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+Project Gutenberg's The History of David Grieve, by Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: The History of David Grieve
+
+Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward
+
+Posting Date: March 18, 2011 [EBook #8076]
+Release Date: May, 2005
+[This file was first posted on June 12, 2003]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Prince
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HISTORY
+
+OF
+
+DAVID GRIEVE
+
+
+
+BY
+
+MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
+
+AUTHOR OF 'ROBERT ELSMERE,' ETC.
+
+TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+BOOK I CHILDHOOD
+
+BOOK II YOUTH
+
+BOOK III STORM AND STRESS
+
+BOOK IV MATURITY
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I CHILDHOOD
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+'Tak your hat, Louie! Yo're allus leavin summat behind yer.'
+
+'David, yo go for 't,' said the child addressed to a boy by her
+side, nodding her head insolently towards the speaker, a tall and
+bony woman, who stood on the steps the children had just descended,
+holding out a battered hat.
+
+'Yo're a careless thing, Louie,' said the boy, but he went back and
+took the hat.
+
+'Mak her tie it,' said the woman, showing an antiquated pair of
+strings. 'If she loses it she needna coom cryin for anudder. She'd
+lose her yead if it wor loose.'
+
+Then she turned and went back into the house. It was a smallish
+house of grey stone, three windows above, two and a door below.
+Dashes of white on the stone gave, as it were, eyebrows to the
+windows, and over the door there was a meagre trellised porch, up
+which grew some now leafless roses and honeysuckles. To the left of
+the door a scanty bit of garden was squeezed in between the hill,
+against which the house was set edgeways, and the rest of the flat
+space, occupied by the uneven farmyard, the cart-shed and stable,
+the cow-houses and duck-pond. This garden contained two shabby
+apple trees, as yet hardly touched by the spring; some currant and
+gooseberry bushes, already fairly green; and a clump or two of
+scattered daffodils and wallflowers. The hedge round it was broken
+through in various places, and it had a casual neglected air.
+
+The children went their way through the yard. In front of them a
+flock of some forty sheep and lambs pushed along, guarded by two
+black short-haired collies. The boy, brandishing a long stick,
+opened a gate deplorably in want of mending, and the sheep crowded
+through, keenly looked after by the dogs, who waited meanwhile on
+their flanks with heads up, ears cocked, and that air of
+self-restrained energy which often makes a sheep-dog more human
+than his master. The field beyond led to a little larch plantation,
+where a few primroses showed among the tufts of long, rich grass,
+and the drifts of last year's leaves. Here the flock scattered a
+little, but David and the dogs were after them in a twinkling, and
+the plantation gate was soon closed on the last bleating mother.
+Then there was nothing more for the boy to do than to go up to the
+top of the green rising ground on which the farm stood and see if
+the gate leading to the moor was safely shut. For the sheep he had
+been driving were not meant for the open moorland. Their feeding
+grounds lay in the stone-walled fields round the homestead, and had
+they strayed on to the mountain beyond, which was reserved for a
+hardier Scotch breed, David would have been answerable. So he
+strode, whistling, up the hill to have a look at that top gate,
+while Louie sauntered down to the stream which ran round the lower
+pastures to wait for him.
+
+The top gate was fast, but David climbed the wall and stood there a
+while, hands in his pockets, legs apart, whistling and looking.
+
+'They can't see t' Downfall from Stockport to-day,' he was saying
+to himself; 'it's coomin ower like mad.'
+
+Some distance away in front of him, beyond the undulating heather
+ground at his feet, rose a magnificent curving front of moor, the
+steep sides of it crowned with black edges and cliffs of grit, the
+outline of the south-western end sweeping finely up on the right to
+a purple peak, the king of all the moorland round. No such colour
+as clothed that bronzed and reddish wall of rock, heather, and
+bilberry is known to Westmoreland, hardly to Scotland; it seems to
+be the peculiar property of that lonely and inaccessible district
+which marks the mountainous centre of mid-England--the district of
+Kinder Scout and the High Peak. Before the boy's ranging eye spread
+the whole western rampart of the Peak--to the right, the highest
+point, of Kinder Low, to the left, 'edge' behind 'edge,' till the
+central rocky mass sank and faded towards the north into milder
+forms of green and undulating hills. In the very centre of the
+great curve a white and surging mass of water cleft the mountain
+from top to bottom, falling straight over the edge, here some two
+thousand feet above the sea, and roaring downward along an almost
+precipitous bed into the stream--the Kinder--which swept round the
+hill on which the boy was standing, and through the valley behind
+him. In ordinary times the 'Downfall,' as the natives call it, only
+makes itself visible on the mountain-side as a black ravine of
+tossed and tumbled rocks. But there had been a late snowfall on the
+high plateau beyond, followed by heavy rain, and the swollen stream
+was to-day worthy of its grand setting of cliff and moor. On such
+occasions it becomes a landmark for all the country round, for the
+cotton-spinning centres of New Mills and Stockport, as well as for
+the grey and scattered farms which climb the long backs of moorland
+lying between the Peak and the Cheshire border.
+
+To-day, also, after the snow and rains of early April, the air was
+clear again. The sun was shining; a cold, dry wind was blowing;
+there were sounds of spring in the air, and signs of it on the
+thorns and larches. Far away on the boundary wall of the farmland a
+cuckoo was sitting, his long tail swinging behind him, his
+monotonous note filling the valley; and overhead a couple of
+peewits chased each other in the pale, windy blue.
+
+The keen air, the sun after the rain, sent life and exhilaration
+through the boy's young limbs. He leapt from the wall, and raced
+back down the field, his dogs streaming behind him, the sheep, with
+their newly dropped lambs, shrinking timidly to either side as he
+passed. He made for a corner in the wall, vaulted it on to the
+moor, crossed a rough dam built in the stream for sheep-washing
+purposes, jumped in and out of the two grey-walled sheep-pens
+beyond, and then made leisurely for a spot in the brook--not the
+Downfall stream, but the Red Brook, one of its westerly
+affluents--where he had left a miniature water-wheel at work the
+day before. Before him and around him spread the brown bosom of
+Kinder Scout; the cultivated land was left behind; here on all
+sides, as far as the eye could see, was the wild home of heather
+and plashing water, of grouse and peewit, of cloud and breeze.
+
+The little wheel, shaped from a block of firwood, was turning
+merrily under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a
+neighbouring fall. David went down on hands and knees to examine
+it. He made some little alteration in the primitive machinery of
+it, his fingers touching it lightly and neatly, and then, delighted
+with the success of it, he called Louie to come and look.
+
+Louie was sitting a few yards further up the stream, crooning to
+herself as she swung to and fro, and snatching every now and then
+at some tufts of primroses growing near her, which she wrenched
+away with a hasty, wasteful hand, careless, apparently, whether
+they reached her lap or merely strewed the turf about her with
+their torn blossoms. When David called her she gathered up the
+flowers anyhow in her apron, and dawdled towards him, leaving a
+trail of them behind her. As she reached him, however, she was
+struck by a book sticking out of his pocket, and, stooping over
+him, with a sudden hawk-like gesture, as he sprawled head
+downwards, she tried to get hold of it.
+
+But he felt her movement. 'Let goo!' he said imperiously, and,
+throwing himself round, while one foot slipped into the water, he
+caught her hand, with its thin predatory fingers, and pulled the
+book away.
+
+'Yo just leave my books alone, Louie. Yo do 'em a mischeef whaniver
+yo can--an I'll not have it.'
+
+He turned his handsome, regular face, crimsoned by his position and
+splashed by the water, towards her with an indignant air. She
+laughed, and sat herself down again on the grass, looking a very
+imp of provocation.
+
+'They're stupid,' she said, shortly. 'They mak yo a stupid gonner
+ony ways.'
+
+'Oh! do they?' he retorted, angrily. 'Bit I'll be even wi yo. I'll
+tell yo noa moor stories out of 'em, not if yo ast iver so.'
+
+The girl's mouth curled contemptuously, and she began to gather her
+primroses into a bunch with an air of the utmost serenity. She was
+a thin, agile, lightly made creature, apparently about eleven. Her
+piercing black eyes, when they lifted, seemed to overweight the
+face, whereof the other features were at present small and pinched.
+The mouth had a trick of remaining slightly open, showing a line of
+small pearly teeth; the chin was a little sharp and shrewish. As
+for the hair, it promised to be splendid; at present it was an
+unkempt, tangled mass, which Hannah Grieve, the children's aunt,
+for her own credit's sake at chapel, or in the public street, made
+occasional violent attempts to reduce to order--to very little
+purpose, so strong and stubborn was the curl of it. The whole
+figure was out of keeping with the English moorside, with the
+sheep, and the primroses.
+
+But so indeed was that of the boy, whose dark colouring was more
+vivacious and pronounced than his sister's, because the red of his
+cheek and lip was deeper, while his features, though larger than
+hers, were more finely regular, and his eyes had the same piercing
+blackness, the same all-examining keenness, as hers. The yellowish
+tones of his worn fustian suit and a red Tam-o'-Shanter cap
+completed the general effect of brilliancy and, as it were,
+_foreignness_.
+
+Having finished his inspection of his water-mill, he scrambled
+across to the other side of the stream so as to be well out of his
+sister's way, and, taking out the volume which was stretching his
+pocket, he began to read it. It was a brown calf-bound book, much
+worn, and on its title-page it bore the title of 'The Wars of
+Jerusalem,' of Flavius Josephus, translated by S. Calmet, and a
+date somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century. To this
+antique fare the boy settled himself down. The two collies lay
+couched beside him; a stone-chat perched on one or other of the
+great blocks which lay scattered over the heath gave out his
+clinking note; while every now and then the loud peevish cluck of
+the grouse came from the distant sides of the Scout.
+
+Titus was now making his final assault on the Temple. The Zealots
+were gathered in the innermost court, frantically beseeching Heaven
+for a sign; the walls, the outer approaches of the Sanctuary were
+choked with the dying and the dead. David sat absorbed, elbows on
+knees, his face framed in his hands. Suddenly the descent of
+something cold and clammy on his bent neck roused him with a most
+unpleasant shock.
+
+Quick as lightning he faced round, snatching at his assailant; but
+Louie was off, scudding among the bilberry hillocks with peals of
+laughter, while the slimy moss she had just gathered from the edges
+of the brook sent cold creeping streams into the recesses of
+David's neck and shoulders. He shook himself free of the mess as
+best he could, and rushed after her. For a long time he chased her
+in vain, then her foot tripped, and he came up with her just as she
+rolled into the heather, gathered up like a hedgehog against
+attack, her old hat held down over her ears and face. David fell
+upon her and chastised her; but his fisticuffs probably looked more
+formidable than they felt, for Louie laughed provokingly all the
+time, and when he stopped out of breath she said exultantly, as she
+sprang up, holding her skirts round her ready for another flight,
+'It's greened aw yur neck and yur collar--luvely! Doan't yo be
+nassty for nothink next time!'
+
+And off she ran.
+
+'If yo meddle wi me ony moor,' he shouted after her fiercely, 'yo
+see what I'll do!'
+
+But in reality the male was helpless, as usual. He went ruefully
+down to the brook, and loosening his shirt and coat tried to clean
+his neck and hair. Then, extremely sticky and uncomfortable, he
+went back to his seat and his book, his wrathful eyes taking
+careful note meanwhile of Louie's whereabouts. And thenceforward he
+read, as it were, on guard, looking up every other minute.
+
+Louie established herself some way up the further slope, in a steep
+stony nook, under two black boulders, which protected her rear in
+case of reprisals from David. Time passed away. David, on the other
+side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the
+more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by
+one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the
+minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness.
+All her resources were for the moment at an end. She could think of
+no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew that she was
+observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of primroses along
+the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, and thrown them
+away; she had found a grouse's nest among the dead fern, and,
+contrary to the most solemn injunctions of uncle and keeper,
+enforced by the direst threats, had purloined and broken an egg;
+and still dinner-time delayed. Perhaps, too, the cold blighting
+wind, which soon made her look blue and pinched, tamed her
+insensibly. At any rate, she got up after about an hour, and coolly
+walked across to David.
+
+He looked up at her with a quick frown. But she sat down, and,
+clasping her hands round her knees, while the primroses she had
+stuck in her hat dangled over her defiant eyes, she looked at him
+with a grinning composure.
+
+'Yo can read out if yo want to,' she remarked.
+
+'Yo doan't deserve nowt, an I shan't,' said David, shortly.
+
+'Then I'll tell Aunt Hannah about how yo let t' lambs stray lasst
+evenin, and about yor readin at neet.'
+
+'Yo may tell her aw t' tallydiddles yo can think on,' was the
+unpromising reply.
+
+Louie threw all the scorn possible into her forced smile, and then,
+dropping full-length into the heather, she began to sing at the top
+of a shrill, unpleasing voice, mainly, of course, for the sake of
+harrying anyone in her neighbourhood who might wish to read.
+
+'Stop that squealing!' David commanded, peremptorily. Whereupon
+Louie sang louder than before.
+
+David looked round in a fury, but his fury was, apparently,
+instantly damped by the inward conviction, born of long experience,
+that he could do nothing to help himself. He sprang up, and thrust
+his book into his pocket.
+
+'Nobory ull mak owt o' yo till yo get a bastin twice a day, wi an
+odd lick extra for Sundays,' he remarked to her with grim emphasis
+when he had reached what seemed to him a safe distance. Then he
+turned and strode up the face of the hill, the dogs at his heels.
+Louie turned on her elbow, and threw such small stones as she could
+discover among the heather after him, but they fell harmlessly
+about him, and did not answer their purpose of provoking him to
+turn round again.
+
+She observed that he was going up to the old smithy on the side of
+Kinder Low, and in a few minutes she got up and sauntered lazily
+after him.
+
+'T' owd smithy' had been the enchanted ground of David's childhood.
+It was a ruined building standing deep in heather, half-way up the
+mountain-side, and ringed by scattered blocks and tabular slabs of
+grit. Here in times far remote--beyond the memory of even the
+oldest inhabitant--the millstones of the district, which gave their
+name to the 'millstone grit' formation of the Peak, were fashioned.
+High up on the dark moorside stood what remained of the primitive
+workshop. The fire-marked stones of the hearth were plainly
+visible; deep in the heather near lay the broken jambs of the
+window; a stone doorway with its lintel was still standing; and on
+the slope beneath it, hardly to be distinguished now from the great
+primaeval blocks out of which they had sprung and to which they
+were fast returning, reposed two or three huge millstones. Perhaps
+they bordered some ancient track, climbed by the millers of the
+past when they came to this remote spot to give their orders; but,
+if so, the track had long since sunk out of sight in the heather,
+and no visible link remained to connect the history of this high
+and lonely place with that of those teeming valleys hidden to west
+and north among the moors, the dwellers wherein must once have
+known it well. From the old threshold the eye commanded a
+wilderness of moors, rising wave-like one after another, from the
+green swell just below whereon stood Reuben Grieve's farm, to the
+far-distant Alderley Edge. In the hollows between, dim tall
+chimneys veiled in mist and smoke showed the places of the cotton
+towns--of Hayfield, New Mills, Staleybridge, Stockport; while in
+the far northwest, any gazer to whom the country-side spoke
+familiarly might, in any ordinary clearness of weather, look for
+and find the eternal smoke-cloud of Manchester.
+
+So the deserted smithy stood as it were spectator for ever of that
+younger, busier England which wanted it no more. Human life
+notwithstanding had left on it some very recent traces. On the
+lintel of the ruined door two names were scratched deep into the
+whitish under-grain of the black weather-beaten grit. The upper one
+ran: 'David Suveret Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863;' the lower, 'Louise
+Stephanie Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863.' They were written in bold
+round-hand, and could be read at a considerable distance. During
+the nine months they had been there, many a rustic passer-by had
+been stopped by them, especially by the oddity of the name
+_Suveret_, which tormented the Derbyshire mouth.
+
+In a corner of the walls stood something more puzzling still--a
+large iron pan, filled to the brim with water, and firmly bedded on
+a foundation of earth and stones. So still in general was the
+shining sheltered round, that the branches of the mountain ash
+which leant against the crumbling wall, the tufts of hard fern
+growing among the stones, the clouds which sailed overhead, were
+all delicately mirrored in it. That pan was David Grieve's dearest
+possession, and those reflections, so magical, and so alive, had
+contrived for him many a half-hour of almost breathless pleasure.
+He had carried it off from the refuse-yard of a foundry in
+the valley, where he had a friend in one of the apprentices.
+The farm donkey and himself had dragged it thither on a certain
+never-to-be-forgotten day, when Uncle Reuben had been on the other
+side of the mountain at a shepherds' meeting in the Woodlands,
+while Aunt Hannah was safely up to her elbows in the washtub. Boy's
+back and donkey's back had nearly broken under the task, but there
+the pan stood at last, the delight of David's heart. In a crevice
+of the wall beside it, hidden jealously from the passer-by, lay the
+other half of that perpetual entertainment it provided--a store of
+tiny boats fashioned by David, and another friend, the lame
+minister of the 'Christian Brethren' congregation at Clough End,
+the small factory town just below Kinder, who was a sea-captain's
+son, and with a knife and a bit of deal could fashion you any craft
+you pleased. These boats David only brought out on rare occasions,
+very seldom admitting Louie to the show. But when he pleased they
+became fleets, and sailed for new continents. Here were the ships
+of Captain Cook, there the ships of Columbus. On one side of the
+pan lay the Spanish main, on the other the islands of the South
+Seas. A certain tattered copy of the 'Royal Magazine,' with
+pictures, which lay in Uncle Reuben's cupboard at home, provided
+all that for David was to be known of these names and places. But
+fancy played pilot and led the way; she conjured up storms and
+islands and adventures; and as he hung over his pan high on the
+Derbyshire moor, the boy, like Sidney of old, 'sailed the seas where
+there was never sand'--the vast and viewless oceans of romance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Once safe in the smithy, David recovered his temper. If Louie
+followed him, which was probable, he would know better how to deal
+with her here, with a wall at his back and a definite area to
+defend, than he did in the treacherous openness of the heath.
+However, just as he was settling himself down, with a sigh of
+relief, between the pan and the wall, he caught sight of something
+through one of the gaps of the old ruin which made him fling down
+his book and run to the doorway. There, putting his fingers to his
+mouth, he blew a shrill whistle along the side of the Scout. A bent
+figure on a distant path stopped at the sound. It was an old man,
+with a plaid hanging from his shoulders. He raised the stick he
+held, and shook it in recognition of David's signal. Then resuming
+his bowed walk, he came slowly on, followed by an old hound, whose
+gait seemed as feeble as his master's.
+
+David leant against the doorway waiting. Louie, meanwhile, was
+lounging in the heather just below him, having very soon caught him
+up.
+
+'What d'yo want 'im for?' she asked contemptuously, as the
+new-comer approached: 'he'd owt to be in th' sylum. Aunt Hannah says
+he's gone that silly, he owt to be took up.'
+
+'Well, he woan't be, then,' retorted David. 'Theer's nobory about as
+ull lay a finger on 'im. He doan't do her no harm, nor yo noather.
+Women foak and gells allus want to be wooryin soomthin.'
+
+'Aunt Hannah says he lost his wits wi fuddlin,' repeated Louie
+shrilly, striking straighter still for what she knew to be one of
+David's tenderest points--his friendship for 'owd 'Lias Dawson,' the
+queer dreamer, who, fifteen years before, had been the schoolmaster
+of Frimley Moor End, and in local esteem 't' cliverest mon abeawt
+t'Peak.'
+
+David with difficulty controlled a hot inclination to fall upon his
+sister once more. Instead, however, he affected not to hear her,
+and shouted a loud 'Good mornin' to the old man, who was toiling up
+the knoll on which the smithy stood.
+
+'Lias responded feebly, panting hard the while. He sank down on a
+stone outside the smithy, and for a while had neither breath nor
+voice. Then he began to look about him; his heaving chest subsided,
+and there was a rekindling of the strange blue eyes. He wore a high
+white stock and neckcloth; his plaid hung round his emaciated
+shoulders with a certain antique dignity; his rusty wideawake
+covered hair still abundant and even curly, but snow-white; the
+face, with its white eyebrows, was long, thin, and full of an
+ascetic delicacy.
+
+'Wal, Davy, my lad,' the old man said at last, with a sort of
+pompous mildness; 'I winna blame yo for 't, but yo interrupted me
+sadly wi yur whistlin. I ha been occupied this day wi business o'
+_graat_ importance. His Majesty King Charles has been wi me
+since seven o'clock this mornin. And for th' fust time I ha been
+gettin reet to th' _bottom_ o' things wi him. I ha been
+_probin_ him, Davy--probin him. He couldno riddle through wi
+lees; I kept him to 't, as yo mun keep a horse to a jump--straight
+an tight. I had it aw out about Strafford, an t'Five Members, an
+thoose dirty dealins wi th' Irish devils! Yo should ha yerd it,
+Davy--yo should, I'll uphowd yo!'
+
+And placing his stick between his knees, the old man leant his
+hands upon it, with a meditative and judicial air. The boy stood
+looking down at him, a broad smile lighting up the dark and vivid
+face. Old 'Lias supplied him with a perpetual 'spectacle' which
+never palled.
+
+'Coe him back, 'Lias, he's soomwheer about. Yo need nobbut coe him,
+an he'll coom.'
+
+'Lias looked fatuously pleased. He lifted his head and affected to
+scan the path along which he had just travelled.
+
+'Aye, I daur say he's not far.--Yor Majesty!'
+
+And 'Lias laid his head on one side and listened. In a few seconds
+a cunning smile stole over his lips.
+
+'Wal, Davy, yo're in luck. He's noan so onwillin, we'st ha him here
+in a twinklin. Yo may coe him mony things, but yo conno coe him
+proud. Noa, as I've fund him, Charles Stuart has no soart o' pride
+about him. Aye, theer yo are! Sir, your Majesty's obleeged an
+humble servant!'
+
+And, raising his hand to his hat, the old man took it off and swept
+it round with a courtly deliberation. Then replacing it, he sat
+with his face raised, as though to one standing near, his whole
+attitude full of a careful and pompous dignity.
+
+'Now then, yor Majesty,' said 'Lias grimly,' I'st ha to put that
+question to yo, yance moor, yo wor noan so well pleased wi this
+mornin. But yo shouldno be soa tender, mon! Th' truth can
+do yo _noa_ harm, wheer yo are, an I'm nobbut askin for
+_informashun's_ sake. Soa out wi it; I'st not use it agen yo.
+_That--wee--bit--o'--damned--paper,_--man, what sent poor
+Strafford to his eend--yo mind it?--aye, _'at yo do!_ Well,
+now'--and the old man's tone grew gently seductive--_'explain
+yursel._ We'n had _their_ tale,' and he pointed away to
+some imaginary accusers. 'But yo mun trust an Englishman's sense o'
+fair play. Say your say. We 'st gie yo a varra patient hearin.'
+
+And with chin thrown up, and his half-blurred eyes blinking under
+their white lashes, 'Lias waited with a bland imperativeness for the
+answer.
+
+'Eh?' said 'Lias at last, frowning and hollowing his hand to his
+ear.
+
+He listened another few seconds, then he dropped his hand sharply.
+
+'What's 'at yo're sayin?' he asked hastily; ''at yo couldno help it,
+not _whativer_--that i' truth yo had nothin to do wi't, no
+moor than mysel--that yo wor _forcit_ to it--willy-nilly--by
+them devils o' Parliament foak--by Mr. Pym and his loike, wi whom,
+if God-amighty ha' not reckoned since, theer's no moor justice i'
+His Kingdom than yo found i' yours?'
+
+The words came out with a rush, tumbling over one another till they
+suddenly broke off in a loud key of indignant scorn. Then 'Lias
+fell silent a moment, and slowly shook his head over the inveterate
+shuffling of the House of Stuart.
+
+''Twinna do, man--'twinna do,' he said at last, with an air of
+fine reproof. 'He wor your _friend_, wor that poor sinner
+Strafford--your awn familiar friend, as t' Psalm says. I'm not
+takin up a brief for him, t' Lord knows! He wor but meetin his
+deserts, to _my_ thinkin, when his yed went loupin. But yo put
+a black mark agen _yore_ name when yo signed that bit paper
+for your awn skin's sake. Naw, naw, man, yo should ha lost your awn
+yed a bit sooner fust. Eh, it wor base--it wor cooardly!'
+
+'Lias's voice dropped, and he fell muttering to himself
+indistinctly. David, bending over him, could not make out whether
+it was Charles or his interlocutor speaking, and began to be afraid
+that the old man's performance was over before it had well begun.
+But on the contrary, 'Lias emerged with fresh energy from the gulf
+of inarticulate argument in which his poor wits seemed to have lost
+themselves awhile.
+
+'But I'm no blamin yo awthegither,' he cried, raising himself, with
+a protesting wave of the hand. 'Theer's naw mak o' mischief i' this
+world, but t' _women_ are at t' bottom o't. Whar's that proud
+foo of a wife o' yourn? Send her here, man; send her here! 'Lias
+Dawson ull mak her hear reason! Now, Davy!'
+
+And the old man drew the lad to him with one hand, while he raised
+a finger softly with the other.
+
+'Just study her, Davy, my lad,' he said in an undertone, which
+swelled louder as his excitement grew, 'theer she stan's, by t' side
+o' t' King. She's a gay good-lookin female, that I'll confess to,
+but study her; look at her curls, Davy, an her paint, an her
+nakedness. For shame, madam! Goo hide that neck o' yourn, goo hide
+it, I say! An her faldaddles, an her jewles, an her ribbons. Is
+that a woman--a French hizzy like that--to get a King out o'
+trooble, wha's awready lost aw t' wits he wor born wi?'
+
+And with sparkling eyes and outstretched arm 'Lias pointed sternly
+into vacancy. Thrilled with involuntary awe the boy and girl looked
+round them. For, in spite of herself, Louie had come closer, little
+by little, and was now sitting cross-legged in front of 'Lias. Then
+Louie's shrill voice broke in--
+
+'Tell us what she's got on!' And the girl leant eagerly forward,
+her magnificent eyes kindling into interest.
+
+'What she's got on, my lassie? Eh, but I'm feart your yead, too, is
+fu' o' gauds!--Wal, it's but nateral to females. She's aw in white
+satin, my lassie,--an in her brown hair theer's pearls, an a blue
+ribbon just howdin down t' little luve-locks on her forehead--an on
+her saft neck theer's pearls again--not soa white, by a thoosand
+mile, as her white skin--an t' lace fa's ower her proud shoothers,
+an down her luvely arms--an she looks at me wi her angry eyes--Eh,
+but she's a queen!' cried 'Lias, in a sudden outburst of
+admiration. 'She hath been a persecutor o' th' saints--a varra
+Jeezebel--the Lord hath put her to shame--but she's moor
+sperrit--moor o't' blood o' kingship i' her little finger, nor
+Charles theer in aw his body!'
+
+And by a strange and crazy reversal of feeling, the old man sat in
+a kind of ecstasy, enamoured of his own creation, looking into thin
+air. As for Louie, during the description of the Queen's dress she
+had drunk in every word with a greedy attention, her changing eyes
+fixed on the speaker's face. When he stopped, however, she drew a
+long breath.
+
+'It's aw lees!' she said scornfully.
+
+'Howd your tongue, Louie!' cried David, angrily.
+
+But 'Lias took no notice. He was talking again very fast, but
+incoherently. Hampden, Pym, Fairfax, Falkland--the great names
+clattered past every now and then, like horsemen, through a maze of
+words, but with no perceptible order or purpose. The phrases
+concerning them came to nothing; and though there were apparently
+many voices speaking, nothing intelligible could be made out.
+
+When next the mists cleared a little from the old visionary's
+brain, David gathered that Cromwell was close by, defending himself
+with difficulty, apparently, like Charles, against 'Lias's
+assaults. In his youth and middle age--until, in fact, an event of
+some pathos and mystery had broken his life across, and cut him off
+from his profession--'Lias had been a zealous teacher and a
+voracious reader; and through the dreams of fifteen years the
+didactic faculty had persisted and grown amazingly. He played
+schoolmaster now to all the heroes of history. Whether it were
+Elizabeth wrangling with Mary Stuart, or Cromwell marshalling his
+Ironsides, or Buckingham falling under the assassin's dagger at
+'Lias's feet, or Napoleon walking restlessly up and down the deck
+of the 'Bellerophon,' 'Lias rated them every one. He was lord of a
+shadow world, wherein he walked with kings and queens, warriors and
+poets, putting them one and all superbly to rights. Yet so subtle
+were the old man's wits, and so bright his fancy, even in
+derangement, that he preserved through it all a considerable
+measure of dramatic fitness. He gave his puppets a certain freedom;
+he let them state their case; and threw almost as much ingenuity
+into the pleading of it as into the refuting of it. Of late, since
+he had made friends with Davy Grieve, he had contracted a curious
+habit of weaving the boy into his visions.
+
+'Davy, what's your opinion o' that?' or, 'Davy, my lad, did yo iver
+hear sich clit-clat i' your life?' or again, 'Davy, yo'll not be
+misled, surely, by sich a piece o' speshul-pleadin as that?'
+
+So the appeals would run, and the boy, at first bewildered, and
+even irritated by them, as by something which threw hindrances in
+the way of the only dramatic entertainment the High Peak was likely
+to afford him, had learnt at last to join in them with relish. Many
+meetings with 'Lias on the moorside, which the old seer made alive
+for both of them--the plundering of 'Lias's books, whence he had
+drawn the brown 'Josephus' in his pocket--these had done more
+than anything else to stock the boy's head with its present
+strange jumble of knowledge and ideas. _Knowledge_, indeed, it
+scarcely was, but rather the materials for a certain kind of
+excitement.
+
+'Wal, Davy, did yo hear that?' said 'Lias, presently, looking round
+on the boy with a doubtful countenance, after Cromwell had given an
+unctuous and highly Biblical account of the slaughter at Drogheda
+and its reasons.
+
+'How mony did he say he killed at that place?' asked the boy
+sharply.
+
+'Thoosands,' said Dawson, solemnly. 'Theer was naw mercy asked nor
+gi'en. And those wha escaped knockin on t' yead were aw sold as
+slaves--every mon jock o' them!'
+
+A strong light of anger showed itself in David's face.
+
+'Then he wor a cantin murderer! Yo mun tell him so! If I'd my way,
+he'd hang for 't!'
+
+'Eh, laddie, they were nowt but rebels an Papists,' said the old
+man, complacently.
+
+'Don't yo becall Papists!' cried David, fiercely, facing round upon
+him. 'My mither wor a Papist.'
+
+A curious change of expression appeared on 'Lias's face. He put his
+hand behind his ear that he might hear better, turned a pair of
+cunning eyes on David, while his lips pressed themselves together.
+
+'Your mither wor a Papist? an your feyther wor Sandy Grieve. Ay,
+ay--I've yeerd tell strange things o' Sandy Grieve's wife,' he said
+slowly.
+
+Suddenly Louie, who had been lying full length on her back in the
+sun, with her hat over her face, apparently asleep, sat bolt
+upright.
+
+'Tell us what about her,' she said imperiously.
+
+'Noa--noa,' said the old man, shaking his head, while a sort of
+film seemed to gather over the eyes, and the face and features
+relaxed--fell, as it were, into their natural expression of weak
+senility, which so long as he was under the stress of his favourite
+illusions was hardly apparent. 'But it's true--it's varra true--I've
+yeerd tell strange things about Sandy Grieve's wife.'
+
+And still aimlessly shaking his head, he sat staring at the
+opposite side of the ravine, the lower jaw dropping a little.
+
+'He knows nowt about it,' said David, roughly, the light of a
+sombre, half-reluctant curiosity, which had arisen in his look,
+dying down.
+
+He threw himself on the grass by the dogs, and began teasing and
+playing with them. Meanwhile Louie sat studying 'Lias with a
+frowning hostility, making faces at him now and then by way of
+amusement. To disappoint the impetuous will embodied in that small
+frame was to commit an offence of the first order.
+
+But one might as well make faces at a stone post as at old 'Lias
+when his wandering fit was on him. When the entertainment palled,
+Louie got up with a yawn, meaning to lounge back to the farm and
+investigate the nearness of dinner. But, as she turned, something
+caught her attention. It was the gleam of a pool, far away beyond
+the Downfall, on a projecting spur of the moor.
+
+'What d' yo coe that bit watter?' she asked David, suddenly
+pointing to it.
+
+David rolled himself round on his face, and took a look at the
+bluish patch on the heather.
+
+'It hasna got naw name,' he said, at a venture.
+
+'Then yo're a stoopid, for it has,' replied Louie, triumphantly.
+'It's t' _Mermaid_ Pool. Theer wor a Manchester mon at Wigsons'
+last week, telling aw maks o' tales. Theer's a mermaid lives
+in 't--a woman, I tell tha, wi' a fish's tail--it's in a book,
+an he read it out, soa _theer_--an on Easter Eve neet she cooms
+out, and walks about t' Scout, combin her hair--an if onybody sees
+her an wishes for soomthin, they get it, sartin sure; an--'
+
+'Mermaids is just faddle an nonsense,' interrupted David, tersely.
+
+'Oh, is they? Then I spose books is faddle. Most on 'em are--t'
+kind of books yo like--I'll uphowd yo!'
+
+'Oh, is they?' said David, mimicking her. 'Wal, I like 'em, yo see,
+aw t' same. I tell yo, mermaids is nonsense, cos I _know_ they
+are. Theer was yan at Hayfield Fair, an the fellys they nearly
+smashed t' booth down, cos they said it wor a cheat. Theer was just
+a gell, an they'd stuffed her into a fish's skin and sewed 'er up;
+an when yo went close yo could see t' stuffin runnin out of her. An
+theer was a man as held 'er up by a wire roun her waist, an waggled
+her i' t' watter. But t' foak as had paid sixpence to coom in, they
+just took an tore down t' place, an they'd 'a dookt t' man an t'
+gell boath, if th' coonstable hadn't coom. Naw, mermaids is faddle,'
+he repeated contemptuously.
+
+'Faddle?' repeated 'Lias, interrogatively.
+
+The children started. They has supposed 'Lias was of doting and
+talking gibberish for the rest of the morning. But his tone was
+brisk and as David looked up he caught a queer flickering
+brightness in the old man's eye, which showed him that 'Lias was
+once more capable of furnishing amusement or information.
+
+'What do they coe that bit watter, 'Lias?' he inquired, pointing to
+it.
+
+'That bit watter?' repeated 'Lias, eyeing it. A sort of vague
+trouble came into his face, and his wrinkled hands lying on his
+stick began to twitch nervously.
+
+'Aye--theer's a Manchester man been cramming Wigsons wi tales--says
+he gets 'em out of a book--'bout a woman 'at walks t' Scout Easter
+Eve neet,--an a lot o' ninny-hommer's talk. Yo niver heer now about
+it--did yo, 'Lias?'
+
+'Yes, yo did, Mr. Dawson--now, didn't yo?' said Louis,
+persuasively, enraged that David would never accept information
+from her, while she was always expected to take it from him.
+
+'A woman--'at walks t' Scout,' said 'Lias, uncertainly, flushing as
+he spoke.
+
+Then, looking tremulously from his companions to the pool, he said,
+angrily raising his stick and shaking it at David, 'Davy, yo're
+takin advantage--Davy, yo're doin what yo owt not. If my Margret
+were here, she'd let yo know!'
+
+The words rose into a cry of quavering passion. The children stared
+at him in amazement. But as Davy, aggrieved, was defending himself,
+the old man laid a violent hand on his arm and silenced him. His
+eyes, which were black and keen still in the blanched face, were
+riveted on the gleaming pool. His features worked as though under
+the stress of some possessing force; a shiver ran through the
+emaciated limbs.
+
+'Oh! yo want to know abeawt Jenny Crum's pool, do yo?' he said at last
+in a low agitated voice. 'Nobbut look, my lad!--nobbut look!--an see for
+yoursen.'
+
+He paused, his chest heaving, his eye fixed. Then, suddenly, he
+broke out in a flood of passionate speech, still gripping David.
+
+'_Passon Maine! Passon Maine!_--ha yo got her, th' owd woman?
+Aye, aye--sure enough--'at's she--as yo're aw drivin afore
+yo--hoontit like a wild beeast--wi her grey hair streamin, and her
+hands tied--Ah!'--and the old man gave a wild cry, which startled
+both the children to their feet. 'Conno yo hear her?--eh, but it's
+enough to tear a body's heart out to hear an owd woman scream like
+that!'
+
+He stopped, trembling, and listened, his hand hollowed to his ear.
+Louie looked at her brother and laughed nervously; but her little
+hard face had paled. David laid hold of her to keep her quiet, and
+shook himself free of 'Lias. But 'Lias took no notice of them now
+at all, his changed seer's gaze saw nothing but the distance and
+the pool.
+
+'Are yo quite _sure_ it wor her, Passon?' he went on,
+appealingly. 'She's nobbut owd, an it's a far cry fro her bit
+cottage to owd Needham's Farm. An th' chilt might ha deed, and t'
+cattle might ha strayed, and t' geyats might ha opened o'
+theirsels! Yo'll not dare to speak agen _that_. They _might_?
+Ay, ay, we aw know t' devil's strong; but she's eighty-one year
+coom Christmas--an an--. Doan't, _doan't_ let t' childer see,
+nor t' yoong gells! If yo let em see sich seets they'll breed
+yo wolves, not babes! Ah!'
+
+And again 'Lias gave the same cry, and stood half risen, his hands
+on his staff, looking.
+
+'What is it, 'Lias?' said David, eagerly; 'what is 't yo see?'
+
+'Theer's my grandfeyther,' said 'Lias, almost in a whisper, 'an owd
+Needham an his two brithers, an yoong Jack Needham's woife--her as
+losst her babby--an yoong lads an lasses fro Clough End, childer
+awmost, and t' coonstable, an Passon Maine--Ay--ay--yo've doon it!
+Yo've doon it! She'll mak naw moor mischeef neets--she's gay quiet
+now! T' watter's got her fasst enough!'
+
+And, drawing himself up to his full height, the old man pointed a
+quivering finger at the pool.
+
+'Ay, it's got her--an your stones are tied fasst! Passon Maine says
+she's safe--that yo'll see her naw moor--
+
+    While holly sticks be green,
+    While stone on Kinder Scoot be seen.
+
+But _I_ tell yo, Passon Maine _lees!_ I tell yo t' witch ull
+_walk_--t' witch ull _walk!_'
+
+For several seconds 'Lias stood straining forward--out of
+himself--a tragic and impressive figure. Then, in a moment, from
+that distance his weird gift had been re-peopling, something else
+rose towards him--some hideous memory, as it seemed, of personal
+anguish, personal fear. The exalted seer's look vanished, the
+tension within gave way, the old man shrank together. He fell back
+heavily on the stone, hiding his face in his hands, and muttering
+to himself.
+
+The children looked at each other oddly. Then David, half afraid,
+touched him.
+
+'What's t' matter, 'Lias? Are yo bad?'
+
+The old man did not move. They caught some disjointed words,--'cold--ay,
+t' neet's cold, varra cold!'
+
+''Lias!' shouted David.
+
+'Lias looked up startled, and shook his head feebly.
+
+'Are yo bad, 'Lias?'
+
+'Ay!' said the old schoolmaster, in the voice of one speaking
+through a dream--'ay, varra bad, varra cold--I mun--lig me down--a
+bit.'
+
+And he rose feebly. David instinctively caught hold of him, and led
+him to a corner close by in the ruined walls, where the heather and
+bilberry grew thick up to the stones. 'Lias sank down, his head fell
+against the wall, and a light and restless sleep seemed to take
+possession of him.
+
+David stood studying him, his hands in his pockets. Never in all
+his experience of him had 'Lias gone through such a performance as
+this. What on earth did it mean? There was more in it than
+appeared, clearly. He would tell Margaret, 'Lias's old wife, who
+kept him and tended him like the apple of her eye. And he would
+find out about the pool, anyway. _Jenny Crum's pool?_ What on
+earth did that mean? The name had never reached his ears before. Of
+course Uncle Reuben would know. The boy eyed it curiously, the
+details of 'Lias's grim vision returning upon him. The wild
+circling moor seemed suddenly to have gained a mysterious interest.
+
+'Didn't I tell yo he wor gone silly?' said Louie, triumphantly, at
+his elbow.
+
+'He's not gone that silly, onyways, but he can freeten little
+gells,' remarked David, dryly, instinctively putting out an arm,
+meanwhile, to prevent her disturbing the poor sleeper.
+
+'I worn't freetened,' insisted Louie; '_yo_ were! He may skrike
+aw day if he likes--for aw I care. He'll be runnin into hedges
+by dayleet soon. Owd churn-yed!'
+
+'Howd your clatterin tongue!' said David, angrily, pushing her out
+of the doorway. She lifted a loose sod of heather, which lay just
+outside, flung it at him, and then took to her heels, and made for
+the farm and dinner, with the speed of a wild goat.
+
+David brushed his clothes, took a stroll with the dogs, and
+recovered his temper as best he might. When he came back, pricked
+by the state of his appetite, to see whether 'Lias had recovered
+enough sanity to get home, he found the old man sitting up, looking
+strangely white and exhausted, and fumbling, in a dazed way, for
+the tobacco to which he always resorted at moments of nervous
+fatigue. His good wife Margaret never sent him out without mended
+clothes, spotless linen, and a paper of tobacco in his pocket. He
+sat chewing it awhile in silence; David's remarks to him met with
+only incoherent answers, and at last the schoolmaster got up and
+with the help of his stick tottered off along the path by which he
+had come. David's eyes followed the bent figure uneasily; nor did
+he turn homeward till it disappeared over the brow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Anyone opening the door of Needham Farm kitchen that night at eight
+would have found the inmates at supper--a meagre supper, which
+should, according to the rule of the house, have been eaten in
+complete silence. Hannah Grieve, the children's aunt, and mistress
+of the farm, thought it an offence to talk at meals. She had not
+been so brought up.
+
+But Louie this evening was in a state of nerves. The afternoon had
+seen one of those periodical struggles between her and Hannah,
+which did so much to keep life at Needham Farm from stagnating into
+anything like comfort. The two combatants, however, must have taken
+a certain joy in them, since they recurred with so much regularity.
+Hannah had won, of course, as the grim self-importance of her
+bearing amply showed. Louie had been forced to patch the
+house-linen as usual, mainly by the temporary confiscation of her
+Sunday hat, the one piece of decent clothing she possessed, and to
+which she clung with a feverish attachment--generally, indeed,
+sleeping with it beside her pillow. But, though she was beaten, she
+was still seething with rebellion. Her eyes were red, but her
+shaggy head was thrown back defiantly, and there was hysterical
+battle in the expression of her sharply-tilted nose and chin.
+
+'Mind yorsel,' cried Hannah angrily, as the child put down her
+plate of porridge with a bang which made the housewife tremble for
+her crockery.
+
+'What's t' matter wi yo, Louie?' said Uncle Reuben, looking at her
+with some discomfort. He had just finished the delivery of a long
+grace, into which he had thrown much unction, and Louie's manners
+made but an ill-fitting Amen.
+
+'It's nasty!' said the child passionately. 'It's allus
+porridge--porridge--porridge--porridge--an I hate it--an it's
+bitter--an it's a shame! I wish I wor at Wigson's--'at I do!'
+
+Davy glanced up at his sister under his eyebrows. Hannah scanned
+her niece all over with a slow, observant scrutiny, as though she
+were a dangerous animal that must be watched. Otherwise Louie might
+have spoken to the wall for all the effect she produced. Reuben,
+however, was more vulnerable.
+
+'What d' yo want to be at Wigson's for?' he asked. 'Yo should
+be content wi your state o' life, Louie. It's a sin to be
+discontented--I've tellt yo so many times.'
+
+'They've got scones and rhubarb jam for tea!' cried the child,
+tumbling the news out as though she were bursting with it. 'Mrs.
+Wigson, she's allus makin em nice things. She's kind, she is--she's
+nice--she wouldn't make em eat stuff like this--she'd give it to
+the pigs--'at she would!'
+
+And all the time it was pitiful to see how the child was gobbling
+up her unpalatable food, evidently from the instinctive fear, nasty
+as it was, that it would be taken from her as a punishment for her
+behaviour.
+
+'Now, Louie, yo're a silly gell,' began Reuben, expostulating; but
+Hannah interposed.
+
+'I wudn't advise yo, Reuben Grieve, to go wastin your breath on
+sich a minx. If I were yo, I'd keep it fur my awn eating.'
+
+And she calmly put another slice of cold bacon on his plate, as
+though reminding him of his proper business. Reuben fell silent and
+munched his bacon, though he could not forbear studying his niece
+every now and then uncomfortably. He was a tall, large-boned man,
+with weakish eyes, sandy whiskers and beard, grown in a fringe
+round his long face, and a generally clumsy and disjointed air. The
+tremulous, uncertain movements of his hand as he stretched it out
+for one article of food after another seemed to express the man's
+character.
+
+Louie went on gulping down her porridge. Her plate was just empty
+when Hannah caught a movement of Reuben's fork. He was in the act
+of furtively transferring to Louie a portion of bacon. But he could
+not restrain himself from looking at Hannah as he held out the
+morsel. Hannah's answering look was too much for him. The bacon
+went into his mouth.
+
+Supper over, Louie went out to sit on the steps, and Hannah
+contemptuously forbore to make her come in and help clear away. Out
+in the air, the child slowly quieted down. It was a clear, frosty
+April night, promising a full moon. The fresh, nipping air blew on
+the girl's heated temples and swollen eyes. Against her will
+almost, her spirits came back. She swept Aunt Hannah out of her
+mind, and began to plan something which consoled her. When would
+they have their stupid prayers and let her get upstairs?
+
+David meanwhile hung about the kitchen. He would have liked to ask
+Uncle Reuben about the pool and 'Lias's story, but Hannah was
+bustling about, and he never mentioned 'Lias in her hearing. To do
+so would have been like handing over something weak, for which he
+had a tenderness, to be worried.
+
+But he rummaged out an old paper-covered guide to the Peak, which
+he remembered to have been left at the farm one summer's day by a
+passing tourist, who paid Hannah handsomely for some bread and
+cheese. Turning to the part which concerned Clough End, Hayfield,
+and the Scout, he found:--
+
+'In speaking of the Mermaiden's Pool, it may be remarked that the
+natives of several little hamlets surrounding Kinder Scout have
+long had a tradition that there is a beautiful woman--an English
+Hamadryad--lives in the side of the Scout; that she comes to bathe
+every day in the Mermaid's Well, and that the man who has the good
+luck to behold her bathing will become immortal and never die.'
+
+David shut the book and fell pondering, like many another wiser
+mortal before him, on the discrepancies of evidence. What was a
+Hamadryad? and why no mention of Easter Eve? and what had it all to
+do with the witch and Parson Maine and 'Lias's excitement?
+
+Meanwhile, the thump made by the big family Bible as Hannah
+deposited it on the table warned both him and the truant outside
+that prayer-time had come. Louie came in noisily when she was
+called, and both children lounged unwillingly into their appointed
+seats.
+
+Nothing but the impatience and indifference of childhood, however,
+could have grudged Reuben Grieve the half-hour which followed.
+During that one half-hour in the day, the mild, effaced man, whose
+absent-minded ways and complete lack of business faculty were the
+perpetual torment of his wife, was master of his house. While he
+was rolling out the psalm, expounding the chapter, or 'wrestling'
+in prayer, he was a personality and an influence even for the wife
+who, in spite of a dumb congruity of habit, regarded him generally
+as incompetent and in the way. Reuben's religious sense was strong
+and deep, but some very natural and pathetically human instincts
+entered also into his constant pleasure in this daily function.
+Hannah, with her strong and harsh features settled into repose,
+with her large hands, reddened by the day's work, lying idle in her
+lap, sat opposite to him in silence; for once she listened to him,
+whereas all day he had listened to her; and the moment made a daily
+oasis in the life of a man who, in his own dull, peasant way, knew
+that he was a failure, and knew also that no one was so well aware
+of it as his wife.
+
+With David and Louie the absorbing interest was generally to see
+whether the prayer would be over before the eight-day clock struck
+nine, or whether the loud whirr which preceded that event would be
+suddenly and deafeningly let loose upon Uncle Reuben in the middle
+of his peroration, as sometimes happened when the speaker forgot
+himself. To-night that catastrophe was just avoided by a somewhat
+obvious hurry through the Lord's Prayer. When they rose from their
+knees Hannah put away the Bible, the boy and girl raced each other
+upstairs, and the elders were left alone.
+
+An hour passed away. Reuben was dozing peacefully in the
+chimney-corner; Aunt Hannah had just finished putting a patch
+on a pair of Reuben's trousers, was folding up her work and
+preparing to rouse her slumbering companion, when a sound
+overhead caught her ear.
+
+'What's that chilt at now?' she exclaimed angrily, getting up and
+listening. 'She'd owt ta been in bed long ago. Soomthin mischeevous,
+I'll be bound. And lighting a dip beside her, she went upstairs
+with a treacherously quiet step. There was a sound of an opening
+door, and then Reuben downstairs was startled out of his snooze by
+a sudden gamut of angry cries, a scurrying of feet, and Hannah
+scolding loudly--
+
+'Coom downstairs wi yo!--coom down an show your uncle what a figure
+o' foon yo'n been makkin o' yorsel! I'st teach yo to burn three
+candles down awbut to nothink 'at yo may bedizen yorsel in this
+way. Coom along wi yo.'
+
+There was a scuffle on the stairs, and then Hannah burst open the
+door, dragging in an extraordinary figure indeed. Struggling and
+crying in her aunt's grip was Louie. White trailing folds swept
+behind her; a white garment underneath, apparently her nightgown,
+was festooned with an old red-and-blue striped sash of some foreign
+make. Round her neck hung a necklace of that gold filigree work
+which spreads from Genoa all along the Riviera; her magnificent
+hair hung in masses over her shoulders, crowned by the primroses of
+the morning, which had been hurriedly twisted into a wreath by a
+bit of red ribbon rummaged out of some drawer of odds-and-ends;
+and her thin brown arms and hands appeared under the white
+cloak--nothing but a sheet--which was being now trodden underfoot
+in the child's passionate efforts to get away from her aunt. Ten
+minutes before she had been a happy queen flaunting over her attic
+floor in a dream of joy before a broken, propped-up looking-glass
+under the splendid illumination of three dips, long since secreted
+for purposes of the kind. Now she was a bedraggled, tear-stained
+Fury, with a fierce humiliation and a boundless hatred glaring out
+of the eyes, which in Aunt Hannah's opinion were so big as to be
+'right down oogly.' Poor Louie!
+
+Uncle Reuben, startled from his snooze by this apparition, looked
+at it with a sleepy bewilderment, and fumbled for his spectacles.
+'Ay, yo'd better luke at her close,' said Hannah, grimly, giving
+her niece a violent shake as she spoke; 'I wor set yo should just
+see her fur yance at her antics. Yo say soomtimes I'm hard on her.
+Well, I'd ask ony pusson aloive if they'd put up wi this soart o'
+thing--dressin up like a bad hizzy that waaks t' streets, wi
+three candles--_three_, I tell yo, Reuben--flarin away, and the
+curtains close to, an nothink but the Lord's mussy keepin 'em from
+catchin. An she peacockin an gallivantin away enough to mak a cat
+laugh!'
+
+And Aunt Hannah in her enraged scorn even undertook a grotesque and
+mincing imitation of the peacocking aforesaid. 'Let goo!' muttered
+Louie between her shut teeth, and with a wild strength she at last
+flung off her aunt and sprang for the door. But Hannah was too
+quick for her and put her back against it. 'No--yo'll not goo till
+your ooncle there's gien yo a word. He _shan't_ say I'm hard
+on yo for nothink, yo good-for-nowt little powsement--he shall see
+yo as yo are!'
+
+And with the bitterness of a smouldering grievance, expressed in
+every feature, Hannah looked peremptorily at her husband. He, poor
+man, was much perplexed. The hour of devotion was past, and outside
+it he was not accustomed to be placed in important situations.
+
+'Louie--didn't yo know yo wor a bad gell to stay up and burn t'
+candles, an fret your aunt?' he said with a feeble solemnity, his
+look fixed on the huddled white figure against the mahogany press.
+
+Louie stood with eyes resolutely cast down, and a forced smile,
+tremulous, but insolent to a degree, slowly lifting up the corners
+of her mouth as Uncle Reuben addressed her. The tears were still
+running off her face, but she meant her smile to convey the
+indomitable scorn for her tormentors which not even Aunt Hannah
+could shake out of her.
+
+Hannah Grieve was exasperated by the child's expression.
+
+'Yo little sloot!' she said, seizing her by the arm again, and
+losing her temper for good and all, 'yo've got your mither's bad
+blude in yo--an it ull coom out, happen what may!'
+
+'Hannah!' exclaimed Reuben, 'Hannah--mind yoursel.'
+
+'My mither's _dead_,' said the child, slowly raising her dark,
+burning eyes. 'My mither worn't bad; an if yo say she wor, yo're a
+_beast_ for sayin it! I wish it wor yo wor dead, an my mither
+wor here instead o' yo!'
+
+To convey the concentrated rage of this speech is impossible. It
+seemed to Hannah that the child had the evil eye. Even she quailed
+under it.
+
+'Go 'long wi yo,' she said grimly, in a white heat, while she
+opened the door--'an the less yo coom into _my_ way for t'
+future, the better.'
+
+She pushed the child out and shut the door.
+
+'Yo _are_ hard on her, Hannah!' exclaimed Reuben, in his
+perplexity--pricked, too, as usual in his conscience.
+
+The repetition of this parrot-cry, as it seemed to her, maddened
+his wife.
+
+'She's a wanton's brat,' she said violently; 'an she's got t'
+wanton's blood.'
+
+Reuben was silent. He was afraid of his wife in these moods. Hannah
+began, with trembling hands, to pick up the contents of her
+work-basket, which had been overturned in the scuffle.
+
+Meanwhile Louie rushed upstairs, stumbling over and tearing her
+finery, the convulsive sobs beginning again as soon as the tension
+of her aunt's hated presence was removed.
+
+At the top she ran against something in the dark. It was David, who
+had been hanging over the stairs, listening. But she flung past
+him.
+
+'What's t' matter, Louie?' he asked in a loud whisper through the
+door she shut in his face; 'what's th' owd crosspatch been slangin
+about?'
+
+But he got no answer, and he was afraid of being caught by Aunt
+Hannah if he forced his way in. So he went back to his own room,
+and closed, without latching, his door. He had had an inch of dip
+to go to bed with, and had spent that on reading. His book was a
+battered copy of 'Anson's Voyages,' which also came from 'Lias's
+store, and he had been straining his eyes over it with enchantment.
+Then had come the sudden noise upstairs and down, and his candle
+and his pleasure had gone out together. The heavy footsteps of his
+uncle and aunt ascending warned him to keep quiet. They turned into
+their room, and locked their door as their habit was. David
+noiselessly opened his window and looked out.
+
+A clear moonlight reigned outside. He could distinguish the rounded
+shapes, the occasional movements of the sheep in their pen to the
+right of the farmyard. The trees in the field threw long shadows
+down the white slope; to his left was the cart-shed with its black
+caverns and recesses, and the branches of the apple-trees against
+the luminous sky. Owls were calling in the woods below; sometimes a
+bell round the neck of one of the sheep tinkled a little, and the
+river made a distant background of sound.
+
+The boy's heart grew heavy. After the noises in the Grieves' room ceased
+he listened for something which he knew must be in the air, and caught
+it--the sound of a child's long, smothered sobs. On most nights they
+would not have made much impression on him. Louie's ways with her
+brother were no more engaging than with the rest of the world; and she
+was not a creature who invited consolation from anybody. David, too,
+with his power of escape at any time into a world of books and dreams or
+simply into the wild shepherd life of the moors, was often inclined to a
+vague irritation with Louie's state of perpetual revolt. The food was
+nasty, their clothes were ugly and scanty, Aunt Hannah was as hard as
+nails--at the same time Louie was enough to put anybody's back up. What
+did she get by it?--that was his feeling; though, perhaps, he never
+shaped it. He had never felt much pity for her. She had a way of putting
+herself out of court, and he was, of course, too young to see her life
+or his own as a whole. What their relationship might mean to him was
+still vague--to be decided by the future. Whatever softness there was in
+the boy was at this moment called out by other people--by old 'Lias and
+his wife; by Mr. Ancrum, the lame minister at Clough End; by the dogs;
+hardly ever by Louie. He had grown used, moreover, to her perpetual
+explosions, and took them generally with a boy's natural callousness.
+
+But to-night her woes affected him as they had never done before.
+The sound of her sobbing, as he stood listening, gradually roused
+in him an unbearable restlessness. An unaccountable depression
+stole upon him--the reaction, perhaps, from a good deal of mental
+exertion and excitement in the day. A sort of sick distaste awoke
+in him for most of the incidents of existence--for Aunt Hannah, for
+Uncle Reuben's incomprehensible prayers, for the thought of the
+long Puritanical Sunday just coming. And, in addition, the low
+vibrations of that distant sobbing stirred in him again, by
+association, certain memories which were like a clutch of physical
+pain, and which the healthy young animal instinctively and
+passionately avoided whenever it could. But to-night, in the dark
+and in solitude, there were no distractions, and as the boy put his
+head down on his arms, rolling it from side to side as though to
+shake them off, the same old images pursued him--the lodging-house
+room, and the curtainless iron bed in which he slept with his
+father: reminiscences of some long, inexplicable anguish through
+which that father had passed; then of his death, and his own lonely
+crying. He seemed still to _feel_ the strange sheets in that
+bed upstairs, where a compassionate fellow-lodger had put him the
+night after his father died; he sat up again bewildered in the cold
+dawn, filled with a home-sickness too benumbing for words. He
+resented these memories, tried to banish them; but the nature on
+which they were impressed was deep and rich, and, once shaken,
+vibrated long. The boy trembled through and through. The more he
+was ordinarily shed abroad, diffused in the life of sensation and
+boundless mental curiosity, the blacker were these rare moments of
+self-consciousness, when all the world seemed pain, an iron vice
+which pinched and tortured him.
+
+At last he went to his door, pulled it gently open, and with bare
+feet went across to Louie's room, which he entered with infinite
+caution. The moonlight was streaming in on the poor gauds, which
+lay wildly scattered over the floor. David looked at them with
+amazement. Amongst them he saw something glittering. He picked it
+up, saw it was a gold necklace which had been his mother's, and
+carefully put it on the little toilet table.
+
+Then he walked on to the bed. Louie was lying with her face turned
+away from him. A certain pause in the sobbing as he came near told
+him that she knew he was there. But it began again directly, being
+indeed a physical relief which the child could not deny herself. He
+stood beside her awkwardly. He could think of nothing to say. But
+timidly he stretched out his hand and laid the back of it against
+her wet cheek. He half expected she would shake it off, but she did
+not. It made him feel less lonely that she let it stay; the impulse
+to comfort had somehow brought himself comfort. He stood there,
+feeling very cold, thinking a whirlwind of thoughts about old
+'Lias, about the sheep, about Titus and Jerusalem, and about
+Louie's extraordinary proceedings--till suddenly it struck him that
+Louie was not crying any more. He bent over her. The sobs had
+changed into the long breaths of sleep, and, gently drawing away
+his hand, he crept off to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It was Sunday afternoon, still cold, nipping, and sunny. Reuben
+Grieve sat at the door of the farmhouse, his pipe in his hand, a
+'good book' on his knee. Beyond the wall which bounded the farmyard
+he could hear occasional voices. The children were sitting there,
+he supposed. It gave him a sensation of pleasure once to hear a
+shrill laugh, which he knew was Louie's. For all this morning,
+through the long services in the 'Christian Brethren' chapel at
+Clough End, and on the walk home, he had been once more pricked in
+his conscience. Hannah and Louie were not on speaking terms. At
+meals the aunt assigned the child her coarse food without a word,
+and on the way to chapel and back there had been a stony silence
+between them. It was evident, even to his dull mind, that the girl
+was white and thin, and that between her wild temper and mischief
+and the mirth of other children there was a great difference.
+Moreover, certain passages in the chapel prayers that morning
+had come home sharply to a mind whereof the only definite gift
+was a true religious sensitiveness. The text of the sermon
+especially--'Whoso loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how
+shall he love God, whom he hath not seen?'--vibrated like an
+accusing voice within him. As he sat in the doorway, with the sun
+stealing in upon him, the clock ticking loudly at his back, and the
+hens scratching round the steps, he began to think with much
+discomfort about his dead brother and his brother's children.
+
+As to his memories of the past, they may perhaps be transformed
+here into a short family history, with some details added which
+had no place in Reuben's mind. Twenty years before this present
+date Needham--once Needham's--Farm had been held by Reuben's
+father, a certain James Grieve. He had originally been a kind of
+farm-labourer on the Berwickshire border, who, driven southwards in
+search of work by the stress of the bad years which followed the
+great war, had wandered on, taking a job of work here and another
+there, and tramping many a score of weary miles between, till at
+last in this remote Derbyshire valley he had found a final
+anchorage. Needham Farm was then occupied by a young couple of
+the name of Pierson, beginning life under fairly prosperous
+circumstances. James Grieve took service with them, and they valued
+his strong sinews and stern Calvinistic probity as they deserved.
+But he had hardly been two years on the farm when his young
+employer, dozing one winter evening on the shafts of his cart
+coming back from Glossop market, fell off, was run over, and
+killed. The widow, a young thing, nearly lost her senses with
+grief, and James, a man of dour exterior and few words, set himself
+to keep things going on the farm till she was able to look life in
+the face again. Her sister came to be with her, and there, was a
+child born, which died. She was left better provided for than most
+women of her class, and she had expectations from her parents.
