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-Project Gutenberg's Sister Gertrude, by Daniel Frederick Edward Sykes
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Sister Gertrude
-       A Tale of the West Riding
-
-Author: Daniel Frederick Edward Sykes
-
-Release Date: January 8, 2017 [EBook #53919]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SISTER GERTRUDE ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by John Parkinson
-
-
-
-
-Sister Gertrude. by D. F. E. Sykes, LL.B.
-
-Sister Gertrude,
-
-A Tale of the
-
-West Riding.
-
-BY
-
-D. F. E. SYKES, LL.B.
-
-Author of “The History of Huddersfield,”
-
-“The History of the Colne Valley,”
-
-“Ben o’ Bill’s, the Luddite,”
-
-“Tom Pinder, Foundling,”
-
-Etc., Etc.
-
-SIXTH THOUSAND.
-
-WORKER PRESS, 47, MARKET STREET, HUDDERSFIELD.
-
-About the author.
-
-D F E Sykes was a gifted scholar, solicitor, local politician and
-newspaper proprietor. He listed his own patrimony as ‘Fred o’ Ned’s o’
-Ben o’ Billy’s o’ the Knowle’ a reference to Holme village above
-Slaithwaite in the Colne Valley. As the grandson of a clothier, his
-association with the woollen trade would be a valuable source of
-material for his novels, but also the cause of his downfall when, in
-1883, he became involved in a bitter dispute between the weavers and
-the mill owners.
-
-When he was declared bankrupt in 1885 and no longer able to practise as
-a solicitor he left the area and travelled abroad to Ireland and Canada.
-On his return to England he struggled with alcoholism and was prosecuted
-by the NSPCC for child neglect. Eventually he was drawn back to
-Huddersfield and became an active member of the Temperance Movement. He
-took to researching local history and writing, at first in a local
-newspaper, then books such as ‘The History of Huddersfield and its
-Vicinity’. He also wrote four novels. It was not until the 1911
-Census, after some 20 years as a writer, that he finally states his
-profession as ‘author’.
-
-In later life he lived with his wife, the daughter of a Lincolnshire
-vicar, at Ainsley House, Marsden. He died of a heart attack following an
-operation at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary on 5th June 1920 and was
-buried in the graveyard of St Bartholomew’s in Marsden.
-
-Introduction.
-
-In all of Sykes’ novels he draws heavily on his own life experiences
-though none more so than in this, his third, semi-autobiographical
-novel. The Edward Beaumont of the novel is indeed Sykes; his solicitors
-practice and early political aspirations are featured along with his
-romance of the daughter of a Lincolnshire vicar. From newspaper articles
-we can also confirm that he was a councillor and a potential
-parliamentary candidate for the West Staffordshire constituency; his
-embroilment with the weavers dispute, bankruptcy and his dependency on
-alcohol are also well documented. He is however selective in what he
-chooses to reveal about himself and uses artistic licence to make the
-book more readable. He does give us an insight into his ideas, opinions
-and aspirations and the turmoil he must have endured before turning his
-life around. It is a salutary lesson in how a talented man can be
-destroyed for his convictions and his struggle, with support, to regain
-his self-respect.
-
-SISTER GERTRUDE.
-
-CHAPTER I.
-
-It was a summer evening of the early eighties, and market-day in the
-ancient manufacturing town of Huddersfield, in the West Riding. The town
-is called a manufacturing town in the geographies, and its name may be
-found therein among the leading centres of the great cloth industry. As
-a matter of fact, though, to be sure, there are still some few mills in
-the lower quarters and outskirts of the town, and hard by the inky river
-that runs through it, the cloth for which Huddersfield is noted is
-manufactured for the most part in the adjacent villages, and the town
-itself is its central mart. On market-days the manufacturers of the
-rural districts, if rural is a term to be applied with any propriety to
-clusters of mills situate on lofty steeps, betake themselves to the
-town, attend the Cloth Market, or may be seen in their town warehouses
-or at the corners of the streets converging on the Cloth Hall, dine
-heavily at the market ordinary of their favourite hostelry, see their
-bankers and their lawyers, and not uncommonly, in the late afternoon,
-join their buxom wives or comely daughters at an accustomed rendezvous,
-assist in the weekly household shopping of their frugal dames, and by
-them are driven home in that outward and visible sign of commercial
-prosperity and social respectability, the family gig or trap. By the
-time the worthy owner of mill and loom is seated at his ample board,
-surrounded by his Lares and Penates, consuming the home-fed ham and
-domestic muffin, and quaffing his fragrant Souchong, his mill hands,
-male and female, donned in their second-best, have in their turn betaken
-themselves townwards to see the sights, and indulge the mild dissipation
-of strolling the streets, gazing in the shop-windows, making a modest
-purchase—it is then that the Phyllis of the loom buys for Corydon the
-meerschaum pipe he is afraid to smoke except on Sundays, and that
-Corydon wastes his substance on sweet-meats for the ripe lips of his
-charmer. Or maybe Phyllis and Corydon, amorously-linked, seek the
-pit-door of the town theatre to suck oranges and furtive peppermints,
-whilst the buskined villain struts upon the none too ample stage and
-declaims his stilted speech.
-
-It was, then, about eight of the evening of a certain Summer market-day
-when two young men, arm in arm, lounged leisurely past the Market Place,
-and stopped for no other reason than to see why others had stopped, for
-a small and shifting crowd had gathered round the base of the Market
-Cross, and were giving, some a rapt and sustained attention, others but
-the brief hearing of a soon-sated curiosity to a speaker standing upon
-the Cross’s pedestal. The audience were, for the most part, of young
-and little heedful holiday-makers, who took the speaking as part of
-their outing, and one of the many wonderful things to be heard of
-market-days, and to be mused upon at leisure, amid the clack of the loom
-and the hum of the revolving wheels, or discussed in the interchange of
-feminine experiences for which the all too brief dinner-hour avails.
-
-There was, however, a fringe of the more serious-minded, who listened to
-the speaker with solemn attention, and regarded her with respectful
-appreciation. These, one may surmise, were in their several homes
-Sunday-school teachers or chapel members themselves, with some
-experience of spiritual exhorting, and feeling under some compulsion to
-lend their countenance, if only, by the way, even to an unauthorised
-Evangelist. Nearer to the speaker stood a body of men and women, some
-with cymbals or other instruments of music or of noise, wearing the
-scarlet tunic and German-band cap, or the close-fitting serge costume
-and coal-scuttle bonnet by which the gentler soldiers of the Salvation
-Army seek to conceal what fairness of feature it has pleased the good
-God to give them.
-
-These militant believers served not only as a body-guard of the central
-figure of the gathering, but as a chorus; a stalwart, rugged-featured
-soldier, whose secular calling was the ungentle craft of a butcher,
-evoking an occasional subdued note from the drum he beat o’ nights to
-the praise and glory of God; whilst a neat and modest maiden, once the
-slattern scullery-maid of the Red Lion, gently tinkled a tambourine,
-that served also as a collection-box for stray coppers earnestly
-entreated; and their brethren of both sexes punctuated the address of
-their leader by fervent “Amens,” “Glorys,” and “Hallelujahs,”
-ejaculated at frequent intervals and interspersed with as little regard
-to their appropriateness to the spoken word as a ’prentice compositor
-displays in the sprinkling of his commas in the printed line.
-
-The speaker, to whom all faces were turned, was young and of a rare
-beauty. Her features were of Grecian cast, her eye of a soft, dark
-violet hue, her lips of that Cupid arch so seldom seen, her complexion
-pure, and suffused now with the glow of health or excitement, and her
-wealth of rippling hair was of dark chestnut hue, just touched by the
-parting rays of the westerning sun as it declined behind the roofs of
-the Bank on the opposite side of New Street, off which the Market Place
-stood. Her dress was of blue serge, fitting closely to a form of just
-proportions and unrelieved by any kind of ornament, unless a small cross
-of chased silver suspended round the neck might deserve the term. The
-hand, which was occasionally moved to emphasise a sentence or point a
-remark, was white and soft and well-formed. The voice in which she spoke
-was soft, sweet, pure, musical, almost caressing; her diction the chaste
-speech of education and refinement.
-
-_“Que diable, fait-elle dans cette galère?”_ muttered Edward
-Beaumont to his companion, as the two young men above-mentioned lingered
-on the fringe of the crowd.
-
-“Oh! it’s one of that Salvation Army lot,” replied his friend, Sam
-Storth. “Come along, Beaumont. The usual thing, you know: hell and
-brimstone, blood and fire, and a collection.”
-
-“Poachers on the preserves of the Church, eh, Sam? Well, you’ll
-admit the saint is pretty enough for a sinner. Let us listen.”
-
-Sam Storth shrugged his shoulders, stretched his little legs apart,
-thrust his hands into his trousers’ pockets, yawned drearily, and
-fixed his big and bulging eyes upon the speaker, eyeing her beauty with
-the calmly critical survey he was wont to bestow upon the Coryphées of
-the local ballet. Edward Beaumont, whom two or three of the more
-respectably clad of the audience recognised and saluted, turned to the
-speaker with respectful and serious attention, already repenting of his
-jesting allusion to her good looks.
-
-“Dear friends,” the girl was saying, as Beaumont and Storth joined
-the crowd, “believe me, we plead with you for your good. I cannot
-think it right so many of you should lead the lives you do. Some of you,
-I fear, live very far apart from Christ, living only, as it were, that
-you may continue to live. All your efforts, all your anxieties, are
-summed up in that—to continue to live. If you can live honestly you
-are the more content, because you do not like the risks of dishonesty.
-If you are unhappily compelled to live meanly, meagrely, you put up with
-it as best you may, hoping, for a turn of your luck. If you are not so
-compelled how do you show your gratitude to the Almighty giver and
-disposer? By faring sumptuously every day, caring only for raiment and
-fine linen, for dainty dishes, good cheer, soft living. Perhaps you are
-of the foolish ones that cannot be quite happy without the envy of your
-neighbours. Then you spend your money upon vanities that give you no
-real pleasure, except the poor delight of making someone jealous of your
-good fortune. You work very hard to get more money than you have any
-need for to buy luxuries that are hurtful to you body and soul. You are
-really very foolish so to waste this precious life in vain strivings.
-How much of the misery and poverty of this world are caused because one
-man conceives he cannot be happy till he has amassed a large fortune. It
-does not seem to matter to him that the price of his wealth is the
-abject misery of many whom in church on Sundays he calls his brothers.
-So have I seen a greedy pig snouting in the trough long after he has
-eaten his fill, and pushing aside some half-starved weakling of the same
-litter. The vaunted brotherhood of man is like that. Do you think that
-you have solved all problems when you have spoken glibly of supply and
-demand, or this new doctrine of the survival of the fittest? Methinks I
-see one of your sleek manufacturers, an alderman, maybe, perhaps a
-magistrate. He is well clad, housed sumptuously; he has money always at
-command, enough and to spare. I can fancy how sweet to him must be that
-smooth saying, ‘the survival of the fittest.’ Pshaw! The man
-mistakes a letter. He means the survival of the fattest. Do you think
-Jesus Christ died for the survival of the fittest, for the sacred law of
-supply and demand? It seems to me that the fittest do not survive. They
-are _too_ fit, and the world crucifies them. That is the world’s way
-of dealing with the fittest. No! Jesus taught a very different doctrine,
-and His teaching will square with that of neither your Huxleys nor your
-Spencers, and still less will it square with your consecrated supply and
-demand. You have tried to carry on the world with theories of men’s
-devising. Are you satisfied with the result? Does Dives enjoy his dinner
-the more because he has perforce heard the moans of Lazarus at his gate?
-Is anybody who has a head to think and eyes to see and a heart to feel
-content with things as they now are? Oh, no! They tell me you people in
-Huddersfield are great Radicals and are going to set everything right by
-Act of Parliament. Well, you have tried Parliament tinkering a many
-centuries. Is the world so very much better for your Acts of Parliament?
-Don’t you think it is time to try a little of Christ’s doctrine? And
-Christ’s doctrine means what? In a word, Christ’s doctrine is Christ
-living. But you profess Christ on Sunday. Where do you put Him on
-Monday? On the shelf with the Family Bible. He is too sacred a Being,
-you think, perhaps, for the mill, the warehouse, the shop.
-
-“Christ, I think, meant that the lives of the people should be more
-joyous, more free from carking care, from grinding poverty. I cannot
-think Christ meant the world should always have its Dives and always its
-Lazarus. Surely there is a happy board of solid comfort midway between
-the insolent ostentation and sinful waste of the rich man’s table, and
-the floor on which the dogs fight for the fallen crumbs. Let us find
-that happy mean, and there will be more of the brotherhood of man and
-more kinship with Christ.
-
-“But you tell me that a working-man has only one use for good
-wages—to spend his superfluity in drink. I know full well how prone so
-many are to besot themselves with drink. But you—” and here the
-speaker looked full at Beaumont and the other well-dressed men, now not
-a few, who stood on the skirts of the growing gathering, “you who have
-never known want can scarcely credit me if I tell you that the most part
-of the fearful, sickening drunkenness of the people comes not from too
-much money, but from too little. When people are stupefied by drink they
-forget for a time their hunger, their rags, their mean, despicable
-condition, their empty, dirty homes, their squalid courts, their unkempt
-children, their slattern wives, in a word, they lose their real selves
-and become for an hour or two _your_ equals. A drunken man is only
-dreaming with his eyes open, and when the waking life is so cold, so
-bare, so unlovely, do you wonder that men love to dream?
-
-“Do I then excuse drunkenness? God forbid. Nay, rather do I plead with
-all that they should quit the accursed thing and not purchase for
-themselves that Fool’s Paradise, so costly, and from which they awake
-to find the world still harder. But I am here to-night to plead with all
-who may hear me, rich or poor, high or low, master or man, to try to
-live in all things the Christ-life. There are miserable sinners enough
-besides the poor drunkard. I daresay some of you have stopped to listen
-just on purpose to hear the faults and vices of the very poor and very
-lost denounced. It is soothing, no doubt, to see other people soundly
-trounced, to hear vices _we_ haven’t got, and imagine we are never
-likely to have, scathingly lashed. But I think we’ll let the _poor_
-sinner have a rest to-night. There are sins in high as well as in low
-places, and first and foremost I count the sin and folly of setting all
-your heart and all your mind on the mad haste to be rich, caring to
-stand well with the world, to have the seat of honour at the feast, to
-surround yourself with all the garb and trappings of wealth—in a word,
-to get on. It is a mean and paltry ambition. Who are you that you should
-want to thrust yourself head and shoulders above your fellows? When the
-final judgment comes, what will it avail you to have piled up riches and
-be driven to church in a carriage and pair.
-
-“I tell you, there are a few other matters that will have to be
-inquired into there—”
-
-“Oh! come along, Beaumont,” said Storth, “we’ve had about enough
-of this bally rot. Canting humbug, I call it. Chuck the girl a bob, and
-let’s slide,” and he flung the silver coin towards the tambourine of
-Happy Sal and moved away. Beaumont flung no coin, but, raising his hat,
-followed his companion.
-
-“I’d have liked to hear the end of it, Storth,” he said. “The
-young lady, for she’s that you can see with half an eye, has tackled a
-big subject. I fancy that’s not the usual kind of Salvation Army
-harangue. If it is, I think I must hunt up their barracks.”
-
-“A lot of blooming nonsense, I call it. That is so far as I could
-understand what the dickens the girl was driving at. But I say, though,
-if she’s a fair sample of Salvation Army lasses, I think I’ll put in
-an hour or two at the Barracks myself. Face like a Mary Magdalene,
-hasn’t she? ’Spose that’s about the time of day with her, eh,
-Beaumont?”
-
-“You’ll have to read faces better than that, Sam, or you’ll never
-be any good in Court,” said Beaumont. “Do you believe in anything or
-anybody? Is there no good thing under the sun?”
-
-“Believe in anything or anybody? Rather. Not many bodies, but a good
-many things. I believe in Sam Storth. I’ve a very great respect for
-him too, and mean to do him well. I believe in a good dinner, and if
-somebody else is fool enough to pay for it, that won’t spoil my
-appetite, you bet. I believe in good wine, and it won’t break my heart
-if it comes out of your or any other fellow’s cellar, and if I can’t
-get good wine at your expense, I’ll be thankful for good beer at my
-own. There’s a very good tap of it at the Royal, let me tell you. And
-I believe in good clothes, and I’d rather drive than walk. Third-class
-riding’s better than first-class walking, let me tell you. And I like
-a good play, not Shakespeare, you know, nor anything classic, but
-something you can take easy, with plenty of leg in it, don’t you know!
-And I like a pretty girl, too, but not enough to chuck myself away on
-one, and I like a coin or two in an old stocking, for I’ve an eye for
-a rainy day, and don’t mean to be out in the wet when it comes. There,
-that’s about my _credo_, Beaumont, and if I can only get a fair share
-of what I want, there isn’t a heartier singer of the doxology in
-church than yours truly.”
-
-“You’re a Sybarite, Sam, a frankly brutal sensualist. Well, I give
-you credit for making no pretences. You aren’t a hypocrite anyway.”
-
-“It isn’t worth while with you, Beaumont. There’s nothing to be
-got out of you by make-believe. But I can pull a long face and snivel
-and turn up the whites of my eyes and groan on occasion. It’s in the
-family, you know. But I’m not paid for doing it. My uncle is. That’s
-all the difference. But here we are at the club. Don’t think I’ll go
-in just yet. I’ll do a half-time at the theatre. So long.”
-
-Beaumont entered the reading-room of the club. There was no library in
-this feeble imitation of a London club. He took up the current number of
-the “Nineteenth Century Review.” He had to cut its leaves. The
-members of the club, manufacturers, merchants, and the larger
-shopkeepers preferred to have their monthlies boiled down for them by
-Mr. Stead in the “Review of Reviews.” But Edward could not
-concentrate his mind on the weighty problems discussed by the sages of
-the century. His thoughts wandered to the scene in the Market Place.
-
-“Which is right,” he mused, “that girl or Sam? The girl, of
-course. But am I any better, _au fond_, than Storth, the epicurean
-little beast? Is there any difference between us, except that he is
-honest with himself? I spend my leisure in political agitation, and
-rather plume myself on being a Town Councillor and Vice-President of the
-Liberal Two Hundred at twenty-four, and would rather any day wag my
-tongue on a public platform for nothing than earn a couple of guineas by
-exercising the same useful member in the County Court or Police Court.
-But do I really care for the political reforms for which I agitate, and
-am I really indignant at the wrongs about which I wax eloquent? How much
-of my wrath against the House of Lords, I wonder, arises from the fact
-that I am not myself the ‘tenth transmitter of a foolish face?’ When
-I thunder against the iniquity of a restricted franchise, is it not,
-perhaps, mainly because it tickles my ears to hear the answering
-plaudits of the great unfranchised? Sam Storth likes soft living, and
-says so, and in that he is honest. I like _monstrari digito et diceri
-hic Niger est_. But I call my liking public spirit, intelligent
-Liberalism, and look to be, and indeed am, patted on the back for it by
-others and myself. His liking I call sensuality and scorn. But aren’t
-his ways and my ways equally a self-gratification in different forms?
-Now, that girl does really seem to care for people. I’ll be bound she
-feels like a sister to the poor wretches of the slums. There’s a screw
-loose with you somewhere, Edward, my boy. What’s the matter with you?
-That girl’s got religion. She believes in Christ. Curious; but I’ll
-bet she does. What a facility women have for accepting myths for facts.
-The clear, cold light of science is a grand thing, but I sometimes feel
-inclined to say, ‘Hang the clear, cold light of science.’ Heigho!
-the ‘Nineteenth’s’ deadly dull, and the ‘Contemporary’ attain
-a deeper depth of Bœotian opacity. I wonder if I can cut in at a
-rubber.” And Beaumont threw his magazine aside and ascended to the
-higher regions of the Club, where two or three rooms were set aside for
-the devotees of whist, nap and poker.
-
-Edward Beaumont and Sam Storth, though both solicitors, and partners in
-the practice of a much and perhaps undeservedly abused profession, were
-in almost every particular in which men may be compared or contrasted as
-dissimilar as two men may well be. Beaumont was a native of
-Huddersfield, and his family connections with the town and district were
-numerous and intricate. The Beaumonts of that vicinity are a numerous
-progeny, and may be found in every calling, in every trade and every
-craft. The Squire of White Meadows is a Beaumont, and traces an unbroken
-line of descent from one of the most intrepid of the Crusaders, whose
-effigy may be seen to this day in the small, time-worn church on the
-ancestral domain. The Beaumonts, or de Bellomontes, were, aforetime,
-lords of the manor of Huddersfield itself, but that position passed from
-them many centuries ago. Whether or no our Edward Beaumont was of the
-Beaumonts of White Meadows is a matter which Edward himself affected to
-regard as of absolutely no importance. His father had been, like
-himself, a solicitor, and had founded the present firm of Beaumont and
-Storth. His grandfather had been a cloth manufacturer, and as to his
-great grandfather, Edward declared that he, too, had been either a cloth
-manufacturer of the smallest, or, more likely, a handloom weaver of a
-saving disposition. As in Huddersfield it is quite exceptional for
-anyone to be able to refer to a grandfather at all, Edward could very
-well afford to affect indifference on the score of his great
-grand-sire’s status.
-
-If looks go for anything Beaumont might certainly have pretended to
-aristocratic lineage. He was tall above the ordinary, and well
-proportioned, his frame well-knit and active, his features regular, his
-hair abundant, of the hue of the raven, and with the natural sheen of
-perfect health. His eyes, well shaped, were dark and full of fire and
-expression. He had a well-formed mouth, mobile lips, of that fullness
-that may betoken either the orator, the poet, or the sensualist, a
-rounded, dimpled chin, the long White hand commonly supposed to be
-indicative of gentle birth. But the tips of the fingers were square
-rather than finely pointed, a trait which a palmist had assured him
-indicated stubborness of character or resoluteness of will, but which
-Edward asserted more probably suggested that one of his female ancestors
-had been engaged in the manual exercise of “twisting,” one of the
-many processes of cloth manufacture, and one eminently calculated to
-stub the fingers of the artist.
-
-Edward Beaumont had been carefully educated, and had taken to books like
-a duck to water. His natural aptitude and facility of apprehension made
-his studies easy to him, and though no one who knows what is properly
-implied in the term scholarship, would have called him a scholar, he had
-taken a fair degree at his University, at that time a somewhat uncommon
-attainment in the lower branch of the legal profession, and could no
-doubt hold his own indifferent will among other educated gentlemen. He
-was reputed to be a sound and careful lawyer, when he could be induced
-to take the necessary trouble, but none questioned that he was always a
-ready one, and it is not, therefore, surprising that he preferred the
-change and excitement and rivalry of the Courts to the more prosaic and
-monotonous and retired, if also more profitable, exercise of the dreary
-art of conveyancing. The same alertness of mind and nimbleness of speech
-that served him well in the forum inclined him to the political
-platform, and already he was a warm favourite of the working-classes at
-the meetings under the auspices of the Liberal Party with which the
-adults of the West Riding beguile the tedium of the winter months.
-Edward was wont to declare that he had imbibed Radicalism with his
-mother’s milk, and certain it is he could point with equal truth and
-pride to more than one of his relations who had suffered in the popular
-cause. His partner Sam Storth, used to complain that Edward’s
-political engagements took him a great deal away from the office, and if
-Edward laughingly pleaded that his public appearances were a capital
-advertisement of the firm, his more sagacious partner retorted that
-Edward’s “clap-trap clientèle,” as he was pleased to stigmatise
-it, wasn’t worth half the time it took to attend to it, and that for
-every decent client Beaumont’s Radicalism attracted it frightened a
-dozen better ones away.
-
-“Depend upon it, Beaumont,” he said one day, “Leatham’s is the
-right tip.”
-
-Now, Mr. Leatham was the respected member for Huddersfield, and sat, of
-course, in the Liberal interest.
-
-“Expound, most sapient Sam,” said Edward.
-
-“Why, somebody said to him the other day, ‘How is it you never take
-your seat on the Borough Bench when you’re in town?’ _‘Pas si
-bete,’_ replied Leatham; ‘every time I fine a man or send one down I
-make at least one enemy, and they count at elections.’ So it is with
-your informal spouting, Beaumont. You make a lot of admirers, perhaps,
-among a lot of greasy, dirty, unwashed mill-hands, who shout themselves
-hoarse about a policy they don’t understand, and they bring you a
-dirty, greasy guinea or so if they get into trouble with an equally
-dirty, greasy mill-girl. But who prepares the conveyances and mortgages
-and settlements for the big-pots? We don’t, anyhow. Why! Leatham
-himself takes his work to that sheaf of parchment skins, old
-Heatherington, who has consistently voted against him ever since he
-first contested the borough. Politics don’t pay, Beaumont, at least,
-not your sort.”
-
-“Ah! well, Sam, suppose we say I like ’em. I think they’re my only
-serious dissipation. You know I don’t go in much for beer and
-skittles, and am bored at a ballet. Supposing we call politics my little
-vice. You don’t want them all yourself, Sam.”
-
-Certainly no one could with justice accuse Sam Storth of having any
-enthusiasms political or otherwise. He called himself a Conservative,
-and plumed himself on his gentility, and had undoubtedly an uncle in
-holy orders, to whom, on occasion, he would casually allude. He chose
-his associates, so far as he could, among the _jeunesse doree_ of the
-wealthy manufacturers and merchants of the town, who patronised a Bond
-Street tailor—“can’t get a decent cut in the country, don’t you
-know,”—were much concerned about the fit of their boots and the
-colour of their ties and gloves; affected a languid drawl, crawled on
-the sunny side of New Street of a Saturday morning, found life a
-“doosid bore,” avoided a reference to the paternal mill or
-counting-house themselves, and thought any such reference by others
-uncommon bad form; held commissions in the Yeomanry or Volunteers and
-were rigorous in the use of their pseudo… military titles in season
-and out of season; had a club of their own, from which the retailer of
-the goods their fathers manufactured were jealously excluded; and, in a
-word, were as innocent a set of sucking young snobs, without knowing it,
-as one could well wish to encounter. As Storth had lived much in London
-before condescending upon Huddersfield, he was rather a favourite at
-this club, though he had to surmount a certain amount of prejudice
-arising from his connection with that low Radical chap, Beaumont.
-
-In person, the junior partner of the firm of Beaumont and Storth was
-small, stout and stodgy, with a broad, flat nose, and eyes that a
-disparaging critic had likened to boiled onions. In address he was
-suavely deferential to the verge of obsequiousness to the local
-magnates, who liked the implied homage of his voice and look, and voted
-him a sensible young fellow who knew his place. In revenge for his own
-lackeydom he bullied and swore at his clerks and the waiters and the
-billiard-markers who ministered to his needs, and they, too, no doubt,
-had their opinion of Mr. Sam Storth. He was careful in his dress,
-without being an exquisite, took in the “Daily Telegraph” and
-“Bell’s Life,” affected a patriotic interest in the national
-sport, and played a very judicious hand at whist and other games, as the
-young nabobs of the club knew to their cost. He had the reputation, in a
-darkly, mysterious way, of being somewhat of a Lothario among the women,
-and it was known that he had access to the green-room of the local
-theatre. But if, indeed, Sam were a sad dog, of which this veracious
-history alleges nothing, he was a very discreet sad dog, and never
-imperilled his reputation by any open indiscretion. He was careful, too,
-to attend church every Sunday morning, and uttered the responses with
-that modulated fervour that is the hall-mark of good breeding, having
-neither the perfunctoriness of custom or inattention nor the warmth of
-spiritual exaltation.
-
-How two men so diverse as Edward Beaumont and Sam Storth came to be
-partners in the same business had puzzled many, but the explanation was
-simple enough. Beaumont had been in want of a managing clerk, and a
-mutual acquaintance had recommended Storth as a safe chamber-man, and a
-safe chamber-man or desk-lawyer Storth proved himself to be. He made no
-pretence of knowing more law than had sufficed to satisfy the not very
-exacting examiners of Carey Street; but he had a very considerable
-endowment of the not very common faculty called common-sense.
-
-“Law, sir,” was Storth’s favourite axiom, delivered oracularly,
-“law is the embodiment of common-sense,” and though the reader can
-scarcely be expected to believe it, Common law is largely common-sense.
-At all events with common-sense and a tincture of technicalities and a
-very considerable knowledge of the shady side of human nature, and a
-very small opinion of that nature in the general. Storth’s did very
-well the kind of work that Beaumont wanted him for, and left that
-somewhat fastidious young gentleman free to lift his voice in the courts
-without being harassed by the petty details of a lawyer’s practice.
-Beaumont thought Sam a soulless little animal, but shrewd and steady;
-Storth thought Beaumont a stuck-up enthusiast with a bee in his bonnet,
-but a good hand with a brief, and as they saw very little of each other
-except business hours, there was little friction in the busy office of
-the well-established and prosperous firm of Beaumont and Storth.
-
-But if there was no friction there was no cordiality between the
-partners. Beaumont’s attitude to Storth was almost of good-humoured
-contempt. Storth retaliated with undisguised scorn for his partner’s
-unpracticability and want of worldly wisdom.
-
-“What do you want sitting in the Town Council?” he grumbled at
-times. “There’s no honour in it. Why, hang it, the barber fellow
-that shaves me sits on the Town Council.”
-
-“And a very good councillor he makes, too. Why not? Does he shave you
-any the worse for being on the Council. I’m sure his opinion on
-matters municipal is none the worse for his being a barber. Shaving is
-really, if you think of the matter dispassionately, a most reputable
-occupation. The profession of a barber, you cannot call it a trade, is
-an ancient and an honourable one. It was formerly, as you know connected
-with the profession of a surgeon. Probably the barbers cut the surgeons,
-and that led to a split. But if you reflect you will see that most
-exceptional qualities are required by a good barber. Sobriety is
-indispensable cleanliness, which everyone knows to be nearer to
-godliness than many people attain, some degree of polish and a pleasing
-loquacity and an intelligent acquaintance with the topics of the day.
-People trust their barber more than their lawyer, for would you offer
-your bared throat to anyone armed with a deadly weapon, unless you had
-the supremest confidence in him? Surely we can confide the gas-pipes and
-water-pipes of a town to a man to whom we entrust our own wind-pipes. I
-protest your barber is a most inestimable profession brother.”
-
-“Oh! dry up,” said Storth, “you aren’t in court now. Beaumont, I
-say again, you get neither profit nor _kudos_ from being in the Council,
-and it takes up a lot of your time. But that’s a small matter. Do you
-think, now, it will add to your professional or social status or do you
-or the office a blessed scintilla of good, to take the chair for that
-fellow Bradlaugh, as I see you are advertised to do?”
-
-“That fellow Bradlaugh, as you are pleased to call him, is worth
-half-a-dozen such respectabilities as either you or I, Sam. In mere
-ability as a lawyer he is worth a round dozen of us lumped together. But
-he is more than that, he is a very fair scholar, though entirely
-self-educated. He has done more for his brains and with his brains than
-many do who have had hundreds of pounds spent upon their education by
-fond parents. He has not only brains but a conscience; he might have
-earned a fat living as a lawyer or a parson. He has not only a
-conscience but a character, and a good one, too, and besides all that,
-he’s the elected member for Northampton, has as much right legally to
-sit for that borough as Churchill has for Woodstock, and a great deal
-better right morally.”
