiosity and
adventure, under all his tradesman's exterior, leapt at the
thought. But prudence restrained him for the present.

As for German books, he was struggling with the language, and
feeling his way besides through innumerable catalogues. How he
found time for all the miscellaneous acquisitions of these months
it would be difficult to say. But whether in his free times or in
trade-hours he was hardly ever without a book or a catalogue beside
him, save when he was working the printing press; and, although his
youth would every now and then break out against the confinement he
imposed upon it, and drive him either to long tramps over the moors
on days when the spring stirred in the air, or to a spell of
theatre-going, in which Louie greedily shared, yet, on the whole,
his force of purpose was amazing, and the success which it brought
with it could only be regarded as natural and inevitable. He was
beginning to be well known to the old-established men in his own
business, who could not but show at times some natural jealousy of
so quick a rise. The story of his relations to Purcell spread, and
the two were watched with malicious interest at many a book-sale,
when the nonchalant self-reliance and prosperous look of the
younger drove the elder man again and again into futile attempts to
injure and circumvent him. It was noticed that never till now had
Purcell lost his head with a rival.

Nevertheless, the lad had far fewer enemies than might have been
expected. His manner had always been radiantly self-confident; but
there was about him a conspicuous element of quick feeling, of warm
humanity, which grew rather than diminished with his success. He
was frank, too, and did not try to gloss over a mistake or a
failure. Perhaps in his lordly way he felt he could afford himself
a few now and then, he was so much cleverer than his neighbours.

Upon no one did David's development produce more effect than upon
Mr. Ancrum. The lame, solitary minister, who only got through his
week's self-appointed tasks at a constant expense of bodily
torment, was dazzled and bewildered by the spectacle of so much
vitality spent with such ease and impunity.

'How many years of Manchester must one give him?' said Ancrum to
himself one night, when he was making his way home from a reading
of the 'Electra' with David. 'That six hundred pounds has quickened
the pace amazingly! Ten years, perhaps. Then London, and anything
you like. Bookselling slips into publishing, and publishing takes a
man into another class, and within reach of a hundred new
possibilities. Some day I shall be bragging of having taught him!
Taught him! He'll be turning the tables on me precious soon. Caught
me out twice to-night, and got through the tough bit of the chorus
much better than I did. How does he do it?--and with that mountain
of other things on his shoulders! There's one speck in the fruit,
however, as far as I can see--Miss Louie!'

From the first moment of his introduction to her, Ancrum had taken
particular notice of David's handsome sister, who, on her side, had
treated her old minister and teacher with a most thoroughgoing
indifference. He saw that now, after some three months of life
together, the brother and sister had developed separate existences,
which touched in two points only--a common liking for Dora Lomax,
and a common keenness for business.

Here, in this matter of business, they were really at one. David
kept nothing from her, and consulted her a good deal. She had the
same shrewd head that he had, and as it was her money as well as
his that was in question she was determined to know and to
understand what he was after. Anybody who had come upon the pair on
the nights when they made up their accounts, their dark heads
touching under the lamp, might have gone away moralising on the
charms of fraternal affection.

And all the while David had once more tacitly given up the attempt
either to love her or to control her. How indeed could he control
her? He was barely two years older, and she had a will of iron. She
made disreputable friends whom he loathed the sight of. But all he
could do was to keep them out of the house. She led John by this
time a dog's life. From the temptress she had become the tease and
tyrant, and the clumsy fellow, consumed with feverish passion,
slaved for her whenever she was near him with hardly the reward of
a kind look or a civil word in a fortnight. David set his teeth and
tried to recover possession of his friend. And as long as they two
were at the press or in the shop together alone, John was often his
old self, and would laugh out in the old way. But no sooner did
Louie appear than he followed her about like an animal, and David
could make no more of him. Whenever any dispute, too, arose between
the brother and sister, he took her part, whatever it might be,
with an acrimony which pushed David's temper hard.

Yet, on the whole, so Ancrum thought, the brother showed a
wonderful patience. He was evidently haunted by a sense of
responsibility towards his sister, and, at the same time, both
tormented and humiliated by his incompetence to manage or influence
her. It was curious, too, to watch how by antagonism and by the
constant friction of their life together, certain qualities in her
developed certain others in him. Her callousness, for instance, did
but nurture a sensitive humanity in him. She treated the lodgers in
the first pair back with persistent indifference and even
brutality, seeing that Mrs. Mason was a young, helpless creature
approaching every day nearer to a confinement she regarded with
terror, and that a little common kindness from the only other woman
in the house could have softened her lot considerably. But David's
books were stacked about in awkward and inconvenient places waiting
for the Masons' departure, and Louie had no patience with
them--with the wife at any rate. It once or twice occurred to David
that if the husband, a good-looking fellow and a very hard-worked
shopman, had had more hours at home, Louie would have tried her
blandishments upon him.

He on his side was goaded by Louie's behaviour into an unusual
complaisance and liberality towards his tenants. Louie once
contemptuously told him he would make a capital 'general help.' He
was Mrs. Mason's coal-carrier and errand-boy already.

In the same way Louie beat and ill-treated a half-starved
collie--one of the short-haired black sort familiar to the shepherd
of the north, and to David himself in his farm days--which would
haunt the shop and kitchen. Whereupon David felt all his heart melt
towards the squalid, unhandsome creature. He fed and cherished it;
it slept on his bed by night and followed him by day, he all the
while protecting it from Louie with a strong hand. And the more
evil was the eye she cast upon the dog, who, according to her,
possessed all the canine vices, the more David loved it, and the
more Tim was fattened and caressed.

In another direction, too, the same antagonism appeared. The
sister's license of speech and behaviour towards the men who became
her acquaintances provoked in the brother what often seemed to
Ancrum--who, of course, remembered Reuben, and had heard many tales
of old James Grieve, the lad's grandfather--a sort of Puritan
reaction, the reaction of his race and stock against 'lewdness.'
Louie's complete independence, however, and the distance she
preserved between his amusements and hers, left David no other
weapon than sarcasm, which he employed freely. His fine sensitive
mouth took during these weeks a curve half mocking, half bitter,
which changed the whole expression of the face.

He saw, indeed, with great clearness after a month or so that
Louie's wildness was by no means the wildness of an ignorant
innocent, likely to slip unawares into perdition, and that, while
she had a passionate greed for amusement and pleasure, and a blank
absence of principle, she was still perfectly alive to the risks of
life, and meant somehow both to enjoy herself and to steer herself
through. But this gradual perception--that, in spite of her mode of
killing spare time, she was not immediately likely to take any
fatal false step, as he had imagined in his first dread--did but
increase his inward repulsion.

A state of feeling which was the more remarkable because he
himself, in Ancrum's eyes, was at the moment in a temper of moral
relaxation and bewilderment! His absorption in George Sand, and
through her in all the other French Romantics whose books he could
either find for himself or borrow from Barbier, was carrying a
ferment of passion and imagination through all his blood. Most
social arrangements, including marriage, seemed to have become open
questions to him. Why, then, this tone towards Louie and her
friends? Was it that, apart from the influence of heredity, the
young fellow's moral perception at this time was not ethical at
all, but aesthetic--a matter of taste, of the presence or absence
of certain ideal and poetic elements in conduct?

At any rate his friendship for old Barbier drew closer and closer,
and Ancrum, who had begun to feel a lively affection for him, could
see but little of him.

As to Barbier, it was a significant chance which had thrown
him across David's path. In former days this lively Frenchman
had been a small Paris journalist, whom the _coup d'état_ had
struck down with his betters, and who had escaped to England
with one suit of clothes and eight francs in his pocket. He
reminded himself on landing of a cousin of his mother's settled
as a clerk in Manchester, found his way northwards, and had
now, for some seventeen years, been maintaining himself in the
cotton capital, mainly by teaching, but partly by a number of
small arts--ornamental calligraphy, _menu_-writing, and the
like--too odd and various for description. He was a fanatic, a Red,
much possessed by political hatreds which gave savour to an
existence otherwise dull and peaceable enough. Religious beliefs
were very scarce with him, but he had a certain literary creed, the
creed of 1830, when he had been a scribbler in the train of Victor
Hugo, which he did his best to put into David.

He was a formidable-looking person, six feet in height, and broad
in proportion, with bushy white eyebrows, and a mouth made hideous
by two projecting teeth. In speech he hated England and all her
ways, and was for ever yearning towards the misguided and yet
unequalled country which had cast him out. In heart he was
perfectly aware that England is free as not even Republican France
is free; and he was also sufficiently alive to the fact that he had
made himself a very tolerable niche in Manchester, and was
pleasantly regarded there--at least, in certain circles--as an
oracle of French opinion, a commodity which, in a great commercial
centre, may at any time have a cash value. He could, in truth,
have long ago revisited _la patrie_ had he had a mind, for
governments are seldom vindictive in the case of people who can
clearly do them no harm. This, however, was not at all his own
honest view of the matter. In the mirror of the mind he saw himself
perpetually draped in the pathos of exile and the dignity of
persecution, and the phrases by which he was wont to impress this
inward vision on the brutal English sense had become, in the course
of years, an effective and touching habit with him.

David had been Barbier's pupil in the first instance at one of the
classes of the Mechanics' Institute. Never in Barbier's memory had
any Manchester lad so applied himself to learn French before. And
when the boy's knowledge of the Encyclopaedists came out, and he
one day put the master right in class on some points connected with
Diderot's relations to Rousseau, the ex-journalist gaped with
astonishment, and then went home and read up his facts, half
enraged and half enraptured. David's zeal piqued him, made him a
better Frenchman and a better teacher than he had been for years.
He was a vain man, and David's capacities put him on his mettle.

Very soon he and the lad had become intimate. He had described to
David the first night of _Hernani_, when he had been one of
the long-haired band of _rapins_, who came down in their
scores to the Theatre Francais to defend their chief, Hugo, against
the hisses of the Philistine. The two were making coffee in
Barbier's attic, at the top of a side street off the Oxford Road,
when these memories seized upon the old Romantic. He took up the
empty coffee-pot, and brandished it from side to side as though it
had been the sword of Hernani; the miserable Academy hugging its
Moliere and Racine fled before him; the world was once more
regenerate, and Hugo its high priest. Passages from the different
parts welled to his old lips; he gave the play over again--the
scene between the lover and the husband, where the husband lays
down the strange and sinister penalty to which the lover
submits--the exquisite love-scene in the fifth act--and the cry of
agonised passion with which Dona Sol defends her love against his
executioner. All these things he declaimed, stumping up and down,
till the terrified landlady rose out of her bed to remonstrate, and
got the door locked in her face for her pains, and till the
_bourgeois_ baby in the next room woke up and roared, and so
put an abrupt end to the performance. Old Barbier sat down
swearing, poked the fire furiously, and then, taking out a huge red
handkerchief, wiped his brow with a trembling hand. His stiff white
hair, parted on either temple, bristled like a high _loupie_
over his round, black eyes, which glowed behind his spectacles. And
meanwhile the handsome boy sat opposite, glad to laugh by way of
reaction, but at bottom stirred by the same emotion, and ready to
share in the same adorations.

Gradually David learnt his way about this bygone world of Barbier's
recollection. A vivid picture sprang up in him of these strange
leaders of a strange band, these cadaverous poets and artists of
Louis Philippe's early days, beings in love with Lord Byron and
suicide, having Art for God, and Hugo for prophet, talking of
were-wolves, vampires, cathedrals, sunrises, forests, passion and
despair, hatted like brigands, cloaked after Vandyke, curled like
Absalom, making new laws unto themselves in verse as in morals, and
leaving all petty talk of duty or common sense to the Academy and
the nursery.

George Sand walking the Paris quays in male dress--George Sand at
Fontainebleau roaming the midnight forest with Alfred de Musset, or
wintering with her dying musician among the mountains of Palma;
Gerard de Nerval, wanderer, poet, and suicide; Alfred de Musset
flaming into verse at dead of night amid an answering and
spendthrift blaze of wax candles; Baudelaire's blasphemies and
eccentricities--these characters and incidents Barbier wove into
endless highly coloured tales, to which David listened with
perpetual relish.

'_Mon Dieu_! _Mon Dieu_! What times! What memories!' the
old Frenchman would cry at last, fairly re-transported to the world
of his youth, and, springing up, he would run to the little
cupboard by his bed head, where he kept a score or so of little
paper volumes--volumes which the tradesman David soon discovered,
from a curious study of French catalogues, to have a fast-rising
money value--and out would come Alfred de Musset's 'Nuit de Mai,'
or an outrageous verse from Baudelaire, or an harmonious nothing
from Gautier. David gradually learnt to follow, to understand, to
range all that he heard in a mental setting of his own. The France
of his imagination indeed was a strange land! Everybody in it was
either girding at priests like Voltaire, or dying for love like
George Sand's Stenio.

But whether the picture was true to life or no, it had a very
strongly marked effect on the person conceiving it. Just as the
speculative complexion of his first youth had been decided by the
chance which brought him into daily contact with the French
eighteenth century--for no self-taught solitary boy of quick and
covetous mind can read Voltaire continuously without bearing the
marks of him henceforward--so in the same way, when he passed, as
France had done before him, from the philosophers to the Romantics,
this constant preoccupation with the French literature of passion
in its romantic and idealist period left deep and lasting results.

The strongest of these results lay in the realm of moral and social
sense. What struck the lad's raw mind with more and more force as
he gathered his French books about him was the profound gulf which
seemed to divide the average French conception of the relation
between the sexes from the average English one. In the French
novels he read every young man had his mistress; every married
woman her lover. Tragedy frequently arose out of these relations,
but that the relations must and did obtain, as a matter of course,
was assumed. For the delightful heroes and heroines of a whole
range of fiction, from 'Manon Lescaut' down to Murger's 'Vie de
Boheme,' marriage did not apparently exist, even as a matter of
argument. And as to the duties of the married woman, when she
passed on to the canvas, the code was equally simple. The husband
might kill his wife's lover--that was in the game; but the young
man's right to be was as good as his own. '_No human being can
control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for
losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood._' So says
the husband in George Sand's 'Jacques' when he is just about to
fling himself down an Alpine precipice that his wife and Octave may
have their way undisturbed. And all the time, what poetry and
passion in the presentation of these things! Beside them the mere
remembrance of English ignorance, prudishness, and conventionality
would set the lad swelling, as he read, with a sense of superior
scorn, and of wild sympathy for a world in which love and not law,
truth and not legal fiction, were masters of human relations.

Some little time after Reuben's visit to him he one day told
Barbier the fact of his French descent. Barbier declared that he
had always known it, had always realised something in David
distinct from the sluggish huckstering English temper. Why, David's
mother was from the south of France; his own family came from
Carcassonne. No doubt the rich Gascon blood ran in both their
veins. _Salut au compatriole!_

Thenceforward there was a greater solidarity between the two than
ever. Barbier fell into an incessant gossip of Paris--the Paris of
Louis Philippe--reviving memories and ways of speech which had been
long dead in him, and leaving on David's mind the impression of a
place where life was from morning till night amusement,
exhilaration, and seduction; where, under the bright smokeless sky,
and amid the stateliest streets and public buildings in Europe, men
were always witty and women always attractive.

Meanwhile the course of business during the spring months and the
rise of his trade in foreign books rapidly brought the scheme of a
visit to France, which had been at first a mere dream and fancy,
within the region of practical possibility, and even advantage, for
the young bookseller. Two things he was set on. If he went he was
determined to go under such conditions as would enable him to see
French life--especially French artistic and student life--from the
inside. And he saw with some clearness that he would have to take
his sister with him.

Against the latter notion Barbier protested vehemently.

'What do you want to tie yourself to a petticoat for? If you take
the girl you will have to look after her. Paris, my boy, let me
inform you, is not the best place in the world for _la jeune
personne;_ and the Paris _rapin_ may be an amusing scoundrel,
but don't trust him with young women if you can help it. Leave
Mademoiselle Louie at home, and let her mind the shop. Get
Mademoiselle Dora or some one to stay with her, or send her to
Mademoiselle Dora.'

So said the Frenchman with sharp dictatorial emphasis. What a
preposterous suggestion!

'I can't stop her coming,' said David, quietly--'if she wants to
come--and she'll be sure to want. Besides, I'll not leave her alone
at home, and she'll not let me send her anywhere--you may be sure
of that.'

The Frenchman stared and stormed. David fell silent. Louie was what
she was, and it was no use discussing her. At last Barbier, being
after all tolerably well acquainted with the lad's relations to his
sister, came to a sudden end of his rhetoric, and began to think
out something practicable.

That evening he wrote to a nephew of his living as an artist in the
Quartier Montmartre. Some months before Barbier's vanity had been
flattered by an adroit letter from this young gentleman, written,
if the truth were known, at a moment when a pecuniary situation,
pinched almost beyond endurance, had made it seem worth while to
get his uncle's address out of his widowed mother. Barbier, a
bachelor, and a man of some small savings, perfectly understood why
he had been approached, and had been none the less extraordinarily
glad to hear from the youth. He was a _rapin?_ well and good;
all the great men had been _rapins_ before him. Very likely he
had the _rapin's_ characteristic vices and distractions. All
the world knew what the life meant for nine men out of ten. What
was the use of preaching? Youth was youth. Clearly the old
man--himself irreproachable--would have been disappointed not to
find his nephew a sad dog on personal acquaintance.

'Tell me, Xavier,' his letter ran, 'how to put a young friend of
mine in the way of seeing something of Paris and Paris life, more
than your fool of a tourist generally sees. He is a bookseller, and
will, of course, mind his trade; but he is a young man of taste and
intelligence besides, and moreover half French. It would be a pity
that he should visit Paris as any _sacre_ British Philistine
does. Advise me where to place him. He would like to see something
of your artist's life. But mind this, young man, he brings a sister
with him as handsome as the devil, and not much easier to manage:
so if you do advise--no tricks--tell me of something _convenable_.'

A few days later Barbier appeared in Potter Street just after David
had put up the shutters, announcing that he had a proposal to make.

David unlocked the shop-door and let him in. Barbier looked round
with some amazement on the small stuffy place, piled to bursting by
now with books of every kind, which only John's herculean efforts
could keep in passable order.

'Why don't you house yourself better--_hein?_' said the
Frenchman. 'A business growing like this, and nothing but a den to
handle it in!'

'I shall be all right when I get my other room,' said David
composedly. 'Couldn't turn out the lodger before. The woman was only
confined last week.'

And as he spoke the wailing of an infant and a skurrying of feet
were heard upstairs.

'So it seems,' said Barbier, adjusting his spectacles in
bewilderment. '_Jesus!_ What an affair! What did you permit it
for? Why didn't you turn her out in time?'

'I would have turned myself out first,' said David. He was
lounging, with his hands in his pockets, against the books; but
though his attitude was nonchalant, his tone had a vibrating
energy.

'Barbier!'

'Yes.'

'What do women suffer for like that?'

The young man's eyes glowed, and his lips twitched a little, as
though some poignant remembrance were at his heart.

Barbier looked at him with some curiosity.

'Ask _le bon Dieu_ and Mother Eve, my friend. It lies between
them,' said the old scoffer, with a shrug.

David looked away in silence. On his quick mind, greedy of all
human experience, the night of Mrs. Mason's confinement, with its
sounds of anguish penetrating through all the upper rooms of the
thin, ill-built house, had left an ineffaceable impression of awe
and terror. In the morning, when all was safely over, he came down
to the kitchen to find the husband--a man some two or three years
older than himself, and the smart foreman of an ironmongery shop in
Deansgate--crouching over a bit of fire. The man was too much
excited to apologise for his presence in the Grieves' room. David
shyly asked him a question about his wife.

'Oh, it's all right, the doctor says. There's the nurse with her,
and your sister's got the baby. She'll do; but, oh, my God! it's
awful--_it's awful!_ My poor Liz! Give me a corner here, will
you! I'm all upset like.'

David had got some food out of the cupboard, made him eat it, and
chatted to him till the man was more himself again. But the crying
of the new-born child overhead, together with the shaken condition
of this clever, self-reliant young fellow, so near his own age,
seemed for the moment to introduce the lad to new and unknown
regions of human feeling.

While these images were pursuing each other through David's mind,
Barbier was poking among his foreign books, which lay, backs
upwards, on the floor to one side of the counter.

'Do you sell them--_hein?_' he said, looking up and pointing
to them with his stick.

'Yes. Especially the scientific books. These are an order.
So is that batch. Napoleon III. 's "Caesar," isn't it? And
those over there are "on spec." Oh, I could do something if
I knew more! There's a man over at Oldham. One of the biggest
weaving-sheds--cotton velvets--that kind of thing. He's awfully
rich, and he's got a French library; a big one, I believe. He
came in here yesterday. I think I could make something out
of him; but he wants all sorts of rum things--last-century
memoirs, out-of-the-way ones--everything about Montaigne--first
editions--Lord knows what! I say, Barbier, I dare say he'd buy
your books. What'll you let me have them for?'

'_Diantre!_ Not for your heart's blood, my young man. It's
like your impudence to ask. You could sell more if you knew more,
you think? Well now listen to me.'

The Frenchman sat down, adjusted his spectacles, and, taking a
letter from his pocket, read it with deliberation.

It was from the nephew, Xavier Dubois, in answer to his uncle's
inquiries. Nothing, the writer declared, could have been more
opportune. He himself was just off to Belgium, where a friend had
procured him a piece of work on a new Government building. Why
should not his uncle's friends inhabit his rooms during his
absence? He must keep them on, and would find it very convenient,
that being so, that some one should pay the rent. There was his
studio, which was bare, no doubt, but quite habitable, and a little
_cabinet de toilette_, adjoining, and shut off, containing a
bed and all necessaries. Why should not the sister take the
bedroom, and let the brother camp somehow in the studio? He could
no doubt borrow a bed from some friend before they came, and with a
large screen, which was one of the 'studio properties,' a very
tolerable sleeping room could be improvised, and still leave a good
deal of the studio free. He understood that his uncle's friends
were not looking for luxury. But _le stricte necessaire_ he
could provide.

Meanwhile the Englishman and his sister would find themselves at
once in the artists' circle, and might see as much or as little as
they liked of artistic life. He (Dubois) could of course give them
introductions. There was a sculptor, for instance, on the ground
floor, a man of phenomenal genius, _joli garcon_ besides, who
would certainly show himself _aimable_ for anybody introduced
by Dubois; and on the floor above there was a landscape painter,
_ancien prix de Rome_, and his wife, who would also, no doubt,
make themselves agreeable, and to whom the brother and sister might
go for all necessary information--Dubois would see to that. Sixty
francs a month paid the _appartement;_ a trifle for service if
you desired it--there was, however, no compulsion--to the
_concierge_ would make you comfortable; and as for your food,
the Quartier Montmartre abounded in cheap restaurants, and you
might live as you pleased for one franc a day or twenty. He
suggested that on the whole no better opening was likely to be
found by two young persons of spirit, anxious to see Paris from the
inside.

'Now then,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles with an
authoritative click, as he shut up the letter, _'decide-toi._
Go!--and look about you for a fortnight. Improve your French; get
to know some of the Paris bookmen; take some commissions out with
you--buy there to the best advantage, and come back twenty per
cent. better informed than when you set out.'

He smote his hands upon his knees with energy. He had a love of
management and contrivance; and the payment of Eugene's rent for
him during his absence weighed with his frugal mind.

David stood twisting his mouth in silence a moment, his head thrown
back against the books.

'Well, I don't see why not,' he said at last, his eyes sparkling.

'And take notice, my friend,' said Barbier, tapping the open
letter, 'the _ancien prix de Rome_ has a wife. Where wives are
young women can go. Xavier can prepare the way, and, if you play
your cards well, you can get Mademoiselle Louie taken off your
hands while you go about.'

David nodded. He was sitting astride on the counter, his face
shining with the excitement he was now too much of a man to show
with the old freedom.

Suddenly there was a sound of wild voices from the inside room.

'Miss Grieve! Miss Grieve! don't you take that child away. Bring it
back, I say; I'll go to your brother, I will!'

'That's Mrs. Mason's nurse,' said David, springing off the
counter. 'What's up now?'

He threw open the door into the kitchen, just as Louie swept into
the room from the other side. She had a white bundle in her arms,
and her face was flushed with a sly triumph. After her ran the
stout woman who was looking after Mrs. Mason, purple with
indignation.

'Now look yo here, Mr. Grieve,' she cried at sight of David, 'I
can't stand it, and I won't. Am I in charge of Mrs. Mason or am I
not? Here's Miss Grieve, as soon as my back's turned, as soon as
I've laid that blessed baby in its cot as quiet as a lamb--and it's
been howling since three o'clock this morning, as yo know--in she
whips, claws it out of its cradle, and is off wi' it, Lord knows
where. Thank the Lord, Mrs. Mason's asleep! If she weren't, she'd
have a fit. She's feart to death o' Miss Grieve. We noather on us
know what to make on her. She's like a wild thing soomtimes--not a
human creetur at aw--Gie me that chilt, I tell tha!'

Louie vouchsafed no answer. She sat down composedly before the
fire, and, cradling the still sleeping child on her knee, she bent
over it examining its waxen hands and tiny feet with an eager
curiosity. The nurse, who stood over her trembling with anger, and
only deterred from snatching the child away by the fear of wakening
it, might have been talking to the wall.

'Now, look here, Louie, what d' you do that for?' said David,
remonstrating; 'why can't you leave the child alone? You'll be
putting Mrs. Mason in a taking, and that'll do her harm.'

'Nowt o' t' sort,' said Louie composedly,' it 's that woman
there'll wake her with screeching. She's asleep, and the baby's
asleep, and I'm taking care of it. Why can't Mrs. Bury go and look
after Mrs. Mason? She hasn't swept her room this two days, and it's
a sight to see.'

Pricked in a tender point, Mrs. Bury broke out again into a stream
of protest and invective, only modified by her fear of waking her
patient upstairs, and interrupted by appeals to David. But whenever
she came near to take the baby Louie put her hands over it, and her
wide black eyes shot out intimidating flames before which the
aggressor invariably fell back.

Attracted by the fight, Barbier had come up to look, and now stood
by the shop-door, riveted by Louie's strange beauty. She wore the
same black and scarlet dress in which she had made her first
appearance in Manchester. She now never wore it out of doors, her
quick eye having at once convinced her that it was not in the
fashion. But the instinct which had originally led her to contrive
it was abundantly justified whenever she still condescended to put
it on, so startling a relief it lent to the curves of her slim
figure, developed during the last two years of growth to all
womanly roundness and softness, and to the dazzling colour of her
dark head and thin face. As she sat by the fire, the white bundle
on her knee, one pointed foot swinging in front of her, now hanging
over the baby, and now turning her bright dangerous look and
compressed lips on Mrs. Bury, she made a peculiar witch-like
impression on Barbier which thrilled his old nerves agreeably. It
was clear, he thought, that the girl wanted a husband and a family
of her own. Otherwise why should she run off with other people's
children? But he would be a bold man who ventured on her!

David, at last seeing that Louie was in the mood to tear the babe
asunder rather than give it up, with difficulty induced Mrs. Bury
to leave her in possession for half an hour, promising that, as
soon as the mother woke, the child should be given back.

'If I've had enough of it,' Louie put in, as a saving clause,
luckily just too late to be heard by the nurse, who had sulkily
closed the door behind her, declaring that 'sich an owdacious chit
she never saw in her born days, and niver heerd on one oather.'

David and Barbier went back into the shop to talk, leaving Louie to
her nursing. As soon as she was alone she laid back the flannel
which lay round the child's head, and examined every inch of its
downy poll and puckered face, her warm breath making the tiny lips
twitch in sleep as it travelled across them. Then she lifted the
little nightgown and looked at the pink feet nestling in their
flannel wrapping. A glow sprang into her cheek; her great eyes
devoured the sleeping creature. Its weakness and helplessness, its
plasticity to anything she might choose to do with it, seemed to
intoxicate her. She looked round her furtively, then bent and laid
a hot covetous kiss on the small clenched hand. The child moved;
had it been a little older it would have wakened; but Louie,
hastily covering it up, began to rock it and sing to it.

The door into the shop was ajar. As David and Barbier were hanging
together over a map of Paris which David had hunted out of his
stores, Barbier suddenly threw up his head with a queer look.

'What's that she's singing?' he said quickly.

He got up hastily, overturning his stool as he did so, and went to
the door to listen.

'I haven't heard that,' he said, with some agitation, 'since my
father's sister used to sing it me when I was a small lad, up at
Augoumat in the mountains near Puy!'

  Sur le pont d'Avignon
  Tout le monde y danse en rond;
  Les beaux messieurs font comme ça,
  Les beaux messieurs font comme ça.

The words were but just distinguishable as Louie sang. They were
clipped and mutilated as by one who no longer understood what they
meant. But the intonation was extraordinarily French, French of the
South, and Barbier could hardly stand still under it.

'Where did you learn that?' he called to her from the door.

The girl stopped and looked at him with her bright bird-like
glance. But she made no reply.

'Did your mother teach it you?' he asked, coming in.

'I suppose so,' she said indifferently.

'Can you talk any French--do you remember it?'

'No.'

'But you'd soon learn. You haven't got the English mouth, that's
plain. Do you know your brother thinks of taking you to Paris?'

She started.

'He don't,' she said laconically.

'Oh, don't he. Just ask him then?'

Ten minutes later Louie had been put in possession of the
situation. As David had fully expected, she took no notice whatever
of his suggestion that after all she might not care to come. They
might be rough quarters, he said, and queer people about; and it
would cost a terrible deal more for two than one. Should he not ask
Dora Lomax to take her in for a fortnight? John, of course, would
look after the shop. He spoke under the pressure of a sudden qualm,
knowing it would be no use; but his voice had almost a note of
entreaty in it.

'When do you want to be starting?' she asked him sharply. 'I'll not
go to Dora's--so you needn't talk o' that. You can take the money
out of what you'll be owing me next month.'

Her nostrils dilated as the quick breath passed through them.
Barbier was fascinated by the extraordinary animation of the face,
and could not take his eyes off her.

'Not for a fortnight,' said David reluctantly, answering her
question. 'Barbier's letter says about the tenth of May. There's two
country sales I must go to, and some other things to settle.'

She nodded.

'Well, then, I can get some things ready,' she said half to
herself, staring across the baby into the fire.

When David and Barbier were gone together 'up street,' still
talking over their plans, Louie leapt to her feet and laid the baby
down--carelessly, as though she no longer cared anything at all
about it--in the old-fashioned arm-chair wherein David spent so
many midnight vigils. Then locking her hands behind her, she paced
up and down the narrow room with the springing gait, the impetuous
feverish grace, of some prisoned animal. Paris! Her education was
small, and her ignorance enormous. But in the columns of a 'lady's
paper' she had often bought from the station bookstall at Clough
End she had devoured nothing more eagerly than the Paris letter,
with its luscious descriptions of 'Paris fashions,' whereby even
Lancashire women, even Clough End mill-hands in their Sunday best,
were darkly governed from afar. All sorts of bygone dreams recurred
to her--rich and subtle combinations of silks, satins, laces, furs,
imaginary glories clothing an imaginary Louie Grieve. The
remembrance of them filled her with a greed past description, and
she forthwith conceived Paris as a place all shops, each of them
superior to the best in St. Ann's Square--where one might gloat
before the windows all day.

She made a spring to the door, and ran upstairs to her own room.
There she began to pull out her dresses and scatter them about the
floor, looking at them with a critical discontented eye.

Time passed. She was standing absorbed before an old gown, planning
out its renovation, when a howl arose from downstairs. She fled
like a roe deer, and pounced upon the baby just in time to
checkmate Mrs. Bury, who was at her heels.

Quite regardless of the nurse's exasperation with her, first for
leaving the child alone, half uncovered, in a chilly room, and now
for again withholding it, Louie put the little creature against her
neck, rocking and crooning to it. The sudden warm contact stilled
the baby; it rubbed its head into the soft hollow thus presented to
it, and its hungry lips sought eagerly for their natural food. The
touch of them sent a delicious thrill through Louie; she turned her
head round and kissed the tiny, helpless cheek with a curious
violence; then, tired of Mrs. Bury, and anxious to get back to her
plans, she almost threw the child to her.

'There--take it! I'll soon get it again when I want to.'

And she was as good as her word. The period of convalescence was to
poor Mrs. Mason--a sickly, plaintive creature at the best of
times--one long struggle and misery. Louie represented to her a
sort of bird of prey, who was for ever descending on her child and
carrying it off to unknown lairs. For neither mother nor nurse had
Louie the smallest consideration; she despised and tyrannised over
them both. But her hungry fondness for the baby grew with
gratification, and there was no mastering her in the matter. Warm
weather came, and when she reached home after her work, she managed
by one ruse or another to get hold of the child, and on one
occasion she disappeared with it into the street for hours. David
was amazed by the whim, but neither he nor anyone else could
control it. At last, Mrs. Mason was more or less hysterical all day
long, and hardly sane when Louie was within reach. As for the
husband, who managed to be more at home during the days of his
wife's weakness than he had yet been since David's tenancy began,
he complained to David and spoke his mind to Louie once or twice,
and then, suddenly, he ceased to pay any attention to his wife's
wails. With preternatural quickness the wife guessed the reason. A
fresh terror seized her--terror of the girl's hateful beauty. She
dragged herself from her bed, found a room, while Louie was at her
work, and carried off baby and husband, leaving no address. Luckily
for her, the impression of Louie's black eyes proved to have been a
passing intoxication, and the poor mother breathed and lived again.

Meanwhile Louie's excitement and restlessness over the Paris plan
made her more than usually trying to Dora. During this fortnight
she could never be counted on for work, not even when it was a
question of finishing an important commission. She was too full of
her various preparations. Barbier offered her for instance, a daily
French lesson. She grasped in an instant the facilities which even
the merest smattering of French would give her in Paris; every
night she sat up over her phrase book, and every afternoon she cut
her work short to go to Barbier. Her whole life seemed to be one
flame of passionate expectation, though what exactly she expected
it would have been hard to say.

Poor Dora! She had suffered many things in much patience all these
weeks. Louie's clear, hard mind, her sensuous temperament, her
apparent lack of all maidenly reserve, all girlish softness, made
her incomprehensible to one for whom life was an iridescent web of
ideal aims and obligations. The child of grace was dragged out of
her own austere or delicate thoughts, and made to touch, taste, and
handle what the 'world,' as the Christian understands it, might be
like. Like every other daughter of the people, Dora was familiar
enough with sin and weakness--Daddy alone had made her amply
acquainted with both at one portion or another of his career. But
just this particular temper of Louie's, with its apparent lack both
of passion and of moral sense, was totally new to her, and produced
at times a stifling impression upon her, without her being able to
explain to herself with any clearness what was the matter.

Yet, in truth, it often seemed as if the lawless creature had been
in some sort touched by Dora, as if daily contact with a being so
gentle and so magnanimous had won even upon her. That confidence,
for instance, which Louie had promised John, at Dora's expense, had
never been made. When it came to the point, some touch of remorse,
of shame, had sealed the girl's mocking lips.

One little fact in particular had amazed Dora. Louie insisted, for
a caprice, on going with her one night, in Easter week, to St.
Damian's, and thenceforward went often. What attracted her, Dora
puzzled herself to discover. When, however, Louie had been a
diligent spectator, even at early services, for some weeks, Dora
timidly urged that she might be confirmed, and that Father Russell
would take her into his class. Louie laughed immoderately at the
idea, but continued to go to St. Damian's all the same. Dora could
not bear to be near her in church, but however far away she might
place herself, she was more conscious than she liked to be of
Louie's conspicuous figure and hat thrown out against a particular
pillar which the girl affected. The sharp uplifted profile with its
disdainful expression drew her eyes against their will. She was
also constantly aware of the impression Louie made upon the crowd,
of the way in which she was stared at and remarked upon. Whenever
she passed in or out of the church, people turned, and the girl,
expecting it, and totally unabashed, flashed her proud look from
side to side.

But once in her place, she was not inattentive. The dark chancel
with its flowers and incense, the rich dresses and slow movements
of the priests, the excitement of the processional hymns--these
things caught her and held her. Her look was fixed and eager all
the time. As to the clergy, Dora spoke to Father's Russell's
sister, and some efforts were made to get hold of the new-comer.
But none of them were at all successful. The girl slipped through
everybody's hands. Only in the case of one of the curates, a man
with a powerful, ugly head, and a penetrating personality, did she
show any wavering. Dora fancied that she put herself once or twice
in his way, that something about him attracted her, and that he
might have influenced her. But as soon as the Paris project rose on
the horizon, Louie thought of nothing else. Father Impey and St.
Damian's, like everything else, were forgotten. She never went near
the church from the evening David told her his news to the day they
left Manchester.

David ran in to say good-bye to Daddy and Dora on the night before
they were to start. Since the Paris journey had been in the air,
Daddy's friendliness for the young fellow had revived. He was not,
after all, content to sit at home upon his six hundred pounds 'like
a hatching hen,' and so far Daddy, whose interest in him had been
for the time largely dashed by his sudden accession to fortune, was
appeased.

When David appeared Lomax was standing on the rug, with a book
under his arm.

'Well, good-bye to you, young man, good-bye to you. And here's a
book to take with you that you may read in the train. It will stir
you up a bit, give you an idea or two. Don't you come back too
soon.'

'Father,' remonstrated Dora, who was standing by, 'who's to look
after his business?'

'Be quiet, Dora! That book'll show him what can be made even of a
beastly bookseller.'

David took it from him, looked at the title, and laughed. He knew
it well. It was the 'Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of
London,' the eccentric record of a seventeenth-century dealer in
books, who, like Daddy, had been a character and a vagrant.

'Och! Don't I know it by heart?' said Daddy, with enthusiasm. 'Many
a time it's sent me off tramping, when my poor Isabella thought
she'd got me tied safe by the heels in the chimney corner.
_Though_ love is strong as death, and every good man loves his
wife as himself, _yet_--many's the score of times I've said it
off pat to Isabella--_yet_ I cannot think of being confined in
a narrower study than the whole world. "There's a man for you! He
gets rid of one wife and saddles himself with another--sorrow a bit
will he stop at home for either of them!" Finding I am for
travelling, Valeria, to show the height of her love, is as willing
I should see Europe as Eliza was I should see America. 'Och! give
me the book, you divil,' cried Daddy, growing more and more
Hibernian as his passion rose, 'and, bedad, but I'll drive it into
you.'

And, reaching over, Daddy seized it, and turned over the pages with
a trembling hand. Dora flushed, and the tears rose into her eyes.
She realised perfectly that this performance was levelled at her at
least as much as at David. Daddy's mad irritability had grown of
late with every week.

'Listen to this, Davy!' cried Daddy, putting up his hand for
silence.' "When I have crossed the Hellespont, where poor Leander
was drowned, Greece, China, and the Holy Land are the other three
countries I'm bound to. And perhaps when my hand is in--"'

'_My hand is in!_' repeated Daddy, in an ecstasy. 'What a
jewel of a man!'

'I may step thence to the Indies, for I am a true lover of travels,
and, when I am once mounted, care not whether I meet the sun at his
rising or going down, provided only I may but ramble.... _He_
is truly a scholar who is versed in the volume of the Universe, who
doth not so much read of Nature as study Nature herself.'

'Well said--well said indeed!' cried Daddy, flinging the book down
with a wild gesture which startled them both. 'Was that the man,
Adrian Lomax, to spend the only hours of the only life he was ever
likely to see--his first thought in the morning, and his last
thought at night--in tickling the stomachs of Manchester clerks?'

His peaked chin and straggling locks fell forward on his breast. He
stared sombrely at the young people before him, in an attitude
which, as usual, was the attitude of an actor.

David's natural instinct was to jeer. But a glance at Dora
perplexed him. There was some tragedy he did not understand under
this poor comedy.

'Don't speak back,' said Dora, hurriedly, under her breath, as she
passed him to get her frame. 'It only makes him worse.'

After a few minutes' broken chat, which Daddy's mood made it
difficult to keep up, David took his departure. Dora followed him
downstairs.

'You're going to be away a fortnight,' she said, timidly.

As she spoke, she moved her head backwards and forwards against the
wall, as though it ached, and she could not find a restful spot.

'Oh, we shall be back by then, never fear!' said David, cheerfully.
He was growing more and more sorry for her.

'I should like to see foreign parts,' she said wistfully. 'Is there
a beautiful church, a cathedral, in Paris? Oh, there are a great
many in France, I know! I've heard the people at St. Damian's speak
of them. I would like to see the services. But they can't be nicer
than ours.'

David smiled.

'I'm afraid I can't tell you much about them, Miss Dora; they
aren't in my line. Good-bye, and keep your heart up.'

He was going, but he turned back to say quickly--

'Why don't you let him go off for a bit of a tramp? It might quiet
him.'

'I would; I would,' she said eagerly; 'but I don't know what would
come of it. We're dreadfully behindhand this month, and if he were
to go away, people would be down on us; they'd think he wanted to
get out of paying.'

He stayed talking a bit, trying to advise her, and, in the first
place, trying to find out how wrong things were. But she had not
yet come to the point of disclosing her father's secrets. She
parried his questions, showing him all the while, by look and
voice, that she was grateful to him for asking--for caring.

He went at last, and she locked the door behind him. But when that
was done, she stood still in the dark, wringing her hands in a
silent passion of longing--longing to be with him, outside, in the
night, to hear his voice, to see his handsome looks again. Oh! the
fortnight would be long. So long as he was there, within a stone's
throw, though he did not love her, and she was sad and anxious, yet
Manchester held her treasure, and Manchester streets had glamour,
had charm.

He walked to Piccadilly, and took a 'bus to Mortimer Street. He
must say good-bye also to Mr. Ancrum, who had been low and ill of
late.

'So you are off, David?' said Ancrum, rousing himself from what
seemed a melancholy brooding over books that he was in truth not
reading. As David shook hands with him, the small fusty room, the
pale face and crippled form awoke in the lad a sense of
indescribable dreariness. In a flash of recoil and desire his
thought sprang to the journey of the next day--to the May seas--the
foreign land.

'Well, good luck to you!' said the minister, altering his position
so as to look at his visitor full, and doing it with a slowness
which showed that all movement was an effort.' Look after your
sister, Davy.'

David had sat down at Ancrum's invitation. He said nothing in
answer to this last remark, and Ancrum could not decipher him in
the darkness visible of the ill-trimmed lamp.

'She's been on your mind, Davy, hasn't she?' he said, gently,
laying his blanched hand on the young man's knee.

'Well, perhaps she has,' David admitted, with an odd note in his
voice. 'She's not an easy one to manage.'

'No. But you've _got_ to manage her, Davy. There's only you
and she together. It's your task. It's set you. And you're young,
indeed, and raw, to have that beautiful self-willed creature on
your hands.'

'Beautiful? Do you think she's that?' David tried to laugh it off.

The minister nodded.

'You'll find it out in Paris even more than you have here. Paris is
a bad place, they say. So's London, for the matter of that. Davy,
before you go, I've got one thing to say to you.'

'Say away, sir.'

'You know a great deal, Davy. My wits are nothing to yours. You'll
shoot ahead of all your old friends, my boy, some day. But there's
one thing you know nothing about--absolutely nothing--and you prate
as if you did. Perhaps you must turn Christian before you do. I
don't know. At least, so long as you're not a Christian you won't
know what _we_ mean by it--what the Bible means by it. It's
one little word, Davy--_sin_.'

The minister spoke with a deep intensity, as though his whole being
were breathed into what he said. David sat silent and embarrassed,
opposition rising in him to what he thought ministerial assumption.

'Well, I don't know what you mean,' he said, after a pause. 'One
needn't be very old to find out that a good many people and things
in the world are pretty bad. Only we Secularists explain it
differently from you. We put a good deal of it down to education,
or health, or heredity.'

'Oh, I know--I know!' said the minister hastily, as though
shrinking from the conversation he had himself evoked. 'I'm not fit
to talk about it, Davy. I'm ill, I think! But there were those two
things I wanted to say to you--your sister--and--'

His voice dropped. He shaded his eyes and looked away from David
into the smouldering coals.

'No--no,' he resumed almost in a whisper; 'it's the
_will_--it's the _will_. It's not anything he says, and
Christ--_Christ's_ the only help.'

Again there was a silence. David studied his old teacher
attentively, as far as the half-light availed him. The young man
was simply angry with a religion which could torment a soul and
body like this. Ancrum had been 'down' in this way for a long time
now. Was another of his black fits approaching? If so, religion was
largely responsible for them!

When at last David sighted his own door, he perceived a figure
lounging on the steps.

'I say,' he said to himself with a groan, 'it's John!'

'What on earth do you want, John, at this time of night?' he
demanded. But he knew perfectly.

'Look here!' said the other thickly, 'it's all straight. You're
coming back in a fortnight, and you'll bring her back too!'

David laughed impatiently.

'Do you think I shall lose her in Paris or drop her in the Channel?'

'I don't know,' said Dalby, with a curiously heavy and indistinct
utterance. 'She's very bad to me. She won't ever marry me; I know
that. But when I think I might never see her again I'm fit to go
and hang myself.'

David began to kick the pebbles in the road.

'You know what I think about it all,' he said at last, gloomily.
'I've told you before now. She couldn't care for you if she tried.
It isn't a ha'p'orth of good. I don't believe she'll ever care for
anybody. Anyway, she'll marry nobody who can't give her money and
fine clothes. There! You may put that in your pipe and smoke it,
for it's as true as you stand there.'

John turned round restlessly, laid his hands against the wall, and
his head upon them.

'Well, it don't matter,' he said slowly, after a pause. 'I'll be
here early. Good night!'

David stood and looked after him in mingled disgust and pity.

'I must pack him off,' he said, 'I must.'

Then he threw back his young shoulders and drew in the warm spring
air with a long breath. Away with care and trouble! Things would
come right--must come right. This weather was summer, and in
forty-eight hours they would be in Paris!




BOOK III STORM AND STRESS




CHAPTER I


The brother and sister left Manchester about midday, and spent the
night in London at a little City hotel much frequented by
Nonconformist ministers, which Ancrum had recommended.

Then next day! How little those to whom all the widest
opportunities of life come for the asking, can imagine such a zest,
such a freshness of pleasure! David had hesitated long before the
expense of the day service _via_ Calais; they could have gone
by night third class for half the money; or they could have taken
returns by one of the cheaper and longer routes. But the eagerness
to make the most of every hour of time and daylight prevailed; they
were to go by Calais and come back by Dieppe, seeing thereby as
much as possible on the two journeys in addition to the fortnight
in Paris. The mere novelty of going anything but third class was
full of savour; Louie's self-conscious dignity as she settled
herself into her corner on leaving Charing Cross caught David's
eye; he saw himself reflected and laughed.

It was a glorious day, the firstling of the summer. In the blue
overhead the great clouds rose intensely thunderously white, and
journeyed seaward under a light westerly wind. The railway banks,
the copses were all primroses; every patch of water had in it the
white and azure of the sky; the lambs were lying in the still
scanty shadow of the elms; every garden showed its tulips and
wallflowers, and the air, the sunlight, the vividness of each hue
and line bore with them an intoxicating joy, especially for eyes
still adjusted to the tones and lights of Manchester in winter.

The breeze carried them merrily over a dancing sea. And once on the
French side they spent their first hour in crossing from one side
of their carriage to the other, pointing and calling incessantly.
For the first time since certain rare moments in their childhood
they were happy together and at one. Mother Earth unrolled for them
a corner of her magic show, and they took it like children at the
play, now shouting, now spell-bound.

David had George Sand's 'Mauprat' on his knee, but he read nothing
the whole day. Never had he used his eyes so intently, so
passionately. Nothing escaped them, neither the detail of that
strange and beautiful fen from which Amiens rises--a country of
peat and peat-cutters where the green plain is diapered with
innumerable tiny lakes edged with black heaps of turf and daintily
set with scattered trees--nor the delicate charm of the forest
lands about Chautilly. So much thinner and gracefuller these woods
were than English woods! French art and skill were here already in
the wild country. Each tree stood out as though it had been
personally thought for; every plantation was in regular lines; each
woody walk drove straight from point to point, following out a plan
orderly and intricate as a spider's web.

By this time Louie's fervour of curiosity and attention had very
much abated; she grew tired and cross, and presently fell asleep.
But, with every mile less between them and Paris, David's pulse
beat faster, and his mind became more absorbed in the flying scene.
He hung beside the window, thrilling with enchantment and delight,
drinking in the soft air, the beauty of the evening clouds, the
wonderful greens and silvers and fiery browns of the poplars. His
mind was full of images--the deep lily-sprinkled lake wherein
Stenio, Lelia's poet lover, plunged and died; the grandiose
landscape of Victor Hugo; Rene sitting on the cliff-side, and
looking farewell to the white home of his childhood;--of lines from
'Childe Harold' and from Shelley. His mind was in a ferment of
youth and poetry, and the France he saw was not the workaday France
of peasant and high road and factory, but the creation of poetic
intelligence, of ignorance and fancy.

Paris came in a flash. He had realised to the full the squalid and
ever-widening zone of London, had frittered away his expectations
almost, in the passing it; but here the great city had hardly
announced itself before they were in the midst of it, shot out into
the noise, and glare, and crowd of the Nord station.

They had no luggage to wait for, and David, trembling with
excitement so that he could hardly give the necessary orders,
shouldered the bags, got a cab and gave the address. Outside it was
still twilight, but the lamps were lit and the Boulevard into which
they presently turned seemed to brother and sister a blaze of
light. The young green of the trees glittered under the gas like
the trees of a pantomime; the kiosks threw their lights out upon
the moving crowd; shops and cafes were all shining and alive; and
on either hand rose the long line of stately houses, unbroken by
any London or Manchester squalors and inequalities, towering as it
seemed into the skies, and making for the great spectacle of life
beneath them a setting more gay, splendid, and complete than any
Englishman in his own borders can ever see.

Louie had turned white with pleasure and excitement. All her dreams
of gaiety and magnificence, of which the elements had been gathered
from the illustrated papers and the Manchester theatres, were more
than realised by these Paris gas-lights, these vast houses, these
laughing and strolling crowds.

'Look at those people having their coffee out of doors,' she cried
to David, 'and that white and gold place behind. Goodness! what they
must spend in gas! And just look at those two girls--look,
quick--there, with the young man in the black moustache--they
_are_ loud, but aren't their dresses just sweet?'

She craned her neck out of window, exclaiming--now at this, now at
that--till suddenly they passed out of the Boulevard into the
comparative darkness of side ways. Here the height of the houses
produced a somewhat different impression; Louie looked out none the
less keenly, but her chatter ceased.

At last the cab drew up with a clatter at the side of a
particularly dark and narrow street, ascending somewhat sharply to
the north-west from the point where they stopped.

'Now for the _concierge_,' said David, looking round him,
after he had paid the man.

And conning Barbier's directions in his mind, he turned into the
gateway, and made boldly for a curtained door behind which shone a
light.

The woman, who came out in answer to his knock, looked him all over
from head to foot, while he explained himself in his best French.

'_Tiens_,' she said, indifferently, to a man behind her, 'it's
the people for No. 26--_des Anglais_--_M. Paul te l'a dit_.
Hand me the key.'

The _bonhomme_ addressed--a little, stooping, wizened
creature, with china-blue eyes, showing widely in his withered face
under the light of the paraffin-lamp his wife was holding--reached
a key from a board on the wall and gave it to her.

The woman again surveyed them both, the young man and the girl, and
seemed to debate with herself whether she should take the trouble
to be civil. Finally she said in an ungracious voice--

'It's the fourth floor to the right. I must take you up, I suppose.'

David thanked her, and she preceded them with the light through a
door opposite and up some stone stairs.

When they had mounted two flights, she turned abruptly on the
landing--

'You take the _appartement_ from M. Dubois?'

'Yes,' said David, enchanted to find that, thanks to old Barbier's
constant lessons, he could both understand and reply with tolerable
ease; 'for a fortnight.'

'Take care; the landlord will be descending on you; M. Dubois never
pays; he may be turned out any day, and his things sold. Where is
Mademoiselle going to sleep?'

'But in M. Dubois' _appartement_,' said David, hoping this
time, in his dismay, that he did _not_ understand; 'he promised
to arrange everything.'

'He has arranged nothing. Do you wish that I should provide some
things? You can hire some furniture from me. And do you want
service?'

The woman had a grasping eye. David's frugal instincts took alarm.

'_Merci_, Madame! My sister and I do not require much. We
shall wait upon ourselves. If Madame will tell us the name of some
restaurant near--'

Instead, Madame made an angry sound and thrust the key abruptly
into Louie's hand, David being laden with the bags.

'There are two more flights,' she said roughly; 'then turn to the
left, and go up the staircase straight in front of you--first door
to the right. You've got eyes; you'll find the way.'

'_Mais, Madame_--' cried David, bewildered by these
directions, and trying to detain her.

But she was already half-way down the flight below them,
throwing back remarks which, to judge from their tone, were
not complimentary.

There was no help for it. Louie was dropping with fatigue, and
beginning to be much out of temper. David with difficulty assumed a
hopeful air, and up they went again. Leading off the next landing
but one they found a narrow passage, and at the end of it a
ladder-like staircase. At the top of this they came upon a corridor
at right angles, in which the first door bore the welcome figures
'26.'

'All right,' said David; 'here we are. Now we'll just go in, and
look about us. Then if you'll sit and rest a bit, I'll run down and
see where we can get something to eat.'

'Be quick, then--do,' said Louie. 'I'm just fit to drop.'

With a beating heart he put the key into the lock of the door. It
fitted, but he could not turn it. Both he and Louie tried in vain.

'What a nuisance!' said he at last. 'I must go and fetch up that
woman again. You sit down and wait.'

As he spoke there was a sound below of quick steps, and of a voice,
a woman's voice, humming a song.

'Some one coming,' he said to Louie; 'perhaps they understand the
lock.'

They ran down to the landing below to reconnoitre. There was, of
course, gas on the staircase, and as they hung over the iron
railing they saw mounting towards them a young girl. She wore a
light fawn-coloured dress and a hat covered with Parma violets.
Hearing voices above her, she threw her head back, and stopped a
moment. Louie's eye was caught by her hand and its tiny wrist as it
lay on the balustrade, and by the coils and twists of her fair
hair. David saw no details, only what seemed to him a miracle of
grace and colour, born in an instant, out of the dark--or out of
his own excited fancy?

She came slowly up the steps, looking at them, at the tall dark
youth and the girl beside him. Then on the top step she paused,
instead of going past them. David took off his hat, but all the
practical questions he had meant to ask deserted him. His French
seemed to have flown.

'You are strangers, aren't you?' she said, in a clear, high,
somewhat imperious voice. 'What number do you want?'

Her expression had a certain _hauteur_, as of one defending
her native ground against intruders. Under the stimulus of it David
found his tongue.

'We have taken M. Paul Dubois' rooms,' he said. 'We have found his
door, but the key the _concierge_ gave us does not fit it.'

She laughed, a free, frank laugh, which had a certain wild note in
it.

'These doors have to be coaxed,' she said; 'they don't like
foreigners. Give it me. This is my way, too.'

Stepping past them, she preceded them up the narrow stairs, and was
just about to try the key in the lock, when a sudden recollection
seemed to flash upon her.

'I know!' she said, turning upon them. '_Tenez--que je suis bête!_
You are Dubois' English friends. He told me something, and I
had forgotten all about it. You are going to take his rooms?'

'For a week or two,' said David, irritated a little by the laughing
malice, the sarcastic wonder of her eyes, 'while he is doing some
work in Brussels. It seemed a convenient arrangement, but if we are
not comfortable we shall go elsewhere. If you can open the door for
us we shall be greatly obliged to you, Mademoiselle. But if not I
must go down for the _concierge_. We have been travelling all
day, and my sister is tired.'

'Where did you learn such good French?' she said carelessly, at the
same time leaning her weight against the door, and manipulating the
key in such a way that the lock turned, and the door flew open.

Behind it appeared a large dark space. The light from the gas-jet
in the passage struck into it, but beyond a chair and a tall
screen-like object in the middle of the floor, it seemed to David
to be empty.

'That's his _atelier_, of course,' said the unknown; 'and mine
is next to it, at the other end. I suppose he has a cupboard to
sleep in somewhere. Most of us have. But I don't know anything
about Dubois. I don't like him. He is not one of my friends.'

She spoke in a dry, masculine voice, which contrasted in the
sharpest way with her youth, her dress, her dainty smallness. Then,
all of a sudden, as her eyes travelled over the English pair
standing bewildered on the threshold of Dubois' most uninviting
apartment, she began to laugh again. Evidently the situation seemed
to her extremely odd.

'Did you ask the people downstairs to get anything ready for you?'
she inquired.

'No,' said David, hesitating; 'we thought we could manage for
ourselves.'

'Well--perhaps--after the first,' she said, still laughing. 'But--I
may as well warn you--the Merichat will be very uncivil to you if
you don't manage to pay her for something. Hadn't you better
explore? That thing in the middle is Dubois' easel, of course.'

David groped his way in, took some matches from his pocket, found a
gas-bracket with some difficulty, and lit up. Then he and Louie
looked round them. They saw a gaunt high room, lit on one side by a
huge studio-window, over which various tattered blinds were drawn;
a floor of bare boards, with a few rags of carpet here and there;
in the middle, a table covered with painter's apparatus of
different kinds; palettes, paints, rags, tin-pots, and, thrown down
amongst them, some stale crusts of bread; a large easel, with a
number of old and dirty canvases piled upon it; two chairs, one of
them without the usual complement of legs; a few etchings and
oil-sketches and fragments of coloured stuffs pinned against the
wall in wild confusion; and, spread out casually behind the easel,
an iron folding-bedstead, without either mattress or bed-clothes.
In the middle of the floor stood a smeared kettle on a spirit-stove,
and a few odds and ends of glass and china were on the mantelpiece,
together with a paraffin-lamp. Every article in the room was thick
in dust.

When she had, more or less, ascertained these attractive details,
Louie stood still in the middle of M. Dubois' apartment.

'What did he tell all those lies for?' she said to David fiercely.
For in the very last communication received from him, Dubois had
described himself as having made all necessary preparations '_et
pour la toilette et pour le manger._' He had also asked for the
rent in advance, which David with some demur had paid.

'Here's something,' cried David; and, turning a handle in the wall,
he pulled a flimsy door open and disclosed what seemed a cupboard.
The cupboard, however, contained a bed, some bedding, blankets, and
washing arrangements; and David joyously announced his discoveries.
Louie took no notice of him. She was tired, angry, disgusted. The
illusion of Paris was, for the moment, all gone. She sat herself
down on one of the two chairs, and, taking off her hat, she threw
it from her on to the belittered table with a passionate gesture.

The French girl had so far stood just outside, leaning against the
doorway, and looking on with unabashed amusement while they made
their inspection. Now, however, as Louie uncovered, the spectator
at the door made a little, quick sound, and then ran forward.

'_Mais, mon Dieu!_ how handsome you are!' she said with a whimsical
eagerness, stopping short in front of Louie, and driving her little
hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. 'What a head!--what eyes! Why
didn't I see before? You must sit to me--you _must!_ You will, won't
you? I will pay you anything you like! You sha'n't be dull--somebody
shall come and amuse you. _Voyons--monsieur!_' she called imperiously.

David came up. She stood with one hand on the table leaning her
light weight backward, looking at them with all her eyes--the very
embodiment of masterful caprice.

'Both of them!' she said under her breath, '_superbe!_'
Monsieur, look here. You and mademoiselle are tired. There is
nothing in these rooms. Dubois is a scamp without a sou. He does no
work, and he gambles on the Bourse. Everything he had he has sold
by degrees. If he has gone to Brussels now to work honestly, it is
for the first time in his life. He lives on the hope of getting
money out of an uncle in England--that I know, for he boasts of it
to everybody. It is just like him to play a practical joke on
strangers. No doubt you have paid him already--_n'est-ce pas_?
I thought as much. Well, never mind! My rooms are next door. I am
Elise Delaunay. I work in Taranne's _atelier_. I am an artist,
pure and simple, and I live to please myself and nobody else. But I
have a chair or two, and the woman downstairs looks after me
because I make it worth her while. Come with me. I will give you
some supper, and I will lend you a rug and a pillow for that bed.
Then to-morrow you can decide what to do.'

David protested, stammering and smiling. But he had flushed a rosy
red, and there was no real resistance in him. He explained the
invitation to Louie, who had been looking helplessly from one to
the other, and she at once accepted it. She understood perfectly
that the French girl admired her; her face relaxed its frown; she
nodded to the stranger with a sort of proud yielding, and then let
herself be taken by the arm and led once more along the corridor.

Elise Delaunay unlocked her own door.

'_Bien!_' she said, putting her head in first, 'Merichat has
earned her money. Now go in--go in!--and see if I don't give you
some supper.'




CHAPTER II


She pushed them in, and shut the door behind them. They looked
round them in amazement. Here was an _atelier_ precisely
corresponding in size and outlook to Dubois'. But to their
tired eyes the change was one from squalor to fairyland. The
room was not in fact luxurious at all. But there was a Persian
rug or two on the polished floor; there was a wood fire burning
on the hearth, and close to it there was a low sofa or divan
covered with pieces of old stuffs, and flanked by a table whereon
stood a little meal, a roll, some cut ham, part of a flat fruit
tart from the _patissier_ next door, a coffee pot, and a spirit
kettle ready for lighting. There were two easels in the room;
one was laden with sketches and photographs; the other carried
a half-finished picture of a mosque interior in Oran--a rich
splash of colour, making a centre for all the rest. Everywhere
indeed, on the walls, on the floor, or standing on the chairs,
were studies of Algeria, done with an ostentatiously bold and
rapid hand. On the mantelpiece was a small reproduction in terra
cotta of one of Dalou's early statues, a peasant woman in a long
cloak straining her homely baby to her breast--true and passionate.
Books lay about, and in a corner was a piano, open, with a
confusion of tattered music upon it. And everywhere, as it seemed
to Louie, were _shoes!_--the daintiest and most fantastic shoes
imaginable--Turkish shoes, Pompadour shoes, old shoes and new
shoes, shoes with heels and shoes without, shoes lined with fur,
and shoes blown together, as one might think, out of cardboard
and ribbons. The English girl's eyes fastened upon them at once.

'Ah, you tink my shoes pretty,' said the hostess, speaking a few words
of English, _'c'est mon dada, voyez-vous--ma collection!--Tenez_--I
cannot say dat in English, Monsieur; explain to your sister. My shoes
are my passion, next to my foot. I am not pretty, but my foot is
ravishing. Dalou modelled it for his Siren. That turned my head. Sit
down, Mademoiselle--we will find some plat
es.'

She pushed Louie into a corner of the divan, and then she went over
to a cupboard standing against the wall, and beckoned to David.

'Take the plates--and this potted meat. Now for the _petit
vin_ my doctor cousin brought me last week from the family
estate. I have stowed it away somewhere. Ah! here it is. We are
from the Gironde--at least my mother was. My father was
nobody--_bourgeois_ from tip to toe, though he called himself
an artist. It was a _mesalliance_ for her when she married
him. Oh, he led her a life!--she died when I was small, and last
year _he_ died, eleven months ago. I did my best to cry.
_Impossible!_ He had made Maman and me cry too much. And now I
am perfectly alone in the world, and perfectly well-behaved.
Monsieur Prudhomme may talk--I snap my finger at him. You will have
your ideas, of course. No matter! If you eat my salt, you will
hardly be able to speak ill of me.'

'Mademoiselle!' cried David, inwardly cursing his shyness--a
shyness new to him--and his complete apparent lack of anything to
say, or the means of saying it.

'Oh, don't protest!--after that journey you can't afford to waste
your breath. Move a little, Monsieur--let me open the other door of
the cupboard--there are some chocolates worth eating on that back
shelf. Do you admire my _armoire?_ It is old Breton--it
belonged to my grandmother, who was from Morbihan. She brought her
linen in it. It is cherry wood, you see, mounted in silver. You may
search Paris for another like it. Look at that flower work on the
panels. It is not _banal_ at all--it has character--there is
real design in it. Now take the chocolates, and these sardine--put
them down over there. As for me, I make the coffee.'

She ran over to the spirit lamp, and set it going; she measured out
the coffee; then sitting down on the floor, she took the bellows
and blew up the logs.

'Tell me your name, Monsieur?' she said suddenly, looking round.

David gave it in full, his own name and Louie's. Then he walked up
to her, making an effort to be at his ease, and said something
about their French descent. His mode of speaking was slow and
bookish--correct, but wanting in life. After this year's devotion
to French books, after all his compositions with Barbier, he had
supposed himself so familiar with French! With the woman from the
_loge_, indeed, he could have talked at large, had she been
conversational instead of rude. But here, with this little glancing
creature, he felt himself plunged in a perfect quagmire of
ignorance and stupidity. When he spoke of being half French, she
became suddenly grave, and studied him with an intent piercing
look. 'No,' she said slowly, 'no, at bottom you are not French a bit,
you are all English, I feel it. I should fight you--_a outrance!
Grive_--what a strange name! It's a bird's name. You are not
like it--you do not belong to it. But _David_!--ah, that is
better. _Voyons_!'

She sprang up, ran over to the furthest easel, and, routing about
amongst its disorder of prints and photographs, she hit upon one,
which she held up triumphantly.

'There, Monsieur!--there is your prototype. That is David--the
young David--scourge of the Philistine. You are bigger and broader.
I would rather fight him than you--but it is like you, all the
same. Take it.'

And she held out to him a photograph of the Donatello David at
Florence--the divine young hero in his shepherd's hat, fresh from
the slaying of the oppressor.

He looked at it, red and wondering, then shook his head.

'What is it? Who made it, Mademoiselle?'

'Donatello--oh, I never saw it. I was never in Italy, but a friend
gave it me. It is like you, I tell you. But, what use is that? You
are English--yes, you _are_, in spite of your mother. It is
very well to be called David--you may be Goliath all the time!'

Her tone had grown hard and dry--insulting almost. Her look sent
him a challenge.

He stared at her dumbfounded. All the self-confidence with which he
had hitherto governed his own world had deserted him. He was like a
tongue-tied child in her hands.

She enjoyed her mastery, and his discomfiture. Her look changed and
melted in an instant.

'I am rude,' she said, 'and you can't answer me back--not yet--for a
day or two. _Pardon_! Monsieur David--Mademoiselle--will you
come to supper?'

She put chairs and waved them to their places with the joyous
animation of a child, waiting on them, fetching this and that, with
the quickest, most graceful motions. She had brought from the
_armoire_ some fine white napkins, and now she produced a
glass or two and made her guests provide themselves with the red
wine which neither had ever tasted before, and over which Louie
made an involuntary face. Then she began to chatter and to
eat--both as fast as possible--now laughing at her own English or
at David's French, and now laying down her knife and fork that she
might look at Louie with an intent professional look which
contrasted oddly with the wild freedom of her talk and movements.

Suddenly she took up a wineglass and held it out to David with a
piteous childish gesture.

'Fill it, Monsieur, and then drink--drink to my good luck. I wish
for something--with my _life_--my soul; but there are people
who hate me, who would delight to see me crushed. And it will be
three weeks--three long long weeks, almost--before I know.'

She was very pale, the tears had sprung to her eyes, and the hand
holding the glass trembled. David flushed and frowned in the vain
desire to understand her.

'What am I to do?' he said, taking the glass mechanically, but
making no use of it.

'Drink!--drink to my success. I have two pictures, Monsieur, in the
Salon; you know what that means? the same as your _Academie?
Parfaitement!_ ah! you understand. One is well hung, on the
line; the other has been shamefully treated--but _shamefully!_
And all the world knows why. I have some enemies on the jury, and
they delight in a mean triumph over me--a triumph which is a
scandal. But I have friends, too--good friends--and in three weeks
the rewards will be voted. You understand? the medals, and the
_mentions honorables_. As for a medal--no! I am only two years
in the _atelier;_ I am not unreasonable. But a _mention!
_--ah! Monsieur David, if they don't give it me I shall be very
miserable.'

Her voice had gone through a whole gamut of emotion in this
speech--pride, elation, hope, anger, offended dignity--sinking
finally to the plaintive note of a child asking for consolation.

And luckily David had followed her. His French novels had brought
him across the Salon and the jury system; and Barbier had told him
tales. His courage rose. He poured the wine into the glass with a
quick, uncertain hand, and raised it to his lips.

'_A la gloire de Mademoiselle!_' he cried, tossing it down
with a gesture almost as free and vivid as her own.

Her eye followed him with excitement, taking in every detail of the
action--the masculine breadth of chest, the beauty of the dark head
and short upper lip.

'Very good--very good!' she said, clapping her small hands. 'You did
that admirably--you improve--_n'est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?_'

But Louie only stared blankly and somewhat haughtily in return. She
was beginning to be tired of her silent _role_, and of the
sort of subordination it implied. The French girl seemed to divine
it, and her.

'She does not like me,' she said, with a kind of wonder under her
breath, so that David did not catch the words. 'The other is quite
different.'

Then, springing up, she searched in the pockets of her jacket for
something--lips pursed, brows knitted, as though the quest were
important.

'Where are my cigarettes?' she demanded sharply. 'Ah! here they are.
Mademoiselle--Monsieur.'

Louie laughed rudely, pushing them back without a word. Then she
got up, and began boldly to look about her. The shoes attracted
her, and some Algerian scarves and burnouses that were lying on a
distant chair. She went to turn them over.

Mademoiselle Delaunay looked after her for a moment--with the same
critical attention as before--then with a shrug she threw herself
into a corner of the divan, drawing about her a bit of old
embroidered stuff which lay there. It was so flung, however, as to
leave one dainty foot in an embroidered silk stocking visible
beyond it. The tone of the stocking was repeated in the bunch of
violets at her neck, and the purples of the flowers told with
charming effect against her white skin and the pale fawn colour of
her dress and hair. David watched her with intoxication. She could
hardly be taller than most children of fourteen, but her
proportions were so small and delicate that her height, whatever it
was, seemed to him the perfect height for a woman. She handled her
cigarette with mannish airs; unless it were some old harridan in a
collier's cottage, he had never seen a woman smoke before, and
certainly he had never guessed it could become her so well. Not
pretty! He was in no mood to dissect the pale irregular face with
its subtleties of line and expression; but, as she sat there
smoking and chatting, she was to him the realisation--the climax of
his dream of Paris. All the lightness and grace of that dream, the
strangeness, the thrill of it seemed to have passed into her.

'Will you stay in those rooms?' she inquired, slowly blowing away
the curls of smoke in front of her.

David replied that he could not yet decide. He looked as he
felt--in a difficulty.

'Oh! _you_ will do well enough there. But your
sister--_Tenez_! There is a family on the floor below--an
artist and his wife. I have known them take _pensionnaires_.
They are not the most distinguished persons in the world--_mais
enfin_!--it is not for long. Your sister might do worse than
board with them.'

David thanked her eagerly. He would make all inquiries. He had in
his pocket a note of introduction from Dubois to Madame Cervin, and
another, he believed, to the gentleman on the ground floor--to M.
Montjoie, the sculptor.

'Ah! M. Montjoie!'

Her brows went up, her grey eyes flashed. As for her tone it was
half amused, half contemptuous. She began to speak, moved
restlessly, then apparently thought better of it.

'After all,' she said, in a rapid undertone, '_qu'est-ce que cela
me fait? Allons._ Why did you come here at all, instead of to an
hotel, for so short a time?'

He explained as well as he was able.

'You wanted to see something of French life, and French artists or
writers?' she repeated slowly, 'and you come with introductions from
Xavier Dubois! _C'est drole, ca._ Have you studied art?'

He laughed.

'No--except in books.'

'What books?'

'Novels--George Sand's.'

It was her turn to laugh now.

'You are really too amusing! No, Monsieur, no; you interest me.
I have the best will in the world towards you; but I cannot ask
Consuelos and Teverinos to meet you. _Pas possible._ I regret--'

She fell into silence a moment, studying him with a merry look.
Then she broke out again.

'Are you a connoisseur in pictures, Monsieur?'

He had reddened already under her _persiflage._ At this he
grew redder still.

'I have never seen any, Mademoiselle,' he said, almost piteously;
'except once a little exhibition in Manchester.'

'Nor sculpture?'

'No,' he said honestly; 'nor sculpture.'

It seemed to him he was being held under a microscope, so keen and
pitiless were her laughing eyes. But she left him no time to resent
it.

'So you are a blank page, Monsieur--virgin soil--and you confess
it. You interest me extremely. I should even like to teach you a
little. I am the most ignorant person in the world. I know nothing
about artists in books. _Mais je suis artiste, moi! fille
d'artiste._ I could tell you tales--'

She threw her graceful head back against the cushion behind her,
and smiled again broadly, as though her sense of humour were
irresistibly tickled by the situation.

Then a whim seized her, and she sat up, grave and eager.

'I have drawn since I was eight years old,' she said; 'would you
like to hear about it? It is not romantic--not the least in the
world--but it is true.'

And with what seemed to his foreign ear a marvellous swiftness and
fertility of phrase, she poured out her story. After her mother
died she had been sent at eight years old to board at a farm near
Rouen by her father, who seemed to have regarded his daughter now
as plaything and model, now as an intolerable drag on the freedom
of a vicious career. And at the farm the child's gift declared
itself. She began with copying the illustrations, the saints and
holy families in a breviary belonging to one of the farm servants;
she went on to draw the lambs, the carts, the horses, the farm
buildings, on any piece of white wood she could find littered about
the yard, or any bit of paper saved from a parcel, till at last the
old cure took pity upon her and gave her some chalks and a
drawing-book. At fourteen her father, for a caprice, reclaimed her,
and she found herself alone with him in Paris. To judge from the
hints she threw out, her life during thee next few years had been
of the roughest and wildest, protected only by her indomitable
resolve to learn, to make herself an artist, come what would. 'I
meant to be _famous_, and I mean it still!' she said, with a
passionate emphasis which made David open his eyes. Her father
refused to believe in her gift, and was far too self-indulgent and
brutal to teach her. But some of his artist friends were kind to
her, and taught her intermittently; by the help of some of them she
got permission, although under age, to copy in the Louvre, and with
hardly any technical knowledge worked there feverishly from morning
to night; and at last Taranne--the great Taranne, from whose
_atelier_ so many considerable artists had gone out to the
conquest of the public--Taranne had seen some of her drawings,
heard her story, and generously taken her as a pupil.

Then emulation took hold of her--the fierce desire to be first in
all the competitions of the _atelier_. David had the greatest
difficulty in following her rapid speech, with its slang, its
technical idioms, its extravagance and variety; but he made out
that she had been for a long time deficient in sound training, and
that her rivals at the _atelier_ had again and again beaten
her easily in spite of her gift, because of her weakness in the
grammar of her art.

'And whenever they beat me I could have killed my conquerors; and
whenever I beat them, I despised my judges and wanted to give the
prize away. It is not my fault. _Je suis faite comme ça--voilà!
_ I am as vain as a peacock; yet when people admire anything I
do, I think them fools--_fools!_ I am jealous and proud and
absurd--so they all say; yet a word, a look from a real
artist--from one of the great men who _know_--can break me,
make me cry. _Demelez ca, Monsieur, si vous pouvez!_'

She stopped, out of breath. Their eyes were on each other. The
fascination, the absorption expressed in the Englishman's look
startled her. She hurriedly turned away, took up her cigarette
again, and nestled into the cushion. He vainly tried to clothe some
of the quick comments running through his mind in adequate French,
could find nothing but the most commonplace phrases, stammered out
a few, and then blushed afresh. In her pity for him she took up her
story again.

After her father's sudden death, the shelter, such as it was, of
his name and companionship was withdrawn. What was she to do? It
turned out that she possessed a small _rente_ which had belonged to
her mother, and which her father had never been able to squander.
Two relations from her mother's country near Bordeaux turned up to
claim her, a country doctor and his sister--middle-aged, devout--to
her wild eyes at least, altogether forbidding.

'They made too much of their self-sacrifice in taking me to live
with them,' she said with her little ringing laugh. 'I said to
them--"My good uncle and aunt, it is too much--no one could have
the right to lay such a burden upon you. Go home and forget me. I
am incorrigible. I am an artist. I mean to live by myself, and work
for myself. I am sure to go to the bad--good morning." They went
home and told the rest of my mother's people that I was insane. But
they could not keep my money from me. It is just enough for me.
Besides, I shall be selling soon,--certainly I shall be selling! I
have had two or three inquiries already about one of the exhibits
in the Salon. Now then--_talk_, Monsieur David!' and she
emphasised the words by a little frown; 'it is your turn.'

And gradually by skill and patience she made him talk, made him
give her back some of her confidences. It seemed to amuse her
greatly that he should be a bookseller. She knew no booksellers in
Paris; she could assure him they were all pure _bourgeois_,
and there was not one of them that could be likened to Donatello's
David. Manchester she had scarcely heard of; she shook her fair
head over it. But when he told her of his French reading, when he
waxed eloquent about Rousseau and George Sand, then her mirth
became uncontrollable.

'You came to France to talk of Rousseau and George Sand?' she asked
him with dancing eyes--'_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ what do you
take us for?'

This time his vanity was hurt. He asked her to tell him what she
meant--why she laughed at him.

'I will do better than that,' she said; 'I will get some friend of
mine to take you to-morrow to "Les Trois Rats."'

'What is "Les Trois Rats"?' he asked, half wounded and half
mystified.

'"Les Trois Rats," Monsieur, is an artist's cafe. It is famous, it
is characteristic; if you are in search of local colour you must
certainly go there. When you come back you will have some fresh
ideas, I promise you.'

He asked if ladies also went there.

'Some do; I don't. Conventions mean nothing to me, as you perceive,
or I should have a companion here to play propriety. But like you,
perhaps, I am Romantic. I believe in the grand style. I have ideas
as to how men should treat me. I can read Octave Feuillet. I have a
terrible weakness for those _cavaliers_ of his. And garbage
makes me ill. So I avoid the "Trois Rats."'

She fell silent, resting her little chin on her hand. Then with a
sudden sly smile she bent forward and looked him in the eyes.

'Are you pious, Monsieur, like all the English? There is some
religion left in your country, isn't there?'

'Yes, certainly,' he admitted, 'there was a good deal.'

Then, hesitating, he described his own early reading of Voltaire,
watching its effect upon her, afraid lest here too he should say
something fatuous, behind the time, as he seemed to have been doing
all through.

'Voltaire!'--she shrugged her little shoulders--'Voltaire to me is
just an old _perruque_--a prating philanthropical person who talked
about _le bon Dieu_, and wrote just what every _bourgeois_ can
understand. If he had had his will and swept away the clergy and
the Church, how many fine subjects we artists should have lost!'

He sat helplessly staring at her. She enjoyed his perplexity a
minute; then she returned to the charge.

'Well, my credo is very short. Its first article is art--and its
second is art--and its third is art!'

Her words excited her. The delicate colour flushed into her cheek.
She flung her head back and looked straight before her with
half-shut eyes.

'Yes--I believe in art--and expression--and colour--and _le
vrai_. Velazquez is my God, and--and he has too many prophets to
mention! I was devout once for three months--since then I have
never had as much faith of the Church sort as would lie on a
ten-sous piece. But'--with a sudden whimsical change of voice--'I
am as credulous as a Breton fisherman, and as superstitious as a
gipsy! Wait and see. Will you look at my pictures?'

She sprang up and showed her sketches. She had been a winter in
Algiers, and had there and in Spain taken a passion for the East,
for its colour, its mystery, its suggestions of cruelty and
passion. She chattered away, explaining, laughing, haranguing, and
David followed her submissively from thing to thing, dumb with the
interest and curiosity of this new world and language of the
artist.

Louie meanwhile, who, after the refreshment of supper, had been
forgetting both her fatigue and the other two in the entertainment
provided her by the shoes and the Oriental dresses, had now found a
little inlaid coffer on a distant table, full of Algerian trinkets,
and was examining them. Suddenly a loud crash was heard from her
neighbourhood.

Elise Delaunay stood still. Her quick speech, died on her lips. She
made one bound forward to Louie; then, with a cry, she turned
deathly pale, tottered, and would have fallen, but that David ran
to her.

'The glass is broken,' she said, or rather gasped; 'she has broken
it--that old Venetian glass of Maman's. Oh! my pictures!--my pictures!
How can I undo it? _Je suis perdue_! Oh go!--go!--_go_--both of you!
Leave me alone! Why did I ever see you?'

She was beside herself with rage and terror. She laid hold of
Louie, who stood in sullen awkwardness and dismay, and pushed her
to the door so suddenly and so violently that the stronger, taller
girl yielded without an attempt at resistance. Then holding the
door open, she beckoned imperiously to David, while the tears
streamed down her cheeks.

'Adieu, Monsieur--say nothing--there is nothing to be said--go!'

He went out bewildered, and the two in their amazement walked
mechanically to their own door.

'She is mad!' said Louie, her eyes blazing, when they paused and
looked at each other. 'She must be mad. What did she say?'

'What happened?' was all he could reply.

'I threw down that old glass--it wasn't my fault--I didn't see it.
It was standing on the floor against a chair. I moved the chair
back just a trifle, and it fell. A shabby old thing--I could have
paid for another easily. Well, I'm not going there again to be
treated like that.'

The girl was furious. All that chafed sense of exclusion and
slighted importance which had grown upon her during David's
_tete-a-tete_ with their strange hostess came to violent
expression in her resentment. She opened the door of their room,
saying that whatever he might do she was going to bed and to sleep
somewhere, if it was on the floor.

David made a melancholy light in the squalid room, and Louie went
about her preparations in angry silence. When she had withdrawn
into the little cupboard-room, saying carelessly that she supposed
he could manage with one of the bags and his great coat, he sat
down on the edge of the bare iron bedstead, and recognised with a
start that he was quivering all over--with fatigue, or excitement?
His chief feeling perhaps was one of utter discomfiture, flatness,
and humiliation.

He had sat there in the dark without moving for some minutes, when
his ear caught a low uncertain tapping at the door. His heart
leapt. He sprang up and turned the key in an instant.

There on the landing stood Elise Delaunay, her arms filled with
what looked like a black bearskin rug, her small tremulous face and
tear-wet eyes raised to his.

'_Pardon_, Monsieur,' she said hurriedly. 'I told you I was
superstitious--well, now you see. Will you take this rug?--one can
sleep anywhere with it though it is so old. And has your sister
what she wants? Can I do anything for her? No! _Alors_--I must
talk to you about her in the morning. I have some more things in my
head to say. _Pardon!--et bonsoir. '_

She pushed the rug into his hands. He was so moved that he let it
drop on the floor unheeding, and as she looked at him, half
audacious, half afraid, she saw a painful struggle, as of some
strange new birth, pass across his dark young face. They stood so a
moment, looking at each other. Then he made a quick step forward
with some inarticulate words. In an instant she was halfway along
the corridor, and, turning back so that her fair hair and smiling
eyes caught the light she held, she said to him with the queenliest
gesture of dismissal:

'_Au revoir_, Monsieur David, sleep well.'




CHAPTER III


David woke early from a restless sleep. He sprang up and dressed.
Never had the May sun shone so brightly; never had life looked more
alluring.

In the first place he took care to profit by the hints of the night
before. He ran down to make friends with Madame Merichat--a process
which was accomplished without much difficulty, as soon as a franc
or two had passed, and arrangements had been made for the passing
of a few more. She was to take charge of the _appartement_,
and provide them with their morning coffee and bread. And upon this
her grim countenance cleared. She condescended to spend a quarter
of an hour gossiping with the Englishman, and she promised to stand
as a buffer between him and Dubois' irate landlord.

'A job of work at Brussels, you say, Monsieur? _Bien_; I will
tell the _proprietaire_. He won't believe it--Monsieur Dubois
tells too many lies; but perhaps it will keep him quiet. He will
think of the return--of the money in the pocket. He will bid me
inform him the very moment Monsieur Dubois shows his nose, that he
may descend upon him, and so you will be let alone.'

He mounted the stairs again, and stood a moment looking along the
passage with a quickening pulse. There was a sound of low singing,
as of one crooning over some occupation. It must be she! Then she
had recovered her trouble of the night before--her strange trouble.
Yet he dimly remembered that in the farm-houses of the Peak also
the breaking of a looking-glass had been held to be unlucky. And,
of course, in interpreting the omen she had thought of her pictures
and the jury.

How could he see her again? Suddenly it occurred to him that she
had spoken of taking a holiday since the Salon opened. A holiday
which for her meant 'copying in the Louvre.' And where else, pray,
does the tourist naturally go on the first morning of a visit to
Paris?

The young fellow went back into his room with a radiant face, and
spent some minutes, as Louie had not yet appeared, in elaborating
his toilette. The small cracked glass above the mantelpiece was not
flattering, and David was almost for the first time anxious about
and attentive to what he saw there. Yet, on the whole, he was
pleased with his short serge coat and his new tie. He thought they
gave him something of a student air, and would not disgrace even
_her_ should she deign to be seen in his company. As he laid
his brush down he looked at his own brown hand, and remembered hers
with a kind of wonder--so small and white, the wrist so delicately
rounded.

When Louie emerged she was not in a good temper. She declared that
she had hardly slept a wink; that the bed was not fit to sleep on;
that the cupboard was alive with mice, and smelt intolerably. David
first endeavoured to appease her with the coffee and rolls which
had just arrived, and then he broached the plan of sending her to
board with the Cervins, which Mademoiselle Delaunay had suggested.
What did she think? It would cost more, perhaps, but he could
afford it. On their way out he would deliver the two notes of
introduction, and no doubt they could settle it directly if she
liked.