+After the child's death, when the widow began to go about again,
+and James still managed all the work of the farm, the neighbours
+naturally fell talking. James took no notice, and he was not a man
+to meddle with, either in a public-house or elsewhere. But
+presently a crop of suitors for the widow began to appear, and it
+became necessary also to settle the destiny of the farm. No one
+outside ever knew how it came about, for Jenny Pierson, who was a
+soft, prettyish creature, had given no particular sign; but one
+Sunday morning the banns of James Grieve, bachelor, and Jenny
+Pierson, widow, were suddenly given out in the Presbyterian chapel
+at Clough End, to the mingled astonishment and disgust of the
+neighbourhood.
+
+Years passed away. James held his own for a time with any farmer of
+the neighbourhood. But, by the irony of fate, the prosperity which
+his industry and tenacity deserved was filched from him little by
+little by the ill-health of his wife. She bore him two sons, Reuben
+and Alexander, and then she sank into a hopeless, fretful invalid,
+tormented by the internal ailment of which she ultimately died. But
+the small farmer who employs little or no labour is lost without an
+active wife. If he has to pay for the milking of his cows, the
+making of his butter, the cooking of his food, and the nursing of
+his children, his little margin of profit is soon eaten away; and
+with the disappearance of this margin, existence becomes a blind
+struggle. Even James Grieve, the man of iron will and indomitable
+industry, was beaten at last in the unequal contest. The life at
+the farm became bitter and tragic. Jenny grew more helpless and
+more peevish year by year; James was not exactly unkind to her, but
+he could not but revenge upon her in some degree that ruin of his
+silent ambitions which her sickliness had brought upon him.
+
+The two sons grew up in the most depressing atmosphere conceivable.
+Reuben, who was to have the farm, developed a shy and hopeless
+taciturnity under the pressure of the family chagrin and
+privations, and found his only relief in the emotions and
+excitements of Methodism. Sandy seemed at first more fortunate.
+An opening was found for him at Sheffield, where he was apprenticed
+to a rope-maker, a cousin of his mother's. This man died before
+Sandy was more than halfway through his time, and the youth went
+through a period of hardship and hand-to-mouth living which ended
+at last in the usual tramp to London. Here, after a period of
+semi-starvation, he found it impossible to get work at his own
+trade, and finally drifted into carpentering and cabinet-making.
+The beginnings of this new line of life were incredibly difficult,
+owing to the jealousy of his fellow-workmen, who had properly
+served their time to the trade, and did not see why an interloper
+from another trade, without qualifications, should be allowed to
+take the bread out of their mouths.
+
+One of Sandy's first successes was in what was called a
+'shop-meeting,' a gathering of all the employes of the firm he
+worked for, before whom the North-countryman pleaded to be allowed
+to earn his bread. The tall, finely grown, famished-looking lad
+spoke with a natural eloquence, and here and there with a
+Biblical force of phrase--the inheritance of his Scotch blood and
+training--which astonished and melted most of his hearers. He was
+afterwards let alone, and even taught by the men about him, in
+return for 'drinks,' which swallowed up sometimes as much as a
+third of his wages.
+
+After two or three years he was fully master of his trade, an
+admirable workman, and a keen politician to boot. All this time he
+had spent his evenings in self-education, buying books with every
+spare penny, and turning specially to science and mathematics. His
+abilities presently drew the attention of the heads of the
+Shoreditch firm for which he worked, and when the post of a foreman
+in a West-end shop, in which they were largely interested, fell
+vacant, it was their influence which put Sandy Grieve into the
+well-paid and coveted post. He could hardly believe his own good
+fortune. The letter in which he announced it to his father reached
+the farm just as the last phase of his mother's long martyrdom was
+developing. The pair, already old--James with work and anxiety, his
+wife with sickness--read it together. They shut it up without a
+word. Its tone of jubilant hope seemed to have nothing to do with
+them, or seemed rather to make their own narrowing prospects look
+more narrow, and the approach of the King of Terrors more black and
+relentless, than before. Jenny lay back on her poor bed, with the
+tears of a dumb self-pity running down her cheeks, and James's only
+answer to it was conveyed in a brief summons to Sandy to come and
+see his mother before the end. The prosperous son, broadened out of
+knowledge almost by good feeding and good clothes, arrived. He
+brought money, which was accepted without much thanks; but his
+mother treated him almost as a stranger, and the dour James, while
+not unwilling to draw out his account of himself, would look him up
+and down from under his bushy grey eyebrows, and often interpose
+with some sarcasm on his 'foine' ways of speaking, or his
+'gen'leman's cloos.' Sandy was ill at ease. He was really anxious
+to help, and his heart was touched by his mother's state; but
+perhaps there was a strain of self-importance in his manner, a
+half-conscious inclination to thank God that his life was not to be
+as theirs, which came out in spite of him, and dug a gulf between
+him and them. Only his brother Reuben, dull, pious, affectionate
+Reuben, took to him, and showed that patient and wondering
+admiration of the younger's cleverness, which probably Sandy had
+reckoned on as his right from his parents also.
+
+On the last evening of his stay--he had luckily been able to make
+his coming coincide with an Easter three days' holiday--he was
+sitting beside his mother in the dusk, thinking, with a relief
+which every now and then roused in him a pang of shame, that in
+fourteen or fifteen more hours he should be back in London, in the
+world which made much of him and knew what a smart fellow he was,
+when his mother opened her eyes--so wide and blue they looked in
+her pinched, death-stricken face--and looked at him full.
+
+'Sandy!'
+
+'Yes, mother!' he said, startled--for he had been sunk in his own
+thoughts--and laying his hand on hers.
+
+'You should get a wife, Sandy.'
+
+'Well, some day, mother, I suppose I shall,' he said, with a change
+of expression which the twilight concealed.
+
+She was silent a minute, then she began again, slow and feebly, but
+with a strange clearness of articulation.
+
+'If she's sick, Sandy, _doan't grudge it her._ Women 'ud die
+fasster iv they could.'
+
+The whole story of the slow consuming bitterness of years spoke
+through those fixed and filmy eyes. Her son gave a sudden
+irrepressible sob. There was a faint lightening in the little
+wrinkled face, and the lips made a movement. He kissed her, and in
+that last moment of consciousness the mother almost forgave him his
+good clothes and his superior airs.
+
+Poor Sandy! Looking to his after story, it seems strange that any
+one should ever have felt him unbearably prosperous. About six
+months after his mother's death he married a milliner's assistant,
+whom he met first in the pit of a theatre, and whom he was already
+courting when his mother gave him the advice recorded. She was
+French, from the neighbourhood of Arles, and of course a Catholic.
+She had come to London originally as lady's-maid to a Russian
+family settled at Nice. Shortly after their arrival, her master
+shot his young wife for a supposed intrigue, and then put an end to
+himself. Naturally the whole establishment was scattered, and the
+pretty Louise Suveret found herself alone, with a few pounds, in
+London. Thanks to the kind offices of the book-keeper in the hotel
+where they had been staying, she had been introduced to a milliner
+of repute in the Bond Street region, and the results of a trial
+given her, in which her natural Frenchwoman's gift and her acquired
+skill came out triumphant, led to her being permanently engaged.
+Thenceforward her good spirits--which had been temporarily
+depressed, not so much by her mistress's tragic ending as by her
+own unexpected discomfort--reappeared in all their native
+exuberance, and she proceeded to enjoy London. She defended herself
+first against the friendly book-keeper, who became troublesome, and
+had to be treated with the most decided ingratitude. Then she
+gradually built herself up a store of clothes of the utmost
+elegance, which were the hopeless envy of the other girls employed
+at Madame Catherine's. And, finally, she looked about for
+serviceable acquaintances.
+
+One night, in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, while 'The Lady of
+Lyons' was going on, Sandy Grieve found himself next to a dazzling
+creature, with fine black eyes, the smooth olive skin of the South,
+white teeth, and small dimpled hands, hardly spoilt at all by her
+trade. She had with her a plain girl-companion, and her manner,
+though conscious and provocative, had that haughtiness, that
+implied readiness to take offence, which is the _grisette's_
+substitute for breeding. She was, however, affable to Sandy, whose
+broad shoulders and handsome, well-to-do air attracted her
+attention. She allowed him to get her a programme, to beguile her
+into conversation, and, finally, to offer her a cup of coffee.
+Afterwards he escorted the two to the door of their lodging, in one
+of the streets off Theobald's Road, and walked home in a state of
+excitement which astonished him.
+
+This happened immediately before his visit to the farm and his
+mother's death. During the six months after that event Sandy knew
+the 'joy of eventful living.' He was establishing his own business
+position, and he was courting Louise Suveret with alternations of
+despair and flattered passion, which stirred the now burly,
+full-blooded North-countryman to his depths. She let him escort her
+to her work in the morning and take her home in the evening, and
+she allowed him to give her as many presents of gloves, ribbons,
+bonbons--for which last she had a childish passion--and the like,
+as he pleased. But when he pressed her to marry him she generally
+laughed at him. She was, in reality, observing her world,
+calculating her chances, and she had several other strings to her
+bow, as Sandy shrewdly suspected, though she never allowed his
+jealousy any information to feed upon. It was simply owing to the
+failure of the most promising of these other strings--a failure
+which roused in Louise one of those white heats of passion
+which made the chief flaw in her organisation, viewed as a
+pleasure-procuring machine--that Sandy found his opportunity. In a
+moment of mortal chagrin and outraged vanity she consented to marry
+him, and three weeks afterwards he was the blissful owner of the
+black eyes, the small hands, the quick tongue, and the seductive
+_chiffons_ he had so long admired more or less at a distance.
+
+Their marriage lasted six years. At first Louise found some
+pleasure in arranging the little house Sandy had taken for her
+in a new suburb, and in making, wearing, and altering the
+additional gowns which their joint earnings--for she still worked
+intermittently at her trade--allowed her to enjoy. After the first
+infatuation was a little cooled, Sandy discovered in her a paganism
+so unblushing that his own Scotch and Puritan instincts reacted in
+a sort of superstitious fear. It seemed impossible that God
+Almighty should long allow Himself to be flouted as Louise flouted
+Him. He found also that the sense of truth was almost non-existent
+in her, and her vanity, her greed of dress and admiration, was so
+consuming, so frenzied, that his only hope of a peaceful life--as
+he quickly realised--lay in ministering to it. Her will soon got
+the upper hand, and he sank into the patient servant of her
+pleasures, snatching feverishly at all she gave him in return with
+the instinct of a man who, having sold his soul, is determined at
+least to get the last farthing he can of the price.
+
+They had two children in four years--David Suveret and Louise
+Stephanie. Louise resented the advent of the second so intensely
+that poor Sandy become conscious, before the child appeared, of a
+fatal and appalling change in her relation to him. She had been
+proud of her first-born--an unusually handsome and precocious
+child--and had taken pleasure in dressing it and parading it before
+the eyes of the other mothers in their terrace, all of whom she
+passionately despised. But Louie nearly died of neglect, and the
+two years that followed her birth were black indeed for Sandy. His
+wife, he knew, had begun to hate him; in business his energies
+failed him, and his employers cooled towards him as he grew visibly
+less pushing and inventive. The little household got deeper and
+deeper into debt, and towards the end of the time Louise would
+sometimes spend the whole day away from home without a word of
+explanation. So great was his nervous terror--strong, broad fellow
+that he was--of that pent-up fury in her, which a touch might have
+unloosed, that he never questioned her. At last the inevitable end
+came. He got home one summer evening to find the house empty and
+ransacked, the children--little things of five and two--sitting
+crying in the desolate kitchen, and a crowd of loud-voiced,
+indignant neighbours round the door. To look for her would have
+been absurd. Louise was much too clever to disappear and leave
+traces behind. Besides, he had no wish to find her. The hereditary
+self in him accepted his disaster as representing the natural
+retribution which the canny Divine vengeance keeps in store for
+those who take to themselves wives of the daughters of Heth. And
+there was the sense, too, of emerging from something unclean, of
+recovering his manhood.
+
+He took his two children and went to lodgings in a decent street
+near the Gray's Inn Road. There for a year things went fairly well
+with him. His boy and girl, whom he paid a neighbour to look after
+during the day, made something to come home to. As he helped the
+boy, who was already at school, with his lesson for the next day,
+or fed Louie, perched on his knee, with the bits from his plate
+demanded by her covetous eyes and open mouth, he got back, little
+by little, his self-respect. He returned, too, in the evenings to
+some of his old pursuits, joined a Radical club near, and some
+science lectures. He was aged and much more silent than of yore,
+but not unhappy; his employers, too, feeling that their man had
+somehow recovered himself, and hearing something of his history,
+were sorry for him, and showed it.
+
+Then one autumn evening a constable knocked at his door, and,
+coming in upon the astonished group of father and children,
+produced from his pocket a soaked and tattered letter, and showing
+Sandy the address, asked if it was for him. Sandy, on seeing it,
+stood up, put down Louie, who, half undressed, had been having a
+ride on his knee, and asked his visitor to come out on to the
+landing. There he read the letter under the gas-lamp, and put it
+deliberately into his pocket.
+
+'Where is she?' he asked.
+
+'In Lambeth mortuary,' said the man briefly--'picked up two hours
+ago. Nothing else found on her but this.'
+
+Half an hour afterwards Sandy stood by a slab in the mortuary, and,
+drawing back a sheet which covered the burden on it, stood face to
+face with his dead wife. The black brows were drawn, the small
+hands clenched. What struck Sandy with peculiar horror was that one
+delicate wrist was broken, having probably struck something in
+falling. She--who in life had rebelled so hotly against the least
+shadow of physical pain! Thanks to the bandage which had been
+passed round it, the face was not much altered. She could not have
+been long in the water. Probably about the time when he was walking
+home from work, she--He felt himself suffocating--the bare
+whitewashed walls grew dim and wavering.
+
+The letter found upon her was the strangest appeal to his pity. Her
+seducer had apparently left her; she was in dire straits, and there
+was, it seemed, no one but Sandy in all London on whose compassion
+she could throw herself. She asked him, callously, for money to
+take her back to some Nice relations. They need only know what she
+chose to tell them, as she calmly pointed out, and, once in Nice,
+she could make a living. She would like to see her children, she
+said, before she left, but she supposed he would have to settle
+that. How had she got his address? From his place of business
+probably, in some roundabout way.
+
+Then what had happened? Had she been seized with a sudden
+persuasion that he would not answer, that it was all useless
+trouble; and in one of those accesses of blind rage by which her
+clear, sharp brain-life was at all times apt to be disturbed, had
+she rushed out to end it all at once and for ever? It made him
+forgive her that she _could_ have destroyed herself--could
+have faced that awful plunge--that icy water--that death-struggle
+for breath. He gauged the misery she must have gone through by what
+he knew of her sensuous love for comfort, for _bien-etre_. He
+saw her again as she had been that night at the theatre when they
+first met,--the little crisp black curls on the temples, the
+dazzling eyes, the artificial pearls round the neck, the slight
+traces of powder and rouge on brow and cheek, which made her all
+the more attractive and tempting to his man's eye--the pretty foot,
+which he first noticed as she stepped from the threshold of the
+theatre into the street. Nature had made all that, to bring her
+work to this grim bed at last!
+
+He himself died eighteen months afterwards. His acquaintances never
+dreamt of connecting his death with his wife's, and the connection,
+if it existed, would have been difficult to trace. Still, if little
+David could have put his experiences at this time into words, they
+might have thrown some light on an event which was certainly a
+surprise to the small world which took an interest in Sandy Grieve.
+
+There was a certain sound which remained all through his life
+firmly fixed in David's memory, and which he never thought of
+without a sense of desolation, a shiver of sick dismay, such as
+belonged to no other association whatever. It was the sound of a
+long sigh, brought up, as it seemed, from the very depths of being,
+and often, often repeated. The thought of it brought with it a
+vision of a small bare room at night, with two iron bedsteads, one
+for Louie, one for himself and his father; a bit of smouldering
+fire in a tiny grate, and beside it a man's figure bowed over the
+warmth, thrown out dark against the distempered wall, and sitting
+on there hour after hour; of a child, wakened intermittently by the
+light, and tormented by the recurrent sound, till it had once more
+burrowed into the bed-clothes deep enough to shut out everything
+but sleep. All these memories belonged to the time immediately
+following on Louise's suicide. Probably, during the interval
+between his wife's death and his own, Sandy suffered severely from
+the effects of strong nervous shock, coupled with a certain growth
+of religious melancholy, the conditions for which are rarely
+wanting in the true Calvinist blood. Owing to the privations and
+exposure of his early manhood, too, it is possible that he was
+never in reality the strong man he looked. At any rate, his fight
+for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. The second
+winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold; he was overworked,
+and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day struck home. He
+took to his bed with a chill, which turned to peritonitis; the
+system showed no power of resistance, and he died.
+
+On the day but one before he died, when the mortal pain was gone,
+but death was absolutely certain, he sent post-haste for his
+brother Reuben. Reuben he believed was married to a decent woman,
+and to Reuben he meant to commend his children.
+
+Reuben arrived, looking more bewildered and stupid than ever, pure
+countryman that he was, in this London which he had never seen.
+Sandy looked at him with a deep inward dissatisfaction. But what
+could he do? His marriage had cut him off from his old friends, and
+since its wreck he had had no energy wherewith to make new ones.
+
+'I've never seen your wife, Reuben,' he said, when they had talked
+awhile.
+
+Reuben was silent a minute, apparently collecting his thoughts.
+
+'Naw,' he said at last; 'naw. She sent yo her luve, and she hopes iv
+it's the Lord's will to tak yo, that it ull foind yo prepared.'
+
+He said it like a lesson. A sort of nervous tremor and shrinking
+overspread Sandy's face. He had suffered so much through religion
+during the last few months, that in this final moment of humanity
+the soul had taken refuge in numbness--apathy. Let God decide. He
+could think it out no more; and in this utter feebleness his terror
+of hell--the ineradicable deposit of childhood and inheritance--had
+passed away. He gathered his forces for the few human and practical
+things which remained to him to do.
+
+'Did she get on comfortable with father?' he asked, fixing Reuben
+with his eyes, which had the penetration of death.
+
+Reuben looked discomposed, and cleared his throat once or twice.
+
+'Wal, it warn't what yo may call just coomfortable atween 'em. Naw,
+I'll not say it wor.'
+
+'What was wrong?' demanded Sandy.
+
+Reuben fidgeted.
+
+'Wal,' he said at last, throwing up his head in desperation, 'I
+spose a woman likes her house to hersel when she's fust married. He
+wor childish like, an mighty trooblesome times. An she's allus
+stirrin, and rootin, is Hannah. Udder foak mus look aloive too.'
+
+The conflict in Reuben's mind between his innate truthfulness and
+his desire to excuse his wife was curious to see. Sandy had a
+vision of his father sitting in his dotage by his own hearth, and
+ministered to by a daughter-in-law who grudged him his years and
+his infirmities, as he had grudged his wife all the troublesome
+incidents of her long decay. But it only affected him now as it
+bore upon what was still living in him, the one feeling which still
+survived amid the wreck made by circumstance and disease.
+
+'Will she be kind to _them?_' he said sharply, which a motion
+of the head towards the children, first towards David, who sat
+drooping on his father's bed, where for some ten or twelve hours
+now he had remained glued, refusing to touch either breakfast or
+dinner, and then towards Louie, who was on the floor by the fire,
+with her rag dolls, which she was dressing up with smiles and
+chatter in a strange variety of finery. 'If not, she shan't have
+'em. There's time yet.'
+
+But the grey hue was already on his cheek, his feet were already
+cold. The nurse in the far corner of the room, looking up as he
+spoke, gave him mentally 'an hour or two.'
+
+Reuben flushed and sat bolt upright, his gnarled and wrinkled hands
+trembling on his knees.
+
+'She _shall_ be kind to 'em,' he said with energy. 'Gie 'em to
+us, Sandy. Yo wouldna send your childer to strangers?'
+
+The clannish instinct in Sandy responded. Besides, in spite of his
+last assertion, he knew very well there was nothing else to be
+done.
+
+'There's money,' he said slowly. 'She'll not need to stint them of
+anything. This is a poor place,' for at the word 'money' he noticed
+that Reuben's eyes travelled with an awakening shrewdness over the
+barely furnished room; 'but it was the debts first, and then I had
+to put by for the children. None of the shop-folk or the fellows
+at the club ever came here. We lived as we liked. There's an
+insurance, and there's some savings, and there's some commission
+money owing from the firm, and there's a bit investment Mr. Gurney
+(naming the head partner) helped me into last year. There's
+altogether about six hundred pound. You'll get the interest of it
+for the children; it'll go into Gurneys', and they'll give five per
+cent. for it. Mr. Gurney's been very kind. He came here yesterday,
+and he's got it all. You go to him.'
+
+He stopped for weakness. Reuben's eyes were round. Six hundred
+pounds! Who'd have thought it of Sandy?--after that bad lot of a
+wife, and he not thirty!
+
+'An what d' yo want Davy to be, Sandy?'
+
+'You must settle,' said the father, with a long sigh. 'Depends on
+him what he turns to. If he wants to farm, he can learn with you,
+and put in his money when he sees an opening. For the bit farms in
+our part there'd be enough. But I'm feeart'(the old Derbyshire word
+slipped out unawares)'he'll not stay in the country. He's too
+sharp, and you mustn't force him. If you see he's not the farming
+sort, when he's thirteen or fourteen or so, take Mr. Gurney's
+advice, and bind him to a trade. Mr. Gurney'll pay the premiums for
+him and he can have the balance of the money--for I've left him to
+manage it all, for himself and Louie too--when he's fit to set up
+for himself.--You and Hannah'll deal honest wi 'em?'
+
+The question was unexpected, and as he put it with a startling
+energy the dying man raised himself on his elbow, and looked
+sharply at his brother.
+
+'D' yo think I'd cheat yo, or your childer, Sandy?' cried Reuben,
+flushing and pricked to the heart.
+
+Sandy sank back again, his sudden qualm appeased. 'No,' he said, his
+thoughts returning painfully to his son. 'I'm feeart he'll not stay
+wi you. He's cleverer than I ever was, and I was the cleverest of
+us all.'
+
+The words had in them a whole epic of human fate. Under the prick
+of them Reuben found a tongue, not now for his wife, but for
+himself.
+
+'It's not cliverness as ull help yo now, Sandy, wi your Maaker! and
+yo feeace t' feeace wi 'un!' he cried. 'It's nowt but satisfacshun
+by t' blood o' Jesus!'
+
+Sandy made no answer, unless, indeed, the poor heart within made
+its last cry of agony to heaven at the words. The sinews of the
+spiritual as well as the physical man were all spent and useless.
+
+'Davy,' he called presently. The child, who had been sitting
+motionless during this talk watching his father, slid along the bed
+with alacrity, and tucking his little legs and feet well away from
+Sandy's long frame, put his head down on the pillow. His father
+turned his eyes to him, and with a solemn, lingering gaze took in
+the childish face, the thick, tumbled hair, the expression, so
+piteous, yet so intelligent. Then he put up his own large hand, and
+took both the boy's into its cold and feeble grasp. His eyelids
+fell, and the breathing changed. The nurse hurriedly rose, lifted
+up Louie from her toys, and put her on the bed beside him. The
+child, disturbed in her play and frightened by she knew not what,
+set up a sudden cry. A tremor seemed to pass through the shut lids
+at the sound, a slight compression of pain appeared in the grey
+lips. It was Sandy Grieve's last sign of life.
+
+Reuben Grieve remembered well the letter he had written to his
+wife, with infinite difficulty, from beside his brother's dead
+body. He told her that he was bringing the children back with him.
+The poor bairns had got nobody in the world to look to but their
+uncle and aunt. And they would not cost Hannah a penny. For Mr.
+Gurney would pay thirty pounds a year for their keep and bringing
+up.
+
+With what care and labour his clumsy fingers had penned that last
+sentence so that Hannah might read it plain!
+
+Afterwards he brought the children home. As he drove his light cart
+up the rough and lonely road to Needham Farm, Louie cried with the
+cold and the dark, and Davy, with his hands tucked between his
+knees, grew ever more and more silent, his restless little head
+turning perpetually from side to side, as though he were trying to
+discover something of the strange, new world to which he had been
+brought, through the gloom of the February evening.
+
+Then at the sound of wheels outside in the lane, the back door of
+the farm was opened, and a dark figure stood on the threshold.
+
+'Yo're late,' Reuben heard. It was Hannah's piercing voice that
+spoke. 'Bring 'em into t'back kitchen, an let 'em take their shoes off
+afore they coom ony further.'
+
+By which Reuben knew that it had been scrubbing-day, and that her
+flagstones were more in Hannah's mind than the guests he had
+brought her. He obeyed, and then the barefooted trio entered the
+front kitchen together. Hannah came forward and looked at the
+children--at David white and blinking--at the four-year-old Louie,
+bundled up in an old shawl, which dragged on the ground behind her,
+and staring wildly round her at the old low-roofed kitchen with the
+terror of the trapped bird.
+
+'Hannah, they're varra cold,' said Reuben--'ha yo got summat hot?'
+
+'Theer'll be supper bime-by,' Hannah replied with decision. 'I've
+naw time scrubbin-days to be foolin about wi things out o' hours.
+I've nobbut just got straight and cleaned mysel. They can sit
+down and warm theirsels. I conno say they feature ony of _yor_
+belongins, Reuben.' And she went to put Louie on the settle by the
+fire. But as the tall woman in black approached her, the child hit
+out madly with her small fists and burst into a loud howl of
+crying.
+
+'Get away, nasty woman! _Nasty_ woman--ugly woman! Take me
+away--I want my daddy,--I want my daddy.' And she threw herself
+kicking on the floor, while, to Hannah's exasperation, a piece of
+crumbling bun she had been holding tight in her sticky little hand
+escaped and littered all the new-washed stones.
+
+'Tak yor niece oop, Reuben, an mak her behave'--the mistress of the
+house commanded angrily. 'She'll want a stick takken to her, soon,
+_I_ can see.'
+
+Reuben obeyed so far as he could, but Louie's shrieks only ceased
+when, by the combined efforts of husband and wife, she had been put
+to bed, so exhausted with rage, excitement, and the journey, that
+sleep mercifully took possession of her just after she had
+performed the crowning feat of knocking the tea and bread and
+butter Reuben brought her out of her uncle's hand and all over the
+room.
+
+Meanwhile, David sat perfectly still in a chair against the wall,
+beside the old clock, and stared about him; at the hams and bunches
+of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling; at the chiffonnier, with
+its red baize doors under a brass trellis-work; at the high wooden
+settle, the framed funeral cards, and the two or three coloured
+prints, now brown with age, which Reuben had hung up twenty years
+before, to celebrate his marriage. Hannah was propitiated by the
+boy's silence, and as she got supper ready she once or twice
+noticed his fine black eyes and his curly hair.
+
+'Yo can coom an get yor supper,' she said to him, more graciously
+than she had spoken yet. 'It's a mussy yo doant goo skrikin like
+your sister.'
+
+'Thank you, ma'am,' said the little fellow, with a townsman's
+politeness, hardly understanding, however, a word of her
+north-country dialect--' I'm not hungry.--You've got a picture of
+General Washington there, ma'am;' and, raising a small hand
+trembling with nervousness and fatigue, he pointed to one of the
+prints opposite.
+
+'Wal, I niver,' said Hannah, with a stare of astonishment. 'Yo're a
+quare lot--the two o' yer.'
+
+One thing more Reuben remembered with some vividness in connection
+with the children's arrival. When they were both at last
+asleep--Louie in an unused room at the back, on an old wooden
+bedstead, which stood solitary in a wilderness of bare boards;
+David in a sort of cupboard off the landing, which got most of its
+light and air from a wooden trellis-work, overlooking the
+staircase--Hannah said abruptly to her husband, as they two were
+going to bed, 'When ull Mr. Gurney pay that money?'
+
+'Twice a year--so his clerk towd me--Christmas an Midsummer. Praps
+we shan't want to use it aw, Hannah; praps we might save soom on it
+for t' childer. Their keep, iv yo feed em on parritch, is nobbut a
+fleabite, an they'n got a good stock o' cloos, Sandy's nurse towd
+me.'
+
+He looked anxiously at Hannah. In his inmost heart there was a
+passionate wish to do his duty to Sandy's orphans, fighting with a
+dread of his wife, which was the fruit of long habit and
+constitutional weakness.
+
+Hannah faced round upon him. It was Reuben's misfortune that
+dignity was at all times impossible to him. Now, as he sat in his
+shirt-sleeves and stocking-feet, flushed with the exertion of
+pulling off his heavy boots, the light of the tallow candle falling
+on his weak eyes with their red rims, on his large open mouth with
+the conspicuous gap in its front teeth, and his stubby hair, he was
+more than usually grotesque. 'As slamp an wobbly as an owd
+corn-boggart,' so his neighbours described him when they wished to
+be disrespectful, and the simile fitted very closely with the
+dishevelled, disjointed appearance which was at all times
+characteristic of him, Sundays or weekdays. No one studying the
+pair, especially at such a moment as this--the _malaise_ of
+the husband--the wife towering above him, her grey hair hanging
+loose round her black brows and sallow face instinct with a rugged
+and indomitable energy--could have doubted in whose hands lay the
+government of Needham Farm.
+
+'I'll thank yo not to talk nonsense, Reuben Grieve,' said his wife
+sharply. 'D'yo think they're _my_ flesh an blood, thoose
+childer? An who'll ha to do for 'em but me, I should loike to know?
+Who'll ha to put up wi their messin an their dirt but _me_?
+Twenty year ha yo an I been married, Reuben, an niver till
+this neet did I ha to goo down on my knees an sweep oop after
+scrubbin-day! Iv I'm to be moidered wi em, I'll be paid for 't.
+Soa I let yo know--it's little enough.'
+
+And Hannah took her payment. As he sat in the sun, looking back on
+the last seven years, with a slow and dreaming mind, Reuben
+recognised, using his own phrases for the matter, that the
+children's thirty pounds had been the pivot of Hannah's existence.
+He was but a small sheep farmer, with very scanty capital. By dint
+of hard work and painful thrift, the childless pair had earned a
+sufficient living in the past--nay, even put by a bit, if the
+truth of Hannah's savings-bank deposits were known. But every
+fluctuation in their small profits tried them sorely--tried
+Hannah especially, whose temper was of the brooding and grasping
+order. The _certainty_ of Mr. Gurney's cheques made them very
+soon the most cheerful facts in the farm life. On two days in the
+year--the 20th of June and the 20th of December--Reuben might be
+sure of finding his wife in a good temper, and he had long shrewdly
+suspected, without inquiring, that Hannah's savings-bank book,
+since the children came, had been very pleasant reading to her.
+
+Reuben fidgeted uncomfortably as he thought of those savings.
+Certainly the children had not cost what was paid for them. He
+began to be oddly exercised this Sunday morning on the subject of
+the porridge Louie hated so much. Was it his fault or Hannah's if
+the frugal living which had been the rule for all the remoter farms
+of the Peak--nay, for the whole north country--in his father's
+time, and had been made doubly binding, as it were, on the dwellers
+in Needham Farm by James Grieve's Scotch blood and habits, had
+survived under their roof, while all about them a more luxurious
+standard of food and comfort was beginning to obtain among their
+neighbours? Where could you find a finer set of men than the
+Berwickshire hinds, of whom his father came, and who were reared on
+'parritch' from year's end to year's end?
+
+And yet, all the same, Reuben's memory was full this morning of
+disturbing pictures of a little London child, full of town
+daintiness and accustomed to the spoiling of an indulgent father,
+crying herself into fits over the new unpalatable food, refusing it
+day after day, till the sharp, wilful face had grown pale and
+pinched with famine, and caring no more apparently for her aunt's
+beatings than she did for the clumsy advances by which her uncle
+would sometimes try to propitiate her. There had been a great deal
+of beating--whenever Reuben thought of it he had a superstitious
+way of putting Sandy out of his mind as much as possible. Many
+times he had gone far away from the house to avoid the sound of the
+blows and shrieks he was powerless to stop.
+
+Well, but what harm had come of it all? Louie was a strong lass
+now, if she were a bit thin and overgrown. David was as fine a boy
+as anyone need wish to see.
+
+_David?_
+
+Reuben got up from his seat at the farm door, took his pipe out of
+his pocket, and went to hang over the garden-gate, that he might
+unravel some very worrying thoughts at a greater distance from
+Hannah.
+
+The day before he had been overtaken coming out of Clough End by Mr.
+Ancrum, the lame minister. He and Grieve liked one another. If
+there had been intrigues raised against the minister within the
+'Christian Brethren' congregation, Reuben Grieve had taken no part
+in them.
+
+After some general conversation, Mr. Ancrum suddenly said, 'Will you
+let me have a word with you, Mr. Grieve, about your nephew
+David--if you'll not think me intruding?'
+
+'Say on, sir--say on,' said Reuben hastily, but with an inward
+shrinking.
+
+'Well, Mr. Grieve, you've got a remarkable boy there--a curious and
+remarkable boy. What are you going to do with him?'
+
+'Do wi him?--me, sir? Wal, I doan't know as I've iver thowt mich
+about it,' said Reuben, but with an agitation of manner that struck
+his interrogator. 'He be varra useful to me on t' farm, Mr. Ancrum.
+Soom toimes i' t' year theer's a lot doin, yo knaw, sir, even on a
+bit place like ours, and he ha gitten a good schoolin, he ha.'
+
+The apologetic incoherence of the little speech was curious. Mr.
+Ancrum did not exactly know how to take his man.
+
+'I dare say he's useful. But he's not going to be the ordinary
+labourer, Mr. Grieve--he's made of quite different stuff, and, if I
+may say so, it will pay you very well to recognise it in good time.
+That boy will read books now which hardly any grown man of his
+class--about here, at any rate--would be able to read. Aye, and
+talk about them, too, in a way to astonish you!'
+
+'Yes, I know 'at he's oncommon cliver wi his books, is Davy,'
+Reuben admitted.
+
+'Oh! it's not only that. But he's got an unusual brain and a
+wonderful memory. And it would be a thousand pities if he were to
+make nothing of them. You say he's useful, but--excuse me, Mr.
+Grieve--he seems to me to spend three parts of his time in loafing
+and desultory reading. He wants more teaching--he wants steady
+training. Why don't you send him to Manchester,' said the minister
+boldly, 'and apprentice him? It costs money, no doubt.'
+
+And he looked interrogatively at Reuben. Reuben, however, said
+nothing. They were toiling up the steep road from Clough End to the
+high farms under the Scout, a road which tried the minister's
+infirm limb severely; otherwise he would have taken more notice of
+his companion's awkward flush and evident discomposure.
+
+'But it would pay you in the long run,' he said, when they stopped
+to take breath; 'it would be a capital investment if the boy lives,
+I promise you that, Mr. Grieve. And he could carry on his education
+there, too, a bit--what with evening classes and lectures, and the
+different libraries he could get the use of. It's wonderful how all
+the facilities for working-class education have grown in Manchester
+during the last few years.'
+
+'Aye, sir--I spose they have--I spose they have,' said Reuben,
+uncomfortably, and then seemed incapable of carrying on the
+conversation any further. Mr. Ancrum talked, but nothing more was
+to be got out of the farmer. At last the minister turned back,
+saying, as he shook hands, 'Well, let me know if I can be of any
+use. I have a good many friends in Manchester. I tell you that's a
+boy to be proud of, Mr. Grieve, a boy of promise, if ever there was
+one. But he wants taking the right way. He's got plenty of mixed
+stuff in him, bad and good. I should feel it anxious work, the next
+few years, if he were my boy.'
+
+Now it was really this talk which was fermenting in Reuben, and
+which, together with the 'rumpus' between Hannah and Louie, had led
+to his singularly disturbed state of conscience this Sunday
+morning. As he stood, miserably pulling at his pipe, the whole
+prospect of sloping field, and steep distant moor, gradually
+vanished from his eyes, and, instead, he saw the same London room
+which David's memory held so tenaciously--he saw Sandy raising
+himself from his deathbed with that look of sudden distrust--'Now,
+you'll deal honest wi 'em, Reuben?'
+
+Reuben groaned in spirit. 'A boy to be proud of' indeed. It seemed
+to him, now that he was perforce made to think about it, that he
+had never been easy in his mind since Sandy's orphans came to the
+house. On the one hand, his wife had had her way--how was he to
+prevent it? On the other, his religious sense had kept pricking and
+tormenting--like the gadfly that it was.
+
+Who, in the name of fortune, was to ask Hannah for money to send
+the boy to Manchester and apprentice him? And who was going to
+write to Mr. Gurney about it without her leave? Once upset the
+system of things on which those two half-yearly cheques depended,
+how many more of them would be forthcoming? And how was Hannah
+going to put up with the loss of them? It made Reuben shiver to
+think of it.
+
+Shouts from the lane behind. Reuben suddenly raised himself and
+made for the gate at the corner of the farmyard. He came out upon
+the children, who had been to Sunday school at Clough End since
+dinner, and were now in consequence in a state of restless animal
+spirits. Louie was swinging violently on the gate which barred the
+path on to the moor. David was shying stones at a rook's nest
+opposite, the clatter of the outraged colony to which it belonged
+sounding as music in his ears.
+
+They stared when they saw Reuben cross the road, sit down on a
+stone beside David, and take out his pipe. David ceased throwing,
+and Louie, crossing her feet and steadying herself as she sat on
+the topmost bar of the gate by a grip on either side, leant hard on
+her hands and watched her uncle in silence. When caught unawares by
+their elders, these two had always something of the air of captives
+defending themselves in an alien country.
+
+'Wal, Davy, did tha have Mr. Ancrum in school?' began Reuben,
+affecting a brisk manner, oddly unlike him.
+
+'Naw. It wor Brother Winterbotham from Halifax, or soom sich name.'
+
+'Wor he edifyin, Davy?'
+
+'He wor--he wor--a leather-yed,' said David, with sudden energy,
+and, taking up a stone again, he flung it at a tree trunk opposite,
+with a certain vindictiveness as though Brother Winterbotham were
+sitting there.
+
+'Now, yo're not speakin as yo owt, Davy,' said Reuben reprovingly,
+as he puffed away at his pipe and felt the pleasantness of the
+spring sunshine which streamed down into the lane through the still
+bare but budding branches of the sycamores.
+
+'He _wor_ a leather-yed,' David repeated with emphasis. 'He
+said it wor Alexander fought t' battle o' Marathon.'
+
+Reuben was silent for a while. When tests of this kind were going,
+he could but lie low. However, David's answer, after a bit,
+suggested an opening to him.
+
+'Yo've a rare deal o' book-larnin for a farmin lad, Davy. If yo wor
+at a trade now, or a mill-hand, or summat o' that soart, yo'd ha
+noan so mich time for readin as yo ha now.'
+
+The boy looked at him askance, with his keen black eyes. His uncle
+puzzled him.
+
+'Wal, I'm not a mill-hand, onyways,' he said, shortly, 'an I doan't
+mean to be.'
+
+'Noa, yo're too lazy,' said Louie shrilly, from the top of the
+gate. 'Theer's heaps o' boys no bigger nor yo, arns their ten
+shillins a week.'
+
+'They're welcome,' said David laconically, throwing another stone
+at the water to keep his hand in. For some years now the boy had
+cherished a hatred of the mill-life on which Clough End and the
+other small towns and villages in the neighbourhood existed. The
+thought of the long monotonous hours at the mules or the looms was
+odious to the lad whose joys lay in free moorland wanderings with
+the sheep, in endless reading, in talks with 'Lias Dawson.
+
+'Wal, now, I'm real glad to heer yo say sich things, Davy, lad,'
+said Reuben, with a curious flutter of manner. 'I'm real glad. So yo
+take to the farmin, Davy? Wal, it's nateral. All yor forbears--all
+on em leastways, nobbut yor feyther--got their livin off t' land.
+It cooms nateral to a Grieve.'
+
+The boy made no answer--did not commit himself in any way. He went
+on absently throwing stones.
+
+'Why doan't he larn a trade?' demanded Louie. 'Theer's Harry Wigson,
+he's gone to Manchester to be prenticed. He doan't goo loafin round
+aw day.'
+
+Her sharp wits disconcerted Reuben. He looked anxiously at David.
+The boy coloured furiously, and cast an angry glance at his sister.
+
+'Theer's money wanted for prenticin,' he said shortly.
+
+Reuben felt a stab. Neither of the children knew that they
+possessed a penny. A blunt word of Hannah's first of all, about
+'not gien 'em ony high noshuns o' theirsels,' aided on Reuben's
+side by the natural secretiveness of the peasant in money affairs,
+had effectually concealed all knowledge of their own share in the
+family finances from the orphans.
+
+He reached out a soil-stained hand, shaking already with incipient
+age, and laid it on David's sleeve.
+
+'Art tha hankerin after a trade, lad?' he said hastily, nay,
+harshly.
+
+David looked at his uncle astonished. A hundred thoughts flew
+through the boy's mind. Then he raised his head and caught sight of
+the great peak of Kinder Low in the distance, beyond the green
+swells of meadowland,--the heathery slopes running up into its
+rocky breast,--the black patch on the brown, to the left, which
+marked the site of the smithy.
+
+'No,' he said decidedly. 'No; I can't say as I am. I like t' farmin
+well enough.'
+
+And then, boy-like, hating to be talked to about himself, he shook
+himself free of his uncle and walked away. Reuben fell to his pipe
+again with a beaming countenance.
+
+'Louie, my gell,' he said.
+
+'Yes,' said the child, not moving.
+
+'Coom yo heer, Louie.'
+
+She unwillingly got down and came up to him. Reuben put down his
+pipe, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. Out of it, with
+difficulty, he produced a sixpence.
+
+'Art tha partial to goodies, Louie?' he said, dropping his voice
+almost to a whisper, and holding up the coin before her.
+
+Louie nodded, her eyes glistening at the magnitude of the coin.
+Uncle Reuben might be counted on for a certain number of pennies
+during the year, but silver was unheard of.
+
+'Tak it then, child, an welcome. If yo have a sweet tooth--an it's
+t' way wi moast gells--I conno see as it can be onythin else but
+Providence as gave it yo. So get yorsel soom bull's-eyes, Louie,
+an--an'--he looked a little conscious as he slipped the coin into
+her eager hand--'doan't let on ti your aunt! She'd think mebbe I
+wor spoilin your teeth, or summat,--an, Louie--'
+
+Was Uncle Reuben gone mad? For the first time in her life, as it
+seemed to Louie, he was looking at what she had on, nay, was even
+taking up her dress between his finger and thumb.
+
+'Is thissen your Sunday frock, chilt?'
+
+'Yes,' said the girl, flushing scarlet, 'bean't it a dishclout?'
+
+And she stood looking down at it with passionate scorn. It was a
+worn and patched garment of brown alpaca, made out of an ancient
+gown of Hannah's.
+
+'Wal, I'm naw judge i' these matters,' said Reuben, dubiously,
+drawing out his spectacles. 'It's got naw holes 'at I can see, but
+it's not varra smart, perhaps. Satan's varra active wi gells on
+this pint o' dress--yo mun tak noatice o' that, Louie--but--listen
+heer--'
+
+And he drew her nearer to him by her skirt, looking cautiously up
+and down the lane and across to the farm.
+
+'If I get a good price for t' wool this year--an theer's a new
+merchant coomin round, yan moor o' t' buyin soart nor owd Croker,
+soa they say, I'st save yo five shillin for a frock, chilt. Yo can
+goo an buy it, an I'st mak it straight wi yor aunt. But I mun get a
+good price, yo know, or your aunt ull be fearfu' bad to manage.'
+
+And he gazed up at her as though appealing to her common sense in
+the matter, and to her understanding of both his and her situation.
+Louie's cheeks were red, her eyes did not meet his. They looked
+away, down towards Clough End.
+
+'Theer's a blue cotton at Hinton's,' she said, hurriedly--'a
+light-blue cotton. They want sixpence farthin,--but Annie Wigson
+says yo could bate 'em a bit. But what's t' use?' she added, with a
+sudden savage darkening of her bright look--'she'd tak it away.'
+
+The tone gave Reuben a shock. But he did not rebuke it. For the
+first time he and Louie were conspirators in the same plot.
+
+'No, no, I'd see to 'at. But how ud yo get it made?' He was
+beginning to feel a childish interest in his scheme.
+
+'Me an Annie Wigson ud mak it oop fast enough. Theer are things I
+can do for her; she'd not want no payin, an she's fearfu' good at
+dressmakin. She wor prenticed two years afore she took ill.'
+
+'Gie me a kiss then, my gell; doan't yo gie naw trooble, an we'st
+see. But I mun get a good price, yo know.'
+
+And rising, Reuben bent towards his niece. She rose on tiptoe, and
+just touched his rough cheek. There was no natural childish
+effusiveness in the action. For the seven years since she left her
+father, Louie had quite unlearnt kissing.
+
+Reuben proceeded up the lane to the gate leading to the moor. He
+was in the highest spirits. What a mercy he had not bothered Hannah
+with Mr. Ancrum's remarks! Why, the boy wouldn't go to a trade, not
+if he were sent!
+
+At the gate he ran against David, who came hastily out of the
+farmyard to intercept him.
+
+'Uncle Reuben, what do they coe that bit watter up theer?' and he
+pointed up the lane towards the main ridge of the Peak. 'Yo
+know--that bit pool on t' way to th' Downfall?'
+
+The farmer stopped bewildered.
+
+'That bit watter? What they coe that bit watter? Why, they coe it
+t' Witch's Pool, or used to i' my yoong days. An for varra good
+reason too. They drownded an owd witch theer i' my grand-feyther's
+time--I've heerd my grandmither tell th' tale on't scores o' times.
+An theer's aw mak o' tales about it, or used to be. I hannot yeerd
+mony words about it o' late years. Who's been talkin to yo, Davy?'
+
+Louie came running up and listened.
+
+'I doan't know,' said the boy,--'what soart o' tales?'
+
+'Why, they'd use to say th' witch walked, on soom neets i' th'
+year--Easter Eve, most pertickerlerly--an foak wor feeart to goo
+onywhere near it on those neets. But doan't yo goo listenin to
+tales, Davy,' said Reuben, with a paternal effusion most rare with
+him, and born of his recent proceedings; 'yo'll only freeten yorsel
+o' neets for nothin.'
+
+'What are witches?' demanded Louie, scornfully. 'I doan't bleeve in
+'em.'
+
+Reuben frowned a little.
+
+'Theer wor witches yance, my gell, becos it's in th' Bible, an
+whativer's in th' Bible's _true_,' and the farmer brought his
+hand down on the top bar of the gate. 'I'm no gien ony judgment
+about 'em nowadays. Theer wor aw mak o' queer things said
+about Jenny Crum an Needham Farm i' th' owd days. I've heerd
+my grandmither say it worn't worth a Christian man's while to
+live in Needham Farm when Jenny Crum wor about. She meddled wi
+everythin--wi his lambs, an his coos, an his childer. I niver seed
+nothin mysel, so I doan't say nowt--not o' my awn knowledge. But I
+doan't soomhow bleeve as it's th' Awmighty's will to freeten a
+Christian coontry wi witches, _i' th' present dispensation_.
+An murderin's a graat sin, wheder it's witches or oother foak.'
+
+'In t' books they doan't coe it t' Witch's Pool at aw,' said Louie,
+obstinately. 'They coe it t' _Mermaid's_ Pool.'
+
+'An anoother book coes it a "Hammer-dry-ad,"' said David,
+mockingly, 'soa theer yo are.'
+
+'Aye, soom faddlin kind of a name they gie it--I know--those
+Manchester chaps, as cooms trespassin ower t' Scout wheer they
+aren't wanted. To hear ony yan o' _them_ talk, yo'd think
+theer wor only three fellows like 'im cam ower i' three ships, an
+two were drownded. T'aint ov ony account what they an their books
+coe it.'
+
+And Reuben, as he leant against the gate, blew his smoke
+contemptuously in the air. It was not often that Reuben Grieve
+allowed himself, or was allowed by his world, to use airs of
+superiority towards any other human being whatever. But in the case
+of the Manchester clerks and warehousemen, who came tramping over
+the grouse moors which Reuben rented for his sheep, and were always
+being turned back by keepers or himself--and in their case
+only--did he exercise, once in a while, the commonest privilege of
+humanity.
+
+'Did yo iver know onybody 'at went up on Easter Eve?' asked David.
+
+Both children hung on the answer.
+
+Reuben scratched his head. The tales of Jenny Crum, once well known
+to him, had sunk deep into the waves of memory of late years, and
+his slow mind had some difficulty in recovering them. But at last
+he said with the sudden brightening of recollection:
+
+'Aye--of _coorse!_--I knew theer wor soom one. Yo know 'im,
+Davy, owd 'Lias o' Frimley Moor? He wor allus a foo'hardy sort o'
+creetur. But if he wor short o' wits when he gan up, he wor mich
+shorter when he cam down. That wor a rum skit!--now I think on 't.
+Sich a seet he wor! He came by here six o'clock i' th' mornin. I
+found him hangin ower t' yard gate theer, as white an slamp as a
+puddin cloth oop on eend; an I browt him in, an was for gien him
+soom tay. An yor aunt, she gien him a warld o' good advice about
+his gooins on. But bless yo, he didn't tak in a word o' 't. An for
+th' tay, he'd naw sooner swallowed it than he runs out, as quick as
+leetnin, an browt it aw up. He wor fairly clemmed wi' t' cold,--'at
+he wor. I put in th' horse, an I took him down to t' Frimley
+carrier, an we packed him i' soom rugs an straw, an soa he got
+home. But they put him out o' t' school, an he wor months in his
+bed. An they do tell me, as nobory can mak owt o' 'Lias Dawson
+these mony years, i' th' matter o' brains. Eh, but yo shudno meddle
+wi Satan.'
+
+'What d'yo think he saw?' asked David, eagerly, his black eyes all
+aglow.
+
+'He saw t' woman wi t' fish's tail--'at's what he saw,' said Louie,
+shrilly.
+
+Reuben took no notice. He was sunk in silent reverie poking at his
+pipe. In spite of his confidence in the Almighty's increased
+goodwill towards the present dispensation, he was not prepared to
+say for certain what 'Lias Dawson did or didn't see.
+
+'Nobory should goo an meddle wi Satan,' he repeated slowly after an
+interval; and then opening the yard gate he went off on his usual
+Sunday walk over the moors to have a look at his more distant
+sheep.
+
+Davy stood intently looking after him; so did Louie. She had
+clasped her hands behind her head, her eyes were wide, her look and
+attitude all eagerness. She was putting two and two together--her
+uncle's promise and the mermaid story as the Manchester man had
+delivered it. You had but to see her and wish, and, according to
+the Manchester man and his book, you got your wish. The child's
+hatred of sermons and ministers had not touched her capacity for
+belief of this sort in the least. She believed feverishly, and was
+enraged with David for setting up a rival creed, and with her uncle
+for endorsing it.
+
+David turned and walked towards the farmyard. Louie followed him,
+and tapped him peremptorily on the arm. 'I'm gooin up theer Easter
+Eve--Saturday week'--and she pointed over her shoulder to the
+Scout.
+
+'Gells conno be out neets,' said David firmly; 'if I goo I can tell
+yo.'
+
+'Yo'll not goo without me--I'd tell Aunt Hannah!'
+
+'Yo've naw moor sense nor rotten sticks!' said David, angrily.
+'Yo'll get your death, an Aunt Hannah 'll be stick stock mad wi
+boath on us. If I goo she'll niver find out.'
+
+Louie hesitated a moment. To provoke Aunt Hannah too much might,
+indeed, endanger the blue frock. But daring and curiosity
+triumphed.
+
+'I doan't care!' she said, tossing her head; 'I'm gooin.'
+
+David slammed the yard gate, and, hiding himself in a corner of the
+cowhouse, fell into moody meditations. It took all the tragic and
+mysterious edge off an adventure he had set his heart on that Louie
+should insist on going too. But there was no help for it. Next day
+they planned it together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+'Reuben, ha yo seen t' childer?' inquired Aunt Hannah, poking her
+head round the door, so as to be heard by her husband, who was
+sitting outside cobbling at a bit of broken harness.
+
+'Noa; niver seed un since dinner.'
+
+'They went down to Clough End, two o'clock about, for t' bread, an
+I've yerd nothin ov em since. Coom in to your tay, Reuben! I'll
+keep nothin waitin for them! They may goo empty if they conno keep
+time!'
+
+Reuben went in. An hour later the husband and wife came out
+together, and stood looking down the steep road leading to the
+town.
+
+'Just cast your eye on aw them stockins waitin to be mended,' said
+Hannah, angrily, turning back to the kitchen, and pointing to a
+chair piled with various garments. 'That's why she doon it, I spose.
+I'll be even wi her! It's a poor soart of a supper she'll get this
+neet, or he noather. An her stomach aw she cares for!'
+
+Reuben wandered down into the road, strolled up and down for nearly
+an hour, while the sun set and the light waned, went as far as the
+corner by Wigson's farm, asked a passer-by, saw and heard nothing,
+and came back, shaking his head in answer to his wife's shrill
+interrogations.
+
+'Wal, if I doan't gie Louie a good smackin,' ejaculated Hannah,
+exasperated; and she was just going back into the house when an
+exclamation from Reuben stopped her; instead, she ran out to him,
+holding on her cap against the east wind.
+
+'Look theer,' he said, pointing; 'what iver is them two up to?'
+
+For suddenly he had noticed outside the gate leading into the field
+a basket lying on the ground against the wall. The two peered at it
+with amazement, for it was their own basket, and in it reposed the
+loaves David had been told to bring back from Clough End, while on
+the top lay a couple of cotton reels and a card of mending which
+Louie had been instructed to buy for her aunt.
+
+After a moment Reuben looked up, his face working.
+
+'I'm thinkin, Hannah, they'n roon away!'
+
+It seemed to him as he spoke that such a possibility had been
+always in his mind. And during the past week there had been much
+bad blood between aunt and niece. Twice had the child gone to bed
+supperless, and yesterday, for some impertinence, Hannah had given
+her a blow, the marks of which on her cheek Reuben had watched
+guiltily all day. At night he had dreamed of Sandy. Since Mr.
+Ancrum had set him thinking, and so stirred his conscience in
+various indirect and unforeseen ways, Sandy had been a terror to
+him; the dead man had gained a mysterious hold on the living.
+
+'Roon away!' repeated Hannah scornfully; 'whar ud they roon to?
+They're just at soom o' their divilments, 'at's what they are. An if
+yo doan't tak a stick to boath on them when they coom back, _I
+will_, soa theer, Reuben Grieve. Yo niver had no sperrit wi
+'em--niver--and that's yan reason why they've grown up soa ramjam
+full o' wickedness.'
+
+It relieved her to abuse her husband. Reuben said nothing, but hung
+over the wall, straining his eyes into the gathering darkness. The
+wooded sides of the great moor which enclosed the valley to the
+north were fading into dimness, and to the east, above the ridge of
+Kinder Low, a young moon was rising. The black steep wall of the
+Scout was swiftly taking to itself that majesty which all mountains
+win from the approach of night. Involuntarily, Reuben held his
+breath, listening, hungering for the sound of children's voices on
+the still air. Nothing--but a few intermittent bird notes and the
+eternal hurry of water from the moorland to the plain.
+
+There was a step on the road, and a man passed whistling.
+
+'Jim Wigson!' shouted Hannah, 'is that yo, Jim?'
+
+The man opened the yard gate, and came through to them. Jim was the
+eldest son of the neighbouring farmer, whose girls were Louie's
+only companions. He was a full-blooded swaggering youth, with whom
+David was generally on bad terms. David despised him for an oaf who
+could neither read nor write, and hated him for a bully.
+
+He grinned when Hannah asked him questions about the truants.
+
+'Why, they're gone to Edale, th' yoong rascots, I'll uphowd yo!
+There's a parcel o' gipsies there tellin fortunes, an lots o' foak
+ha gone ower there to-day. You may mak your mind up they've gone to
+Edale. That Louie's a limb, she is. She's got spunk enough to waak
+to Lunnon if she'd a mind. Oh, they'll be back here soon enough,
+trust 'em.'
+
+I shut _my_ door at nine o'clock,' said Hannah, grimly. 'Them
+as cooms after that, may sleep as they can.'
+
+'Well, that'll be sharp wark for th' eyes if they're gone to Edale,'
+said Jim, with a laugh. 'Its a good step fro here to Edale.'
+
+'Aye, an soom o' 't bad ground,' said Reuben uneasily--'vara bad
+ground.'
+
+'Aye, it's not good walkin, neets. If they conno see their way when
+they get to the top o' t' Downfall, they'll stay theer till it gets
+mornin, if they've ony sort o' gumption. But, bless yo, it bean't
+gooin to be a dark neet, '--and he pointed to the moon. 'They'll be
+here afore yoo goo to bed. An if yo want onybody to help yo gie
+Davy a bastin, just coo me, Mr. Grieve. Good neet to yo.'
+
+Reuben fidgeted restlessly all the evening. Towards nine he went
+out on the pretext of seeing to a cow that had lately calved and
+was in a weakly state. He gave the animal her food and clean
+litter, doing everything more clumsily than usual. Then he went
+into the stable and groped about for a lantern that stood in the
+corner.
+
+He found it, slipped through the farmyard into the lane, and then
+lit it out of sight of the house.
+
+'It's bad ground top o' t' Downfall,' he said to himself,
+apologetically, as he guiltily opened the gate on to the
+moor--'varra bad ground.'
+
+Hanna shut her door that night neither at nine nor at ten. For by
+the latter hour the master of the house was still absent, and
+nowhere to be found, in spite of repeated calls from the door and
+up the lane. Hannah guessed where he had gone without much
+difficulty; but her guess only raised her wrath to a white heat.
+Troublesome brats Sandy's children had always been--Louie more
+especially--but they had never perpetrated any such overt act of
+rebellion as this before, and the dour, tyrannical woman was filled
+with a kind of silent frenzy as she thought of her husband going
+out to welcome the wanderers.
+
+'It's a quare kind o' fatted calf they'll get when _I_ lay
+hands on 'em,' she thought to herself as she stood at the front
+door, in the cold darkness, listening.
+
+Meanwhile David and Louie, high up on the side of Kinder Scout,
+were speculating with a fearful joy as to what might be happening
+at the farm. The manner of their escape had cost them much thought.
+Should they slip out of the front door instead of going to bed? But
+the woodwork of the farm was old and creaking, and the bolts and
+bars heavy. They were generally secured before supper by Hannah
+herself, and, though they might be surreptitiously oiled, the
+children despaired--considering how close the kitchen was to the
+front door--of getting out without rousing Hannah's sharp ears.
+Other projects, in which windows and ropes played a part, were
+discussed. David held strongly that he alone could have managed any
+one of them, but he declined flatly to attempt them with a 'gell.'
+In the same way he alone could have made his way up the Scout and
+over the river in the dark. But who'd try it with a 'gell'?
+
+The boy's natural conviction of the uselessness of 'gells' was
+never more disagreeably expressed than on this occasion. But he
+could not shake Louie off. She pinched him when he enraged her
+beyond bounds, but she never wavered in her determination to go
+too.
+
+Finally they decided to brave Aunt Hannah and take the
+consequences. They meant to be out all night in hiding, and in the
+morning they would come back and take their beatings. David
+comfortably reflected that Uncle Reuben couldn't do him much harm,
+and, though Louie could hardly flatter herself so far, her tone,
+also, in the matter was philosophical.
+
+'Theer's soom bits o' owd books i' th' top-attic,' she said to
+David; 'I'll leave 'em in t' stable, an when we coom home, I'll tie
+'em on my back--under my dress--an she may leather away till
+Christmas.'
+
+So on their return from Clough End with the bread--about five
+o'clock--they slipped into the field, crouching under the wall, so
+as to escape Hannah's observation, deposited their basket by the
+gate, took up a bundle and tin box which David had hidden that
+morning under the hedge, and, creeping back again into the road,
+passed noiselessly through the gate on to the moor, just as Aunt
+Hannah was lifting the kettle off the fire for tea.
+
+Then came a wild and leaping flight over the hill, down to the main
+Kinder stream, across it, and up the face of the Scout--up, and up,
+with smothered laughter, and tumbles and scratches at every step,
+and a glee of revolt and adventure swelling every vein.
+
+It was then a somewhat stormy afternoon, with alternate gusts of
+wind and gleams of sun playing on the black boulders, the red-brown
+slopes of the mountain. The air was really cold and cutting,
+promising a frosty night. But the children took no notice of it.
+Up, and on, through the elastic carpet of heather and bilberry, and
+across bogs which showed like veins of vivid green on the dark
+surface of the moor; under circling peewits, who fled before them,
+crying with plaintive shrillness to each other, as though in
+protest; and past grouse-nests, whence the startled mothers soared
+precipitately with angry duckings, each leaving behind her a loose
+gathering of eggs lying wide and open on the heather, those newly
+laid gleaming a brighter red beside their fellows. The tin box and
+its contents rattled under David's arm as he leapt and straddled
+across the bogs, choosing always the widest jump and the stiffest
+bit of climb, out of sheer wantonness of life and energy. Louie's
+thin figure, in its skimp cotton dress and red crossover, her long
+legs in their blue worsted stockings, seemed to fly over the moor,
+winged, as it were, by an ecstasy of freedom. If one could but be
+in two places at once--on the Scout--and peeping from some safe
+corner at Aunt Hannah's wrath!
+
+Presently they came to the shoulder whereon--gleaming under the
+level light--lay the Mermaid's Pool. David had sufficiently
+verified the fact that the tarn did indeed bear this name in the
+modern guide-book parlance of the district. Young men and women,
+out on a holiday from the big towns near, and carrying little red
+or green 'guides,' spoke of the 'Mermaid's Pool' with the accent of
+romantic interest. But the boy had also discovered that no
+native-born farmer or shepherd about had ever heard of the name, or
+would have a word to say to it. And for the first time he had
+stumbled full into the deep deposit of witch-lore and belief still
+surviving in the Kinder Scout district, as in all the remoter
+moorland of the North. Especially had he won the confidence of a
+certain 'owd Matt,' a shepherd from a farm high on Mardale Moor;
+and the tales 'owd Matt' had told him--of mysterious hares coursed
+at night by angry farmers enraged by the 'bedivilment' of their
+stock, shot at with silver slugs, and identified next morning with
+some dreaded hag or other lying groaning and wounded in her bed--of
+calves' hearts burnt at midnight with awful ceremonies, while the
+baffled witch outside flung herself in rage and agony against the
+close-barred doors and windows--of spells and wise men--these
+things had sent chills of pleasing horror through the boy's frame.