-
-“The man’s an atheist,” said Storth.
-
-“I don’t know that he is; but even so, that’s his concern and
-Northampton’s. What are you, Sam? What, indeed, is anyone of us that
-we should throw stones at such a man as Bradlaugh?”
-
-“Well, I call myself a Christian and I rather flatter myself I am one,
-at least, an indifferent one,” replied Sam. “I don’t set up for a
-saint, of course.”
-
-“I should think not, indeed.” replied Beaumont, smiling, as he
-recalled certain gossip that had floated from the _coulisses_ of the
-theatre to the club. “I Suppose you fancy yourself what we may call a
-so-so Christian. So are we all, so-so Christians. Why, man alive, I’d
-guarantee to empty any church in Christendom simply by preaching
-Christianity in it. I mean the pure, unadulterated article, as Jesus of
-Nazareth is reported to have preached it, not as it is watered down to
-suit the weak stomachs of your latter-day saints, or more likely to
-square with our conceptions of social necessity.”
-
-“Look here, Beaumont;” Storth said, stretching his arms lazily and
-yawning long and loud, “I’m not going to be drawn into an argument
-on theology with you. I’d almost said another member of our
-illustrious family attends to that department. But I don’t think
-you’d catch the Rev. Jacob arguing about it, either. He’s far too
-downy for that. It pays better to treat matters you’re paid to believe
-as beyond question, and a man who questions them as a moral leper. Now,
-I don’t say you’re a moral leper any more than I say I’m a saint.
-But I do say that, from a business point of view, it’s just as bad to
-be thought one as to be one; worse, in fact, for you get damned as a
-sinner without the fun of the sin.”
-
-“Oh, Sam, you’re just incorrigible. I’ve said in my haste you
-believe in nothing. But you do believe in Mrs. Grundy.”
-
-“I do,” said Storth, devoutly. “Great is the Grundy of the British
-Philistine.”
-
-“Hang the fellow, with his affectation of being so superior to another
-fellow,” he added to himself. “Mind you don’t carry your head so
-high in the clouds, Master Edward, that you trip and fall over a very
-little obstacle, and if that obstacle’s Sam Storth thank your own
-infernal folly. I’ll back common-sense against ideals any day, and if
-you’ll allow me the one. You’re welcome to my share of the other.”
-
-CHAPTER II.
-
-The morning after the meeting in the Market Place Edward Beaumont was
-seated in a capacious easy chair in his own room in the office in Queen
-Street, smoking a well-seasoned meerschaum pipe, and reading the
-“Leeds Mercury” of the day. Edward felt a sort of proprietorship in
-the winged messenger from the fact, which he regarded with satisfaction,
-that his great-grandfather had purchased the first issue of the paper a
-hundred years before, and the subscription to that journal had been
-piously continued in the family down to his own day, though he flattered
-himself he had considerably overpast the cautious Liberalism but
-slightly differentiated from Whiggery, of the “Mercury.” He had
-skimmed the local news, pshaw’d over the leading articles, and was
-enjoying the London Letter from our Own Correspondent, usually
-attributed to a rising publicist, when Storth bustled into the room.
-
-“There’s not much for Petty Sessions this morning, Beaumont; a
-couple of assaults, a profane and obscene, and a bastardy; but there’s
-one case you’ll have to put all you know into. You remember that girl
-we heard last night in the Market Place?”
-
-“The Salvation Army girl?”
-
-“That’s the party. Well, she’s in my room now.”
-
-“What’s the trouble?”
-
-“Well, here’s the brief. It seems she was staying in Matt Duskin’s
-Lodging House last night.”
-
-“In Matt Duskin’s Lodging House in Kirkgate?”
-
-“Nowhere else, as I’m a sinner, and a lively time of it she must
-have had before they settled down for the night and went to bed.”
-
-“I should imagine the lively time for a lodger at Matt’s comes after
-he gets into bed,” said Beaumont, smiling. “The place must be alive
-with vermin. But what’s the case?”
-
-“You remember Pat Sullivan that’s been in trouble with the police so
-often and that they’re so afraid of? They say it took three of them to
-get him to the station last night. Well, he’s about half-killed
-another of Duskin’s select assortment of lodgers, and all Kirkgate and
-his wife will be in Court this morning to see the last of Sullivan for a
-few months anyway. He’s sure to be sent down. Ward will work for a
-committal without the option, and the constables on that beat will do
-their nightly prowl all the more serenely when they know Pat’s
-comfortably snoring on a plank bed in Wakefield gaol.”
-
-“Miss—the Salvation Army girl’s in your room, you say. What’s
-she got to do with it?”
-
-“There’s her and Sullivan’s wife in tears and a shawl and
-half-a-dozen more of the quality. They say Pat didn’t begin it. But
-it’ll be no good. Pat’s booked this journey, you bet. Anyhow,
-here’s your brief, and it’s about time you were off to Court.”
-
-“I think I’ll speak to the Young lady first. Ask her to come here,
-will you, Sam?”
-
-When the speaker of the previous evening entered the large low room,
-with its walls lined with many rows of calf-bound volumes of statutes,
-reports, and precedents, its lettered pigeon-holes, its ponderous safe,
-and japanned deed boxes, it was evident she had lost for a time the calm
-serenity that had distinguished her at the Market Cross. Her face was
-pale, and her eyes looked as though they had lately wept. Her expression
-was anxious, and her manner agitated. As Beaumont rose from his chair
-he returned the respectful bow with which he greeted her, and took with
-some trembling the chair he placed for her. She waited for him to speak.
-
-“Mr. Storth tells me you will be a witness in the case in which
-Sullivan is charged with assault, Miss——. I beg your pardon, I
-don’t think Storth told me your name.”
-
-A crimson flush suffused the fair and beautiful features.
-
-“I am called Sister Gertrude in the Army.”
-
-“H’m; I’m afraid the clerk will ask for your full name. I
-understand this is a serious case, and he may think it necessary to take
-depositions.”
-
-“My name is Gertrude Fairfax, but, if possible, I prefer that my
-surname should not appear. There are reasons.”
-
-“Fairfax is a name both known and honoured in Yorkshire,” said
-Edward, with a courteous inclination towards the lady; “but I should
-not take you for a native of our county.”
-
-“Oh, no! my home is in Staffordshire, but my address is at the
-headquarters of the Army in London.”
-
-“Very well, Sister, I think we can manage that your name may not
-appear. I’ll speak to the reporter; he’ll work the oracle for a
-drink,” he mentally added.
-
-“And now Miss——I beg your pardon, Sister Gertrude—would you mind
-telling me what you know about this wretched business. You belong to the
-Salvation Army, I perceive.”
-
-“Yes; I am a soldier in the Army, not an officer, and last night,
-after our meeting at the Market Cross, a poor frightened woman spoke to
-me. She was in great trouble, but almost afraid to address me. You see,
-she is a Catholic and the Catholics never care to do anything their
-priest might not like. She said she was living an awful life. Her
-husband, the man they are to try to-day, she said, is a good, true man,
-and a loving husband, but for the drink, and then he is like one
-possessed. She said he earned good wages, under the Corporation, I
-fancy, as a navvy; but he spent so much in drink they were always in
-sore straits, and now had broken up their home and were living in vile
-lodgings. I was moved by Nellie’s story, and asked how I could help
-her. She begged me to go speak with her husband, plead and pray with him
-to give up the drink. Of course I went….
-
-“Oh! yes. Why should I fear? No one would injure me, and if they did,
-what matter? So she took me to the lodging-house in which they live. Her
-husband, Pat, was in a long room, where there were several men and women
-and some children. At first the man was very surly, would not speak to
-me. But he is Irish, from the county Cork; and I happen to have spent
-some time with friends in the neighbourhood of Cork, between the city
-and Queenstown, on the Lea. But perhaps you don’t know the Lea?”
-
-“Only the lines:
-       ‘…those bells of Shandon,
-   That sound so grand on,
-       The pleasant waters of the river Lea,’”
-confessed Edward.
-
-“Ah! you read Father Prout,” said the girl, and looked at the grim
-law books as though to say they did not look suggestive of the warblings
-of a poet. “Well, when he got to speak of his home in the ould
-country, and the good mother he had left in the village he was born in,
-and of the days of boyhood, I led him on to speak of the glad
-springtime, when he courted Ellen as a sweet colleen, as he called her,
-and so the man was melted, and he heard me patiently. Then I asked Mr.
-Duskin if I might say a few words to the others, and offer a prayer, and
-as he didn’t say me nay, why I did.”
-
-“Was this man, what’s his name, the complainant, I mean, there
-then?”
-
-“Oh, no! I was just about to leave, for it was near eleven o’clock,
-and I feared the friends with whom I stayed would be anxious about
-me.”
-
-“Oh! you weren’t staying at Duskin’s yourself, then? Mr. Storth
-must have misunderstood you.”
-
-“Oh, no! I was saying a few parting words to one or two of the women,
-who seemed glad that I should speak to them. Then the door was thrust
-open violently, and the man Graham almost fell into the room. He was
-very much under the influence of drink. One of the women was his wife,
-and he accused me of wanting to make a Black Protestant of her, and
-threatened me. But I did not mind him, for he was not himself and was
-moving to the door. But he stood in my way, and made as though to
-prevent my going, and Ellen came between us, and made to push him on one
-side, and he called her a foul name and struck her in the face. Then
-Patrick Sullivan jumped to his feet with a wild cry, and before one
-could think or speak the two men were fighting, and then it seemed as
-though all the house began to scream and shout and yell and swear, and
-the street filled even at that late hour, and then the police came and
-seized Sullivan. Graham was on the floor with a nasty wound in his head,
-and poor Ellen almost in hysterics blaming herself bitterly for taking
-me to the house at all.”
-
-“You are sure Graham struck Nelly?”
-
-“Oh, yes! And now this morning what could I do but come with the poor
-woman to see her through the trouble. I had much ado to prevent her
-pawning her wedding-ring to pay your fee, but we managed without
-that.”
-
-“Oh! Nelly had her wedding-ring? Then Pat hadn’t been drinking long.
-It’s the last thing that goes. When that’s gone the husband starts
-working again. It’s the last thing in and the first thing out.”
-
-“Can you get Sullivan off, Mr. Beaumont? If it is only a question of a
-fine, perhaps that can be arranged.”
-
-“In the same way, I supose as my fee was arranged?”
-
-“Well, yes; that way or some other. But I hope he may not be sent to
-prison. Perhaps he may turn over a new leaf, and give up the drink and
-mend his ways. I’m sure there’s much more of good than bad in him,
-and prison will only foster the bad and dwarf the good.”
-
-“Oh! we’ll pull him through, Sister Gertrude, if you tell the Bench
-your story as you have told it to me. I’m sure, if you will permit me
-to say so, you behaved very pluckily in going unprotected to that horrid
-hole. But I’m afraid you wasted your time in trying to save Pat
-Sullivan. He’s always in trouble with the police.”
-
-“That’s why my time was _not_ wasted. Society has been trying to
-deal with such lost creatures as Sullivan for centuries by its police,
-always its police. I think perhaps a little human sympathy and gentle
-entreating may do what your police cannot do. That is why I wear this
-uniform.”
-
-Beaumont bowed silently. He had had his own opinion of ecstatic young
-ladies who take to Slumming as a diversion; but Sister Gertrude did not
-harmonise with his preconceived ideas. He would have liked to ask many
-questions, but he resented prying inquisitiveness in his own affairs,
-and was careful to respect the reserve of others. He looked at his
-watch.
-
-“Jove! we must be off. May I have the pleasure of showing you the way
-to Court?”
-
-“Thank you. Nelly will be waiting for me. I will go with her.”
-
-As Beaumont entered the Court and made his way to the solicitors’
-well, he glanced at the Bench and noted with satisfaction that the
-Mayor, Thomas Hoyleham, presided. Mr. Hoyleham was a weak, worthy man of
-venerable appearance, with a long, flowing, white beard, and of pallid,
-bloodless complexion. He was a draper by trade, and one of the pillars
-of the Independent Church at Lowfield. He had signalised his accession
-to the Chief Magistracy by treating the members of the Town Council to a
-Temperance Banquet, zoedone, phospherade, and other effervescent and
-phosphorescent cordials supplanting the wines of France and Spain; much
-to the discontent of his guests.
-
-Beaumont, however, had tossed off a bumper of the beady and gaseous
-compound with a flourish to the health of the Mayor, and whilst
-questioning convictions that forced a man to prefer zoedone to
-champagne, vowed he admired the Mayor’s pluck and consistency, and
-protested that it was worth while to run the risk of being poisoned to
-sit at table with a man of principle. Of course, this sentiment had
-reached the Mayor’s ears, and had not only greatly comforted him and
-sustained him in presence of the rueful countenances of his guests, but
-had led him ever after to entertain a high opinion of Beaumont’s
-discrimination. And though he mourned over the young councillor's
-infidelity, he was not without hopes some Christian Church might win him
-to its bosom, and lost no opportunity of speaking a word in season to
-his young colleague; and had even ventured to give him a Temperance
-Tract in an apologetic manner, assuring him that the passages marked by
-the Mayor’s own hand were not to be taken by Edward as offensively
-personal. Beaumont had taken all in good part, and when ribald members
-of the Council poked fun at the old gentleman, and called him an old
-woman, only fit to sit behind the urn at a tea-party, Beaumont had
-stoutly declared that beneath the mild and deferential, almost
-shrinking, manner of Mr. Hoyleham, lay a rare staunchness and fidelity
-to the right as he conceived it.
-
-The case against Patrick Sullivan was not taken till the charge-sheet
-was cleared of all others. Mr. Ward the Chief Constable, was determined
-to have that redoubtable breaker of the law and terror of the police
-safe under lock and key for so long a spell as the law could ensure, and
-he, of course, had heard only the version of the fracas given by the
-police and by Graham. The strong, most damaging point against Pat was
-his resistance of the police in the discharge of their duty. It was an
-article of faith with the Borough Bench that the police must be
-supported, and it was equally a matter of faith with those who had been
-summoned before it, or who expected to be, and with their witnesses,
-that the sworn testimony of one policeman would be taken before that of
-all Kirkgate put together. Sullivan was looked upon as a doomed man, as
-good as done for, and his sympathisers only found consolation in the
-resolve to make the place too hot to hold the complainant. With these
-sympathisers the back benches of the Court were crowded. They were
-there, male and female, some scores of them, in all states of dress and
-undress and all degrees of cleanliness and sobriety. They were all to a
-man and also woman known to the police, and most of them had stood in
-the very dock now tenanted by the redoubtable Sullivan, and those who
-had not looked forward to their appearance in that unenviable rectangle
-as a natural and inevitable incident in their career. Needless to say,
-the sympathies of this section of the audience in Court were entirely
-with the prisoner, and when Edward entered with a light and springing
-step and bright smiling face, a subdued murmur ran through their ranks.
-
-“Och! it’s himself has the cometherin’ way wid ’im,” whispered
-a shawled and frowsy nymph of the pavement to another lady of the same
-nationality and facility of affection. “Fwat an eye’s in de face of
-’im; ’t would melt a stone, an’ the tongue of him for Blarney most
-wonderful.”
-
-The chief witness against Sullivan was, of course, the aggrieved Graham,
-who appeared in the box, his head all swathed in bandages and plasters.
-He told a piteous tale. He was a homeless, inoffensive man that lodged
-at Duskin’s, and wouldn’t harm a fly, so he said. He had been
-refreshing himself after the labours of the day at the house of a
-friend, and at an early hour had sought his humble lodgings and his
-virtuous couch. But he had no sooner entered the door of that sacred
-spot—where peace should reign, whatever broils disturb the
-street—than that cowardly brute, as strong as an ox and as raging as a
-lion, had leaped upon him, beaten down his feeble defence, and left him
-senseless on the ground. His wounds were there for their Worships and
-all the world to see, and so forth.
-
-Unfortunately for Graham, Beaumont had a memory and Graham an unwary
-tongue. Looking at Beaumont’s face as he rose to cross examine the
-witness, one would have read there nothing but compassion and sympathy
-with the complainant in his great and unmerited wrongs. Sister Gertrude
-confided to Ellen, when all was over, that her heart failed her at that
-moment, for she feared the plausible rogue’s canting tongue had
-imposed on their chosen champion. “He is so young, you know,” But
-Ellen had smiled superior.
-
-“Let me see, Graham,” Edward began, in an insinuating voice, “I think
-you did not tell us your age.”
-
-“Forty-four, your honour, if I live till Christmas.”
-
-“And what trade may you be?”
-
-“A mason, sorr.”
-
-“May I feel your hands?”
-
-“’Deed, they’re too dirty, sir.”
-
-“Oh, never mind. His Worship might tell you lawyers are used to dirt.
-But, indeed, they are dirty, and soft, too; very soft. Where do you
-work?”
-
-“’Deed, sorr, just at the time present I’m out of a job.”
-
-“But the building trade’s very brisk just now, I believe?”
-
-“’Deed, sorr, I couldn't say.”
-
-“What, not know the state of the labour market in your own trade!
-Where did you work last?”
-
-“At Mr. Whitwam’s, sorr.”
-
-“You live in Huddersfield, I think?”
-
-“Yes, sorr.”
-
-“This how long?”
-
-“This twenty years and more, sorr” answered Graham, with alacrity,
-apparently relieved to get away from the subject of his occupation.
-
-“Off and on, or all on?”
-
-“Straight on, sorr, twenty year an’ more I’ve lived in this
-town.”
-
-“And never out of it this twenty years?”
-
-“Not a day, sorr. If I have may I be——”
-
-“Oh, quite so. Then may I ask how long it is since you worked for Mr.
-Whitwam?”
-
-After much evasion it appeared that it was ten years since the witness
-had worked for Mr. Whitwam or anyone else.
-
-“Made your fortune at thirty, you lucky man, and retired from
-business, is that it?”
-
-His clothes answered for him.
-
-“Then may I ask how you’ve lived since you gave up working?”
-
-“Hadn’t he a license to hawk, sure?”
-
-“A pedlar, eh? In other words, a licensed mendicant. Let me see your
-license.”
-
-After much fumbling in the inner creases of the rag that served him as a
-vest, the witness produced a soiled, tattered document that Beaumont
-handled gingerly.
-
-“Dated seven years ago and long out of date. That won’t do, my man.
-Well what else have you done?”
-
-“Arrah! odd jobs, an’ maybe, a copper or two from a friend or a
-Christian lady of the town or the praste. God bless them.”
-
-“Now, turn up the sleeve of your arm, higher, let’s see your
-muscles, man.”
-
-A brawny, muscular arm was bared to view.
-
-“An arm, your Worships will observe” said Edward, “that hasn’t
-done a stroke of honest work these ten years back.”
-
-“You’re a married man, I think, Graham?”
-
-“’Deed, I am, sorr, worse luck.”
-
-“Where’s your wife?”
-
-Graham couldn’t say, but when his memory was assisted he confessed she
-had left him years ago, but not before he had been convicted three or
-four times in that very Court of aggravated assault upon her.
-
-“You didn’t strike Pat Sullivan last night, you say?”
-
-“Not a strike, sorr!”
-
-“Striking a woman’s more in your line, I suppose. Perhaps you’ll
-have their Worships believe you never beat your wife. Who was the friend
-you had been spending the night with?”
-
-Then it transpired that the friend was the genial host of the “Spotted
-Dog,” and that before visiting that popular house of entertainment
-Graham had favoured the “Brindled Cow” with his company, and when
-somebody in the crowd at the back called out “Wheatsheaf,” to the
-great indignation of half-a-dozen constables, who all called out
-“Silence in Court,” and glared angrily at a very small boy who began to
-whimper, Mr. Graham confessed to having had a glass, or maybe, two,
-’deed, he wouldn’t swear not three, at the “Wheatsheaf.”
-
-But at this the confusion of the witness was so great that Beaumont knew
-it to be more damaging than any evidence, and magnanimously forbore to
-press the question.
-
-“Hadn’t we better get to last night?” suggested Mr. Mayor, mildly.
-
-“I agree with your Worship. But it was desirable that we should know
-who this injured innocent is that comes here with his whimpering,
-whining story. And now, Graham, you know Nelly Sullivan?”
-
-“Sure he did, bad cess to her for a squalling, meddling woman!”
-
-“What made you strike Nelly Sullivan when you returned to your
-lodgings last night?”
-
-Of course he hadn’t struck Nelly. “Was he the man to lift his hand
-against any woman?”
-
-“Bar your wife, Graham,” reminded Beaumont.
-
-“That was different. He hadn’t come there to talk about his wife. He
-swore before God and all His saints on the blessed book he’d never
-lifted so much as his little finger ’gainst Nelly Sullivan; strike him
-dead, if he had!”
-
-“Well, we’ll see what others have to say about it,” concluded
-Edward, as he sat down.
-
-“You’ve settled the assault on Graham, but what about resisting the
-police?” whispered Storth, to his partner; “that’ll settle his
-hash you’ll see.”
-
-The constables who had arrested Pat and carried him to the cells
-certainly bore speaking marks of that hero’s prowess, and their story
-lost nothing in the telling. They told it with that unswerving
-consistency which distinguishes the British policeman before “their
-Washups.” They had certain things to say, those and no more. For the
-time being the sum total of human knowledge was contained in just that.
-They knew neither more nor less than what they went into the box to
-swear to. For anything they knew Sullivan might have been provoked
-beyond endurance by Graham, but when they appeared he ought to have
-become as a bleating lamb. That was the official view, that, too, it was
-clear, was the view of the Bench.
-
-“We must support the police, you know,” was the most sacred tenet of
-the magisterial mind.
-
-“I shall not occupy your Worship’s time by making a speech,” said
-Edward briefly. “I shall show you that Sullivan at the time the police
-appeared was smarting under the sense of a cowardly blow given by that
-wretched man Graham to his wife. When the police rushed in it was Graham
-they ought to have seized, not my client. But give a dog a bad name and
-hang him. But it is a most unfortunate thing that the police should have
-interfered and put poor Pat to his trial at the very time when there was
-some likelihood of his becoming a teetotaller and entirely amending his
-ways.”
-
-The Mayor pricked up his ears.
-
-“Eh, eh? What’s that you say, Mr. Beaumont—a teetotaller?”
-
-“Yes, your Worship, incredible as it may seem. Sullivan had yielded to
-the persuasion a young lady, who will give her evidence before you, and
-whose influence, I verily believe, was in a fair way to accomplish what
-your Worships can do neither by fine nor imprisonment. You shall hear
-the lady’s story. She is known in the Salvation Army as Sister
-Gertrude, and as many ladies of very good social position and education
-are engaged in this good work under these assumed titles, I shall ask
-the Bench to allow the witness to be sworn in that name.
-
-A hush fell upon the Court when Gertrude Fairfax entered the box, a
-thrill passed through it when her clear but sweet and soft voice spoke.
-Very quietly, almost timidly, with nothing of the self-assurance and
-glib loquacity one hears in so many of the public women speakers and
-that takes the bloom off their womanhood, she told to the Bench, with
-little prompting from Edward, the story with which we are already
-acquainted. Insensibly there arose before the minds of all who heard her
-the picture of this pure, delicately-nurtured maiden, seated in a vile
-den, surrounded by rough men, and slattern, vicious women, speaking to
-them words of loving counsel and pleading with them for their good; of
-Pat Sullivan, at first resentful, then subsiding into sulky silence,
-then interested, then touched, and at length moved to promise of
-amendment, the forgotten tenderness for his wife revived, the angel
-within the man rescued from the death of sensuality and self-indulgence.
-As she told her simple tale, women in the body of the Court sobbed
-aloud, and even the stolid policemen looked human. The Mayor, an
-emotional man, furtively used his handkerchief.
-
-Then, when Beaumont adroitly threw in the remark:
-
-“You are not, I believe, a paid officer in the Army, Sister Gertrude;
-why should you concern yourself about the reformation of Patrick
-Sullivan?”
-
-The witness paused for one short moment, and then, with utmost
-naturalness and naiveté, not as one quoting, but as speaking from her
-own heart, said quietly:
-
-“Wist ye not that I must be about Father’s business?”
-
-“That is the case for the defence, Sir,” Said Beaumont, with a bow
-to the Bench.
-
-“We cannot convict upon such testimony,” said the Mayor, after
-consulting his colleagues. “We only hope this will be a warning to
-Sullivan. He shall go scot free this time, may God help him to be a
-better man.”
-
-“The Clerk ought to say ‘Amen,’” muttered Sam Storth, “and
-then the thing would be complete. We’d turn the Court into a church
-and dedicate it to St. Barabbas.”
-
-“That was a narrow squeak for Master Sullivan,” said Beaumont to
-Sister Gertrude. He found her waiting at the Court door, as he passed
-out of it at the rising of the Court—to thank him, she said.
-“There’s nothing to thank me for. It’s you they’ve to thank.
-I’m afraid, if you are returning to Duskin’s Lodging House, you
-won’t find Pat there cultivating the domestic virtues. He’ll be
-celebrating his victory over the allied forces of the brutal and bloody
-Sassenach in his national beverage at the ‘Wheatsheaf.’ The police
-will keep a sharper eye on him than ever now, and I hope he won’t give
-them another chance yet awhile. We can’t hope for a Thomas Hoyleham
-and a Sister Gertrude in conjunction every day in the planetary system
-of police administration. However, sufficient for the day’s the evil
-thereof.”
-
-“I hope better things for Pat and Nelly, Mr. Beaumont. I know how
-difficult it will be for him and Nelly to struggle out of their present
-surroundings; but I have faith.”
-
-“Yes, you may have faith, Miss Fairfax; but I fear the surroundings
-will be stronger than your faith. I suppose environment has a lot to say
-to it. See! I don’t like the idea of Sullivan going and making a mess
-of it again after the way you’ve tried to save him. Can’t you get
-him and Nelly out of Duskin’s?”
-
-“It would be a help, of course. But environment isn’t everything,
-Mr. Beaumont.”
-
-They were walking slowly on the New Street now, and many turned to cast
-an envious and admiring glance at the well-known young lawyer and the
-beautiful, graceful figure that moved, _dea certe_, by his side.
-
-“Perhaps not. But it must be difficult to cultivate the domestic
-virtues—that was what we called them, I think?—at such a hole as
-Duskin’s. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Tell Nelly to find a small
-house somewhere near Sullivan’s work, and if you don’t mind getting
-them some furniture into it—you can go to Oldfield and tell him to
-send the bill in to me. We’ll give poor Pat a chance, anyway; but
-I’m afraid the sticks will find their way back to Oldfield before the
-month’s over. And now, good-bye, Miss Fairfax,” and Beaumont hurried
-away to avoid the thanks his companion was beginning to express.
-
-CHAPTER III.
-
-It was the beginning of the Long Vacation, and Edward Beaumont was
-asking himself how he should spend his holiday. Sam Storth had already
-elected for Scotland, and had amused his partner by appearing at the
-office in a tweed shooting suit, knicker-bockers and ribbed stockings
-and stout boots complete. Sam was breaking his suit in, so that by the
-time he reached the land of cakes it might be subtly suggestive of
-honourable service on the moors.
-
-“I don’t suppose you could hit a haystack if you tried, Sam,”
-Edward had commented, with an amused smile. “Practising in a shooting
-gallery at Huddersfield Fair at three shots a penny must be rather
-different from popping at grouse on their native heath.”
-
-“Well, I’m not going to pop at grouse on their native heath or
-anywhere else. When I tackle that toothsome bird give me a knife and
-fork, and I’m your man. But a fellow can’t go to Scotland, even if
-he doesn’t get further North than Princess Street in Auld
-Reekie—that’s the correct name for the town, isn’t it?—in a
-frock-coat and top hat. But here’s a letter for you marked
-‘Private.’ I’d nearly opened it with the office letters.”
-
-Beaumont looked at the envelope. There was a crest and motto on the
-flap. “_Forliter et leniter_, a lion rampant air scraping, I call it.
-What rot this heraldic tomfoolery is? Who the deuce can it be from?”
-
-“Better open it and see,” suggested Storth. Beaumont read the letter
-rapidly, then more carefully, and finally handed it to his partner.
-
-“Read it up, Sam. Who in the name of all that’s ecclesiastical is
-Hugh St. Clair, Archdeacon?”
-
-                                                         “The Vicarage,
-                                                          Caistorholm,
-                                                           Lincs.
-                                                         August 10, 188
-
-   “DEAR SIR,—
-   I am strongly recommended by my esteemed friend, Mr. Fortescue, to
-   seek your advice and professional assistance in a somewhat
-   complicated matter in which I am very seriously concerned.
-   Unfortunately, the absence of the Bishop on the Continent has thrown
-   an unusual stress of diocesan work upon me, and I cannot very well
-   pay a visit to Yorkshire at this juncture. Moreover, if you should
-   be disposed to undertake the protection of my interests, the matter
-   is such as to render a visit by you—probably, indeed, many visits—to
-   this neighbourhood, indispensable. May I suggest, then, that you
-   should accept the modest hospitality of the Vicarage for a few days.
-   If you can come, I hope you can come at a very early day. You will
-   find the route by Doncaster a convenient one, and if you will
-   apprize me of the time of your arrival, I will send the carriage to
-   meet your train. Believe me, Mr. Fortescue has spoken to me of you
-   in such terms that I hope your many engagements will not preclude
-   you from giving your valued time and attention to the affair in
-   which I hope to have the benefit of your advice.
-                                                    Yours faithfully,
-                                                       HUGH ST. CLAIR,
-                                                          Archdeacon.”
-
-“Who’s ‘my friend Mr. Fortescue’?” queried Beaumont. “Never
-heard of him in my life that I can remember. Tell you what, Sam, seems
-to me this letter’s missed its way. St. Clairs and Fortescues and
-crests and mottoes aren’t much in our line, eh? Memorandum heads from
-Plover Mills, Telephone address No.—is more our form. Yet here it is
-as plain as a pike-staff, ‘Edward Beaumont, Esq., solicitor,
-Huddersfield.’”
-
-“I fancy I’ve heard my reverend relative talk of a Fortescue he knew
-at Cambridge. I daresay that’s the way it’s worked round. Anyhow,
-assuming the letter’s for you, what do you mean to do? Go, of
-course.”
-
-“Well, no, Sam, I think not. You see, Archdeacons and I don’t
-assimilate somehow. Who was it that wondered how the old augurs and
-haruspices kept their faces when they saw each other? Well, I’m that
-way with parsons. Not that I ever came across a live Archdeacon. But I
-suppose he’ll be a cleric, double distilled. I think you’d better
-write and offer your own valuable services. Besides, it looks like
-chamber business, and that’s your department, you know.”
-
-“Well, I’m not having any, thank you, Beaumont. I pass this deal.