Louie yawned, put up objections, and refused to see anything in a
promising light. Paris was horrid, and the man who had let them the
rooms ought to be 'had up.' As for people who couldn't talk any
English she hated the sight of them.

The remark from an Englishwoman in France had its humour. But David
did not see that point of it. He flushed hotly, and with difficulty
held an angry tongue. However, he was possessed with an inward
dread--the dread of the idealist who sees his pleasure as a
beautiful whole--lest they should so quarrel as to spoil the visit
and the new experience. Under this curb he controlled himself, and
presently, with more _savoir vivre_ than he was conscious of,
proposed that they should go out and see the shops.

Louie, at the mere mention of shops, passed into another mood.
After she had spent some time on dressing they sallied forth, David
delivering his notes on the way down. Both noticed that the house
was squalid and ill-kept, but apparently full of inhabitants. David
surmised that they were for the most part struggling persons of
small means and extremely various occupations. There were three
_ateliers_ in the building, the two on their own top floor,
and M. Montjoie's, which was apparently built out at the back on
the ground floor. The first floor was occupied by a dressmaker, the
_proprietaires_ best tenant, according to Madame Merichat.
Above her was a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, with his
wife and two or three children; above them again the Cervins, and a
couple of commercial travellers, and so on.

The street outside, in its general aspect, suggested the same
small, hard-pressed professional life. It was narrow and dull; it
mounted abruptly towards the hill of Montmartre, with its fort and
cemetery, and, but for the height of the houses, which is in itself
a dignified architectural feature, would have been no more
inspiriting than a street in London.

A few steps, however, brought them on to the Boulevard Montmartre,
and then, taking the Rue Lafitte, they emerged upon the Boulevard
des Italiens.

Louie looked round her, to this side and that, paused for a moment,
bewildered as it were by the general movement and gaiety of the
scene. Then a _lingerie_ shop caught her eye, and she made for
it. Soon the last cloud had cleared from the girl's brow. She gave
herself with ecstasy to the shops, to the people. What jewellery,
what dresses, what delicate cobwebs of lace and ribbon, what
miracles of colour in the florists' windows, what suggestions of
wealth and lavishness everywhere! Here in this world of costly
contrivance, of an eager and inventive luxury, Louise Suveret's
daughter felt herself at last at home. She had never set foot in it
before; yet already it was familiar, and she was part of it.

Yes, she was as well dressed as anybody, she concluded, except
perhaps the ladies in the closed carriages whose dress could only
be guessed at. As for good looks, there did not seem to be much of
_them_ in Paris. She called the Frenchwomen downright plain.
They knew how to put on their clothes; there was style about them,
she did not deny that; but she was prepared to maintain that there
was hardly a decent face among them.

Such air, and such a sky! The trees were rushing into leaf; summer
dresses were to be seen everywhere; the shops had swung out their
awnings, and the day promised a summer heat still tempered by a
fresh spring breeze. For a time David was content to lounge along,
stopping when his companion did, lost as she was in the enchantment
and novelty of the scene, drinking in Paris as it were at great
gulps, saying to himself they would be at the Opera directly, then
the Theatre-Francais, the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Place de la
Concorde! Every book that had ever passed through his hands
containing illustrations and descriptions of Paris he had read with
avidity. He, too, like Louie, though in a different way, was at
home in these streets, and hardly needed a look at the map he
carried to find his way. Presently, when he could escape from
Louie, he would go and explore to his heart's content, see all that
the tourist sees, and then penetrate further, and judge for himself
as to those sweeping and iconoclastic changes which, for its own
tyrant's purposes, the Empire had been making in the older city. As
he thought of the Emperor and the government his gorge rose within
him. Barbier's talk had insensibly determined all his ideas of the
imperial regime. How much longer would France suffer the villainous
gang who ruled her? He began an inward declamation in the manner of
Hugo, exciting himself as he walked--while all the time it was the
spring of 1870 which was swelling and expanding in the veins and
branches of the plane trees above him--May was hurrying on, and
Worth lay three short months ahead!

Then suddenly into the midst of his political musings and his
traveller's ardour the mind thrust forward a disturbing image--the
figure of a little fair-haired artist. He looked round impatiently.
Louie's loiterings began to chafe him.

'Come along, do,' he called to her, waking up to the time; 'we shall
never get there.'

'Where?' she demanded.

'Why, to the Louvre.'

'What's there to see there?'

'It's a great palace. The Kings of France used to live there once.
Now they've put pictures and statues into it. You must see it,
Louie--everybody does. Come along.'

'I'll not hurry,' she said perversely.' I don't care _that_
about silly old pictures.'

And she went back to her shop-gazing. David felt for a moment
precisely as he had been used to feel in the old days on the Scout,
when he had tried to civilise her on the question of books. And now
as then he had to wrestle with her, using the kind of arguments he
felt might have a chance with her. At last she sulkily gave way,
and let him lead on at a quick pace. In the Rue Saint-Honore,
indeed, she was once more almost unmanageable; but at last they
were safely on the stairs of the Louvre, and David's brow smoothed,
his eye shone again. He mounted the interminable steps with such
gaiety and eagerness that Louie's attention was drawn to him.

'Whatever do you go that pace for?' she said crossly. 'It's enough
to kill anybody going up this kind of thing!'

'It isn't as bad as the Downfall,' said David, laughing, 'and I've
seen you get up that fast enough. Come, catch hold of my umbrella
and I'll drag you up.'

Louie reached the top, out of breath, turned into the first room to
the right, and looked scornfully round her.

'Well I never!' she ejaculated. 'What's the good of this?'

Meanwhile David shot on ahead, beckoning to her to follow. She,
however, would take her own pace, and walked sulkily along, looking
at the people who were not numerous enough to please her, and only
regaining a certain degree of serenity when she perceived that here
as elsewhere people turned to stare after her.

David meanwhile threw wondering glances at the great Veronese, at
Raphael's archangel, at the towering Vandyke, at the 'Virgin of the
Rocks.' But he passed them by quickly. Was she here? Could he find
her in this wilderness of rooms? His spirits wavered between
delicious expectancy and the fear of disappointment. The gallery
seemed to him full of copyists young and old: beardless
_rapins_ laughing and chatting with fresh maidens; old men
sitting crouched on high seats with vast canvases before them; or
women, middle-aged and plain, with knitted shawls round their
shoulders, at work upon the radiant Greuzes and Lancrets; but that
pale golden head--nowhere!

_AT LAST_!

He hurried forward, and there, in front of a Velazquez, he found
her, in the company of two young men, who were leaning over the
back of her chair criticising the picture on her easel.

'Ah, Monsieur David!'

She took up the brush she held with her teeth for a moment, and
carelessly held him out two fingers of her right hand.

'Monsieur--make a diversion--tell the truth--these gentlemen here
have been making a fool of me.'

And throwing herself back with a little laughing, coquettish
gesture, she made room for him to look.

'Ah, but I forgot; let me present you. M. Alphonse, this is an
Englishman; he is new to Paris, and he is an acquaintance of mine.
You are not to play any joke upon him. M. Lenain, this gentleman
wishes to be made acquainted with art; you will undertake his
education--you will take him to-night to "Les Trois Rats." I
promised for you.'

She threw a merry look at the elder of her two attendants, who
ceremoniously took off his hat to David and made a polite speech,
in which the word _enchante_ recurred. He was a dark man, with
a short black beard, and full restless eye; some ten years older
apparently than the other, who was a dare-devil boy of twenty.

'_Allons!_ tell me what you think of my picture, M. David.'

The three waited for the answer, not without malice. David looked
at it perplexed. It was a copy of the black and white Infanta, with
the pink rosettes, which, like everything else that France
possesses from the hand of Velazquez, is to the French artist of
to-day among the sacred things, the flags and battle-cries of his
art. Its strangeness, its unlikeness to anything of the picture
kind that his untrained provincial eyes had ever lit upon, tied his
tongue. Yet he struggled with himself.

'Mademoiselle, I cannot explain--I cannot find the words. It seems
to me ugly. The child is not pretty nor the dress. But--'

He stared at the picture, fascinated--unable to express himself,
and blushing under the shame of his incapacity.

The other three watched him curiously.

'Taranne should get hold of him,' the elder artist murmured to his
companion, with an imperceptible nod towards the Englishman. 'The
models lately have been too common. There was a rebellion yesterday
in the _atelier de femmes_; one and all declared the model was
not worth drawing, and one and all left.'

'Minxes!' said the other coolly, a twinkle in his wild eye.
'Taranne will have to put his foot down. There are one or two
demons among them; one should make them know their place.'

Lenain threw back his head and laughed--a great, frank laugh, which
broke up the ordinary discontent of the face agreeably. The
speaker, M. Alphonse Duchatel, had been already turned out of two
_ateliers_ for a series of the most atrocious _charges_
on record. He was now with Taranne, on trial, the authorities
keeping a vigilant eye on him.

Meanwhile Elise, still leaning back with her eyes on her picture,
was talking fast to David, who hung over her, absorbed. She was
explaining to him some of the Infanta's qualities, pointing to this
and that with her brush, talking a bright, untranslatable artist's
language which dazzled him, filled him with an exciting medley of
new impressions and ideas, while all the time his quick sense
responded with a delightful warmth and eagerness to the personality
beside him--child, prophetess, egotist, all in one--noticing each
characteristic detail, the drooping, melancholy trick of the eyes,
the nervous delicacy of the small hand holding the brush.

'David--_David_! I'm tired of this, I tell you! I'm not going
to stay, so I thought I'd come and tell you. Good-bye!'

He turned abruptly, and saw Louie standing defiantly a few paces
behind him.

'What do you want, Louie?' he said impatiently, going up to her. It
was no longer the same man, the same voice.

'I want to go. I hate this!'

'I'm not ready, and you can't go by yourself. Do you see'--(in an
undertone)--'this is Mademoiselle Delaunay?'

'That don't matter,' she said sulkily, making no movement. 'If you
ain't going, I am.'

By this time, however, Elise, as well as the two artists, had
perceived Louie's advent. She got up from her seat with a slight
sarcastic smile, and held out her hand.

'_Bonjour_, Mademoiselle! You forgave me for dat I did last
night? I ask your pardon--oh, _de tout mon coeur_!'

Even Louie perceived that the tone was enigmatical. She gave an
inward gulp of envy, however, excited by the cut of the French
girl's black and white cotton. Then she dropped Elise's hand, and
moved away.

'Louie!' cried David, pursuing her in despair; 'now just wait half
an hour, there's a good girl, while I look at a few things, and
then afterwards I'll take you to the street where all the best
shops are, and you can look at them as much as you like.'

Louie stood irresolute.

'What is it?' said Elise to him in French. 'Your sister wants to go?
Why, you have only just come!'

'She finds it dull looking at pictures,' said David, with an angry
brow, controlling himself with difficulty. 'She must have the shops.'

Elise shrugged her shoulders and, turning her head, said a few
quick words that David did not follow to the two men behind her.
They all laughed. The artists, however, were both much absorbed in
Louie's appearance, and could not apparently take their eyes off
her.

'Ah!' said Elise, suddenly.

She had recognised some one at a distance, to whom she nodded. Then
she turned and looked at the English girl, laughed, and caught her
by the wrist.

'Monsieur David, here are Monsieur and Madame Oervin. Have you
thought of sending your sister to them? If so, I will present you.
Why not? They would amuse her. Madame Cervin would take her to all
the shops, to the races, to the Bois. _Que sais-je_?

All the while she was looking from one to the other. David's face
cleared. He thought he saw a way out of this _impasse_.

'Louie, come here a moment. I want to speak to you.'

And he carried her off a few yards, while the Cervins came up and
greeted the group round the Infanta. A powerfully built, thickset
man, in a grey suit, who had been walking with them, fell back as
they joined Elise Delaunay, and began to examine a Pieter de Hooghe
with minuteness.

Meanwhile David wrestled with his sister. She had much better let
Mademoiselle Delaunay arrange with these people. Then Madame Cervin
could take her about wherever she wanted to go. He would make a
bargain to that effect. As for him, he must and would see
Paris--pictures, churches, public buildings. If the Louvre bored
her, everything would bore her, and it was impossible either that
he should spend his time at her apron-string, flattening his nose
against the shop-windows, or that she should go about alone. He was
not going to have her taken for 'a bad lot,' and treated
accordingly, he told her frankly, with an imperious tightening of
all his young frame. He had discovered some time since that it was
necessary to be plain with Louie.

She hated to be disposed of on any occasion, except by her own will
and initiative, and she still made difficulties for the sake of
making them, till he grew desperate. Then, when she had pushed his
patience to the very last point, she gave way.

'You tell her she's to do as I want her,' she said, threateningly.
'I won't stay if she doesn't. And I'll not have her paid too much.'

David led her back to the rest.

'My sister consents. Arrange it if you can, Mademoiselle,' he said
imploringly to Elise.

A series of quick and somewhat noisy colloquies followed, watched
with disapproval by the _gardien_ near, who seemed to be once
or twice on the point of interfering.

Mademoiselle Delaunay opened the matter to Madame Cervin, a short,
stout woman, with no neck, and a keen, small eye. Money was her
daily and hourly preoccupation, and she could have kissed the hem
of Elise Delaunay's dress in gratitude for these few francs thus
placed in her way. It was some time now since she had lost her last
boarder, and had not been able to obtain another. She took David
aside, and, while her look sparkled with covetousness, explained to
him volubly all that she would do for Louie, and for how much. And
she could talk some English too--certainly she could. Her education
had been _excellent_, she was thankful to say.

'_Mon Dieu, qu'elle est belle!_' she wound up. 'Ah, Monsieur,
you do very right to entrust your sister to me. A young fellow like
you--no!--that is not _convenable_. But I--I will be a dragon.
Make your mind quite easy. With me all will go well.'

Louie stood in an impatient silence while she was being thus talked
over, exchanging looks from time to time with the two artists, who
had retired a little behind Mademoiselle Delaunay's easel, and from
that distance were perfectly competent to let the bold-eyed English
girl know what they thought of her charms.

At last the bargain was concluded, and the Cervins walked away with
Louie in charge. They were to take her to a restaurant, then show
her the Rue Royale and the Rue de la Paix, and, finally--David
making no demur whatever about the expense--there was to be an
afternoon excursion through the Bois to Longchamps, where some of
the May races were being run.

As they receded, the man in grey, before the Pieter de Hooghe,
looked up, smiled, dropped his eyeglass, and resumed his place
beside Madame Cervin. She made a gesture of introduction, and he
bowed across her to the young stranger.

For the first time Elise perceived him. A look of annoyance and
disgust crossed her face.

'Do you see,' she said, turning to Lenain; 'there is that animal,
Montjoie? He did well to keep his distance. What do the Cervins
want with him?'

The others shrugged their shoulders.

'They say his Maenad would be magnificent if he could keep sober
enough to finish her,' said Lenain; 'it is his last chance; he will
go under altogether if he fails; he is almost done for already.'

'And what a gift!' said Alphonse, in a lofty tone of critical
regret. 'He should have been a second Barye. _Ah, la vie
Parisienne--la maudite vie Parisienne_!'

Again Lenain exploded.

'Come and lunch, you idiot,' he said, taking the lad's arm; 'for
whom are you posing?'

But before they departed, they inquired of David in the politest
way what they could do for him. He was a stranger to Mollie.
Delaunay's acquaintance; they were at his service. Should they take
him somewhere at night? David, in an effusion of gratitude,
suggested 'Les Trois Rats.' He desired greatly to see the artist
world, he said. Alphonse grinned. An appointment was made for eight
o'clock, and the two friends walked off.




CHAPTER IV


David and Elise Delaunay thus found themselves left alone. She
stood a moment irresolutely before her canvas, then sat down again,
and took up her brushes.

'I cannot thank you enough, Mademoiselle,' the young fellow began
shyly, while the hand which held his stick trembled a little. 'We
could never have arranged that affair for ourselves.'

She coloured and bent over her canvas.

'I don't know why I troubled myself,' she said, in a curious
irritable way.' Because you are kind!' he cried, his charming smile
breaking. 'Because you took pity on a pair of strangers, like the
guardian angel that you are!'

The effect of the foreign language on him leading him to a more set
and literary form of expression than he would have naturally used,
was clearly marked in the little outburst.

Elise bit her lip, frowned and fidgeted, and presently looked him
straight in the face.

'Monsieur David, warn your sister that that man with the Cervins
this morning--the man in grey, the sculptor, M. Montjoie--is a
disreputable scoundrel that no decent woman should know.'

David was taken aback.

'And Madame Cervin--'

Elise raised her shoulders.

'I don't offer a solution,' she said; 'but I have warned you.'

'Monsieur Cervin has a somewhat strange appearance,' said David,
hesitating.

And, in fact, while the negotiations had been going on there had
stood beside the talkers a shabby, slouching figure of a man, with
longish grizzled hair and a sleepy eye--a strange, remote creature,
who seemed to take very little notice of what was passing before
him. From various indications, however, in the conversation, David
had gathered that this looker-on must be the former _prix de
Rome_.

Elise explained that Monsieur Carvin was the wreck of a genius. In
his youth he had been the chosen pupil of Ingres and Hippolyte
Flandrin, had won the _prix de Rome_, and after his three
years in the Villa Medicis had come home to take up what was
expected to be a brilliant career. Then for some mysterious reason
he had suddenly gone under, disappeared from sight, and the waves
of Paris had closed over him. When he reappeared he was broken in
health, and married to a retired modiste, upon whose money he was
living. He painted bad pictures intermittently, but spent most of
his time in hanging about his old haunts--the Louvre, the Salon,
the various exhibitions, and the dealers, where he was commonly
regarded by the younger artists who were on speaking terms with him
as a tragic old bore, with a head of his own worth painting,
however if he could be got to sit--for an augur or a chief priest.

'It was _absinthe_ that did it,' said Elise calmly, taking a
fresh charge into her brush, and working away at the black
trimmings of the Infanta's dress. 'Every day, about four, he
disappears into the Boulevard. Generally, Madame Cervin drives him
like a sheep; but when four o'clock comes she daren't interfere
with him. If she did, he would be unmanageable altogether. So he
takes his two hours or so, and when he comes back there is not much
amiss with him. Sometimes he is excited, and talks quite
brilliantly about the past--sometimes he is nervous and depressed,
starts at a sound, and storms about the noises in the street. Then
she hurries him off to bed, and the next morning he is quite meek
again, and tries to paint. But his hand shakes, and he can't see.
So he gives it up, and calls to her to put on her things. Then they
wander about Paris, till four o'clock comes round again, and he
gives her the slip--always with some elaborate pretence of other.
Oh! she takes it quietly. Other vices might give her more trouble.'

The tone conveyed the affectation of a complete knowledge of the
world, which saw no reason whatever to be ashamed of itself. The
girl was just twenty, but she had lived for years, first with a
disreputable father, and then in a perpetual _camaraderie_,
within the field of art, with men of all sorts and kinds. There are
certain feminine blooms which a _milieu_ like this effaces
with deadly rapidity.

For the first time David was jarred. The idealist in him recoiled.
His conscience, too, was roused about Louie. He had handed her
over, it seemed, to the custody of a drunkard and his wife, who had
immediately thrown her into the company of a man no decent woman
ought to know. And Mademoiselle Delaunay had led him into it. The
guardian angel speech of a few moments before rang in his ears
uncomfortably.

Moreover, whatever rebellions his young imagination might harbour,
whatever license in his eyes the great passions might claim, he had
maintained for months and years past a practical asceticism, which
had left its mark. The young man who had starved so gaily on
sixpence a day that he might read and learn, had nothing but
impatience and disgust for the glutton and the drunkard. It was a
kind of physical repulsion. And the woman's light indulgent tone
seemed for a moment to divide them.

Elise looked round. Why this silence in her companion?

In an instant she divined him. Perhaps her own conscience was not
easy. Why had she meddled in the young Englishman's affairs at all?
For a whim? Out of a mere good-natured wish to rid him of his
troublesome sister; or because his handsome looks, his _naivete_,
and his eager admiration of herself amused and excited her, and
she did not care to be baulked of them so soon? At any rate,
she found refuge in an outburst of temper.

'Ah!' she said, after a moment's pause and scrutiny. 'I see! You
think I might have done better for your sister than send her to
lodge with a drunkard--that I need not have taken so much trouble
to give you good advice for that! You repent your little remarks
about guardian angels! You are disappointed in me!--you distrust
me!'

She turned back to her easel and began to paint with headlong
speed, the small hand flashing to and fro, the quick breath rising
and falling tempestuously.

He was dismayed--afraid, and he began to make excuses both for
himself and her. It would be all right; he should be close by, and
if there were trouble he could take his sister away.

She let her brushes fall into her lap with an exclamation.

'Listen!' she said to him, her eyes blazing--why, he could not for
the life of him understand. 'There will be no trouble. What I told
you means nothing open--or disgusting. Your sister will notice
nothing unless you tell her. But I was candid with you--I always
am. I told you last night that I had no scruples. You thought it
was a woman's exaggeration; it was the literal truth! If a man
drinks, or is vicious, so long as he doesn't hurl the furniture at
my head, or behave himself offensively to me, what does it matter
to me! If he drinks so that he can't paint, and he wants to paint,
well!--then he seems to me another instance of the charming way in
which a kind Providence has arranged this world. I am sorry for
him, _tout bonnement_! If I could give the poor devil a hand
out of the mud, I would; if not, well, then, no sermons! I take him
as I find him; if he annoys me, I call in the police. But as to
hiding my face and canting, not at all! That is your English
way--it is the way of our _bourgeoisie._ It is not mine. I
don't belong to the respectables--I would sooner kill myself a
dozen times over. I can't breathe in their company. I know how to
protect myself; none of the men I meet dare to insult me; that is
my idiosyncrasy--everyone has his own. But I have my ideas, and
nobody else matters a fig to me.--So now, Monsieur, if you regret
our forced introduction of last night, let me wish you a good
morning. It will be perfectly easy for your sister to find some
excuse to leave the Cervins. I can give you the addresses of
several cheap hotels where you and she will be extremely
comfortable, and where neither I nor Monsieur Cervin will annoy
you!'

David stared at her. He had grown very pale. She, too, was white to
the lips. The violence and passion of her speech had exhausted her;
her hands trembled in her lap. A wave of emotion swept through him.
Her words were insolently bitter. Why, then, this impression of
something wounded and young and struggling--at war with itself and
the world, proclaiming loneliness and _Sehnsucht_, while it
flung anger and reproach?

He dropped on one knee, hardly knowing what he did. Most of the
students about had left their work for a while; no one was in sight
but a _gardien_, whose back was turned to them, and a young
man in the remote distance. He picked up a brush she had let fall,
pressed it into her reluctant hand, and laid his forehead against
the hand for an instant.

'You misunderstand me,' he said, with a broken, breathless
utterance. 'You are quite wrong--quite mistaken. There are not such
thoughts in me as you think. The world matters nothing to me,
either. I am alone, too; I have always been alone. You meant
everything that was heavenly and kind--you must have meant it. I am
a stupid idiot! But I could be your friend--if you would permit it.'

He spoke with an extraordinary timidity and slowness. He forgot all
his scruples, all pride--everything. As he knelt there, so close to
her delicate slimness, to the curls on her white neck, to the
quivering lips and great, defiant eyes, she seemed to him once more
a being of another clay from himself--beyond any criticism his
audacity could form. He dared hardly touch her, and in his heart
there swelled the first irrevocable wave of young passion. She
raised her hand impetuously and began to paint again. But suddenly
a tear dropped on to her knee. She brushed it away, and her wild
smile broke.

'Bah!' she said, 'what a scene, what a pair of children! What was it
all about? I vow I haven't an idea. You are an excellent
_farceur._ Monsieur David! One can see well that you have read
George Sand.'

He sat down on a little three-legged stool she had brought with
her, and held her box open on his knee. In a minute or two they
were talking as though nothing had happened. She was giving him a
fresh lecture on Velazquez, and he had resumed his role of pupil
and listener. But their eyes avoided each other, and once when, in
taking a tube from the box he held, her fingers brushed against his
hand, she flushed involuntarily and moved her chair a foot further
away.

'Who is that?' she asked, suddenly looking round the corner of her
canvas. '_Mon Dieu!_ M. Regnault! How does he come here? They
told me he was at Granada.'

She sat transfixed, a joyous excitement illuminating every feature.
And there, a few yards from them, examining the Rembrandt 'Supper
at Emmaus' with a minute and absorbed attention, was the young man
he had noticed in the distance a few minutes before. As Elise
spoke, the new-comer apparently heard his name, and turned. He put
up his eyeglass, smiled, and took off his hat.

'Mademoiselle Delaunay! I find you where I left you, at the feet of
the master! Always at work! You are indefatigable. Taranne tells me
great things of you. "Ah," he says, "if the men would work like the
women!" I assure you, he makes us smart for it. May I look?
Good--very good! a great improvement on last year--stronger, more
knowledge in it. That hand wants study--but you will soon put it
right. Ah, Velazquez! That a man should be great, one can bear
that, but so great! It is an offence to the rest of us mortals. But
one cannot realise him out of Madrid. I often sigh for the months I
spent copying in the Museo. There is a repose of soul in copying a
great master--don't you find it? One rests from one's own efforts
awhile--the spirit of the master descends into yours, gently,
profoundly.'

He stood beside her, smiling kindly, his hat and gloves in his
hands, perfectly dressed, an air of the great world about his look
and bearing which differentiated him wholly from all other persons
whom David had yet seen in Paris. In physique, too, he was totally
unlike the ordinary Parisian type. He was a young athlete,
vigorous, robust, broad-shouldered, tanned by sun and wind. Only
his blue eye--so subtle, melancholy, passionate--revealed the
artist and the thinker.

Elise was evidently transported by his notice of her. She talked to
him eagerly of his pictures in the Salon, especially of a certain
'Salome,' which, as David presently gathered, was the sensation of
the year. She raved about the qualities of it--the words colour,
poignancy, force recurring in the quick phrases.

'No one talks of your _success_ now, Monsieur. It is another
word. _C'est la gloire elle-même qui vous parle à l'oreille!_'

As she let fall the most characteristic of all French nouns, a
slight tremor passed across the young man's face. But the look
which succeeded it was one of melancholy; the blue eyes took a
steely hardness.

'Perhaps a lying spirit, Mademoiselle. And what matter, so long as
everything one does disappoints oneself? What a tyrant is
art!--insatiable, adorable! You know it. We serve our king on our knees,
and he deals us the most miserly gifts.'

'It is the service itself repays,' she said, eagerly, her chest
heaving.

'True!--most true! But what a struggle always!--no rest--no
content. And there is no other way. One must seek, grope,
toil--then produce rapidly--in a flash--throw what you have done
behind you--and so on to the next problem, and the next. There is
no end to it--there never can be. But you hardly came here this
morning, I imagine, Mademoiselle, to hear me prate! I wish you good
day and good-bye. I came over for a look at the Salon, but
to-morrow I go back to Spain. I can't breathe now for long away
from my sun and my South! Adieu, Mademoiselle. I am told your
prospects, when the voting comes on, are excellent. May the gods
inspire the jury!'

He bowed, smiled, and passed on, carrying his lion-head and kingly
presence down the gallery, which had now filled up again, and
where, so David noticed, person after person turned as he came near
with the same flash of recognition and pleasure he had seen upon
Elise's face. A wild jealousy of the young conqueror invaded the
English lad.

'Who is he?' he asked.

Elise, womanlike, divined him in a moment. She gave him a sidelong
glance and went back to her painting.

'That,' she said quietly, 'is Henri Regnault. Ah, you know nothing
of our painters. I can't make you understand. For me he is a young
god--there is a halo round his head. He has grasped his fame--the
fame we poor creatures are all thirsting for. It began last year
with the Prim--General Prim on horseback--oh, magnificent!--a
passion!--an energy! This year it is the "Salome." About--
Gautier--all the world--have lost their heads over it. If
you go to see it at the Salon, you will have to wait your turn.
Crowds go every day for nothing else. Of course there are murmurs.
They say the study of Fortuny has done him harm. Nonsense! People
discuss him because he is becoming a master--no one discusses the
nonentities. _They_ have no enemies. Then he is sculptor,
musician, athlete--well-born besides--all the world is his friend.
But with it all so simple--_bon camarade_ even for poor
scrawlers like me. _Je l'adore!_'

'So it seems,' said David.

The girl smiled over her painting. But after a bit she looked up
with a seriousness, nay, a bitterness, in her siren's face, which
astonished him.

'It is not amusing to take you in--you are too ignorant. What do
you suppose Henri Regnault matters to me? His world is as far above
mine as Velazquez' art is above my art. But how can a foreigner
understand our shades and grades? Nothing but _success_, but
_la gloire_, could ever lift me into his world. Then indeed I
should be everybody's equal, and it would matter to nobody that I
had been a Bohemian and a _declassee_.

She gave a little sigh of excitement, and threw her head back to
look at her picture, David watched her.

'I thought,' he said ironically, 'that a few minutes ago you were
all for Bohemia. I did not suspect these social ambitions.'

'All women have them--all artists deny them,' she said, recklessly.
'There, explain me as you like, Monsieur David. But don't read my
riddle too soon, or I shall bore you. Allow me to ask you a
question.'

She laid down her brushes and looked at him with the utmost
gravity. His heart beat--he bent forward.

'Are you ever hungry, Monsieur David?'

He sprang up, half enraged, half ashamed.

'Where can we get some food?'

'That is my affair,' she said, putting up her brushes. 'Be humble,
Monsieur, and take a lesson in Paris.'

And out they went together, he beside himself with the delight of
accompanying her, and proudly carrying her box and satchel. How her
little feet slipped in and out of her pretty dress--how, as they
stood on the top of the great flight of stairs leading down into
the court of the Louvre, the wind from outside blew back the curls
from her brow, and ruffled the violets in her hat, the black lace
about her tiny throat. It was an enchantment to follow and to serve
her. She led him through the Tuileries Gardens and the Place de la
Concorde to the Champs-Elysées. The fountains leapt in the sun; the
river blazed between the great white buildings of its banks; to the
left was the gilded dome of the Invalides, and the mass of the
Corps Législatif, while in front of them rose the long ascent to
the Arc de l'Etoile set in vivid green on either hand. Everywhere
was space, glitter, magnificence. The gaiety of Paris entered into
the Englishman, and took possession.

Presently, as they wandered up the Champs-Elysées, they passed a
great building to the left. Elise stopped and clasped her hands in
front of her with a little nervous, spasmodic gesture.

'That,' she said, 'is the Salon. My fate lies there. When we have
had some food, I will take you in to see.'

She led him a little further up the Avenue, then took him aside
through cunningly devised labyrinths of green till they came upon a
little cafe restaurant among the trees, where people sat under an
awning, and the wind drove the spray of a little fountain hither
and thither among the bushes. It was gay, foreign, romantic, unlike
anything David had ever seen in his northern world. He sat down,
with Barbier's stories running in his head. Mademoiselle Delaunay
was George Sand--independent, gifted, on the road to fame like that
great _declassee_ of old; and he was her friend and comrade, a
humble soldier, a camp follower, in the great army of letters.

Their meal was of the lightest. This descent on the Champs-Elysées
had been a freak on Elise's part, who wished to do nothing so
_banal_ as take her companion to the Palais Royal. But the
restaurant she had chosen, though of a much humbler kind than those
which the rich tourist commonly associates with this part of Paris,
was still a good deal more expensive than she had rashly supposed.
She opened her eyes gravely at the charges; abused herself
extravagantly for a lack of _savoir vivre_; and both with one
accord declared it was too hot to eat. But upon such eggs and such
green peas as they did allow themselves--a _portion_ of each,
scrupulously shared--David at any rate, in his traveller's ardour,
was prepared to live to the end of the chapter.

Afterwards, over the coffee and the cigarettes, Elise taking her
part in both, they lingered for one of those hours which make the
glamour of youth. Confidences flowed fast between them. His French
grew suppler and more docile, answered more truly to the
individuality behind it. He told her of his bringing up, of his
wandering with the sheep on the mountains, of his reading among the
heather, of 'Lias and his visions, of Hannah's cruelties and
Louie's tempers--that same idyll of peasant life to which Dora had
listened months before. But how differently told! Each different
listener changes the tale, readjusts the tone. But here also the
tale pleased. Elise, for all her leanings towards new schools in
art, had the Romantic's imagination and the Romantic's relish for
things foreign and unaccustomed. The English boy and his story
seemed to her both charming and original. Her artist's eye followed
the lines of the ruffled black head and noted the red-brown of the
skin. She felt a wish to draw him--a wish which had entirely
vanished in the case of Louie.

'Your sister has taken a dislike to me,' she said to him once,
coolly. 'And as for me, I am afraid of her. Ah! and she broke my
glass!'

She shivered, and a look of anxiety and depression invaded her
small face. He guessed that she was thinking of her pictures, and
began timidly to speak to her about them. When they returned to the
world of art, his fluency left him; he felt crushed beneath the
weight of his own ignorance and her accomplishment.

'Come and see them!' she said, springing up. 'I am tired of my
Infanta. Let her be awhile. Come to the Salon, and I will show you
"Salome." Or are you sick of pictures? What do you want to see?
_Ça m'est égal_. I can always go back to my work.'

She spoke with a cavalier lightness which teased and piqued him.

'I wish to go where you go,' he said flushing, 'to see what you see.'

She shook her little head.

'No compliments, Monsieur David. We are serious persons, you and I.
Well, then, for a couple of hours, _soyons camarades!_'

Of those hours, which prolonged themselves indefinitely, David's
after remembrance was somewhat crowded and indistinct. He could
never indeed think of Regnault's picture without a shudder, so
poignant was the impression it made upon him under the stimulus of
Elise's nervous and passionate comments. It represented the
daughter of Herodias resting after the dance, with the dish upon
her knee which was to receive the head of the saint. Her mass of
black hair--the first strong impression of the picture--stood out
against the pale background, and framed the smiling sensual face,
broadly and powerfully made, like the rest of the body, and knowing
neither thought nor qualm. The colour was a bewilderment of
scarlets and purples, of yellow and rose-colour, of turtle-greys
and dazzling flesh-tints--bathed the whole of it in the searching
light of the East. The strangeness, the science of it, its
extraordinary brilliance and energy, combined with its total lack
of all emotion, all pity, took indelible hold of the English lad's
untrained provincial sense. He dreamt of it for nights afterwards.

For the rest--what whirl and confusion! He followed Elise through
suffocating rooms, filled with the liveliest crowd he had ever
seen. She was constantly greeted, surrounded, carried off to look
at this and that. Her friends and acquaintances, indeed, whether
men or women, seemed all to treat her in much the same way. There
was complete, and often noisy, freedom of address and discussion
between them. She called all the men by their surnames, and she was
on half mocking, half caressing terms with the women, who seemed to
David to be generally art students, of all ages and aspects. But
nobody took any liberties with her. She had her place, and that one
of some predominance. Clearly she had already the privileges of an
eccentric, and a certain cool ascendency of temperament. Her little
figure fluttered hither and thither, gathering a train, then
shaking it off again. Sometimes and her friends, finding the heat
intolerable, and wanting space for talk, would overflow into the
great central hall, with its cool palms and statues; and there David
would listen to torrents of French artistic theory, anecdote, and
_blague_, till his head whirled, and French cleverness--conveyed
to him in what, to the foreigner, is the most exquisite and the
most tantalising of all tongues--seemed to him superhuman.

As to what he saw, after 'Salome,' he remembered vividly only three
pictures--Elise Delaunay's two--a portrait and a workshop
interior--before which he stood, lost in naive wonder at her
talent; and the head of a woman, with a thin pale face,
reddish-brown hair, and a look of pantherish grace and force, which
he was told was the portrait of an actress at the Odeon who was
making the world stare--Mademoiselle Bernhardt. For the rest he had
the vague, distracting impression of a new world--of nude horrors
and barbarities of all sorts--of things licentious or cruel, which
yet, apparently, were all of as much value in the artist's eye, and
to be discussed with as much calm or eagerness, as their
neighbours. One moment he loathed what he saw, and threw himself
upon his companion, with the half-coherent protests of an English
idealism, of which she scarcely understood a word; the next he lost
himself in some landscape which had torn the very heart out of an
exquisite mood of nature, or in some scene of peasant life--so true
and living that the scents of the fields and the cries of the
animals were once more about him, and he lived his childhood over
again.

Perhaps the main idea which the experience left with him was one of
a goading and intoxicating _freedom_. His country lay in the
background of his mind as the symbol of all dull convention and
respectability. He was in the land of intelligence, where nothing
is prejudged, and all experiments are open.

When they came out, it was to get an ice in the shade, and then to
wander to and fro, watching the passers-by--the young men playing a
strange game with disks under the trees--the nurses and
children--the ladies in the carriages--and talking, with a quick,
perpetual advance towards intimacy, towards emotion. More and more
there grew upon her the charm of a certain rich poetic intelligence
there was in him, stirring beneath his rawness and ignorance,
struggling through the fetters of language; and in response, as the
evening wore on, she threw off her professional airs, and sank the
egotist out of sight. She became simpler, more childish; her
variable, fanciful youth answered to the magnetism of his.

At last he said to her, as they stood by the Arc de l'Etoile,
looking down towards Paris:

'The sun is just going down--this day has been the happiest of my
life!'

The low intensity of the tone startled her. Then she had a movement
of caprice, of superstition.

'_Alors--assez_! Monsieur David, stay where you are. Not
another step!--_Adieu!_'

Astonished and dismayed, he turned involuntarily. But, in the crowd
of people passing through the Arch, she had slipped from him, and
he had lost her beyond recovery. Moreover, her tone was
peremptory--he dared not pursue and anger her.

Minutes passed while he stood, spell--and trance-bound, in the
shadow of the Arch. Then, with the long and labouring breath, the
sudden fatigue of one who has leapt in a day from one plane of life
to another--in whom a passionate and continuous heat of feeling has
for the time burnt up the nervous power--he moved on eastwards,
down the Champs-Elysées. The sunset was behind him, and the trees
threw long shadows across his path. Shade and sun spaces alike
seemed to him full of happy crowds. The beautiful city laughed and
murmured round him. Nature and man alike bore witness with his own
rash heart that all is divinely well with the world--let the
cynics and the mourners say what they will. His hour had come,
and without a hesitation or a dread he rushed upon it. Passion
and youth--ignorance and desire--have never met in madder or
more reckless dreams than those which filled the mind of David
Grieve as he wandered blindly home.




CHAPTER V


As David climbed the garret stairs to his room, the thought of
Louie flashed across his mind for the first time since the morning.
He opened the door and looked round. Yes; all her things were gone.
She had taken up her abode with the Cervins.

A certain anxiety and discomfort seized him; before going out to
the Boulevard to snatch some food in preparation for his evening at
the 'Trois Rats' he descended to the landing below and rang the
Cervins' bell.

A charwoman, dirty and tired with much cleaning, opened to him.

No, Madame was not at home. No one was at home, and the dinner was
spoiling. Had they not been seen all day? Certainly. They had come
in about six o'clock _avec une jeune personne_ and M. Montjoie.
She thought it probable that they were all at that moment down
below, in the studio of M. Montjoie.

David already knew his way thither, and was soon standing outside
the high black door with the pane of glass above it to which Madame
Merichat had originally directed him. While he waited for an answer
to his ring he looked about him. He was in a sort of yard which was
almost entirely filled up by the sculptor's studio, a long
structure lighted at one end as it seemed from the roof, and at the
other by the usual north window. At the end of the yard rose a huge
many-storied building which seemed to be a factory of some sort.
David's Lancashire eye distinguished machinery through the
monotonous windows, and the figures of the operatives; it took note
also of the fact that the rooms were lit up and work still going on
at seven o'clock. All around were the ugly backs of tall houses,
every window flung open to this May heat. The scene was squalid and
_triste_ save for the greenish blue of the evening sky, and
the flight of a few pigeons round the roof of the factory.

A man in a blouse came at last, and led the way in when David asked
for Madame Cervin. They passed through the inner studio full of a
confusion of clay models and casts to which the dust of months gave
the look and relief of bronze.

Then the further door opened, and he saw beyond a larger and
emptier room; sculptor's work of different kinds, and in various
stages on either side; casts, and charcoal studies on the walls,
and some dozen people scattered in groups over the floor, all
looking towards an object on which the fading light from the upper
part of the large window at the end was concentrated.

What was that figure on its pedestal, that white image which lived
and breathed? _Louie?_

The brother stood amazed beside the door, staring while the man in
the blouse retreated, and the persons in the room were too much
occupied with the spectacle before them to notice the new-comer's
arrival.

Louie stood upon a low pedestal, which apparently revolved with the
model, for as David entered, Montjoie, the man in the grey suit,
with the square, massive head, who had joined the party in the
Louvre, ran forward and moved it round slightly. She was in Greek
dress, and some yards away from her was the clay study--a maenad
with vine wreath, tambourine, thyrsus, and floating hair--for which
she was posing.

Even David was dazzled by the image thus thrown out before him.
With her own dress Louie Grieve seemed to have laid aside for the
moment whatever common or provincial elements there might be in her
strange and startling beauty. Clothed in the clinging folds of the
Greek chiton; neck, arms, and feet bare; the rounded forms of the
limbs showing under the soft stuff; the face almost in profile,
leaning to the shoulder, as though the delicate ear were listening
for the steps of the wine god; a wreath of vine leaves round the
black hair which fell in curly masses about her, sharpening and
framing the rosy whiteness of the cheek and neck; one hand lightly
turned back behind her, showing the palm, the other holding a
torch; one foot poised on tiptoe, and the whole body lightly bent
forward, as though for instant motion:--in this dress and this
attitude, worn and sustained with extraordinary intelligence and
audacity, the wild hybrid creature had risen, as it were, for the
first time, to the full capacity of her endowment--had eclipsed and
yet revealed herself.

The brother stood speechless, looking from the half-completed study
to his sister. How had they made her understand?--where had she got
the dress? And such a dress! To the young fellow, who in his
peasant and tradesman experience had never even seen a woman in the
ordinary low dress of society, it seemed incredible, outrageous.
And to put it on for the purpose of posing as a model in a room
full of strange men--Madame Cervin was the only woman present--his
cheek burnt for his sister; and for the moment indignation and
bewilderment held him paralysed.

In front of him a little way, but totally unaware of the stranger's
entrance, were two men whispering and laughing together. One held a
piece of paper on a book, and was making a hurried sketch of Louie.
Every now and then he drew the attention of his companion to some
of the points of the model. David caught a careless phrase or two,
and understood just enough of their student's slang to suspect a
good deal worse than was actually said.

Meanwhile Montjoie was standing against an iron pillar, studying
intently every detail of Louie's pose, both hands arched over his
eyes.

'_Peste!_ did one ever see so many points combined?' he threw back to
a couple of men behind him. 'Too thin--the arms might be better--and
the hands a _little_ common. But for the _ensemble--mon Dieu!_ we
should make Carpeaux's _atelier_ look alive--_hein?_'

'Take care!' laughed a man who was leaning against a cast a few
feet away, and smoking vigorously. 'She likes it, she has never done
it before, but she likes it. Suppose Carpeaux gets hold of her. You
may repent showing her, if you want to keep her to yourself.'

'Ah, that right knee wants throwing forward a trifle,' said
Montjoie in a preoccupied tone, and going up to Louie, he spoke a
few words of bad English.

'Allow me, mademoiselle--put your hand on me--_ainsi_--vile I
change dis pretty foot.'

Louie looked down bewildered, then at the other men about her, with
her great eyes, half exultant, half inquiring. She understood
hardly anything of their French. One of them laughed, and, running
to the clay Maenad, stooped down and touched the knee and ankle, to
show her what was meant. Louie instinctively put her hand on
Montjoie's shoulder to steady herself, and he proceeded to move the
bare sandalled foot.

One of the men near him made a remark which David caught. He
suddenly strode forward.

'Sir! Have the goodness to tell me how you wish my sister to stand,
and I will explain to her. She is not your model!'

The sculptor looked up startled. Everybody stared at the intruder,
at the dark English boy, standing with a threatening eye, and
trembling with anger, beside his sister. Then Madame Cervin,
clasping her little fat hands with an exclamation of dismay, rushed
up to the group, while Louie leapt down from her pedestal and went
to David.

'What are you interfering for?' she said, pushing Madame Cervin
aside and looking him full in the eyes, her own blazing, her chest
heaving.

'You are disgracing yourself,' he said to her with the same
intensity, fast and low, under his breath, so as to be heard only
by her. 'How can you expose yourself as a model to these men whom
you never saw before? Let them find their own models; they are a
pack of brutes!'

But even as he spoke he shrank before the concentrated wrath of her
face.

'I will make you pay for it!' she said. 'I will teach you to
domineer.'

Then she turned to Madame Cervin.

'Come and take it off, please!' she said imperiously. 'It's no good
while he is here.'

As she crossed the room with her free wild step, her white
draperies floating, Montjoie, who had been standing pulling at his
moustaches, and studying the brother from under his heavy brows,
joined her, and, stooping, said two or three smiling words in her
ear. She looked up, tossed her head and laughed--a laugh half
reckless, half _farouche;_ two or three of the other men
hurried after them, and presently they made a knot in the further
room, Louie calmly waiting for Madame Cervin, and sitting on the
pedestal of a bronze group, her beautiful head and white shoulders
thrown out against the metal. Montjoie's artist friends--of the
kind which haunt a man whose _moeurs_ are gradually bringing
his talent to ruin--stood round her, smoking and talking and
staring at the English girl between whiles. The arrogance with
which she bore their notice excited them, but they could not talk
to her, for she did not understand them. Only Montjoie had a few
words of English. Occasionally Louie bent forward and looked
disdainfully through the door. When would David be done prating?

For he, in fact, was grappling with Madame Cervin, who was showing
great adroitness. This was what had happened according to her.
Monsieur Montjoie--a man of astonishing talent, an artist
altogether superior--was in trouble about his statue--could not
find a model to suit him--was in despair. It seemed that he had
heard of mademoiselle's beauty from England, in some way, before
she arrived. Then in the studio he had shown her the Greek dress.

'--There were some words between them--some compliments,
Monsieur, I suppose--and your sister said she would pose for
him. I opposed myself. I knew well that mademoiselle was a
young person _tout-à-fait comme il faut_, that monsieur her
brother might object to her making herself a model for M.
Montjoie. _Mais, mon Dieu!_' and the ex-modiste shrugged her
round shoulders--'mademoiselle has a will of her own.'

Then she hinted that in an hour's acquaintance mademoiselle had
already shown herself extremely difficult to manage--monsieur would
probably understand that. As for her, she had done everything
possible. She had taken mademoiselle upstairs and dressed her with
her own hands--she had been her maid and companion throughout. She
could do no more. Mademoiselle would go her own way.

'Who were all these men?' David inquired, still hot and frowning.

Madame Cervin rose on tiptoe and poured a series of voluble
biographies into his ear. According to her everybody present was a
person of distinction; was at any rate an artist, and a man of
talent. But let monsieur decide. If he was dissatisfied, let him
take his sister away. She had been distressed, insulted, by his
behaviour. Mademoiselle's box had been not yet unpacked. Let him
say the word and it should be taken upstairs again.

And she drew away from him, bridling, striking an attitude of
outraged dignity beside her husband, who had stood behind her in a
slouching abstracted silence during the whole scene--so far as her
dwarf stature and vulgar little moon-face permitted.

'We are strangers here, Madame,' cried David. 'I asked you to take
care of my sister, and I find her like this, before a crowd of men
neither she nor I have ever seen before!'

Madame Cervin swept her hand grandiloquently round.

'Monsieur has his remedy! Let him take his sister.'

He stood silent in a helpless and obvious perplexity. What, saddle
himself afresh after these intoxicating hours of liberty and
happiness? Fetter and embarrass every moment? Shut himself out from
freedom--from _her_?

Besides, already his first instinctive rage was disappearing. In
the confusion of this new world he could no longer tell whether he
was right or ridiculous. Had he been playing the Philistine,
mistaking a mere artistic convention for an outrage? And Louie was
so likely to submit to his admonitions!

Madame Cervin watched him with a triumphant eye. When he began to
stammer out what was in effect an apology, she improved the
opportunity, threw off her suave manners, and let him understand
with a certain plain brutality that she had taken Louie's measure.
She would do her best to keep the girl in order--it was lucky for
him that he had fallen upon anybody so entirely respectable as
herself and her husband--but she would use her own judgment; and if
monsieur made scenes, she would just turn out her boarder, and
leave him to manage as he could.

She had the whip-hand, and she knew it. He tried to appease her,
then discovered that he must go, and went with a hanging head.

Louie took no notice of him nor he of her, as he passed through the
inner studio, but Montjoie came forward to meet the English lad,
bending his great head and shoulders with a half-ironic politeness.
Monsieur Grieve he feared had mistaken the homage rendered by
himself and his friends to his sister's beauty for an act of
disrespect--let him be reassured! Such beauty was its own defence.
No doubt monsieur did not understand artistic usage. He, Montjoie,
made allowance for the fact, otherwise the young man's behaviour
towards himself and his friends would have required explanation.

The two stood together at the door--David proudly crimson, seeking
in vain for phrases that would not come--Montjoie cool and
malicious, his battered weather-beaten face traversed by little
smiles. Louie was looking on with scornful amusement, and the group
of artists round her could hardly control their mirth.

He shut the door behind him with the feeling of one who has cut a
ridiculous figure and beaten a mean retreat. Then, as he neared the
bottom of the stairs, he gave himself a great shake, with the
gesture of one violently throwing off a weight. Let those who
thought that he ought to control Louie, and could control her, come
and see for themselves! He had done what he thought was for the
best--his quick inner sense carefully refrained from attaching any
blame whatever to Mademoiselle Delaunay--and now Louie must go her
own gait, and he would go his. He had said his say--and she should
not spoil this hoarded, this long-looked-for pleasure. As he passed
into the street, on his way to the Boulevard for some food, his
walk and bearing had in them a stern and passionate energy.

He had to hurry back for his appointment with Mademoiselle
Delaunay's friends of the morning. As he turned into the Rue
Chantal he passed a flower-stall aglow with roses from the south
and sweet with narcissus and mignonette. An idea struck him, and he
stopped, a happy smile softening away the still lingering tension
of the face. For a few sous he bought a bunch of yellow-eyed
narcissus and stepped gaily home with them. He had hardly time to
put them in water and to notice that Madame Merichat had made
Dubois' squalid abode look much more habitable than before, when
there was a knock at the door and his two guides stood outside.

They carried him off at once. David found more of a tongue than he
had been master of in the morning, and the three talked incessantly
as they wound in and out of the streets which cover the face of the
hill of Montmartre, ascending gradually towards the place they were
in search of. David had heard something of the history of the two
from Elise Delaunay. Alphonse was a lad of nineteen brimming over
with wild fun and mischief, and perpetually in disgrace with all
possible authorities; the possessor nevertheless of a certain
delicate and subtle fancy which came out in the impressionist
landscapes--many of them touched with a wild melancholy as
inexplicable probably to himself as to other people--which he
painted in all his spare moments. The tall black-bearded Lenain was
older, had been for years in Taranne's _atelier_, was an
excellent draughtsman, and was now just beginning seriously upon
the painting of large pictures for exhibition. In his thin long
face there was a pinched and anxious look, as though in the
artist's inmost mind there lay hidden the presentiment of failure.

They talked freely enough of Elise Delaunay, David alternately
wincing and craving for more. What a clever little devil it was!
She was burning herself away with ambition and work; Taranne
flattered her a good deal; it was absolutely necessary, otherwise
she would be for killing herself two or three times a week. Oh! she
might get her _mention_ at the Salon. The young Solons sitting
in judgment on her thought on the whole she deserved it; two of her
exhibits were not bad; but there was another girl in the
_atelier_, Mademoiselle Breal, who had more interest in high
places. However, Taranne would do what he could; he had always made
a favourite of the little Elise; and only he could manage her when
she was in one of her impracticable fits.

Then Alphonse put the Englishman through a catechism, and at the
end of it they both advised him not to trouble his head about
George Sand. That was all dead and done with, and Balzac not much
less. He might be great, Balzac, but who could be at the trouble
of reading him nowadays? Lenain, who was literary, named to him
with enthusiasm Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' and the brothers
Goncourt. As for Alphonse, who was capable, however, of occasional
excursions into poetry, and could quote Musset and Hugo, the
_feuilletons_ in the 'Gaulois' or the 'Figaro' seemed, on the
whole, to provide him with as much fiction as he desired. He was
emphatically of opinion that the artist wants no books; a little
poetry, perhaps, did no harm; but literature in painting was the
very devil. Then perceiving that between them they had puzzled
their man, Alphonse would have proceeded to 'cram' him in the most
approved style, but that Lenain interposed, and a certain cooling
of the Englishman's bright eye made success look unpromising.
Finally the wild fellow clapped David on the back and assured him
that 'Les Trois Rats' would astonish him. 'Ah! here we are.'

As he spoke they turned a corner, and a blaze of light burst upon
them, coming from what seemed to be a gap in the street face, a
house whereof the two lower stories were wall--and windowless,
though not in the manner of the ordinary cafe, seeing that the open
parts were raised somewhat above the pavement.

'The patron saint!' said Alphonse, stopping with a grin and
pointing. Following the finger with his eye David caught a
fantastic sign swinging above him: a thin iron crescent, and
sitting up between its two tips a lean black rat, its sharp nose in
the air, its tail curled round its iron perch, while two other
creatures of the same kind crept about him, the one clinging to the
lower tip of the crescent, the other peering down from the top on
the king-rat in the middle. Below the sign, and heavily framed by
the dark overhanging eave, the room within was clearly visible from
the street. From the background of its black oak walls and
furniture emerged figures, lights, pictures, above all an imposing
_cheminee_ advancing far into the floor, a high, fantastic
structure also of black oak like the panelling of the room, but
overrun with chains of black rats, carved and combined with a wild
_diablerie_, and lit by numerous lights in branching ironwork.
The dim grotesque shapes of the pictures, the gesticulating,
shouting crowd in front of them, the mediaevalism of the room and
of that strange sign dangling outside: these things took the
English lad's excited fancy and he pressed his way in behind his
companions. He forgot what they had been telling him; his pulse
beat to the old romantic tune; poets, artists, talkers--here he was
to find them.

David's two companions exchanged greetings on all sides, laughing
and shouting like the rest. With difficulty they found a table in a
remote corner, and, sitting down, ordered coffee.

'Alphonse! _mon cher!_'

A young man sitting at the next table turned round upon them,
slapped Alphonse on the shoulder, and stared hard at David. He had
fine black eyes in a bronzed face, a silky black beard, and long
hair _à la lion_, that is to say, thrown to one side of the
head in a loose mane-like mass.

'I have just come from the Salon. Not bad--Regnault? _Hein?_'

'_Non--il arrivera, celui-là_,' said the other calmly.

'As for the other things from the Villa Medici fellows,' said the
first speaker, throwing his arm round the back of his chair, and
twisting it round so as to front them, 'they make me sick. I should
hardly do my fire the injustice of lighting it with some of them.'

'All the same,' replied Alphonse stoutly, 'that Campagna scene of D.
's is well done.'

'Literature, _mon cher_! literature!' cried the unknown, 'and
what the deuce do we want with literature in painting?'

He brought his fist down violently on the table.

'_Connu_,' said Alphonse scornfully. 'Don't excite yourself.
But the story in D. 's picture doesn't matter a halfpenny. Who cares
what the figures are doing? It's the brush work and the values I
look to. How did he get all that relief--that brilliance? No
sunshine--no local colour--and the thing glows like a Rembrandt!'

The boy's mad blue eyes took a curious light, as though some inner
enthusiasm had stirred.

'_Peuh_! we all know you, Alphonse. Say what you like, you
want something else in a picture than painting. That'll damn you,
and make your fortune some day, I warn you. Now _I_ have got a
picture on the easel that will make the _bourgeois_ skip.'

And the speaker passed a large tremulous hand through his waves of
hair, his lip also quivering with the nervousness of a man
overworked and overdone.

'You'll not send it to the Salon, I imagine,' said another man
beside him, dryly. He was fair, small and clean-shaven, wore
spectacles, and had the look of a clerk or man of business.

'Yes, I shall,' cried the other violently--his name was
Dumesnil--'I'll fling it at their heads. That's all our school can
do--make a scandal.'

'Well, that has even been known to make money,' said the other,
fingering his watch-chain with a disagreeable little smile.

'Money!' shouted Dumesnil, and swinging round to his own table
again he poured out hot denunciations of the money-grabbing
reptiles of to-day who shelter themselves behind the sacred name of
art. Meanwhile the man at whom it was all levelled sipped his
coffee quietly and took no notice.

'Ah, a song!' cried Alphonse. 'Lenain, _vois-tu_? It's that
little devil Perinot. He's been painting churches down near
Toulouse, his own country. Saints by the dozen, like this,' and
Alphonse drooped his eyes and crossed his limp hands, taking off
the frescoed mediaeval saint for an instant, as only the Parisian
_gamin_ can do such things. 'You should see him with a _cure_.
However, the _cures_ don't follow him here, more's the pity.
Ah! _très bien--très bien_!'

These plaudits were called out by some passages on the guitar with
which the singer was prefacing his song. His chair had been mounted
on to a table, so that all the world could see and hear. A hush of
delighted attention penetrated the room; and outside, in the street,
David could see dark forms gathering on the pavement.

The singer was a young man, undersized and slightly deformed, with
close-cut hair, and a large face, droll, pliant and ugly as a
gutta-percha mask. Before he opened his lips the audience laughed.

David listened with all his ears, feeling through every fibre the
piquant strangeness of the scene--alive with the foreigner's
curiosity, and with youth's pleasure in mere novelty. And what
clever fellows, what dash, what _camaraderie!_ That old
imaginative drawing towards France and the French was becoming
something eagerly personal, combative almost,--and in the
background of his mind throughout was the vibrating memory of the
day just past--the passionate sense of a new life.

The song was tumultuously successful. The whole crowded
_salle_, while it was going on, was one sea of upturned faces,
and it was accompanied at intervals by thunders of applause, given
out by means of sticks, spoons, fists, or anything else that might
come handy. It recounted the adventures of an artist and his model.
As it proceeded, a slow crimson rose into the English lad's cheek,
overspread his forehead and neck. He sat staring at the singer, or
looking round at the absorbed attention and delight of his
companions. By the end of it David, his face propped on his hands,
was trying nervously to decipher the names and devices cut in the
wood of the table on which he leant. His whole being was in a surge
of physical loathing--the revulsion of feeling was bewildering and
complete. So this was what Frenchmen thought of women, what they
could say of them, when the mask was off, and they were at their
ease. The witty brutality, the naked coarseness of the thing
scourged the boy's shrinking sense. Freedom, passion--yes! but
_this!_ In his wild recoil he stood again under the Arc de
Triomphe watching her figure disappear. Ah! pardon! That he should
be listening at all seemed to a conscience, an imagination
quickened by first love, to be an outrage to women, to love, to
her!

_Yet_--how amusing it was! how irresistible, as the first
shock subsided, was the impression of sparkling verse, of an
astonishing mimetic gift in the singer! Towards the end he had just
made up his mind to go on the first pretext, when he found himself,
to his own disgust, shaking with laughter.

He recovered himself after a while, resolved to stay it out, and
betrayed nothing. The comments made by his two companions on the
song--consisting mainly of illustrative anecdote--were worthy of
the occasion. David sat, however, without flinching, his black eyes
hardening, laughing at intervals.

Presently the room rose _en bloc_, and there was a move
towards the staircase.

'The manager, M. Edmond, has come,' explained Alphonse; 'they are
going upstairs to the concert-room. They will have a recitation
perhaps,--_ombres chinoises,_--music. Come and look at the
drawings before we go.'

And he took his charge round the walls, which were papered with
drawings and sketches, laughing and explaining. The drawings were
done, in the main, according to him, by the artists on the staffs
of two illustrated papers which had their headquarters at the
'Trois Rats.' David was especially seized by the innumerable sheets
of animal sketches--series in which some episode of animal life was
carried through from its beginning to a close, sometimes humorous,
but more often tragic. In a certain number of them there was a free
imagination, an irony, a pity, which linked them together, marked
them as the conceptions of one brain. Alphonse pointed to them as
the work of a clever fellow, lately dead, who had been launched and
supported by the 'Trois Rats' and its frequenters. One series in
particular, representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a
glass of absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium
tremens, had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous,
half pathetic fancy, which held David's eye riveted.

As for the ballet-girl, she was everywhere, with her sisters, the
model and the _grisette_. And the artistic ability shown in
the treatment of her had nowhere been hampered by any Philistine
scruple in behalf of decency.

Upstairs there was the same mixed experience. David found himself
in a corner with his two acquaintances, and four or five others, a
couple of journalists, a musician and a sculptor. The conversation
ranged from art to religion, from religion to style, from style to
women, and all with a perpetual recurrence either to the pictures
and successes of the Salon, or to the _liaisons_ of well-known
artists.

'Why do none of us fellows in the press pluck up courage and tell
H. what we really think about those Homeric _machines_ of his
which he turns out year after year?' said a journalist, who was
smoking beside him, an older man than the rest of them. 'I have a
hundred things I want to say--but H. is popular--I like him
himself--and I haven't the nerve. But what the devil do we want
with the Greeks--they painted their world--let us paint ours!
Besides, it is an absurdity. I thought as I was looking at H. 's
things this morning of what Preault used to say of Pradier: "_Il
partait tous les matins pour la Grèce et arrivait tous les soirs
Rue de Breda._" "Pose your goddesses as you please--they are
_grisettes_ all the same."'

'All very well for you critics,' growled a man smoking a long pipe
beside him; 'but the artist must live, and the _bourgeois_ will
have subjects. He won't have anything to do with your "notes"--and
"impressions"--and "arrangements." When you present him with the
view, served hot, from your four-pair back--he buttons up his
pockets and abuses you. He wants his stories and his sentiment. And
where the deuce is the sentiment to be got? I should be greatly
obliged to anyone who would point me to a little of the commodity.
The Greeks are already ridiculous,--and as for religion--'

The speaker threw back his head and laughed silently.

'Ah! I agree with you,' said the other emphatically; 'the religious
pictures this year are really too bad. Christianity is going too
fast--for the artist.'

'And the sceptics are becoming bores,' cried the painter; 'they take
themselves too seriously. It is, after all, only another dogmatism.
One should believe in nothing--not even in one's doubts.'

'Yes,' replied the journalist, knocking out his pipe, with a
sardonic little smile--'strange fact! One may swim in free thought
and remain as _banal_ as a bishop all the time.'

'I say,' shouted a fair-haired youth opposite, 'who has seen C. 's
Holy Family? Who knows where he got his Madonna?'

Nobody knew, and the speaker had the felicity of imparting an
entirely fresh scandal to attentive ears. The mixture in the story
of certain brutalities of modern manners with names and things
still touching or sacred for the mass of mankind had the old
Voltairean flavour. But somehow, presented in this form and at this
moment, David no longer found it attractive. He sat nursing his
knee, his dark brows drawn together, studying the story-teller,
whose florid Norman complexion and blue eyes were already seared by
a vicious experience.

The tale, however, was interrupted and silenced by the first notes
of a piano. The room was now full, and a young actor from the
Gymnase company was about to give a musical sketch. The subject of
it was 'St. Francis and Santa Clara.'

This performance was perhaps more wittily broad than anything which
had gone before. The audience was excessively amused by it. It was
indeed the triumph of the evening, and nothing could exceed the
grace and point of the little speech in which M. Edmond, the
manager of the cafe, thanked the accomplished singer afterwards.

While it was going on, David, always with that poignant, shrinking
thought of Elise at his heart, looked round to see if there were
any women present. Yes, there were three. Two were young,
outrageously dressed, with sickly pretty tired faces. The third was
a woman in middle life, with short hair parted at the side, and a
strong, masculine air. Her dress was as nearly as possible that of
a man, and she was smoking vigorously. The rough _bonhomie_ of
her expression and her professional air reminded David once more of
George Sand. An artist, he supposed, or a writer.

Suddenly, towards the end of the sketch, he became conscious of a
tall figure behind the singer, a man standing with his hat in his
hand, as though he had just come in, and were just going away. His
fine head was thrown back, his look was calm, David thought
disdainful. Bending forward he recognised M. Regnault, the hero of
the morning.

Regnault had come in unperceived while the dramatic piece was
going on; but it was no sooner over than he was discovered,
and the whole _salle_ rose to do him honour. The generosity, the
extravagance of the ovation offered to the young painter by this
hundred or two of artists and men of letters were very striking to
the foreign eye. David found himself thrilling and applauding with
the rest. The room had passed in an instant from cynicism to
sentiment. A moment ago it had been trampling to mud the tenderest
feeling of the past; it was now eagerly alive with the feeling of
the present.

The new-comer protested that he had only dropped in, being in the
neighbourhood, and must not stay. He was charming to them all,
asked after this man's picture and that man's statue, talked a
little about the studio he was organising at Tangiers, and then,
shaking hands right and left, made his way through the crowd.

As he passed David, his quick eye caught the stranger and he
paused.

'Were you not in the Louvre this morning with Mademoiselle
Delaunay?' he asked, lowering his voice a little; 'you are a
stranger?'

'Yes, an Englishman,' David stammered, taken by surprise.
Regnault's look swept over the youth's face, kindling in an instant
with the artist's delight in beautiful line and tint.

'Are you going now?'

'Yes,' said David hurriedly. 'It must be late?'

'Midnight, past. May I walk with you?'

David, overwhelmed, made some hurried excuses to his two
companions, and found himself pushing his way to the door, an
unnoticed figure in the tumult of Regnault's exit.

When they got into the street outside, Regnault walked fast
southwards for a minute or so without speaking. Then he stopped
abruptly, with the gesture of one shaking off a weight.

'Pah! this Paris chokes me.'

Then, walking on again, he said, half-coherently, and to himself:

'So vile,--so small,--so foul! And there are such great things in
the world. _Beasts!--pigs!_--and yet so generous, so struggling,
such a hard fight for it. So gifted,--many of them! What are you
here for?'

And he turned round suddenly upon his companion. David, touched and
captured he knew not how by the largeness and spell of the man's
presence, conquered his shyness and explained himself as
intelligibly as he could:

An English bookseller, making his way in trade, yet drawn to France
by love for her literature and her past, and by a blood-tie which
seemed to have in it mystery and pain, for it could hardly be
spoken of--the curious little story took the artist's fancy.
Regnault did his best to draw out more of it, helped the young
fellow with his French, tried to get at his impressions, and
clearly enjoyed the experience to which his seeking artist's sense
had led him.

'What a night!' he said at last, drawing a full draught of the May
into his great chest. 'Stop and look down those streets in the
moonlight. What surfaces,--what gradations,--what a beauty of
multiplied lines, though it is only a piece of vulgar Haussmann!
Indoors I can't breathe--but out of doors and at night this Paris
of ours,--ah! she is still beautiful--_beautiful_! Now one has
shaken the dust of that place off, one can feel it. What did you
think of it?--tell me.'

He stooped and looked into his companion's face. David was tall and
lithe, but Regnault was at least half a head taller and broader in
proportion.

David walked along for a minute without answering. He too, and even
more keenly than Regnault, was conscious of escape and relief. A
force which had, as it were, taken life and feeling by the throat
had relaxed its grip. He disengaged himself with mingled loathing
and joy. But in his shyness he did not know how to express himself,
fearing, too, to wound the Frenchman. At last he said slowly:

'I never saw so many clever people together in my life.'

The words were bald, but Regnault perfectly understood what was
meant by them, as well as by the troubled consciousness of the
black eyes raised to his. He laughed--shortly and bitterly.

'No, we don't lack brains, we French. All the same I tell you, in
the whole of that room there are about half-a-dozen people,--oh,
not so many!--not nearly so many!--who will ever make a mark, even
for their own generation, who will ever strike anything out of
nature that is worth having--wrestle with her to any purpose. Why?
Because they have every sort of capacity--every sort of
cleverness--and _no character_!'

David walked beside him in silence. He thought suddenly of
Regnault's own picture--its strange cruelty and force, its
craftsman's brilliance. And the recollection puzzled him.

Regnault, however, had spoken with passion, and as though out of
the fulness of some sore and long-familiar pondering.

'You never saw anything like that in England,' he resumed quickly.

David hesitated.

'No, I never did. But I am a provincial, and I have seen nothing at
all. Perhaps in London--'

'No, you would see nothing like it in London,' said Regnault
decidedly. 'Bah! it is not that you are more virtuous than we are.
Who believes such folly? But your vice is grosser, stupider. Lucky
for you! You don't sacrifice to it the best young brain of the
nation, as we are perpetually doing. Ah, _mon Dieu_!' he broke
out in a kind of despair, 'this enigma of art!--of the artist! One
flounders and blunders along. I have been floundering and
blundering with the rest,--playing tricks--following this man and
that--till suddenly--a door opens--and one sees the real world
through for the first time!'

He stood still in his excitement, a smile of the most exquisite
quality and sweetness dawning on his strong young face.

'And then,' he went on, beginning to walk again, and talking much
more to the night than to his companion, 'one learns that the secret
of life lies in _feeling_--in the heart, not in the head. And
no more limits than before!--all is still open, divinely open.
Range the whole world--see everything, learn everything--till at
the end of years and years you may perhaps be found worthy to be
called an artist! But let art have her ends, all the while, shining
beyond the means she is toiling through--her ends of beauty or of
power. To spend herself on the mere photography of the vile and the
hideous! what waste--what sacrilege!'

They had reached the Place de la Concorde, which lay bathed in
moonlight, the silver fountains plashing, the trees in the
Champs-Elysées throwing their sharp yet delicate shadows on the
intense whiteness of the ground, the buildings far away rising
softly into the softest purest blue. Regnault stopped and looked
round him with enchantment. As for David, he had no eyes save for
his companion. His face was full of a quick responsive emotion.
After an experience which had besmirched every ideal and bemocked
every faith, the young Frenchman's talk had carried the lad once
more into the full tide of poetry and romance. 'The secret of life
lies in _feeling_, in the heart, not the head'--ah, _that_ he
understood! He tried to express his assent, his homage to the
speaker; but neither he nor the artist understood very clearly
what he was saying. Presently Regnault said in another tone:

'And they are such good fellows, many of them. Starving often--but
nothing to propitiate the _bourgeois_, nothing to compromise
the "dignity of art." A man will paint to please himself all day,
paint, on a crust, something that won't and can't sell, that the
world in fact would be mad to buy; then in the evening he will put
his canvas to the wall, and paint sleeve-links or china to live.
And so generous to each other: they will give each other all they
have--food, clothes, money, knowledge. That man who gave that
abominable thing about St. Francis--I know him, he has a little
apartment near the Quai St.-Michel, and an invalid mother. He is a
perfect angel to her. I could take off my hat to him whenever I
think of it.'

His voice dropped again. Regnault was pacing along across the
Place, his arms behind him, David at his side. When he resumed, it
was once more in a tone of despondency.

'There is an ideal; but so twisted, so corrupted! What is wanted
is not less intelligence but _more_--more knowledge, more
experience--something beyond this fevering, brutalising Paris,
which is all these men know. They have got the poison of the
Boulevards in their blood, and it dulls their eye and hand. They
want scattering to the wilderness; they want the wave of life to
come and lift them past the mud they are dabbling in, with its
hideous wrecks and _debris_, out and away to the great sea, to
the infinite beyond of experience and feeling! you, too, feel with
me?--you, too, see it like that? Ah! when one has seen and felt
Italy--the East,--the South--lived heart to heart with a wild
nature, or with the great embodied thought of the past,--lived at
large, among great things, great sights, great emotions, then there
comes purification! There is no other way out--no, none!'

So for another hour Regnault led the English boy up and down and
along the quays, talking in the frankest openest way to this
acquaintance of a night. It was as though he were wrestling his own
way through his own life-problem. Very often David could hardly
follow. The joys, the passions, the temptations of the artist,
struggling with the life of thought and aspiration, the craving to
know everything, to feel everything, at war with the hunger for a
moral unity and a stainless self-respect--there was all this in his
troubled, discursive talk, and there was besides the magic touch of
genius, youth, and poetry.

'Well, this is strange!' he said at last, stopping at a point
between the Louvre on the one hand and the Institute on the other,
the moonlit river lying between.--' My friends come to me at Rome
or at Tangiers, and they complain of me, "Regnault, you have grown
morose, no one can get a word out of you"--and they go away
wounded--I have seen it often. And it was always true. For months I
have had no words. I have been in the dark, wrestling with my art
and with this goading, torturing world, which the artist with his
puny forces has somehow to tame and render. Then--the other
day--ah! well, no matter!--but the dark broke, and there was light!
and when I saw your face, your stranger's face, in that crowd
to-night, listening to those things, it drew me. I wanted to say my
say. I don't make excuses. Very likely we shall never meet
again--but for this hour we have been friends. Good night!--good
night! Look,--the dawn is coming!'

And he pointed to where, behind the towers of Notre-Dame, the first
whiteness of the coming day was rising into the starry blue.

They shook hands.

'You go back to England soon?'

'In a--a--week or two.'

'Only believe this--we have things better worth seeing than "Les
Trois Rats"--things that represent us better. That is what the
foreigner is always doing; he spends his time in wondering at our
monkey tricks; there is no nation can do them so well as we; and
the great France--the undying France!--disappears in a splutter of
_blague_!'

He leant over the parapet, forgetting his companion, his eyes fixed
on the great cathedral, on the slender shaft of the Sainte
Chapelle, on the sky filling with light.

Then suddenly he turned round, laid a quick hand on his companion's
shoulder.

'If you ever feel inclined to write to me, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
will find me. Adieu.'

And drawing his coat round him in the chilliness of the dawn, he
walked off quickly across the bridge.

David also hurried away, speeding along the deserted pavements till
again he was in his own dark street. The dawn was growing from its
first moment of mysterious beauty into a grey disillusioning light.
But he felt no reaction. He crept up the squalid stairs to his
room. It was heavy with the scent of the narcissus.

He took them, and stole along the passage to Elise's door. There
were three steps outside it. He sat down on the lowest, putting his
flowers beside him. There was something awful to him even in this
nearness; he dare not have gone higher.

He sat there for long--his heart beating, beating. Every part of
his French experience so far, whether by sympathy or recoil, had
helped to bring him to this intoxication of sense and soul.
Regnault had spoken of the 'great things' of life. Had he too come
to understand them--thus?

At last he left his flowers there, kissing the step on which they
were laid, and which her foot must touch. He could hardly sleep;
the slight fragrance which clung to the old bearskin in which he
wrapt himself helped to keep him restless; it was the faint
heliotrope scent he had noticed in her room.




CHAPTER VI


'He loves me--he does really! Poor boy!'

The speaker was Elise Delaunay. She was sitting alone on the divan
in her _atelier_, trying on a pair of old Pompadour shoes,
with large faded rosettes and pink heels, which she had that moment
routed out of a broker's shop in the Rue de Seine, on her way back
from the Luxembourg with David. They made her feet look
enchantingly small, and she was holding back her skirts that she
might get a good look at them.

Her conviction of David's passion did not for some time lessen her
interest in the shoes, but at last she kicked them off, and flung
herself back on the divan, to think out the situation a little.

Yes, the English youth's adoration could no longer be ignored. It
had become evident, even to her own acquaintances and comrades in
the various galleries she was now haunting in this bye-time of the
artistic year. Whenever she and he appeared together now, there
were sly looks and smiles.

The scandal of it did not affect her in the least. She belonged to
Bohemia, so apparently did he. She had been perfectly honest till
now; but she had never let any convention stand in her way. All her
conceptions of the relations between men and women were of an
extremely free kind. Her mother's blood in her accounted both for a
certain coldness and a certain personal refinement which both
divided and protected her from a great many of her acquaintance,
but through her father she had been acquainted for years with the
type of life and _menage_ which prevails among a certain
section of the French artist class, and if the occasion were but
strong enough she had no instincts inherited or acquired which
would stand in the way of the gratification of passion.

On the contrary, her reasoned opinions so far as she had any
were all in favour of _l'union libre_--that curious type of
association which held the artist Theodore Rousseau for life to the
woman who passed as his wife, and which obtains to a remarkable
extent, with all those accompaniments of permanence, fidelity, and
mutual service, which are commonly held to belong only to
_l'union légale_, in one or two strata of French society. She
was capable of sentiment; she had hidden veins of womanish
weakness; but at the same time the little creature's prevailing
temper was one of remarkable coolness and audacity. She judged for
herself; she had read for herself, observed for herself. Such a
temper had hitherto preserved her from adventures; but, upon
occasion, it might as easily land her in one. She was at once a
daughter of art and a daughter of the people, with a cross strain
of gentle breeding and intellectual versatility thrown in, which
made her more interesting and more individual than the rest of her
class.

'We are a pair of Romantics out of date, you and I,' she had said
once to David, half mocking, half in earnest, and the phrase fitted
the relation and position of the pair very nearly. In spite of the
enormous difference of their habits and training they had at bottom
similar tastes--the same capacity for the excitements of art and
imagination, the same shrinking from the coarse and ugly sides of
the life amid which they moved, the same cravings for novelty and
experience.

David went no more to the 'Trois Rats,' and when, in obedience to
Lenain's recommendation, he had bought and begun to read a novel of
the Goncourts, he threw it from him in a disgust beyond expression.
_Her_ talk, meanwhile, was in some respects of the freest; she
would discuss subjects impossible to the English girl of the same
class; she asked very few questions as to the people she mixed
with; and he was, by now, perfectly acquainted with her view, that
on the whole marriage was for the _bourgeois_, and had few
attractions for people who were capable of penetrating deeper into
the rich growths of life. But there was no _personal_ taint or
license in what she said; and she herself could be always happily
divided from her topics. Their Bohemia was canopied with illusions,
but the illusions on the whole were those of poetry.

Were all David's illusions hers, however? _Love!_ She thought
of it, half laughing, as she lay on the divan. She knew nothing
about it--she was for _art_. Yet what a brow, what eyes, what
a gait--like a young Achilles!

She sprang up to look at a sketch of him, dashed off the day
before, which was on the easel. Yes, it was like. There was the
quick ardent air, the southern colour, the clustering black hair,
the young parting of the lips. The invitation of the eyes was
irresistible--she smiled into them--the little pale face flushing.

But at the same moment her attention was caught by a sketch pinned
against the wall just behind the easel.

'Ah! my cousin, my good cousin!' she said, with a little mocking
twist of the mouth; 'how strange that you have not been here all
this time--never once! There was something said, I remember, about
a visit to Bordeaux about now. Ah! well--_tant mieux_--for you
would be rather jealous, my cousin!'

Then she sat down with her hands on her knees, very serious. How
long since they met? A week. How long till the temporary closing of
the Salon and the voting of the rewards? A fortnight. Well, should
it go on till then? Yes or no? As soon as she knew her fate--or at
any rate if she got her _mention_--she would go back to work.
She had two subjects in her mind; she would work at home, and
Taranne had promised to come and advise her. Then she would have no
time for handsome English boys. But till then?

She took an anemone from a bunch David had brought her, and began
to pluck off the petals, alternating 'yes' and 'no.' The last petal
fell to 'yes.'

'I should have done just the same if it had been "no,"' she said,
laughing. '_Allons_, he amuses me, and I do him no harm. When
I go back to work he can do his business. He has done none yet. He
will forget me and make some money.'

She paced up and down the studio thinking again. She was conscious
of some remorse for her part in sending the Englishman's sister to
the Cervins. The matter had never been mentioned again between her
and David; yet she knew instinctively that he was often ill at
ease. The girl was perpetually in Montjoie's studio, and surrounded
in public places by a crew of his friends. Madame Cervin was
constantly in attendance no doubt, but if it came to a struggle she
would have no power with the English girl, whose obstinacy was in
proportion to her ignorance.

Elise had herself once stopped Madame Cervin on the stairs, and
said some frank things of the sculptor, in order to quiet an
uncomfortable conscience.

'Ah! you do not like Monsieur Montjoie?' said the other, looking
hard at her.

Elise coloured, then she recovered herself.

'All the world knows that Monsieur Montjoie has no scruples,
madame,' she cried angrily. 'You know it yourself. It is a shame.
That girl understands nothing.'

Madame Cervin laughed.

'Certainly she understands everything that she pleases,
mademoiselle. But if there is any anxiety, let her brother come and
look after her. He can take her where she wants to go. I should be
glad indeed. I am as tired as a dog. Since she came it is one
_tapage_ from morning till night.'

And Elise retired, discomfited before those small malicious eyes.
Since David's adoration for the girl artist in No. 27 had become
more or less public property, Madame Cervin, who had seen from the
beginning that Louie was a burden on her brother, had decidedly the
best of the situation.

'Has she lent Montjoie money?'

Elise meditated. The little _bourgeoise_ had a curious
weakness for posing as the patron of the various artists in the
house. 'Very possible! and she looks on the Maenad as the only way
of getting it back? She would sell her soul for a napoleon--I
always knew that. _Canaille_, all of them!'

And the meditation ended in the impatient conclusion that neither
she nor the brother had any responsibility. After all, any decent
girl, French or English, could soon see for herself what manner of
man was Jules Montjoie! And now for the 'private view' of a certain
artistic club to which she had promised to take her English
acquaintance. All the members of the club were young--of the new
rebellious school of '_plein air_'--the afternoon promised to
be amusing.

So the companionship of these two went on, and David passed from
one golden day to another. How she lectured him, the little, vain,
imperious thing; and how meek he was with her, how different from
his Manchester self! The woman's cleverness filled the field. The
man, wholly preoccupied with other things, did not care to produce
himself, and in the first ardour of his new devotion kept all the
self-assertive elements of his own nature in the background, caring
for nothing but to watch her eyes as she talked, to have her voice
in his ears, to keep her happy and content in his company.

Yet she was not taken in. With other people he must be proud,
argumentative, self-willed--that she was sure of; but her
conviction only made her realise her power over him with the more
pleasure. His naive respect for her own fragmentary knowledge, his
unbounded admiration for her talent, his quick sympathy for all she
did and was, these things, little by little, tended to excite, to
preoccupy her.

Especially was she bent upon his artistic education. She carried
him hither and thither, to the Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Salon,
insisting with a feverish eloquence and invention that he should
worship all that she worshipped--no matter if he did not
understand!--let him worship all the same--till he had learnt his
new alphabet with a smiling docility, and caught her very tricks of
phrase. Especially were they haunters of the sculptures in the
Louvre, where, because of the difficulty of it, she piqued herself
most especially on knowledge, and could convict him most
triumphantly of a barbarian ignorance. Up and down they wandered,
and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or
Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the
Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him,
perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and
through with a voluble enjoyment.

Then from these lingerings amid a world charged at every point with
the elements of passion and feeling, they would turn into the open
air, into the May sunshine, which seemed to David's northern eyes
so lavish and inexhaustible, carrying with it inevitably the
kindness of the gods! They would sit out of doors either in the
greenwood paths of the Bois, where he could lie at her feet, and
see nothing but her face and the thick young wood all round them,
or in some corner of the Champs-Elysées, or the sun-beaten Quai de
la Conference, where the hurrying life of the town brushed past
them incessantly, yet without disturbing for a moment their
absorption in or entertainment of each other.

Yet all through she maintained her mastery of the situation. She
was a riddle to him often, poor boy! One moment she would lend
herself in bewildering unexpected ways to his passion, the next she
would allow him hardly the privileges of the barest acquaintance,
hardly the carrying of her cloak, the touch of her hand. But she
had no qualms. It was but to last another fortnight; the friendship
soothed and beguiled for her these days of excited waiting; and a
woman, when she is an artist and a Romantic, may at least sit,
smoke, and chat with whomsoever she likes, provided it be a time of
holiday, and she is not betraying her art.

Meanwhile the real vulgarity of her nature--its insatiable vanity,
its reckless ambition--was masked from David mainly by the very
jealousy and terror which her artist's life soon produced in him.
He saw no sign of other lovers; she had many acquaintances but no
intimates; and the sketch in her room had been carelessly explained
to him as the portrait of her cousin. But the _atelier_, and
the rivalries it represented:--after three days with her he had
learnt that what had seemed to him the extravagance, the pose of
her first talk with him, was in truth the earnest, the reality of
her existence. She told him that since she was a tiny child she had
dreamed of _fame_--dreamed of people turning in the streets
when she passed--of a glory that should lift her above all the
commonplaces of existence, and all the disadvantages of her own
start in life.

'I am neither beautiful, nor rich, nor well-born; but if I have
talent, what matter? Everyone will be at my feet. And if I have no
talent--_grand Dieu!_--what is there left for me but to kill
myself?'

And she would clasp her hands round her knees, and look at him with
fierce, drawn brows, as though defying him to say a single syllable
in favour of any meaner compromise with fate.

This fever of the artist and the _concurrent_--in a woman
above all--how it bewildered him! He soon understood enough of it,
however, to be desperately jealous of it, to realise something of
the preliminary bar it placed between any lover and the girl's
heart and life.

Above all was he jealous of her teachers. Taranne clearly could
beat her down with a word, reduce her to tears with an unfavourable
criticism; then he had but to hold up a finger, to say,
'Mademoiselle, you have worked well this week, your drawing shows
improvement, I have hopes of you,' to bring her to his feet with
delight and gratitude. It was a _monstrous_ power, this power
of the master with his pupil! How could women submit to it?