+They were altogether new to him, in this vivid personal guise at
+least, and mixed up with all the familiar names and places of the
+district; for his childish life had been singularly solitary,
+giving to books the part which half a century ago would have been
+taken by tradition; and, moreover, the witch-belief in general had
+now little foothold among the younger generation of the Scout, and
+was only spoken of with reserve and discretion among the older men.
+
+But the stories once heard had struck deep into the lad's quick and
+pondering mind. Jenny Crum seemed to have been the latest of all
+the great witches of Kinder Scout. The memory of her as a real and
+awful personage was still fresh in the mind of many a grey-haired
+farmer; the history of her death was well known; and most of the
+local inhabitants, even the boys and girls, turned out, when you
+came to inquire, to be familiar with the later legends of the Pool,
+and, as David presently discovered, with one or more tales--for the
+stories were discrepant--of 'Lias Dawson's meeting with the witch,
+now fifteen years ago.
+
+'_What_ had 'Lias seen? What would they see?' His flesh crept
+deliciously.
+
+'Wal, owd Mermaid!' shouted Louie, defiantly, as soon as she had
+got her breath again. 'Are yo coomin out to-night? Yo'll ha coompany
+if yo do.'
+
+David smiled contemptuously and did not condescend to argue.
+
+'Are yo coomin on?' he said, shouldering his box and bundle again.
+'They'st be up after us if we doan't look out.'
+
+And on they went, climbing a steep boulder-strewn slope above the
+pool till they came to the 'edge' itself, a tossed and broken
+battlement of stone, running along the top of the Scout. Here the
+great black slabs of grit were lying fantastically piled upon each
+other at every angle and in every possible combination. The path
+which leads from the Hayfield side across the desolate tableland of
+the Scout to the Snake Inn on the eastern side of the ridge, ran
+among them, and many a wayfarer, benighted or mist-bound on the
+moor, had taken refuge before now in their caverns and recesses,
+waiting for the light, and dreading to find himself on the cliffs
+of the Downfall.
+
+But David pushed on past many hiding-places well known to him, till
+the two reached the point where the mountain face sweeps backward
+in the curve of which the Downfall makes the centre. At the outward
+edge of the curve a great buttress of ragged and jutting rocks
+descends perpendicularly towards the valley, like a ruined
+staircase with displaced and gigantic steps.
+
+Down this David began to make his way, and Louie jumped, and slid,
+and swung after him, as lithe and sure-footed as a cat. Presently
+David stopped. 'This ull do,' he said, surveying the place with a
+critical eye.
+
+They had just slid down a sloping chimney of rock, and were now
+standing on a flat block, over which hung another like a penthouse
+roof. On the side of the Downfall there was a projecting stone, on
+which David stepped out to look about him.
+
+Holding on to a rock above for precaution's sake, he reconnoitred
+their position. To his left was the black and semicircular cliff,
+down the centre of which the Downfall stream, now tamed and thinned
+by the dry spring winds, was trickling. The course of the stream
+was marked by a vivid orange colour, produced, apparently, in the
+grit by the action of water; and about halfway down the fall a mass
+of rock had recently slipped, leaving a bright scar, through which
+one saw, as it were, the inner mass of the Peak, the rectangular
+blocks, now thick, now thin, as of some Cyclopean masonry,
+wherewith the earth-forces had built it up in days before a single
+alp had yet risen on the face of Europe. Below the boy's feet a
+precipice, which his projecting stone overhung, fell to the bed of
+the stream. On this side at least they were abundantly protected.
+
+On the moorside the steep broken ground of the hill came up to the
+rocky line they had been descending, and offered no difficulty to
+any sure-footed person. But no path ran anywhere near them, and
+from the path up above they were screened by the grit 'edge'
+already spoken of. Moreover, their penthouse, or half-gable, had
+towards the Downfall a tolerably wide opening; but towards the moor
+and the north there was but a narrow hole, which David soon saw
+could be stopped by a stone. When he crept back into their
+hiding-place, it pleased him extremely.
+
+'They'll niver find us, if they look till next week!' he exclaimed
+exultantly, and, slipping off the heavy bundle strapped on his
+back, he undid its contents. Two old woollen rugs appeared--one a
+blanket, the other a horse-rug--and wrapped up in the middle of
+them a jagged piece of tarpaulin, a hammer, some wooden pegs, and
+two or three pieces of tallow dip. Louie, sitting cross-legged in
+the other corner, with her chin in her hands, looked on with her
+usual detached and critical air. David had not allowed her much of
+a voice in the preparations, and she felt an instinctive aversion
+towards other people's ingenuities. All she had contributed was
+something to while away the time, in the shape of a bag of
+bull's-eyes, bought with some of the sixpence Uncle Reuben had
+given her.
+
+Having laid out his stores, David went to work. Getting out on the
+projecting stone again, he laid the bit of tarpaulin along the
+sloping edge of the rock which roofed them, pegged it down into
+crevices at either end, and laid a stone to hold it in the middle.
+Then he slipped back again, and, behold, there was a curtain
+between them and the Downfall, which, as the dusk was fast
+advancing, made the little den inside almost completely dark.
+
+'What's t' good o' that?' inquired Louie, scornfully, more than
+half inclined to put out a mischievous hand and pull it down again.
+
+'Doan't worrit, an yo'll see,' returned David, and Louie's
+curiosity got the better of her malice.
+
+Stooping down beside her, he looked through the hole which opened
+to the moor. His eye travelled down the hillside to the path far
+below, just visible in the twilight to a practised eye, to the
+river, to the pasture-fields on the hill beyond, and to the smoke,
+rising above the tops of some unseen trees, which marked the site
+of the farmhouse. No one in sight. The boy crawled out, and
+searched the moor till he found a large flattish stone, which he
+brought and placed against the opening, ready to be drawn quite
+across it from inside.
+
+Then he slipped back again, and in the glimmer of light which
+remained groped for his tin box. Louie stooped over and eagerly
+watched him open it. Out came a bottle of milk, some large slices
+of bread, some oatcake, and some cheese. In the corner, recklessly
+near the cheese, lurked a grease-bespattered lantern and a box of
+matches. David had borrowed the lantern that afternoon from a
+Clough End friend under the most solemn vows of secrecy, and he
+drew it out now with a deliberate and special relish. When he had
+driven a peg into a cranny of the rock, trimmed half a dip
+carefully, lighted it, put it into the lantern, and hung the
+lantern on the peg, he fell back on his heels to study the effect,
+with a beaming countenance, filled all through with the essentially
+human joy of contrivance.
+
+'Now, then, d'yo see what that tarpaulin's for?' he inquired
+triumphantly of Louie.
+
+But Louie's mouth was conveniently occupied with a bull's-eye, and
+she only sucked it the more vigorously in answer.
+
+'Why, yo little silly, if it worn't for that we couldno ha no leet.
+They'd see us from t' fields even, as soon as it's real dark.'
+
+'Doan't bleeve it,' said Louie, laconically, in a voice much
+muffled by bull's-eyes.
+
+'Wal, yo needn't; I'm gooin to have my tea.'
+
+And David, diving into the tin, brought out a hunch of bread and a
+knob of cheese. The voracity with which he fell on them, soon, with
+him also, stopped up the channels of speech. Louie, alarmed perhaps
+by the rapidity with which the mouthfuls disappeared, slid up on
+her heels and claimed her share. Never was there a more savoury
+meal than that! Their little den with its curtain felt warm for the
+moment after the keen air of the moor; the lantern light seemed to
+shut them in from the world, gave them the sense of settlers
+carving a home out of the desert, and milk which had been filched
+from Aunt Hannah lay like nectar in the mouth.
+
+After their meal both children crept out on to the moor to see what
+might be going on in the world outside. Darkness was fast
+advancing. A rising wind swept through the dead bracken, whirled
+round the great grit boulders, and sent a shiver through Louie's
+thin body.
+
+'It's cowd,' she said pettishly; 'I'm gooin back.'
+
+'Did yo spose it wor gooin to be warm, yo little silly? That's why
+I browt t' rugs, of course. Gells never think o' nothin. It's
+parishin cowd here, neets--fit to tie yo up in knots wi th'
+rheumatics, like Jim Spedding, if yo doan't mind yorsel. It wor
+only laying out a neet on Frimley Moor--poachin, I guess--'at
+twisted Jim that way.'
+
+Louie's countenance fell. Jim Spedding was a little crooked
+greengrocer in Clough End, of whom she had a horror. The biting
+hostile wind, which obliged her to hold her hat on against it with
+both hands, the black moor at their feet, the grey sweep of sky,
+the pale cloudy moon, the darkness which was fast enveloping
+them--blotting out the distant waves of hill, and fusing the great
+blocks of grit above them into one threatening mass--all these
+became suddenly hateful to her. She went back into their den,
+wrapped herself up in one of the tattered rugs, and crept sulkily
+into a corner. The lantern gleamed on the child's huddled form, the
+frowning brow, the great vixenish eyes. She had half a mind to run
+home, in spite of Aunt Hannah. Hours to wait! and she loathed
+waiting.
+
+But gradually, as the rug warmed her, the passion for adventure and
+mystery--the vision of the mermaid--the hope of the blue
+cotton--reasserted themselves, and the little sharp face relaxed.
+She began to amuse herself with hunting the spiders and beetles
+which ran across the rocky roof above her head, or crept in and out
+of the crevices of stone, wondering, no doubt, at this unbidden and
+tormenting daylight. She caught one or two small blackbeetles in a
+dirty rag of a handkerchief--for she would not touch them if she
+could help it--and then it delighted her to push aside the curtain,
+stretch her hand out into the void darkness, and let them fall into
+the gulf below. Even if they could fly, she reflected, it must 'gie
+'em a good start.'
+
+Meanwhile, David had charged up the hill, filled with a sudden
+curiosity to see what the top of the Scout might look like by
+night. He made his way through the battlement of grit, found the
+little path behind, gleaming white in the moonlight, because of the
+quartz sheddings which wind and weather are forever teasing out of
+the grit, and which drift into the open spaces; and at last, guided
+by the sound and the gleam of water, he made out the top of the
+Downfall, climbed a high peat bank, and the illimitable plateau of
+the Scout lay wide and vast before him.
+
+Here, on the mountain-top, there seemed to be more daylight left
+than on its rocky sides, and the moon among the parting clouds
+shone intermittently over the primeval waste. The top of the Peak
+is, so to speak, a vast black glacier, whereof the crevasses are
+great fissures, ebon-black in colour, sometimes ten feet deep, and
+with ten feet more of black water at the bottom. For miles on
+either side the ground is seamed and torn with these crevasses, now
+shallower, now deeper, succeeding each other at intervals of a yard
+or two, and it is they which make the crossing of the Peak in the
+dark or in mist a matter of danger sometimes even for the native.
+David, high on his bank, from which the black overhanging eaves
+curled inwards beneath his feet to a sullen depth of water, could
+see against the moonlit sky the posts which marked the track from
+the Downfall to the Snake Inn on the Glossop Road. Miss that
+track--a matter of some fifteen minutes' walk for the sturdy farmer
+who knows it well--and you find yourself lost in a region which has
+no features and no landmarks, where the earth lays snares for you
+and the mists betray you, and where even in bright sunshine there
+reigns an eternal and indescribable melancholy. The strangeness and
+wildness of the scene entered the boy's consciousness, and brought
+with them a kind of exaltation. He stood gazing; that inner life of
+his, of which Louie, his constant companion, knew as good as
+nothing, asserting itself.
+
+For the real companions of his heart were not Louie or the boys
+with whom he had joked and sparred at school; they were ideas,
+images, sounds, imaginations, caught from books or from the talk of
+old 'Lias and Mr. Ancrum. He had but to stand still a moment, as it
+were, to listen, and the voices and sights of another world came
+out before him like players on to a stage. Spaces of shining water,
+crossed by ships with decks manned by heroes for whom the blue
+distance was for ever revealing new lands to conquer, new
+adventures to affront; the plumed Indian in his forest divining the
+track of his enemy from a displaced leaf or twig; the Zealots of
+Jehovah urging a last frenzied defence of Jehovah's Sanctuary
+against the Roman host; and now, last of all, the gloom and flames,
+the infernal palaces, the towering fiends, the grandiose and
+lumbering war of 'Paradise Lost': these things, together with the
+names and suggestions of 'Lias's talk--that whole crew of shining,
+fighting, haranguing men and women whom the old dreamer was for
+ever bringing into weird action on the moorside--lived in the boy's
+mind, and in any pause of silence, as we have said, emerged and
+took possession.
+
+It was only that morning, in an old meal-chest which had belonged
+to his grandfather, James Grieve, he had discovered the old
+calf-bound copy of 'Paradise Lost,' which was now in one of his
+pockets, balanced by 'Anson's Voyages' in the other. All the
+morning he had been lying hidden in a corner of the sheepfold
+devouring it, the rolling verse imprinting itself on the boy's
+plastic memory by a sort of enchantment--
+
+         Yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
+    The seat of desolation, void of light,
+    Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
+    Casts pale and dreadful.
+
+He chanted the words aloud, flinging them out in an ecstasy
+of pleasure. Before him, as it seemed, there stretched that very
+plain 'forlorn and wild,' with its black fissures and its
+impenetrable horizons; the fitful moonlight stood for the
+glimmering of the Tartarean flames; the remembered words and the
+actual sights played into and fused with each other, till in the
+cold and darkness the boy thrilled all through with that mingling
+of joy and terror which is only possible to the creature of fine
+gifts and high imagination.
+
+Jenny Crum, too! A few more hours and he might see her face to
+face--as 'Lias had seen her. He quaked a little at the thought, but
+he would not have flinched for the world. _He_ was not going
+to lose his wits, as 'Lias did; and as for Louie, if she were
+frightened it would do her good to be afraid of something.
+
+Hark! He turned, stooped, put his hand to his ear.
+
+The sound he heard had startled him, turned him pale. But he soon
+recovered himself. It was the sound of heavy boots on stones, and
+it was brought to him by the wind, as it seemed, from far below.
+Some one was coming after them--perhaps more than one. He thought
+he heard a voice.
+
+He leapt fissure after fissure like a young roe, fled to the top of
+the Downfall and looked over. Did the light show through the
+tarpaulin? Alack!--there must be a rent somewhere--for he saw a dim
+glow-worm light beyond the cliff, on the dark rib of the mountain.
+It was invisible from below, but any roving eye from the top would
+be caught by it in an instant. In a second he had raced along the
+edge, dived in and out of the blocks, guiding his way by a sort of
+bat's instinct, till he reached the rocky stairway, which he
+descended at imminent risk of his neck.
+
+'Put your hand ower t'leet, Louie, till I move t'stone!'
+
+The light disappeared, David crept in, and the two children
+crouched together in a glow of excitement.
+
+'Is't Uncle Reuben?' whispered Louie, pressing her face against the
+side of the rocks, and trying to look through the chink between it
+and the covering stone.
+
+'Aye--wi a lantern. But there's talkin--theer's someone else. Jim
+Wigson, mebbe.'
+
+'If it's Jim Wigson,' said Louie, between her small, shut teeth,
+'I'll bite him!'
+
+'Cos yo're a gell! Gells and cats bite--they can't do nowt else!'
+
+Whereupon Louie pinched him, and David, giving an involuntary kick
+as he felt the nip, went into first a fit of smothered laughter,
+and then seized her arm in a tight grip.
+
+'Keep quiet, conno yo? Now they're coomin, an I bleeve they're
+coomin this way!'
+
+But after another minute's waiting, he was quite unable to obey his
+own injunction and he crept out on the stone overlooking the
+precipice to look.
+
+'Coom back! They'll see yo.' cried Louie, in a shrill whisper; and
+she caught him by the ankle.
+
+David gave a kick. 'Let goo; if yo do 'at I shall fall an be kilt!'
+
+She held her breath. Presently, with an exclamation, he knelt down
+and looked over the edge of the great sloping block which served
+them for roof.
+
+'Wal, I niver! Theer's nobory but Uncle Reuben, an he's talkin to
+hissel. Wal, this is a rum skit!'
+
+And he stayed outside watching, in spite of Louie's angry commands
+to him to come back into the den. David had no fears of being
+discovered by Uncle Reuben. If it had been Jim Wigson it would have
+been different.
+
+Presently, on the path some sixty feet above them, but hidden from
+them by the mass of tumbled rocks through which they had descended,
+they heard someone puffing and blowing, a stick striking and
+slipping on the stones, and weird rays of light stole down the
+mountain-side, and in and out of the vast blocks with which it was
+overstrewn.
+
+'He's stopt up theer,' said David, creeping in under the gable, 'an
+I mun hear what he's sayin. I'm gooin up nearer. If yo coom we'll
+be caught.'
+
+'Yo stoopid!' cried Louie. But he had crawled up the narrow chimney
+they had come down by in a moment, and she was left alone. Her
+spirit failed her a little. She daren't climb after him in the
+dark.
+
+David clambered in and out, the fierce wind that beat the side of
+the mountain masking whatever sounds he may have made, till he
+found himself directly under the place where Reuben Grieve sat,
+slowly recovering his breath.
+
+_'O Lord! O Lord!_ They're aw reet, Sandy--they're aw reet!'
+
+The boy crouched down sharply under an overhanging stone, arrested
+by the name--Sandy--his father's name.
+
+Once or twice since he came to Kinder he had heard it on Uncle
+Reuben's lips, once or twice from neighbours who had known James
+Grieve's sons in their youth. But Sandy had left the farm early and
+was little remembered, and the true story of Sandy's life was
+unknown in the valley, though there were many rumours. What the
+close and timid Reuben heard from Mr. Gurney, the head of Sandy's
+firm, after Sandy's death, he told to no one but Hannah. The
+children knew generally, from what Hannah often let fall when she
+was in a temper, that their mother was a disgrace to them, but they
+knew no more, and, with the natural instinct of forlorn creatures
+on the defensive, studiously avoided the subject within the walls
+of Needham Farm. They might question old 'Lias; they would suffer
+many things rather than question their uncle and aunt.
+
+But David especially had had many secret thoughts he could not put
+away, of late, about his parents. And to hear his father's name
+dropped like this into the night moved the lad strangely. He lay
+close, listening with all his ears, expecting passionately, he knew
+not what.
+
+But nothing came--or the wind carried it away. When he was rested,
+Reuben got up and began to move about with the lantern, apparently
+throwing its light from side to side.
+
+'David! Louie!'
+
+The hoarse, weak voice, strained to its utmost pitch, died away on
+the night wind, and a weird echo came back from the cliffs of the
+Downfall.
+
+There was no menace in the cry--rather a piteous entreaty. The
+truant below had a strange momentary impulse to answer--to disclose
+himself. But it was soon past, and instead, he crept well out of
+reach of the rays which flashed over the precipitous ground about
+him. As he did so he noticed the Mermaid's Pool, gleaming in a pale
+ray of moonlight, some two hundred feet below. A sudden alarm
+seized him, lest Reuben should be caught by it, put two and two
+together and understand.
+
+But Reuben was absorbed in a discomfort, half moral, half
+superstitious, and nothing else reached the slow brain--which was
+besides preoccupied by Jim Wigson's suggestion. After a bit he
+picked up his stick and went on again. David, eagerly watching,
+tracked him along the path which follows the ridge, and saw the
+light pause once more close to the Downfall.
+
+So far as the boy could see, his uncle made a long stay at a point
+beyond the stream, the bed of which was just discernible, as a sort
+of paler streak on the darkness.
+
+'Why, that's about whar th' Edale path cooms in,' thought David,
+wondering. 'What ud he think we'd be doin theer?'
+
+Faint sounds came to him in a lull of the wind, as though Reuben
+were shouting again--shouting many times. Then the light went
+wavering on, defining in its course the curved ridge of the further
+moor, till at last it made a long circuit downwards, disappearing
+for a minute somewhere in the dark bosom of Kinder Low, about
+midway between earth and sky. David guessed that Uncle Reuben must
+be searching the smithy. Then it descended rapidly, till finally it
+vanished behind the hill far below, which was just distinguishable
+in the cloudy moonshine. Uncle Reuben had gone home.
+
+David drew a long breath. But that patient quest in the dark--the
+tone of the farmer's call--that mysterious word _Sandy_, had
+touched the boy, made him restless. His mood grew a little flat,
+even a little remorseful. The joy of their great adventure ebbed a
+little.
+
+However, he climbed down again to Louie, and found a dark elfish
+figure standing outside their den, and dancing with excitement.
+
+'Wouldn't yo like to ketch us--wouldn't yo?--wouldn't yo?'
+screeched the child, beside herself. She too had been watching, had
+seen the light vanish.
+
+'Yo'll have t' parish up after yo if yo doan't howd your tongue,'
+said David roughly.
+
+And creeping into their den he relit the lantern. Then he pulled
+out a watch, borrowed from the same friend who had provided the
+lantern. Past nine. Two hours and more before they need think of
+starting downwards for the Pool.
+
+Louie condescended to come in again, and the stone was drawn close.
+But how fierce the wind had grown, and how nipping was the air!
+David shivered, and looked about for the rugs. He wrapt Louie in
+the horse-rug, which was heaviest, and tucked the blanket round
+himself.
+
+'Howd that tight round yo,' he commanded, struck with an uneasy
+sense of responsibility, as he happened to notice how starved she
+looked, 'an goo to sleep if yo want to. I'll wake yo--I'm gooin to
+read.'
+
+Louie rolled the rug round her chrysalis-like, and then, disdaining
+the rest of David's advice, sat bolt upright against the rock, her
+wide-open eyes staring defiantly at all within their ken.
+
+The minutes went by. David sat close up against the lantern,
+bitterly cold, but reading voraciously. At last, however, a sharper
+gust than usual made him look up and turn restive. Louie still sat
+in the opposite corner as stiffly as before, but over the great
+staring eyes the lids had just fallen, sorely against their owner's
+will; the head was dropping against the rock; the child was fast
+asleep. It occurred to David she looked odd; the face seemed so
+grey and white. He instinctively took his own blanket and put it
+over her. The silence and helplessness of her sleep seemed to
+appeal to him, to change his mood towards her, for the action was
+brotherly and tender. Then he pushed the stone aside and crept out
+on to the moor.
+
+There he stood for a while, with his hands in his pockets, marking
+time to warm himself. How the wind bit to be sure!--and it would be
+colder still by dawn.
+
+The pool showed dimly beneath him, and the gruesome hour was
+stealing on them fast. His heart beat quick. The weirdness and
+loneliness of the night came home to him more than they had done
+yet. The old woman dragged to her death, the hooting crowd, the
+inexorable parson, the struggle in the water, the last gurgling
+cry--the vision rose before him on the dark with an ever ghastlier
+plainness than a while ago on the mountain-top. _How_ had 'Lias
+seen her that the sight had changed him so? Did she come to him
+with her drowned face and floating grey hair--grip him with her
+cold hands? David, beginning to thrill in good earnest, obstinately
+filled in the picture with all the horrible detail he could think
+of, so as to harden himself. Only now he wished with all his heart
+that Louie were safe at home.
+
+An idea occurred to him. He smiled at it, turned it over, gradually
+resolved upon it. She would lead him a life afterward, but what
+matter?--let her!
+
+From the far depths of the unseen valley a sound struck upwards,
+piercing through the noises of river and wind. It was the clock of
+Clough End church, tolling eleven.
+
+Well, one could not stand perishing there another hour. He stooped
+down and crawled in beside Louie. She was sleeping heavily, the
+added warmth of David's blanket conducing thereto. He hung over
+her, watching her breathing with a merry look, which gradually
+became a broad grin. It was a real shame--she would be just mad
+when she woke up. But mermaids were all stuff, and Jenny Crum would
+'skeer' her to death. Just in proportion as the adventure became
+more awesome and more real did the boy's better self awake. He grew
+soft for his sister, while, as he proudly imagined, iron for
+himself.
+
+He crept in under the blanket carefully so as not to disturb her.
+He was too tired and excited to read. He would think the hour out.
+So he lay staring at the opposite wall of rock, at its crevices,
+and creeping ants, at the odd lights and shadows thrown by the
+lantern, straining his eyes every now and then, that he might be
+the more sure how wide awake they were.
+
+Louie stretched herself. What was the matter? Where was she? What
+was that smell? She leant forward on her elbow. The lantern was
+just going out, and smelt intolerably. A cold grey light was in the
+little den. What? Where?
+
+A loud wail broke the morning silence, and David, sleeping
+profoundly, his open mouth just showing above the horse-rug, was
+roused by a shower of blows from Louie's fists. He stirred
+uneasily, tried to escape them by plunging deeper into the folds,
+but they pursued him vindictively.
+
+'Give ower!' he said at last, striking back at random, and then
+sitting up he rubbed his eyes. There was Louie sitting opposite to
+him, crying great tears of rage and pain, now rocking her ankle as
+if it hurt her, and now dealing cuffs at him.
+
+He hastily pulled out his watch. Half-past four o'clock!
+
+'Yo great gonner, yo!' sobbed Louie, her eyes blazing at him
+through her tears. 'Yo good-for-nowt, yo muffin-yed, yo donkey!' And
+so on through all the words of reviling known to the Derbyshire
+child. David looked extremely sheepish under them.
+
+Then suddenly he put his head down on his knees and shook with
+laughter. The absurdity of it all--of their preparations, of his
+own terrors, of the disturbance they had made, all to end in this
+flat and futile over-sleeping, seized upon him so that he could not
+control himself. He laughed till he cried, while Louie hit and
+abused him and cried too. But her crying had a different note, and
+at last he looked up at her, sobered.
+
+'Howd your tongue!--an doan't keep bully-raggin like 'at! What's t'
+matter wi yo?'
+
+For answer, she rolled over on the rock and lay on her face,
+howling with pain. David sprang up and bent over her.
+
+'What _iver's_ t' matter wi yo, Louie?'
+
+But she kept him off like a wild cat, and he could make nothing of
+her till her passion had spent itself and she was quiet again, from
+sheer exhaustion.
+
+Then David, who had been standing near, shivering, with his hands
+in his pockets, tried again.
+
+'Now, Louie, do coom home,' he said appealingly. 'I can find yo a
+place in t' stable ull be warmer nor this. You be parished if yo
+stay here.' For, ignorant as he was, her looks began to frighten
+him.
+
+Louie would have liked never to speak to him again. The thought of
+the blue cotton and of her own lost chance seemed to be burning a
+hole in her. But the stress of his miserable look drew her eyes
+open whether she would or no, and when she saw him her self-pity
+overcame her.
+
+'I conno walk,' she said, with a sudden loud sob. 'It's my leg.'
+
+'What's wrong wi't?' said David, inspecting it anxiously. 'It's got
+th' cowd in't, that's what it is; it's th' rheumatics, I speck. Yak
+howd on me, I'll help yo down.'
+
+And with much coaxing on his part and many cries and outbursts on
+hers he got her up at last, and out of the den. He had tied his tin
+box across his back, and Louie, with the rugs wrapped about her,
+clung, limping, and with teeth chattering, on to his arm. The child
+was in the first throes of a sharp attack of rheumatism, and half
+her joints were painful.
+
+That was a humiliating descent! A cold grey morning was breaking
+over the moor; the chimneys of the distant cotton-towns rose out of
+mists, under a sky streaked with windy cloud. The Mermaid's Pool,
+as they passed it, looked chill and mocking; and the world
+altogether felt so raw and lonely that David welcomed the first
+sheep they came across with a leap of the heart, and positively
+hungered for a first sight of the farm. How he got Louie--in whose
+cheeks the fever-spots were rising--over the river he never quite
+remembered. But at last he had dragged her up the hill, through the
+fields close to the house, where the lambs were huddling in the
+nipping dawn beside their mothers, and into the farmyard.
+
+The house rose before them grey and frowning. The lower windows
+were shuttered; in the upper ones the blinds were pulled closely
+down; not a sign of life anywhere. Yes; the dogs had heard them!
+Such a barking as began! Jock, in his kennel by the front door,
+nearly burst his chain in his joyful efforts to get at them; while
+Tib, jumping the half-door of the out-house in the back yard, where
+he had been curled up in a heap of bracken, leapt about them and
+barked like mad.
+
+Louie sank down crying and deathly pale on a stone by the stable
+door.
+
+'They'll hear that fast enoof,' said David, looking anxiously up at
+the shut windows.
+
+But the dogs went on barking, and nothing happened. Ten minutes of
+chilly waiting passed away.
+
+'Tak him away, _do!_' she cried, as Tib jumped up at her. 'No,
+I woan't!--I woan't!'
+
+The last words rose to a shriek, as David tried to persuade her to
+go into the stable, and let him make her a bed in the straw. He
+stood looking at her in despair. They had always supposed they
+would be locked out; but surely the sleepers inside must hear the
+dogs. He turned and stared at the house, hungering for some sign of
+life in it. Uncle Reuben would hear them--Uncle Reuben would let
+them in!
+
+But the blinds of the top room never budged. Louie, with her head
+against the stable-door, and her eyes shut, went on convulsively
+sobbing, while Tibby sniffed about her for sympathy. And the bitter
+wind coming from the Scout whistled through the yard and seemed to
+cut the shivering child like a knife.
+
+'I'll mak a clunter agen th' window wi some gravel,' said David at
+last, in desperation. And he picked up a handful and threw it,
+first cautiously, then recklessly. Yes!--at last a hand moved the
+blind--a hand the children knew well, and a face appeared to one
+side of it. Hannah Grieve had never looked so forbidding as at that
+moment. The boy caught one glance of a countenance pale with wrath
+and sleeplessness; of eyes that seemed to blaze at them through the
+window; then the blind fell. He waited breathlessly for minute
+after minute. Not a sound.
+
+Furiously he stooped for more gravel, and flung it again and again.
+For an age, as it seemed to him, no more notice was taken. At last,
+there was an agitation in the blind, as though more than one person
+was behind it. It was Hannah who lifted it again; but David thought
+he caught a motion of her arm as though she were holding some one
+else back. The lad pointed excitedly to Louie.
+
+'She's took bad!' he shouted. 'Uncle Reuben!--Uncle Reuben!--coom
+down an see for yorsel. If yo let her in, yo can keep me out as
+long as yo like!'
+
+Hannah looked at him, and at the figure huddled against the
+stable-door--looked deliberately, and then, as deliberately, pulled
+the blind down lower than before, and not a sign of Reuben
+anywhere.
+
+A crimson flame sprang to David's cheek. He rushed at the door, and
+while with one hand he banged away at the old knocker, he thumped
+with the other, kicking lustily the while at the panels, till
+Louie, almost forgetting her pains in the fierce excitement of the
+moment, thought he would kick them in. In the intervals of his
+blows, David could hear voices inside in angry debate.
+
+'Uncle Reuben!' he shouted, stopping the noise for a moment, 'Uncle
+Reuben, Louie's turned sick! She's clemmed wi t' cold. If yo doan't
+open th' door, I'll go across to Wigson's, and tell 'em as Louie's
+parishin, an yo're bein th' death on her.'
+
+The bolt shot back, and there stood Reuben, his red hair sticking
+up wildly from his head, his frame shaking with unusual excitement.
+
+'What are yo makin that roompus for, Davy?' began Reuben, with
+would-be severity. 'Ha done wi yo, or I'll have to tak a stick to
+yo.'
+
+But the boy stood akimbo on the steps, and the old farmer shrank
+before him, as David's black eye travelled past him to a gaunt
+figure on the stairs.
+
+'Yo'll tak noa stick to me, Uncle Reuben. I'll not put up wi it,
+and yo know it. I'm goin to bring Louie in. We've bin on t' moor by
+t' Pool lookin for th' owd witch, an we both on us fell asleep, an
+Louie's took the rheumatics.--Soa theer.--Stan out o' t' way.'
+
+And running back to Louie, who cried out as he lifted her up, he
+half carried, half dragged her in.
+
+'Why, she's like death,' cried Reuben. 'Hannah! summat hot--at
+woonst.'
+
+But Hannah did not move. She stood at the foot of the stairs,
+barring the way, the chill morning light falling on her threatening
+attitude, her grey dishevelled hair and all the squalid disarray of
+her dress.
+
+'Them as doos like beggar's brats,' she said grimly, 'may fare like
+'em. _I_'ll do nowt for 'em.'
+
+The lad came up to her, his look all daring and resolution--his
+sister on his arm. But as he met the woman's expression, his lips
+trembled, he suddenly broke down.
+
+'Now, look here,' he cried, with a sob in his throat. 'I know we're
+beggar's brats. I know yo hate th' seet on us. But I wor t' worst.
+I'm t' biggest. Tak Louie in, and bully-rag me as mich as yo like.
+Louie--_Louie_!' and he hung over her in a frenzy, 'wake up,
+Louie!'
+
+But the child was insensible. Fatigue, the excitement of the
+struggle, the anguish of movement had done their work--she lay like
+a log upon his arm.
+
+'She's fainted,' said Hannah, recognising the fact with a sort of
+fierce reluctance. 'Tak her up, an doan't stan blatherin theer.'
+
+And she moved out of the way.
+
+The boy gathered up the thin figure, and, stumbling over the
+tattered rugs, carried her up by a superhuman effort.
+
+Reuben leant against the passage wall, staring at his wife.
+
+'Yo're a hard woman, Hannah--a hard woman,' he said to her under
+his breath, in a low, shaken voice. 'An yo coed 'em beggar's
+brats--oh Lord--Lord!'
+
+'Howd your tongue, an blow up t' fire,' was all the reply she
+vouchsafed him, and Reuben obeyed.
+
+Meanwhile upstairs Louie had been laid on her bed. Consciousness
+had come back, and she was moaning.
+
+David stood beside her in utter despair. He thought she was going
+to die, and he had done it. At last he sank down beside her, and
+flinging an arm round her, he laid his hot cheek to her icy one.
+
+'Louie, doan't--doan't--I'll tak yo away from here, Louie, when I
+can. I'll tak care on yo, Louie. Doan't, Louie,--doan't!'
+
+His whole being seemed rent asunder by sympathy and remorse. Uncle
+Reuben, coming up with some hot gruel, found him sitting on the bed
+beside his sister, on whom he had heaped all the clothing he could
+find, the tears running down his cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+From that night forward, David looked upon the farm and all his
+life there with other eyes.
+
+Up till now, in spite of the perennial pressure of Hannah's
+tyrannies, which, however, weighed much less upon him than upon
+Louie, he had been--as he had let Reuben see--happy enough. The
+open-air life, the animals, his books, out of all of them he
+managed to extract a very fair daily sum of enjoyment. And he had
+been content enough with his daily tasks--herding the sheep, doing
+the rough work of the stable and cow-house, running Aunt Hannah's
+errands with the donkey-cart to Clough End, helping in the
+haymaking and the sheep-shearing, or the driving of stock to and
+from the various markets Reuben frequented. All these things he had
+done with a curious placidity, a detachment and yet readiness of
+mind, as one who lends himself, without reluctance, to a life not
+his own. It was this temper mainly, helped, no doubt, by his
+unusual tastes and his share of foreign blood and looks, which had
+set him apart from the other lads of his own class in the
+neighbourhood. He had few friends of his own age, yet he was not
+unpopular, except, perhaps, with an overbearing animal like Jim
+Wigson, who instinctively looked upon other people's brains as an
+offence to his own muscular pretensions.
+
+But his Easter Eve struggle with Hannah closed, as it were, a
+childhood, which, though hard and loveless, had been full of
+compensations and ignorant of its own worst wants. It woke in him
+the bitterness of the orphan dependant, who feels himself a burden
+and loathes his dependence. That utter lack of the commonest
+natural affection, in which he and Louie had been brought up--for
+Reuben's timorous advances had done but little to redress the
+balance--had not troubled him much, till suddenly it was writ so
+monstrous large in Hannah's refusal to take pity on the fainting
+and agonised Louie. Thenceforward every morsel of food he took at
+her hands seemed to go against him. They were paupers, and Aunt
+Hannah hated them. The fact had been always there, but it had never
+meant anything substantial to him till now. Now, at last, that
+complete dearth of love, in which he had lived since his father
+died, began to react in revolt and discontent.
+
+The crisis may have been long preparing, those words of his uncle
+as to his future, as well as the incident of their locking out, may
+have had something to say to it. Anyway, a new reflective temper
+set in. The young immature creature became self-conscious, began to
+feel the ferments of growth. The ambition and the restlessness his
+father had foreseen, with dying eyes, began to stir.
+
+Reuben's qualms returned upon him. On the 15th of May, he and David
+went to Woodhead, some sixteen or seventeen miles off, to receive
+the young stock from the Yorkshire breeders, which were to be
+grazed on the farm during the summer. In general, David had taken
+the liveliest interest in the animals, in the number and quality of
+them, in the tariff to be paid for them, and the long road there
+and back had been cheered for the farmer by the lad's chatter, and
+by the athletic antics he was always playing with any handy gate or
+tree which crossed their path.
+
+'Them heifers ull want a deal o' grass puttin into 'em afoor
+they'll be wuth onybody's buyin, Davy,' said Reuben, inspecting his
+mixed herd with a critical eye from a roadside bank, as they
+climbed the first hill on their return journey.
+
+'Aye, they're a poor lot,' returned David, shortly, and walked on
+as far in front of his uncle as might be, with his head in the air
+and his moody look fixed on the distance.
+
+'T' Wigsons ull be late gettin whoam,' began Reuben again, with an
+uneasy look at the boy. 'Owd Wigson wor that full up wi yell when I
+last seed him they'll ha a job to get him started straight this
+neet.'
+
+To this remark David had nothing at all to say, though in general
+he had a keen neighbourly relish for the misdeeds of the Wigsons.
+Reuben did not know what to make of him. However, a mile further on
+he made another attempt:
+
+'Lord, how those Yorkshire breeders did talk! Yo'd ha thowt they'd
+throw their jaws off the hinges. An a lot o' gimcrack notions as
+iver wor--wi their new foods, an their pills an strengthening
+mixtures--messin wi cows as though they wor humans. Why conno they
+leave God Awmighty alone? He can bring a calvin cow through beawt
+ony o' their meddlin, I'll uphowd yo!'
+
+But still not a word from the lad in front. Reuben might as well
+have talked to the wall beside him. He had grown used to the boy's
+companionship, and the obstinate silence which David still
+preserved from hour to hour as they drove their stock homewards
+made a sensible impression on him.
+
+Inside the house there was a constant, though in general a silent,
+struggle going on between the boy and Hannah on the subject of
+Louie. Louie, after the escapade of Easter Eve, was visited with a
+sharp attack of inflammatory rheumatism, only just stopping
+short of rheumatic fever. Hannah got a doctor, and tended her
+sufficiently while the worst lasted, partly because she was, after
+all, no monster, but only a commonly sordid and hard-natured woman,
+and partly because for a day or two Louie's state set her
+pondering, perforce, what might be the effect on Mr. Gurney's
+remittances if the child incontinently died. This thought
+undoubtedly quickened whatever natural instincts might be left in
+Hannah Grieve; and the child had her doctor, and the doctor's
+orders were more or less followed.
+
+But when she came downstairs again--a lanky, ghostly creature, much
+grown, her fierce black eyes more noticeable than ever in her
+pinched face--Hannah's appetite for 'snipin'--to use the expressive
+Derbyshire word--returned upon her. The child was almost bullied
+into her bed again--or would have been if David had not found ways
+of preventing it. He realised for the first time that, as the young
+and active male of the household, he was extremely necessary to
+Hannah's convenience, and now whenever Hannah ill-treated Louie her
+convenience suffered. David disappeared. Her errands were undone,
+the wood uncut, and coals and water had to be carried as they best
+could. As to reprisals, with a strong boy of fourteen, grown very
+nearly to a man's height, Hannah found herself a good deal at a
+loss. 'Bully-raggin' he took no more account of than of a shower of
+rain; blows she instinctively felt it would have been dangerous to
+attempt; and as to deprivation of food, the lad seemed to thrive on
+hunger, and never whistled so loudly as when, according to Hannah's
+calculations, he must have been as 'keen-bitten as a hawk.' For the
+first time in her life Hannah was to some extent tamed. When there
+was business about she generally felt it expedient to let Louie
+alone.
+
+But this sturdy protection was more really a matter of roused pride
+and irritation on David's part than of brotherly love. It was the
+tragedy of Louie Grieve's fate--whether as child or woman--that she
+was not made to be loved. Whether _she_ could love, her story
+will show; but to love her when you were close to her was always
+hard. How different the days would have been for the moody lad, who
+had at last learnt to champion her, if their common isolation and
+dependence had but brought out in her towards him anything
+clinging--anything confidential, any true spirit of comradeship! On
+the contrary, while she was still ill in bed, and almost absolutely
+dependent on what he might choose to do for her, she gibed and
+flouted him past bearing, mainly, no doubt, for the sake of
+breaking the tedium of her confinement a little. And when she was
+about again, and he was defending her weakness from Aunt Hannah, it
+seemed to him that she viewed his proceedings rather with a
+malicious than a grateful eye. It amused and excited her to see him
+stand up to Hannah, but he got little reward from her for his
+pains.
+
+She was, as it were, always watching him with a sort of secret
+discontent. He did not suit her--was not congenial to her.
+Especially was she exasperated now more than ever by his bookish
+tastes. Possibly she was doubly jealous of his books; at any rate,
+unless he had been constantly on his guard, she would have hidden
+them, or done them a mischief whenever she could, in her teasing,
+magpie way.
+
+One morning, in the grey summer dawn, Louie had just wakened, and
+was staring sleepily at the door, when, all of a sudden, it
+opened--very quietly, as though pushed by some one anxious not to
+make a noise--and Reuben's head looked round it. Louie, amazed,
+woke up in earnest, and Reuben came stealthily in. He had his hat
+and stick under his arm, and one hand held his boots, while he
+stepped noiselessly in his stocking feet across the room to where
+Louie lay--'Louie, are yo awake?'
+
+The child stared up at him, seeing mostly his stubble of red hair,
+which came like a grotesque halo between her and the wall. Then she
+nodded.
+
+'Doan't let yor aunt hear nothin, Louie. She thinks I'm gone out to
+th' calves. But, Louie, that merchant I towd yo on came yesterday,
+an he wor a hard un, he wor--as tough as nails, a sight worse nor
+owd Croker to deal wi, ony day in th' week. I could mak nowt on
+him--an he gan me sich a poor price. I darn't tak a penny on 't
+from your aunt--noa, I darn't, Louie,--not if it wor iver so.
+She'll be reet down mad when she knaws--an I'm real sorry about
+that bit dress o' yourn, Louie.'
+
+He stood looking down at her, his spectacles falling forward on his
+nose, the corners of his mouth drooping--a big ungainly culprit.
+
+For a second or two the child was quite still, nothing but the
+black eyes and tossed masses of hair showing above the sheet. Then
+the eyes blinked suddenly, and flinging out her hand at him with a
+passionate gesture, as though to push him away, she turned on her
+face and drew the bedclothes over her head.
+
+'Louie!' he said--'Louie!'
+
+But she made no sign, and, at last, with a grotesquely concerned
+face, he went out of the room and downstairs, hanging his head.
+
+Out of doors, he found David already at work in the cowhouse, but
+as surly and uncommunicative as before when he was spoken to. That
+the lad had turned 'agen his wark,' and was on his way to hate the
+farm and all it contained, was plain even to Reuben. Why was he so
+glum and silent--why didn't he speak up? Perhaps he would, Reuben's
+conscience replied, if it were conveyed to him that he possessed a
+substantial portion of six hundred pounds!
+
+The boy knew that his uncle watched him--anxiously, as one watches
+something explosive and incalculable--and felt a sort of contempt
+for himself that nothing practical came of his own revolt and
+discontent. But he was torn with indecision. How to leave
+Louie--what to do with himself without a farthing in the
+world--whom to go to for advice? He thought often of Mr. Ancrum,
+but a fierce distaste for chapels and ministers had been growing on
+him, and he had gradually seen less and less of the man who had
+been the kind comrade and teacher of his early childhood. His only
+real companions during this year of moody adolescence were his
+books. From the forgotten deposit in the old meal-ark upstairs,
+which had yielded 'Paradise Lost,' he drew other treasures by
+degrees. He found there, in all, some tattered leaves--three or
+four books altogether--of Pope's 'Iliad,' about half of Foxe's
+'Martyrs'--the rest having been used apparently by the casual
+nurses, who came to tend Reuben's poor mother in her last days,
+to light the fire--a complete copy of Locke 'On the Human
+Understanding,' and various volumes of old Calvinist sermons, which
+he read, partly because his reading appetite was insatiable, partly
+from a half-contemptuous desire to find out what it might be that
+Uncle Reuben was always troubling his head about.
+
+As to 'Lias Dawson, David saw nothing of him for many long weeks
+after the scene which had led to the adventure of the Pool. He
+heard only that 'Lias was 'bad,' and mostly in his bed, and feeling
+a little guilty, he hardly knew why, the lad kept away from his old
+friend.
+
+Summer and the early autumn passed away. October brought a spell of
+wintry weather; and one day, as he was bringing the sheep home, he
+met old Margaret, 'Lias's wife. She stopped and accosted him.
+
+'Why doan't yo coom and see 'Lias sometimes, Davy, my lad? Yo might
+leeten him up a bit, an' he wants it, t' Lord knows. He's been
+fearfu' bad in his sperrits this summer.'
+
+The lad stammered out some sheepish excuses, and soon made his way
+over to Frimley Moor. But the visits were not so much pleasure as
+usual. 'Lias was very feeble, and David had a constant temptation to
+struggle with. He understood that to excite 'Lias, to throw him
+again into the frenzy which had begotten the vision of the Pool,
+would be a cruel act. But all the same he found it more and more
+difficult to restrain himself, to keep back the questions which
+burnt on his tongue.
+
+As for 'Lias, his half-shut eye would brighten whenever David
+showed himself at the door, and he would point to a wooden stool on
+the other side of the fire.
+
+'Sit tha down, lad. Margret, gie him soom tay,' or 'Margret, yo'll
+just find him a bit oatcake.'
+
+And then the two would fall upon their books together, and the
+conversation would glide imperceptibly into one of those scenes of
+half-dramatic impersonation, for which David's relish was still
+unimpaired.
+
+But the old man was growing much weaker; his inventions had less
+felicity, less range than of old; and the watchful Margaret, at her
+loom in the corner, kept an eye on any signs of an undue
+excitement, and turned out David or any other visitor, neck and
+crop, without scruple, as soon as it seemed to her that her
+crippled seer was doing himself a mischief. Poor soul! she had
+lived in this tumult of 'Lias's fancies year after year, till the
+solid world often turned about her. And she, all the while, so
+simple, so sane--the ordinary good woman, with the ordinary woman's
+hunger for the common blessings of life--a little love, a little
+chat, a little prosaic well-being! She had had two sons--they were
+gone. She had been the proud wife 'o' t' cliverest mon atwixt
+Sheffield an Manchester,' as Frimley and the adjacent villages had
+once expressed it, when every mother that respected herself sent
+her children to 'Lias Dawson's school. And the mysterious chances
+of a summer night had sent home upon her hands a poor incapable,
+ruined in mind and body, who was to live henceforward upon her
+charity, wandering amid the chaotic wreck and debris of his former
+self.
+
+Well, she took up her burden!
+
+The straggling village on Frimley Moor was mainly inhabited by a
+colony of silk hand-loom weavers--the descendants of French
+prisoners in the great war, and employed for the most part by a
+firm at Leck. Very dainty work was done at Frimley, and very
+beautiful stuffs made. The craft went from father to son. All
+Margaret's belongings had been weavers; but 'Lias, in the pride of
+his schoolmaster's position, would never allow his wife to use the
+trade of her youth. When he became dependent on her, Margaret
+bought a disused loom from a cousin, had it mended and repaired,
+and set to work. Her fingers had not forgotten their old cunning;
+and when she was paid for her first 'cut,' she hurried home to
+'Lias with a reviving joy in her crushed heart. Thenceforward, she
+lived at her loom; she became a skilled and favoured worker, and
+the work grew dear to her--first, because 'Lias lived on it, and,
+next, because the bright roses and ribbon-patterns she wove into
+her costly stuffs were a perpetual cheer to her. The moors might
+frown outside, the snow might drift against the cottage walls:
+Margaret had always something gay under her fingers, and threw her
+shuttle with the more zest the darker and colder grew the
+Derbyshire world without.
+
+Naturally the result of this long concentration of effort had been
+to make the poor soul, for whom each day was lived and fought, the
+apple of Margaret's eye. So long as that bent, white form sat
+beside her fire, Margaret was happy. Her heart sank with every
+fresh sign of age and weakness, revived with every brighter hour.
+He still lorded it over her often, as he had done in the days of
+their prosperity, and whenever this old mood came back upon him,
+Margaret could have cried for pleasure.
+
+The natural correlative of such devotion was a drying up of
+interest in all the world beside. Margaret had the selfishness of
+the angelic woman--everything was judged as it affected her idol.
+So at first she took no individual interest in David--he cheered up
+'Lias--she had no other thought about him.
+
+On a certain November day David was sitting opposite to 'Lias. The
+fire burnt between them, and on the fire was a griddle, whereon
+Margaret had just deposited some oatcakes for tea. The old man was
+sitting drooped in his chair, his chin on his breast, his black
+eyes staring beyond David at the wall. David was seized with
+curiosity--what was he thinking about?--what did he see? There was
+a mystery, a weirdness about the figure, about that hungry gaze,
+which tormented him. His temptation returned upon him irresistibly.
+
+'Lias,' he said, bending forward, his dark cheek flushing with
+excitement, 'Louie and I went up, Easter Eve, to t' Pool, but we
+went to sleep an saw nowt. What was't yo saw, 'Lias? Did yo see her
+for sure?'
+
+The old man raised his head frowning, and looked at the boy. But
+the frown was merely nervous, he had heard nothing. On the other
+hand, Margaret, whom David had supposed to be in the back kitchen,
+but who was in reality a few steps behind him, mending something
+which had gone wrong in her loom, ran forward suddenly to the fire,
+and bending over her griddle somehow promptly threw down the tongs,
+making a clatter and commotion, in the midst of which the cakes
+caught, and old 'Lias moved from the fender, saying fretfully,
+
+'Yo're that orkard wi things, Margret, yo're like a dog dancin.'
+
+But in the bustle Margaret had managed to say to David, 'Howd your
+tongue, noddle-yed, will yo?'
+
+And so unexpected was the lightning from her usually mild blue eyes
+that David sat dumbfounded, and presently sulkily got up to go.
+Margaret followed him out and down the bit of garden.
+
+And at the gate, when they were well out of hearing of 'Lias, she
+fell on the boy with a torrent of words, gripping him the while
+with her long thin hand, so that only violence could have released
+him. Her eyes flamed at him under the brown woollen shawl she wore
+pinned under her chin; the little emaciated creature became a fury.
+What did he come there for, 'moiderin 'Lias wi his divilments'? If
+he ever said a word of such things again, she'd lock the door on
+him, and he might go to Jenny Crum for his tea. Not a bite or a sup
+should he ever have in her house again.
+
+'I meant no harm,' said the boy doggedly. 'It wor he towd me about
+t' witch--it wor he as put it into our yeds--Louie an me.'
+
+Margaret exclaimed. So it was he that got 'Lias talking about the
+Pool in the spring! Some one had been 'cankin wi him about things
+they didn't owt'--that she knew--'and she might ha thowt it wor'
+Davy. For that one day's 'worritin ov him' she had had him on her
+hands for weeks--off his sleep, and off his feed, and like a
+blighted thing. 'Aye, it's aw play to yo,' she said, trembling all
+through in her passion, as she held the boy--'it's aw play to yo
+and your minx of a sister. An if it means deein to the old man
+hissel, _yo_ don't care! "Margaret," says the doctor to me
+last week, "if you can keep his mind quiet he may hang on a bit.
+But you munna let him excite hissel about owt--he mun tak things
+varra easy. He's like a wilted leaf--nobbut t'least thing will
+bring it down. He's worn varra thin like, heart an lungs, and aw t'
+rest of him." An d' yo think I'st sit still an see yo _murder_
+him--the poor lamb--afore my eyes--me as ha got nowt else but him
+i' t' wide warld? No--yo yoong varlet--goo an ast soom one else
+about Jenny Crum if yo 're just set on meddlin wi divil's wark--but
+yo'll no trouble my 'Lias.'
+
+She took her hands off him, and the boy was going away in a
+half-sullen silence, when she caught him again.
+
+'Who towd yo about 'Lias an t' Pool, nobbut 'Lias hissel?'
+
+'Uncle Reuben towd me summat.'
+
+'Aye, Reuben Grieve--he put him in t' carrier's cart, an behaved
+moor like a Christian nor his wife--I allus mind that o' Reuben
+Grieve, when foak coe him a foo. Wal, I'st tell yo, Davy, an if
+iver yo want to say a word about Jenny Crum in our house
+afterwards, yo mun ha a gritstone whar your heart owt to be--that's
+aw.'
+
+And she leant over the wall of the little garden, twisting her
+apron in her old, tremulous hands, and choking down the tears which
+had begun to rise. Then, looking straight before her, and in a low,
+plaintive voice, which seemed to float on hidden depths of grief,
+she told her story.
+
+It appeared that 'Lias had been 'queer' a good while before the
+adventure of the Pool. But, according to his wife, 'he wor that
+cliver on his good days, foak could mak shift wi him on his bad
+days;' the school still prospered, and money was still plentiful.
+Then, all of a sudden, the moorland villages round were overtaken
+by an epidemic of spirit-rapping and table-turning. 'It wor sperrits
+here, sperrits there, sperrits everywhere--t' warld wor gradely
+swarmin wi 'em,' said Margaret bitterly. It was all started,
+apparently, by a worthless 'felly' from Castleton, who had a great
+reputation as a medium, and would come over on summer evenings to
+conduct seances at Frimley and the places near. 'Lias, already in an
+excitable, overworked state, was bitten by the new mania, and could
+think of nothing else.
+
+One night he and the Castleton medium fell talking about Jenny
+Crum, the witch of Kinder Scout, and her Easter Eve performances.
+The medium bet 'Lias a handsome sum that he would not dare face
+her. 'Lias, piqued and wrathful, and 'wi moor yell on board nor he
+could reetly stan,' took the bet. Margaret heard nothing of it. He
+announced on Easter Eve that he was going to a brother in Edale for
+the Sunday, and gave her the slip. She saw no more of him till the
+carrier brought home to her, on the Sunday morning, a starved and
+pallid object--'gone clean silly, an hutched thegither like an owd
+man o' seventy--he bein fifty-six by his reet years.' With woe and
+terror she helped him to his bed, and in that bed he stayed for
+more than a year, while everything went from them--school and
+savings, and all the joys of life.
+
+'An yo'll be wantin to know, like t' rest o' 'em, what he saw!'
+cried Margaret angrily, facing round upon the boy, whose face was,
+indeed, one question.' "Margaret, did he tell tha what t' witch
+said to un?"--every blatherin idiot i' th' parish asked me that, wi
+his mouth open, till I cud ha stopped my ears an run wheniver I
+seed a livin creetur. What do I keer?--what doos it matter to me
+what he saw? I doan't bleeve he saw owt, if yo ast _me_. He
+wor skeert wi his own thinkins, an th' cowd gripped him i' th'
+in'ards, an twisted him as yo may twist a withe of hay--Aye! it wor
+a _cruel_ neet. When I opened t' door i' t' early mornin, t'
+garden wor aw black--th' ice on t' reservoir wor inches thick. Mony
+a year afterwards t' foak round here ud talk o' that for an April
+frost. An my poor 'Lias--lost on that fearfu Scout--sleepin out
+wi'out a rag to cover him, an skeert soomhow--t'Lord or t'Devil
+knows how! And then foak ud have me mak a good tale out o'
+it--soomthin to gie 'em a ticklin down their backbane--soomthin to
+pass an evenin--_Lord!'_
+
+The wife's voice paused abruptly on this word of imprecation, or
+appeal, as though her own passion choked her. David stood beside
+her awkwardly, his eyes fixed on the gravel, wherewith one foot was
+playing. There was no more sullenness in his expression.
+
+Margaret's hand still played restlessly with the handkerchief. Her
+eyes were far away, her mind absorbed by the story of her own fate.
+Round the moorside, on which the cottage was built, there bent a
+circling edge of wood, now aflame with all the colour of late
+autumn. Against its deep reds and browns, Margaret's small profile
+was thrown out--the profile already of the old woman, with the
+meeting nose and chin, the hollow cheek, the maze of wrinkles round
+the eyes. Into that face, worn by the labour and the grief of the
+poor--into that bending figure, with the peasant shawl folded round
+the head and shoulders--there had passed all the tragic dignity
+which belongs to the simple and heartfelt things of human life, to
+the pain of helpless affection, to the yearning of irremediable
+loss.
+
+The boy beside her was too young to feel this. But he felt more,
+perhaps, than any other lad of the moorside could have felt. There
+was, at all times, a natural responsiveness in him of a strange
+kind, vibrating rather to pain than joy. He stood by her,
+embarrassed, yet drawn to her--waiting, too, as it seemed to him,
+for something more that must be coming.
+
+'An then,' said Margaret at last, turning to him, and speaking more
+quietly, but still in a kind of tense way, 'then, when 'Lias wor
+took bad, yo know, Davy, I had my boys. Did yo ever hear tell o'
+what came to 'em, Davy?'
+
+The boy shook his head.
+
+'Ah!' she said, catching her breath painfully, 'they're moast
+forgotten, is my boys. 'Lias had been seven weeks i' his bed, an I
+wor noan so mich cast down--i' those days I had a sperrit more 'n
+most. I thowt th' boys ud keer for us--we'd gien em a good bringin
+up, an they wor boath on 'em larnin trades i' Manchester. Yan
+evenin--it wor that hot we had aw t' doors an windows open--theer
+came a man runnin up fro t' railway. An my boys were kilt,
+Davy--boath on 'em--i' Duley Moor Tunnel. They wor coomin to spend
+Sunday wi us, an it wor an excursion train--I niver knew t' reets
+on 't!'
+
+She paused and gently wiped away her tears. Her passion had all
+ebbed.
+
+'An I thowt if I cud ha got 'em home an buried 'em, Davy, I could
+ha borne it better. But they wor aw crushed, an cut about, an
+riddlet to bits--they wudna let me ha em. And so we kep it fro
+'Lias. Soomtimes I think he knows t' boys are dead--an then
+soomtimes he frets 'at they doan't coom an see him. Fourteen year
+ago! An I goo on tellin him they'll coom soon. An last week, when I
+towd him it, I thowt to mysel it wor just th' naked truth!'
+
+David leant over the gate, pulling at some withered hollyhocks
+beside it. But when, after a minute of choking silence, Margaret
+caught his look, she saw, though he tried to hide it, that his
+black eyes were swimming. Her full heart melted altogether.
+
+'Oh, Davy, I meant naw offence!' she said, catching him by the arm
+again. 'Yo're a good lad, an yo're allus a welcome seet to that poor
+creetur. But yo'll not say owt to trouble him again, laddie--will
+yo? If he'd yeerd yo just now--but, by t' Lord's blessin, he did
+na--he'd ha worked himsel up fearfu'! I'd ha had naw sleep wi him
+for neets--like it wor i' th' spring. Yo munna--yo munna! He's all
+I ha--his livin 's my livin, Davy--an when he's took away--why,
+I'll mak shift soomhow to dee too!'
+
+She let him go, and, with a long sigh, she lifted her trembling
+hands to her head, put her frilled cap straight and her shawl. She
+was just moving away, when something of a different sort struck her
+sensitive soul, and she turned again. She lived for 'Lias, but she
+lived for her religion too, and it seemed to her she had been
+sinning in her piteous talk.
+
+'Dinna think, Davy,' she said hurriedly, 'as I'm complainin o' th'
+Lord's judgments. They're aw mercies, if we did but know. An He
+tempers th' wind--He sends us help when we're droppin for sorrow.
+It worn't for nothin He made us all o' a piece. Theer's good foak
+i' th' warld--aye, theer is! An what's moor, theer's soom o' th'
+best mak o' foak gooin about dressed i' th' worst mak o' clothes.
+Yo'll find it out when yo want 'em.'
+
+And with a clearing face, as of one who takes up a burden again and
+adjusts it anew more easily, she walked back to the house.
+
+David went down the lane homewards, whistling hard. But once, as he
+climbed a stile and sat dangling his legs a moment on the top, he
+felt his eyes wet again. He dashed his hand impatiently across
+them. At this stage of youth he was constantly falling out with and
+resenting his own faculty of pity, of emotion. The attitude of mind
+had in it a sort of secret half-conscious terror of what feeling
+might do with him did he but give it head. He did not want to
+feel--feeling only hurt and stabbed--he wanted to enjoy, to take
+in, to discover--to fling the wild energies of mind and body into
+some action worthy of them. And because he had no knowledge to show
+him how, and a wavering will, he suffered and deteriorated.
+
+The Dawsons, indeed, became his close friends. In Margaret there
+had sprung up a motherly affection for the handsome lonely lad; and
+he was grateful. He took her 'cuts' down to the Clough End office
+for her; when the snow was deep on the Scout, and Reuben and David
+and the dogs were out after their sheep night and day, the boy
+still found time to shovel the snow from Margaret's roof and cut a
+passage for her to the road. The hours he spent this winter by her
+kitchen fire, chatting with 'Lias, or eating havercakes, or helping
+Margaret with some household work, supplied him for the first time
+with something of what his youth was, in truth, thirsting for--the
+common kindliness of natural affection.
+
+But certainly, to most observers, he seemed to deteriorate. Mr.