-I’ve no sort of fancy for passing a week in a country vicarage with a
-parson double-distilled or diluted. I know the kind of thing; family
-prayers at eight, croquet with the parsonettes till luncheon, cold
-mutton and rice pudding and small beer, inspection of the village school
-at three, yawn yourself to death till dinner, heavy joint, sodden
-pudding, cheap claret, family prayers again at ten, no beer, no baccy,
-no cards, unless its back-gammon or whist for penny points and no grog.
-A washed-out archdeaconess, gushing or prim daughters, a dozen of ’em,
-a cub of a son home from the local grammar-school, a noodle of a curate,
-and the devil and all to pay if you wink at the chambermaid. No thank
-you, Beaumont, you’re the man asked for, and ought to go. You can talk
-theology till you’re black in the face, and flirt mildly with the
-saintly misses, take it out of the curate generally, and perhaps shoot a
-rabbit or two if you fancy yourself with a gun,” concluded Sam,
-viciously.
-
-And so it came to pass that Edward Beaumont some three days later found
-himself in a market train crawling between Doncaster and Caisterholm,
-marvelling at the, to him, new and unaccustomed types he saw on the
-platforms or had for companions in his department—gentlemen farmers,
-with a horsey look, ponderous bucolics, farmers of their thousand acres,
-and slouching, sleepy peasants, with occasional glimpses of country
-Hebes, with tangled, tawny locks, blooming cheeks, cherry lips, dancing
-eyes of azure hue, bidding noisy farewells or boisterous greetings to
-bent and wrinkled parents as they left for or returned to their rural
-homes from domestic service in the colliery towns, where so many leave
-their roses and their innocency. As the train crept its leisurely way
-into the heart of the fen country, with its thorpes and long spires or
-hoary towers, its dykes and placid streams—the majestic Trent spanned
-and left many miles behind—its hazel groves, its clustered copses, its
-broad expanse of teeming soil, groaning in labour of the bearded barley
-and the golden wheat, Beaumont could scarcely realise that but a few
-hours’ journey had borne him from the rough, brown, bare, moor-crested
-hills of his home, with their streams all foul with the waste of the
-dye-pans, the sky greyed by the smoke of a legion of long and lean
-mill-chimneys, sallow, gaunt, eager-visaged, restless mill hands, rude
-and assertive of speech, clattering everywhere with clogged feet, all
-nerve, hurry, impatience, and irreverence. When he asked his
-whereabouts, and was told that the Parts of Holland lay to his left, he
-could have well-believed that he had slept and awoke in the flat land of
-Hans and Frau and schiedam. The talk, such as there was, of his
-companions for the first few miles had been of mangols and
-“’tates,” of beasts and calves, of tithes and rents, of bushels
-and loads, and the dreadful low prices ruling at the Corn Exchange in
-Doncaster. The farmers had talked with dreamy complacency of inevitable
-ruin, and seemed to be sheathing themselves in fat as they progressed
-comfortably to the Bankruptcy Court. There had been a good many
-clergymen travelling by the same train for short distances, and they
-seemed as learned in matters agricultural as their parishioners. One,
-indeed, had spoken of chemistry and scientific agriculture, and certain
-classes that were spoken of for the farmers, with professors from
-London, and the farmers had listened with tolerant contempt, but with
-the evident conviction that nothing was to be learned from gentlemen in
-London.
-
-“I went to one o’ the classes when I was staying with my missus’
-brother, Selby way. An’ if he didn’t talk of oxides an’ nitrates.
-If he’d ha’ talked about poor-rates and sheep scab there’d ha’
-been some sense in it.”
-
-Edward Beaumont did not anticipate his stay at Caistorholm Vicarage
-without some inward trepidation. To begin with, he did not quite know
-what manner of man an Archdeacon might be. He had a vague memory that
-Lord Palmerston had defined an Archdeacon to be a priest who discharged
-archidiaconal functions; but that did not seem to help him much. His own
-acquaintance among ministers of religion lay chiefly among the
-professors of dissenting doctrines with whom his political activities
-had brought him into contact on the Liberal Two Hundred and on
-platforms. He bethought him of two doctors of divinity of his own town,
-one a pillar of Congregationalism, a Scotchman, long, lean, ascetic, but
-a scholar; the other a Boanerges of the Baptist faith, loud, blatant,
-pushing, with an American degree. A week of either in the enforced
-companionship of a country house would be badly paid by any fee the most
-indulgent taxing-master would be likely to approve. But an Archdeacon!
-That might mean anything from a prince of the Church, haughty, dignified
-unconsciously patronizing, to a country vicar with a sounding title, but
-differing only from an educated farmer in the necessity of preaching a
-sermon a week to a sprinkling of clodhoppers and pensioners.
-
-“Anyhow, I won’t be patronized!” resolved Edward, as he drew near
-his destination. “If I find the place too much of a bore, or too much
-against the grain, I can either chuck the thing altogether or send
-Storth. He’s got a better stomach for spattle than I have, and if
-there’s a decent inn in the place, with a respectable tap, Master Sam
-will comfort himself o’ nights for the ennui of the days.”
-
-The station at Caistorholm seemed to consist of a platform and a wooden
-waiting-room, a porter’s-room, and a ticket-office. An aged
-station-master received his portmanteau, and told him a carriage from
-the Vicarage was waiting outside for a gent from Yorkshire. A steep
-flight of wooden steps led from the top of the embankment, on which the
-station stood, to the long, straight, chalky road outside—a Roman road
-Edward learned later, straight as an arrow’s flight, running mile
-after mile in undeviating line—“the shortest distance between two
-extreme points,” ruminated Edward. A neat dogcart was at the foot of
-the steps, a natty groom stood at the head of the mettlesome cob; the
-aged porter, descending the steps with difficulty, placed Edward’s
-portmanteau at the back of the phaeton, received a more liberal tip, as
-he reflected subsequently, than he was accustomed to receive from
-visitors to the Vicarage, and the mare, at a word, jumped to the collar,
-and the carriage bowled away. On each side the road a broad, unfenced
-ditch ran between the highway and the hedgerows that fenced the
-spreading acres of potatoes, cabbage, and turnip that spread on either
-side, far as the eye could reach, in one vast expanse of weary level,
-unbroken save by an occasional windmill, whose great wheels turned
-slowly with many a creak and groan in the warm autumn air.
-
-“These roads must be dangerous on a dark night,” suggested Beaumont,
-by way of breaking a silence that was becoming irksome.
-
-“Not when you knows the road, sir.”
-
-“The farmers hereabout must be a remarkably temperate sort of men!”
-
-“’Taint the farmers, sir, it’s the hosses. Give a hoss his head if
-you be o’ercome yourself, sir, an’ he’ll bring you home all right,
-never fear. That’s my advice.”
-
-“I don’t drive myself,” said Edward, smiling, “when I do I’ll
-remember your advice. Though I’m more by way of giving advice than
-taking it.”
-
-“Doctor Gummidge, sir, the young ’un, he hasn’t been in these
-parts above ten year or so. He take a deal aboard, he do, to be sure,
-an’ he never had a spill yet that I heerd tell on. If you can’t
-trust a hoss, sir, why, sell him or shoot him, that’s what I say.
-That’s the Vicarage, sir, between the trees. If you’ll hold the
-reins, I’ll open the gates of the drive. Woa, lass.”
-
-A wide, well-kept carriage drive swept up between fields of what Edward
-rightly surmised to be ancient glebe, in which a few sheep grazed
-placidly, lifting drowsy heads to gaze unconcernedly at the high
-stepping mare, a turkey, angrily suffused about the head, gobbled in
-indignant protest, and a peacock, with outspread tail, strutted
-resplendent. An Alderney whisked the flies from its back lazily as it
-chewed its cud. A sunk fence divided the paddocks from a large lawn,
-which, with flower beds of varied shape, rich in a declining bloom,
-extended to the long French windows of a massive, square, two-storied
-building of deep-toned, ruddy brick, about which the ivy and the
-honeysuckle climbed and clustered in rich luxuriance. At the trellised
-porch of the main entrance stood a tall, well-built, portly man of some
-sixty years. His face was full and clean-shaven, his teeth perfect, his
-hair, still abundant, snowy white. His broad shoulders, well thrown
-back, enabled him to bear without loss of dignity a becoming fullness of
-habit. The hand, which was extended in greeting to Edward, was plump,
-white, and soft, the voice refined and mellow.
-
-“You’re train was late, of course, Mr. Beaumont. If a train arrived
-punctually at Caistorholm we should expect a revival of miracles in the
-Church. You shall go to your room now, and we can have a chat in my
-study before dinner. We dine early, six o’clock. I hope you won’t
-find that too early for you; but you must try to put up with our country
-ways.”
-
-The ordinary dinner-hour at Huddersfield was one o’clock. At the club
-or hostelries at which Beaumont was fain to dine, if he wished for ought
-more than the chop or steak beyond which the culinary skill of his
-landlady seldom adventured, one o’clock was the sacred hour of dinner,
-and at that time the manufacturers, merchants, and professional men took
-their substantial mid-day meal. To be sure, there were occasional
-dinner-parties at private houses of the more pretentious of the
-_nouveaux riches_ of the neighbourhood, fixed for seven o’clock, at
-which the gentlemen were expected to appear arrayed in the correct
-glories of evening-dress, but Edward had always complied with an
-ill-grace to this sacrifice to middle-class snobbishness. He thought it
-ridiculous that people who, on three hundred and sixty days of the year,
-sat down at noon with healthy appetites to their Yorkshire pudding and
-roast beef, with pickled cabbage and apple-pie and cheese, and a glass
-of Burton to wash it down, should, on festive days, don a garb they were
-not used to, and in which they felt ill at ease, dine off kickshaws they
-did not care for, drink wines of which they hardly knew the names, and
-which they did not honestly like—all because, instead of dining, they
-were giving a dinner. However, he had brought a dress suit with him
-in—_utrurmque sortem paratus_, as he reflected with satisfaction. The
-library at the Vicarage was a capacious room, furnished in oak, and did
-service also as a smoke-room. It was a very choice Havana that the
-Archdeacon handed to his guest, as the latter joined him in the pleasant
-room, and stood to admire the prospect from the long French window
-giving upon the trim lawn.
-
-“I’m afraid you won’t find many books here much to your taste; but
-my daughter will perhaps be able to find you some literature of a
-lighter sort.”
-
-“I confess, Archdeacon, to a weakness for fiction. The mistress of my
-choice is, of course, law; but I flirt with divinity, or, should I say,
-apologetics, and I am afraid to think how many novels I read in the
-year.”
-
-“Ah! well, _dulce est desipere_. Unhappily I neglect my books too much
-in these latter days. And for some time now I have been unable to
-concentrate my mind even on my sermons, I suppose it is a just judgment
-on me. I preach to my poor flock on the sin of covetousness and the
-blessedness of contentment, and yet I have myself, though blessed by
-Providence with stores above my every need, have not known to be
-content, and have sought to add to my sufficiency. I say _mea culpa_
-with all my heart, and I promise you, Mr. Beaumont, if you can help me
-out of this coil, never again to entangle myself with concerns I do not
-understand, and which have brought me hitherto only anxious days and
-sleepless nights.”
-
-“Perhaps,” suggested Edward, “’t were as well that you should
-give me an outline of the matter on which you desire my assistance. I
-can afterwards consider the papers in detail, for I understand the
-affair is one of complexity.”
-
-“A perfect maze, I assure you, my dear sir. I was tenth wrangler of my
-year, and one would have thought I should know something about figures.
-But when I try to understand the books and accounts of the Skerne Iron
-Works Company, of which I am a director, I am as utterly befogged as if
-I had never heard of Todhunter or Colenso.”
-
-“Ah, well! happily I know something of book-keeping, so we may be able
-to unravel the skein. Now tell me all about it.”
-
-“What do you say to a little whisky and seltzer to your cigar—unless
-you prefer a dry smoke?”
-
-“If you will join me, Archdeacon.”
-
-“With all my heart. We have a couple of hours before the dressing-bell
-sounds. If whisky and rheumatism had been known to St. Paul, and
-Timothy’s complaint had not apparently been simply stomachic, no doubt
-the Pauline injunction would have been more comprehensive. But I am not
-for literal interpretation, Mr. Beaumont, are you?”
-
-“Assuredly not! We will apply the _cy pres_ doctrine. ’tis merest
-equity.”
-
-The Archdeacon looked puzzled, but passed the decanter.
-
-“It is some five years since I acquired my shares in the Skerne Iron
-Works. The concern had, according to all seeming, been a prosperous one
-for years. The three brothers who owned it were most respectable men,
-good churchmen, justices for the borough of G——, and, in a word,
-most respectable men. When they turned their business into a company,
-and sold out the greater part of their interest, I was easily persuaded
-to adventure a large part of my savings in the shares of the company. I
-was only getting a beggarly 4 per cent. on mortgage securities, and had
-often as much difficulty and delay in getting my interest as I still
-have in getting my tithes. But the Skerne shares showed 7 per cent., and
-the interest was to come as punctually as quarter-day itself. So it did
-for a year or so, and I congratulated myself on my prescience in making
-so excellent an investment. I assured myself that my dear daughter’s
-welfare was now secured, die when I might. Of course, as you know, my
-income with this living dies with me. My poor wife had some three
-thousand pounds of her own, which, by her will, she left to our child,
-and as I was sole trustee of it, I thought I could not do better than
-invest it along with my own money, and my daughter, of course, assented
-to my proposal.”
-
-“Was she of age?” asked Edward.
-
-“H’m, well, no; not at the time.”
-
-“Was the Skerne investment authorised by the terms of the will?”
-
-“Really I cannot say, and I don’t see that it matters. Of course,
-whatever I have is, or will be, my daughter’s some day.”
-
-“Quite so,” assented Beaumont. “Well?”
-
-“The shareholders made me a director,” continued the Archdeacon,
-“and for a time I took quite an eager interest in the work of the
-concern. It was quite delightful to drive over—it is but ten miles
-from here—and see the various processes. But after the first twelve
-months or so, instead of dividend warrants, I got calls, and that was
-not so pleasant, you know.”
-
-“Naturally,” agreed Edward. “What became of the three most
-respectable brothers?”
-
-“Two of them retired on the formation of the company. The elder
-continued for a time as managing director; but gradually, as I have
-ascertained, he, too, has almost entirely severed his connection, and
-his financial interest in the works is very slender. In fact, whilst I
-was eagerly acquiring more and more of the shares, Allcroft, that’s
-his name, was quietly but steadily getting rid of his.”
-
-“‘Unloading,’ I think it is called,” said Edward.
-
-“And a very good term, too. The worst of it is, in a sense, I not only
-put my own and my daughter’s money into the company, but persuaded a
-number of my brother clergymen to do the same. You see, Mr. Beaumont, an
-archdeacon has naturally a great deal of confidence reposed in him, and,
-I’m sure I can’t tell why, my brethren credited me with an amount of
-business capacity and astuteness, which it is quite clear I don’t
-possess.”
-
-“You ought to have smelt a rat when the Allcrofts unloaded. Depend
-upon it, they knew what they were about.”
-
-“Oh! they had very good reasons to give—family settlements, the
-desire to retire from business, and so on.”
-
-“You went into this thing, I suppose, largely on the advice of these
-Allcrofts?”
-
-“Entirely.”
-
-“Well, if I had thought their advice good enough to lead me into it, I
-think I should have considered their example still better to lead me
-out. However, you aren’t out, so it’s no use talking about that. But
-perhaps it’s not too late now. The shares will have fallen, but you
-might clear at a trifling loss.”
-
-“Rat, you mean?”
-
-“If you like, yes. A sinking ship’s not the best quarters.”
-
-“You forget, Mr. Beaumont, I told you many of my brother clergymen
-have invested in the Skerne Iron Works through my advice and influence,
-and, indeed, not a few others, widowed ladies chiefly of small means.
-And I cannot leave them in the lurch. I wish you to investigate the
-affairs of the Company, and to take such steps as may get me clear of it
-with honour and with as little loss as may be.”
-
-“I understand thoroughly, Archdeacon, and I shall have pleasure in
-doing my best to protect both your interest and your honour.”
-
-“And now, Mr. Beaumont, enough of business for to-day. It is time to
-dress, and we shall, no doubt, find my daughter expecting us in the
-drawing-room. Our neighbour, Squire Wright, is to dine with us to-day,
-I think.”
-
-Whilst the Vicar and his lawyer were in serious conference in the
-library. Miss Eleanor St. Clair was whiling away the tedious quarter of
-an hour before the dinner-bell with the only other guest of the evening.
-She was the Archdeacon’s only child, and he a widower for some years,
-and, since her mother’s death, the charge of the household had
-devolved upon daughter. Perhaps that fact had given to Eleanor a
-thoughtfulness and an air of authority beyond her years. Tall, raven of
-hair, of pure, pale the complexion, with dark orbs, full of life and
-intelligence, Eleanor moved with the easy grace of accustomed dignity.
-_Incessit regina_. Related on her mother’s side to the noble house of
-Yarborough, she did not forget that her grandfather was an earl, and it
-is possible she was equally well aware that the coronet of a countess
-would sit becomingly upon the smooth, white brow borne so proudly above
-her long but rounded neck, and the white smooth shoulders her simple
-costume of to-night rather hinted than revealed.
-
-Her companion, Squire Wright, was the largest landowner, except perhaps
-the noble family aforesaid, for miles around. He said, and believed,
-that when Norman William came to the fens, a Wright was a Saxon Thane,
-and lord of many a wide-spreading demense, and that, from that day to
-this, Thoresby Manor had never been without a squire of his family
-sprung in direct line from the stout old Thane, who had dealt his shrewd
-knocks against the mailed warriors on Senlac’s fatal field. One felt
-little disposed to question the genealogy, looking at the present
-representative of the ancient line. George Wright was a well-set,
-stalwart man, of some thirty summers. His hair was flaxen, and curled
-closely to his head, his short beard and moustache were of flax, rudded
-by the sun, his shoulders were broad, his chest deep, his cheeks full,
-his eye of pale blue—a healthy, manly young Saxon, and good to look
-upon. For the rest, was he not in the commission of the peace, had a
-troop in the Yeomanry, riding to the annual inspection at the head of
-his own tenantry, could give a good account of himself among the
-partridges, and was so good a judge of a horse or a bullock that he was
-one of the judges at the County Cattle Show, and if not especially
-brilliant, was also not especially stupid; and if he had sowed any wild
-oats had sowed them discreetly and without scandal; was regular in his
-church-going, a steady supporter of the Crown, the Church, and the
-finest constitution in the world, and had no silly fads. He was an easy
-landlord, and, therefore, popular; his estate was unencumbered, and
-there were no sisters or younger brothers to provide for, and as it was
-now full time in everybody’s opinion, his own included, that he should
-marry and settle down, he told himself to-night for the thousandth time,
-that the country for once was right when it declared that no more
-gracious nor more beautiful nor more worthy a mistress for Thoresby
-Grange could be found, search where he might, than the Archdeacon’s
-queenly daughter.
-
-“We have a visitor, George, from Yorkshire. Papa thought he could not
-very well do otherwise than ask him to stay at the Vicarage; though,
-I’m sure, if he’s at all like that horrid Mr. Shaw, he would have
-been much more at home at the ‘Marquis of Granby’ than with us.”
-
-“And why should he be like ‘that horrid Shaw,’ Eleanor? Though
-Shaw is right enough for anything I can see. What’s the matter with
-Shaw, and why should your visitor be like him?”
-
-“Mr. Shaw always smells of gin and tobacco, and our visitor, like him,
-is a solicitor.”
-
-“Phew! a solicitor, and from Yorkshire? But, then, there are no doubt
-solicitors and solicitors; though I confess I don’t like the breed. No
-trouble of the Archdeacon’s, I hope.”
-
-“Something to do with the Iron Works, I fancy. Papa, I know, has been
-very much troubled about them. You know I hate business, and understand
-it as little as I dislike it much. Whatever could have induced papa to
-meddle with those dirty works I can’t conceive.”
-
-“Well come to that I’ve got a few shares in the Iron Works myself,
-Eleanor. The Archdeacon said it would be a good thing. I’m not in very
-deep, but I’m afraid your father has invested pretty considerably in
-the shares. Indeed, I know he has taken over shares from people who
-bought on his recommendation, and very foolishly insisted on giving them
-the price they gave, though the shares are down in the market.”
-
-“Well, I only hope this Mr. Beaumont, I think they call him, will take
-some of the creases out of papa’s brow. He may smell of gin and
-tobacco as much as he likes, and I’ll be monstrous civil to him, if
-he’ll do that, and I expect you to be the same, sir. But here they
-come.”
-
-If either Eleanor St. Clair or Squire Wright had any idea of being
-condescendingly polite to the lawyer from Yorkshire, the idea was
-banished as Edward Beaumont acknowledged the Archdeacon’s introduction
-to his daughter, and made his bow before his hostess. If Edward had not
-mixed much in polite society—as the world counts polite society—he
-knew its usages. Without being conceited, he knew himself to be as well
-educated, in the broad sense of the word, as most men, and he was very
-far from feeling disposed to cringe before either Church dignitary or
-landed magnate. The Archdeacon, indeed, accustomed to the smooth
-deference of the suave attorneys of the cathedral town who did the
-business of the clergy of the county, had been surprised and pleased to
-find in his guest not only a shrewd, well-informed lawyer, but a scholar
-and a gentleman, who took it for granted that he would be received in
-the Archdeacon’s house on the footing of any other guest.
-
-The dinner-gong sounded as the introductions ended, and Edward with Miss
-St. Clair on his arm, followed his host and the Squire into the
-dining-room.
-
-“You’ve not seen enough of our county, yet, to tell us how it
-impresses you, Mr. Beaumont, and I don’t know anything of Yorkshire,
-except that it is mostly moors and mills. Huddersfield, I suppose, is
-all smoke and mills?”
-
-“We’ve mills enough in and about the town, but we haven’t much to
-complain about in the matter of smoke. For one thing, the surrounding
-hills are so lofty, and the moors on their summits so extensive, that
-the breezes sweep down the valleys or over our heads, and of a summer
-day you can stand in the main street of the town and see above your head
-sky as blue and as little obscured by smoke as looks down upon your fat
-pastures and rustling cornfields. You must go to Sheffield for smoke,
-not Huddersfield.”
-
-“But your people,” said the Squire. “They’re a rascally set of
-malcontents, I have always understood—Chartists, atheists, and
-Communists.”
-
-Edward laughed pleasantly.
-
-“I am by way of telling our people they are the most intelligent and
-the most independent in the world. I’ve no doubt, though, there are
-some Chartists among them, or those who were Chartists in their youth.
-As for Republicans, well, you know, we go in for practical measures up
-our way and leave Utopias to the dreamers. As Pat at Donnybrook Fair, if
-he sees a head he hits it; so we just hit the abuses we see.”
-
-“But aren’t the mill-hands, generally speaking, a very godless set
-of men?” asked the Archdeacon. “I have always looked on my brother
-clergymen who accept livings or curacies in the West Riding more as
-missionaries than incumbents, and, indeed, they tell fearful tales of
-the irreverence and slackness of the common people in the manufacturing
-towns. Dissent, we know, is simply rampant in the West Riding.”
-
-“I should scarcely have regarded dissent as a sign of want of
-spirituality,” said Edward, with a quiet smile. “I have always
-regarded it as a rather disagreeable sign of excessive
-spirituality—religion run mad.”
-
-“But the mills, Mr. Beaumont,” interposed Miss St. Clair, who,
-perhaps, thought the conversation was tending in a direction best
-avoided. “One reads stories of the awful lives of the factories. It
-must be so wretched to live all the weary days amid the din of the
-wheels and the fluff and dirt and grease of the wool.”
-
-“If you were to stand, Miss St. Clair, as I have often stood, of a
-dark and wintry night on the ridge of one of our valleys, and looked
-down upon the great mills, their windows all glowing with light, and
-heard from within the deep voices of the men, and the sweet, pure,
-trained notes of the women and the girls, blended in some well-known
-hymn, or even taking their parts in some familiar and more complex song,
-you would not think the weaver’s lot a very wretched one. Depend upon
-it, there’s a lot of poetry in a mill, only we haven’t yet been
-happy enough to produce a poet. But I profess it is strange to find you
-commiserating our mill-hands. We in the West Riding have always thought
-it was the poor hinds of the country who called for commiseration. I
-don’t know that we regard Huddersfield as an Athens of the North, but
-we certainly have thought of parts of Lincolnshire as a sort of Baotia.
-I’m afraid we have been wasting a lot of very genuine sympathy.
-Perhaps I don’t know much about Hodge. I hope to know more before I
-leave Lincolnshire. May I hope Miss St. Clair will be my
-instructress?”
-
-“Confound his impudence!” thought the Squire. “Do you hunt, Mr.
-Beaumont?”
-
-“No! our’s is not a hunting district. Besides, I haven’t the time
-for it.”
-
-“You shoot, of course?”
-
-“Oh! I’ve knocked over a grouse or a hare or two. But, to tell the
-truth, I am no sportsman. When I go on the moors I’d rather lie down
-in the sun and admire the view than blaze away at the birds. And as for
-sport, rather badger a witness than hunt a fox, any day.”
-
-“We can’t all badger a witness,” suggested Eleanor.
-
-“Besides, a fox likes the run as much as the hounds do.”
-
-“So I’ve heard,” conceded Edward; “but never from the lips of
-Monsieur Reynard. I never heard of a witness enjoying badgering. But,
-there, I’m no sportsman, only because I can’t get sport
-conveniently—I’m no sentimentalist.”
-
-“It’s marvellous,” said the Archdeacon, “what a lot of
-‘anti-everything’ people there are. You have nothing to do nowadays
-but declare you like something, and a society is sure to be formed to
-put it down. There are people who won’t smoke, or drink a glass of
-good wine, or honest beer, or eat flesh meat, or play a hand at whist,
-or go near a racecourse, or handle a gun, or touch a cue. It is
-Puritanism run mad.”
-
-“They’re generally a set of low Radical Methodists,” opined the
-Squire. “You never find such absurd fads among Church people.”
-
-“Of course not,” agreed the Archdeacon. “All the same,” demurred
-Edward, “I don’t see the connection between sound doctrine and roast
-beef, or between Church polity and a hand at whist.”
-
-“It’s a mental habit, my dear sir,” explained the cleric. “A man
-begins by dissenting from the Church of his fathers, and by a natural
-process begins to question their diet.”
-
-“Depend upon it,” said Wright, with conviction, the battles of Old
-England were never fought, nor its empire built, on carrots and cold
-water. Look at your Frenchman.”
-
-“I’ve known some very charming French-women,” protested Edward.
-
-“We spent a month in Paris last autumn,” said the Archdeacon, “and
-I hadn’t a decent meal all the time I was there.”
-
-“Oh! Papa!” protested Eleanor. “The cooking is exquisite.”
-
-“A woman doesn’t understand cooking,” declared her father. “It
-is well known that if the matter had been left to Eve, we should never
-have progressed beyond tea and bread and butter.”
-
-“At any rate, Eve invented costumes,” suggested Edward. “The
-Palais-Royal was founded in Eden.”
-
-“Don’t speak disrespectfully of Eden,” said the Archdeacon.
-
-“I don’t. ’tis there we meet the first lawyer.”
-
-“You mean the serpent.”
-
-“_Teste_ Coleridge,” said Beaumont. “You remember the lines, Miss
-St. Clair?—
-
-    ‘Cain and his brother Abel.’”
-
-“I never knew before how much we have to reproach you with, Mr.
-Beaumont.”
-
-“But if there had been no lawyers there would have been
-no—Archdeacons, shall we say?”
-
-“Oh, then, we’ll forgive them for the sake of the Archdeacons. You
-won’t keep me sitting by myself in the drawing-room too long, papa,”
-and Miss St. Clair swept through the door which Beaumont opened. “I
-declare we women have always to leave the table by the time men find
-their tongues.”
-
-“’Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance,”
-quoted Edward, as he bowed before her.
-
-“Fill up your glass, Wright,” said the Archdeacon. “That
-Burgundy’s all right, if you prefer it. But I’m for the
-vintage—what does our Lincolnshire bard sing?—
-
-    ‘Whose father grape grew fat
-    In Lusitanian summers.’
-
-Did you see the _Standard_ this morning, Mr. Beaumont? I see the rumour
-grows more persistent that Gladstone may dissolve any day. He will go to
-the country, of course, on the Extension of the Franchise?”
-
-“And Parish Councils,” added Beaumont.
-
-“Cursed rot,” muttered the Squire. “That man will ruin the
-country. See if he don’t disestablish and disendow you, Archdeacon,
-before he dies.”
-
-“Mr. Gladstone’s a good Churchman, I always understood,” demurred
-Edward.
-
-“He’d rob his grandmother for power,” vowed the Squire.
-
-“Perhaps Mr. Beaumont is an admirer of his?” queried his host.
-
-“My grandfather was a Whig, my father a Liberal, and you may write me
-down a——”
-
-“‘Not an ass,’ that’s the correct quotation, I believe.”
-
-“No! a Radical.”
-
-“That’s worse!” said the Squire, with emphasis.
-
-“Radical lawyers are _raræaves_ are they not, Mr. Beaumont?” asked
-the Archdeacon.
-
-“Black swans. Black enough, I suppose, Mr. Wright thinks. Well, yes,
-in the country, men of my branch of the profession are generally
-Conservative. I don’t know why, except it be that they have the sense
-to know on which side their bread is buttered.”
-
-“Of course,” said the Squire; “the law and the land.”
-
-“But in my town,” said Edward, “there’s only one landlord and we
-can’t all live on him. But we manage to butter our bread pretty well
-all the same.”
-
-“No more wine, Mr. Beaumont? Then we’ll see if Miss St. Clair can
-give us a cup of tea.”
-
-CHAPTER IV.