Yet his lover's instincts led him safely through many perils. He
was infinitely complaisant towards all her artistic talk, all her
gossip of the _atelier_. It seemed to him--but then his
apprehension of this strange new world was naturally a somewhat
confused one--that Elise was not normally on terms with any of her
fellow students.

'If I don't get my _mention_,' she would say passionately, 'I
tell you again it will be intrigue; it will be those creatures in
the _atelier_ who want to get rid of me--to finish with me.
Ah! I will _crush_ them all yet. And I have been good to them
all--every one--I vow I have--even to that animal of a Breal, who
is always robbing me of my place at the _concours_, and taking
mean advantages. _Miserables!_'

And the tears would stand in her angry eyes; her whole delicate
frame would throb with fierce feeling.

Gradually he learnt how to deal with these fits, even when they
chilled him with a dread, a conviction he dared not analyse. He
would so soothe and listen to her, so ply her with the praises of
her gift, which came floated to him on the talk of those
acquaintances of hers to whom she had introduced him, that her most
deep-rooted irritations would give way for a time. The woman would
reappear; she would yield to the charm of his admiring eyes, his
stammered flatteries; her whole mood would break up, dissolve into
eager softness, and she would fall into a childish plaintiveness,
saying wild generous things even of her rivals, now there seemed to
be no one under heaven to take their part, and at last, even,
letting her little hand fall into those eager brown ones which lay
in wait for it, letting it linger there--forgotten.

Especially was she touched in his favour by the way in which
Regnault had singled him out. After he had given her the history of
that midnight walk, he saw clearly that he had risen to a higher
plane in her esteem. She had no heroes exactly; but she had certain
artistic passions, certain romantic fancies, which seemed to touch
deep fibres in her. Her admiration for Regnault was one of these;
but David soon understood that he had no cause whatever to be
jealous of it. It was a matter purely of the mind and the
imagination.

So the days passed--the hot lengthening days. Sometimes in the long
afternoons they pushed far afield into the neighbourhood of Paris.
The green wooded hills of Sevres and St. Cloud, the blue curves and
reaches of the Seine, the flashing lights and figures, the
pleasures of companionship, self-revelation, independence--the day
was soon lost in these quick impressions, and at night they would
come back in a fragrant moonlight, descending from their train into
the noise and glitter of the streets, only to draw closer
together--for surely on these crowded pavements David might claim
her little arm in his for safety's sake--till at last they stood in
the dark passage between his door and hers, and she would suddenly
pelt him with a flower, spring up her small stairway, and lock her
door behind her, before, in his emotion, he could find his voice or
a farewell. Then he would make his way into his own den, and sit
there in the dark, lost in a thronging host of thoughts and
memories,--feeling life one vibrating delight.

At last one morning he awoke to the fact that only four days more
remained before the date on which, according to their original
plan, they were to go back to Manchester. He laughed aloud when the
recollection first crossed his mind; then, having a moment to
himself, he sat down and scrawled a few hasty words to John.
Business detained him yet a while--would detain him a few
weeks--let John manage as he pleased, his employer trusted
everything to him--and money was enclosed. Then he wrote another
hurried note to the bank where he had placed his six hundred
pounds. Let them send him twenty pounds at once, in Bank of England
notes. He felt himself a young king as he gave the order--king of
this mean world and of its dross. All his business projects had
vanished from his mind. He could barely have recalled them if he
had tried. During the first days of his acquaintance with Elise he
had spent a few spare hours in turning over the boxes on the quays,
in talks with booksellers in the Rue de Seine or the Rue de Lille,
in preliminary inquiries respecting some commissions he had
undertaken. But now, every hour, every thought were hers. What did
money matter, in the name of Heaven? Yet when his twenty pounds
came, he changed his notes and pocketed his napoleons with a vast
satisfaction. For they meant power, they meant opportunity; every
one should be paid away against so many hours by her side, at her
feet.

Meanwhile day after day he had reminded himself of Louie, and day
after day he had forgotten her again, absolutely, altogether. Once
or twice he met her on the stairs, started, remembered, and tried
to question her as to what she was doing. But she was still angry
with him for his interference on the day of the pose; and he could
get very little out of her. Let him only leave her alone; she was
not a school-child to be meddled with; that he would find out. As
to Madame Cervin, she was a little fool, and her meanness in money
matters was disgraceful; but she, Louie, could put up with her. One
of these meetings took place on the day of his letters to the bank
and to John. Louie asked him abruptly when he thought of returning.
He flushed deeply, stammered, said he was inclined to stay longer,
but of course she could be sent home. An escort could be found for
her. She stared at him; then suddenly her black eyes sparkled, and
she laughed so that the sound echoed up the dark stairs. David
hotly inquired what she meant; but she ran up still laughing
loudly, and he was left to digest her scornful amusement as best he
could.

Not long after he found the Cervins' door open as he passed, and in
the passage saw a group of people, mostly men; Montjoie in front,
just lighting a cigar; Louie's black hat in the background. David
hurried past; he loathed the sculptor's battered look, his insolent
eye, his slow ambiguous manner; he still burnt with the anger and
humiliation of his ineffectual descent on the man's domain. But
Madame Cervin, catching sight of him from the back of the party,
pursued him panting and breathless to his own door. Would monsieur
please attend to her; he was so hard to get hold of; never, in
fact, at home! Would he settle her little bill, and give her
more money for current expenses? Mademoiselle Louie required to
be kept amused--_mon Dieu!_--from morning to night! She had no
objection, provided it were made worth her while. And how much
longer did monsieur think of remaining in Paris?

David answered recklessly that he did not know, paid her bill for
Louie's board and extras without looking at it, and gave her a
napoleon in hand, wherewith she departed, her covetous eyes aglow,
her mouth full of excited civilities.

She even hesitated a moment at the door and then came back to
assure him that she was really all discretion with regard to his
sister; no doubt monsieur had heard some unpleasant stories, for
instance, of M. Montjoie; she could understand perfectly, that
coming from such a quarter, they had affected monsieur's mind; but
he would see that she could not make a sudden quarrel with one of
her husband's old friends; Mademoiselle Louie (who was already her
_cherie_) had taken a fancy to pose for this statue; it was
surely better to indulge her than to rouse her self-will, but she
could assure monsieur that she had looked after her as though it
had been her own daughter.

David stood impatiently listening. In a few minutes he was to be
with Elise at the corner of the Rue Lafitte. Of course it was all
right!--and if it were not, he could not mend it. The woman was
vulgar and grasping, but what reason was there to think anything
else that was evil of her? Probably she had put up with Louie more
easily than a woman of a higher type would have done. At any rate
she was doing her best, and what more could be asked of him than he
had done? Louie behaved outrageously in Manchester; he could not
help it, either there or here. He had interfered again and again,
and had always been a fool for his pains. Let her choose for
herself. A number of old and long-hidden exasperations seemed now
to emerge whenever he thought of his sister.

Five minutes later he was in the Rue Lafitte.

It was Elise's caprice that they should always meet in this way,
out of doors; at the corner of their own street; on the steps of
the Madeleine; beneath the Vendome Column; in front of a particular
bonbon shop; or beside the third tree from the Place de la Concorde
in the northern alley of the Tuileries Gardens. He had been only
once inside her studio since the first evening of their
acquaintance.

His mind was full of excitement, for the Salon had been closed
since the day before; and the awards of the jury would be
informally known, at least in some cases, by the evening. Elise's
excitement since the critical hours began had been pitiful to see.
As he stood waiting he gave his whole heart to her and her
ambitions, flinging away from him with a passionate impatience
every other interest, every other thought.

When she came she looked tired and white. 'I can't go to galleries,
and I can't paint,' she said, shortly. 'What shall we do?'

Her little black hat was drawn forward, but through the dainty veil
he could see the red spot on either cheek. Her hands were pushed
deep into the pockets of her light grey jacket, recalling the
energetic attitude in which she had stood over Louie on the
occasion of their first meeting. He guessed at once that she had
not slept, and that she was beside herself with anxiety. How to
manage her?--how to console her? He felt himself so young and raw;
yet already his passion had awakened in him a hundred new and
delicate perceptions.

'Look at the weather!' he said to her. 'Come out of town! let us
make for the Gare St. Lazare, and spend the day at St. Germain.'

She hesitated.

'Taranne will write to me directly he knows--directly! He might
write any time this evening. No, no!--I can't go! I must be on the
spot.'

'He can't write _before_ the evening. You said yourself before
seven nothing could be known. We will get back in ample time, I
swear.'

They were standing in the shade of a shop awning, and he was
looking down at her, eagerly, persuasively. She had a debate with
herself, then with a despairing gesture of the hands, she turned
abruptly--

'Well then--to the station!'

When they had started, she lay back in the empty carriage he had
found for her, and shut her eyes. The air was oppressive, for the
day before had been showery, and the heat this morning was a damp
heat which relaxed the whole being. But before the train moved, she
felt a current of coolness, and hastily looking up she saw that
David had possessed himself of the cheap fan which had been lying
on her lap, and was fanning her with his gaze fixed upon her, a
gaze which haunted her as her eyelids fell again.

Suddenly she fell into an inward perplexity, an inward impatience
on the subject of her companion, and her relation to him. It had
been all very well till yesterday! But now the artistic and
professional situation had become so strained, so intense, she
could hardly give him a thought. His presence there, and its tacit
demands upon her, tried her nerves. Her mind was full of a hundred
_miseres d'atelier_, of imaginary enemies and intrigues; one
minute she was all hope, the next all fear; and she turned sick
when she thought of Taranne's letter.

What had she been entangling herself for? she whose whole life and
soul belonged to art and ambition! This comradeship, begun as a
caprice, an adventure, was becoming too serious. It must end!--end
probably to-day, as she had all along determined. Then, as she
framed the thought, she became conscious of a shrinking, a
difficulty, which enraged and frightened her.

She sat up abruptly and threw back her veil.

David made a little exclamation as he dropped the fan.

'Yes!' she said, looking at him with a little frown, 'yes--what did
you say?'

Then she saw that his whole face was working with emotion.

'I wish you would have stayed like that,' he said, in a voice which
trembled.

'Why?'

'Because--because it was so sweet!'

She gave a little start, and a sudden red sprang into her cheek.

His heart leapt. He had never seen her blush for any word of his
before.

'I prefer the air itself,' she said, bending forward and looking
away from him out of the open window at the villas they were
passing.

Yet, all the while, as the country houses succeeded each other and
her eyes followed them, she saw not their fragrant, flowery
gardens, but the dark face and tall young form opposite. He was
handsomer even than when she had seen him first--handsomer far than
her portrait of him. Was it the daily commerce with new forms of
art and intelligence which Paris and her companionship had brought
him?--or simply the added care which a man in love instinctively
takes of the little details of his dress and social conduct?--which
had given him this look of greater maturity, greater distinction?
Her heart fluttered a little--then she fell back on the thought of
Taranne's letter.

They emerged from the station at St. Germain into a fierce blaze of
sun, which burned on the square red mass of the old chateau, and
threw a blinding glare on the white roads.

'Quick! for the trees!' she said, and they both hurried over the
open space which lay between them and the superb chestnut grove
which borders the famous terrace. Once there all was well, and they
could wander from alley to alley in a green shade, the white
blossom-spikes shining in the sun overhead, and to their right the
blue and purple plain, with the Seine winding and dimpling, the
river polders with their cattle, and far away the dim heights of
Montmartre just emerging behind the great mass of Mont Valerien,
which blocked the way to Paris. Such lights and shades, such spring
leaves, such dancing airs!

Elise drew a long breath, slipped off her jacket which he made a
joy of carrying, and loosened the black lace at her throat which
fell so prettily over the little pink cotton underneath.

Then she looked at her companion unsteadily. There was excitement
in this light wind, this summer sun. Her great resolve to 'end it'
began to look less clear to her. Nay, she stood still and smiled up
into his face, a very siren of provocation and wild charm--the wind
blowing a loose lock about her eyes.

'Is this better than England--than your Manchester?' she asked him
scornfully, and he--traitor!--flinging out of his mind all the
bounties of an English May, all his memories of the whitethorn and
waving fern and foaming streams set in the deep purple breast of
the Scout--vowed to her that nowhere else could there be spring or
beauty or sunshine, but only here in France and at St. Germain.

At this she smiled and blushed--no woman could have helped the
blush. In truth, his will, steadily bent on one end, while hers was
distracted by half a dozen different impulses, was beginning to
affect her in a troubling, paralysing way. For all her parade of a
mature and cynical enlightenment, she was just twenty; it was such
a May day as never was; and when once she had let herself relax
towards him again, the inward ache of jealous ambition made this
passionate worship beside her, irrelevant as it was, all the more
soothing, all the more luring.

Still she felt that something must be done to stem the tide, and
again she fell back upon luncheon. They had bought some provisions
on their way to the station in Paris. He might subsist on scenery
and aesthetics if he pleased--as for her, she was a common person
with common needs, and must eat.

'Oh, not here!' he cried, 'why, this is all in public. Look at the
nursemaids, and the boys playing, and the carriages on the terrace.
Come on a little farther. You remember that open place with the
thorns and the stream?--there we should be in peace.'

She did not know that she wanted to be in peace; but she gave way.

So they wandered on past the chestnuts into the tangled depths of
the old forest. A path sunk in brambles and fern took them through
beech wood to the little clearing David had in his mind. A tiny
stream much choked by grass and last year's leaves ran along one
side of it. A fallen log made a seat, and the beech trees spread
their new green fans overhead, or flung them out to right and left
around the little space, and for some distance in front, till the
green sprays and the straight grey stems were lost on all sides in
a brownish pinkish mist which betrayed a girdle of oaks not yet
conquered by the summer.

She took her seat on the log, and he flung himself beside her. Out
came the stores in his pockets, and once more they made themselves
childishly merry over a scanty meal, which left them still hungry.

Then for an hour or two they sat lounging and chattering in the
warm shade, while the gentle wind brought them every spring scent,
every twitter of the birds, every swaying murmur of the forest.
David lay on his back against the log, his eyes now plunging into
the forest, now watching the curls of smoke from his pipe mounting
against the background of green, or the moist fleecy clouds which
seemed to be actually tangled in the tree-tops, now fixed as long
as they dared on his companion's face. She was not beautiful? Let
her say it! For she had the softest mouth which drooped like a
child with a grievance when she was silent, and melted into the
subtlest curves when she talked. She had, as a rule, no colour, but
her clear paleness, as contrasted with the waves of her light-gold
hair, seemed to him an exquisite beauty. The eyebrows had an
oriental trick of mounting at the corners, but the effect, taken
with the droop of the mouth, was to give the face in repose a
certain charming look of delicate and plaintive surprise. Above all
it was her smallness which entranced him; her feet and hands, her
tiny waist, the _finesse_ of her dress and movements. All the
women he had ever seen, Lucy and Dora among them, served at this
moment only to make a foil in his mind for this little Parisian
beside him.

How she talked this afternoon! In her quick reaction towards him
she was after all more the woman than she had ever been. She
chattered of her forlorn childhood, of her mother's woes and her
father's iniquities, using the frankest language about these last;
then of herself and her troubles. He listened and laughed; his look
as she poured herself out to him was in itself a caress. Moreover,
unconsciously to both, their relation had changed somewhat. The
edge of his first ignorance and shyness had rubbed off. He was no
longer a mere slave at her feet. Rather a new and sweet equality
seemed at last after all these days to have arisen between them; a
bond more simple, more natural. Every now and then he caught his
breath under the sense of a coming crisis; meanwhile the May day
was a dream of joy, and life an intoxication.

But he controlled himself long, being indeed in desperate fear of
breaking the spell which held her to him this heavenly afternoon.
The hours slipped by; the air grew stiller and sultrier. Presently,
just as the sun was sinking into the western wood, a woman,
carrying a bundle and with a couple of children, crossed the glade.
One child was on her arm; the other, whimpering with heat and
fatigue, dragged wearily behind her, a dead weight on its mother's
skirts. The woman looked worn out, and was scolding the crying
child in a thin exasperated voice. When she came to the stream, she
put down her bundle, and finding a seat by the water, she threw
back her cotton bonnet and began to wipe her brow, with long
breaths which were very near to groans. Then the child on her lap
set up a shout of hunger, while the child behind her began to cry
louder than before. The woman hastily raised the baby, unfastened
her dress, and gave it the breast, so stifling its cries; then,
first slapping the other child with angry vehemence, she groped in
the bundle for a piece of sausage roll, and by dint of alternately
shaking the culprit and stuffing the food into its poor open mouth,
succeeded in reducing it to a chewing and sobbing silence. The
mother herself was clearly at the last gasp, and when at length the
children were quiet, as she turned her harshly outlined head so as
to see who the other occupants of the glade might be, her look had
in it the dull hostility of the hunted creature whose powers of
self-defence are almost gone.

But she could not rest long. After ten minutes, at longest, she
dragged herself up from the grass with another groan, and they all
disappeared into the trees, one of the children crying again--a
pitiable trio.

Elise had watched the group closely, and the sight seemed in some
unexplained way to chill and irritate the girl.

'There is one of the drudges that men make,' she said bitterly,
looking after the woman.

'Men?' he demurred; 'I suspect the husband is a drudge too.'

'Not he!' she cried. 'At least he has liberty, choice, comrades. He
is not battered out of all pleasure, all individuality, that other
human beings may have their way and be cooked for, and this
wretched human race may last. The woman is always the victim, say
what you like. But for _some_ of us at least there is a way
out!'

She looked at him defiantly.

A tremor swept through him under the suddenness of this jarring
note. Then a delicious boldness did away with the tremor. He met
her eyes straight.

'Yes--_love_ can always find it,' he said under his
breath--'or make it.'

She wavered an instant, then she made a rally.

'I know nothing about that,' she said scornfully; 'I was thinking of
art. _Art_ breaks all chains, or accepts none. The woman that
has art is free, and she alone; for she has scaled the men's heaven
and stolen their sacred fire.'

She clasped her hands tightly on her knee; her face was full of
aggression.

David sat looking at her, trying to smile, but his heart sank
within him.

He threw away his pipe, and laid his hand down against the log, not
far from her, trying to smile, but his heart sank within him.

He threw away his pipe and laid his head down against the log, not
far from her, drawing his hat over his eyes. So they sat in silence
a little while, till he looked up and said, in a bright beseeching
tone:

'Finish me that scene in _Hernani!_'

The day before, after a _matinee_ of _Andromaque_ at the
Theatre-Francais, in a moment of rebellion and reaction against
all things classical, they had both thrown themselves upon
_Hernani_. She had read it aloud to him in a green corner of
the Bois, having a faculty that way, and bidding him take it as a
French lesson. He took it, of course, as a lesson in nothing but
the art of making wild speeches to the woman one loves.

But now she demurred.

'It is not here.'

He produced it out of his pocket.

She shrugged her shoulders.

'I am not in the vein.'

'You said last week you were not in the vein,' he said, laughing
tremulously, 'and you read me that scene from _Ruy Blas_, so
that when we went to see Sarah Bernhardt in the evening I was
disappointed!'

She smiled, not being able to help it, for all flattery was sweet
to her.

'We must catch our train. I would never speak to you again if we
were late!'

He held up his watch to her.

'An hour--it is, at the most, half an hour's walk.'

'Ah, _mon Dieu!_' she cried, clasping her hands. 'It is all
over, the vote is given. Perhaps Taranne is writing to me now, at
this moment!'

'Read--read! and forget it half an hour more.'

She caught up the book in a frenzy, and began to read, first
carelessly and with unintelligible haste; but before a page was
over, the artist had recaptured her, she had slackened, she had
begun to interpret.

It was the scene in the third act where Hernani the outlaw, who has
himself bidden his love, Dona Sol, marry her kinsman the old Duke,
rather than link her fortunes to those of a ruined chief of
banditti, comes in upon the marriage he has sanctioned, nay
commanded. The bridegroom's wedding gifts are there on the table.
He and Dona Sol are alone.

The scene begins with a speech of bitter irony from Hernani. His
friends have been defeated and dispersed. He is alone in the world;
a price is on his head; his lot is more black and hopeless than
before. Yet his heart is bursting within him. He had bidden her,
indeed, but how could she have obeyed! Traitress! false love! false
heart!

He takes up the jewels one by one.

'_This necklace is brave work,--and the bracelet is rare--though
not so rare as the woman who beneath a brow so pure can bear about
with her a heart so vile! And what in exchange? A little love?
Bah!--a mere trifle!... Great God! that one can betray like
this--and feel no shame--and live!_'

For answer, Dona Sol goes proudly up to the wedding casket and,
with a gesture matching his own, takes out the dagger from its
lowest depth. 'You stop halfway!' she says to him calmly, and he
understands. In an instant he is at her feet, tortured with remorse
and passion, and the magical love scene of the act develops. What
ingenuity of tenderness, yet what truth!

'She has pardoned me, and loves me! Ah, who will make it possible
that I too, after such words, should love Hernani and forgive him?
Tears!--thou weepest, and again it is my fault! And who will punish
me? for thou wilt but forgive again! Ah, my friends are dead!--and
it is a madman speaks to thee. Forgive! I would fain love--I know
not how. And yet, what deeper love could there be than this? Oh!
Weep not, but die with me! If I had but a world, and could give it
to thee!'

The voice of the reader quivered. A hand came upon the book and
caught her hand. She looked up and found herself face to face with
David, kneeling beside her. They stared at each other. Then he
said, half choked:

'I can't bear it any more! I love you with all my heart--oh, you
know--you know I do!'

She was stupefied for a moment, and then with a sudden gesture she
drew herself away, and pushed him from her.

'Leave me alone--leave me free--this moment!' she said
passionately.

'Why do you persecute and pursue me? What right have you? I have
been kind to you, and you lay shares for me. I will have nothing
more to do with you. Let me go home, and let us part.'

She got up, and with feverish haste tied her veil over her hat. He
had fallen with his arms across the log, and his face hidden upon
them. She paused irresolutely. 'Monsieur David!'

He made no answer.

She bent down and touched him.

He shook his head.

'No, no!--go!' he said thickly. She bit her lip. The breath under
her little lace tippet rose and fell with furious haste. Then she
sat down beside him, and with her hands clasped on her knee began
to please with him in tremulous light tones, as though they were a
pair of children. Why was he so foolish? Why had he tried to spoil
their beautiful afternoon? She must go. The train would not wait
for them. But he must come too. He must. After a little he rose
without a word, gathered up the book and her wrap, and off they set
along the forest path.

She stole a glance at him. It seemed to her that he walked as if he
did not know where he was or who was beside him. Her heart smote
her. When they were deep in a hazel thicket, she stole out a small
impulsive hand, and slipped it into his, which hung beside him. He
started. Presently she felt a slight pressure, but it relaxed
instantly, and she took back her hand, feeling ashamed of herself,
and aggrieved besides. She shot on in front of him and he followed.

So they walked through the chestnuts and across the white road to
the station in the red glow of the evening sun. He followed her
into the railway carriage, did her every little service with
perfect gentleness; then when they started he took the opposite
corner, and turning away from her, stared, with eyes that evidently
saw nothing, at the villas beside the line, at the children in the
streets, at the boats on the dazzling river.

She in her corner tried to be angry, to harden her heart, to
possess herself only with the thought of Taranne's letter. But the
evening was not as the morning. That dark teasing figure at the
other end, outlined against the light of the window, intruded, took
up a share in her reverie she resented but could not prevent nay,
presently absorbed it altogether. Absurd! she had had love made to
her before, and had known how to deal with it. The artist must have
comrades, and the comrades may play false; well, then the artist
must take care of herself.

She had done no harm; she was not to blame; she had let him know
from the beginning that she only lived for art. What folly, and
what treacherous, inconsiderate folly, it had all been!

So she lashed herself up. But her look stole incessantly to that
opposite corner, and every now and then she felt her lips trembling
and her eyes growing hot in a way which annoyed her.

When they reached Paris she said to him imperiously as he helped
her out of the carriage, 'A cab, please!'

He found one for her, and would have closed the door upon her.

'No, come in!' she said to him with the same accent.

His look in return was like a blow to her, there was such an
inarticulate misery in it. But he got in, and they drove on in
silence.

When they reached the Rue Chantal she sprang out, snatched her key
from the concierge, and ran up the stairs. But when she reached the
point on that top passage where their ways diverged, she stopped
and looked back for him.

'Come and see my letter,' she said to him, hesitating.

He stood quite still, his arms hanging beside him, and drew a long
breath that stabbed her.

'I think not.'

And he turned away to his own door.

But she ran back to him and laid her hand on his arm. Her eyes were
full of tears.

'Please, Monsieur David. We were good friends this morning. Be now
and always my good friend!'

He shook his head again, but he let himself be led by her. Still
holding him--torn between her quick remorse and her eagerness for
Taranne's letter, she unlocked her door. One dart for the table.
Yes! there it lay. She took it up; then her face blanched suddenly,
and she came piteously up to David, who was standing just inside
the closed door.

'Wish me luck, Monsieur David, wish me luck, as you did before!'

But he was silent, and she tore open the letter. '_Dieu!--mon
Dieu!_'

It was a sound of ecstasy. Then she flung down the letter, and
running up to David, she caught his arm again with both hands.

'_Triomphe! Triomphe!_ I have got my _mention_, and the
picture they skied is to be brought down to the line, and Taranne
says I have done better than any other pupil of his of the same
standing--that I have an extraordinary gift--that I must succeed,
all the world says so--and two other members of the jury send me
their compliments. Ah! Monsieur David'--in a tone of reproach--'be
kind--be nice--congratulate me.'

And she drew back an arm's-length that she might look at him, her
own face overflowing with exultant colour and life. Then she
approached again, her mood changing.

'It is too _detestable_ of you to stand there like a statue!
ah! that it is! For I never deceived you, no, never. I said to
you the first night--there is nothing else for me in the world
but art--nothing! Do you hear? This falling in love spoils
everything--_everything!_ Be friends with me. You will be
going back to England soon. Perhaps--perhaps'--her voice
faltered--'I will take a week's more holiday--Taranne says I ought.
But then I must go to work--and we will part friends--always
friends--and respect and understand each other all our lives,
_n'est-ce pas!_'

'Oh! let me go!' cried David fiercely, his loud strained voice
startling them both, and flinging her hand away from him, he made
for the door. But impulsively she threw herself against it,
dismayed to find herself so near crying, and shaken with emotion
from head to foot.

They stood absorbed in each other; she with her hands behind her on
the door, and her hat tumbling back from her masses of loosened
hair. And as she gazed she was fascinated; for there was a grand
look about him in his misery--a look which was strange to her, and
which was in fact the emergence of his rugged and Puritan race. But
whatever it was it seized her, as all aspects of his personal
beauty had done from the beginning. She held out her little white
hands to him appealing.

'No! no!' he said roughly, trying to put her away,'
_never--never_--friends! You may kill me--you shan't make a
child of me any more. Oh! my God!' It was a cry of agony. 'A man
can't go about with a girl in this way, if--if she is like you, and
not--' His voice broke--he lost the thread of what he was saying,
and drew his hand across his eyes before he broke out again.
'What--you thought I was just a raw cub, to be played with. Oh, I
am too dull, I suppose, to understand! But I have grown under your
hands anyway. I don't know myself--I should do you or myself a
mischief if this went on, Let me go--and go home to-night!'

And again he made a threatening step forward. But when he came
close to her he broke down.

'I would have worked for you so,' he said thickly. 'For your sake I
would have given up my country. I would have made myself French
altogether. It should have been marriage or no marriage as you
pleased. You should have been free to go or stay. Only I would have
laid myself down for you to walk over. I have some money. I would
have settled here. I would have protected you. It is not right for
a woman to be alone--anyone so young and so pretty. I thought you
understood--that you must understand--that your heart was melting
to me. I should have done your work no harm--I should have been
your slave--you know that. That _cursed, cursed_ art!'

He spoke with a low intense emphasis; then turning away he buried
his face in his hands.

'David!'

He looked up startled. She was stepping towards him, a smile of
ineffable charm floating as it were upon her tears.

'I don't know what is the matter with me!' she said tremulously.
'There is trouble in it, I know.' It is the broken glass coming
true. _Mais, Voyons! c'est plus fort que moi!_ Do you care so
much--would it break your heart--would you let me work--and never,
_never_ get in the way? Would you be content that art should
come first and you second? I can promise you no more than that--not
one little inch! _Would_ you be content? Say!'

He ran to her with a cry. She let him put his arms round her, and a
shiver of excitement ran through her.

'What does it mean?' she said breathlessly. 'One is so strong one
moment--and the next--like this! Oh, why did you ever come?'

Then she burst into tears, hiding her eyes upon his breast.

'Oh! I have been so much alone! but I have got a heart somewhere
all the same. If you will have it, you must take the consequences.'

Awed by the mingling of his silence with that painful throbbing
beneath her cheek, she looked up. He stooped--and their young faces
met.




CHAPTER VII


During the three weeks which had ended for David and Elise in this
scene of passion, Louie had been deliberately going her own way,
managing even in this unfamiliar _milieu_ to extract from it
almost all the excitement or amusement it was capable of yielding
her. All the morning she dragged Madame Cervin about the Paris
streets: in the afternoon she would sometimes pose for Montjoie,
and sometimes not; he had to bring her bonbons and theatre tickets
to bribe her, and learn new English wherewith to flatter her. Then
in the evenings she made the Cervins take her to theatres and
various entertainments more or less reputable, for which of course
David paid. It seemed to Madame Cervin, as she sat staring beside
them, that her laughs never fell in with the laughs of other
people. But whether she understood or no, it amused her, and go she
would.

A looker-on might have found the relations between Madame Cervin
and her boarder puzzling at first sight. In reality they
represented a compromise between considerations of finance and
considerations of morals--as the wife of the _ancien prix de
Rome_ understood these last. For the ex-modiste was by no means
without her virtues or her scruples. She had ugly manners and ideas
on many points, but she had lived a decent life at any rate since
her marriage with a man for whom she had an incomprehensible
affection, heavily as he burdened and exploited her; and though she
took all company pretty much as it came, she had a much keener
sense now than in her youth of the practical advantages of good
behaviour to a woman, and of the general reasonableness of the
_bourgeois_ point of view with regard to marriage and the
family. Her youth had been stormy; her middle age tended to a
certain conservative philosophy of common sense, and to the
development of a rough and ready conscience.

Especially was she conscious of the difficulties of virtue. When
Elise Delaunay, for instance, was being scandalously handled by the
talkers in her stuffy _salon_, Madame Cervin sat silent. Not
only had she her own reasons for being grateful to the little
artist, but with the memory of her own long-past adventures behind
her she was capable by now of a secret admiration for an
unprotected and struggling girl who had hitherto held her head
high, worked hard, and avoided lovers.

So that when the artist's wife undertook the charge of the
good-looking English girl she had done it honestly, up to her
lights, and she had fulfilled it honestly. She had in fact hardly
let Louie Grieve out of her sight since her boarder was handed over
to her.

These facts, however, represent only one side of the situation.
Madame Cervin was now respectable. She had relinquished years
before the _chasse_ for personal excitement; she had replaced
it by 'the _chasse_ of the five-franc piece.' She loved her
money passionately; but at the same time she loved power, gossip,
and small flatteries. They distracted her, these last, from the
depressing spectacle of her husband's gradual and inevitable decay.
So that her life represented a balance between these various
instincts. For some time past she had gathered about her a train of
small artists, whom she mothered and patronised, and whose wild
talk and pecuniary straits diversified the monotony of her own
childless middle age. Montjoie, whose undoubted talent imposed upon
a woman governed during all her later life by the traditions and
the admirations of the artist world, had some time before
established a hold upon her, partly dependent on a certain
magnetism in the man, partly, as Elise had suspected, upon money
relations. For the grasping little _bourgeoise_ who would
haggle for a morning over half a franc, and keep a lynx-eyed watch
over the woman who came to do the weekly cleaning, lest the
miserable creature should appropriate a crust or a cold potato, had
a weak side for her artist friends who flattered and amused her.
She would lend to them now and then out of her hoards; she had lent
to Montjoie in the winter when, after months of wild dissipation,
he was in dire straits and almost starving.

But having lent, the thought of her jeopardised money would throw
her into agonies, and she would scheme perpetually to get it back.
Like all the rest of Montjoie's creditors she was hanging on the
Maenad, which promised indeed to be the _chef--d'oeuvre_ of an
indisputable talent, could that talent only be kept to work. When
the sculptor--whose curiosity had been originally roused by certain
phrases of Barbier's in his preliminary letters to his nephew,
phrases embellished by Dubois' habitual _fanfaronnade_--had
first beheld the English girl, he had temporarily thrown up his
work and was lounging about Paris in moody despair, to Madame
Cervin's infinite disgust. But at sight of Louie his artist's zeal
rekindled. Her wild nature, her half-human eye, the traces of Greek
form in the dark features--these things fired and excited him.

'Get me that girl to sit,' he had said to Madame Cervin, 'and the
Maenad will be sold in six weeks!'

And Madame Cervin, fully determined on the one hand that Montjoie
should finish his statue and pay his debts, and on the other that
the English girl should come to no harm from a man of notorious
character, had first led up to the sittings, and then superintended
them with the utmost vigilance. She meant no harm--the brother was
a fool for his pains--but Montjoie should have his sitter. So she
sat there, dragon-like, hour after hour, knitting away with her
little fat hands, while Louie posed, and Montjoie worked; and
groups of the sculptor's friends came in and out, providing the
audience which excited the ambition of the man and the vanity of
the girl.

So the days passed. At last there came a morning when Louie came
out early from the Cervins' door, shut it behind her, and ran up
the ladder-like stairs which led to David's room.

'David!'

Her voice was pitched in no amiable key, as she violently shook the
handle of the door. But, call and shake as she might, there was no
answer, and after a while she paused, feeling a certain
bewilderment.

'It is ridiculous! He can't be out; it isn't half-past eight. It's
just his tiresomeness.'

And she made another and still more vehement attempt, all to no
purpose. Not a sound was to be heard from the room within. But as
she was again standing irresolute, she heard a footstep behind her
on the narrow stairs, and looking round saw the _concierge_,
Madame Merichat. The woman's thin and sallow face--the face of a
born pessimist--had a certain sinister flutter in it.

She held out a letter to the astonished Louie, saying at the same
time with a disagreeable smile:

'What is the use of knocking the house down when there is no one
there?'

'Where is he?' cried Louie, not understanding her, and looking at
the letter with stupefaction.

The woman put it into her hand.

'No one came back last night,' she said with a shrug. 'Neither
monsieur nor mademoiselle; and this morning I receive orders to
send letters to "Barbizon, pres Fontainebleau."'

Louie tore open her letter. It was from David, and dated Barbizon.
He would be there, it said, for nearly a month. If she could wait
with Madame Cervin till he himself could take her home, well and
good. But if that were disagreeable to her, let her communicate
with him 'chez Madame Pyat, Barbizon, Fontainebleau,' and he would
write to Dora Lomax at once, and make arrangements for her to lodge
there, till he returned to Manchester. Some one could easily be
found to look after her on the homeward journey if Madame Cervin
took her to the train. Meanwhile he enclosed the money for two
weeks' _pension_ and twenty francs for pocket money.

No other person was mentioned in the letter, and the writer offered
neither explanation nor excuses.

Louie crushed the sheet in her hand, with an exclamation, her
cheeks flaming.

'So they are amusing themselves at Fontainebleau?' inquired Madame
Merichat, who had been leaning against the wall, twisting her apron
and studying the English girl with her hard, malicious eyes. 'Oh! I
don't complain; there was a letter for me too. Monsieur has paid
all. But I regret for mademoiselle--if mademoiselle is surprised.'

She spoke to deaf ears.

Louie pushed past her, flew downstairs, and rang the Cervins' bell
violently. Madame Cervin herself opened the door, and the girl
threw herself upon her, dragged her into the _salon_, and then
said with the look and tone of a fury:

'Read that!'

She held out the crumbled letter. Madame Cervin adjusted her
spectacles with shaking hands.

'But it is in English!' she cried in despair.

Louie could not have beaten her for not understanding. But, herself
trembling with excitement, she was forced to bring all the French
words she knew to bear, and between them, somehow, piecemeal,
Madame Cervin was brought to a vague understanding of the letter.

'Gone to Fontainebleau!' she cried, subsiding on to the sofa. 'But
why, with whom?'

'Why, with that girl, that _creature--can't_ you understand?'
said Louie, pacing up and down.

'Ah, I will go and find out all about that!' said Madame Cervin,
and hastily exchanging the blue cotton apron and jacket she wore in
the mornings in the privacy of her own apartment for her walking
dress, she whisked out to make inquiries.

Louie was left behind, striding from end to end of the little
_salon_, brows knit, every feature and limb tense with excitement.
As the meaning of her discovery grew plainer to her, as she
realised what had happened, and what the bearing of it must be
on herself and her own position, the tumult within her rose and
rose. After that day in the Louvre her native shrewdness had of
course very soon informed her of David's infatuation for the little
artist. And when it became plain, not only to her, but to all Elise
Delaunay's acquaintance, there was much laughter and gossip on the
subject in the Cervins' apartment. It was soon discovered that
Louie had taken a dislike, which, perhaps, from the beginning had
been an intuitive jealousy, to Elise, and had, moreover, no
inconvenient sensitiveness on her brother's account, which need
prevent the discussion of his love affairs in her presence. So the
discussion went freely on, and Louie only regretted that, do what
she would to improve herself in French, she understood so little of
it. But the tone towards Elise among Montjoie's set, especially
from Montjoie himself, was clearly contemptuous and hostile; and
Louie instinctively enjoyed the mud which she felt sure was being
thrown.

Yet, incredible as it may seem, with all this knowledge on her
part, all this amusement at her brother's expense, all this
blackening of Elise's character, the possibility of such an event
as had actually occurred had never entered the sister's
calculations.

And the reason lay in the profound impression which one side of his
character had made upon her during the five months they had been
together. A complete stranger to the ferment of the lad's
imagination, she had been a constant and chafed spectator of his
daily life. The strong self-restraint of it had been one of the
main barriers between them. She knew that she was always jarring
upon him, and that he was always blaming her recklessness and
self-indulgence. She hated his Spartan ways--his teetotalism, the
small store he set by any personal comfort or luxury, his powers of
long-continued work, his indifference to the pleasures and
amusements of his age, so far as Manchester could provide them.
They were a reflection upon her, and many a gibe she had flung out
at him about them. But all the same these ways of his had left a
mark upon her; they had rooted a certain conception of him in her
mind. She knew perfectly well that Dora Lomax was in love with him,
and what did he care? 'Not a ha'porth!' She had never seen him turn
his head for any girl; and when he had shown himself sarcastic on
the subject of her companions, she had cast about in vain for
materials wherewith to retort.

And _now_! That he should fall in love with this French
girl--that was natural enough; it had amused and pleased her to see
him lose his head and make a fool of himself like other people; but
that he should run away with her after a fortnight, without
apparently a word of marrying her--leaving his sister in the
lurch--

'_Hypocrite_!'

She clenched her hands as she walked. What was really surging in
her was that feeling of _ownership_ with regard to David which
had played so large a part in their childhood, even when she had
teased and plagued him most. She might worry and defy him; but no
sooner did another woman appropriate him, threaten to terminate for
good that hold of his sister upon him which had been so lately
renewed, than she was flooded with jealous rage. David had escaped
her--he was hers no longer--he was Elise Delaunay's! Nothing that
she did could scandalise or make him angry any more. He had sent
her money and washed his hands of her. As to his escorting her back
to England in two or three weeks, that was just a lie! A man who
takes such a plunge does not emerge so soon or so easily. No, she
would have to go back by herself, leaving him to his intrigue. The
very calmness and secretiveness of his letter was an insult. 'Mind
your own business, little girl--go home to work--and be good!
'--that was what it seemed to say to her. She set her teeth over it
in her wild anger and pride.

At the same moment the outer door opened and Madame Cervin came
bustling back again, bursting with news and indignation.

Oh, there was no doubt at all about it, they had gone off together!
Madame Merichat had seen them come downstairs about noon the day
before. He was carrying a black bag and a couple of parcels. She
also was laden; and about halfway down the street, Madame Merichat,
watching from her window, had seen them hail a cab, get into it,
and drive away, the cab turning to the right when they reached the
Boulevard.

Madame Cervin's wrath was loud, and stimulated moreover by personal
alarm. One moment, remembering the scene in Montjoie's studio, she
cried out, like the sister, on the brother's hypocrisy; the next
she reminded her boarder that there was two weeks' _pension_
owing.

Louie smiled scornfully, drew out the notes from David's letter and
flung them on the table. Then Madame Cervin softened, and took
occasion to remember that condolence with the sister was at least
as appropriate to the situation as abuse of the brother. She
attempted some consolation, nay, even some caresses, but Louie very
soon shook her off.

'Don't talk to me! don't kiss me!' she said impatiently.

And she swept out of the room, went to her own, and locked the
door. Then she threw herself face downwards on her bed, and
remained there for some time hardly moving. But with every minute
that passed, as it seemed, the inward smart grew sharper. She had
been hardly conscious of it, at first, this smart, in her rage and
pride, but it was there.

At last she could bear it quietly no longer. She sprang up and
looked about her. There, just inside the open press which held her
wardrobe, were some soft white folds of stuff. Her eye gleamed: she
ran to the cupboard and took out the Maenad's dress. During the
last few days she had somewhat tired of the sittings--she had at
any rate been capricious and tiresome about them; and Montjoie, who
was more in earnest about this statue than he had been about any
work for years, was at his wit's end, first to control his own
temper, and next so to lure or drive his strange sitter as to
manage her without offending her.

But to-day the dress recalled David--promised distraction and
retaliation. She slipped off her tight gingham with hasty fingers,
and in a few seconds she was transformed. The light folds floated
about her as she walked impetuously up and down, studying every
movement in the glass, intoxicated by the polished clearness and
whiteness of her own neck and shoulders, the curves of her own
grace and youth. Many a night, even after a long sitting, had she
locked her door, made the gas flare, and sat absorbed before her
mirror in this guise, throwing herself into one attitude after
another, naively regretting that sculpture took so long, and that
Montjoie could not fix them all. The ecstasy of self-worship in
which the whole process issued was but the fruition of that
childish habit which had wrought with childish things for the same
end--with a couple of rushlights, an old sheet and primroses from
the brook.

Her black abundant hair was still curled about her head. Well, she
could pull it down in the studio--now for a wrap--and then no
noise! She would slip downstairs so that madame should know nothing
about it. She was tired of that woman always at her elbow. Let her
go marketing and leave other people in peace.

But before she threw on her wrap she stood still a moment, her
nostril quivering, expanding, one hand on her hip, the other
swinging her Maenad's tambourine. She knew very little of this
sculptor-man--she did not understand him; but he interested, to
some extent overawed, her. He had poured out upon her the coarsest
flatteries, yet she realised that he had not made love to her.
Perhaps Madame Cervin had been in the way. Well, now for a
surprise and a _tête-a-tête_! A dare-devil look--her mother's
look--sprang into her eyes.

She opened the door, and listened. No one in the little passage,
only a distant sound of rapid talking, which suggested to the girl
that madame was at that moment enjoying the discussion of her
boarder's affairs with monsieur, who was still in bed. She hurried
on a waterproof which covered her almost from top to toe. Then,
holding up her draperies, she stole out, and on to the public
stairs.

They were deserted, and running down them she turned to the right
at the bottom and soon found herself at the high studio door.

As she raised her hand to the bell she flushed with passion.

'I'll let him see whether I'll go home whining to Dora, while he's
amusing himself,' she said under her breath.

The door was opened to her by Montjoie himself, in his working
blouse, a cigarette in his mouth. His hands and dress were daubed
with clay, and he had the brutal look of a man in the blackest of
tempers. But no sooner did he perceive Louie Grieve's stately
figure in the passage than his expression changed.

'You--you here! and for a sitting?'

She nodded, smiling. Her look had an excitement which he perceived
at once. His eye travelled to the white drapery and the beautiful
bare arm emerging from the cloak; then he looked behind her for
Madame Cervin.

No one--except this Maenad in a waterproof. Montjoie threw away his
cigarette.

'_Entrez, entrez, mademoiselle!_' he said, bowing low to her.
'When the heavens are blackest, then they open. I was in a mind to
wring the Maenad's neck three minutes ago. Come and save your
portrait!'

He led her in through the ante-room into the large outer studio.
There stood the Maenad on her revolving stand, and there was the
raised platform for the model. A heap of clay was to one side, and
water was dripping from the statue on to the floor. The studio
light had a clear evenness; and, after the heat outside, the
coolness of the great bare room was refreshing.

They stood and looked at the statue together, Louie still in her
cloak. Montjoie pointed out to her that he was at work on the
shoulders and the left arm, and was driven mad by the difficulties
of the pose. '_Tonnerre de Dieu!_ when I heard you knock, I
felt like a murderer; I rushed out to let fly at someone. And there
was my Maenad on the mat!--all by herself, too, without that little
piece of ugliness from upstairs behind her. I little thought this
day--this cursed day--was to turn out so. I thought you were tired
of the poor sculptor--that you had deserted him for good and all.
Ah! _déesse--je vous salue_!'

He drew back from her, scanning her from head to foot, a new tone
in his voice, a new boldness in his deep-set eyes--eyes which were
already old. Louie stood instinctively shrinking, yet smiling,
understanding something of what he said, guessing more.

There was a bull-necked strength about the man, with his dark,
square, weather-beaten head, and black eyebrows, which made her
afraid, in spite of the smooth and deprecating manner in which he
generally spoke to women. But her fear of him was not unpleasant to
her. She liked him; she would have liked above all to quarrel with
him; she felt that he was her match, He stepped forward, touched
her arm, and took a tone of command.

'Quick, mademoiselle, with that cloak!'

She mounted the steps, threw off her cloak, and fell into her
attitude without an instant's hesitation. Montjoie, putting his
hands over his eyes to look at her, exclaimed under his breath.

It was perfectly true that, libertine as he was, he had so far felt
no inclination whatever to make love to the English girl. Nor was
the effect merely the result of Madame Cervin's vigilance.
Personally, for all her extraordinary beauty, his new model left
him cold. Originally he had been a man of the most complex artistic
instincts, the most delicate and varied perceptions. They and his
craftsman's skill were all foundering now in a sea of evil living.
But occasionally they were active still, and they had served him
for the instant detection of that common egotistical paste of which
Louie Grieve was made. He would have liked to chain her to his
model's platform, to make her the slave of his fevered degenerating
art. But she had no thrill for him. While he was working from her
his mind was often running on some little _grisette_ or other,
who had not half Louie Grieve's physical perfection, but who had
charm, provocation, wit--all that makes the natural heritage of the
French woman, of whatever class. At the same time it had been an
irritation and an absurdity to him that, under Madame Cervin's eye,
he had been compelled to treat her with the ceremonies due to
_une jeune fille honnete._ For he had at once detected the
girl's reckless temper. From what social stratum did she come--she
and the brother? In her, at least, there was some wild blood! When
he sounded Madame Cervin, however, she, with her incurable habit of
vain mendacity, had only put her lodger in a light which Montjoie
felt certain was a false one.

But this morning! Never had she been so superb, so inspiring! All
the vindictive passion, all the rage with David that was surging
within her, did but give the more daring and decision to her
attitude, and a wilder power to her look. Moreover, the boldness of
her unaccompanied visit to him provoked and challenged him. He
looked at her irresolutely; then with an effort he turned to his
statue and fell to work. The touch of the clay, the reaction from
past despondency prevailed; before half an hour was over he was
more enamoured of his task than he had ever yet been, and more
fiercely bent on success. Insensibly as the time passed, his tone
with her became more and more short, brusque, imperious. Once or
twice he made some rough alteration in the pose, with the
overbearing haste of a man who can hardly bear to leave the work
under his hands even for an instant. When he first assumed this
manner Louie opened her great eyes. Then it seemed to please her.
She felt no regret whatever for the smooth voice; the more
dictatorial he became the better she liked it, and the more
submissive she was.

This went on for about a couple of hours--an orgie of work on his
side, of excited persistence on hers. Her rival in the clay grew in
life and daring under her eyes, rousing in her, whenever she was
allowed to rest a minute and look, a new intoxication with herself.
They hardly talked. He was too much absorbed in what he was doing;
and she also was either bent upon her task, or choked by wild gusts
of jealous and revengeful thought. Every now and then as she stood
there, in her attitude of eager listening, the wall of the studio
would fade before her eyes, and she would see nothing but a
torturing vision of David at Fontainebleau, wrapt up in 'that
creature,' and only remembering his sister to rejoice that he had
shaken her off. _Ah_! How could she sufficiently avenge
herself! how could she throw all his canting counsels to the winds
with most emphasis and effect!

At last a curious thing happened. Was it mere nervous reaction
after such a strain of will and passion, or was it the sudden
emergence of something in the sister which was also common to
the brother--a certain tragic susceptibility, the capacity for
a wild melancholy? For, in an instant, while she was thinking
vaguely of Madame Cervin and her money affairs, _despair_ seized
her--shuddering, measureless despair--rushing in upon her, and
sweeping away everything else before it. She tottered under it,
fighting down the clutch of it as long as she could. It had no
words, it was like a physical agony. All that was clear to her for
one lurid moment was that she would like to kill herself.

The studio swam before her, and she dropped into the chair behind
her.

Montjoie gave a protesting cry.

'Twenty minutes more!--_Courage_!'

Then, as she made no answer, he went up to her and put a violent
hand on her shoulder--beside himself.

'You _shall_ not be tired, I tell you. Look up! look at me!'

Under the stimulus of his master's tone she slowly recovered
herself--her great black eyes lifted. He gazed into them steadily;
his voice sank.

'You belong to me,' he said with breathless rapidity. 'Do you
understand? What is the matter with you? What are those tears?'

A cry of nature broke from her.

'My brother has left me--with that girl!'

She breathed out the words into the ears of the man stooping
towards her. His great brow lifted--he gave a little laugh. Then
eagerly, triumphantly, he seized her again by the arms. '_A la
bonne heure_! Then it is plainer still. You belong to me and I
to you. In that statue we live and die together. Another hour, and
it will be a masterpiece. Come! one more!'

She drank in his tone of mad excitement as though it were wine, and
it revived her. The strange grip upon her heart relaxed; the
nightmare was dashed aside. Her colour came back, and, pushing him
proudly away from her, she resumed her pose without a word.




CHAPTER VIII


'Do you know, sir, that that good woman has brought in the soup for
the second time? I can see her fidgeting about the table through
the window. If we go on like this, she will depart and leave us to
wait on ourselves. Then see if you get any soup out of _me_.'

David, for all answer, put his arm close round the speaker. She
threw herself back against him, smiling into his face. But neither
could see the other, for it was nearly dark, and through the acacia
trees above them the stars glimmered in the warm sky. To their
left, across a small grass-plat, was a tiny thatched house buried
under a great vine which embowered it all from top to base, and
overhung by trees which drooped on to the roof, and swept the
windows with their branches. Through a lower window, opening on to
the gravel path, could be seen a small bare room, with a paper of
coarse brown and blue pattern, brightly illuminated by a paraffin
lamp, which also threw a square of light far out into the garden.
The lamp stood on a table which was spread for a meal, and a stout
woman, in a white cap and blue cotton apron, could be seen moving
beside it.

'Come in!' said Elise, springing to her feet, and laying a
compelling hand on her companion. 'Get it over! The moon is waiting
for us out there!'

And she pointed to where, beyond the roofs of the neighbouring
houses, rose the dark fringe of trees which marked the edge of the
forest.

They went in, hand in hand, and sat opposite each other at the
little rickety table, while the peasant woman from whom they had
taken the house waited upon them. The day before, after looking at
the _auberge_, and finding it full of artists come down to
look for spring subjects in the forest, they had wandered on
searching for something less public, more poetical. And they had
stumbled upon this tiny overgrown house in its tangled garden. The
woman to whom it belonged had let it for the season, but till the
beginning of her 'let' there was a month; and, after much
persuasion, she had consented to allow the strangers to hire it and
her services as _bonne_, by the week, for a sum more congruous
with the old and primitive days of Barbizon than with the later
claims of the little place to fashion and fame. As the lovers stood
together in the _salon_, exclaiming with delight at its bare
floor, its low ceiling, its old bureau, its hard sofa with the
Empire legs, and the dilapidated sphinxes on the arms, the
owner of the house looked them up and down, from the door, with
comprehending eyes. Barbizon had known adventures like this before!

But she might think what she liked; it mattered nothing to her
lodgers. To 'a pair of romantics out of date,' the queer overgrown
place she owned was perfection, and they took possession of it in a
dream of excitement and joy. From the top loft, still bare and
echoing, where the highly respectable summer tenants were to put up
the cots of their children, to the outside den which served for a
kitchen, whence a wooden ladder led to a recess among the rafters,
occupied by Madame Pyat as a bedroom; from the masses of Virginia
creeper on the thatched roof to the thicket of acacias and roses on
the front grass-plat, and the high flowery wall which shut them off
from the curious eyes of the street, it was all, in the lovers'
feeling, the predestined setting for such an idyll as theirs.

And if this was so in the hot mornings and afternoons, how much
more in the heavenly evenings and nights, when the forest lay
whispering and murmuring under the moonlight, and they, wandering
together arm in arm under the gaunt and twisted oaks of the Bas
Breau, or among the limestone blocks which strew the heights of
this strange woodland, felt themselves part of the world about
them, dissolved into its quivering harmonious life, shades among
its shadows!

On this particular evening, after the hurried and homely meal,
David brought Elise's large black hat, and the lace scarf which
had bewitched him at St. Germain--oh, the joy of handling such
things in this familiar, sacrilegious way!--and they strolled
out into the long uneven street beyond their garden wall, on
their way to the forest. The old inn to the left was in a clatter.
Two _diligences_ had just arrived, and the horses were drooping
and panting at the door. A maidservant was lighting guests across
the belittered courtyard with a flaring candle. There was a red
glimpse of the kitchen with its brass and copper pans, and on the
bench outside the gateway sat a silent trio of artists, who had
worked well and dined abundantly, and were now enjoying their last
smoke before the sleep, to which they were already nodding, should
overtake them. The two lovers stepped quickly past, making with all
haste for that leafy mystery beyond cleft by the retreating
whiteness of the Fontainebleau road--into which the village melted
on either side.

Such moonlight! All the tones of the street, its white and greys,
the reddish brown of the roofs, were to be discerned under it; and
outside in the forest it was a phantasmagoria, an intoxication. The
little paths they were soon threading, paths strewn with limestone
dust, wound like white threads among the rocks and through the
blackness of the firs. They climbed them hand in hand, and soon
they were on a height looking over a great hollow of the forest to
the plain beyond, as it were a vast cup overflowing with moonlight
and melting into a silver sky. The width of the heavens, the dim
immensity of the earth, drove them close together in a delicious
silence. The girl put the warmth of her lover's arm between her and
the overpowering greatness of a too august nature. The man, on the
other hand, rising in this to that higher stature which was truly
his, felt himself carried out into nature on the wave of his own
boundless emotion. That cold Deism he had held so loosely broke
into passion. The humblest phrases of worship, of entreaty, swept
across the brain.

'Could one ever have guessed,' he asked her, his words stumbling
and broken, 'that such happiness was possible?'

She shook her head, smiling at him.

'Yes, certainly!--if one has read poems and novels. Nothing to me
is ever _more_ than I expect,--generally less.'

Then she broke off hesitating, and hid her face against his breast.
A pang smote him. He cried out in the old commonplaces that he was
not worthy, that she must tire of him, that there was nothing in
him to hold, to satisfy her.

'And three weeks ago,' she said, interrupting him, 'we had never
heard each other's names. Strange--life is strange! Well, now,' and
she quickly drew herself away from him, and holding him by both
hands lightly swung his arms backwards and forwards, 'this can't
last for ever, you know. In the first place--we shall die.' and
throwing herself back, she pulled against him childishly, a spray
of ivy he had wound round her hat drooping with fantastic shadows
over her face and neck.

'Do you know what you are like?' he asked her, evading what she had
said, while his eyes devoured her.

'No!'

'You are like that picture in the Louvre,--Da Vinci's St. John,
that you say should be a Bacchus.'

'Which means that you find me a queer,--heathenish,--sort of
creature?' she said, still laughing and swaying. 'So I am. Take
care! Well now, a truce to love-making! I am tired of being meek
and charming--this night excites me. Come and see the oaks in the
Bas Breau.'

And running down the rocky path before them she led him in and out
through twisted leafy ways, till at last they stood among the
blasted giants of the forest, the oaks of the Bas Breau. In the
emboldening daylight, David, with certain English wood scenes in
his mind, would swear the famous trees of Fontainebleau had neither
size nor age to speak of. But at night they laid their avenging
spell upon him. They stood so finely on the broken ground, each of
them with a kingly space about him; there was so wild a fantasy in
their gnarled and broken limbs; and under the night their scanty
crowns of leaf, from which the sap was yearly ebbing, had so lofty
a remoteness.

They found a rocky seat in front of a certain leafless monster,
which had been struck by lightning in a winter storm years before,
and rent from top to bottom. The bare trunk with its torn branches
yawning stood out against the rest, a black and melancholy shape,
preaching desolation. But Elise studied it coolly.

'I know that tree by heart,' she declared. 'Corot, Rousseau,
Diaz--it has served them all. I could draw it with my eyes shut.'

Then with the mention of drawing she began to twist her fingers
restlessly.

'I wonder what the _concours_ was to-day,' she said. 'Now that
I am away that Breal girl will carry off everything. There will be
no bearing her--she was never second till I came.'

David took a very scornful view of this contingency. 'When you
go back you will beat them all again; let them have their few
weeks' respite! You told me yesterday you had forgotten the
_atelier_.'

'Did I?' she said with a strange little sigh. 'It wasn't true--I
haven't.'

With a sudden whim she pulled off his broad hat and threw it down.
Reaching forward she took his head between her hands, and arranged
his black curls about his brow in a way to suit her. Then, still
holding him, she drew back with her head on one side to look at
him. The moon above them, now at its full zenith of brightness,
threw the whole massive face into strong relief, and her own look
melted into delight.

'There is no model in Paris,' she declared, 'with so fine a head.'
Then with another sigh she dropped her hold, and propping her chin
on her hands, she stared straight before her in silence.

'Do you imagine you are _the first?_' she asked him presently,
with a queer abruptness.

There was a pause.

'You told me so,' he said, at last, his voice quivering; 'don't
deceive me--there is no fun in it--I believe it all!'

She laughed, and did not answer for a moment. He put out his
covetous arms and would have drawn her to him, but she withdrew
herself.

'What did I tell you? I don't remember. In the first place there
was a cousin--there is always a cousin!'

He stared at her, his face flushing, and asked her slowly what she
meant.

'You have seen his portrait in my room,' she said coolly.

He racked his brains.

'Oh! that portrait on the wall,' he burst out at last, in vain
trying for a tone as self-possessed as her own,' that man with a
short beard?'

She nodded.

'Oh, he is not bad at all, my cousin. He is the son of that uncle
and aunt I told you of. Only while they were rusting in the
Gironde, he was at Paris learning to be a doctor, and enlarging his
mind by coming to see me every week. When they came up to town to
put in a claim to me, _they_ thought me a lump of wickedness,
as I told you; I made their hair stand on end. But Guillaume knew a
good deal more about me; and _he_ was not scandalised at all;
oh dear, no. He used to come every Saturday and sit in a corner
while I painted--a long lanky creature, rather good looking, but
with spectacles--he has ruined his eyes with reading. Oh, he would
have married me any day, and let his relations shriek as they
please; so don't suppose, Monsieur David, that I have had no
chances of respectability, or that my life began with you!' She
threw him a curious look.

'Why do you talk about him?' cried David, beside himself. 'What is
your cousin to either of us?'

'I shall talk of what I like,' she said wilfully, clasping her
hands round her knees with the gesture of an obstinate child.

David stared away into the black shadow of the oaks, marvelling at
himself? at the strength of that sudden smart within him, that
half-frenzied restlessness and dread which some of her lightest
sayings had the power to awaken in him.

Then he repented him, and turning, bent his head over the little
hands and kissed them passionately. She did not move or speak. He
came close to her, trying to decipher her face in the moonlight.
For the first time since that night in the studio there was a film
of sudden tears in the wide grey eyes. He caught her in his arms
and demanded why.

'You quarrel with me and dictate to me,' she cried, wrestling with
herself, choked by some inexplicable emotion, 'when I have given you
everything? when I am alone in the world with you? at your mercy? I
who have been so proud, have held my head so high!'

He bent over her, pouring into her ear all the words that passion
could find or forge. Her sudden attack upon him, poor fellow,
seemed to him neither unjust nor extravagant. She _had_ given
him everything, and who and what was he that she should have thrown
him so much as a look!

Gradually her mysterious irritation died away. The gentleness of
the summer night, the serenity of the moonlight, the sea-like
murmur of the forest, these things sank little by little into their
hearts, and in the calm they made, youth and love spoke again,
siren voices, with the old magic. And when at last they loitered
home, they moved in a trance of feeling which wanted no words. The
moon dropped slowly into the western trees; midnight chimes came to
them from the villages which ring the forest; and a playing wind
sprang up about them, cooling the girl's hot cheeks, and freshening
the verdurous ways through which they passed.

But in the years which came after, whenever David allowed his mind
to dwell for a short shuddering instant on these days at
Fontainebleau, it often occurred to him to wonder whether during
their wild dream he had ever for one hour been truly happy. At the
height of their passion had there been any of that exquisite give
and take between them which may mark the simplest love of the
rudest lovers, but which is in its essence moral, a thing not of
the senses but of the soul? There is nothing else which is vital to
love. Without it passion dies into space like the flaming corona of
the sun. With it, the humblest hearts may 'bear it out even to the
edge of doom.'

There can be no question that after the storm of feeling,
excitement, pity, which had swept her into his arms, he gained upon
her vagrant fancy for a time day by day. Seen close, his social
simplicity, his delicately tempered youth had the effect of great
refinement. He had in him much of the peasant nature, but so
modified by fine perception and wide-ranging emotion, that what had
been coarseness in his ancestors was in him only a certain rich
savour and fulness of being. His mere sympathetic, sensitive
instinct had developed in him all the essentials of good manners,
and books, poetry, observation had done the rest.

So that in the little matters of daily contact he touched and
charmed her unexpectedly. He threw no veil whatever over his
tradesman's circumstances, and enjoyed trying to make her
understand what had been the conditions and prospects of his
Manchester life. He had always, indeed, conceived his bookseller's
profession with a certain dignity; and he was secretly proud, with
a natural conceit, of the efforts and ability which had brought him
so rapidly to the front. How oddly the Manchester names and facts
sounded in the forest air! She would sit with her little head on
one side listening; but privately he suspected that she understood
very little of it; that she accepted him and his resources very
much in the vague with the _insouciance_ of Bohemia.

He himself, however, was by no means without plans for the
future. In the first flush of his triumphant passion he had
won from her the promise of a month alone with him, in or near
Fontainebleau--her own suggestion--after which she was to go back
in earnest to her painting, and he was to return to Manchester and
make arrangements for their future life together. Louie must be
provided for, and after that his ideas about himself were already
tolerably clear. In one of his free intervals, during his first
days in Paris, he had had a long conversation one evening with the
owner of an important bookshop on the Quai St.-Michel. The man
badly wanted an English clerk with English connections. David made
certain of the opening, should he choose to apply for it. And if
not there, then somewhere else. With the consciousness of capital,
experience, and brains, to justify him, he had no fears. Meanwhile,
John should keep on the Manchester shop, and he, David, would go
over two or three times a year to stock-take and make up accounts.
John was as honest as the day, and had already learnt much.

But although his old self had so far reasserted itself; although
the contriving activity of the brain was all still there, ready to
be brought to bear on this new life when it was wanted; Elise could
never mistake him, or the true character of this crisis of his
youth. The self-surrender of passion had transformed, developed him
to an amazing extent, and it found its natural language. As she
grew deeper and deeper into the boy's heart, and as the cloud of
diffidence which had enwrapped him since he came to Paris gave way,
so that even in this brilliant France he ventured at last to
express his feelings and ideas, the poet and thinker in him grew
before her eyes. She felt a new consideration, a new intellectual
respect for him.

But above all his tenderness, his womanish consideration and
sweetness amazed her. She had been hotly wooed now and then, but
with no one, not even 'the cousin,' had she ever been on terms of
real intimacy. And for the rest she had lived a rough-and-tumble,
independent life, defending herself first of all against the big
boys of the farm, then against her father, or her comrades in the
_atelier_, or her Bohemian suitors. The ingenuity of service
David showed in shielding and waiting upon her bewildered her--had,
for a time, a profound effect upon her.

And yet!--all the while--what jars and terrors from the very
beginning! He seemed often to be groping in the dark with her.
Whole tracts of her thought and experience were mysteries to him,
and grew but little plainer with their new relation. Little as he
knew or would have admitted it, the gulf of nationality yawned deep
between them. And those artistic ambitions of hers--as soon as they
re-emerged on the other side of the first intoxication of
passion--they were as much of a jealousy and a dread to him as
before. His soul was as alive as it had ever been to the threat and
peril of them.

Their relation itself, too--to her, perhaps, secretly a
guarantee--was to him a perpetual restlessness. _L'union
libre_ as the French artist understands it was not in his social
tradition, whatever might be his literary assimilation of French
ideas. He might passionately adopt and defend it, because it was
her will; none the less was he, at the bottom of his heart, both
ashamed and afraid because of it. From the very beginning he had
let her know that she had only to say the word and he was ready to
marry her instantly. But she put him aside with an impatient wave
of her little hand, a nervous, defiant look in her grey eyes. Yet
one day, when in the little village shop of Barbizon, a woman
standing beside Elise at the counter looked her insolently over
from head to foot, and took no notice of a question addressed to
her on the subject of one of the forest routes, the girl felt and
unexpected pang of resentment and shame.

One afternoon, in a lonely part of the forest, she strained her
foot by treading on a loose stone among the rocks. Tired with long
rambling and jarred by the shock she sank down, looking white and
ready to cry. Pain generally crushed and demoralized her. She was
capable, indeed, of setting the body at defiance on occasion; but,
as a rule, she had no physical fortitude, and did not pretend to
it.

David was much perplexed. So far as he knew, they were not near any
of the huts which are dotted over the forest and provide the
tourist with _consommations_ and carved articles. There was no
water wherewith to revive her or to bandage the foot, for
Fontainebleau has no streams. All he could do was to carry her. And
this he did, with the utmost skill, and with a leaping thrill of
tenderness which made itself felt by the little elfish creature in
the clasp of his arms, and in the happy leaning of his dark cheek
to hers, as she held him round the neck.

'Paul and Virginia!' she said to him, laughing. "_He bore her in
his arms!_"--all heroes do it--in reality, most women would
break the hero's back. 'Confess _I_ am even lighter than you
thought!'

'As light as Venus' doves,' he swore to her. 'Bid me carry you to
Paris and see.'

'Paris!' At the mention of it she fell silent, and the corners of
her mouth drooped into gravity. But he strode happily on,
perceiving nothing.

Then when they got home, she limping through the village, he put on
the airs of a surgeon, ran across to the grocer, who kept a tiny
_pharmacie_ in one corner of his miscellaneous shop, and
conferred with him to such effect that the injured limb was soon
lotioned and bandaged in a manner which made David inordinately
proud of himself. Once, as he was examining his handiwork, it
occurred to him that it was Mr. Ancrum who had taught him to use
his fingers neatly. _Mr. Ancrum!_ At the thought of his name
the young man felt an inward shrinking, as though from contact with
a cold and alien order of things. How hard to realise, indeed, that
the same world contained Manchester with its factories and chapels,
and this perfumed forest, this little overgrown house!

Afterwards, as he sat beside her, reading, as quiet as a mouse, so
that she might sleep if the tumble-down Empire sofa did but woo her
that way, she suddenly put up her arm and drew him down to her.

'Who taught you all this--this tenderness?' she said to him, in a
curious wistful tone, as though her question were the outcome of a
long reverie. 'Was it your mother?'

David started. He had never spoken to her or to anyone of his
mother, and he could not bring himself to do so now.

'My mother died when I was five years old,' he said reluctantly.
'Why don't you go to sleep, little restless thing? Is the bandage
right?'

'Quite. I can imagine,' she said presently in a low tone, letting
him go, 'I can imagine one might grow so dependent on all this
cherishing, so horribly dependent!'

'Well, and why not?' he said, taking up her hand and kissing it.
'What are we made for, but to be your bondslaves?'

She drew her hand away, and let it fall beside her with an
impatient sigh. The poor boy looked at her with frightened eyes.
Then some quick instinct came to the rescue, and his expression
changed completely.

'I have thought it all out,' he began, speaking with a brisk,
business-like air, 'what I shall do at Manchester, and when I get
back here.'

And he hung over her, chattering and laughing about his plans. What
did she say to a garret and a studio somewhere near the Quai
St.-Michel, in the Quartier Latin, rooms whence they might catch a
glimpse of the Seine and Notre-Dame, where she would be within easy
reach of Taranne's studio, and the Luxembourg, and the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, and the Louvre rooms where after their day's work they
might meet, shut out the world and let in heaven--a home consecrate
at once to art and love?

The quick bright words flowed without a check; his eye shone as
though it caught the light of the future. But she lay turned away
from him, silent, till at last she stopped him with a restless
gesture.

'Don't--don't talk like that! As soon as one dares to reckon on
Him--_le bon Dieu_ strikes--just to let one know one's place.
And don't drive me mad about my art! You saw me try to draw this
morning; you might be quiet about it, I think, _par pitié!_ If
I ever had any talent--which is not likely, or I should have had
some notices of my pictures by this time--it is all dead and done
for.'

And turning quite away from him, she buried her face in the
cushion.

'Look here,' he said to her, smiling and stooping, 'shall I tell you
something? I forgot it till now.'

She shook her head, but he went on:

You remember this morning while I was waiting for you, I went into
the inn to ask about the way to the Gorges d'Affremont. I had your
painting things with me. I didn't know whether you wanted them or
not, and I laid them down on the table in the _cour_, while I
went in to speak to madame. Well, when I came out, there were a
couple of artists there, those men who have been here all the time
painting, and they had undone the strap and were looking at the
sketch--you know, that bit of beechwood with the rain coming on. I
rushed at them. But they only grinned, and one of them, the young
man with the fair moustache, sent you his compliments. You must
have, he said, "very remarkable dispositions indeed." Perhaps I
looked as if I knew that before! Whose pupil were you? I told him,
and he said I was to tell you to stick to Taranne. You were one of
the _peintres de temperament_, and it was they especially who
must learn their grammar, and learn it from the classics; and the
other man, the old bear who never speaks to anybody, nodded and
looked at the sketch again, and said it was "amusing--not bad at
all," and you might make something of it for the next Salon.'

Cunning David! By this time Elise had her arm round his neck, and
was devouring his face with her keen eyes. Everything was shaken
off--the pain of her foot, melancholy, fatigue--and all the
horizons of the soul were bright again. She had a new idea!--what
if she were to combine his portrait with the beechwood sketch, and
make something large and important of it? He had the head of a
poet--the forest was in its most poetical moment. Why not pose him
at the foot of the great beech to the left, give him a book
dropping from his hand, and call it 'Reverie'?

For the rest of the day she talked or sketched incessantly. She
would hardly be persuaded to give her bandaged foot the afternoon's
rest, and by eight o'clock next morning they were off to the
forest, she limping along with a stick.

Two or three days of perfect bliss followed. The picture promised
excellently. Elise was in the most hopeful mood, alert and merry as
a bird. And when they were driven home by hunger, the work still
went on. For they had turned their top attic into a studio, and
here as long as the light lasted she toiled on, wrestling with the
head and the difficulties of the figure. But she was determined to
make it substantially a picture _en plein air_. Her mind was
full of all the daring conceptions and ideals which were then
emerging in art, as in literature, from the decline of Romanticism.
The passion for light, for truth, was, she declared, penetrating,
and revolutionising the whole artistic world. Delacroix had a
studio to the south; she also would 'bedare the sun.'

At the end of the third day she threw herself on him in a passion
of gratitude and delight, lifting her soft mouth to be kissed.

'_Embrasse-moi! Embrasse-moi! Blague a part,--je commence a me
sentir artiste!_'

And they wandered about their little garden till past midnight,
hand close in hand. She could talk of nothing but her picture, and
he, feeling himself doubly necessary and delightful to her,
overflowed with happiness and praise.

But next day things went less well. She was torn, overcome by the
difficulties of her task. Working now in the forest, now at home,
the lights and values had suffered. The general tone had neither an
indoor nor an outdoor truth. She must repaint certain parts, work
only out of doors. Then all the torments of the outdoor painter
began: wind, which put her in a nervous fever, and rain, which,
after the long spell of fine weather, began to come down on them,
and drive them into shelter.

Soon she was in despair. She had been too ambitious. The landscape
should have been the principal thing, the figure only indicated, a
suggestion in the middle distance. She had carried it too far; it
fought with its surroundings; the picture had no unity, no repose.
Oh, for some advice! How could one pull such a thing through
without help? In three minutes Taranne would tell her what was
wrong.

In twenty-four hours more she had fretted herself ill. The picture
was there in the corner, turned to the wall; he could only just
prevent her from driving her palette-knife through it. And she
was sitting on the edge of the sofa, silent, a book on her
knee, her hands hanging beside her, and her feverish eyes
wandering--wandering round the room, if only they might escape from
David, might avoid seeing him--or so he believed. Horrible! It was
borne in upon him that in this moment of despair he was little more
to her than the witness, the occasion, of her discomfiture.

Oh! his heart was sore. But he could do nothing. Caresses,
encouragements, reproaches, were alike useless. For some time she
would make no further attempts at drawing; nor would she be wooed
and comforted. She held him passively at arm's length, and he could
make nothing of her. It was the middle of their third week; still
almost the half left of this month she had promised him. And
already it was clear to him that he and love had lost their first
hold, and that she was consumed with the unspoken wish to go back
to Paris, and the _atelier_. Ah, no!--_no!_ With a fierce
yet dumb tenacity he held her to her bargain. Those weeks were his;
they represented his only hope for the future; she _should_
not have them back.

But he, too, fell into melancholy and silence, and on the afternoon
when this change in him first showed itself she was, for a time,
touched, ashamed. A few pale smiles returned for him, and in the
evening, as he was sitting by the open window, a newspaper on his
knee, staring into vacancy, she came up to him, knelt beside him,
and drew his half-reluctant arm about her. Neither said anything,
but gradually her presence there, on his breast, thrilled through
all his veins, filled his heart to bursting. The paper slid away;
he put both arms about her, and bowed his head on hers. She put up
her small hand, and felt the tears on his cheek. Then a still
stronger repentance woke up in her.

'_Pauvre enfant!_' she said, pushing herself away from him,
and tremulously drying his eyes. 'Poor Monsieur David--I make you
very unhappy! But I warned you--oh, I _warned_ you! What evil
star made you fall in love with me?'

In answer he found such plaintive and passionate things to say to
her that she was fairly melted, and in the end there was an
effusion on both sides, which seemed to bring back their golden
hours. But at bottom, David's sensitive instinct, do what he would
to silence it, told him, in truth, that all was changed. He was no
longer the happy and triumphant lover. He was the beggar, living
upon her alms.




CHAPTER IX


Next morning David went across to the village shop to buy some
daily necessaries, and found a few newspapers lying on the counter.
He bought a _Debats_, seeing that there was a long critique of
the Salon in it, and hurried home with it to Elise. She tore it
open and rushed through the article, putting him aside that he
might not look over her. Her face blanched as she read, and at the
end she flung the paper from her, and tottering to a chair sat
there motionless, staring straight before her. David, beside
himself with alarm, and finding caresses of no avail, took up the
paper from the floor.

'Let it alone!' she said to him with a sudden imperious gesture.
'There is a whole paragraph about Breal--her fortune is made. _La
voilà lancée--arrivée!_ And of me, not a line, not a mention!
Three or four pupils of Taranne--all beginners--but _my_
name--nowhere! Ah, but no--it is too much!'

Her little foot beat the ground, a hurricane was rising within her.

David tried to laugh the matter off. 'The man who wrote the wretched
thing had been hurried--was an idiot, clearly, and what did one
man's opinion matter, even if it were paid for at so much a column?'

'_Mais, tais-toi, donc!_' she cried at last, turning upon him in a
fury. '_Can't_ you see that everything for an artist--especially a
woman--depends on the _protections_ she gets at the beginning?
How can a girl--helpless--without friends--make her way by herself?
Some one must hold out a hand, and for me it seems there is no
one--no one!'

The outburst seemed to his common sense to imply the most grotesque
oblivion of her success in the Salon, of Taranne's kindness--the
most grotesque sensitiveness to a few casual lines of print. But it
wrung his heart to see her agitation, her pale face, the
handkerchief she was twisting to shreds in her restless hands. He
came to plead with her--his passion lending him eloquence. Let her
but trust herself and her gift. She had the praise of those she
revered to go upon. How should the carelessness of a single critic
affect her? _Imbéciles!_--they would be all with her, at her
feet, some day. Let her despise them then and now! But his
extravagances only made her impatient.

'Nonsense!' she said, drawing her hand away from him; 'I am not made
of such superfine stuff--I never pretended to be! Do you think I
should be content to be an unknown genius? _Never!_--I must
have my fame counted out to me in good current coin, that all the
world may hear and see. It may be vulgar--I don't care! it is so.
_Ah, mon Dieu!_' and she began to pace the room with wild
steps, 'and it is my fault--my fault! If I were there on the spot, I
should be remembered--they would have to reckon with me--I could
keep my claim in sight. But I have thrown away everything--wasted
everything--_everything!_'

He stood with his back to the window, motionless, his hand on
the table, stooping a little forward, looking at her with a
passion of reproach and misery; it only angered her; she lost all
self-control, and in one mad moment she avenged on his poor heart
all the wounds and vexations of her vanity. _Why_ had he ever
persuaded her? _Why_ had he brought her away and hung a fresh
burden on her life which she could never bear? Why had he done her
this irreparable injury--taken all simplicity and directness of aim
from her--weakened her energies at their source? Her only
_milieu_ was art, and he had made her desert it; her only
power was the painter's power, and it was crippled, the fresh
spring of it was gone. It was because she felt on her the weight of
a responsibility, and a claim she was not made for. She was not
made for love--for love at least as he understood it. And he had
her word, and would hold her to it. It was madness for both of
them. It was stifling--killing her!

Then she sank on a chair, in a passion of desperate tears.
Suddenly, as she sat there, she heard a movement, and looking up
she saw David at the door. He turned upon her for an instant, with
a dignity so tragic, so true, and yet so young, that she was
perforce touched, arrested. She held out a trembling hand, made a
little cry. But he closed the door softly, and was gone. She half
raised herself, then fell back again.

'If he had beaten me,' she said to herself with a strange smile, 'I
could have loved him. _Mais!_'

She was all day alone. When he came back it was already evening;
the stars shone in the June sky, but the sunset light was still in
the street and on the upper windows of the little house. As he
opened the garden gate and shut it behind him, he saw the gleam of
a lamp behind the acacia, and a light figure beside it. He stood a
moment wrestling with himself, for he was wearied out, and felt as
if he could bear no more. Then he moved slowly on.

Elise was sitting beside the lamp, her head bent over something
dark upon her lap. She had not heard the gate open, and she did not
hear his steps upon the grass. He came closer, and saw, to his
amazement, that she was busy with a coat of his--an old coat, in
the sleeve of which he had torn a great rent the day before, while
he was dragging her and himself through some underwood in the
forest. She--who loathed all womanly arts, who had often boasted to
him that she hardly knew how to use a needle!

In moving nearer, he brushed against the shrubs, and she heard him.
She turned her head, smiling. In the mingled light she looked like
a little white ghost, she was so pale and her eyes so heavy. When
she saw him, she raised her finger with a childish, aggrieved air,
and put it to her lips, rubbing it softly against them.

'It does prick so!' she said plaintively.

He came to sit beside her, his chest heaving.

'Why do you do that--for me?'

She shrugged her shoulders and worked on without speaking.
Presently she laid down her needle and surveyed him.

'Where have you been all day? Have you eaten nothing, poor friend?'

He tried to remember.

'I think not; I have been in the forest.'

A little quiver ran over her face; she pulled at her needle
violently and broke the thread.

'Finished!' she said, throwing down the coat and springing up.
'Don't tell your tailor who did it! I am for perfection in all
things--_abas l'amateur!_ Come in, it is supper-time past. I
will go and hurry Madame Pyat. _Tu dois avoir une faim de
loup_.'

He shook his head, smiling sadly.

'I tell you, you are hungry, you shall be hungry!' she cried,
suddenly flinging her arm round his neck, and nestling her fair
head against his shoulder. Her voice was half a sob.

'Oh, so I am!--so I am!' he said, with a wild emphasis, and would
have caught her to him. But she slipped away and ran before him to
the house, turning at the window with the sweetest, frankest
gesture to bid him follow.

They passed the evening close together, she on a stool leaning
against his knee, he reading aloud Alfred de Musset's _Nuit de
Mai_. At one moment she was all absorbed in the verse, carried
away by it; great battle-cry that it is! calling the artist from
the miseries of his own petty fate to the lordship of life and
nature as a whole; the next she had snatched the book out of his
hands and was correcting his accent, bidding him speak after her,
put his lips so. Never had she been so charming. It was the coaxing
charm of the softened child that cannot show its penitence enough.
Every now and then she fell to pouting because she could not move
him to gaiety. But in reality his sad and passive gentleness, the
mask of feelings which would otherwise have been altogether beyond
his control, served him with her better than any gaiety could have
done.

_Gaiety!_ it seemed to him his heart was broken.

At night, after a troubled sleep, he suddenly woke, and sprang up
in an agony. _Gone!_ was she gone already? For that was what
her sweet ways meant. Ah, he had known it all along!

Where was she? His wild eyes for a second or two saw nothing but
the landscape of his desolate dream. Then gradually the familiar
forms of the room emerged from the gloom, and there--against the
further wall--she lay, so still, so white, so gracious! Her
childish arm, bare to the elbow, was thrown round her head, her
soft waves of hair made a confusion on the pillow. After her long
day of emotion she was sleeping profoundly. Whatever cruel secret
her heart might hold, she was there still, his yet, for a few hours
and days. He was persuaded in his own mind that her penitence had
been the mere fruit of a compromise with herself, their month had
still eight days to run, then--_adieu!_ Art and liberty should
reclaim their own. Meanwhile why torment the poor boy, who must any
way take it hardly?

He lay there for long, raised upon his arm, his haggard look fixed
on the sleeping form which by-and-by the dawn illuminated. His life
was concentrated in that form, that light breath. He thought with
repulsion and loathing of all that had befallen him before he saw
her--with anguish and terror of those days and nights to come when
he should have lost her. For in the deep stillness of the rising
day there fell on him the strangest certainty of this loss. That
gift of tragic prescience which was in his blood had stirred in
him--he knew his fate. Perhaps the gift itself was but the fruit of
a rare power of self-vision, self-appraisement. He saw and cursed
his own timid and ignorant youth. How could he ever have hoped to
hold a creature of such complex needs and passions? In the pale
dawn he sounded the very depths of self-contempt.

But when the day was up and Elise was chattering and flitting about
the house as usual without a word of discord or parting, how was it
possible to avoid reaction, the re-birth of hope? She talked of
painting again, and that alone, after these long days of sullen
alienation from her art, was enough to bring the brightness back to
their little _menage_ and to dull that strange second sight of
David's. He helped her to set her palette, to choose a new canvas;
he packed her charcoals, he beguiled some cold meat and bread out
of Madame, and then before the heat they set out together for the
Bas Breau.

Just as they started he searched his pockets for a knife of hers
which was missing, and thrusting his hand into a breast pocket
which he seldom used, he brought out some papers at which he stared
in bewilderment.

Then a shock went through him; for there was Mr. Gurney's letter,
the letter in which the cheque for 600 _pounds_ had been enclosed,
and there was also that faded scrap of Sandy's writing which
contained the father's last injunction to his son. As he held the
papers he remembered--what he had forgotten for weeks--that on the
morning of his leaving Manchester he had put them carefully into
this breast pocket, not liking to leave things so interesting to
him behind him, out of his reach. Never had he given a thought to
them since! He looked down at them, half ashamed, and his eye
caught the words:--'_I lay it on him now I'm dying to look after
her. She's not like other children; she'll want it. Let him see her
married to a decent man, and give her what's honestly hers. I trust
it to him. That little lad_--' and then came the fold of the
sheet.

'I have found the knife,' cried Elise from the gate. 'Be quick!'

He pushed the papers back and joined her. The day was already hot,
and they hurried along the burning street into the shade of the
forest. Once in the Bas Breau Elise was not long in finding a
subject, fell upon a promising one indeed almost at once, and was
soon at work. This time there were to be no figures, unless indeed
it might be a dim pair of woodcutters in the middle distance, and
the whole picture was to be an impressionist dream of early summer,
finished entirely out of doors, as rapidly and cleanly as possible.
David lay on the ground under the blasted oak and watched her, as
she sat on her camp-stool, bending forward, looking now up, now
down, using her charcoal in bold energetic strokes, her lip
compressed, her brow knit over some point of composition. The
little figure in its pink cotton was so daintily pretty, so full of
interest and wilful charm, it might well have filled a lover's eye
and chained his thoughts. But David was restless and at times
absent.