+Ancrum could make nothing of him. David held the minister at
+arm's-length, and meanwhile rumours reached him that 'Reuben
+Grieve's nevvy' was beginning to be much seen in the public-houses;
+he had ceased entirely to go to chapel or Sunday school; and the
+local gossips, starting perhaps from a natural prejudice against
+the sons of unknown and probably disreputable mothers, prophesied
+freely that the tall, queer-looking lad would go to the bad.
+
+All this troubled Mr. Ancrum sincerely. Even in the midst of some
+rising troubles of his own he found the energy to buttonhole Reuben
+again, and torment him afresh on the subject of a trade for the
+lad.
+
+Reuben, flushed and tremulous, went straight from the minister to
+his wife--with the impetus of Mr. Ancrum's shove, as it were, fresh
+upon him. Sitting opposite to her in the back kitchen, while she
+peeled her potatoes with a fierce competence and energy which made
+his heart sick within him, Reuben told her, with incoherent
+repetitions of every phrase, that in his opinion the time had come
+when Mr. Gurney should be written to, and some of Sandy's savings
+applied to the starting of Sandy's son in the world.
+
+There was an ominous silence. Hannah's knife flashed, and the
+potato-peelings fell with a rapidity which fairly paralysed Reuben.
+In his nervousness, he let fall the name of Mr. Ancrum. Then Hannah
+broke out. '_Some_ foo',' she knew, had been meddling, and she
+might have guessed that fool was Mr. Ancrum. Instead of defending
+her own position, she fell upon Reuben and his supporter with a
+rhetoric whereof the moral flavour was positively astounding.
+Standing with the potato-bowl on one hip and a hand holding the
+knife on the other, she delivered her views as to David's laziness,
+temper, and general good-for-nothingness. If Reuben chose to incur
+the risks of throwing such a young lout into town-wickedness, with
+no one to look after him, let him; she'd be glad enough to be shut
+on him. But, as to writing to Mr. Gurney and that sort of talk, she
+wasn't going to bandy words--not she; but nobody had ever meddled
+with Hannah Grieve's affairs yet and found they had done well for
+themselves.
+
+'An I wouldna advise yo, Reuben Grieve, to begin now--no, I
+wouldna. I gie yo fair noatice. Soa theer's not enough for t' lad
+to do, Mr. Ancrum, he thinks? Perhaps he'll tak th' place an try?
+I'd not gie him as mich wage as ud fill his stomach i' th'
+week--noa, I'd not, not if yo wor to ask _me_--a bletherin
+windy chap as iver I saw. I'd as soon hear a bird-clapper preach as
+him--theer'd be more sense an less noise! An they're findin it out
+down theer--we'st see th' back on him soon.'
+
+And to Reuben, looking across the little scullery at his wife, at
+the harsh face shaken with the rage which these new and intolerable
+attempts of her husband to dislodge the yoke of years excited in
+her, it was as though like Christian and Hopeful he were trying to
+get back into the Way, and found that the floods had risen over it.
+
+When he was out of her sight, he fell into a boundless perplexity.
+Perhaps she was right, after all. Mr. Ancrum was a meddler and he
+an ass. When next he saw David, he spoke to the boy harshly, and
+demanded to know where he went loafing every afternoon. Then, as
+the days went on, he discovered that Hannah meant to visit his
+insubordination upon him in various unpleasant ways. There were
+certain little creature comforts, making but small show on the
+surface of a life of general abstinence and frugality, but which,
+in the course of years, had grown very important to Reuben, and
+which Hannah had never denied him. They were now withdrawn. In her
+present state of temper with her better half, Hannah could not be
+'fashed' with providing them. And no one could force her to brew him
+his toddy at night, or put his slippers to warm, or keep his meals
+hot and tasty for him, if some emergency among the animals made him
+late for his usual hours--certainly not the weak and stammering
+Reuben. He was at her mercy, and he chafed indescribably under her
+unaccustomed neglect.
+
+As for Mr. Ancrum, his own affairs, poor soul, soon became so
+absorbing that he had no thoughts left for David. There were
+dissensions growing between him and the 'Christian Brethren.' He
+spoke often at the Sunday meetings--too often, by a great deal, for
+the other shining lights of the congregation. But his much speaking
+seemed to come rather of restlessness than of a fall 'experience,'
+so torn, subtle, and difficult were the things he said. Grave
+doubts of his doctrine were rising among some of the 'Brethren'; a
+mean intrigue against him was just starting among others, and he
+himself was tempest-tossed, not knowing from week to week whether
+to go or stay.
+
+Meanwhile, as the winter went on, he soon perceived that Reuben
+Grieve's formidable wife was added to the ranks of his enemies. She
+came to chapel, because for a Christian Brother or Sister to go
+anywhere else would have been a confession of weakness in the face
+of other critical and observant communities--such, for instance, as
+the Calvinistic Methodists, or the Particular Baptists--not to be
+thought of for a moment. But when he passed her, he got no greeting
+from her; she drew her skirts aside, and her stony eye looked
+beyond him, as though there were nothing on the road. And the
+sharp-tongued things she said of him came round to him one by one.
+Reuben, too, avoided the minister, who, a year or two before, had
+brought fountains of refreshing to his soul, and in the business of
+the chapel, of which he was still an elder, showed himself more
+inarticulate and confused than ever. While David, who had won a
+corner in Mr. Ancrum's heart since the days of their first
+acquaintance at Sunday-school--David fled him altogether, and would
+have none of his counsel or his friendship. The alienation of the
+Grieves made another and a bitter drop in the minister's rising cup
+of failure.
+
+So the little web of motives and cross-motives, for the most part
+of the commonest earthiest hue, yet shot every here and there by a
+thread or two of heavenlier stuff, went spinning itself the winter
+through round the unknowing children. The reports which had reached
+Mr. Ancrum were true enough. David was, in his measure,
+endeavouring to 'see life.' On a good many winter evenings the lad,
+now nearly fifteen, and shooting up fast to man's stature, might
+have been seen among the topers at the 'Crooked Cow,' nay, even
+lending an excited ear to the Secularist speakers, who did their
+best to keep things lively at a certain low public kept by one
+Jerry Timmins, a Radical wag, who had often measured himself both
+in the meeting-houses and in the streets against the local
+preachers, and, according to his own following, with no small
+success. There was a covered skittle-ground attached to this house
+in which, to the horrid scandal of church and chapel, Sunday dances
+were sometimes held. A certain fastidious pride, and no doubt a
+certain conscience towards Reuben, kept David from experimenting in
+these performances, which were made as demonstratively offensive to
+the pious as they well could be without attracting the attention of
+the police.
+
+But at the disputations between Timmins and a succession of
+religious enthusiasts, ministers and others, which took place on
+the same spot during the winter and spring, David was frequently
+present.
+
+Neither here, however, nor at the 'Crooked Cow' did the company
+feel the moody growing youth to be one of themselves. He would sit
+with his pint before him, silent, his great black eyes roving round
+the persons present. His tongue was sharp on occasion, and his
+fists ready, so that after various attempts to make a butt of him
+he was generally let alone. He got what he wanted--he learnt to
+know what smoking and drinking might be like, and the jokes of the
+taproom. And all by the help of a few shillings dealt out to him
+this winter for the first time by Reuben, who gave them to him with
+a queer deprecating look and an injunction to keep the matter
+secret from Hannah. As to the use the lad made of them, Reuben was
+as ignorant as he was of all other practical affairs outside his
+own few acres.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Spring came round again and the warm days of June. At Easter time
+David had made no further attempts to meet with Jenny Crum on her
+midnight wanderings. The whole tendency of his winter's mental
+growth, as well perhaps of the matters brutally raised and crudely
+sifted in Jerry Timmins's parlour, had been towards a harder and
+more sceptical habit of mind. For the moment the supernatural had
+no thrill in it for an intelligence full of contradictions. So the
+poor witch, if indeed she 'walked,' revisited her place of pain
+unobserved of mortal eye.
+
+About the middle of June David and his uncle went, as usual, to
+Kettlewell and Masholme, in Yorkshire, for the purpose of bringing
+home from thence some of that hardier breed of sheep which was
+required for the moorland, a Scotch breed brought down yearly to
+the Yorkshire markets by the Lowland farmers beyond the border.
+This expedition was an annual matter, and most of the farmers in
+the Kinder Valley and thereabouts joined in it. They went together
+by train to Masholme, made their purchases, and then drove their
+sheep over the moors home, filling the wide ferny stretches and the
+rough upland road with a patriarchal wealth of flocks, and putting
+up at night at the village inns, while their charges strayed at
+will over the hills. These yearly journeys had always been in
+former years a joy to David. The wild freedom of the walk, the
+change of scene which every mile and every village brought with it,
+the resistance of the moorland wind, the spring of the moorland
+turf, every little incident of the road, whether of hardship or of
+rough excess, added fuel to the flame of youth, and went to build
+up the growing creature.
+
+This year, however, that troubling of the waters which was going on
+in the boy was especially active during the Masholme expedition. He
+kept to himself and his animals, and showed such a gruff
+unneighbourly aspect to the rest of the world that the other
+drivers first teased and then persecuted him. He fought one or two
+pitched battles on the way home, showed himself a more respectable
+antagonist, on the whole, than his assailants had bargained for,
+and was thenceforward contemptuously sent to Coventry. 'Yoong man,'
+said an old farmer to him once reprovingly, after one of these
+"rumpuses," '_yor_ temper woan't mouldy wi keepin.' Reuben
+coming by at the moment threw an unhappy glance at the lad, whose
+bruised face and torn clothes showed he had been fighting. To the
+uncle's mind there was a wanton, nay, a ruffianly look about him,
+which was wholly new. Instead of rebuking the culprit, Reuben
+slouched away and put as much road as possible between himself and
+Davy.
+
+One evening, after a long day on the moors, the party came, late in
+the afternoon, to the Yorkshire village of Haworth. To David it was
+a village like any other. He was already mortally tired of the
+whole business--of the endless hills, the company, the bleak grey
+weather. While the rest of the party were mopping brows and
+draining ale-pots in the farmers' public, he was employing himself
+in aimlessly kicking a stone about one of the streets, when he was
+accosted by a woman of the shopkeeping class, a decent elderly
+woman, who had come out for a mouthful of air, with a child
+dragging after her.
+
+'Yoong mester, yo've coom fro a distance, hannot yo?'
+
+The woman's tone struck the boy pleasantly as though it had been a
+phrase of cheerful music. There was a motherliness in it--a
+something, for which, perhaps all unknown to himself, his secret
+heart was thirsting.
+
+'Fro Masholme,' he said, looking at her full, so that she could see
+all the dark, richly coloured face she had had a curiosity to see;
+then he added abruptly, 'We're bound Kinder way wi t' sheep--reet
+t'other side o' t' Scout.'
+
+The woman nodded. 'Aye, I know a good mony o' your Kinder foak.
+They've coom by here a mony year passt. But I doan't know as I've
+seen yo afoor. Yo're nobbut a yoong 'un. Eh, but we get sich a
+sight of strangers here now, the yan fairly drives the tother out
+of a body's mind.'
+
+'Doos foak coom for t' summer?' asked David, lifting his eyebrows a
+little, and looking round on the bleak and straggling village.
+
+'Noa, they coom to see the church. Lor' bless ye!' said the good
+woman, following his eyes towards the edifice and breaking into a
+laugh, ''taint becos the church is onything much to look at. 'Taint
+nowt out o' t' common that I knows on. Noa--but they coom along
+o't' monument, an' Miss Bronte--Mrs. Nicholls, as should be, poor
+thing--rayder.'
+
+There was no light of understanding in David's face, but his
+penetrating eyes, the size and beauty of which she could not help
+observing, seemed to invite her to go on.
+
+'You niver heerd on our Miss Bronte?' said the woman, mildly.
+'Well, I spose not. She was just a bit quiet body. Nobbody
+hereabouts saw mich in her. But she wrote bukes--tales, yo
+know--tales about t' foak roun here; an they do say, them as has
+read 'em, 'at they're terr'ble good. Mr. Watson, at t' Post Office,
+he's read 'em, and he's allus promised to lend 'em me. But soomhow
+I doan't get th' time. An in gineral I've naw moor use for a book
+nor a coo has for clogs. But she's terr'ble famous, is Miss Bronte,
+now--an her sisters too, pore young women. Yo should see t'
+visitors' book in th' church. Aw t' grand foak as iver wor. They
+cooms fro Lunnon a purpose, soom ov 'em, an they just takes a look
+roun t' place, an writes their names, an goos away. Would yo like
+to see th' church?' said the good-natured creature--looking at the
+tall lad beside her with an admiring scrutiny such as every woman
+knows she may apply to any male. 'I'm goin that way, an it's my
+brother 'at has th' keys.'
+
+David accompanied her with an alacrity which would have astonished
+his usual travelling companions, and they mounted the straggling
+village street together towards the church. As they neared it the
+woman stopped and, shading her eyes against the sunlight, pointed
+up to it and the parsonage.
+
+'Noa, it's not a beauty, isn't our church. They do say our parson
+ud like to have it pulled clean down an a new one built. Onyways,
+they're goin to clear th' Brontes' pew away, an sich a rumpus as
+soom o' t' Bradford papers have bin makin, and a gradely few o' t'
+people here too! I doan't know t' reets on 't missel, but I'st be
+sorry when yo conno see ony moor where Miss Charlotte an Miss Emily
+used to sit o' Sundays--An theer's th' owd house. Yo used to be
+'lowed to see Miss Charlotte's room, where she did her writin, but
+they tell me yo can't be let in now. Seems strange, doan't it, 'at
+onybody should be real fond o' that place? When yo go by it i'
+winter, soomtimes, it lukes that lonesome, with t' churchyard
+coomin up close roun it, it's enoof to gie a body th' shivers. But
+I do bleeve, Miss Charlotte she could ha kissed ivery stone in 't;
+an they do say, when she came back fro furrin parts, she'd sit an
+cry for joy, she wor that partial to Haworth. It's a place yo do
+get to favour soomhow,' said the good woman, apologetically, as
+though feeling that no stranger could justly be expected to
+sympathise with the excesses of local patriotism.
+
+Did th' oother sisters write books?' demanded David, his eyes
+wandering over the bare stone house towards which the passionate
+heart of Charlotte Bronte had yearned so often from the land of
+exile.
+
+'Bless yo, yes. An theer's mony foak 'at think Miss Emily wor a
+deol cliverer even nor Miss Charlotte. Not but what yo get a bad
+noshun o' Yorkshire folk fro Miss Emily's bukes--soa I'm towd. Bit
+there's rough doins on t' moors soomtimes, I'll uphowd yo! An Miss
+Emily had eyes like gimlets--they seed reet through a body. Deary
+me,' she cried, the fountain of gossip opening more and more, 'to
+think I should ha known 'em in pinafores, Mr. Patrick an aw!'
+
+And under the stress of what was really a wonder at the small
+beginnings of fame--a wonder which much repetition of her story had
+only developed in her--she poured out upon her companion the
+history of the Brontes; of that awful winter in which three of that
+weird band--Emily, Patrick, Anne--fell away from Charlotte's side,
+met the death which belonged to each, and left Charlotte alone to
+reap the harvest of their common life through a few burning years;
+of the publication of the books; how the men of the Mechanics'
+Institute (the roof of which she pointed out to him) went crazy
+over 'Shirley'; how everybody about 'thowt Miss Bronte had bin
+puttin ov 'em into prent,' and didn't know whether to be pleased or
+pique; how, as the noise made by 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley' grew, a
+wave of excitement passed through the whole countryside, and people
+came from Halifax, and Bradford, and Huddersfield--aye, an Lunnon
+soomtoimes '--to Haworth church on a Sunday, to see the quiet body
+at her prayers who had made all the stir; how Mr. Nicholls, the
+curate, bided his time and pressed his wooing; how he won her as
+Rachel was won; and how love did but open the gate of death, and
+the fiery little creature--exhausted by such an energy of living as
+had possessed her from her cradle--sank and died on the threshold
+of her new life. All this Charlotte Bronte's townswoman told simply
+and garrulously, but she told it well because she had felt and
+seen.
+
+'She wor so sma' and nesh; nowt but a midge. Theer was no lasst in
+her. Aye, when I heerd the bell tolling for Miss Charlotte that
+Saturday mornin,' said the speaker, shaking her head as she moved
+away towards the church, 'I cud ha sat down an cried my eyes out.
+But if she'd ha seen me she'd ha nobbut said, "Martha, get your
+house straight, an doan't fret for me!" She had sich a sperrit, had
+Miss Charlotte. Well, now, after aw, I needn't go for t' keys, for
+th' church door's open. It's Bradford early closin day, yo see, an
+I dessay soom Bradford foak's goin over.'
+
+So she marched him in, and there indeed was a crowd in the little
+ugly church, congregated especially at the east end, where the
+Brontes' pew still stood awaiting demolition at the hands of a
+reforming vicar. As David and his guide came up they found a young
+weaver in a black coat, with a sallow oblong face, black hair, high
+collars, and a general look of Lord Byron, haranguing those about
+him on the iniquity of removing the pews, in a passionate
+undertone, which occasionally rose high above the key prescribed by
+decorum. It was a half-baked eloquence, sadly liable to bathos,
+divided, indeed, between sentences ringing with the great words
+'genius' and 'fame,' and others devoted to an indignant
+contemplation of the hassocks in the old pews, 'the touching and
+well-worn implements of prayer,' to quote his handsome description
+of them, which a meddlesome parson was about to 'hurl away,' out of
+mere hatred for intellect and contempt of the popular voice.
+
+But, half-baked or no, David rose to it greedily. After a few
+moments' listening, he pressed up closer to the speaker, his broad
+shoulders already making themselves felt in a crowd, his eyes
+beginning to glow with the dissenter's hatred of parsons. In the
+full tide of discourse, however, the orator was arrested by an
+indignant sexton, who, coming quickly up the church, laid hold upon
+him.
+
+'No speechmakin in the church, if you _please_, sir. Move on
+if yo're goin to th' vestry, sir, for I'll have to shut up
+directly.'
+
+The young man stared haughtily at his assailant, and the men and
+boys near closed up, expecting a row. But the voice of authority
+within its own gates is strong, and the champion of outraged genius
+collapsed. The whole flock broke up and meekly followed the sexton,
+who strode on before them to the vestry.
+
+'William's a rare way wi un,' said his companion to David,
+following her brother's triumph with looks of admiration. 'I thowt
+that un wud ha bin harder to shift.'
+
+David, however, turned upon her with a frown. '_'Tis_ a black
+shame,' he said; 'why conno they let t' owd pew bide?'
+
+'Ah, weel,' said the woman with a sigh, 'as I said afore, I'st be
+reet sorry when Miss Charlotte's seat's gone. But yo conno ha
+brawlin i' church. William's reet enough there.'
+
+And beginning to be alarmed lest she should be raising up fresh
+trouble for William in the person of this strange, foreign-looking
+lad, with his eyes like 'live birds,' she hurried him on to the
+vestry, where the visitors' books were being displayed. Here the
+Byronic young man was attempting to pick a fresh quarrel with the
+sexton, by way of recovering himself with his party. But he took
+little by it; the sexton was a tough customer. When the local
+press was shaken in his face, the vicar's hireling, a canny,
+weather-beaten Yorkshireman, merely replied with a twist of the
+mouth,
+
+'Aye, aye, th' newspapers talk--there'd be soombody goin hoongry if
+they didn't;' or--' Them 'at has to eat th' egg knaws best whether
+it is addled or no--to my thinkin,' and so on through a string of
+similar aphorisms which finally demolished his antagonist.
+
+David meanwhile was burning to be in the fray. He thought of some
+fine Miltonic sayings to hurl at the sexton, but for the life of
+him he could not get them out. In the presence of that indifferent,
+sharp-faced crowd of townspeople his throat grew hot and dry
+whenever he thought of speaking.
+
+While the Bradford party struggled out of the church, David, having
+somehow got parted from the woman who had brought him in, lingered
+behind, before that plain tablet on the wall, whereat the crowd
+which had just gone out had been worshipping.
+
+EMILY, aged 29.
+
+ANNE, aged 27.
+
+CHARLOTTE, in the 39th year of her age.
+
+The church had grown suddenly quite still. The sexton was outside,
+engaged in turning back a group of Americans, on the plea that
+visiting hours were over for the day. Through the wide-open door
+the fading yellow light streamed in, and with it a cool wind which
+chased little eddies of dust about the pavement. In the dusk the
+three names--black on the white--stood out with a stern and yet
+piteous distinctness. The boy stood there feeling the silence--the
+tomb near by--the wonder and pathos of fame, and all that thrill of
+undefined emotion to which youth yields itself so hungrily.
+
+The sexton startled him by tapping him on the shoulder. 'Time to go
+home, yoong man. My sister she told me to say good neet to yer, and
+she wishes yo good luck wi your journey. Where are yo puttin up?'
+
+'At the "Brown Bess,"' murmured the boy ungraciously, and hurried
+out. But the good man, unconscious of repulse and kindly disposed
+towards his sister's waif, stuck to him, and, as they walked down
+the churchyard together, the difference between the manners of
+official and those of private life proved to be so melting to the
+temper that even David's began to yield. And a little incident of
+the walk mollified him completely. As they turned a corner they
+came upon a bit of waste land, and there in the centre of an
+admiring company was the sexton's enemy, mounted on a bit of wall,
+and dealing out their deserts in fine style to those meddling
+parsons and their underlings who despised genius and took no heed
+of the relics of the mighty dead. The sexton stopped to listen when
+they were nearly out of range, and was fairly carried away by the
+'go' of the orator.
+
+'Doan't he do it nateral!' he said with enthusiasm to David, after
+a passage specially and unflatteringly devoted to himself. 'Lor'
+bless yo, it don't hurt me. But I do loike a bit o' good speakin,
+'at I do. If fine worrds wor penny loaves, that yoong gen'leman ud
+get a livin aisy! An as for th' owd pew, I cud go skrikin about th'
+streets mysel, if it ud do a ha'porth o' good.'
+
+David's brow cleared, and, by the time they had gone a hundred
+yards further, instead of fighting the good man, he asked a favour
+of him.
+
+'D'yo think as theer's onybody in Haworth as would lend me a seet
+o' yan o' Miss Bronte's tales for an hour?' he said, reddening
+furiously, as they stopped at the sexton's gate.
+
+'Why to be sure, mon,' said the sexton cheerily, pleased with the
+little opening for intelligent patronage. 'Coom your ways in, and
+we'll see if we can't oblige yo. I've got a tidy lot o' books in my
+parlour, an I can give yo "Shirley," I know.'
+
+David went into the stone-built cottage with his guide, and was
+shown in the little musty front room a bookcase full of books which
+made his eyes gleam with desire. The half-curbed joy and eagerness
+he showed so touched the sexton that, after inquiring as to the
+lad's belongings, and remembering that in his time he had enjoyed
+many a pipe and 'glass o' yell' with 'owd Reuben Grieve' at the
+'Brown Bess,' the worthy man actually lent him indefinitely three
+precious volumes--'Shirley,' 'Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography,'
+and 'Nicholas Nickleby.'
+
+David ran off hugging them, and thenceforward he bore patiently
+enough with the days of driving and tramping which remained, for
+the sake of the long evenings when in some lonely corner of moor
+and wood he lay full length on the grass revelling in one or other
+of his new possessions. He had a voracious way of tearing out the
+heart of a book first of all, and then beginning it again with a
+different and a tamer curiosity, lingering, tasting, and digesting.
+By the time he and Reuben reached home he had rushed through all
+three books, and his mind was full of them.
+
+'Shirley' and 'Nicholas Nickleby' were the first novels of modern
+life he had ever laid hands on, and before he had finished them he
+felt them in his veins like new wine. The real world had been to
+him for months something sickeningly narrow and empty, from which
+at times he had escaped with passion into a distant dream-life of
+poetry and history. Now the walls of this real world were suddenly
+pushed back as it were on all sides, and there was an inrush of
+crowd, excitement, and delight. Human beings like those he heard of
+or talked with every day--factory hands and mill-owners, parsons,
+squires, lads and lasses--the Yorkes, and Robert Moore, Squeers,
+Smike, Kate Nickleby and Newman Noggs, came by, looked him in the
+eyes, made him take sides, compare himself with them, join in their
+fights and hatreds, pity and exult with them. Here was something
+more disturbing, personal, and stimulating than that mere
+imaginative relief he had been getting out of 'Paradise Lost,' or
+the scenes of the 'Jewish Wars'!
+
+By a natural transition the mental tumult thus roused led to a more
+intense self-consciousness than any he had yet known. In measuring
+himself with the world of 'Shirley' or of Dickens, he began to
+realise the problem of his own life with a singular keenness and
+clearness. Then--last of all--the record of Franklin's life,--of
+the steady rise of the ill-treated printer's devil to knowledge and
+power--filled him with an urging and concentrating ambition, and
+set his thoughts, endowed with a new heat and nimbleness, to the
+practical unravelling of a practical case.
+
+They reached home again early on a May day. As he and Reuben,
+driving their new sheep, mounted the last edge of the moor which
+separated them from home, the Kinder Valley lay before them,
+sparkling in a double radiance of morning and of spring. David
+lingered a minute or two behind his uncle. What a glory of light
+and freshness in the air--what soaring larks--what dipping
+swallows! And the scents from the dew-steeped heather--and the
+murmur of the blue and glancing stream!
+
+The boy's heart went out to the valley--and in the same instant he
+put it from him. An indescribable energy and exultation took
+possession of him. The tide of will for which he had been waiting
+all these months had risen; and for the first time he felt swelling
+within him the power to break with habit, to cut his way.
+
+But what first step to take? Whom to consult? Suddenly he
+remembered Mr. Ancrum, first with shame, then with hope. Had he
+thrown away his friend? Rumour said that things were getting worse
+and worse at chapel, and that Mr. Ancrum was going to Manchester at
+once.
+
+He ran down the slopes of heather towards home as though he would
+catch and question Mr. Ancrum there and then. And Louie? Patience!
+He would settle everything. Meanwhile, he was regretfully persuaded
+that if you had asked Miss Bronte what could be done with a
+creature like Louie she would have had a notion or two.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+'Reach me that book, Louie,' said David peremptorily; 'it ull be
+worse for yo if yo don't.'
+
+The brother and sister were in the smithy. Louie was squatting on
+the ground with her hands behind her, her lips sharply shut as
+though nothing should drag a word out of them, and her eyes blazing
+defiance at David, who had her by the shoulder, and looked to the
+full as fierce as she looked provoking.
+
+'Find it!' was all she said. He had been absent for a few minutes
+after a sheep that had got into difficulties in the Red Brook, and
+when he returned, his volume of Rollin's 'Ancient History'--'Lias's
+latest loan--which he had imprudently forgotten to take with him,
+had disappeared.
+
+David gave her an angry shake, on which she toppled over among the
+fallen stones with an exasperating limpness, and lay there
+laughing.
+
+'Oh, very well,' said David, suddenly recovering himself; 'yo keep
+yor secret. I'st keep mine, that's aw.'
+
+Louie lay quiet a minute or two, laughing artificially at
+intervals, while David searched the corners of the smithy, turning
+every now and then to give a stealthy look at his sister.
+
+The bait took. Louie stopped laughing, sat up, put herself
+straight, and looked about her.
+
+'Yo hain't got a secret,' she said coolly; 'I'm not to be took in wi
+snuff that way.'
+
+'Very well,' said David indifferently, 'then I haven't.'
+
+And sitting down near the pan, he took out one of the little boats
+from the hole near, and began to trim its keel here and there with
+his knife. The occupation seemed to be absorbing.
+
+Louie sat for a while, sucking at a lump of sugar she had swept
+that morning into the _omnium gatherum_ of her pocket. At last
+she took up a little stone and threw it across at David.
+
+'What's yor silly old secret about, then?'
+
+'Where's my book, then?' replied David, holding up the boat and
+looking with one eye shut along the keel.
+
+'Iv I gie it yer, an yor secret ain't wo'th it, I'll put soom o'
+that watter down yor neckhole,' said Louie, nodding towards the
+place.
+
+'If yo don't happen to find yorsel in th' pan fust,' remarked David
+unmoved.
+
+Louie sucked at her sugar a little longer, with her hands round her
+knees. She had thrown off her hat, and the May sun struck full on
+her hair, on the glossy brilliance of it, and the natural curls
+round the temples which disguised a high and narrow brow. She no
+longer wore her hair loose. In passionate emulation of Annie
+Wigson, she had it plaited behind, and had begged an end of blue
+ribbon of Mrs. Wigson to tie it with, so that the beautiful arch of
+the head showed more plainly than before, while the black eyes and
+brows seemed to have gained in splendour and effectiveness, from
+their simpler and severer setting. One could see, too, the length
+of the small neck and of the thin falling shoulders. It was a face
+now which made many a stranger in the Clough End streets stop and
+look backward after meeting it. Not so much because of its beauty,
+for it was still too thin and starved-looking for beauty, as
+because of a singular daring and brilliance, a sense of wild and
+yet conscious power it left behind it. The child had grown a great
+piece in the last year, so that her knees were hardly decently
+covered by the last year's cotton frock she wore, and her brown
+sticks of arms were far beyond her sleeves. David had looked at her
+once or twice lately with a new kind of scrutiny. He decided that
+she was a 'rum-looking' creature, not the least like anybody else's
+sister, and on the whole his raw impression was that she was plain.
+
+'How'll I know yo'll not cheat?' she said at last, getting up and
+surveying him with her arms akimbo.
+
+'Can't tell, I'm sure,' was all David vouchsafed. 'Yo mum find out.'
+
+Louie studied him threateningly.
+
+'Weel, I'd be even wi yo soomhow,' was her final conclusion; and
+disappearing through the ruined doorway, she ran down the slope to
+where one of the great mill-stones lay hidden in the heather, and
+diving into its central hole, produced the book, keenly watched the
+while by David, who took mental note of the hiding-place.
+
+'Naw then,' she said, walking up to him with her hands behind her
+and the book in them, 'tell me yor secret.'
+
+David first forcibly abstracted the book and made believe to box
+her ears, then went back to his seat and his boat.
+
+'Go on, can't yo!' exclaimed Louie, after a minute, stamping at
+him.
+
+David laid down his boat deliberately.
+
+'Well, yo won't like it,' he said; 'I know that. But--I'm off to
+Manchester, that's aw--as soon as I can goo; as soon as iver I can
+hear of onything. An I'm gooin if I don't hear of onything. I'm
+gooin onyways; I'm tired o' this. So now yo know.'
+
+Louie stared at him.
+
+'Yo ain't!' she said, passionately, as though she were choking.
+
+David instinctively put up his hands to keep her off. He thought
+she would have fallen upon him there and then and beaten him for
+his 'secret.'
+
+But, instead, she flung away out of the smithy, and David was left
+alone and in amazement. Then he got up and went to look, stirred
+with the sudden fear that she might have run off to the farm with
+the news of what he had been saying, which would have precipitated
+matters unpleasantly.
+
+No one was to be seen from outside, either on the moor path or in
+the fields beyond, and she could not possibly have got out of sight
+so soon. So he searched among the heather and the bilberry
+hummocks, till he caught sight of a bit of print cotton in a hollow
+just below the quaint stone shooting-hut, built some sixty years
+ago on the side of the Scout for the convenience of sportsmen.
+David stalked the cotton, and found her lying prone and with her
+hat, as usual, firmly held down over her ears. At sight of her
+something told him very plainly he had been a brute to tell her his
+news so. There was a strong moral shock which for the moment
+transformed him.
+
+He went and lifted her up in spite of her struggles. Her face was
+crimson with tears, but she hit out at him wildly to prevent his
+seeing them. 'Now, Louie, look here,' he said, holding her hands, 'I
+didna mean to tell yo short and sharp like that, but yo do put a
+body's back up so, there's no bearin it. Don't take on, Louie. I'll
+coom back when I've found soomthin, an take yo away, too, niver
+fear. Theer's lots o' things gells can do in Manchester--tailorin,
+or machinin, or dress-makin, or soomthin like that. But yo must get
+a bit older, an I must find a place for us to live in, so theer's
+naw use fratchin, like a spiteful hen. Yo must bide and I must
+bide. But I'll coom back for yo, I swear I will, an we'll get shut
+on Aunt Hannah, an live in a little place by ourselves, as merry as
+larks.'
+
+He looked at her appealingly. Her head was turned sullenly away
+from him, her thin chest still heaved with sobs. But when he
+stopped speaking she jerked round upon him.
+
+'Leave me behint, an I'll murder her!'
+
+The child's look was demoniacal. 'No, yo won't,' said David,
+laughing. 'I' th' fust place, Aunt Hannah could settle a midge like
+yo wi yan finger. I' th' second, hangin isn't a coomfortable way o'
+deein. Yo wait till I coom for yo, an when we'st ha got reet away,
+an can just laugh in her face if she riles us,--_that_'ll
+spite her mich moor nor murderin.'
+
+The black eyes gleamed uncannily for a moment and the sobbing
+ceased. But the gleam passed away, and the child sat staring at the
+moorland distance, seeing nothing. There was such an unconscious
+animal pain in the attitude, the pain of the creature that feels
+itself alone and deserted, that David watched her in a puzzled
+silence. Louie was always mysterious, whether in her rages or her
+griefs, but he had never seen her sob quite like this before. He
+felt a sort of strangeness in her fixed gaze, and with a certain
+timidity he put out his arm and laid it round her shoulder. Still
+she did not move. Then he slid up closer in the heather, and kissed
+her. His heart, which had seemed all frostbound for months, melted,
+and that hunger for love--home-love, mother-love--which was,
+perhaps, at the very bottom of his moody complex youth, found a
+voice.
+
+'Louie, couldn't yo be nice to me soomtimes--couldn't yo just take
+an interest, like, yo know--as if yo cared a bit--couldn't yo?
+Other gells do. I'm a brute to yo, I know, often, but yo keep aggin
+an teasin, an theer's niver a bit o' peace. Look here, Loo, yo give
+up, an I'st give up. Theer's nobbut us two--nawbody else cares a
+ha'porth about the yan or the tother--coom along! yo give up, an
+I'st give up.'
+
+He looked at her anxiously. There was a new manliness in his tone,
+answering to his growing manliness of stature. Two slow tears
+rolled down her cheeks, but she said nothing. She couldn't for the
+life of her. She blinked, furiously fighting with her tears, and at
+last she put up an impatient hand which left a long brown streak
+across her miserable little face.
+
+'Yo havn't got no trade,' she said. 'Yo'll be clemmed.' David
+withdrew his arm, and gulped down his rebuff. 'No, I sha'n't,' he
+said. 'Now you just listen here.' And he described how, the day
+before, he had been to see Mr. Ancrum, to consult him about leaving
+Kinder, and what had come of it.
+
+He had been just in time. Mr. Ancrum, worn, ill, and harassed to
+death, had been cheered a little during his last days at Clough End
+by the appearance of David, very red and monosyllabic, on his
+doorstep. The lad's return, as he soon perceived, was due simply to
+the stress of his own affairs, and not to any knowledge of or
+sympathy with the minister's miseries. But, none the less, there
+was a certain balm in it for Mr. Ancrum, and they had sat long
+discussing matters. Yes, the minister was going--would look out at
+Manchester for an opening for David, in the bookselling trade by
+preference, and would write at once. But Davy must not leave a
+quarrel behind him. He must, if possible, get his uncle's consent,
+which Mr. Ancrum thought would be given.
+
+'I'm willing to lend you a hand, Davy,' he had said, 'for you're on
+the way to no trade but loafing as you are now; but square it with
+Grieve. You can, if you don't shirk the trouble of it.'
+
+Whereupon Davy had made a wry face and said nothing. But to Louie
+he expressed himself plainly enough.
+
+'I'll not say owt to oather on 'em,' he said, pointing to the
+chimneys of the farm, 'till the day I bid 'em good-bye. Uncle
+Reuben, mebbe, ud be for givin me somethin to start wi, an Aunt
+Hannah ud be for cloutin tin him over the head for thinkin of it.
+No, I'll not be beholden to yan o' them. I've got a shillin or two
+for my fare, an I'll keep mysel.'
+
+'What wages ull yo get?' inquired Louie sharply.
+
+'Nothin very fat, that's sure,' laughed David. 'If Mr. Ancrum can do
+as he says, an find me a place in a book-shop, they'll, mebbe, gie
+me six shillin to begin wi.'
+
+'An what ull yo do wi 'at?'
+
+'Live on't,' replied David briefly.
+
+'Yo conno, I tell yo! Yo'll ha food an firin, cloos, an lodgin to
+pay out o't. Yo conno do 't--soa theer.'
+
+Louie looked him up and down defiantly. David was oddly struck with
+the practical knowledge her remark showed. How did such a wild imp
+know anything about the cost of lodging and firing?
+
+'I tell yo I'll live on't,' he replied with energy; 'I'll get a room
+for half a crown--two shillin, p'r'aps--an I'll live on sixpence a
+day, see if I don't.'
+
+'See if yo do!' retorted Louie, 'clemm on it more like.'
+
+'That's all yo know about it, miss,' said David, in a tone,
+however, of high good humour; and, stretching one of his hands down
+a little further into his trousers pocket, he drew out a
+paper-covered book, so that just the top of it appeared. 'Yo're
+allus naggin about books. Well; I tell yo, I've got an idea out o'
+thissen ull be worth shillins a week to me. It's about Benjamin
+Franklin. Never yo mind who Benjamin Franklin wor; but he wor a
+varra cute soart of a felly; an when he wor yoong, an had nobbut a
+few shillins a week, he made shift to save soom o' them shillins,
+becos he found he could do without eatin _flesh meat_, an that
+wi bread an meal an green stuff, a mon could do very well, an save
+soom brass every week. When I go to Manchester,' continued David
+emphatically, 'I shall niver touch meat. I shall buy a bag o'
+oatmeal like Grandfeyther Grieve lived on, boil it for mysel, wi a
+sup o' milk, perhaps, an soom salt or treacle to gi it a taste. An
+I'll buy apples an pears an oranges cheap soomwhere, an store 'em.
+Yo mun ha a deal o' fruit when yo doan't ha meat. Fourpence!' cried
+Davy, his enthusiasm rising, 'I'll live on _thruppence_ a day,
+as sure as yo're sittin theer! Seven thruppences is one an nine;
+lodgin, two shillin--three an nine. Two an three left over, for
+cloos, firin, an pocket money. Why, I'll be rich before yo can look
+roun! An then, o' coorse, they'll not keep me long on six shillings
+a week. In the book-trade I'll soon be wuth ten, an moor!'
+
+And, springing up, he began to dance a sort of cut and shuffle
+before her out of sheer spirits. Louie surveyed him with a flushed
+and sparkling face. The nimbleness of David's wits had never come
+home to her till now.
+
+'What ull I earn when I coom?' she demanded abruptly.
+
+David stopped his cut and shuffle, and took critical stock of his
+sister for a moment.
+
+'Now, look here, Louie, yo're goin to stop where yo are, a good bit
+yet,' he replied decidedly. 'Yo'll have to wait two year or so--moor
+'n one, onyways,' he went on hastily, warned by her start and
+fierce expression. 'Yo know, they can ha th' law on yo,' and he
+jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the farm. 'Boys is all
+reet, but gells can't do nothink till they're sixteen. They mun
+stay wi th' foak as browt 'em up, an if they run away afore their
+sixteenth birthday--they gets put in prison.'
+
+David poured out his legal fictions hastily, three parts convinced
+of them at any rate, and watched eagerly for their effect on Louie.
+
+She tossed her head scornfully. 'Doan't b'lieve it. Yo're jest
+tellin lees to get shut o' me. Nex summer if yo doan't send for me,
+I'll run away, whativer yo may say. So yo know.'
+
+'Yo're a tormentin thing!' exclaimed David, exasperated, and began
+savagely to kick stones down the hill. Then, recovering himself, he
+came and sat down beside her again.
+
+'I doan't want to get shut on yo, Louie. But yo won't understand
+nothin.'
+
+He stopped, and began to bite at a stalk of heather, by way of
+helping himself. His mind was full of vague and yet urgent thoughts
+as to what became of girls in large towns with no one to look after
+them, things he had heard said at the public-house, things he had
+read. He had never dreamt of leaving Louie to Aunt Hannah's tender
+mercies. Of course he must take her away when he could. She was his
+charge, his belonging. But all the same she was a 'limb'; in his
+opinion she always would be a 'limb.' How could he be sure of her
+getting work, and who on earth was to look after her when he was
+away?
+
+Suddenly Louie broke in on his perplexities.
+
+'I'll go tailorin,' she cried triumphantly. 'Now I know--it wor t'
+Wigsons' cousin Em'ly went to Manchester; an she earned nine
+shillin a week--nine shillin I tell yo, an found her own thread.
+Yo'll be takin ten shillin, yo say, nex year? an I'll be takin
+nine. That's nineteen shillin fur th' two on us. _Isn't_ it
+nineteen shillin?' she said peremptorily, seizing his arm with her
+long fingers.
+
+'Well, I dessay it is,' said David, reluctantly. 'An precious tired
+yo'll be o' settin stitchin mornin, noon, an neet. Like to see yo
+do't.'
+
+'I'd do it fur nine shillin,' she said doggedly, and sat looking
+straight before her, with wide glittering eyes. She understood from
+David's talk that, what with meal, apples, and greenstuff, your
+'eatin' need cost you nothing. There would be shillings and
+shillings to buy things with. The child who never had a copper but
+what Uncle Reuben gave her, who passed her whole existence in
+greedily coveting the unattainable and in chafing under the rule of
+an iron and miserly thrift, felt suddenly intoxicated by this
+golden prospect of illimitable 'buying.' And what could possibly
+prevent its coming true? Any fool--such as 'Wigson's Em'ly'--could
+earn nine shillings a week at tailoring; and to make money at your
+stomach's expense seemed suddenly to put you in possession of a
+bank on which the largest drawings were possible. It all looked so
+ingenious, so feasible, so wholly within the grip of that
+indomitable will the child felt tense within her.
+
+So the two sat gazing out over the moorland. It was the first
+summer day, fresh and timid yet, as though the world and the sun
+were still ill-acquainted. Down below, over the sparkling brook, an
+old thorn was quivering in the warm breeze, its bright thin green
+shining against the brown heather. The larches alone had as yet any
+richness of leaf, but the sycamore-buds glittered in the sun, and
+the hedges in the lower valley made wavy green lines delightful to
+the eye. A warm soft air laden with moist scents of earth and plant
+bathed the whole mountain-side, and played with Louie's hair.
+Nature wooed them with her best, and neither had a thought or a
+look for her.
+
+Suddenly Louie sprang up.
+
+'Theer's Aunt Hannah shoutin. I mun goo an get t' coos.'
+
+David ran down the hill with her.
+
+'What'll yo do if I tell?' she inquired maliciously at the bottom.
+
+'If yo do I shall cut at yance, an yo'll ha all the longer time to
+be by yoursen.'
+
+A darkness fell over the girl's hard shining gaze. She turned
+abruptly, then, when she had gone a few steps, turned and came back
+to where David stood whistling and calling for the dogs. She caught
+him suddenly from behind round the neck. Naturally he thought she
+was up to some mischief, and struggled away from her with an angry
+exclamation. But she held him tight and thrust something hard and
+sweet against his lips. Involuntarily his mouth opened and admitted
+an enticing cake of butter-scotch. She rammed it in with her wiry
+little hand so that he almost choked, and then with a shrill laugh
+she turned and fled, leaping down the heather between the boulders,
+across the brook, over the wall, and out of sight.
+
+David was left behind, sucking. The sweetness he was conscious of
+was not all in the mouth. Never that he could remember had Louie
+shown him any such mark of favour.
+
+Next day David was sent down with the donkey-cart to Clough End to
+bring up some weekly stores for the family, Hannah specially
+charging him to call at the post-office and inquire for letters. He
+started about nine o'clock, and the twelve o'clock dinner passed by
+without his reappearance.
+
+When she had finished her supply of meat and suet-pudding, after a
+meal during which no one of the three persons at table had uttered
+a word, Louie abruptly pushed her plate back again towards Hannah.
+
+'David!' was all she said.
+
+'Mind your manners, miss,' said Hannah, angrily. 'Them as cooms
+late gets nowt.' And, getting up, she cleared the table and put the
+food away with even greater rapidity than usual. The kitchen was no
+sooner quite clear than the donkey-cart was heard outside, and
+David appeared, crimsoned with heat, and panting from the long tug
+uphill, through which he had just dragged the donkey.
+
+He carried a letter, which he put down on the table. Then he looked
+round the kitchen.
+
+'Aunt's put t' dinner away,' said Louie, shortly, ''cos yo came
+late.'
+
+David's expression changed. 'Then nex time she wants owt, she can
+fetch it fro Clough End hersel,' he said violently, and went out.
+
+Hannah came forward and laid eager hands on the letter, which was
+from London, addressed in a clerk's hand.
+
+'Louie!' she called imperatively, 'tak un out soom
+bread-an-drippin.'
+
+Louie put some on a plate, and went out with it to the cowhouse,
+where David sat on a stool, occupying himself in cutting the pages
+of a number of the _Vegetarian News,_ lent him in Clough End,
+with trembling hands, while a fierce red spot burnt in either
+cheek.
+
+'Tak it away!' he said, almost knocking the plate out of Louie's
+hands; 'it chokes me to eat a crumb o' hers.'
+
+As Louie was bearing the plate back through the yard, Uncle Reuben
+came by.' What's--what's 'at?' he said, peering shortsightedly at
+what she held. Every month of late Reuben's back had seemed to grow
+rounder, his sight less, and his wits of less practical use.
+
+'Summat for David,' said Louie, shortly, ''cos Aunt Hannah woan't
+gie him no dinner. But he woan't ha it.'
+
+Reuben's sudden look of trouble was unmistakable. 'Whar is he?'
+
+'I' th' coo-house.'
+
+Reuben went his way, and found the dinnerless boy deep, or
+apparently deep, in recipes for vegetable soups.
+
+'What made yo late, Davy?' he asked him, as he stood over him.
+
+David had more than half a mind not to answer, but at last he
+jerked out fiercely, 'Waitin for th' second post, fust; then t'
+donkey fell down half a mile out o' t' town, an th' things were
+spilt. There was nobody about, an' I had a job to get 'un up at a'.'
+
+Reuben nervously thrust his hands far into his coat-pockets.
+
+'Coom wi me, Davy, an I'st mak yor aunt gie yer yor dinner.'
+
+'I wouldn't eat a morsel if she went down on her bended knees to
+me,' the lad broke out, and, springing up, he strode sombrely
+through the yard and into the fields.
+
+Reuben went slowly back into the house. Hannah was in the
+parlour--so he saw through the half-opened door. He went into the
+room, which smelt musty and close from disuse. Hannah was standing
+over the open drawer of an old-fashioned corner cupboard, carefully
+scanning a letter and enclosure before she locked them up.
+
+'Is 't Mr. Gurney's money?' Reuben said to her, in a queer voice.
+
+She was startled, not having heard him come in, but she put what
+she held into the drawer all the more deliberately, and turned the
+key.
+
+'Ay, 't is.'
+
+Reuben sat himself down on one of the hard chairs beside the table
+in the middle of the room. The light streaming through the shutters
+Hannah had just opened streamed in on his grizzling head and face
+working with emotion.
+
+'It's stolen money,' he said hoarsely. 'Yo're stealin it fro Davy.'
+
+Hannah smiled grimly, and withdrew the key.
+
+'I'm paying missel an yo, Reuben Grieve, for t' keep o' two
+wuthless brats as cost moor nor they pays,' she said, with an
+accent which somehow sent a shiver through Reuben. '_I_ don't
+keep udder foaks' childer fur nothin.'
+
+'Yo've had moor nor they cost for seven year,' said Reuben, with
+the same thick tense utterance. 'Yo should let Davy ha it, an gie
+him a trade.'
+
+Hannah walked up to the door and shut it.
+
+'I should, should I? An who'll pay for Louie--for your luvely limb
+of a niece? It 'ud tak about that,' and she pointed grimly to the
+drawer, 'to coover what she wastes an spiles i' t' yeer.'
+
+'Yo get her work, Hannah. Her bit and sup cost yo most nothin. I
+cud wark a bit moor--soa cud yo. Yo're hurtin me i' mi conscience,
+Hannah--yo're coomin atwixt me an th' Lord!'
+
+He brought a shaking hand down on the damask table-cloth among the
+wool mats and the chapel hymn-books which adorned it. His long,
+loose frame had drawn itself up with a certain dignity.
+
+'Ha done wi your cantin!' said Hannah under her breath, laying her
+two hands on the table, and stooping down so as to face him with
+more effect. The phrase startled Reuben with a kind of horror.
+Whatever words might have passed between them, never yet that he
+could remember had his wife allowed herself a sneer at his
+religion. It seemed to him suddenly as though he and she were going
+fast downhill--slipping to perdition, because of Sandy's six
+hundred pounds.
+
+But she cowed him--she always did. She stayed a moment in the same
+bent and threatening position, coercing him with angry eyes. Then
+she straightened herself, and moved away.
+
+'Let t' lad tak hisself off if he wants to,' she said, an iron
+resolution in her voice. 'I told yo so afore--I woan't cry for 'im.
+But as long as Louie's here, an I ha to keep her, I'll want that
+money, an every penny on't. If it bean't paid, she may go too!'
+
+'Yo'd not turn her out, Hannah?' cried Reuben, instinctively
+putting out an arm to feel that the door was closed.
+
+'_She_'d not want for a livin,' replied Hannah, with a bitter
+sneer; 'she's her mither's child.'
+
+Reuben rose slowly, shaking all over. He opened the door with
+difficulty, groped his way out of the front passage, then went
+heavily through the yard and into the fields. There he wandered by
+himself for a couple of hours, altogether forgetting some newly
+dropped lambs to which he had been anxiously attending. For months
+past, ever since his conscience had been roused on the subject of
+his brother's children, the dull, incapable man had been slowly
+reconceiving the woman with whom he had lived some five-and-twenty
+years, and of late the process had been attended with a kind of
+agony. The Hannah Martin he had married had been a hard body
+indeed, but respectable, upright, with the same moral instincts as
+himself. She had kept the farm together--he knew that; he could not
+have lived without her, and in all practical respects she had been
+a good and industrious wife. He had coveted her industry and her
+strong will; and, having got the use of them, he had learnt to put
+up with her contempt for him, and to fit his softer nature to hers.
+Yet it seemed to him that there had always been certain conditions
+implied in this subjection of his, and that she was breaking them.
+He could not have been fetching and carrying all these years for a
+woman who could go on wilfully appropriating money that did not
+belong to her,--who could even speak with callous indifference of
+the prospect of turning out her niece to a life of sin.
+
+He thought of Sandy's money with loathing. It was like the cursed
+stuff that Achan had brought into the camp--an evil leaven
+fermenting in their common life, and raising monstrous growths.
+
+Reuben Grieve did not demand much of himself; a richer and more
+spiritual nature would have thought his ideals lamentably poor.
+But, such as they were, the past year had proved that he could not
+fall below them without a dumb anguish, without a sense of shutting
+himself out from grace. He felt himself--by his fear of his
+wife--made a partner in Hannah's covetousness, in Hannah's cruelty
+towards Sandy's children. Already, it seemed to him, the face of
+Christ was darkened, the fountain of grace dried up. All those
+appalling texts of judgment and reprobation he had listened to so
+often in chapel, protected against them by that warm inward
+certainty of 'election,' seemed to be now pressing against a bared
+and jeopardised soul.
+
+But if he wrote to Mr. Gurney, Hannah would never forgive him till
+her dying day; and the thought of making her his enemy for good put
+him in a cold sweat.
+
+After much pacing of the upper meadows he came heavily down at last
+to see to his lambs. Davy was just jumping the wall on to his
+uncle's land, having apparently come down the Frimley path. When he
+saw his uncle he thrust his hands into his pockets, began to
+whistle, and came on with a devil-may-care swing of the figure.
+They met in a gateway between two fields.
+
+'Whar yo been, Davy?' asked Reuben, looking at him askance, and
+holding the gate so as to keep him.
+
+'To Dawson's,' said the boy, sharply.
+
+Reuben's face brightened. Then the lad's empty stomach must have
+been filled; for he knew that 'Dawsons' were kind to him. He
+ventured to look at him more directly, and, as he did so, something
+in the attitude of the proud handsome stripling reminded him of
+Sandy--Sandy, in the days of his youth, coming down to show his
+prosperous self at the farm. He put his large soil-stained hand on
+David's shoulder.
+
+'Goo yor ways in, Davy. I'll see yo ha your reets.'
+
+David opened his eyes at him, astounded. There is nothing more
+startling in human relations than the strong emotion of weak
+people.
+
+Reuben would have liked to say something else, but his lips opened
+and shut in vain. The boy, too, was hopelessly embarrassed. At
+last, Reuben let the gate fall and walked off, with downcast head,
+to where, in the sheep-pen, he had a few hours before bound an
+orphan lamb to a refractory foster-mother. The foster-mother's
+resistance had broken down, she was lying patiently and gently
+while the thin long-legged creature sucked; when it was frightened
+away by Reuben's approach she trotted bleating after it. In his
+disturbed state of feeling the parallel, or rather the contrast,
+between the dumb animal and the woman struck home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+But the crisis which had looked so near delayed!
+
+Poor Reuben! The morning after his sudden show of spirit to David
+he felt himself, to his own miserable surprise, no more courageous
+than he had been before it. Yet the impression made had gone too
+deep to end in nothingness. He contracted a habit of getting by
+himself in the fields and puzzling his brain with figures--an
+occupation so unfamiliar and exhausting that it wore him a good
+deal; and Hannah, when he came in at night, would wonder, with a
+start, whether he were beginning 'to break up.' But it possessed
+him more and more. Hannah would not give up the money, but David
+must have his rights. How could it be done? For the first time
+Reuben fell to calculation over his money matters, which he did not
+ask Hannah to revise. But meanwhile he lived in a state of
+perpetual inward excitement which did not escape his wife. She
+could get no clue to it, however, and became all the more
+forbidding in the household the more she was invaded by this wholly
+novel sense of difficulty in managing her husband.
+
+Yet she was not without a sense that if she could but contrive to alter
+her ways with the children it would be well for her. Mr. Gurney's cheque
+was safely put away in the Clough End bank, and clearly her best policy
+would have been to make things tolerable for the two persons on whose
+proceedings--if they did but know it!--the arrival of future cheques in
+some measure depended. But Hannah had not the cleverness which makes the
+successful hypocrite. And for some time past there had been a strange
+unmanageable change in her feelings towards Sandy's orphans. Since
+Reuben had made her conscious that she was robbing them, she had gone
+nearer to an active hatred than ever before. And, indeed, hatred in such
+a case is the most natural outcome; for it is little else than the
+soul's perverse attempt to justify to itself its own evil desire.
+
+David, however, when once his rage over Hannah's latest offence had
+cooled, behaved to his aunt much as he had done before it. He was
+made placable by his secret hopes, and touched by Reuben's
+advances--though of these last he took no practical account
+whatever; and he must wait for his letter. So he went back
+ungraciously to his daily tasks. Meanwhile he and Louie, on the
+strength of the great _coup_ in prospect, were better friends
+than they had ever been, and his consideration for her went up as
+he noticed that, when she pleased, the reckless creature could keep
+a secret 'as close as wax.'
+
+The weeks, however, passed away, and still no letter came for
+David. The shepherds' meetings--first at Clough End for the
+Cheshire side of the Scout, and then at the 'Snake Inn' for the
+Sheffield side--when the strayed sheep of the year were restored to
+their owners, came and went in due course; sheep-washing and
+sheep-shearing were over; the summer was halfway through; and still
+no word from Mr. Ancrum.
+
+David, full of annoyance and disappointment, was seething with
+fresh plans--he and Louie spent hours discussing them at the
+smithy--when suddenly an experience overtook him, which for the
+moment effaced all his nascent ambitions, and entirely did away
+with Louie's new respect for him.
+
+It was on this wise.
+
+Mr. Ancrum had left Clough End towards the end of June. The
+congregation to which he ministered, and to which Reuben Grieve
+belonged, represented one of those curious and independent
+developments of the religious spirit which are to be found
+scattered through the teeming towns and districts of northern
+England. They had no connection with any recognised religious
+community, but the members of it had belonged to many--to the
+Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They were
+mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side
+with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of
+English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various
+features in the different sects from which they came--by the
+hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the
+looseness of the Congregationalists, or the coldness of the Church.
+They had come together to seek the Lord in some way more intimate,
+more moving, more effectual than any they had yet found; and in
+this pathetic search for the 'rainbow gold' of faith they were
+perpetually brought up against the old stumbling-blocks of the
+unregenerate man,--the smallest egotisms, and the meanest vanities.
+Mr. Ancrum, for instance, had come to the Clough End 'Brethren'
+full of an indescribable missionary zeal. He had laboured for them
+night and day, taxing his sickly frame far beyond its powers. But
+the most sordid conspiracy imaginable, led by two or three of the
+prominent members who thought he did not allow them enough share in
+the evening meetings, had finally overthrown him, and he had gone
+back to Manchester a bitterer and a sadder man.
+
+After he left there was an interregnum, during which one or two of
+the elder 'Brethren' taught Sunday school and led the Sunday
+services. But at last, in August, it became known in Clough End
+that a new minister for the 'Christian Brethren' had come down, and
+public curiosity in the Dissenting circles was keen about him.
+After a few weeks there began to be a buzz in the little town on
+the subject of Mr. Dyson. The 'Christian Brethren' meeting-room, a
+long low upper chamber formerly occupied by half a dozen
+hand-looms, was crowded on Sundays, morning and evening, not only
+by the Brethren, but by migrants from other denominations, and the
+Sunday school, which was held in a little rickety garret off the
+main room, also received a large increase of members. It was
+rumoured that Mr. Dyson was specially successful with boys, and
+that there was an 'awakening' among some of the lowest and roughest
+of the Clough End lads.
+
+'He ha sich a way wi un,' said a much-stirred mother to Reuben
+Grieve, meeting him one day in the street, 'he do seem to melt your
+varra marrow.'
+
+Reuben went to hear the new man, was much moved, and came home
+talking about him with a stammering unction, and many furtive looks
+at David. He had tried to remonstrate several times on the lad's
+desertion of chapel and Sunday school, but to no purpose. There was
+something in David's half contemptuous, half obstinate silence on
+these occasions which for a man like Reuben made argument
+impossible. To his morbid inner sense the boy seemed to have
+entered irrevocably on the broad path which leadeth to destruction.
+Perhaps in another year he would be drinking and thieving. With a
+curious fatalism Reuben felt that for the present, and till he had
+made some tangible amends to Sandy and the Unseen Powers for
+Hannah's sin, he himself could do nothing. His hands were unclean.
+But some tremulous passing hopes he allowed himself to build on
+this new prophet.
+
+Meanwhile, David heard the town-talk, and took small account of it.
+He supposed he should see the new-comer at Jerry's in time. Then if
+folk spoke true there would be a shindy worth joining in.
+Meanwhile, the pressure of his own affairs made the excitement of
+the neighbourhood seem to him one more of those storms in the
+Dissenting tea-cup, of which, boy as he was, he had known a good
+many already.
+
+One September evening he was walking down to Clough End, bound to
+the reading-room. He had quite ceased to attend the 'Crooked Cow.'
+His pennies were precious to him now, and he saved them jealously,
+wondering scornfully sometimes how he could ever have demeaned
+himself so far as to find excitement in the liquor or the company
+of the 'Cow.' Half-way down to the town, as he was passing the
+foundry, whence he had drawn the pan which had for so long made the
+smithy enchanted ground to him, the big slouching appprentice who
+had been his quondam friend and ally there, came out of the foundry
+yard just in front of him. David quickened up a little.
+
+'Tom, whar are yo goin?'
+
+The other looked round at him uneasily.
+
+'Niver yo mind.'
+
+The youth's uncouth clothes were carefully brushed, and his fat
+face, which wore an incongruous expression of anxiety and
+dejection, shone with washing. David studied him a moment in
+silence, then he said abruptly--
+
+'Yo're goin prayer-meetin, that's what yo are.'
+
+'An if I am, it's noa consarn o' yourn. Yo're yan o'
+th'unregenerate; an I'll ask yo, Davy, if happen yo're goin town
+way, not to talk ony o' your carnal talk to me. I'se got hindrances
+enough, t' Lord knows.'
+
+And the lad went his way, morosely hanging his head, and stepping
+more rapidly as though to get rid of his companion.
+
+'Well, I niver!' exclaimed David, in his astonishment. 'What's
+wrong wi yo, Tom? Yo've got no more spunk nor a moultin hen. What's
+getten hold o' yo?''
+
+Tom hesitated a moment. '_Th' Lord!_' he burst out at last,
+looking at Davy with that sudden unconscious dignity which strong
+feeling can bestow for the moment on the meanest of mortals. 'He's
+a harryin' me! I haven't slep this three neets for shoutin an
+cryin! It's th' conviction o' _sin_, Davy. Th' devil seems a
+howdin me, an I conno pull away, not whativer. T' new minister
+says, 'Dunnot yo pull. Let Jesus do't all.' He's strang, He is.
+'Yo're nobbut a worm.' But I've naw _assurance_, Davy, theer's
+whar it is--I've naw assurance!' he repeated, forgetting in his
+pain the unregenerate mind of his companion.
+
+David walked on beside him wondering. When he had last seen Tom he
+was lounging in a half-drunken condition outside the door of the
+'Crooked Cow,' cracking tipsy jokes with the passers-by.
+
+'Where is the prayer-meetin?' he inquired presently.
+
+'In owd Simes's shed--an it's late too--I mun hurry.'
+
+'Why, theer'll be plenty o' room in old Simes's shed. It's a fearfu
+big place.'
+
+'An lasst time theer was na stannin ground for a corn-boggart; an I
+wudna miss ony o' Mr. Dyson's prayin, not for nothin. Good neet to
+yo, Davy.'