-
-The time passed very pleasantly at Caistorholm Vicarage. Edward rose
-betimes each morning, and was often deep immersed in the intricacies of
-the Skerne Iron Works Company’s accounts long before his host had
-quitted his downy bed, and could with clear conscience enter into those
-delights of country-life that were to him all the sweeter because
-unaccustomed. The glories of the Vicarage garden were on the wane, but
-its orchard was prepared to yield its juicy fruits. The fields were fast
-ripening for the sickle. The great calm and hush of those pastoral
-scenes stole over his senses like a young child’s sleep. There were no
-revelries, but there was constant interest. The Archdeacon had suggested
-a dinner-party, but Edward had been so emphatic in his declarations of
-preference for quiet, the project had been abandoned. A neighbouring
-vicar or rector dropped in occasionally for luncheon, and was easily
-persuaded to stay for dinner. Edward had, at first, spoken rarely and
-with reserve about matters social and political—doctrine was avoided
-by common consent. Strange, one may pass a month in a clergyman’s
-house and never hear religion discussed. Presumably the household has so
-long taken fundamental dogma for granted that the possibilities of wide
-divergence amounting to repudiation is not so much as thought of. Edward
-saw with amaze men of unquestioned scholarship and intelligence equally
-indisputably above the average grow warm and excited in discussing the
-Eastward position, incense, lights, stoles, birettas, man millinery
-generally. He itched to tell them that the vast bulk of those who should
-be their flock didn’t care a brass farthing about genuflexions or
-ecclesiastical trappings. What the human soul yearns to understand is
-the Divine rule and ordinance, if rule and ordnance there be and not
-blind chaos; to know if man be indeed _Imaginis Imago_, or but the last
-if not the final link of a chain long drawn out with a protoplasm at one
-end of it; if there is indeed and in very sooth a God our Father, who
-sees and loves and can be moved by prayer, if man have in truth an
-immortal spirit or is like unto the beasts that perish; if it be true
-that after death comes the judgement, when the gross inequalities of
-this world shall be made right and virtue shall indeed reign. Edward
-knew, as any man with ears to hear may know, that the avowed scepticism
-of mankind is a mere speck of dust compared with the huge mass of
-practical perhaps unconscious, infidelity that pervades society. It
-filled him with impatient scorn that men who should be leaders of
-thought, able to give counsel and enlightenment to those who grope in
-darkness, should spend the priceless years in mumbling twaddling
-homilies and in agitated harassment about stage effects. He could not
-interest himself in the question how far a beneficed incumbent may go on
-the road to Rome without jeopardising his living. He longed to tell
-these clerical traitors who let “I dare not wait upon I would,” that
-in this country any man worth his salt, who had a message to give, need
-not be uneasy about the forthcoming of the salt. He could go back to
-Yorkshire, he reflected sardonically, and find a score of half-educated
-weavers who had borne hunger and thirst, imprisonment, and stripes for
-conscience sake, and were ready to do it again and glory in the doing.
-But, then, hunger and thirst and imprisonment and stripes are one thing
-to a man to whom hunger and thirst and oppression are the daily lot, and
-quite another to a sleek, soft man who basks in the sunshine all his
-days and counts himself piteously poor and an object of commiseration
-on five hundred a year. “Why, don’t you all turn dissenters?” he
-asked of a clerical party one evening, as they lingered over the desert.
-“You all find fault with your Bishop. The poor man can apparently do
-nothing right. If you were dissenting ministers you would be your own
-bishops.”
-
-“I fancy, my dear Beaumont, the dissenters have their Trust deeds.”
-
-“Oh, Trust deeds—a fico for your Trust deeds. They talk about
-driving a coach and six through an Act of Parliament—why, a regiment
-of soldiers could walk through a Trust deed. ’Tis an instrument as
-little resorted to for the purpose of torture in a Nonconformist church
-as the thumbscrew in the Tower of London. Besides a man isn’t a
-fixture in a Dissenting Church. When he has talked himself dry, or made
-more enemies than friends, he can always change pulpits with another
-fellow who has talked himself dry or made more enemies than friends.”
-
-“There are our social status and influence to be considered,” said a
-sucking young curate just emerged from the Bishop’s Hostel. “Our
-mere position invests us with a sacred authority never wielded by a mere
-dissenter.”
-
-“Your social position is largely the result of social factors. The
-Established Church draws its ministers mainly from families socially
-established, and they receive not only the education and culture, but
-also the social stamp of Oxford or Cambridge. The dissenting parson is
-often the son of a grocer or a shoemaker, and receives a surface polish
-and a surfeit of theology at a training college, but seldom loses the
-smell of the ancestral shop. Your clergyman is a gentleman first, a
-clergyman afterwards. Turn all your well-born scholars into Methodists,
-and your half-educated social inferiors into the Church, and you would
-reverse the present social positions of the established and the
-nonconforming divines.”
-
-“Then you think our present social superiority, and therefore our
-greater influence for good, for, of course, it is only to be valued for
-that, is a matter of birth and education.”
-
-“Largely, but not entirely. You see, your present status is official.
-You owe your posts directly or indirectly to the Crown. You are part of
-the machinery of the State. And it is surprising how mere officialism
-and the possession of authorised and acknowledged titles impress the
-popular imagination in this country. You see it all through. Dub a man
-M.A. or LL.D., and the general man will persist in thinking him a better
-scholar than another who far surpasses him, but has not received the
-hall-mark of a University. So put a man in uniform with epaulettes and
-dub him an officer. He bears a social cachet, though he may be a
-poltroon and a blackguard. It is largely an affair of clothes and names
-and State-connection. You clergymen, if you really care about retaining
-your social importance, would commit social suicide if you got
-yourselves disestablished, even if you retain those endowments and other
-fleshpots you are so concerned about, but which appear to me the element
-you could most easily compensate under a system of voluntaryism.”
-
-“Then you think, Mr. Beaumont,” asked the Rector of Fillingham,
-“our policy is to let well alone?”
-
-“Yes, if you’re let. I think if I were an incumbent with a fat
-living I could swallow my bishop and make no bones about it. Remember
-the dissenting parsons have their deacons, and I can conceive of nothing
-more galling than for a man of principle and education to have to trim
-his sails to suit the views of a coarse, uneducated deacon with all the
-soul of a village tyrant, just because he happens to have more money
-than some of the humbler worshippers. I should preach either him or
-myself out of the conventicle.”
-
-“Ah! he would be your bishop,” laughed the Archdeacon.
-
-“Those dissenters are just the plague of my life,” confided one of
-the country vicars from a neighbouring parish. “Just fancy, Mr.
-Beaumont, there aren’t five hundred families in all my parish, and yet
-there is besides mother church, a Wesleyan chapel, a Congregational and
-a Baptist. It turns my modest glass of wine and my crust to gall and
-ashes when I think of it.”
-
-“Oh! I know something of the feeling, Vicar. You don’t suppose I
-like to see people taking their cases to the man next door, who, I am
-persuaded is not half so fine a fellow as I am. But you can’t go
-begging for communicants, any more than I can go touting for clients.
-Besides, what does it matter in which church a man saves his soul alive,
-so long as it is saved. _Ut palata, sic judicia_ is of universal
-application.”
-
-“Ah! but can a man be saved outside the true Church?” asked the
-young curate from the Bishop’s Hostel.
-
-“That’s a question the next Roman Catholic parish priest might have
-something to say about,” rejoined Edward. “Anyway, people seem
-willing to risk it. Don’t you think, Archdeacon, instead of trying to
-filch flocks from the folds, the shepherds of the Church could find
-quite enough to do in casting their crooks about those wandering sheep
-that are utterly lost in the wilderness?”
-
-“Pray condescend to particularise, Mr. Beaumont,” begged his host.
-
-“Well, a day or two before I came down here a vulgar case, of which I
-need not trouble you with the details, gave me a glimpse of the workings
-of the Salvation Army.”
-
-“A most valuable institution, no doubt,” said the Archdeacon.
-
-“Yes,” said Edward, “but you will pardon my saying—why a
-Salvation Army at all? Here are more than half our churches and chapels
-with yawning pews, and out in the street are crowds of earnest
-enthusiasts following a dancing Dervish and a big drum.”
-
-“You wouldn’t have me dancing in my cassock through Caisterholm, and
-the parish clerk or verger tinkling a tambourine?”
-
-“Well, no. But, after all, if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet,
-Mahomet must go to the mountain. And that’s just General Booth’s
-secret.”
-
-“A very latitudinarian young man,” commented one vicar to another,
-as they jogged home together in the still autumnal evening through the
-fragrant hedgerows. “Whatever did St. Clair mean by taking advice from
-a man like him. But the man may be a good lawyer for all that, and I
-won’t look too closely at his Church principles if he’ll pull my
-good sovereigns out of those infernal Skerne blasts.”
-
-The Archdeacon himself, before Beaumont had been a week under his roof,
-had conceived not only a high opinion of his guests’ acumen and legal
-attainments, but also a warm regard for himself personally. Their very
-points of difference seemed to enhance the pleasure the cleric found in
-the lawyer’s society and conversation. It is true they approached
-almost every subject from an entirely different point of view, and
-therein lay constant danger of friction or collision. But Edward had
-ever a seemly consideration for his senior in years and a ready
-concession of whatever deference the Archdeacon’s ecclesiastical
-dignity reasonably demanded. There is, perhaps, nothing so well designed
-as practice in the Courts to develop in a man a happy blending of due
-submission to authority with the respectful but unflinching assertion of
-one’s own opinions. The Archdeacon declared in later years that it was
-as great a pleasure to be routed in argument by Beaumont as to prevail,
-for the fellow had a sweet reasonableness about him that took away the
-sting of defeat, and almost persuaded the vanquished that he himself was
-victor. The elder man was fond of controversy if it were not pushed too
-far, of debate if it were conducted decently. It was an intellectual
-treat to meet a man with the generous enthusiasm of youth and with ideas
-outside the narrow range with which a country clergyman, whose only
-associates are clergymen like unto himself, must, almost perforce, be
-content. Though not so disputative as the man who repined because the
-very wife of his bosom was ceasing to contradict him, the Archdeacon
-wearied at times of speaking _ex cathedra_ Moreover, in a society drawn
-almost exclusively from one’s fellows controversy lacked not only
-variety of interest but variety of treatment. No doubt the smooth
-serenity of a soundly Conservative orthodoxy was an excellent thing, but
-the Vicar of Caistorholm confessed to himself that Beaumont’s radical
-heterodoxy, if a disturbance, was one that acted as a mental tonic and
-wholesome fillip. Exercise is a disturbance; but it is recommended for
-the liver. Mr. St. Clair acknowledged with a sigh that, intellectually
-and spiritually, life at Caistorholm might be serene, but it was
-unquestionably sluggish.
-
-“We touched on Disestablishment the other evening,” he said one day
-to Edward, as they walked together in the peaceful afternoon of a mellow
-autumn day about the Vicarage gardens; “I did not encourage you to
-pursue the subject, because some of our friends are very sensitive on
-that topic. To us clergymen, you know, the Church is as the Ark to the
-Levites, not to be touched by unholy hands.”
-
-“Well,” said Edward, smiling, “I’ve no mind to bring upon myself
-the fate of Uzzah—at all events, I must avoid it whilst I am at the
-Vicarage. Percz-Uzzah is not near so pretty a name as Caistorholm.”
-
-“But though I did not think it desirable to discuss the question when
-some of my friends were present who are, I fear, too apt to confound
-persons and principles and to think suspiciously, if not evilly, of a
-man who differs from them as widely as I know you do, I hope you will
-not conclude I shrink from discussing it. Nay, I confess, I should like
-to know your views on the question more at large, for then we of the
-Order should at least know how we appear to the outer world and learn
-the worst we have to expect.”
-
-“To tell the truth, Mr. St. Clair, it is a question I have little at
-heart. It has always seemed to me more an affair between Church and
-Chapel than one that concerns the masses very largely. And, you see, if
-I’m but an indifferent Churchman I’m just as bad a Chapel man.
-Indeed, so far as I can see, a Chapel man is only an average
-Trinitarian, plus envy, indocility, and cant. In the abstract, of
-course, I certainly think the Establishment cannot be justified to-day
-whatever might have been said for it, at the reformation, say. As for
-your endowments, I think the nonconforming envy of them simply
-contemptible, and the claim that they ought to be applied to national
-education, free libraries, art galleries, etc., a mere pretence. If John
-Bull wants art galleries he can afford to pay for them without taking
-the coat off your back. No! I don’t feel like slapping you in the
-face, Archdeacon, just to pleasure the Rev. Josiah Boanerges, who would
-have no objection to be snugly endowed himself. Frankly, I don’t think
-the Church will fall from any blows that may be dealt from without. Its
-danger lies in the dry-rot that is silently but surely Consuming the
-inner rafters and supports.”
-
-“Dry rot, my dear Beaumont!”
-
-“Yes, dry-rot. If I speak at all you must let me speak frankly, and
-you know I do not want to wound your sensibilities. Burns, after all,
-was foolish to sigh for the gift to see ourselves as others see us. It
-might from ‘mony a faultie free us and sair mistake’; but it would
-so rudely and so constantly shake our serenity that life would not be
-worth the living. Let us change the subject, Archdeacon.”
-
-“Well, I’ll tell you frankly enough the great danger of the Church.
-You know it is a common lament that your services, in the towns, I mean,
-attract the women, not the men?”
-
-The Vicar bowed a silent assent.
-
-“Now, how do you account for it, Mr. St. Clair?”
-
-“I can only suggest spiritual indifference.”
-
-“Nay, I cannot subscribe to that. Take my town. Let a good speaker be
-announced to deliver an address on political or social questions he can
-fill the Town Hall with men and women, mostly men, of every
-grade—clergy men, dissenting ministers, lawyers, doctors,
-manufacturers, merchants, shop-keepers; and working-men.”
-
-“Yes, but that is to hear about worldly affairs, Beaumont, not
-heavenly. Your lecturers deal with to-day and here. I speak of to-morrow
-and there.”
-
-“Ah! well, Archdeacon, I think you will find if a man is anxious about
-setting matters right to-day and here he will not be indifferent about
-to-morrow and there. But you must satisfy him there is a to-morrow and
-there.”
-
-“But that is of course.”
-
-“To you, yes. But to how many? I don’t judge men by their
-professions or their creeds. I judge them by their acts. And so judged I
-conclude that for most men to-day and here are very real, to-morrow and
-there are very visionary, very problematical; so distant, so uncertain,
-as to be a negligible quantity.”
-
-“Then you would have us?”
-
-“I would have the Church remember that we live in a questioning age,
-an age when the fact of an institution or an opinion being hoary with
-age, so far from rendering it secure from investigation rather makes it
-an object of suspicion. We have found our forefathers wrong in so many
-things, and we have improved on them so much, that we have lost our
-confidence in their judgment. The Church drones about things nobody
-questions I mean what Matthew Arnold calls ‘right conduct,’ what you
-call ‘righteousness’; it dogmatises, I mean asserts positively or
-takes for granted things which an increasing number of intelligent men
-are very far indeed from taking for granted. Men will no more endure
-being droned to about right conduct than they will submit to having it
-eternally dinned into their ears that twice two makes four. They cry you
-‘granted.’ They go to Church for bread and you give them a stone.
-They seek for guidance and assurance, if guidance and assurance there
-may be, on matters you have made a special study, and instead of showing
-them how to be sure, you only tell them that you are sure.”
-
-“What more can we do? People don’t believe, because their hearts are
-corrupt, and they don’t want to believe. If anyone wish to know the
-truth let him seek it on his knees. ‘The wind bloweth where it
-listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whither it
-cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the
-Spirit.’”
-
-“Possibly,” said Edward, dryly. “We quote authorities in the Law
-Courts, Mr. St. Clair; but, you see, they are of acknowledged validity
-there. The suitors in our Courts are bound by the law they seek to
-invoke, and submit themselves to the jurisdiction when they enter their
-plaints. You see, the whole point is that, to-day, you have to deal with
-honest doubters who deny the authority of your authority, and your only
-answer is a _petitio principis_. But I see Miss St. Clair is ready for
-her expedition to the village, and I am to have the honour of
-accompanying her.”
-
-The Archdeacon looked thoughtfully at the figures of his daughter and
-guest, as, side by side, apparently in gay converse, they passed down
-the Vicar’s Walk that led through orchard and paddock, past the hoary
-church and mouldering churchyard into the road that led to the
-straggling rows of peasants’ and small farmers’ houses, with here
-and there a shop, that constitute the village of Caistorholm. He could
-not fail to observe that Eleanor took pleasure in the lawyer’s
-company, that her glance had been brighter, her face happier of late.
-Mr. St. Clair was glad that Edward’s stay at the Vicarage should be
-made pleasant to him, and that his daughter should find a visit that
-might have developed into a visitation an agreeable break in the
-monotony of rural life. It was, of course, eminently satisfactory that
-the stranger whom he had been advised to consult and to trust in a
-matter of the very gravest importance should turn out to be not only a
-sound and reliable lawyer and a shrewd business man, but also a
-well-educated, well-read man, with the manners of a gentleman. Mr. St.
-Clair’s acquaintance with solicitors was chiefly confined to the
-urbane practitioners who dealt in advowsons or were learned in
-dilapidations, and with them he had permitted himself rather a
-condescending affability. From the first he had recognised that he could
-not patronise Beaumont, and had enjoyed the discomfiture and amazement
-with which Squire Wright had retired from his attempt in that direction,
-and which had so affected him that he had given the Vicarage a wide
-berth ever since. But Mr. St. Clair told himself that, after all, he
-knew very little about Beaumont. His old college friend, Fortescue, had
-told him that he had heard the best accounts of Beaumont’s successful
-conduct of a difficult and delicate matter, in which a mutual friend had
-been embroiled, and on his recommendation, and not without some natural
-hesitation, he had invited Edward to his home, feeling that he would
-rather confide to a stranger living at a distance than to a Lincoln
-lawyer the whole story of what he was now fully persuaded had been his
-very foolish, nay, reckless speculations in the Skerne shares. With
-Edward as a legal adviser he felt that he had more than reason to be
-satisfied, and he had enjoyed his conversation and the interchange of
-thought not a little. But he noticed with anything but satisfaction that
-Edward had made his conversation very acceptable to the stately Eleanor,
-who was not easily pleased. Not one afternoon passed but the young
-people found some occasion for being together—a round of parochial
-visits in which Edward carried the basket, and supplemented Eleanor’s
-tracts with covert half-crowns to rheumatic and asthmatical pensioners;
-a drive in Eleanor’s pony-carriage to some object of antiquarian
-interest, an ancient tower or a ruined church—who does not know the
-devices by which the tedium of the country is enlivened for the visitor
-from the towns?
-
-On these excursions the Archdeacon felt he could not, even privately to
-his daughter, put an embargo, without giving them an importance which
-they might not deserve, and even suggesting to his daughter’s mind
-ideas that might never lodge there unless suggested. To be sure, the
-Archdeacon might accompany the young folk on these jaunts; but the
-archdeacon, like many less exalted individuals, liked to take his ease
-of an afternoon, and found himself on all the better terms with himself
-and mankind in general for forty winks in the armchair of his study,
-after luncheon of an afternoon, when it was a matter of faith in the
-household that he was meditating his next Sunday sermon, and must on no
-account be disturbed.
-
-And so it came about that if Edward spent many a long hour with the
-father over the wearying and irritating concerns of the Iron Works, or
-holding forth, as was his wont, upon topics of more general interest,
-sometimes startling, sometimes alarming, but always interesting the
-Vicar, he spent also hours that seemed neither long, tedious, nor
-irritating with Eleanor St. Clair, when we may be sure the subjects of
-conversation were neither law nor theology nor commerce.
-
-“This kind of thing, Miss St. Clair, is idyllic,” said Beaumont.
-“I have always had my mental picture of the Lady Bountiful of a
-village. She must, of course, be beautiful, with a soft, musical, tender
-voice, a heart quick to feel, and a soft and lily-white hand quick to
-help. Her path is strewn beneath her feet with the heartfelt blessings
-of the poor and afflicted. She moves a ministering angel among the
-hovels of the destitute.”
-
-“Ah! now, Mr. Beaumont, you are laughing at me. Surely you would have
-me help the sick and needy.”
-
-“It is the most priceless prerogative of the rich, and if I seem to
-mock I hasten to cry _peccavi_. But, seriously, this kind of parochial
-charity is but a dainty dilettantism, and you engage in it, Miss St.
-Clair, I beg you to confess, partly because it grieves you to see
-suffering without trying to relieve it and partly because it is
-picturesque.”
-
-“Then I shall confess nothing of the kind, Mr. Beaumont. It is my
-simple duty to visit the sick and to do what little I can to ease their
-pains.”
-
-“There’s Stokes the cobbler laid up with the lumbago, I am told. I
-went into his little shop the other day to get a trifling repair done,
-and the poor old fellow was nearly doubled up with pain, and, if I’m
-not very much mistaken, slowly dying of hunger. Shall we take Stokes the
-cobbler on our round?”
-
-“Stokes does not belong to us, Mr. Beaumont. Papa would not like me to
-visit him. And I’m not sure that Stokes would be over civil to me.”
-
-“He seemed a surly sort of customer, truly. I was chatting away quite
-comfortably with him when I mentioned casually that I was staying at the
-Vicarage. Then he seemed to shut himself up as I’ve seen a flower do
-in an east wind. Is there war between him and the Vicarage?”
-
-“As if there could be! Papa would not condescend to notice anything
-such a man could say or do. All the same, it isn’t nice to be called a
-whited sepulchre, and I believe that is Stokes’ mildest epithet for
-papa.”
-
-“Then he’s a dissenter, I suppose. He did not appear unctuous enough
-for hat. But religion may have disagreed with him. I have observed that
-with some people it acts like whey in a curd.”
-
-“They say,” spoke Eleanor, with bated breath, “he’s a
-Bradlaughite, an atheist. He talks about Tom Paine and the rights of
-man.”
-
-“And how does he live?”
-
-“As you know, he is a cobbler. But I don’t suppose he gets much
-work. It is very inconvenient. Of course, we cannot send our repairs to
-him, and his being here prevents another setting up in the village.”
-
-“It’s most inconsiderate of him,” said Beaumont, gravely. “He
-ought to be made to see that he is inconveniencing the servants of the
-Vicarage. No doubt, if he were told, he would go away, and make room for
-a better man. Then he doesn’t get much work?”
-
-“Very little. He seems to spend most of his time, in the summer, in
-the fields; and I have heard he has a curious gift of taming birds and
-animals. I fancy he ekes out a scanty livelihood that way.”
-
-“Perhaps he has taken to birds and animals because he can’t get men
-and women to have anything to do with him. A man must love something or
-other.”
-
-“What! all men?”
-
-“Yes, I suppose so—all men. Even lawyers.”
-
-“I know one lawyer who is very fond of something.”
-
-“And of someone?”
-
-“I said something, sir!”
-
-“And that is?”
-
-“Lecturing other people.”
-
-“A hit, a most palpable hit, Miss St. Clair. I own my fault. But
-confess I don’t pretend to be a bit better than my neighbours. But
-about this Stokes, now. He interests me.”
-
-“Of course.”
-
-“Why of course?”
-
-“Well, you see, Stokes would be all right if he would only take things
-as he finds them. Why can’t he come to church like other people, and
-be a decent member of society? Instead of that he goes on Saturday night
-to the public-house and talks—oh! horrid things—blasphemy and high
-treason, to the labourers. Papa says if his ricks are burned he shall
-have Stokes arrested as an accessory before the fact.”
-
-“I don’t suppose Mr. St. Clair will entrust me with the brief for
-the prosecution.”
-
-“Oh, no! If you don’t take care, sir, you’ll have enough to do to
-defend yourself some fine day. But I’ve done Stokes an injustice. I
-said he went to the public-house. He used to; but the Publican refused
-to serve him any more.”
-
-“Got too much to drink, I suppose. I always knew tailors were a
-guzzling lot. Tailoring runs to drink, as naturally as cobbling to
-atheism. I don’t know why, but cobblers are all free-thinkers and
-tailors and lawyers’ clerks born tosspots.”
-
-“Well, you’re out this time, Mr. Beaumont. The landlord—he’s
-people’s warden, you know, at the church and a most respectable
-man—turned Stokes out because, whenever he went of a Saturday night,
-he drank only one mug of small beer in a matter of three hours, and all
-the time discoursed of nothing but the evils of strong drink. He so
-frightened our undergardener, who was of the company, that he turned
-teetotaller, and got my maid to stitch him a piece of blue ribbon in the
-lapel of his Sunday coat.”
-
-“That was carrying the war into the enemy’s camp with a vengeance.
-Well, he won’t be able to corrupt the farm labourers any longer of a
-Saturday night now he’s ejected from the ‘Blue Boar.’”
-
-“Oh! they’ve started a club, and Joseph Arch came to open it. Papa
-was so upset he fled to Lincoln, and stopped a whole week at the Palace,
-though he does nothing but quarrel with the dear bishop.”
-
-“And I suppose the Vicarage set the fashion in tabooing this poor son
-of St. Crispin?”
-
-“Of course, papa cannot countenance atheism and arson”
-
-“Clearly. But if the man’s ill, the man’s ill, and atheist or no
-atheist the man’s a man. I’m sorry I didn’t know more about him
-when I went to have my boot stretched. However, the other boot isn’t
-very comfortable, that’s one consolation.”
-
-They walked on in silence for a time. Then, apropos of nothing, Eleanor
-said, very quietly: “The man must have some good about him or he
-wouldn’t be so fond of birds and animals. I think my boot is not very
-comfortable, Mr. Beaumont.”
-
-Edward laughed gaily. “What will the Archdeacon say?”
-
-“Oh! papa won’t mind. He’ll probably tell me I’m a goose for my
-pains.”
-
-“Ah! well; I don’t know. I think the Church makes a mistake in being
-so discriminating in its charity.”
-
-“You are a universal fault-finder, Mr. Beaumont. But I suppose that is
-what makes you a Radical. It must be a very unhappy state of mind—to
-be always seeing the imperfections of things.”
-
-“Somebody must do it, Miss St. Clair. Even critics have their uses.
-But when you announced so unexpectedly that your shoe pinched you, I was
-wondering how Sister Gertrude would have dealt with old Stokes.”
-
-“I didn’t know you had a sister. Do tell me about her.”
-
-“Well you see, I haven’t, except in a very broad sense. Sister
-Gertrude is the name of a young lady I met under rather interesting
-circumstances. Shall I tell you about her?”
-
-Then Edward narrated the story of the troubles of Patrick Sullivan.
-
-“Was she very beautiful?”
-
-“Very. It was a sort of awful beauty. You forgot the artistic delight
-inspired by her perfection of form, colour, and expression, in the sense
-that you gazed upon one who was superior to mere charm of person. There
-seemed something like sacrilege in thinking of her as beautiful. I
-suppose a devout Catholic does not let his thoughts dwell upon the
-physical charms of the Madonna.”
-
-“You cease to be critical, Mr. Beaumont, sometimes I see. And she was
-a lady, you say?”
-
-“Unquestionably, or I’m no judge.”
-
-“But, after all, this lady only does ostentatiously and to the sound
-of the drum and the tambourine what I, what we, try to do quietly and
-unostentatiously. You sneer at my tracts; but as I have no gifts for
-sermon-making, what can I do but take a tract?”
-
-“Oh! I don’t find fault with the tracts, Miss St. Clair, though
-they’re twaddly things.”
-
-Miss St. Clair smiled.
-
-“I fear they’re very goody-goody. But I don’t write them, you
-know. Why don’t you write a tract yourself, Mr. Beaumont, and show the
-world how it should be done?”
-
-“Again a hit, a most palpable hit. But you see, that isn’t my
-line.”
-
-“No; your line is fault-finding. What’s that Latin papa always
-quotes—_si possis, ernenda_. I forget the rest.”
-
-“_Si non, his utere mecum_,” completed Edward. “Well, I won’t
-amend your tracts, still less use them. A Radical has greater work cut
-out for him. You see that hind labouring in the field yonder, Miss St.
-Clair? Now, I think I know the kind of life that man leads. He toils
-like a slave year in and year out for a wretched twelve shillings a
-week. He lives on fat bacon and cabbage and coarse bread. His thatched
-cottage is small, dark, unwholesome. There is a cesspool at his very
-door and a dunghill under his window. His great dissipation is a quart
-of beer and a big drunk at harvest time. He can scarcely read, and if he
-could read he has no literature but a Bible, of which only very small
-portions are intelligible to him for want of other knowledge, and, of
-course, your tracts. When he is old, and rheumatism wracks his bones,
-and he is past work, he and his dame must either be burdens on their
-children, who will be no better off than he is now, or go to the Union
-Workhouse. And this kind of thing has been going on for generation after
-generation, and all the suggestion the Church, or Sister Gertrude I
-suppose for that matter, has to make, takes the form of a bottle of
-medicine, a roll of flannel, and a tract or a sermon.”
-
-Edward spoke warmly indignantly.
-
-“And you?” said Miss St. Clair.
-
-“I—nay, not I. Say We. We, Radicals I mean, would tell that man he
-is a fool to be content to till the land all his life for another to
-reap the harvest. We don’t think that it is one of the divinely
-ordained laws of nature that there should be a Squire Wright and a
-Hodge.”
-
-“There always has been, there always will be, just as there have
-always been horses and riders.”
-
-“And hammers and anvils? Well, we Radicals think otherwise. We say
-that it is better that all men should walk on their own legs than that
-one should be borne in a palanquin. Some day the people will examine the
-title deeds of your Squire Wrights.”
-
-“That will be a fat day for the lawyers, Mr. Beaumont,” suggested
-Eleanor mischievously.
-
-“Nay, in the ideal state there’ll be no lawyers.”
-
-“And clearly there’ll be no critics; there’ll be nothing to
-criticise. Poor Mr. Beaumont. How unhappy you’ll be. _Quelle triste
-veillesse vous vous preparez_.”
-
-“Oh, well, imperfection will last my time, Miss St. Clair. And if I
-cannot find perfection in this sweet Arcadia of yours, why I deserve to.
-. . .”
-
-“Get Sister Gertrude to find it for you in the slums. How provoking
-there’s the bell, and only just time to dress for dinner.”
-CHAPTER V.
-
-The business that had taken Edward Beaumont to Caistorholm was
-progressing satisfactorily, and the Archdeacon and the other
-shareholders had every reason to congratulate themselves on having
-invited his assistance. It had been the usual story, a large industrial
-concern successfully and prosperously conducted so long as its founders
-had been young, energetic, and single-eyed. When they had made their
-fortunes and courted ease they had converted the business into a
-company, retaining a connection with it as salaried directors. They had
-put their own price on what they had to sell to the company and had not
-felt called upon exactly to kill themselves by working too hard as
-directors.
-
-With a concern much over-capitalised and lax management, the natural
-result had ensued; but Beaumont had seen that with some reduction of
-sharemoney and better management, the situation might be saved. He had
-impressed his views on the general body of shareholders without any
-difficulty, and had cared not a rap for the black looks of the directors
-compulsorily retired.
-
-All this had kept him busy enough, and every post brought him letters,
-copies of accounts, drafts of legal documents, and such like. One
-morning, as the Vicarage party were at breakfast, and the Archdeacon had
-opened the letter-bag and distributed its contents, Edward was smiling
-over a petulant letter from Storth, who wanted to know if he intended to
-spend the whole of the Long Vacation at Caistorholm, and if he expected
-his long-suffering partner to submit to being cooped up in the office
-when all the rest of the legal world was on the moors or drinking the
-waters or sniffling the salt sea air.
-
-“Poor Sam! it’s too bad, after he’d rigged himself out for the
-moors. Ah, well! he must spell patience for another week anyhow,” he
-reflected.
-
-“Do Radicals dance, Mr. Beaumont?” asked Eleanor. “Yes, you’re
-right, papa, it’s from the Countess.”
-
-“Do Radicals dance? Some of them do, I believe. I know one who tries,
-_et après_?”
-
-“The Countess of Yarborough asks us to dinner for the —th, and
-there’s to be dancing afterwards. It won’t be a ball, you know. Only
-the house-party down with Lord Lindsey for the shooting and a few
-neighbours. It will be very nice, though. Of course, we can go, papa?”