'Tell me what you know of that man Montjoie?' he asked her at last,
abruptly. 'I know you disliked him.'

She paused, astonished.

'Why do you ask? Dislike--I _detest and despise_ him. I told
you so.'

'But what do you know of him?' he persisted.

'No good!' she said quickly, going back to her work. Then a light
broke upon her, and she turned on her stool, her two hands on her
knees.

'_Tiens!_--you are thinking of your sister. You have had news
of her?'

A conscious half-remorseful look rose into her face.

'No, I have had no news. I ought to have had a letter. I wrote, you
remember, that first day here. Perhaps Louie has gone home already,'
he said, with constraint. 'Tell me anyway what you know.'

'Oh, he!--well, there is only one word for him--he is a
_brute_ I' said Elise, drawing vigorously, her colour rising.
'Any woman will tell you that. Oh, he has plenty of talent,--he
might be anything. Carpeaux took him up at one time, got him
commissions. Five or six years ago there was quite a noise about
him for two or three Salons. Then people began to drop him. I
believe he was the most mean, ungrateful animal towards those who
had been kind to him. He drinks besides--he is over head and ears
in debt, always wanting money, borrowing here and there, then
locking his door for weeks, making believe to be out of town--only
going out at night. As for his ways with women'--she shrugged her
shoulders--'Was your sister still sitting to him when we left, or
was it at an end? Hasn't your sister been sitting to him for his
statue?'

She paused again and studied him with her shrewd, bright eyes.

He coloured angrily.

'I believe so--I tried to stop it--it was no use.'

She laughed out.

'No--I imagine she does what she wants to do. Well, we all do,
_mon ami!_ After all'--and she shrugged her shoulders again--
'I suppose she can do what I did?'

''What _you_ did!'

She went on drawing in sharp deliberate strokes; her breath came
fast.

'He met me on the stairs one night--it was just after I had taken
the _atelier_. I knew no one in the house--I was quite defenceless
there. He insulted me--I had a little walking-stick in my hand,
my cousin had given me--I struck him with it across the face twice,
three times--if you look close you will see the mark. You may
imagine he tells fine stories of me when he gets the chance.
_Oh! je m'en fiche!_'

The scorn of the last gesture was unmeasured.

'_Canaille!_' said David, between his teeth. 'If you had told
me this!'

Her expression changed and softened.

'You asked me no questions after that quarrel we had in the Louvre,'
she said, excusing herself. 'You will understand it is not a
reminiscence one is exactly proud of; I did speak to Madame Cervin
once--'

David said nothing, but sat staring before him into the far vistas
of the wood. It seemed strange that so great a smart and fear as
had possessed him since yesterday, should allow of any lesser smart
within or near it. Yet that scrap of tremulous writing weighed
heavy. _Where_ was Louie; why had she not written? So far he
had turned impatiently away from the thought of her, reiterating
that he had done his best, that she had chosen her own path. Now in
this fragrant quiet of the forest the quick vision of some
irretrievable wreck presented itself to him; he thought of Mr.
Ancrum--of John--and a cold shudder ran through him. In it spoke
the conscience of a lifetime.

Elise meanwhile laid aside her charcoal, began to dash in some
paint, drew back presently to look at it from a distance, and then,
glancing aside, suddenly threw down her brushes, and ran up to
David.

She sat down beside him, and with a coaxing, childish gesture, drew
his arm about her.

'_Tu me fais pitie, mon ami!_' she said, looking up into his
face. 'Is it your sister? Go and find her--I will wait for you.'

He turned upon her, his black eyes all passion, his lips struggling
with speech.

'My place is here,' he said. 'My life is here!'

Then, as she was silent, not knowing in her agitation what to say,
he broke out:

'What was in your mind yesterday, Elise? what is there to-day?
There is something--something I _will_ know.'

She was frightened by his look. Never did fear and grief speak more
plainly from a human face. The great deep within had broken up.

'I was sorry,' she said, trembling, 'sorry to have hurt you. I
wanted to make up.'

He flung her hand away from him with an impatient gesture.

'There was more than that!' he said violently; 'will you be like all
the rest--betray me without a sign?'

'David!'

She bit her lip proudly. Then the tears welled up into her grey
eyes, and she looked round at him--hesitated--began and stopped
again--then broke into irrevocable confession.

'David!--Monsieur David!--how can it go on? _Voyons_--I said
to myself yesterday--I am torturing him and myself--I cannot make
him happy--it is not in me--not in my destiny. It must end--it
must,--it _must_, for both our sakes. But then first,--first--'

'Be quiet!' he said, laying an iron hand on her arm. 'I knew it all.'

And he turned away from her, covering his face.

This time she made no attempt to caress him. She clasped her hands
round her knees and remained quite still, gazing--yet seeing
nothing--into the green depths which five minutes before had been
to her a torturing ecstasy of colour and light. The tears which had
been gathering fell, the delicate lip quivered.

Struck by her silence at last, he looked up--watched her a
moment--then he dragged himself up to her and knelt beside her.

'Have I made you so miserable?' he said, under his breath.

'It is--it is--the irreparableness of it all,' she answered, half
sobbing. 'No undoing it ever, and how a woman glides into it, how
lightly, knowing so little!--thinking herself so wise! And if she
has deceived herself, if she is not made for love, if she has given
herself for so little--for an illusion--for a dream that breaks and
must break--how dare the _man_ reproach her, after all?'

She raised her burning eyes to him. The resentment in them seemed
to be more than individual, it was the resentment of the woman, of
her sex.

She stabbed him to the heart by what she said--by what she left
unsaid. He took her little cold hand, put it to his lips--tried to
speak.

'Don't,' she said, drawing it away and hiding her face on her
knees. 'Don't say anything. It is not you, it is God and Nature that
I accuse.'

Strange, bitter word!--word of revolt! He lay on his face beside
her for many minutes afterwards, tasting the bitterness of it,
revolving those other words she had said--_'an illusion--a dream
that breaks--must break.'_ Then he made a last effort. He came
close to her, laid his arm timidly round her shoulders, bent his
cheek to hers.

'Elise, listen to me a little. You say the debt is on my side--that
is true--true--a thousand times true! I only ask you, _implore_ you,
to let me pay it. Let it be as you please--on what terms you
please--servant or lover. All I pray for is to pay that debt,
with my life, my heart.'

She shook her head softly, her face still hidden.

'When I am with you,' she said, as though the words were wrung out
of her, 'I must be a woman. You agitate me, you divide my mind, and
my force goes. There are both capacities in me, and one destroys
the other. And I want--I _want_ my art!'

She threw back her head with a superb gesture. But he did not
flinch.

'You shall have it,' he said passionately, 'have it abundantly. Do
you think I want to keep you for ever loitering here? Do you think
I don't know what ambition and will mean? that I am only fit for
kissing?'

He stopped almost with a smile, thinking of that harsh struggle to
know and to have, in which his youth had been so far consumed night
and day. Then words rushed upon him again, and he went on with a
growing power and freedom.

'I never looked at a woman till I saw you!--never had a whim, a
caprice. I have eaten my heart out with the struggle first for
bread, then for knowledge. But when you came across me, then the
world was all made new, and I became a new creature, your creature.'

He touched her face with a quick, tender hand, laid it against his
breast, and spoke so, bending piteously down to her, within reach
of her quivering mouth, her moist eyes:--

'Tell me this, Elise--answer me this! How can there be great art, great
knowledge, only from the brain,--without passion, without experience?
You and I have been _living_ what Musset, what Hugo, what Shakespeare
wrote,' and he struck the little volume of Musset beside him. 'Is not
that worth a summer month? not worth the artist's while? But it is
nearly gone. You can't wonder that I count the moments of it like a
miser! I have had a _hard_ life, and this has transfigured it. Whatever
happens now in time or eternity, this month is to the good--for me and
for you, Elise!--yes, for you, too! But when it is over,--see if I hold
you back! We will work together--climb--wrestle, together. And on what
terms you please,--mind that,--only dictate them. I deny your
"illusion," your "dream that breaks." You _have_ been happy! I dare to
tell you so. But part now,--shirk our common destiny,--and you will
indeed have given all for nothing, while I--'

His voice sank. She shook her head again, but as she drew herself
gently away she was stabbed by the haggardness of the countenance,
the pleading pathos of the eyes. His gust of speech had shaken her
too--revealed new points in him. She bent forward quickly and laid
her soft lips to his, for one light swift moment.

'Poor boy!' she murmured, 'poor poet!'

'Ah, that was enough!' he said, the colour flooding his cheeks.'
That healed--that made all good. Will you hide nothing from me,
Elise--will you promise?'

'Anything,' she said with a curious accent, 'anything--if you will
but let me paint.'

He sprang up, and put her things in order for her. They stood
looking at the sketch, neither seeing much of it.

'I must have some more cobalt,' she said wearily, 'Look, my tube is
nearly done.'

Yes, that was certain. He must get some more for her. Where could
it be got? No nearer than Fontainebleau, alas! where there was a
shop which provided all the artists of the neighbourhood. He was
eagerly ready to go--it would take him no time.

'It will take you between two and three hours, sir, in this heat.
But oh, I am so tired, I will just creep into the fern there while
you are away, and go to sleep. Give me that book and that shawl.'

He made a place for her between the spurs of a great oak-root,
tearing the brambles away. She nestled into it, with a sigh of
satisfaction. 'Divine! Take your food--I want nothing but the air
and sleep. _Adieu, adieu!_'

He stood gazing down upon her, his face all tender lingering and
remorse. How white she was, how fragile, how shaken by this storm
of feeling he had forced upon her! How could he leave her?

But she waved him away impatiently, and he went at last, going
first back to the village to fetch his purse which was not in his
pocket.

As he came out of their little garden gate, turning again towards
the forest which he must cross in order to get to Fontainebleau, he
became aware of a group of men standing in front of the inn. Two of
them were the landscape artists already slightly known to him, who
saluted him as he came near. The other was a tall fine-looking man,
with longish grizzled hair, a dark commanding eye, the rosette of
the Legion of Honour at his buttonhole, and a general look of
irritable power. He wore a wide straw hat and holland overcoat, and
beside him on the bench lay some artist's paraphernalia.

All three eyed David as he passed, and he was no sooner a few yards
away than they were looking after him and talking, the new-comer
asking questions, the others replying.

'Oh, it is she!' said the stranger impatiently, throwing away his
cigar. 'Auguste's description leaves me no doubt of it, and the
woman at the house in the Rue Chantal where I had the caprice to
inquire one day, when she had been three weeks away, told me they
were here. It is annoying. Something might have been made of her.
Now it is finished. A handsome lad all the same!--of a rare type.
_Non!--je me suis trompé--en devenant femme, elle n'a pas cesse
d'être artiste!_'

The others laughed. Then they all took up their various equipments,
and strolled off smoking to the forest. The man from Paris was
engaged upon a large historical canvas representing an incident
in the life of Diane de Poitiers. The incident had Diane's forest
for a setting, but his trees did not satisfy him, he had come down
to make a few fresh studies on the spot.

David walked his four miles to Fontainebleau, bought his cobalt,
and set his face homewards about three o'clock. When he was halfway
home, he turned aside into a tangle of young beech wood, parted the
branches, and found a shady corner where he could rest and think.
The sun was very hot, the high road was scorched by it. But it was
not heat or fatigue that had made him pause.

So far he had walked in a tumult of conflicting ideas, emotions,
terrors, torn now by this memory, now by that--his mind traversed
by one project after another. But now that he was so near to
meeting her again, though he pined for her, he suddenly and
pitifully felt the need for some greater firmness of mind and will.
Let him pause and think! Where _was_ he with her?--what were
his real, tangible hopes and fears? Life and death depended for him
on these days--these few vanishing days. And he was like one of the
last year's leaves before him, whirled helpless and will-less in
the dust-storm of the road!

He had sat there an unnoticed time when the sound of some heavy
carriage approaching roused him. From his green covert he could see
all that passed, and instinctively he looked up. It was the
Barbizon _diligence_ going in to meet the five o'clock train
at Fontainebleau, a train which in these lengthening days very
often brought guests to the inn. The _correspondance_ had been
only begun during the last week, and to the dwellers at Barbizon
the afternoon _diligence_ had still the interest of novelty.
With the perception of habit David noticed that there was no one
outside; but though the rough blinds were most of them drawn down
he thought he perceived some one inside--a lady. Strange that
anyone should prefer the stifling _interieur_ who could mount
beside the driver with a parasol!

The omnibus clattered past, and with the renewal of the woodland
silence his mind plunged heavily once more into the agonised
balancing of hope and fear. But in the end he sprang up with a
renewed alertness of eye and step.

_Despair?_ Impossible!--so long as one had one's love still in
one's arms--could still plead one's cause, hand to hand, lip to
lip. He strode homewards--running sometimes--the phrases of a new
and richer eloquence crowding to his lips.

About a mile from Barbizon, the path to the Bas Breau diverges to
the right. He sped along it, leaping the brambles in his path. Soon
he was on the edge of the great avenue itself, looking across it
for that spot of colour among the green made by her light dress.

But there was no dress, and as he came up to the tree where he had
left her, he saw to his stupefaction that there was no one
there--nothing, no sign of her but the bracken and brambles he had
beaten down for her some three hours before, and the trodden grass
where her easel had been. Something showed on the ground. He
stooped and noticed the empty cobalt-tube of the morning.

Of course she had grown tired of waiting and had gone home. But a
great terror seized him. He turned and ran along the path they had
traversed in the morning making for the road; past the inn which
seemed to have been struck to sleep by the sun, past Millet's
studio on the left, to the little overgrown door in the brick wall.

No one in the garden, no one in the little _salon_, no one upstairs;
Madame Pyat was away for the day, nursing a daughter-in-law. In all
the house and garden there was not a sound or sign of life but the
cat asleep on the stone step of the kitchen, and the bees humming
in the acacias.

'Elise!' he called, inside and out, knowing already, poor fellow,
in his wild despair that there could be no answer--that all was
over.

But there was an answer. Elise was no untaught heroine. She played
her part through. There was her letter, propped up against the gilt
clock on the sham marble _cheminee_.

He found it and tore it open.

'You will curse me, but after a time you will forgive. I
_could_ not go on. Taranne found me in the forest, just half
an hour after you left me. I looked up and saw him coming across
the grass. He did not see me at first, he was looking about for a
subject. I would have escaped, but there was no way. Then at last
he saw me. He did not attack me, he did not persuade me, he only
took for granted it was all over,--my Art! I must know best, of
course; but he was sorry, for I had a gift. Had I seen the notice
of my portrait in the "Temps," or the little mention in the "Figaro"?
Oh, yes, Breal had been very successful, and deserved to be. It
was a brave soul, devoted to art, and art had rewarded her.

'Then I showed him my sketch, trembling--to stop his talk--every
word he said stabbed me. And he shrugged his shoulders quickly;
then, as though recollecting himself, he put on a civil face all in
a moment, and paid me compliments. To an amateur he is always
civil. I was all white and shaking by this time. He turned to go
away, and then I broke down. I burst into tears--I said I was
coming back to the _atelier_--what did he mean by taking such
a cruel, such an insolent tone with me? He would not be moved from
his polite manner. He said he was glad to hear it; mademoiselle
would be welcome; but just as though we were complete strangers.
_He_ who has befriended me, and taught me, and scolded me
since I was fourteen! I could not bear it. I caught him by the arm.
I told him he _should_ tell me all he thought. Had I really
talent?--a future?

'Then he broke out in a torrent--he made me afraid of him--yet I
adored him! He said I had more talent than any other pupil he had
ever had; that I had been his hope and interest for six years; that
he had taught me for nothing--befriended me--worked for me, behind
the scenes, at the Salon; and all because he knew that I must rise,
must win myself a name, that when I had got the necessary technique
I should make one of the poetical impressionist painters, who are
in the movement, who sway the public taste. But I must give
_all_ myself--my days and nights--my thoughts, and brain, and
nerves. Other people might have adventures and paint the better.
Not I,--I was too highly strung--for me it was ruin. _"C'est un
maitre sevire--l'Art,_" he said, looking like a god. "_Avec
celui-là on ne transige pas. Ah! Dieu, je le connais, moi!_" I
don't know what he meant; but there has been a tragedy in his life;
all the world knows that.

'Then suddenly he took another tone, called me _pauvre
enfant_, and apologised. Why should I be disturbed? I had chosen
for my own happiness, no doubt. What was fame or the high steeps of
art compared even with an _amour de jeunesse?_ He had seen
you, he said,--_une tête superbe--des epaules de lion!_ I was
a woman; a young handsome lover was worth more to me, naturally,
than the drudgeries of art. A few years hence, when the pulse was
calmer, it might have been all very well. Well! I must forgive him;
he was my old friend. Then he wrung my hand, and left me.

'Oh, David, David, I must go! I _must._ My life is imprisoned
here with you--it beats its bars. Why did I ever let you persuade
me--move me? And I should let you do it again. When you are there I
am weak. I am no cruel adventuress, I can't look at you and torture
you. But what I feel for you is not love--no, no, it is not, poor
boy! Who was it said "A love which can be tamed is no love"? But in
three days--a week--mine had grown tame--it had no fears left. I am
older than you, not in years, _mais dans l'âme_--there is what
parts us.

'Oh! I must go--and you must not try to find me. I shall be quite
safe, but with people you know nothing about. I shall write to
Madame Pyat for my things. You need have no trouble.

'Very likely I shall pass you on the way, for if I hurry I can
catch the _diligence_. But you will not see me. Oh, David, I
put my arms round you! I press my face against you. I ask you to
forgive me, to forget me, to work out your own life as I work out
mine. It will soon be a dream--this little house--these summer
days! I have kissed the chair you sat in last night, the book you
read to me. _C'est déjà fini! Adieu! adieu!'_

He sat for long in a sort of stupor. Then that maddening thought
seized him, stung him into life, that she had actually passed him,
that he had seen her, not knowing. That little indistinct figure in
the _interieur_, that was she.

He sprang up, in a blind anguish. Pursuit! the _diligence_ was
slow, the trains doubtful, he might overtake her yet. He dashed
into the street, and into the Fontainebleau road. After he had run
nearly a mile, he plunged into a path which he believed was a short
cut. It led through a young and dense oak wood. He rushed on,
seeing nothing, bruising himself and stumbling. At last a
projecting branch struck him violently on the temple. He staggered,
put up a feeble hand, sank on the grass against a trunk, and
fainted.




CHAPTER X


It was between five and six o'clock in the morning. In the
Tuileries Gardens flowers, grass, and trees were drenched in dew,
the great shadow of the Palace spread grey and cool over terraces
and slopes, while beyond the young sun had already shaken off all
cumbering mists, and was pouring from a cloudless sky over the
river with its barges and swimming-baths, over the bridges and the
quays, and the vast courts and facades of the Louvre. Yet among the
trees the air was still exquisitely fresh, the sun still a friend
to be welcomed. The light morning wind swept the open, deserted
spaces of the Gardens, playing merrily with the dust, the leaves,
the fountains. Meanwhile on all sides the stir of the city was
beginning, mounting slowly and steadily like a swelling tone.

On a bench under one of the trees in the Champs-Elysées sat a young
man asleep. He had thrown himself against the back of the bench,
his cheek resting on the iron, one hand on his knee. It was David
Grieve; the lad's look showed that his misery was still with him,
even in sleep.

He was dreaming, letting fall here and there a troubled and
disconnected word. In his dream he was far from Paris--walking
after his sheep among the heathery slopes of the Scout, climbing
towards the grey smithy among the old mill-stones, watching the Red
Brook slide by over its long, shallow steps of orange grit, and the
Downfall oozing and trickling among its tumbled blocks. Who was
that hanging so high above the ravine on that treacherous stone
that rocked with the least touch? Louie--mad girl!--come back. Ah!
too late--the stone rocks, falls; he leaps from block to block,
only to see the light dress disappear into the stony gulf below. He
cries--struggles--wakes.

He sat up, wrestling with himself, trying to clear his torpid
brain. Where was he? His dream-self was still roaming the Scout;
his outer eye was bewildered by these alleys, these orange-trees,
these statues--that distant arch.

Then the hideous, undefined cloud that was on him took shape. Elise
had left him. And Louie, too, was gone--he knew not where, save
that it was to ruin. When he had arrived the night before at the
house in the Rue Chantal, Madame Merichat could tell him nothing of
Mademoiselle Delaunay, who had not been heard of. Then he asked,
his voice dying in his throat before the woman's hard and cynical
stare--the stare of one who found the chief savour of life in the
misfortunes of her kind--he asked for his sister and the Cervins.
The Cervins were staying at Sevres with relations, and were
expected home again in a day or two; Mademoiselle Louie?--well,
Mademoiselle Louie was not with them. Had she gone back to
England? _Mais non!_ A trunk of hers was still in the Cervins'
vestibule. Did Madame Merichat know anything about her? the lad
asked, forcing himself to it, his blanched face turned away. Then
the woman shrugged her shoulders and spoke out.

If he really must know, she thought there was no doubt at all
that where Monsieur Montjoie was, Mademoiselle Louie was too.
Monsieur Montjoie had paid the arrears of his rent to the
_proprietaire_, somehow or other, and had then made a midnight
flitting of it so as to escape other creditors who were tired of
waiting for his statue to be finished. He had got a furniture van
there at night, and he and the driver and her husband between them
had packed most of the things from the studio, and M. Montjoie had
gone off in the van about one o'clock in the morning. But of course
she did not know his address! she said so half-a-dozen times a day
to the persons who called, and it was as true as gospel. Why,
indeed, should M. Montjoie let her or anyone else know, that he
could help? He had gone into hiding to keep honest people out of
their money--that was what it meant.

Well, and the same evening Mademoiselle Louie also disappeared.
Madame Cervin had been in a great way, but she and mademoiselle had
already quarrelled violently, and madame declared that she had no
fault in the matter and that no one could be held responsible for
the doings of such a minx. She believed that madame had written to
monsieur. Monsieur had never received it? Ah, well, that was not
surprising! No one could ever read madame's writing, though it made
her temper very bad to tell her so.

Could he have Madame Cervin's address? Certainly. She wrote it out
for him. As to his old room?--no, he could not go back to it.

Monsieur Dubois had lately come back, with some money apparently,
for he had paid his _loyer_ just as the landlord was going to
turn him out. But he was not at home.

Then she looked her questioner up and down, with a cool, inhuman
curiosity working in her small eyes. So M'selle Elise had thrown
him over already? That was sharp work! As for the rest of her news,
her pessimism was interested in observing his demeanour under it.
Certainly he did not seem to take it gaily; but what else did he
expect with his sister?--'_Je vous demande_!'

The young man dropped his head and went out, shrinking together
into the darkness. She called her husband to the door, and the two
peered after him into the lamp-lit street, dissecting him, his
mistress, and his sister with knifelike tongues.

David went away and walked up and down the streets, the quays, the
bridges, hour after hour, feeling no fatigue, till suddenly, just
as the dawn was coming on, he sank heavily on to the seat in the
Champs-Elysées. The slip with Madame Cervin's address on it dropped
unheeded from his relaxing hand. His nervous strength was gone, and
he had to sit and bear his anguish without the relief of frenzied
motion.

Now, after his hour's sleep, he was somewhat revived, ready to
start again--to search again; but where? whither? _Somewhere_
in this vast, sun-wrapped Paris was Elise, waking, perhaps, at this
moment and thinking of him with a smile and a tear. He _would_
find her, come what would; he could not live without her!

Then into his wild passion of loss and desire there slipped again
that cold, creeping thought of Louie--ruined, body and soul--ruined
in this base and dangerous Paris, while he still carried in his
breast that little scrap of scrawled paper! And why? Because he had
flung her to the wolves without a thought, that he and Elise might
travel to their goal unchecked. '_My God_!'

The sense of some one near him made him look up. He saw a girl
stopping near the seat whom in his frenzy he for an instant took
for Louie. There was the same bold, defiant carriage, the same
black hair and eyes. He half rose, with a cry.

The girl gave a quick, coarse laugh. She had been hurrying across
the Avenue towards the nearest bridge when she saw him; now she
came up to him with a hideous jest. David saw her face full, caught
the ghastly suggestions of it--its vice, its look of mortal illness
wrecking and blurring the cheap prettiness it had once possessed,
and beneath all else the fierceness of the hunted creature. His
whole being rose in repulsion; he waved her away, and she went,
still laughing. But his guilty mind went with her, making of her
infamy the prophecy and foretaste of another's.

He hurried on again, and again had to rest for faintness' sake,
while the furies returned upon him. It seemed as though every
passer-by were there only to scourge and torture him; or, rather,
out of the moving spectacle of human life which began to flow past
him with constantly increasing fulness, that strange selective
poet-sense of his chose out the figures and incidents which bore
upon his own story and worked into his own drama, passing by the
rest. A group of persons presently attracted him who had just come
apparently from the Rive Gauche, and were making for the Rue
Royale. They consisted of a man, a woman, and a child. The child
was a tiny creature in a preposterous feathered hat as large as
itself. It had just been put down to walk by its father, and was
dragging contentedly at its mother's hand, sucking a crust. The man
had a bag of tools on his shoulder and was clearly an artisan going
to work. His wife's face was turned to him and they were talking
fast, lingering a little in the sunshine like people who had a few
minutes to spare and were enjoying them. The man had the blanched,
unwholesome look of the city workman who lives a sedentary life in
foul air, and was, moreover, undersized and noways attractive, save
perhaps for the keen amused eyes with which he was listening to his
wife's chatter. The great bell of Notre-Dame chimed in the
distance. The man straightened himself at once, adjusted his bag of
tools, and hurried off, nodding to his wife.

She looked after him a minute, then turned and came slowly along
the alley towards the bench where David sat, idly watching her. The
heat was growing steadily, the child was heavy on her hand, and she
was again clearly on the way to motherhood. The seat invited her,
and she came up to it.

She sat down, panting, and eyed her neighbour askance, detecting at
once how handsome he was, and how unshorn and haggard. Before he
knew where he was, or how it had begun, they were talking. She had
no shyness of any sort, and, as it seemed to him, a motherly,
half-contemptuous indulgence for his sex, as such, which fitted
oddly with her young looks. Very soon she was asking him the most
direct questions, which he had to parry as best he could. She made
out at once that he was a foreigner and in the book trade, and then
she let him know by a passing expression or two that naturally she
understood why he was lounging there in that plight at that hour in
the morning. He had been keeping gay company, of course, and had
but just emerged from some nocturnal orgie or other. And then she
shrugged her strong shoulders with a light, pitiful air, as though
marvelling once more for the thousandth time over the stupidity of
men who would commit these idiocies, would waste their money and
health in them, say what women would.

Presently he discovered that she was giving him advice of different
kinds, counselling him above all to find a good wife who would work
and save his wages for him. A decent marriage was in truth an
economy, though young men would never believe it.

David could only stare at her in return for her counsels. The
difference between his place at that moment in the human comedy and
hers was too great to be explained; it called only for silence or a
stammering commonplace or two. Yet for a few moments the
neighbourhood of her and her child was pleasant to him. She had a
good comely head, which was bare under the sun, a little shawl
crossed upon her ample bust, and a market-basket on her arm. The
child was playing in the fine gravel at her feet, pausing every now
and then to study her mother's eye with a furtive gravity, while
the hat fell back and made a still more fantastic combination than
before with the pensive little face.

Presently, tired of her play, she came to stand by her mother's
knee, laying her head against it.

'_Mon petit ange! que tu es gentille!_' said the mother in a
low, rapid voice, pressing her hand on the child's cheek. Then,
turning back to David, she chattered on about the profit and loss
of married life. All that she said was steeped in prose--in the
prose especially of sous and francs; she talked of rents, of the
price of food, of the state of wages in her husband's trade. Yet
every here and there came an exquisite word, a flash. It seemed
that she had been very ill with her first child. She did not mince
matters much even with this young man, and David gathered that she
had not only been near dying, but that her illness had made a moral
epoch in her life. She was laid by for three months; work was slack
for her husband; her own earnings, for she was a skilled
embroideress working for a great linen-shop in the Rue Vivienne,
were no longer forthcoming. Would her husband put up with it, with
the worries of the baby, and the _menage_, and the sick wife,
and that sharp pinch of want into the bargain, from which during
two years she had completely protected him?

'I cried one day,' she said simply; 'I said to him, "You're just
sick of it, ain't you? Well, I'm going to die. Go and shift for
yourself, and take the baby to the _Enfants Trouves. Alors--_"'

She paused, her homely face gently lit up from within. 'He is not a
man of words--Jules. He told me to be quiet, called me _petite
sotte_. "Haven't you slaved for two years?" he said. "Well,
then, lie still, can't you?--_faut bien que chacun prenne son
tour!_"'

She broke off, smiling and shaking her head. Then glancing round
upon her companion again, she resumed her motherly sermon. That was
the good of being married; that there was some one to share the bad
times with, as well as the good.

'But perhaps,' she inquired briskly, 'you don't believe in being
married? You are for _l'union libre?_'

She spoke like one touching on a long familiar question--as much a
question indeed of daily life and of her class as those other
matters of wages and food she had been discussing.

A slow and painful red mounted into the Englishman's cheek.

'I don't know,' he said stupidly. 'And you?'

'No, no!' she said emphatically, twice, nodding her head. 'Oh, I was
brought up that way. My father was a Red--an Anarchist--a great man
among them; he died last year. He said that liberty was everything.
It made him mad when any of his friends accepted _l'union
légale_--for him it was a treason. He never married my mother,
though he was faithful to her all his life. But for me--' she
paused, shaking her head slowly. 'Well, I had an elder sister--that
says everything. _Faut pas en parler;_ it makes melancholy,
and one must keep up one's spirits when one is like this. It is
three years since she died; she was my father's favourite. When
they buried her--she died in the hospital--I sat down and thought a
little. It was abominable what she had suffered, and I said to
myself, "Why?"'

The child swayed backward against her knee, so absorbed was it in
its thumb and the sky, and would have fallen but that she caught it
with her housewife's hand, being throughout mindful of its
slightest movement.

'"Why?" I said. She was a good creature--a bit foolish perhaps,
but she would have worked the shoes off her feet to please anybody.
And they had treated her--but like a dog! It bursts one's heart to
think of it, and I said to myself,--_le mariage c'est la
justice!_ it is nothing but that. It is not what the priests
say--oh! not at all. But it strikes me like that--_c'est la
justice_; it is nothing but that!'

And she looked at him with the bright fixed eyes of one whose
thoughts are beyond their own expressing. He interrupted her,
wondering at the harsh rapidity of his own voice. 'But if it is the
woman who will be free?--who will have no bond?'

Her expression changed, became shrewd, inquisitive, personal.

'Well, then!' she said with a shrug, and paused. 'It is because one
is ignorant, you see, or one is bad--_on peut toujours être une
coquine!_ And one forgets--one thinks one can be always young,
and love is all pleasure--and it is not true! one get old--and
there is the child--and one may die of it.'

She spoke with the utmost simplicity, yet with a certain intensity.
Evidently she had a natural pride in her philosophy of life, as
though in a possession of one's own earning and elaborating. She
had probably expressed it often before in much the same terms, and
with the same verbal hitches and gaps.

The young fellow beside her rose hastily, and bade her good morning.
She looked mildly surprised at such an abrupt departure, but she
was not offended.

'Good day, citizen,' she said, nodding to him. 'I disturb you?'

He muttered something and strode away.

How much time had that wasted of his irrevocable day that was to
set him on Elise's track once more! The first post had been
delivered by this time. Elise must either return to her studio or
remove her possessions; anyhow, sooner or later the Merichats must
have information. And if they were forbidden to speak, well, then
they must be bribed.

That made him think of money, and in a sudden panic he turned aside
into a small street and examined his pockets. Nearly four napoleons
left, after allowing for his debt to Madame Pyat, which must be
payed that day. Even in his sick, stunned state of the evening
before, when he was at last staggering on again, after his fall, to
the Fontainebleau station, he had remembered to stop a Barbizon man
whom he came across and give him a pencilled message for the
deserted madame. He had sent her the Tue Chantal address, there
would be a letter from her this morning. And he must put her on the
watch, too--Elise could not escape him long.

But he must have more money. He looked out for a stationer's shop,
went in and wrote a letter to John, which he posted at the next
post-office.

It was an incoherent scrawl, telling the lad to change the cheque
he enclosed in Bank of England notes and send them to the Rue
Chantal, care of Madame Merichat. He was not to expect him back
just yet, and was to say to any friend who might inquire that he
was still detained.

That letter, with the momentary contact it involved with his
Manchester life, brought down upon him again the thought of Louie.
But this time he flung it from him with a fierce impatience. His
brain, indeed, was incapable of dealing with it. Remorse? rescue?
there would be time enough for that by-and-by. Meanwhile--to find
Elise!

And for a week he spent the energies of every thought and every
moment on this mad pursuit. Of these days of nightmare he could
afterwards remember but a few detached incidents here and there. He
recollected patrols up and down the Rue Chantal; talks with Madame
Merichat; the gleam in her eyes as he slipped his profitless bribes
into her hand; visits to Taranne's _atelier_, where the
_concierge_ at last grew suspicious and reported the matter
within; and finally an interview with the artist himself, from
which the English youth emerged no nearer to his end than before,
and crushed under the humiliation of the great man's advice. He
could vaguely recall the long pacings of the Louvre; the fixed
scrutiny of face after face; vain chases; ignominious retreats; and
all the wretched stages of that slow descent into a bottomless
despair! At last there was a letter--the long-expected letter to
Madame Merichat, directing the removal of Mademoiselle Delaunay's
possessions from the Rue Chantal. It was written by a certain M.
Pimodan, who did not give his address, but who declared himself
authorised by Mademoiselle Delaunay to remove her effects, and
named a day when he would himself superintend the process and
produce his credentials. David passed the time after the arrival of
this letter in a state of excitement which left him hardly master
of his actions. He had a room at the top of a wretched little hotel
close to the Nord station, but he hardly ate or slept. The noises
of Paris were agony to him night and day; he lived in a perpetual
nausea of mind and body, hardly able at times to distinguish
between the images of the brain and the impressions coming from
without.

Before the day came, a note was brought to him from the Rue
Chantal. It was from M. Pimodan, and requested an interview.

'I should be glad to see you on Mademoiselle Delaunay's behalf.
Will you meet me in the Garden of the Luxembourg in front of the
central pavilion, at three o'clock to-morrow?

'GUSTAVE PIMODAN.'

Before the hour came David was already pacing up and down the
blazing gravel in front of the Palace. When M. Pimodan came the
Englishman in an instant recognised the cousin--the lanky fellow
with the spectacles, who had injured his eyes by reading.

As soon as he had established this identification--and the two men
had hardly exchanged half-a-dozen sentences before the flashing
inward argument was complete--a feeling of enmity arose in his
mind, so intense that he could hardly keep himself still, could
hardly bring his attention to bear on what he or his companion was
saying. He had been brought so low that, with anyone else, he must
have broken into appeals and entreaties. With this man--No!

As for M. Pimodan, the first sight of the young Englishman had
apparently wrought in him also some degree of nervous shock; for
the hand which held his cane fidgeted as he walked. He had the air
of a person, too, who had lately gone through mental struggle; the
red rims of the eyes under their large spectacles might be due
either to chronic weakness or to recent sleeplessness.

But however these things might be, he took a perfectly mild tone,
in which David's sick and irritable sense instantly detected the
note of various offensive superiorities--the superiority of class
and the superiority of age to begin with. He said in the first
place that he was Mademoiselle Delaunay's relative, and that she
had commissioned him to act for her in this very delicate matter.
She was well aware--had been aware from the first day--that she was
watched, and that M. Grieve was moving heaven and earth to discover
her whereabouts. She did not, however, intend to be discovered; let
him take that for granted. In her view all was over--their relation
was irrevocably at an end. She wished now to devote herself wholly
and entirely to her art, without disturbance or distraction from
any other quarter whatever. Might he, under these circumstances,
give M. Grieve the advice of a man of the world, and counsel him to
regard the matter in the same light?

David walked blindly on, playing with his watch-chain. In the name
of God whom and what was this fellow talking about? At the end of
ten minutes' discourse on M. Pimodan's part, and of a few rare
monosyllables on his own, he said, straightening his young figure
with a nervous tremor:

'What you say is perfectly useless--I shall find her.'

Then a sudden angry light leapt into the cousin's eyes.

'You will _not_ find her!' he said, drawing a sharp breath. 'It
shows how little you know her, after all--compared with--those
who--No matter! Oh, you can persecute and annoy her! No one doubts
that. You can stand between her and all that she now cares to live
for--her art. But you can do nothing else; and you will not be
allowed to do that long, for she is not alone, as you seem to
think. She will be protected. There are resources, and we shall
employ them!'

The cousin had gone beyond his commission. David guessed as much.
He did not believe that Elise had set this man on to threaten him.
What a fool! But he merely said with a sarcastic dryness,
endeavouring the while to steady his parched lips and his eyelids
swollen with weariness.

'_A la bonne heure!_--employ them. Well, sir, you know, I
believe, where Mademoiselle Delaunay is. I wish to know. You will
not inform me. I therefore pursue my own way, and it is useless for
me to detain you any longer.'

'Know where she is!' cried the other, a triumphant flash passing
across his sallow student's face; 'I have but just parted from her.'

But he stopped. As a physician, he was accustomed to notice the
changes of physiognomy. Instinctively he put some feet of distance
between himself and his companion. Was it agony or rage he saw?

But David recovered himself by a strong effort.

'Go and tell her, then, that I shall find her,' he said with a
shaking voice. 'I have many things to say to her yet.'

'Absurd!' cried the other angrily. 'Very well, sir, we know what to
expect. It only remains for us to take measures accordingly.'

And drawing himself up he walked quickly away, looking back every
now and then to see whether he were followed or no.

'Supposing I did track him,' thought David vaguely, 'what would he
do? Summon one of the various _gardiens_ in sight?'

He had, however, no such intention. What could it have ended in but
a street scuffle? Patience! and he would find Elise for himself in
spite of that prater.

Meanwhile he descended the terrace, and threw himself, worn out,
upon the first seat, to collect his thoughts again.

Oh, this summer beauty:--this festal moment of the great city!
Palace and Garden lay under the full June sun. The clipped trees on
the terraces, statues, alleys, and groves slept in the luminous
dancing air. All the normal stir and movement of the Garden seemed
to have passed to-day into the leaping and intermingling curves of
the fountains; the few figures passing and repassing hardly
disturbed the general impression of heat and solitude.

For hours David sat there, head down, his eyes on the gravel, his
hands tightly clasped between his knees. When he rose at last it
was to hurry down the Rue de Seine and take the nearest bridge and
street northwards to the Quartier Montmartre. He had been dreaming
too long! and yet so great by now was his confusion of mind that he
was no nearer a fresh plan of operations than when the cousin left
him.

When he arrived at Madame Merichat's _loge_ it was to find
that no new development had occurred. Elise's possessions were
still untouched; neither she nor M. Pimodan had given any further
sign. The _concierge_, however, gave him a letter which had
just arrived for him. Seeing that it bore the Manchester postmark,
he thrust it into his pocket unread.

When he entered the evil-smelling passage of his hotel, a
_garcon_ emerged from the restaurant, dived into the _salle
de lecture_, and came out with an envelope, which he gave to the
Englishman. It had been left by a messenger five minutes before
monsieur arrived. David took it, a singing in his ears; mounted to
the first landing, where the gas burnt at midday, and read it.

'Gustave tells me you would not listen to him. Do you want to make me
curse our meeting? Be a man and leave me to myself! While I know that
you are on the watch I shall keep away from Paris--_voilà, tout_. I
shall eat my heart out,--I shall begin to hate you,--you will have
chosen it so. Only understand this: I will _never_ see you again, for
both our sakes, if I can help it. Believe what I say--believe that what
parts us is a fate stronger than either of us, and go! Oh! you men talk
of love--and at bottom you are all selfish and cruel. Do you want to
break me more than I am already broken? Set me free!--will you kill both
my youth and my art together?'

He carefully refolded the letter and put it into its envelope. Then
he turned and went downstairs again towards the street. But the
same frowsy waiter who had given him his letter was on the watch
for him. In the morning monsieur had commanded some dinner. Would
he take it now?

The man's tone was sulky. David understood that he was not
considered a profitable customer of the hotel--that, considering
his queer ways, late hours, and small spendings, they would
probably be glad to be rid of him. With a curious submission and
shrinking he followed the man into the stifling restaurant and sat
down at one of the tables.

Here some food was brought to him, which he tried to eat. But in
the midst of it he was seized with so great a loathing, that he
suddenly rose, so violently as to upset a plate of bread beside
him, and make a waiter spring forward to save the table itself. He
pushed his way to the glass-door into the street, totally
unconscious of the stir his behaviour was causing among the stout
women in bonnets and the red-faced men with napkins tucked under
their chins who were dining near, fumbled at the handle, and
tottered out.

'_Quel animal!_' said the enraged _dame du comptoir_,
who had noticed the incident. 'Marie!'--this to the sickly girl who
sat near with the books in front of her, 'enter that plate, and
charge it high. To-morrow I shall raise the price of his room. One
must really finish with him. _C'est un fou!_'

Meanwhile David, revived somewhat by the air, was already in the
Boulevard, making for Opera and the Rue Royale. It was not yet
seven, the Salon would be still open. The distances seemed to
him interminable--the length of the Rue Royale, the expanse
of the Place de la Concorde, the gay and crowded ways of the
Champs-Elysée. But at last he was mounting the stairs and battling
through the rooms at the top. He looked first at the larger picture
which had gained her _mention honorable_. It was a study of
factory girls at their work, unequal, impatient, but full of a warm
inventive talent--full of _her_. He knew its history--the
small difficulties and triumphs of it, the adventures she had gone
through on behalf of it--by heart. That fair-haired girl in the
corner was studied from herself; the tint of the hair, the curve of
the cheek were exact. He strained his eyes to look, searching for
this detail and that. His heart said farewell--that was the last,
the nearest he should ever come to her on this earth! Next year?
Ah, he would give much to see her pictures of next year, with these
new perceptions she had created in him.

He stood a minute before the other picture, the portrait--a study
from one of her comrades in the _atelier_--and then he wound
his way again through the thronged and suffocating rooms, and out
into the evening.

The excessive heat of the last few days was about to end in storm.
A wide tempestuous heaven lay beyond the Arc de Triomphe; the red
light struck down the great avenue and into the faces of those
stepping westwards. The deep shade under the full-leafed trees--how
thinly green they were still against the sky that day when she
vanished from him beside the arch and their love began!--was full
of loungers and of playing children; the carriages passed and
repassed in the light. So it had been, the enchanting never-ending
drama, before this spectator entered--so it would be when he had
departed.

He turned southwards and found himself presently on the Quai de la
Conference, hanging over the river in a quiet spot where few people
passed.

His frenzy of will was gone, and his last hope with it. Elise had
conquered. Her letter had brought him face to face with those
realities which, during this week of madness, he had simply refused
to see. He could pit himself against her no longer. When it came to
the point he had not the nerve to enter upon a degrading and
ignoble conflict, in which all that was to be won was her hatred or
her fear. That, indeed, would be the last and worst ruin, for it
would be the ruin, not of happiness or of hope, but of love itself,
and memory.

He took out her letter and re-read it. Then he searched for some of
the writing materials he had bought when he had written his last
letter to Manchester, and, spreading a sheet on the parapet of the
river wall, he wrote:

'Be content. I think now--I am sure--that we shall never meet
again. From this moment you will be troubled with me no more. Only
I tell you for the last time that you have done ill--irrevocably
ill. For what you have slain in yourself and me is not love or
happiness, but _life_ itself--the life of life!'

Foolish, incoherent words, as they seemed to him, but he could find
no better. Confusedly and darkly they expressed the cry, the inmost
conviction of his being. He could come no nearer at any rate to
that desolation at the heart of him.

But now what next? Manchester?--the resumption and expansion of his
bookseller's life--the renewal of his old friendships--the pursuit
of money and of knowledge?

No. That is all done. The paralysis of will is complete. He cannot
drive himself home, back to the old paths. The disgust with life
has sunk too deep--the physical and moral collapse of which he is
conscious has gone too far.

_'Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of
this death?'_

There, deep in the fibre of memory lie these words, and others like
them--the typical words of a religion which is still in some sense
the ineradicable warp of his nature, as it had been for generations
of his forefathers. His individual resources of speech, as it were,
have been overpassed; he falls back upon the inherited, the
traditional resources of his race.

He looked up. A last gleam was on the Invalides--on the topmost
roof of the Corps Législatif; otherwise the opposite bank was
already grey, the river lay in shade. But the upper air was still
aglow with the wide flame and splendour of the sunset; and beneath,
on the bridges and the water and the buildings, how clear and
gracious was the twilight!

_'Who shall deliver me?' 'Deliver thyself!'_ One instant, and
the intolerable pressure on this shrinking point of consciousness
can be lightened, this hunger for sleep appeased! Nothing else is
possible--no future is even conceivable. His life in flowering has
exhausted and undone itself, so spendthrift has been the process.

So he took his resolve. Then, already calmed, he hung over the
river, thinking, reviewing the past.

Six weeks--six weeks only!--yet nothing in his life before matters
or counts by comparison. For this mood of deadly fatigue the
remembrance of all the intellectual joys and conquests of the last
few years has no savour whatever. Strange that the development of
one relation of life--the relation of passion--should have been
able so to absorb and squander the power of living! His fighting,
enduring capacity, compared with that of other men, must be small
indeed. He thinks of himself as a coward and a weakling. But
neither the facts of the present nor the face of the future are
altered thereby.

_The relation of sex_--in its different phases--as he sees the
world at this moment, there is no other reality. The vile and
hideous phase of it has been present to him from the first moment
of his arrival in these Paris streets. He thinks of the pictures
and songs at the 'Trois Rats' from which in the first delicacy and
flush of passion he had shrunk with so deep a loathing; of the
photographs and engravings in the shops and the books on the
stalls; of some of those pictures he had passed, a few minutes
before, in the Salon; of that girl's face in the Tuileries Gardens.
The animal, the beast in human nature, never has it been so present
to him before; for he has understood and realised it while loathing
it, has been admitted by his own passion to those regions of human
feeling where all that is most foul and all that is most beautiful
are generated alike from the elemental forces of life. And because
he had loved Elise so finely and yet so humanly, with a boy's
freshness and a man's energy, this animalism of the great city had
been to him a perpetual nightmare and horror. His whole heart had
gone into Regnault's cry--into Regnault's protest. For his own
enchanted island had seemed to him often in the days of his wooing
to be but floating on the surface of a ghastly sea, whence emerged
all conceivable shapes of ruin, mockery, terror, and disease. It
was because of the tremulous adoration which filled him from the
beginning that the vice of Paris had struck him in this tragical
way. At another time it might have been indifferent to him, might
even have engulfed him.

But he!--he had known the best of passion! He laid his head down on
the wall, and lived Barbizon over again--day after day, night after
night. Now for the first time there is a pause in the urging
madness of his despair. All the pulses of his being slacken; he
draws back as it were from his own fate, surveys it as a whole,
separates himself from it. The various scenes of it succeed each
other in memory, set always--incomparably set--in the spring green
of the forest, or under a charmed moonlight, or amid the flowery
detail of a closed garden. Her little figure flashes before
him--he sees her gesture, her smile; he hears his own voice
and hers; recalls the struggle to express, the poverty of words,
the thrill of silence, and that perpetual and exquisite recurrence
to the interpreting images of poetry and art. But no poet had
imagined better, had divined more than they in those earliest
hours had _lived_! So he had told her, so he insisted now with
a desperate faith.

But, poor soul! even as he insists, the agony within rises, breaks
up, overwhelms the picture. He lives again through the jars and
frets of those few burning days, the growing mistrust of them, the
sense of jealous terror and insecurity--and then through the
anguish of desertion and loss. He writhes again under the wrenching
apart of their half-fused lives--under this intolerable ache of his
own wound.

_This_ the best of passion! Why his whole soul is still
athirst and ahungered. Not a single craving of it has been
satisfied. What is killing him is the sense of a thwarted gift, a
baffled faculty--the faculty of self-spending, self-surrender.
This, the best?

Then the mind fell into a whirlwind of half-articulate debate, from
the darkness of which emerged two scenes--fragments--set clear in a
passing light of memory.

That workman and his wife standing together before the day's
toil--the woman's contented smile as her look clung to the mean
departing figure.

And far, far back in his boyish life--Margaret sitting beside 'Lias
in the damp autumn dawn, spending on his dying weakness that
exquisite, ineffable passion of tenderness, of pity.

Ah! from the very beginning he had been in love with loving. He
drew the labouring breath of one who has staked his all for some
long-coveted gain, and lost.

Well!--Mr. Ancrum may be right--the English Puritan may be
right--'sin' and 'law' may have after all some of those mysterious
meanings his young analysis had impetuously denied them--he and
Elise may have been only dashing themselves against the hard facts
of the world's order, while they seemed to be transcending the
common lot and spurning the common ways. What matter now! A certain
impatient defiance rises in his stricken soul. He has made
shipwreck of this one poor opportunity of life--confessed! now let
the God behind it punish, if God there be. _'The rest is silence.
'_ With Elise in his arms, he had grasped at immortality. Now a
stubborn, everlasting 'Nay' possesses him. There is nothing beyond.

He gathered up his letter, folded it, and put it into the
breast--pocket of his coat. But in doing so his fingers touched
once more the ragged edges of a bit of frayed paper.

_Louie!_

Through all these half-sane days and nights he had never once
thought of his sister. She had passed out of his life--she had
played no part even in the nightmares of his dreams.

But now!--while that intense denial of any reality in the universe
beyond and behind this masque of life and things was still
vibrating through his deepest being, it was as though a hand gently
drew aside a curtain, and there grew clear before him, slowly
effacing from his eyes the whole grandiose spectacle of buildings,
sky, and river, that scene of the past which had worked so potently
both in his childish sense and in Reuben's maturer conscience--the
bare room, the iron bed, the dying man, one child within his arm,
the other a frightened baby beside him.

It was frightfully clear, clearer than it had ever been in
any normal state of brain, and as his mind lingered on it,
unconsciously shaping, deepening its own creation, the weird
impression grew that the helpless figure amid the bedclothes rose
on its elbow, opened its cavernous eyes, and looked at him face to
face, at the son whose childish heart had beat against his father's
to the last. The boy's tortured soul quailed afresh before the
curse his own remorse called into those eyes.

He hung over the water pleading with the phantom--defending
himself. Every now and then he found that he was speaking aloud;
then he would look round with a quick, piteous terror to see
whether he had been heard or no, the parched lips beginning to move
again almost before his fear was soothed.

All his past returned upon him, with its obligations, its fetters
of conscience and kinship, so slowly forged, so often resisted and
forgotten, and yet so strong. The moment marked the first passing
away of the philtre, but it brought no recovery with it.

_'My God! my God! I tried, father--I tried. But she is lost,
lost--as I am!'_

Then a thought found entrance and developed. He walked up and down
the quay, wrestling it out, returning slowly and with enormous
difficulty, because of his physical state, to some of the normal
estimates and relations of life.

At last he dragged himself off towards his hotel. He must have some
sleep, or how could these hours that yet remained be lived
through--his scheme carried out?

On the way he went into a shop still open on the boulevard. When he
came out he thrust his purchase into his pocket, buttoned his coat
over it, and pursued his way northwards with a brisker step.




CHAPTER XI


Two days afterwards David stood at the door of a house in the
outskirts of the Auteuil district of Paris. The street had a
half-finished, miscellaneous air; new buildings of the villa type
were mixed up with old and dingy houses standing in gardens, which
had been evidently overtaken by the advancing stream of Paris,
having once enjoyed a considerable amount of country air and space.

It was at the garden gate of one of these older houses that David
rang, looking about him the while at the mean irregular street and
the ill-kept side-walks with their heaps of cinders and refuse.

A powerfully built woman appeared, scowling, in answer to the bell.
At first she flatly refused the new-comer admission. But David was
prepared. He set to work to convince her that he was not a Paris
creditor, and, further, that he was well aware M. Montjoie was not
at home, since he had passed him on the other side of the road,
apparently hurrying to the railway station, only a few minutes
before. He desired simply to see madame. At this the woman's
expression changed somewhat. She showed, however, no immediate
signs of letting him in, being clearly chosen and paid to be a
watch-dog. Then David brusquely put his hand in his pocket. Somehow
he must get this harridan out of the way at once! The same terror
was upon him that had been upon him now for many days and
nights--of losing command of himself, of being no more able to do
what he had to do.

The creature studied him, put out a greedy palm, developed a smile
still more repellent than her brutality, and let him in.

He found himself in a small, neglected garden; in front of him, to
the right, a wretched, weather-stained house, bearing every mark of
poverty and dilapidation, while to the left there stretched out
from the house a long glass structure, also in miserable
condition--a sculptor's studio, as he guessed.

His guide led him to the studio-door. Madame was there a few
minutes ago. As they approached, David stopped.

'I will knock. You may go back to the house. I am madame's brother.'

She looked at him once more, reluctant. Then, in the clearer light
of the garden, the likeness of the face to one she already knew
struck her with amazement; she turned and went off, muttering.

David knocked at the door; there was a movement within, and it was
cautiously opened.

'_Monsieur est sorti._--You!'

The brother and sister were face to face.

David closed the door behind him, and Louie retreated slowly, her
hands behind her, her tall figure drawing itself up, her face
setting into a frowning scorn.

'_You!_--what are you here for? We have done with each other!'

For answer David went up to a stove which was feebly burning in the
damp, cheerless place, put down his hat and stick, and bent over
it, stretching out his hands to the warmth. A chair was beside it,
and on the chair some scattered bits of silk and velvet, out of
which Louie was apparently fashioning a hat.

She stood still, observing him. She was in a loose dress of some
silky Oriental material, and on her black hair she wore a red
close-fitting cap with a fringe of golden coins dropping lightly
and richly round her superb head and face.

'What is the matter with you?' she asked him grimly, after a
minute's silence.' She has left you--that's plain!'

The young man involuntarily threw back his head as though he had
been struck, and a vivid colour rushed into his cheek. But he
answered quickly:

'We need not discuss my affairs. I did not come here to speak of
them. They are beyond mending. I came to see--before I go--whether
there is anything I can do to help you.'

'Much obliged to you!' she cried, flinging herself down on the edge
of a rough board platform, whereon stood a fresh and vigorous
clay-study, for which she had just been posing, to judge from her
dress. Beyond was the Maenad. And in the distance loomed a great
block of marble, upon which masons had been working that afternoon.

'I am _greatly_ obliged to you!' she repeated mockingly,
taking the crouching attitude of an animal ready to attack. 'You are
a pattern brother.'

Her glowing looks expressed the enmity and contempt she was at the
moment too excited to put into words.

David drew his hand across his eyes with a long breath. How was he
to get through it, this task of his, with this swollen, aching
brain and these trembling limbs? Louie _must_ let him speak;
he bitterly felt his physical impotence to wrestle with her.

He went up to her slowly and sat down beside her. She drew away
from him with a violent movement. But he laid his hand upon her
knee--a shaking hand which his impatient will tried in vain to
steady.

'Louie, look at me!' he commanded.

She did so unwillingly, but the proud repulsion of her lip did not
relax.

'Well, I dare say you look pretty bad. Whose fault is it? everybody
else but you knew what the creature was worth. Ask anybody!'

The lad's frame straightened and steadied. He took his hand from
her knee.

'Say that kind of thing again,' he said calmly, 'and I walk straight
out of that door, and you set eyes on me for the last time. That
would be what you want, I dare say. All I wish to point out is,
that you would be a great fool. I have not come here to-day to waste
words, but to propose something to your advantage--your
money-advantage,' he repeated deliberately, looking round the
dismal building with its ill-mended gaps and rents, and its
complete lack of the properties and appliances to which the
humblest modern artist pretends. 'To judge from what I heard in
Paris, and what I see, money is scarce here.'

His piteous sudden wish to soften her, to win a kind word from her,
from anyone, had passed away. He was beginning to take command of
her as in the old days.

'Well, maybe we are hard up,' she admitted slowly. 'People are such
brutes and won't wait, and a sculptor has to pay out for a lot of
things before he can make anything at all. But that statue will put
it all right,' and she pointed behind her to the Maenad. 'It's
me--it's the one you tried to put a stopper on.'

She looked at him darkly defiant. She was leaning back on one arm,
her foot beating with the trick familiar to her. For reckless and
evil splendour the figure was unsurpassable.

'When he sells that,' she went on, seeing that he did not answer,
'and he will sell it in a jiffy--it is the best he's ever
done--there'll be heaps of money.'

David smiled.

'For a week perhaps. Then, if I understand this business aright--I
have been doing my best, you perceive, to get information, and M.
Montjoie seems to be better known than one supposed to half
Paris--the game will begin again.'

'Never you mind,' she broke in, breathing quickly. 'Give me my
money--the money that belongs to me--and let me alone.'

'On one condition,' he said quietly. 'That money, as you remember,
is in my hands and at my disposal.'

'Ah! I supposed you would try to grab it!' she cried.

Even he was astonished at her violence--her insolence. The demon in
her had never been so plain, the woman never so effaced. His heart
dropped within him like lead, and his whole being shrank from her.

'Listen to me!' he said, seizing her strongly by the hand, while a
light of wrath leapt into his changed and bloodshot eyes. 'This man
will desert you; in a year's time he will have tired of you;
what'll you do then?'

'Manage for myself, thank you! without any canting interference
from you. I have had enough of that.'

'And fall again,' he said, releasing her, and speaking with a
deliberate intensity; 'fall again--from infamy to infamy!'

She sprang up.

'Mind yourself!' she cried.

Miserable moment! As he looked at her he felt that that weapon of
his old influence with her which, poor as it was, he had relied on
in the last resort all his life, had broken in his hand. His own
act had robbed it of all virtue. That pang of 'irreparableness'
which had smitten Elise smote him now. All was undone--all was
done!

He buried his face in his hands an instant. When he lifted it
again, she was standing with her arms folded across her chest,
leaning against an iron shaft which supported part of the roof.

'You had better go!' she said, still in a white heat. 'Why you ever
came I don't know. If you won't give me that money, I shall get it
somehow.'

Suddenly, as she spoke, everything--the situation, the subject of
their talk, the past--seemed to be wiped out of David's brain. He
stared round him helplessly. Why were they there--what had
happened?

This blankness lasted a certain number of seconds. Then it passed
away, and he painfully recovered his identity. But the experience
was not new to him--it would recur--let him be quick.

This time a happier instinct served him. He, too, rose and went up
to her.

'We are a pair of fools,' he said to her, half bitterly, half
gently; 'we reproach and revile each other, and all the time I am
come to give you not only what is yours, but all--all I have--that
it may stand between you and--and worse ruin.'

'Ruin!' she said, throwing back her head and catching at the word;
'speak for yourself! If I am Montjoie's mistress, Elise Delaunay
was yours. Don't preach. It won't go down.'

'I have no intention of preaching--don't alarm yourself,' he
replied quietly, this time controlling himself without difficulty.'

'I have only this to say. On the day when you become Montjoie's
wife, all our father's money--all the six hundred pounds Mr. Gurney
paid over to me in January, shall be paid to you.'

She started, caught her breath, tried to brazen it out.

'What is this idiocy for?' she asked coldly. 'What does marrying
matter to you?'

He sank down again on the chair by the stove, being, indeed, unable
to stand.

'Perhaps I can't tell you,' he said, after a pause, shading his
face from her with his hand; 'perhaps I could not make plain to
myself what I feel. But this I know--that this man with whom you
are living here is a man for whom nobody has a good word. I want to
give you a hold over him. But first--stop a moment, '--he dropped
his hand and looked up eagerly, 'will you leave him--leave him at
once? I could arrange that.'

'Make your mind easy,' she said shortly; 'he suits me--I stay. I
went with him, well, because I was dull--and because I wanted to
make you smart for it, if you're keen to know!--but if you think I
am anxious to go home, to be cried over by Dora and lectured by
you, you're vastly mistaken. I can manage him! I have my hold on
him--he knows very well what I am worth to him.'

She threw her head back superbly against the iron shaft, putting
one arm round it and resting her hot cheek against it as though for
coolness.

'Why should we argue?' he said sharply--after a wretched silence.
'I didn't come for that. If you won't leave him I have only this to
say. On the day he marries you, if the evidence of the marriage is
satisfactory to an English lawyer I have discovered in Paris and
whose address I will give you, six hundred pounds will be paid over
to you. It is there now, in the lawyer's hands. If not, I go home,
and the law does not compel me to hand you over one farthing.'

She was silent, and began to pace up and down.

'Montjoie despises marriage,' she said presently.

'Try whether he despises money too,' said David, and could not for
the life of him keep the sarcastic note out of his voice.

She bit her lip.

'And when, if it is done, must this precious thing be settled?'

'If your marriage does not take place within a month, Mr.
O'Kelly--I will leave you his address,' he put his hand into his
pocket--'has orders to return the money--'

'To whom?' she inquired, struck by his sudden break.

'To me, of course,' he said slowly. 'Is it perfectly plain? do you
understand? Now, then, listen. I have inquired what the law is--you
will have to be married both at the mairie and by the chaplain at
the British embassy.'

She stopped suddenly in her walk and confronted him.

'If I am married at all,' she said abruptly, 'I shall be married as
a Catholic.'

'A Catholic!' David stared at her. She enjoyed his astonishment.

'Oh, I have had that in my mind for a long time,' she said
scornfully. 'There is a priest at that church with the steps, you
know, near that cemetery place on the hill, who is very much
interested in me indeed. He speaks English. I used to go to
confession. Madame Cervin told me all about it, and how to do it; I
did it exact! Oh, if I am to be married, that will make it plain
sailing enough. It was awkward--while--'

She broke off and sat down again beside him, pondering and smiling
as he had seen her do in Manchester, when she had the prospect of a
new dress or some amusement that excited her.

'How have you been able to think about such things?' he asked her,
marvelling.

'Think about them! What was the good of that? It's the churches I like,
and the priests. Now there _is_ something to see in the Paris churches,
like the Madeleine--worth a dozen St. Damian's,--you may tell Dora that.
The flowers and the dresses and the music--they _are_ something like.
And the priests--'

She smiled again, little meditative smiles, as though she were
recalling her experiences.

'Well, I don't know that there's much about them,' she said at
last; 'they're queer, and they're awfully clever, and they want to
manage you, of course.'

She stopped, quite unable to express herself any more fully. But it
was evident that the traditional relation of the Catholic priest to
his penitent had been to her a subject of curiosity and
excitement--that she would gladly know more of it.

David could hardly believe his ears. He sat lost at first in the
pure surprise of it, in the sense of Louie's unlikeness to any
other human creature he had ever seen. Then a gleam of satisfaction
arose. He had heard of the hold on women possessed by the Catholic
Church, and maintained by her marvellous, and on the whole
admirable, system of direction. For himself, he would have no
priests of whatever Church. But his mind harboured none of the
common Protestant rules and shibboleths. In God's name, let the
priests get hold of this sister of his:--if they could--when he--

'Marry this man, then!' he said to her at last, breaking the silence
abruptly,' and square it with the Church, if you want to.'

'Oh, indeed!' she said mockingly. 'So you have nothing to say
against my turning Catholic? I should like to see Uncle Reuben's
face.'

Her voice had the exultant mischief of a child. It was evident that
her spirits were rising, that her mood towards her brother was
becoming more amiable.

'Nothing,' he said dryly, replying to her question.

Then he got up and looked for his hat. She watched him askance.
'What are you going for? I could get you some tea. _He_ won't
be in for hours.'

'I have said what I had to say. These'--taking a paper from his
pocket and laying it down, 'are all the directions, legal and other,
that concern you, as to the marriage. I drew them up this morning,
with Mr. O'Kelly. I have given you his address. You can communicate
with him at any time.'

'I can write to you, I suppose?'

'Better write to him,' he said quietly, 'he has instructions. He
seemed to me a good sort.'

'Where are you going?'

'Back to Paris, and then--home.'

She placed herself in his way, so that the sunny light of the late
afternoon, coming mostly from behind her, left her face in shadow.

'What'll you do without that money?' she asked abruptly.

He paused, getting together his answer with difficulty.

'I have the stock, and there is something left of the sixty pounds
Uncle Reuben brought. I shall do.'

'He'll muddle it all,' she said roughly. 'What's the good?'

And she folded her arms across her with the recklessness of one
quite ready and eager, if need be, to fight her own battle, with
her own weapons, in her own way.

'Get Mr. O'Kelly to keep it, if you can persuade him, and draw it
by degrees. I'd have made a trust of it, if it had been enough; but
it isn't. Twenty-four pounds a year: that's all you'd get, if we
tied up the capital.'

She laughed. Evidently her acquaintance with Montjoie had enlarged
her notions of money, which were precise and acute enough before.

'He spends that in a supper when he's in cash. I'll be curious to
see whether, all in a lump, it'll be enough to make him marry me.
Still, he is precious hard up: he don't stir out till dark, he's so
afraid of meeting people.'

'That's my hope,' said David heavily, hardly knowing what he said.
'Good-bye.'

'Hope!' she re-echoed bitterly. 'What d'you want to tie me to him
for, for good and all?'

And, turning away from him, she stared, frowning, through the dingy
glass door in to the darkening garden. In her mind there was once
more that strange uprising swell of reaction--of hatred of herself
and life.

Why, indeed? David could not have answered her question. He only
knew that there was a blind instinct in him driving him to this, as
the best that remained open--the only _ainde_ possible for
what had been so vilely done by himself, by her, and by the man who
had worked out her fall for a mere vicious whim. There was no word
in any mouth, it seemed to him, of his being in love with her.

There were all sorts of whirling thoughts in his mind--fragments
cast up by the waves of desolate experience he had been passing
through--inarticulate cries of warning, judgment, pain. But he
could put nothing into words.

'Good-bye, Louie!'

She turned and stood looking at him.

'What made you get ill?' she inquired, eyeing him.

His thirsty heart drank in the change of tone.

'I don't sleep,' he said hurriedly. 'It's the noise. The Nord
station is never quiet. Well, mind you've got to bring that off.
Keep the papers safe. Good-bye, for a long time'.

'I can come over when I want?' she said half sullenly.

'Yes,' he assented, 'but you won't want.'

He drew her by the hand with a solemn tremulous feeling, and kissed
her on the cheek. He would have liked to give her their father's
dying letter. It was there, in his coat-pocket. But he shrank from
the emotion of it. No, he must go. He had done all he could.

She opened the door for him, and took him to the garden-gate in
silence.

'When I'm married,' she said shortly, 'if ever I am--Lord knows!--you
can tell Uncle Reuben and Dora?'

'Yes. Good-bye.'

The gate closed behind him. He went away, hurrying towards the
Auteuil station.

When he landed again in the Paris streets, he stood irresolute.

'One more look,' he said to himself, 'one more.'

And he turned down the Rue Chantal. There was the familiar archway,
and the light shining behind the porter's door. Was her room
already stripped and bare, or was the broken glass--poor dumb
prophet!--still there, against the wall?

He wandered on through the lamp-lit city and the crowded pavements.
Elise--the wraith of her--went with him, hand in hand, ghost with
ghost, amid this multitude of men. Sometimes, breaking from this
dream-companionship, he would wake with terror to the perception of
his true, his utter loneliness. He was not made to be alone, and
the thought that nowhere in this great Paris was there a single
human being to whose friendly eye or hand he might turn him in his
need, swept across him from time to time, contracting the heart.
Dora--Mr. Ancrum--if they knew, they would be sorry.

Then again indifference and blankness came upon him, and he could
only move feebly on, seeing everything in a blur and mist. After
these long days and nights of sleeplessness, semi-starvation, and
terrible excitement, every nerve was sick, every organ out of gear.
The lights of the Tuileries, the stately pile of the Louvre, under
a gray driving sky.--There would be rain soon--ah, there it came!
the great drops hissing along the pavement. He pushed on to the
river, careless of the storm, soothed, indeed, by the cool dashes
of rain in his face and eyes.

The Place de la Concorde seemed to him as day, so brilliant
was the glare of its lamps. To the right, the fairyland of the
Champs-Elysées, the trees tossing under the sudden blast; in front,
the black trench of the river. On, on--let him see it all--gather
it all into his accusing heart and brain, and then at a stroke blot
out the inward and the outward vision, and 'cease upon the midnight
with no pain'!

He walked till he could walk no more; then he sank on a dark seat
on the Quai Saint-Michel, cursing himself. Had he no nerve left for
the last act--was that what this delay, this fooling meant? Coward!

But not here! not in these streets--this publicity! Back--to this
little noisome room. There lock the door, and make an end!

On the way northward, at the command of a sudden caprice, he sat
outside a blazing cafe on the Boulevard and ordered absinthe, which
he had never tasted. While he waited he looked round on the painted
women, on the men escorting them, on the loungers with their
newspapers and cigars, the shouting, supercilious waiters. But all
the little odious details of the scene escaped him; he felt only
the touchingness of his human comradeship, the yearning of a common
life, bruised and wounded but still alive within him.

Then he drank the stuff they gave him, loathed it, paid and
staggered on. When he reached his hotel he crept upstairs, dreading
to meet any of the harsh-faced people who frowned as he passed
them. He had done abject things these last three days to conciliate
them--tipped the waiter, ordered food, not that he might eat it but
that he might pay for it, bowed to the landlady--all to save the
shrinking of his sore and quivering nerves. In vain! It seemed to
him that since that last look from Elise as she nestled into the
fern, there had been no kindness for him in human eyes--save,
perhaps, from that woman with the child.

As he dragged himself up to his fourth floor, the stimulant he had
taken began to work upon his starved senses. The key was in his
door, he turned it and fell into his room, while the door, with the
key still in it, swung to behind him. Guiding himself by the
furniture, he reached the only chair the room possessed--an
arm-chair of the commonest and cheapest hotel sort, which, because
of the uncertainty of its legs, the _femme de chambre_ had
propped up against the bed. He sat down in it and his head fell
back on the counterpane. There was much to do. He had to write to
John about the sale of his stock and the payment of his debts. He
had to put his father's letter into an envelope for Louie, to send
all the papers and letters he had on him and a last message to Mr.
Ancrum, and then to post these letters, so that nothing private
might fall into the hands of the French police, who would, of
course, open his bag.

While these thoughts were rising in him, a cloud came over the
brain, bringing with it, as it seemed, the first moment of ease
which had been his during this awful fortnight. Before he yielded
himself to it he thrust his hand into his coat-pocket with a sudden
vague anxiety to feel what was there. But even as he withdrew his
fingers they relaxed; a black object came with them, and fell
unheeded, first on his knee, then on to a coat lying on the floor
between him and the window.

A quarter of an hour afterwards there was a stir and voices on the
landing outside. Some one knocked at the door of No. 139. No
answer. 'The key is in the door. _Ouvrez donc!_' cried the
waiter, as he ran downstairs again to the restaurant, which was
still crowded. The visitor opened the door and peeped in. Some
quick words broke from him. He rushed in and up to the bed. But
directly the heavy feverish breathing of the figure in the chair
caught his ear his look of sudden horror relaxed, and he fell back,
looking at the sleeping youth.

It was a piteous sight he saw! Exhaustion, helplessness, sorrow,
physical injury, and moral defeat, were written in every line of
the poor drawn face and shrunken form. The brow was furrowed, the
breathing hard, the mouth dry and bloodless. Upon the mind of the
new-comer, possessed as it was with the image of what David Grieve
had been two short months before, the effect of the spectacle was
presently overwhelming.

He fell on his knees beside the sleeper. But as he did so, he
noticed the black thing on the floor, stooped to it, and took it
up. That it should be a loaded revolver seemed to him at that
moment the most natural thing in the world, little used as he
personally was to such possessions. He looked at it carefully, took
out the two cartridges it contained, put them into one pocket and
the revolver into the other.

Then he laid his arm round the lad's neck.

'David!'

The young man woke directly and sat up, shaking with terror and
excitement. He pushed his visitor from him, looking at him with
defiance. Then he slipped his hand inside his coat and sprang up
with a cry.

'David!--dear boy--dear fellow!'

The voice penetrated the lad's ear. He caught his visitor and
dragged him forward to the light. It fell on the twisted face and
wet eyes of Mr. Ancrum. So startling was the vision, so poignant
were the associations which it set vibrating, that David stood
staring and trembling, struck dumb.

'Oh, my poor lad! my poor lad! John wanted me to come yesterday,
and I delayed. I was a selfish wretch. Now I will take you home.'

David fell again upon his chair, too feeble to speak, too feeble
even to weep, the little remaining colour ebbing from his cheeks.
The minister used all his strength, and laid him on the bed. Then
he rang and made even the callous and haughty madame, who was
presently summoned, listen to and obey him while he sent for brandy
and a doctor, and let the air of the night into the stifling room.




CHAPTER XII


In two or three days the English doctor who was attending David
strongly advised Mr. Ancrum to get his charge home. The fierce
strain his youth had sustained acting through the nervous system
had disordered almost every bodily function, and the collapse which
followed Mr. Ancrum's appearance was severe. He would lie in his
bed motionless and speechless, volunteered no confidence, and
showed hardly any rallying power.

'Get him out of this furnace and that doghole of a room,' said the
doctor. 'He has come to grief here somehow--that's plain. You won't
make anything of him till you move him.'

When the lad was at last stretched on the deck of a Channel steamer
speeding to the English coast, and the sea breeze had brought a
faint touch of returning colour to his cheek, he asked the question
he had never yet had the physical energy to ask.

'Why did you come, and how did you find me?'

Then it appeared that the old cashier at Heywood's bank, who had
taken a friendly interest in the young bookseller since the opening
of his account, had dropped a private word to John in the course of
conversation, which had alarmed that youth not a little. His own
last scrawl from David had puzzled and disquieted him, and he
straightway marched off to Mr. Ancrum to consult. Whereupon the
minister wrote cautiously and affectionately to David asking for
some prompt and full explanation of things for his friends' sake.
The letter was, as we know, never opened, and therefore never
answered. Whereupon John's jealous misery on Louie's account and
Mr. Ancrum's love for David had so worked that the minister had
broken in upon his scanty savings and started for Paris at a few
hours' notice. Once in the Rue Chantal he had come easily on
David's track.

Naturally he had inquired after Louie as soon as David was in a
condition to be questioned at all. The young man hesitated a
moment, then he said resolutely, 'She is married,' and would say no
more. Mr. Ancrum pressed the matter a little, but his patient
merely shook his head, and the sight of him as he lay there on the
pillow was soon enough to silence the minister.

On the evening before they left Paris he called for a telegraph
form, wrote a message and paid the reply, but Mr. Ancrum saw
nothing of either. When the reply arrived David crushed it in his
hand with a strange look, half bitterness, half relief, and flung
it behind a piece of furniture standing near.

Now, on the cool, wind-swept deck, he seemed more inclined to talk
than he had been yet. He asked questions about John and the
Lomaxes--he even inquired after Lucy, as to whom the minister who
had lately improved an acquaintance with Dora and her father, begun
through David, could only answer vaguely that he believed she was
still in the south. But he volunteered nothing about his own
affairs or the cause of the state in which Mr. Ancrum had found
him.

Every now and then, indeed, as they stood together at the side of
the vessel, David leaning heavily against it, his words would fail
him altogether, and he would be left staring stupidly, the great
black eyes widening, the lower lip falling--over the shifting
brilliance of the sea.

Ancrum was almost sure too that in the darkness of their last night
in Paris there had been, hour after hour, a sound of hard and
stifled weeping, mingled with the noises from the street and from
the station; and to-day the youth in the face was more quenched
than ever, in spite of the signs of reviving health. There had been
a woman in the case, of course: Louie might have misbehaved
herself; but after all the world is so made that no sister can make
a brother suffer as David had evidently suffered--and then there
was the revolver! About this last, after one or two restless
movements of search, which Mr. Ancrum interpreted, David had never
asked, and the minister, timid man of peace that he was, had resold
it before leaving.

Well, it was a problem, and it must be left to time. Meanwhile Mr.
Ancrum was certainly astonished that _any_ love affair should
have had such a destructive volcanic power with the lad. For it was
no mere raw and sensuous nature, no idle and morbid brain. One
would have thought that so many different aptitudes and capacities
would have kept each other in check.

As they neared Manchester, David grew plainly restless and ill at
ease. He looked out sharply for the name of each succeeding town,
half turning afterwards, as though to speak to his companion; but
it was not till they were within ten minutes of the Central Station
that he said--

'John will want to know about Louie. She is married,--as I told
you,--to a French sculptor. I have handed over to her all my
father's money--that is why I drew it out.'

Mr. Ancrum edged up closer to him--all ears--waiting for more. But
there was nothing more.

'And you are satisfied?' he said at last.

David nodded and looked out of window intently.

'What is the man's name?'

David either did not or would not hear, and Mr. Ancrum let him
alone. But the news was startling. So the boy had stripped himself,
and must begin the world again as before! What had that minx been
after?

Manchester again. David looked out eagerly from the cab, his hand
trembling on his knee, beads of perspiration on his face.

They turned up the narrow street, and there in the distance to the
right was the stall and the shop, and a figure on the steps. Mr.
Ancrum had sent a card before them, and John was on the watch.

The instant the cab stopped, and before the driver could dismount,
John had opened the door. Putting his head in he peered at the pair
inside, and at the opposite seat, with his small short-sighted
eyes.

'Where is she?' he said hoarsely, barring the way.

Mr. Ancrum looked at his companion. David had shrunk back into the
corner, with a white hangdog look, and said nothing. The minister
interposed.

'David will tell you all,' he said gently. 'First help me in with
him, and the bags. He is a sick man.'

With a huge effort John controlled himself, and they got inside.
Then he shut the shop door and put his back against it.

'Tell me where she is,' he repeated shortly.

'She is married,' David said in a low voice, but looking up from
the chair on which he had sunk.' By now--she is married. I heard by
telegram last night that all was arranged for to-day.'

The lad opposite made a sharp, inarticulate sound which startled
the minister's ear. Then clutching the handle of the door, he
resumed sharply--

'Who has she married?'

The assumption of the right to question was arrogance
itself--strange in the dumb, retiring creature whom the minister
had hitherto known only as David's slave and shadow!

'A French sculptor,' said David steadily, but propping his head and
hand against the counter, so as to avoid John's stare--'a man
called Montjoie. I was a brute--I neglected her. She got into his
hands. Then I sent for all my money to bribe him to marry her. And
he has.'

'You--you _blackguard!_' cried John.

David straightened instinctively under the blow, and his eyes met
John's for one fierce moment. Then Mr. Ancrum thought he would have
fainted. The minister took rough hold of John by the shoulders.

'If you can't stay and hold your tongue,' he said, 'you must go. He
is worn out with the journey, and I shall get him to bed. Here's
some money: suppose you run to the house round the corner, in
Prince's Street; ask if they've got some strong soup, and, if they
have, hurry back with it. Come--look sharp. And--one moment--you've
been sleeping here, I suppose? Well, I shall take your room for a
bit, if that'll suit you. This fellow'll have to be looked after.'

The little lame creature spoke like one who meant to have his way.
John took the coin, hesitated, and stumbled out.

For days afterwards there was silence between him and David, except
for business directions. He avoided being in the shop with his
employer, and would stand for hours on the step, ostensibly
watching the stall, but in reality doing no business that he could
help. Whenever Mr. Ancrum caught sight of him he was leaning
against the wall, his hat slouched over his eyes, his hands in his
pockets, utterly inert and listless, more like a log than a human
being. Still he was no less stout, lumpish, and pink-faced than
before. His fate might have all the tragic quality; nature had none
the less inexorably endowed him with the externals of farce.

Meanwhile David dragged himself from his bed to the shop and set to
work to pick up dropped threads. The customers, who had been
formerly interested in him, discovered his return, and came in to
inquire why he had been so long away, or, in the case of one or
two, whether he had executed certain commissions in Paris. The
explanation of illness, however, circulated from the first moment
by Mr. Ancrum, and perforce adopted--though with an inward rage and
rebellion--by David himself, was amply sufficient to cover his
omissions and inattentions, and to ease his resumption of his old
place. His appearance indeed was still ghastly. The skin of the
face had the tightened, transparent look of weakness; the eyes,
reddened and sunk, showed but little of their old splendour between
the blue circles beneath and the heavy brows above; even the hair
seemed to have lost its boyish curl, and fell in harsh, troublesome
waves over the forehead, whence its owner was perpetually and
impatiently thrusting it back. All the bony structure of the face
had been emphasised at the expense of its young grace and bloom,
and the new indications of moustache and beard did but add to its
striking and painful black and white. And the whole impression of
change was completed by the melancholy aloofness, the shrinking
distrust with which eyes once overflowing with the frankness and
eagerness of one of the most accessible of human souls now looked
out upon the world.

'Was it fever?' said a young Owens College professor who had taken
a lively interest from the beginning in the clever lad's venture.
'Upon my word! you do look pulled down. Paris may be the first city
in the world--it is an insanitary hole all the same. So you never
found time to inquire after those Moliere editions for me?'

David racked his brains. What was it he had been asked to do? He
remembered half an hour's talk on one of those early days with a
bookseller on the Quai Voltaire--was it about this commission? He
could not recall.

'No, sir,' he said, stammering and flushing. 'I believe I did ask
somewhere, but I can't remember.'

'It's very natural, very natural,' said the professor kindly.
'Never mind. I'll send you the particulars again, and you can keep
your eyes open for me. And, look here, take your business easy for
a while. You'll get on--you're sure to get on--if you only recover
your health.'

David opened the door for him in silence.

The reawakening of his old life in him was strange and slow. When
he first found himself back among his books and catalogues, his
ledgers and business memoranda, he was bewildered and impatient.
What did these elaborate notes, with their cabalistic signs and
abbreviations--whether as to the needs of customers, or the
whereabouts of books, or the history of prices--mean or matter? He
was like a man who has lost a sense. Then the pressure of certain
debts which should have been met out of the money in the bank first
put some life into him. He looked into his financial situation and
found it grave, though not desperate. All hope of a large and easy
expansion of business was, of course, gone. The loss of his capital
had reduced him to the daily shifts and small laborious
accumulations with which he had begun. But this factor in his state
was morally of more profit to him at the moment than any other.
With such homely medicines nature and life can often do most for
us.

Such was Ancrum's belief, and in consequence he showed a very
remarkable wisdom during these early days of David's return.

'As far as I can judge, there has been a bad shake to the heart in
more senses than one,' had been the dry remark of the Paris doctor;
'and as for nervous system, it's a mercy he's got any left. Take
care of him, but for Heaven's sake don't make an invalid of
him--that would be the finish.'

So that Ancrum offered no fussy opposition to the resumption of the
young man's daily work, though at first it produced a constant
battle with exhaustion and depression. But never day or night did
the minister forget his charge. He saw that he ate and drank; he
enforced a few common sense remedies for the nervous ills which the
moral convulsion had left behind it, ills which the lad in his
irritable humiliation would fain have hidden even from him; above
all he knew how to say a word which kept Dora and Daddy and other
friends away for a time, and how to stand between David and that
choked and miserable John.

He had the strength of mind also to press for no confidence and to
expect no thanks. He had little fear of any further attempts at
suicide, though he would have found it difficult perhaps to explain
why. But instinctively he felt that for all practical purposes
David had been mad when he found him, and that he was mad no
longer. He was wretched, and only a fraction of his mind was in
Manchester and in his business--that was plain. But, in however
imperfect a way, he was again master of himself; and the minister
bided his time, putting his ultimate trust in one of the finest
mental and physical constitutions he had ever known.

In about ten days David took up his hat one afternoon and, for the
first time, ventured into the streets. On his return he was walking
down Potter Street in a storm of wind and rain, when he ran against
some one who was holding an umbrella right in front of her and
battling with the weather. In his recoil he saw that it was Dora.

Dora too looked up, a sudden radiant pleasure in her face
overflowing her soft eyes and lips.

'Oh, Mr. Grieve! And are you really better?'

'Yes,' he said briefly. 'May I walk with you a bit?'

'Oh no!--I don't believe you ought to be out in such weather. I'll
just come the length of the street with you.'

And she turned and walked with him, chattering fast, and of course,
from the point of view of an omniscience which could not have been
hers, foolishly. Had he liked Paris?--what he saw of it at least
before he had been ill?--and how long had he been ill? Why had he
not let Mr. Ancrum or some one know sooner? And would he tell her
more about Louie? She heard that she was married, but there was so
much she, Dora, wanted to hear.

To his first scanty answers she paid in truth but small heed, for
the joy of seeing him again was soon effaced by the painful
impression of his altered aspect. The more she looked at him, the
more her heart went out to him; her whole being became an effusion
of pity and tenderness, and her simplest words, maidenly and
self-restrained as she was, were in fact charged with something
electric, ineffable. His suffering, his neighbourhood, her own
sympathy--she was taken up, overwhelmed by these general
impressions. Inferences, details escaped her.

But as she touched on the matter of Louie, and they were now at his
own steps, he said to her hurriedly--

'Walk a little further, and I'll tell you. John's in there.'

She opened her eyes, not understanding, and then demurred a little
on the ground of his health and the rain.

'Oh, I'm all right,' he said impatiently. 'Look here, will you walk
to Chetham's Library? There'll be a quiet place there, in the
reading room--sure to be--where we can talk.'