+
+And Tom broke into a run; David, however, kept up with him.
+
+'P'raps I'll coom too,' he said, with a kind of bravado, when they
+had passed the bridge and the Kinder printing works, and Clough End
+was in sight.
+
+Tom said nothing till they had breasted a hill, at the top of which
+he paused panting, and confronted David.
+
+'Noo yo'll not mak a rumpus, Davy,' he said, mistrustfully.
+
+'An if do, can't a hundred or two o' yo kick me out?' asked David,
+mockingly. 'I'll mak no rumpus. P'raps yor Mr. Dyson'll convert
+me.'
+
+And he walked on laughing.
+
+Tom looked darkly at him; then, as he recovered his wind, his
+countenance suddenly cleared. Satan laid a new snare for him--poor
+Tom!--and into his tortured heart there fell a poisonous drop of
+spiritual pride. Public reprobation applied to a certain order of
+offences makes a very marketable kind of fame, as the author of
+_Manfred_ knew very well. David in his small obscure way was
+supplying another illustration of the principle. For the past year
+he had been something of a personage in Clough End--having always
+his wits, his book-learning, his looks, and his singular parentage
+to start from.
+
+Tom--the shambling butt of his comrades--began to like the notion
+of going into prayer-meeting with David Grieve in tow; and even
+that bitter and very real cloud of spiritual misery lifted a
+little.
+
+So they marched in together, Tom in front, with his head much
+higher than before; and till the minister began there were many
+curious glances thrown at David. It was a prayer-meeting for boys
+only, and the place was crammed with them, of all ages up to
+eighteen.
+
+It was a carpenter's workshop. Tools and timber had been as far as
+possible pushed to the side, and at the end a rough platform of
+loose planks had been laid across some logs so as to raise the
+preacher a little.
+
+Soon there was a stir, and Mr. Dyson appeared. He was tall and
+loosely built, with the stoop from the neck and the sallow skin
+which the position of the cotton-spinner at work and the close
+fluffy atmosphere in which he lives tend to develop. Up to six
+months ago, he had been a mill-hand and a Wesleyan class-leader.
+Now, in consequence partly of some inward crisis, partly of revolt
+against an 'unspiritual' superintendent, he had thrown up mill and
+Methodism together, and come to live on the doles of the Christian
+Brethren at Clough End. He had been preaching on the moors already
+during the day, and was tired out; but the pallor of the harsh face
+only made the bright, commanding eye more noticeable. It ran over
+the room, took note first of the numbers, then of individuals,
+marked who had been there before, who was a new-comer. The audience
+fell into order and quiet before it as though a general had taken
+command.
+
+He put his hands on his hips and began to speak without any
+preface, somewhat to the boys' surprise, who had expected a prayer.
+The voice, as generally happens with a successful revivalist
+preacher, was of fine quality, and rich in good South Lancashire
+intonations, and his manner was simplicity itself.
+
+'Suppose we put off our prayer a little bit,' he said, in a
+colloquial tone, his fixed look studying the crowded benches all
+the while. 'Perhaps we'll have more to pray about by-and-by....
+Well, now, I haven't been long in Clough End, to be sure, but I
+think I've been long enough to get some notion of how you boys here
+live--whether you work on the land, or whether you work in the
+mills or in shops--I've been watching you a bit, perhaps you didn't
+think it; and what I'm going to do to-night is to take your lives
+to pieces--take them to pieces, an look close into them, as you've
+seen them do at the mill, perhaps, with a machine that wants
+cleaning. I want to find out what's wrong wi them, what they're
+good for, whose work they do--_God's or the devil's_ ... First
+let me take the mill-hands. Perhaps I know most about their life,
+for I went to work in a cotton-mill when I was eight years old, and
+I only left it six months ago. I have seen men and women saved in
+that mill, so that their whole life afterwards was a kind of
+ecstasy: I have seen others lost there, so that they became true
+children of the devil, and made those about them as vile and
+wretched as themselves. I have seen men grow rich there, and I have
+seen men die there; so if there is anything I know in this world it
+is how factory workers spend their time--at least, I think I know.
+But judge for yourselves--shout to me if I'm wrong. Isn't it
+somehow like this?'
+
+And he fell into a description of the mill-hand's working day. It
+was done with knowledge, sometimes with humour, and through it all
+ran a curious undercurrent of half-ironical passion. The audience
+enjoyed it, took the points, broke in now and then with comments as
+the speaker touched on such burning matters as the tyranny of
+overlookers, the temper of masters, the rubs between the different
+classes of 'hands,' the behaviour of 'minders' to the 'piecers'
+employed by them, and so on. The sermon at one time was more like a
+dialogue between preacher and congregation. David found himself
+joining in it involuntarily once or twice, so stimulating was the
+whole atmosphere, and Mr. Dyson's eye was caught perforce by the
+tall dark fellow with the defiant carriage of the head who sat next
+to Tom Mullins, and whom he did not remember to have seen before.
+
+But suddenly the preacher stopped, and the room fell dead silent,
+startled by the darkening of his look. 'Ay,' he said, with stern
+sharpness. 'Ay, that's how you live--them's the things you spend
+your time and your minds on. You laugh, and I laugh--not a bad sort
+of life, you think--a good deal of pleasure, after all, to be got
+out of it. If a man must work he might do worse. _O you poor
+souls!_'
+
+The speaker stopped, as though mastering himself. His face worked
+with emotion; his last words had been almost a cry of pain. After
+the easy give and take of the opening, this change was electrical.
+David felt his hand tremble on his knee.
+
+'Answer me this!' cried the preacher, his nervous cotton-spinner's hand
+outstretched. 'Is there any soul here among you factory lads who, when
+he wakes in the morning, _ever thinks of saying a prayer?_ Not one of
+you, I'll be bound! What with shovelling on one's clothes, and gulping
+down one's breakfast, and walking half a mile to the mill, who's got
+time to think about prayers? God must wait. He's always there above, you
+think, sitting in glory. He can listen any time. Well, as you stand at
+your work--all those hours!--is there ever a moment _then_ for putting
+up a word in Jesus' ear--Jesus, Who died for sinners? Why, no, how
+should there be indeed? If you don't keep a sharp eye on your work the
+overlooker 'ull know the reason why in double-quick time!... But there
+comes a break, perhaps, for one reason or another. Does the Lord get it?
+What a thing to ask, to be sure! Why, there are other spinners close by,
+waiting for rovings, or leaving off for "baggin," and a bit of talk and
+a bad word or two are a deal more fun, and come easier than praying.
+Half-past five o'clock at last--knocking-off time. Then you begin to
+think of amusing yourselves. There's loafing about the streets, which
+never comes amiss, and there's smoking and the public for you bigger
+ones, and there's betting on Manchester races, and there's a bout of
+swearing every now and then to keep up your spirits, and there are other
+thoughts, and perhaps actions, for some of you, of which the less said
+in any decent Christian gathering the better! And so bedtime comes round
+again; still not a moment to think of God in--of the Judgment which has
+come a day closer--of your sins which have grown a day heavier--of your
+soul which has sunk a day further from heaven, a day nearer to hell? Not
+one. You are dead tired, and mill-work begins so early. Tumble in--God
+can wait. He has waited fourteen, or eighteen, or twenty years already!
+
+'But you're not all factory hands here. I see a good many lads
+I know come from the country--from the farms up Kinder or Edale
+way. Well, I don't know so much about your ways as I do about
+mills; but I know some, and I can guess some. _You_ are not shut
+up all day with the roar of the machines in your ears, and the
+cotton-fluff choking your lungs. You have to live harder, perhaps.
+You've less chances of getting on in the world; but I declare to
+you, if you're bad and godless--as some of you are--I think there's
+a precious sight less excuse for you than there is for the
+mill-hands!'
+
+And with a startling vehemence, greater by far than he had shown in
+the case of the mill-workers, he threw himself on the vices and the
+callousness of the field-labourers. For were they not, day by day,
+and hour by hour, face to face with the Almighty in His marvellous
+world--with the rising of His sun, with the flash of His lightning,
+with His clouds which dropped fatness, and with the heavens which
+declare His glory? Nothing between them and the Most High, if they
+would open their dull eyes and see! And more than that. Not a bit
+of their life,' but had been dear to the Lord Jesus--but He had
+spoken of it, taught from it, made it sacred. The shepherd herding
+the sheep--how could he, of all men, forget and blaspheme the Good
+Shepherd? The sower scattering the seed--how could he, of all men,
+forget and blaspheme the Heavenly Sower? Oh, the crookedness of
+sin! Oh, the hardness of men's hearts!
+
+The secret of the denunciations which followed lay hidden deep in
+the speaker's personal history. They were the utterances of a man
+who had stood for years at the 'mules,' catching, when he could,
+through the coarse panes of factory glass, the dim blue outlines of
+distant moors. _Here_ were noise, crowd, coarse jesting, mean
+tyrannies, uncongenial company--everything which a nervous,
+excitable nature, tuned to poetry in the English way through
+religion, most loathed; _there_ was beauty, peace, leisure for
+thought, for holiness, for emotion.
+
+Meanwhile the mind of David Grieve rose once or twice in angry
+protest. It was not fair--it was unjust--and why did Mr. Dyson
+always seem to be looking at him?--flinging at him all these
+scathing words about farming people's sins and follies? He was
+shaken and excited. Oratory, of any sort, never failed to stir him
+extraordinarily. Once even he would have jumped up to speak, but
+Tom Mullins's watchful hand closed on his arm. Davy shook it off
+angrily, but was perforce reminded of his promise. And Mr. Dyson
+was swift in all things. The pitiless sentences dropped; the
+speaker, exhausted, wiped his brow and pondered a moment; and the
+lads from the farms about, most of whom David knew by sight, were
+left staring at the floor, some inclined to laugh by reaction,
+others crimson and miserable.
+
+Well; so God was everywhere forgotten--in the fields and in
+the mill. The greedy, vicious hours went by, and God still
+waited--waited. Would he wait for ever?
+
+'_Nay!_'
+
+The intense, low-spoken word sent a shiver through the room. The
+revivalist passion had been mounting rapidly amongst the listeners,
+and the revivalist sense divined what was coming. To his dying day
+David, at least, never forgot the picture of a sinner's death
+agony, a sinner's doom, which followed. As to the first, it was
+very quiet and colloquial. The preacher dwelt on the tortured body,
+the choking breath, the failing sight, the talk of relations and
+friends round the bed.
+
+'Ay, poor fellow, he'll not lasst mich longer; t' doctor's gien
+him up--and a good thing too, for his sufferins are terr'ble to
+see.'
+
+'And your poor dying ears will catch what they say. Then will your
+fear come upon you as a storm, and your calamity as a whirlwind.
+Such a fear!
+
+'Once, my lads--long ago--I saw a poor girl caught by her hair in
+one of the roving machines in the mill I used to work at. Three
+minutes afterwards they tore away her body from the iron teeth
+which had destroyed her. But I, a lad of twelve, had seen her face
+just as the thing caught her, and if I live to be a hundred I shall
+never forget that face--that horrible, horrible fear convulsing it.
+
+'But that fear, my boys, was as _nothing_ to the sinner's fear
+at death! Only a few more hours--a few more minutes, perhaps--and
+then _judgment_! All the pleasant loafing and lounging, all
+the eating and drinking, the betting and swearing, the warm sun,
+the kind light, the indulgent parents and friends left behind;
+nothing for ever and ever but the torments which belong to sin, and
+which even the living God can no more spare you and me if we die in
+sin than the mill-engine, once set going, can spare the poor
+creature that meddles with it.
+
+'Well; but perhaps in that awful last hour you try to pray--to call
+on the Saviour. But, alas! alas! prayer and faith have to be
+learnt, like cotton-spinning. Let no man count on learning that
+lesson for the asking. While your body has been enjoying itself in
+sin, your soul has been dying--dying; and when at the last you bid
+it rise and go to the Father, you will find it just as helpless as
+your poor paralysed limbs. It cannot rise, it has no strength; it
+cannot go, for it knows not the way. No hope; no hope. Down it
+sinks, and the black waters of hell close upon it for ever!'
+
+Then followed a sort of vision of the lost--delivered in short
+abrupt sentences--the form of the speaker drawn rigidly up
+meanwhile to its full height, the long arm outstretched. The
+utterance had very little of the lurid materialism, the grotesque
+horror of the ordinary ranter's hell. But it stole upon the
+imagination little by little, and possessed it at last with an
+all-pervading terror. Into it, to begin with, had gone the whole
+life-blood and passion of an agonised soul. The man speaking had
+himself graven the terrors of it on his inmost nature through many
+a week of demoniacal possession. But since that original experience
+of fire which gave it birth, there had come to its elaboration a
+strange artistic instinct. Day after day the preacher had repeated
+it to hushed congregations, and with every repetition, almost,
+there had come a greater sharpening of the light and shade, a
+keener sense of what would tell and move. He had given it on the
+moors that afternoon, but he gave it better to-night, for on the
+wild walk across the plateau of the Peak some fresh illustrations,
+drawn from its black and fissured solitude, had suggested
+themselves, and he worked them out as he went, with a kind of joy,
+watching their effect. Yet the man was, in his way, a saint, and
+altogether sincere--so subtle a thing is the life of the spirit.
+
+In the middle, Tom Mullins, David's apprentice-friend, suddenly
+broke out into loud groans, rocking himself to and fro on the form.
+A little later, a small fair-haired boy of twelve sprang up from
+the form where he had been sitting trembling, and rushed into the
+space between the benches and the preacher, quite unconscious of
+what he was doing.
+
+'Sir!' he said; 'oh, sir!--please--I didn't want to say them bad
+words this mornin; I didn't, sir; it wor t' big uns made me; they
+said they'd duck me--an it do hurt that bad. Oh, sir, please!'
+
+And the little fellow stood wringing his hands, the tears coursing
+down his cheeks.
+
+The minister stopped, frowning, and looked at him. Then a smile
+broke on the set face, he stepped up to the lad, threw his arm
+round him, and drew him up to his side fronting the room.
+
+'My boy,' he said, looking down at him tenderly, 'you and I, thank
+God, are still in the land of the _living_; there is still
+time to-night--this very minute--to be saved! Ay, saved, for ever
+and ever, by the blood of the Lamb. Look away from yourselves--away
+from sin--away from hell--to the blessed Lord, that suffered and
+died and rose again; just for what? For this only--that He might,
+with His own pierced hands, draw every soul here to-night, and
+every soul in the wide world that will but hear His voice, out of
+the clutches of the devil, and out of the pains of hell, and gather
+it close and safe into His everlasting arms!'
+
+There was a great sob from the whole room. Rough lads from the
+upland farms, shop-boys, mill-hands, strained forward, listening,
+thirsting, responding to every word.
+
+_Redemption--Salvation--_ the deliverance of the soul from
+itself--thither all religion comes at last, whether for the ranter
+or the philosopher. To the enriching of that conception, to the
+gradual hewing it out in historical shape, have gone the noblest
+poetry, the purest passion, the intensest spiritual vision of the
+highest races, since the human mind began to work. And the
+historical shape may crumble; but the need will last and the
+travail will go on; for man's quest of redemption is but the
+eternal yielding of the clay in the hands of the potter, the
+eternal answer of the creature to the urging indwelling Creator.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Half an hour later, after the stormy praying and singing which had
+succeeded Mr. Dyson's address, David found himself tramping up the
+rough and lonely road leading to the high Kinder valley. The lights
+of Clough End had disappeared; against the night sky the dark woody
+side of Mardale Moor was still visible; beneath it sang the river;
+a few stars were to be seen; and every now and then the windows of
+a farm shone out to guide the wayfarer. But David stumbled on,
+noticing nothing. At the foot of the steep hill leading to the farm
+he stopped a moment, and leant over the gate. The little lad's cry
+was in his ears.
+
+Presently he leapt the gate impatiently, and ran up whistling.
+Supper was over, but Hannah ungraciously brought him out some cold
+bacon and bread. Louie hung about him while he ate, studying him
+with quick furtive eyes.
+
+'Whar yo bin?' she said abruptly, when Hannah had gone to the back
+kitchen for a moment. Reuben was dozing by the fire over the local
+paper.
+
+'Nowhere as concerns yo,' said David, shortly. He finished his
+supper and went and sat on the steps. The dogs came and put their
+noses on his knees. He pulled absently at their coats, looking
+straight before him at the dark point of Kinder Low.
+
+'Whar yo bin?' said Louie's voice again in his ear. She had
+squatted down on the step behind him.
+
+'Be off wi yer,' said David, angrily, getting up in order to escape
+her.
+
+But she pursued him across the farmyard.
+
+'Have yo got a letter?'
+
+'No, I haven't.'
+
+'Did yo ask at t' post-office?'
+
+'No, I didn't.'
+
+'An why didn't yo?'
+
+'Because I didn't want--soa there--get away.' And he stalked off.
+Louie, left behind, chewed the cud of reflection in the darkness.
+
+Presently, to his great disgust, as he was sitting under a wall of
+one of the pasture-fields, hidden, as he conceived, from all the
+world by the night, he heard the rustle of a dress, the click of a
+stone, and there was Louie dangling her legs above him, having
+attacked him in the rear.
+
+'Uncle Reuben's talkin 'is stuff about Mr. Dyson. I seed 'im gooin
+passt Wigsons' this afternoon. He's nowt--he's common, he is.'
+
+The thin scornful voice out of the dark grated on him intolerably.
+He bent forward and shut his ears tight with both his hands. To
+judge from the muffled sounds he heard, Louie went on talking for a
+while; but at last there had been silence for so long, that he took
+his hands away, thinking she must have gone.
+
+'Yo've been at t' prayer-meetin, I tell yo, an yo're a great stupid
+muffin-yed, soa theer.'
+
+And a peremptory little kick on his shoulder from a substantial
+shoe gave the words point.
+
+He sprang up in a rage, ran down the hill, jumped over a wall or
+two, and got rid of her. But he seemed to hear her elfish laugh for
+some time after. As for himself, he could not analyse what had come
+over him. But not even the attraction of an unopened parcel of
+books he had carried home that afternoon from Clough End--a loan
+from a young stationer he had lately made acquaintance with--could
+draw him back to the farm. He sat on and on in the dark. And when
+at last, roused by the distant sounds of shutting up the house, he
+slunk in and up to bed, he tossed about for a long time, and woke
+up often in the night. The tyrannous power of another man's faith
+was upon him. He could not get Mr. Dyson out of his head. How on
+earth could anybody be so _certain_? It was monstrous that any
+one should be. It was canting stuff.
+
+Still, next day, hearing by chance that the new-comer was going to
+preach at a hamlet the other side of Clough End, he went, found a
+large mixed meeting mostly of mill-hands, and the tide of
+Revivalism rolling high. This time Mr. Dyson picked him out at
+once--the face and head indeed were easily remembered. After the
+sermon, when the congregation were filing out, leaving behind those
+more particularly distressed in mind to be dealt with more
+intimately in a small prayer-meeting by Mr. Dyson and a
+prayer-leader, the minister suddenly stepped aside from a group of
+people he was talking with, and touched David on the arm as he was
+making for the door.
+
+'Won't you stay?' he said peremptorily. 'Don't trifle with the Lord.'
+
+And his feverish divining eyes seemed to look the boy through and
+through. David flushed, and pushed past him with some inarticulate
+answer. When he found himself in the open air he was half angry,
+half shaken with emotion. And afterwards a curious instinct, the
+sullen instinct of the wild creature shrinking from a possible
+captor, made him keep himself as much as possible out of Mr.
+Dyson's way. At the prayer-meetings and addresses, which followed
+each other during the next fortnight in quick succession, David was
+almost always present; but he stood at the back, and as soon as the
+general function was over he fled. The preacher's strong will was
+piqued. He began to covet the boy's submission disproportionately,
+and laid schemes for meeting with him. But David evaded them all.
+
+Other persons, however, succeeded better. Whenever the revivalist
+fever attacks a community, it excites in a certain number of
+individuals, especially women, an indescribable zeal for
+proselytising. The signs of 'conviction' in any hitherto
+unregenerate soul are marked at once, and the 'saved' make a prey
+of it, showing a marvellous cunning and persistence in its pursuit.
+
+One day a woman, the wife of a Clough End shoemaker, slightly known
+to David, met him on the moors.
+
+'Will yo coom to-night?' she said, nodding to him. 'Theer'll be
+prayin' at our house--about half a dozen.'
+
+Then, as the boy stopped, amazed and hesitating, she fixed him with
+her shining ecstatic eyes.
+
+'Awake, thou that sleepest,' she said under her breath, 'and Christ
+shall give thee light.'
+
+She had been carrying a bundle to a distant farm. A child was in
+her arms, and she looked dragged and worn. But all the way down the
+moor as she came towards him David had heard her singing hymns.
+
+He hung his head and passed on. But in the evening he went, found
+three or four other boys his own age or older, the woman, and her
+husband. The woman sang some of the most passionate Methodist
+hymns; the husband, a young shoemaker, already half dead of asthma
+and bronchitis, told his 'experiences' in a voice broken by
+incessant coughing; one of the boys, a rough specimen, known to
+David as a van-boy from some calico-printing works in the
+neighbourhood, prayed aloud, breaking down into sobs in the middle;
+and David, at first obstinately silent, found himself joining
+before the end in the groans and 'Amens,' by force of a contagious
+excitement he half despised but could not withstand.
+
+The little prayer-meeting, however, broke up somewhat in confusion.
+There was not much real difference of opinion at this time in
+Clough End, which was, on the whole, a strongly religious town.
+Even the Churchmanship of it was decidedly evangelical, ready at
+any moment to make common cause with Dissent against Ritualism, if
+such a calamity should ever threaten the little community, and very
+ready to join, more or less furtively, in the excitements of
+Dissenting revivals. Jerry Timmins and his set represented the only
+serious blot on what the pious Clough Endian might reasonably
+regard as a fair picture. But this set contained some sharp
+fellows--provided outlet for a considerable amount of energy of a
+raw and roving sort, and, no doubt, did more to maintain the mental
+equilibrium of the small factory-town than any enthusiast on the
+other side would for a moment have allowed. The excitement which
+followed in the train of a man like Mr. Dyson roused, of course, an
+answering hubbub among the Timminsites. The whole of Jerry's circle
+was stirred up, in fact, like a hive of wasps; their ribaldry grew
+with what it fed on; and every day some new and exquisite method of
+harrying the devout occurred to the more ingenious among them.
+
+David had hitherto escaped notice. But on this evening, while
+he and his half-dozen companions were still on their knees,
+they were first disturbed by loud drummings on the shoemaker's
+door, which opened directly into the little room where they
+were congregated; and then, when they emerged into the street,
+they found a mock prayer-meeting going on outside, with all the
+usual 'manifestations' of revivalist fervour--sighs, groans,
+shouts, and the rest of it--in full flow. At the sight of David
+Grieve there were first stares and then shrieks of laughter.
+
+'I say, Davy,' cried a drunken young weaver, sidling up to him on
+his knees and embracing him from behind, 'my heart's real touched.
+Gie me yor coat, Davy; it's better nor mine, Davy; and I'm yor
+Christian brother, Davy.'
+
+The emotion of this appeal drew uproarious merriment from the knot
+of Secularists. David, in a frenzy, kicked out, so that his
+assailant dropped him with a howl. The weaver's friends closed upon
+the 'Ranters,' who had to fight their way through. It was not till
+they had gained the outskirts of the town that the shower of stones
+ceased, and that they could pause to take stock of their losses.
+Then it appeared that, though all were bruised, torn, and furious,
+some were inclined to take a mystical joy in persecution, and to
+find compensation in certain plain and definite predictions as to
+the eternal fate in store for 'Jerry Timmins's divils.' David, on
+the other hand, was much more inclined to vent his wrath on his own
+side than on the Timminsites.
+
+'Why can't yo keep what yo're doin to yorsels?' he called out
+fiercely to the knot of panting boys, as he faced round upon them
+at the gate leading to the Kinder road. 'Yo're a parcel o'
+fools--always chatterin and clatterin.'
+
+The others defended themselves warmly. 'Them Timmins lot' were
+always spying about. They daren't attack the large meetings, but
+they had a diabolical way of scenting out the small ones. The
+meetings at the shoemaker's had been undisturbed for some few
+nights, then a Timminsite passing by had heard hymns, probably
+listened at the keyhole, and of course informed the main body of
+the enemy.
+
+'They're like them nassty earwigs,' said one boy in disgust,
+'they'll wriggle in onywheres.'
+
+'Howd yor noise!' said David, peremptorily. 'If yo wanted to keep
+out o' their way, yo could do't fasst enough.'
+
+'How!' they inquired, with equal curtness.
+
+'Yo needn't meet in th' town at aw. Theer's plenty o' places up on
+t' moor,' and he waved his hand towards the hills behind him, lying
+clear in the autumn moonlight.' Theer's th' owd smithy--who'd find
+yo there?'
+
+The mention of the smithy was received as an inspiration. There is
+a great deal of pure romantic temper roused by these revivalistic
+outbreaks in provincial England. The idea of the moors and the old
+ruin as setting for a secret prayer-meeting struck the group of
+excited lads as singularly attractive. They parted cheerfully upon
+it, in spite of their bruises.
+
+David, however, walked home fuming. The self-abandonment of the
+revival had been all along wellnigh intolerable to him--and now,
+that he should have allowed the Timminsites to know anything about
+his prayers! He very nearly broke off from it altogether in his
+proud disgust.
+
+However he did ultimately nothing of the sort. As soon as he grew
+cool again, he was as much tormented as before by what was at
+bottom more an intellectual curiosity than a moral anguish. There
+was _some_ moral awakening in it; he had some real qualms
+about sin, some real aspirations after holiness, and, so far, the
+self-consciousness which had first stirred at Haworth was deepened
+and fertilised. But the thirst for emotion and sensation was the
+main force at work. He could not make out what these religious
+people meant by their 'experiences,' and for the first time he
+wanted to make out. So when it was proposed to him to meet at the
+smithy on a certain Saturday evening, he agreed.
+
+Meanwhile, Louie was sitting up in bed every night, with her hands
+round her sharp knees, and her black brows knit over David's
+follies. It seemed to her he no longer cared 'a haporth' about
+getting a letter from Mr. Ancrum, about going to Manchester, about
+all those entrancing anti-meat schemes which were to lead so easily
+to a paradise of free 'buying' for both of them. Whenever she tried
+to call him back to these things he shook her off impatiently, and
+their new-born congeniality to each other had been all swamped in
+this craze for 'shoutin hollerin' people she despised with all her
+heart. When she flew out at him, he just avoided her. Indeed, he
+avoided her now at all times, whether she flew out or not. There
+was an invincible heathenism about Louie, which made her the
+natural enemy of any 'awakened' person.
+
+The relation of the elders in the farm to the new development
+in David was a curious one. Hannah viewed it with a secret
+satisfaction. Christians have less time than other people--such,
+at least, had been her experience with Reuben--to spend in
+thirsting for the goods of this world. The more David went to
+prayer-meetings, the less likely was he to make inadmissible
+demands on what belonged to him. As for poor Reuben, he seemed to
+have got his wish; while he and Hannah had been doing their best to
+drive Sandy's son to perdition through a downward course of
+'loafing,' God had sent Mr. Dyson to put Davy back on the right
+road. But he was ill at ease; he watched the excitement, which all
+the lad's prickly reticence could not hide from those about him,
+with strange and variable feelings. As a Christian, he should have
+rejoiced; instead, the uncle and nephew shunned each other more
+than ever, and shunned especially all talk of the revival. Perhaps
+the whole situation--the influence of the new man, of the local
+talk, of the quickened spiritual life around him, did but aggravate
+the inner strain in Reuben. Perhaps his wife's satisfaction, which
+his sharpened conscience perceived and understood, troubled him
+intolerably. At any rate, his silence and disquiet grew, and his
+only pleasure lay, more than ever, in those solitary cogitations we
+have already spoken of.
+
+The 15th of October approached--as it happened, the Friday before
+the smithy prayer-meeting. On that day of the year, according to
+ancient and invariable custom, the Yorkshire stock--steers,
+heifers, young horses--which are transferred to the Derbyshire
+farms on the 15th of May, are driven back to their Yorkshire
+owners, with all the fatness of Derbyshire pastures showing on
+their sleek sides. Breeders and farmers meet again at Woodhead,
+just within the Yorkshire border. The animals are handed over to
+their owners, paid for at so much a head, and any preventible
+damage or loss occurring among them is reckoned against the farmer
+returning them, according to certain local rules.
+
+As the middle of the month came nearer, Reuben began to talk
+despondently to Hannah of his probable gains from his Yorkshire
+'boarders.' It had been a cold wet summer; he was 'feart' the
+owners would think he might have taken more care of some of the
+animals, especially of the young horses, and he mentioned certain
+ailments springing from damp and exposure for which he might be
+held responsible. Hannah grew irritated and anxious. The receipts
+from this source were the largest they could reckon upon in the
+year. But the fields on which the Yorkshire animals pastured were
+at some distance from the house; this department of the farm
+business was always left wholly to Reuben; and, with much grumbling
+and scolding, she took his word for it as to the probable lowness
+of the sum he should bring back.
+
+David, meanwhile, was sometimes a good deal puzzled by Reuben's
+behaviour. It seemed to him that his uncle told some queer tales at
+home about their summer stock. And when Reuben announced his
+intention of going by himself to Woodhead, and leaving David at
+home, the boy was still more astonished.
+
+However, he was glad enough to be spared the tramp with a set of
+people whose ways and talk were more and more uncongenial to him;
+and after his uncle's departure he lay for hours hidden from Louie
+among the heather, sometimes arguing out imaginary arguments with
+Mr. Dyson, sometimes going through passing thrills of emotion and
+fear. What was meant, he wanted to know, by '_the sense of
+pardon'?_ Person after person at the prayer-meetings he had been
+frequenting had spoken of attaining it with ecstasy, or of being
+still shut out from it with anguish. But how, after all, did it
+differ from pardoning yourself? You had only, it seemed to him, to
+think very hard that you were pardoned, and the feeling came.
+How could anybody tell it was more than that? David racked his
+brain endlessly over the same subject. Who could be sure that
+'experience' was not all moonshine? But he was as yet much too
+touched and shaken by what he had been going through to draw any
+trenchant conclusions. He asked the question, however, and therein
+lay the great difference between him and the true stuff of
+Methodism.
+
+Meanwhile, in his excitement, he, for the first time, ceased to go
+to the Dawsons' as usual. To begin with, they dropped out of a mind
+which was preoccupied with one of the first strong emotions of
+adolescence. Then, some one told him casually that 'Lias was more
+ailing than usual, and that Margaret was in much trouble. He was
+pricked with remorse, but just because Margaret would be sure to
+question him, a raw shyness came in and held him back from the
+effort of going.
+
+On the Saturday evening David, having ingeniously given Louie the
+slip, sped across the fields to the smithy. It was past five
+o'clock, and the light was fading. But the waning gold of the
+sunset as he jumped the wall on to the moor made the whole autumnal
+earth about him, and the whole side of the Scout, one splendour.
+Such browns and pinks among the withering ling; such gleaming
+greens among the bilberry leaf; such reds among the turning ferns;
+such fiery touches on the mountain ashes overhanging the Red Brook!
+The western light struck in great shafts into the bosom of the
+Scout; and over its grand encompassing mass hung some hovering
+clouds just kindling into rosy flame. As the boy walked along he
+saw and thrilled to the beauty which lay spread about him. His mood
+was simple, and sweeter than usual. He felt a passionate need of
+expression, of emotion. There was a true disquiet, a genuine
+disgust with self at the bottom of him, and God seemed more than
+imaginatively near. Perhaps, on this day of his youth, of all days,
+he was closest to the Kingdom of Heaven.
+
+At the smithy he found about a dozen persons, mostly youths, just
+come out from the two or three mills which give employment to
+Clough End, and one rather older than the rest, a favourite
+prayer-leader in Sunday meetings. At first, everything felt
+strange; the boys eyed one another; even David as he stepped in
+among them had a momentary reaction, and was more conscious of the
+presence of a red-haired fellow there with whom he had fought a
+mighty fight on the Huddersfield expedition, than of any spiritual
+needs.
+
+However, the prayer-leader knew his work. He was slow and pompous;
+his tone with the Almighty might easily have roused a hostile sense
+of humour; but Dissent in its active and emotional forms kills the
+sense of humour; and, besides, there was a real, ungainly power in
+the man. Every phrase of his opening prayer was hackneyed; every
+gesture uncouth. But his heart was in it, and religious conviction
+is the most infectious thing in the world. He warmed, and his
+congregation warmed with him. The wild scene, too, did its
+part--the world of darkening moors spread out before them; the
+mountain wall behind them; the October wind sighing round the
+ruined walls; the lonely unaccustomed sounds of birds and water.
+When he ceased, boy after boy broke out into more or less
+incoherent praying. Soon in the dusk they could no longer see each
+other's faces; and then it was still easier to break through
+reserve.
+
+At last David found himself speaking. What he said was at first
+almost inaudible, for he was kneeling between the wall and the pan
+which had been his childish joy, with his face and arms crushed
+against the stones. But when he began the boys about pricked up
+their ears, and David was conscious suddenly of a deepened silence.
+There were warm tears on his hidden cheeks; but it pleased him
+keenly they should listen so, and he prayed more audibly and
+freely. Then, when his voice dropped at last, the prayer-leader
+gave out the familiar hymn, 'Come, O thou Traveller unknown:'--
+
+    Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
+      Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
+    My company before is gone,
+      And I am left alone with Thee;
+    With Thee all night I mean to stay,
+    And wrestle till the break of day.
+
+    Wilt thou not yet to me reveal
+      Thy new unutterable name?
+    Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell--
+      To know it now resolved I am.
+    Wrestling, I will not let thee go,
+    Till I thy name, thy nature know.
+
+                * * *
+
+    'Tis Love! 'tis Love--thou lovest me!
+      I hear thy whisper in my heart;
+    The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
+      Pure universal Love thou art;
+    To me, to all, thy mercies move,
+    Thy nature and thy name is Love.
+
+Again and again the lines rose on the autumn air; each time the
+hymn came to an end it was started afresh, the sound of it
+spreading far and wide into the purple breast of Kinder Scout. At
+last the painful sobbing of poor Tom Mullins almost drowned the
+singing. The prayer-leader, himself much moved, bent over and
+seized him by the arm.
+
+'Look to Jesus, Tom. Lay hold on the Saviour. Don't think of your
+sins; they're done away i' th' blood o' the Lamb. Howd Him fast.
+Say, "I believe," and the Lord ull deliver yo.'
+
+With a cry, the great hulking lad sprang to his feet, and clasped
+his arms above his head--
+
+'I do believe--I will believe. Help me, Lord Jesus. Oh, I'm saved!
+I'm saved!' And he remained standing in an ecstasy, looking to the
+sky above the Scout, where the red sunset glow still lingered.
+
+'Hallelujah! hallelujah! Thanks be to God!' cried the
+prayer-leader, and the smithy resounded in the growing darkness
+with similar shouts. David was almost choking with excitement. He
+would have given worlds to spring to Tom Mullins's side and
+proclaim the same faith. But the inmost heart of him, his real
+self, seemed to him at this testing moment something dead and cold.
+No heavenly voice spoke to _him_, David Grieve. A genuine pang
+of religious despair seized him. He looked out over the moor
+through a gap in the stones. There was a dim path below; the fancy
+struck him that Christ, the 'Traveller unknown,' was passing along
+it. He had already stretched out His hand of blessing to Tom
+Mullins.
+
+'To me! to me, too!' David cried under his breath, carried away by
+the haunting imagination, and straining his eyes into the dusk. Had
+the night opened to his sight there and then in a vision of glory,
+he would have been no whit surprised.
+
+Hark!--what was that sound?
+
+A weird scream rose on the wind. The startled congregation in the
+smithy scrambled to their feet. Another scream, nearer apparently
+than the first, and then a loud wailing, broken every few seconds
+by a strange slight laugh, of which the distance seemed quite
+indefinite. Was it close by, or beyond the Red Brook?
+
+The prayer-leader turned white, the boys stood huddled round him in
+every attitude of terror. Again the scream, and the little ghostly
+laugh! Looking at each other wildly, the whole congregation broke
+from the smithy down the hill. But the leader stopped himself.
+
+'It's mebbe soom one in trouble,' he said manfully, every limb
+trembling. 'We mun go and see, my lads.' And he rushed off in the
+direction whence the first sound had seemed to come--towards the
+Red Brook--half a dozen of the bolder spirits following. The rest
+stood cowering on the slope under the smithy. David meanwhile had
+climbed the ruined wall, and stood with head strained forward, his
+eyes sweeping the moor. But every outline was sinking fast into the
+gulf of the night; only a few indistinct masses--a cluster of
+gorse-bushes, a clump of mountain ash--still showed here and there.
+
+The leader made for one of these darker patches on the
+mountain-side, led on always by the recurrent screams. He reached
+it; it was a patch of juniper overhanging the Red Brook--when
+suddenly from behind it there shot up a white thing, taller than
+the tallest man, with nodding head and outspread arms, and such
+laughter--so faint, so shrill, so evil, breaking midway into a
+hoarse angry yell.
+
+'_Jenny Crum! Jenny Crum!_' cried the whole band with one
+voice, and, wheeling round, they ran down the Scout, joined by the
+contingent from the smithy, some of them falling headlong among the
+heather in their agony of flight, others ruthlessly knocking over
+those in front of them who seemed to be in their way. In a few
+seconds, as it seemed, the whole Scout was left to itself and the
+night. Footsteps, voices, all were gone--save for one long peal of
+most human, but still elfish, mirth, which came from the Red Brook.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+A dark figure sprang down from the wall of the smithy, leapt along
+the heather, and plunged into the bushes along the brook. A cry in
+another key was heard.
+
+David emerged, dragging something behind him.
+
+'Yo limb, yo! How dare yo, yo little beast? Yo impident little
+toad!' And in a perfect frenzy of rage he shook what she held. But
+Louie--for naturally it was Louie--wrenched herself away, and stood
+confronting him, panting, but exultant.
+
+'I freetened 'em! just didn't I? Cantin humbugs! "_Jenny Crum!
+Jenny Crum!_"' And, mimicking the voice of the leader, she broke
+again into an hysterical shout of laughter.
+
+David, beside himself, hit out and struck her. It was a heavy blow
+which knocked her down, and for a moment seemed to stun her. Then
+she recovered her senses, and flew at him in a mad passion, weeping
+wildly with the smart and excitement.
+
+He held her off, ashamed of himself, till she flung away, shrieking
+out--
+
+'Go and say its prayers, do--good little boy--poor little babby.
+Ugh, yo coward! hittin gells, that's all yo're good for.'
+
+And she ran off so fast that all sight of her was lost in a few
+seconds. Only two or three loud sobs seemed to come back from the
+dark hollow below. As for the boy, he stopped a second to
+disentangle his feet from the mop and the tattered sheet wherewith
+Louie had worked her transformation scene. Then he dashed up the
+hill again, past the smithy, and into a track leading out on to the
+high road between Castleton and Clough End. He did not care where
+he went. Five minutes ago he had been almost in heaven; now he was
+in hell. He hated Louie, he hated the boys who had cut and run, he
+loathed himself. No!--religion was not for such as he. No more
+canting--no more praying--away with it! He seemed to shake all the
+emotion of the last few weeks from him with scorn and haste, as he
+ran on, his strong young limbs battling with the wind.
+
+Presently he emerged on the high road. To the left, a hundred yards
+away, were the lights of a wayside inn; a farm waggon and a pair of
+horses standing with drooped and patient heads were drawn up on the
+cobbles in front of it. David felt in his pockets. There was
+eighteenpence in them, the remains of half-a-crown a strange
+gentleman had given him in Clough End the week before for stopping
+a runaway horse. In he stalked.
+
+'Two penn'orth of gin--hot!' he commanded.
+
+The girl serving the bar brought it and stared at him curiously.
+The glaring paraffin lamp above his head threw the frowning brows
+and wild eyes, the crimson cheeks, heaving chest, and tumbled hair,
+into strong light and shade. 'That's a quare un!' she thought, but
+she found him handsome all the same, and, retreating behind the
+beer-taps, she eyed him surreptitiously. She was a raw country
+lass, not yet stript of all her natural shyness, or she would have
+begun to 'chaff' him.
+
+'Another!' said David, pushing forward his glass. This time he
+looked at her. His reckless gaze travelled over her coarse and
+comely face, her full figure, her bare arms. He drank the glass she
+gave him, and yet another. She began to feel half afraid of him,
+and moved away. The hot stimulant ran through his veins. Suddenly
+he felt his head whirling from the effects of it, but that horrible
+clutch of despair was no longer on him. He raised himself defiantly
+and turned to go, staggering along the floor. He was near the
+entrance when an inner door opened, and the carter, who had been
+gossiping in a room behind with the landlord, emerged. He started
+with astonishment when he saw David.
+
+'Hullo, Davy, what are yo after?'
+
+David turned, nearly losing his balance as he did so, and clutching
+at the bar for support. He found himself confronted with Jim
+Wigson--his old enemy--who had been to Castleton with a load of hay
+and some calves, and was on his way back to Kinder again. When he
+saw who it was clinging to the bar counter, Jim first stared and
+then burst into a hoarse roar of laughter.
+
+'Coom here! coom here!' he shouted to the party in the back parlour.
+'Here's a rum start! I do declare this beats cock-fighting!--this do.
+Damn my eyes iv it doosn't! Look at that yoong limb. Why they towd me
+down at Clough End this mornin he'd been took "serious" --took wi a
+prayin turn--they did. Look at un! It ull tak 'im till to-morrow mornin
+to know his yed from his heels. He! he! he! Yo're a deep un, Davy--yo
+are. But yo'll get a bastin when Hannah sees yo--prayin or no prayin.'
+
+And Jim went off into another guffaw, pointing his whip the while
+at Davy. Some persons from the parlour crowded in, enjoying the
+fun. David did not see them. He reached out his hand for the glass
+he had just emptied, and steadying himself by a mighty effort,
+flung it swift and straight in Jim Wigson's face. There was a crash
+of fragments, a line of blood appeared on the young carter's chin,
+and a chorus of wrath and alarm rose from the group behind him.
+With a furious oath Jim placed a hand on the bar, vaulted it, and
+fell upon the lad. David defended himself blindly, but he was dazed
+with drink, and his blows and kicks rained aimlessly on Wigson's
+iron frame. In a second or two Jim had tripped him up, and stood
+over him, his face ablaze with vengeance and conquest.
+
+'Yo yoong varmint--yo cantin yoong hypocrite! I'll teach yo to show
+imperence to your betters. Yo bin allus badly i' want o' soombody
+to tak yo down a peg or two. Now I'll show yo. I'll not fight yo,
+but I'll flog yo--_flog yo_--d' yo hear?'
+
+And raising his carter's whip he brought it down on the boy's back
+and legs. David tried desperately to rise--in vain--Jim had him by
+the collar; and four or five times more the heavy whip came down,
+avenging with each lash many a slumbering grudge in the victor's
+soul.
+
+Then Jim felt his arm firmly caught. 'Now, Mister Wigson,' cried the
+landlord--a little man, but a wiry--'yo'll not get me into trooble.
+Let th' yoong ripstitch go. Yo've gien him a taste he'll not forget
+in a week o' Sundays. Let him go.'
+
+Jim, with more oaths, struggled to get free, but the landlord had
+quelled many rows in his time, and his wrists were worthy of his
+calling. Meanwhile his wife helped up the boy. David was no sooner
+on his feet than he made another mad rush for Wigson, and it needed
+the combined efforts of landlord, landlady, and servant-girl to
+part the two again. Then the landlord, seizing David from behind by
+'the scuft of the neck,' ran him out to the door in a twinkling.
+
+'Go 'long wi yo! An if yo coom raisin th' divil here again, see iv I
+don't gie yo a souse on th' yed mysel.' And he shoved his charge
+out adroitly and locked the door.
+
+David staggered across the road as though still under the impetus
+given by the landlord's shove.
+
+The servant-girl took advantage of the loud cross-fire of talk
+which immediately rose at the bar round Jim Wigson to run to a
+corner window and lift the blind. The boy was sitting on a heap of
+stones for mending the road, looking at the inn. Other passers-by
+had come in, attracted by the row, and the girl slipped out
+unperceived, opened the side door, and ran across the road. It had
+begun to rain, and the drops splashed in her face.
+
+David was sitting leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the lighted
+windows of the house opposite. The rays which came from them showed
+her that his nose and forehead were bleeding, and that the blood
+was dripping unheeded on the boy's clothes. He was utterly
+powerless, and trembling all over, but his look 'gave her a turn.'
+
+'Now, luke here,' she said, bending down to him. 'Yo jes go whoam.
+Wigson, he'll be out direckly, an he'll do yo a hurt iv he finds
+yo. Coom, I'll put yo i' the way for Kinder.'
+
+And before he could gather his will to resist, she had dragged him
+up with her strong countrywoman's arms and was leading him along
+the road to the entrance of the lane he had come by.
+
+'Lor, yo _are_ bleedin,' she said compassionately; 'he shud ha
+thowt as how yo wor nobbut a lad--an it wor he begun aggin fust.
+He's a big bully is Wigson.' And impulsively raising her apron she
+applied it to the blood, David quite passive all the while. The
+great clumsy lass nearly kissed him for pity.
+
+'Now then,' she said at last, turning him into the lane, 'yo know
+your way, an I mun goo, or they'll be raisin the parish arter me.
+Gude neet to yo, an keep out o' Wigson's seet. Rest yursel a bit
+theer--agen th' wall.'
+
+And leaving him leaning against the wall, she reluctantly departed,
+stopping to look back at him two or three times in spite of the
+rain, till the angle of the wall hid him from view.
+
+The rain poured down and the wind whistled through the rough lane.
+David presently slipped down upon a rock jutting from the wall, and
+a fevered, intermittent sleep seized him--the result of the spirits
+he had been drinking. His will could oppose no resistance; he slept
+on hour after hour, sheltered a little by an angle of the wall, but
+still soaked by rain and buffeted by the wind.
+
+When he awoke he staggered suddenly to his feet. The smart of his
+back and legs recalled him, after a few moments of bewilderment, to
+a mental torture he had scarcely yet had time to feel. He--David
+Grieve--had been beaten--thrashed like a dog--by Jim Wigson! The
+remembered fact brought with it a degradation of mind and body--a
+complete unstringing of the moral fibres, which made even revenge
+seem an impossible output of energy. A nature of this sort, with
+such capacities and ambitions, carries about with it a sense of
+supremacy, a natural, indispensable self-conceit which acts as the
+sheath to the bud, and is the condition of healthy development.
+Break it down and you bruise and jeopardise the flower of life.
+
+Jim Wigson!--the coarse, ignorant lout with whom he had been, more
+or less, at feud since his first day in Kinder, whom he had
+despised with all the strength of his young vanity. By to-morrow
+all Kinder would know, and all Kinder would laugh. 'What! yo
+whopped Reuben Grieve's nevvy, Jim? Wal, an a good thing, too!
+A lick now an again ud do _him_ noa harm--a cantankerous yoong
+rascot--pert an proud, like t' passon's pig, I say.' David could
+hear the talk to be as though it were actually beside him. It burnt
+into his ear.
+
+He groped his way through the lane and on to the moor--trembling
+with physical exhaustion, the morbid frenzy within him choking his
+breath, the storm beating in his face. What was that black mass to
+his right?--the smithy? A hard sob rose in his throat. Oh, he had
+been so near to an ideal world of sweetness, purity, holiness! Was
+it a year ago?
+
+With great difficulty he found the crossing-place in the brook, and
+then the gap in the wall which led him into the farm fields. When
+he was still a couple of fields off the house he heard the dogs
+beginning. But he heard them as though in a dream.
+
+At last he stood at the door and fumbled for the handle. Locked!
+Why, what time could it be? He tried to remember what time he had
+left home, but failed. At last he knocked, and just as he did so he
+perceived through a chink of the kitchen shutter a light on the
+scrubbed deal table inside, and Hannah's figure beside it. At
+the sound of the knocker Hannah rose, put away her work with
+deliberation, snuffed the candle, and then moved with it to the
+door of the kitchen. The boy watched her with a quickly beating
+heart and whirling brain. She opened the door.
+
+'Whar yo bin?' she demanded sternly. 'I'd like to know what business
+yo have to coom in this time o' neet, an your uncle fro whoam.
+Yo've bin in mischief, I'll be bound. Theer's Louie coom back wi a
+black eye, an jes because she woan't say nowt about it, I know as
+it's yo are at t' bottom o' 't. I'm reg'lar sick o' sich doins in a
+decent house. Whar yo bin, I say?'
+
+And this time she held the candle up so as to see him. She had been
+sitting fuming by herself, and was in one of her blackest tempers.
+David's misdemeanour was like food to a hungry instinct.
+
+'I went to prayer-meetin,' the lad said thickly. It seemed to him
+as though the words came all in the wrong order.
+
+Hannah bent forward and gave a sudden cry.
+
+'Why, yo bin fightin! Yo're all ower blood! Yo bin fightin,
+and I'll bet a thousand pund yo draw'd in Louie too. And
+_sperrits_! Why, yo _smell_ o' sperrits! Yo're jes _reekin_
+wi 'em! Wal, upon my word!'--and Hannah drew herself back,
+flinging every slow word in his face like a blow. 'Yo feature
+your mither, yo do, boath on you, pretty close. I allus said it ud
+coom out i' yo too. Prayer-meetin! Yo yoong hypocrite! Gang your
+ways! Yo may sleep i' th' stable; it's good enough liggin for yo
+this neet.'
+
+And before he had taken in her words she had slammed the door in
+his face, and locked it. He made a feeble rush for it in vain.
+Hannah marched back into the kitchen, listening instinctively first
+to him left outside, and then for any sound there might be from
+upstairs. In a minute or two she heard uneven steps going away; but
+there was no movement in the room overhead. Louie was sleeping
+heavily. As for Hannah, she sat down again with a fierce decision
+of gesture, which seemed to vibrate through the kitchen and all it
+held. Who could find fault with her? It would be a lesson to him.
+It was not a cold night, and there was straw in the stable--a deal
+better lying than such a boy deserved. As she thought of his
+'religious' turn she shrugged her shoulders with a bitter scorn.
+
+The night wore on in the high Kinder valley. The stormy wind and
+rain beat in great waves of sound and flood against the breast of
+the mountain; the Kinder stream and the Red Brook danced under the
+heavy drops. The grouse lay close and silent in the sheltering
+heather; even the owls in the lower woods made no sound. Still, the
+night was not perfectly dark, for towards midnight a watery moon
+rose, and showed itself at intervals between the pelting showers.
+
+In the Dawsons' little cottage on Frimley Moor there were still
+lights showing when that pale moon appeared. Margaret was watching
+late. She and another woman sat by the fire talking under their
+breaths. A kettle was beside her with a long spout, which sent the
+steam far into the room, keeping the air of it moist and warm for
+the poor bronchitic old man who lay close-curtained from the
+draughts on the wooden bed in the corner.
+
+The kettle sang, the fire crackled, and the wind shook the windows
+and doors. But suddenly, through the other sounds, Margaret was
+aware of an intermittent knocking--a low, hesitating sound, as of
+some one outside afraid, and yet eager, to make himself heard.
+
+She started up, and her companion--a homely neighbour, one of those
+persons whose goodness had, perhaps, helped to shape poor
+Margaret's philosophy of life--looked round with a scared
+expression.
+
+'Whoiver can it be, this time o' neet?' said Margaret--and she
+looked at the old clock--'why, it's close on middle-neet!'
+
+She hesitated a moment, then she went to the door, and bent her
+mouth to the chink--
+
+'Who are yo? What d' yo want?' she asked, in a distinct but low
+voice, so as not to disturb 'Lias.
+
+No answer for a minute. Then her ear caught some words from
+outside. With an exclamation she unlocked the door and threw it
+open.
+
+'Davy! Davy!' she cried, almost forgetting her patient.
+
+The boy clung to the lintel without a word.
+
+'Coom your ways in!' she said peremptorily, catching him by the
+sleeve. 'We conno ha no draughts on th' owd man.'
+
+And she drew him into the light, and shut the door. Then as the
+shaded candle and firelight fell on the tall lad, wavering now to
+this side, now to that, as though unable to support himself, his
+clothes dripping on the flags, his face deadly white, save for the
+smears of blood upon it, the two women fell back in terror.
+
+'Will yo gie me shelter?' said the boy, hoarsely; 'I bin lying hours
+i' th' wet. Aunt Hannah turned me out.'
+
+Margaret came close to him and looked him all over.
+
+'What for did she turn yo out, Davy?'
+
+'I wor late. I'd been fightin Jim Wigson, an she smelt me o' drink.'
+
+And suddenly the lad sank down on a stool near, and laid his head
+in his hands, as though he could hold it up no longer. Margaret's
+blanched old face melted all in a minute.
+
+'Howd 'un up quick!' she said to her companion, still in a whisper.
+'He hanno got a dry thread on--and luke at that cut on his
+yed--why, he'll be laid up for weeks, maybe, for this. Get his
+cloos off, an we'll put him on my bed then.'
+
+And between them they dragged him up, and Margaret began to strip
+off his jacket. As they held him--David surrendering himself
+passively--the curtain of the bed was drawn back, and 'Lias,
+raising himself on an elbow, looked out into the room. As he caught
+sight of the group of the boy and the two women, arrested in their
+task by the movement of the curtain, the old man's face expressed,
+first a weak and agitated bewilderment, and then in an instant it
+cleared.
+
+His dream wove the sight into itself, and 'Lias knew all about it.
+His thin long features, with the white hair hanging about them,
+took an indulgent amused look.
+
+'_Bony_--eh, Bony, is that _yo_, man? Eh, but yo're cold
+an pinched, loike! A gude glass o' English grog ud not come amiss
+to yo. An your coat, an your boots--what is 't drippin? _Snaw?
+_ Yo make a man's backbane freeze t' see yo. An there's hot wark
+behind yo, too. Moscow might ha warmed yo, I'm thinkin, an--'
+
+But the weak husky voice gave way, and 'Lias fell back, still
+holding the curtain, though, in his emaciated hand, and straining
+his dim eyes on David. Margaret, with tears, ran to him, tried to
+quiet him and to shut out the light from him again. But he pushed
+her irritably aside.
+
+'No, Margaret,--doan't intrude. What d' yo know about it? Yo know
+nowt, Margaret. When did yo iver heer o' the Moscow campaign? Let
+me be, woan't yo?'
+
+But perceiving that he would not be quieted, she turned him on his
+pillows, so that he could see the boy at his ease.
+
+'He's bin out i' th' wet, 'Lias dear, has Davy,' she said; 'and it's
+nobbut a clashy night. We mun gie him summat hot, and a place to
+sleep in.'
+
+But the old man did not listen to her. He lay looking at David, his
+pale blue eyes weirdly visible in his haggard face, muttering to
+himself. He was still tramping in the snow with the French army.
+
+Then, suddenly, for the first time, he seemed troubled. He stared
+up at the pale miserable boy who stood looking at him with
+trembling lips. His own face began to work painfully, his dream
+struggled with recognition.
+
+Margaret drew David quickly away. She hurried him into the further
+corner of the cottage, where he was out of sight of the bed. There
+she quickly stripped him of his wet garments, as any mother might
+have done, found an old flannel shirt of 'Lias's for him, and,
+wrapping him close in a blanket, she made him lie down on her own
+bed, he being now much too weak to realise what was done with him.
+Then she got an empty bottle, filled it from the kettle, and put it
+to his feet; and finally she brought a bowlful of warm water and a
+bit of towel, and, sitting down by him, she washed the blood and
+dirt away from his face and hand, and smoothed down the tangled
+black hair. She, too, noticed the smell of spirits, and shook her
+head over it; but her motherliness grew with every act of service,
+and when she had made him warm and comfortable, and he was dropping
+into the dead sleep of exhaustion, she drew her old hand tenderly
+across his brow.
+
+'He do feature yan o' my own lads so as he lies theer,' she said
+tremulously to her friend at the fire, as though explaining
+herself. 'When they'd coom home late fro wark, I'd use to hull 'em
+up so mony a time. Ay, I'd been woonderin what had coom to th' boy.
+I thowt he'd been goin wrang soomhow, or he'd ha coom aw these
+weeks to see 'Lias an me. It's a poor sort o' family he's got. That
+Hannah Grieve's a hard un, I'll uphowd yo. Theer's a deal o' her
+fault in 't, yo may mak sure.'
+
+Then she went to give 'Lias some brandy--he lived on little else
+now. He dropped asleep again, and, coming back to the hearth, she
+consented to lie down before it while her friend watched. Her
+failing frame was worn out with nursing and want of rest, and she
+was soon asleep.
+
+When Davy awoke the room was full of a chill daylight. As he moved
+he felt himself stiff all over. The sensation brought back memory,
+and the boy's whole being seemed to shrink together. He burrowed
+first under his coverings out of the light, then suddenly he sat up
+in bed, in the shadow of the little staircase--or rather
+ladder--which led to the upper story, and looked about him.
+
+The good woman who had shared Margaret's watch was gone back to her
+own home and children. Margaret had made up the fire, tidied the
+room, and, at 'Lias's request, drawn up the blinds. She had just
+given him some beef-tea and brandy, sponged his face, and lifted
+him on his pillows. There seemed to be a revival of life in the old
+man, death was for the moment driven back; and Margaret hung over
+him in an ecstasy, the two crooning together. David could see her
+thin bent figure--the sharpened delicacy of the emaciated face set
+in the rusty black net cap which was tied under the chin, and fell
+in soft frills on the still brown and silky hair. He saw her
+weaver's hand folded round 'Lias's, and he could hear 'Lias
+speaking in a weak thread of a voice, but still sanely and
+rationally. It gave him a start to catch some of the words--he had
+been so long accustomed to the visionary 'Lias.
+
+'Have yo rested, Margaret?'
+
+'Ay, dear love, three hours an moor. Betsy James wor here; she saw
+yo wanted for nowt. She's a gude creetur, ain't she, 'Lias?'
+
+'Ay, but noan so good as my Margaret,' said the old man, looking at
+her wistfully.' But yo'll wear yorsel down, Margaret; 'yo've had no
+rest for neets. Yo're allus toilin' and moilin', an I'm no worth
+it, Margaret.'
+
+The tears gushed to the wife's eyes. It was only with the nearness
+of death that 'Lias seemed to have found out his debt to her. To
+both, her lifelong service had been the natural offering of the
+lower to the higher; she had not been used to gratitude, and she
+could not bear it.
+
+'Dear heart! dear love!' David heard her say; and then there came
+to his half-reluctant ear caresses such as a mother gives her
+child. He laid his head on his knees, trying to shut them out. He
+wished with a passionate and bitter regret that he had not been so
+many weeks without coming near these two people; and now 'Lias was
+going fast, and after to-day he would see them both no more--for
+ever?
+
+Margaret heard him moving, and nodded back to him over her
+shoulder.
+
+'Yo've slept well, Davy,--better nor I thowt yo would. Your cloos
+are by yo--atwixt yo an t'stairs.'
+
+And there he found them, dry and brushed. He dressed hastily and
+came forward to the fire. 'Lias recognised him feebly, Margaret
+watching anxiously to see whether his fancies would take him again.
+In this tension of death and parting his visions had become almost
+more than she could bear. But 'Lias lay quiet.
+
+'Davy wor caught i' th' rain, and I gave him a bed,' she explained
+again, and the old man nodded without a word.
+
+Then as she prepared him a bowl of oatmeal she stood by the fire
+giving the boy motherly advice. He must go back home, of course,
+and never mind Hannah; there would come a time when he would get
+his chance like other people; and he mustn't drink, for, 'i' th'
+first place, drink wor a sad waste o' good wits,' and David's were
+'better'n most;' and in the second, 'it wor a sin agen the Lord.'
+
+David sat with his head drooped in his hand apparently listening.
+In reality, her gentle babble passed over him almost unheeded. He
+was aching in mind and body; his strong youth, indeed, had but just
+saved him from complete physical collapse; for he had lain an
+indefinite time on the soaking moor, till misery and despair had
+driven him to Margaret's door. But his moral equilibrium was
+beginning to return, in virtue of a certain resolution, the one
+thing which now stood between him and the black gulf of the night.
+He ate his porridge and then he got up.
+
+'I mun goo, Margaret.'
+
+He would fain have thanked her, but the words choked in his throat.
+
+'Ay, soa yo mun, Davy,' said the little body briskly. 'If theer's an
+onpleasant thing to do it's best doon quickly--yo mun go back and
+do your duty. Coom and see us when yo're passin again. An say
+good-bye to 'Lias. He's that wick this mornin--ain't yo, 'Lias?'
+
+And with a tender cheerfulness she ran across to 'Lias and told him
+Davy was going.
+
+'Good-bye, Davy, my lad, good-bye,' murmured the old man, as he
+felt the boy's strong fingers touching his. 'Have yo been readin
+owt, Davy, since we saw yo? It's a long time, Davy.'
+
+'No, nowt of ony account,' said David, looking away.
+
+'Ay, but yo mun keep it up. Coom when yo like; I've not mony books,
+but yo know yo can have 'em aw. I want noan o' them now, do I,
+Marg'ret? But I want for nowt--nowt. Dyin 's long, but it's
+varra--varra peaceful. Margaret!'
+
+And withdrawing his hand from Davy, 'Lias laid it in his wife's with
+a long, long sigh. David left them so. He stole out unperceived by
+either of them.
+
+When he got outside he stood for a moment under the sheltering
+sycamores and laid his cheek against the door. The action contained
+all he could not say.
+
+Then he sped along towards the farm. The sun was rising through the
+autumn mists, striking on the gold of the chestnuts, the red of the
+cherry trees. There were spaces of intense blue among the rolling
+clouds, and between the storm past and the storm to come the whole
+moorland world was lavishly, garishly bright.