-
-“Yes, why not? Write and accept at once, Eleanor. You’ll join us,
-Beaumont?”
-
-“If——”
-
-“Oh! there’s neither if nor but in it. Lady Yarborough will be
-delighted to see you, and you’ll get on well with young Lindsey,
-that’s her son, you know. He’s been at Heidelburgh lately, studying
-philosophy. Said Oxford was decadent and obstructive. I’m sure I
-don’t know what’s come over all the young fellows now-a-days.”
-
-“The sportsmen aren’t content with pheasants and partridges and
-hares as their fathers were, they go to the Alleghanies and Central
-Africa for big game, and the scholars, I suppose, think they’re
-entitled to follow suit and try farther afield for fresh ideas,”
-suggested Eleanor.
-
-“Anyhow, I don’t know what to make of young Lindsey. When I talked
-with him last he didn’t seem to know his own mind. But he’ll have to
-make it up one way or another before the next election. Richardson says
-he’s tired of playing warming-pan for him, and, of course, it’s out
-of the question that anyone but a Yarborough or his nominee should sit
-for this division. But Lindsey will be getting married before long, no
-doubt, and that will take the nonsense out of him. Say we’re bringing
-a friend, Eleanor.”
-
-Norton Towers, the ancestral home of the Yarboroughs is a large and
-rambling structure in various styles of architecture, built originally
-in the Wars of the Roses, but added to and altered many times. It stands
-pleasantly and picturesquely on a rising stretch of knoll, Some eight
-miles distant from Caistorholm The noble family, whose principal seat it
-is, has for many generations been of paramount consideration and
-influence in Lincolnshire. The founder of the family is commonly
-supposed to have been a Venetian adventurer, one of the many merchant
-princes of the Adriatic’s queen, who, settling in London, became Lord
-Mayor under the second Richard. Then, in time, the family withdrew from
-commerce, acquired by prudent purchases and equally prudent marriages
-considerable estates in Lincolnshire, and became in time as racy of the
-soil as though not a trace of Italian blood intermingled with the blue
-blood their alliances had incorporated.
-
-In the Civil War the heir of the house had a narrow escape of perishing
-on Cavendish Bog at the hand of Oliver himself, then a captain of Horse
-in the Parliamentary forces not yet known to fame, though marked by the
-observant. The Royalist soldier was borne from the field with Oliver’s
-bullet in his sword-arm, and that and the fever that supervened had like
-to have finished him, and gave him a distaste for further adventures of
-the kind. When the Commonwealth came the family compounded for past
-offences by a smart money-fine, and accepted with what grace they might
-the Roundhead régime. Cromwell bore no malice, perhaps remembering
-Cavendish Bog, and the Yarboroughs, though but sullenly acquiescent in
-the new order of things, and indifferent psalm-singers, kept themselves
-clear of the plots against the Protector’s life and rule.
-
-When the glorious Restoration came the Lincolnshire lord was welcomed at
-Whitehall, perhaps because, having made few sacrifices for the Stuarts,
-Charles felt he owed the family nothing, and they wanted nothing from
-him. The Court of the second James smelt too much of incense for the
-stomach of the Earl, and he kept to his hunting and farming in the Fens,
-and had no difficulty in wearing the Orange favours when James fled the
-country. Since that time the Yarboroughs had been consistent Whigs, but
-they did not conceive that their Whiggery compelled them to quarrel with
-their neighbours. They had made no bones about Catholic emancipation,
-and, indeed, were on friendly terms with not a few of the Catholic
-families to be found in Lincolnshire. They had supported Jack Russell
-and his Reform Bill, had made a wry face over Household Suffrage, and
-now the Earl, who cared little for politics, but thought Lord Granville
-an ideal Foreign Secretary, was counted a friend of Mr. Gladstone,
-thinking that his dangerous political proclivities would be finally
-corrected by his admirable High Church principles.
-
-But it was whispered in the county that the heir and hope of the family
-had returned from the Continent tainted with rank heresies of every
-kind. This was the Lord Lindsey, whom marriage was expected to sober.
-
-“I don’t suppose we shall see the Earl,” said the Archdeacon, as
-the carriage rapidly traversed the distance between the Vicarage and the
-Towers. “He is a great invalid and seldom shows at the dinner table.
-Like the Speaker of the House he takes his homely chop when his guests
-are dining. I shall go to him in his room and smoke my cigar with him
-whilst you young folk are romping. Wright will, no doubt, be invited,
-and he’ll find you some partners.”
-
-Edward had not much confidence in any help likely to be vouchsafed by
-the master of Thorsby Manor.
-
-Some thirty guests gathered in the drawing room a few minutes before the
-clanging of the dinner-gong, and a sparkling, blue-eyed damsel of some
-twenty summers fell to Edward’s lot. He would have preferred to take
-down Miss St. Clair, but Miss Edith des Forges left him no leisure to
-indulge regrets.
-
-“You’re staying at Caistorholme Vicarage, Eleanor St. Clair tells
-me. I stayed there three years ago, just after I left school. Eleanor
-and I were at school together. Mrs. St. Clair was alive then, poor dear.
-I flirted outrageously with the Archdeacon, and she wasn’t a bit
-jealous. It’s such fun flirting with a parson, don’t you know.”
-
-“Can’t say, I’m sure. I’ll take your opinion, Miss des Forges.
-Are you an authority on flirting?”
-
-“Well, pretty fair. I ought to be. Practice makes perfect. Don’t you
-think Eleanor simply beautiful? Don’t look at her. She is looking at
-us. I’m sure that stupid George Wright is boring her to death. But I
-suppose she’ll have to get used to it.”
-
-“Ah! Why?”
-
-“How long have you been at the Vicarage?”
-
-“A fortnight.”
-
-“And you don’t know why?”
-
-“’Pon my word I don’t.”
-
-“And you a lawyer! and Eleanor said you were so awfully clever. I
-quite quaked when the Countess sent me down with you. Are you very
-clever, Mr. Beaumont?”
-
-“You must find out, Miss des Forges.”
-
-“Do you know, I’ve never talked to a Solicitor before. I’ve wanted
-to meet a real live Solicitor this ever so long.”
-
-“Question of marriage settlement, I suppose?”
-
-“Nonsense. Anybody that takes me will have to take me just as I am
-without one stiver. Not much of a bargain, am I?”
-
-“I should say cheap at any price.”
-
-“That’s what Charlie says.”
-
-“And who’s Charlie?”
-
-“Ah! that’s why I wanted to meet a solicitor. Charlie’s my cousin
-and awfully nice. Just ask Eleanor.”
-
-“I’ll be content with your opinion.”
-
-“But perhaps you know him. He’s in the Temple, Paper Buildings.
-Isn’t it ridiculous? Paper Buildings! I’ve heard of men of straw.”
-
-“There are a good many Charlies in Paper Buildings, Miss des Forges. I
-suppose your cousin is a barrister?”
-
-“That’s just what he is—a what d’ye call it barrister, short,
-no, not short.”
-
-“Briefless, perhaps?”
-
-“How clever of you to guess it. Eleanor must be right. And he’s
-delightfully poor, and gives luncheon to us girls in his chambers when
-we go up to town, and takes us down the river. He’s awfully good; but
-he’s only had one brief, and then the wretched people went and settled
-out of Court, as Charlie calls it. I think it was a conspiracy. I’d
-settle ’em,” and Miss des Forgess glared vindictively across the
-table, to the great discomfiture of the curate of an adjoining village,
-who blushed distressedly.
-
-“Quite possibly,” agreed Edward. “So your cousin’s one chance of
-distinction was taken from him. Never mind, he may have another brief
-some day.”
-
-Miss des Forges shook her head dolefully.
-
-“Charlie says not. He writes for the papers and magazines now and
-lives on air. Tell me, how do barristers get on—at first, you know.
-What gives them the start?”
-
-“There are three ways never known to fail.”
-
-“Oh! do tell one. How I wish Charlie were here!”
-
-“Well, first, he can write a book, not a book likely to run through
-the fictional monthlies, you know, but a sound, solid, substantial book,
-say, on Estovers.”
-
-“What’s Estovers? It sounds like something to eat. Charlie could
-manage that.”
-
-“You’d better ask your cousin to tell you all about Estovers. It
-will help him to write the book.”
-
-“And how long will that take?”
-
-“Oh! not long. Say, ten or fifteen years for it to be written and get
-known.”
-
-The sunshine faded from the bright face of Miss des Forges.
-
-“As well say a lifetime,” she pouted. “And what’s another
-way—a short way, you understand, Mr. Beaumont?”
-
-“Well, there’s huggery.”
-
-“Heavens, what a name! Now, pray, Mr. Beaumont, what is huggery, It
-sounds like a crime of the Middle Ages.”
-
-“Well, it has a smack of the Middle Ages. You’ve heard of ‘the
-rich attorney’s elderly ugly daughter’?”
-
-Miss des Forges nodded.
-
-“Well, that’s huggery.”
-
-“Then that won’t do at all, sir, and you ought to know it.”
-
-“Perhaps I do, Miss des Forges. But don’t be angry. There’s still
-another way.”
-
-“Oh, yes! the third—and what is that?”
-
-“A miracle!”
-
-“Oh! you stupid. And Eleanor praised you ever so much.”
-
-“Well, you haven’t told me your cousin’s name yet. There may be
-still another, but it isn’t recorded in the books.”
-
-“And the heart of a certain young barrister in the Temple, sighing
-like hundreds of other young fellows for the chance so long a-coming,
-was made glad within a week from the dinner at the Temple by receipt of
-a ponderous parcel, bearing the Caistorholm postmark.”
-
-“And may I post it with my own hands, Mr. Beaumont?”
-
-“Come over to Caistorholm the day after tomorrow. The brief shall be
-ready then.”
-
-And if the saucy lips of Miss des Forges were pressed just above the
-words, “With you, Mr. Dryasdust, Q.C.,” was ever brief better
-endorsed.
-
-“I think you owe me a dance to-night, Miss des Forges.”
-
-“A dozen, if you like. But Eleanor will want some. Oh! do just cut in
-and shake that stupid George Wright out of his self-centred serenity.
-Estovers was the word, wasn’t it? Write it me down on a slip of paper,
-and I’ll give you any dance you ask for in exchange for it.”
-
-“You found a lot to talk about with Mr. Beaumont, Ethel,” said Miss
-St. Clair to the vivacious girl, as they awaited the gentlemen in the
-drawing-room. “He talks politics chiefly to me. But you wouldn’t
-look so radiant on politics. What was it all about?”
-
-“Oh! huggery!” said Ethel, gaily, and Miss St. Clair wondered
-mightily.
-
-Edward was standing later in the evening gazing on the pretty scene
-musingly. The large drawing-room was brilliantly lighted. The huge,
-candelabras, with their crystal pendants cunningly cut, broke and
-reflected the soft lights of tapers of purest wax. The mirrors, posed
-with art, reflected the shifting scene. There was the soft frou-frou of
-sweeping trains, the low hum of broken converse, the rippling music of
-maiden voices, and the dreamy strains of a Danubian waltz. Edward,
-though dancing sufficiently well, well enough, as he thought, for a man,
-was no votary of the graceful art; the party, happily, was a
-well-balanced one—there was no need for him to dance from mere
-complaisance. His mind carried him to a festive gathering he had
-recently attended in Yorkshire. The son of an acquaintance and
-client—a large manufacturer—had come of age and a treat was given to
-the millhands. After their own repast in the house the guests of the
-millowner had adjourned willingly enough to the vast weaving shed in
-which the “hands” held their revel. The bare, whitewashed walls had
-been hung with gay festoons and appropriate devices. The Linthwaite
-Brass Band, victor in historic contests, discoursed sweet music. The
-employees danced not ungracefully. Instead of languourous movement,
-swimming smoothly to a dying strain, there was the grigging romp of
-lusty lads and lasses. The couples in the quadrilles had no sort of
-notion of the challenge, the equivoque, the alluring and the feigned
-retreat the movements symbolise. But the music caught their feet, the
-unwonted excitement stirred their young blood, and their cheeks mantled
-and eyes glowed with the unrestrained and undisguised rapture of the
-fleeting hour. There was the rude and rustic humour of the looms, the
-lively sally, the broad retort, and the ringing laugh. Was it not as
-good in its way, mused Edward, as the veiled innuendo, the sneer in
-silky tones, the languid smile of an earl’s drawing-room—and was not
-that way a better way?
-
-“Are you so soon tired of dancing—shall I find you a partner?”
-asked a voice at his elbow, as Edward started out of his reverie and
-came back from the weaving shed to the gilded saloon. He did not know
-the young man who had addressed him, a youth of medium height, with
-features none too classical, but with a smooth and lofty brow, dreamy
-eyes, a nascent moustache of brown down upon the upper lip. The
-complexion was pale to pallor, the small white hand that caressed the
-lips’ adorning was thin and delicate, the figure frail and almost
-effeminate.
-
-“You don’t know me, Mr. Beaumont. I didn’t get the chance of an
-introduction before dinner. I took in Miss St. Clair—stunning
-creature, isn’t she?—and she told me all about you. If you aren’t
-dancing for a while let us slip off to my den and have a cigarette.
-I’m Lindsay, Lord Lindsay, you know.”
-
-Then Beaumont knew he was speaking to the heir of the house.
-
-“We must slip out quietly, or my mother ’ll collar us. Keep your eye
-on me, and hook it when we near the door. I’ll pilot you.”
-
-The manœuver was executed.
-
-“Take that chair; you can lose yourself in it. Try this smoke. Seltzer
-or soda. Mix your own liquor. Ain’t this a cozy little hole? This is
-my hermitage. What were you thinking of when I spoke to you? You looked
-miles away.”
-
-“So I was. I was wondering, I think, whether I’d rather be a
-Lifeguardsman or a power-loom weaver, and contrasting that six feet two
-of quintessential boredom, Captain Bouverie, I think his name is, with a
-shuttle-thrower of my native valley.”
-
-“Ah! yes. You’re Yorkshire, aren’t you? Any relation of Beaumont,
-of White Meadows? I met him once at Baden.”
-
-“I can’t say I am and I can’t say I’m not. I’ve heard my
-mother say there’s some distant connection, but it is of the remotest.
-If we are of the same blood, it’s about run itself out by this
-time.”
-
-“But you know Beaumont, of White Meadows. Plunges a lot at the tables,
-they say. Great friend of the Prince.”
-
-“So I have heard. But I don’t know much about him. I’ve spoken
-once or twice on the same platform and probably shall again.”
-
-“Beaumont’s a Liberal, isn’t he? Then you’re a Liberal, too.
-I’m glad of that. I’m to go into the House at the next Election. I
-suppose we’ll all have to talk extension of the suffrage to the
-counties?”
-
-“That won’t be a very difficult matter in my district. I pity the
-poor devil of a candidate who has to address a lot of unenfranchised
-weavers and tell them they’re not fit to have the franchise enjoyed by
-their mates who work in the same shed, but happen to live the other side
-of an inky stream you could hop over, but that divides the county from
-the borough. It’s preposterous!”
-
-“Of course it is. But how do your manufacturers like the idea?”
-
-“Like it! Why shouldn’t they like it? If they don’t they’ll have
-to lump it, that’s all. It’s sure to come. If not from Gladstone
-then from Salisbury.”
-
-“Do you know, Beaumont, I never saw a weaver in my life, not to talk
-to, that is. I should awfully like to.”
-
-“Well, come up to Yorkshire. I’ll take you the round of the mills.
-But if you want to see the genuine article you must drop the Lord and
-come as plain Lindsay. They’ll think you’re home spun. We make
-lindseys our way.”
-
-“Do you mean the hands would fawn? I shouldn’t like that.”
-
-“No, they wouldn’t fawn. But you’d be seized on by the masters.
-They’d ‘my lord’ up hill and down dale. The ‘hands’ would try
-to equalise matters by being as unapproachable as they knew how, and
-that’s saying something I can tell you.”
-
-“But I should like that.”
-
-“I don’t think you would. But, anyway, you wouldn’t see them just
-as they are. To do that plain Lindsay’s the ticket.”
-
-“Our farmers don’t take half kindly to enfranchising Hodge.”
-
-“That’s because your farmer is only a step removed from Hodge.
-Intellectually, I should imagine there isn’t much difference between
-the farmer and the hind nor between the hind and his sheep.”
-
-“Oh! come; we’re not so bad as that. Anyway, I tell you household
-suffrage for the counties is a bitter pill. Our clergy pull a sour face
-over it. It will take a lot of gilding to make it go down. I’m not
-sure I shall be returned, and I shall be the first Lindsay to be
-rejected since good old Noll’s days.”
-
-“Oh! come to the West Riding and we’ll console you. We dearly love a
-lord.”
-
-“Young Fitzwilliam didn’t find it so.”
-
-“Ah! he was weighted by a banker.”
-
-“But, seriously, do you think the people will be any better off when
-they get the vote?”
-
-“That depends.”
-
-“On how they use it? Not for revolution, I hope.”
-
-“For reform, I hope. For revolution if they cannot get reform.”
-
-“You don’t stick at tries.”
-
-“No; three acres and a cow is my minimum, and that is to be only
-typical of inroads in other directions.”
-
-“A leveller you?”
-
-“No! a diffuser.”
-
-“That’s a bitter word. I must throw that at the Archdeacon. He moans
-over my dangerous principles. He must rend himself over yours. How do
-you get on with him?”
-
-“Oh! I change the subject when he winces.”
-
-“See much of Wright these days?”
-
-“Enough.”
-
-“I suppose it’s a settled thing between the Manor and the Vicarage.
-She is too good for him.”
-
-“He hasn’t got her yet.”
-
-Lord Lindsay stole a glance out of the corner of his eyes.
-
-“Phew! sets the wind in that corner. Well, time’s up. That’s a
-waltz they’re starting and I’m booked.”
-
-When Lord Lindsay and Beaumont reentered the drawing-room Edward sought
-Eleanor St. Clair to claim the dance she had promised him. He was
-received with gay rebuke.
-
-“This is the way you fulfil your trust, Mr. Beaumont. Papa makes his
-bow to the Countess and sidles off incontinent to the sanctum of the
-Earl. I have no doubt he is at this moment smoking a cigar and
-discoursing learnedly on the virtues of the Earl’s very particular and
-precious Madeira to which my lord, they say, is indebted for his very
-particular and precious gout. It’s a mercy if the wine is so very
-particular and precious, or I should have papa prostrate with the gout,
-and from all accounts that would be as bad for me as for him. Deprived
-of my natural protector I rely, of course, on a certain cavalier from
-Yorkshire, and, lo! he, too, has vanished, spirited away by Lord Lindsay
-to his own secret cave, there to demolish institutions, or was it only
-reputations?”
-
-“As I was being spirited away I caught a vision of a radiant being
-threading the mazes of the Lancers on the arm of a dashing son of Mars,
-and looking in need neither of protection nor consolation.”
-
-“I am a woman and therefore can dissemble, Mr. Beaumont; but see, the
-sets are filling.”
-
-“Do you really want to dance every dance? See how brightly the moon
-shines above the trees, and the air is still and warm without. Will you
-not show me the view from the Terrace. It must be lovely at this hour,
-stretched beneath the harvest moon.”
-
-“Papa will miss me should he tear himself away from the Earl and the
-Madeira.”
-
-“He will miss me, too, and know you are in safe keeping.”
-
-“H’m, perhaps. Well, it is hot within.”
-
-“Adjust my wrap, so. Now, your arm, and you shall see as sweet a vista
-as ever eyes gazed upon—the Axholme winding through the shorn fields
-with the moon upon its bosom.”
-
-In silence, side by side, they drank into their souls the solemn beauty
-of the darkling scene. The music of the instruments floated through the
-casement and fell with mellowed cadence on their ears. An owl hooted
-from the ivy that clung about the ancient towers; the river beneath them
-coiled sinuously almost at the Castle base, and the full moon with
-harvest beam played upon the rich treasures of the ripened grain.
-
-“We have nothing to equal this in my part of the country. ’Tis an
-idyll. It breathes the spirit of peace, the gospel of content. Sure
-everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
-
-“That’s the first Christian sentiment I have ever heard you utter,
-sir.”
-
-“Miss St. Clair,” said Edward very gravely, “I had a purpose in
-asking you to forego the dance and bear me company a while where I could
-say to you that of which my heart is full. And now I seek in vain for
-words to tell you what I would. Miss St. Clair, Eleanor, I have presumed
-to love you. How great is that presuming none can know so acutely as
-myself. But I love you. To-morrow I must return to Yorkshire and I could
-not go, my love untold. Perhaps I ought to have spoken first to the
-Archdeacon, to your father; but it is not so we woo in my class. I can
-offer you nothing but my love to make my suit more pleasing in your
-ears. Unless your own heart, fair Eleanor, should be my mediator, I must
-sue as one without hope. Say, Eleanor, that I do not speak too
-presumptuously, can I hope the love I offer you, the life I would
-dedicate to you are not spurned as worthless and unfit.”
-
-“Not spurned, Mr. Beaumont—surely not spurned!” said Eleanor, in a
-voice so low, ’twas scarce a whisper.
-
-“I will not win you, Eleanor, by false pretences. Though my profession
-is an honourable one, and my social position respectable, it does not
-equal yours. I number no Earls and no Countesses among my friends, and
-the great mansions do not receive me as a guest. But I am young, the
-world is all before me, and for your sweet sake I feel I could greatly
-dare and perhaps greatly do. Give me your glove, Eleanor, to wear in the
-fray and it shall not be soiled in the dust of the lists.”
-
-“I do not fear, Mr. Beaumont, nay, let me say I do not tremble,
-Edward, lest you should lack courage and high endeavour. ’Tis for
-myself I tremble. I had looked to spend my life, if not by my father’s
-side, at least near him. I had schooled myself to anticipate without
-other yearnings the serene uneventful round of a village life. But you
-have touched my soul to fiercer longings, you have opened my eyes to a
-wider vision. I do not fear poverty, and there can be no meanness in the
-life that contents you. But it is all so strange, so unreal, you know me
-so little. You lure me to a nobler and a grander life, and I dread lest
-the past of my upbringing may fetter my limbs and keep my feet from
-those giddier heights you would tread.”
-
-“If you can love me, Eleanor, as I love you, your soul will grow into
-my own. We shall have one heart, one hope, one life. Say, oh! Eleanor,
-can such bliss be mine!” He stole his arm round her waist, the proud
-head drooped upon his shoulder, and upon the lips that breathed “I
-love you true!” he pressed the kindling kiss.
-
-It was only with a qualified satisfaction that Archdeacon St. Clair
-received Edward’s formal proposal for his daughter’s hand.
-
-“I had other views for her, Beaumont, other views. And I have had them
-so long that they seem part of my life, part of the natural order of
-things. Everything was going just as I wished till—till you came.
-Eleanor would make an ideal chatelaine, and I had hoped to see her
-established almost at my Vicarage gates.”
-
-“At Thoresby Manor in effect?”
-
-“Well, yes. I’ve no doubt the Squire took the thing as settled.”
-
-“It doesn’t do, Archdeacon, to take a woman’s hand for granted. I
-haven’t much experience of the sex, but I fancy a lady does not care
-to be regarded as to be had for the asking. A woman likes to be wooed
-before she is won.”
-
-“Well, it seems you have both wooed and won. There’s one comfort, I
-shan’t have to explain all about those confounded Skerne Iron Works in
-which Eleanor’s fortune is invested. You’ll have to take it in
-shares instead of cash.”
-
-“I want neither the shares nor the cash. I want Eleanor.”
-
-“I don’t see it’s much use coming to me now. Eleanor’s her own
-mistress. Well, Beaumont, you know I like you. Of course, I think your
-opinions are horrid, but you’ll wear out of them, just as young men of
-poetical fancies wear out of long hair and Byron collars. But, frankly,
-and though it’s a nasty thing to say to a fellow in my own house, I
-aspired higher for my only daughter than a provincial attorney.”
-
-Edward winced and flushed.
-
-“A provincial attorney may rise to the Woolsack, Archdeacon St. Clair.
-He is not more remote from it than a curate from a mitre.”
-
-“Now, you’re huffed, and I don’t wish you to be. You may thank
-your stars you haven’t Eleanor’s mother to deal with instead of me.
-You’d have heard a great deal about her grandfather, the Earl. I know
-I did.”
-
-“Well, he’s dead and buried now, Archdeacon.”
-
-“All the same, I am ambitious for my child. I should not like to think
-of her settling down to the somewhat vulgar mediocrity of your
-manufacturing middle-classes. And, what’s more, Beaumont, Eleanor
-won’t like it. Depend on it. She will not like your bejewelled dames
-sprung from the loom, with good hearts, maybe, and excellent principles,
-but lax notions about the letter H. She may not think so now. No doubt
-she’ll think that for life and eternity you will be all in all. But it
-won’t do. She’ll miss the kind of society she has been used to, and
-I don’t think she’s the sort of girl to find her compensation in the
-nursery and household idolatry. You must go into Parliament, Beaumont.
-With your ability you can count on a Junior Lordship, at least. That is,
-if you shred some of your impracticabilities and vote the party ticket,
-as I think they phrase it in America. And, of course, you’ll do
-that.”
-
-“I have thought of Parliament, sir, but as a remote possibility.
-Something to crown my days, not to begin them on. But I should not run
-well in official harness.”
-
-“Oh, we won’t insist on that. After all, an M.P.’s an M.P., if
-he’s but a Radical member. I don’t like that Labouchere, though
-he’s an amusing fellow, and of good family, too. Well, go into
-Parliament, and then come to me for my blessing.”
-
-“And meanwhile, sir?”
-
-“Meanwhile? meanwhile? Why, if Eleanor St. Clair has said she will
-have you, have you she will, and I don’t and won’t withhold my
-consent from your engagement. But I ask you not to press for an early
-marriage. Win your spurs, Edward, and then we’ll set the wedding bells
-ringing. You’re both young, and waiting will try you and do you good.
-Now, admit I’m reasonable.”
-
-“I don’t say you’re not. So hey! for Westminster and my bride.”
-
-“What did papa say to you, Edward?” asked Eleanor when he sought her
-to tell her the issue of the dreaded interview. “Wasn’t he awfully
-cross?”
-
-“Not a bit of it. I can bring a ring for the prettiest hand in the
-world the next time I come down. But I’m to get into Parliament before
-I bring the plain gold loop.”
-
-Eleanor’s eyes sparkled.
-
-“Did papa really say that?”
-
-Edward nodded.
-
-“Oh! won’t that be glorious! And I can go up to town for the season.
-Shall we be so very poor, Edward? Shall we have to live in a garret when
-we go to London, and shall I have to sit in the Ladies’ Gallery in a
-print frock whilst you make your maiden speech in fustian.”
-
-“Not so bad as that, Eleanor mine. But I’m not in yet. Can you wait;
-will you wait?”
-
-“Wait, you know I will wait, sir. Besides, we shan’t have to wait
-long. You’re sure to be elected as soon as you try. I wish there was
-an election to-morrow. I’ll canvas for you, Edward!”
-
-“And bribe the electors as the Duchess bribed for Fox?”
-
-“Are Yorkshiremen _very_ fond of kisses, sir?”
-
-“What should you say?”
-
-“Well, yes. Pretty fair. There, that will do. Oh! I am so happy.
-Edward Beaumont, M.P. You’ll be Sir Edward in no time and a Peer
-before your first twinge of the gout.”
-
-“They don’t make Peers of men whose greatest worldly wealth is a
-beautiful wife. At least, they don’t now-a-days.”
-
-“Of course, I’m joking, Edward. Isn’t papa thoughtful? I don’t
-suppose you’d have thought of it yourself.”
-
-“I don’t suppose I should,” conceded Edward. “I thought only of
-you.”
-
-CHAPTER VI.
-
-_Dulce est desipere in loco_—a Latin tag that assures us we may on
-occasions pleasantly unbend. Edward Beaumont, as we have seen, was
-dreaming love’s young dream, than which we are all convinced there is
-nothing sweeter in this brief life of ours, and seeing visions of a
-glorious future rounded by the woolsack, and I know not what other
-suggestions of a lively imagination. Sam Storth, the partner whom he was
-fool enough to at the same time trust implicitly and regard with a sort
-of good-humoured contempt, was essaying the gentle art, _desipere in
-loco_, after a fashion of his own, in a word, combining business with
-pleasure. The Long Vacation, beloved of lawyers of ample means, bemoaned
-by those members of the junior bar to whom briefs—briefs lightly
-“marked” at that—are as angels’ visits, few and far between, was
-now dragging its weary course—and Mr. Storth had time enough and to
-spare on his hands. He would have liked to don that much-prized
-shooting-jacket and those knickerbockers that so fittingly displayed a
-calf whose proportions Sam surveyed with a proper pride, and to which he
-rightly conceived the costume of the courts failed to do adequate
-justice. But here was he doomed to the treadmill, whilst his partner
-dangled at the petticoats of an Archdeacon’s daughter, and had the
-confounded impudence to stretch his legs under an earl’s mahogany.
-
-“There’s Beaumont,” the irate junior partner thus unburthened
-himself, “doing the la-di-da in baronial halls, whilst I’m expected
-to moil and toil trying to find work for a set of idle clerks in the
-deadest season of the legal year. How Beaumont, with the principles he
-professes can cheek to make himself so very much at home, as I’m sure
-from his letters he has done, in _gremio ecclesiae_, in the very bosom
-of the Church, or, what is more scandalous still, of the Church’s
-daughter, passes my comprehension. But I suppose Beaumont’s not such a
-fool as a fellow’d take him to be by his talk. These Radicals are all
-alike. They rail against aristocrats, but give me a Radical for
-kow-towing to a duke; they gibe at the Church as by law established, but
-trust ’em to be uncommon deferential to a bishop; they declaim against
-pensions and annuities, but wouldn’t they just like a soft job
-themselves. Oh, no, I don’t think. There’s Beaumont, whose
-grandfather, I verily believe, used to wear clogs and a blue smock, and
-take his twopenny-ha’penny pieces to market on a donkey’s back,
-quaffing the vintages of Burgundy in the baronial halls aforesaid,
-whilst I, forsooth, whose father was a——”
-
-“Was a what?” queried the fair damsel to whom Master Sam had opened
-the floodgates of his eloquence.
-
-“Well, he wasn’t a damned poverty-knocker anyway,” said Charles
-hurriedly; “whilst I, as I was saying, must content myself with a
-tankard of bitter in a——”
-
-“In a what, sir?” asked the lady, tartly.
-
-“In a place that I much refer to baronial halls,” quoth Sam
-gallantly.
-
-The place so honoured was the snug of the Royal Albert in Huddersfield,
-and the lady to whom Mr. Storth was confiding his grievances was Miss
-Amelia Wrigley, the very comely daughter of the landlord of that
-old-established hostelry, a lady not only well-dowered by Nature with a
-good figure, a pleasing face, and a sprightly wit, but reputed to be
-likely in the years to come to be well-dowered by the worthy but gouty
-sire, whose ales and liquors Mr. Storth so vastly appreciated.