She assented, and very soon they were mounting the black oak stairs
leading to this old corner of Manchester. At the top of the stairs
they saw in the distance, at the end of the passage on to which
open the readers' studies, each with its lining of folios and its
oaken lattice, a librarian, who nodded to David, and took a look at
Dora. Further on they stumbled over a small boy from the charity
school who wished to lionise them over the whole building. But when
he had been routed, they found the beautiful panelled and painted
reading-room quite empty, and took possession of it in peace. David
led the way to an oriel window he had become familiar with in the
off-times of his first years at Manchester, and they seated
themselves there with a low sloping desk between them, looking out
on the wide rain-swept yard outside, the buildings of the
grammar-school, and the black mass of the cathedral.

Manchester had never been more truly Manchester than on this dark
July afternoon, with its low shapeless clouds, its darkness, wind,
and pelting rain. David, staring out through the lozenge panes at
the familiar gloom beyond, was suddenly carried by repulsion into
the midst of a vision which was an agony--of a spring forest cut by
threadlike paths; of a shadeless sun; of a white city steeped in
charm, in gaiety.

Dora watched him timidly, new perceptions and alarms dawning in
her.

'You were going to tell me about Louie,' she said.

He returned to himself, and abruptly turned with his back to the
window, so that he saw the outer world no more.

'You heard that she was married?'

'Yes.'

'She has married a brute. It was partly my fault. I wanted to be
rid of her; she got in my way. This man was in the same house; I
left her to herself, and partly, I believe, to spite me, she went
off with him. Then at the last when she wouldn't leave him I made
her marry him. I bribed him to marry her. And he did. I had just
enough money to make it worth his while. But he will ill-treat her;
and she won't stay with him. She will go from bad to worse.'

Dora drew back, with her hand on the desk, staring at him with
incredulous horror.

'But you were ill?' she stammered.

He shook his head.

'Never mind my being ill. I wanted you to know, because you were
good to her, and I'm not going to be a hypocrite to you. Nobody
else need know anything but that she's married, which is true. If
I'd looked after her it mightn't have happened--perhaps. But I
didn't look after her--I couldn't.'

His face, propped in his hands, was hidden from her. She was in a
whirl of excitement and tragic impression--understanding something,
divining more.

'Louie was always so self-willed,' she said trembling.

'Aye. That don't make it any better. You remember all I told you
about her before? You know we didn't get on; she wasn't nice to me,
and I didn't suit her, I suppose. But all this year, I don't know
why, she's been on my mind from morning till night; I've always
felt sure, somehow, that she would come to harm; and the worrying
oneself about her--well! it has seemed _to grow into one's very
bones_. '--He threw out the last words after a pause, in which he
had seemed to search for some phrase wherewith to fit the energy of
his feeling. 'I took her to Paris to keep her out of mischief. I had
much rather have gone alone; but she would not ask you to take her
in, and I couldn't leave her with John. Well, then, she got in my
way--I told you--and I let her go to the dogs. There--it's
done--_done!_'

He turned on his seat, one hand drumming the desk, while his eyes
fixed themselves apparently on the portrait of Sir Humphry Chetham
over the carved mantelpiece. His manner was hard and rapid; neither
voice nor expression had any of the simplicity or directness of
remorse.

Dora remained silent looking at him; her slender hands were pressed
tight against either cheek; the tears rose slowly till they filled
her grey eyes.

'It is very sad,' she said in a low voice.

There was a pause.

'Yes--it's sad. So are most things in this world, perhaps. All
natural wants seem just to lead us to misery sooner or later. And
who gave them to us--who put us here--with no choice but just to go
on blundering from one muddle into another?'

Their eyes met. It was as though he had remembered her religion,
and could not, in his bitterness, refrain from an indirect fling at
it.

As for her, what he said was strange and repellent to her. But her
forlorn passion, so long trampled on, cried within her; her pure
heart was one prayer, one exquisite throb of pain and pity.

'Did some one deceive you?' she asked, so low that the words seemed
just breathed into the air.

'No,--I deceived myself.'

Then as he looked at her an impulse of confession crossed his mind.
Sympathy, sincerity, womanly sweetness, these things he had always
associated with Dora Lomax. Instinctively he had chosen her for a
friend long ago as soon as their first foolish spars were over.

But the impulse passed away. He thought of her severity, her
religion, her middle-class canons and judgments, which perhaps were
all the stricter because of Daddy's laxities. What common ground
between her and his passion, between her and Elise? No! if he must
speak--if, in the end, he proved too weak to forbear wholly from
speech--let it be to ears more practised, and more human!

So he choked back his words, and Dora felt instinctively that he
would tell her no more. Her consciousness of this was a mingled
humiliation and relief; it wounded her to feel that she had so
little command of him; yet she dreaded what he might say. Paris was
a wicked place--so the world reported. Her imagination, sensitive,
Christianised, ascetic, shrank from what he might have done.
Perhaps the woman shrank too. Instead, she threw herself upon the
thought, the bliss, that he was there again beside her, restored,
rescued from the gulf, if gulf there had been.

He went back to the subject of Louie, and told her as much as a
girl of Dora's kind could be told of what he himself knew of
Louie's husband. In the course of his two days' search for them,
which had included an interview with Madame Cervin, he had become
tolerably well acquainted with Montjoie's public character and
career. Incidentally parts of the story of Louie's behaviour came
in, and for one who knew her as Dora did, her madness and
wilfulness emerged, could be guessed at, little as the brother
intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse
himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on
by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself
for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora
perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she
forgave him--for she knew not what!--became his champion. There was
a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming
ill in all he said which wrung her heart. And how blanched he was
by that unknown misery! How should she not pity, not forgive? It
was the impotence of her own feeling to express itself that swelled
her throat. And poor Lucy, too--ah! poor Lucy.

Suddenly, as he was speaking, he noticed his companion more
closely, the shabbiness of the little black hat and jacket, the new
lines round the eyes and mouth.

'_You_ have not been well,' he said abruptly.' How has your
father been going on?'

She started and tried to answer quietly. But her nerves had been
shaken by their talk, and by that inward play of emotion which had
gone on out of his sight. Quite unexpectedly she broke down, and
covering her eyes with one hand, began to sob gently.

'I can't do anything with him now, poor father,' she said, when she
could control herself. 'He won't listen to me at all. The debts are
beginning to be dreadful, and the business is going down fast. I
don't know what we shall do. And it all makes him worse--drives him
to drink.'

David thought a minute, lifted out of himself for the first time.

'Shall I come to-night to see him?'

'Oh do!' she said eagerly; 'come about nine o'clock. I will tell
him--perhaps that will keep him in.'

Then she went into more details than she had yet done; named the
creditors who were pressing; told how her church-work, though she
worked herself blind night and day, could do but little for them;
how both the restaurant and the reading-room were emptying, and she
could now get no servants to stay, but Sarah, because of her
father's temper.

It seemed to him as he listened that the story, with its sickened
hope and on-coming fate, was all in some strange way familiar; it
or something like it was to have been expected; for him the strange
and jarring thing now would have been to find a happy person. He
was in that young morbid state when the mind hangs its own cloud
over the universe.

But Dora got up to go, tying on her veil with shaking hands. She
was so humbly grateful to him that he was sorry for her--that he
could spare a thought from his own griefs for her.

As they went down the dark stairs together, he asked after Lucy.
She was now staying with some relations at Wakely, a cotton town in
the valley of the Irwell, Dora said; but she would probably go back
to Hastings for the winter. It was now settled that she and her
father could not get on; and the stepmother that was to
be--Purcell, however, was taking his time--as determined not to be
bothered with her.

David listened with a certain discomfort. 'It was what she did for
me,' he thought, 'that set him against her for good and all. Old
brute!'

Aloud he said: 'I wrote to her, you know, and sent her that book.
She did write me a queer letter back--it was all dashes and
splashes--about the street-preachings on the beach, and a blind man
who sang hymns. I can't remember why she hated him so particularly!'

She answered his faint smile. Lucy was a child for both of them.
Then he took her to the door of the Parlour, noticing, as he parted
from her, how dingy and neglected the place looked.

Afterwards--directly he had left her--the weight of his pain which
had been lightened for an hour descended upon him again, shutting
the doors of the senses, leaving him alone within, face to face
with the little figure which haunted him day and night. During the
days since his return from Paris the faculty of projective
imagination, which had endowed his childhood with a second world,
and peopled it with the incidents and creatures of his books, had
grown to an abnormal strength. Behind the stage on which he was now
painfully gathering together the fragments of his old life, it
created for him another, where, amid scenes richly set and lit with
perpetual summer, he lived with Elise, walked with her, watched
her, lay at her feet, quarrelled with her, forgave her. His drama
did not depend on memory alone, or rather it was memory passing
into creation. Within its bounds he was himself and not himself;
his part was loftier than any he had ever played in reality; his
eloquence was no longer tongue-tied--it flowed and penetrated. His
love might be cruel, but he was on her level, nay, her master; he
could reproach, wrestle with, command her; and at the end evoke the
pardoning flight into each other's arms--confession--rapture.

Till suddenly, poor fool! a little bolt shot from the bow
of memory--the image of a _diligence_ rattling along a white
road--or of black rain-beaten quays, with their lines of
wavering lamps--or of a hideous upper room with blue rep
furniture where one could neither move nor breathe--would
strike his dream to fragments, and as it fell to ruins within
him, his whole being would become one tumult of inarticulate
cries--delirium--anguish--with which the self at the heart of
all seemed to be wrestling for life.

It was so to-day after he left Dora. First the vision, the
enchantment--then the agony, the sob of desolation which could
hardly be kept down. He saw nothing in the streets. He walked on
past the Exchange, where an unusual crowd was gathered, elbowing
his way through it mechanically, but not in truth knowing that it
was there.

When he reached the shop he ran past John, who was reading a
newspaper, up to his room and locked the door.

About an hour afterwards Mr. Ancrum came in, all excitement, a
batch of papers under his arm.

'It is going to be war, John! _War_--I tell you! and such a
war. They'll be beaten, those braggarts, if there's justice in
heaven. The streets are all full; I could hardly get here;
everybody talking of how it will affect Manchester. Time enough to
think about that! What a set of selfish beasts we all are! Where's
David?'

'Come in an hour ago!' said John sullenly; 'he went upstairs.'

'Ah, he will have heard--the placards are all over the place.'

The minister went upstairs and knocked at David's door.

'David!'

'All right,' said a voice from inside.

'David, what do you think of the news?'

'What news?' after a pause.

'Why, the war, man! Haven't you seen the evening paper?'

No answer. The minister stood listening at the door. Then a tender
look dawned in his odd grey face.

'David, look here, I'll push you the paper under the door. You're
tired, I suppose--done yourself up with your walk?'

'I'll be down to supper,' said the voice from inside, shortly.
'Will you push in the paper?'

The minister descended, and sat by himself in the kitchen thinking.
He was a wiser man now than when he had gone out, and not only as
to that reply of the King of Prussia to the French ultimatum on the
subject of the Hohenzollern candidature.

For he had met Barbier in the street. How to keep the voluble
Frenchman from bombarding David in his shattered state had been one
of Mr. Ancrum's most anxious occupations since his return. It had
been done, but it had been difficult. For to whom did David owe his
first reports of Paris if not to the old comrade who had sent him
there, found him a lodging, and taught him to speak French so as
not to disgrace himself and his country? However, Ancrum had found
means to intercept Barbier's first visit, and had checkmated his
attempts ever since. As a natural result, Barbier was extremely
irritable. Illness--stuff! The lad had been getting into
scrapes--that he would swear.

On this occasion, when Ancrum stumbled across him, he found
Barbier, at first bubbling over with the war news; torn different
ways; now abusing the Emperor for a cochon and a _fou_,
prophesying unlimited disaster for France, and sneering at the
ranting crowds on the boulevards; the next moment spouting the same
anti-Prussian madness with which his whole unfortunate country was
at the moment infected. In the midst of his gallop of talk,
however, the old man suddenly stopped, took off his hat, and
running one excited hand through his bristling tufts of grey hair
pointed to Ancrum with the other.

'_Halte là_!' he said, 'I know what your young rascal has been
after. I know, and I'll be bound you don't. Trust a lover for
hoodwinking a priest. Come along here.'

And putting his arm through Ancrum's, he swept him away, repeating,
as they walked, the substance of a letter from his precious nephew,
in which the Barbizon episode as it appeared to the inhabitants of
No. 7 Rue Chantal and to the students of Taranne's _atelier de
femmes_ was related, with every embellishment of witticism and
_blague_ that the imagination of a French _rapin_ could
suggest. Mademoiselle Delaunay was not yet restored, according to
the writer, to the _atelier_ which she adorned. '_On criait
au scandale_,' mainly because she was such a clever little
animal, and the others envied and hated her. She had removed to a
studio near the Luxembourg, and Taranne was said to be teaching her
privately. Meanwhile Dubois requested his dear uncle to supply him
with information as to _l'autre;_ it would be gratefully
received by an appreciative circle. As for _la soeur de
l'autre_, the dear uncle no doubt knew that she had migrated
to the studio of Monsieur Montjoie, an artist whose little
affairs in the _genre_ had already, before her advent, attained
a high degree of interest and variety. On a review of all the
circumstances, the dear uncle would perhaps pardon the writer if he
were less disposed than before to accept those estimable views of
the superiority of the English _morale_ to the French, which
had been so ably impressed upon him during his visit to Manchester.

For after a very short stay at Brussels the nephew had boldly and
suddenly pushed over to England, and had spent a fortnight in
Barbier's lodgings reconnoitering his uncle. As to the uncle,
Xavier had struck him, on closer inspection, as one of the most
dissolute young reprobates he had ever beheld. He had preached to
him like a father, holding up to him the image of his own absent
favourite, David Grieve, as a brilliant illustration of what could
be achieved even in this wicked world by morals and capacity. And
in the intervals he had supplied the creature with money and amused
himself with his _gaminerie_ from morning till night. On their
parting the uncle had with great frankness confessed to the nephew
the general opinion he had formed of his character; all the same
they were now embarked on a tolerably frequent correspondence; and
Dubois' ultimate chance of obtaining his uncle's savings, on the
_chasse_ of which he had come to England, would have seemed to
the cool observer by no means small.

'But now, look here,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles to
wipe away the 'merry tear' which dimmed them, after the
recapitulation of Xavier's last letter, 'no more nonsense! I come
and have it out with that young man. I sent him to Paris, and I'll
know what he did there. _He's_ not made of burnt sugar. Of
course he's broken his heart--we all do. Serve him right.'

'It's easy to laugh,' said Ancrum dryly, 'only these young fellows
have sometimes an uncomfortable way of vindicating their dignity by
shooting themselves.'

Barbier started and looked interrogative.

'Now suppose you listen to me,' said the minister.

And the two men resumed their patrol of Albert Square while Ancrum
described his rescue of David. The story was simply told but
impressive. Barbier whistled, stared, and surrendered. Nay, he went
to the other extreme. He loved the absurd, but he loved the
romantic more. An hour before, David's adventures had been to him a
subject of comic opera. As Ancrum talked, they took on 'the grand
style,' and at the end he could no more have taken liberties with
his old pupil than with the hero of the _Nuit de Mai._ He
became excited, sympathetic, declamatory, tore open old sores, and
Mr. Ancrum had great difficulty in getting rid of him.

So now the minister was sitting at home meditating. Through the
atmosphere of mockery with which Dubois had invested the story he
saw the outlines of it with some clearness.




CHAPTER XIII


In the midst of his meditations, however, the minister did not
forget to send John out for David's supper, and when David
appeared, white, haggard, and exhausted, it was to find himself
thought for with a care like a woman's. The lad, being sick and
irritable, showed more resentment than gratitude; pushed away his
food, looking sombrely the while at the dry bread and tea which
formed the minister's invariable evening meal as though to ask when
he was to be allowed his rational freedom again to eat or fast as
he pleased. He scarcely answered Ancrum's remarks about the war,
and finally he got up heavily, saying he was going out.

'You ought to be in your bed,' said Ancrum, protesting almost for
the first time, 'and it's there you will be--tied by the leg--if you
don't take a decent care of yourself.'

David took no notice and went. He dragged himself to the German
Athenaeum, of which he had become a member in the first flush of
his inheritance. There were the telegrams from Paris, and an eager
crowd reading and discussing them. As he pushed his way in at last
and read, the whole scene rose before him as though he were
there--the summer boulevards with their trees and kiosks, the
moving crowds, the shouts, the 'Marseillaise'--the blind infectious
madness of it all. And one short fortnight ago, what man in Europe
could have guessed that such a day was already on the knees of the
gods?

Afterwards, on the way to the Parlour, he talked to Elise about
it,--placing her on the boulevards with the rest, and himself beside her
to guard her from the throng. Hour by hour, this morbid gift of his,
though it tortured him, provided an outlet for passion, saved him from
numbness and despair.

When he got to Dora's sitting-room he found Daddy sitting there,
smoking sombrely over the empty grate. He had expected a flood of
questions, and had steeled himself to meet them. Nothing of the
sort. The old man took very little notice of him and his travels.
Considering the petulant advice with which Daddy had sent him off,
David was astonished and, in the end, piqued. He recovered the
tongue which he had lost for Ancrum, and was presently discussing
the war like anybody else. Reminiscences of the talk amid which he
had lived during those Paris weeks came back to them; and he
repeated some of them which bore on the present action of Napoleon
III and his ministry, with a touch of returning fluency. He was, in
fact, playing for Daddy's attention.

Daddy watched him silently with a wild and furtive eye. At last,
looking round to see whether Dora was there, and finding that she
had gone out, he laid a lean long hand on David's knee.

'That'll do, Davy. Davy, why were you all that time away?'

The young man drew himself up suddenly, brought back to realities
from this first brief moment of something like forgetfulness. He
tried for his common excuse of illness; but it stuck in his throat.

'I can't tell you, Daddy,' he said at last, slowly. 'I might tell
you lies, but I won't. It concerns myself alone.'

Daddy still bent forward, his peaked wizard's face peering at his
companion.

'You've been in trouble, Davy?'

'Yes, Daddy. But if you ask me questions I shall go.'

He spoke with a sudden fierce resolution.

Daddy paid no attention. He threw himself back in his chair with a
long breath.

'Bedad, and I knew it, Davy! But sorrow a bit o' pity will you get
out o' me, my boy--sorrow a bit!'

He lay staring at his companion with a glittering hostile look.

'By the powers!' he said presently, 'to be a gossoon of twenty again
and throubled about a woman!'

David sprang up.

'Well, Daddy, I'll bid you good night! I wanted to hear something
about your own affairs, which don't seem to be flourishing. But
I'll wait till Miss Dora's at home.'

'Sit down, sit down again!' cried Lomax angrily, catching him by
the arm. 'I'll not meddle with you. Yes, we're in a bad way, a
deuced bad way, if you listen to Dora. If it weren't for her I'd
have walked myself off long ago and let the devil take the
creditors.'

David sat down and tried to get at the truth. But Daddy turned
restive, and now invited the traveller's talk he had before
repelled. He fell into his own recollections of the Paris streets
in '48, and his vanity enjoyed showing this slip of a fellow that
old Lomax was well acquainted with France and French politics
before he was born.

Presently Dora came in, saw that her father had been beguiled into
foregoing his usual nocturnal amusements, and looked soft gratitude
at David. But as for him, he had never realised so vividly the
queer aloofness and slipperiness of Daddy's nature, nor the
miserable insecurity of Dora's life. Such men were not meant to
have women depending on them.

He went downstairs pondering what could be done for the old
vagabond. Drink had indeed made ravages since he had seen him last.
For Dora's sake the young man recalled with eagerness some
statements and suggestions in a French treatise on 'L'Alcoolisme'
he chanced to have been turning over among his foreign scientific
stock. Dora, no doubt, had invoked the parson; he would endeavour
to bring in the doctor. And there was a young one, a frequenter of
the stall in Birmingham Street, not as yet overburdened with
practice, who occurred to him as clever and likely to help.

Nor did he forget his purpose. The very next morning he got hold of
the young man in question. Out came the French book, which
contained the record of a famous Frenchman's experiments, and the
two hung over it together in David's little back room, till the
doctor's views of booksellers and their probable minds were
somewhat enlarged, and David felt something of the old intellectual
glow which these scientific problems of mind and matter had
awakened in him during the winter. Then he walked his physician off
to Daddy during the dinner hour and boldly introduced him as a
friend. The young doctor, having been forewarned, treated the
situation admirably, took up a jaunty and jesting tone, and,
finally, putting morals entirely aside, invited Daddy to consider
himself as a scientific case, and deal with himself as such for the
benefit of knowledge.

Daddy was feeling ill and depressed; David struck him as an
'impudent varmint,' and the doctor as little better; but the lad's
solicitude nevertheless flattered the old featherbrain, and in the
end he fell into a burst of grandiloquent and self-excusing
confidence. The doctor played him; prescribed; and when he and
David left together it really seemed as though the old man from
sheer curiosity about and interest in his own symptoms would
probably make an attempt to follow the advice given him.

Dora came in while the three were still joking and discussing. Her
face clouded as she listened, and when David and the doctor left
she gave them a cool and shrinking good bye which puzzled David.

Daddy, however, after a little while, mended considerably,
developed an enthusiasm for his self-appointed doctor, and, what
was still better, a strong excitement about his own affairs. When
it came to the stage of a loan for the meeting of the more pressing
liabilities, of fresh and ingenious efforts to attract customers,
and of a certain gleam of returning prosperity, David's concern for
his old friend very much dropped again. His former vivid interest
in the human scene and the actors in it, as such, was not yet
recovered; in these weeks weariness and lassitude overtook each
reviving impulse and faculty in turn.

He was becoming more and more absorbed, too, by the news from
France. Its first effect upon him was one of irritable repulsion.
Barbier and Hugo had taught him to loathe the Empire; and had not
he and she read _Les Chatiments_ together, and mocked the
Emperor's carriage as it passed them in the streets? The French
telegrams in the English papers, with their accounts of the
vapouring populace, the wild rhetoric in the Chamber, and the
general outburst of _fanfaronnade_, seemed to make the French
nation one with the Empire in its worst aspects, and, as we can all
remember, set English teeth on edge. David devoured the papers day
by day, and his antagonism grew, partly because, in spite of that
strong gravitation of his mind towards things expansive, emotional,
and rhetorical, the essential paste of him was not French but
English--but mostly because of other and stronger reasons of which
he was hardly conscious. During that fortnight of his agony in
Paris all that sympathetic bond between the great city and himself
which had been the source of so much pleasure and excitement to him
during his early days with Elise had broken down. The glamour of
happiness torn away, he had seen, beneath the Paris of his dream, a
greedy brutal Paris from which his sick senses shrank in fear and
loathing. The grace, the spell, was gone--he was alone and
miserable!--and amid the gaiety, the materialism, the selfish vice
of the place he had moved for days, an alien and an enemy, the love
within him turning to hate.

So now his mortal pain revenged itself. They would be beaten--this
depraved and enervated people!--and his feverish heart rejoiced.
But Elise? His lips quivered. What did the war matter to her except
so far as its inconveniences were concerned? What had _la
patrie_ any more than _l'amour_ to do with art? He put the
question to her in his wild evening walks. It angered him that as
the weeks swept on, and the great thunderbolts began to
fall--Wissembourg, Forbach, Worth--his imagination would sometimes
show her to him agitated and in tears. No pity for him! why this
sorrow for France? Absurd! let her go paint while the world loved
and fought. In '48, while monarchy and republic were wrestling it
out in the streets of Paris, was not the landscape painter
Chintreuil quietly sketching all the time just outside one of the
gates of the city? There was the artist for you.

Meanwhile the growing excitement of the war, heightened and
poisoned by this reaction of his personality, combined with his
painful efforts to recover his business to make him for a time more
pale and gaunt than ever. Ancrum remonstrated in vain. He would go
his way.

One evening--it was the day after Worth--he was striding blindly up
the Oxford Road when he ran against a man at the corner of a side
street. It was Barbier, coming out for the last news.

Barbier started, swore, caught him by the arm, then fell back in
amazement.

'_C'est toi? bon Dieu!_'

David, who had hitherto avoided his old companion with the utmost
ingenuity, began hurriedly to inquire whether he was going to look
at the evening's telegram.

'Yes--no--what matter? You can tell me. David, my lad, Ancrum told
me you had been ill, but--'

The old man slipped his arm through that of the youth and looked at
him fixedly. His own face was all furrowed and drawn, the eyes red.

'_Oui; tu es change_,' he said at last with a sudden
quivering breath, almost a sob, 'like everything,--like the world!'

And hanging down his head he drew the lad on, down the little
street, towards his lodging.

'Come in! I'll ask no questions. Oh, come in! I have the French
papers; for three hours I have been reading them alone. Come in or
I shall go mad!'

And they discussed the war, the political prospect, and Barbier's
French letters till nearly midnight. All the exile's nationality
had revived, and so lost was he in weeping over France he had
scarcely breath left wherewith to curse the Empire. In the presence
of a grief so true, so poignant, wherein all the man's little
tricks and absurdities had for the moment melted out of sight,
David's own seared and bitter feeling could find no voice. He said
not a word that could jar on his old friend. And Barbier, like a
child, took his sympathy for granted and abused the 'heartless
hypocritical' English press to him with a will.

The days rushed on. David read the English papers in town, then
walked up late to Barbier's lodgings to read a French batch and
talk. Gravelotte was over, the siege was approaching. In that
strange inner life of his, David with Elise beside him looked on at
the crashing trees in the Bois de Boulogne, at the long lines of
carts laden with household stuff and fugitives from the _zone
militaire_ flocking into Paris, at the soldiers and horses
camping in the Tuileries Gardens, at the distant smoke-clouds amid
the woods of Issy and Meudon, as village after village flamed to
ruins.

One night--it was a day or two after Sedan--in a corner of the
Constitutionnel, he found a little paragraph:--

'M. Henri Regnault and M. Clairin, leaving their studio at Tangiers to
the care of the French Consul, have returned to Paris to offer
themselves for military service, from which, as holder of the _prix de
Rome_, M. Regnault is legally exempt. To praise such an act would be to
insult its authors. France--our bleeding France!--does but take stern
note that her sons are faithful.'

David threw the paper down, made an excuse to Barbier, and went
out. He could not talk to Barbier, to whom everything must be
explained from the beginning, and his heart was full. He wandered
out towards Fallowfield under a moon which gave beauty and magic
even to these low, begrimed streets, these jarring, incongruous
buildings, thinking of Regnault and that unforgotten night beside
the Seine. The young artist's passage through the Louvre, the
towering of his great head above the crowd in the 'Trois Rats,' and
that outburst under the moonlight--everything, every tone, every
detail, returned upon him.

'_The great France--the undying France--_'

And now for France--ah!--David divined the eagerness, the passion,
with which it had been done. He was nearer to the artist than he
had been two months before--nearer to all great and tragic things.
His recognition of the fact had in it the start of a strange joy.

So moved was he, and in such complex ways, that as he thought of
Regnault with that realising imagination which was his gift, the
whole set of his feeling towards France and the war wavered and
changed. The animosity, the drop of personal gall in his heart,
disappeared, conjured by Regnault's look, by Regnault's act. The
one heroic figure he had seen in France began now to stand to him
for the nation. He walked home doing penance in his heart,
passionately renewing the old love, the old homage, in this awful
presence of a stricken people at bay.

And Elise came to him, in the moonlight, leaning upon him, with
soft, approving eyes--

Ah! where was she--where--in this whirlwind of the national fate?
where was her frail life hidden? was she still in this Paris, so
soon to be 'begirt with armies'?

       *       *       *       *       *

Four days later Barbier sent a note to Ancrum: 'Come and see me this
afternoon at six o'clock. Say nothing to Grieve.'

A couple of hours afterwards Ancrum came slowly home to Birmingham
Street, where he was still lodging. David had just put up the
shop-shutters, John had departed, and his employer was about to
retire to supper and his books in the back kitchen.

Ancrum went in and stood with his back to the fire which John had
just made for the kettle and the minister's tea, when David came in
with an armful of books and shut the door behind him. Ancrum let
him put down his cargo, and then walked up to him.

'David,' he said, laying his hand with a timid gesture on the
other's shoulder, 'Barbier has had some letters from Paris
to-day--the last he will get probably--and among them a letter from
his nephew.'

David started, turned sharp round, shaking off the hand.

'It contains some news which Barbier thinks you ought to know.
Mademoiselle Elise Delaunay has married suddenly--married her
cousin, Mr. Pimodan, a young doctor.'

The shock blanched every atom of colour from David's face. He tried
wildly to control himself, to brave it out with a desperate 'Why
not?' But speech failed him. He walked over to the mantelpiece and
leant against it. The room swam with him, and the only impression
of which for a moment or two he was conscious was that of the
cheerful singing of the kettle.

'She would not leave Paris,' said Ancrum in a low voice, standing
beside him. 'People tried to persuade her--nothing would induce her.
Then this young man, who is said to have been in love with her for
years, urged her to marry him--to accept his protection really, in
view of all that might come. Dubois thinks she refused several
times, but anyway two days ago they were married, civilly, with
only the legal witnesses.'

David moved about the various things on the mantelpiece with
restless fingers. Then he straightened himself.

'Is that all?' he asked, looking at the minister.

'All,' said Ancrum, who had, of course, no intention of repeating
any of Dubois' playful embroideries on the facts. 'You will be glad,
won't you, that she should have some one to protect her in such a
strait?'--he added, after a minute's pause, his eyes on the fire.

'Yes,' said the other after a moment. 'Thank you. Won't you have
your tea?'

Mr. Ancrum swallowed his emotion, and they sat down to table in
silence. David played with some food, took one thing up after
another, laid it down, and at last sprang up and seized his hat.

'Going out again?' asked the minister, trembling, he knew not why.

The lad muttered something. Instinctively the little lame fellow,
who was closest to the door, rushed to it and threw himself against
it.

'David, don't--don't go out alone--let me go with you!'

'I want to go out alone,' said David, his lips shaking. 'Why do you
interfere with me?'

'Because--' and the short figure drew itself up, the minister's
voice took a stern deep note, 'because when a man has once
contemplated the sin of self-murder, those about him have no right
to behave as though he were still like other innocent and happy
people!'

David stood silent a moment, every limb trembling. Then his mouth
set, and he made a step forward, one arm raised.

'Oh, yes!' cried Ancrum, 'you may fling me out of the way. My
weakness and deformity are no match for you. Do, if you have the
heart! Do you think I don't know that I rescued you from
despair--that I drew you out of the very jaws of death? Do you
think I don't guess that the news I have just given you wither the
heart in your breast? You imagine, I suppose, that because I am
deformed and a Sunday-school teacher, because I think something of
religion, and can't read your French books, I cannot enter into
what a _man_ is and feels. Try me! When you were a little boy
in my class, _my_ life was already crushed in me--my tragedy
was over. I have come close to passion and to sin; I'm not afraid
of yours! You are alive here to-night, David Grieve, because I went
to look for you on the mountains--lost sheep that you were--and
found you, by God's mercy. You never thanked me--I knew you
couldn't. Instead of your thanks I demand your confidence,
here--now. Break down this silence between us. Tell me what you
have done to bring your life to this pass. You have no father--I
speak in his place and I _deserve_ that you should trust and
listen to me!'

David looked at him with amazement--at the worn misshapen head
thrown haughtily back--at the arms folded across the chest. Then
his pride gave way, and that intolerable smart within could no
longer hide itself. His soul melted within him; tears began to
rain over his cheeks. He tottered to the fire and sat down,
instinctively spreading his hands to the blaze, that word 'father'
echoing in his ears; and by midnight Mr. Ancrum knew all the story,
or as much of it as man could to tell to man.

From this night of confession and of storm there emerged at least
one result--the beginnings of a true and profitable bond between
David and Ancrum. Hitherto there had been expenditure of interest
and affection on the minister's side, and a certain responsiveness
and friendly susceptibility on David's; but no true understanding
and contact, mind with mind. But in these agitated hours of such
talk as belongs only to the rare crises of life, not only did
Ancrum gain an insight into David's inmost nature, with all its
rich, unripe store of feelings and powers, deeper than any he had
possessed before, but David, breaking through the crusts of
association, getting beyond and beneath the Sunday-school teacher
and minister, came for the first time upon the real man in his
friend, apart from trappings--cast off the old sense of pupilage,
and found a brother instead of a monitor.

There came a moment when Ancrum, laying his hand on David's knee,
told his own story in a few bare sentences, each of them, as it
were, lightning on a dark background, revealing some few things
with a ghastly plainness, only to let silence and mystery close
again upon the whole. And there came another moment when the little
minister, carried out of himself, fell into incoherent sentences,
full of obscurity, yet often full of beauty, in which for the first
time David came near to the living voice of religion speaking in
its purest, intensest note. Christ was the burden of it all; the
religion of pain, sacrifice, immortality; the religion of chastity
and self-repression.

'Life goes from test to test, David; it's like any other
business--the more you know the more's put on you. And this test of
the man with the woman--there's no other cuts so deep. Aye, it
parts the sheep from the goats. A man's failed in it--lost his
footing--rolled into hell, before he knows where he is. "On this
stone if a man fall"--I often put those words to it--there's all
meanings in Scripture. Yes, you've stumbled, David--stumbled badly,
but not more. There's mercy in it! You must rise again--you can.
Accept yourself; accept the sin even; bear with yourself and go
forward. That's what the Church says. Nothing can be undone, but
break your pride, do penance, and all can be forgiven.

'But you don't admit the sin? A man has a right to the satisfaction
of his own instincts. You asked a free consent and got it. What is
law but a convention for miserable people who don't know how to
love? Who was injured?

'David, that's the question of a fool. Were you and she the first
man and woman in the world that ever loved? That's always the way;
each man imagines the matter is still for his deciding, and he can
no more decide it than he can tamper with the fact that fire burns
or water drowns. All these centuries the human animal has fought
with the human soul. And step by step the soul has registered her
victories. She has won them only by feeling for the law and finding
it--uncovering, bringing into light, the firm rocks beneath her
feet. And on these rocks she rears her landmarks--marriage, the
family, the State, the Church. Neglect them, and you sink into the
quagmire from which the soul of the race has been for generations
struggling to save you. Dispute them! overthrow them--yes, if you
can! You have about as much chance with them as you have with the
other facts and laws amid which you live--physical or chemical or
biological.

'I speak after the manner of men. If I were to speak after the
manner of a Christian, I should say other things. I should ask how
a man _dare_ pluck from the Lord's hand, for his own wild and
reckless use, a soul and body for which He died; how he, the Lord's
bondsman, _dare_ steal his joy, carrying it off by himself
into the wilderness, like an animal his prey, instead of asking
it at the hands, and under the blessing, of his Master; how he
_dare_--a man under orders, and member of the Lord's body--forget
the whole in his greed for the one--eternity in his thirst for
the present.'

'But no matter. Christ is nothing to you, nor Scripture, nor the
Church--'

The minister broke off abruptly, his lined face working with
emotion and prayer. David said nothing. In this stage of the
conversation--the stage, as it were, of judgment and estimate--he
could take no part. The time for it with him had not yet come. He
had exhausted all his force in the attempt to explain himself--an
attempt which began in fragmentary question and answer, and ended
on his part in the rush of a confidence, an 'Apologia,'
representing, in truth, that first reflex action of the mind upon
experience, whence healing and spiritual growth were ultimately to
issue. But for the moment he could carry the process no farther. He
sat crouched over the flickering fire, saying nothing, letting
Ancrum soliloquise as he pleased. His mind surged to and fro,
indeed, as Ancrum talked between the poles of repulsion and
response. His nature was not as Ancrum's, and every now and then
the quick critical intellect flashed through his misery, detecting
an assumption, probing an hypothesis. But in general his
_feeling_ gave way more and more. That moral sensitiveness in
him which in its special nature was a special inheritance, the
outcome of a long individualist development under the conditions of
English Protestantism, made him from the first the natural prey of
Ancrum's spiritual passion. As soon as a true contact between them
was set up, David began to feel the religious temper and life in
Ancrum draw him like a magnet. Not the forms of the thing, but the
thing itself. In it, or something like it, as he listened, his
heart suspected, for the first time, the only possible refuge from
the agony of passion, the only possible escape from this fever of
desire, jealousy, and love, in which he was consumed.

At the end he let Ancrum lead him up to bed and give him the
bromide the Paris doctor had prescribed. When Ancrum softly put his
head in, half an hour later, he was heavily asleep. Ancrum's face
gleamed; he stole into the room carrying a rug and a pillow; and
when David woke in the morning it was to see the twisted form of
the little minister stretched still and soldierlike beside him on
the floor.




CHAPTER XIV


From that waking David rose and went about his work another man. As
he moved about in the shop or in the streets, he was conscious of a
gulf between his present self and his self of yesterday, which he
could hardly explain. Simply the whole atmosphere and temperature
of the soul was other, was different. He could have almost supposed
that some process had gone on within him during the unconsciousness
of sleep, of which he was now feeling the results; which had
carried him on, without his knowing it, to a point in the highroad
of life, far removed from that point where he had stood when his
talk with Ancrum began. That world of enervating illusion, that
'kind of ghastly dreaminess, 'as John Sterling called it, in which
since his return he had lived with Elise, was gone, he knew not
how--swept away like a cloud from the brain, a mist from the eyes.
The sense of catastrophe, of things irrevocable and irreparable,
the premature ageing of the whole man, remained-only the fever and
the restlessness were past. Memory, indeed, was not affected. In
some sort the scenes of his French experience would be throughout
his life a permanent element in consciousness; but the persons
concerned in them were dead-creatures of the past. He himself had
been painfully re-born, and Pimodan's wife had no present personal
existence for him. He turned himself deliberately to his old life,
and took up the interests of it again one by one, but, as he soon
discovered, with an insight, a power, a comprehension which had
never yet been his. A moral and spiritual life destined to a rich
development practically began for him with this winter--this awful
winter of the agony of France.

His thoughts were often occupied now with Louie, but in a saner
way. He could no longer, without morbidness, take on himself the
whole responsibility of her miserable marriage. Human beings after
all are what they make themselves. But the sense of his own share
in it, and the perception of what her future life was likely to be,
made him steadily accept beforehand the claims upon him which she
was sure to press.

He had written to her early in September, when the siege was
imminent, offering her money to bring her to England, and the
protection of his roof during the rest of the war. And by a still
later post than that which brought the news of Elise's marriage
arrived a scrawl from Louie, written from a country town near
Toulouse, whither she and Montjoie had retreated--apparently the
sculptor's native place.

The letter was full of complaints--complaints of the war, which was
being mismanaged by a set of rogues and fools who deserved
stringing to the nearest tree; complaints of her husband, who was a
good-for-nothing brute; and complaints of her own health. She was
expecting her confinement in the spring; if she got through
it--which was not likely, considering the way in which she was
treated--she should please herself about staying with such a man.
_He_ should not keep her for a day if she wanted to go.
Meanwhile David might send her any money he could spare. There was
not much of the six hundred left--_that_ she could tell him;
and she could not even screw enough for baby-clothes out of her
husband. Very likely there would not be enough to pay for a nurse
when her time came. Well, then she would be out of it--and a good
job too.

She wished to be remembered to Dora; and Dora was especially to be
told again that she needn't suppose St. Damian's was a patch on the
real Catholic churches, because it wasn't. She--Louie--had been at
the Midnight Mass in Toulouse Cathedral on Christmas Eve. That was
something like. And down in the crypt they had a 'Bethlehem'--the
sweetest thing you ever saw. There were the shepherds, and the wise
men, and the angels--dolls, of course, but their dresses were
splendid, and the little Jesus was dressed in white satin,
embroidered with gold--_old_ embroidery, tell Dora.

To this David had replied at once, sending money he could ill
spare, and telling her to keep him informed of her whereabouts.

But the months passed on, and no more news arrived. He wrote again
_via_ Bordeaux, but with no result, and could only wait
patiently till that eagle's grip, in which all French life was
stifled, should be loosened.

Meanwhile his relation to another human being, whose life had been
affected by the French episode, passed into a fresh phase. Two days
after the news of Elise's marriage had reached him, he and John had
just shut up the shop, and the young master was hanging over the
counter under the gas, heavily conning a not very satisfactory
business account.

John came in, took his hat and stick from a corner, and threw David
a gruff 'good night.'

Something in the tone struck David's sore nerves like a blow. He
turned abruptly--

'Look here, John! I can't stand this kind of thing much longer.
Hadn't we better part? You've learnt a lot here, and I'll see you
get a good place. You--you rub it in too long!'

John stood still, his big rough hands beginning to shake, his pink
cheeks turning a painful crimson.

'You--you never said a word to me!' he flung out at last,
incoherently, resentfully.

'Said a word to you? What do you mean? I told you the truth, and I
would have told you more, if you hadn't turned against me as though
I had been the devil himself. Do you suppose you are the only
person who came to grief because of that French time? _Good God!_'

The last words came out with a low exasperation. The young man
leant against the counter, looking at his assistant with bitter,
indignant eyes.

John first shrank from them, then his own were drawn to meet them.
Even his slow perceptions, thus challenged, realised something of
the truth. He gave way--as David might have made him give way long
before, if his own misery had not made him painfully avoid any
fresh shock of speech.

'Well!' said John, slowly, with a mighty effort; 'I'll not lay it
agen you any more. I'll say that. But if you want to get rid of me,
you can. Only you'll be put to 't wi' t' printing.'

The two young fellows surveyed each other. Then suddenly David
said, pushing him to the door:

'You're a great ass, John--get out, and good night to you.'

But next day the atmosphere was cleared, and, with inexpressible
relief on both sides, the two fell back into the old brotherly
relation. Poor John! He kept an old photograph of Louie in a drawer
at his lodging, and, when he came home to bed, would alternately
weep over and denounce it. But, all the same, his interest in
David's printing ventures was growing keener and keener, and
whenever business had been particularly exciting during the day,
the performance with the photograph was curtailed or omitted at
night. Let no scorn, however, be thought, on that account, of the
true passion!--which had thriven on unkindness, and did but yield
to the slow mastery of time.

The war thundered on. To Manchester, and to the cotton and silk
industries of Lancashire generally, the tragedy of France meant on
the whole a vast boom in trade. So many French rivals crippled--so
much ground set free for English enterprise to capture--and,
meanwhile, high profits for a certain number at least of Manchester
and Macclesfield merchants, and brisk wages for the Lancashire
operatives, especially for the silk-weavers. This, with of course
certain drawbacks and exceptions, was the aspect under which the
war mainly presented itself to Lancashire. Meanwhile, amid these
teeming Manchester streets with their clattering lurries and
overflowing warehouses, there was at least one Englishman who took
the war hardly, in whom the spectacle of its wreck and struggle
roused a feeling which was all moral, human, disinterested.

What was Regnault doing? David kept a watch on the newspapers, of
which the Free Library offered him an ample store; but there was no
mention of him in the English press that he could discover, and
Barbier, of course, got nothing now from Paris.

Christmas was over. The last month of the siege, that hideous
January of frost and fire, rushed past, with its alternations of
famine within and futile battle without--Europe looking on appalled
at this starved and shivering Paris, into which the shells were
raining. At last--the 27th!--the capitulation! All was over; the
German was master in Europe, and France lay at the feet of her
conqueror.

Out to all parts streamed the letters which had been so long
delayed. Barbier and David, walking together one bitter evening
towards Barbier's lodgings, silent, with hanging heads, met the
postman on Barbier's steps, who held out a packet. The Frenchman
took it with a cry; the two rushed upstairs and fell upon the
letters and papers it contained.

There--while Barbier sat beside him, groaning over the conditions
of peace, over the enthronement of the Emperor-King at Versailles,
within sight of the statue of Louis Quatorze, now cursing '_ces
imbéciles du gouvernement!_' and now wiping the tears from his
old cheeks with a trembling hand--David read the news of the fight
of Buzenval, and the death of Regnault.

It seemed to him that he had always foreseen it--that from the very
beginning Regnault's image in his thought had been haloed with a
light of tragedy and storm--a light of death. His eyes devoured the
long memorial article in which a friend of Regnault's had given the
details of his last months of life. Barbier, absorbed in his own
grief, heard not a sound from the corner where his companion sat
crouched beneath the gas.

Everything--the death and the manner of it--was to him, as it were,
in the natural order--fitting, right, such as might have been
expected. His heart swelled to bursting as he read, but his eyes
were dry.

This, briefly, was the story which he read.

Henri Regnault re-entered Paris at the beginning of September. By
the beginning of October he was on active service, stationed now at
Asnieres, now at Colombes. In October or November he became engaged
to a young girl, with whom he had been for long devotedly in
love--ah! David thought of that sudden smile--the 'open door'!
Their passion, cherished under the wings of war, did but give
courage and heroism to both. Yet he loved most humanly! One
night, in an interval of duty, on leaving the house where his
_fiancee_ lived, he found the shells of the bombardment falling
fast in the street outside. He could not make up his mind to
go--might not ruin befall the dear house with its inmates at any
moment? So he wandered up and down outside for hours in the bitter
night, watching, amid the rattle of the shells and the terrified
cries of women and children from the houses on either side.
At last, worn out and frozen with cold, but still unable to
leave the spot, he knocked softly at the door he had left. The
_concierge_ came. 'Let me lie down awhile on your floor. Tell
no one.' Then, appeased by this regained nearness to her, and by
the sense that no danger could strike the one without warning the
other, he wrapped himself in his soldier's cloak and fell asleep.

In November he painted his last three water-colours--visions of the
East, painted for her, and as flower-bright as possible, 'because
flowers were scarce' in the doomed city.

December came. Regnault spent Christmas night at the advanced post
of Colombes. His captain wished to make him an officer. 'Thanks, my
captain,' said the young fellow of twenty-three; 'but if you have a
good soldier in me, why exchange him for an indifferent officer? My
example will be of more use to you than my commission.' Meanwhile
the days and nights were passed in Arctic cold. Men were frozen to
death round about him; his painter's hand was frostbitten. 'Oh! I
can speak with authority on cold!' he wrote to his _fiancee_;
'this morning at least I know what it is to spend the night on the
hard earth exposed to a glacial wind. Enough! _Je me rechaufferai
a votre foyer_. I love you--I love my country--that sustains.
Adieu!'

On the 17th, after a few days in Paris spent with her and some old
friends, he was again ordered to the front. On Thursday the fight
at Buzenval began with a brilliant success; in the middle of the
day his _fiancee_ still had news of him, brought by a servant.
Night fell. The battle was hottest in a wood adjoining the park of
Buzenval. Regnault and his painter-comrade Clairin were side by
side. Suddenly the retreat was sounded, and the same instant
Clairin missed his friend. He sought him with frenzy amid the trees
in the darkening wood, called to him, peered into the faces of the
dying--no answer! Ah! he must have been swept backwards by the rush
of the retreat--Clairin will find him again.

Three days later the lost was found--one among two hundred corpses
of National Guards carted into Pere Lachaise. Clairin, mad with
grief, held his friend in his arms--held, kissed the beautiful
head, now bruised and stained past even _her_ knowing, with
its bullet-wound in the temple.

On his breast was found a medal with a silver tear hanging from it.
She who had long worn it as a symbol of bereavement, in memory of
dear ones lost to her, had given it to him in her first joy. 'I will
reclaim it,' she had said, smiling, 'the first time you make me
weep!' It was all that was brought back to her--all except a
scrawled paper found in his pocket, containing some hurried and
almost illegible words, written perhaps beside his outpost fire.

'We have lost many men--we must remake
them--_better_--_stronger_. The lesson should profit us.
No more lingering amid facile pleasures! Who dare now live for
himself alone? It has been for too long the custom with us to
believe in nothing but enjoyment and all bad passions. We have
prided ourselves on despising everything good and worthy. No more
of such contempt!'

Then--so the story ended--four days later, on the very day of the
capitulation of Paris, Regnault was carried to his last rest. A
figure in widow's dress walked behind. And to many standing by,
amid the muffled roll of the drums and the wailing of the music, it
was as though France herself went down to burial with her son.

David got up gently and went across to Barbier, who was sitting
with his letters and papers before him, staring and stupefied, the
lower jaw falling, in a trance of grief.

The young man put down the newspaper he had been reading in front
of the old man.

'Read that some time; it will give you something to be proud of. I
told you I knew him--he was kind to me.'

Barbier nodded, not understanding, and sought for his spectacles
with shaking fingers. David quietly went out.

He walked home in a state of exaltation like a man still environed
with the emotion of great poetry or great music. He said very
little about Regnault in the days that followed to Ancrum or
Barbier, even to Dora, with whom every week his friendship was
deepening. But the memory of the dead man, as it slowly shaped
itself in his brooding mind, became with him a permanent and
fruitful element of thought. Very likely the Regnault whom he
revered, whose name was henceforth a sacred thing to him, was only
part as it were of the real Regnault. He saw the French artist with
an Englishman's eyes--interpreted him in English ways--the ways,
moreover, of a consciousness self-taught and provincial, however
gifted and flexible. Only one or two aspects, no doubt, of that
rich, self-tormented nature, reared amid the most complex movements
of European intelligence, were really plain to him. And those
aspects were specially brought home to him by his own mental
condition. No matter. Broadly, essentially, he understood.

But thenceforward, just as Elise Delaunay had stood to him in the
beginning for French art and life, and that ferment in himself
which answered to them, so now in her place stood Regnault with
those stern words upon his young and dying lips--'We have lost many
men--we must remake them--better! Henceforward let no one dare live
unto himself.' The Englishman took them into his heart, that
ethical fibre in him, which was at last roused and dominant,
vibrating, responding. And as the poignant images of death and
battle faded he saw his hero always as he had seen him last--young,
radiant, vigorous, pointing to the dawn behind Notre-Dame.

All life looked differently to David this winter. He saw the
Manchester streets and those who lived in them with other
perceptions. His old political debating interests, indeed, were
comparatively slack; but persons--men and women, and their
stories--for these he was instinctively on the watch. His eye
noticed the faces he passed as it had never yet done--divined in
them suffering, or vice, or sickness. All that he saw at this
moment he saw tragically. The doors set open about him were still,
as Keats, himself hurried to his end by an experience of passion,
once expressed it, 'all dark,' and leading to darkness. There were
times when Dora's faith and Ancrum's mysticism drew him
irresistibly; other times when they were almost as repulsive to him
as they had ever been, because they sounded to him like the formula
of people setting out to explain the world 'with a light heart,' as
Ollivier had gone to war.

But whether or no it could be explained, this world, he could not
now help putting out his hand to meddle with and mend it; his mind
fed on its incidents and conditions. The mill-girls standing on the
Ancoats pavements; the drunken lurryman tottering out from the
public-house to his lurry under the biting sleet of February; the
ragged barefoot boys and girls swarming and festering in the slums;
the young men struggling all about him for subsistence and
success--these for the first time became realities to him, entered
into that pondering of 'whence and whither' to which he had been
always destined, and whereon he was now consciously started.

And as the months went on, his attention was once more painfully
caught and held by Dora's troubles and Daddy's infirmities. For
Daddy's improvement was short-lived. A bad relapse came in
November; things again went downhill fast; the loan contracted in
the summer had to be met, and under the pressure of it Daddy only
became more helpless and disreputable week by week. And now, when
Doctor Mildmay went to see him, Daddy, crouching over the fire,
pretended to be deaf, and 'soft' besides. Nothing could be got out
of him except certain grim hints that his house was his own till he
was turned out of it. 'Looks pretty bad this time,' said the doctor
to David once as he came out discomfited. 'After all, there's not
much hope when the craving returns on a man of his age, especially
after some years' interval.'

Daddy would sometimes talk frankly enough to David. At such times
his language took an exasperating Shakespearean turn. He was
abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques--as a man much
buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets of life. Purcell
stood generally for 'the enemy;' and to Purcell his half-mad fancy
attributed most of his misfortunes. It was Purcell who had
undermined his business, taken away his character, and driven him
back to drink. David did not believe much of it, and told him so.
Then, roused to wrath, the young man would speak his mind plainly
as to Dora's sufferings and Dora's future. But to very little
purpose.

'Aye, you're right--you're right enough,' said the old man to him
on one of these occasions, with a wild, sinister look. 'Cordelia'll
hang for 't. If you want to do her any good, you must turn old Lear
out--send him packing, back to the desert where he was before.
There's elbow-room there!'

David looked up startled. The thin bronzed face had a restless
flutter in it. Before he could reply Daddy had laid a hand on his
shoulder.

'Davy, why don't you drink?'

'What do you mean?' said the young man, flushing.

'Davy, you've been as close as wax; but Daddy can see a thing or
two when he chooses. Ah, you should drink, my lad. Let people
prate--why shouldn't a man please himself? It's not the beastly
liquor--that's the worst part of it--it's the _dreams,_ my
lad, "the dreams that come." They say ether does the business
cheapest. A teaspoonful--and you can be alternately in Paradise and
the gutter four times a day. But the fools here don't know how to
mix it.'

As he spoke the door opened, and there stood Dora on the threshold.
She had just come back from a Lenten service; her little worn
prayer-book was in her hand. She stood trembling, looking at them
both--at David's tight, indignant lips--at her father's excitement.

Daddy's eye fell on her prayer-book, and David, looking up, saw a
quick cloud of distaste, aversion, pass over his weird face.

She put out some supper, and pressed David to stay. He did so in
the vain hope of keeping Daddy at home. But the old vagrant was too
clever for both of them. When David at last got up to go, Daddy
accompanied him downstairs, and stood in the doorway looking up
Market Place till David had disappeared in the darkness. Then with
a soft and cunning hand he drew the door to behind him, and stood a
moment lifting his face to the rack of moonlit cloud scudding
across the top of the houses opposite. As he did so, he drew a long
breath, with the gesture of one to whom the wild airs of that upper
sky, the rush of its driving wind, were stimulus and delight. Then
he put down his head and stole off to the right, towards the old
White Inn in Hanging Ditch, while Dora was still listening in
misery for his return step upon the stairs.

A week later Dora, not knowing how the restaurant could be kept
going any longer, and foreseeing utter bankruptcy and ruin as soon
as the shutters should be up, took her courage in both hands,
swallowed all pride, and walked up to Half Street to beg help of
Purcell. After all he was her mother's brother. In spite of that
long feud between him and Daddy, he would surely, for his own
credit's sake, help them to escape a public scandal. For all his
rodomontade, Daddy had never done him any real harm that she could
remember.

So she opened the shop door in Half Street, quaking at the sound of
the bell she set in motion, and went in.

Twenty minutes afterwards she came out again, looking from side to
side like a hunted creature, her veil drawn close over her face.
She fled on through Market Place, across Market Street and St.
Ann's Square, and through the tall dark warehouse streets
beyond--drawn blindly towards Potter Street and her only friend.

David was putting out some books on the stall when he looked up and
saw her. Perceiving that she was weeping and breathless, he asked
her into the back room, while John kept guard in the shop.

There she leant against the mantelpiece, shaking from head to foot,
and wiping away her tears. He soon gathered that she had been to
Purcell, and that Purcell had dismissed her appeal with every
circumstance of cold and brutal insult. The sooner her father was
in the workhouse or the lunatic asylum, and she in some nunnery or
other, the sooner each would be in their right place. He was a
vagabond, and she a Papist--let them go where they belonged. He was
not going to spend a farthing of his hard-earned money to help
either of them to impose any further on the world. And then he let
fall a word or two which showed her that he had probably been at
the bottom of some merciless pressure lately applied to them by one
or two of their chief creditors. The bookseller's hour was come,
and he was looking on at the hewing of his Agag with the joy of the
righteous. So might the Lord avenge him of all his enemies.

Dora could hardly give an account of it. The naked revelation of
Purcell's hate, of so hard and vindictive a soul, had worked upon
her like some physical horror. She had often suspected the truth,
but now that it was past doubting, the moral shock was terrible to
this tender mystical creature, whose heart by day and night lived a
hidden life with the Crucified and with His saints. Oh, how could
he, how could anyone, be so cruel? her father getting an old man!
and she, who had never quarrelled with him--who had nursed Lucy! So
she wailed, gradually recovering her poor shaken soul--calming it,
indeed, all the while out of sight, with quick piteous words of
prayer and submission.

David stood by, pale with rage and sympathy. But what could he do?
He was himself in the midst of a hard struggle, and had neither
money nor credit available. They parted at last, with the
understanding that he was to go and consult Ancrum, and that she
was to go to her friends at St. Damian's.

Till now poor Dora had carefully refrained from bringing her
private woes into relation with her life in and through St.
Damian's. Within that enchanted circle, she was another being with
another existence. There she had never asked anything for herself,
except the pardon and help of God, before His altar, and through
His priests. Rather she had given--given all that she had--her
time, such as she could spare from Daddy and her work, to the
Sunday-school and the sick; her hard-won savings on her clothes,
and on the extra work, for which she would often sit up night after
night when Daddy believed her asleep, to the poor and to the
services of the Church. There she had a position, almost an
authority of her own--the authority which comes of self-spending.
But now this innocent pride must be humbled. For the sake of her
father, and of those to whom they owed money they could not pay,
she must go and ask--beg instead of giving. All she wanted was
time. Her embroidery work was now better paid than ever. If the
restaurant were closed she could do more of it. In the end she
believed she could pay everybody. But she must have time. Yes, she
would go to Father Vernon that night! He would understand, even if
he could not help her.

Alas! Next morning David was just going out to dinner, when a
message was brought him from Market Place. He started off thither
at a run, and found a white and gasping Dora wandering restlessly
up and down the upper room; while Sarah, the old Lancashire cook,
very red and very tearful, followed her about trying to administer
consolation. Daddy had disappeared. After coming in about eleven
the night before and going noisily to his room--no doubt for the
purpose of deluding Dora--he must have stolen down again and made
off without being either seen or heard by anybody. Even the
policeman on duty in Market Place had noticed nothing. He had taken
what was practically the only money left them in the world--about
twenty pounds--from Dora's cashbox, and some clothes, packing these
last in a knapsack which still remained to him from the foreign
tramps of years before.

The efforts made by Dora, David, and Ancrum, whom David called in
to help, to track the fugitive, were quite useless. Daddy had
probably disguised himself, for he had all the tricks of the
adventurer, and could 'make up' in former days so as to deceive
even his own wife.

Strange outbreak of a secret ineradicable instinct! He had been
Dora's for twenty years. But life with her at Leicester, and during
their first years at Manchester, had thriven too evenly, and in the
end the old wanderer had felt his blood prick within him, and the
mania of his youth revive. His business had grown hateful to him;
it was probably the comparative monotony of success which had first
reawakened the travel-hunger--then restlessness, conflict, leading
to drink, and, finally, escape.

'He will come back, you know,' said Dora one night, sharply, to
David. 'He served my mother so many times. But he always came back.'

They were sitting together in the shuttered and dismantled
restaurant. There was to be a sale on the premises on the morrow,
and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of
the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from
upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who
had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was
realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still
leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had
met the creditors for her. There had been a composition, and she
had insisted upon working off to the best of her power whatever sum
might remain after the possession and goodwill had been sold. She
could live on a crust, and she was sure of continuous work both for
the great church-furniture shop in Manchester which had hitherto
employed her and also for the newly established School of Art
Needlework at Kensington. As an embroideress there were few more
delicately trained eyes and defter hands than hers in England.

When she spoke of her father's coming back, David was seized with
pity. She could not sit down in these days when her work was out of
her hands. Perpetual movement seemed her only relief. The face,
that seemed so featureless but was so expressive, had lost its
sweet, shining look; the mouth had the pucker of pain; and she had
piteous startled ways quite unlike her usual soft serenity.

'Oh, yes, he will come back--some time,' he said, to comfort her.

'I don't doubt that--never. But I wonder how he could go like
that--how he had the heart! I did think he cared for me. I wasn't
ever nasty to him--at least, I don't remember. Perhaps he thought I
was. But only we two--and always together--since mother died!'

She began to tidy some of the lots, to tie some of the bundles of
odds and ends together more securely--talking all the while in a
broken way. She was evidently bewildered and at sea. If she could
have remembered any misconduct of her own, it seemed to David, it
would have been a relief to her. Her faith taught her that love was
all-powerful--but it had availed her nothing!

The sale came; and the goodwill of the Parlour was sold to a man
who was to make a solid success of what with Daddy had been a
half-crazy experiment.

Dora went to live in Ancoats, that teeming, squalid quarter which
lies but a stone's-throw from the principal thoroughfares and
buildings of Manchester, and in its varieties of manufacturing life
and population presents types which are all its own. Here are the
cotton operatives who work the small proportion of mills still
remaining within the bounds of Manchester--the spinners, minders,
reelers, reed-makers, and the rest; here are the calico-printers
and dyers, the warehousemen and lurrymen; and here too are the
sellers of 'fents,' and all the other thousand and one small trades
and occupations which live on and by the poor. The quarter has one
broad thoroughfare or lung, which on a sunny day is gay, sightly,
and alive; then to north and south diverge the innumerable low
red-brick streets where the poor live and work; which have none,
however, of the trim uniformity which belongs to the workers'
quarters of the factory towns pure and simple. Manchester in its
worst streets is more squalid, more haphazard, more nakedly poor
even than London. Yet, for all that, Manchester is a city with a
common life, which London is not. The native Lancashire element,
lost as it is beneath many supervening strata, is still there and
powerful; and there are strong well-defined characteristic
interests and occupations which bind the whole together.

Here Dora settled with a St. Damian's girl friend, a shirt-maker.
They lived over a sweetshop, in two tiny rooms, in a street even
more miscellaneous and half-baked than its neighbours. Outside was
ugliness; inside, unremitting labour. But Dora soon made herself
almost happy. By various tender shifts she had saved out of the
wreck in Market Place Daddy's bits of engravings and foreign
curiosities, his Swiss carvings and shells, his skins and stuffed
birds; very moth-eaten and melancholy these last, but still safe.
There, too, was his chair; it stood beside the fire; he had but to
come back to it. Many a time in the week did she suddenly rise that
she might go to the door and listen; or crane her head out of
window, agitated by a figure, a sound, as her mother had done
before her.

Then her religious life was free to expand as it had never been
yet. Very soon, in Passion Week, she and her friend had gathered a
prayer-meeting of girls, hands from the mill at the end of the
street. They came for twenty minutes in the dinner-hour,
delicate-faced comely creatures many of them, with their shawls
over their heads: Dora prayed and sang with them, a soft tremulous
passion in every word and gesture. They thought her a saint--began
to tell her their woes and their sins. In the evenings and on
Sunday she lived in the coloured and scented church, with its
plaintive music, its luminous altar, its suggestions both of a
great encompassing church order of undefined antiquity and infinite
future, and of a practical system full of support for individual
weakness and guidance for the individual will. The beauty of the
ceremonial appealed to those instincts in her which found other
expression in her glowing embroideries; and towards the church
order, with its symbols, observances, mysteries, the now solitary
girl felt a more passionate adoration, a more profound humility,
than ever before. Nothing too much could be asked of her. During
Lent, but for the counsels of Father Russell himself, a shrewd man,
well aware that St. Damian's represented the one Anglican oasis in
an incorrigibly moderate Manchester, even her serviceable and
elastic strength would have given way, so hard she was to that poor
'sister the body,' which so many patient ages have gone to perfect
and adjust.

Half of the romance, the poetry of her life, lay here; the other
half in her constant expectation of her father, and in the visits
of David Grieve. Once a week at least David mounted to the little
room where the two girls sat working; sometimes now, oh joy! he
went to church with her; sometimes he made her come out to Eccles,
or Cheadle, or the Irwell valley for a walk. She used various
maidenly arts and self-restraints to prevent scandal. At home she
never saw him alone, and she now never went to Potter Street.
Still, out of doors they were often alone. There was no
concealment, and the persons who took notice assumed that they were
keeping company and going to be married. When such things were said
to Dora she met them with a sweet and quiet denial, at first
blushing, then with no change at all of look or manner.

Yet the girl who lived with her knew that the first sound of
David's rap on the door below sent a tremor through the figure
beside her, that the slight hand would go up instinctively to the
coiled hair, straightening and pinning, and that the smiling,
listening, sometimes disputing Dora who talked with David Grieve
was quite different from the dreamy and ascetic Dora who sat beside
her all day.

Why did David go? As a matter of fact, with every month of this
winter and spring, Dora's friendship became more necessary to him.
All the brotherly feeling he would once so willingly have spent on
Louie, he now spent on Dora. She became in truth a sister to him.
He talked to her as he would have done to Louie had she been like
Dora. No other relationship ever entered his mind; and he believed
that he was perfectly understood and met in the same way.

Both often spoke of Lucy, towards whom David in this new and graver
temper felt both kindly and gratefully. She, poor child, wrote to
Dora from time to time letters full of complaints of her father and
of his tyranny in keeping her away from Manchester. He indeed
seemed to have taken a morbid dislike to his daughter, and what
company he wanted he got from the widow, whom yet he had never made
up his mind to marry. Lucy chafed and rebelled against the
perpetual obstacles he placed in the way of her returning home, but
he threatened to make her earn her own living if she disobeyed him,
and in the end she always submitted. She poured herself out
bitterly, however, to Dora, and Dora was helplessly sorry for her,
feeling that her idle wandering life with the various aunts and
cousins she boarded with was excessively bad for her--seeing that
Lucy was not of the stuff to fashion new duties or charities for
herself out of new relations--and that the small, vain, and yet
affectionate nature ran an evil chance of ultimate barrenness and
sourness.

But what could she do? In every letter there was some mention of
David Grieve or request for news about him. About the visit to
Paris Dora had written discreetly, telling only what she knew, and
nothing of what she guessed. In reality, as the winter passed on,
Dora watched him more and more closely, waiting for the time when
that French mystery, whatever it was, should have ceased to
overshadow him, and she might once more scheme for Lucy. He must
marry--that she knew!--whatever he might think. Anyone could see
that, with the returning spring, in spite of her friendship and
Ancrum's, he felt his loneliness almost intolerable. It was clear,
too, as his manhood advanced, that he was naturally drawn to women,
naturally dependent on them. In spite of his great intelligence, to
her so formidable and mysterious, Dora had soon recognised, as
Elise had done, the eager, clinging, confiding temper of his youth.
And beneath the transformation of passion and grief it was still
there--to be felt moving often like a wounded thing.




CHAPTER XV


It was a showery April evening. But as it was also a Saturday,
Manchester took no heed at all of the weather. The streets were
thronged. All the markets were ablaze with light, and full of
buyers. In Market Place, Dora's old home, the covered glass booths
beside the pavement brought the magic of the spring into the very
heart of the black and swarming town, for they were a fragrant show
of daffodils, hyacinths, primroses, and palms. Their lights shone
out into the rainy mist of the air, on the glistening pavements,
and on the faces of the cheerful chattering crowd, to which the
shawled heads so common among the women gave the characteristic
Lancashire touch. Above rose the dark tower of the Exchange; on one
side was the Parlour, still dedicated to the kindly diet of
corn--and fruit-eating men, but repainted, and launched on a fresh
career of success by Daddy's successor; on the other, the gabled
and bulging mass of the old Fishing-tackle House, with a lively
fish and oyster traffic surging in the little alleys on either side
of it.

Market Street, too, was thronged. In the great cheap shop at the
head of it, aflame with lights from top to base, you could see the
buyers story after story, swarming like bees in a glass hive.
Farther on in the wide space of the Infirmary square, the omnibuses
gathered, and a detachment of redcoats just returned from
rifle-practice on the moors crowded the pavement outside the
hospital, amid an admiring escort of the youth of Manchester, while
their band played lustily.

But especially in Peter Street, the street of the great public
halls and principal theatres, was Manchester alive and busy.
Nilsson was singing at the 'Royal,' and the rich folk were setting
down there in their broughams and landaus. But in the great Free
Trade Hall there was a performance of 'Judas Maccabeus' given by
the Manchester Philharmonic Society, and the vast place, filled
from end to end with shilling and two-shilling seats, was crowded
with the 'people.' It was a purely local scene, unlike anything of
the same kind in London, or any other capital. The performers on
the platform were well known to Manchester, unknown elsewhere;
Manchester took them at once critically and affectionately,
remembering their past, looking forward to their future; the
Society was one of which the town was proud; the conductor was a
character, and popular; and half the audience at least was composed
of the relations and friends of the chorus. Most people had a
'Susan,' an 'Alice,' or a 'William' making signs to them at
intervals from the orchestra; and when anything went particularly
well, and the applause was loud, the friends of Susan or Alice
beamed with a proprietary pride.

Looking down upon this friendly cheerful throng sat David Grieve,
high up in the balcony. It had been his wont of late to frequent
these cheap concerts, where as a rule, owing to the greater musical
sensitiveness of the English North as compared with the South, the
music is singularly good. During the past winter, indeed, music
might almost be said to have become part of his life. He had no
true musical gift, but in the paralysis of many of his natural
modes of expression which had overtaken him music supplied a need.
In it he at least, and at this moment, found a voice and an emotion
not too personal or poignant. He lost himself in it, and was
soothed.

Towards the beginning of the last part he suddenly with a start
recognised Lucy Purcell in the body of the hall. She was sitting
with friends whom he did not know, staring straight before her. He
bent forward and looked at her carefully. In a minute or two he
decided that she was looking tired, cross, and unhappy, and that
she was not attending to the music at all.

So at last her father had let her come home. As to her looks, to be
daughter to Purcell was to be sure of disagreeable living; and
perhaps her future stepmother had been helping Purcell to annoy
her.

Poor little thing! David felt a strong wish to speak to her after
the performance. Meanwhile he tried to attract her attention, but
in vain. It seemed to him that she looked right along the bench on
which he sat; but there was no flash in her face; it remained as
tired and frowning as before.

He ran downstairs before the end of the last chorus, and placed
himself near the door by which he felt sure she would come out. He
was just in time. She and her party also came out early before the
rush. There was a sudden crowd of people in the doorway, and then
he heard a little cry. Lucy stood before him, flushed, pulling at
her glove, and saying something incoherent. But before he could
understand she had turned back to the two women who accompanied her
and spoken to them quickly; the elder replied, with a sour look at
David; the younger laughed behind her muff. Lucy turned away
wilfully, and at that instant the crowd from within, surging
outwards, swept them away from her, and she and David found
themselves together.

'Come down those steps there to the right,' she said peremptorily.
'They are going the other way.'

By this time David himself was red. She hurried him into the
street, however, and then he saw that she was breathing hard, and
that her hands were clasped together as though she were trying to
restrain herself.

'Oh, I am so unhappy!' she burst out, 'so unhappy! And it was all,
you know, to begin with, because of you, Mr. Grieve! But oh! I
forgot you'd been ill--you look so different!'

She paused suddenly, while over her face there passed an expression
half startled, half shrinking, as of one who speaks familiarly, as
he supposes, to an old friend and finds a stranger. She could not
take her eyes off him. What was this new dignity, this indefinable
change of manner?

'I am not different,' he said hastily, 'not in the least. So your
father has never forgiven you the kindness you did me? I don't know
what to say, Miss Lucy. I'm both sorry and ashamed.'

'Forgiven it!--no, nor ever will,' she said shortly, walking on,
and forgetting everything but her woes. 'Oh, do listen! Come up
Oxford Street. I must tell some one, or I shall die! I must see
Dora. Father's forbidden me to go, and I haven't had a moment to
myself yet. She hasn't written to me since she left the Parlour,
and no one'll tell me where she is. And that _odious_ woman!
Oh, she is an abominable wretch! She wants to claim all my
things--all the bits of things that were mother's, and I have
always counted mine. She won't let me take any of them away. And
she's stolen a necklace of mine--yes, Mr. Grieve, _stolen_ it.
I don't care _that_ about it--not in itself; but to have your
things taken out of your drawers without "_With_ your leave"
or "_By_ your leave"!--She's made father worse than ever. I
thought he had found her out, but he is actually going to marry her
in July, and they won't let me live at home unless I make a solemn
promise to "perform my religious duties" and behave properly to the
chapel people. And I never will, not if I starve for it--nasty,
canting, crawling, backbiting things! Then father says I can live
away, and he'll make me an allowance. And what do you think he'll
allow me?'

She faced round upon him with curving lip and eyes aflame. David
averred truly that he could not guess.

'Thirty--pounds--a--year!' she said with vicious emphasis.
'There--would you believe it? If you put a dirty little chit of a
nurse-girl on board wages, it would come to more than that. And he
just bought three houses in Millgate, and as rich as anything! Oh,
it's shameful, I call it, _shameful!_'

She put her handkerchief to her eyes. Then she quickly withdrew it
again and turned to him, remembering how his first aspect had
surprised her. In the glare of some shops they were passing David
could see her perfectly, and she him. Certainly, in the year which
had elapsed since they had met she had ripened, or rather softened,
into a prettier girl. Whether it was the milder Southern climate in
which she had been living, or the result of physical weakness left
by her attack of illness in the preceding spring, at any rate her
bloom was more delicate, the lines of her small, pronounced face
more finished and melting. As for her, now that she had paused a
moment in her flow of complaint, she was busy puzzling out the
change in him. David became vaguely conscious of it, and tried to
set her off again.

'But you'd rather live away,' he said, 'when they treat you like
that? You'd rather be independent, I should think? I would!'

'Oh, catch me living with that woman!' she cried passionately.'
She's no better than a thief, a common thief. I don't care who
hears me. And _made up!_ Oh, its shocking! It seems to me
there's nothing I can talk about at home now--whether it's getting
old--or teeth--or hair--I'm always supposed to be "passing
remarks." And I wouldn't mind if it was my Hastings cousins I had
to live with. But they can't have me any more, and now I'm at
Wakely with the Astons.'

'The Aston's?' David echoed. Like most people of small training and
intelligence, Lucy instinctively supposed that whatever was
familiar to her was familiar to other people.

'Oh, don't you know? It's father's sister who married a
mill-overseer at Wakely. And they're very kind to me. Only they're
_dreadfully_ pious too--not like father--I don't mean that.
And, you see--it's Robert!'

'Who's Robert?' asked David amused by her blush, and admiring the
trim lightness of her figure and walk.

'Robert's the eldest son. He's a reedmaker. He's got enough to
marry on--at least he thinks so.'

'And he wants to marry you?'

She nodded. Then she looked at him, laughing, her naturally bright
eyes sparkling through the tears still wet in them.

'Father's a Baptist, you know--that's bad enough--but Robert's
a _Particular_ Baptist. I asked him what it meant once when
he was pestering me to marry him. "Well, you see," he said,
"a man must _show_ that his heart's changed--we don't take
in everybody like--we want to be _sure_ they're real _converted_."
I don't believe it does mean that--father says it doesn't.
Anyway I asked him whether if I married him he'd want me to be
a Particular Baptist too. And he said, very slow and solemn,
that of course he should look for religious fellowship in his
wife, but that he didn't want to hurry me. I laughed till I
cried at the thought of _me_ going to that hideous chapel of
his, dressed like his married sister. But sometimes, I declare, I
think he'll make me do what he wants--he's got a way with him. He
sticks to a thing as tight as wax, and I don't care what becomes of
me sometimes.'

She pouted despondently, but her quick eye stole to her companion's
face.

'Oh, no, you won't marry Robert, Miss Lucy,' said David cheerfully.
'You've had a will of your own ever since I've known you. But what
are you at home for now?'

'Why, I told you--to pack up my things. But I can't find half of
them; she--she's walked off with them. Oh, I'm going off again as
soon as possible--I can't stand it. But I must see Dora. Father
says I shan't visit Papists. But I'll watch my chance. I'll get
there to-morrow--see if I don't! Tell me what she's doing, Mr.
Grieve.'

David told her all he knew. Lucy's comments were very
characteristic. She was equally hard on Daddy's ill-behaviour and
Dora's religion, with a little self-satisfied hardness that would
have provoked David but for its childish _naivete_. Many of
the things that she said of Dora, however, showed real feeling,
real affection.

'She _is_ good,' she wound up at last with a long sigh.

'Yes, she's the best woman I ever saw,' said David slowly; 'she's
beautiful, she's a saint.'

Lucy looked up quickly--her dismayed eyes fastened on him--then
they fell again, and her expression became suddenly piteous and
humble.

'You're still getting on well, aren't you?' she said timidly. 'You
were glad not to be turned out, weren't you?'

Somehow, for the life of her, she could not at that moment help
reminding him of her claim upon him. He admitted it very readily,
told her broadly how he was doing and what new connections he was
making. It was pleasant to tell her, pleasant to speak to this
changing rose-leaf face with its eager curiosity and attention.

'And you were ill when you were abroad?--so Dora said. Father, of
course, made unkind remarks--you may be sure of that!--_He_'ll
set stories about when he doesn't like anybody. I didn't believe a
word.'

'It don't matter,' said David hotly, but he flushed. His desire to
wring Purcell's neck was getting inconveniently strong.

'No, not a bit,' she declared. Then she suddenly broke into
laughter. 'Oh, Mr. Grieve, how many assistants do you think father's
had since you left?'

And she chatted on about these individuals, describing a series of
dolts, their achievements and personalities, with a great deal of
girlish fun. Her companion enjoyed her little humours and egotisms,
enjoyed the walk and her companionship. After the strain of the
day, a day spent either in the toil of a developing business or
under a difficult pressure of thought, this light girl's voice
brought a gay, relaxed note into life. The spring was in the air,
and his youth stirred again in that cavern where grief had buried
it.

'Oh, _dear_, I must go home,' she said at last regretfully,
startled by a striking clock. 'Father'll be just mad. Of course,
he'll hear all about my meeting you--I don't care. I'm not going to
be parted from all my friends to please him, particularly now he's
turned me out for good--from Dora and--'

'From you,' she would have said, but she became suddenly conscious
and her voice failed.

'No, indeed! And your friends won't forget you, Miss Lucy. You'll
go and see Dora to-morrow?'

'Yes, if I can give them the slip at home.'

There was a pause, and then he said--

'And will you allow me to visit you at Wakely some Sunday? I know
those moors well.'

She reddened all over with delight. There was something in the
little stiffness of the request which gave it importance.

'I wish you would; it's not far,' she stammered. 'Aunt Miriam would
be glad to see you.'

They walked back rapidly along Mosley Street and into Market Place.
There she stopped and shyly asked him to leave her. Almost all the
Saturday-night crowd had disappeared from the streets. It was
really late, and she became suddenly conscious that this walk of
hers might reasonably be regarded at home as a somewhat bold
proceeding.

'I wish you'd let me see you right home,' he said, detaining her
hand in his.

'Oh, no, no--I shall catch it enough as it is. Oh, they'll let me
in! Will it be next Sunday, Mr. Grieve?'

'No, the Sunday after. Can I do anything for you?'

He came closer to her, seeming to envelope her in his tall,
protecting presence. It was impossible for him to ignore her
girlish flutter, her evident joy in having seen and talked to him
again, in spite of her dread of her father. Nor did he wish to
ignore them. They were unexpectedly sweet to him, and he surprised
himself.

'Oh no, nothing,--but it's very good of you to say so,' she said
impulsively; '_very_. Good night again.'

And instinctively she put out another small hand, which also he
took, so holding her prisoner a moment.

'Look here,' he said, 'I'll just slip down that side of the Close
and wait till I see you get safe in. Good night; I _am_ glad I
saw you!'

She ran away in a blind whirl of happiness up the steps into the
passage of Half Street. He slipped down to the left and waited,
looking through the railings across the corner of the Close, his
eyes fixed on that upper window, where he had so often sat,
parleying alternately with the cathedral and Voltaire.

Lucy rang, the door opened, there were loud sounds within, but she
was admitted; it closed behind her.

David was soon in his back room, kindling a lamp and a bit of fire
to read by. But when it was done he sat bent forward over the
blaze, till the cathedral clock chimed the small hours, thinking.

She was so unformed and childish, that poor little thing!--surely a
man could make what he would of her. She would give him affection
and duty; the core of the nature was sound, and her little humours
would bring life into a house.

He had but to put out his hand--that was plain enough. And why not?
Was any humbler draught to be for ever put aside, because the best
wine had been poured to waste?

Then the rebellions of an unquenched romance, an untamed heart,
beset him. Surging waves of bitterness and pain, the after-swell of
that tempest in which his youth had so nearly foundered, seemed to
bear him away to seas of desolation.

After all that had happened, the greed for personal joy he every
now and then detected in himself surprised and angered him by its
strength. The truth was that in whole tracts of his nature he was
still a boy, still young beyond his years, and it was the conflict
in him between youth's hot immaturity and a man's baffling
experience which made the pain of his life.

He meant to go to Wakely on the next Sunday but one--that he was
certain of--but as to what he was to do and say when he got there
he was perhaps culpably uncertain. But in his weakness and
_sehnsucht_ he dwelt upon the thought of Lucy more and more.

Then Dora--foolish saint!--came upon the scene.

Lucy found her way to the street in Ancoats where Dora lived, the
morning after her talk with David, and the two cousins spent an
agitated hour together. Lucy could hardly find time to ask Dora
about her sorrows, so occupied was she in recounting all her own
adventures. She was to go back to Wakely that very afternoon.
Purcell had been absolutely unapproachable since the cousin who had
escorted Lucy to the Free Trade Hall the night before had in her
own defence revealed the secret of that young lady's behaviour.
Pack and go she should! He wouldn't have such a hussy another night
under his roof. Let them do with her as could.

'I thought he would have beaten me this morning,' Lucy candidly
confessed. There was a red spot on each cheek, and she was
evidently glorying in martyrdom. 'He looked like a devil--a real
devil. Why can't he be fond of me, and let me alone, like other
girls' fathers? I believe he _is_ fond of me somehow, but he
wants to break my spirit--'

She tossed her head significantly.

'Lucy, you know you ought to give in when you can,' said the
perplexed Dora, with rebuke in her voice.

'Oh, nonsense!' said Lucy. 'You can't--it's ridiculous. Well,
he'll quarrel with that woman some day--I'm sure _she's_ his
match--and then maybe he'll want me back. But perhaps he won't
get me.'

Dora looked up with a curious expression, half smiling, half
wistful. She had already heard all the story of the walk.

'O Dora!' cried the child, laying down her head on the table
beneath her cousin's eyes, 'Dora, I do believe he's beginning to
care. You see he _asked_ to come to Wakely. I didn't ask him.
Oh, if it all comes to nothing again, I shall break my heart!'

Dora smoothed the fine brown hair, and said affectionate things,
but vaguely, as if she was not quite certain what to say.

'He does look quite different, somehow,' continued Lucy. 'Why do you
think he was so long away over there, Dora? Father says nasty
things about it--says he fell into bad company and lost his money.'

'I don't know how uncle Purcell can know,' said Dora indignantly.
'He's always thinking the worst of people. He was ill, for Mr.
Ancrum told me, and he's the only person that _does_ know. And
anyone can see he isn't strong yet.'

'Oh, and he is so handsome!' sighed Lucy, 'handsomer than ever.
There isn't a man in Manchester to touch him.'

Dora laughed out and called her a 'little silly.' But, as privately
in her heart of hearts she was of the same opinion, her reproof had
not much force.

When Lucy left, Dora put away her work, and, lifting a flushed
face, walked to the window and stood there looking out. A pale
April sun was shining on the brewery opposite, and touched the dark
waters of the canal under the bridge to the left. The roofs of the
squalid houses abutting on the brewery were wet with rain. Through
a gap she could see a laundress's back-yard mainly filled with
drying clothes, but boasting besides a couple of pink flowering
currants just out, and holding their own for a few brief days
against the smuts of Manchester. Here and there a man out of work
lounged, pipe in mouth, at his open door, silently absorbing the
sunshine and the cheerfulness of the moist blue over the
house-tops. There was a new sweetness and tenderness in the spring
air--or were they in Dora's soul?

She leant her head against the window, and remained there with her
hands clasped before her for some little time--for her, a most
unusual idleness.

Yes, Lucy was very obstinate. Dora had never thought she would have
the courage to fight her father in this way. And selfish, too. She
had spoken only once of Daddy, and that in a way to make the
daughter wince. But she was so young--such a child!--and would be
ruined if she were left to this casual life, and people who didn't
understand her. A husband to take care of her, and children--they
would be the making of her.

And he! Dora's eyes filled with tears. All this winter the change
in him, the silent evidences of a shock all the more tragic to her
because of its mystery, had given him a kind of sacredness in her
eyes. She fell thinking, besides, of the times lately he had been
to church with her. Ah, she was glad he had heard that sermon, that
beautiful sermon of Canon Welby's in Passion Week! He had said
nothing about it, but she knew it had been meant for clever,
educated men--men like him. The church, indeed, had been full of
men--her neighbours had told her that several of the gentlemen from
Owens College had been there.

That evening David knocked at the door below about half-past eight.
Dora got up quickly and went across to her room-fellow, a
dark-faced stooping girl, who took her shirt-maker's slavery
without a murmur, and loved Dora.

'Would you mind, Mary?' she said timidly. 'I want to speak to Mr.
Grieve.'

The girl looked up, understood, stopped her machine, and, hastily
gathering some pieces together that wanted buttonholes, went off
into the little inner room and shut the door.

Dora knelt and with restless hands put the bit of fire together.
She had just thrown a handkerchief over her canaries. On the frame
a piece of her work, a fine altar-cloth gleaming with golds,
purples, and pale pinks, stood uncovered. The deal table, the white
walls on which hung Daddy's old prints, the bare floor with its
strip of carpet, were all spotlessly clean. The tea had been put
away. Daddy's vacant chair stood in its place.

When David came in he found her sitting pensively on a little
wooden stool by the fire. Generally he gossipped while the two
girls worked busily away--sometimes he read to them. To-night as he
sat down he felt something impending.