+
+He paused at the top of the pasture-fields to look at the farm.
+Smoke was already rising from the chimney. Then Aunt Hannah was up,
+and he must mind himself. He crept on under walls, till he got to
+the back of the farmyard. Then he slipped in, ran into the stable,
+and got an old coat of his left there the day before. There was a
+copy of a Methodist paper lying near it. He took it up and tore it
+across with passion. But his rage was not so much with the paper.
+It was his own worthless, unstable, miserable self he would have
+rent if he could. The wreck of ideal hopes, the defacement of that
+fair image of itself which every healthy youth bears about with it,
+could not have been more pitifully expressed.
+
+Then he looked round to see if there was anything else that he
+could honestly take. Yes--an ash stick he had cut himself a week or
+two ago. Nothing else--and there was Tibby moving and beginning to
+bark in the cowhouse.
+
+He ran across the road, and from a safe shelter in the fields on
+the farther side he again looked back to the farm. There was
+Louie's room, the blind still down. He thought of his blow of the
+night before--of his promises to her. Aye, she would fret over his
+going--he knew that--in her own wild way. She would think he had
+been a beast to her. So he had--so he had! There surged up in his
+mind inarticulate phrases of remorse, of self-excuse, as though he
+were talking to her.
+
+Some day he would come back and claim her. But when? His
+buoyant self-dependence was all gone. It had nothing to do with
+his present departure. That came simply from the fact that it was
+_impossible_ for him to go on living in Kinder any longer--he
+did not stop to analyse the whys and wherefores.
+
+But suddenly a nervous horror of seeing anyone he knew, now that
+the morning was advancing, startled him from his hiding-place. He
+ran up towards the Scout again, so as to make a long circuit round
+the Wigsons' farm. As he distinguished the walls of it a shiver of
+passion ran through the young body. Then he struck off straight
+across the moors towards Glossop.
+
+One moment he stood on the top of Mardale Moor. On one side of him
+was the Kinder valley, Needham Farm still showing among its trees;
+the white cataract of the Downfall cleaving the dark wall of the
+Scout, and calling to the runaway in that voice of storm he knew so
+well; the Mermaid's Pool gleaming like an eye in the moorland. On
+the other side were hollow after hollow, town beyond town, each
+with its cap of morning smoke. There was New Mills, there was
+Stockport, there in the far distance was Manchester.
+
+The boy stood a moment poised between the two worlds, his ash-stick
+in his hand, the old coat wound round his arm. Then at a bound he
+cleared a low stone wall beside him and ran down the Glossop road.
+
+Twelve hours later Reuben Grieve climbed the long hill to the farm.
+His wrinkled face was happier than it had been for months, and his
+thoughts were so pleasantly occupied that he entirely failed to
+perceive, for instance, the behaviour of an acquaintance, who
+stopped and started as he met him at the entrance of the Kinder
+lane, made as though he would have spoken, and, thinking better of
+it, walked on. Reuben--the mendacious Reuben--had done very well
+with his summer stock--very well indeed. And part of his earnings
+was now safely housed in the hands of an old chapel friend, to whom
+he had confided them under pledge of secrecy. But he took a
+curious, excited pleasure in the thought of the 'poor mouth' he was
+going to make to Hannah. He was growing reckless in his passion for
+restitution--always provided, however, that he was not called upon
+to brave his wife openly. A few more such irregular savings, and,
+if an opening turned up for David, he could pay the money and pack
+off the lad before Hannah could look round. He could never do it
+under her opposition, but he thought he could do it and take the
+consequences--he _thought_ he could.
+
+He opened his own gate. There on the house doorstep stood Hannah,
+whiter and grimmer than ever.
+
+'Reuben Grieve,' she said quickly, 'your nevvy's run away. An if yo
+doan't coom and keep your good-for-nothin niece in her place, and
+make udder foak keep a civil tongue i' their head to your wife,
+I'll leave your house this neet, as sure as I wor born a Martin!'
+
+Reuben stumbled into the house. There was a wild rush downstairs,
+and Louie fell upon him, David's blow showing ghastly plain in her
+white quivering face.
+
+'Whar's Davy?' she said. 'Yo've got him!--he's hid soomwhere--yo
+know whar he is! I'll not stay here if yo conno find him! It wor
+_her_ fault'--and she threw out a shaking hand towards her
+aunt--'she druv him out last neet--an Dawsons took him in--an
+iverybody's cryin shame on her! And if yo doan't mak her find
+him--she knows where he is--I'll not stay in this hole!--I'll kill
+her!--I'll burn th' house!--I'll--'
+
+The child stopped--panting, choked--beside herself.
+
+Hannah made a threatening step, but at her gesture Reuben sprang
+up, and seizing her by both wrists he looked at her from a height,
+as a judge looks. Never had those dull eyes met her so before.
+
+'Woman!' he cried fiercely. 'Woman! what ha yo doon wi Sandy's son?'
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II YOUTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+A tall youth carrying a parcel of books under his arm was hurrying
+along Market Place, Manchester. Beside him were covered flower
+stalls bordering the pavement, in front of him the domed mass of
+the Manchester Exchange, and on all sides he had to push his way
+through a crowd of talking, chaffering, hurrying humanity.
+Presently he stopped at the door of a restaurant bearing the
+idyllic and altogether remarkable name--there it was in gilt
+letters over the door--of the 'Fruit and Flowers Parlour.' On the
+side post of the door a bill of fare was posted, which the young
+man looked up and down with careful eyes. It contained a strange
+medley of items in all tongues--
+
+         'Marrow pie
+  _Haricots a la Lune de Miel_
+  _Vol-au-Vent a la bonne Santo:_
+        Tomato fritters
+        Cheese 'Ticements
+       _Salad saladorum_'
+
+And at the bottom of the _menu_ was printed in bold red
+characters,
+
+  'No meat, no disease. _Ergo_, no meat, no sin.
+  Fellow-citizens, leave your carnal foods,
+  and try a more excellent way.
+  I. E. Push the door and walk in.
+  The Fruit and Flowers Parlour
+  invites everybody and overcharges nobody.'
+
+The youth did not trouble, however, to read the notice. He knew it
+and the 'Parlour' behind it by heart. But he moved away, pondering
+the _menu_ with a smile.
+
+In his amused abstraction--at the root of which lay the appetite of
+eighteen--he suddenly ran into a passer-by, who stumbled against a
+shop window with an exclamation of pain. The youth's attention was
+attracted and he stopped awkwardly.
+
+'People of your height, young man, should look before them,' said
+the victim, rubbing what seemed to be a deformed leg, while his
+lips paled a little.
+
+'Mr. Ancrum,' cried the other, amazed.
+
+'Davy!'
+
+The two looked at each other. Then Mr. Ancrum gripped the lad's
+arm.
+
+'Help me along, Davy. It's only a bruise. It'll go off. Where are
+you going?'
+
+'Up Piccadilly way with a parcel,' said Davy, looking askance at
+his companion's nether man. 'Did I knock your bad leg, sir?'
+
+'Oh no, nothing--never mind. Well now, Davy, this is
+queer--decidedly queer. Four years!--and we run against each other
+in Market Street at last. Tell me the truth, Davy--have you long
+ago given me up as a man who could make promises to a lad in
+difficulties and forget 'em as soon as he was out of sight? Say it
+out, my boy.'
+
+David flushed and looked down at his companion with some
+embarrassment. Their old relation of minister and pupil had left a
+deep mark behind it. Moreover, in the presence of that face of Mr.
+Ancrum's, a long, thin, slightly twisted face, with the stamp
+somehow of a tragic sincerity on the eyes and mouth, it was
+difficult to think as slightingly of his old friend as he had done
+for a good while past, apparently with excellent reason.
+
+'I supposed there was something the matter,' he blurted out at
+last.
+
+'Well, never mind, Davy,' said the other, smiling sadly. 'We can't
+talk here in this din. But now I've got you, I keep you. Where are
+you?'
+
+'I'm in Half Street, sir--Purcell's, the bookseller.'
+
+'Don't know him. I never go into a shop. I have no money. Are you
+apprentice there?'
+
+'Well, there was no binding. I'm assistant. I do a lot of business
+one way and another, buying and selling both.'
+
+'How long have you been in Manchester?'
+
+'Four years, sir.'
+
+The minister looked amazed.
+
+'And I have been here, off and on, for the last three. How have we
+missed each other all that time? I made inquiries at Clough End,
+when--ah, well, no matter; but it was too late. You had decamped,
+no one could tell me anything.'
+
+David walked on beside his companion, silent and awkward. The
+explanation seemed a lame one. Mr. Ancrum had left Clough End in
+May, promising to look out for a place for the lad at once, and to
+let him know. Six whole months elapsed between that promise and
+David's own departure. Yes, it was lame; but it was so long ago,
+and so many things had happened since, that it did not signify.
+Only he did not somehow feel much effusion in meeting his old
+friend and playfellow again.
+
+'Getting on, Davy?' said Ancrum presently, looking the lad up and
+down.
+
+David made a movement of the shoulders which the minister noticed.
+It was both more free and more graceful than ordinary English
+gesture. It reawakened in Ancrum at once that impression of
+something alien and unusual which both David and his sister had
+often produced in him while they were still children.
+
+'I don't know,' said the boy slowly; and then, after a hesitation
+or two, fell silent.
+
+'Well, look here,' said Ancrum, stopping short; 'this won't do for
+talk, as I said before; but I must know all about you, and I must
+tell you what I can about myself. I lodge in Mortimer Road, you
+know, up Fallowfield way. You can get there by tram in twenty
+minutes; when will you come and see me? To-night?'
+
+The lad thought a moment.
+
+'Would Wednesday night do, sir? I--I believe I'm going to the music
+to-night.'
+
+'What, to the "Elijah," in the Free Trade Hall? Appoint me a place
+to meet--we'll go together--and you shall come home to supper with
+me afterwards.'
+
+David flushed and looked straight before him.
+
+'I promised to take two young ladies,' he said, after a moment,
+abruptly.
+
+'Oh!' said Mr. Ancrum, laughing. 'I apologise. Well, Wednesday
+night, then.--Don't you forget, Davy--half-past seven? Done.
+_Fourteen_, Mortimer Road. Good-bye.'
+
+And the minister turned and retraced his steps towards Market
+Place. He walked slowly, like one much preoccupied, and might have
+run into fresh risks but for the instinctive perception of most
+passers-by that he was not a person to be hustled. Suddenly he
+laughed out--thinking of David and his 'young ladies,' and
+comparing the lad's admission with his former attitude towards
+'gells.' Well, time had but wrought its natural work. What
+a brilliant noticeable creature altogether--how unlike the
+ordinary run of north-country lads! But that he had been from the
+beginning--the strain of some nimbler blood had always shown
+itself.
+
+Meanwhile, David made his way up Piccadilly--did some humourist
+divert himself, in days gone by, with dropping a shower of London
+names on Manchester streets?--and deposited his parcel. Then the
+great clock of the Exchange struck twelve, and the Cathedral
+followed close upon it, the sounds swaying and vibrating above the
+crowds hurrying through Market Street. It was a damp October day.
+Above, the sky was hidden by a dark canopy of cloud and smoke; the
+Cathedral on its hill rose iron-black above the black streets and
+river; black mud encrusted all the streets, and bespattered those
+that walked in them. Nothing more dreary than the smoke-grimed
+buildings on either hand, than the hideous railway station across
+the bridge, or the mud-sprinkled hoardings covered with flaring
+advertisements, which led up to the bridge, could be well imagined.
+Manchester was at its darkest and grimmest.
+
+But as David Grieve walked back along Market Street his heart
+danced within him. Neither mud nor darkness, neither the squalor of
+the streets, nor the penetrating damp of the air, affected him at
+all. The crowd, the rush of life about him, the gas in the shops,
+the wares on which it shone, the endless faces passing him, the
+sense of hurry, of business, of quick living--he saw and felt
+nothing else; and to these his youth was all atune.
+
+Arrived in Market Place again he made his way with alacrity to the
+'Parlour.' For it was dinner time; he had a free half-hour, and
+nine times out of ten he spent it at the 'Parlour.'
+
+He walked in, put his hat on its accustomed peg, took his seat at a
+table near the door, and looked round for some one. The low
+widespreading room was well filled, mostly with clerks and shopmen;
+the gas was lit because of the darkness outside, and showed off the
+gay panels on the walls filled with fruit and flower subjects, for
+which Adrian O'Connor Lomax, commonly called 'Daddy,' the owner of
+the restaurant, had given a commission to some students at the
+Mechanics' Institute, and whereof he was inordinately proud. At the
+end of the room near the counter was a table occupied by about half
+a dozen young men, all laughing and talking noisily, and beside
+them shouting, gesticulating, making dashes, now for one, now for
+another--was a figure, which David at once set himself to watch,
+his chin balanced on his hand, his eyes dancing. It was the thin
+tall figure of an oldish man in a long frock-coat, which opened in
+front over a gaily flowered silk waistcoat. On the bald crown of
+his head he wore a black skull cap, below which certain grotesque
+and scanty tails of fair hair, carefully brushed, fell to his
+shoulders. His face was long and sharply pointed, and the surface
+of it bronzed and wrinkled by long exposure, out of all likeness to
+human skin. The eyes were weirdly prominent and blue; the gestures
+had the deliberate extravagance of an actor; and the whole man
+recalled a wizard of pantomime.
+
+David had hardly time to amuse himself with the 'chaffing' of
+Daddy, which was going on, and which went on habitually at the
+Parlour from morning till night, when Daddy perceived a new-comer.
+
+He turned round sharp upon his heels, surveyed the room with the
+frown of a general.
+
+'Ah!' he said with a theatrical air, as he made out the lad at the
+further table. 'Gentlemen, I let you off for the present,' and
+waving his hand to them with an indulgent self-importance, which
+provoked a roar of laughter, he turned and walked down the
+restaurant, with a quick swaying gait, to where David sat.
+
+David made room for him in a smiling silence. Lomax sat down, and
+the two looked at each other.
+
+'Davy,' said Daddy severely, 'why weren't you here yesterday?'
+
+'When did you begin opening on Sundays, Daddy?' said the youth,
+attacking a portion of marrow pie, which had just been laid before
+him, his gay curious eyes still wandering over Daddy's costume,
+which was to-day completed by a large dahlia in the buttonhole, as
+grotesque as the rest.
+
+'Ah bedad, but I'm losing my memory entirely;--and you know it, you
+varmint. Well then, it was Saturday you weren't here.'
+
+'You're about right there. I was let off early, and got a walk out
+Ramsbottom way with a fellow. I hadn't stretched my legs for two
+months, and--I'll confess to you, Daddy--that when we got down from
+the moor, I was--overtaken--as the pious people say--by a mutton
+chop.'
+
+The lad looked up at him laughing. Daddy surveyed him with chagrin.
+
+'I knew you were a worthless lukewarm sort of a creature.
+Flesh-eating's as bad as drink for them that have got it in 'em.
+It'll come out. Well, go your ways! _You'll_ never be Prime
+Minister.'
+
+'Don't distress yourself, Daddy. As long as marrow pies are good, I
+shall eat 'em--you may count on that. What's that cheese affair
+down there?' and he pointed towards the last item but one in the
+bill of fare. Instead of answering, the old man turned on his seat,
+and called to one of the waitresses near. In a second David had a
+'Cheese 'Ticement' before him, at which he peered curiously. Daddy
+watched him, not without some signs of nervousness.
+
+'Daddy,' said David, calmly looking up, 'when I last saw this
+article it was called "Welsh rabbit."'
+
+'Davy, you've no soul for fine distinctions,' said the other
+hastily. 'Change the subject. How have my _dear_ brother-in-law
+and you been hitting it off lately?'
+
+David went on with his ''Ticement,' the corners of his mouth
+twitching, for a minute or so, then he raised his head and slowly
+shook it, looking Daddy in the face.
+
+'We shall bear up when we say good-bye, Daddy, and I don't think
+that crisis is far off. It would have come long ago, only I do
+happen to know a provoking deal more about books than any assistant
+he ever had before. Last week I picked him up a copy of "Bells and
+Pomegranates" for one and nine, and he sold it next day for two
+pound sixteen. There's business for you, Daddy. That put off our
+breach at least a fortnight, but unless I discover a first folio of
+Shakespeare for sixpence between now and then, I don't see what's
+to postpone the agony after that--and if I did I should probably
+speculate in it myself. No, Daddy, it's coming to the point, as the
+tiger said when he reached the last joint of the cow's tail. And
+it's your fault.'
+
+'My fault, Davy,' said Lomax, half tremulous, half delighted,
+drawing a chair close up to the table that he might lose nothing of
+the youth's confidences. 'What d'ye mean by that, ye spalpeen?'
+
+'Well, wasn't it you took me to the Hall of Science, Daddy, and
+couldn't keep a quiet tongue in your head about it afterwards?
+Wasn't it you lent me the "Secularist," which got me into the worst
+rumpus of the season? Oh, Daddy, you're a bad un!'
+
+And the handsome lad leant back in his chair, stretching his long
+legs and studying Daddy with twinkling eyes. As for Lomax, he
+received the onslaught with a curious mixture of expressions, in
+which a certain malicious pleasure, crossed by an uneasy sense of
+responsibility, was the most prominent. He sat drumming on the
+table, his straggling beard falling forward on to his chest, his
+mouth pursing itself up. At last he threw back his head with
+energy.
+
+'I'll not excuse myself, Davy; you're well out of it. You'll be a
+great man yet--always provided you can manage yourself in the
+matter of flesh meat. It was to come one way or the other--you
+couldn't put up much longer with such a puke-stocking as my
+precious brother-in-law. (That's one of the great points of
+Shakespeare, Davy, my lad--perhaps you haven't noticed it--you get
+such a ruck of bad names out of him for the asking! Puke-stocking
+is good--real good. If it wasn't made for a sanctimonious
+hypocrite of a Baptist like Purcell it ought to have been.)
+And "Spanish-pouch" too! Oh, I love "Spanish-pouch"! When I've
+called a man "Spanish-pouch", I'm the better for it, Davy--the
+bile's relieved.'
+
+'Thank you, Daddy; I'll remember the receipt. I say, were you ever
+in Purcell's shop?'
+
+'Purcell's shop? Why, of course I was, you varmint! Wasn't it there
+I met my Isabella, his sister? Ah, the poor thing! He led her a
+life; and when I was his assistant I took sides with her--that was
+the beginning of it all. At first we hadn't got on so badly--I had
+a pious fit on myself in those days--but one day at tea, I had been
+making free--taking Isabella's part. There had been a neighbour
+there, and the laugh had been against him. Well, after tea, we
+marched back to the shop, and says he to me, as black as thunder,
+"I'm quite willing, Lomax, to be your Christian brother in here:
+when we're in society I'd have you remember it's different. You
+should know your place."
+
+'"Oh, should I?" says I. (Isabella had been squeezing my hand under
+the table and I didn't care what I said.) "Well, you'd better find
+some one as will, and be d--d to your Christian brotherhood." And
+I took my cap up and marched out, leaving him struck a pillar of
+salt with surprise, and that mad!--for we were in the middle of
+issuing the New Year's catalogue, and he'd left most of it to me.
+And three weeks after--'
+
+Daddy rose quivering with excitement, put his thumbs into his
+waistcoat pocket, and bent over the back of his chair towards
+David. As he stood there, on tiptoe, the flaps of the long coat
+falling back from him like wings, his skull-cap slightly awry, two
+red spots on either wrinkled cheek, and every feature of the sharp
+brown face alive with the joy of his long-past vengeance, he was
+like some strange perching bird.
+
+'--Three weeks after, Davy, I married my Isabella under his
+puritanical nose, at the chapel across the way; and the bit of
+spite in it--bedad!--it was like mustard to beef. (Pish! what am I
+about!) And I set up shop almost next door to the chapel, and took
+the trade out of his mouth, and enjoyed myself finely for six
+months. At the end of that time he gave out that the neighbourhood
+was too "low" for him, and he moved up town. And though I've been
+half over the world since, I've never ceased to keep an eye on him.
+I've had a finger in more pies of his than he thinks for!'
+
+And Daddy drew himself up, pressing his hands against his sides,
+his long frame swelling out, as it seemed, with sudden passion.
+David watched him with a look half sympathetic, half satirical.
+
+'I don't see that he did you much harm, Daddy.'
+
+'Harm!' said the little man, irascibly. 'Harm! I must say you're
+uncommon slow at gripping a situation, Davy. I'd my wife's score to
+settle, too, I tell you, as well as my own. He'd sat on his poor
+easy-going sister till she hadn't a feature left. I knew he had.
+He's made up of all the mean vices--and at the same time, if you
+were to hear him at a prayer meeting, you'd think that since Enoch
+went up to heaven the wrong way, the world didn't happen to have
+been blessed with another saint to match Tom Purcell.' And, stirred
+by his own eloquence, Daddy looked down frowning on the youth
+before him.
+
+'What made you give up the book-trade, Daddy?' asked David, with a
+smile.
+
+It was like the pricking of a bladder. Daddy collapsed in a moment.
+Sitting down again, he began to arrange his coat elaborately over
+his knees, as though to gain time.
+
+'David, you're an inquisitive varmint,' he said at last, looking up
+askance at his companion.' Some one's been telling you tales,
+by the look of you. Look here--if Tom Purcell's a blathering
+hypocrite, that is not the same thing precisely as saying that
+Adrian O'Connor Lomax is a perfect specimen of the domestic
+virtues. Never you mind, my boy, what made me give up bookselling.
+I've chucked so many things overboard since, that it's hardly worth
+inquiring. Try any trade you like and Daddy'll be able to give you
+some advice in it--that's the only thing that concerns you. Well
+now, tell me--' and he turned round and put his elbows on the
+table, leaning over to David--'When are you coming away, and what
+are your prospects?'
+
+'I told you about a fortnight would see it out, Daddy. And there's
+a little shop in--But it's no good, Daddy. You can't keep secrets.'
+
+The old man turned purple, drew himself up, and looked fiercely at
+David from behind his spectacles. But in a second his mood changed
+and he stretched his hand slowly out across the table.
+
+'On the honour of a Lomax,' he said solemnly.
+
+There was a real dignity about the absurd action which melted
+David. He shook the hand and repeated him. Leaning over he
+whispered some information in Daddy's ear, Daddy beamed. And in the
+midst of the superfluity of nods and winks that followed David
+called for his bill.
+
+The action recalled Daddy to his own affairs, and he looked on
+complacently while David paid.
+
+''Pon my word, Davy, I can hardly yet believe in my own genius.
+Where else, my boy, in this cotton-spinning hole, would you find a
+dinner like that for sixpence? Am I a benefactor to the species,
+sir, or am I not?'
+
+'Looks like it, Daddy, by the help of Miss Dora.'
+
+'Aye, aye,' said the old man testily,--'I'll not deny that Dora's
+useful to the business. But the _inspiration_, Davy, 's all
+mine. You want genius, my boy, to make a tomfool of yourself like
+this,' and he looked himself proudly up and down. 'Twenty customers
+a week come here for nothing in the world but to see what new rigs
+Daddy may be up to. The invention--the happy ideas, man, I throw
+into one day of this place would stock twenty ordinary businesses.'
+
+'All the same, Daddy, I've tasted Welsh rabbit before,' said David
+drily, putting on his hat.
+
+'I scorn your remark, sir. It argues a poorly furnished mind. Show
+me anything new in this used-up world, eh? but for the name and the
+dishing up--Well, good-bye, Davy, and good luck to you!'
+
+David made his way across Hanging Ditch to a little row of houses
+bearing the baldly appropriate name of Half Street. It ran along
+the eastern side of the Cathedral close. First came the houses,
+small, irregular, with old beams and projections here and there,
+then a paved footway, then the railings round the close. In full
+view of the windows of the street rose the sixteenth-century
+church which plays as best it can the part of Cathedral to
+Manchester. Round it stretched a black and desolate space paved
+with tombstones. Not a blade of grass broke the melancholy of those
+begrimed and time-worn slabs. The rain lay among them in pools,
+squalid buildings overlooked them, and the church, with its
+manifest inadequacy to a fine site and a great city, did but little
+towards overcoming the mean and harsh impression made--on such a
+day especially--by its surroundings.
+
+David opened the door of a shop about halfway up the row. A bell
+rang sharply, and as he shut the outer door behind him, another at
+the back of the shop opened hastily, and a young girl came in.
+
+'Mr. Grieve, father's gone out to Eccles to see some books a
+gentleman wants him to buy. If Mr. Stephens comes, you're to tell
+him father's found him two or three more out of the list he sent.
+You know where all his books are put together, if he wants to see
+them, father says.'
+
+'Yes, thank you, Miss Purcell, I do. No other message?'
+
+'No.' The speaker lingered. 'What time do we start for the music
+to-night? But you'll be down to tea?'
+
+'Certainly, if you and Miss Dora don't want it to yourselves.' The
+speaker smiled. He was leaning on the counter, while the girl stood
+behind it.
+
+'Oh dear, no!' said Miss Purcell with a half-pettish gesture. 'I
+don't know what to talk to Dora about now. She thinks of nothing
+but St. Damian's and her work. It's worse than father. And, of
+course, I know she hasn't much opinion of _me_. Indeed, she's
+always telling me so--well, not exactly--but she lets me guess fast
+enough.'
+
+The speaker put up two small hands to straighten some of the
+elaborate curls and twists with which her pretty head was crowned.
+There was a little consciousness in the action. The thought of her
+cousin had evidently brought with it the thought of some of those
+things of which the stern Dora disapproved.
+
+David looked at the brown hair and the slim fingers as he was meant
+to look at them. Yet in his smiling good humour there was not a
+trace of bashfulness or diffidence. He was perfectly at his ease,
+with something of a proud self-reliant consciousness in every
+movement; nothing in his manner could have reminded a spectator of
+the traditional apprentice making timid love to his master's
+daughter.
+
+'I've seen you stand up to her though,' he said laughing. 'It's like
+all pious people. Doesn't it strike you as odd that they should
+never be content with being pious for themselves?'
+
+He looked at her with bright sarcastic eyes.
+
+'Oh, I know what you mean!' she said with an instant change of
+tone; 'I didn't mean anything of the sort. I think it's shocking of
+you to go to that place on Sundays--so there, Mr. Grieve.'
+
+She threw herself back defiantly against the books which walled the
+shop, her arms folded before her. The attitude showed the long
+throat, the rounded bust, and the slender waist compressed with
+some evident rigour into a close-fitting brown dress. That Miss
+Purcell thought a great deal of the fashion of her hair, the style
+of her bodices, and the size of her waist was clear; that she was
+conscious of thinking about them to good purpose was also plain.
+But on the whole the impression of artificiality, of something
+over-studied and over-done which the first sight of her generally
+awakened, was soon, as a rule, lost in another more attractive--in
+one of light, tripping youth, perfectly satisfied with itself and
+with the world.
+
+'I don't think you know much about the place,' he said quietly,
+still smiling.
+
+She flushed, her foolish little sense of natural superiority to
+'the assistant' outraged again, as it had been outraged already a
+hundred times since she and David Grieve had met.
+
+'I know quite as much as anybody need know--any respectable
+person--' she maintained angrily. 'It's a low, disgraceful
+place--and they talk wicked nonsense. Everyone says so. It doesn't
+matter a bit where Uncle Lomax goes--he's mad--but it is a shame he
+should lead other people astray.'
+
+She was much pleased with her own harangue, and stood there
+frowning on him, her sharp little chin in the air, one foot beating
+the ground.
+
+'Well, yes, really,' said David in a reflective tone; 'one would
+think Miss Dora had her hands full at home, without--'
+
+He looked up, significantly, smiling. Lucy Purcell was enraged
+with him--with his hypocritical sympathy as to her uncle's
+misdoings--his avoidance of his own crime.
+
+'It's not uncle at all, it's you!' she cried, with more logic than
+appeared. 'I tell you, Mr. Grieve, father won't stand it.'
+
+The young man drew himself up from the counter.
+
+'No,' he said with great equanimity, 'I suppose not.'
+
+And taking up a parcel of books from the counter he turned away.
+Lucy, flurried and pouting, called after him.
+
+'Mr. Grieve!'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'I--I didn't mean it. I _hope_ you won't go. I know father's
+hard. He's hard enough with me.'
+
+And she raised her hands to her flushed face. David was terribly
+afraid she was going to cry. Several times since the orphan girl of
+seventeen had arrived from school three months before to take her
+place in her father's house, had she been on the point of confiding
+her domestic woes to David Grieve. But though under the terms of
+his agreement with her father, which included one meal in the back
+parlour, the assistant and she were often thrown together, he had
+till now instinctively held her aloof. His extraordinary good looks
+and masterful energetic ways had made an impression on her
+schoolgirl mind from the beginning. But for him she had no
+magnetism whatever. The little self-conceited creature knew it, or
+partially knew it, and smarted under it.
+
+Now, he was just beginning an awkward sentence, when there was a
+sound at the outer door. With another look at him, half shy, half
+appealing, Lucy fled. Conscious of a distinct feeling of relief,
+David went to attend to the customer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The customer was soon content and went out again into the rain.
+David mounted a winding iron stair which connected the downstairs
+shop with an upper room in which a large proportion of the books
+were stored. It was a long, low, rambling place made by throwing
+together all the little bits of rooms on the first floor of the old
+house. One corner of it had a special attraction for David. It was
+the corner where, ranged partly on the floor, partly on the shelves
+which ran under the windows, lay the collection of books that
+Purcell had been making for his customer, Mr. Stephens.
+
+Out of that collection Purcell's assistant had extracted a very
+varied entertainment. In the first place it had amused him to watch
+the laborious pains and anxiety with which his pious employer had
+gathered together the very sceptical works of which Mr. Stephens
+was in want, showing a knowledge of contents, and editions, and
+out-of-the-way profanities, under the stimulus of a paying
+customer, which drew many a sudden laugh from David when he was
+left to think of it in private.
+
+In the next place the books themselves had been a perpetual feast
+to him for weeks, enjoyed all the more keenly because of the
+secrecy in which it had to be devoured. The little gathering
+represented with fair completeness the chief books of the French
+'philosophers,' both in the original French, and in those English
+translations of which so plentiful a crop made its appearance
+during the fifty years before and after 1800. There, for instance,
+lay the seventy volumes of Voltaire. Close by was an imperfect copy
+of the Encyclopaedia, which Mr. Stephens was getting cheap; on the
+other side a motley gathering of Diderot and Rousseau; while
+Holbach's 'System of Nature,' and Helvetius 'On the Mind,' held
+their rightful place among the rest.
+
+Through these books, then, which had now been on the premises for
+some time--Mr. Stephens being a person of uncertain domicile, and
+unable as yet to find them a home--David had been freely ranging.
+Whenever Purcell was out of the way and customers were slack, he
+invariably found his way to this spot in the upper room. There,
+with his elbows on the top of the bookcase which ran under the
+window, and a book in front of him--or generally two, the original
+French and a translation--he had read Voltaire's tales, a great
+deal of the Encyclopaedia, a certain amount of Diderot, for whom he
+cherished a passionate admiration, and a much smaller smattering of
+Rousseau. At the present moment he was grappling with the
+'Dictionnaire Philosophique,' and the 'Systeme de la Nature,'
+fortified in both cases by English versions.
+
+The gloom of the afternoon deepened, and the increasing rain had
+thinned the streets so much that during a couple of hours David had
+but three summonses from below to attend to. For the rest of the
+time he was buried in the second volume of the 'Dictionnaire
+Philosophique,' now skipping freely, now chewing and digesting, his
+eyes fixed vacantly on the darkening church outside. Above all, the
+article on _Contradictions_ had absorbed and delighted him.
+There are few tones in themselves so fascinating to the nascent
+literary sense as this mock humility tone of Voltaire's. And in
+David's case all that passionate sense of a broken bubble and a
+scattered dream, which had haunted him so long after he left
+Kinder, had entered into and helped toward his infatuation with
+his new masters. They brought him an indescribable sense of
+freedom--omniscience almost.
+
+For instance:--
+
+'We must carefully distinguish in all writings, and especially in
+the sacred books, between real and apparent contradictions.
+Venturous critics have supposed a contradiction existed in that
+passage of Scripture which narrates how Moses changed all the
+waters of Egypt into blood, and how immediately afterwards the
+magicians of Pharaoh did the same thing, the book of Exodus
+allowing no interval at all between the miracle of Moses and the
+magical operation of the enchanters. Certainly it seems at first
+sight impossible that these magicians should change into blood what
+was already blood; but this difficulty may be avoided by supposing
+that Moses had allowed the waters to reassume their proper nature,
+in order to give time to Pharaoh to recover himself. This
+supposition is all the more plausible, seeing that the text, if it
+does not favour it expressly, is not opposed to it.
+
+'The same sceptics ask how when all the horses had been killed by
+the hail in the sixth plague Pharaoh could pursue the Jews with
+cavalry. But this contradiction is not even apparent, because the
+hail, which killed all the horses in the fields, could not fall
+upon those which were in the stables.'
+
+And so on through a long series of paragraphs, leading at last to
+matters specially dear to the wit of Voltaire, the contradictions
+between St. Luke and St. Matthew--in the story of the census of
+Quirinus, of the Magi, of the massacre of the Innocents, and what
+not--and culminating in this innocent conclusion:--
+
+'After all it is enough that God should have deigned to reveal to us
+the principal mysteries of the faith, and that He should have
+instituted a Church in the course of time to explain them. All
+these contradictions, so often and so bitterly brought up against
+the Gospels, are amply noticed by the wisest commentators; far from
+harming each other, one explains another; they lend each other a
+mutual support, both in the concordance and in the harmony of the
+four Gospels.'
+
+David threw back his head with a laugh which came from the very
+depths of him. Then, suddenly, he was conscious of the church
+standing sombrely without, spectator as it seemed of his thoughts
+and of his mirth. Instantly his youth met the challenge by a rise
+of passionate scorn! What! a hundred years since Voltaire, and
+mankind still went on believing in all these follies and fables, in
+the ten plagues, in Balaam's ass, in the walls of Jericho, in
+miraculous births, and Magi, and prophetic stars!--in everything
+that the mockery of the eighteenth century had slain a thousand
+times over. Ah, well!--Voltaire knew as well as anybody that
+superstition is perennial, insatiable--a disease and weakness of
+the human mind which seems to be inherent and ineradicable. And
+there rose in the boy's memory lines he had opened upon that
+morning in a small Elizabethan folio he had been cataloguing with
+much pains as a rarity--lines which had stuck in his mind--
+
+    Vast superstition! glorious style of weakness,
+    Sprung from the deep disquiet of man's passion
+    To dissolution and despair of Nature!--
+
+He flung them out at the dark mass of building opposite, as though
+he were his namesake flinging at Goliath. Only a few months before
+that great church had changed masters--had passed from the hands of
+an aristocratic and inaccessible bishop of the old school into
+those of a man rich in all modern ideas and capacities, full of
+energy and enthusiasm, a scholar and administrator both. And
+_he_ believed all those absurdities, David wanted to know?
+Impossible! No honest man could, thought the lad defiantly, with
+the rising colour of crude and vehement feeling, when his attention
+had been once challenged, and he had developed mind enough to know
+what the challenge meant.
+
+Except, perhaps, Uncle Reuben and Dora Lomax, and people like that.
+He stood thinking and staring out of window, one idea leading to
+another. The thought of Reuben brought with it a certain softening
+of mood--the softening of memory and old association. Yes, he would
+like to see Uncle Reuben again--explain to him, perhaps, that old
+story--so old, so distant!--of his running away. Well, he
+_would_ see him again, as soon as he got a place of his own,
+which couldn't be long now, whether Purcell gave him the sack or
+not. Instinctively, he felt for that inner pocket, which held his
+purse and his savings-bank book. Yes, he was near freedom now,
+whatever happened!
+
+Then it occurred to him that it was unlucky he should have stumbled
+across Mr. Ancrum just at this particular juncture. The minister,
+of course, had friends at Clough End still. And he, David, didn't
+want Louie down upon him just yet--not just yet--for a month or
+two.
+
+Then the smile which had begun to play about the mouth suddenly
+broadened into a merry triumph. When Louie knew all about him and his
+contrivances these last four years, wouldn't she be mad! If she were to
+appear at this moment, he could tell her that she wore a pink dress at
+the 'wake' last week,--when she was at chapel last,--what young men were
+supposed to be courting her since the summer, and a number of other
+interesting particulars--
+
+'Mr. Grieve! Tea!'
+
+His face changed. Reluctantly shutting his book and putting it into
+its place, he took his way to the staircase.
+
+As David opened the swing door leading to the Purcells' parlour at
+the back of the shop he heard Miss Purcell saying in a mournful
+voice, 'It's no good, Dora; not a haporth of good. Father won't let
+me. I might as well have gone to prison as come home.'
+
+The assistant emerged into the bright gaslight of the little room
+as she spoke. There was another girl sitting beside Lucy, who got
+up with a shy manner and shook hands with him.
+
+'Will you take your tea, Mr. Grieve?' said Lucy, with a pettish
+sigh, handing it to him, and then throwing herself vehemently back
+in her hostess's chair, behind the tea tray. She let her hands hang
+over the arms of it--the picture of discontent. The gaslight showed
+her the possessor of bright brown eyes, under fine brows slenderly
+but clearly marked, of a pink and white skin slightly freckled, of
+a small nose quite passable, but no ways remarkable, of a dainty
+little chin, and a thin-lipped mouth, slightly raised at one
+corner, and opening readily over some irregular but very white
+teeth. Except for the eyes and eyebrows the features could claim
+nothing much in the way of beauty. Yet at this moment of
+seventeen--thanks to her clear colours, her small thinness, and the
+beautiful hair so richly piled about her delicate head--Lucy
+Purcell was undeniably a pretty girl, and since her arrival in
+Manchester she had been much more blissfully certain of the fact
+than she had ever succeeded in being while she was still under the
+repressive roof of Miss Pym's boarding-school for young ladies,
+Pestalozzi House, Blackburn.
+
+David sat down, perceiving that something had gone very wrong, but
+not caring to inquire into it. His whole interest in the Purcell
+household was, in fact, dying out. He would not be concerned with
+it much longer.
+
+So that, instead of investigating Miss Purcell's griefs, he asked
+her cousin whether it had not come on to rain. The girl opposite
+replied in a quiet, musical voice. She was plainly dressed in a
+black hat and jacket; but the hat had a little bunch of cowslips to
+light it up, and the jacket was of an ordinary fashionable cut.
+There was nothing particularly noticeable about the face at first
+sight, except its soft fairness and the gentle steadfastness of the
+eyes. The movements were timid, the speech often hesitating. Yet
+the impression which, on a first meeting, this timidity was apt to
+leave on a spectator was very seldom a lasting one. David's idea of
+Miss Lomax, for instance, had radically changed during the three
+months since he had made acquaintance with her.
+
+Rain, it appeared, _had_ begun, and there must be umbrellas
+and waterproofs for the evening's excursion. As the two others were
+settling at what time David Grieve and Lucy should call for Dora in
+Market Place, Lucy woke up from a dream, and broke in upon them.
+
+'And, Dora, you know, I _could_ have worn that dress with the
+narrow ribbons I showed you last week. It's all there--upstairs--in
+the cupboard--not a crease in it!'
+
+Dora could not help laughing, and the laugh sent a charming light
+into her grey, veiled eyes. The tone was so inexpressibly doleful,
+the manner so childish. David smiled too, and his eyes and Dora's
+met in a sort of friendly understanding--the first time, perhaps,
+they had so met. Then they both turned themselves to the task of
+consolation. The assistant inquired what was the matter.
+
+'I wanted her to go with me to the dance at the Mechanics'
+Institute next week,' said Dora. 'Mrs. Alderman Head would have
+taken us both. It's very nice and respectable. I didn't think uncle
+would mind. But Lucy's sure he will.'
+
+'Sure! Of course I'm sure,' said Lucy sharply. 'I've heard him talk
+about dancing in a way to make anybody sick. If he only knew all
+the dancing we had at Pestalozzi House!'
+
+'Does he think all dancing wrong?' inquired David.
+
+'Yes--unless it's David dancing before the Ark, or some such
+nonsense,' replied Lucy, with the same petulant gloom.
+
+David laughed out. Then he fell into a brown study, one hand
+playing with his tea-cup, an irrepressable smile still curving
+about his mouth. Dora, observing him across the table, could not
+but remember other assistants of Uncle Purcell whom she has seen
+sitting in that same place, and the airs which Miss Purcell in her
+rare holidays had given herself towards those earlier young men.
+And now, this young man, whenever Purcell himself was out of the
+way, was master of the place. Anyone could see that, so long as he
+was there, Lucy was sensitively conscious of him in all that she
+said or did.
+
+She did not long endure his half-mocking silence now.
+
+'You see, Dora,' she began again, with an angry glance towards
+him, 'father's worse than ever just now. He's been so aggravated.'
+
+'Yes,' said Dora timidly. She perfectly understood what was meant,
+but she shrank from pursuing the subject. But David looked up.
+
+'I should be very sorry, I'm sure, Miss Purcell, to get in your way
+at all, or cause you any unpleasantness, if that's what you mean. I
+don't think you'll be annoyed with me long.'
+
+He spoke with a boyish exaggerated dignity. It became him, however,
+for his fine and subtle physique somehow supported and endorsed it.
+
+Both girls started. Lucy looked suddenly as miserable as she had
+before looked angry. But in her confused state of feeling she
+renewed her attack.
+
+'I don't understand anything about it,' she said, with plaintive
+incoherence. 'Only I can't _think_ why people should always be
+making disturbances. Dora! Doesn't _everybody_ you know think
+it wicked to go to the Hall of Science?'
+
+She drew herself up peremptorily. David resumed the half smiling,
+half meditative attitude which had provoked her before. Dora looked
+from one to the other, a pure bright color rising in her cheek.
+
+'I don't know anything about that,' she said in a low voice. 'I
+don't think that would matter, Lucy. But, oh, I do wish father
+wouldn't go--and Mr. Grieve wouldn't go.'
+
+Her voice and hand shook. Lucy looked triumphantly at David.
+Instinctively she realised that, especially of late, David had come
+to feel more respectfully towards Dora than she had ever succeeded
+in making him feel towards herself. In the beginning of their
+acquaintance he had often launched into argument with Dora about
+religious matters, especially about the Ritualistic practices in
+which she delighted. The lad, overflowing with his Voltaire and
+d'Holbach, had not been able to forbear, and had apparently taken a
+mischievous pleasure in shocking a bigot--as he had originally
+conceived Lucy Purcell's cousin to be. The discussion, indeed, had
+not gone very far. The girl's horror and his own sense of his
+position and its difficulties had checked them in the germ.
+Moreover, as has been said, his conception of Dora had gradually
+changed on further acquaintance. As for her, she had now for a long
+time avoided arguing with him, which made her outburst on the
+present occasion the more noticeable.
+
+He looked up quickly.
+
+'Miss Lomax, how do you suppose one makes up one's mind--either
+about religion or anything else? Isn't it by hearing both sides?'
+
+'Oh, no--no!' she said, shrinking. 'Religion isn't like anything
+else. It's by--by growing up into it--by thinking about it--and
+doing what the Church tells you. You come to _know_ it's true.'
+
+That the Magi and Balaam's ass are true! What folly! But somehow
+even his youthful ardour could not say it, so full of pure and
+tremulous pain was the gaze fixed upon him. And, indeed, he had no
+time for any answer, for she had just spoken when the bell of the
+outer door sounded, and a step came rapidly through the shop.
+
+'Father!' said Lucy, lifting the lid of the teapot in a great
+hurry. 'Oh, I wonder if the tea's good enough.'
+
+She was stirring it anxiously with a spoon, when Purcell entered, a
+tall heavily built man, with black hair, a look of command, and a
+step which shook the little back room as he descended into it. He
+touched Dora's hand with a pompous politeness, and then subsided
+into his chair opposite Lucy, complaining about the weather, and
+demanding tea, which his daughter gave him with a timid haste,
+looking to see whether he were satisfied as he raised the first
+spoonful to his lips.
+
+'Anything worth buying?' said David to his employer. He was leaning
+back in his chair, with his arm round the back of another. Again
+Dora was reminded by contrast of some of the nervous lads she had
+seen in that room before, scarcely daring to eat their tea under
+Purcell's eye, flying to cut him bread, or pass him the sugar.
+
+'No,' said Purcell curtly.
+
+'And a great price, I suppose?'
+
+Purcell looked up. Apparently the ease of the young man's tone and
+attitude put the finishing stroke to an inward process already far
+advanced.
+
+'The price, I conceive, is _my_ business,' he said, in his
+most overbearing manner. 'When you have to pay, it will be yours.'
+
+David flushed, without, however, changing his position, and Lucy
+made a sudden commotion among the teacups.
+
+'Father,' she said, with a hurried agitation which hardly allowed
+her to pick up the cup she had thrown over, 'Dora and I want to
+speak to you. You mustn't talk business at tea. Oh, I _know_
+you won't let me go; but I _should_ like it, and Dora's come
+to ask. I shouldn't want a new dress, and it will be _most_
+respectable, everyone says; and I _did_ learn dancing at
+school, though you didn't know it. Miss Georgina said it was stuff
+and nonsense, and I must--'
+
+'What _is_ she talking about?' said Purcell to Dora, with an
+angry glance at Lucy.
+
+'I want to take her to a dance,' said Dora quietly, 'if you would
+let her come. There's one at the Mechanics' Institute next week,
+given by the Unicorn benefit society. Mrs. Alderman Head said I
+might go with her, and Lucy too if you'll let her come. I've got a
+ticket.'
+
+'I'm much obliged to Mrs. Alderman Head,' said Purcell
+sarcastically. 'Lucy knows very well what I think of an unchristian
+and immodest amusement. Other people must decide according to their
+conscience, _I_ judge nobody.'
+
+At this point David got up, and disappeared into the shop.
+
+'Oh yes, you do judge, uncle,' cried Dora, roused at last, and
+colouring. 'You're always judging. You call everything unchristian
+you don't like, whether its dancing, or--or--early celebration, or
+organ music, or altar-cloths. But you can't be always right--nobody
+can.'
+
+Purcell surveyed her with a grim composure.
+
+'If you suppose I make any pretence to be infallible, you are quite
+mistaken,' he said, with slow solemnity--no one in disclaiming
+Papistry could have been more the Pope--'I leave that to your
+priests at St. Damian's, Dora. But there _is_ an infallible
+guide, both for you and for me, and that's the Holy Scriptures. If
+you can show me any place where the _Bible_ approves of
+promiscuous dancing between young Christian men and women, or of a
+woman exposing her person for admiration's sake, or of such vain
+and idle talking as is produced by these entertainments, I will let
+Lucy go. But you can't. "Whose adorning let it not be--"'
+
+And he quoted the Petrine admonition with a harsh triumphant
+emphasis on every syllable, looking hard all the time at Dora, who
+had risen, and stood confronting him in a tremor of impatience and
+disagreement.
+
+'Father Russell--' she began quickly, then changed her form of
+expression--'Mr. Russell says you can't settle things by just
+quoting a text. The Bible has to be explained, he says.'
+
+Purcell's eyes flamed. He launched into a sarcastic harangue,
+delivered in a strong thick voice, on the subject of 'Sacerdotalism,'
+'priestly arrogance,' 'lying traditions,' 'making the command of
+God of no effect,' and so forth. While his sermon rolled along,
+Dora stood nervously tying her bonnet strings, or buttoning her
+gloves. Her heart was full of a passionate scorn. Beside the
+bookseller's muscular figure and pugnacious head she saw with
+her mind's eye the spare forms and careworn faces of the young
+priests at St. Damian's. Outraged by this loud-voiced assurance,
+she called to mind the gentleness, the suavity, the delicate
+consideration for women which obtained among her friends.
+
+'There's not a pin to choose,' Purcell wound up, brutally, 'between
+you and that young infidel in there,' and he jerked his thumb
+towards the shop. 'It all comes of pride. He's bursting with his own
+wisdom,--you will have the "Church" and won't have the Bible.
+What's the Church!--a pack of sinners, and a million sinners are no
+better than one.'
+
+'Good-bye, Lucy,' said Dora, stooping to kiss her cousin, and not
+trusting herself to speak. 'Call for me at the quarter.'
+
+Lucy hardly noticed her kiss, she sat with her elbows on the table,
+holding her little chin disconsolately, something very like tears
+in her eyes. In the first place, she was reflecting dolefully that
+it was all true--she was never to have any amusement like other
+girls--never to have any good of her life; she might as well be a
+nun at once. In the second, she was certain her father meant to
+send young Grieve away, and the prospect drew a still darker pall
+over a prospect dark enough in all conscience before.
+
+Purcell opened the door for Dora more punctiliously than usual, and
+came back to the hearthrug still inflated as it were with his own
+eloquence. Meanwhile Lucy was washing up the tea things. The little
+servant had brought her a bowl of water and an apron, and Lucy was
+going gingerly through an operation she detested. Why shouldn't
+Mary Ann do it? What was the good of going to school and coming
+back with Claribel's songs and Blumenthal's _Deux Anges_ lying
+on the top of your box,--with a social education, moreover, so
+advanced that the dancing--mistress had invariably made you waltz
+alone round the room for the edification and instruction of the
+assembled company,--if all you had to do at home was to dust and
+wash up, and die with envy of girls with reprobate fathers? As she
+pondered the question, Lucy began to handle the cups with a more
+and more unfriendly energy.
+
+'You'll break some of that china, Lucy!' said Purcell, at last
+disturbed in his thoughts. 'What's the matter with you?'
+
+'Nothing!' said Lucy, taking, however, a saucer from the line as
+she spoke so viciously that the rest of them slipped with a clatter
+and only just escaped destruction.
+
+'Mind what you're about,' cried Purcell angrily, fearing for the
+household stuff that had been in the establishment so much longer
+and was so much more at home there than Lucy.
+
+'I know what it is,' he said, looking at her severely, while his
+great black presence seemed to fill the little room. 'You've lost
+your temper because I refused to let you go to the dance.'
+
+Lucy was silent for a moment, trying to contain herself; then she
+broke out like a child, throwing down her apron, and feeling for
+her handkerchief.
+
+'It's _too_ bad--it's _too_ bad--I'd rather be Mary
+Ann--_she's_ got friends, and evenings out--and--and parties
+sometimes; and I see nobody, and go nowhere. What did you have me
+home for at all?'
+
+And she sat down and dried her eyes piteously. She was in real
+distress, but she liked a scene, and Purcell knew her peculiarities.
+He surveyed her with a sort of sombre indulgence.
+
+'You're a vain child of this world, Lucy. If I didn't keep a
+look-out on you, you'd soon go rejoicing down the broad way. What
+do you mean about amusements? There's the missionary tea to-morrow
+night, and the magic-lantern at the schools on Saturday.'
+
+Lucy gave a little hysterical laugh.
+
+'Well,' said Purcell loudly, 'there'll be plenty of young people
+there. What have you got to say against them?'
+
+'A set of _frights_ and _gawks_,' said Lucy, sitting bolt
+upright in a state of flat mutiny, and crushing her handkerchief on
+her knee between a pair of trembling hands. 'The way they do their
+hair, and the way they tie their ties, and the way they put a chair
+for you--it's enough to make one faint. At the Christmas treat
+there was one young man asked me to trim his shirt-cuffs for him
+with scissors he took out of his pocket. I told him _I_
+wasn't his nurse, and people who weren't dressed ought to stay at
+home. You should have seen how he and his sister glared at me
+afterwards. I don't care! None of the chapel people like me--I know
+they don't, and I don't want them to, and I wouldn't _marry_
+one of them.'
+
+The gesture of Lucy's curly head was superb.
+
+'It seems to me,' said Purcell sarcastically, 'that what you mostly
+learnt at Blackburn was envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. As
+to marrying, child, the less you think of it for the present the
+better, till you get more sense.'
+
+But the eyes which studied her were not unkindly. Purcell liked
+this slim red and white creature who belonged to him, whose
+education had cost him hard money which it gave him pleasure to
+reckon up, and who promised now to provide him with a fresh field
+for the management and the coarse moral experiment which he loved.
+She would be restive at first, but he would soon break her in. The
+idea that under her folly and childishness she might possibly
+inherit some of his own tenacity never occurred to him.
+
+'I can't imagine,' said Lucy inconsequently, with eyes once more
+swimming, 'why you can't let me do what Dora does! She's _much_
+better than I am. She's a saint, she is. She's always going to
+church; she's always doing things for poor people; she never thinks
+about herself, or whether she's pretty, or--Why shouldn't I dance
+if she does?'
+
+Purcell laughed.
+
+'Aye!' he said grimly, 'that's the Papistical way all over. So many
+services, so much fasting, so much money, so much knocking under to
+your priest, so much "church work"--and who cares a brass farthing
+what you do with the rest of your time? Do as I tell you, and dance
+away! But I tell you, Christianity wants _a new heart_!'
+
+And the bookseller looked at his daughter with a frowning severity.
+Conversation of this kind was his recreation, his accomplishment,
+so to speak. He had been conducting a difficult negotiation all day
+of the diamond-cut-diamond order, and was tired out and disgusted
+by the amount of knowledge of books which even a gentleman may
+possess. But here was compensation. A warm hearthrug, an unwilling
+listener, and this sense of an incomparable soundness of view,--he
+wanted nothing more to revive him, unless, indeed, it were a larger
+audience.
+
+As for Lucy, as she looked up at her father, even her childish
+intelligence rose to a sense of absurdity. As if Dora hadn't a new
+heart; as if Dora thought it was enough to go to church and give
+sixpences in the offertory!
+
+But her father overawed her. She had been left motherless at ten
+years old, and brought up since away from home, except for
+holidays. At the bottom of her she was quite conscious that she
+knew nothing at all about this big contemptuous person, who ordered
+her about and preached to her, and never let himself be kissed and
+played with and coaxed as other girls' fathers did.
+
+So she went on with her washing up in a crushed silence, very sorry
+for herself in a vague passionate way, the corners of her mouth
+drooping. Purcell too fell into a reverie, the lower jaw pushed
+forward, one hand playing with the watch-chain which adorned his
+black suit.
+
+'Did you give Grieve that message?' he asked at last.
+
+Lucy, still sulky, nodded in reply.
+
+'What time did he come in from dinner?'
+
+'On the stroke of the half-hour,' said Lucy quickly. 'I think he
+keeps time better than anybody you ever had, father.'
+
+'Insolent young whelp!' said Purcell in a slow, deliberate voice.
+'He was at that place again yesterday.'
+
+'Yes, I know he was,' said Lucy, with evident agitation. 'I told him
+he ought to have been ashamed.'
+
+'Oh, you talked to him, did you? What business had you to do that,
+I wonder? Well, what did he say?'
+
+'He said--well, I don't know what he said. He don't seem to think
+it matters to anybody where he goes on Sunday!'
+
+'Oh, indeed--don't he? I'll show him some cause to doubt the truth
+of that proposition,' said Purcell ponderously; 'or I'll know the
+reason why.'
+
+Lucy looked unhappy, and said nothing for a minute or two. Then she
+began insistently, 'Well, _does_ it matter to you?'
+
+This deplorable question--viewed from the standpoint of a Baptist
+elder--passed unnoticed, for with the last words the shop-bell
+rang, and Purcell went off, transformed on the instant into the
+sharp, attentive tradesman.
+
+Lucy sat wiping her cups mechanically for a little while. Then,
+when they were all done, and Mary Ann had been loftily commanded to
+put them away, she slipped upstairs to her own room, a little attic
+at the top of the house. Here she went to a deal press, which had
+been her mother's, opened it, and took out a dress which hung in a
+compartment by itself, enveloped in a holland wrapper, lest
+Manchester smuts should harm it. She undid the wrapper, and laid it
+on the bed. It was an embroidered white muslin, adorned with lace
+and full knots of narrow pink ribbon.
+
+'What a trouble I had to get the ribbon just that width,' she
+thought to herself ruefully, 'and everybody said it was so uncommon.
+I might as well give it Dora. I don't believe I shall ever wear it.
+I don't know what'll become of me. I don't get any chances.'
+
+And shaking her head mournfully from side to side, she sat on
+beside the dress, in the light of her solitary candle, her hands
+clasped round her knee, the picture of girlish despair, so far as
+anything so daintily gowned, and shoed, and curled, could achieve
+it. She was thinking drearily of some people who were coming to
+supper, one of her father's brother elders at the chapel, Mr.
+Baruch Barton, and his daughter. Mr. Barton had a specialty for the
+prophet Zephaniah, and had been several times shocked because Lucy
+could not help him out with his quotations from that source. His
+daughter, a little pinched asthmatic creature, in a dress whereof
+every gore and seam was an affront to the art of dressmaking, was
+certainly thirty, probably more. And between thirty and the
+Psalmist's limit of existence, there is the very smallest
+appreciable difference, in the opinion of seventeen. What
+_could_ she have to say to Emmy Barton? Lucy asked herself.
+She began yawning from sheer dulness, as she thought of her. If it
+were only time to go to bed!
+
+Suddenly she heard a sound of raised voices in the upper shop on
+the floor below. What could it be? She started up. 'Mr. Grieve and
+father quarrelling!' She knew it must come to that!
+
+She crept down the stairs with every precaution possible till she
+came to the door behind which the loud talk which had startled her
+was going on. Here she listened with all her ears, but at first to
+very little purpose. David was speaking, but so rapidly, and
+apparently so near to the other end of the room, that she could
+hear nothing. Then her father broke in, and by dint of straining
+very hard, she caught most of what he said before the whole
+colloquy came abruptly to an end. She heard Purcell's heavy tread
+descending the little iron spiral staircase leading from the lower
+shop to the upper. She heard David moving about, as though he were
+gathering up books and papers, and then, with a loud childish sob
+which burst from her unawares, she ran upstairs again to her own
+room.
+
+'Oh, he's going, he's going!' she cried under her breath, as she
+stood before the glass winking to keep the tears back, and biting
+her handkerchief hard between her little white teeth. 'Oh, what
+shall I do? what shall I do? It'll be always the same; just when
+anyone _might_ like me, it all stops. And he won't care one
+little, little bit. He'll never think of me again. Oh, I do think
+somebody might care about me--might be sorry for me!'
+
+And she locked her hands tight before her, and stared at the glass,
+while the tears forced their way. But all the time she was noticing
+how prettily she stood, how slim she was. And though she smarted,
+she would not for the world have been without her smart, her
+excitement, her foolish secret, which, for sheer lack of something
+to do and think about, had suddenly grown to such magnitude in her
+eyes. It was hard to cherish a hopeless passion for a handsome
+youth, without a halfpenny, who despised you, but it was infinitely
+better than to have nothing in your mind but Emmy Barton and the
+prophet Zephaniah. Nay, as she washed her hands and smoothed her
+dress and hair with trembling fingers, she became quite friendly
+with her pain--in a sense, even proud of it, and jealous for
+it. It was a sign of mature life--of something more than mere
+school-girlishness. Like the lover in the Elizabethan sonnet, 'She
+had been vexed, if vexed she had not been!'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+'Come in, David,' said Mr. Ancrum, opening the door of his little
+sitting-room in Mortimer Street. 'You're rather late, but I don't
+wonder. Such a wind! I could hardly stand against it myself. But,
+then, I'm an atomy. What, no top-coat in such weather! What do you
+mean by that, sir? You're wet through. There, dry yourself.'
+
+David, with a grin at Mr. Ancrum's unnecessary concern for him,
+deposited himself in the carpet chair which formed the minister's
+only lounge, and held out his legs and arms to the blaze. He was
+wet indeed, and bespattered with the blackest mud in the three
+kingdoms. But the battle with wind and rain had so brought into
+play all the physical force of him, had so brightened eye and
+cheek, and tossed the black hair into such a fine confusion, that,
+as he sat there bending over the glow of the fire, the crippled man
+opposite, sickly with long confinement and over-thinking, could not
+take his eyes from him. The storm with all its freshness, youth
+with all its reckless joy in itself, seemed to have come in with
+the lad and transformed the little dingy room.
+
+'What do you wear trash like that for in a temperature like this?'
+said the minister, touching his guest's thin and much-worn coat.
+'Don't you know, David, that your health is money? Suppose you get
+lung trouble, who's to look after you?'
+
+'It don't do me no harm, sir. I can't get into my last year's coat,
+and I couldn't afford a new one this winter.'
+
+'What wages do you earn?' asked Ancrum. His manner was a curious
+mixture of melancholy gentleness and of that terse sharpness in
+practical things which the south country resents and the north
+country takes for granted.
+
+'Eighteen shillings a week, since last November, sir.'
+
+'That ought to be enough for a top-coat, you rascal, with only
+yourself to feed,' said Mr. Ancrum, stretching himself in his hard
+armchair, so as to let his lame leg with its heavy boot rest
+comfortably on the fender. David had noticed at first sight of him
+that his old playfellow had grown to look much older than in the
+Clough End days. His hair was nearly white, and lay in a large
+smooth wave across the broad brow. And in that brow there were deep
+furrows, and many a new and premature line in the hollow cheeks.
+Something withering and blighting seemed to have passed over the
+whole man since those Sunday school lessons in the Christian
+Brethren's upper room, which David still remembered so well. But
+the eyes with their irresistible intensity and force were the same.
+In them the minister's youth--he was not yet thirty-five--still
+spoke, as from a last stronghold in a failing realm. They had a
+strange look too, the look as of a secret life, not for the
+passer-by.
+
+David smiled at Ancrum's last remark, and for a moment or two
+looked into the fire without speaking.
+
+'Well, if I'd bought clothes or anything else this winter, I should
+be in a precious worse hole than I am,' he said reflectively.
+
+'Hole? What's wrong, Davy?'
+
+'My master gave me the sack Monday.'
+
+'Humph!' said Ancrum, surveying him. 'Well, you don't look much cast
+down about it, I must say.'
+
+'Well, you see, I'd laid my plans,' said the young man, an
+irrepressible gaiety and audacity in every feature. 'It isn't as
+though I were taken by surprise.'