-
-Now, Miss Amelia Wrigley was not only of a good figure, a pleasing face,
-and a sprightly wit, and with those promising prospects that are a
-mighty agreeable adjunct to personal charms; she was also fully aware of
-her own value. She knew to the decimal of an inch how far it was prudent
-to permit the thirsty youths who frequented the Royal Albert Hotel to go
-in their amorous advances. Of course, she must not be too frigid, and
-there were occasions when it was politic to be diplomatically hard of
-hearing. The ingenious Hebe who ministers to the pleasures of
-manufacturers, flushed by the frequent “friendly glasses”
-inseparable from the conduct of business on market-day, must affect not
-to hear many an innuendo that crapulous youth seems to think he may
-safely utter in the presence of a barmaid, though he would soundly
-trounce the fellow who should utter the like in the hearing of his
-sister in the domestic drawing-room. Poor Hebe’s face may glow with
-outraged modesty, her eyes may flash her indignation and resentment, but
-business requires that she should smile and smirk and say smooth things.
-Miss Amelia Wrigley was declared by many a young buck of Huddersfield to
-be “too stand-offish” for his taste, which required that a girl
-should be able “to give a joke and take a joke, don’t you know”;
-though the kind of joke required by this predilection to be given and
-taken was not defined with that precision beloved of the mathematician.
-But it may be put down to Mr. Sam Storth’s credit that this
-stand-offishness of the fair Amelia was very far from diminishing that
-lady’s attractiveness in his eyes.
-
-“I like a larky girl as well as any man,” he confided to his
-partner, “and when I’m in for fun I don’t want to have to do with
-a condemned iceberg; but fun’s one thing and matrimony’s another and
-don’t you forget it. And when I place a lady at the head of my
-mahogany, I don’t want to think that every doddering idiot in
-Huddersfield that can sport a flash ring and chain has blown a cloud of
-cigarette smoke in her face and drawled out ‘Another special, Millie,
-my angel, and a smile with it.’ You don’t ‘Millie’ Amelia
-Wrigley, I can tell you.”
-
-From which profound observation it may be inferred that in the
-conversation of which we have heard but a part, and of which, by your
-leave, good reader, we will take the liberty to hear more, Mr. Sam
-Storth could not boast of that self-assurance and complacency that
-usually marked his intercourse with the ladies he honoured with his
-acquaintance. In some mysterious way the talk had drifted, as talk
-between a young man and maid will drift, to the perilous subject of
-liking, of love, of the choice of a lover and so forth.
-
-“I used to think I wasn’t a marrying man, Miss Amelia—I may call
-you that mayn’t I?—Miss Wrigley’s so formal, so cold, between
-friends, don’t you think?—not a marrying man by a long chalk. Seen
-so much billing and cooing in my time, and then a chain that can’t
-very well be broken with a cat at one end of it and a dog at the other.
-I always draw the line at that particular service in the Prayer Book
-that so appropriately begins with “dearly beloved” and ends with
-“amazement! But”—with a sigh that was intended to be sentimental,
-and a glance that was unmistakeably amorous—“but a man never knows
-his fate. How true it is that man proposes but God disposes.”
-
-“Then man shouldn’t propose,” suggested the lady.
-
-“Oh, do be serious, Miss Amelia, or may say I Amelia?”
-
-“Certainly you may not say Amelia, Storth, at least not to me. Why
-should you?”
-
-“Because, because oh! hang it Amelia, I mean Miss Amelia, you make it
-confounded difficult for a fellow. Jove! Isn’t it hot?”—and Mr.
-Storth mopped his troubled and moist brow with a vast bandana. “I
-think, if you don’t mind, I’ll have another pint of bitter, with a
-top on.”
-
-Miss Wrigley rose, and, moving with stately ease to the pumps, drew a
-large tankard of the foaming beverage.
-
-“I never knew such a man as you for beer, Mr. Storth.”
-
-“Safer than whisky, my dear. I mean Miss Amelia; but I was
-saying——”
-
-“Yes; you were saying.”
-
-“Well, lately, ever since I came to know you in fact, I’ve been
-thinking of settling down. I’m not a sentimental young fool, as you
-know. This isn’t calf love, in fact, I never had any such tommyrot to
-bother me as calf-love. It’s the genuine article, warranted 18 carat
-and entered A1 at Lloyd’s. I’ve met my fate at last. A lady, young,
-and yet not too young; I do hate your simpering schoolgirl-misses, just
-out of short frocks, and long what-do-you-call-’ems, with the crochet
-frills on; tall, a good figure, handsome, of good intelligence and
-education and manners—by Jove, the manners of a duchess.”
-
-“Oh! so you’ve met such a lady at last, have you, Mr. Storth, and
-deigned to approve of her figure, face, mind, and manners, and all.”
-
-“Why, you know I have, Amelia. Ain’t I telling you so?”
-
-“Meaning me, I suppose?” queried the lady, with much composure.
-
-“Why, of course I mean you. You don’t think I’m such a confounded
-ass as to sit here half the afternoon talking about another girl. I may
-be ten or twenty different kinds of fool, but I’m not such a fool as
-all that comes to. Of course I mean you.”
-
-“I’m sure I’m vastly obliged to you,” commented the lady.
-“You’ve assured me, somewhat obliquely, to be sure, that I’ve a
-fine figure, a passable face, an intelligent mind, and the manners of a
-duchess, I think you were so flattering as to observe; and you’ve also
-assured me, also somewhat obliquely, but ’twill pass, that I’m your
-fate. You’ve said nothing, by the way, about my heart, Mr. Storth,
-nor, now I come to think of it, unless very, very obliquely, about your
-own.”
-
-“Oh! that’s of course,” declared Sam, with considerable vigour.
-
-“Exactly, that’s, as you say, of course. So I’ve a good figure, a
-fair face, an intelligent mind, the manners of a duchess. I never met a
-duchess, but I presume the comparison is meant as complimentary; all
-these, and, to boot, a heart that’s, as you say, of course. Now, pray,
-Mr. Storth, what do you offer in exchange for all this?”
-
-“What do I offer? I? Why, surely you can’t misunderstand me, you
-cannot fail to know that all this time I’ve been offering MYSELF!”
-
-“I see ‘myself,’ in large capitals, I suppose.” Sam Storth
-looked, as he doubtless felt, somewhat nonplussed by this reception of
-what he assured himself was an uncommonly handsome offer.
-
-“Yourself!” continued the object of his well-regulated affections;
-“h’m, yourself. That’s so comprehensive as to be a trifling vague.
-You were good enough to enter into detailed particulars, quite a bill of
-quantities, or particular invoice of what should be included in the
-self, the other self besides yourself, on which you would deign to
-lavish the treasures of your heart. Cannot you be a little more precise
-as to what is included in YOURSELF? What’s to be the _quid pro quo_
-for my good figure, my fair face, my excellent understanding and my
-manners of a duchess? Is it to be _par example your_ good figure?”
-
-Now, it has been said that Mr. Storth, however excellent a lawyer, was
-no Adonis.
-
-He winced and sate silent.
-
-“_Your_ fair face?”
-
-Again Mr. Storth winced and found no words.
-
-“_Your_ excellent understanding? _Your_ manners? I suppose they should
-be ducal to match mine?”
-
-“Oh, hang it all, Miss Wrigley! I think you’re piling it on a bit
-too thick. I don’t set up for a beauty, though I’ve had my
-successes,” Sam added, in parenthesis.
-
-“So I understand. In the _coulisses_ of the music-hall.”
-
-“And I don’t set up for a saint. But that’s all over now. But
-you’ve beauty and goodness enough for the pair of us, and if I’m
-neither an Adonis nor a saint I’m not generally looked upon as a fool.
-I’m a gentleman by profession, I’ve a good business, and I’m
-making enough to keep a wife, and if that isn’t good enough, why, I
-can’t help it, and there’s an end on’t.”
-
-“Ah! now you’re talking sense. You’re making, you say, a good
-income. But as what? As the junior partner of Mr. Edward Beaumont; the
-man who does the leavings of his work, takes the cases he doesn’t
-think important enough to attend to himself, and does the drudgery he
-thinks beneath his high and mightiness.”
-
-“Oh, damn Edward Beaumont!” broke in Storth, hotly.
-
-“With all the pleasure in life,” pursued the lady serenely,
-“though perhaps it isn’t quite in harmony with ducal manners to say
-so in the presence of a lady. But that’s the position you offer
-me—the wife of a junior partner, whose senior is, I understand, the
-guest of an Archdeacon, and is, you imagine, basking in the smiles of
-the Archdeacon’s daughter. I suppose I should be expected to take up
-the _role_ of a junior partner’s wife, to receive an occasional
-invitation to dinner when no one else in particular was invited, to be
-on visiting terms with the managing clerk and his lady, and to be humbly
-thankful when my partner’s wife acknowledged me in New Street. No
-thank you, Mr. Storth, it isn’t good enough.”
-
-“Is that your final word?” asked Storth, savagely.
-
-“No, it isn’t, and you needn’t glare at me like that. I’m not in
-the witness box, and, if I were, I shouldn’t be afraid of _you_. It
-isn’t my final word. If you want me you must win me.”
-
-“How?” interjected Sam, eagerly.
-
-“Only show me how.”
-
-“Cease to be a junior partner, and if, in doing so, you humble your
-Mr. Edward Beaumont to the dust, I shall be none the less pleased on
-that account. Make a position that is your own. I know you’ve brains.
-Perhaps not of the highest order, but still good enough for the work you
-have to do. Use them to lift you up from the shadow by which you are now
-obscured, the shadow of another man’s personality. And then come to
-me. And, meanwhile, don’t forget what I said about your precious Mr.
-Edward Beaumont.”
-
-“Then it’s a promise, Amelia?” asked Storth eagerly, his face lit
-up with the joy of triumph.”
-
-“It’s what I think you lawyers would call a conditional promise. You
-keep your part of the bargain, Sam, and I’ll keep mine. There,
-that’ll do. I’m not fond of those demonstrations, and I don’t like
-the smell of beer. You’ll have to take to claret—some day.”
-
-“And that day isn’t far off, you bet, Amelia. I’m not too fond of
-Mr. Edward Beaumont, as you call him, myself; and I’ll be no more
-sorry than yourself to see my lord taught a lesson he badly needs. Well
-what is it, Ainley?”—this to one of the clerks of his firm who was
-heard inquiring if Mr. Storth was about.
-
-“Mr. Schofield would like to see you, sir.”
-
-“Pat as the heft to the blade,” exclaimed Storth. “I’ll tell you
-some day what I mean,” he added, as he hastily drained his pewter,
-wiped his lips and nodded his adieus to Miss Wrigley.
-
-Mr. William Schofield, the client whom Mr. Storth found nervously
-awaiting him, was a man of some sixty years of age, of middle stature,
-with hard, one might say, harsh features, his face clean shaven save for
-a ragged, grizzled fringe of hair that ran down the sides of the cheeks
-and under the chin, leaving unadorned the close lips, and exposed the
-few yellow front teeth advancing years had left; eyes bright, keen and
-greedy. Mr. Schofield had been, as he would have told you with pride, a
-hard worker all his life. He had known the hardships in his youth of the
-unreformed, uncoerced Factory System. As a boy, not yet in his teens, he
-had been a “billy piecener,” walking miles to the mill in all sorts
-of weather, in winter time long before sunrise, he had worked his
-fourteen and fifteen hours a day for a beggarly wage of a few shillings
-weekly, subsisting for the most part on water porridge, which he often
-had to eat cold. What education he had he had picked up in the Sunday
-School attached to the Golcar Baptist Chapel. There he had learned to
-read, to write, and to “sum,” so that by the aid of a ready-reckoner
-he could make out an invoice.
-
-Despite, or perhaps because of, his early disadvantages he had
-prospered. He had by the time he was forty years old become a small
-lindsey manufacturer. He worked hard six days a week, and he could
-scarce be said to rest on the seventh, for he was a deacon of the chapel
-in whose Sunday school he had learned the rudiments. He had worked hard
-and he had lived hard, denying himself almost necessary food and fuel
-and clothing, “clamming,” so it was said by the envious, himself and
-his wife, that he might put more and more of his earnings into his
-business. He had no pleasures, unless the hearing of the non-elect
-vigorously damned every Sunday by a Predestinarian preacher be a
-pleasure, and excepting always that: great and all-sufficing joy of
-adding shilling by shilling to his store. He had no children, and when
-he reflected that unless he left his money to the chapel it should in
-the natural course go to a spendthrift nephew he often consoled himself
-by the thought that the nephew could not have more pleasure in
-dissipating his patrimony than the uncle had in hoarding it. He cared
-neither for literature nor arts. He never read anything but the Bible,
-the Baptist Magazine, and the Leeds Mercury. He called himself a
-Liberal, but his Liberalism was not based so much on a desire for the
-betterment of the condition of the many as upon resentment of the
-privileges of the few. And Edward Beaumont was his solicitor, as Edward
-Beaumont’s father before him had been.
-
-“Howd’ye do, Mr. Schofield? Fine day, isn’t it? Glad to see you
-looking so fit, ’pon my word you look younger every time you give us a
-call.” It was one of Mr. Sam Storth’s most cherished maxims that
-politeness—to the people to whom it is worth while to be
-polite—costs nothing.
-
-“Well, I’m nobbut so-so, Mr. Storth, nobbut so-so, a plaguy lot o’
-rheumatiz these days, but aw reckon aw mun expect to feel th’ years
-creepin ower me, tho aw’m nobbut a lad yet in a manner o’
-speakin’, that is, wheer some come; but it wer’ Mr. Beaumont aw
-wer’ wantin’ to see. Aw reckon yo’n know nowt abaat that bit o’
-brass o’ mine, if yo can call a matter o’ three thousand paand a bit
-o’ brass at Edward’s father ligged aat at interest for me. I’d
-better wait and see hissen.”
-
-“But Mr. Beaumont’s away, down in Lincolnshire, and I can’t quite
-say when he’ll be back. Perhaps you can tell me what it is you want to
-know and I may be able to give you the information you require. Let me
-see, you’re the mortgagee of Midgley’s mill, aren’t you?”
-
-“Aye, that’s me. Yo’ see, it’s abaat ten yer sin’ aw, put th’ brass
-aat. It were i’ Edward’s father’s time an’ he made th’ writins for me.
-It wer’ a seet o’ eggs to put i’ one basket—three thaasand paand,
-awmost th’ savin’s o’ my lifetime—but Midgley were doin’ well then an’
-th’ rate o’ interest, five per cent., were temptin’. But aw’d never ony
-bother abaat th’ interest till just abaat th’ time th’ owd man, tho’ he
-woren’t so owd to be sure, Edward’s father aw mean, took an’,
-died, and Edward stepped into his shoin. That were afore yo’ came to
-th’ office, so happen yo’ won’t know th’ ins an’ th’ outs on
-it. Then owd Midgley went dahn th’ slot, banked tha’ knows. Awst
-nivver forget that market-day, when th’ news came to th’ market.
-Aw’ were eitin’ a fourpenny plate o’ meat pie at Morton’s, when
-somebody axed me if aw’d heerd owd Tommy Midgley had done a bank. It
-welly choked me, an’ aw’d to struggle hard to finish th’ pie, but
-aw couldn’t fashion to put it i’ mi pocket-hanker. Aw come up
-straight to see Mr. Edward, an’ he made nowt but fun o’ me. He axed
-me if aw’d forgotten th’ mortgage. As aw’m a miserable sinner it
-had clean slipped my mind. He tried to sell th’ mill under th’
-mortgage, but th’ highest bid wouldn’t have paid me off. Trade were
-very bad just then, an’ folk failin’ reet an’ left. Midgley’s
-mill were just a white elephant. But Mr. Edward came out like a
-gentleman an’ he said as how his father had advised th’ loan he’d
-take th’ responsibility on his showders till things mended. An’
-aw’ve had my cheque reg’lar ivery half-year ever sin for th’
-interest less th’ income-tax.”
-
-“Ah! I see,” said Storth; “this is all new to me. You see this was, as
-you say, before I came into the office, and it appears to have been a
-private arrangement between you and Mr. Beaumont. A merely verbal
-arrangement, I understand. You’ve only Mr. Beaumont’s word.”
-
-“That’s all. It’s good enough, isn’t it?”
-
-“Oh, quite so. But we’re all mortal, you know, and I like black and
-white myself in business. Who’s running the mill now?”
-
-“Aw couldn’t reetly say for sure. But aw yer it’s let off, or part
-on it is, shoose ha’, i’ room an’ power. Aw nivver bothered my yed
-abaat it, as long as th’ interest cam’ to hand. But it’s a week
-o’er due, an’ aw’ve been expectin’ it by ivery post, so aw thowt
-aw’d better call in an’ see abaat it. Yo’ won’t charge me owt
-for that, will yo’?” he asked, as a sudden fear seized him.
-
-“No, no, by no means—mortgagor’s costs. Make your mind easy. I’ve no
-doubt it will be all right when Mr. Beaumont returns. Still...,” and
-Mr. Storth fingered the seal on his watch-chain, and puckered his
-brow and pursed his lips and slowly shook his head.
-
-“Still, what?” asked Mr. Schofield, sharply. “There’s nowt
-wrong, is there?”
-
-“Wrong? No, no, of course not, at least…. well, well. No writing,
-you say, only Mr. Beaumont’s word; and, of course, Mr. Beaumont’s
-the soul of honour. You know what the poet says: “So are we all, all
-honourable men.” Still, three thousand pounds is a tidy bit.”
-
-“Yo’d ’ave thowt so if yo’d had to addle it an’ nip an’
-scrat for it same as I had.”
-
-“A very tidy bit. You have the deeds, of course?”
-
-“They’re at the bank.”
-
-“You’ve overdrawn on them, I suppose.”
-
-“Then you suppose wrang, young man, aw dunnot lend money at five per
-cent. to borrow brass fra’ the bank at six. That’s noan th’ way we
-mak’ money i’ Golcar. Th’ writin’s are nobbut theer for safety.
-Aw can fot ’em aat ony day aw like. What are yo’ axin’ for, if aw
-may mak’ so bowd?”
-
-“I’m not only asking, Mr. Schofield, I’m thinking. You read the
-local papers, of course?”
-
-“Aw see th’ Weekly Examiner ivery week. Me an’ a neighbour join at
-it. What for?”
-
-“Well, of course, you’ve read any time this last few weeks that
-there’s great unrest in the industrial world. There was the strike at
-Martin’s, of Lindley, not so long ago; there’s just been trouble at
-Taylor and Littlewood’s, at Newsome, and I know for a fact that the
-textile workers have formed a very strong and formidable union that
-embraces not only Huddersfield, but the valleys of the Colne and the
-Holme. In fact, Mr. Beaumont was fool enough to draw up the rules of the
-union and make no charge.”
-
-“That’s more nor he’d do for me, aw rekon. What sud he do that
-for?”
-
-“Oh, you know, he’s all for the rights of labour.”
-
-“Rights o’ fiddlesticks. What’s a man want more nor plenty o’
-wark an’ overtime? But what’s all this to do wi’ my brass?”
-
-“Not much, perhaps. Only, you see, I don’t think, from what I saw of
-that exceedingly amiable gentleman, Albert Clough, the weavers’
-secretary, when he came to consult Beaumont about the draft of the new
-rules—a cut-throat lace, if I ever saw one—that this new union’s
-going to be idle very long.”
-
-“Well, what’s that to me?”
-
-“Nothing—perhaps; perhaps a great deal; perhaps a matter of that
-tidy little bit of a three thousand pounds of yours.”
-
-Mr. Schofield’s face sicklied over with the pale cast of a mortal
-fear. His hands became cold and clammy, his heart sank within him.
-
-“Good God! how can that be? Isn’t there th’ writin’s?”
-
-“Oh, don’t alarm yourself unnecessarily, Mr. Schofield. It may be
-all right. The late Mr. Beaumont was a very cautious man, I’ve always
-understood. Still, as you say, there wasn’t a very spirited bidding
-when the mill was put up before, and if there should be a general
-strike, or what comes to much the same thing in the long run, a general
-lockout, mill property will be a drug on the market.”
-
-“Still, aw’ve Mr. Beaumont’s word.”
-
-Mr. Storth shrugged his shoulders.
-
-“Exactly. Well, Mr. Beaumont’s away. Lord only knows when he’ll be
-back. It’s the Long Vacation, you know. Meanwhile, tho’ it’s very
-irregular, I’ll let you have my own cheque, on my private account, for
-the interest. Doubtless Beaumont will see me all right. All the same,
-I’m glad my little bit isn’t out on mill property and I’ll take
-precious good care it never is. Of course, it was all right to have your
-money out in a good round sum when you were up to your eyes in business,
-and hadn’t time to look after things. But if I were a man of your
-years, with a fair amount of leisure and settled in my native village,
-do you know the kind of investment I should fancy?”
-
-“Let’s be knowing, sir, if yo’ don’t mind.”
-
-“I’d lend a hundred here and a hundred there on good cottage
-property—property that I could walk past every day of my life. I
-should have the satisfaction of knowing I’d helped some hard-working
-man to become the owner of his own dwelling.”
-
-“Wi’ me on th’ top of it.”
-
-“Exactly, with you on the top of it, as a sort of ballast; and if you
-like to devote your retired leisure to serving your native village on
-the Local Board, or on the Board of Guardians, why you could serve your
-own interests at the same time by keeping the rates down . . . .”
-
-“Them poor rates is a scandal,” interposed Mr. Schofield with
-conviction.
-
-“Keeping the rates down and consequently the value of property up; and
-with three thousand pounds out in small sums take it you’ve thirty
-voters at least you can rely on any time you like to put up for
-office.”
-
-“Aw winnot say but aw had thowt o’ th’ Local Board, an’
-happen’ th’ Guardians. But nob’dy’s axed me to stand.”
-
-Mr. Storth smiled indulgently.
-
-“Oh, that’s easily managed when the time comes. Let me see, what’s
-the formula? ‘Yielding to the urgent solicitations of a large and
-influential body of my fellow townsmen I have consented to allow myself
-to be nominated as a candidate for your suffrages at the forthcoming
-election. If elected, etc.’ But we’re jumping a little before we get
-to the stile, eh? You haven’t got these thirty nice snug mortgages
-yet, have you?”
-
-“No; but aw sooin can have. Just yo’ call in that brass i’ double
-quick time.”
-
-“No need to be precipitate. I’ll speak to Mr. Beaumont about it when
-he returns. All the same, there’s no need to let the grass grow under
-your feet. If you’ll make yourself comfortable with a newspaper in the
-waiting-room for half-an-hour, I’ll draw up the formal notice of
-withdrawal of the money—we shall have sufficient particulars in the
-Deed Book, I’ve no doubt, and you can sign it, leaving the date open;
-and if Mr. Beaumont concurs in my view, the notice can go without
-troubling you again.”
-
-But a few days after the consultation, at which we have been privileged
-to assist, Edward Beaumont returned to Yorkshire and the duties there
-awaiting him.
-
-“Morning, Sam,” he exclaimed, as he grasped his partner’s chubby
-hand. “I’m a bit overdue, I fear. The fact is, I didn’t come
-straight on from Lincolnshire. I had to take a run up to town.”
-
-“Did you go to see Russell about those Iron Works, those blasted
-Blasting Works, as I’ve been tempted to call them. It’ll end in
-Chancery, I suppose.”
-
-“Not if I can help it; and I didn’t go to town to see Russell.”
-Now, Mr. Russell, of Bedford Row, was the London agent of the firm of
-Beaumont, Son, and Storth. “You’ll never guess whom I went to see,
-and why. The fact is, I put in a good bit of time at the Reform Club.”
-
-“Well, I don’t doubt they do you very well at the Reform Club. Never
-been beyond its august portals myself, but on general principles I
-should argue a _cordon bleu_ for a _chef_ and a cellar second only to an
-Emperor’s. Your true reformer who recommends vegetarianism and total
-abstinence, high thinking and low feeding to the general, takes uncommon
-good care to have the best of everything for himself.”
-
-“Well, I only sampled a cigar and a whiskey and soda. Leatham took me
-to interview the Junior Whip.”
-
-Now Mr. Leatham was the Liberal member for Huddersfield.
-
-“And what the deuce did you want with the Liberal Whip, if I may make
-so free?”
-
-“Why, what the deuce, to borrow your phrase, do people want with
-Liberal Whips?”
-
-“Can’t say. No use for ’em myself, and I should have thought you
-hadn’t. But I can make a shrewd guess what the Junior Liberal Whip
-wanted with Mr. Edward Beaumont, and that’s a subscription to the
-party fund. Well, go ahead with your tale.”
-
-“Well, it seems I was just the sort of man the party’s looking for.
-There’s to be a vacancy soon in one of the West Staffordshire
-Divisions—Staveley Hill’s the sitting member, a blue of the blues,
-you know—and the party our party, want a man well up on the Land
-Question to fight the seat. Now, I do rather fancy myself on the Land
-Question.”
-
-“I don’t think you know a turnip from a mangel wurzel, if that’s
-what you call being well up on the Land Question.”
-
-“Don’t be a fool, Sam. You know that’s nothing to do with the
-question. And the long and short of it is I’ve promised to step into
-the breach, and uncommon glad of the chance, too. Why, man, it’s an
-honour to be permitted to carry the banner of Land Reform right up to
-the entrenchments of feudalism.”
-
-“Oh, you can keep that sort of talk for the free and independent. Have
-you counted the cost? There hasn’t been a Liberal member for a county
-constituency in the whole length and breadth of Staffordshire since the
-days of Simon de Montfort, I imagine. The Southern Division’s an
-awfully scattered one and almost purely agricultural.”
-
-“There’s the mining district right in the heart of it,” broke in
-Beaumont.
-
-“True; and the miners haven’t a vote. They’ll crowd round your
-meetings, and carry you shoulder high, shout themselves harse, and wring
-the hands off you in their grimy fists, and sing ‘See the conquering
-hero comes’ till you feel you can’t fail to head the poll. And when
-the polling day comes, where are they? No more use than a row of
-skittles. And while they’re roaring, your quiet comfortable farmer
-draws up in his gig from his quiet comfortable farm, has a quiet and
-comfortable glass at his favourite hostelry, and then quietly and
-comfortably pills you in the polling-booth. Do you think the farmer is
-such an insensate ass as to fall out with the vicar and the squire and
-his relations, just to oblige Mr. Edward Beaumont, charm he never so
-wisely?”
-
-“Well, commend me to you for a Job’s comforter, Sam. It will be a
-hard fight, I know, but, as the Whip put it, it will give me a chance to
-show the stuff I’m made of, to win my spurs; and what can a man want
-more? Anyway, I’ve passed my word, and I’m off to Wolverhampton in
-next to no time to meet the election agent and arrange for a series of
-meetings all over the Division. And I want you to cut off for your
-holidays and come back as fit as a fiddle, for I expect during the next
-few months you’ll have to do more than your share of the office
-work.”
-
-“Well, ‘who will to Cupar, maun to Cupar.’ Whom God wants to ruin,
-He first turns mad; and if ever a man was qualifying for a lunatic
-asylum, that man’s yourself, Beaumont. Don’t say I haven’t warned
-you. You’ll think of what I say someday or my name’s not Sam Storth.
-You’ll spend a lot of money.”…
-
-“I don’t care if it costs every penny I have in the world.”
-
-“You needn’t care. It _will_ cost every penny you have in the world,
-and more to boot, unless you’ve stumbled across a gold mine in the
-fens.”
-
-“Better than a gold mine, my boy. The grandest, divinest
-creature——”
-
-“Exactly. I guessed there was a woman at the bottom of it. But for
-electioneering purposes give me the gold mine. Well, just run through
-these papers with me and then I’m off. My name’s Walker, and my
-address the Highlands for the next six weeks.”
-
-At the door Storth turned, as if on an afterthought.
-
-“Oh, by-the-bye, Beaumont, I had a man here the other day, a William
-Schofield, of Golcar. He’d got some maggot in his head about a
-mortgage, and was in mortal terror about some overdue interest. He told
-me the amount and I gave him my cheque for it. I suppose it was all
-right?”
-
-“Quite right. If you’ll wait a moment I’ll write you a cheque for
-the money. It’s a private account, you know. I’d forgotten the
-interest was due. How quickly half-years slip away when you’ve money
-to pay at the end of them. I think I’ve had more bother about that
-loan of Schofield’s than all the rest of the business put together.”
-
-“Ah! I didn’t quite get the hang of the matter from the old
-gentleman. But I sized him up to be just the sort to talk enough about
-his interest, if he didn’t get it, to shake the credit of the Bank of
-England, so I just, as I say, calmed him down with a piece of stamped
-paper with my name in the corner.”
-
-“Well, I’d better tell you all about it. It seems he lent three
-thousand pounds to Midgley, of Almondbury, on the security of Plover
-Mill, and some adjacent cottages, in the mill-yard, I expect. That was
-in my father’s time; and the strange thing about it is I’ve never
-been able to find any valuer’s certificate as to the value of the
-property at the time of the loan, though from what I know of my
-father’s way of doing business I’m as certain there was one as I am
-that the sun’s in the heavens. To make matters worse, soon after my
-father’s death, poor old Midgley went smash and the mill has never
-been wholly occupied since, and the rents from the cottages hardly pay a
-clerk’s wages for collecting. However, I told Schofield I’d pay the
-interest myself, and so I must, I fear, for the sake of the dear old
-dad’s memory. It’s a bit of a pull though.”
-
-“But what about the principal? Three thousand pounds isn’t exactly a
-flea-bite, and it would about kill Schofield to lose it.”
-
-“I suppose I’ll have to take it on my own shoulders. I’ve always
-put off taking over the property, subject to the mortgage, though
-Midgley’s trustee is willing enough to transfer the equity to me. I
-hoped to get a good tenant, but things seem to go from bad to worse out
-Almondbury way. Still, the thing’s got to be done. They can’t go on
-in this slip-shod way. Just attend to the matter, Sam, when you come
-back. Put it on a business footing. I’ll take over the whole thing,
-lock, stock, and barrel, with Schofield’s mortgage on the top of
-it.”
-
-“All right; I’ll see to it between now and next interest-day No
-hurry. I think you’re rather a fool though.”
-
-“Well, you see, it wasn’t your father, Sam. If only that confounded
-valuer’s certificate would turn up; but that’s past praying for, I
-fear, and I don’t know who the valuer was and, what’s more, when I
-tried to find out, some time ago, by inquiring among the auctioneers and
-estate agents, nary a one of them had any recollection of making a
-valuation.”
-
-“All right, Beaumont, I’ll put things to ship-shape. Well, I
-shan’t see you again before I start, so ta-ta. Hope biz. will brighten
-up before I come back. It’s been as dull as ditch-water this month
-back.”
-
-Mr. Storth returned to his own room and began to set to rights, as he
-styled it, the heterogeneous mass of papers that accumulate about a busy
-lawyer’s desk and pigeon-holes and drawers. He was routing out the
-contents of a deep recess, lettered XYZ, a receptacle apparently for
-odds and ends of documents that could find no other home, reading the
-endorsements, tearing up some, transferring others to their appropriate
-resting-place, when he chanced upon a document bearing no
-endorsement—an omission not a little irritating to the methodic mind.