Dora talked of Lucy's visit. They agreed as to the folly and
brutality of Purcell's treatment of her, and laughed together over
the marauding stepmother.

Then there was a pause. Dora broke it. She was sitting upright on
the stool, looking straight into his face.

'Will you not be cross if I say something?' she asked, catching her
breath. 'It's not my business.'

'Say it, please.' But he reddened instantly.

'Lucy's--Lucy's--got a fancy for you,' she said tremulously,
shrinking from her own words. 'Perhaps it's a shame to say it--oh,
it may be! You haven't told me anything, and she's given me no
leave. But she's had it a long time.'

'I don't know why you say so,' he replied half sombrely.

His flush had died away, but his hand shook on his knee.

'Oh, yes, you do,' she cried; 'you must know. Lucy can't keep even
her own secrets. But she's got such a warm heart! I'm sure she has.
If a man would take her and be kind to her, she'd make him happy.'

She stopped, looking at him intently.

Then suddenly she burst out, laying her hand on the arm of his
chair--Daddy's chair:

'Don't be angry; you've been like a brother to me.'

He took her hand and pressed it, reassuring her.

'But how can I make her happy?' he said, with his head on his hand.
'I don't want to be a fool and deny what you say, for the sake of
denying it. But--'

His voice sank into silence. Then, as she did not speak, he looked
up at her. She was sitting, since he had released her, with her
arms locked behind her, frowning in her intensity of thought, her
last energy of sacrifice.

'You would make her happy,' she said slowly, 'and she'd be a loving
wife. She's flighty is Lucy, but there's nothing bad in her.'

Both were silent for another minute, then, by a natural reaction,
both looked at each other and laughed.

'I'm making rather free with you, I'm bound to admit that,' she
said, with a merry shamefaced expression, which brought out the
youth in her face.

'Well, give me time, Miss Dora. If--if anything did come of it, I
should have to let Purcell know, and there'd be flat war. You've
thought of that?'

Certainly, Dora had thought of it. They might have to wait, and
Purcell would probably refuse to give or leave Lucy any money. All
the better, according to David. Nothing would ever induce him to
take a farthing of his ex-master's hoards.

But here, by a common instinct, they stopped planning, and David
resolutely turned the conversation. When they parted, however, Dora
was secretly eager and hopeful. It was curious how little the
father's rights weighed with so scrupulous a soul. Whether it was
his behaviour to her father which had roused an unconscious
hardness even in her gentle nature, or whether it was the subtle
influence of his Dissent, as compared with the nascent dispositions
she seemed to see in David--anyway, Dora's conscience was silent;
she was entirely absorbed in her own act, and in the prospects of
the other two.




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.

'Are you a stranger in these parts, or do you know Benet's Park
already?' she said presently to Lucy, who was next her, in a
pleasant, nonchalant way.

'I have never been here before,' said Lucy, dreading somehow the
sound of her own voice; 'but my husband is well acquainted with the
family.'

She was pleased with her own phrase, and began to recover herself.
The lady said no more, however, but leant back and apparently went
to sleep. The tall ladies presently did the same. Lucy's depression
returned as the silence lasted. She supposed that it was
aristocratic not to talk to people till you had been introduced to
them. She hoped she would be introduced when they reached Benet's
Park. Otherwise it would be awkward staying in the same house.

Then she fell into a dream, imagining herself with a maid--ordering
her about deliciously--saying to the handsome footman, 'My maid has
my wraps'--and then with the next jolt of the carriage waking up to
the humdrum and unwelcome reality. And David might be as rich as
anybody! Familiar resentments and cravings stirred in her, and her
drive became even less of a pleasure than before. As for David, he
spent the whole of it in lively conversation with the small dark
man, beside the window.

The carriage paused a moment. Then great gates were swung back and
in they sped, the horses stepping out smartly now that they were
within scent of home. There was a darkness as of thick and lofty
trees, then dim opening stretches of park; lastly a huge house,
mirage-like in the distance, with rows of lighted windows, a
crackling of crisp gravel, the sound of the drag, and a pomp of
opening doors.

'Shall I take your bag, Madam?' said a magnificent person, bending
towards Lucy, as, clinging to her possession, she followed the lady
in green into the outer hall.

'Oh no, thank you! at least, shall I find it again?' said the
frightened Lucy, looking in front of her at the vast hall, with its
tall lamps and statues and innumerable doors.

'It shall be sent upstairs for you, Madam,' said the magnificent
person gravely, and, as Lucy thought, severely.

She submitted, and looked round for David. Oh, where was he?

'This is a fine hall, isn't it?' said the lady in green beside her.
'Bad period--but good of its kind. What on earth do they spoil it
for with those shocking modern portraits?'

Such assurance--combined with such garments--in such a house--it
was nothing short of a miracle!




CHAPTER III


'Now, Lavinia, do be kind to young Mrs. Grieve. She is evidently as
shy as she can be.'

So spoke Lord Driffield, with some annoyance in his voice, as he
looked into his wife's room after dressing for dinner.

'I suppose she can amuse herself like other people,' said Lady
Driffield. She was standing by the fire warming a satin-shoed foot.
'I have told Williams to leave all the houses open to-morrow. And
there's church, and the pictures. The Danbys and the rest of us are
going over to Lady Herbart's for tea.'

A cloud came over Lord Driffield's face. He made some impatient
exclamation, which was muffled by his white beard and moustache,
and walked back to his own room.

Meanwhile Lucy, in another corridor of the great house, was
standing before a long glass, looking herself up and down in a
tumult of excitement and anxiety.

She had just passed through a formidable hour! In a great gallery,
with polished floor, and hung with portraits of ancestral
Driffields, the party from the station had found Lady Driffield,
with five or six other people, who seemed to be already staying in
the house. Though the butler had preceded them, no names but those
of Lady Venetia Danby and Miss Danby had been announced; and when
Lady Driffield, a tall effective-looking woman with a cold eye and
an expressionless voice, said a short 'How do you do?' and extended
a few fingers to David and his wife, no names were mentioned, and
Lucy felt a sudden depressing conviction that no names were needed.
To the mistress of the house they were just two nonentities, to
whom she was to give bed and board for two nights to gratify her
husband's whims; whether their insignificant name happened to be
Grieve, or Tompkins, or Johnson, mattered nothing.

So Lucy had sat down in a subdued state of mind, and was handed tea
by a servant, while the Danbys--Colonel Danby, after his smoke in
the dog-cart, following close on the heels of his wife and
daughter--mixed with the group round the tea-table, and much
chatter, combined with a free use of Christian names, liberal
petting of Lady Driffield's Pomeranian, and an account by Miss
Danby of an accident to herself in the hunting-field, filled up a
half-hour which to one person, at least, had the qualities of a
nightmare. David was talking to the lady in green--to whom, by the
way, Lady Driffield had been distinctly civil. Once he came over to
relieve Lucy from a waterproof which was on her knee, and to get
her some bread and butter. But otherwise no one took any notice of
her, and she fell into a nervous terror lest she should upset her
cup, or drop her teaspoon, or scatter her crumbs on the floor.

Then at last Lord Driffield, who had been absent on some country
business, which his soul loathed, had come in, and with the
cordiality, nay, affection of his greeting to David, and the
kindness of his notice of herself, little Lucy's spirits had risen
at a bound. She felt instinctively that a protector had arrived,
and even the formidable procession upstairs in the wake of Lady
Driffield, when the moment at last arrived for showing the guests
to their rooms, had passed off safely, Lucy throwing out an
agitated 'Thank you!' when Lady Driffield had even gone so far as
to open a door with her own bediamonded hand, which had Mrs.
Grieve's plebeian appellations written in full upon the card
attached to it.

And now? Was the dress nice? Would it do? Unluckily, since Lucy's
rise in the social scale which had marked the last few years, the
sureness of her original taste in dress had somewhat deserted her.
Her natural instinct was for trimness and closeness; but of late
her ideals had been somewhat confused by a new and more important
dressmaker with 'aesthetic' notions, who had been recommended to
her by the good-natured and artistic wife of one of the College
professors. Under the guidance of this expert, she had chosen a
'Watteau _sacque_' from a fashion-plate, not quite daring,
little tradesman's daughter as she felt herself at bottom, to
venture on the undisguised low neck and short sleeves of ordinary
fashionable dress.

She said fretfully to herself that she could see nothing in this
vast room. More and more candles did she light with a trembling
hand, trusting devoutly that no one would come in and discover her
with such an extravagant illumination. Then she tried each of the
two long glasses of the room in turn. Her courage mounted. It
_was_ pretty. The terra-cotta shade was _exquisite,_ and
_no_ one could tell that the satin was cotton-backed. The
flowing sleeves and the pleat from the shoulder gave her dignity,
she was certain; and she had done her hair beautifully. She wished
David would come in and see! But his room was across a little
landing, which, indeed, seemed to be all their own, for it was shut
off from the passage they had entered from by an outer door. There
was, however, more than one door opening on to the landing, and
Lucy was so much afraid of her surroundings that she preferred to
wait till he came.

Meanwhile--what a bedroom! Why, it was more gorgeous than any
drawing-room she had ever entered. Every article of furniture was
of old marqueterie, adapted to modern uses, the appointments of the
writing-table were of solid silver--Lucy had eagerly ascertained
the fact by looking at the 'marks'--and as for the _towels_,
she simply could not have imagined that such things were made! Her
little soul was in a whirl of envy, admiration, pride. What tales
she would have to tell Dora when they got home!

'Are you ready?' said David, opening the door. 'I believe I hear
people going downstairs.'

He came in arrayed in the new dress suit which became him as well
as anything else; for he had a natural dignity which absorbed and
surmounted any novelty of circumstance or setting, and was purely a
matter of character, depending upon a mind familiar with large
interests and launched towards ideal aims. He might be silent,
melancholy, impracticable, but never meanly self-conscious. It had
rarely occurred to anyone to pity or condescend to David Grieve.

Lucy looked at him with uneasy pride. Then she glanced back at her
own reflection in the glass.

'What do you think of it?' she asked him, eagerly.

'Magnificent!' said David, with all the sincerity of
ignorance--wishing, moreover, to make his wife pleased with
herself. 'But oughtn't you to have gloves instead of those things?'

He pointed doubtfully to the mittens on her arms.

'Oh, David, don't say that!' cried Lucy, in despair. 'Miss Helby
said these were the right things. It's to be like an old picture,
don't you understand? And I haven't got any gloves but those I came
in. Oh, don't be so disagreeable!'

She looked ready to cry. Poor David hastened to declare that Miss
Helby must be right, and that it was all very nice. Then they blew
out the candles and ventured forth.

'Lord Driffield says that Canon Aylwin is coming,' said David,
examining some Hollar engravings on the wall of the staircase as
they descended, 'and the Dean of Bradford, who is staying with him.
I shall be glad to see Canon Aylwin.'

His face took a pleased meditative look. He was thinking of Canon
Aylwin's last volume of essays--of their fine scholarship, their
delicate, unique qualities of style. As for Lucy, it seemed to her
that all the principalities and powers of this world were somehow
arraying themselves against her in that terrible drawing-room they
were so soon to enter. She set her teeth, held up her head, and on
they went.

Presently they found themselves approaching a glass door, which
opened into the central hall. Beyond it was a crowd of figures and
a buzz of talk, and at the door stood a tall person in black with
white gloves, holding a silver tray, from which he presented David
with a button-hole. Then, with a manner at once suave and
impersonal, he held open the door, and the husband and wife passed
through.

'Ah, my dear Grieve,' said Lord Driffield, laying his hand on
David's shoulder, 'come here and be introduced to Canon Aylwin. I am
delighted to have caught him for you.'

So David was swept away to the other side of the room, and Lucy was
left forlorn and stranded. It seemed to her an immense party; there
were at least eight or ten fresh faces beyond those she had seen
already. And just as she was looking for a seat into which she
might slip and hide herself, Lady Venetia Danby, who was standing
near, playing with a huge feather fan and talking to a handsome
young man, turned around by chance and, seeing the figure in the
bright-coloured 'Watteau _sacque_,' involuntarily put up her
eyeglass to look at it. Instantly Lucy, conscious of the eyeglass,
and looking hurriedly round on the people near, was certain that
the pleat from the shoulder and the mittens were irretrievably
wrong and conspicuous, and that she had betrayed herself at once by
her dress as an ignoramus and an outsider. Worst of all, the lady
in green was in a _sacque_ too!--a shapeless yellow thing of
the most untutored and detestable make. Mittens also! drawn
laboriously over the hands and arms of an Amazon. Lucy glanced at
Miss Danby beside her, then at a beautiful woman in pale pink
across the room--at their slim waists, the careless _aplomb_
and grace with which the costly stuffs and gleaming jewels were
worn, and the white necks displayed--and sank into a chair
trembling and miserable. That the only person to keep her in
countenance should be that particular person--that they two should
thus fall into a class together, by themselves, cut off from all
the rest--it was too much! Then, by a quick reaction, some of her
natural obstinacy returned upon her. She held herself erect, and
looked steadily round the room.

'Mr. Edwardes--Mrs. Grieve,' said Lady Driffield's impassive voice,
speaking, as it seemed to Lucy, from a great height, as the tall
figure swept past her to introductions more important.

A young man bowed to Lucy, looked at her for a moment, then,
pulling his fair moustache, turned away to speak to Miss Danby,
who, in the absence of more stimulating suitors for her smiles, was
graciously pleased to bestow a few of them on Lord Driffield's new
agent.

'Whom are we waiting for?' said Miss Danby, looking round her, and
slightly glancing at Lucy.

'Only the Dean, I believe,' said Mr. Edwardes, with a smile. 'I
never knew Dean Manley less than half an hour late in _this_
house.'

A cold shiver ran through Lucy. Then they--she and David--had been
all but the last, had all but kept the whole of this portentous
gathering waiting for them.

In the midst of her new tremor the glass doors were again thrown
open, and in walked the Dean--a short, plain man, with a mirthful
eye, a substantial person, and legs which became his knee-breeches.

'Thirty-five minutes, Dean!' said the handsome youth, who had been
talking to Lady Venetia, as he held up his watch.

'It is a remarkable fact, Reggie,' said the Dean, laying his hand
on the lad's shoulder, 'that your watch has gained persistently ever
since I was first acquainted with you. Ah, well, keep it ahead, my
boy. A diplomatist must be egged on somehow.'

'I thought the one condition of success in that trade was the
patience to do nothing,' said a charming voice. 'Don't interfere
with Reggie's prospects, Dean.'

'Has he got any?' said the Dean, maliciously. 'My dear Mrs.
Wellesdon, you are a "sight for sair een."'

And he pressed the new-comer's hand between both his own, surveying
her the while with a fatherly affection and admiration.

Lucy looked up, a curious envy at her heart. She saw the beautiful
lady in pink, who had come across the room to greet the Dean.
_Was_ she beautiful? Lucy hurriedly asked herself. Perhaps
not, in point of feature, but she held her head so nobly, her
colour was so subtle and lovely, her eye so speaking, and her mouth
so sweet, she carried about with her a preeminence so natural and
human, that beauty was in truth the only word that fitted her. Now,
as the Dean passed on from her to some one else, she glanced down
at the little figure in terra-cotta satin, and, with a kindly
diffident expression, she sat down and began to talk to Lucy.
Marcia Wellesdon was a sorceress, and could win whatever hearts she
pleased. In a few moments she so soothed Lucy's nervousness that
she even beguiled from her some bright and natural talk about the
journey and the house, and Lucy was rapidly beginning to be happy,
when the signal for dinner was given, and a general move began.

At dinner Mr. Edwardes bestowed his conversation for a decent space
of time--say, during the soup and fish--upon Mrs. Grieve. Lucy,
once more ill at ease, tried eagerly to propitiate him by asking
innumerable questions about the family, and the pictures, and the
estate, it being at once evident that he had an intimate knowledge
of all three. But as the family, the pictures, and the estate were
always with him, so to speak, made, indeed, a burden which his
shoulders had some difficulty in carrying, the attractions of this
vein of talk palled on the young agent--who was himself a scion of
good family, with his own social ambitions--before long. He decided
that Mrs. Grieve was pure middle-class, not at all accustomed to
dine in halls of pride, and much agitated by her surroundings. The
type did not interest him. She seemed to be asking him to help her
out of the mire, and as one does not go into society to be
benevolent but to be amused, by the time the first _entree_
was well in he had edged his chair round, and was in animated talk
with pretty little Lady Alice Findlay, the daughter of the
hook-nosed Lord-Lieutenant of the county, who was seated at Lady
Driffield's right hand. Lucy noticed the immediate difference in
tone, the easy variety of topic, compared with her own sense of
difficulty, and her heart swelled with bitterness.

Then, to her horror, she saw that, from inattention and ignorance
of what might be expected, she had allowed the servants to
fill every single wineglass of the four standing at her
right--positively every one. Sherry, claret, hock, champagne--she
was provided with them all. She cast a hurried and guilty eye round
the table. Save for champagne, each lady's glasses stood
immaculately empty, and when Lucy came back to her own collection
she could bear it no longer.

'Mr. Edwardes!' she said hastily, leaning over towards him.

The young man turned abruptly. 'Yes,' he said, looking at her in
some surprise.

'Oh, Mr. Edwardes! can you ask some one to take these wineglasses
away? I didn't want any, and it looks so--so--dreadful!'

The agent thought that Mrs. Grieve was going to cry. As for
himself, his eye twinkled, and he had great difficulty to restrain
a burst of laughter. He called a footman near, and Lucy was soon
relieved of her fourfold incubus.

'Oh, but you must save the champagne!' he said, and, bending his
chair backward, he was about to recall the man, Lucy stopped him.

'Don't--don't, _please_, Mr. Edwardes!' she said, in an agony.

He lifted his eyebrows good-humouredly, and desisted. Then he asked
her if he should give her some water, and when that was done the
episode apparently seemed to him closed, for he turned away again,
and looked out for fresh opportunities with Lady Alice. Lucy,
meanwhile, was left feeling herself even more unsuccessful and more
out of place than before, and ready to sink with vexation. And how
well David was getting on! There he was, between Mrs. Shepton and
the beautiful lady in pink, and he and Mrs. Wellesdon were deep in
conversation, his dark head bent gravely towards her, his face
melting every now and then into laughter or crossed by some vivid
light of assent and pleasure. Lucy's look travelled over the table,
the orchids with which it was covered, the lights, the plate, then
to the Vandykes behind the guests, and the great mirrors in
between--came back to the table, and passed from face to face, till
again it rested upon David. The conviction of her husband's
handsome looks and natural adequacy to this or any world, with
which her survey ended, brought with it a strange mixture of
feelings--half pleasure, half bitterness.

'Are you from this part of the world, may I ask?' said a voice at
her elbow.

She turned, and saw Colonel Danby, who was tired of devoting
himself to the wife of a neighbouring Master of Hounds--a lady with
white hair and white eyelashes, always apparently on the point of
sleep, even at the liveliest dinner-table--and was now inclined to
see what this little provincial might be made of.

'Oh, yes! we are from Manchester,' said Lucy, straightening
herself, and preparing to do her best. 'We live in Manchester--at
least, of course, not _in_ Manchester. No one could do that.'

It was but three years since she had ceased to do it, but new
habits of speech grow apace when it is a matter of social prestige.
She was terribly afraid lest anybody should now think of them as
persons who lived over their shop.

'Ah!--suppose not,' said Colonel Danby, carelessly. 'Land in
Manchester, they tell me now, is almost as costly as it is in
London.'

Whereat Lucy went off at score, delighted to make Manchester
important and to produce her own information. She had an aptitude
for business gossip, and she chatted eagerly about the price that
So-and-So had paid for their new warehouses, and the sum which
report said the Corporation was going to spend on a fine new
street.

'And of course many people don't like it. There's always grumbling
about the rates. But they should have public spirit, shouldn't
they? Are you acquainted with Manchester?' she added, more timidly.

All this time Colonel Danby had been listening with half an ear,
and was much more assiduously trying to make up his mind whether
the little _bourgeoise_ was pretty at all. She had rather a
fine pair of eyes--he supposed she had made that dress in her own
back parlour.

'Manchester? I--oh, I have spent a night at the Queen's Hotel now
and then,' said the Colonel, with a yawn. 'What do you do there? Do
you amuse yourself--eh?'

His smile was not pleasant. He had a florid face, with bad lines
round the eyes and a tyrannous mouth. His physical make had been
magnificent, but reckless living had brought on the penalties of
gout before their time.

Lucy was intimidated by the mixture of familiarity and patronage in
the tone.

'Oh, yes,' she said, hurriedly; 'we get all the best companies from
the London theatres, and there are _very_ good concerts.'

'And that kind of thing amuses you?' said the Colonel, still
examining her with the same cool, fixed glance.

'I like music very much,' stammered Lucy, and then fell silent.

'Do you know all these people here?'

'Oh, dear, no!' she cried, feeling the very question malevolent. 'I
don't know any of them. My husband wishes to lead a very retired
life,' she added, bridling a little, by way of undoing the effect
of her admissions.

'And _you_ don't wish it?'

The disagreeable eyes smiled again.

'Oh! I don't know,' said Lucy.

Colonel Danby reflected that whatever his companion might be, she
was not amusing.

'Have you noticed the gentleman opposite?' he inquired, stifling
another yawn.

Lucy timidly looked across.

'It is--it is the Dean of Bradford, isn't it?'

'Yes; it's a comfort, isn't it, when one can know a man by his
clothes! Do you see what his deanship has had for dinner?'

Lucy ventured another look, and saw that the Dean had in front of
him a plate of biscuits and a glass of water, and that the
condition of his knives and forks showed him to have hitherto
subsisted on this fare alone.

'Is he so very--so very religious?' she said, wondering.

'A-saint in gaiters? Well, I don't know. Probably the saint has
dined at one. Do you feel any inclination to be a saint, Mrs.
Grieve?'

Lucy could neither meet nor parry the banter of his look. She only
blushed.

'I wouldn't attempt it, if I were you,' he said, laughing. 'Those
pretty brown eyes weren't meant for it.'

Lucy suddenly felt as though she had been struck, so free and
cavalier was the tone. Her cheek took a deeper crimson, and she
looked helplessly across at David.

'Little fool!' thought the Colonel. 'But she has certainly some
points.'

At that moment Lady Driffield gave the signal, and, with a
half-ironical bow to his companion, Colonel Danby rose, picked up
her handkerchief for her, and drew his chair aside to let her pass.

Presently Lucy was sitting in a corner of the magnificent green
drawing-room, to which Lady Driffield had carelessly led the way.
In her vague humiliation and unhappiness, she craved that some one
should come and talk to her and be kind to her--even Mrs. Shepton,
who had addressed a few pleasant remarks to her on their way from
the dining-room. But Mrs. Shepton was absorbed by Lady Driffield,
who sat down beside her, and took some trouble to talk. 'Then why
not to me?' was Lucy's instinctive thought. For she realised that
she and Mrs. Shepton were socially not far apart. Yet Lady
Driffield had so far addressed about six words to Mrs. David
Grieve, while she was now bending her aristocratic neck to listen
to Mrs. Shepton, who was talking entirely at her ease, with her arm
round the back of a neighbouring chair, and, as it seemed to Lucy,
about politics.

The rest of the ladies, with the exception of the Master of Hounds'
wife, who sat in a chair by the fire and dozed, were all either old
friends or relations, and they gathered in a group on the Aubusson
rug in front of the fire, chatting merrily about their common
kindred, the visits they had paid, or were to pay, the fate of
their fathers and brothers in the recent election, 'the Duke's'
terrible embarrassments, or 'Sir Alfred's' yachting party to
Norway, of which little Lady Alice gave a sparkling account.

In her chair on the outskirts of the talkers, Lucy sat painfully
turning over the leaves of a costly collection of autographs, which
lay on the table near her. Sometimes she tried to interest herself
in the splendid room, with its hangings of pale flowered silk, its
glass cases, full of historical relics, miniatures, and precious
things, representing the long and brilliant past of the house of
Driffield, the Sir Joshuas and Romneys, which repeated on the walls
the grace and physical perfection of some of the living women
below. But she had too few associations with anything she saw to
care for it, and, indeed, her mind was too wholly given to her own
vague, but overmastering sense of isolation and defeat. If it were
only bedtime!

Mrs. Wellesdon glanced at the solitary figure from time to time,
but Lady Alice had her arm round 'Marcia's' waist, and kept close
hold of her favourite cousin. At last, however, Mrs. Wellesdon drew
the young girl with her to the side of Lucy's chair, and, sitting
down by the stranger, they both tried to entertain her, and to show
her some of the things in the room.

Lucy brightened up at once, and thought them both the most
beautiful and fascinating of human beings. But her good fortune was
soon over, alas! for the gentlemen came in, and the social elements
were once more redistributed. 'Reggie', the young diplomatist,
freshly returned from Berlin, laid hold of his sister Marcia, and
his cousin Lady Alice, and carried them off for a family gossip
into a corner of the room, whence peals of young laughter were soon
to be heard from him and Lady Alice.

Mr. Edwardes and Colonel Danby passed Mrs. Grieve by, in quest of
metal more attractive; Lord Driffield, the Dean, Canon Aylwin, and
David stood absorbed in conversation; while Lady Driffield
transferred her attentions to Mr. Shepton, and the husband of the
lady by the fire walked up to her, insisting, somewhat crossly, on
waking her. Lucy was once more left alone.

'Lavinia, haven't we done our duty to this apartment?' cried Lord
Driffield, impatiently; 'it always puts me on stilts. The library is
ten times more comfortable. I propose an adjournment.'

Lady Driffield shrugged her shoulders, and assented. So the whole
party, Lucy timidly attaching herself to Mrs. Shepton, moved slowly
through a long suite of beautiful rooms, till they reached the
great cedar-fitted library, which was Lord Driffield's paradise.
Here was every book to be desired of the scholar to make him wise,
and every chair to make him comfortable. Lord Driffield went to one
of the bookcases, and took a vellum-bound book, found a passage in
it, and showed it to David Grieve. Canon Aylwin and the Dean
pressed in to look, and they all fell back into the recess of a
great oriel, talking earnestly.

The others passed on into a conservatory beyond the library, where
was a billard-table, and many nooks for conversation amid the
cunning labyrinths of flowers.

Lucy sank into a cane chair, close to a towering mass of arum
lilies, and looked back into the library. Nobody in the
conservatory had any thought for her. They were absorbed in each
other, and a merry game of pyramids had been already organised. So
Lucy watched her husband wistfully.

What a beautiful face was that of Canon Aylwin, with whom he was
talking! She could not take her eyes from its long, thin outlines,
the apostolic white hair, the eager eyes and quivering mouth,
contrasting with the patient courtesy of manner. Yet in her present
soreness and heat, the saintly charm of the old man's figure did
somehow but depress her the more.

A little after ten it became evident that _nothing_ could keep
the lady with the white eyelashes out of bed any longer, so the
billiard-room party broke up, and, with a few gentlemen in
attendance, the ladies streamed into the hall, and possessed
themselves of bedroom candlesticks. The great house seemed to be
alive with talk and laughter as they strolled upstairs, the girls
making dressing-gown appointments in each other's rooms for a
quarter of an hour later.

When Lucy reached her own door she stopped awkwardly. Lady
Driffield walked on, talking to Marcia Wellesdon. But Marcia looked
back:

'Good night, Mrs. Grieve.'

She returned, and pressed Lucy's hand kindly. 'I am afraid you must
be tired,' she said; 'you look so.'

Lady Driffield also shook hands, but, with constitutional
_gaucherie_, she did not second Mrs. Wellesdon's remark; she
stood by silent and stiff.

'Oh, no, thank you,' said Lucy, hurriedly, 'I am quite well.'

When she had disappeared, the other two walked on.

'What a stupid little thing!' said Lady Driffield. 'The husband may
be interesting--Driffield says he is--but I defy anybody to get
anything out of the wife.'

It occurred to Marcia that nobody had been very anxious to make the
attempt. But she only said aloud:

'I'm sure she is very shy. What a pity she wears that kind of
dress! She might be quite pretty in something else.'

Meanwhile Lucy, after shutting the outer door of their little suite
behind her, was overtaken as she opened that leading to her own
room by a sudden gust of wind coming from a back staircase emerging
on to their private passage, which she had not noticed before. The
candle was blown out, and she entered the room in complete
darkness. She groped for the matches, and found the little stand;
but there were none there. She must have used the last in the
making of her great illumination before dinner. After much
hesitation, she at last summoned up courage to ring the bell,
groping her way to it by the help of the light in the passage.

For a long time no one came. Lucy, standing near her own door,
seemed to hear two sounds--the angry beating of her own heart, and
a murmur of far-off talk and jollity, conveyed to her up the
mysterious staircase, which apparently led to some of the servants'
quarters.

Fully five minutes passed; then steps were heard approaching, and a
housemaid appeared. Lucy timidly asked for fresh matches. The girl
said 'Yes, ma'am,' in an off-hand way, looked at Lucy with a
somewhat hostile eye, and vanished.

The minutes passed, but no matches were forthcoming. The whirlpool
of the lower regions, where the fun was growing uproarious, seemed
to have engulfed the messenger. At last Lucy was fain to undress by
the help of a glimmer of light from her door left ajar, and after
many stumbles and fumblings at last crept, tired and wounded, into
bed. This finale seemed to her of a piece with all the rest.

As she lay there in the dark, incident after incident of her
luckless evening coming back upon her, her heart grew hungry for
David. Nay, her craving for him mounted to jealousy and passion.
After all, though he did get on so much better in grand houses than
she did, though they were all kind to him and despised her, he was
_hers_, her very own, and no one should take him from her.
Beautiful Mrs. Wellesdon might talk to him and make friends with
him, but he did not belong to any of them, but to _her_, Lucy.
She pined for the sound of his step--thought of throwing herself
into his arms, and seeking consolation there for the pains of an
habitual self-importance crushed beyond bearing.

But when that step was actually heard outside, her mind veered
in an instant. She had made him come; he would think she had
disgraced him; he had probably noticed nothing, for a certain
absent-mindedness in society had grown upon him of late years. No,
she would hold her peace.

So when David, stepping softly and shading his candle, came in, and
called 'Lucy' under his breath to see whether she might be awake,
Lucy pretended to be sound asleep. He waited a minute, and then
went out to change his coat and go down to the smoking-room.

Poor little Lucy! As she lay there in the dark, the tears
dropping slowly on her embroidered pillow, the issue of all her
mortification was a new and troubled consciousness about her
husband. Why this difference between them? How was it that he
commanded from all who knew him either a warm sympathy or an
involuntary respect, while she--

She had gathered from some scraps of the talk round him which had
reached her that it was just those sides of his life--those
quixotic ideal sides--which were an offence and annoyance to her
that touched other people's imagination, opened their hearts. And
she had worried and teased him all these years! Not since the
beginning. For, looking back, she could well remember the days when
it was still an intoxication that he should have married her, when
she was at once in awe of him and foolishly, proudly, happy. But
there had come a year when David's profits from his business had
amounted to over 2, 000 pounds, and when, thanks to a large loan
pressed upon him by his Unitarian landlord, Mr. Doyle, he had taken
the new premises in Prince's Street. And from that moment Lucy's
horizon had changed, her ambitions had hardened and narrowed; she
had begun to be impatient with her husband, first, that he could
not make her rich faster, then, after their Tantalus gleam of
wealth, that he would put mysterious and provoking obstacles in
the way of their getting rich at all.

She meant to keep awake--to wait for him. But she began to think of
Sandy. _He_ would be glad to see his 'mummy' again! In fancy
she pressed his cheek against her own burning one. He and David
were still alive--still hers--it was all right somehow. Consolation
began to steal upon her, and in ten minutes she was asleep.




CHAPTER IV


When David came in later, he took advantage of Lucy's sleep to sit
up awhile in his own room. He was excited, and any strong
impression, in the practical loneliness of his deepest life, always
now produced the impulse to write.

'_Midnight_.--Lucy is asleep. I hope she has been happy and
they have been kind to her. I saw Mrs. Wellesdon talking to her
after dinner. She must have liked that. But _at_ dinner she
seemed to be sitting silent a good deal.

'What a strange spectacle is this country-house life to anyone
bringing to it a fresh and unaccustomed eye! "After all," said Mrs.
Wellesdon, "you must admit that the best of anything is worth
keeping. And in these country-houses, with all their drawbacks, you
do from time to time get the best of social intercourse, a phase of
social life as gay, complex, and highly finished as it can possibly
be made."

'Certainly this applies to me to-night. When have I enjoyed any
social pleasure so much as my talk with her at dinner? When have I
been conscious of such stimulus, such exhilaration, as the
evening's discussion produced in me? In the one case, Mrs.
Wellesdon taught me what general conversation might be how nimble,
delicate, and pleasure-giving; in the other, there was the joy of
the intellectual wrestle, mingled with a glad respect for one's
opponents. Perhaps nowhere, except on some such ground and in
some such circumstances as these, could a debate so earnest
have taken quite so wholesome a tone, so wide a range. We were
equals--debaters, not controversialists--friends, not rivals--in
the quest for truth.

'Yet what drawbacks! This army of servants--which might be an army
of slaves without a single manly right, so mute, impassive, and
highly trained it is--the breeding of a tyrannous temper in the
men, of a certain contempt for facts and actuality even in the best
of the women. Mrs. Wellesdon poured out her social aspirations to
me. How naive and fanciful they were! They do her credit, but they
will hardly do anyone else much good. And it is evident that they
mark her out in her own circle, that they have brought her easily
admiration and respect, so that she has never been led to test
them, as any one, with the same social interest, living closer to
the average realities and griefs of life, must have been led to
test them.

'The culture, too, of these aristocratic women, when they
are cultured, is so curious. Quite unconsciously and innocently
it takes itself for much more than it is, merely by contrast with
the _milieu_--the _milieu_ of material luxury and complication--in
which it moves.

'But I am ungrateful. What a social power in the best sense such a
woman might become--a woman so sensitively endowed, so nobly
planned!'

David dropped his pen awhile. In the silence of the great house, a
silence broken only by the breathings of a rainy autumn wind
through the trees outside, his thought took that picture-making
intensity which was its peculiar gift. Images of what had been
in his own life, and what might have been--the dream of passion
which had so deeply marked and modified his manhood--Elise, seen
in the clearer light of his richer experience--his married
years--the place of the woman in the common life--on these his mind
brooded, one by one, till gradually the solemn consciousness of
opportunities for ever missed, of failure, of limitation, evoked
another, as solemn, but sweeter and more touching, of human lives
irrevocably dependent on his, of the pathetic unalterable claim of
marriage, the poverty and hopelessness of all self-seeking, the
essential wealth, rich and making rich, of all self-spending. As he
thought of his wife and son a deep tenderness flooded the man's
whole nature. With a long sigh, it was as though he took them both
in his arms, adjusting his strength patiently and gladly to the
familiar weight.

Then, by a natural reaction, feeling, to escape itself, passed into
speculative reminiscence and meditation of a wholly different kind.

'Our discussion to-night arose from an attack--if anyone so gentle
can be said to attack--made upon me by Canon Aylwin, on the subject
of those "Tracts on the New Testament"--tracts of mine, of which we
have published three, while I have two or three more half done in
my writing-table drawer. He said, with a certain nervous decision,
that he did not wish to discuss the main question, but he would
like to ask me, Could anyone be so sure of supposed critical and
historical fact as to be clear that he was right in proclaiming it,
when the proclamation of it meant the inevitable disturbance in his
fellow-men of conceptions whereon their moral life depended? It was
certain that he could destroy; it was most uncertain, even to
himself, whether he could do anything else, with the best
intentions; and, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, ought not
the certainty of doing a moral mischief to outweigh, with any just
and kindly mind, the much feebler and less solid certainty he may
imagine himself to have attained with regard to certain matters of
history and criticism?

'It was the old question of the rights of "heresy," the function of
the individual in the long history of thought. We fell into sides:
Lord Driffield and I against the Dean and Canon Aylwin. The Dean
did not, indeed, contribute much. He sat with his square powerful
head bent forward, throwing in a shrewd comment here and there,
mainly on the logical course of the argument. But when we came to
the main question, as we inevitably did, he withdrew altogether,
though he listened.

'"No," he said, "no. I am not competent. It has not been my line
in life. I have found more than enough to tax my strength in the
practical administration of the goods of Christ. All such questions
I leave, and must leave, to experts, such experts as"--and he
mentioned the names of some of the leading scholars of the
English Church--"or as my friend here", and he laid his hand
affectionately on Canon Aylwin's knee.

'Strange! He leaves to experts such questions as those of the
independence, authenticity, and trustworthiness of the Gospel
records; of the culture and idiosyncrasies of the first two
centuries as tending to throw light on those records; of the
earliest growth of dogma, as, thanks mainly to German labour, it
may now be exhibited within the New Testament itself. In a Church
of private judgment, he takes all this at second hand, after having
vowed at his ordination "to be diligent in such studies as help to
the knowledge of the Scriptures"!

'Yet a better, a more God-fearing, a more sincere, and, within
certain lines, a more acute man than Dean Manley it would certainly
be difficult to find at the present time within the English Church.
It is an illustration of the dualism in which so many minds tend to
live, divided between two worlds, two standards, two wholly
different modes of thought--the one applied to religion even in its
intellectual aspect, the other applied to all the rest of
existence. Yet--is truth divided?

'To return to Canon Aylwin. I could only meet his reproach, which
he had a special right to make, for he has taken the kindliest
interest in some of the earlier series of our "Workmen's Tracts,"
by going back to some extent to first principles. I endeavoured to
argue the matter on ground more or less common to us both. If both
knowledge and morality have only become possible for man by the
perpetual action of a Divine spirit on his since the dawn of
conscious life; if this action has taken effect in human history,
as, broadly speaking, the Canon would admit, through a free and
constant struggle of opposites, whether in the realm of interest or
the realm of opinion; and if this struggle, perpetually reconciled,
perpetually renewed, is the divinely ordered condition, nay, if you
will, the sacred task of human life,--how can the Christian, who
clings, above all men, to the victory of the Divine in the human,
who, moreover, in the course of his history has affronted and
resisted all possible "authorities" but that of conscience--how
can he lawfully resent the fullest and largest freedom of speech,
employed disinterestedly and in good faith, on the part of his
brother man? The truth must win; and it is only through the free
life of the spirit that she has hitherto prevailed. So much, at
least, the English Churchman must hold.

It comes to this: must there be no movement of thought because the
individual who lives by custom and convention may at least
temporarily suffer? Yet the risks of the individual throughout
nature--so far we were agreed--are the correlative of his freedom
and responsibility.

'"Ah, well," said the dear old man at last, with a change of
expression which went to my heart, so wistful and spiritual it was,
"perhaps I have been faithless; perhaps the Christian minister
would do better to trust the Lord with His own. But before we leave
the subject, let me say, once for all, that I have read all your
tracts, and weighed most carefully all that they contain. The
matter of them bears on what for me has been the study of many
years, and all I can say is that I regard your methods of reasoning
as unsound, and your conclusions as wholly false. I have been a
literary man from my youth as well as a theologian, and I
completely dissent from your literary judgments. I believe that if
you had not been already possessed by a hostile philosophy--which
will allow no space for miracle and revelation--you would not have
arrived at them. I am old and you are young. Let me bear my
testimony while there is time. I have taken a great interest in you
and your work."

'He spoke with the most exquisite courtesy and simplicity, his look
was dignified and heavenly. I felt like kneeling to ask his
blessing, even though he could only give it in the shape of a
prayer for my enlightenment.

'But now, alone with conscience, alone with God, how does the
matter stand? The challenge of such a life and conviction as Canon
Aylwin's is a searching one. It bids one look deep into one's self,
it calls one to truth and soberness. What I seem to see is that he
and I both approach Christianity with a prepossession, with, as he
says, "a philosophy." His is a prepossession in favour of a system
of interference from without, by Divine or maleficent powers, for
their own ends, with the ordinary sequences of nature--which once
covered, one may say, the whole field of human thought and shaped
the whole horizon of humanity. From the beginning of history this
prepossession--which may be regarded in all its phases as an
expression of man's natural impatience to form a working hypothesis
of things--has struggled with the "impulse to know." And slowly,
irrevocably, from age to age--the impulse to know has beaten back
the impulse to imagine, has confined the prepossession of faith
within narrower and narrower limits, till at last it is even
preparing to deny it the guidance of religion, which it has so long
claimed. For the impulse of science, justified by the long wrestle
of centuries, is becoming itself religious,--and there is a new awe
rising on the brow of Knowledge.

'_My_ prepossession--but let the personal pronoun be merely
understood as attaching me to that band of thinkers, "of all
countries, nations, and languages," whose pupil and creature I
am--is simply that of science, of the organised knowledge of the
race. It is drawn from the whole of experience, it governs without
dispute every department of thought, and without it, in fact,
neither Canon Aylwin nor I could think at all.

'Moreover, I humbly believe that I desire the same spiritual goods
as he: holiness, the knowledge of God, the hope of immortality. But
while for him these things are bound up with the maintenance of the
older prepossession, for me there is no such connection at all.

'And again, I seem to see that when this intellect of his, so keen,
so richly stored, approaches the special ground of Christian
thought, it changes in quality. It becomes wholly subordinate to
the affections, to the influences of education and habitual
surroundings. Talk to him of Dante, of the influence of the
barbarian invasions on the culture and development of Europe, of
the Oxford movement, you will find in him an historical sense, a
delicate accuracy of perception, a luminous variety of statement,
which carry you with him into the very heart of the truth. But
discuss with him the critical habits and capacity of those earliest
Christian writers, on whose testimony so much of the Christian
canon depends--ask him to separate the strata of material in the
New Testament, according to their relative historical and ethical
value, under the laws which he would himself apply to any other
literature in the world--invite him to exclude this as legendary
and that as accretion, to distinguish between the original kernel
and that which the fancy or the theology of the earliest hearers
inevitably added--and you will feel that a complete change has come
over the mind. However subtle and precise his arguments may
outwardly look, they are at bottom the arguments of affection, of
the special pleader. He has fenced off the first century from the
rest of knowledge; has invented for all its products alike special
_criteria_ and a special perspective. He cannot handle the New
Testament in the spirit of science, for he approaches it on his
knees. The imaginative habit of a lifetime has decided for him; and
you ask of him what is impossible.

'"An end must come to scepticism somewhere!" he once said in the
course of our talk. "Faith must take her leap--you know as well as
I!--if there is to be faith at all."

'Yes, but _where_--at what point? Is the clergyman who talks
with sincere distress about infidel views of Scripture and preaches
against them, while at the same time he could not possibly give an
intelligible account of the problem of the Synoptic Gospels as it
now presents itself to the best knowledge, or an outline of the
case pressed by science for more than half a century with
increasing force and success against the historical character of
St. John's Gospel--is he justified in making his ignorance the
leaping-point?

'Yet the upshot of all our talk is that I am restless and
oppressed.

'... I sit and think of these nine years since Berkeley and sorrow
first laid hold of me. Berkeley rooted in me the conception of mind
as the independent antecedent of all experience, and none of the
scientific materialism, which so troubles Ancrum that he will
ultimately take refuge from it in Catholicism, affects me. But the
ethical inadequacy of Berkeley became very soon plain to me. I
remember I was going one day through one of the worst slums of
Ancoats, when a passage in his examination of the origin of evil
occurred to me:

'"But we should further consider that the very blemishes and
defects of nature are not without their use, in that _they make
an agreeable sort of variety_, and augment the beauty of the
rest of creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the
brighter and more enlightened parts."

'I had just done my best to save a little timit scarecrow of a
child, aged about six, from the blows of its brutal father, who had
already given it a black eye--my heart blazed within me,--and from
that moment Berkeley had no spell for me.

'Then came that moment when, after my marriage, haunted as I was by
the perpetual oppression of Manchester's pain and poverty, the
Christian mythology, the Christian theory with all its varied and
beautiful flowerings in human life, had for a time an attraction
for me so strong that Dora naturally hoped everything, and I felt
myself becoming day by day more of an orthodox Christian. What
checked the tendency I can hardly now remember in detail. It was a
converging influence of books and life--no doubt largely helped,
with regard to the details of Christian belief, by the pressure of
the German historical movement, as I became more and more fully
acquainted with it.

'At any rate, St. Damian's gradually came to mean nothing to me,
though I kept, and keep still, a close working friendship with most
of the people there. But I am thankful for that Christian phase. It
enabled me to realise as nothing else could the strength of the
Christian case.

'And since then it has been a long and weary journey through many
paths of knowledge and philosophy, till of late years the new
English phase of Kantian and Hegelian thought, which has been
spreading in our universities, and which is the outlet of men who
can neither hand themselves over to authority, like Newman, nor to
a mere patient nescience in the sphere of metaphysics, like Herbert
Spencer, has come to me with an ever-increasing power of healing
and edification.

'That the spiritual principle in nature and man exists and governs;
that mind cannot be explained out of anything but itself; that the
human consciousness derives from a universal consciousness, and is
thereby capable both of knowledge and of goodness; that the
phenomena and history of conscience are the highest revelation of
God; that we are called to co-operation in a divine work, and in
spite of pain and sin may find ground for an infinite trust,
covering the riddle of the individual lot, in the history and
character of that work in man, so far as it has gone--these things
are deeper and deeper realities to me. They govern my life; they
give me peace; they breathe me hope.

'But the last glow, the certainties, the _vision_, of faith!
Ah! me, I believe that He is there, yet my heart gropes in
darkness. All that is personality, holiness, compassion in us, must
be in Him intensified beyond all thought. Yet I have no familiarity
of prayer. I cannot use the religious language which should be mine
without a sense of unreality. My heart is athirst.

'And can religion possibly _depend_ upon a long process of
thought? How few can think their way to Him--perhaps none, indeed,
by the logical intellect alone. He reveals himself to the simple.
_Speak to me, to me also, O my Father!_'

Sunday morning broke fresh and golden after a wet night. Lucy lay
still in the early dawn, thinking of the day that had to be faced,
feeling more cheerful, however, with the refreshment of sleep, and
inclined to hope that she might have got over the worst, and that
better things might be in store for her.

So that when David said to her, 'You poor little person, did they
eat you up last night--Lady Driffield and her set?' she only
answered evasively that Mrs. Wellesdon had been nice, but that Lady
Driffield had very bad manners, and she was sure everybody thought
so.

To which David heartily assented. Then Lucy put her question:

'Did you think, when you looked at me last night at dinner, that
I--that I looked nice?' she said, flushing, yet driven on by an
inward smart.

'Of course I did!' David declared. 'Perhaps you should hold yourself
up a little more. The women here are so astonishingly straight and
tall, like young poplars.'

'Mrs. Wellesdon especially,' Lucy reflected, with a pang.

'But you thought I--had done my hair nicely?' she said desperately.

'Very! And it was the prettiest hair there!' he said, smoothing
back the golden brown curls from her temple.

His compliment so delighted her that she dressed and prepared to
descend to breakfast with a light heart. She was not often now so
happily susceptible to a word of praise from him; she was more
exacting than she had once been, but since her acquaintance with
Lady Driffield she had been brought low!

And her evil fortune returned upon her, alas, at breakfast, and
throughout the day. Breakfast, indeed, seemed to her a more
formidable meal than any. For people straggled in, and the ultimate
arrangement of the table seemed entirely to depend upon the
personal attractiveness of individuals, upon whether they annexed
or repelled new-comers. Lucy found herself at one time alone and
shivering in the close neighbourhood of Lady Driffield, who was
intrenched behind the tea-urn, and after giving her guest a finger,
had, Lucy believed, spoken once to her, expressing a desire for
scones. The meal itself, with its elaborate cakes and meats and
fruits, intimidated Lucy even more than the dinner had done. The
breach between it and any small housekeeping was more complete. She
felt that she was eating like a schoolgirl; she devoured her toast
dry, out of sheer inability to ask for butter; and, sitting for the
most part isolated in the unpopular--that is to say, the Lady
Driffield--quarter of the table, went generally half-starved.

As for David, he, with Lord Driffield, Mrs. Wellesdon, Lady Alice,
Reggie, and Mrs. Shepton for company at the other end, had on the
whole an excellent time. There was, however, one uncomfortable
moment of friction between him and Colonel Danby, who had strolled
in last of all, with the vicious look of a man who has not had the
good night to which he considered himself entitled, and must
somehow wreak it on the world.

Just before he entered, Lady Driffield, looking round to see that
the servants had departed, had languidly started the question:
'Does one talk to one's maid? Do you, Marcia, talk to your maid?
How can anyone ever find anything to say to one's maid?'

The topic proved unexpectedly interesting. Both Marcia Wellesdon
and Lady Alice declared that their maids were their bosom friends.
Lady Driffield shrugged her shoulders, then looked at Mrs. Grieve,
who had sat silent, opened her mouth to speak, recollected herself,
and said nothing. At that moment Colonel Danby entered.

'I say, Danby!' called the young attache, Marcia's brother, 'do you
talk to your valet?'

'Talk to my valet!' said the Colonel, putting up his eyeglass to
look at the dishes on the side table--he spoke with suavity, but
there was an ominous pucker in the brow--'what should I do that
for? I don't pay the fellow for his conversation, I presume, but to
button my boots, and precious badly he does it too. I don't even
know what his elegant surname is. "Thomas," or "James," or "William"
is enough peg for me to hang my orders on. I generally christen
them fresh when they come to me.'

Little Lady Alice looked indignant. Lucy caught her husband's face,
and saw it suddenly pale, as it easily did under a quick emotion.
He was thinking of the valet he had seen at the station standing by
the Danbys' luggage--a dark, anxious-looking man, whose likeness to
one of the compositors in his own office--a young fellow for whom
he had a particular friendship--had attracted his notice.

'Why do you suppose he puts up with you--your servant?' he said,
bending across to Colonel Danby. He smiled a little, but his eyes
betrayed him.

'Puts up with me!' Colonel Danby lifted his brows, regarding David
with an indescribable air of insolent surprise. 'Because I make it
worth his while in pounds, shillings, and pence; that's all.'

And he put down his pheasant _salmi_ with a clatter, while his
wife handed him bread and other propitiations.

'Probably because he has a mother or sister,' said David, slowly.'
We trust a good deal to the patience of our "masters."'

The Colonel stopped his wife's attentions with an angry hand. But
just as he was about to launch a reply more congruous with his gout
and his contempt for 'Driffield's low-life friends' than with the
amenities of ordinary society, and while Lady Venetia was slowly
and severely studying David through her eyeglass, Lord Driffield
threw himself into the breach with a nervous story of some
favourite 'man' of his own, and the storm blew over.

Lady Driffield, indeed, who herself disliked Colonel Danby, as one
overbearing person dislikes another, and only invited him because
Lady Venetia was her cousin and an old friend, was rather pleased
with David's outbreak. After breakfast she graciously asked him if
she should show him the picture gallery.

But David was still seething with wrath, and looked at Vandeveldes
and De Hoochs and Rembrandts with a distracted eye. Once, indeed,
in a little alcove of the gallery hung with English portraits, he
woke to a start of interest.

'Imagine that that should be Gray!' he said, pointing to a
picture--well known to him through engraving--of a little man in a
bob wig, with a turned-up nose and a button chin, and a general air
of eager servility. '_Gray_,--one of our greatest poets!' He
stood wondering, feeling it impossible to fit the dignity of Gray's
verse to the insignificance of Gray's outer man.

'Oh, Gray--a great poet, you think? I don't agree with you. I have
always thought the "Night Thoughts" very dull,' said Lady
Driffield, sweeping along to the next picture, in a sublime
unconsciousness. David smiled--a flash of mirth that cleared his
whole look--and was himself again. Moreover he was soon taken
possession of by Lord Driffield, and the two disappeared for a
happy morning spent between the library and the woods.

Meanwhile Lucy went to church, and had the bliss of feeling that
she made one too many in the omnibus, and that, squeeze herself as
small as she might, she was still crushing Miss Danby's new
dress--a fact of which both mother and daughter were clearly aware.
Looking back upon it, Lucy could not remember that for her there
had been any conversation going or coming; but it is quite possible
that her memory of Benet's Park was even more pronounced than in
reality.

David and Lord Driffield came in when lunch was half over, and
afterwards there was a general strolling into the garden.

'Are you all right?' said David to his wife, taking her arm
affectionately.

'Oh yes, thank you,' she said hurriedly, perceiving that Reggio
Calvert was coming up to her. 'I'm all right. Don't take my arm,
David. It looks so odd.'

And she turned delightedly to talk to the young diplomatist, who
had the kindliness and charm of his race, and devoted himself to
her very prettily for a while, though they had great difficulty in
finding topics, and he was coming finally to the end of his
resources when Lady Driffield announced that 'the carriage would be
round in half an hour.'

'Goodness gracious! then I must write some letters first,' he said,
with the importance of the budding ambassador, and ran into the
house.

The others seemed to melt away--David and Canon Aylwin strolling
off together--and soon Lucy found herself alone. She sat down in a
seat round which curved a yew hedge, and whence there was a
somewhat wide view over a bare, hilly country, with suggestions
everywhere of factory life in the hollows, till on the southwest it
rose and melted into the Derbyshire moors. Autumn--late autumn--was
on all the reddening woods and in the cool sunshine; but there was
a bright border of sunflowers and dahlias near, which no frost had
yet touched, and the gaiety both of the flowers and of the clear
blue distance forbade as yet any thought of winter.

Lucy's absent and discontented eye saw neither flowers nor
distance; but it was perforce arrested before long by the figure of
Mrs. Shepton, who came round the corner of the yew hedge.

'Have they gone?' said that lady.

'Who?' said Lucy, startled. 'I heard a carriage drive off just now,
I think.'

'Ah! then they _are_ gone. Lady Driffield has carried off all
her friends--except Mrs. Wellesdon, who, I believe, is lying down
with a headache--to tea at Sir Wilfrid Herbart's. You see the house
there'--and she pointed to a dim, white patch among woods, about
five miles off. 'It is not very civil of a hostess, perhaps, to
leave her guests in this way. But Lady Driffield is Lady Driffield.'

Mrs. Shepton laughed, and threw back the flapping green gauze veil
with which she generally shrouded a freckled and serviceable
complexion, in no particular danger, one would have thought, of
spoiling.

Lucy instinctively looked round to see how near they were to the
house, and whether there were any windows open.

'It must be very difficult, I should think, to be--to be friends
with Lady Driffield.'

She looked up at Mrs. Shepton with the childish air of one both
hungry for gossip and conscious of the naughtiness of it.

Mrs. Shepton laughed again. She had never seen anyone behave worse,
she reflected, than Lady Driffield to this little Manchester
person, who might be uninteresting, but was quite inoffensive.

'Friends! I should think so. An armed neutrality is all that pays
with Lady Driffield. I have been here many times, and I can now
keep her in order perfectly. You see, Lady Driffield has a brother
whom she happens to be fond of--everybody has some soft place--and
this brother is a Liberal member down in our West Riding part of
the world. And my husband is the editor of a paper that possesses a
great deal of political influence in the brother's constituency. We
have backed him up through this election. He is not a bad fellow at
all, though about as much of a Liberal at heart as this hedge,' and
Mrs. Shepton struck it lightly with the parasol she carried. 'My
husband thinks we got him in--by the skin of his teeth. So Lady
Driffield asks us periodically, and behaves herself, more or less.
My husband likes Lord Driffield. So do I; and an occasional descent
upon country houses amuses me. It especially entertains me to make
Lady Driffield talk politics.'

'She must be very Conservative,' said Lucy, heartily. Conservatism
stood in her mind for the selfish exclusiveness of big people. Her
father had always been a bitter Radical.

'Oh dear no--not at all! Lady Driffield believes herself an
advanced Liberal; that is the comedy of it. _Liberals!_' cried
Mrs. Shepton, with a sudden bitterness, which transformed the
broad, plain, sleepy face. 'I should like to set her to work for a
year in one of those mills down there. She might have some politics
worth having by the end of it.'

Lucy looked at her in amazement. Why, the mill people were very
happy--most of them.

'Ah well!' said Mrs. Shepton, recovering herself, 'what we have to
do--we intelligent middle class--for the next generation or two, is
to _drive_ these aristocrats. Then it will be seen what is to
be done with them finally. Well, Mrs. Grieve, we must amuse
ourselves. _Au revoir!_ My husband has some writing to do, and
I must go and help him.'

She waved her hand and disappeared, sweeping her green and yellow
skirts behind her with an air as though Benet's Park were already a
seminary for the correction of the great.

Lucy sat on pondering till she felt dull and cold, and decided to
go in. On finding her way back she passed round a side of the house
which she had not yet seen. It was the oldest part of the building,
and the windows, which were mullioned and narrow, and at some
height from the ground, looked out upon a small bowling-green,
closely walled in from the rest of the gardens and the park by a
thick screen of trees. She lingered along the path looking at a few
late roses which were still blooming in this sheltered spot against
the wall of the house, when she was startled by the sound of her
own name, and, looking up, she saw that there was an open window
above her. The temptation was too great. She held her breath and
listened.

'Lord Driffield says he married her when he was quite young, that
accounts for it.' Was not the voice Lady Alice's? 'But it is a pity
that she is not more equal to him. I never saw a more striking
face, did you? Yet Lord Driffield says he is not as good-looking as
he promised to be as a boy. I wish we had been there last night
after dinner, Marcia! They say he gave Colonel Danby such a
dressing about some workmen's question. Colonel Danby was laying
down the law about strikes in his usual way--he _is_ an odious
creature!--and wishing that the Government would just send an
infantry regiment into the middle of the Yorkshire miners that are
on strike now, when Mr. Grieve fired up. And everybody backed him.
Reggie told me it was splendid; he never saw a better shindy. It is
a pity about her. Everybody says he might have a great career if he
pleased. And she can't be any companion to him.--Now, Marcia, you
know your head _is_ better, so don't say it isn't! Why, I have
used a whole bottle of eau de Cologne on you.'

So chattered pretty, kindly Lady Alice, sitting with her back to
the window beside Marcia Wellesdon. Lucy stood still a moment,
could not hear what Mrs. Wellesdon said languidly in answer, then
crept on, her lip quivering.

From then till long after the dark had fallen she was quite alone.
David, coming back from a long walk, and tea at the agent's house
on the further edge of the estate, found his wife lying on her bed,
and the stars beginning to look in upon her through the unshuttered
windows.

'Why, Lucy! aren't you well, dear?' he said, hurrying up to her.

'Oh yes, very well, thank you' she said, in a constrained voice.
'My head aches rather.'

'Who has been looking after you?' he said, instantly reproaching
himself for the enjoyment of his own afternoon.

'I have been here since three o'clock.'

'And nobody gave you any tea?' he asked, flushing.

'No, I went down, but there was nobody in the drawing-room. I
suppose the footman thought nobody was in.'

'Where was Lady Driffield?'

'Oh! she and most of them went out to tea--to a house a good way
off.'

Lucy's tone was dreariness itself. David sat still, his breath
coming quickly. Then suddenly Lucy turned round and drew him down
to her passionately.

'When can we get home? Is there an early train?'

Then David understood. He took her in his arms, and she broke down
and cried, sobbing out a catalogue of griefs that was only half
coherent. But he saw at once that she had been neglected and
slighted, nay more, that she had been somehow wounded to the quick.
His clasped hand trembled on his knee. This was hospitality! He had
gauged Lady Driffield well.

'An early train?' he said, with frowning decision. 'Yes, of course.
There is to be an eight o'clock breakfast for those who want to get
off. We shall be home by a little after nine. Cheer up, darling. I
will look after you to-night--and think of Sandy to-morrow!'

He laid his cheek tenderly against hers, full of a passion of
resentment and pity. As for her, the feeling with which she clung
to him was more like the feeling she had first shown him on the
Wakely moors, than anything she had known since.

'Sandy! why don't you say good morning, sir?' said David next
morning, standing on the threshold of his own study, with Lucy just
behind. His face was beaming with the pleasures of home.

Sandy, who was lying curled up in David's arm-chair, looked
sleepily at his parents. His thumb was tightly wedged in his mouth,
and with the other he held pressed against him a hideous rag doll,
which had been presented to him in his cradle.

'Jane's asleep,' he said, just removing his thumb for the purpose,
and then putting it back again.

'Heartless villain!' said David, taking possession of both him and
Jane. 'And do you mean to say you aren't glad to see Daddy and
Mammy?'

'Zes--but Sandy's _so_ fond of childwen,' said Sandy, cuddling
Jane up complacently, and subsiding into his father's arms.

Husband and wife laughed into each other's eyes. Then Lucy knelt
down to tie the child's shoe, and David, first kissing the boy,
bent forward and laid another kiss on the mother's hair.




CHAPTER V


'An exciting post,' said David to Lucy one morning as she entered
the dining-room for breakfast. 'Louie proposes to bring her little
girl over to see us, and Ancrum will be home to-night!'

'Louie!' repeated Mrs. Grieve, standing still in her amazement.
'What do you mean?'

It was certainly unexpected. David had not heard from Louie for
more than six months; his remittances to her, however, were at all
times so casually acknowledged that he had taken no particular
notice; and he and she had not met for two years and more--since
that visit to Paris, in fact, recorded in his journal.

'It is quite true,' said David; 'it seems to be one of her sudden
schemes. I don't see any particular reason for it. She says she
must "put matters before" me, and that Cecile wants a change. I
don't see that a change to Manchester in February is likely to help
the poor child much. No, it must mean more money. We must make up
our minds to that,' said David with a little sad smile, looking at
his wife.

'David! I don't see that you're called to do it at all!' cried
Lucy. 'Why, you've done much more for her than anybody else would
have done! What they do with the money I can't think--dreadful
people!'

She began to pour out the tea with vehemence and an angry lip. She
had always in her mind that vision of Louie, as she had seen her
for the first and only time in her life, marching up Market Place
in the 'loud' hat and the black and scarlet dress, stared at and
staring. Nor had she ever lost her earliest impression of strong
dislike which had come upon her immediately afterwards, when Louie
and Reuben had mounted to Dora's sitting-room, and she, Lucy, had
angrily told the quick-fingered, bold-eyed girl who claimed to be
David Grieve's sister not to touch Dora's work. Nay, every year
since had but intensified it, especially since their income had
ceased to expand rapidly, and the drain of the Montjoies' allowance
had been more plainly felt. She might have begun to feel a little
ashamed of herself that she was able to give her husband so little
sympathy in his determination to share his gains with his
co-workers. She was quite clear that she was right in resenting the
wasting of his money on such worthless people as the Montjoies. It
was disgusting that they should sponge upon them so--and with
hardly a 'thank you' all the time. Oh dear, no!--Louie took
everything as her right, and had once abused David through four
pages because his cheque had been two days late.

David received his wife's remarks in a meditative silence. He
devoted himself a while to Sandy, who was eating porridge at his
right hand, and tended with great regularity to bestow on his
pinafore what was meant for his mouth. At last he said, pushing the
letter over to Lucy:

'You had better read it, Lucy. She talks of coming next week.'

Lucy read it with mounting wrath. It was the outcome of a fit of
characteristic violence. Louie declared that she could stand her
life no longer; that she was coming over to put things before
David; and if he couldn't help her, she and her child would just go
out and beg. She understood from an old Manchester acquaintance
whom she had met in the Rue de Rivoli about Christmas-time that
David was doing very well with his business. She wished him joy of
it. If he was prosperous, it was more than she was. Nobody ever
seemed to trouble their heads about her.

'Well, I never!' said Lucy, positively choked. 'Why, it's not much
more than a month since you sent her that last cheque. And now I
know you'll be saying you can't afford yourself a new great-coat.
It's disgraceful! They'll suck you dry, those kind of people, if
you let them.'

She had taken no pains so far to curb her language for the sake of
her husband's feelings. But as she gave vent to the last acid
phrase she felt a sudden compunction. For David was looking
straight before him into vacancy, with a painful intensity in the
eyes, and a curious droop and contraction of the mouth. Why did he
so often worry himself about Louie? _He_ had done all he
could, anyway.

She got up and went over to him with his tea. He woke up from his
absorption and thanked her.

'Is it right?'

'Just right!' he said, tasting it. 'All the same, Lucy, it would be
really nice of you to be kind to her and poor little Cecile. It
won't be easy for either of us having Louie here.'

He began to cut up his bread with sudden haste, then, pausing
again, he went on in a low voice. 'But if one leaves a task like
that undone it makes a sore spot, a fester in the mind.'

She went back to the place in silence.

'What day is it to be?' she said presently. Certainly they both
looked dejected.

'The 16th, isn't it? I wonder who the Manchester acquaintance was.
He must have given a rose-coloured account. We aren't so rich as
all that, are we, wife?'

He glanced at her with a charming half-apprehensive smile, which
made his face young again. Lucy looked ready to cry.

'I know you'll get out of buying that coat,' she said with energy,
as though referring to an already familiar topic of discussion
between them.

'No, I won't,' said David cheerfully. 'I'll buy it before Louie
comes, if that will please you. Oh, we shall do, dear! I've had a
real good turn at the shop this last month. Things will look better
this quarter's end, you'll see.'

'Why, I thought you'd been so busy in the printing office,' she
said, a good deal cheered, however, by his remark.

'So we have. But John's a brick, and doesn't care how much he does.
And the number of men who take a personal interest in the house,
who do their utmost to forward work, and to prevent waste and
scamping, is growing fast. When once we get the apprentices' school
into full working order, we shall see.'

David gave himself a great stretch; and then, thrusting his hands
deep into his pockets, stood by the fire enjoying it and his dreams
together.

'Has it begun?' said Lucy. Her tone was not particularly cordial;
but anyone who knew them well would perhaps have reflected that six
months before he would have neither made his remark, nor she have
asked her question.

'Yes--what?' he said with a start. 'Oh, the school! It has begun
tentatively. Six of our best men give in rotation two hours a day
to it at the time when work and the machines are slackest. And we
have one or two teachers from outside. Twenty-three boys have
entered. I have begun to pay them a penny a day for attendance.'

His face lit up with merriment as though he anticipated her
remonstrance.

'David, how foolish! If you coax them like that they won't care a
bit about it.'

'Well, the experiment has been tried by a great French firm,' he
said, 'and it did well. It is really a slight addition to wages, and
pays the firm in the end. You should see the little fellows hustle
up for their money. I pay it them every month.'

'And it all comes out of _your_ pocket--that, of course, I
needn't ask,' said Lucy. But her sarcasm was not bitter, and she
had a motherly eye the while to the way in which Sandy was stuffing
himself with his bread and jam.

'Well,' he said, laughing and making no attempt to excuse himself,
'but I tell you, madam, you will do better this year. I positively
must make some money out of the shop for you and myself too. So I
have been going at it like twenty horses, and we've sent out a
splendid catalogue.'

'Oh, I say, David!' said Lucy, dismayed, 'you're not going to take
the shop-money too to spend on the printing?'

'I won't take anything that will leave you denuded,' he said
affectionately; 'and whenever I want anything I'll tell you all
about it--if you like.'

He looked at her significantly. She did not answer for a minute,
then she said:

'Don't you want me to give those boys a treat some time?'

'Yes, when the weather gets more decent, if it ever does. We must
give them a day on the moors--take them to Clough End perhaps. Oh,
look here!' he exclaimed with a sudden change of tone, 'let us ask
Uncle Reuben to come and spend the day to see Louie!'

'Why, he won't leave _her_,' said Lucy.

'Who? Aunt Hannah? Oh yes, he will. It's wonderful what she can do
now. I saw her in November, you remember, when I went to see
Margaret. It's a resurrection. Poor Uncle Reuben!'

'What do you mean?' said Lucy, startled.

'Well,' said David slowly, with a half tender, half humorous twist
of the lip, 'he can't understand it. He prayed so many years, and it
made no difference. Then came a new doctor, and with electricity
and rubbing it was all done. Oh yes, Uncle Reuben would like to see
Louie. And I want to show him that boy there!'

He nodded at Sandy, who sat staring open-mouthed and open-eyed at
his parents, a large piece of bread and jam slipping slowly down
his throat.

'David, you're silly,' said Lucy. But she went to stand by him at
the fire, and slipped her hand inside his arm. 'I suppose she and
Cecile had better have the front room,' she went on slowly.

'Yes, that would be the most cheerful.'

Then they were silent a little, he leaning his head lightly against
hers.

'Well, I must go,' he said, rousing himself; 'I shall just catch the
train. Send a line to Ancrum, there's a dear, to say I will go and
see him to-night. Four months! I am afraid he has been very bad.'

Lucy stood by the fire a little, lost in many contradictory
feelings. There was in her a strange sense as of some long strain
slowly giving way, the quiet melting of some old hardness. Ever
since that autumn time when, after their return from Benet's Park,
her husband's chivalry and delicacy of feeling had given back to
her the self-respect and healed the self-love which had been so
rudely hurt, there had been a certain readjustment of Lucy's nature
going on below the little commonplaces and vanities and affections
of her life which she herself would never have been able to
explain. It implied the gradual abandonment of certain ambitions,
the relinquishment bit by bit of an arid and fruitless effort.

She would stand and sigh sometimes--long, regretful sighs like a
child--for she knew not what. But David would have his way, and it
was no good; and she loved him and Sandy.

But she owed no love to Louie Montjoie! It was a relief to her
now--an escape from an invading sweetness of which her little heart
was almost afraid--to sit down and plan how she would protect David
from that grasping woman and her unspeakable husband.

'David, my dear fellow!' said Ancrum's weak voice. He rose with
difficulty from his seat by the fire. The room was the same little
lodging-house sitting-room in Mortimer Road, where David years
before had poured out his boyish account of himself. Neither
chiffonnier, nor pictures, nor antimacassars had changed at all;
the bustling landlady was still loud and vigorous. But Ancrum
was a shadow.

'You are better?' David said, holding his hand in both his.

'Oh yes, better for a time. Not for long, thank God!'

David looked at him with painful emotion. Several times during
these eight years had he seen Ancrum emerge from these mysterious
crises of his, a broken and shattered man, whom only the force of a
superhuman will could drag back to life and work. But he had never
yet seen him so beaten down, so bloodless, so emaciated as this.
Lung mischief had declared itself more than a year before this
date, and had clearly made progress during this last attack of
melancholia. He thought to himself that his old friend could not
have long to live.

'Has Williams been to see you?' he asked, naming a doctor whom
Ancrum had long known and trusted.

'Oh yes! He can do nothing. He tells me to give in and go to the
south. But there is a little work left in me still. I wanted my
boys. I grew to pine for my boys--up there.'

'Up there' meant that house in Scotland where lived the friends
bound to him by such tragic memories of help asked and rendered in
a man's worst extremity, that he could never speak of them when he
was living his ordinary life in Manchester, passionately as he
loved them.

They chatted a little about the boys, some of whom David had been
keeping an eye on. Five or six of them, indeed, were in his
printing-office, and learning in the apprentices' school he had
just started.

But in the middle of their talk, with a sudden change of look,
Ancrum stooped forward and laid his hand on David's.

'A little more, Davy--I have just to get a _little_ worse--and
_she_ will come to me.'

David was not sure that he understood. Ancrum had only spoken of
his wife once since the night when, led on by sympathy and emotion,
he had met David's young confession by the story of his own fate.
She was still teaching at Glasgow so far as David knew, where she
was liked and respected.

'Yes, Davy--when I have come to the end of my tether--when I can do no
more but die--I shall call--and she will come. It has so far killed us
to be together--more than a few hours in the year. But when life is all
over for me--she will be kind--and I shall be able to forget it all. Oh,
the hours I have sat here thinking--thinking--and _gnashing my teeth!_
My boys think me a kind, gentle, harmless creature, Davy. They little
know the passions I have carried within me--passions of hate and
bitterness--outcries against God and man. But there has been One with me
through the storms'--his voice sank--'aye! and I have gone to Him again
and again with the old cry--_Master!--Master!--carest Thou not that we
perish?_'

His drawn grey face worked and he mastered himself with difficulty.
David held his hand firm and close in a silence which carried with it a
love and sympathy not to be expressed.

'Let me just say this to you, Davy,' Ancrum went on presently,
'before we shut the door on this kind of talk--for when a man has
got a few things to do and very little strength to do 'em with, he
must not waste himself. You may hear any day that I have been
received into the Catholic Church, or you may only hear it when I
am dying. One way or the other, you _will_ hear it. It has
been strange to go about all these years among my Unitarian and
dissenting friends and to know that this would be the inevitable
end of it. I have struggled alone for peace and certainty. I cannot
get them for myself. There is an august, an inconceivable
possibility which makes my heart stand still when I think of it,
that the Catholic Church may verily have them to give, as she says
she has. I am weak--I shall submit--I shall throw myself upon her
breast at last.'

'But why not now,' said David, tenderly, 'if it would give you
comfort?'

Ancrum did not answer at once; he sat rubbing his hands restlessly
over the fire.

'I don't know--I don't know,' he said at last. 'I have told you what
the end will be, Davy. But the will still flutters--flutters--in my
poor breast, like a caged thing.'

Then that beautiful half-wild smile of his lit up the face.

'Bear with me, you strong man! What have you been doing with
yourself? How many more courts have you been pulling down? And how
much more of poor Madam Lucy's money have you been throwing out of
window?'

He took up his old tone, half bantering, half affectionate, and
teased David out of the history of the last six months. While he
sat listening he reflected once more, as he had so often reflected,
upon the difference between the reality of David Grieve's life as
it was and his, Ancrum's, former imaginations of what it would be.
A rapid rise to wealth and a new social status, removal to London,
a great public career, a personality, and an influence conspicuous
in the eyes of England--all these things he had once dreamed of as
belonging to the natural order of David's development. What he had
actually witnessed had been the struggle of a hidden life to
realise certain ideal aims under conditions of familiar difficulty
and limitation, the dying down of that initial brilliance and
passion to succeed, into a wrestle of conscience as sensitive as it
was profound, as tenacious as it was scrupulous. He had watched an
unsatisfactory marriage, had realised the silent resolve of the
north-countryman to stand by his own people, of the man sprung from
the poor to cling to the poor: he had become familiar with the
veins of melancholy by which both character and life were crossed.
That glittering prince of circumstance as he had once foreseen him,
was still enshrined in memory and fancy; but the real man was knit
to the cripple's inmost heart.

Another observer, perhaps, might have wondered at Ancrum's sense of
difference and disillusion. For David after all had made a mark. As
he sat talking to Ancrum of the new buildings behind the
printing-office where he now employed from two to three hundred
men, of the ups and downs of his profit-sharing experiences, of
this apprentices' school for the sons of members of the 'house,'
imitated from one of the same kind founded by a great French
printing firm, and the object just now of a passionate energy of
work on David's part--or as he diverged into the history of an
important trade dispute in Manchester, where he had been appointed
arbitrator by the unanimous voice of both sides--as he told these
things, it was not doubtful even for Ancrum that his power and
consideration were spreading in his own town.

But, substantially, Ancrum was right. Hard labour and natural gift
had secured their harvest; but that vivid personal element in
success which captivates and excites the bystander seemed, in
David's case, to have been replaced by something austere, which
pointed attention and sympathy rather to the man's work than to
himself. When he was young there had been intoxication for such a
spectator as Ancrum in the magical rapidity and ease with which he
seized opportunity and beat down difficulty. Now that he was
mature, he was but one patient toiler the more at the eternal
puzzles of our humanity.

Ancrum let him talk awhile. He had always felt a certain interest
in David's schemes, though they were not of a quality and sort with
which a mind like his naturally concerned itself. But his interest
now could not hold out so long as once it could.

'Ah, that will do--that will do, dear fellow!' he said,
interrupting and touching David's hand with apologetic affection.
'I seem to feel your pulse beating 150 to the minute, and it tires
me so I can't bear myself. Gossip to me. How is Sandy?'

David laughed, and had as usual a new batch of 'Sandiana' to
produce. Then he talked of Louie's coming and of the invitation
which had been sent to Reuben Grieve.

'I shall come and sit in a corner and look at _her_,' said
Ancrum, nodding at Louie's name. 'What sort of a life has she been
leading all these years? Neither you nor I can much imagine. But
what beauty it used to be! How will John stand seeing her again?'

David smiled, but did not think it would affect John very greatly.
He was absorbed in the business of Grieve & Co., and no less round,
roseate, and trusty than he had always been.

'Well, good night--good night!' said Ancrum, and seemed to be
looking at the clock uneasily. 'Come again, Davy, and I dare say I
shall struggle up to you.'

At that moment the door opened, and, in spite of a hasty shout from
Ancrum, which she did not or would not understand, Mrs. Elsley, his
landlady, came into the room, bearing his supper. She put down the
tray, seemed to invite David's attention to it by her indignant
look, and flounced out again like one bursting with forbidden
speech.

'Ancrum, this is absurd!' cried David, pointing to the tea and
morsel of dry bread which were to provide this shrunken invalid
with his evening meal. 'You _can't_ live on this stuff now, you
know--you want something more tempting and more nourishing. Do be
rational!'

Ancrum sprang up, hobbled with unusual alacrity across the room,
and, laying hold of David, made a feint of ejecting his visitor.

'You get along and leave me to my wittles!' he said with the smile
of a schoolboy; 'I don't spy on you when you're at your meals.'

David crossed his arms.

'I shall have to send Lucy down every morning to housekeep with
Mrs. Elsley,' he said firmly.

'Now, David, hold your tongue! I couldn't eat anything else if I
tried. And there are two boys down with typhoid in Friar's
Yard--drat 'em!--and scarcely a rag on 'em: don't you understand?
And besides, David, if _she_ comes, I shall want a pound or
two, you see?'

He did not look at his visitor's face nor let his own be seen. He
simply pushed David through the door and shut it.

'Sandy, they're just come!' cried Lucy in some excitement, hugging
the child to her by way of a last pleasant experience before the
advent of her sister-in-law. Then she put the child down on the
sofa and went out to meet the new-comers.

Sandy sucked a meditative thumb, putting his face to the window,
and surveyed the arrival which was going on in the front garden.
There was a great deal of noise and talking; the lady in the grey
cloak was scolding the cabman, and 'Daddy' was taking her bags and
parcels from her, and trying to make her come in. On the steps
stood a little girl looking frightened and tired. Sandy twisted his
head round and studied her carefully. But he showed no signs of
running out to meet her. She might be nice, or she might be nasty.
Sandy had a cautious philosophical way with him towards novelties.
He remained perfectly still with his cheek pressed against the
glass.

The door opened. In came Louie, with Lucy looking already flushed
and angry behind her, and David, last of all, holding Cecile by the
hand.

Louie was in the midst of denunciations of the cabman, who had,
according to her, absorbed into his system, or handed over to an
accomplice on the way, a bandbox which had _certainly_ been
put in at St. Pancras, and which contained Cecile's best hat. She
was red and furious, and David felt himself as much attacked as the
cabman, for to the best of his ability he had transferred them and
their packages, at the Midland station, from the train to the cab.

In the midst of her tirade, however, she suddenly stopped short and
looked round the room she had just entered--Lucy's low comfortable
sitting-room, with David's books overflowing into every nook and
corner, the tea-table spread, and the big fire which Lucy had been
nervously feeding during her time of waiting for the travellers.

'Well, you've got a fire, anyway,' she said, brusquely. 'I thought
you'd have a bigger house than this by now.'

'Oh, thank you, it's quite big enough!' cried Lucy, going to the
tea-table and holding herself very straight. '_Quite_ big
enough for anything _we_ want! Will you take your tea?'

Louie threw herself into an armchair and looked about her.

'Where's the little boy?' she inquired.

'I'm here,' said a small solemn voice from behind the sofa, 'but I'm
not _your_ boy.'

And Sandy, discovered with his back to the window, replaced the
thumb which he had removed to make the remark, and went on staring
with portentous gravity at the new-comers. Cecile had nervously
disengaged herself from David and was standing by her mother.

'Why, he's small for his age!' exclaimed Louie; 'I'm sure he's small
for his age. Why, he's nearly five!'

'Come here, Sandy,' said David, 'and let your aunt and cousin look
at you.'

Sandy reluctantly sidled across the room so as to keep as far as
possible from his aunt and cousin, and fastened on his father's
hand. He and the little girl looked at one another.

'Go and kiss her,' said David.

Sandy most unwillingly allowed himself to be put forward. Cecile
with a little patronising woman-of-the-world air stooped and kissed
him first on one cheek and then on the other. Louie only looked at
him. Her black eyes--no less marvellous than of yore, although now
the brilliancy of them owed something to art as well as nature, as
Lucy at once perceived--stared him up and down, taking stock
minutely.

'He's well made,' she said grudgingly, 'and his colour isn't bad.
Cecile, take your hat off.'

The child obeyed, and the mother with hasty fingers pulled her hair
forward here, and put it back there. 'Look at the thickness of it,'
she said, proudly pointing it out to David. 'They'd have given me
two guineas for it in the Rue de la Paix the other day. Why didn't
that child have your hair, I wonder?' she added, nodding towards
Sandy.

'Because he preferred his mother's, I suppose,' said David, smiling
at Lucy, and wondering through his discomfort what Sandy could
possibly be doing with his coat-tail. He seemed to be elaborately
scrubbing his face with it.

'What are you doing with my coat, villain?' he said, lifting his
son in his arms.

Sandy found his father's ear, and with infinite precaution
whispered vindictively into it:

'I've wiped _them_ kisses off anyhow.'

David suppressed him, and devoted himself to the travellers and
their tea.

Every now and then he took a quiet look at his sister. Louie was in
some ways more beautiful than ever. She carried herself
magnificently, and as she sat at the tea-table--restless
always--she fell unconsciously into one fine attitude after
another, no doubt because of her long practice as a sculptor's
model. All the girl's awkwardness had disappeared; she had the
insolent ease which goes with tried and conscious power. But with
the angularity and thinness of first youth had gone also that wild
and startling radiance which Montjoie had caught and fixed in the
Maenad statue--the one enduring work of a ruined talent, now to be
found in the Luxembourg by anyone who cares to look for it. Her
beauty was less original; it had taken throughout the second-rate
Parisian stamp; she had the townswoman's pallor, as compared with
the moorland red and white of her youth; and round the eyes and
mouth in a full daylight were already to be seen the lines which
grave the history of passionate and selfish living.

But if her beauty was less original, it was infinitely more
finished. Lucy beside her stumbled among the cups, and grew more
and more self-conscious; she had felt much the same at Benet's Park
beside Lady Venetia Danby; only here there was a strong personal
animosity and disapproval fighting with the disagreeable sense of
being outshone.

She left almost all the talk to her husband, and employed herself
in looking after Cecile. David, who had left his work with
difficulty to meet his sister, did his best to keep her going on
indifferent subjects, wondering the while what it was that she had
come all this way to say to him, and perfectly aware that her sharp
eyes were in every place, taking a depreciatory inventory of his
property, his household, and his circumstances.

Suddenly Louie said something to Cecile in violent French. It was
to the effect that she was to hold herself up and not stoop like an
idiot.

The child, who was shyly eating her tea, flushed all over, and drew
herself up with painful alacrity. Louie went on with a loud account
of the civility shown her by some gentlemen on the Paris boat and
on the journey from Dover. In the middle of it she stopped short,
her eye flamed, she bent forward with the rapidity of a cat that
springs, and slapped Cecile smartly on the right cheek.

'I was watching you!' she cried. 'Are you never going to obey me--do
you think I am going to drag a hunchback about with me?'

Both David and Lucy started forward. Cecile dropped her bread and
butter and began to cry in a loud, shrill voice, hitting out
meanwhile at her mother with her tiny hands in a frenzy of rage and
fear. Sandy, frightened out of his wits, set up a loud howl also,
till his mother caught him up and carried him away.

'Louie, the child is tired out!' said David, trying to quiet Cecile
and dry her tears. 'What was that for?'

Louie's chest heaved.

'Because she won't do what I tell her,' she said fiercely. 'What am
I to do with her when she grows up? Who'll ever look at her twice?'

She scowled at the child who had taken refuge on David's knee, then
with a sudden change of expression she held out her arms, and said
imperiously:

'Give her to me.'

David relinquished her, and the mother took the little trembling
creature on her knee.

'Be quiet then,' she said to her roughly, always in French, 'I
didn't hurt you. There! _Veux-tu du gateau_?'

She cut some with eager fingers and held it to Cecile's lips. The
child turned away, silently refusing it, the tears rolling down her
cheeks. The mother devoured her with eyes of remorse and adoration,
while her face was still red with anger.

'_Dis-moi_, you don't feel anything?' she said, kissing her
hungrily. 'Are you tired? Shall I carry you upstairs and put you on
the bed to rest?'

And she did carry her up, not allowing David to touch her. When
they were at last safe in their own room, David came down to his
study and threw himself into his chair in the dark with a groan.




CHAPTER VI


Louie and her child entered the sitting-room together when the bell
rang for supper-tea. Louie had put on a high red silk dress of a
brilliant, almost scarlet, tone, which showed her arms from the
elbows and was very slightly clouded here and there with black;
Cecile crept beside her, a little pale shadow, in a white muslin
frock, adorned, however, as Lucy's vigilant eyes immediately
perceived, with some very dainty and expensive embroidery. The
mother's dress reminded her of that in which she first saw Louie
Grieve; so did her splendid and reckless carriage; so did the wild
play of her black eyes, always on the watch for opportunities of
explosion and offence. How did they get their dresses? Who paid for
them? And now they had come over to beg for more! Lucy could hardly
keep a civil tongue in her head at all, as her sister-in-law swept
round the room making strong and, to the mistress of the house,
cutting remarks on the difference between 'Manchester dirt' and
the brightness and cleanliness of Paris. Why, she lorded it over
them as though the place belonged to her! 'And she is just a
pauper--living on what we give her!' thought Lucy to herself with
exasperation.