+
+'Plans for a new place, I suppose?'
+
+'No; I have done with that. I am going to set up for myself. I know
+the trade, and I've got some money.'
+
+'How old are you, Davy?'
+
+'Just upon twenty,' said the lad, quietly.
+
+The minister pursed up his lips and whistled a little.
+
+'Well, that's bold,' he said. 'Somehow I like it, though by all the
+laws of prudence I ought to jump down your throat for announcing
+such a thing. But how did you get your money? and what have you
+been doing these four years? Come, I'm an old friend,--though I
+dare say you don't think me much of a fellow. Out with it! Pay me
+anyway for all those ships I made you long ago.'
+
+And he held out his blanched hand, little more now than skin and
+bone. David put his own into it awkwardly enough. At this period of
+his life he was not demonstrative.
+
+The story he had to tell was, to Ancrum's thinking, a remarkable
+one. He had come into Manchester on an October evening with five
+shillings and threepence in his pocket. From a point on the
+south-western border of the city he took a 'bus for Deansgate and
+Victoria Street. As he was sitting on the top, feeding his eyes on
+the lights and the crowd of the streets, but wholly ignorant where
+to go and what first step to take, he fell into talk with a decent
+working-man and his wife sitting beside him. The result of the talk
+was that they offered him shelter at fourpence a night. He
+dismounted with them at Blackfriars Bridge, and they made their way
+across the river to a street in Salford, where he lodged with them
+for a week. During that week he lived on oatmeal and an occasional
+baked potato, paying his hostess eighteenpence additional for the
+use of her fire, and the right to sit in her kitchen when he was
+not tramping about in search of work. By the end of the week he had
+found a post as errand-boy at a large cheap bookseller's and
+stationer's in Deansgate, at eight shillings a week, his good
+looks, manner, and education evidently helping him largely, as Mr.
+Ancrum could perceive through the boy's very matter-of-fact account
+of himself. He then made an agreement for bed, use of fire, and
+kitchen, with his new friends at four shillings a week, and by the
+end of six months he was receiving a wage of fourteen shillings as
+salesman and had saved close on five pounds.
+
+'Well, now, come, how did you manage that, Davy?' said Mr. Ancrum,
+interrupting. 'Don't run on in that fashion. Details are the only
+interesting things in life, and details I'll have. You must have
+found it a precious tight fit to save that five pounds.'
+
+Whereupon David, his eye kindling, ran out Benjamin Franklin and
+the 'Vegetarian News,' his constant friends from the first day of
+his acquaintance with the famous autobiography till now, in spite
+of such occasional lapses into carnal feeding as he had confessed
+to Daddy. In a few minutes Ancrum found himself buried in 'details'
+as to 'flesh-forming' and 'bone-forming' foods, as to nitrogen and
+albumen, as to the saving qualities of fruit, and Heaven knows what
+besides. Long before the enthusiast had spent his breath or his
+details, the minister cried 'Enough!'
+
+'Young materialist,' he said growling, 'what do you mean at your age
+by thinking so much about your body?'
+
+'It wasn't my body, sir,' said David, simply, 'it was just business.
+If I had got ill, I couldn't have worked; if I had lived like other
+chaps, I couldn't have saved. So I had to know something about it,
+and it wasn't bad fun. After a bit I got the people I lodged with
+to eat a lot of the things I eat--and that was cheaper for me of
+course. The odd thing about vegetarianism is that you come not to
+care a rap what you eat. Your taste goes somehow. So long as you're
+nourished and can do your work, that's all you want.'
+
+The minister sat studying his visitor a minute or two in silence,
+though the eyes under the care-worn brow were bright and restless.
+Any defiance of the miserable body was in itself delightful to a
+man who had all but slain himself many times over in the soul's
+service. He, too, had been living on a crust for months, denying
+himself first this, then that ingredient of what should have been
+an invalid's diet. But it had been for cause--for the poor--for
+self-mortification. There was something just a little jarring to
+the ascetic in this contact with a self-denial of the purely
+rationalistic type, so easy--so cheerful--put forward without the
+smallest suspicion of merit, as a mere business measure.
+
+David resumed his story. By the end of another six months it
+appeared that he had grown tired of his original shop, with its
+vast masses of school stationery and cheap new books. As might have
+been expected from his childish antecedents, he had been soon laid
+hold of by the old bookstalls, had read at them on his way from
+work, had spent on them all that he could persuade himself to spare
+from his hoard, and in a year from the time he entered Manchester,
+thanks to wits, reading, and chance friendships, was already a
+budding bibliophile. Slates and primers became suddenly odious to a
+person aware of the existence of Aldines and Elzevirs, and bitten
+with the passion, then just let loose on the book-buying world, for
+first editions of the famous books of the century. Whenever that
+sum in the savings bank should have reached a certain height, he
+would become a second-hand bookseller with a stall. Till then he
+must save more and learn his trade. So at the end of his first year
+he left his employers, and by the help of excellent recommendations
+from them got the post of assistant in Purcell's shop in Half
+Street, at a rise of two shillings, afterwards converted into four
+shillings a week.
+
+'And I've been there three years--very near,' said David,
+straightening himself with a little nervous gesture peculiar to
+him. 'If you'd been anywhere about, sir, you'd have wondered how I
+could have stayed so long. But I wanted to learn the trade and I've
+learnt it--no thanks to old Purcell.'
+
+'What was wrong with him?'
+
+'Mostly brains!' said the lad, with a scornful but not unattractive
+conceit. 'He was a hard master to live with--that don't matter. But he
+is a fool! I don't mean to say he don't know a lot about some
+things--but he thinks he knows everything--and he don't. And he'll not
+let anyone tell him--not he! Once, if you'll believe it, he got the
+Aldine Virgil of 1501, for twenty-five shillings--came from a gentleman
+out Eccles way--a fellow selling his father's library and didn't know
+bad from good,--real fine tall copy,--binding poor,--but a _stunner_
+take it altogether--worth twenty pounds to Quaritch or Ellis, any day.
+Well, all I could do, he let a man have it for five shillings profit
+next day, just to spite me, I believe, because I told him it was a good
+thing. Then he got sick about that, I believe, though he never let out,
+and the next time he found anything that looked good,--giminy!--but he
+put it on. Now you know, sir'--Mr. Ancrum smiled at the confidential
+eagerness of the expert--'you know, sir, it's not many of those Venice
+or Florence Dantes that are worth anything. If you get the first edition
+of Landino's 'Commentary,' or the other man's, Imola's, isn't it--'
+
+The minister lifted his eyebrows--the Italian came out pat, and, so
+far as he knew, right--
+
+'Well, of course, _they're_ worth money--always fetch
+their price. But the later editions are no good at all--nobody but a
+gentleman-collector, very green, you know, sir'--the twinkle in the
+boy's eye showed how much his subject was setting him at his
+ease--'would be bothered with them. Well, if he didn't get hold of
+an edition of 1540 or so--worth about eight shillings, and dear at
+that--and send it up to one of the London men as a good thing. He
+makes me pack it and send it and _register_ it--you might have
+thought it was the Mazarin Bible, bar size. And then, of course,
+next day, down comes the book again flying, double quick. I kept
+out of his way, post-time! But I'd have given something to see the
+letter he got.'
+
+And David, rising, put his hands in his pockets, and stood before
+the fire chuckling with irrepressible amusement.
+
+'Well, then you know there's the first editions of Rousseau--not a
+bit rare, as rare goes--lucky if you get thirty shillings for the
+"Contrat Social," or the "Nouvelle Heloise," even good copies--'
+
+Again the host's eyebrows lifted. The French names ran remarkably;
+there was not the least boggling over them. But he said nothing,
+and David rattled on, describing, with a gusto which never failed,
+one of Purcell's book-selling enormities after another. It was
+evident that he despised his master with a passionate contempt. It
+was evident also that Purcell had shown a mean and unreasoning
+jealousy of his assistant. The English tradesman inherits a
+domineering tradition towards his subordinates, and in Purcell's
+case, as we know, the instincts of an egotistical piety had
+reinforced those of the employer. Yet Mr. Ancrum felt some sympathy
+with Purcell.
+
+'Well, Davy,' he said at last, 'so you were too 'cute for your man,
+that's plain. But I don't suppose he put it on that ground when he
+gave you the sack?'
+
+And he looked up, with a little dry smile.
+
+'No!' cried David, abruptly. 'No! not he. If you go and ask
+_him_ he'll tell you he sent me off because I would go to the
+Secularist meetings at the Hall of Science, and air myself as an
+atheist; that's his way of putting it. And it was doing him harm
+with his religious customers! As if I was going to let him dictate
+where I went on Sundays!'
+
+'Of course not,' said Ancrum, with a twist of his oddly shaped
+mouth. 'Even the very youngest of us might sometimes be the better
+for advice; but, hang it, let's be free--free to "make fools of
+ourselves," as a wise man hath it. Well, Davy, no offence,' for his
+guest had flushed suddenly. 'So you go to the Hall of Science? Did
+you hear Holyoake and Bradlaugh there the other night? You like
+that kind of thing?'
+
+'I like to hear it,' said the lad, stoutly, meeting his old
+teacher's look, half nervously, half defiantly. 'It's a great deal
+more lively than what you hear at most churches, sir. And why
+shouldn't one hear everything?'
+
+This was not precisely the tone which the same culprit had adopted
+towards Dora Lomax. The Voltairean suddenly felt himself to be
+making excuses--shabby excuses--in the presence of somebody
+connected, however distantly, with _l'infame_. He drew himself
+up with an angry shake of his whole powerful frame.
+
+'Oh, why not?' said Ancrum, with a shrug, 'if life's long
+enough'--and he absently lifted and let fall a book which lay on
+the table beside him; it was Newman's 'Dream of Gerontius'--'if
+life's long enough, and--happy enough! Well, so you've been
+learning French, I can hear. Teaching yourself?'
+
+'No; there's an old Frenchman, old Barbier--do you know him, sir?
+He gives lessons at a shilling an hour. Very few people go to him
+now; they want younger men. And there's lot's of them about. But
+old Barbier knows more about books than any of them, I'll be bound.'
+
+'Has he introduced you to French novels? I never read any; but
+they're bad, of course--must be. In all those things I'm a
+Britisher and believe what the Britishers say.'
+
+'We're just at the end of "Manon Lescaut,"' said David, doggedly.
+'And partly with him, partly by myself, I've read a bit of
+Rousseau--and a good lot of Diderot,--and Voltaire.'
+
+David threw an emphasis into the last name, which was meant to
+atone to himself for the cowardice of a few minutes before. The old
+boyish feeling towards Mr. Ancrum, which had revived in him when he
+entered the room, had gradually disappeared again. He bore the
+minister no real grudge for having forgotten him, but he wished it
+to be clearly understood that the last fragments of the Christian
+Brethren yoke had dropped from his neck.
+
+'Ah! don't know anything about them,' said Ancrum, slowly; 'but
+then, as you know, I'm a very ignorant person. Well, now, was it
+Voltaire took you to the secularists, or the secularists to
+Voltaire?'
+
+David laughed, but did not give a reply immediately.
+
+'Well, never mind,' said the minister, 'All Christians are fools, of
+course--that's understood.--Is that all you have been learning
+these four years?'
+
+'I work at Latin every morning,' said David, very red, and on his
+dignity. 'I've begun Greek, and I go to the science classes,
+mathematics and chemistry, at the Mechanics' Institute.'
+
+Mr. Ancrum's face softened.
+
+'Why, I'll be bound you have to go to work pretty early, Davy?'
+
+'Seven o'clock, sir, I take the shutters down. But I get an hour
+and a half first, and three hours in the evening. This winter I've
+got through the "Aeneid," and Horace's "Epistles" and "Ars
+Poetica." Do you remember, sir?'--and the lad's voice grew sharp
+once more, tightening as it were under the pressure of eagerness
+and ambition from beneath--'do you remember that Scaliger read the
+"Iliad" in twenty days, and was a finished Greek scholar in two
+years? Why can't one do that now?'
+
+'Why shouldn't you?' said Mr. Ancrum, looking up at him. 'Who helps
+you in your Greek?'
+
+'No one; I get translations.'
+
+'Well, now, look here, Davy. I'm an ignorant person, as I told you,
+but I learnt some Latin and Greek at Manchester New College. Come
+to me in the evenings, and I'll help you with your Greek, unless
+you've got beyond me. Where are you?'
+
+The budding Scaliger reported himself. He had read the 'Anabasis,'
+some Herodotus, three plays of Euripides, and was now making some
+desperate efforts on Aeschylus and Sophocles. Any Plato? David made
+a face. He had read two or three dialogues in English; didn't want
+to go on, didn't care about him. Ah! Ancrum supposed not.
+
+'Twelve hours' shop,' said the minister reflecting, 'more or less,--two
+hours' work before shop,--three hours or so after shop; that's what you
+may call driving it hard. You couldn't do it, Richard Ancrum,' and he
+shook his head with a whimsical melancholy. 'But you were always a poor
+starveling. Youth that _is_ youth's tough. Don't tell me, sir,' and he
+looked up sharply, 'that you don't amuse yourself. I wouldn't believe
+it. There never was a man built like you yet that didn't amuse himself.'
+
+David smiled, but said nothing.
+
+'Billiards?'
+
+'No, sir.'
+
+'Betting?'
+
+'No, sir. They cost money.'
+
+'Niggardly dog! Drink?--no, I'll answer that for myself.'
+
+The minister dropped his catechism, and sat nursing his lame leg
+and thinking. Suddenly he broke out with, 'How many young women are
+you in love with, David?'
+
+David showed his white teeth.
+
+'I only know two, sir. One's my master's daughter--she's rather a
+pretty girl, I think--'
+
+'That'll do. You're not in love with her. Who's the other?'
+
+'The other's Mr. Lomax's daughter,--Lomax of the Parlour, that
+queer restaurant, sir, in Market Place. She--well, I don't know how
+to describe her. She's not good-looking--at least, I don't think
+so,' he added dubiously. 'She's very High Church, and fasts all
+Lent. I think she does Church embroidery.'
+
+'And doesn't think any the better of you for attending the Hall of
+Science? Sensible girl! Still, when people mean to fall in love,
+they don't think twice of that sort of thing. I make a note of
+Lomax's daughter. Ah! enter supper. David, if you let any 'ism
+stand between you and that veal pie, I despair of your future.'
+
+David, however, in the course of the meal, showed himself as
+superior to narrowness of view in the matter of food-stuffs as in
+other matters. The meal went merrily. Mr. Ancrum dropped his
+half-sarcastic tone, and food, warmth, and talk loosened the lad's
+fibres, and made him more and more human, handsome, and attractive.
+Soon his old friend knew all that he wanted to know,--the sum David
+had saved--thirty pounds in the savings-bank--the sort of stock he
+meant to set up, the shop he had taken--with a stall, of course--no
+beginner need hope to prosper without a stall. Customers must be
+delicately angled for at a safe distance--show yourself too much,
+and, like trout, they flashed away. See everything, force nothing.
+Let a book be turned over for nineteen days, the chances were that
+on the twentieth you would turn over the price. As to expecting the
+class of cheap customers to commit themselves by walking into a
+shop, it was simple madness. Of course, when you were 'established,'
+that was another matter.
+
+By the help of a certain wealthy Unitarian, one Mr. Doyle, with
+whom he had made friends in Purcell's shop, and whom he had boldly
+asked for the use of his name as a reference, the lad had taken--so
+it appeared--a small house in Potter Street, a narrow but
+frequented street in the neighbourhood of Deansgate and all the
+great banks and insurance offices in King Street. His shop took up
+the ground floor. The two floors above were let, and the tenants
+would remain. But into the attics and the parlour kitchen behind
+the shop, he meant, ultimately, when he could afford it, to put
+himself and his sister. He could only get the house on a yearly
+tenancy, as it and the others near it were old, and would probably
+be rebuilt before long. But meanwhile the rent was all the lower
+because of the insecurity of tenure.
+
+At the mention of the boy's sister, Ancrum looked up with a start.
+
+'Ah, to be sure! What became of that poor child after you left? The
+Clough End friends who wrote to me of your disappearance had more
+pity for her, Davy, than they had for you.'
+
+A sudden repulsion and reserve darkened the black eyes opposite.
+
+'There was no helping it,' he said with hasty defiance. There was a
+moment's silence. Then a wish to explain himself rose in David.
+
+'I couldn't have stayed, sir,' he said, with a curious
+half-reproachful accent. 'I told you about how it was before you
+left. And there were other things. I should have cut my own throat
+or some one else's if it had gone on. But I haven't forgotten
+Louie. You remember Tom Mullins at the foundry. He's written me
+every month. I paid him for it. I know all about Louie, and they
+don't know anything about me. They think I'm in America.'
+
+His eyes lit again with the joy of contrivance.
+
+'Is that kind, Davy?'
+
+'Yes, sir--' and for the first time the minister heard in the boy's
+voice the tone of a man's judgment. 'I couldn't have Louie on me
+just yet. I was going to ask you, sir, not to tell the people at
+Clough End you've seen me. It would make it very hard. You know
+what Louie is--and she's all right. She's learnt a trade.'
+
+'What trade?'
+
+'Silk-weaving--from Margaret Dawson.'
+
+'Poor soul--poor saint! There'd be more things than her trade to be
+learnt from Margaret Dawson if anyone had a mind to learn them.
+What of 'Lias?'
+
+'Oh, he died, sir, a week after I left.' The lad's voice dropped.
+Then he added slowly, looking away, 'Tom said he was very quiet--he
+didn't suffer much--not at the end.'
+
+'Aye, the clouds lift at sunset,' said Mr. Ancrum in an altered
+tone; 'the air clears before the night!'
+
+His head fell forward on his breast, and he sat drumming on the
+table. They had finished supper, the little, bustling landlady had
+cleared away, and Davy was thinking of going. Suddenly the minister
+sprang up and stood before the fire, looking down at his guest.
+
+'Davy, do you want to know why I didn't write to you? I was ill
+first--very ill; then--_I was in hell!_'
+
+David started. Into the thin, crooked face, with the seeking eyes,
+there had flashed an expression--sinister, indescribable, a sort of
+dumb rage. It changed the man altogether.
+
+'I was in hell!' he repeated slowly. 'I know no more about it. Other
+people may tell you, perhaps, if you come across them--I can't.
+There were days at Clough End--always a certain number in the
+year--when this earth slipped away from me, and the fiends came
+about me, but this was months. They say I was overdone in the
+cotton famine years ago just before I came to Clough End. I got
+pneumonia after I left you that May--it doesn't matter. When I knew
+there was a sun again, I wrote to ask about you. You had left
+Kinder and gone--no one knew where.'
+
+David sat nervously silent, not knowing what to say, his mind
+gradually filling with the sense of something tragic, irreparable.
+Mr. Ancrum, too, stood straight before him, as though turned to
+stone. A t last David got up and approached him. Had Ancrum been
+looking he must have been touched by the change in the lad's
+expression. The hard self-reliant force of the face had melted into
+feeling.
+
+'Are you better now, sir? I knew you must have been ill,' he
+stammered.
+
+Ancrum started as though just wakened.
+
+'Ill? Yes, I was pretty bad,' he said briskly, and in his most
+ordinary tone, though with a long breath.' But I'm as fit as
+anything now. Good night, Davy, good night. Come a walk with me
+some day? Sunday afternoon? Done. Here, write me your new address.'
+
+The tall form and curly black head disappeared, the little
+lodging-house room, with its round rosewood table, its horsehair
+sofa, its chiffonnier, and its prints of 'Sport at Balmoral' and
+'The Mother's Kiss,' had resumed the dingy formality of every day.
+
+The minister sank into his seat and held his hands out over the
+blaze. He was in pain. All life was to him more or less a struggle
+with physical ill. But it was not so primarily that he conceived
+it. The physical ill was nothing except as representing a
+philosophical necessity.
+
+That lad, with all his raw certainties--of himself, his knowledge,
+his Voltaire--the poor minister felt once or twice a piteous
+envy of him, as he sat on through the night hours. Life was
+ill-apportioned. The poor, the lonely, the feeble--it is they who
+want certainty, want hope most. And because they are lonely and
+feeble, because their brain tissues are diseased, and their life
+from no fault of their own unnatural, nature who has made them
+dooms them to despair and doubt. Is there any 'soul,' any
+'personality' for the man who is afflicted and weakened with
+intermittent melancholia? Where is his identity, where his
+responsibility? And if there is none for him, how does the accident
+of health bestow them on his neighbour?
+
+Questions of this sort had beset Richard Ancrum for years. On the
+little book-table to his right lay papers of Huxley's, of
+Clifford's, and several worn volumes of mental pathology. The
+brooding intellect was for ever raising the same problem, the same
+spectre world of universal doubt, in which God, conscience, faith,
+were words without a meaning.
+
+But side by side with the restlessness of the intellect there had
+always gone the imperious and prevailing claim of temperament.
+Beside Huxley and Clifford, lay Newman's 'Sermons' and 'Apologia,'
+and a little High Church manual of self-examination. And on the
+wall above the book-table hung a memorandum-slate on which were a
+number of addresses and dates--the addresses of some forty boys
+whom the minister taught on Sunday in one of the Unitarian Sunday
+schools of Manchester, and visited in the week. The care and
+training of street arabs had been his passion when he was still a
+student at Manchester New College. Then had come his moment of
+utterance--a thirst for preaching, for religious influence; though
+he could not bring himself to accept any particular shibboleth or
+take any kind of orders. He found something congenial for a time to
+a deep though struggling faith in the leadership of the Christian
+Brethren. Now, however, something had broken in him; he could
+preach no more. But he could go back to his old school; he could
+teach his boys on Sundays and week days; he could take them out
+country walks in spite of his lame limb; he could deny himself even
+the commonest necessaries of life for their sake; he could watch
+over each of them with a fervour, a moral intensity which wore him
+out. In this, in some insignificant journalism for a religious
+paper, and in thinking, he spent his life.
+
+There had been a dark page in his history. He had hardly left
+Manchester New College when he married suddenly a girl of some
+beauty, but with an undeveloped sensuous temperament. They were to
+live on a crust and give themselves to the service of man. His own
+dream was still fresh when she deserted him in the company of one
+of his oldest friends. He followed them, found them both in black
+depths of remorse, and took her back. But the strain of living
+together proved too much. She implored him to let her go and earn
+her living apart. She had been a teacher, and she proposed to
+return to her profession. He saw her established in Glasgow in the
+house of some good people who knew her history, and who got her a
+post in a small school. Then he returned to Manchester and threw
+himself with reckless ardour into the work of feeding the hungry,
+and nursing the dying, in the cotton famine. He emerged a broken
+man, physically and morally, liable thenceforward to recurrent
+crises of melancholia; but they were not frequent or severe enough
+to prevent his working. He was at the time entirely preoccupied
+with certain religious questions, and thankfully accepted the call
+to the little congregation at Clough End.
+
+Since then he had visited his wife twice every year. He was
+extremely poor. His family, who had destined him for the
+Presbyterian ministry, were estranged from him; hardly anyone in
+Manchester knew him intimately; only in one house, far away in the
+Scotch lowlands, were there two people, who deeply loved and
+thoroughly understood him. There he went when his dark hours came
+upon him; and thence, after the terrible illness which overtook him
+on his leaving Clough End, he emerged again, shattered but
+indomitable, to take up the battle of life as he understood it.
+
+He was not an able nor a literary man. His mind was a strange
+medley, and his mental sight far from clear. Of late the study of
+Newman had been a revelation to him. But he did not cease for that
+to read the books of scientific psychology which tortured him--the
+books which seemed to make of mind a function of matter, and man
+the slave of an immoral nature.
+
+The only persistent and original gift in him--yet after all it is
+the gift which for ever divides the sheep from the goats--was that
+of a 'hunger and thirst after righteousness.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It was towards noon on a November day, and Dora Lomax sat working
+at her embroidery frame in the little sitting-room overlooking
+Market Place. The pale wintry sun touched her bent head, her deftly
+moving hand, and that device of the risen Christ circled in golden
+flame on which she was at work. The room in which she sat was old
+and low; the ceiling bulged here and there, the floor had
+unexpected slopes and declivities. The furniture was of the
+cheapest, the commonest odds and ends of a broker's shop, for the
+most part. There was the usual horsehair suite, the usual cheap
+sideboard, and dingy druggeting of a large geometrical pattern. But
+amid these uninviting articles there were a few things which gave
+the room individuality--some old prints of places abroad, of
+different shapes and sizes, which partly disguised the blue and
+chocolate paper on the walls; some bits of foreign carving, Swiss
+and Italian; some eggs and shells and stuffed birds, some of these
+last from the Vosges, some from the Alps; a cageful of canaries,
+singing their best against the noise of Manchester; and, lastly, an
+old bookcase full of miscellaneous volumes, mostly large and
+worthless 'sets' of old magazines and encyclopaedias, which
+represented the relics of Daddy's bookselling days.
+
+The room smelt strongly of cooking, a mingled odour of boiling
+greens and frying onions and stored apples which never deserted it,
+and produced a constant slight sense of nausea in Dora, who, like
+most persons of sedentary occupation, was in matters of eating and
+digestion somewhat sensitive and delicate. From below, too, there
+seemed to spread upwards a general sense of bustle and disquiet.
+Doors banged, knives and plates rattled perpetually, the great
+swing-door into the street was for ever opening and shutting, each
+time shaking the old, frail house with its roughly built additions
+through and through, and there was a distant skurry of voices that
+never paused. The restaurant indeed was in full work, and Daddy's
+voice could be heard at intervals, shouting and chattering. Dora
+had been at work since half-past seven, marketing, giving orders,
+making up accounts, writing bills of fare, and otherwise organising
+the work of the day. Now she had left the work for an hour or two
+to her father and the stout Lancashire cook with her various
+handmaidens. Daddy's irritable pride liked to get her out of the
+way and make a lady of her as much as she would allow, and in her
+secret heart she often felt that her embroidery, for which she was
+well paid as a skilled and inventive hand, furnished a securer
+basis for their lives than this restaurant, which, in spite of its
+apparent success, was a frequent source of dread and discomfort to
+her. The money obligation it involved filled her sometimes with a
+kind of panic. She knew her father so well!
+
+Now, as she sat absorbed in her work, sewing her heart into it, for
+every stitch in it delighted not only her skilled artistic sense
+but her religious feeling, little waves of anxious thought swept
+across her one after another. She was a person of timid and
+brooding temperament, and her father's eccentricities and past
+history provided her with much just cause for worry. But to-day she
+was not thinking much of him.
+
+Again and again there came between her and her silks a face, a face
+of careless pride and power, framed in strong waves of black hair.
+It had once repelled her quite as much as it attracted her. But at
+any rate, ever since she had first seen it, it had taken a place
+apart in her mind, as though in the yielding stuff of memory and
+feeling one impression out of the thousands of every day had,
+without warning, yet irrevocably, stamped itself deeper than the
+rest. The owner of it--David Grieve--filled her now, as always,
+with invincible antagonisms and dissents. But still the thought of
+him had in some gradual way become of late part of her habitual
+consciousness, associated always, and on the whole painfully
+associated, with the thought of Lucy Purcell.
+
+For Lucy was such a little goose! To think of the way in which she
+had behaved towards young Grieve in the fortnight succeeding his
+notice to quit, before he finally left Purcell's service, made Dora
+hot all over. How could Lucy demean herself so? and show such
+tempers and airs towards a man who clearly did not think anything
+at all about her? And now she had flung herself upon Dora,
+imploring her cousin to help her, and threatening desperate things
+unless she and David were still enabled to meet. And meanwhile
+Purcell had flatly forbidden any communication between his
+household and the young reprobate he had turned out, whose
+threatened prosperity made at this moment the angry preoccupation
+of his life.
+
+What was Dora to do? Was she to aid and abet Lucy, against her
+father's will, in pursuing David Grieve? And if in spite of all
+appearances the little self-willed creature succeeded, and Dora
+were the means of her marrying David, how would Dora's conscience
+stand? Here was a young man who believed in nothing, and openly
+said so, who took part in those terrible atheistical meetings and
+discussions, which, as Father Russell had solemnly said, were like
+a plague-centre in Manchester, drawing in and corrupting soul after
+soul. And Dora was to help in throwing her young cousin, while she
+was still almost a child with no 'Church principles' to aid and
+protect her, into the hands of this enemy of the Lord and His
+Church?
+
+Then, when it came to this point, Dora would be troubled and drawn
+away by memories of young Grieve's talk and ways, of his dashes
+into Market Place to see Daddy since he had set up for himself, of
+his bold plans for the future which delighted Daddy and took her
+breath away; of the flash of his black eyes; the triumphant energy
+of his youth; and those indications in him, too, which had so
+startled her of late since they--she and he--had dropped the futile
+sparrings in which their acquaintance began, of an inner softness,
+a sensitive magnetic something--indescribable.
+
+Dora's needle paused in mid-air. Then her hand dropped on her lap.
+A slight but charming smile--born of youth, sympathy, involuntary
+admiration--dawned on her face. She sat so for a minute or two lost
+in reminiscence.
+
+The clock outside struck twelve. Dora with a start felt along the
+edge of her frame under her work and brought out a book. It was a
+little black, worn manual of prayers for various times and
+occasions compiled by a High Church dignitary. For Dora it had a
+talismanic virtue. She turned now to one of the 'Prayers for
+Noonday,' made the sign of the cross, and slipped on to her knees
+for an instant. Then she rose happily and went back to her work. It
+was such acts as this that made the thread on which her life of
+mystical emotion was strung.
+
+But her father was a Secularist of a pronounced type, and her
+mother had been a rigid Baptist, old-fashioned and sincere, filled
+with a genuine horror of Papistry and all its ways.
+
+Adrian O'Connor Lomax, to give Daddy his whole magnificent name,
+was the son of a reed-maker, of Irish extraction, at Hyde, and was
+brought up at first to follow his father's trade--that of making
+the wire 'reed,' or frame, into which the threads of the warp are
+fastened before weaving. But such patient drudgery, often
+continued, as it was in those days, for twelve and fourteen hours
+out of the twenty-four, was gall and wormwood to a temperament like
+Daddy's. He developed a taste for reading, fell in with Byron's
+poems, and caught the fever of them; then branched out into
+politics just at the time of the first Reform Bill, when all over
+Lancashire the memory of Peterloo was still burning, and when men
+like Henry Hunt and Samuel Bamford were the political heroes of
+every weaver's cottage. He developed a taste for itinerant
+lecturing and preaching, and presently left his family and tramped
+to Manchester.
+
+Here after many vicissitudes--including an enthusiastic and on the
+whole creditable participation, as an itinerant lecturer, in the
+movement for the founding of Mechanics' Institutes, then spreading
+all over the north--Daddy, to his ill-fortune, came across his
+future brother-in-law, the bookseller Purcell. At the moment Daddy
+was in a new and unaccustomed phase of piety. After a period of
+revolutionary spouting, in which Byron, Tom Paine, and the various
+publications of Richard Carlile had formed his chief scriptures, a
+certain Baptist preacher laid hold of the Irishman's mercurial
+sense. Daddy was awakened and converted, burnt his Byron and his
+Tom Paine in his three-pair back with every circumstance of insult
+and contumely, and looked about for an employer worthy of one of
+the elect. Purcell at the time had a shop in one of the main
+streets connecting Manchester and Salford; he was already an elder
+at the chapel Daddy frequented; the two made acquaintance and Lomax
+became Purcell's assistant. At the moment the trade offered to him
+attracted Daddy vastly. He had considerable pretensions to
+literature; was a Shakespearian, a debater, and a haunter of a
+certain literary symposium, held for a long time at one of the old
+Manchester inns, and attended by most of the small wits and poets
+of a then small and homely town. The gathering had nothing saintly
+about it; free drinking went often hand in hand with free thought;
+Daddy's infant zeal was shocked, but Daddy's instincts were
+invincible, and he went.
+
+The result of the bookselling experiment has been already told by
+Daddy himself. It was, of course, inevitable. Purcell was then a
+young man, but in his dealings with Daddy he showed precisely the
+same cast-iron self-importance, the same slowness of brain coupled
+with the same assumptions of an unbounded and righteous authority,
+the same unregenerate greediness in small matters of gain and loss
+which now in his later life had made him odious to David Grieve.
+Moreover, Daddy, by a happy instinct, had at once made common cause
+with Purcell's downtrodden sister, going on even, as his passionate
+sense of opposition developed, to make love to the poor humble
+thing mainly for the sake of annoying the brother. The crisis came;
+the irritated tyrant brought down a heavy hand, and Daddy and
+Isabella disappeared together from the establishment in Chapel
+Street.
+
+By the time Daddy had set up as the husband of Purcell's sister in
+a little shop precisely opposite to that of his former employer, he
+had again thrown over all pretensions to sanctity, was, on the
+contrary, convinced afresh that all religion was one vast perennial
+imposture, dominated, we may suppose, in this as in most other
+matters, by the demon of hatred which now possessed him towards his
+brother-in-law. His wife, poor soul, was beginning to feel herself
+tied for good to the tail of a comet destined to some mad career or
+other, and quite uncontrollable by any efforts of hers. Lomax had
+married her for the most unpromising reasons in the world, and he
+soon tired of her, and of the trade, which required a sustained
+effort, which he was incapable of giving. As long as Purcell
+remained opposite, indeed, hate and rivalry kept him up to the
+mark. He was an attractive figure at that time, with his long fair
+hair and his glancing greenish eyes; and his queer discursive talk
+attracted many a customer, whom he would have been quite competent
+to keep had his character been of the same profitable stuff as his
+ability.
+
+But when Purcell vanished across the river into Manchester, the
+zest of Daddy's bookselling enterprise departed also. He began to
+neglect his shop, was off here and there lecturing and debating,
+and when he came back again it was plain to the wife their scanty
+money had been squandered on other excesses than those of talk. At
+last the business fell to ruins, and debts pressed. Then suddenly
+Daddy was persuaded by a French commercial traveller to take up his
+old trade of reed-making, and go and seek employment across the
+Channel, where reed-makers were said to be in demand.
+
+In ecstasy at the idea of travel thus presented to him, Daddy
+devoured what books about France he could get hold of, and tried to
+teach himself French. Then one morning, without a word to his wife,
+he stole downstairs and out of the shop, and was far on the road to
+London before his flight was discovered. His poor wife shed some
+tears, but he had ceased to care for her she believed, largely
+because she had brought him no children, and his habits had begun
+to threaten to lead her with unpleasant rapidity to the workhouse.
+So she took comfort, and with the help of some friends set up a
+little stationery and fancy business, which just kept her alive.
+
+Meanwhile Lomax found no work in Picardy, whither he had first
+gone, and ultimately wandered across France to Alsace, in search of
+bread, a prey to all possible hardships and privations. But nothing
+daunted him. The glow of adventure and romance was on every
+landscape. Cathedrals, forests, the wide river-plains of central
+France, with their lights and distances,--all things on this new
+earth and under these new heavens 'haunted him like a passion.' He
+travelled in perpetual delight, making love no doubt here and there
+to some passing Mignon, and starving with the gayest of hearts.
+
+At Mulhausen he found work, and being ill and utterly destitute,
+submitted to it for a while. But as soon as he had got back his
+health and saved some money, he set out again, walking this time,
+staff in hand, over the whole Rhine country and into the
+Netherlands. There in the low Dutch plains he fell ill again, and
+the beauty of the Rhineland was no longer there to stand like a
+spell between him and the pains of poverty. He seemed to come to
+himself, after a dream in which the world and all its forms had
+passed him by 'apparelled in celestial light.' And the process of
+self-finding was attended by some at least of those salutary pangs
+which eternally belong to it. He suddenly took a resolution, crept
+on board a coal smack going from a Dutch port to Grimsby, toiled
+across Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and appeared one evening, worn
+to a shadow, in his wife's little shop in Salford.
+
+He was received as foolish women in whom there is no ineradicable
+taint of cruelty or hate will always receive the prodigal who
+returns. And when Daddy had been fed and clothed, he turned out for
+a time to be so amiable, so grateful a Daddy, such good company, as
+he sat in the chair by his wife's fire and told stories of his
+travels to her and anybody else who might drop in, that not only
+the wife but the neighbourhood was appeased. His old friends came
+back to him, he began to receive overtures to write in some of the
+humbler papers, to lecture on his adventures in the Yorkshire and
+Lancashire towns. Daddy expanded, harangued, grew daily in good
+looks and charm under his wife's eyes.
+
+At last one day the papers came in with news of Louis Philippe's
+overthrow. Daddy grew restless, and began to study the foreign news
+with avidity. Revolution spread, and what with democracy abroad and
+Chartism at home, there was more stimulus in the air than such
+brains as Daddy's could rightly stand. One May day he walked into
+the street, looked hesitatingly up and down it, shading his eyes
+against the sun. Then with a shake of his long hair, as of one
+throwing off a weight, he drew his hat from under his arm, put it
+on, felt in his pockets, and set off at a run, head downwards,
+while poor Isabella Lomax was sweeping her kitchen. During the next
+few days he was heard of, rumour said, now here, now there, but one
+might as well have attempted to catch and hold the Pied Piper.
+
+He was away for rather more than twenty months. Then one day, as
+before, a lean, emaciated, sun-browned figure came slowly up the
+Salford street, looking for a familiar door. It was Daddy. He went
+into the shop, which was empty, stared, with a countenance in which
+relief and repulsion were oddly mingled, at the boxes of
+stationery, at the dusty counter with its string and glass cases,
+when suddenly the inside door, which was standing ajar, was pushed
+stealthily inwards, and a child stood in the doorway. It was a
+tottering baby of a year old, holding in one fat hand a crust of
+bread which it had been sucking. When it saw the stranger it looked
+at him gravely for a second. Then without a trace of fear or
+shyness it came forward, holding up its crust appealingly, its rosy
+chin and lips still covered with bread-crumbs.
+
+Daddy stared at the apparition, which seemed to him the merest
+witchcraft. For it was _himself_, dwarfed to babyhood and
+pinafores. His eyes, his prominent brow, his colour, his trick of
+holding the head--they were all there, absurdly there.
+
+He gave a cry, which was answered by another cry from behind. His
+wife stood in the door. The stout, foolish Isabella was white to
+the lips. Even she felt the awe, the poetry of the moment.
+
+'Aye,' she said, trembling. 'Aye! it's yourn. It was born seven
+months after yo left us.'
+
+Daddy, without greeting his wife, threw himself down by the babe,
+and burst into tears. He had come back in a still darker mood than
+on his first return, his egotistical belief in himself more rudely
+shaken than ever by the attempts, the failures, the miseries of the
+last eighteen months. For one illuminating moment he saw that he
+was a poor fool, and that his youth was squandered and gone. But in
+its stead, there--dropped suddenly beside him by the forgiving
+gods--stood this new youth sprung from his, and all his own, this
+child--Dora.
+
+He took to her with a passion which the trembling Isabella thought
+a great deal too excessive to last. But though the natural Daddy
+very soon reappeared, with all the aggravating peculiarities which
+belonged to him, the passion did last, and the truant strayed no
+more. He set up a small printing business with the help of some old
+customers--it was always characteristic of the man that, be his
+failings what they might, he never lacked friends--and with
+lecturing and writing, and Isabella's shop, they struggled on
+somehow. Isabella's life was hard enough. Daddy was only good when
+he was happy; and at other times he dipped recklessly into vices
+which would have been the ruin of them all had they been
+persistent. But by some kind fate he always emerged, and more and
+more, as years went on, owing to Dora. He drank, but not
+hopelessly; he gambled, but not past salvation; and there was
+generally, as we have said, some friend at hand to pick the poor
+besmirched featherbrain out of the mire.
+
+Dora grew up not unhappily. There were shifts and privations to put
+up with; there were stormy days when life seemed a hurricane of
+words and tears. But there were bright spaces in between, when
+Daddy had good resolutions, or a little more money than usual; and
+with every year the daughter instinctively knew that her spell over
+her father strengthened. She was on the whole a serious child, with
+fair pale hair, much given to straying in long loose ends about her
+prominent brow and round cheeks. Yet at the Baptist school, whither
+she was sent, she was certainly popular. She had a passion for the
+little ones; and her grey-blue eyes, over which in general the
+fringed lids drooped too much, had a charming trick of sudden
+smiles, when the soft soul behind looked for an instant clearly and
+blithely out. At home she was a little round-shouldered drudge in
+her mother's service. At chapel she sat very patiently and happily
+under a droning minister, and when the inert and despondent
+Isabella would have let most of her religious duties drop, in the
+face of many troubles and a scoffing husband, the child of fourteen
+gently and persistently held her to them.
+
+At last, however, when Dora was seventeen, Isabella died of cancer,
+and Daddy, who had been much shaken and terrified by her sufferings
+in her last illness, fell for a while into an irritable melancholy,
+from which not even Dora could divert him. It was then that he
+seemed for the first time to cross the line which had hitherto
+divided him from ruin. The drinking at the White Horse, where the
+literary circle met of which Lomax had been so long an ornament,
+had been of late going from bad to worse. The households of the
+wits concerned were up in arms; neighbourhood and police began to
+assert themselves. One night the trembling Dora waited hour after
+hour for her father. About midnight he staggered in, maddened with
+drink and fresh from a skirmish with the police. Finding her there
+waiting for him, pale and silent, he did what he had never done
+before under any stress of trouble--struck and swore at her. Dora
+sank down with a groan, and in another minute Lomax was dashing his
+head against the wall, vowing that he would beat his brains out. In
+the hours that followed, Dora's young soul was stretched as it were
+on a rack, from which it rose, not weakened, but with new powers
+and a loftier stature. All her girlish levities and illusions
+seemed to drop away from her. She saw her mission, and took her
+squalid Oedipus in charge.
+
+Next morning she went to some of her father's friends, unknown to
+Daddy, and came back with a light in her blanched face, bearing the
+offer of some work on a Radical paper at Leicester. Daddy, now
+broken and miserable, submitted, and off they went.
+
+At Leicester the change of moral and physical climate produced for
+a while a wonderful effect. Daddy found himself marvellously at
+ease among the Secularist and Radical stockingers of the town, and
+soon became well known to them as a being half butt, half oracle.
+Dora set herself to learn dressmaking, and did her best to like the
+new place and the new people. It was at Leicester, a place seething
+with social experiment in its small provincial way, with
+secularism, Owenism, anti-vaccination, and much else, that Lomax
+fell a victim to one 'ism the more--to vegetarianism. It was there
+that, during an editorial absence, and in the first fervour of
+conversion, Daddy so belaboured a carnivorous world in the columns
+of the 'Penny Banner' for which he worked, and so grotesquely and
+persistently reduced all the problems of the time to terms of
+nitrogen and albumen, that curt dismissal came upon him, and for a
+time Dora saw nothing but her precarious earnings between them and
+starvation. It was then also that, by virtue of that queer charm he
+could always exercise when he pleased, he laid hold on a young
+Radical manufacturer and got out of him a loan of 200 pounds for
+the establishment of a vegetarian restaurant wherein Leicester was
+to be taught how to feed.
+
+But Leicester, alas! remained unregenerate. In the midst of Daddy's
+preparations a commercial traveller, well known both to Manchester
+and Leicester, repeated to him one day a remark of Purcell's, to
+the effect that since Daddy's migration Manchester had been well
+rid of a vagabond, and he, Purcell, of a family disgrace. Daddy,
+bursting with fatuous rage, and possessed besides of the wildest
+dreams of fortune on the strength of his 200 pounds, straightway
+made up his mind to return to Manchester, 'pull Purcell's nose,' and
+plant himself and his prosperity that was to be in the bookseller's
+eyes. He broke in upon Dora at her work, and poured into her
+astonished ears a stream of talk, marked by a mad inventiveness,
+partly in the matter of vegetarian receipts, still more in that of
+Purcell's future discomforts. When Daddy was once launched into a
+subject that suited him, he was inexhaustible. His phrases flowed
+for ever; of words he was always sure. Like a certain French talker,
+'his sentences were like cats: he showered them into air and they
+found their feet without trouble.'
+
+Dora sat through it, bewildered and miserable. Go back to
+Manchester where they had been so unhappy, where the White Horse
+and its crew were waiting for her father, simply to get into debt
+and incur final ruin for the sake of a mad fancy she humoured but
+could not believe in, and a still madder thirst for personal
+vengeance on a man who was more than a match for anything Daddy
+could do! She was in despair.
+
+But Daddy was obdurate, brutal in his determination to have his
+way; and when she angered him with her remonstrances, he turned
+upon her with an irritable--
+
+'I know what it is--damn it! It's that Puseyite gang you've taken up
+with--you think of nothing but them. As if you couldn't find antics
+and petticoats and priests in Manchester--they're everywhere--like
+weeds. Wherever there's a dunghill of human credulity they swarm.'
+
+Dora looked proudly at her father, as though disdaining to reply,
+gentle creature that she was; then she bent again over her work,
+and a couple of tears fell on the seam she was sewing.
+
+Aye, it was true enough. In leaving Leicester, after these two years,
+she was leaving what to her had been a spiritual birthplace,--tearing
+asunder a new and tender growth of the soul.
+
+This was how it had come about.
+
+On her first arrival in Leicester, in a _milieu_, that is to
+say, where at the time 'Gavroche,' as M. Renan calls him--the
+street philosopher who is no less certain and no more rational than
+the street preacher--reigned supreme, where her Secularist father
+and his associates, hot-headed and early representatives of a phase
+of thought which has since then found much abler, though hardly
+less virulent, expression in such a paper, say, as the 'National
+Reformer,' were for ever rending and trampling on all the current
+religious images and ideas, Dora shrank into herself more and more.
+She had always been a Baptist because her mother was. But in her
+deep reaction against her father's associates, the chapel which she
+frequented did not now satisfy her. She hungered for she knew not
+what, certain fastidious artistic instincts awakening the while in
+unexpected ways.
+
+Then one Easter Eve, as she came back from an errand into the
+outskirts of the town, she passed a little iron church standing in
+a very poor neighbourhood, where, as she knew, a 'Puseyite' curate
+in charge officiated, and where a good many disturbances which had
+excited the populace had taken place. She went in. The curate, a
+long, gaunt figure, of a familiar monkish type, was conducting
+'vespers' for the benefit of some twenty hearers, mostly women in
+black. The little church was half decorated for Easter, though the
+altar had still its Lenten bareness. Something in the ordering of
+the place, in its colours, its scents, in the voice of the priest,
+in the short address he delivered after the service, dwelling in a
+tone of intimate emotion, the tone of the pastor to the souls he
+guides and knows, on the preparation needful for the Easter
+Eucharist, struck home to Dora. Next day she was present at the
+Easter festival. Never had religion spoken so touchingly to her
+before as through these hymns, these flowers, this incense, this
+Eucharistic ceremonial wherein--being the midday celebration--the
+congregation were merely hushed spectators of the most pathetic and
+impressive act in the religious symbolism of mankind. In the dark
+corner where she had hidden herself, Dora felt the throes of some
+new birth within her. In six weeks from that time she had been
+admitted, after instruction, to the Anglican communion.
+
+Thenceforward another existence began for this child of English
+Dissent, in whom, however, some old Celtic leaven seems to have
+always kept up a vague unrest, till the way of mystery and poetry
+was found.
+
+Daddy--the infidel Daddy--stormed a good deal, and lamented himself
+still more, when these facts became known to him. Dora had become a
+superstitious, priest-ridden dolt, of no good to him or anyone else
+any more. What, indeed, was to become of him? Natural affection
+cannot stand against the priest. A daughter cannot love her father
+and go to confession. Down with the abomination--_ecrasez
+l'infame!_
+
+Dora smiled sadly and went her way. Against her sweet silent
+tenacity Daddy measured himself in vain. She would be a good
+daughter to him, but she would be a good churchwoman first. He
+began to perceive in her that germ of detachment from things
+earthly and human which all ceremonialism produces, and in a sudden
+terror gave way and opposed her no more. Afterwards, in a curious
+way, he came even to relish the change in her. The friends it
+brought her, the dainty ordering of the little flower-decked
+oratory she made for herself in one corner of her bare attic room,
+the sweet sobriety and refinement which her new loves and
+aspirations and self-denials brought with them into the house,
+touched the poetical instincts which were always dormant in the
+queer old fellow, and besides flattered some strong and secret
+ambitions which he cherished for his daughter. It appeared to him
+to have raised her socially, to have made a lady of her--this
+joining the Church. Well, the women must have some religious bag or
+other to run their heads into, and the Church bag perhaps was the
+most seemly.
+
+On the day of their return to Manchester, Daddy, sitting with
+crossed arms and legs in a corner of the railway carriage, might
+have sat for a fairy-book illustration of Rumpelstiltzchen. His old
+peaked hat, which he had himself brought from the Tyrol, fell
+forward over his frowning brow, his cloak was caught fiercely about
+him, and, as the quickly-passing mill-towns began to give notice of
+Manchester as soon as the Derbyshire vales were left behind, his
+glittering eyes disclosed an inward fever--a fever of contrivance
+and of hate. He was determined to succeed, and equally determined
+to make his success Purcell's annoyance.
+
+Dora sat opposite, with her bird-cage on her knee, looking sad
+weary. She had left behind, perhaps for ever, the dear friends who
+had opened to her the way of holiness, and guided her first steps.
+Her eyes filled with tears of gratitude and emotion as she thought
+of them.
+
+Two things only were pleasant to remember. One was that the Church
+embroidery she had begun in her young zeal at Leicester, using her
+odds and ends of time, to supplement the needs of a struggling
+church depending entirely on voluntary contributions, was now
+probably to become her trade. For she had shown remarkable aptitude
+for it; and she carried introductions to a large church-furniture
+shop in Manchester which would almost certainly employ her.
+
+The other was the fact that somewhere in Manchester she had a
+girl-cousin--Lucy Purcell--who must be about sixteen. Purcell had
+married after his migration to Half Street; his wife proved to be
+delicate and died in a few years; this little girl was all that was
+left to him. Dora had only seen her once or twice in her life. The
+enmity between Lomax and Purcell of course kept the families apart,
+and, after her mother's early death, Purcell sent his daughter to a
+boarding-school and so washed his hands of the trouble of her
+bringing up. But in spite of these barriers Dora well remembered a
+slim, long-armed schoolgirl, much dressed and becurled, who once in
+a by-street of Salford had run after her and, looking round
+carefully to see that no one was near, had thrust an eager face
+into hers and kissed her suddenly. 'Dora,--is your mother better? I
+wish I could come and see you. Oh, it's horrid of people to
+quarrel! But I mustn't stay,--some one'll see, and I should just
+catch it! Good-bye, Dora!' and so another kiss, very hasty and
+frightened, but very welcome to the cheek it touched.
+
+As they neared Manchester, Dora, in her loneliness of soul, thought
+very tenderly of Lucy--wondered how she had grown up, whether she
+was pretty and many other things. She had certainly been a pretty
+child. Of course they must know each other and be friends. Dora
+could not let her father's feud come between her and her only
+relation. Purcell might keep them apart; but she would show him she
+meant no harm; and she would bring her father round--she would and
+must.
+
+Two years had gone by. Of Daddy's two objects in leaving Leicester,
+one had so far succeeded better than any rational being would have
+foreseen.
+
+On the first morning after their arrival he went out, giving Dora
+the slip lest she might cramp him inconveniently in his decision;
+and came back radiant, having taken a deserted seed-shop in Market
+Place, which had a long, irregular addition at the back, formerly a
+warehouse, providentially suited, so Daddy declared, to the
+purposes of a restaurant. The rent he had promised to give seemed
+to Dora a crime, considering their resources. The thought of it,
+the terror of the servants he was engaging, the knowledge of the
+ridicule and blame with which their old friends regarded her
+father's proceedings, these things kept the girl awake night after
+night.
+
+But he would hear no remonstrances, putting all she had to say
+aside with an arrogant boastfulness, which never failed.
+
+In they went. Dora set her teeth and did her best, keeping as
+jealous a watch on the purse-strings as she could, and furnishing
+their three rooms above the shop for as few shillings as might be,
+while Daddy was painting and decorating, composing _menus_,
+and ransacking recipes with the fever of an artist, now writing
+letters to the Manchester papers, or lecturing to audiences in the
+Mechanics' Institute and the different working men's clubs, and now
+plastering the shop-front with grotesque labels, or posing at his
+own doorway and buttonholing the passers-by in the Tyrolese
+brigand's costume which was his favourite garb.
+
+The thing took. There is a certain mixture of prophet and
+mountebank which can be generally counted upon to hit the popular
+fancy, and Daddy attained to it. Moreover, the moment was
+favourable. After the terrible strain of the cotton-famine and the
+horrors of the cholera, Manchester was prosperous again. Trade was
+brisk, and the passage of the new Reform Bill had given a fresh
+outlet and impulse to the artisan mind which did but answer to the
+social and intellectual advance made by the working classes since
+'32. The huge town was growing fast, was seething with life,
+with ambitions, with all the passions and ingenuities that
+belong to gain and money-making and the race for success. It
+was pre-eminently a city of young men of all nationalities,
+three-fourths constantly engaged in the _chasse_ for money,
+according to their degrees--here for shillings, there for
+sovereigns, there for thousands. In such a _milieu_ any man
+has a chance who offers to deal afresh on new terms with those
+daily needs which both goad and fetter the struggling multitude at
+every step. Vegetarianism had, in fact, been spreading in
+Manchester; one or two prominent workmen's papers were preaching
+it; and just before Daddy's advent there had been a great dinner in
+a public hall, where the speedy advent of a regenerate and
+frugivorous mankind, with length of days in its right hand, and a
+captivating abundance of small moneys in its waistcoat pocket, had
+been freely and ardently prophesied.
+
+So Daddy for once seized the moment, and succeeded like the veriest
+Philistine. On the opening day the restaurant was crowded from
+morning till night. Dora, with her two cooks in the suffocating
+kitchen behind, had to send out the pair of panting, perspiring
+kitchen-boys again and again for fresh supplies; while Daddy, at
+his wits' end for waiters, after haranguing a group of customers on
+the philosophy of living, amid a tumult of mock cheers and
+laughter, would rush in exasperated to Dora, to say that
+_never_ again would he trust her niggardly ways--she would be
+the ruin of him with her economies.
+
+When at night the doors were shut at last on the noise and the
+crowd, and Daddy sat, with his full cash-box open on his knee,
+while the solitary gaslight that remained threw a fantastic and
+colossal shadow of him over the rough floor of the restaurant, Dora
+came up to him dropping with fatigue. He looked at her, his gaunt
+face working, and burst into tears.
+
+'Dora, we never had any money before, not when--when--your mother
+was alive.'
+
+And she knew that by a strange reaction there had come suddenly
+upon him the memory of those ghastly months when she and he through
+the long hours of every day had been forced--baffled and
+helpless--to watch her mother's torture, and when the sordid
+struggle for daily bread was at its worst, robbing death of all its
+dignity, and pity of all its power to help.
+
+Do what she would, she could hardly get him to give up the money
+and go to bed. He was utterly unstrung, and his triumph for the
+moment lay bitter in the mouth.
+
+It was now two years since that opening day. During that time the
+Parlour had become a centre after its sort--a scandal to some and a
+delight to others. The native youth got his porridge, and apple
+pie, and baked potato there; but the place was also largely haunted
+by the foreign clerks of Manchester. There was, for instance, a
+company of young Frenchmen who lunched there habitually, and in
+whose society the delighted Daddy caught echoes from that
+unprejudiced life of Paris or Lyons, which had amazed and
+enlightened his youth. The place assumed a stamp and character. To
+Daddy the development of his own popularity, which was like the
+emergence of a new gift, soon became a passion. He deliberately
+'ran' his own eccentricities as part of the business. Hence his
+dress, his menus, his advertisements, and all the various antics
+which half regaled, half scandalised the neighbourhood. Dora
+marvelled and winced, and by dint of an habitual tolerance retained
+the power of stopping some occasional enormity.
+
+As to finances, they were not making their fortune; far from it;
+but to Dora's amazement, considering her own inexperience and her
+father's flightiness, they had paid their way and something more.
+She was no born woman of business, as any professional accountant
+examining her books might have discovered. But she had a passionate
+determination to defraud no one, and somehow, through much toil her
+conscience did the work. Meanwhile every month it astonished her
+freshly that they two should be succeeding! Success was so little
+in the tradition of their tattered and variegated lives. Could it
+last? At the bottom of her mind lay a constant presentiment of new
+change, founded no doubt on her knowledge of her father.
+
+But outwardly there was little to justify it. The craving for drink
+seemed to have left him altogether--a not uncommon effect of this
+particular change of diet. And his hatred of Purcell, though in
+itself it had proved quite unmanageable by all her arts, had done
+nobody much harm. In a society dependent on law and police there
+are difficulties in the way of a man's dealing primitively with his
+enemy. There had been one or two awkward meetings between the two
+in the open street; and at the Parlour, among his special
+intimates, Daddy had elaborated a Purcell myth of a Pecksniffian
+character which his invention perpetually enriched. On the whole,
+however, it was in his liking for young Grieve, originally a casual
+customer at the restaurant, that Dora saw the chief effects of the
+feud. He had taken the lad up eagerly as soon as he had discovered
+both his connection with Purcell and his daring rebellious temper;
+had backed him up in all his quarrels with his master; had taken
+him to the Hall of Science, and introduced him to the speakers
+there; and had generally paraded him as a secularist convert,
+snatched from the very jaws of the Baptist.
+
+And now!--now that David was in open opposition, attracting
+Purcell's customers, taking Purcell's water, Daddy was in a tumult
+of delight: wheeling off old books of his own, such as 'The Journal
+of Theology' and the 'British Controversialist,' to fill up David's
+stall, running down whenever business was slack to see how the lad
+was getting on; and meanwhile advertising him with his usual
+extravagance among the frequenters of the Parlour.
+
+All through, however, or rather since Miss Purcell had returned
+from school, Dora and her little cousin Lucy had been allowed to
+meet. Lomax saw his daughter depart on her visits to Half Street,
+in silence; Purcell, when he first recognised her, hardly spoke to
+her. Dora believed, what was in fact the truth, that each regarded
+her as a means of keeping an eye on the other. She conveyed
+information from the hostile camp--therefore she was let alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+'Why--Lucy!'
+
+Dora was still bending over her work when a well-known tap at the
+door startled her meditations.
+
+Lucy put her head in, and, finding Dora alone, came in with a look
+of relief. Settling herself in a chair opposite Dora, she took off
+her hat, smoothed the coils of hair to which it had been pinned,
+unbuttoned the smart little jacket of pilot cloth, and threw back
+the silk handkerchief inside; and all with a feverish haste and
+irritation as though everything she touched vexed her.
+
+'What's the matter, Lucy?' said Dora, after a little pause. At the
+moment of Lucy's entrance she had been absorbed in a measurement.
+
+'Nothing!' said Lucy quickly. 'Dora, you've got your hair loose!'
+
+Dora put up her hand patiently. She was accustomed to be put to
+rights. It was characteristic at once of her dreaminess and her
+powers of self-discipline that she was fairly orderly, though she
+had great difficulty in being so. Without a constant struggle, she
+would have had loose plaits and hanging strings about her always.
+Lucy's trimness was a perpetual marvel to her. It was like the
+contrast between the soft indeterminate lines of her charming face
+and Lucy's small, sharply cut features.
+
+Lucy, still restless, began tormenting the feather in her hat.
+
+'When are you going to finish that, Dora?' she asked, nodding
+towards the frame.
+
+'Oh it won't be very long now,' said Dora, putting her head on one
+side that she might take a general survey, at once loving and
+critical, of her work.
+
+'You oughtn't to sit so close at it,' said Lucy decidedly; 'you'll
+spoil your complexion.'
+
+'I've none to spoil.'
+
+'Oh, yes, you have, Dora--that's so silly of you. You aren't sallow
+a bit. It's pretty to be pale like that. Lots of people say so--not
+quite so pale as you are sometimes, perhaps--but I know why
+_that_ is,' said Lucy, with a half-malicious emphasis.
+
+A slight pink rose in Dora's cheeks, but she bent over her frame
+and said nothing.
+
+'Does your clergyman _tell_ you to fast in Lent, Dora--who
+tells you?'
+
+'The Church!' replied Dora, scandalised and looking up with bright
+eyes. 'I wish you understood things a little more, Lucy.'
+
+'I can't,' said Lucy, with a pettish sigh, 'and I don't care
+twopence!'
+
+She threw herself back in her rickety chair. Her arm dropped over
+the side, and she lay staring at the ceiling. Dora went on with her
+work in silence for a minute, and then looked up to see a tear
+dropping from Lucy's cheek on to the horsehair covering of the
+chair.
+
+'Lucy, what _is_ the matter?--I knew there was something
+wrong!'
+
+Lucy sat up and groped energetically for her handkerchief.
+
+'You wouldn't care,' she said, her lips quivering--'nobody cares!'
+
+And, sinking down again, she hid her face and fairly burst out
+sobbing. Dora, in alarm, pushed aside her frame and tried to caress
+and console her. But Lucy held her off, and in a second or two was
+angrily drying her eyes.
+
+'Oh, you can't do any good, Dora--not the least good. It's
+father--you know well enough what it is--I shall never get on with
+father if I live to be a hundred!'
+
+'Well, you haven't had long to try in,' said Dora, smiling.
+
+'Quite long enough to know,' replied Lucy, drearily. 'I know I shall
+have a horrid life--I must. Nobody can help it. Do you know we've
+got another shopman, Dora?'
+
+The tone of childish scorn she threw into the question was
+inimitable. Dora with difficulty kept from laughing.
+
+'Well, what's he like?' '_Like?_ He's like--like nothing,'
+said Lucy, whose vocabulary was not extensive. 'He's fat and
+ugly--wears spectacles. Father says he's a treasure--to me--and
+then when they're in the shop I hear him going on at him like
+anything for being a stupid. And I have to give the creature tea
+when father's away, to clear up after him as though he were a
+school-child. And father gets in a regular passion if I ask him
+about the dance and there's a missionary tea next week, and he's
+made me take a table--and he wants me to teach in Sunday
+School--and the minister's wife has been talking to him about my
+dress--and--and--No, I _can't_ stand it, Dora--I can't and I
+won't!'