-
-“If I knew the clerk who’s responsible for this I’d give him a
-piece of my mind,” muttered Mr. Storth, vindictively, as he opened the
-folded paper and set about ascertaining its nature, with a view to duly
-marking its date and character upon its back. He read a few lines and
-then whistled softly.
-
-“Well, I’m jiggered! The missing certificate! ‘Can recommend an
-advance of £3,000 (three thousand) to £3,500 (three thousand five
-hundred pounds).’ Now, what shall I do with this precious bit of
-paper? What a load the finding of this will take off Beaumont’s mind!
-I’ve a good mind to pop it in the fire. I know a young lady who would
-say that’s what I ought to do. Shall I? No; hanged if I play it as low
-as that, not even to pleasure Miss Amelia Wrigley.”
-
-Mr. Storth was so absorbed in his own reflections that he did not hear a
-gentle tap at his room door, did not hear the door open, did not hear
-the deprecating cough by which the clerk who entered sought to attract
-his attention, and only when the clerk stood by his side, and had cast a
-quick glance at the document that engrossed his thoughts did he turn
-swiftly round in his chair.
-
-“That you, Barnes. What the deuce do you mean stealing into my room
-like a confounded ghost? What do you want any way?” And Mr. Storth
-huddled up the papers he had taken from the pigeon-hole XYZ, the long
-lost, anxiously-searched certificate among them and thrust them into
-that receptacle.
-
-And though, later, Mr. Storth searched high and low for the document, he
-found it not. It had again vanished.
-
-And so had Mr. Barnes.
-
-CHAPTER VII.
-
-If any man prides himself on being the master and controller of his own
-destiny, if he plumes himself on his own achievements, saying in his
-heart: “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this
-wealth,” or this title, or this what you will, let him chasten his
-self-esteem by reviewing his own career, and observing how, not once nor
-twice but many times, it hath been over-ruled, shaped, fashioned,
-deflected, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, by happenings in
-which he has had neither part nor parcel, in which it seemed little
-likely he would and could have no concern, yet which for him and all his
-future were as big with fate as if they had been specially designed by
-Providence for no other purpose than to humble or exalt him, to make or
-to mar him. Thus, whilst at this period we may safely conceive of Edward
-Beaumont as reflecting with some complacency on the enjoyment of a
-lucrative practice, anticipating the delights of a keen contest for a
-seat in Parliament, with visions belike of at least a junior lordship,
-and sweet imaginings of bridal veils and orange wreaths; it is none the
-less true that the doings of some half-dozen not over cultured
-millhands, whose very names were unknown to him, were fated to leave on
-his life a mark eternity itself would perchance not suffice to efface.
-
-It is a wild night, and the wild and blustering month of March, 1883,
-and the New Street of Huddersfield is swept by a gale that comes
-tearing, roaring, wuthering down the Come Valley right from Standedge
-top; a wind laden with pelting rain that dashes into your face, blinds
-your eyes, and makes as though to rend the very garments from your back,
-whirl them sky high, and sport with them among the scurrying, glowering
-clouds. It is a night on which, to quote the quaint equivoque, it is
-good to have no home to go to, to be instead snugly seated in your own
-ingle-nook, by a roaring fire, with slippered feet on a thick, list rug,
-a pipe in your mouth, a book in your hand, the dog at your feet blinking
-his honest eyes at you, the cat purring peacefully its hymn of bliss,
-and the _placens uxor_, the sonsie wife, as she rocks in her chair
-opposite you, breathes a sigh of profound thankfulness that the day’s
-work is well-nigh done, that the bairns, God bless them, are snugly
-tucked in bed, and for ten peaceful hours will cease from troubling, and
-the weary mother may be at rest. It is a night on which the mind,
-reposeful after a day’s toil well done, and a day’s wage well won,
-would fain enjoy a peace undisturbed by thoughts of the morrow’s
-harrassings.
-
-But in Huddersfield and in all the wildly beautiful district around, nor
-for master nor man, was there any hope that night of that ideal,
-beatific peace. The strike, the great Weavers’ Strike, as it came to
-be known, was well under weigh, and both masters and men had settled
-down with the grim resolve of the northern character to see which side
-could starve the other into submission. For, after all, with all the
-talk and all the writing about good trade and bad trade, about high
-profits and losses, about scales and rates of wages, after all the
-conferences and deputations and talk of arbitration and Boards of
-Conciliation, to a trial of brute strength, of sheer endurance, of
-staying power, not to a determination of which side was right and which
-was wrong, must the contest surely come.
-
-It was a very pretty quarrel, as quarrels go, a quarrel to make the
-cynic hug himself in glee, a quarrel to make angels weep. The masters
-had agreed upon a new scale of wages to be adopted and enforced in every
-mill in the district, a scale that would determine not only the plus and
-minus of the employers’ balance-sheets, but that perhaps negligible
-affair, the plus or minus of thousands of humble homes for miles around.
-The masters declared, _ore rotundo_, with swelling voices and in good
-round phrase that the new scale of wages was not a reduction, but a
-readjustment; the weavers swore by all their gods that any readjustment
-the scale would effect would be a transference of so many weekly
-shillings from the earnings of each craftsman to the pockets of his
-master.
-
-A question, surely, this, to be settled in three minutes by a penny
-ready reckoner, where and when Reason has sway. But in Huddersfield and
-in the villages converging therein Reason had unfurled her glittering
-wings and had fled affrighted from the scene of strife, to return only
-when Passion, and Hatred, and Ignorance, and all evil imaginings and
-utterings had wrought their fill of ill.
-
-A pretty quarrel, in very sooth, a quarrel that should have shown the
-veriest idiot of a workingman of how little worth are political
-professions, nay, indeed, of how little worth are religious
-protestations when that sorest of sore points, the pocket, is touched.
-The weavers of Huddersfield and of the valleys hard by had, for years
-that stretched back almost beyond count, flocked in their thousands to
-shout at the hustings in the Square, or, in later days, to shout in
-their noble Town Hall for banker or manufacturer or merchant who came to
-them with glib, smooth speech, asseverating with tear-laden eyes that
-all they asked, to make them happy, was to spend and be spent in the
-workers’ cause. And now the lists are ranged for a grim conflict
-between Labour and Capital, and where are ye now oh, friends of the
-people? Where now is the Liberal merchant, where now the Radical
-manufacturer, where now your reforming councillors and aldermen who have
-risen to their paltry place and gimcrack power on the popular vote,
-where now the editors of facile pen who have been so fluent in their
-vows of fidelity to the people’s cause? All, all alike—Whig and
-Tory, Conservative, Liberal, and Radical stand in solid phalanx,
-confronting an abandoned, impassioned mob, conscious only of its wrongs
-and its betrayal. The men know the masters’ scale means robbery, but
-how shall they, unlettered, unskilled, with hands that can ply a shuttle
-but unused to pen, with brains to think and know and feel, with tongues
-little used to ordered speech, how shall they plead their cause?
-
-Two men are seated this stormy March night in a retired room of the
-Albion public-house on the Buxton Road. The room is small,
-ill-ventilated, stuffy, its air laden with tobacco reek and the fumes of
-stale ale. They are Albert Clough, the Weavers’ Secretary, and Allen
-Rae, two men as different in character and temperament as the poles are
-wide asunder, but united in a common belief in the worker’s right to a
-fairer and a sweeter heritage.
-
-Both were weavers, and both, therefore, were well aware of the effect
-likely to be produced by the masters’ proposed scale upon the earnings
-of themselves and their fellow-workmen. But there was little other
-resemblance between the two men. Rae was a man of no small natural
-ability, his forehead denoted intellectuality, his firm, close-set lips
-determination and self-control. Anyone accustomed to judge character by
-external indications would have no difficulty in pronouncing Rae to be
-of an essentially practical turn of mind; of no great ideals or
-enthusiasms; a safe guide rather than an impassioned leader. Clough, on
-the other hand, was as readily assessed, or, as his acquaintances would
-have phrased it, “sized up,” as a man of impulses, apt to allow his
-judgment to be warped by his passions and his prejudices. And of
-passions and prejudices he had his full share. He had read much, and the
-literature to which he was partial consisted, for the most part, of
-those books that exposed the iniquities of those in high places, men
-born and nurtured in the lap of luxury. He, at all events, never
-questioned the divine _dictum_ as to the possibility of a rich man
-entering the kingdom of heaven. His whole attitude to the capitalist
-class, as embodied for him in the Masters’ Union, was determined by a
-consuming sense of the rank injustice of things, the gross iniquity that
-he and his fellows should be cursed rather than born into the world,
-foredoomed to moil and toil for a pittance to lead a hard life of
-endless work, with long hours and paltry pay, to live a dun, colourless
-existence, a life of carking care and ceaseless struggle, with the
-prospect at its close, of the Workhouse, unless he should be so happy as
-to drop at his loom; while other men, many of whom, he was very sure,
-were neither so clever, nor so well instructed as himself, were by the
-accident of birth or from positions their own hands and brains had not
-won, sheltered from the storms of life, had never known and would never
-know the pangs of hunger nor the hideous monotony of a life of
-mechanical toil in another’s service. There was not much talk of
-Socialism in those days; Socialism was vaguely supposed to be a milder
-orm of Nihilism, having something to do with dynamite and secret
-societies. Had there been any Socialists in Huddersfield, Clough would
-have been in their midst; but his Socialism would have been based not so
-much upon a divine compassion for others as upon a fierce pity for
-himself.
-
-“Have you read that leading article o’ Joe Woodhead in to-neet’s
-Rag?” it was thus impolitely he referred to the “Huddersfield Daily
-Examiner.”
-
-Rae nodded.
-
-“An’ this is th’ paper th’ working-men ha’ been fooils enough
-to call th’ friend o’ freedom. By gow, Allen, it ma’es me think
-what fooils we ’n bin.”
-
-“I don’t quite see what else we could expect,” said Rae, quietly.
-“Yo’ musn’t forget that behind the editorial ‘we’ there is
-always a very human personality. Th’ editor o’ th’ ‘Examiner’s’ only
-human, and it’s only natural he’ll look at the present crisis in th’
-trade of Huddersfield from a very different standpoint to you an’ me.
-Yo’ see, he started in life as a manufacturer hissen, an’ only drifted
-into journalism. He’s one of the middle-class hissen. He were born into
-it, he wedded into it, an’ aw should think all his friends are of it.
-Look how thick he is wi’ ‘Midget’ o’ Marsden, ’at they say’s done so
-much to make th’ ‘Examiner’ go in the Colne Valley. Yo’ can’t say but
-what both Mr. Woodhead an’ Mr. Robinson—that’s ‘Midget,’ you know—are
-good Liberals. They’re sound on questions of Church an’ State. But
-this strike isn’t a question of Church an’ State; it’s a question
-o’ £ s. d.”
-
-“It’s more nor that, Allen. It’s a question o’ th’ right o’
-combination; th’ right o’ th’ men to have a say in fixin’ th’
-rate o’ wages they’re willin’ to work for.”
-
-“Well, it comes to £ s. d. in the end. The masters want to put their
-finished goods on the market at as little cost to themselves as they
-possibly can; the men want to get as much for producing the finished
-article as they possibly can. The only question is, can they starve us
-into accepting their price for our labour.”
-
-“There’s one man they’ll never starve into swallowing this new
-scale. There’s another man off to America first.”
-
-“That’s all very well for you, Albert, and may be for me, too. In
-fact, when this fight’s over, end choose which way it may, it’s more
-nor likely that’s th’ only course open for either on us. I don’t
-fancy there’ll be a loom for either you or me long in this town or
-hereabouts. We’re marked men, however others may fare. But we can’t
-all clear out to th’ States, an’ none o’ us can stand clammin’
-long. We haven’t really felt th’ pinch yet. We’ve only had a month
-of it, and it’s just been a holiday for all o’ us. An’ th’
-anxiety’s been on th’ masters’ side up to now, having to turn away
-orders because they couldn’t accept ’em running th’ risk o’
-losing good customers it’s cost em happen years o’ fishing an’ a
-mint o’ money to cooper. That’ll hit us in the long run, but it hits
-them first. And, meantime, we’ve been all right. The strike pay’s
-been there to th’ minnit, an’ it’s just been a novel an’
-delightful sensation to lie i’ bed as long as you like, to stroll
-about th’ streets, or sit by th’ fireside, or hang about th’ pubs,
-as too many of us do, an’ then to draw our strike pay without th’
-trouble of addling it. But this can’t go on for ever. Th’ question
-is, how long will it last, Albert, how long will it last?”
-
-“Well, as far as I’m concerned it’ll last as long as the Union has
-a meg to its back.”
-
-“That won’t be long, as things are shaping. Yo’ see, if we’d
-only a third of the men out and two-third’s working for th’
-‘out’s’ to draw on we should be up another street. But th’
-masters….”
-
-“Curse ’em!” ejaculated Clough.
-
-“Th’ masters soon saw that, an’ now yo’ may say were’re all
-out, an’ we’re like that German chap’s monkey you’ll have read
-on, sat afore th’ fire hilariously boiling its own tail for
-breakfast.”
-
-“You’re nobbut a Job’s comforter, Allen. Don’t yo’ believe in
-th’ triumph o’ right over might, o’ principle over pelf?”
-
-“I believe in facts, Albert, an’ facts stubborn things. Of course,
-there’s no hurry yet. As I said, th’ pinch hasn’t come yet. Wait
-till th’ co-op.’s an’ th’ small grocers ha’ put their foot
-down, an’ won’t let as much as a pound o’ oatmeal go out o’
-th’ shop till it’s paid for; wait till th’ landlord begins to
-fetch th’ sticks for th’ rent; wait till the distress warrants are
-out for the borough rate an’ th’ poor rate; wait till th’
-pop-shops are full an’ the houses are welly empty; wait till th’
-strike fund’s don an’ th’ children are cryin’ for bread—what
-then Albert, what then?”
-
-“There’s wealth enough all round for th’ taking, wealth we’n
-more right to nor them ’at’s gotten it.”
-
-“That means the treadmill. No thank you, lad.”
-
-“Oh! what’s th’ use o’ lookin’ forrard so far? Th’ masters
-’ll weaken before th’ worst comes to th’ worst. I’m all for a
-policy o’ bluff; th’ weaker we get th’ bigger we mun talk.”
-
-“That’s all right. But we must look forward to a time when it’ll
-do us good to have th’ public on our side, an’ th’ only way to get
-them is to show th’ people we’re right an’ th’ masters wrong. I
-don’t think myself that th’ people o’ England are going to see our
-Union stamped out if we’ve reason on our side—an’ I’m as sure
-o’ that as that’s a pint o’ ale you’ve got in front o’ you.”
-
-“But it isn’t,” said Albert, “it wor, but awve supped it long
-sin. But how are we to get th’ public on our side? It’s easy
-talking. You see for yoursen th’ ‘Examiner’s’ none likely to
-take our side, an’ you may be certain sure th’ ‘Chronicle’ and
-th’ ‘Weekly News’ ’ll be worse. If we hold meetings there’ll
-be nobbut weavers theer, and that’s preachin’ to the converted w’
-a vengeance. There’s only th’ pen left when th’ sword an’ th’
-tongue are teed. An’ if it comes to writin’ there’s none o’ us
-fit to howd a candle to th’ masters, to say wowt o’ th’ allies
-they may have i’ th’ Press.”
-
-“I’ve been wondering,” said Rae, slowly, “if Mr. Edward Beaumont
-….”
-
-“The very man,” cried Clough, rising so excitedly that he upset his
-pewter; “th’ very man, or I’m sore mista’en. By gow, aw nivver
-thowt o’ him. If we can nobbut mak’ him see th’ same way as we
-see.”
-
-“If,”, assented Rae. “But there’s no harm i’ trying.”
-
-And thus it came about that long letters signed “Edward Beaumont”
-began to appear in one of the local papers, bearing upon the one topic
-that engrossed the thoughts and speech of nearly every man and woman in
-Huddersfield, and in the valleys converging on that town, be those men
-and women of what class, of what degree they might. For the Weavers’
-Strike, as it was called, though strike it was not, if by a strike is
-meant a refusal to work for the wages current at its commencement, had
-assumed proportions so portentous that there was in all that great and
-populous district scarce a household that was not seriously affected by
-it. The combatants drawn up in conflict, of course; but not they alone.
-And yet they alone, and the children of their loins, were numbered by
-their thousands. But upon the textile industry of that great area
-depended dozens of auxiliary trades, and every trade, wholesale and
-retail, was hit and hit hard. All gloomed under this heavy pall
-except, at first, the publican, and he, for a few glad weeks, felt that
-the normal condition of every industry should be one of strike or
-lock-out; felt it so intensely that in the exuberance of his
-disinterested sympathy he placed upon his beer-stained tables hot
-luncheons of fried tripe with onions, and savoury dishes of liver and
-bacon. And as the men consumed these delicacies and quaffed their
-measures of “Timmy,” by which fond name the brew of a local firm was
-widely and appreciatively known, of what should they read, and of Edward
-Beaumont. It is to be feared that these contributions to the dialectics
-of the great contest were more relished by the workers than by their
-employers. The letters took it for granted in the outset that the
-masters were sincere in their protestations that nothing was further
-from their thoughts, in insisting on the acceptance of the new scale,
-than the reduction of current wages. The writer declined to believe,
-with the men, that the masters’ insistence on this point was but a
-Machiavellian device for a considerable lowering of rates. The masters
-were, of course, honourable men, all honourable men, and they must know
-how the scale of their own devising would work out. But if the men were
-so obtuse that they could not see that a raising rather than a lowering
-at all events and certainly no lowering, would result; why not put the
-whole question to the arbitrament of one or two competent men conversant
-with the intricacies of the textile trade, men able to unravel the
-somewhat tangled and bewildering skein of the new scale—and let them
-say, aye or nay, would it be, as the weavers so passionately persisted,
-a grievous weekly diminution, not of their earnings, not of their work
-and output, but of the guerdon of their toil. Never in the whole history
-of industrial conflicts, the writer exclaimed, had there before been
-known a case of employers being driven to lock-out their men to dragoon
-them into accepting higher wages, or of men striking in resentment of
-the benefits their benevolent despots were bent upon thrusting into
-their unwilling hands.
-
-And when the blue-smocked ones read these words they gaffawed over their
-cups; but the masters scowled and damned the writer as a meddling
-busy-body. The president of the Employers’ Association—the employers
-naturally, did not have a union, merely an Association, such virtue is
-there in a name, despite the poet’s dictum—Who chanced to be, not
-only a large manufacturer, but also a prominent Liberal, worshipful
-master of Beaumont’s Masonic Lodge, and a very desirable client to
-boot, called upon that gentleman at his office, and proceeded to give
-him a piece of his mind in language whose plainness left nothing to be
-desired.
-
-“Look here, brother Beaumont, I should have thought by this time
-you’d learned which side your bread’s buttered on, and who spreads
-the butter. You know I’m a Liberal, as good a Liberal as you are
-yourself, if it comes to that; you know when there’s a fight to be
-fought my cheque’s always been ready, and not a little cheque at that;
-and you’re vastly mistaken if you think you’ve got a monopoly of
-zeal for the working-class. But what the deuce, man alive, do you want
-poking your finger into this pie for? Why, in the name of common sense,
-can’t you leave us and our men to fight this battle out between us?”
-
-“Do you think it’s a fair fight, brother Tomlinson?”
-
-“Fair. Why not?”
-
-“Well, I’ll tell you why not, if my opinion’s worth anything. On
-your side you’ve got all the money, all the staying power, and all, or
-nearly all, the educated skill to put your case plausibly before the
-public. Now, what have these poor devils of weavers got? A few pounds of
-reserve in the Co-op. and the Savings Bank, a few sticks of furniture,
-and hands for which they can find no work to do, and so unused to
-wielding the pen to state their own claim that, with the best case in
-the world, if they had it, you’d have no difficulty in making it
-appear the worst. They’ve been to me, I admit it, everyone by this
-time knows they have. I’ve tried in every way I could to get at the
-merits of the dispute, and, to tell you frankly, I don’t believe, for
-a single minute, this is a question of wages at all!”
-
-“Oh, indeed, and what is it?”
-
-“I believe, in my heart of hearts, it’s neither more nor less than a
-deliberate attempt to smash and pulverise the Weavers’ Union. That,
-neither more nor less; and I think it’s a criminal shame that men like
-yourself, who call themselves Liberals and the friends of Labour, should
-be engaged in what is at bottom simply a conspiracy against Labour’s
-most precious and hard-won right—the right of combination.”
-
-“Oh, stow that talk! it’s good enough for electioneering and the
-Town Hall platform. This is business, solid business, and business
-hasn’t room for bunkum. How would _you_ like Albert Clough coming
-swaggering and hectoring into your office, and telling you you didn’t
-pay your clerks a proper wage?”
-
-“I shouldn’t like anybody coming swaggering and hectoring into my
-office. I shouldn’t like Albert Clough and, perhaps you won’t mind
-my saying, I shouldn’t like Albert Cough’s employer.”
-
-Mr. Tomlinson waived away the suggestion impatiently and continued:—
-
-“Not merely saying you didn’t pay enough wage, demanding, when you
-told him you paid as much as you could see your way to pay, demanding in
-a truculent voice to see your ledgers and overhaul your pass-book, and
-wanting to know why you kept a carriage if you couldn’t afford better
-wages. D—n the man, he’ll be wanting to know what I have for dinner
-next, and what my wife gives for her bonnets and her gloves.”
-
-Edward smiled. He knew Albert Clough and Albert’s ways. But he was not
-the man to make admissions that might be useful to his adversary and of
-no use to himself.
-
-“Why, Tomlinson,” he said, “if it comes to that I’ve over a
-thousand men coming every day of the week into my office, not exactly
-hectoring and blustering, but in a manner that is more effective, though
-quieter, than any hectoring and blustering, and these thousand men and
-more dictate to me every hour of my life, not what I shall pay my
-clerks, but, what is more comprehensive still, what I shall sell my
-goods for, in other words, what I shall charge for every act of my
-business life; I can’t give a piece of advice, I can’t open my
-mouth in the court, I can’t write a business letter, I can’t take a
-business journey, I can’t prepare a will, an agreement, or a deed, but
-these impertinent thousand odd men, meaning thereby my lords and
-gentlemen of the British Parliament, tell me exactly what I may charge
-and what I may not. And yet, you see, I contrive to live and look
-pleasant.”
-
-“Oh! that’s special pleading, and you know it. There’s no parallel
-in the two cases.”
-
-“Pardon me, the cases are exactly parallel. The State intervenes
-between me and my client because it knows it would be a sad day for the
-client if he were left to the tender mercies of the lawyer, or, as you
-would put it, to the law of supply and demand on which you employers
-claim to rest the rate of wages. Now the workman has nothing to help him
-against you but this very right of combination and the clumsy, often
-futile, boomerang-like device of a strike. A poor weapon, but better
-than none at all. And yet he is to be deprived even of that.”
-
-“But you’re ruining us, man; you’re driving the trade out of the
-district and God only knows when and whether it will ever come back
-again.”
-
-“Pardon me, Tomlinson. It is not I that am doing all this. It is
-rather you and your fellow employers, who have not only caused the
-present crisis, but are needlessly prolonging it. Sooner or later I
-suppose you’ll get your own way. I’ve no doubt that sooner or later
-the men—not the best of them, for they will have been snapped up by
-outside firms—will be brought to their knees. The victory will be
-yours—but what a victory! Do you think things will be any pleasanter
-in your mills when the men have been starved into submission, and go
-back to their work beaten, sullen, and resentful, feeling every day they
-live that they have been robbed and their masters are the thieves, for
-that’s what it comes to in plain English. If it isn’t so, why in the
-name of elemental justice and common sense don’t you agree to
-arbitrate the whole matter? The men are willing, always have been
-willing. I’ll go bail that if you’ll agree to that every mill shall
-be running in a week, aye, and less. It is you and your Association that
-stand in the way and not the men. If you are being done to death it is
-_felo de se_, suicide, pure and simple; if the town is being ruined, you
-and your colleagues are doing that deed most damnable.”
-
-“By heavens! Beaumont, I’ll hear no more of this. I came to you as a
-friend and as a brother mason to bring you to reason in a friendly and
-brotherly way, and you as good as tell me I’m a robber and a murderer.
-Well, well, if I’m to be ruined, I’ll be ruined; but I’ll take
-precious good care there’s somebody tumbles before I tumble, and I
-shouldn’t be surprised if his name’s Edward Beaumont. I’m not
-chairman of a Banking Company for nothing. People who play at bowls must
-expect rubbers. Send me my account, if you’ve got one against me, and
-you can send all my papers to Ewart and Co. You’ll get your cheque,
-and I fancy it’ll be a long time before you see the colour of my money
-again.”
-
-“Good morning, Mr. Tomlinson. There’s the door. You remember what I
-said about hectoring and bullying?”
-
-For long after the irate manufacturer had bounced out of his office
-Beaumont sat ruminating in the chair he drew to the fire. In vain he had
-tried to concentrate his thoughts upon the documents upon his desk. His
-own concerns crowded out the concerns of others. He had been made
-painfully sensible of late that things were not going well with him. Mr.
-Tomlinson was not the only client who had demanded his account and the
-transference of his papers. His best and oldest clients were deserting
-him. His staff of clerks was a large and expensive one, and he had
-little or no work now for them to do, and yet he shrank from discharging
-so much as an office-boy. Why should they and their families suffer? At
-the club, too, men looked black at him; at his Lodge his brethren
-treated him coldly. He was uneasy, too, about Schofield’s mortgage.
-Edward was resolved, that at any cost to himself, no cloud should rest
-upon his father’s name. The expenses of his electioneering promised to
-be heavy. Money seemed to flow like water from his bank into
-Staffordshire, and his account was overdrawn to an unusual and
-disquieting extent. The courteous manager and he were on the best of
-terms, but Edward knew a manager, even a bank manager, is but a servant
-of the directors—and the directors were manufacturers or merchants to
-a man, and the chairman of the directors was none other than the
-gentleman who had just left him in such high dudgeon and breathing
-threats that could have but one meaning.
-
-And top of all this the morning’s post had brought him a letter from
-Storth.
-
-   “DEAR BEAUMONT,—I have been thinking things over a lot since I
-  started for my holidays, and I’ve come to the conclusion to try to
-  stand on my own bottom, like any other tub. I know by the terms of
-  our agreement you are entitled to six months’ notice of dissolution,
-  but I’ve no doubt you’ll waive that, for it would be pleasant for
-  neither you nor me for me to continue in the office, as it were, with
-  one foot in it and the other out. What say you? My plans for the
-  future are very vague. Hope things are going on smoothly at your end.
-  Wretched weather here.
-                                                          Yours,
-  S. S.”
-
-“Pretty cool,” reflected Edward, as he re-perused this missive.
-“Anyway, I’m not going to beg him to stop on to please me. He can
-cut the painter now if he likes, and I’ll write and say so. It’s a
-nuisance that I must be in Stafford to-morrow night, and I wish more
-than I can say I’d never gone into that electioneering campaign.
-However, I’m in it and it can’t be helped. In for a penny, in for a
-pound. I feel very much like having put out my leg further than I can
-stride, and it’s time for the proverbial silver lining to the
-cloud.”
-
-CHAPTER VIII.
-
-There stands, or some years ago there stood, in a noble park some five
-miles to the south of the ancient town of Stafford, a large and imposing
-edifice, built of a dull red brick, grown russet-hued with age, a house,
-one judged, reared in the days when Anne was queen. The outer door,
-stout almost as the portal of a jail, opened into a spacious hall,
-cheered by the fire of a commodious grate, its walls adorned, or one had
-perhaps better say furnished, by gloomy portraits of departed worthies
-and their beloved spouses. Dining-room and breakfast or morning-room
-opened right and left into the hall, whilst a noble staircase of oak,
-dark with age, with broad, shallow steps, worn by the feet of many
-generations, led to the upper storeys. In a room, on the second floor,
-snug, cosy, but somewhat severely furnished, sat in the early gloom of a
-wintry afternoon two maidens, both passing fair and good to look upon,
-and yet of a fairness how unlike—the one dark, tall, queenly of port
-and mien, and the other of slenderer form, of a gentler aspect, of a
-softer gaze, the one born to sway imperious, the other to win by the
-soft persuasion of tender look and soft appeal. The house is the home of
-Mrs. Jane Fairfax, relict of a former burgess and mayor of the town,
-whose trade—the townsfolk proudly boast—is trodden under foot by all
-the world—and it is the home also of her niece, ward, and heiress,
-Gertrude Fairfax.
-
-Gertrude Fairfax and her old schoolfellow, Eleanor St. Clair, the proud
-and imperious beauty who, as a girl, had ruled her classmates and sorely
-tried the patience of her teachers, and to whom the gentler maiden had
-yielded a ready and adoring submission when both were in short frocks
-and wore their hair in a pig-tail, were in the intimate converse of
-afternoon tea.
-
-“My dearest Eleanor,” the younger girl is saying, as she hands cake
-and tea to her friend reclined in the deep, soft-cushioned basket chair,
-“I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see you after all these
-years. Why, you had almost ceased to write, and, lo! when I could not
-have dreamed of such a pleasure, with just one day’s warning, you
-drop, as it were, out of the clouds. And how beautiful you are, Eleanor.
-Oh! how beautiful. But you always were. Don’t you remember how we used
-to call you Lady Macbeth, and vow you would wed at least an earl. You
-were born to move resplendent in imperial courts, waited upon by adoring
-slaves, laying their coronets at your feet.”
-
-Eleanor laughed complacently.
-
-“Well, if I was so born, I’m not going to fulfil my destiny. I
-don’t know that courts will know much of me, unless they are some
-horrid, low, fusty, musty law courts. Heigho! I shudder at the thought
-of them. No! destiny’s out of it this time for me. But you, Gertrude,
-you, if you like, are fulfilling your destiny. Didn’t we call you
-Saint Cecilia, and the Puritan maiden, and Miss Prim, and all that? And
-there you sit, I declare, dressed in a plain serge, with a plain linen
-collar and cuffs, your hair confined as tight and brushed as smooth as
-its inherent rebelliousness will permit, without a ribbon or a ring, and
-just a cheap jet brooch at a neck you hide as though you were ashamed of
-it. You might be a nun, or what is it you remind me of? I have it. You
-only want a poke bonnet and a tambourine and you’re the picture of a
-Salvation Army lass; but sure the prettiest and the sweetest Salvation
-Army lass that ever travestied religion.”
-
-“Well, I am a Salvation Army lass, if it comes to that; but I don’t
-know, Eleanor, that I travesty religion. I try to live it, not to parody
-it.”
-
-“You, a Salvation Army lass! Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
-You, Gertrude, that simply roll in money, you that live in this grand
-old house, you with a maid of your own a butler like a bishop, a footman
-with calves that are simply thrown away in Staffordshire, you with a
-carriage and a lovely pair, and a coachman as gorgeous as the Lord
-Mayor’s, you a Salvation Army lass! As the Scotch parson said: ‘Good
-Lord! it’s juist rideeculous!’”