After supper, at which Louie behaved with the same indefinable
insolence--whether as regarded the food or the china, or the shaky
moderator lamp, a relic from David's earliest bachelor days, which
only he could coax into satisfactory burning--Lucy made the move,
and said to her with cold constraint:

'Will you come into the drawing-room?--David has a pipe in the
study after dinner.'

'I want to speak to David,' said Louie, pushing back her chair with
noisy decision. 'I'll go with him. He can smoke as much as he
likes--I'm used to it.'

'Well, then, come into my study,' said David, trying to speak
cheerfully. 'Lucy will look after Cecile.'

To Louie's evident triumph Cecile made difficulties about going
with her aunt, but was at last persuaded by the prospect of seeing
Sandy in bed. She had already shown signs in her curious frightened
way of a considerable interest in Sandy.

Then David led the way to the study. He put his sister into his
armchair and stood pipe in hand beside her, looking down upon her.
In his heart there was the passionate self-accusing sense that he
could not feel pity, or affection, or remorse for the past when she
was there; every look and word roused in him the old irritation,
the old wish to master her, he had known so often in his youth. Yet
he drew himself together, striving to do his best.

Well, now, look here,' said Louie defiantly, 'I want some money.'

'So I supposed,' he said quietly, lighting his pipe.

Louie reddened.

'Well, and if I do want it,' she said, breathing quickly, 'I've a
right to want it. You chose to waste all that money--all my
money--on that marrying business, and you must take the
consequence. I look upon it this way--you promised to put my money
into your trade and give me a fair share of your profits. Then you
chucked it away--you made me spend it all, and now, of course, I'm
to have nothing to say to your profits. Oh dear, no! It's a trifle
that I'm a pauper and you're rolling in money compared to me
anyway. Oh! it doesn't matter nothing to nobody--not at all! All
the same you couldn't have made the start you did--not those few
months I was with you--without my money. Why can't you confess it,
I want to know--and behave more handsome to me now--instead of
leaving me in that state that I haven't a franc to bless myself
with!'

She threw herself back in her chair, with one arm flung behind her
head. David stared at her tongue-tied for a while by sheer
amazement.

'I gave you everything I had,' he said, at last, with a slow
distinctness,' all your money, and all my own too. When I came back
here, I had my new stock, it is true, but it was much of it unpaid
for. My first struggle was to get my neck out of debt.'

He paused, shrinking with a kind of sick repulsion from the memory
of that bygone year of shattered nerves and anguished effort.
Deliberately he let thought and speech of it drop. Louie was the
last person in the world to whom he could talk of it.

'I built up my business again,' he resumed, 'by degrees. Mr. Doyle
lent me money--it was on that capital I first began to thrive. From
the very beginning, even in the very year when I handed over to you
all our father's money--I sent you more. And every year since--you
know as well as I do--'

But again he looked away and paused. Once more he felt himself on a
wrong tack. What was the use of laying out, so to speak, all that
he had done in the sight of these angry eyes? Besides, a certain
high pride restrained him.

Louie looked a trifle disconcerted, and her flush deepened. Her
audacious attempt to put him in the wrong and provide herself with
a grievance could not be carried on. She took refuge in passion.

'Oh, I dare say you think you've done a precious lot!' she said,
sitting straight up and locking her hands round her knee, while the
whole frame of her stiffened and quivered. 'I suppose you think
other people would think so too. _I_ don't care! It don't
matter to me. You're the only belonging I've got--who else was
there for me to look to? Oh, it is all very fine! All I know is, I
can't stand my life any more! If you can't do anything, I'll just
pack up my traps and go. _Somebody_'ll have to make it easier
for me, that's all! Last week--I was out of the house--he found out
where I kept my money, he broke the lock open, and when I got home
there was nothing. _Nothing_, I tell you!' Her voice rose to a
shrillness that made David look to see that the door between them
and Lucy was securely closed. 'And I'd promised a whole lot of
things to the church for Easter, and Cecile and I haven't got a rag
between us; and as for the rent, the landlord may whistle for it!
Oh! the beast!' she said, between her teeth, while the fierce tears
stood in her eyes.

Lucy--any woman of normal shrewdness, putting two and two
together--would have allowed these complaints about half their
claimed weight. Upon David--unconsciously inclined to measure all
emotion by his own standard--they produced an immediate and deep
impression.

'You poor thing!' he murmured, as he stood looking down upon her.

She tossed her head, as though resenting his compassion.

'Yes, I'm about tired of it! I thought I'd come over and tell you
that. Now you know,--and if you hear things you don't like, don't
blame me, that's all!'

Her great eyes blazed into his. He understood her. Her child--the
priests--had, so far, restrained her. Now--what strange mixture of
shameless impulse--curiosity, greed, reckless despair--had driven
her here that she might threaten him thus!

'Ah, I dare say you think I've had a gay life of it over there with
your money,' she went on, not allowing him to speak. '_My God!_'

She shrugged her shoulders, with a scornful laugh, while the
tempest gathered within her.

'Don't I know perfectly that for years I have been one of the most
beautiful women in Paris! Ask the men who have painted me for the
Salon--ask that brute who might have made a fortune out of me if he
hadn't been the sot he is! And what have I got by it? What do other
women who are not a tenth part as good-looking as I am get by it? A
comfortable life, anyway! _Eh bien! essayons!--nous aussi._'

The look she flung at him choked the words on his lips.

'When I think of these ten years,' she cried, 'I just wonder at
myself. There,--what you think about it I don't know, and I don't
care. I might have had a good time, and I've had a _devil's_
time. And, upon my word, I think I'll make a change!'

In her wild excitement she sprang up and began to pace the narrow
room.

David watched her, fighting with himself, and with that inbred
antipathy of temperament which seemed to paralyse both will and
judgment. Was the secret of it that in their profound unlikeness
they were yet so much alike?

Then he went up to her and made her sit down again.

'Let me have a word now,' he said quietly, though his hand as it
gripped hers had a force of which he was unconscious. 'You say you
wonder at yourself. Well, I can tell you this: other people have
wondered too! When I left you in Paris ten years ago, I tell you
frankly, I had no hopes. I said to myself--don't rage at me!--with
that way of looking at things, and with such a husband, what chance
is there? And for some years now, Louie, I confess to you, I have
been simply humbled and amazed to see what--what'--his voice sank
and shook--'_love--and the fear of God_--can do. It has been
hard to be miserable and poor--I know that--but you have cared for
Cecile, and you have feared to shut yourself out from good people
who spoke to you in God's name. Don't do yourself injustice.
Believe in yourself. Look back upon these years and be thankful.
With all their miseries they have been a kind of victory! Will you
throw them away _now_? But your child is growing up and will
understand. And there are hands to help--mine, always--always.'

He held out his to her, smiling. He could not have analysed his own
impulse--this strange impulse which had led him to bless instead of
cursing. But its effect upon Louie was startling. She had looked
for, perhaps in her fighting mood she had ardently desired, an
outburst of condemnation, against which her mad pleasure in the
sound of her own woes and hatreds might once more spend itself. And
instead of blaming and reproaching he had--

She stared at him. Then with a sudden giving way, which was a matter
partly of nerves and partly of surprise, she let her two arms fall
upon the edge of the chair, and dropping her head upon them, burst
out into wild sobbing.

His own eyes were wet. He soothed her hurriedly and incoherently,
told her he would spare her all the money he could; that he and
Lucy would do their best, but that she must not suppose they were
very rich. He did not regard all his money as his own.

He went on to explain to her something of his business position.
Her sobbing slackened and ceased. And presently, his mood changing
instinctively with hers, he became more vague and cautious in
statement; his tone veered back towards that which he was
accustomed to use to her. For, once her burst of passion over, he
felt immediately that she was once more criticising everything that
he said and did in her own interest.

'Oh, I know you've become a regular Communist,' she said sullenly
at last, drying her eyes in haste.' Well, I tell you, I must have a
hundred pounds. I can't do with a penny less than that.'

He tried to get out of her for what precise purposes she wanted it,
and whether her husband had stolen from her the whole of the
quarter's allowance he had just sent her. She answered evasively;
he felt that she was telling him falsehoods; and once more his
heart grew dry within him.

'Well,' he said at last with a certain decision, 'I will do it if I
can, and I think I can do it. But, Louie, understand that I have
got Lucy and the child to think for, that I am not alone.'

'I should think she had got more than she could expect!' cried
Louie, putting her hair straight with trembling hands.

His cheek flushed at the sneer, but before he could reply she said
abruptly:

'Have you ever told her about Paris?'

'No,' he said, with equal abruptness, his mouth taking a stern
line, 'and unless I am forced to do so I never shall. That you
understand, I know, for I spoke to you about it in Paris. My past
died for me when I asked Lucy to be my wife. I do not ask you to
remember this. I take it for granted.'

'I saw that woman the other day,' said Louie with a strange smile,
as she sat staring into the fire.

He started, but he did not reply. He went to straighten some papers
on his table. It seemed to him that he did not want her to say a
word more, and yet he listened for it.

'I remember they used to call her pretty,' said Louie, a hateful
scorn shining in her still reddened eyes. 'She is just a little
frump now--nobody would ever look at her twice. They say her
husband leads her a life. He poisoned himself at an operation and
has gone half crippled. She has to keep them both. She doesn't give
herself the airs she used to, anyway.'

David could bear it no longer.

'I think you had better go and take Cecile to bed,' he said
peremptorily. 'I heard it strike nine a few minutes ago. I will go
and talk business to Lucy.'

She went with a careless air. As he saw her shut the door his heart
felt once more dead and heavy. A few minutes before there had been
the flutter of a divine presence between them. Now he felt nothing
but the iron grip of character and life. And that little picture
which her last words had left upon the mind--it carried with it a
shock and dreariness he could only escape by hard work, that best
medicine of the soul. He went out early next morning to his
printing-office, spent himself passionately upon a day of
difficulties, and came back refreshed.

For the rest, he talked to Lucy, and with great difficulty
persuaded her in the matter of the hundred pounds. Lucy's
indignation may be taken for granted, and the angry proofs she
heaped on David that Louie was an extravagant story-telling hussy,
who spent everything she could get on dress and personal luxury.

'Why, her dressing-table is like a perfumer's shop!' she cried in
her wrath; 'what she does with all the messes I can't imagine--makes
herself beautiful, I suppose! Why should we pay for it all? And I
tell you she has got a necklace of real pearls. I know they are
real, for she told Lizzie'(Lizzie was the boy's nurse)'that she
always took them about with her to keep them safe out of her
husband's clutches--just imagine her talking to the girl like that!
When will you be able to give _me_ real pearls, and where do
you suppose she got them?'

David preferred not to inquire. What could he do, he asked himself
in despair--what even could he know, unless Louie chose that he
should know it? But she, on the contrary, carefully avoided the
least recurrence to the threats of her first talk with him.

Ultimately, however, he brought his wife round, and Louie was
informed that she could have her hundred pounds, which should be
paid her on the day of her departure, but that nothing more, beyond
her allowance, could or should be given her during the current
year.

She took the promise very coolly, but certainly made herself more
agreeable after it was given. She dressed up Cecile and set her
dancing in the evenings, weird dances of a Spanish type,
alternating between languor and a sort of 'possession,' which had
been taught the child by a moustached violinist from Madrid, who
admired her mother and paid Louie a fantastic and stormy homage
through her child. She also condescended to take an interest in
Lucy's wardrobe. The mingled temper and avidity with which Lucy
received her advances may be imagined. It made her mad to have it
constantly implied that her gowns and bonnets would not be worn by
a maid-of-all-work in Paris. At the same time, when Louie's fingers
had been busy with them it was as plain to her as to anyone else
that they became her twice as well as they had before. So she
submitted to be pinned and pulled about and tried on, keeping as
much as possible on her dignity all the time, and reddening with
fresh wrath each time that Louie made it plain to her that she
thought her sister-in-law a provincial little fool, and was only
troubling herself about her to pass the time.

Dora, of course, came up to see Louie, and Louie was much more
communicative to her than to either Lucy or David. She told stories
of her husband which made Dora's hair stand on end; but she boasted
in great detail of her friendships with certain Legitimist ladies
of the bluest blood, with one of whom she had just held a
_quete_ for some Catholic object on the stairs of the Salon.
'I was in blue and pink with a little silver,' she said, looking
quickly behind her to see that Lucy was not listening. 'And Cecile
was a fairy, with spangled wings--the sweetest thing you ever saw.
We were both in the illustrated papers the week after, but as
nobody took any notice of Madame de C--she has behaved like a
washerwoman to me ever since. As if I could help her complexion or
her age!'

But above all did she boast herself against Dora in Church matters.
She would go to St. Damian's on Sunday, triumphantly announcing
that she should have to confess it as a sin when she got home, and
afterwards, when Dora, as her custom was, came out to early dinner
with the Grieves, Louie could not contain herself on the subject of
the dresses, the processions, the decorations, the flowers, and
ceremonial trappings in general, with which _she_ might, if
she liked, regale herself either at Ste. Eulalie or the Madeleine,
in comparison with the wretched show offered by St. Damian's. Dora,
after an early service and much Sunday-school, sat looking pale and
weary under the scornful information poured out upon her. She was
outraged by Louie's tone; yet she was stung by her contempt. Once
her gentleness was roused to speech, and she endeavoured to give
some of the reasons for rejecting the usurped authority of the
'Bishop of Rome,' in which she had been drilled at different times.
But she floundered and came to grief. Her adversary laughed at her,
and in the intervals of rating Cecile for having inked her dress,
flaunted some shrill controversy which left them all staring. Louie
vindicating, the claims of the Holy See with much unction and an
appropriate diction! It seemed to David, as he listened, that the
irony of life could hardly be carried further.

On the following day, David, not without a certain consciousness,
said to John Dalby, his faithful helper through many years, and of
late his partner:

'My sister is up at our place, John, with her little girl. Lucy
would be very glad if you would go in this evening to see them.'

John, who was already aware of the advent of Madame Montjoie,
accepted the invitation and went. Louie received him with a manner
half mocking--half patronising--and made no effort whatever to be
agreeable to him. She was preoccupied; and the stout, shy man in
his new suit only bored her. As for him, he sat and watched her;
his small, amazed eyes took in her ways with Cecile, alternately
boastful and tyrannical; her airs towards Lucy; her complete
indifference to her brother's life and interests. When he got up to
go, he took leave of her with all the old timid _gaucherie_.
But if, when he entered the room, there had been anything left in
his mind of the old dream, he was a wholly free man when he
recrossed the threshold. He walked home thinking much of a small
solicitor's daughter, who worshipped at the Congregational chapel
he himself attended. He had been at David Grieve's side all these
years; he loved him probably more than he would now love any woman;
he devoted himself with ardour to the printing and selling of the
various heretical works and newspapers published by Grieve & Co.;
and yet for some long time past he had been--and was likely to
remain--a man of strong religious convictions, of a common
Evangelical type.

The second week of Louie's stay was a much greater trial than the
first to all concerned. She grew tired of dressing and patronising
Lucy; her sharp eyes and tongue found out all her sister-in-law's
weak points; the two children were a fruitful source of jarring and
jealousy between the mothers; and by the end of the week their
relation was so much strained, and David had so much difficulty in
keeping the peace, that he could only pine for the Monday morning
which was to see Louie's departure. Meanwhile nothing occurred to
give him back his momentary hold upon her. She took great care not
to be alone with him. It was as though she felt the presence of a
new force in him, and would give it no chance of affecting her in
mysterious and incalculable ways.

On the Saturday before her last Sunday, Reuben Grieve arrived in
Manchester--with his wife. His nephew's letter and invitation had
thrown the old man into a great flutter. Ultimately his curiosity
as to David's home and child--David himself he had seen several
times since the marriage--and the desire, which the more prosperous
state of his own circumstances allowed him to feel, to see what
Louie might be like after all these years--decided him to go. And
when he told Hannah of his intended journey, he found, to his
amazement, that she was minded to go too. 'If yo'll tell me when yo
gan me a jaunt last, I'll be obliged to yo!' she said sourly, and
he at once felt himself a selfish brute that he should have thought
of taking the little pleasure without her.

When they were seated in the railway-carriage, he broke out in a
sudden excitement:

'Wal, I never thowt, Hannah, to see yo do thissens naw moor!'

'Aye, yo wor allus yan to mak t' warst o' things,' she said to him,
as she slowly settled herself in her corner.

Nevertheless, Reuben's feeling was amply justified. It had been a
resurrection. The clever young doctor, brimful of new methods, who
had brought her round, had arrived just in time to stop the process
of physical deterioration before it had gone too far; and the
recovery of power both on the paralysed side and in general health
had been marvellous. She walked with a stick, and was an old and
blanched woman before her time. But her indomitable spirit was once
more provided with its necessary means of expression. She was at
least as rude as ever, and it was as clear as anything can be in
the case of a woman who has never learnt to smile, that her visit
to Manchester--the first for ten years--was an excitement and
satisfaction to her.

David met them at the station; but Reuben persisted in going to an
old-fashioned eating-house in the centre of the city, where he had
been accustomed to stay on the occasion of his rare visits to
Manchester, in spite of his nephew's repeated offers of
hospitality.

'Noa, Davy, noa,' he said, 'yo're a gen'leman now, and yo conno' be
moidered wi' oos. We'st coom and see yo--thank yo kindly,--bit
we'st do for oursels i' th' sleepin' way.'

To which Hannah gave a grim and energetic assent.

When Louie had been told of their expected arrival she opened her
black eyes to their very widest extent.

'Well, you'd better keep Aunt Hannah and me out of each other's
way,' she remarked. 'I shall let her have it, you'll see. I'm bound
to.' A remark that David did his best to forget, seeing that the
encounter was now past averting.

When on Sunday afternoon the door of the Grieves's sitting-room
opened to admit Hannah and Reuben Grieve, Louie was lying half
asleep in an armchair by the fire, Cecile and Sandy were playing
with bricks in the middle of the floor, and Dora and Lucy were
chatting on the sofa.

Lucy, who had seen Reuben before, but had never set eyes on Hannah,
sprang up ill at ease and awkward, but genuinely anxious to behave
nicely to her husband's relations.

'Won't you take a chair? I'll go and call David. He's in the next
room. This is Miss Lomax. Louie!'

Startled by the somewhat sharp call, Louie sat up and rubbed her
eyes.

Hannah, resting on her stick, was standing in the middle of
the floor. At sight of the familiar tyrannous face, grown
parchment-white in place of its old grey hue--of the tall gaunt
figure robed in the Sunday garb of rusty black which Louie
perfectly remembered, and surmounted by the old head-gear--the
stiff frizzled curls held in place by two small combs on the
temples, the black bandeau across the front of the head, and the
towering bonnet--Louie suddenly flushed and rose.

'How do you do?' she said in a cool off-hand way, holding out her
hand, which Hannah's black cotton glove barely touched. 'Well, Uncle
Reuben, do you think I'm grown? I have had about time to, anyway,
since you saw me. That's my little girl.'

With a patronising smile she pushed forward Cecile. The
short-sighted tremulous Reuben, staring uncomfortably about him at
the town splendours in which 'Davy' lived, had to have the child's
hand put into his by Dora before he could pull himself together
enough to respond.

'I'm glad to see tha, my little dear.' he said, awkwardly dropping
his hat and umbrella as he stooped to salute her. 'I'm sure yo're
varra kind, miss'--This was said apologetically to Dora, who had
picked up his belongings and put them on a chair. 'Wal, Louie, she
doan't feature her mither mich, as I can see.'

He looked hurriedly at his wife for confirmation. Hannah, who had
seated herself on the highest and plainest chair she could find,
stared the child up and down, and then slowly removed her eyes,
saying nothing. Instantly her manner woke the old rage in Louie,
who was observing her excitedly.

'Come here to me, Cecile. I'd be sorry, anyway, if you were like
what your mother was at your age. You'd be a poor, ill-treated,
half-starved little wretch if you were!'

Hannah started, but not unpleasantly. Her grim mouth curved with a
sort of satisfaction. It was many years since she had enjoyed those
opportunities for battle which Louie's tempers had once so freely
afforded her.

'She's nobbut a midge,' she remarked audibly to Dora, who had just
tried to propitiate her by a footstool. 'The chilt looks as thoo
she'd been fed on spiders or frogs, or summat o' that soart.'

At this moment David came in, just in time to prevent another
explosion from Louie. He was genuinely glad to see his guests; his
feeling of kinship was much stronger now than it ever had been in
his youth; and in these years of independent, and on the whole
happy, living he had had time to forget even Hannah's enormities.

'Well, have you got a comfortable inn?' he asked Reuben presently,
when some preliminaries were over.

'I thank yo kindly, Davy,' said Reuben cautiously, 'we're meeterly
weel sarved; bit yo conno look for mich fro teawn folk.'

'What are yo allus so mealy-mouthed for?' said his wife
indignantly. 'Why conno yo say reet out 'at it's a pleeace not fit
for ony decent dog to put his head in, an' an ill-mannert
daggle-tail of a woman to keep it, as I'd like to sweep out wi th'
bits of a morning, an' leave her on th' muck-heap wheer she
belongs?'

David laughed. To an ear long accustomed to the monotony of town
civilities there was a not unwelcome savour of the moors even in
these brutalities of Hannah's.

'Sandy, where are you?' he said, looking round. 'Have you had a look
at him, Aunt Hannah?'

Sandy, who was sitting in the midst of his bricks sucking his thumb
patiently till Cecile should be given back to him by her mother,
and these invaders should be somehow dispersed, looked up and gave
his father a sleepy and significant nod, as much as to say, 'Leave
me alone, and turn these people out.'

But David lifted him up, and carried him off for exhibition. Hannah
looked at him, as he lay lazily back on his father's arm; his fair
curls straying over David's coat, his cheek flushed by the heat.
'Aye, he's a gradely little chap,' she said, more graciously it
seemed to David than he ever remembered to have heard Hannah Grieve
speak before. His paternal vanity was instantly delighted.

'Sit up, Sandy, and tell your great-uncle and aunt about the fine
games you've been having with your cousin.'

But Sandy was lost in quite other reflections. He looked out upon
Hannah and Reuben with grave filmy eyes, as though from a vast
distance, and said absently:

'Daddy!'

'Yes, Sandy, speak up.'

'Daddy, when everybody in the world was babies, who put 'em to bed?'

The child spoke as usual with a slow flute-like articulation, so
that every word could be heard. Reuben and Hannah turned and looked
at each other.

'Lord alive!' cried Hannah 'whativer put sich notions into th'
chilt's yed?'

David, with a happy twinkle in his eye, held up a hand for silence.

'I don't know, Sandy; give it up.'

Sandy considered a second or two, then said, with the sigh of one
who relinquishes speculation in favor of the conventional solution:

'I s'pose God did.'

His tone was dejected, as though he would gladly have come to
another conclusion if he could.

'Reuben,' said Hannah with severity, 'hand me that sugar-stick.'

Reuben groped in his pockets for the barley-sugar, which, in spite
of Hannah's scoffs, he had bought in Market Street the evening
before, 'for t' childer.' He watched his wife in gaping astonishment
as he saw her approaching Sandy, with blandishments which, rough
and clumsy as they were, had nevertheless the effect of beguiling
that young man on to the lap where barley-sugar was to be had.
Hannah fed him triumphantly, making loud remarks on his beauty and
cleverness.

Meanwhile Louie stood on the other side of the fire, holding Cecile
close against her, with a tight defiant grip--her lip twitching
contemptuously. David, always sensitively alive to her presence and
her moods, insisted in the midst of Sandy's feast that Cecile
should have her share. Sandy held out the barley-sugar, following
it with wistful eyes. Louie beat down Cecile's grasping hand. 'You
shan't spoil your tea--you'll be sick with that stuff!' she said
imperiously. Hannah turned, and brought a slow venomous scrutiny to
bear upon her niece--on the slim tall figure in the elegant
Parisian dress, the daintily curled and frizzled head, the wild
angry eyes. Then she withdrew her glance, contented. Louie's
evident jealousy appeased her. She had come to Manchester with one
fixed determination--not to be 'talked foine to by that hizzy.'

At this juncture tea made its appearance, Lucy having some time ago
given up the sit-down tea in the dining-room, which was the natural
custom of her class, as not genteel. She seated herself nervously
to pour it out. Hannah had at the very beginning put her down 'as a
middlin' soart o' person,' and vouchsafed her very little notice.

'Auntie Dora! auntie Dora!' cried Sandy, escaping from Hannah's
knee, 'I'm coming to sit by zoo.'

And as soon as he had got comfortably into her pocket, he pulled
her head down and whispered to her, his thoughts running as before
in the theological groove, 'Auntie Dora, God made me--and God made
Cecile--_did_ God make that one?'

And he nodded across at Hannah, huddling himself together meanwhile
in a paroxysm of glee and mischief. He was excited by the
flatteries he had been receiving, and Dora, thankful to see that
Hannah had heard nothing, could only quiet him by copious supplies
of bread and butter.

David wooed Cecile to sit on a stool beside him, and things went
smoothly for a time, though Hannah made it clearly evident that
this was not the kind of tea she had expected, and that she 'didn't
howd wi' new-fangled ways o' takkin' your vittles.' Reuben did his
best to cover and neutralise her remarks by gossip to David about
the farm and the valley. 'Eh--it's been nobbut _raggy_ weather
up o' the moors this winter, Davy, an' a great lot o' sheep lost.
Nobbut twothrey o' mine, I thank th' Lord.' But in the midst of a
most unflattering account of the later morals and development of
the Wigson family, Reuben stopped dead short, with a stare at the
door.

'Wal, aa niver!--theer's Mr. Ancrum hissel,--I do uphowd yo!'

And the old man rose with effusion, his queer eyes and face beaming
and blinking with a light of affectionate memory, for Ancrum stood
in the doorway, smiling a mute inquiry at Lucy as to whether he
might come in. David sprang up to bring him into the circle. Hannah
held out an ungracious hand. Never, all these years, had she
forgiven the ex-minister those representations he had once made on
the subject of David's 'prenticing.

Then the new-comer sat down by Reuben cheerily, parrying the
farmer's concern about his altered looks, and watching Louie, who
had thrown him a careless word in answer to his greeting. Dora, who
had come to know him well, and to feel much of the affectionate
reverence for him that David did, in spite of some bewilderment as
to his religious position, went round presently to talk to him, and
Sandy as it happened was left on his stool for a minute or two
forgotten. He asked his mother plaintively for cake, and she did
not hear him. Meanwhile Cecile had cake, and he followed her eating
of it with resentful eyes.

'Come here, Cecile,' said David, 'and hold the cake while I cut it;
there's a useful child.'

He handed a piece to Reuben, and then put the next into Cecile's
hand.

'Ready for some more, little woman?'

Cecile in a furtive squirrel-like way seized the piece and was
retiring with it, when Sandy, beside himself, jumped from his
stool, rushed at his cousin and beat her wildly with his small
fists.

'Yo're a geedy thing--a geedy 'gustin' thing!' he cried, sobbing
partly because he wanted the cake, still more because, after his
exaltation on Hannah's knee, he had been so unaccountably
neglected. To see Cecile battening on a second piece while he was
denied a first was more than could be borne.

'You little viper, you!' exclaimed Louie, and springing up, she
swept across to Sandy, and boxed his ears smartly, just as she was
accustomed to box Cecile's, whenever the fancy took her.

The child raised a piercing cry, and David caught him up.

'Give him to me, David, give him to me,' cried Lucy, who had almost
upset the tea-table in her rush to her child. 'I'll see whether that
sister of yours shall beat and abuse my boy in my own house! Oh,
she may beat her own child as much as she pleases, she does it all
day long! If she were a poor person she would be had up.'

Her face glowed with passion. The exasperation of many days spoke
in her outburst. David, himself trembling with anger, in vain tried
to quiet her and Sandy.

'Ay, I reckon she maks it hot wark for them 'at ha to live wi her,'
said Hannah audibly, looking round on the scene with a certain
enjoyment which contrasted with the panic and distress of the rest.

Louie, who was holding Cecile--also in tears--in her arms, swept
her fierce, contemptuous gaze from Lucy to her ancient enemy.

'You must be putting in _your_ word, must you?--you old toad,
you--you that robbed us of our money till your own husband was
ashamed of you!'

And, totally regardless of the presence of Dora and Ancrum, and of
the efforts made to silence her by Dora or by the flushed and
unhappy Reuben, she descended on her foe. She flung charge after
charge in Hannah's face, showing the minutest and most vindictive
memory for all the sordid miseries of her childhood; and then when
her passion had spent itself on her aunt, she returned to Lucy,
exulting in the sobs and the excitement she had produced. In vain
did David try either to silence her or to take Lucy away. Nothing
but violence could have stopped the sister's tongue; his wife,
under a sort of fascination of terror and rage, would not move.
Flinging all thoughts of her dependence on David--of the money she
had come to ask--of her leave-taking on the morrow--to the winds,
Louie revenged herself amply for her week's unnatural self-control,
and gave full rein to a mad propensity which had been gradually
roused and spurred to ungovernable force by the trivial incidents
of the afternoon. She made mock of Lucy's personal vanity; she
sneered at her attempts to ape her betters, shrilly declaring that
no one would ever take her for anything else than what she was, the
daughter of a vulgar cheese-paring old hypocrite; and, finally, she
attacked Sandy as a nasty, greedy, abominable little monkey, not
fit to associate with her child, and badly in want of the stick.

Then slowly she retreated to the door out of breath, the wild
lightnings of her eyes flashing on them still. David was holding
the hysterical Lucy, while Dora was trying to quiet Sandy.
Otherwise a profound silence had fallen on them all, a silence
which seemed but to kindle Louie's fury the more.

'Ah, you think you've got him in your power, him and his money, you
little white-livered cat!' she cried, standing in the doorway, and
fixing Lucy with a look beneath which her sister-in-law quailed,
and hid her face on David's arm. 'You think you'll stop him giving
it to them that have a right to look to him? Perhaps you'd better
look out; perhaps there are people who know more about him than
you. Do you think he would ever have looked at you, you little
powsement, if he hadn't been taken on the rebound?'

She gave a mad laugh as she flung out the old Derbyshire word of
abuse, and stood defying them, David and all. David strode forward
and shut the door upon her. Then he went tenderly up to his wife,
and took her and Sandy into the library.

The sound of Cecile's wails could be heard in the distance. The
frightened Reuben turned and looked at his wife. She had grown
paler even than before, but her eyes were all alive.

'A racklesome, natterin' creetur as ivir I seed,' she said calmly;
'I allus telt tha, Reuben Grieve, what hoo'd coom to. It's bred in
her--that's yan thing to be hodden i' mind. But I'll shift her in
double quick-sticks if she ever cooms meddlin' i' _my_ house,
Reuben Grieve--soa yo know.'

'She oughtn't to stay here,' said Ancrum in a quick undertone to
Dora; 'she might do that mother and child a mischief.'

Dora sat absorbed in her pity for David, in her passionate sympathy
for this home that was as her own.

'She is going to-morrow, thank God!' she said with a long breath;
'oh, what an awful woman!'

Ancrum looked at her with a little sad smile.

'Whom are you sorry for?' he asked. 'Those two in there?' and he
nodded towards the library. 'Think again, Miss Dora. There is one
face that will haunt me whenever I think of this--the face of that
French child.'

All the afternoon visitors dispersed. The hours passed. Lucy, worn
out, had gone to bed with a crying which seemed to have in it some
new and heavy element she would not speak of, even to David. The
evening meal came, and there was no sign or sound from that room
upstairs where Louie had locked herself in.

David stood by the fire in the dining-room, his lips sternly set.
He had despatched a servant to Louie's door with an offer to send
up food for her and Cecile. But the girl had got no answer. Was he
bound to go--bound to bring about the possible renewal of a
degrading scene?

At this moment Lizzie, the little nurse, tapped at the door.

'If you please, sir--'

'Yes. Anything wrong with Master Sandy?'

David went to the door in a tremor. 'He won't go to sleep, sir. He
wants you, and I'm afraid he'll disturb mistress again.'

David ran upstairs.

'Sandy, what do you want?'

Sandy was crying violently, far down under the bedclothes. When
David drew him out, he was found to be grasping a piece of
crumbling cake, sticky with tears.

'It's Cecile's cake,' he sobbed into his father's ear. 'I want to
give it her.'

And in fact, after his onslaught upon her, Cecile had dropped the
offending cake, which he had instantly picked up the moment before
Louie struck him. He had held it tight gripped ever since, and
repentance was busy in his small heart.

David thought a moment.

'Come with me, Sandy,' he said at last, and, wrapping up the child
in an old shawl that hung near, he carried him off to Louie's door.
'Louie!' he called, after his knock, in a low voice, for he was
uncomfortably aware that his household was on the watch for
developments.

For a while there was no answer. Sandy, absorbed in the interest of
the situation, clung close to his father and stopped crying.

At last Louie suddenly flung the door wide open.

'What do you want?' she said defiantly, with the gesture and
bearing of a tragic actress. She was, however, deadly white, and
David, looking past her, saw that Cecile was lying wide awake in
her little bed.

'Sandy wants to give Cecile her cake,' he said quietly, 'and to
tell her that he is sorry for striking her.'

He carried his boy up to Cecile. A smile flashed over the child's
worn face. She held out her little arms. David, infinitely touched,
laid down Sandy, and the children crooned together on the same
pillow, he trying to stuff the cake into Cecile's mouth, she gently
refusing.

'She's ill,' said Louie abruptly, 'she's feverish--I want a
doctor.'

'We can get one directly,' he said. 'Will you come down and have
some food? Lucy has gone to bed. If Lizzie comes and sits by the
children, perhaps they will go to sleep. I can carry Sandy back
later.'

Louie paused irresolutely. Then she went up to the bed, knelt down
by it, and took Cecile in her arms.

'You can take him away,' she said, pointing to Sandy. 'I will put
her to sleep. Don't you send me anything to eat. I want a doctor.
And if you won't order a fly for me at twenty minutes to nine
to-morrow, I will go out myself, that's all.'

'Louie!' he cried, holding out his hand to her in despair, 'why will
you treat us in this way--what have we done to you?'

'Never you mind,' she said sullenly, gathering the child to her and
confronting him with steady eyes. There was a certain magnificence
in their wide unconscious despair--in this one fierce passion.

She and Lucy did not meet again. In the morning David paid her her
hundred pounds, and took her and Cecile to the station, a doctor
having seen the child the night before, and prescribed medicine,
which had given her a quiet night. Louie barely thanked him for the
money. She was almost silent and still very pale.

Just before they parted, the thought of the tyranny of such a
nature, of the life to which she was going back, wrung the
brother's heart. The outrage of the day before dropped from his
mind as of no account, effaced by sterner realities.

'Write to me, Louie!' he said to her just as the train was moving
off; 'I could always come if there was trouble--or Dora.'

She did not answer, and her hand dropped from his. But he
remembered afterwards that her eyes were fixed upon him, as long as
the train was in sight, and the picture of her dark possessed look
will be with him to the end.




CHAPTER VII


It was a warm April Sunday. Lucy and Dora were pacing up and down
in the garden, and Lucy was talking in a quick, low voice.

'Oh! there was something, Dora. You know as well as I do there was
something. That awful woman didn't say that for nothing. I suppose
he'd tell me if I asked him.'

'Then why don't you ask him?' said Dora, with a little frown.

Lucy gathered a sprig of budding lilac, and restlessly stripped off
its young green.

'It isn't very pleasant,' she said at last, slowly. 'I dare say it's
silly to expect your husband never to have looked at anybody
else--'

She paused again, unable to explain herself. Dora glanced at her,
and was somewhat struck by her thin and worn appearance. She had
often, moreover, seemed to her cousin to be fretting during these
last weeks. Not that there was much difference in her ways with
David and Sandy. But her small vanities, prejudices, and passions
were certainly less apparent of late; she ordered her two servants
about less; she was less interested in her clothes, less eager for
social amusement. It was as though something clouding and dulling
had passed over a personality which was naturally restless and
vivacious.

Yet it was only to-day, in the course of some conversation about
Louie, of whom nothing had been heard since her departure, that
Lucy had for the first time broken silence on the subject of those
insolent words of her sister-in-law, which Ancrum and Dora had
listened to with painful shock, while to Reuben and Hannah,
pre-occupied with their own long-matured ideas of Louie, they had
been the mere froth of a venomous tongue.

'Why didn't you ask him about it at first--just after?' Dora
resumed.

'I didn't want to,' said Lucy, after a minute, and then would say
no more. But she walked along, thinking, unhappily, of the moment
when David had taken her into the library to be out of the sound of
Louie's rage; of her angry desire to ask him questions, checked by
a childish fear she could not analyse, as to what the answers might
be; of his troubled, stormy face; and of the tender ways by which
he tried to calm and comfort her. It had seemed to her that once or
twice he had been on the point of saying something grave and
unusual, but in the end he had refrained. Louie had gone away;
their everyday life had begun again; he had been very full, in the
intervals of his hard daily business, of the rebuilding of the
James Street court, and of the apprentices' school; and, led by a
variety of impulses--by a sense of jeopardised possession and a
conscience speaking with new emphasis and authority--she had taken
care that he should talk to her about both; she had haunted him in
the library, and her presence there, once the signal of antagonism
and dispute, had ceased to have any such meaning for him. Her
sympathy was not very intelligent, and there was at times a
childish note of sulkiness and reluctance in it; she was extremely
ready to say, 'I told you so,' if anything went wrong; but,
nevertheless, there was a tacit renunciation at the root of her new
manner to him which he perfectly understood, and rewarded in his
own ardent, affectionate way.

As she sauntered along in this pale gleam of sun, now drinking in
the soft April wind, now stooping to look at the few clumps of
crocuses and daffodils which were pushing through the blackened
earth, Lucy had once more a vague sense that her life this
spring--this past year--had been hard. It was like the feeling of
one who first realises the intensity of some long effort or
struggle in looking back upon it. Her little life had been breathed
into by a divine breath, and growth, expansion, had brought a pain
and discontent she had never known before.

Dora meanwhile had her own thoughts. She was lost in memories of
that first talk of hers with David Grieve after his return from
Paris, with the marks of his fierce, mysterious grief fresh upon
him; then, pursuing her recollection of him through the years, she
came to a point of feeling where she said, with sudden energy,
throwing her arm round Lucy, and taking up the thread of their
conversation:--

'I wouldn't let what Louie said worry you a bit, Lucy. Of course,
she wanted to make mischief; but you know, and I know, what sort of
a man David has been since you and he were married. That'll be
enough for you, I should think.'

Lucy flushed. She had once possessed very little reticence, and had
been quite ready to talk her husband over, any day and all day,
with Dora. But now, though she would begin in the old way, there
soon came a point when something tied her tongue.

This time she attacked the lilac-bushes again with a restless hand.

'Why, I thought you were shocked at his opinions,' she said,
proudly.

Dora sighed. Her conscience had not waited for Lucy's remark to
make her aware of the constant perplexity between authority and
natural feeling into which David's ideals were perpetually throwing
her.

'They make one very sad,' she said, looking away. 'But we must
believe that God, who sees everything, judges as we cannot do.'

Lucy fired up at once. It annoyed her to have Dora making spiritual
allowance for David in this way.

'I don't believe God wants anything but that people should be good,'
she said. 'I am sure there are lots of things like that in the New
Testament.'

Dora shook her head slowly. '"He that hath not the Son, hath not
life,"' she said under her breath, a sudden passion leaping to her
eye.

Lucy looked at her indignantly. 'I don't agree with you,
Dora--there! And it all depends on what things mean.'

'The meaning is quite plain,' said Dora, with rigid persistence. 'O
Lucy, don't be led away. I missed you at early service this
morning.'

The look she threw her cousin melted into a pathetic and heavenly
reproach.

'Well, I know,' said Lucy, ungraciously, 'I was tired. I don't know
what's wrong with me these last weeks; I can't get up in the
morning.'

Dora only looked grieved. Lucy understood that her plea seemed to
her cousin too trivial and sinful to be noticed.

'Oh! I dare say I'd go,' she said in her own mind, defiantly, 'if
_he_ went.'

Aloud, she said:--

'Dora, just look at this cheek of mine; I can't think what
the swelling is.'

And she turned her right cheek to Dora, pointing to a lump, not
discoloured, but rather large, above the cheek-bone. Dora stopped,
and looked at it carefully.

'Yes, I had noticed it,' she said. 'It is odd. Can't you account for
it in any way?'

'No. It's been coming some little while. David says I must ask Dr.
Mildmay about it. I don't think I shall. It'll go away. Oh! there
they are.'

As she spoke, David and Sandy, who had been out for a Sunday walk
together, appeared on the steps of the garden-door. David waved his
hat to his wife, an example immediately followed by Sandy, who
twisted his Scotch cap madly, and then set off running to her.

Lucy looked at them both with a sudden softening and brightening
which gave her charm. David came up to her, ran his arm through
hers, and began to give her a laughing account of Sandy's
behaviour. The April wind had flushed him, tumbled his black hair,
and called up spring lights in the eyes, which had been somewhat
dimmed by overmuch sedentary work and a too small allowance of
sleep. His plenitude of virile energy, the glow of health and power
which hung round him this afternoon, did but make Lucy seem more
languid and faded as she hung upon him, smiling at his stories of
their walk and of Sandy's antics.

He broke off in the middle, and looked at her anxiously.

'She isn't the thing, is she, Dora? I believe she wants a change.'

'Oh! thank you!' cried Lucy, ironically--'with all Sandy's spring
things and my own to look to, and some new shirts to get for you,
and the spring cleaning to see to. Much obliged to you.'

'All those things, madam,' said David, patting her hand, 'wouldn't
matter twopence, if it should please your lord and master to order
you off. And if this fine weather goes on, you'll have to take
advantage of it. By the way, I met Mildmay, and asked him to come
in and see you.'

Lucy reddened.

'Why, there's nothing,' she said, pettishly. 'This'll go away
directly.' Instinctively she put up her hand to her cheek.

'Oh! Mildmay won't worry you,' said David; 'he'll tell you what's
wrong at once. You know you like him.'

'Well, I must go,' said Dora.

They understood that she had a mill-girls' Bible class at half-past
five, and an evening service an hour later, so they did not press
her to stay. Lucy kissed her, and Sandy escorted her halfway to the
garden-door, giving her a breathless and magniloquent account of
the 'hy'nas and kangawoos' she might expect to find congregated in
the Merton Road outside. Dora, who was somewhat distressed by his
powers of imaginative fiction, would not 'play up' as his father
did, and he left her half-way to run back to David, who was always
ready to turn road and back garden into 'Africa country' at a
moment's notice, and people it to order with savages, elephants,
boomerangs, kangaroos, and all other possible or impossible things
that Sandy might chance to want.

Dora, looking back from the garden, saw them all three in a group
together--Sandy tugging at his mother's skirts, and shouting at the
top of his voice; David's curly black head bent over his wife, who
was gathering her brown shawl round her throat, as though the light
wind chilled her. But there was no chill in her look. That, for the
moment, as she swayed between husband and child, had in it the
qualities of the April sun--a brightness and promise all the more
radiant by comparison with the winter or the cloud from which it
had emerged.

Dora went home as quickly as tramcar and fast walking could take
her. She still lived in the same Ancoats rooms with her
shirt-making friend, who had kept company, poor thing! for four
years with a young man, and had then given him up with anguish
because he was not 'the sort of man she'd been taking him for,'
though no one but Dora had ever known what qualities or practices,
intolerable to a pure mind, the sad phrase covered. Dora might long
ago have moved to more comfortable rooms and a better quarter of
the town had she been so minded, for her wages as an admirable
forewoman and an exceptionally skilled hand were high; but she
passionately preferred to be near St. Damian's and amongst her
'girls.' Also, there was the thought that by staying in the place
whither she had originally moved she would be more easily
discoverable if ever,--ay, if _ever_--Daddy should come back
to her. She was certain that he was still alive; and great as the
probabilities on the other side became with every passing year, few
people had the heart to insist upon them in the face of her
sensitive faith, whereof the bravery was so close akin to tears.

Only once in all these years had there been a trace of Daddy.
Through a silk-merchant acquaintance of his, having relations with
Lyons and other foreign centres, David had once come across a
rumour which had seemed to promise a clue. He had himself gone
across to Lyons at once, and had done all he could. But the clue
broke in his hand, and the tanned, long-faced lunatic from
Manchester, whereof report had spoken, could be only doubtfully
identified with a man who bore no likeness at all to Daddy.

Dora's expectation and hope had been stirred to their depths, and
she bore her disappointment hardly. But she did not therefore cease
to hope. Instinctively on this Sunday night, when she reached home,
she put Daddy's chair, which had been pushed aside, in its right
place by the fire, and she tenderly propped up a stuffed bird,
originally shot by Daddy in the Vosges, and now vilely overtaken by
Manchester moths. Then she set round chairs and books for her
girls.

Soon they came trooping up the stairs, in their neat Sunday
dresses, so sharply distinguished from the mill-gear of the week,
and she spent with them a moving and mystical hour. She was
expounding to them a little handbook of 'The Blessed Sacrament,'
and her explanations wound up with a close appeal to each one of
them to make more use of the means of grace, to surrender
themselves more fully to the awful and unspeakable mystery by which
the Lord gave them His very flesh to eat, His very blood to drink,
so fashioning within them, Communion after Communion, the immortal
and incorruptible body which should be theirs in the Resurrection.

She spoke in a low, vibrating voice, somewhat monotonous in tone;
her eyes shone with strange light under her round, prominent brow;
all that she said of the joys of frequent Communion, of the mortal
perils of unworthy participation, of treating the heavenly food
lightly--coming to it, that is, unfasting and unprepared--of the
need especially of Lenten self-denial, of giving up 'what each one
of you likes best, so far as you can,' in preparation for the great
Easter Eucharist--came evidently from the depths of her own intense
conviction. Her girls listened to her with answering excitement and
awe; one of them she had saved from drink, all of them had been her
Sunday-school children for years, and many of them possessed, under
the Lancashire exterior, the deep-lying poetry and emotion of the
North.

When she dismissed them she hurried off to church, to sit once more
dissolved in feeling, aspiration, penitence; to feel the thrill of
the organ, the pathos of the bare altar, and the Lenten hymns.

After the service she had two or three things to settle with one of
the curates and with some of her co-helpers in the good works of
the congregation, so that when she reached home she was late and
tired out. Her fellow-lodger was spending the Sunday with friends;
there was no one to talk to her at her supper; and after supper she
fell, sitting by the fire, into a mood of some flatness and
reaction. She tried to read a religious book, but the religious
nerve could respond no more, and other interests, save those of her
daily occupations, she had none.

In Daddy's neighbourhood, what with his travels, his whims, and his
quotations, there had been always something to stir the daughter's
mind, even if it were only to reprobation. But since he had left
her the circle of her thoughts had steadily and irrevocably
narrowed. All secular knowledge, especially the reading of other
than religious books, had become gradually and painfully
identified, for her, with those sinister influences which made
David Grieve an 'unbeliever,' and so many of the best Manchester
workmen 'atheists.'

So now, in her physical and moral slackness, she sat and thought
with some bitterness of a 'young woman' who had recently entered
the shop which employed her, and, by dint of a clever tongue, was
gaining the ear of the authorities, to the disturbance of some of
Dora's cherished methods of distributing and organising the work.
They might have trusted her more after all these years; but nobody
appreciated her; she counted for nothing.

Then her mind wandered on to the familiar grievances of Sandy's
religious teaching and Lucy's gradual defection from St. Damian's.
She must make more efforts with Lucy, even if it angered David. She
looked back on what she had done to bring about the marriage, and
lashed herself into a morbid sense of responsibility.

But her missionary projects were no more cheering to her than her
thoughts about the shop and her work, and she felt an intense sense
of relief when she heard the step of her room-mate, Mary Styles,
upon the stairs. She made Mary go into every little incident of her
day; she was insatiable for gossip--a very rare mood for her--and
could not be chattered to enough.

And all through she leant her head against her father's chair,
recalling Lucy on her husband's arm, and the child at her skirts,
with the pathetic inarticulate longing which makes the tragedy of
the single life. She could have loved so well, and no one had ever
wished to make her his wife; the wound of it bled sometimes in her
inmost heart.

Meanwhile, on this same April Sunday, Lucy, after Sandy was safe in
bed, brought down some needlework to do beside David while he read.
It was not very long since she had induced herself to make so great
a breach in the Sunday habits of her youth. As soon as David's
ideals began to tease her out of thought and sympathy, his freedoms
also began to affect her. She was no longer so much chilled by his
strictness, or so much shocked by his laxity.

David had spoken of a busy evening. In reality, a lazy fit overtook
him. He sat smoking, and turning over the pages of Eckermann's
'Conversations with Goethe.'

'What are you reading?' said Lucy at last, struck by his face of
enjoyment. 'Why do you like it so much?'

'Because there is no one else in the world who hits the right nail
on the head so often as Goethe,' he said, throwing himself back
with a stretch of pleasure. 'So wide a brain--so acute and sane a
temper!'

Lucy looked a little lost, as she generally did when David made
literary remarks to her. But she did not drop the subject.

'You said something to Professor Madgwick the other day about a
line of Goethe you used to like so when you were a boy. What did it
mean?'

She flushed, as though she were venturing on something which would
make her ridiculous.

'A line of Goethe?' repeated David, pondering. 'Oh! I know. Yes, it
was a line from Goethe's novel of "Werther." When I was young and
foolish--when you and I were first acquainted, in fact, and you
used to scold me for going to the Hall of Science!--I often said
this line to myself over and over. I didn't know much German, but
the swing of it carried me away.'

And, with a deep voice and rhythmic accent, he repeated:'
_Handwerker trugen ihn; kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet_.'

'What does it mean?' said Lucy.

'Well, it comes at the end of the story. The hero commits suicide
for love, and Goethe says that at his burial, on the night after
his death, "labouring men bore him; no priest went with him."'

He bent forward, clasping his hands tightly, with the half smiling,
half dreamy look of one who recalls a bygone thrill of feeling,
partly in sympathy, partly in irony.

'Then he wasn't a Christian?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Do you still
hate priests so much, David?'

'It doesn't look like it, does it, madam,' he said, laughing, 'when
you think of all my clergymen friends?'

And, in fact, as Lucy's mind pondered his answer, she easily
remembered the readiness with which any of the clergy at St.
Damian's would ask his help in sending away a sick child, or giving
a man a fresh start in life, or setting the necessary authorities
to work in the case of some moral or sanitary scandal. She thought
also of various Dissenting ministers who called on him and
corresponded with him; of his reverent affection for Canon Aylwin,
for Ancrum.

'Well, anyway, you care about the labouring men,' she went on
persistently. 'I suppose you're what father used to call a "canting
Socialist"?'

'No,' said David, quietly--'no, I'm not a Socialist, except'--and
he smiled--'in the sense in which some one said the other day, "we
are all Socialists now."'

'Well, what does it mean?' said Lucy, threading another needle, and
feeling a certain excitement in this prolonged mental effort.

David tried to explain to her the common Socialist ideal in simple
terms--the hope of a millennium, when all the instruments of
production shall be owned by the State, and when the surplus profit
produced by labour, over and above the maintenance of the worker
and the general cost of production, will go, not to the capitalist,
the individual rich man, but to the whole community of workers;
when everybody will be made to work, and as little advantage as
possible will be allowed to one worker above another.

'I think it's absurd!' said Lucy, up in arms at once for all the
superiorities she loved. 'What nonsense! Why, they can't ever do it!'

'Well, it's about that!' said David, smiling at her. 'Still,
no doubt it _could_ be done, if it ought to be done. But
Socialism, as a system, seems to _me_, at any rate, to strike
down and weaken the most precious thing in the world, that on which
the whole of civilised life and progress rests--the spring of will
and conscience in the individual. Socialism as a spirit, as an
influence, is as old as organised thought--and from the beginning
it has forced us to think of the many when otherwise we should be
sunk in thinking of the one. But, as a modern dogmatism, it is like
other dogmatisms. The new truth of the future will emerge from it
as a bud from its sheath, taking here and leaving there.' He sat
looking into the fire, forgetting his wife a little.

'Well, any way, I'm sure you and I won't have anything to do with
it,' said Lucy positively. 'I don't a bit believe Lady Driffield
will have to work in the mills, though Mrs. Shepton did say it
would do her good. I shouldn't mind something, perhaps, which would
make her and Colonel Danby less uppish.'

She drew her needle in and out with vindictive energy.

'Well, I don't see much prospect of uppish people dying out of the
world,' said David, throwing himself back in his chair; 'until--'

He paused.

'Until what?' inquired Lucy.

'Well, of course,' he said after a minute, in a low voice, 'we must
always hold that the world is tending to be better, that the Divine
Life in it will somehow realise itself, that pride will become
gentleness, and selfishness love. But the better life cannot be
imposed from without--it must grow from within.'

Lucy pondered a moment.

'Then is it--is it because you think working-men _better_ than
other people that you are so much more interested in them? Because
you are, you know.'

'Oh dear no!' he said, smiling at her from under the hand which shaded
his eyes; 'they have their own crying faults and follies. But--so many
of them lack the first elementary conditions which make the better life
possible--that is what tugs at one's heart and fills one's mind! How can
_we_--we who have gained for ourselves health and comfort and
knowledge--how can we stand by patiently and see our brother diseased
and miserable and ignorant?--how can we bear our luxuries, so long as a
child is growing up in savagery whom we might have taught,--or a man is
poisoning himself with drink whom we might have saved,--or a woman is
dropping from sorrow and overwork whom we might have cherished and
helped? We are not our own--we are parts of the whole. Generations of
workers have toiled for us in the past. And are we, in return, to carry
our wretched bone off to our own miserable corner!--sharing and giving
nothing? Woe to us if we do! Upon such comes indeed the "second
death,"--the separation final and irretrievable, as far, at any rate, as
this world is concerned, between us and the life of God!'

Lucy had dropped her work. She sat staring at him--at the shining
eyes, at the hand against the brow which shook a little, at the
paleness which went so readily in him with any expression of deep
emotion. Never had he so spoken to her before; never, all these
years. In general no one shrank more than he from 'high phrases;'
no one was more anxious than he to give all philanthropic talk a
shrewd business-like aspect, which might prevent questions as to
what lay beneath.

Her heart fluttered a little.

'David!' she broke out, 'what is it you believe? You know Dora
thinks you believe nothing.'

'Does she?' he said, with evident shrinking. 'No, I don't think she
does.'

Lucy instinctively moved her chair closer to him, and laid her head
against his knee.

'Yes, she does. But I don't mind about that. I just wish you'd tell
me why you believe in God, when you won't go to church, and when
you think Jesus was just--just a man.'

She drew her breath quickly. She was making a first voyage of
discovery in her husband's deepest mind, and she was astonished at
her own venturesomeness.

He put out a hand and touched her hair.

'I can't read Nature and life any other way,' he said at last,
after a silence. 'There seems to me something in myself, and in
other human beings, which is beyond Nature--which, instead of being
made by Nature, is the condition of our knowing there is a Nature
at all. This something--reason, consciousness, soul, call it what
you will--unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world
reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of
a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of
sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal
life--"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!--whence, if there
is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. And so, in
its most perfect work, it carries us to God--it bids us claim our
sonship--it gives us hope of immortality!'

His voice had the vibrating intensity of prayer. Lucy hardly
understood what he said at all, but the tears came into her eyes as
she sat hiding them against his knee.

'But what makes you think God is good--that He cares anything about
us?' she said softly.

'Well--I look back on human life, and I ask what reason--which is
the Divine Life communicated to us, striving to fulfil itself in
us--has done, what light it throws upon its "great Original." And
then I see that it has gradually expressed itself in law, in
knowledge, in love; that it has gradually learnt, under the
pressure of something which is itself and not itself, that to be
gained life must be lost; that beauty, truth, love, are the
realities which abide. Goodness has slowly proved itself in the
world,--is every day proving itself,--like a light broadening in
darkness!--to be that to which reason tends, in which it realises
itself. And, if so, goodness here, imperfect and struggling as we
see it always, must be the mere shadow and hint of that goodness
which is in God!--and the utmost we can conceive of human
tenderness, holiness, truth, though it tell us all we know, can yet
suggest to us only the minutest fraction of what must be the Divine
tenderness,--holiness,--truth.'

There was a silence.

'But this,' he added after a bit, 'is not to be proved by argument,
though argument is necessary and inevitable, the mind being what it is.
It can only be proved by living,--by taking it into our hearts,--by
every little victory we gain over the evil self.'

The fire burnt quietly beside them. Everything was still in the house.
Nothing stirred but their own hearts.

At last Lucy looked up quickly.

'I am glad,' she said with a kind of sob--'glad you think God loves
us, and, if Sandy and I were to die, you would find us again.'

Instead of answering, he bent forward quickly and kissed her. She
gave a little shrinking movement.

'Oh! that poor cheek!' he said remorsefully; 'did I touch it? I hope
Dr. Mildmay won't forget to-morrow.'

'Oh! never mind about it,' she said, half impatiently. 'David!'

Her little thin face twitched and trembled. He was puzzled by her
sudden change of expression, her agitation.

'David!--you know--you know what Louie said. I want you to tell me
whether she--she meant anything.'

He gave a little start, then he understood perfectly.

'My dear wife,' he said, laying his hand on hers, which were
crossed on his knee.

She waited breathlessly.

'You shall know all there is to know,' he said at last, with an
effort. 'I thought perhaps you would have questioned me directly
after that scene, and I would have told you; but as you did not, I
could not bring myself to begin. What Louie said had to do with
things that happened a year before I asked you to be my wife. When
I spoke to you, they were dead and gone. The girl herself--was
married. It was her story as well as my own, and it seemed to
concern no one else in the world--not even you, dear. So I thought
then, any way. Since, I have often wondered whether I was right.'

'Was it when you were in Paris?' she asked sharply.

He gave a sign of assent.

'I thought so!' she cried, drawing her breath. 'I always said there
was more than being ill. I said so to Dora. Well, tell me--tell me
at once! What was she like? Was she young, and good-looking?'

He could not help smiling at her--there was something so childish
in her jealous curiosity.

'Let me tell you in order,' he said, 'and then we will both put it
out of sight--at least, till I see Louie again.'

His heavy sigh puzzled her. But her strained and eager eyes
summoned him to begin.

He told her everything, with singular simplicity and frankness. To
Lucy it was indeed a critical and searching moment! No wife,
whatever stuff she may be made of, can listen to such a story for
the first time, from the husband she loves and respects, without
passing thereafter into a new state of consciousness towards him.
Sometimes she could hardly realise at all that it applied to David,
this tale of passion he was putting, with averted face, into these
short and sharp sentences. That conception of him which the daily
life of eight years, with its growing self-surrender, its expanding
spiritual force, had graven on her mind, clashed so oddly with all
that he was saying! A certain desolate feeling, too large and deep
in all its issues to be harboured long in her slight nature, came
over her now and then. She had been so near to him all these years,
and had yet known nothing. It was the separateness of the
individual lot--that awful and mysterious chasm which divides even
lover from lover--which touched her here and there like a cold
hand, from which she shrank.

She grew a little cold and pale when he spoke of his weeks of
despair, of the death from which Ancrum had rescued him. But any
ordinary prudish word of blame, even for his silence towards her,
never occurred to her. Once she asked him a wistful question:--

'You and she thought that marrying didn't matter at all when people
loved each other--that nobody had a right to interfere? Do you
think that now, David?'

'No,' he said, with deep emphasis. 'No.--I have come to think the
most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, to be better
worth having than what people call an "ideal passion,"--if the
ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those
fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such
infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its
own weakness. I did not know it,--but, so far as in me lay, I was
betraying and injuring that society which has given me all I have.'

She sat silent. 'The most disappointing marriage.' An echo from that
overheard talk at Benet's Park floated through her mind. She
winced, and shrank, even as she realised his perfect innocence of
any such reference.

Then, with eagerness, she threw herself into innumerable questions
about Elise--her looks, her motives, the details of what she said
and did. Beneath the satisfaction of her curiosity, of course,
there was all the time a pang--a pang not to be silenced. In her
flights of idle fancy she had often suspected something not unlike
the truth, basing her conjecture on the mystery which had always
hung round that Paris visit, partly on the world's general
experience of what happened to handsome young men. For, in her
heart of hearts, had there not lurked all the time a wonder which
was partly self-judgment? Had David, with such a temperament, never
been more deeply moved than she knew herself to have moved him?
More than once a secret inarticulate suspicion of this kind had
crossed her. The poorest and shallowest soul may have these flashes
of sad insight, under the kindling of its affections.

But now she knew, and the difference was vast. After she had asked
all her questions, and delivered a vehement protest against the
tenacity of his self-reproach with regard to Louie--for what decent
girl need go wrong unless she has a mind to?--she laid her head
down again on David's knee.

'I don't think she cared much about you--I'm sure she couldn't
have,' she said slowly, finding a certain pleasure in the words.

David did not answer. He was sunk in memory. How far away lay that
world of art and the artist from this dusty, practical life in
which he was now immersed! At no time had he been really akin to
it. The only art to which he was naturally susceptible was the art
of oratory and poetry. Elise had created in him an artificial
taste, which had died with his passion. Yet now, as his quickened
mind lingered in the past, he felt a certain wide philosophic
regret for the complete divorce which had come about between him
and so rich a section of human experience.

He was roused from his reverie, which would have reassured her,
could she have followed it, more than any direct speech, by a
movement from Lucy. Dropping the hand which had once more stolen
over his brow, he saw her looking at him with wide, wet eyes.

'David!'

'Yes.'

'Come here! close to me!'

He moved forward, and laid his arm round her shoulders, as she sat
in her low chair beside him.

'What is it, dear? I have been keeping you up too late.'

She lifted a hand, and brought his face near to hers.

'David, I am a stupid little thing--but I do understand more than I
did, and I would never, _never_ desert you for anything,--for
any sorrow or trouble in the world!'

The mixture of yearning, pain, triumphant affection in her tone,
cannot be rendered in words.

His whole heart melted to her. As he held her to his breast, the
hour they had just passed through took for both of them a sacred
meaning and importance. Youth was going--their talk had not been
the talk of youth. Was true love just beginning?




CHAPTER VIII


'_My God! My God!_'

The cry was David's. He had reeled back against the table in his
study, his hand upon an open book, his face turned to Doctor
Mildmay, who was standing by the fireplace.

'Of course, I can't be sure,' said the doctor hastily, almost
guiltily. 'You must not take it upon my authority alone. Try and
throw it off your mind. Take your wife up to town to see Selby or
Paget, and if I am wrong I shall be too thankful! And, above all,
don't frighten her. Take care--she will be down again directly.'

'You say,' said David, thickly, 'that if it were what you suspect,
operation would be difficult. Yes, I see there is something of the
sort here.'

He turned, shaking all over, to the book beside him, which was a
medical treatise he had just taken down from his scientific
bookcase.

'It would be certainly difficult,' said the doctor, frowning, his
lower lip pushed forward in a stress of thought, 'but it would have
to be attempted. Only, on the temporal bone it will be a puzzle to
go deep enough.'

David's eye ran along the page beside him. 'Sarcoma, which was
originally regarded with far less terror than cancer (carcinoma),
is now generally held by doctors to be more malignant and more
deadly. There is much less pain, but surgery can do less, and death
is in most cases infinitely more rapid.'

'Hush!' said the doctor, with short decision, 'I hear her coming
down again. Let me speak.'

Lucy, who had run upstairs to quiet a yell of crying from Sandy
immediately after Doctor Mildmay had finished his examination of
her swollen cheek, opened the door as he spoke. She was slightly
flushed, and her eyes were more wide open and restless than usual.
David was apparently bending over a drawer which he had opened on
the farther side of his writing-table. The doctor's face was
entirely as usual.

'Well now, Mrs. Grieve,' he said cheerily, 'we have been
agreeing--your husband and I--that it will be best for you to go up
to London and have that cheek looked at by one of the crack
surgeons. They will give you the best advice as to what to do with
it. It is not a common ailment, and we are very fine fellows down
here, but of course we can't get the experience, in a particular
line of cases, of one of the first-rate surgical specialists. Do
you think you could go to-morrow? I could make an appointment for
you by telegraph to-day.'

Lucy gave a little unsteady, affected laugh.

'I don't see how I can go all in a moment like that,' she said. 'It
doesn't matter! Why don't you give me something for it, and it will
go away.'

'Oh! but it does matter,' said the doctor, firmly. 'Lumps like that
are serious things, and mustn't be trifled with.'

'But what will they want to do to it?' said Lucy nervously. She was
standing with one long, thin hand resting lightly on the back of a
chair, looking from David, whose face and figure were blurred to
her by the dazzle of afternoon light coming in through the window,
to Doctor Mildmay.

The doctor cleared his throat.

'They would only want to do what was best for you in every way,' he
said; 'you may be sure of that. Could you be very brave if they
advised you that it ought to be removed?'

She gave a little shriek.

'What! you mean cut it out--cut it away!' she cried, shaking, and
looking at him with the frowning anger of a child. 'Why, it would
leave an ugly mark, a hideous mark!'

'No, it wouldn't. The mark would disfigure you much less than the
swelling. They would take care to draw the skin together again
neatly, and you could easily arrange your hair a little. But you
ought to get a first-rate opinion.'

'What is it? what do you call it?' said Lucy, irritably. 'I can't
think why you make such a fuss.'

'Well, it might be various things,' he said evasively. 'Any way, you
take my advice, and have it seen to. I can telegraph as I go from
here.'

'I could take you up to-morrow,' said David, coming forward in
answer to the disturbed look she threw him. Now that her flush had
faded, how pale and drooping she was in the strong light! 'It would
be better, dear, to do what Doctor Mildmay recommends. And you
never mind a day in London, you know.'

Did she detect any difference in the voice? She moved up to him,
and he put his arm round her.

'Must I?' she said, helplessly; 'it's such a bore, to-morrow
particularly. I had promised to take Sandy out to tea.'

'Well, let that young man go without a treat for once,' said the
doctor, laughing. 'He has a deal too many, anyway. Very well, that's
settled. I will telegraph as I go to the train. Just come here a
moment, Grieve.'

The two went out together. When David returned, any one who had
happened to be in the hall would have seen that he could hardly
open the sitting-room door, so fumbling were his movements. As he
passed through the room to reach the study he caught sight of his
own face in a glass, and stopping, with clenched hands, pulled
himself together by the effort of his whole being.

When he opened the study-door, Lucy was hunting about his table in
a quick, impatient way.

'I can't think where you keep your india-rubber rings, David. I want
to put one round a parcel for Dora.'

He found one for her. Then she stood by the fire, as the
sunset-light faded into dusk, and poured out to him a story of
domestic grievances. Sarah, their cook, wished to leave and be
married--it was very unexpected and very inconsiderate, and Lucy
did not believe the young man was steady; and how on earth was she
to find another cook? It was enough to drive one wild, the
difficulty of getting cooks in Manchester.

For nearly an hour, till the supper-bell rang, she stood there,
with her foot on the fender, chattering in a somewhat sharp, shrill
way. Not one word would she say, or let him say, of London or the
doctor's visit.

After supper, as they went back into the study, David looked for
the railway-guide. 'The 10. 15 will do,' he said. 'Mildmay has made
the appointment for three. We can just get up in time.'

'It is great nonsense!' said Lucy, pouting. 'The question is, can we
get back? I must get back. I don't want to leave Sandy for the
night. He's got a cold.'

It seemed to David that something clutched at his breath and voice.
Was it he or some one else that said:--

'That will be too tiring, dear. We shall have to stay the night.'

'No, I must get back,' said Lucy, obstinately.

Afterwards she brought her work as usual, and he professed to smoke
and read. But the evening passed, for him, beneath his outward
quiet, in a hideous whirl of images and sensations, which
ultimately wore itself out, and led to a mood of dulness and
numbness. Every now and then, as he sat there, with the fire
crackling, and the familiar walls and books about him, he felt
himself sinking, as it were, in a sudden abyss of horror; then,
again, the scene of the afternoon seemed to him absurd, and he
despised his own panic. He dwelt upon everything the doctor had
said about the rarity, the exceptional nature of such an illness.
Well, what is rare does not happen--not to oneself--that was what
he seemed to be clinging to at last.

When Lucy went up to bed, he followed her in about a quarter of an
hour.

'Why, you are early!' she said, opening her eyes.

'I am tired,' he said. 'There was a great press of work to-day. I
want a long night.'

In reality, he could not bear her out of his sight. Hour after hour
he tossed restlessly, beside her quiet sleep, till the spring
morning broke.

They left Manchester next morning in a bitter east wind. As she
passed through the hall to the cab, Lucy left a little note for
Dora on the table, with instructions that it should be posted.

'I want her to come and see him at his bedtime,' she said, 'for of
course we can't get back for that.'

David said nothing. When they got to the station, he dared not even
propose to her the extra comfort of first class, lest he should
intensify the alarm he perfectly well divined under her offhand,
flighty manner.

By three o'clock they were in the waiting-room of the famous doctor
they had come to see. Lucy looked round her nervously as they
entered, with quick, dilating nostrils, and across David there
swept a sudden choking memory of the trapped and fluttering birds
he had sometimes seen in his boyhood struggling beneath a
birdcatcher's net on the moors.

As the appointment was at an unusual time, they were not kept
waiting very long by the great man. He received them with a sort of
kindly distance, made his examination very quickly, and asked her a
number of general questions, entering the answers in his large
patients' book.

Then he leant back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Lucy over
his spectacles.

'Well,' he said at last, with a perfectly cheerful and businesslike
voice, 'I am quite clear there is only one thing to be done, Mrs.
Grieve. You must have that growth removed.'

Lucy flushed.

'I want you to give me something to take it away,' she said, half
sullenly, half defiantly. She was sitting very erect, in a little
tight-fitting black jacket, with her small black hat and veil on
her knee.

'No, I am sorry to say nothing can be done in that way. If you were
my daughter or sister, I should say to you, have that lump removed
without a day's, an hour's unnecessary delay. These growths are not
to be trifled with.'

He spoke with a mild yet penetrating observance of her. A number of
reflections were passing rapidly through his mind. The operation
was a most unpromising one, but it was clearly the surgeon's duty
to try it. The chances were that it would prolong life which was
now speedily and directly threatened, owing to the proximity of the
growth to certain vital points.

'When could you do it?' said David, so hoarsely that he had to
repeat his question. He was standing with his arm on the
mantelpiece, looking down on the surgeon and his wife.

The great man lifted his eyebrows, and looked at his
engagement-book attentively.

'I _could_ do it to-morrow,' he said at last; 'and the sooner,
the better. Have you got lodgings? or can I help you? And--'

Then he stopped, and looked at Lucy. 'Let me settle things with your
husband, Mrs. Grieve,' he said, with a kindly smile. 'You look tired
after your journey. You will find a fire and some newspapers in the
waiting-room.'

And, with a suavity not to be gainsaid, he ushered her himself
across the hall, and shut the waiting-room door upon her. Then he
came back to David.

A little while after a bell rang, and the man-servant who answered
it presently took some brandy into the consulting-room. Lucy
meanwhile sat, in a dazed way, looking out of window at the square
garden, where the lilacs were already in full leaf in spite of the
east wind.

When her husband and the doctor came in she sprang up, looking
partly awkward, partly resentful. Why had they been discussing it
all without her?

'Well, Mrs. Grieve,' said the doctor, 'your husband is just going to
take you on to see the lodgings I recommend. By good luck they are
just vacant. Then, if you like them, you know, you can settle in at
once.'

'But I haven't brought anything for the night,' cried Lucy in an
injured voice, looking at David.

'We will telegraph to Dora, darling,' he said, taking up her bag
and umbrella from the table; 'but now we mustn't keep Mr. Selby. He
has to go out.'

'How long will it take?' interrupted Lucy, addressing the surgeon.
'Can I get back next day?'

'Oh no! you will have to be four or five days in town. But don't
alarm yourself, Mrs. Grieve. You won't know anything at all about
the operation itself; your husband will look after you, and then a
little patience--and hope for the best. Now I really must be off.
Good-bye to you--good-bye to you.'

And he hurried off, leaving them to find their own cab. When they
got in, Lucy said, passionately:--

'I want to go back, David. I want Sandy. I won't go to these
lodgings.'

Then courage came to him. He took her hand.

'Dear, dear wife--for my sake--for Sandy's!'

She stared at him--at his white face.

'Shall I die?' she cried, with the same passionate tone.

'No, no, no!' he said, kissing the quivering hand, and seeing no
one but her in the world, though they were driving through the
crowd of Regent Street. 'But we must do everything Mr. Selby said.
That hateful thing must be taken away--it is so near--think for
yourself!--to the eye and the brain; and it might go downwards to
the throat. You will be brave, won't you? We will look after you
so--Dora and I.'

Lucy sank back in the cab, with a sudden collapse of nerve and
spirit. David hung over her, comforting her, one moment promising
her that in a few days she should have Sandy again, and be quite
well; the next, checked and turned to stone by the memory of the
terrible possibilities freely revealed to him in his private talk
with Mr. Selby, and by the sense that he might be soothing the
present only to make the future more awful.

'David! she is in such fearful pain! The nurse says she must have
more morphia. They didn't give her enough. Will you run to Mr.
Selby's house? You won't find him, of course--he is on his
round--but his assistant, who was with him here just now, went back
there. Run for him at once.'

It was Dora who spoke, as she closed the folding-doors of the inner
room where Lucy lay. David, who was crouching over the fire in the
sitting-room, whither the nurse had banished him for a while, after
the operation, sprang up, and disappeared in an instant. Those
faint, distant sounds of anguish which had been in his ear for half
an hour or more, ever since the doctors had departed, declaring
that everything was satisfactorily over, had been more than his
manhood could bear.

He returned in an incredibly short space of time with a young
surgeon, who at once administered another injection of morphia.

'A highly sensitive patient,' he said to David, 'and the nerves
have, no doubt, been badly cut. But she will do now.'

And, indeed, the moaning had ceased. She lay with closed eyes--so
small a creature in the wide bed--her head and face swathed in
bandages. But the breathing was growing even and soft. She was once
more unconscious.

The doctor touched David's hand and went, after a word with the
nurse.

'Won't you go into the next room, sir, and have your tea? Mrs.
Grieve is sure to sleep now,' said the nurse to him in her
compassion.

He shook his head, and sat down near the foot of the bed. The nurse
went into the dressing-room a moment to speak to Dora, who was
doing some unpacking there, and he was left alone with his wife.

The sounds of the street came into the silent room, and every now
and then he had a start of agony, thinking that she was moving
again--that she was in pain again. But no, she slept; her breath
came gently through the childish parted lips, and the dim
light--for the nurse had drawn the curtains on the lengthening
April day--hid her pallor and the ghastliness of the dressings.

Forty-eight hours ago, and they were in the garden with Sandy! And
now life seemed to have passed for ever into this half-light of
misery. Everything had dropped away from him--the interests of his
business, his books, his social projects. He and she were shut out
from the living world. Would she ever rise from that bed
again--ever look at him with the old look?

He sat on there, hour after hour, till Dora coaxed him into the
sitting-room for a while, and tried to make him take some food. But
he could not touch it, and how the sudden gas which the servant lit
glared on his sunken eyes! He waited on his companion mechanically,
then sat, with his head on his hand, listening for the sound of the
doctors' steps.

When they came, they hardly disturbed their patient. She moaned at
being touched; but everything was right, and the violent pain which
had unexpectedly followed the operation was not likely to recur.

'And what a blessing that she took the chloroform so well, with
hardly any after-effects!' said Mr. Selby cheerily, drawing on his
gloves in the sitting-room. 'Well, Mr. Grieve, you have got a good
nurse, and can leave your wife to her with perfect peace of mind.
You must sleep, or you will knock up; let me give you a sleeping
draught.'

'Oh! I shall sleep,' said David, impatiently. 'You considered the
operation successful--completely successful?'

The surgeon looked gravely into the fire.

'I shall know more in a week or so,' he said. 'I have never
disguised from you, Mr. Grieve, how serious and difficult the case
was. Still, we have done what was right--we can but wait for the
issue.'

An hour later Dora looked into the sitting-room, and said softly:--

'She would like to see you, David.'

He went in, holding his breath. There was a night-light in the room,
and her face was lying in deep shadow.

He knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand.

'My darling!' he said--and his voice was quite firm and
steady--'are you easier now?'

'Yes,' she said faintly. 'Where are you going to sleep?'

'In a room just beyond Dora's room. She could make me hear in a
moment if you wanted me.'

Then, as he looked closer, he saw that about her head was thrown
the broad white lace scarf she had worn round her neck on the
journey up. And as he bent to her, she suddenly opened her languid
eyes, and gazed at him full. For the moment it was as though she
were given back to him.

'I made Dora put it on,' she said feebly, moving her hand towards
the lace. 'Does it hide all those nasty bandages?'

'Yes. I can't see them at all.'

'Is it pretty?'

The little gleam of a smile nearly broke down his self-command.

'Very,' he said, with a quivering lip.

She closed her eyes again.

'Oh! I hope Lizzie will look after Sandy,' she said after a while,
with a long sigh.

Not a word now of wilfulness, of self-assertion! After the
sullenness and revolt of the day before, which had lasted
intermittently almost up to the coming of the doctors, nothing
could be more speaking, more pathetic, than this helpless
acquiescence.

'I mustn't stay with you,' he said. 'You ought to be going to sleep
again. Nurse will give you something if you can't.'

'I'm quite comfortable,' she said, sleepily. 'There isn't any pain.'

And she seemed to pass quickly and easily into sleep as he sat
looking at her.

An hour or two later, Dora, who could not sleep from the effects of
fatigue and emotion, was lying in her uncomfortable stretcher-bed,
thinking with a sort of incredulity of all that had passed since
David's telegram had reached her the day before, or puzzling
herself to know how her employers could possibly spare her for
another three or four days' holiday, when she was startled by some
recurrent sounds from the room beyond her own. David was sleeping
there, and Dora, with her woman's quickness, had at once perceived
that the partition between them was very thin, and had been as
still as a mouse in going to bed.

The sound alarmed her, though she could not make it out.
Instinctively she put her ear to the wall. After a minute or two
she hastily moved away, and hiding her head under the bedclothes,
fell to soft crying and praying.

For it was the deep rending sound of suppressed weeping, the
weeping of a strong man who believes himself alone with his grief
and with God. That she should have heard it at all filled her with
a sort of shame.

Things, however, looked much brighter on the following morning. The
wound caused by the operation was naturally sore and stiff, and the
dressing was painful; but when the doctor's visit was over, and
Lucy was lying in the halo of her white scarf on her fresh pillows,
in a room which Dora and the nurse had made daintily neat and
straight, her own cheerfulness was astonishing. She made Dora go
out and get her some patterns for Sandy's summer suits, and when
they came she lay turning them over from time to time, or weakly
twisting first one and then another round her finger. She was, of
course, perpetually anxious to know when she would be well, and
whether the scar would be very bad; but on the whole she was a
docile and promising patient, and she even began to see some gleams
of virtue in Mr. Selby, for whom at first she had taken the
strongest dislike.

Meanwhile, David, haunted always by a horrible knowledge which was
hid from her, could get nothing decided for the future out of the
doctors.

'We must wait,' said Mr. Selby; 'for the present all is healing
well, but I wish we could get up her general strength. It must have
been running down badly of late.'

Whereupon David was left reproaching himself for blindness
and neglect, the real truth being that, with any one of Lucy's
thin elastic frame and restless temperament, a good deal of
health-degeneration may go on without its becoming conspicuous.

A few days passed. Dora was forced to go back to work; but as she
was to take up her quarters at the Merton Road house, and to write
long accounts of Sandy to his mother every day, Lucy saw her depart
with considerable equanimity. Dora left her patient on the sofa, a
white and ghostly figure, but already talking eagerly of returning
to Manchester in a week. When she heard the cab roll off, Lucy lay
back on her cushions and counted the minutes till David should come
in from the British Museum, whither, because of her improvement, he
had gone to clear up one or two bibliographical points. She
caressed the thought of being left alone with him, except for the
nurse--left to that tender and special care he was bestowing on her
so richly, and through which she seemed to hold and know him
afresh.

When he came in she reproached him for being late, and both enjoyed
and scouted his pleas in answer.

'Well, I don't care,' she said obstinately; 'I wanted you.'

Then she heaved a long sigh.

'David, I made nurse let me look at the horrid place this morning.
I shall always be a fright--it's no good.'

But he knew her well enough to perceive that she was not really
very downcast, and that she had already devised ways and means of
hiding the mark as much as possible.

'It doesn't hurt or trouble you at all?' he asked her anxiously.

'No, of course not,' she said impatiently. 'It's getting well. Do
ask nurse to bring me my tea.'

The nurse brought it, and she and David spoiled their invalid with
small attentions.

'It's nice being waited on,' said Lucy when it was over, settling
herself to rest with a little sigh of sensuous satisfaction.

Another week passed, and all seemed to be doing well, though Mr.
Selby would say nothing as yet of allowing her to move. Then came a
night when she was restless; and in the morning the wound troubled
her, and she was extremely irritable and depressed. The moment the
nurse gave him the news at his door in the early morning, David's
face changed. He dressed, and went off for Mr. Selby, who came at
once.

'Yes,' he said gravely, after his visit, as he shut the
folding-doors of Lucy's room behind him--'yes, I am sorry to say
there is a return. Now the question is, what to do.'

He came and stood by the fireplace, legs apart, head down, debating
with himself. David, haggard and unshorn, watched him helplessly.

'We could operate again,' he said thoughtfully, 'but it would cut
her about terribly. And I can't disguise from you, Mr. Grieve'--as
he raised his head and caught sight of his companion his tone
softened insensibly--'that, in my opinion, it would be all but
useless. I more than suspect, from my observation to-day, that
there are already secondary growths in the lung. Probably they have
been there for some time.'

There was a silence.

'Then we can do nothing,' said David.

'Nothing effectual, alas!' said the doctor, slowly. 'Palliatives, of
course, we can use, of many kinds. But there will not be much pain.'

'Will it be long?'

David was standing with his back to the doctor, looking out of
window, and Mr. Selby only just heard the words.

'I fear it will be a rapid case,' he said reluctantly. 'This return
is rapid, and there are many indications this morning I don't like.
But don't wish it prolonged, my dear sir!--have courage for her and
yourself.'

The words were not mere platitudes--the soul of a good man looked
from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the directions he
had left with the nurse, and promised to come again in the evening.
Then he grasped David's hand, and would have gone away quickly. But
David, following him mechanically to the door, suddenly recollected
himself.

'Could we move her?' he asked; 'she may crave to get home, or to
some warm place.'

'Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. 'With an
invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk about it
when I come again to-night.'

'A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went downstairs,
'and, thank heaven! a rare one. Strange and mysterious thing it is,
with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor thing! poor thing!
and yesterday she was so cheerful--she would tell me all about her
boy.'




CHAPTER IX


The history of the weeks that followed shall be partly told in
David's own words, gathered from those odds-and-ends of paper, old
envelopes, the half-sheets of letters, on which he would write
sometimes in those hours when he was necessarily apart from Lucy,
thrusting them on his return between the leaves of his locked
journal, clinging to them as the only possible record of his wife's
ebbing life, yet passionately avoiding the sight of them when they
were once written.

'RYDAL, AMBLESIDE: _May 5th_--We arrived this afternoon. The
day has been glorious. The mountains round the head of the lake, as
we drove along it at a foot's pace that the carriage might not
shake her, stood out in the sun; the light wind drove the
cloud-shadows across their blues and purples; the water was a sheet
of light; the larches were all out, though other trees are late;
and every breath was perfume.

'But she was too weary to look at it; and before we had gone two
miles, it seemed to me that I could think of nothing but the
hateful length of the drive, and the ups and downs of the road.

'When we arrived, she would walk into the cottage, and before
nurse or I realised what she was doing, she went straight through
the little passage which runs from front to back, out into the
garden. She stood a moment--in her shawls, with the little white
hood she has devised for herself drawn close round her head and
face--looking at the river with its rocks and foaming water, at the
shoulder of Nab Scar above the trees, at the stone house with the
red blinds opposite.

'"It looks just the same," she said, and the tears rolled down her
cheeks.

'We brought her in--nurse and I--and when she had been put
comfortably on the low couch I had sent from London beforehand, and
had taken some food, she was a little cheered. She made us draw her
to the window of the little back sitting-room, and she lay looking
out till it was almost dark. But as I foresaw, the pain of coming
is more than equal to any pleasure there may be.

'Yet she would come. During those last days in London, when she
would hardly speak to us, when she lay in the dark in that awful
room all day, and every attempt to feed her or comfort her made her
angry, I could not, for a long time, get her to say what she wished
about moving, except that she would not go back to Manchester.

'Her hand-glass could not be kept from her, and one morning she
cried bitterly when she saw that she could no longer so arrange her
laces as to completely hide the disfigurement of the right side of
the face.

'"No! I will _never_ go back to Merton Road!" she cried,
throwing down the glass; "no one shall see me!"

'But at night, after I hoped she was asleep, she sent nurse to say
that she wanted to go to--_Rydal!_--to the same cottage by the
Rotha we had stayed at on our honeymoon. Nurse said she could--she
could have an invalid-carriage from door to door. Would I write for
the rooms at once? And Sandy could join us there.

'So, after nine years, we are here again. The house is empty. We
have our old rooms. Nothing is changed in the valley. After she was
asleep, I went out along the river, keeping to a tiny path on the
steep right bank till I reached a wooden bridge, and then through a
green bit, fragrant with fast-springing grass and flowers, to that
point beside the lake I remember so well. I left her there one day,
sitting, and dabbling in the water, while I ran up Loughrigg. She
was nineteen. How she tripped over the hills!

'To-night there was a faint moon. The air was cold, but quite
still, and the reflections, both of the islands and of Nab Scar,
seemed to sink into unfathomed depths of shadowy water. Loughrigg
rose boldly to my left against the night sky; I could see the
rifle-butts and the soft blackness of the great larch-plantation on
the side of Silver How.

'There, to my right, was the tower of the little church, whitish
against the woods, and close beside it, amid the trees, I felt the
presence of Wordsworth's house, though I could not see it.

'O Poet! who wrote for me, not knowing--oh, heavenly valley!--you
have but one voice; it haunts my ears:--

    _'Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
     The bowers where Lucy played;
     And thine, too, is the last green field
     That Lucy's eyes surveyed._'

'_May 10th_.--She never speaks of dying, and I dare not
speak of it. But sometimes she is like a soul wandering in terror
through a place of phantoms. Her eyes grow large and strained, she
pushes me away from her. And she often wakes at night, sinking in
black gulfs of fear, from which I cannot save her.

'Oh, my God! my heart is torn, my life is sickened with pity! Give
me some power to comfort--take from me this impotence, this
numbness. She, so little practised in suffering, so much of
a child still, called to bear this _monstrous_ thing. Savage,
incredible Nature! But behind Nature there is God--

'To-night she asked me to pray with her--asked it with reproach.
"You never say good things to me now!" And I could not explain
myself.

'It was in this way. When Dora was with her, she used to read and
pray with her. I would not have interfered for the world. When Dora
left, I thought she would use the little manual of prayers for the
sick that Dora had left behind; the nurse, who is a religious
woman, and reads to her a good deal, would have read this whenever
she wished. One night I offered to read it to her myself, but she
would not let me. And for the rest--in spite of our last talk--I
was so afraid of jarring her, of weakening any thought that might
have sustained her. 'But to-night she asked me, and for the first
time since our earliest married life I took her hand and prayed.
Afterwards she lay still, till suddenly her lip began to quiver.
'"I wasn't ever so very bad. I did love you and Sandy, and I did help
that girl,--you know--that Dora knew, who went wrong. And I am so
ill--SO ill!"'

'MAY 20TH.--A fortnight has passed. Sandy and his nurse are lodging
at a house on the hill; every morning he comes down here, and I
take him for a walk. He was very puzzled and grave at first when he
saw her, but now he has grown used to her look, and he plays
merrily about among the moss-grown rocks beside the river, while
she lies in the slung couch, to which nurse and I carry her on a
little stretcher, watching him. 'There was a bright hour this
morning. We are in the midst of a spell of dry and beautiful
weather, such as often visits this rainy country in the early
summer, before any visitors come. The rhododendrons and azaleas are
coming out in the gardens under Loughrigg--some little copses here
and there are sheets of blue--and the green is rushing over the
valley. We had put her among the rocks under a sycamore-tree--a
singularly beautiful tree, with two straight stems dividing its
rounded masses of young leaf. There were two wagtails perching on
the stones in the river, and swinging their long tails; and the
light flickered through the trees on to the water foaming round the
stones or slipping in brown cool sheets between them. There was a
hawthorn-tree in bloom near by; in the garden of the house opposite
a woman was hanging out some clothes to dry; the Grasmere coach
passed with a clatter, and Sandy with the two children from the
lodgings ran out to the bridge to look at it. 'Yes, she had a moment
of enjoyment! I bind the thought of it to my heart. Lizzie was
sitting sewing near the edge of the river, that she might look
after Sandy. He was told not to climb on to the stones in the
current of the stream, but as he was bent on catching the vain,
provoking wagtails who strutted about on them, the prohibition was
unendurable. As soon as Lizzie's head was bent over her work, he
would clamber in and out till he reached some quite forbidden rock;
and then, looking back with dancing eyes and the tip of his little
tongue showing between his white teeth, he would say, "Go on with
your work, Nana, DARLING!"--And his mother's look never left him
all the time. 'Once he had been digging with his little spade among
the fine grey gravel silted up here and there among the hollows of
the rocks. He had been digging with great energy, and for May the
air was hot. Lizzie looked up and said to him, "Sandy, it's time
for me to take you to bed"--that is, for his midday sleep. "Yes,"
he said, with a languid air, sitting down on a stone with his spade
between his knees--"yes, I think I'd better come to bed. My heart
is very dreary."

'What do you mean?'

'My heart is very dreary--dreary means tired, you know.'

'Oh, indeed!--where is your heart?'

'Here,' he said, laying his hand lackadaisically on the
small of his back.

'And then she smiled, for the first time for so many, many days! I
came to sit by her; she left her hand in mine; and after the child
was gone the morning slipped by peacefully, with only the sound of
the river and the wheels of a few passing carts to break the
silence.

'In the afternoon she asked me if I should not have to go back to
Manchester. How could all those men and those big printing-rooms
get on without me? I told her that John reported to me every other
day; that a batch of our best men had sent word to me, through him,
that everything was going well, and I was not to worry; that there
had been a strike of some importance among the Manchester
compositors, but that our men had not joined.

'She listened to it all, and then she shut her eyes and said:--

'"I'm glad you did that about the men. I don't understand quite--but
I'm glad."

'... You can see nothing of her face now in its white draperies
but the small, pointed chin and nose; and then the eyes, with their
circles of pain, the high centre of the brow, and a wave or two of
her pretty hair tangled in the lace edge of the hood.

'"_My darling,--my darling! God have mercy upon us!_"'

'_June 2nd.--"For the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this
commandment._" How profoundly must he who spoke the things
reported in this passage have conceived of marriage! _For the
hardness of your hearts._ Himself governed wholly by the inward
voice, unmoved by the mere external authority of the great Mosaic
name, he handles the law presented to him with a sort of sad irony.

The words imply the presence in him of a slowly formed and
passionately held ideal. Neither sin, nor suffering, nor death can
nor ought to destroy the marriage bond, once created. It is not
there for our pleasure, nor for its mere natural object,--but to
form the soul.

'The world has marched since that day, in law--still more, as it
supposes, in sentiment. But are we yet able to bear such a saying?

'... Then compare with these words the magnificent outburst in
which, a little earlier, he sweeps from his path his mother and his
brethren. There are plentiful signs--take the "corban" passage, for
instance, still more, the details of the Prodigal Son--of the same
deep and tender thinking as we find in the most authentic sayings
about marriage applied to the parental and brotherly relation. But
he himself, realising, as it would seem, with peculiar poignancy,
the sacredness of marriage and the claim of the family, is yet
alone, and must be alone to the end. The fabric of the Kingdom
rises before him; his soul burns in the fire of his message; and
the lost sheep call.

'She has been fairly at ease this afternoon, and I have been lying
on the grass by the lake, pondering these things. The narrative of
Mark, full as it is already of legendary accretion, brings one so
close to him; the living breath and tone are in one's ears.'

'_June 4th_.--These last two days she is much worse. The
local trouble is stationary; but there must be developments we know
nothing of elsewhere. For she perishes every day before our
eyes--we cannot give her sleep--there is such malaise, emaciation,
weariness.

'She is wonderfully patient. It seems to me, looking back, that a
few days ago came a change. I cannot remember any words that marked
it, but it is as though--without our knowing it--her eyes had
turned themselves irrevocably from us and from life, to the hills
of death. Yet--strange!--she takes more notice of those about her.

Yesterday she showed an interest just like her old self in the
children's going to a little fete at Ambleside. She would have them
all in--Sandy and the landlady's two little girls--to look at them
when they were dressed.--What strikes me with awe is that she has
no more tears, though she says every now and then the most touching
things--things that pierce to the very marrow.

'She told me to-day that she wished to see her father. I have
written to him this evening.'

'_June 6th_.--Purcell has been here a few hours, and has gone
back to-night. She received him with perfect calmness, though they
have not spoken to each other for ten years. He came in with his
erect, military port and heavy tread, looking little older, though
his hair is gray. But he blenched at sight of her.

'"You must kiss me on the forehead," she said to him feebly, "but,
please, very gently."

'So he kissed her, and sat down. He cleared his throat often, and
did not know what to say. But she asked him, by degrees, about some
of her mother's relations whom she had not seen for long, then
about himself and his health. The ice thawed, but the talk was
difficult. Towards the end he inquired of her--and, I think, with
genuine feeling--whether she had "sought salvation." She said
faintly, "No;" and he, looking shocked and shaken, bade her, with
very much of his old voice and manner, and all the old phraseology,
"lay hold of the merits of Jesus."

'Towards the end of his exhortations she interrupted him.

'"You must see Sandy, and you must kiss me again. I wasn't a good
daughter. But, oh! why wouldn't you make friends with me and David?
I tried--you remember I tried?"

'"I am ready to forgive all the past," he said, drawing himself
up: "I can say no more."

'"Well, kiss me!" she said, in a melancholy whisper. And he kissed
her again.

'Then I would not let him exhaust her any more, or take any set
farewell. I hurried him away as though for tea, and nurse and I
pronounced against his seeing her again.

'On our walk to the coach he broke out once more, and implored me,
with much unction and some dignity, not to let my infidel opinions
stand in the way, but to summon some godly man to see and talk with
her. I said that a neighbouring clergyman had been several times to
see her, since, as he probably knew, she had been a Churchwoman for
years. In my inward frenzy I seemed to be hurling all sorts of wild
sayings at his head; but I don't believe they came to speech, for I
know at the end we parted with the civility of strangers. I
promised to send him news. What amazed me was his endless curiosity
about the details of her illness. He would have the whole history
of the operation, and all the medical opinion she could remember
from the nurse. And on our walk he renewed the subject; but I could
bear it no more.

'Oh, my God! what does it matter to me _why_ she is dying?'

'Then, when I got home, I found her rather excited, and she
whispered to me: "He asked me if I had sought salvation, and
I said No. I didn't seek it, David; but it comes--when you are
here." Then her chest heaved, but with that strange instinct of
self-preservation she would not say a word more, nor would she let
me weep. She asked me to hold her hands in mine, and so she slept a
little.

'Dora writes that in a fortnight more she can get a holiday of a
week or two. Will she be in time?

'It is two months to-day since we went to London.'

On one of the last days in June Dora arrived. It seemed to her that
Lucy could have but a few days to live. Working both outwardly and
inwardly, the terrible disease had all but done its work. She had
nearly lost the power of swallowing, and lived mainly on the
morphia injections which were regularly administered to her. But at
intervals she spoke a good deal, and quite clearly.

And Dora had not been six hours with her before a curious thing
happened. The relation which, ever since their meeting as girls,
had prevailed between her and Lucy, seemed to be suddenly reversed.
She was no longer the teacher and sustainer; in the little dying
creature there was now a remote and heavenly power; it could not be
described, but Dora yielded with tears to the awe and sovereignty
of it.

She saw with some plainness, however, that it depended on the
relation between the husband and wife. Since she had been with them
last, it had been touched--this relation--by a Divine alchemy. The
self in both seemed to have dropped away. The two lives were no
longer two, but one--he cherishing, she leaning.

The night she came she pressed Lucy to take the Holy Communion.
Lucy assented, and the Communion was administered, with David
kneeling beside her pillow. But afterwards Lucy was troubled, and
when Dora proposed at night to read and pray with her, she said
faintly, 'No; David does.' And thenceforward, though she was all
gentleness, Dora did not find it very easy to get religious speech
with her, and went often--poor Dora!--sadly, and in fear.

Dora had been in the house five days, when new trouble followed on
the old. David one morning received a letter from Louie, forwarded
from Manchester, and when Dora followed him into the garden with a
message, she found him walking about distracted.

'Read it!' he said.

The letter was but a few scrawled lines:--

'Cecile has got diphtheria. Our doctor says so, but he is a devil. I
must have another--the best--and there is no money. If she dies,
you will never see me again, I swear. I dare say you will think it
a good job, but now you know.'

The writing was hardly legible, and the paper had been twisted and
crumpled by the haste of the writer.

'What is to be done?' said David, in pale despair. 'Can I leave this
house one hour?--one minute?'

Then a sudden thought struck him. He looked at Dora with a flash of
appeal.

'Dora, you have been our friend always, and you have been good to
Louie. Will you go? I need not say all shall be made easy. I could
get John to take you over. He has been several times to Paris for
me this last five years, and would be a help.'

That was indeed a struggle for Dora! Her heart clung to these
people she loved, and the devote in her yearned for those last
opportunities with the dying, on the hope of which she still fed
herself. To go from this deathbed, to that fierce mother, in those
horrible surroundings!

But just as she had taught Louie in the old days because David
Grieve asked her, so now she went, in the end, because he asked
her.

She was to be away six days at least. But the doctor thought it
possible she might return to find Lucy alive. David made every
possible arrangement--telegraphed to Louie that she was coming; and
to John directing him to meet her at Warrington and take her on;
wrote out the times of her journey; the address of a pension in the
Avenue Friedland, kept by an English lady, to which he happened to
be able to direct her; and the name of the English lawyer in Paris
who had advised him at the time of Louie's marriage, had done
various things for him since, and would, he knew, be a friend in
need.

Twelve hours after the arrival of Louie's letter, Dora tore herself
from Lucy. 'Don't say good-bye,' said David, his face working, and
to spare him and Lucy she went as though she were just going across
the road for the night. David saw her--a white and silent
traveller--into the car that was to take her on the first stage of
a journey which, apart from everything else, alarmed her provincial
imagination. David's gratitude threw her into a mist of tears as
she drove off. Surely, of all the self-devoted acts of Dora's life,
this mission and this leave-taking were not the least!

Lucy heard the wheels roll away. A stony, momentary sense of
desolation came over her as this one more strand was cut. But David
came in, and the locked lips relaxed. It had been necessary to tell
her the reason of Dora's departure. And in the course of the long
June evening David gathered from the motion of her face that she
wished to speak to him. He bent down to her, and she murmured:--

'Tell Louie I wished I'd been kinder--I pray God will let her keep
Cecile.... She must come to Manchester again when I'm gone.'

The night-watch was divided between David and the nurse. At five
o'clock in the summer morning--brilliant once more after storm and
rain--he injected morphia into the poor wasted arm, and she took a
few drops of brandy. Then, after a while, she seemed to sleep; and
he, stretched on a sofa beside her, and confident of waking at the
slightest sound, fell into a light doze.

Lucy woke when the sun was high, rather more than an hour later.
Her eyes were teased by a chink in the curtain; she hardly knew
what it was, but her dying sense shrank, and she vaguely thought of
calling David. But as she lay, propped up, she looked down on him,
and she saw his pale, sunken face, with the momentary softening of
rest upon it. And there wandered through her mind fragments of his
sayings to her in that last evening of theirs together in the
Manchester house,--especially, '_It can only be proved by
living--by every victory over the evil self_.' In its mortal
fatigue her memory soon lost hold of words and ideas; but she had
the strength not to wake him.

Then as she lay in what seemed to her this scorching light--in
reality it was one little ray which had evaded the thick curtains--
a flood of joy seemed to pour into her soul. 'I shall not live
beyond to-day,' she thought, 'but I know now I shall see him again.'

When at last she made a faint movement, and he woke at once, he saw
that the end was very near. He thought of Dora in Paris with a
pang, but there was no help for it. Through that day he never
stirred from her side in the darkened room, and she sank fast. She
spoke only one connected sentence--to say with great difficulty,
'Dying is long--but--_not_--painful.' The words woke in him a
strange echo; they had been among the last words of 'Lias, his
childhood's friend. But she breathed one or two names--the landlady
of the lodging-house, and the servants, especially the nurse.

They came in on tiptoe and kissed her. She had already thanked each
one.

Sandy was just going to bed, when David carried him in to her. One
of her last conscious looks was for him. He was in his nightgown,
with bare feet, holding his father tight round the neck, and
whimpering. They bent down to her, and he kissed her on the cheek,
as David told him, 'very softly.' Then he cried to go away from this
still, grey mother. David gave him to the nurse and came back.

The day passed, and the night began. The doctor in his evening
visit said it would be a marvel if she saw the morrow. David sat
beside the bed, his head bowed on the hand he held; the nurse was
in the farther corner. His whole life and hers passed before him;
and in his mind there hovered perpetually the image of the potter
and the wheel. He and she--the Hand so unfaltering, so divine had
bound them there, through resistance and anguish unspeakable. And
now, for him there was only a sense of absolute surrender and
submission, which in this hour of agony and exaltation rose
steadily into the ecstasy--ay, the _vision_ of faith! In the
pitying love which had absorbed his being he had known that 'best'
at last whereat his craving youth had grasped; and losing himself
wholly had found his God.

And for her, had not her weak life become one flame of love--a cup
of the Holy Grail, beating and pulsing with the Divine Life?

The dawn came. She pulled restlessly at her white wrapper--seemed
to be in pain--whispered something of 'a weight.' Then the last
change came over her. She opened her eyes--but they saw no longer.
Nature ceased to resist, and the soul had long since yielded
itself. With a meekness and piteousness of look not to be told,
never to be forgotten, Lucy Grieve passed away.




CHAPTER X


The very day after Lucy had been carried to her last rest in that
most poetic of all graveyards which bends its grassy shape to the
encircling Rotha and holds in trust the ashes of Wordsworth, David
Grieve started for Paris.

He had that morning received a telegram from Dora: 'Louie
disappeared. Have no clue. Can you come?' Two days before, the news
of Cecile's death from diphtheria had reached him in a letter from
poor Dora, rendered almost inarticulate by her grief for Lucy and
bitter regret for her own absence from her cousin's deathbed,
mingling with her pity for Louie's unfortunate child and her dread
and panic with regard to Louie herself.

But so long as that white form lay shrouded in the cottage upper
room, he could not move--and he could scarcely feel. The telegram
broke in upon a sort of lethargy which had held him ever since
Lucy's last breath. He started at once. On the way he spent two
hours at Manchester. On the table in his study there still lay the
medical book he had taken down from his scientific shelf on the
night of Dr. Mildmay's visit; in Lucy's room her dresses hung as
she had left them on the doors; a red woollen cap she had been
knitting for Sandy was thrown down half finished on the
dressing-table. Of the hour he spent in that room, putting away
some of the little personal possessions, still warm as it were from
her touch, let no more be said.

When he reached Paris he inquired for Dora at the _pension_ in
the Avenue Friedland, to which he had sent her. John, who had also
written to him, and was still in Paris, was staying, he knew, at an
hotel on the Quai Voltaire. But he went to Dora first.

Dora, however, was not at home. She had left for him the full
address of the house in the Paris _banlieue_ where she had
found Louie, and full directions as to how to reach it. He took one
of the open cabs and drove thither in the blazing July sun.

An interminable drive!--the whole length of the Avenue de la
Grande-Armée and the Avenue de Neuilly, past the Seine and the Rond
Pont de Courbevoie, until at last turning to the left into the wide
and villainously paved road that leads to Rueil, Bougival, and St.
Germain, the driver and David between them with difficulty
discovered a side street which answered to the name Dora had
several times given.

They had reached one of the most squalid parts of the western
_banlieue_. Houses half built and deserted in the middle,
perhaps by some bankrupt builder; small traders, bakers,
_charcutiers_, fried-fish sellers, lodged in structures
of lath and plaster, just run up and already crumbling;
_cabarets_ of the roughest and meanest kind, adorned with
high-sounding devices,--David mechanically noticed one which had
blazoned on its stained and peeling front, _A la renaissance du
Phénix_;--heaps of rubbish and garbage with sickly children
playing among them; here and there some small, ill-smelling
factory; a few melancholy shrubs in new-made gardens, drooping and
festering under a cruel sun in a scorched and unclean soil:--the
place repelled and outraged every sense. Was it here that little
Cecile had passed from a life of pain to a death of torture?

He rang at a sinister and all but windowless house, which he was
able to identify from Dora's directions. John opened to him, and in
a little room to the right, which looked on to a rank bit of
neglected garden, he found Dora. A woman, with a scowling brow and
greedy mouth, disappeared into the back premises as he entered.

Dora and he clasped hands. Then the sight of his face broke down
even her long-practised self-control, and she laid her head down on
the table and sobbed. But he showed little emotion; while John,
standing shyly on the other side of the room, and the weeping Dora
could hardly find words to tell their own story, so overwhelmed
were they by those indelible signs upon him of all that he had gone
through.

He asked them rapidly a number of questions.

In the first place Dora explained that she and John were engaged in
putting together whatever poor possessions the house contained of a
personal kind, that they might not either be seized for debt, or
fall into the claws of the old _bonne_, a woman of the lowest
type, who had already plundered all she could. As to the wretched
husband, very little information was forthcoming. John believed
that he had been removed to the hospital in a state of alcoholic
paralysis the very week that Cecile was taken ill; at any rate he
had made no sign.

The rest of the story which Dora had to tell may be supplemented by
a few details which were either unknown to his informants, or
remained unknown to David.

Louie, on her return to Paris with David's hundred pounds, had
promptly staked the greater part of it in certain Bourse
speculations. She was quite as sorely in need of money as she had
professed to be while in Manchester, but for more reasons than one,
as David had uncomfortably suspected. Not only did her husband
strip her of anything he could lay hands on, but a certain
fair-haired Alsatian artist a good deal younger than herself had
for some months been preying upon her. What his hold upon her
precisely was, Father Lenoir, her director, when David went to see
him, either could not or--because the matter was covered by the
confessional seal--would not say. The artist, Brenart by name, was
a handsome youth, with a droll facile tongue, and a recklessness of
temper matching her own. He became first known to her as one of her
husband's drinking companions, then, dazzled by the wife's mad
beauty, he began to haunt the handsome Madame Montjoie, as many
other persons had haunted her before him,--with no particular
results except to increase the arrogant self-complacency with which
Louie bore herself among her Catholic friends.

In the first year of his passion, Brenart came into a small
inheritance, much of which he spent on jewellery and other presents
for his idol. She accepted them without scruple, and his hopes
naturally rose high. But in a few months he ran through his money,
his drinking habits, under Montjoie's lead, grew upon him, and he
fell rapidly into a state of degradation which would have made it
very easy for Louie to shake him off, had she been so minded.

But by this time he had, no doubt, a curious spell for her. He
was a person of considerable gifts, an etcher of fantastic
promise, a clever musician, and the owner of a humorous _carillon_
of talk, to quote M. Renan's word, which made life in his
neighbourhood perpetually amusing for those, at any rate, who took
the grossness of its themes as a matter of course. Louie found on
the one hand that she could not do without him, in her miserable
existence; on the other that if he was not to starve she must keep
him. His misfortunes revealed the fact that there was neither
chivalry nor delicacy in him; and he learnt to live upon her with
surprising quickness, and on the most romantic pretexts.

So she made her pilgrimage to Manchester for money, and then she
played with her money to make it more, on the Bourse. But clever as
she was, luck was against her, and she lost. Her losses made her
desperate. So too did the behaviour of her husband, who robbed her
whenever he could, and spent most of his time on the pavements of
Paris, dragging himself from one low drinking-shop to another, only
coming home to cheat her out of fresh supplies, and goad his wife
to hideous scenes of quarrel and violence, which frightened the
life out of Cecile. Brenart, whom she could no longer subsidise,
kept aloof, for mixed reasons of his own. And the landlord, not to
be trifled with any longer, gave them summary notice of eviction.

While she was in these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during
these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a
certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon,
being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a
wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for
the first time, he could not affect by any of those arts of
persuasion or rebuke, in which his long experience as a guide of
souls had trained him. She would tell him nothing either about her
plans, or her husband; she did not respond to his skilful and
reproachful comments upon her failure to give them assistance in a
recent great function at Ste. Eulalie; nor was she moved by the
tone of solemn and fatherly exhortation into which he gradually
passed. He left her, fearing the worst.

On the following morning she fled to the wretched house on the
outskirts of Paris where Dora had found her. She went thither to
escape from her husband; to avoid the landlord's pursuit; to cut
herself adrift from the clergy of Ste. Eulalie, and to concert with
Brenart a new plan of life. But Brenart failed to meet her there,
and, a very few days after the flight, Cecile, already worn to a
shadow, sickened with diphtheria. Either the seeds were already in
her when they left Paris, or she was poisoned by the half-finished
drainage and general insanitary state of the quarter to which they
had removed.

From the moment the child took to her bed, Louie fell into the
blackest despair. She had often ill-used her daughter during these
last months; the trembling child, always in the house, had again
and again been made the scapegoat of her mother's miseries; but she
no sooner threatened to die than Louie threw everything else in the
world aside and was madly determined she should live.

She got a doctor, of an inferior sort, from the neighbourhood, and
when he seemed to her to bungle, and the child got no better, she
drove him out of the house with contumely. Then she herself tried
to caustic Cecile's throat, or she applied some of the old-wives'
remedies, suggested by the low servant she had taken. The result
was that the poor little victim was brought to the edge of the
grave, and Louie, reduced to abjectness, went and humbled herself
to the doctor and brought him back. This time he told her bluntly
that the child was dying and nothing could save her. Then, in her
extremity, she telegraphed to David. Her brother had written to her
twice since the beginning of Lucy's illness; but when she sent her
telegram, all remembrance of her sister-in-law had vanished from
Louie's mind--Lucy might never have existed; and whether she was
alive or dead mattered nothing.

When Dora came, she found the child speechless, and near the end.
Tracheotomy had been performed, but its failure was already clear.
It seemed a question of hours. John went off post-haste for a
famous doctor. The great man came, agreed with the local
practitioner that nothing more could be done, and that death was
imminent. Louie, beside herself, first turned and rent him, and
then fell in a dead faint beside Cecile's bed. While the nurse,
whom John had also brought from Paris, was tending both mother and
daughter, Dora sent John--who in these years had acquired a certain
smattering of foreign languages under the pressure of printing-room
needs and David's counsel--to inquire for and fetch a priest. She
was in an agony lest the child should die without the sacraments of
her Church.

The priest came--a young man of a heavy peasant type--bearing the
Host. Never did Dora forget that scene--the emaciated child gasping
her life away, the strange people, dimly seen amid the wreaths of
incense, who seemed to her to have flocked in from the street in
the wake of the priest, to look--the sacred words and gestures in
the midst, which, because of the quick unintelligible Latin, she
could only follow as a mystery of ineffable and saving power, the
same, so she believed, for Anglican and Catholic--and by the
bedside the sullen erect form of the mother, who could not be
induced to take any part whatever in the ceremony.

But when it was all over, and the little procession which had
brought the Host was forming once more, Louie thrust Dora and the
nurse violently away from the bed, and bent her ear down to
Cecile's mouth. She gave a wild and hideous cry; then drawing
herself to her full height, with a tragic magnificence of movement
she stretched out one shaking hand over the poor little wasted
body, while with the other she pointed to the priest in his white
officiating dress.

'Go out of this house!--go this _instant_! Who brought you in?
Not I! I tell you,--last night'--she flung the phrases out in
fierce gasps--' I gave God the chance. I said to Him, Make Cecile
well, and I'll behave myself--I'll listen to Father Lenoir. Much
good I've got by it all this time!--but I will. I'll live on a
crust, and I'll give all I can skin and scrape to those people at
Ste. Eulalie. If not--then I'll go to the devil--_to the devil!_
Do you hear? I swore that.'

Her voice sank to a hoarse whisper; she bent down, still keeping
everyone at bay and at a distance from her dead child,--though Dora
ran to her--her head turned over her shoulder, her glowing eyes of
hatred fixed upon the priest.

'She is mad!' he said to himself, receding quickly, lest the sacred
burden he bore should suffer any indignity.

At that moment she fell heavily on her knees beside the bed
insensible, her dark head lying on Cecile's arm. Dora, in a pale
trance of terror, closed little Cecile's weary eyes, the nurse
cleared the room, and they laid Louie on her bed.

When she revived, she crawled to the place where Cecile lay in her
white grave-dress strewn with flowers, and again put everyone away,
locking herself in with the body. But the rules of interment in the
case of infectious diseases are strict in France; the authorities
concerned intervened; and after scenes of indescribable misery and
violence, the little corpse was carried away, and, thanks to Dora's
and John's care, received tender and reverent burial.

The mother was too exhausted to resist any more. When Dora came
back from the funeral, the nurse told her that Madame Montjoie,
after having refused all meat or drink for two days, had roused
herself from what seemed the state of stupor in which the departure
of the funeral procession had left her, had asked for brandy, which
had been given her, and had then, of her own accord, swallowed a
couple of opium pills, which the doctor had so far vainly
prescribed for her, and was now heavily asleep.

Dora went to her own bed, too tired to stand, yet inexpressibly
relieved. Her bed was a heap of wraps contrived for her by the
nurse on the floor of the lower room--a bare den, reeking of damp,
which called itself the _salon_. But she had never rested
anywhere with such helpless thankfulness. For some hours at least,
agony and conflict were still, and she had a moment in which to
weep for Lucy, the news of whose death had now lain for two days a
dragging weight at her heart. Hateful memory!--she had forced her
way in to Louie with the letter, thinking in her innocence that the
knowledge of the brother's bereavement must touch the sister, or at
least momentarily divert her attention: and Louie had dashed it
down with the inconceivable words,--Dora's cheek burnt with anguish
and shame, as she tried to put them out of her mind for ever,--

'Very well. Now, then, you can marry him! You know you've always
wanted to!'

But at last that biting voice was hushed; there was not a sound in
the house; the summer night descended gently on the wretched
street, and in the midst of anxious discussion with herself as to
how she and John were to get Louie to England, she fell asleep.

When Dora awoke, Louie was not in the house. After a few hours of
opium-sleep, she must have noiselessly put together all her
valuables and money, a few trifles belonging to Cecile, and a small
parcel of clothes, and have then slipped out through the garden
door, and into a back lane or track, which would ultimately lead
her down to the bank of the river. None of the three other persons
sleeping in the house--Dora, the nurse, the old _bonne_, had
heard a sound.

When John arrived in the morning, his practical common sense
suggested a number of measures for Louie's pursuit, or for the
discovery of her fate, should she have made away with herself, as
he more than suspected--measures which were immediately taken by
himself, or by the lawyer, Mr. O'Kelly.

Everything had so far been in vain. No trace of the
fugitive--living or dead--could be found.

David, sitting with his arms on the deal table in the lower room,
and his face in his hands, listened in almost absolute silence to
the main facts of the story. When he looked up, it was to say,
'Have you been to Father Lenoir?'

No. Neither Dora nor John knew anything of Father Lenoir.

David went off at once. The good priest was deeply touched and
overcome by the story, but not astonished. He first told David of
the existence of Brenart, and search was instantly made for the
artist. He, too, was missing, but the police, whose cordial
assistance David, by the help of Lord Driffield's important friends
in Paris, was able to secure, were confident of immediate
discovery. Day after day passed, however; innumerable false clues
were started; but at the end of some weeks Louie's fate was much of
a secret as ever.

Dora and John had, of course, gone back to England directly after
David's arrival; and he now felt that his child and his work called
him. He returned home towards the middle of August, leaving the
search for his sister in Mr. O'Kelly's hands.

For five months David remained doggedly at his work in Prince's
Street. John watched him silently from day to day, showing him a
quiet devotion which sometimes brought his old comrade's hand upon
his shoulder in a quick touch of gratitude, or a flash to eyes
heavy with broken sleep. The winter was a bad one for trade; the
profits made by Grieve & Co., even on much business, were but
small; and in the consultative council of employés which David had
established the chairman constantly showed a dreaminess or an
irritability in difficult circumstances which in earlier days would
have cost him influence and success. But the men, who knew him
well, looked at each other askance, and either spoke their minds or
bore with him as seemed best. They were well aware that while wages
everywhere else had been cut down, theirs were undiminished; that
the profits from the second-hand book trade which remained
nominally outside the profit-sharing partnership were practically
all spent in furthering the social ends of it; and that the master,
in his desolate house, with his two maid-servants, one of them his
boy's nurse, lived as modestly as any of them, yet with help always
to spare for the sick and the unfortunate. To a man they remained
loyal to the firm and the scheme; but among even the best of them
there was a curious difference of opinion as to David and his ways.
They profited by them, and they would see him through; but there
was an uncomfortable feeling that, if such ideas were to spread,
they might cut both ways and interfere too much with the easy
living which the artisan likes and desires as much as any other
man.

Meanwhile, those who have followed the history of David Grieve with
any sympathy will not find it difficult to believe that this autumn
and winter were with him a time of intense mental anguish and
depression. The shock and tragedy of Louie's disappearance
following on the prolonged nervous exhaustion caused by Lucy's
struggle for life had brought him into a state similar to that in
which his first young grief had left him; only with this
difference, that the nature being now deeper and richer was but the
more capable of suffering. The passion of religious faith which had
carried him through Lucy's death had dwindled by natural reaction;
he believed, but none the less he walked in darkness. The cruelty
of his wife's fate, meditated upon through lonely and restless
nights, tortured beyond bearing a soul made for pity; and every now
and then wild fits of remorse for his original share in Louie's
sins and misfortunes would descend upon him, and leave no access to
reason.

His boy, his work, and his books, these were ultimately his
protections from himself. Sandy climbed about him, or got into
mischief with salutary frequency. The child slept beside his father
at night, and in the evenings was always either watching for him at
the gate or standing thumb in mouth with his face pressed against
the window, and his bright eye scanning the dusk.

For the rest, after a first period of utter numbness and
languor, David was once more able to read, and he read with
voracity--science, philosophy, belles lettres. Two subjects,
however, held his deepest mind all through, whatever might be added
to them--the study of ethics, in their bearing upon religious
conceptions, and the study of Christian origins. His thoughts
about them found occasional outlet, either in his talks with
Ancrum--whose love soothed him, and whose mind, with all its
weaknesses and its strong Catholic drift, he had long found to be
infinitely freer and more hospitable in the matter of ideas than
the average Anglican mind--or in his journal.

A few last extracts from the journal may be given. It should be
remembered that the southern element in him made such a mode of
expression more easy and natural to him than it ever can be to most
Englishmen.

'_November 2nd_.--It seems to me that last night was the
first night since she died that I have not dreamt of her. As a
rule, I am always with her in sleep, and for that reason I am the
more covetous of the sleep which comes to me so hardly. It is a
second life. Yet before her illness, during our married life, I
hardly knew what it was to dream.

'Two nights ago I thought I was standing beside her. She was lying
on the long couch under the sycamore tree whither we used to carry
her. At first, everything was wholly lifelike and familiar. Sandy
was somewhere near. She had the grey camel's hair shawl over her
shoulders, which I remember so well, and the white frilled cap
drawn loosely together under her chin, over bandages and dressings,
as usual. She asked me to fetch something for her from the house,
and I went, full of joy. There seemed to be a strange mixed sense
at the bottom of my heart that I had somehow lost her and found her
again.

'When I came back, nurse was there, and everything was changed.
Nurse looked at me with meaning, startled eyes, as much as to say,
"Look closely, it is not as you think." And as I went up to her,
lying still and even smiling on her couch, there was an
imperceptible raising of her little white hand as though to keep me
off. Then in a flash I saw that it was not my living Lucy; that it
could only be her spirit. I felt an awful sense of separation and
yet of yearning; sitting down on one of the mossy stones beside
her, I wept bitterly, and so woke, bathed in tears.

'... It has often seemed to me lately that certain elements in the
Resurrection stories may be originally traced to such experiences
as these. I am irresistibly drawn to believe that the strange and
mystic scene beside the lake, in the appendix chapter to the Gospel
of St. John, arose in some such way. There is the same mixture of
elements--of the familiar with the ghostly, the trivial with the
passionate and exalted--which my own consciousness has so often
trembled under in these last visionary months.

The well-known lake, the old scene of fishers and fishing-boats,
and on the shore the mysterious figure of the Master, the same, yet
not the same, the little, vivid, dream-like details of the fire of
coals, the broiled fish, and bread, the awe and longing of the
disciples--it is borne in upon me with extraordinary conviction
that the whole of it sprang, to begin with, from the dream of grief
and exhaustion. Then, in an age which attached a peculiar and
mystical importance to dreams, the beautiful thrilling fancy passed
from mouth to mouth, became almost immediately history instead of
dream,--just as here and there a parable misunderstood has taken
the garb of an event,--was after a while added to and made more
precise in the interest of apologetics, or of doctrine, or of the
simple love of elaboration, and so at last found a final
resting-place as an epilogue to the fourth Gospel.'

'NOVEMBER 4TH.--To-night I have dared to read again Browning's
"Rabbi ben Ezra." For months I have not been able to read it, or
think of it, though for days and weeks towards the end of her life
it seemed to be graven on my heart.

                   Look not thou down, but up!
                   To uses of a cup,
       The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal
                   The new wine's foaming glow,
                   The Master's lips a-glow!

Thou heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?

'Let me think again, my God, of that astonishing ripening of her
last days!--of all her little acts of love and gratitude towards
me, towards her nurse, towards the people in the house, who had
helped to tend her--of her marvellous submission, when once the
black cloud of the fear of death, and the agony of parting from
life had left her.

'And such facts alone in the world's economy are to have no
meaning, point no-whither? I could as soon believe it as that, in
the physical universe, the powers of the magnet, or the flash of
the lightning, are isolated and meaningless--tell us nothing and
lead nowhere.

_'November 10th._--In the old days--there is a passage of the
kind in an earlier part of this journal--I was constantly troubled,
and not for myself only, but for others, the poor and unlearned
especially, who, as it seemed to me, would lose most in the
crumbling of the Christian mythology--as to the intellectual
difficulties of the approach to God. All this philosophical travail
of two thousand years--and so many doubts and darknesses! A
world athirst for preaching, and nothing simple or clear to
preach--when once the miracle-child of Bethlehem had been
dispossessed. And _now_ it is daylight-plain to me that in the
simplest act of loving self-surrender there is the germ of all
faith, the essence of all lasting religion. Quicken human service,
purify and strengthen human love, and have no fear but that the
conscience will find its God! For all the time this quickening
and this purification are His work in thee. Around thee are the
institutions, the ideals, the knowledge and beliefs, ethical or
intellectual, in which that work, that life, have been so far
fragmentarily and partially realised. Submit thyself and press
forward. Thou knowest well what it means to be _better:_ more
pure, more loving, more self-denying. And in thy struggle to be all
these, God cometh to thee and abides.... _But the greatest of
these is love!_'

_'November 20th._--To-day I have finished the last of my New
Testament tracts, the last at any rate for a time. While Ancrum
lives I have resolved to suspend them. They trouble him deeply; and
I, who owe him so much, will not voluntarily add to his burden. His
wife is with him, a somewhat heavy, dark-faced woman, with a
slumbrous eye, which may, however, be capable of kindling. They
have left Mortimer Street, and have gone to live in a little house
on the road to Cheadle. He seems perfectly happy, and though the
doctor is discouraging, I at least can see no change for the worse.
She sits by him and reads or works, without much talking, but is
all the time attentive to his lightest movement. Friends send them
flowers which brighten the little house, his "boys" visit him in
the evenings, he is properly fed, and altogether I am more happy
about him than I have been for long. It required considerable
courage, this move, on her part; for there are a certain number of
people still left who knew Ancrum at college, and remember the
story; and those who believed him a bachelor are of course
scandalised and wondering. But the talk, whatever it is, does not
seem to molest them much. He offered to leave Manchester, but she
would not let him. "What would he do away from you and his boys?"
she said to me. There is a heroism in it all the same.

'... So my New Testament work may rest a while.--During these
autumn weeks, it has helped me through some terrible hours.

'When I look back over the mass of patient labour which has
accumulated during the present century round the founder of
Christianity and the origins of his society--when I compare the
text-books of the day with the text-books of sixty years ago--I no
longer wonder at the empty and ignorant arrogance with which the
French eighteenth century treated the whole subject. The first
stone of the modern building had not been laid when Voltaire wrote,
unless perhaps in the Wolfenbuttel fragments. He knew, in truth,
no more than the Jesuits, much less in fact than the better men
among them.

'... It has been like the unravelling of a piece of fine and
ancient needlework--and so discovering the secrets of its make and
craftsmanship. A few loose ends were first followed up; then
gradually the whole tissue has been involved, till at last the
nature and quality of each thread, the purpose and the skill of
each stitch, are becoming plain, and what was mystery rises into
knowledge.

'... But how close and fine a web!--and how difficult and patient
the process by which Christian reality has to be grasped! There is
no short cut--one must toil.

'But after one has toiled, what are the rewards? Truth first--which
is an end in itself and not a means to anything beyond. Then--the
great figure of Christianity given back to you--with something at
least of the first magic, the first "natural truth" of look and
tone. Through and beyond dogmatic overlay, and Messianic theory and
wonder-loving addition, to recover, at least fragmentarily, the
actual voice, the first meaning, which is also the eternal meaning,
of Jesus--Paul--"John"!

'Finally--a conception of Christianity in which you discern once
more its lasting validity and significance--its imperishable place
in human life. It becomes simply that preaching of the Kingdom
of God which belongs to and affects you--you, the modern
European--just as Greek philosophy, Stoic or Cynic, was that
preaching of it which belonged to and affected Epictetus.'

'November 24th.--Mr. O'Kelly writes to me to-day his usual hopeless
report. No news! I do not even know whether she is alive, and I can
do nothing--absolutely nothing.

'Yes--let me correct myself, there is some news of an event which,
if we could find her, might simplify matters a little. Montjoie is
dead in hospital--at the age of thirty-six--

'Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament? As
I look back on the whole course of my relation to Louie, I am
conscious only of a sickening sense of utter failure. Our father
left her to me, and I have not been able to hold her back
from--nay, I have helped to plunge her into the most obvious and
commonplace ruin. Yet I am always asking myself, if it were to do
again, could I do any better? Has any other force developed in me
which would make it possible for me _now_ to break through the
barriers between her nature and mine, to love her sincerely, asking
for nothing again, to help her to a saner and happier life?

'If sometimes I dream that so it is, it is to _her_ I owe
it--to _her_ whom I carry on my bosom, and whose hand did
once, or so it seemed, unlock to me the gates of God. _Lucy! my
Lucy!_

'... All my past life becomes sometimes intolerable to me. I can
see nothing in it that is not tarnished and flecked with black
stains of egotism, pride, hardness, moral indolence.

'And the only reparation possible, "Be ye transformed by the
renewing of your minds," at which my fainting heart sinks.

'Sometimes I find much comfort in the saying of a lonely thinker,
"Let us humbly accept from God even our own nature; not that we are
called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us
accept _ourselves_ in spite of the evil and the disease."

    _'Que vivre est difficile--Ô mon coeur fatigué!'_




CHAPTER XI


By the end of December David Grieve was near breaking down.

Dr. Mildmay insisted brusquely on his going away.

'As far as I can see you will live to be an old man,' he said, 'but
if you go on like this, it will be with shattered powers. You are
driving yourself to death, yet at the present moment you have no
natural driving force. It is all artificial, a matter of will. Do,
for heaven's sake, get away from these skies and these streets, and
leave all work and all social reforms behind. The first business of
the citizen--prate as you like!--is to keep his nerves and his
digestion in going order.'

David laughed and yielded. The advice, in fact, corresponded to an
inward thirst, and had, moreover, a coincidence to back it. In one
of the Manchester papers two or three mornings before he had seen
the advertisement of a farm to let, which had set vibrating all his
passion for and memory of the moorland. It was a farm about half a
mile from Needham Farm, on one of the lower slopes of Kinder Low.
It had belonged to a peasant owner, lately dead. The heirs wished
to sell, but failing a purchaser were willing to let on a short
lease.

It was but a small grazing farm, and the rent was low. David went
to the agent, took it at once, and in a few days, to the amazement
of Reuben and Hannah, to whom he wrote only the night before he
arrived, he and Sandy, and a servant, were established with a
minimum of furniture, but a sufficiency of blankets and coals, in
two or three rooms of the little grey-walled house.

'Well, it caps me, it do!' Hannah said to herself, in her
astonishment as she stood on her own doorstep the day after the
arrival, and watched the figures of David and Sandy disappearing
along the light crisp snow of the nearer fields in the direction of
the Red Brook and the sheep-fold. They had looked in to ask for
Reuben, and had gone in pursuit of him.

What on earth should make a man in the possession of his natural
senses leave a warm town-house in January, and come to camp in 'owd
Ben's' farm, was, indeed, past Hannah's divination. In reality, no
sudden resolve could have been happier. Sandy was a hardy little
fellow, and with the first breath of the moorland wind David felt a
load, which had been growing too heavy to bear, lifting from his
breast. His youth, his manhood, reasserted themselves. The bracing
clearness of what seemed to be the setting-in of a long frost put a
new life into him; winter's 'bright and intricate device' of
ice-fringed stream, of rimy grass, of snow-clad moor, of steel-blue
skies, filled him once more with natural joy, carried him out of
himself. He could not keep himself indoors; he went about with
Reuben or the shepherd, after the sheep; he fed the cattle at
Needham Farm, and brought his old knowledge to bear on the rearing
of a sickly calf; he watched for the grouse, or he carried his
pockets full of bread for the few blackbirds or moor-pippits that
cheered his walks into the fissured solitudes of the great Peak
plateau, walks which no one to whom every inch of the ground was
not familiar dared have ventured, seeing how misleading and
treacherous even light snow-drifts may become in the black bog-land
of these high and lonely moors; or he toiled up the side of the
Scout with Sandy on his back, that he might put the boy on one of
the boulders beside the top of the Downfall, and, holding him fast,
bid him look down at the great icicles which marked its steep and
waterless bed, gleaming in the short-lived sun.

The moral surroundings, too, of the change were cheering. There,
over the brow, in the comfortable little cottage, where he had
long since placed her, with a woman to look after her, was
Margaret--quite childish and out of her mind, but happy and well
cared for. He and Sandy would trudge over from time to time to see
her, he carrying the boy in a plaid slung round his shoulders when
the snow was deep. Once Sandy went to Frimley with the Needham Farm
shepherd, and when David came to fetch him he found the boy and
Margaret playing cat's-cradle together by the fire, and the
eagerness in Sandy's pursed lips, and on the ethereally blanched
and shrunken face of Margaret, brought the tears to David's eyes,
as he stood smiling and looking on. But she did not suffer; for
memory was gone; only the gentle 'imperishable child' remained.

And at Needham Farm he had never known the atmosphere so still.
Reuben was singularly cheerful and placid. Whether by the mere
physical weakening of years, or by some slow softening of the soul,
Hannah and her ways were no longer the daily scourge and perplexity
to her husband they had once been. She was a harsh and tyrannous
woman still, but not now openly viperish or cruel. With the
disappearance of old temptations, the character had, to some
extent, righted itself. Her sins of avarice and oppression towards
Sandy's orphans had raised no Nemesis that could be traced, either
within or without. It is doubtful whether she ever knew what
self-reproach might mean; in word, at any rate, she was to the end
as loudly confident as at the first. Nevertheless it might
certainly be said that at sixty she was a better and more tolerable
human being than she had been at fifty.

'Aye, if yo do but live long enoof, yo get past t' bad bits o' t'
road,' Reuben said one night, with a long breath, to David, and
then checked himself, brought up either by a look at his nephew's
mourning dress, or by a recollection of what David had told him of
Louie the night before.

It troubled Reuben indeed, something in the old fashion, that his
wife would show no concern whatever for Louie when he repeated to
her the details of that disappearance whereof so far he and she had
known only the bare fact.

'Aye, I thowt she'd bin and married soom mak o' rabblement,'
remarked Hannah. 'Yo doant suppose ony decent mon ud put up wi her.
What Davy wants wi lookin for her I doant know. He'll be hard-set
when he's fand her, I should think.'

She was equally impervious and sarcastic with regard to David's
social efforts. Her sharp tongue exercised itself on the 'poor way'
in which he seemed to live, and when Reuben repeated to her, with
some bewilderment, the facts which she had egged him on to get out
of David, her scorn knew no bounds.

'Weel, it's like t' Bible after aw, Hannah,' said Reuben, perplexed
and remonstrating; 'theer's things, yo'll remember, abeawt gien t'
coat off your back, an sellin aw a mon has, an th' loike, 'at fairly
beats me soomtimes.'

'Oh--go long wi yo!' said Hannah in high wrath. 'He an his loike'll
mak a halliblash of us aw soon, wi their silly faddle, an pamperin
o' workin men, wha never wor an never will be noa better nor they
should be. But--thank the Lord--_I_'ll not be theer to see.'

And after this communication she found it very difficult to treat
David civilly.

But to David's son--to Sandy--Hannah Grieve capitulated, for the
first and only time in her life.

On the second and third day after his arrival, Sandy came over with
the servant to ask Hannah's help in some small matter of the new
household. As they neared the farm door, Tim, the aged Tim, who was
slouching behind, was suddenly set upon by a new and ill-tempered
collie of Reuben's, who threatened very soon to shake the life out
of his poor toothless victim. But Sandy, who had a stick, rushed at
him, his cheeks and eyes glowing with passion.

'Get away! you great big dog, you! and leave my middle-sized dog
alone!'

And he belaboured and pulled at the collie, without a thought of
fear, till the farm-man and Hannah came and separated the
combatants,--stalking into the farm kitchen afterwards in a
speechless rage at the cowardly injustice which had been done to
Tim. As he sat in the big rocking-chair, fiercely cuddling Tim and
sucking his thumb, his stormy breath subsiding by degrees, Hannah
thought him, as she confessed to the only female friend she
possessed in the world, 'the pluckiest and bonniest little grig i'
th' coontry side.'

Thenceforward, so far as her queer temper would allow, she became
his nurse and slave, and David, with all the memorials of his own
hard childhood about him, could not believe his eyes, when he found
Sandy established day after day in the Needham Farm kitchen,
sucking his thumb in a corner of the settle, and ordering Hannah
about with the airs of a three-tailed bashaw. She stuffed him with
hot girdle-cakes; she provided for him a store of 'humbugs,' the
indigenous sweet of the district, which she made and baked with her
own hands, and had not made before for forty years; she took him
about with her, 'rootin,' as she expressed it, after the hens and
pigs and the calves; till, Sandy's exactions growing with her
compliance, the common fate of tyrants overtook him. He one day
asked too much and his slave rebelled. David saw him come in one
afternoon, and found him a minute or two after viciously biting the
blind-cord in the parlour, in a black temper. When his father
inquired what was the matter, Sandy broke out in a sudden wail of
tears.

'Why _can't_ she be a Kangawoo when I want her to?'

Whereupon David, with the picture of Hannah's grim figure, cap and
all, before his mind's eye, went into the first fit of side-shaking
laughter that had befallen him for many and many a month.

On a certain gusty afternoon towards the middle of February, David
was standing alone beside the old smithy. The frost, after a
temporary thaw, had set in again, there had been tolerably heavy
snow the night before, and it was evident from the shifting of the
wind and the look of the clouds that were coming up from the
north-east over the Scout that another fall was impending. But the
day had been fine, and the sun, setting over the Cheshire hills,
threw a flood of pale rose into the white bosom of the Scout and on
the heavy clouds piling themselves above it. It was a moment of
exquisite beauty and wildness. The sunlit snow gleamed against the
stormy sky; the icicles lining the steep channel of the Downfall
shone jagged and rough between the white and smoothly rounded banks
of moor, or the snow-wreathed shapes of the grit boulders; to his
left was the murmur of the Red Brook creeping between its frozen
banks; while close beside him about twenty of the moor sheep were
huddling against the southern wall of the smithy in prescience of
the coming storm. Almost within reach of his stick was the pan of
his childish joy, the water left in it by the December rains frozen
hard and white; and in the crevice of the wall he had just
discovered the mouldering remains of a toy-boat.

He stood and looked out over the wide winter world, rejoicing in
its austerity, its solemn beauty. Physically he was conscious of
recovered health; and in the mind also there was a new energy of
life and work. Nature seemed to say to him, "Do but keep thy heart
open to me, and I have a myriad aspects and moods wherewith to
interest and gladden and teach thee to the end;" while, as his eye
wandered to the point where Manchester lay hidden on the horizon,
the world of men, of knowledge, of duty, summoned him back to it
with much of the old magic and power in the call. His grief, his
love, no man should take from him; but he must play his part.

Yes--he and Sandy must go home--and soon. Yet even as he so
decided, the love of the familiar scene, its freedom, its
loneliness, its unstainedness, rose high within him. He stood lost
in a trance of memory. Here he and Louie had listened to 'Lias';
there, far away amid the boulders of the Downfall, they had waited
for the witch; among those snow-laden bushes yonder Louie had
hidden when she played Jenny Crum for the discomfiture of the
prayer-meeting; and it was on the slope at his feet that she had
pushed the butter-scotch into his mouth, the one and only sign of
affection she had ever given him, that he could remember, in all
their forlorn childhood.

As these things rose before him, the moor, the wind, the rising
voice of the storm became to him so many channels, whereby the
bitter memory of his sister rushed upon him and took possession.
Everything spoke of her, suggested her. Then with inexorable force
his visualising gift carried him on past her childhood to the
scenes of her miserable marriage; and as he thought of her child's
death, the desolation and madness of her flight, the mystery of her
fate, his soul was flooded once more for the hundredth time with
anguish and horror. Here in this place, where their childish lives
had been so closely intertwined, he could not resign himself for
ever to ignorance, to silence; his whole being went out in protest,
in passionate remorseful desire.

The wind was beginning to blow fiercely; the rosy glow was gone;
darkness was already falling. Wild gusts swept from time to time
round the white amphitheatre of moor and crag; the ghostly sounds
of night and storm were on the hills. Suddenly it was to him as
though he heard his name called from a great distance--breathed
shrilly and lingeringly along the face of the Scout.

'_David_!'

It was Louie's voice. The illusion was so strong that, as he raised
his hand to his ear, turning towards the Downfall, whence the sound
seemed to come, he trembled from head to foot.

'_David!_'

Was it the call of some distant boy or shepherd? He could not tell,
could not collect himself. He sank down on one of the grit-boulders
by the snow-wreathed door of the smithy and sat there long,
heedless of the storm and cold, his mind working, a sudden purpose
rising and unfolding, with a mysterious rapidity and excitement.

Early on the following morning he made his way down through the
deep snow to the station, having first asked Hannah to take charge
of Sandy for a day or two; and by the night mail he left London for
Paris.

It was not till he walked into Mr. O'Kelly's office, on the ground
floor of a house in the Rue d'Assas, at about eleven o'clock on the
next day, that he was conscious of any reaction. Then for a
bewildered instant he wondered why he had come, and what he was to
say.

But to his amazement the lawyer rose at once, throwing up his hands
with the gesture of one who notes some singular and unexpected
stroke of good fortune.

'This is _most_ extraordinary, Mr. Grieve! I have not yet
signed the letter on my desk--there it is!--summoning you to Paris.
We have discovered Madame Montjoie! As constantly happens, we have
been pursuing inquiries in all sorts of difficult and remote
quarters, and she is here--at our doors, living for some weeks
past, at any rate, without any disguise, at _Barbizon_, of all
places in the world! Barbizon _pres_ Fontainebleau. You know
it?'

David sat down.

'Yes,' he said, after an instant. 'I know it. Is he--is that man
Brenart there?'

'Certainly. He has taken a miserable studio, and is making, or
pretending to make, some winter studies of the forest. I hear that
Madame Montjoie looks ill and worn; the neighbours say the
_menage_ is a very uncomfortable one, and not likely to last
long. I wish I had better news for you, Mr. Grieve.'

And the lawyer, remembering the handsome hollow-eyed boy of twenty
who had first asked his help, studied with irrepressible curiosity
the man's noble storm-beaten look and fast grizzling hair, as David
sat before him with his head bent and his hat in his hands.

They talked a while longer, and then David said, rising:

'Can I get over there to-night? The snow will be deep in the
forest.'

'I imagine they will keep that main road to Barbizon open in some
fashion,' said the lawyer. 'You may find a sledge. Let me know how
you speed and whether I can assist you. But, I fear, '--he shrugged
his shoulders--'in the end this wild life _gets into the
blood_. I have seen it so often.'

He spoke with the freedom and knowledge of one who had observed
Louie Montjoie with some closeness for eleven years. David said
nothing in answer; but at the door he turned to ask a question.

'You can't tell me anything of the habits of this man--this
Brenart?'

'Stop!' said the lawyer, after a moment's thought; 'I remember this
detail--my agent told me that M. Brenart was engaged in some work
for "D--et Cie"'--he named a great picture-dealing firm on the
Boulevard St. Germain, famous for their illustrated books and
_editions de luxe_.--'He did not hear what it was, but--ah! I
remember,--it has taken him occasionally to Paris, or so he says,
and it has been these absences which have led to some of the worst
scenes between him and your sister. I suppose she put a jealous
woman's interpretation on them. You want to see her alone?--when
this man is out of the way? I have an idea: take my card and your
own to this person--' he wrote out an address--'he is one of the
junior partners in "D--et Cie"; I know him, and I got his firm
the sale of a famous picture. He will do me a good turn. Ask him
what the work is that M. Brenart is doing, and when he expects him
next in Paris. It is possible you may get some useful information.'

David took the card and walked at once to the Boulevard St.
Germain, which was close by. He was civilly received by the man to
whom O'Kelly had sent him, and learned from him that Brenart was
doing for the firm a series of etchings illustrating the forest in
winter, and intended to make part of a great book on Fontainebleau
and the Barbizon school. They were expecting the last batch from
him, were indeed desperately impatient for them. But he was a
difficult fellow to deal with--an exceedingly clever artist, but
totally untrustworthy. In his last letter to them he had spoken of
bringing the final instalment to them, and returning some corrected
proofs by February 16--'to-morrow, I see,' said the speaker,
glancing at an almanac on his office table. 'Well, we may get them,
and we mayn't. If we don't, we shall have to take strong measures.
And now, Monsieur, I think I have told you all I can tell you of
our relations to M. Brenart.'

David bowed and took his leave. He made his way through the great
shop with its picture-covered walls and its floors dotted with
stands on which lay exposed the new etchings and engravings of
the season. In front of him a lady in black was also making her
way to the door and the street. No one was attending her, and
instinctively he hurried forward to open the heavy glass door for
her. As he did so a sudden sharp presentiment shot through him. The
door swung to behind them, and he found himself in the covered
entrance of the shop face to face with Elise Delaunay.

The meeting was so startling that neither could disguise the shock
of it. He took off his hat mechanically; she grew white and leant
against the glass window.

'You!--how can it be you?' she said in a quick whisper, then
recovering herself--'Monsieur Grieve, old associations are painful,
and I am neither strong--nor--nor stoical. Which way are you
walking?'

'Towards the Rue de Seine,' he said, thrown into a bewildering mist
of memory by her gesture, the crisp agitated decision of her
manner. 'And you?'

'I also. We will walk a hundred yards together. What are you in
Paris for?'

'I am here on some business of my sister's,' he said evasively.

She raised her eyes, and looked at him long and sharply. He, on his
side, saw, with painful agitation, that her youth was gone, but not
her grace, not her singular and wiltful charm. The little face
under her black hat was lined and sallow, and she was startlingly
thin. The mouth had lost its colour, and gained instead the hard
shrewdness of a woman left to battle with the world and poverty
alone; but the eyes had their old plaintive trick; the dead gold of
the hair, the rings and curls of it against the white temples, were
still as beautiful as they had ever been; and the light form moved
beside him with the same quick floating gait.

'You have grown much older,' she said abruptly. 'You look as if you
had suffered--but what of that?--_C'est comme tout le monde_.'

She withdrew her look a moment, with a little bitter gesture, then
she resumed, drawn on by a curiosity and emotion she could not
control.

'Are you married?'

'Yes, but my wife is dead.'

She gave a start; the first part of the answer had not prepared her
for the second.

'_Ah, mon Dieu!_' she said, 'always grief--_always_! Is
it long?'

'Eight months. I have a boy. And you?--I heard sad news of you
once--the only time.'

'You might well,' she said, with a half-ironical accent, driving
the point of her umbrella restlessly into the crevices of the
stones, as they slowly crossed a paved street. 'My husband is only a
cripple, confined to his chair,--I am no longer an artist but an
artisan,--I have not painted a _picture_ for years,--but what
I paint sells for a trifle, and there is soup in the pot--of a
sort. For the rest I spend my life in making _tisane_, in
lifting weights too heavy for me, and bargaining for things to eat.'

'But--you are not unhappy!' he said to her boldly, with a change of
tone.

She stopped, struck by the indescribable note in his voice. They
had turned into a side street, whither she had unconsciously led
him. She stood with her eyes on the ground, then she lifted them
once more, and there was in them a faint beautiful gleam, which
transformed the withered and sharpened face.

'You are quite right,' she said, 'if he will only live. He depends
on me for everything. It is like a child, but it consoles. Adieu!'

That night David found himself in the little _auberge_ at
Barbizon. He had discovered a sledge to take him across the forest,
and he and his driver had pushed their way under a sky of lead and
through whirling clouds of fresh sleet past the central beechwood,
where the great boles stood straight and bare amid fantastic masses
of drift; through the rock and fir region, where all was white, and
the trees drooped under their wintry load; and beneath withered and
leaning oaks, throwing gaunt limbs here and there from out the
softening effacing mantle of the snow. Night fell when the journey
was half over, and as the lights of the sledge flashed from side to
side into these lonely fastnesses of cold, how was it possible to
believe that summer and joy had ever tabernacled here?

He was received at the inn, as his driver had brought him--with
astonishment. But Barbizon has been long accustomed, beyond most
places in France, to the eccentricities of the English and American
visitor; and being a home of artists, it understands the hunt for
"impressions," and easily puts up with the unexpected. Before a
couple of hours were over, David was installed in a freezing room,
and was being discussed in the kitchen, where his arrival produced
a certain animation, as the usual English madman in quest of a
sensation, and no doubt ready to pay for it.

There were, however, three other guests in the inn, as he found,
when he descended for dinner. They were all artists--young, noisy,
_bons camarades_, and of a rough and humble social type. To
them the winter at Barbizon was as attractive as anywhere else.
Life at the inn was cheap, and free; they had the digestion of
ostriches, eating anything that was put before them, and drinking
oceans of red wine at ten sous a litre; on bad days they smoked,
fed, worked at their pictures or played coarse practical jokes on
each other and the people of the inn; in fine weather there was
always the forest to be exploited, and the chance of some happy and
profitable inspiration.

They stared at David a good deal during the _biftek_, the black
pudding which seemed to be a staple dish of the establishment,
and the _omelette aux fines herbes_, which the landlord's wife
had added in honour of the stranger. One of them, behind the
shelter of his glasses, drew the outline of the Englishman's
head and face on the table-cloth, and showed it to his neighbour.

'Poetical, grand style, _hein_?'

The other nodded carelessly. '_Pourtant--l'hiver lui plaît_,'
he hummed under his breath, having some lines of Hugo's, which he
had chosen as a motto for a picture, running in his head.

After dinner everybody gathered round the great fire, which
the servant had piled with logs, while the flames, and the
wreaths of smoke from the four pipes alternately revealed and
concealed the rough sketches of all sorts--landscape, portrait,
_genre_--legacies of bygone visitors, wherewith the walls of
the _salle à manger_ were covered. David sat in his corner
smoking, ready enough to give an account of his journey across the
forest, and to speak when he was spoken to.

As soon as the strangeness of the new-comer had a little worn off,
the three young fellows plunged into a flood of amusing gossip
about the storm and the blocking of the roads, the scarcity of food
in Barbizon, the place in general, and its inhabitants. David fell
silent after a while, stiffening under a presentiment which was
soon realised. He heard his sister's wretched lot discussed with
shouts of laughter--the chances of Brenart's escape from the
mistress he had already wearied of and deceived--the perils of 'la
Montjoie's' jealousy. _'Il veut bien se debarrasser d'elle--mais
on ne plaisante pas avec une tigresse_!' said one of the
speakers. So long as there was information to be got which might
serve him he sat motionless, withdrawn into the dark, forcing
himself to listen. When the talk became mere scurrility and noise,
he rose and went out.

He passed through the courtyard of the inn, and turned down the
village street. The storm had gone down, and there were a few stars
amid the breaking clouds. Here and there a light shone from the low
houses on either hand; the snow, roughly shovelled from the foot
pavements, lay piled in heaps along the roadway, the white roofs
shone dimly against the wild sky. He passed Madame Pyat's
_maisonnette_, pausing a moment to look over the wall. Not a
sign of life in the dark building, and, between him and it, great
drifts of snow choking up and burying the garden. A little further
on, as he knew, lay the goal of his quest. He easily made out the
house from Mr. O'Kelly's descriptions, and he lingered a minute, on
the footway, under an overhanging roof to look at it. It was just a
labourer's cottage standing back a little from the street, and to
one side rose a high wooden addition which he guessed to be the
studio. Through the torn blind came the light of a lamp, and as he
stood there, himself invisible in his patch of darkness, he heard
voices--an altercation, a woman's high shrill note.

Then he crept back to the inn vibrating through all his being to
the shame of those young fellows' talk, the incredible difficulty
of the whole enterprise. Could he possibly make any impression upon
her whatever? What was done was done; and it would be a crime on
his part to jeopardise in the smallest degree the wholesome
brightness of Sandy's childhood by any rash proposals which it
might be wholly beyond his power to carry out.

He carried up a basket of logs to his room, made them blaze, and
crouched over them till far into the night. But in the end the
doubt and trouble of his mind subsided; his purpose grew clear
again. 'It was my own voice that spoke to me on the moor,' he
thought, 'the voice of my own best life.'

About eight o'clock, with the first light of the morning, he was
roused by bustle and noise under his window. He got up, and,
looking out, saw two sledges standing before the inn, in the cold
grey light. Men were busy harnessing a couple of horses to each,
and there were a few figures, muffled in great coats and carrying
bags and wraps, standing about.

'They are going over to Fontainebleau station,' he thought; 'if that
man keeps his appointment in Paris to-day, he will go with them.'

As the words passed through his mind, a figure came striding
up from the lower end of the street, a young fair-haired man,
in a heavy coat lined with sheepskin. His delicately made
face--naturally merry and _bon enfant_--was flushed and
scowling. He climbed into one of the sledges, complained of the
lateness of the start, swore at the ostler, who made him take
another seat on the plea that the one he had chosen was engaged,
and finally subsided into a moody silence, pulling at his
moustache, and staring out over the snow, till at last the signal
was given, and the sledges flew off on the Fontainebleau road,
under a shower of snowballs which a group of shivering bright-eyed
urchins on their way to school threw after them, as soon as the
great whips were at a safe distance.

David dressed and descended.

'Who was that fair-haired gentleman in the first sledge?' he
casually asked of the landlord who was bringing some smoking hot
coffee into the _salle à manger_.

'That was a M. Brenart, monsieur,' said the landlord, cheerfully,
absorbed all the while in the laying of his table. '_C'est un
drôle de corps, M. Brenart_. I don't take to him much myself;
and as for madame--_qui n'est pas madame!_'

He shrugged his shoulders, saw that there were no fresh rolls, and
departed with concern to fetch them.

David ate and drank. He would give her an hour yet.

When his watch told him that the time was come, he went out slowly,
inquiring on the way if there would be any means of getting to
Paris later in the day. Yes, the landlord thought a conveyance of
some sort could be managed--if monsieur would pay for it!

A few minutes later David knocked at the door of Brenart's house.
He could get no answer at all, and at last he tried the latch. It
yielded to his hand, and he went in.

There was no one in the bare kitchen, but there were the remains of
a fire, and of a meal. Both the crockery on the table and a few
rough chairs and stools the room contained struck him as being in
great disorder. There were two doors at the back. One led into a
back room which was empty, the other down a few steps into a
garden. He descended the steps and saw the long wooden erection of
the studio stretching to his left. There was a door in the centre
of its principal wall, which was ajar. He went up to it and softly
pushed it open. There, at the further end, huddled over an iron
stove, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaken with
fierce sobs, was Louie.

He closed the door behind him, and at the sound she turned,
hastily. When she saw who it was she gave a cry, and, sinking back
on her low canvas chair, she lay staring at him, and speechless.
Her eyes were red with weeping; her beauty was a wreck; and in face
of the despair which breathed from her, and from her miserable
surroundings, all doubt, all repulsion, all condemnation fled from
the brother's heart. The iron in his soul melted. He ran up to her,
and, kneeling beside her, he put his arms round her, as he had
never done in his life.

'Oh you poor thing--you poor thing!' he cried, scarcely knowing
what he said. He took her worn, tear-stained face, and, laying it
on his shoulder, he kissed her, breathing incoherent words of pity
and consolation.

She submitted a while, helpless with shock and amazement, and still
shaken with the tempest of her own passion. But there came a moment
when she pushed him away and tried desperately to recover herself.

'I don't know what you want--you're not going to have anything to
do with me now--you can't. Let me alone--it will be over soon--one
way or the other.'

And she sat upright, one hand clenched on her knees, her frowning
brows drawn together, and the tears falling in spite of her intense
effort to drive them back.

He found a painter's stool, and sat down by her, pale and
determined. He told her the history of his search; he implored her
to be guided by him, to let him take her home to England and
Manchester, where her story was unknown, save to Dora and John. He
would make a home for her near his own; he would try to comfort her
for the loss of her child; they would understand each other better,
and the past should be buried.

Louie looked at him askance. Every now and then she ceased to
listen to him at all; while, under the kindling of her own
thoughts, her wild eyes flamed into fresh rage and agony.

'Don't!--leave me alone!' she broke out at last, springing up. 'I don't
want your help, I don't want you; I only want _him_,--and I will have
him, or we shall kill each other.'

She paced to and fro, her hands clasped on her breast, her white
face setting into a ghastly calm. David gazed at her with horror.
This was another note! one which in all their experience of each
other he had never heard on her lips before. _She loved this
man_!--this mean wretch, who had lived upon her and betrayed
her, and, having got from her all she had to give, was probably
just about to cast her off into the abyss which yawns for such
women as Louie. He had thought of her flight to him before as the
frenzy of a nature which must have distraction at any cost from the
unfamiliar and intolerable weight of natural grief.

But this!--one moment it cut the roots from hope, the next it
nerved him to more vigorous action.

'You cannot have him,' he said, steadily and sternly. 'I have
listened to the talk here for your sake--he is already on the point
of deserting you--everyone else in this place knows that he is
tired of you--that he is unfaithful to you.'

She dropped into her chair with a groan. Even her energies were
spent--she was all but fainting--and her miserable heart knew, with
more certainty than David himself did, that all he said was true.

Her unexpected weakness, the collapse of her strained nerves,
filled him with fresh hopes. He came close to her again and
pleaded, by the memory of her child, of their father--that she
would yield, and go away with him at once.

'What should I do'--she broke in passionately, her sense of
opposition of absurdity reviving her, 'when I get to your hateful
Manchester? Go to church and say my prayers! And you? In a week or
two, I tell you, you would be sick of having soiled your hands with
such _mud_ as I am.'

She threw herself back in her chair with a superb gesture, and
folded her arms, looking him defiance.

'Try me,' he said quietly, while his lip trembled. 'I am not as I
was, Louie. There are things one can only learn by going
down--down--into the depths of sorrow. The night before Lucy
died--she could hardly speak--she sent you a message: "I wish I had
been kinder--ask her to come to Manchester when I am gone." I have
not seen her die--not seen her whole life turn to love--through
such unspeakable suffering--for nothing. Oh Louie--when we submit
ourselves to God--when we ask for His life--and give up our
own--then, and then only, there is peace--and strength. We
ourselves are nothing--creatures of passion--miserable--weak--but
in Him and through Him--'

His voice broke. He took her cold hand and pressed it tenderly. She
trembled in spite of herself, and closed her eyes.

'_Don't_--I know all about that--why did the child die? There
is no God--nothing. It's just talk. I told Him what I'd do--I vowed
I'd go to the bad, for good and all--and I have. There--let me
alone!'

But he only held her hand tighter.

'No I--never! Your trouble was awful--it might well drive you
mad. But others have suffered, Louie--no less--and yet have
believed--have hoped. It is not beyond our power--for it has been
done again and again!--by the most weak, the most miserable. Oh!
think of that--tear yourself first from the evil life--and you,
too, will know what it is to be consoled--to be strengthened. The
mere effort to come with me--I promise it you!--will bring you
healing and comfort. We make for ourselves the promise of eternal
life, by turning to the good. Then the hope of recovering our dear
ones--which was nothing to us before--rises and roots itself in our
heart. Come with me,--conquer yourself,--let us begin to love each
other truly, give me comfort and yourself--and you will bear to
think again of Cecile and of God--there will be calm and peace
beyond this pain.'

His eyes shone upon her through a mist. She said no more for a
while. She lay exhausted and silent, the tears streaming once more
down her haggard cheeks.

Then, thinking she had consented, he began to speak of arrangements
for the journey--of the possibility of getting across the forest.

Instantly her passion returned. She sprang up and put him away from
her.

'It is ridiculous, I tell you--_ridiculous!_ How can I decide
in such an instant? You must go away and leave me to think.'

'No,' he said firmly, 'my only chance is to stay with you.'

She walked up and down, saying wild incoherent things to herself
under her breath. She wore the red dress she had worn at
Manchester--now a torn and shabby rag--and over it, because of the
cold, a long black cloak, a relic of better days. Her splendid
hair, uncombed and dishevelled, hung almost loose round her head
and neck; and the emaciation of face and figure made her height and
slenderness more abnormal than ever as she swept tempestuously to
and fro.

At last she paused in front of him.

'Well, I dare say I'll go with you,' she said, with the old
reckless note. 'That fiend thinks he has me in his power for good,
he amuses himself with threats of leaving _me_--perhaps I'll
turn the tables.... But you must go--go for an hour. You can
find out about a carriage. There will be an old woman here
presently for the house-work. I'll get her to help me pack. You'll
only be in the way.'

'You'll be ready for me in an hour?' he said, rising reluctantly.

'Well, it don't look, does it, as if there was much to pack in this
hole!' she said with one of her wild laughs.

He looked round for the first time and saw a long bare studio,
containing a table covered with etcher's apparatus and some blocks
for wood engraving. There was besides an easel, and a picture upon
it, with a pretentious historical subject just blocked in, a tall
oak chair and stool of antique pattern, and in one corner a stand
of miscellaneous arms such as many artists affect--an old flintlock
gun or two, some Moorish or Spanish rapiers and daggers. The north
window was half blocked by snow, and the atmosphere of the place,
in spite of the stove, was freezing.

He moved to the door, loth, most loth, to go, yet well aware, by
long experience, of the danger of crossing her temper or her whims.
After all, it would take him some time to make his arrangements
with the landlord, and he would be back to the moment.

She watched him intently with her poor red eyes. She herself opened
the door for him, and to his amazement put a sudden hand on his
arm, and kissed him--roughly, vehemently, with lips that burnt.

'Oh, you fool!' she said, 'you fool!'

'What do you mean?' he said, stopping. 'I believe I _am_ a
fool, Louie, to leave you for a moment.'

'Nonsense! You are a fool to want to take me to Manchester, and I
am a fool to think of going. There:--if I had never been born!--oh!
go, for God's sake, go! and come back in an hour. I _must_
have some time, I tell you--' and she gave a passionate stamp--'to
think a bit, and put my things together.'

She pushed him out, and shut the door. With a great effort he
mastered himself and went.

He made all arrangements for the two-horse sledge that was to take
them to Fontainebleau. He called for his bill, and paid it. Then he
hung about the entrance to the forest, looking with an unseeing eye
at the tricks which the snow had been playing with the trees, at
the gleams which a pale and struggling sun was shedding over the
white world--till his watch told him it was time.

He walked briskly back to the cottage, opened the outer door, was
astonished to hear neither voice nor movement, to see nothing of
the charwoman Louie had spoken of--rushed to the studio and
entered.

She sat in the tall chair, her hands dropping over the arms, her
head hanging forward. The cold snow-light shone on her open and
glazing eyes--on the red and black of her dress, on the life-stream
dripping among the folds, on the sharp curved Algerian dagger at
her feet. She was quite dead. Even in the midst of his words of
hope, the thought of self-destruction--of her mother--had come upon
her and absorbed her. That capacity for sudden intolerable despair
which she had inherited, rose to its full height when she had
driven David from her--guided her mad steps, her unshrinking hand.

He knelt by her--called for help, laid his ear to her heart, her
lips. Then the awfulness of the shock, and of his self-reproach,
the crumbling of all his hopes, became too much to bear.
Consciousness left him, and when the woman of whom Louie had spoken
did actually come in, a few minutes later, she found the brother
lying against the sister's knee, his arms outstretched across her,
while the dead Louie, with fixed and frowning brows, sat staring
beyond him into eternity--a figure of wild fate--freed at last and
for ever from that fierce burden of herself.



EPILOGUE

_Alas!--Alas!_

--But to part from David Grieve under the impression of this scene
of wreck and moral defeat would be to misread and misjudge a life,
destined, notwithstanding the stress of exceptional suffering it
was called upon at one time to pass through, to singularly rich and
fruitful issues. Time, kind inevitable Time, dulled the paralysing
horror of his sister's death, and softened the memory of all that
long torture of publicity, legal investigation, and the like, which
had followed it. The natural healing 'in widest commonalty spread,'
which flows from affection, nature, and the direction of the mind
to high and liberating aims, came to him also as the months and
years passed. His wife's death, his sister's tragedy, left indeed
indelible marks; but, though scarred and changed, he was in the end
neither crippled nor unhappy. The moral experience of life had
built up in him a faith which endured, and the pangs of his own
pity did but bring him at last to rest the more surely on a pity
beyond man's. During the nights of semi-delirium which followed the
scene at Barbizon, John, who watched him, heard him repeat again
and again words which seemed to have a talismanic power over his
restlessness. 'Neither do I condemn thee. Come, and sin no more.'
They were fragments dropped from what was clearly a nightmare of
anguish and struggle; but they testified to a set of character,
they threw light on the hopes and convictions which ultimately
repossessed themselves of the sound man.

Two years passed. It was Christmas Eve. The firm of Grieve & Co. in
Prince's Street was shut for the holiday, and David Grieve, a mile
or two away, was sitting over his study fire with a book. He closed
it presently, and sat thinking.

There was a knock at his door. When he opened it he found Dora
outside. It was Dora, in the quasi-sister's garb she had assumed of
late--serge skirt, long black cloak, and bonnet tied with white
muslin strings under the throat. In her parish visiting among the
worst slums of Ancoats, she had found such a dress useful.

'I brought Sandy's present,' she said, looking round her
cautiously. 'Is his stocking hung up?'

'No! or the rascal would never go to sleep to-night. He is nearly
wild about his presents as it is. Give it to me. It shall go into
my drawer, and I will arrange everything when I go to bed
to-night.'

He looked at the puzzle-map she had brought with a childish
pleasure, and between them they locked it away carefully in a
drawer of the writing-table.

'Do sit down and get warm,' he said to her, pushing forward a
chair.

'Oh no! I must go back to the church. We shall be decorating till
late to-night. But I had to be in Broughton, so I brought this on
my way home.'

Then Sandy and I will escort you, if you will have us. He made me
promise to take him to see the shops. I suppose Market Street is a
sight.'

He went outside to shout to Sandy, who was having his tea, to get
ready, and then came back to Dora. She was standing by the fire
looking at an engagement tablet filled with entries, on the
mantelpiece.

'Father Russell says they have been asking you again to stand for
Parliament,' she said timidly, as he came in.

'Yes, there is a sudden vacancy. Old Jacob Cherritt is dead.'

'And you won't?'

He shook his head.

'No,' he said, after a pause. 'I am not their man; they would be
altogether disappointed in me.'

She understood the sad reverie of the face, and said no more.

No. For new friends, new surroundings, efforts of another type, his
power was now irrevocably gone; he shrank more than ever from the
egotisms of competition. But within the old lines he had recovered
an abundant energy. Among his workmen; amid the details now
fortunate, now untoward of his labours for the solution of certain
problems of industrial ethics; in the working of the remarkable
pamphlet scheme dealing with social and religious fact, which was
fast making his name famous in the ears of the England which thinks
and labours; and in the self-devoted help of the unhappy,--he was
developing more and more the idealist's qualities, and here and
there--inevitably--the idealist's mistakes. His face, as middle
life was beginning to shape it--with its subtle and sensitive
beauty--was at once the index of his strength and his limitations.

He and Dora stood talking a while about certain public schemes that
were in progress for the bettering of Ancoats. Then he said with
sudden emphasis:

_'Ah!_ if one could but jump a hundred years and see what
England will be like! But these northern towns, and this northern
life, on the whole fill one with hope. There is a strong social
spirit and strong individualities to work on.'

Dora was silent. From her Churchwoman's point of view the prospect
was not so bright.

'Well, people seem to think that co-operation is going to do
everything,' she said vaguely.

'We all cry our own nostrums,' he said, laughing; 'what co-operation
has done up here in the north is wonderful! It has been the making
of thousands. But the world is not going to give itself over wholly
to committees. There will be room enough for the one-man-power at
any rate for generations to come. What we want is leaders; but
leaders who will feel themselves "members of one body," instruments
of one social order.'

They stood together a minute in silence; then he went out to the
stairs and called: 'Sandy, you monkey, come along!'

Sandy came shouting and leaping downstairs, as lithe and handsome
as ever, and as much of a compound of the elf and the philosopher.

'I _know_ Auntie Dora's brought me a present,' he said,
looking up into her face,--'but father's locked it up!'

David chased him out of doors with contumely, and they all took the
tram to Victoria Street.

Once there, Sandy was in the seventh heaven. The shops were ablaze
with lights, and gay with every Christmas joy; the pavements were
crowded with a buying and gaping throng. He pulled at his father's
hand, exclaiming here and pointing there, till David, dragged
hither and thither, had caught some of the boy's mirth and
pleasure.

But Dora walked apart. Her heart was a little heavy and dull, her
face weary. In reality, though David's deep and tender gratitude
and friendship towards her could not express themselves too richly,
she felt, as the years went on, more and more divided from him and
Sandy. She was horrified at the things which David published, or
said in public; she had long dropped any talk with the child on all
those subjects which she cared for most. Young as he was, the boy
showed a marvellous understanding in some ways of his father's
mind, and there were moments when she felt a strange and dumb
irritation towards them both.

Christmas too, in spite of her Christian fervour, had always its
sadness for her. It reminded her of her father, and of the
loneliness of her personal life.

'How father would have liked all this crowd!' she said once to
David as they passed into Market Street.

David assented with instant sympathy, and they talked a little of
the vanished wanderer as they walked along, she with a yearning
passion which touched him profoundly.

He and Sandy escorted her up the Ancoats High Street, and at last
they turned into her own road. Instantly Dora perceived a little
crowd round her door, and, as soon as she was seen, a waving of
hands, and a Babel of voices.

'What is it?' she cried, paling, and began to run.

David and Sandy followed. She had already flown upstairs; but the
shawled mill-girls, round the door, flushed with excitement,
shouted their news into his ear.

'It's her feyther, sir, as ha coom back after aw these years--an
he's sittin by the fire quite nat'ral like, Mary Styles says--and
they put him in a mad-house in furrin parts, they did--an his
hair's quite white--an oh! sir, yo mun just goo up an look.'

Pushed by eager hands, and still holding Sandy, David, though half
unwilling, climbed the narrow stairs.

The door was half open. And there, in his old chair, sat Daddy, his
snow-white hair falling on his shoulders, a childish excitement and
delight on his blanched face. Dora was kneeling at his feet, her
head on his knees, sobbing.

David took Sandy up in his arms.

'Be quiet, Sandy; don't say a word.'

And he carried him downstairs again, and into the midst of the
eager crowd.

'I think,' he said, addressing them, 'I would go home if I were
you--if you love her.'

They looked at his shining eyes and twitching lips, and understood.

'Aye, sir, aye, sir, yo're abeawt reet--we'st not trouble her, sir.'

He carried his boy home, Sandy raining questions in a tumult of
excitement. Then when the child was put to bed he sat on in his
lonely study, stirred to his sensitive depths by the thought of
Dora's long waiting and sad sudden joy--by the realisation of the
Christmas crowds and merriment--by the sharp memory of his own
dead. Towards midnight, when all was still, he opened the locked
drawer which held for him the few things which symbolised and
summed up his past--a portrait of Lucy, by the river under the
trees, taken by a travelling photographer, not more than six weeks
before her death--a little collection of pictures of Sandy from
babyhood onwards--Louie's breviary--his father's dying letter--a
book which had belonged to Ancrum, his vanished friend. But though
he took thence his wife's picture, communing awhile, in a passion
of yearning, with its weary plaintive eyes, he did not allow
himself to sink for long into the languor of memory and grief. He
knew the perils of his own nature, and there was in him a stern
sense of the difficulty of living aright, and the awfulness of the
claim made by God and man on the strength and will of the
individual. It seemed to him that he had been 'taught of God'
through natural affection, through repentance, through sorrow,
through the constant energies of the intellect. Never had the
Divine voice been clearer to him, or the Divine Fatherhood more
real. Freely he had received--but only that he might freely give.
On this Christmas night he renewed every past vow of the soul, and
in so doing rose once more into that state and temper which is
man's pledge and earnest of immortality--since already, here and
now, it is the eternal life begun.

THE END









End of Project Gutenberg's The History of David Grieve, by Mrs. Humphry Ward