-
-“My dear Eleanor, you forget. The house is not mine, the maid, the
-groom, the coachman, and the carriage and the pair—these are not mine.
-They are my dear aunt’s. Mine they never may be. Should they be
-destined some day to be mine, may that day be far, far distant.”
-
-“Amen, with all my heart. Your aunt’s a dear. But to all intents and
-purposes they’re yours, or will be some day, and you know it. I wish I
-were as certain of heaven. And, heigho! don’t I just wish that some of
-that filthy dross you Salvationists affect to despise were mine.
-Money’s just thrown away on you. It’s a ridiculous waste of the good
-things of life to lavish them on a girl I verily believe would just as
-soon have a steel as a diamond brooch at her breast, and a slip of
-velvet round her neck as a rope of pearls.”
-
-“Sooner,” said Gertrude. “I think it’s simply sinful to spend
-precious money on pearls and diamonds when so many of my sisters perish
-for lack of very bread. I do not judge others, Eleanor, God forbid that
-I should. It may not be sinful for others, but it would for me, seeing
-as I see and thinking and feeling as I think and feel. And, indeed, it
-is no sacrifice for me to be without fine apparel and costly jewels. I
-take neither pride nor pleasure in them. A bit of coloured glass is to
-me as beautiful as the rarest gem, and a rose or a violet more beautiful
-than either. I often think people value jewels not for what they see in
-them, but from a curious sense that their costliness denies them to
-others. I don’t think it is an enviable frame of mind. But you
-haven’t told me, dear, why you wished particularly to be in
-Staffordshire just now. You hinted in your letter there was a reason. Is
-it a secret?”
-
-“It is, and it isn’t. Oh! Gertrude, I am the happiest and the most
-miserable of girls. I’ve given my heart and promised my hand to nearly
-the last man in the world I ought to have loved, and papa simply won’t
-hear a word of our being engaged, and as for being married, it may come
-off when I’m ready for one of those old-age pensions those horrid
-Radicals dangle before the silly people’s eyes. But, I forgot, I’m a
-Radical myself now, or I suppose I ought to be.”
-
-“You a Radical, Gertrude! Yes, when I’m a Tory. But why must you?”
-
-“Why, because Edward’s a Radical. Isn’t that reason enough? But I
-forget. You’re but a schoolgirl yet. You know nothing of such things.
-And there’s that goose of a Squire Wright—never leaves me alone,
-follows me like my shadow, and the more I snub him the more he seems to
-like it. He grows sleek on cruelty and positively beams under despiteful
-usage.”
-
-“And Edward is, I presume, the fortunate suitor. Edward what? Who is
-he? Where did you meet him? You’ve never mentioned him in your
-letters.”
-
-“Edward Beaumont. See, this is his portrait,” and Eleanor drew a
-locket from her bosom and handed it to her friend. “Isn’t he
-handsome? Now don’t say yes if you don’t think so; but I’ll just
-shake you if you don’t.” Gertrude Fairfax gazed long upon the face
-encircled in its golden frame, and a close observer would have seen a
-deeper colour suffuse her cheeks and brow only to leave them paler than
-before. She clasped the locket nervously and returned it to her
-companion.
-
-“It is a good face,” she said quietly. “I have seen it before. I
-know Mr. Beaumont slightly, and, Eleanor, I think you should be a very
-happy girl.”
-
-Then she told of that adventure in Huddersfield which has been already
-chronicled in these veracious pages.
-
-“And you love him, Eleanor?” she concluded, “and he loves you, and
-soon the glad marriage-bells will ring and you will live happy ever
-after.”
-
-“I’m not so sure of all that, Gertrude. There’s the Archdeacon to
-reckon with, and though he’s the best of fathers, he can put his foot
-down when he likes, and it’s a heavy one. Then, yes, I suppose it’s
-true enough, and I may as well say it, there’s Eleanor St. Clair to
-reckon with. You see, Edward’s not rich, a successful attorney at the
-best. That is what he is now, and if I marry now I marry what he is now,
-not what he may be. And I really don’t think I could marry a poor man
-of no position worth talking of. Why, I might as well marry a curate.”
-
-“But you love him, Eleanor?”
-
-“Oh! that’s well enough in novels. But I’ve been told on high
-authority that when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the
-window. Fancy me, Eleanor St. Clair, living in a cheap villa, with a
-horrid garden patch in front and a yard for drying clothes at the back;
-a slip-shod servant-maid with a sniffing nose, doing my own laundry
-work, cooking my own meals and my lord’s, cold mutton and rice pudding
-most days. I don’t think I could bear it for the best man living, and
-that’s flat!”
-
-“Perhaps it won’t be so bad as all that, Eleanor. Does Mr. Beaumont
-know how you look at things?”
-
-“Pretty well, I fancy, and he has more sense than to expect anything
-else. Don’t you know he’s trying for Parliament? Why, bless me, I
-forget to tell you. He’s to be in Stafford to-night, speaking in the
-Town Hall, I’ve never heard him make a speech, so I trumped up an
-invitation from my old school friend and here I am. You’ll go with me
-to the Hall to-night, won’t you, dear? He mustn’t see me nor know
-I’m in Stafford, but I do so want to see and hear him.”
-
-That was a memorable meeting in the Stafford Town Hall. It was to be, so
-far as possible, a county meeting. From all parts of the Southern
-Division men teemed into Stafford—farmers, greatly daring, who braved
-the wrath of their landlords, shop-keepers, agricultural labourers, and
-the miners from Cannock Chase. An ex-Cabinet Minister was to be on the
-platform, Joseph Arch, the peasant’s pride, was to speak, and the new
-Radical candidate was to address the electors and non-electors. And
-Edward Beaumont had resolved that that night he would deliver his soul,
-let the result be what it might. He would speak not to win this
-election, for that he was convinced no Radical could do and be honest,
-but so speak that either he or some better man should hereafter win
-elections by an emancipated electorate. He would not water down his
-creed to conciliate the half-hearted or to disarm the prejudiced. The
-people should know his soul, his whole soul and nothing short of it. He
-knew his speech would shock, would wound, would alienate; but he had
-learned his political creed amid the free, outspoken, fearless, and
-enlightened citizens of the North; and that creed, or none at all, from
-him the more dull and decorous Midlands should have. The chairman, a
-pursy, podgy alderman of the town, gasped with horror, the ex-Cabinet
-Minister grew frigid with haughty resentment, the black-clothed
-citizens looked into each other’s eyes in blank dismay, but the ruddy
-peasants and the grimy miners roared themselves hoarse as he warmed to
-his work and spoke the convictions of his mind.
-
-“You have heard,” he said, “from the right hon. gentleman who has
-just resumed his seat that a much-needed, long-delayed measure of
-electoral reform cannot much longer be denied. You met that declaration
-with much cheering, and rightly so. But I wish you to ask yourselves
-what use are you prepared to make of the vote when you get it? Are you
-so content with your present lot that you look forward to ending your
-lives as most of you have begun and so far spent them? You miners, you
-stalwart sons of the soil, has the future no fairer promise for you than
-the lot you and your fathers have known. To what measures are our
-legislators to put their hands when Liberal, perchance a Radical, House
-sits to carry into law the people’s behests? I tell you your votes
-will be of no value unless you are resolved to use them as the crowbars
-and the jemmies with which to force the safes of privilege and plunder,
-use them not to steal what is not your own, but to regain that of which
-the people have been despoiled, to win back for yourselves your own, but
-that which has been so long enjoyed by others you have almost forgotten
-your imprescriptible rights. Is it a law of Nature that one should spend
-his toil and another enjoy its fruits? Is it an immutable decree of
-heaven that there should be for ever and for aye the inordinately rich
-and the abjectly poor? Is it marked down in holy Writ that Dives should
-always be clad in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day,
-whilst Lazarus lies at his gates and the dogs lick his sores? Is it to
-be endured for ever that the miner should toil in the bowels of the
-earth—shut out from God’s sunshine and daring all the perils of a
-sudden and awful death, whilst the mine-owner rolls lordly in his
-carriage and cossets himself on partridge and champagne? Is it to be
-endured that so long as this earth shall last the owners of the soil may
-live in pampered luxury upon the earnings of the harassed farmer and the
-sweating and sweated hind? No, by heavens, gentlemen, if I am to be your
-candidate I shall stand for measures that will humble the pride of those
-in high places, measures that will strip the coronetted peers of the
-power they now possess to thwart the people’s will, measures that will
-humble the bishop’s bench and strip the haughty hierarchy of its
-ungodly privileges, measures that will give back to the people the
-wealth the people earn by their sinews and their brain. A time shall
-come when England shall be Merry England once more, aye, if we have to
-make a holocaust of the title-deeds by which its broad acres have been
-tied in parchment bonds; a time when honest toil shall be honestly
-rewarded; a time when he who toils not shall see himself and be seen as
-the parasite he is; a time when no man shall wield political power
-merely because he chances to be ‘the tenth transmitter of a foolish
-face’; a time when no man and no woman shall be poor who is willing
-and able to work; a time when the Workhouse shall no longer be the only
-asylum for decent poverty, a time when the wealth-winners shall be the
-wealth-enjoyers. Woe in that day to the man, aye, though he boast the
-blood of the Plantagenets, who owes his pride and station, his pomp and
-luxury, to the rentals of common land stolen from the peasant; woe in
-that day to the capitalist who grinds the faces of the poor; woe in that
-day to all who sit at the feast they have not spread and quaff the
-goblet they have not filled. But glad, glad that day for all who give
-unstinting of brain or muscle and by honest toil add their measure to
-the common wealth and win thereby the right to share to the full in the
-generous bounty of Nature’s ungrudging hand. I do not come to you with
-mincing gait and honeyed words. No kid-glove politician I. You know my
-mind. Say, shall I be your spokesman at the people’s House?”
-
-And that vast audience, almost to a man, sprang to feet, and thundered
-back an “Aye” that shook the very walls. But the chairman paled in
-his puffy cheeks and the ex-minister’s brow was dark. And even as the
-cheers rolled and rolled again a messenger handed to Beaumont as,
-flushed and exultant, he gazed upon the sea of faces, a message flashed
-across the wires by his confidential clerk:—
-
-“Petition in Bankruptcy against you by Bank and Schofield.”
-
-“See, Eleanor,” whispered Gertrude Fairfax, who, seated in the
-balcony beside her friend, had drunk in with enraptured ears the fervent
-periods of the speaker. “See, he has had bad news. He pales, I can see
-it even here. He is ghastly white. Oh! I am sure he has had some
-terrible blow. And at such a moment! Cannot you go to him and comfort
-him?”
-
-But Eleanor made no sign.
-
-CHAPTER IX.
-
-Three years have passed; years to which in later life Edward Beaumont
-looked back with loathing and with wonder, wonder that in so short a
-time he should have not merely fallen from that fair place he had filled
-in the eye of what was to him the world, but worse, infinitely worse,
-have fallen from his purer, better, nobler self; years in which, merged,
-well-nigh submerged, in London’s restless, ruthless sea, he had
-struggled to keep body and soul together by the use of his pen. When
-first he had come to town he could, doubtless, have obtained employment
-as a managing clerk. There are hundreds of men of his profession who are
-glad to earn the bread of dependence in that capacity; but a false pride
-forbade him to serve as clerk, who had so recently kinged it in his own
-office. So he had turned to that refuge of the educated
-out-of-work—literature—to find, as thousands have found before, that
-literature is, perhaps, the hardest of all professions. And yet it seems
-so easy a thing to start in life as a writer; all you need is a J pen, a
-few sheets of foolscap, and, yes, there’s the rub, something to write
-about that people want to read about; and, given all that, he’s a
-lucky man that does not find someone else has forestalled him and has
-written on the same theme infinitely better than he can write himself.
-Beaumont, in those days, often recalled the three ways in which,
-according to the traditions of the Bar, a young barrister may rise
-rapidly: by writing a book on some legal subject, by huggery—_id
-est_—by marrying an attorney’s daughter, or by a miracle. For the
-man who must needs write daily for his daily crust it is not easy to
-write a book, certainly not easy to find an appreciative publisher; as
-for huggery, or marrying an editor’s daughter editor’s daughters
-look far beyond the out-at elbows penny-a-liner; and as for miracles,
-well, he had never believed in them. Indeed, in these days he had ceased
-to believe in anything or anybody, even in himself. It was the worst of
-his misfortunes that he had lost, as it were, at one fell swoop,
-everything, even the desire to succeed. If he could earn enough to keep
-life within him, though why he should care even to do that he would have
-been hard put to it to say, that would suffice. He who loses fortune
-loses much, who loses friends loses more, but who loses courage loses
-all. And Beaumont’s heart was dead within him.
-
-It was a dark, dreary night of March. The rain beat fitfully against the
-window of a bedroom in a small by-street off the Holloway Road. The room
-is Edward’s sleeping room, his eating-room, and his workshop. A tiny
-fire burns dully in a tiny grate and emits rather less heat than the gas
-that blares with a sickly flame above Beaumont’s head. It is close
-upon ten of the night, and Edward has thrown down his pen, collected the
-sheets of “copy” that he hopes to turn into money if editors prove
-kind on the morrow, and is now, pipe in mouth and book in hand, trying
-to find a comfortable place in the rickety, horse-hair armchair, called
-by his landlady in some fit of uncanny humour, an easy chair, and
-trying, too, to so focus his book as to catch the rays from his solitary
-gas-jet. A very different Edward this from the easy, debonair youth whom
-men had envied and maidens smiled upon. His clothes are well cut, but
-woefully white at the seams, his linen is frayed, his boots down at
-heel, the watch he glances at is manifestly a Waterbury, its chain of
-steel; and before he lights his pipe he is compelled to cut a pipeful of
-unmistakeable Limerick. Upon the small table are a jug of water, a
-tumbler, and a bottle labelled “Pride of the Glen.” Edward holds it
-to the light and measures its contents with his eye.
-
-“Still three-parts full. Behold the rewards of abstinence. Had I not
-been frugal last night I must have been frugal to-night; but, heaven be
-thanked, there are two or three hours’ quiet soaking in three-quarters
-of a 3s. 6d. bottle of the ‘Pride of the Glen,’ and by that is drunk
-this dingy hole will be a palace and Edward Beaumont its prince; my tea
-of bread and margarine, with a bloater, will look in the retrospect a
-Guildhall banquet; this very angular, grid-iron like chair will be as
-cosy as a divan; the cheap prints that adorn my walls will show as the
-works of Watteau and Greuze; my rags will fall away, and I shall be clad
-in purple and fine linen; my whiskey will be imperial Tokay; my twist
-Havanas; and, in fine, it will be Edward Beaumont and not the bottle
-that will be three-parts full. It is true that tomorrow my mouth will be
-parched and I shall crave for a hair of the dog that bit me, and have to
-crave unless the landlord of the ‘Jolly Dogs’ is in confiding mood;
-my gorge will rise at the streaky, sickly slice of bacon and the ghastly
-‘shop-’un’ and the leathery bread that will be served for
-breakfast; it is also true my eye ill be bleared, if not blood-shot, my
-head will ache fit to split, and my hand tremble till I can scarce lift
-to my lips the cup of wash-up water my landlady calls tea. All these
-things I verily believe. It is doubtless also true that I am shortening
-my life, true as gospel, oh! most sapient Sir Wilfrid Lawson. But is it
-not written that man shall take no thought for the morrow and that
-sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Here, benign deity at 3s.
-6d. the bottle! here, thou offerest three hours’ oblivion, and
-they’re well purchased by tomorrow’s reckoning.”
-
-And he poured from the bottle a generous measure of the _elixir mortis_,
-puffed his pipe to a vigorous glow, and with a sigh of something like
-content, set himself to the reading of his well-thumbed “Omar
-Khayyam.”
-
-  “Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears
-
-  TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears—
-
-    _To-morrow?_ Why, To-morrow I may be
-
-  Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand years”
-
-“Good old Omar,” the reader mutters, as he drains his goblet, and
-replenishes it from bottle and jug, “good old Omar, thine is the only
-true philosophy. _Carpe diem_, pluck the passing hour, let us eat and
-drink for to-morrow we may die, and who cares?
-
-  “Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
-
-  Nor _whence_, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
-
-    And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
-
-  I know not _whither_, willy-nilly blowing.
-
-  What, without asking, hither hurried _whence?_
-
-  And, without asking, whither hurried _hence!_
-
-    Another and another Cup to drown
-
-  The Memory of this Impertinence.”
-
-“Now, talk of Impertinence, who the deuce is this coming up my stairs
-at this hour of the night, and such a night? It can’t be the
-printer’s devil, besides, the step’s a man’s at that. If his
-thirst’s as big as himself, God help the bottle or what’s left of
-it. Oh! come in, whoever you are, and be hanged to you!” and in
-response to this not very pressing invitation the door opens, and in the
-doorway stands, peering into the room, dazzled in the transition from
-the gloomy staircase, a tall, erect figure, closely draped in a heavy
-Inverness cape, sodden with the rain.
-
-“It is Mr. Beaumont, is it not?” asks a manly, pleasant voice.
-“Why, of course it is, now I can see you. How are you, Beaumont?”
-and a white but strong firm hand is outstretched and grasps the hand
-that not too gladly meets it.
-
-“Denis Caird, by all that’s holy!”
-
-“Of course, it’s Denis Caird, and glad to see you, Beaumont. Been
-hunting for you everywhere this month or two back. Was up in the West
-Riding lecturing, inquired about my old pupil we all prophesied such
-great things from, expected to find you in the Mayor’s parlour at
-least, till such times as you could follow Chamberlain’s lead heard
-you’d gone under, been seen in London, made up my mind to find you by
-hook or crook, and here I am and there you are. I say, what’s this,
-and this?” And the speaker, who had thrown off his cape, took up the
-little volume of verse, glanced at the title, and shook his head at the
-tall bottle. “‘Omar Khayyam’ and a whiskey bottle; bad food for
-mind, worse food for the body, my friend; the apostle of
-self-indulgence, and the worst, or nearly the worst, way to gratify it.
-This won’t do, Beaumont; this won’t do, my lad.”
-
-Edward moved uneasily in his chair.
-
-“_Dulce est_” he began.
-
-“_Dulce est_ be hanged,” quoth his visitor.
-
-“I’m a clergyman or I’d say something stronger than that. What’s
-a young fellow like you want cooped up in a garret reading that rubbish,
-beautiful rubbish, if you like, but still rubbish, and making matters
-ten thousand times worse by drinking liquid damnation at three-and-six a
-bottle; up here, I say, in a garret, mooning over a lot of verses and
-soaking yourself with poison, when all around you there’s work to be
-done, man’s work, God’s work, and none too many to do it. What’s
-wrong with you, Beaumont, what’s wrong, say?”
-
-“Everything’s wrong. You know, of course, how I came a mucker up
-yonder. Well, I’ve cared for nothing since, but just to get a crust of
-bread, and as much of that stuff as the money’ll run to.”
-
-“Wasn’t there a girl in the case. Hadn’t you her to live for if
-nothing and nobody else?”
-
-“Oh! yes, there was a girl, if it comes to that. But when the smash
-came she very promptly declined to permit me to ‘live for her,’ as
-you put it. See, look here, you can read my letters of dismissal, if you
-care to. Short and sweet, like a donkey’s gallop, I call ’em.”
-
-And Beaumont took from a drawer and threw upon the table two letters:
-
-                                                    “The Vicarage,
-                                                      Caistorholm,
-                                                       Lincs.
-  February, 188
-
-    “DEAR MR. BEAUMONT,—
-I am exceedingly distressed to learn of your   misfortune. You will
-do me the justice to remember that I gave only a   reluctant and
-conditional assent to my daughter’s engagement to you. Of course
-that must now be absolutely and finally broken. I trust the dear
-girl may be given strength to bear this fearful trial, and I hope
-that your future may be brighter than present prospects indicate.
-
-                                                     Yours faithfully,
-
-                                                      HUGH ST. CLAIR.”
-
-
-                                                     “The Vicarage,
-                                                      Caistorholm.
-
-    “DEAR EDWARD,—
-  Papa insists that I endorse his words. What else can I do? I am so
-  sorry, but there seems no other way. And, after all, I’m sure I should
-  not have made you the wife you ought to have. With best wishes,
-
-                                                    ELEANOR ST. CLAIR.”
-
-“Humph!” said the Rev. Denis Caird.
-
-“There’s nothing lacking on the score of lucidity anyway. Anything
-else?”
-
-“Merely this,” said Edward, bitterly, as he handed a newspaper to
-his visitor.
-
-  “A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly be solemnised, between
-  Mr. George Wright, of Thoresby Manor, Lincs, and Eleanor, only child
-  of the Very Reverend Archdeacon St. Clair, of Caistorholm Vicarage,
-  Lincs.”
-
-“Ah, well!” said Mr. Denis; “there’s an end of that chapter
-anyway.”
-
-“With your permission we’ll drop these precious letters carefully
-into that not very cheerful fire of yours. It’s simply mawkish
-sentimentality keeping them by you to gloom over. I don’t know the
-lady, but it seems to me she knew what she was talking about when she
-said she wasn’t quite the kind of wife you want. A fair-weather sort
-of mate isn’t quite the sort of mate for a shipwrecked mariner. And
-so, because you’ve got two nasty slaps in the face from that fickle
-jade, Dame Fortune, you coop yourself up in this dingy hole, read Omar
-Khayyam and that rot, and drink yourself into a fool’s paradise or a
-sot’s oblivion, by way of mending matters. I thought you were made of
-better stuff, Beaumont, and that’s a fact. Why, man alive, if you’ve
-no more backbone in you than that comes to Eleanor St. Clair’s well
-rid of you, or any other decent woman for that matter.”
-
-“Oh, yes, I’m down, jump on me,” said Beaumont, savagely.
-
-“It’s time somebody did jump on you to some purpose. I’ve no
-patience with you, man. Why, it’s just such nasty knocks as those that
-test a man. Life’s a fight for the best of us, a stand-up fight,
-shoulders squared, knees braced, fists clenched, lips tight-pressed, and
-eyes intent and steadfast. A fight not with your fellow-man, to see
-which can down the other, that’s a poor business, but with the world,
-the flesh, and the devil. What sort of a fighter do you call the man
-who, on the first knockout, lies grovelling in the saw-dust, bleating
-for mercy? he’s not the man you put your money on. No, it’s the
-little game one who never knows when he’s beaten, that takes his gruel
-kindly, and is up on his feet after a breathing space, bruised and
-stricken, if you like, but eager for another round, and another, and
-still another, so long as he’s a leg to stand on. Now, you’ve had
-your breathing space. Look on me, if you like, as the man who brushes
-the saw-dust off your clothes, sponges your brow, gives you a knee, and
-bucks you up generally for another set-to. I want to see you in the ring
-again. Are you willing, or is it to be whiskey and Omar Khayyam, till
-the inevitable end, a leap over Westminster Bridge into the Thames, or
-the Workhouse? I could almost quote Scripture to you: ‘See, I have set
-before thee this day life and good, death and evil. Therefore choose
-life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’”
-
-For a long time there was silence between the men. Edward leaned with
-his elbows upon his knees, gazing into the dull embers of the fire, the
-minister watching him anxiously. Then Beaumont rose and stretched out
-his hand.
-
-“I choose life,” he said. “Show me the way.”
-
-“There is only one way, Beaumont. There never has been, never will be,
-anyway but one. It is the _Via Crucis_—the way of the Cross. It is a
-way that was before Gethsemane, though men knew it not as they may know
-it now, if they but will. And you may put your foot on that way
-to-night, this very moment. What are you going to do with that whiskey
-bottle? You can’t carry that sort of luggage on the _Via Crucis?”_
-
-“There’s the sink,” said Edward.
-
-“Precisely, there’s the sink, and here goes for the sink and the
-sewer and the rats. And those letters?”
-
-“There’s the fire.”
-
-“Exactly. Let the dead past bury its dead, or as burial is not
-convenient for letters, here’s for cremation. And Omar Khayyam?”
-
-“In with him.”
-
-“Now we breathe a purer air. Now put on your hat and coat and come
-with me to a place I wot of where you can get the juiciest steak in all
-London town, with fried onions and roast potatoes and a cup of very
-decent coffee, piping hot. And then we’ll talk of things, and I may be
-able to put you in the way of doing a bit of useful work and earning a
-modest shilling or two by doing it. And that’s something to be
-thankful for in this vale of tears, I can tell you.”
-
-CHAPTER X.
-
-THE LAST.
-
-Denis Caird was as good as his word, and better. He stuck to Beaumont
-like a leech. In those hours of depression that always come to him who
-has abandoned alcoholic stimulant—those hours in which every fibre of
-the being seems to clamour for the wonted drug, the good clergyman was
-to Beaumont a man and a brother, cheering him, rallying him, exhorting
-him, appealing to all the better forces of his nature, and aiding him in
-the bitter fight, till, after anxious months, both could feel the
-victory was won.
-
-And Beaumont got work, work to his heart’s desire, work for his pen
-and work for what gift of speech he had.
-
-“Go into the slums, go to the bottommost pit in this London hell,”
-said Mr. Caird. “Go and see for yourself what the teaching of your
-Omar Khayyam makes of men and women. See human beings turned into beasts
-and devils by yielding to the beast and devil latent within every man
-and every woman. You believe in evolution, you say. Well, what has made
-men and women only a little lower than the angels? Why, nought but
-myriads of years of beating down Satan under their feet, beating down
-the animal basis on which the moral and the spiritual superstructure is
-reared. Go, learn your lesson, and then, and not till then, with pen and
-tongue preach your lesson. I’m a Socialist, you know I am. But ere
-ever the masses enter into their kingdom of economic justice, ere ever
-they win the full heritage of their toil, I pray and labour that they
-may be worthy of that kingdom and of that heritage, that they may learn
-the right use of wealth; else will all their gains be but added
-curses.”
-
-And Beaumont went into the slums, and their teaching sank deep into his
-soul. And in his goings he met time after time that sweet and winsome
-maiden whom he had first seen, years ago, in circumstances how
-different, in his office in Huddersfield—Gertrude Fairfax, Sister
-Gertrude. He saw her move, a ministering angel, among the foul purlieus,
-the noxious dens, speaking to Women from whose touch Respectability
-plucked its skirts, saw her indeed touch pitch without being defiled, a
-serene and wholesome presence before which sin slunk abashed away, and
-e’en the drunkard forbore to curse.
-
-And seeing her thus almost daily, old memories died away, the carking
-bitterness left his heart, and it was filled again with the image of a
-woman whom to love was a liberal education and a holy cult in one.
-
-The last scene of this story shall not open under the fogs nor ’mid
-the slums of hideous London. Come with me, gentle reader, to that goodly
-mansion by Stafford town, where dwell Mistress Jane Fairfax and her
-niece Gertrude. It is the month of leafy June, the skies are blue
-o’erhead, the air sweet and soft and warm, and the garden of Cromwell
-House is rich in verdure and in bloom, and redolent of the choicest
-perfumes distilled by that cunningest of all alchemists—Dame Nature.
-There is a bower there with rustic seat, a bower all garlanded with
-roses sweetly breathing, with clematis and wild convolvulus, and a
-purling brook alive with darting troutlet babbles by. And there are
-seated side by side the heroine of this story and Edward Beaumont.
-
-“I have something to give you, Mr. Beaumont, that I think belongs to
-you. Let me first tell you how it came to my hands. You had a clerk, had
-you not, called Barnes?”
-
-“I had.”
-
-“Well, he came to a sad end, poor fellow. Drifted to London, took to
-evil courses, and died in great straits. I was by his bed when the end
-drew near. He remembered my being at your office, when you defended Pat
-Sullivan. He had tried to find you. He confessed he had abstracted this
-paper from your office, thinking he might make money by it, if a reward
-were offered for its recovery. I promised if ever I met you to restore
-it to you, and the man seemed easier for the promise.”
-
-Beaumont wondering opened the document she handed to him.
-
-“By Jove!” he cried, “the missing valuer’s certificate for
-Midgley’s mortgage. Why, I’ve searched high and low for this. What
-would I not have given for this precious bit of paper that night in
-Stafford Town Hall when I got that awful telegram. You were there, you
-tell me. If I’d only had this then! But it’s better as it is, much
-better. Don’t you think God schemes for us better than we can scheme
-for ourselves? A man need have long visions to scan the ways of God.”
-
-“I don’t think, I know. But why do you ask that question just
-now?”
-
-“Why, you see, Gertrude, if I may call you so, if I had had this paper
-I should probably have made a fight and struggled on in the law. And if
-I had, it seems to stand to reason I shouldn’t have been here!”
-
-“No; you’d have been happily married by this to Eleanor St.
-Clair!”
-
-“Who is much more happily married to George Wright, and I am free to
-say what say I must before I leave for London and my work. Can’t you
-guess what it is I would say, Gertrude? I’m not much of a man to offer
-to any woman, but such as I am I love you, Gertrude. I’m poor, you are
-rich or will be; I’m tainted, you are pure, unsullied. But, there, I
-think you know me as I am. Say, Gertrude, is there in your heart any
-tiny seedling of love for me that time and the warmth of my love may woo
-to life and growth?”
-
-Edward had risen and now stood before the girl to whom he pleaded, who
-drooped her eyes before the ardour of his gaze, her bosom fluttering
-’neath her modest dress like a prisoned bird that beats its bars, the
-rich colour suffusing the pale brow and cheeks.
-
-“I think I have loved you, Edward, since that day in the Police Court.
-Oh! it nearly broke my heart when I heard how sadly you had fallen from
-what I dreamed you might be, and shall from what, God willing, you may
-be yet.”
-
-“And you will help, Gertrude?”
-
-“Aye, that I will.” And she rose and placed her hands in his and
-spake to him as Ruth the Maobitish damsel, spake to Naomi, and as Edward
-drew her to his breast and kissed the lips that met his he murmured:
-“The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and
-me.”
-
-And this is the end of my story, and yet but the real beginning of the
-lives that were joined before God’s altar by the Rev. Denis Caird. The
-wedding presents were neither costly nor numerous, but they included one
-from Eleanor St Clair, now Lady Wright, for that ambitious matron never
-rested till she saw her spouse a member for the Louth division, and,
-once in Parliament, that gentleman wisely refrained from speech,
-“never thought of thinking for himself at all, but always voted at his
-party’s call”; and in due time the Premier of the day, yielding, it
-was said, to the blandishments of that brilliant leader of society, Mrs.
-George Wright, rewarded him with a baronetcy.
-
-And what of Miss Amelia Wrigley and her amorous Sam? Alas! that lady
-never realised her modest ambitions. Mr. Storth prospered, as indeed he
-deserved to prosper, in the profession of his choice; but much beer,
-added to a plethoric habit and a choleric temperament, induced an
-apoplectic seizure from which he never rallied, and Miss Wrigley still
-lives in maiden meditation, if not fancy free, still to be wooed and
-won.
-
-THE END.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's Sister Gertrude, by Daniel Frederick Edward Sykes
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