+
+And Lucy, gulping down fresh tears, sat intensely upright, and
+looked frowningly at Dora as though defying her to take the matter
+lightly.
+
+Dora was perplexed. Deep in her dove-like soul lay the fiercest
+views about Dissent--that rent in the seamless vesture of Christ,
+as she had learnt to consider it. Her mother had been a Baptist
+till her death, she herself till she was grown up. But now she
+had all the zeal--nay, even the rancour--of the convert. It
+was one of her inmost griefs that her own change had not come
+earlier--before her mother's death. Then perhaps her mother, her
+poor--poor--mother, might have changed with her. It went against
+her to urge Lucy to make herself a good Baptist.
+
+'It's no wonder Uncle Tom wants you to do what he likes,' she said
+slowly. 'But if you don't take the chapel, Lucy--if you want
+something different, perhaps--'
+
+'Oh, I don't want any _church_, thank you.' cried Lucy, up in
+arms. 'I don't want _anybody_ ordering me about. Why can't I go
+my own way a bit, and amuse myself as I please? It is _too_,
+too bad!'
+
+Dora did not know what more to say. She went on with her work,
+thinking about it all. Suddenly Lucy astonished her by a question
+in another voice.
+
+'Have you seen Mr. Grieve's shop, Dora?'
+
+Dora looked up.
+
+'No. Father's been there a good many times. He says it's capital
+for a beginning and he's sure to get on fast. There's one or two
+very good sort of customers been coming lately. There's the Earl of
+Driffield, I think it is--don't you remember, Lucy, it was he gave
+that lecture with the magic lantern at the Institute you and I went
+to last summer. He's a queer sort of gentleman. Well, he's been
+coming several times and giving orders. And there's some of the
+college gentlemen; oh, and a lot of others. They all seem to think
+he's so clever, father says--'
+
+'I know the Earl of Driffield quite well,' said Lucy loftily, 'He
+used to be always coming to our place, and I've tied up his books
+for him sometimes. I don't see what's good of being an earl--not to
+go about like that. And father says he's got a grand place near
+Stalybridge too. Well, if _he's_ gone to Mr. Grieve, father'll
+be just mad.' Lucy pursed up her small mouth with energy. Dora
+evaded the subject.
+
+'He says when he's quite settled,' she resumed presently, 'we're to
+go and have supper with him for a house-warming.'
+
+Lucy looked ready to cry again.
+
+'He couldn't ask me--of course he couldn't,' she said,
+indistinctly. 'Dora--Dora!'
+
+'Well? Oh, don't mix up my silks, Lucy; I shall never get them
+right again.'
+
+Lucy reluctantly put them down.
+
+'Do you think, Dora, Mr. Grieve cares anything at all about me?'
+she said at last, hurrying out the words, and looking Dora in the
+face, very red and bold.
+
+Dora laughed outright.
+
+'I knew you were going to ask that!' she said. 'Perhaps I've been
+asking myself!'
+
+Lucy said nothing, but the tears dropped again down her cheeks and
+on to her small quivering hands--all the woman awake in her.
+
+Dora pushed her frame away, and put her arm round her cousin, quite
+at a loss what to say for the best.
+
+Another woman would have told Lucy plumply that she was a little
+fool; that in the first place young Grieve had never shown any
+signs of making love to her at all; and that, in the second, if he
+had, her father would never let her marry him without a struggle
+which nobody could suppose Lucy capable of waging with a man like
+Purcell. It was all a silly fancy, the whim of a green girl, which
+would make her miserable for nothing. Mrs. Alderman Head, for
+instance, Dora's chaperon for the Institute dance, the sensible,
+sharp-tongued wife of a wholesale stationer in Market Street, would
+certainly have taken this view of the matter, and communicated it
+to Lucy with no more demur than if you had asked her, say, for her
+opinion on the proper season for bottling gooseberries. But Dora,
+whose inmost being was one tremulous surge of feeling and emotion,
+could not approach any matter of love and marriage without a
+thrill, without a sense of tragedy almost. Besides, like Lucy, she
+was very young still--just twenty--and youth answers to youth.
+
+'You know Uncle Tom wouldn't like it a bit, Lucy,' she began in her
+perplexity.
+
+'I don't care!' cried Lucy, passionately. 'Girls can't marry to
+please their fathers. I should have to wait, I suppose. I would get
+my own way somehow. But what's the good of talking about it, Dora?
+I'm sick of thinking about it--sick of everything. He'll marry
+somebody else--I know he will--and I shall break my heart, or--'
+
+'Marry somebody else, too,' suggested Dora slyly.
+
+Lucy drew herself angrily away, and had to be soothed into
+forgiving her cousin. The child had, in fact, thought and worried
+herself by now into such a sincere belief in her own passion, that
+there was nothing for it but to take it seriously. Dora yielded
+herself to Lucy's tears and her own tenderness. She sat pondering.
+
+Then, suddenly, she said something very different from what Lucy
+expected her to say.
+
+'Oh! if I could get him to go and talk to Father Russell! He's so
+wonderful with young men.'
+
+Her hand dropped on to her knee; she looked away from Lucy out of
+the window, her sweet face one longing.
+
+Lucy was startled, and somewhat annoyed. In her disgust with her
+father and her anxiety to attract David's notice, she had so
+entirely forgotten his religious delinquencies, that it seemed
+fussy and intrusive on Dora's part to make so much of them. She
+instinctively resented, too, what sounded to her like a tone of
+proprietary interest. It was not Dora that was his friend--it was
+she!
+
+'I don't see what you have to do with his opinions, Dora,' she said
+stiffly; 'he isn't rude to you now as he used to be. Young men are
+always wild a bit at first.'
+
+And she tossed her head with all the worldly wisdom of seventeen.
+
+Dora sighed and was silent. She fell to her work again, while Lucy
+wandered restlessly about the room. Presently the child stopped
+short.
+
+'Oh! look here, Dora--'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Do come round with me and look at some spring patterns I've got.
+You might just as well. I know you've been slaving your eyes out,
+and it's a nice day.'
+
+Dora hesitated, but finally consented. She had been at work for
+many hours in hot rooms, and meant to work a good many more yet
+before night. A break would revive her, and there was ample time
+before the three o'clock dinner which she and her father took
+together after the midday rush of the restaurant was over. So she
+put on her things.
+
+On their way Dora looked into the kitchen. Everything was in full
+work. A stout, red-faced woman was distributing and superintending.
+On the long charcoal stove which Daddy under old Barbier's advice
+had just put up, on the hot plates near, and the glowing range in
+the background, innumerable pans were simmering and steaming. Here
+was a table covered with stewed fruits; there another laden with
+round vegetable pies just out of the oven--while a heap of tomatoes
+on a third lent their scarlet to the busy picture. Some rays of
+wintry sun had slipped in through the high windows, and were
+contending with the steam of the pies and the smoke from the
+cooking. And in front of all on an upturned box sat a pair of
+Lancashire lasses, peeling apples at lightning speed, yet not so
+fast but they could laugh and chat the while, their bright eyes
+wandering perpetually through the open serving hatches which ran
+along one side of the room, to the restaurant stretching beyond,
+with its rows of well-filled tables and its passing waitresses in
+their white caps and aprons.
+
+Dora slipped in among them in her soft deprecating way, smiling at
+this one and that till she came to the stout cook. There she
+stopped and asked something. Lucy, standing at the door, saw the
+huge woman draw a corner of her apron across her eyes.
+
+'What did you want, Dora?' she inquired as her cousin rejoined her.
+
+'It's her poor boy. He's in the Infirmary and very bad. I'm sure
+they think he's dying. I wanted to send her there this morning and
+do her work, but she wouldn't go. There's no more news--but we
+mustn't be long.'
+
+She walked on, evidently thinking with a tender absorption of the
+mother and son, while Lucy was conscious of her usual impatience
+with all this endless concern for unknown people, which stood so
+much in the way of Dora's giving her full mind to her cousin's
+affairs.
+
+Yet, as she knew well, Sarah, the stout cook, had been the chief
+prop of the Parlour ever since it opened. No other servant had
+stayed long with Daddy. He was too fantastic and exacting a master.
+She had stayed--for Dora's sake--and, from bearing with him, had
+learnt to manage him. When she came she brought with her a sickly,
+overgrown lad, the only son of her widowhood, to act as
+kitchen-boy. He did his poor best for a while, his mother in truth
+getting through most of his work as well as her own, while Dora,
+who had the weakness for doctoring inherent in all good, women,
+stuffed him with cod-liver oil and 'strengthening mixtures.' Then
+symptoms of acute hip-disease showed themselves, and the lad was
+admitted to the big Infirmary in Piccadilly. There he had lain for
+some six or eight weeks now, toiling no more, fretting no more,
+living on his mother's and Dora's visits, and quietly loosening one
+life-tendril after another. During all this time Dora had thought
+of him, prayed for him, taught him--the wasted, piteous creature.
+
+When they arrived at Half Street, they let themselves in by the
+side-door, and Lucy hurried her cousin into the parlour that there
+might be no meeting with her father, with whom she was on decidedly
+uncomfortable terms.
+
+The table in the parlour was strewn with patterns from several
+London shops. To send for them, examine them, and imagine what they
+would look like when made up was now Lucy's chief occupation. To
+which might be added a little strumming on the piano, a little
+visiting--not much, for she hated most of her father's friends, and
+was at present too closely taken up with self-pity and speculations
+as to what David Grieve might be doing to make new ones--and a
+great deal of ordering about of Mary Ann.
+
+Dora sat down, and Lucy pounced on one pattern after another,
+folding them between her fingers and explaining eagerly how this or
+that would look if it were cut so, or trimmed so. 'Oh, Dora,
+look--this pink gingham with white spots! Don't you think it's a
+love? And, you know, pink always suits me, except when it's a
+blue-pink. But you don't call that a blue-pink, do you? And yet it
+isn't salmon, certainly--it's something between. It _ought_ to
+suit me, but I declare--' and suddenly, to Dora's dismay, the
+child flung down the patterns she held with a passionate
+vehemence--'I declare nothing seems to suit me now! Dora!'--in
+a tone of despair--'_Dora!_ don't you think I'm going off? My
+complexion's all dull, and--and--why I might be thirty!' and
+running over to the glass, draped in green cut-paper, which adorned
+the mantelpiece, Lucy stood before it examining herself in an
+agony. And, indeed, there was a change. A touch of some withering
+blight seemed to have swept across the whole dainty face, and taken
+the dewy freshness from the eyes. There was fever in it--the fever
+of fret and mutiny and of a starved self-love.
+
+Dora looked at her cousin with less patience than usual--perhaps
+because of the inevitable contrast between Lucy's posings and the
+true heartaches of the world.
+
+'Lucy, what nonsense! You're just a bit worried, and you make such
+a lot of it. Why can't you be patient?'
+
+'Because I can't!' said Lucy, sombrely, dropping into a chair, and
+letting her arm fall over the back. 'It's all very well, Dora. You
+aren't in love with a man whom you never see, and whom your father
+has a spite on! And you won't do anything to help me--you won't
+move a finger. And, of _course,_ you might!'
+
+'What could I do, Lucy?' cried Dora, exasperated. 'I can't go and
+ask young Grieve to marry you. I do wish you'd try and put him out
+of your head, that I do. You're too young, and he's got his
+business to think about. And while Uncle Tom's like this, I can't
+be always putting myself forward to help you meet him. It would be
+just the way to make him think something bad--to make him
+suspect--'
+
+'Well, and why shouldn't he suspect?' said Lucy, obstinately, her
+little mouth set and hard; 'it's all rubbish about girls leaving it
+all to the men. If a girl doesn't show she cares about a man, how's
+he to know--and when she don't meet him--and when her father keeps
+her shut up--_shameful!'_
+
+She flung the word out through her small, shut teeth, the brows
+meeting over her flashing eyes.
+
+'Oh! it's shameful, is it--eh, Miss Purcell?' said a harsh,
+mimicking voice coming from the dark passage leading into the shop.
+
+Lucy sprang up in terror. There on the steps stood her father,
+bigger, blacker, more formidable than he had ever been in the eyes
+of the two startled girls. All unknown to them, the two doors which
+parted them from the shop had been slightly ajar, and Purcell,
+catching their voices as they came in, and already on the watch for
+his daughter, had maintained a treacherous quiet behind them. Now
+he was entirely in his element. He surveyed them both with a dark,
+contemptuous triumph. What fools women were to be sure!
+
+As he descended the two steps into the parlour the floor shook
+under his heavy tread. Dora had instinctively thrown her arm round
+Lucy, who had begun to cry hysterically. She herself was very pale,
+but after the first start she looked her uncle in the face.
+
+'Is it you that's been teaching Lucy these _beautiful_
+sentiments?' said Purcell, with ironical emphasis, stopping a yard
+from them and pointing at Dora, 'and do you get 'em from St.
+Damian's?'
+
+Dora threw up her head, and flushed. 'I get nothing from St.
+Damian's that I'm ashamed of,' she said in a proud voice, 'and I've
+done nothing with Lucy that I'm ashamed of.'
+
+'No, I suppose not,' said Purcell dryly; 'the devil don't deal much
+in shame. It's a losing article.'
+
+Then he looked at Lucy, and his expression suddenly changed. The
+flame beneath leapt to sight. He caught her arm, dragged her out of
+Dora's hold, and shook her as one might shake a kitten.
+
+'Who were you talking of just now?' he said to her, holding her by
+both shoulders, his eyes blazing down upon her.
+
+Lucy was much too frightened to speak. She stood staring back at
+him, her breast heaving violently.
+
+Dora came forward in indignation.
+
+'You'll get nothing out of her if you treat her like that,' she
+said, with spirit, 'nor out of me either.'
+
+Purcell recovered himself with difficulty. He let Lucy go, and
+walking up to the mantelpiece stood there, leaning his arm upon it,
+and looking at the girls from under his hand.
+
+'What do I want to get out of you?' he said, with scorn. 'As if I
+didn't know already everything that's in your silly minds! I
+guessed already, and now that you have been so obliging as to let
+your secrets out under my very nose--I _know!_ That chit
+there'--he pointed to Lucy--all his gestures had a certain
+theatrical force and exaggeration, springing, perhaps, from his
+habit of lay preaching--'imagines she going to marry the young
+infidel I gave the sack to a while ago. Now don't she? Are you
+going to say no to that?'
+
+His loud challenge pushed Dora to extremities, and it was all left
+to her. Lucy was sobbing on the sofa.
+
+'I don't know what she imagines,' said Dora, slowly, seeking in
+vain for words; the whole situation was so ridiculous. 'Are you
+going to prevent her falling in love with the man she chooses?'
+
+'_Certainly!_' said Purcell, with mocking emphasis.
+'Certainly--since she chooses wrong. The only concern of the godly
+in these matters is to see that their children are not yoked with
+unbelievers. Whenever I see that young reprobate in the street now,
+I smell _the pit_. And it'll not be long before the Lord
+tumbles him into it; there's an end comes to such devil's fry as
+that. Oh, they may prosper and thrive, they may revile the children
+of the Lord, they may lift up the hoof against the poor Christian,
+but the time comes--_the time comes._'
+
+His solemnity, at once unctuous and full of vicious meaning, only
+irritated Dora. But Lucy raised herself from the sofa, and looked
+suddenly round at her father. Her eyes were streaming, her hair in
+disorder, but there was a suspicion and intelligence in her look
+which seemed to give her back self-control. She watched eagerly for
+what her father might say or do next.
+
+As soon as he saw her sitting up he walked over to her and took her
+again by the shoulder.
+
+'Now look here,' he said to her, holding her tight, 'let's finish
+with this. That young man's the Lord's enemy--he's my enemy--and
+I'll teach him a lesson before I've done. But that's neither here
+nor there. You understand this. If you ever walk out of this door
+with him, you'll not walk back into it, with him or without him.
+I'd have done with you, and _my money_'ld have done with you.
+But there'--and Purcell gave a little scornful laugh, and let her
+go with a push--'_he_ don't care twopence about you--I'll say
+that for him.'
+
+Lucy flushed fiercely, and getting up began mechanically to smooth
+her hair before the glass, with wild tremulous movements, will and
+defiance settling on her lip, as she looked at herself and at the
+reflection of her father.
+
+'And as for you, Miss Lomax,' said Purcell deliberately, standing
+opposite Dora, 'you've been aiding and abetting somehow--I don't
+care how. I don't complain. There was nothing better to be expected
+of a girl with your parentage and bringing up, and a Puseyite into
+the bargain. But I warn you you'll go meddling here once too often
+before you've done. If you'll take my advice you'll let other
+people's business alone, and _mind your own_. Them that have
+got Adrian Lomax on their hands needn't go poaching on their
+neighbours for something to do.'
+
+He spoke with a slow, vindictive emphasis, and Dora shrank and
+quivered as though he had struck her. Then by a great effort--the
+effort of one who had not gone through a close and tender training
+of the soul for nothing--she put from her both her anger and her
+fear.
+
+'You're cruel to father,' she said, her voice fluttering; 'you might
+be thinking sometimes how straight he's kept since he took the
+Parlour. And I don't believe young Grieve means any harm to you or
+anybody--and I'm sure I don't.'
+
+A sob rose in her throat. Anybody less crassly armoured in
+self-love than Purcell must have been touched. As for him, he
+turned on his heel.
+
+'I'll protect myself, thank you,' he said dryly;' and I'll judge
+for myself. You can do as you like, and Lucy too, so long as she
+takes the consequences. Do you understand, Lucy?'
+
+'Yes,' said Lucy, facing round upon him, all tremulous passion and
+rebellion, but she could not meet his fixed, tyrannical eye. Her
+own wavered and sank. Purcell enjoyed the spectacle of her for a
+second or two, smiled, and went.
+
+As soon as he was gone, Lucy dragged her cousin to the stairs, and
+never let her go till Dora was safe in her room and the door
+bolted.
+
+Dora implored to be released. How could she stay in her uncle's
+house after such a scene? and she must get home quickly anyway, as
+Lucy knew.
+
+Lucy took no notice at all of what she was saying.
+
+'Look here.' she said, breaking into the middle of Dora's appeal,
+and speaking in an excited whisper--'he's going to do him a
+mischief. I'm certain he is. That's how he looks when he's going to
+pay some one out. Now, what's he going to do? I'll know
+somehow--trust me!'
+
+She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her arms behind her,
+supporting her, her little feet beating each other restlessly--a
+hot, vindictive anger speaking from every feature, every movement.
+The pretty chit of seventeen seemed to have disappeared. Here was
+every promise of a wilful and obstinate woman, with more of her
+father's stuff in her than anyone could have yet surmised.
+
+A pang rose in Dora. She rose impulsively, and throwing herself
+down by Lucy, drew the ruffled, palpitating creature into her arms.
+
+'Oh, Lucy, isn't it only because you're angry and vexed, and
+because you want to fight Uncle Purcell? Oh, don't go on just for
+that! When we're--we're Christians, we mustn't want our own way--we
+must give it up--_we must give it up._' Her voice sank in a
+burst of tears, and she drooped her head on Lucy's, kissing her
+cousin's brown hair.
+
+Lucy extricated herself with a movement of impatience.
+
+'When one _loves_ anybody,' she said, sitting very upright and
+twisting her fingers together, 'one must stick to him!'
+
+Dora started at the word 'love.' It seemed to her a profanation.
+She dried her eyes, and got up to go without another word.
+
+'Well, Dora,' said Lucy, frowning, 'and so you'll do nothing for
+me--_nothing_?'
+
+Dora stood a moment in a troubled silence. Then she turned, and
+took gentle hold of her cousin.
+
+'If I get a chance, Lucy, I'll try and find out whether he's
+thinking of marrying at all. And if he isn't--and I'm sure he
+isn't--will you give it all up, and try and live comfortable with
+Uncle Purcell, and think of something else?'
+
+Her eyes had a tender, nay a passionate entreaty in them.
+
+'No!' said Lucy with energy; 'but I'll very likely drown myself in
+the river some fine night.'
+
+Dora still held her, standing above her, and looking down at her,
+trying hard to read her true mind. Lucy bore it defiantly for a
+minute; then suddenly two large tears rose. A quiver passed over
+Dora's face; she kissed her cousin quickly, and went towards the
+door.
+
+'And I'll find out what father's going to do, or my name isn't what
+it is!' said the girl behind her, in a shrill, shaking voice, as
+she closed the door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dora ran back to Market Place, filled with a presentiment that she
+was late, though the hand of the Cathedral clock was still far from
+three.
+
+At the side door stood a woman with a shawl over her head, looking
+distractedly up the street.
+
+'Oh, Miss Dora! Miss Dora! they've sent. He's gooin--gooin quick.
+An' he keeps wearyin' for "mither an' Miss Dora."'
+
+The powerful scarred face had the tremulous helplessness of grief.
+Dora took her by the arm.
+
+'Let us run, Sarah--at once. Oh, never mind the work!'
+
+The two women hurried through the crowded Saturday streets. But
+halfway up Market Street Sarah stopped short, looking round her in
+an agony.
+
+'Theer's his feyther, Miss Dora. Oh, he wor a bad 'un to me, but he
+had allus a soft spot for t' lad. I'd be reet glad to send worrud.
+He wor theer in the ward, they tell't me, last week.'
+
+Three years before she had separated from her husband, a sawyer, by
+mutual consent. He was younger than she, and he had been grossly
+unfaithful to her; she came of a good country stock and her
+daleswoman's self-respect could put up with him no longer. But she
+had once been passionately in love with him, and, as she said, he
+had been on the whole kind to the boy.
+
+'Where is he?' said Dora.
+
+'At Mr. Whitelaw's yard, Edgell Street, Great Ancoats.'
+
+They had just entered the broad Infirmary Square. Dora, looking
+round her in perplexity, suddenly saw coming towards them the tall
+figure of David Grieve. The leap of the heart of which she was
+conscious through all her preoccupation startled her. But she went
+up to him without a moment's hesitation. David, swinging along as
+though Manchester belonged to him, found himself arrested and,
+looking down, saw Dora's pale and agitated face.
+
+'Mr. Grieve, will you help me?'
+
+She drew him to the side and explained as quickly as she could.
+Sarah stood by, and threw in directions.
+
+'He'll be to be found at Mr. Whitelaw's yard--Edgell Street--an'
+whoever goos mun just say to him, "Sarah says to tha--Wilt tha
+coom, or wilt tha not coom?--t' lad's deein."'
+
+She threw out the words with a sombre simplicity and force, then,
+her whole frame quivering with impatience, she crossed the road to
+the Infirmary without waiting for Dora.
+
+'Can you send some one?' said Dora.
+
+'I will go myself at once. I'll find the man if he's there, and
+bring him. You leave it to me.'
+
+He turned without more ado, broke into a run, and disappeared round
+the corner of Oldham Street.
+
+Dora crossed to the Infirmary, her mind strangely divided for a
+moment between the solemn image of what was coming, and the
+vibrating memory of something just past.
+
+But, once in the great ward, pity and death possessed her wholly.
+He knew them, the poor lad--made, as it seemed, two tremulous
+movements,--once, when his mother's uncontrollable crying passed
+into his failing ear--once when Dora's kiss was laid upon his
+hollow temple. Then again he lay unconscious, drawing gently to the
+end.
+
+Dora knelt beside him praying, his mother on the other side, and
+the time passed. Then there were sounds about the bed, and looking
+up, Dora saw two figures approaching. In front was a middle-aged
+man, with a stupid, drink-stained face. He came awkwardly and
+unsteadily up to the bedside, almost stumbling over his wife, and
+laying his hand on the back of a chair to support himself. He
+brought with him an overpowering smell of beer, and Dora thought as
+she looked at him that he had only a very vague idea of what was
+going on. His wife took no notice of him whatever.
+
+Behind at some little distance, his hat in his hand, stood David
+Grieve. Why did he stay? Dora could not get him out of her mind.
+Even in her praying she still saw the dark, handsome head and lithe
+figure thrown out against the whiteness of the hospital walls.
+
+There was a slight movement in the bed, and the nurse, standing
+beside the boy, looked up and made a quick sign to the mother. What
+she and Dora saw was only a gesture as of one settling for sleep.
+Without struggle and without fear, the little lad who had never
+lived enough to know the cost of dying, went the way of all flesh.
+
+'They die so easily, this sort,' said the nurse to Dora, as she
+tenderly closed the patient eyes; 'it's like a plant that's never
+rooted.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few minutes later Dora was blindly descending the long stairs.
+The mother was still beside her dead, making arrangements for the
+burial. The father, sobered and conscious, had already slouched
+away. But at the foot of the stairs Dora, looking round, saw that
+David was just behind her.
+
+He came out with her.
+
+'He was drunk when I found him,' he explained, 'he had been drinking
+in the dinner hour. I had him by the arm all the way, and thought I
+had best bring him straight in. And then--I had never seen anyone
+die,' he said simply, a curious light in his black eyes.
+
+Dora, still choked with tears, could not speak. With shaking hands
+she searched for a bit of veil she had with her to hide her eyes
+and cheeks. But she could not find it.
+
+'Don't go down Market Street,' he said, after a shy look at her.
+'Come this way, there isn't such a crowd.'
+
+And turning down Mosley Street, all the way he guided her through
+some side streets where there were fewer people to stare. Such
+forethought, such gentleness in him were quite new to her. She
+gradually recovered herself, feeling all the while this young
+sympathetic presence at her side--dreading lest it should desert
+her.
+
+He meanwhile was still under the tremor and awe of the new
+experience. So this was dying! He remembered 'Lias holding
+Margaret's hand. _'Deein's long--but it's varra, varra peaceful.
+'_ Not always, surely! There must be vigorous, tenacious souls
+that went out with tempests and agonies; and he was conscious of a
+pang of fear, feeling himself so young and strong.
+
+Presently he led her into St. Ann's Square, and then they shook
+hands. He hurried off to his business, and she remained standing a
+moment on the pavement outside the church which makes one side of
+the square. An impulse seized her--she turned and went into the
+church instead of going home.
+
+There, in one of the old oak pews where the little tarnished plates
+still set forth the names of their eighteenth-century owners, she
+fell on her knees and wrestled with herself and God.
+
+She was very simple, very ignorant, but religion, as religion can,
+had dignified and refined all the elements of character. She said
+to herself in an agony--that he _must_ love her--that she had
+loved him in truth all along. And then a great remorse came upon
+her--the spiritual glory she had just passed through closed round
+her again. What! she could see the heaven opened--the Good Shepherd
+stoop to take his own--and then come away to feel nothing but this
+selfish, passionate craving? Oh, she was ashamed, she loathed
+herself!
+
+_Lucy!_--Lucy had no claim! should have no claim! He did not
+care for her.
+
+Then again the pale dead face would flash upon her with its
+submissive look,--so much gratitude for so little, and such a
+tender ease in dying! And she possessed by all these bad and
+jealous feelings, these angry desires, fresh from such a presence!
+
+_'Oh! Lamb of God--Lamb of God--that takest away the sins of the
+world!'_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+And David, meanwhile, was thinking of nothing in the world but the
+fortunes of a little shop, about twelve feet square, and of the
+stall outside that shop. The situation--for a hero--is certainly
+one of the flattest conceivable. Nevertheless it has to be faced.
+If, however, one were to say that he had marked none of Lucy
+Purcell's advances, that would be to deny him eyes as well as
+susceptibilities. He had, indeed, said to himself in a lordly way
+that Lucy Purcell was a regular little flirt, and was beginning
+those ways early. But a certain rough young modesty, joined with a
+sense of humour at his own expense, prevented him from making any
+more of it, and he was no sooner in his own den watching for
+customers than Lucy vanished from his mind altogether. He thought
+much more of Purcell himself, with much vengeful chuckling and
+speculation.
+
+As for Dora, he had certainly begun to regard her as a friend. She
+had sense and experience, in spite of her Ritualism, whereas Lucy
+in his eyes had neither. So that to run into the Parlour, after
+each new day was over, and discuss with Daddy and her the ups and
+downs, the fresh chances and prospects of his infant business, was
+pleasant enough. Daddy and he met on the common ground of wishing
+to make the world uncomfortable for Purcell; while Dora supplied
+the admiring uncritical wonder, in which, like a warm environment,
+an eager temperament expands, and feels itself under the stimulus
+more inventive and more capable than before.
+
+But marrying! The lad's careless good-humoured laugh under Ancrum's
+probings was evidence enough of how the land lay. Probably at the
+bottom of him, if he had examined, there lay the instinctive
+assumption that Dora was one of the girls who are not likely to
+marry. Men want them for sisters, daughters, friends--and then go
+and fall in love with some minx that has a way with her.
+
+Besides, who could be bothered with 'gells,' when there was a stall to
+be set out and a career to be made? With that stall, indeed, David was
+truly in love. How he fingered and meddled with it!--setting out the
+cheap reprints it contained so as to show their frontispieces, and
+strewing among them, in an artful disorder, a few rare local pamphlets,
+on which he kept a careful watch, either from the door or from inside.
+Behind these, again, within the glass, was a precious shelf, containing
+in the middle of it about a dozen volumes of a kind dear to a
+collector's eye--thin volumes in shabby boards, then just beginning to
+be sought after--the first editions of nineteenth-century poets. For
+months past David had been hoarding up a few in a corner of his little
+lodging, and on his opening day they decoyed him in at least five
+inquiring souls, all of whom stayed to talk a bit. There was a 'Queen
+Mab;' and a 'Lyrical Ballads;' an 'Endymion;' a few Landors thrown in,
+and a 'Bride of Abydos'--this last not of much account, for its author
+had the indiscretion, from the collector's point of view, to be famous
+from the beginning, and so to flood the world with large editions.
+
+Round and about these dainty morsels were built in with
+solid rubbish, with Daddy's 'Journals of Theology,' 'British
+Controversialist,' and the rest. In one top corner lurked a few
+battered and cut-down Elzevirs, of no value save to the sentiment
+of the window, while a good many spaces were filled up with some
+new and attractive editions of standard books just out of
+copyright, contributed, these last, by the enterprising traveller
+of a popular firm, from whom David had them on commission.
+
+Inside, the shop was of the roughest: a plank or two on a couple of
+trestles served for a counter, and two deal shelves, put up by
+David, ran along the wall behind. The counter held a few French
+scientific books, very fresh, and 'in the movement,' the result of
+certain inquiries put by old Barbier to a school friend of his, now
+professor at the Sorbonne--meant to catch the 'college people;'
+while on the other side lay some local histories of neighbouring
+towns and districts, a sort of commodity always in demand in a
+great expanding city, where new men have risen rapidly and families
+are in the making. For these local books the lad had developed an
+astonishing _flair_. He had the geographical and also the
+social instincts which the pursuit of them demands.
+
+On his first day David netted in all a profit of seventeen
+shillings and twopence, and at night he curled himself up on a
+mattress in the little back kitchen, with an old rug for covering
+and a bit of fire, and slept the sleep of liberty.
+
+In a few days more several of the old-established book-buyers of
+the town, a more numerous body, perhaps, in Manchester than in
+other northern centres, had found him out; a certain portly and
+wealthy lady, connected with one of the old calico-printing
+families, a person of character, who made a hobby of Lancashire
+Nonconformity, had walked into the shop, and given the boyish owner
+of it much good advice and a few orders; the Earl of Driffield had
+looked in, and, caught by the lures of the stall, customers had
+come from the most unlikely quarters, desiring the most
+heterogeneous wares. The handsome, intelligent young fellow, with
+his out-of-the-way strains of knowledge, with his frank
+self-conceit and his equally frank ignorance, caught the fancy of
+those who stayed to talk with him. A certain number of persons had
+been already taken with him in Purcell's shop, and were now vastly
+amused by the lad's daring and the ambitious range of his first
+stock.
+
+As for Lord Driffield, on the first occasion when he had dropped in
+he had sat for an hour at least, talking and smoking cigarettes
+across David's primitive counter.
+
+This remarkable person, of whom Lucy thought so little, was well
+known, and had been well known, for a good many years, to the
+booksellers of Manchester and Liverpool. As soon as the autumn
+shooting season began, Purcell, for instance, remembered Lord
+Driffield, and began to put certain books aside for him. He
+possessed one of the famous libraries of England, and he not only
+owned but read. Scholars all over Europe took toll both of his
+books and his brains. He lived to collect and to be consulted.
+There was almost nothing he did not know, except how to make a book
+for himself. He was so learned that he had, so to speak, worked
+through to an extreme modesty. His friends, however, found nothing
+in life so misleading as Lord Driffield's diffidence.
+
+At the same time Providence had laid upon him a vast family estate,
+and an aristocratic wife, married in his extreme youth to please
+his father. Lady Driffield had the ideas of her caste, and when
+they came to their great house near Stalybridge, in the autumn, she
+insisted on a succession of proper guests, who would shoot the
+grouse in a proper manner, and amuse her in the evenings. For, as
+she had no children, life was often monotonous, and when she was
+bored she had a stately way of making herself disagreeable to Lord
+Driffield. He therefore did his best to content her. He received
+her guests, dined with them in the evenings, and despatched them to
+the moors in the morning. But between those two functions he was
+his own master; and on the sloppy November afternoons he might
+as often as not be seen trailing about Manchester or Liverpool,
+carrying his slouching shoulders and fair spectacled face
+into every bookseller's shop, good, bad, and indifferent, or
+giving lectures, mostly of a geographical kind, at popular
+institutions--an occupation in which he was not particularly
+effective.
+
+David had served him, once or twice, in Half Street, and had sent a
+special notice of his start and his intentions to Benet's Park, the
+Driffields' 'place.' Lord Driffield's first visit left him
+quivering with excitement, for the earl had a way of behaving as
+though everybody else were not only his social, but his
+intellectual equal--even a lad of twenty, with his business to
+learn. He would sit pleasantly smoking and asking questions--a
+benevolent, shabby person, eager to be informed. Then, when David
+had fallen into the trap, and was holding forth--proud, it might
+be, of certain bits of knowledge which no one else in Manchester
+possessed--Lord Driffield would throw in a gentle comment, and then
+another and another, till the trickle became a stream, and the
+young man would fall blankly listening, his mouth opening wider and
+wider. When it was over, and the earl, with his draggled umbrella,
+his disappeared, David sat, crouched on his wooden stool, consumed
+with hot ambition and wonder. How could a man know so much--and an
+earl, who didn't want it? For a few hours, at any rate, his
+self-conceit was dashed. He realised dimly what it might be to know
+as the scholar knows. And that night, when he had shut the
+shutters, he vowed to himself, as he gathered his books about him,
+that five hours was enough sleep for a strong man; that
+_learn_ he must and should, and that some day or other he
+would hold his own, even with Lord Driffield.
+
+How he loved his evenings--the paraffin lamp glaring beside him,
+the crackling of the coal in his own fire, the book on his knee!
+Ancrum had kept his promise, and was helping him with his Greek;
+but his teaching hardly kept pace with the boy's enthusiasm
+and capacity. The _voracity_ with which he worked at his
+Thucydides and Homer left the lame minister staring and sighing.
+The sound of the lines, the roll of the _oi_'s and _ou_'s
+was in David's ear all day, and to learn a dozen irregular verbs in
+the interval between two customers was like the gulping of a
+dainty.
+
+Meanwhile, as he collected his English poets he read them. And
+here was a whole new world. For in his occupation with the
+Encyclopaedists he had cared little for poetry. The reaction
+against his Methodist fit had lasted long, had developed a certain
+contempt for sentiment, a certain love for all sharp, dry,
+calculable things, and for the tone of _irony_ in particular.
+But in such a nature such a phase was sure to pass, and it was
+passing. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson--now he was making
+acquaintance piecemeal with them all, as the precious volumes
+turned up, which he was soon able to place with a precision which
+tore them too soon out of his hands. The Voltairean temper in him
+was melting, was passing into something warmer, subtler, and more
+restless.
+
+But he was not conscious of it. He was as secular, as cocksure, as
+irritating as ever, when Ancrum probed him on the subject of the
+Hall of Science or the various Secularist publications which he
+supported.
+
+'Do you call yourself an atheist now, David?' said Ancrum one day,
+in that cheerful, half-ironic tone which the young bookseller
+resented.
+
+'I don't call myself anything,' said David, stoutly. 'I'm all for
+this world; we can't know anything about another. At least, that's
+my opinion, sir--no offence to you.'
+
+'Oh, dear me, no offence! There have been a _few_
+philosophers, you know, Davy, since Voltaire. There's a person
+called Kant; I don't know anything about him, but they tell me he
+made out a very pretty case, on the practical side anyway, for a
+God and immortality. And in England, too, there have been two or
+three persons of consequence, you remember, like Coleridge and John
+Henry Newman, who have thought it worth while to believe a little.
+But you don't care about that?'
+
+The lad stood silent a moment, his colour rising, his fine lip
+curling. Then he burst out:
+
+'What's the good of thinking about things by the wrong end? There's
+such a lot to read!'
+
+And with a great stretch of all his young frame he fell back on the
+catalogue he was looking through, while Ancrum went on turning over
+a copy of 'The Reasoner,' a vigorous Secularist paper of the day,
+which he had found on the counter, and which had suggested his
+question.
+
+_Knowledge--success:_ it was for these that David burned, and
+he laid rapid hands upon them. He had a splendid physique, and at
+this moment of his youth he strained it to the utmost. He grudged
+the time for sleep and meals, and on Saturday afternoons, the
+early-closing day of Manchester, he would go out to country sales,
+or lay plans for seeing the few considerable libraries--Lord
+Driffield's among them--which the neighbouring districts possessed.
+On Sunday he read from morning till night, and once or twice his
+assistant John, hammering outside for admittance in the winter
+dark, wakened the master of the shop from the rickety chair where
+he had fallen asleep over his books in the small hours of the
+morning.
+
+His assistant! It may well be asked what a youth of twenty, setting
+up on thirty pounds capital in a small shop, wanted with an
+assistant before he had any business to speak of. The story is a
+curious one.
+
+Some time in the previous summer Daddy had opened a smoking and
+debating room at the Parlour, by way of keeping his _clientele_
+together and giving a special character to the place. He had
+merely boarded off a bit of the original seed warehouse, put in
+some rough tables and chairs, and a few newspapers. But by a
+conjunction of circumstances the place had taken a Secularist
+character, and the weekly debates which Daddy inaugurated were,
+for a time at least, well attended. Secularism, like all other
+forms of mental energy, had lately been active in Manchester;
+there had been public discussions between Mr. Holyoake and
+Mr. Bradlaugh as to whether Secularism were necessarily atheistic
+or no. Some of the old newspapers of the movement, dating from
+Chartist days, had recently taken a new lease of life; and
+combined with the protest against theology was a good deal of
+co-operative and republican enthusiasm. Lomax, who had been a
+Secularist and an Owenite for twenty years, and who was a
+republican to boot, threw himself into the _melee_, and the
+Parlour debates during the whole of the autumn and winter of '69-70
+were full of life, and brought out a good many young speakers,
+David Grieve among them. Indeed, David was for a time the leader of
+the place, so ready was his gift, so confident and effective his
+personality.
+
+On one occasion in October he was holding forth on 'Science--the
+true Providence of Life.' The place was crowded. A well-known
+Independent had been got hold of to answer the young Voltairean,
+and David was already excited, for his audience was plying him with
+interruptions, and taxing to the utmost a natural debating power.
+
+In the midst of it a printer's devil from the restaurant outside, a
+stout, stupid-looking lad, found his way in, and stood at the door
+listening. The fine classical head of the speaker, the beautiful
+voice, the gestures so free and flowing, the fire and fervour of
+the whole performance--these things left him gaping.
+
+'Who's that?' he ventured to inquire of a man near him, a calico
+salesman, well known in the Salford Conservative Association, who
+had come to support the Independent speaker.
+
+The man laughed.
+
+'That's young Grieve, assistant to old Purcell, Half Street. He
+talks a d--d lot of stuff--blasphemous stuff, too; but if
+somebody'd take and teach him and send him into Parliament, some
+day he'd make 'em skip, I warrant yo. I never heard onybody frame
+better for public speaking, and I've heard a lot.'
+
+The printer's devil stayed and stared through the debate. Then,
+afterwards, he began to haunt the paths of this young Satan, crept
+up to him in the news-room, skulked about him in the restaurant. At
+last David took notice of him, and they made friends.
+
+'Have you got anybody belonging to you?' he asked him shortly.
+
+'No,' said the boy. 'Father died last spring; mother was took with
+pleurisy in November--'
+
+But the words stuck in his throat, and he coughed over them.
+
+'All right,' said David; 'come for a walk Sunday afternoon?'
+
+So a pretty constant companionship sprang up between them. John
+Dalby came of a decent stock, and was still, as it were, under the
+painful and stupefying surprise of those bereavements which had
+left him an orphan. His blue eyes looked bewilderment at the world;
+he was bullied by the compositors he worked under. Sometimes he had
+violent fits of animal spirits, but in general he was dull and
+silent, and no one could have guessed that he often read poetry and
+cried himself to sleep in the garret where he lodged. Physically he
+was a great, overgrown creature, not, in truth, much younger than
+David. But while David was already the man, John was altogether in
+the tadpole-stage--a being of large, ungainly frame, at war with
+his own hands and feet, his small eyes lost in his pink, spreading
+cheeks, his speech shy and scanty. Yet, such as he was, David found
+a use for him. Temperaments of the fermenting, expansive sort want
+a listener at the moment of early maturity, and almost any
+two-legged thing with the listener's gift will do. David worked off
+much steam on the Saturday or Sunday afternoons, when the two would
+push out into the country, walking some twenty miles or so for the
+sheer joy of movement. While the one talked and declaimed,
+ploughing his violent way through the soil of his young thought,
+the other, fat and silent, puffed alongside, and each in his own
+way was happy.
+
+Just about the time David was dismissed by Purcell, John's
+apprenticeship came to an end. When he heard of the renting of the
+shop in Potter Street, he promptly demanded to come as assistant.
+
+'Don't be a fool!' said David, turning upon him; 'what should I want
+with an assistant in that bit of a place? And I couldn't pay you,
+besides, man.'
+
+'Don't mind that,' said John, stoutly. 'I'd like to learn the trade.
+Perhaps you'll set up a printing business by-and-by. Lots of
+booksellers do. Then I'll be handy.'
+
+'And how the deuce are you going to live?' cried David, somewhat
+exasperated by these unpractical proposals. 'You're not exactly a
+grasshopper;' and his eye, half angry, half laughing, ran over
+John's plump person.
+
+To which John replied, undisturbed, that he had got four pounds
+still of the little hoard his mother had left him, and, judging by
+what David had told him of his first months in Manchester, he could
+make that last for living a good while. When he had learnt
+something of the business with David, he would move on--trust him.
+
+Whereupon David told him flatly that _he_ wasn't going to help
+him waste his money, and sent him about his business.
+
+On the very day, however, that David opened, he was busy in the
+shop, when he saw John outside at the stall, groaning under a
+bundle.
+
+'It's Mr. Lomax ha sent you this,' said the lad, calmly, 'and I'm to
+put it up, and tell him how your stock looks.'
+
+The bundle contained Daddy's contributions to young Grieve's
+window, which at the moment were very welcome; and David in his
+gratitude instructed the messenger to take back a cordial message.
+The only notice John took was to lift up two deal shelves that were
+leaning against the wall of the shop, and to ask where they were to
+go.
+
+And, say what David would, he stuck, and would not be got rid of.
+With the Lancashire accent he had also the Lancashire persistence,
+and David after a while gave in, consented that he should stay for
+some weeks, at any rate, and then set to work to teach him, in a
+very impatient and intermittent way. For watching and bargaining at
+the stall, at any rate, for fetching and carrying, and for all that
+appertains to the carrying and packing of parcels, John presently
+developed a surprising energy. David's wits were thereby freed for
+the higher matters of his trade, while John was beast of burden.
+The young master could work up his catalogues, study his famous
+collections, make his own bibliographical notes, or run off here
+and there by 'bus or train in quest of books for a customer; he
+could swallow down his Greek verbs or puzzle out his French for
+Barbier in the intervals of business; the humbler matters of the
+shop prospered none the less.
+
+Meanwhile both lads were vegetarians and teetotalers; both lived as
+near as might be on sixpence a day; and an increasing portion of
+the Manchester world--of that world, at any rate, which buys
+books--began, as the weeks rolled on, to take interest in the pair
+and their venture.
+
+Christmas came, and David made up his accounts. He had turned over
+the whole of his capital in six weeks, had lived and paid his rent,
+and was very nearly ten pounds to the good. On the evening when he
+made this out he sat jubilantly over the fire, thinking of Louie.
+Certainly it would be soon time for him to send for Louie at this
+rate. Yet there were _pros_ and _cons_. He would have to
+look after her when she did come, and there would be an end of his
+first freedom. And what would she find to do?
+
+Silk-weaving had been decaying year by year in Manchester, and for
+hand-loom weaving, at any rate, there was no opening at all.
+
+No matter! With his prosperity there came a quickening of the sense
+of kinship, which would not let him rest. For the first time for
+many years he thought often of his father. Who and what had his
+mother been? Why had Uncle Reuben never spoken of his parents, save
+that one tormented word in the dark? Why, his father could not have
+been thirty when he died! Some day he would make Uncle Reuben tell
+all the story--he would know, too, where his father was buried.
+
+And meanwhile, in a few more weeks, he would write to Kinder. He
+would be good to Louie--he decidedly meant that she should have a
+good time. Perhaps she had grown out of her tricks by now. Tom said
+she was thought to be uncommon handsome. David made a little face
+as he remembered that. She would be all the more difficult to
+manage.
+
+Yet all the time David Grieve's prosperity was the most insecure
+growth imaginable.
+
+One evening Lucy rushed in late to see Dora.
+
+'Oh, Dora! Dora! Put down your work at once and listen to me.' Dora
+looked up in amazement, to see Lucy's little face all crimson with
+excitement and resolution.
+
+'Dora, I've found it all out: he's going to buy the house over Mr.
+Grieve's head, and turn him into the street, just as he's got
+nicely settled. Oh! he's done it before, I can tell you. There was
+a man higher up Half Street he served just the same. He's got the
+money, and he's got the spite. Well now, Dora, it's no good
+staring. Has Mr. Grieve been up here lately?'
+
+'No; not lately,' said Dora, with an involuntary sigh. 'Father's
+been to see him. He says he's that busy he can't come out. But,
+Lucy, how do you know all this?'
+
+Whereupon, at first, Lucy wouldn't tell; but being at bottom
+intensely proud of her own cleverness at last confessed. She had
+been for long convinced that her father meant mischief to young
+Grieve, and had been on the watch. A little listening at doors
+here, and a little prying into papers there, had presently given
+her the clue. In a private drawer, unlocked by chance, she had
+found a solicitor's letter containing the full description of No.
+15 Potter Street, and of some other old houses in the same street,
+soon to be sold and rebuilt. The description contained notes of
+price and date in her father's hand. That very evening the
+solicitor in question had come to see her father. She had been
+sent upstairs, but had managed to listen all the same. The
+purchase--whatever it was--was to be concluded 'shortly.' There had
+been much legal talk, and her father had seemed in a particularly
+good temper when Mr. Vance went away.
+
+'Well now, look here,' said Lucy, frowning and biting her lips; 'I
+shall just go right on and see him. I thought I might have found
+him here. But there's no time to lose.'
+
+Dora had bent over her frame again, and her face was hidden.
+
+'Why, it's quite late,' she said, slowly; 'the shop will be shut up
+long ago.'
+
+'I don't care--I don't care a bit,' cried Lucy. 'One can't think
+about what's proper. I'm just going straight away.'
+
+And she got up feverishly, and put on her hat again.
+
+'Why can't you tell father and send him? He's downstairs in the
+reading-room,' said Dora.
+
+'I'll go myself, Dora, thank you,' said Lucy, with an obstinate
+toss of her head, as she stood before the old mirror over the
+mantelpiece. 'I dare say you think I'm a very bold girl. It don't
+matter.'
+
+Then for a minute she became absorbed in putting one side of her
+hair straight. Dora, from behind, sat looking at her, needle in
+hand. The gaslight fell on her pale, disturbed face, showed for an
+instant a sort of convulsion pass across it which Lucy did not see.
+Then she drew her hand along her eyes, with a low, quivering
+breath, and went back to her work.
+
+As Lucy opened the door, however, a movement of anxiety, of
+conscience, rose in Dora.
+
+'Lucy, shall I go with you?'
+
+'Oh, no,' said Lucy, impatiently. 'I know what's what, thank you,
+Dora. I'll take care of myself. Perhaps I'll come back and tell you
+what he says.'
+
+And she closed the door behind her. Dora did not move from her
+work; but her hand trembled so that she made several false stitches
+and had to undo them.
+
+Meanwhile Lucy sped along across Market Street and through St.
+Ann's Square. Her blood was up, and she could have done anything,
+braved anybody, to defeat her father and win a smile from David
+Grieve. Yet, as she entered Potter Street, she began to quake a
+little. The street was narrow and dark. On one side the older
+houses had been long ago pulled down and replaced by tall
+warehouses, which at night were a black and towering mass, without
+a light anywhere. The few shops opposite closed early, for in the
+office quarter of Manchester there is very little doing after
+office hours, when the tide of life ebbs outwards.
+
+Lucy looked for No. 15, her heart beating fast. There was a light
+in the first floor, but the shop-front was altogether dark. She
+crossed the street, and, lifting a shaking hand, rang the bell of
+the very narrow side door.
+
+Instantly there were sounds inside--a step--and David stood on the
+threshold.
+
+He stared in amazement at his unwonted visitor.
+
+'Oh, Mr. Grieve--please--I've got something to tell you. Oh, no, I
+won't come in--we can stand here, please, out of the wind. But
+father's going to buy this place over your head, and I thought I'd
+better come and tell you. He'll be pretty mad if he thinks I've let
+out; but I don't care.'
+
+She was leaning against the wall of the passage, and David could
+just see the defiance and agitation on her face by the light of the
+gas-lamp outside.
+
+He himself gave a low whistle.
+
+'Well, that's rather strong, isn't it, Miss Purcell?'
+
+'It's mean--it's abominable,' she cried. 'I vowed I'd stop it. But I
+don't know what he'll do to me--kill me, most likely.'
+
+'Nobody shall do anything to you,' said David, decidedly. 'You're a
+brick. But look here--can you tell me anything more?'
+
+She commanded herself with great difficulty, and told all she knew.
+David leant against the wall beside her, twisting a meditative lip.
+The situation was ominous, certainly. He had always known that his
+tenure was precarious, but from various indications he had supposed
+that it would be some years yet before his side of the street was
+much meddled with. That old fox! He must go and see Mr. Ancrum.
+
+A passion of hate and energy rose within him. Somehow or other he
+would pull through.
+
+When Lucy had finished the tale of her eavesdroppings, the young
+fellow shook himself and stood erect.
+
+'Well, I _am_ obliged to you, Miss Purcell. And now I'll just
+go straight off and talk to somebody that I think'll help me. But
+I'll see you to Market Street first.'
+
+'Oh!--somebody will see us!' she cried in a fever, 'and tell father.'
+
+'Not they; I'll keep a look out.'
+
+Then suddenly, as they walked along together, a great shyness fell
+upon them both. Why had she done this thing, and run the risk of
+her father's wrath? As David walked beside her, he felt for an
+instant, through all his gratitude, as though some one had thrown
+a lasso round him, and the cord were tightening. He could not
+have explained the feeling, but it made him curt and restive,
+absorbed, apparently, in his own thoughts. Meanwhile Lucy's heart
+swelled and swelled. She _did_ think he would have taken her news
+differently--have made more of it and her. She wished she had never
+come--she wished she had brought Dora. The familiar consciousness
+of failure, of insignificance, returned, and the hot tears rose in
+her eyes.
+
+At Market Street she stopped him hurriedly.
+
+'Don't come any farther. I can get home.'
+
+David, meanwhile, was saying to himself that he was a churlish
+brute; but for the life of him he could not get out any pretty
+speeches worthy of the occasion.
+
+'I'm sure I take it most kind of you, Miss Purcell. There's nothing
+could have saved me if you hadn't told. And I don't know whether I
+can get out of it now. But if ever I can do anything for you, you
+know--'
+
+'Oh, never mind!--never mind!' she said, incoherently, stabbed by
+his constraint. 'Good night.'
+
+And she ran away into the darkness, choked by the sorest tears she
+had ever shed.
+
+David, meanwhile, went on his way to Ancrum, scourging himself. If
+ever there was an ungrateful cur, it was he! Why could he find
+nothing nice to say to that girl in return for all her pluck? Of
+course she would get into trouble. Coming to see him at that time
+of night, too! Why, it was splendid!
+
+Yet, all the same, he knew perfectly well that if she had been
+there beside him again, he would have been just as tongue-tied as
+before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+On the following night David walked into the Parlour about eight
+o'clock, hung up his hat with the air of an emperor, and looked
+round for Daddy.
+
+'Look here, Daddy! I've got something to say to you, but not down
+here: you'll be letting out my private affairs, and I can't stand
+that.'
+
+'Well, come upstairs then, you varmint! You're a poor sort of
+fellow, always suspecting your friends. Come up--come up with you!
+I'll humour you!'
+
+And Daddy, bursting with curiosity, led the way upstairs to Dora's
+sitting-room. Dora was moving about amid a mass of silks, which lay
+carefully spread out on the table, shade melting into shade,
+awaiting their transference to a new silk case she had been busy
+upon.
+
+As the door opened she look up, and when she saw David her face
+flushed all over.
+
+Daddy pushed the lad in.
+
+'Dora, he's got some news. Out with it, sir!'
+
+And he stood opposite the young fellow, on tiptoe, quivering with
+impatience.
+
+David put both hands in his pockets, and looked out upon them,
+radiant.
+
+'I think,' he said slowly, 'I've scotched old Purcell this time. But
+perhaps you don't know what he's been after?'
+
+'Lucy was in here last night,' said Dora, hesitating; 'she told me
+about it.'
+
+'Lucy!' cried Daddy, exasperated. 'What have you been making secrets
+about? I'll have no secrets from me in this house, Dora. Why, when
+Lucy tells you something important, is it all hidden up from me?
+Nasty close ways!'
+
+And he looked at her threateningly.
+
+Nothing piqued the old Bohemian so much as the constant assumption
+of the people about him that he was a grown-up baby, of no
+discretion at all. That the assumption was true made no difference
+whatever to the irritating quality of it.
+
+Dora dropped her head a little, but said nothing. David interposed:
+
+'Well, now _I'll_ tell you all about it.'
+
+His tone was triumph itself, and he plunged into his story. He
+described what Purcell had meant to do, and how nearly he had done
+it. In a month, if the bookseller had had his way, his young rival
+would have been in the street, with all his connection to make over
+again. At the moment there was not another corner to be had, within
+David's means, anywhere near the centre of the town. It would have
+meant a completely fresh beginning, and temporary ruin.
+
+But he had gone to Ancrum. And Ancrum and he had bethought them of
+the rich Unitarian gentleman who had been David's sponsor when he
+signed his agreement.
+
+There and then, at nine o'clock at night, Ancrum had gone off to
+Higher Broughton, where the good man lived, and laid the case
+before him. Mr. Doyle had taken the night to think it over, and the
+following morning he had paid a visit to his lawyer.
+
+'He and his wife thought it a burning shame, he told Mr. Ancrum;
+and, besides, he's been buying up house property in Manchester for
+some time past, only we couldn't know that--that was just luck. He
+looked upon it as a good chance both for him and for me. He told
+his lawyer it must be all settled in three hours, and he didn't
+mind the price. The lawyer found out that Purcell was haggling,
+went in to win, put the cash down, and here in my pocket I've got
+the fresh agreement between me and Mr. Doyle--three months' notice
+on either side, and no likelihood of my being turned out, if I want
+to stay, for the next three or four years. Hurrah!'
+
+And the lad, quite beside himself with jubilation, raised the blue
+cap he held in his hand, and flung it round his head. Dora stood
+and looked at him, leaning lightly against the table, her arms
+behind her. His triumph carried her away; her lips parted in a
+joyous smile; her whole soft, rounded figure trembled with
+animation and sympathy.
+
+As for Daddy, he could not contain himself. He ran to the top of
+the stairs, and sent a kitchen-boy flying for a bottle of
+champagne.
+
+'Drink, you varmint, drink!' he said, when the liquor came, 'or I'll
+be the death of you! Hold your tongue, Dora! Do you think a man can
+put up with temperance drinks when his enemy's smitten hip and
+thigh? Oh, you jewel, David, but you'll bring him low, lad--you'll
+bring him low before you've done--promise me that. I shall see him
+a beggar yet, lad, shan't I? Oh, nectar!'
+
+And Daddy poured down his champagne, apostrophising it and David's
+vengeance together.
+
+Dora looked distressed.
+
+'Father--Lucy! How can you say such things?'
+
+'Lucy--eh?--Lucy? She won't be a beggar. She'll marry; she's got a
+bit of good looks of her own. But, David, my lad, what was it you
+were saying? How was it you got wind of this precious business?'
+
+David hesitated.
+
+'Well, it was Miss Purcell told me,' he said. 'She came to see me at
+my place last evening.'
+
+He drew himself together with a little nervous dignity, as though
+foreseeing that Daddy would make remarks.
+
+'Miss Purcell!--what, Lucy?--_Lucy? Upon_ my word, Davy! Why,
+her father'll wring her neck when he finds it out. And she came to
+warn you?'
+
+Daddy stood a moment taking in the situation, then, with a queer
+grin, he walked up to David and poked him in the ribs.
+
+'So there were passages--eh, young man--when you were up there?'
+
+The young fellow straightened himself, with a look of annoyance.
+
+'Nothing of the sort, Daddy; there were no passages. But Miss
+Lucy's done me a real friendly act, and I'd do the same for her any
+day.'
+
+Dora had sat down to her silks again. As David spoke she bent
+closely over them, as though the lamp-light puzzled her usually
+quick perception of shade and quality.
+
+As for Daddy, he eyed the lad doubtfully.
+
+'She's got a pretty waist and a brown eye, Davy, and she's
+seventeen.'
+
+'She may be for me,' said David, throwing his head back and
+speaking with a certain emphasis and animation. 'But she's a little
+brick to have given me notice of this thing.'
+
+The warmth of these last words produced more effect on Daddy than
+his previous denials.
+
+'Dora,' he said, looking round--'Dora, do you believe the varmint?
+All the same, you know, he'll be for marrying soon. Look at him!'
+and he pointed a thin theatrical finger at David from across the
+room.' When I was his make I was in love with half the girls in the
+place. Blue eyes here--brown eyes there--nothing came amiss to me.'
+
+'Marrying!' said David, with an impatient shrug of the shoulders,
+but flushing all over. 'You might wait, I think, till I've got
+enough to keep one on, let alone two. If you talk such stuff,
+Daddy, I'll not tell you my secrets when there are any to tell.'
+
+He tried to laugh it off; but Dora's grey eye, glancing timidly
+round at him, saw that he was in some discomfort. There was a
+bright colour in _her_ cheek too, and her hand touched her
+silks uncertainly.
+
+'Thank you for nothing, sir,' said Daddy, unabashed. 'Trust an
+old hound like me for scenting out what he wants. But, go along
+with you! I'm disappointed in you. The young men nowadays have
+got no _blood_! They're made of sawdust and brown paper. The
+world was our orange, and we sucked it. Bedad, we did! But
+_you_--cold-blooded cubs--go to the devil, I tell you, and
+read your Byron!'
+
+And, striking an attitude which was a boisterous reminiscence of
+Macready, the old wanderer flung out the lines:
+
+  'Alas! when mingling souls forget to blend,
+  Death hath but little left him to destroy.
+  Ah! happy years! Once more, who would not be a boy?'
+
+David laughed out. Daddy turned petulantly away, and looked out of
+window. The night was dreary, dark, and wet.
+
+'Dora!'
+
+'Yes, father.'
+
+'Manchester's a damned dull hole. I'm about tired of it.'
+
+Dora started, and her colour disappeared in an instant. She got up
+and went to the window.
+
+'Father, you know they'll be waiting for you downstairs,' she said,
+putting her hand on his shoulder. 'They always say they can't get on
+without you on debating nights.'
+
+'Stuff and nonsense!' said Daddy, throwing off the hand. But he
+looked mollified. The new reading-room was at present his pet
+hobby; his interest in the restaurant proper had dropped a good
+deal of late, or so Dora's anxiety persuaded her.
+
+'It's quite true,' said David. 'Go and start 'em, Daddy, and I'll
+come down soon and cut in. I feel as if I could speak the roof off
+to-night, and I don't care a hang about what! But first I've got
+something to say to Miss Dora. I want to ask her a favour.'
+
+He came forward smiling. She gave him a startled look, but her
+eyes--poor Dora!--could not light on him now without taking a new
+brightness. How well his triumph sat on him! How crisply and
+handsomely his black hair curled above his open brow!
+
+'More secrets,' growled Daddy.
+
+'Nothing of any interest, Daddy. Miss Dora can tell you all about
+it, if she cares. Now go along! Start 'em on the Bishop of
+Peterborough and the Secularists. I've got a lot to say about that.'
+
+He pushed Daddy laughingly to the door, and came back again to
+where Dora was once more grappling with her silks. Her expression
+had changed again. Oh! she had so many things to open to him, if
+only she could find the courage.
+
+He sat down and looked at a bit of her embroidery, which lay
+uncovered beside her on the frame.
+
+'I say, that is fine work!' he said, wondering. 'I hope you get well
+paid for it, Miss Dora. You ought. Well, now, I do want to ask your
+advice. This business of the house has set me thinking about a lot
+of things.'
+
+He lay back in his chair, with his hands in his pockets, and threw
+one leg over the other. He was in such a state of nervous
+excitement, Dora could see, that he could hardly keep himself
+still.
+
+'Did I ever tell you about my sister? No, I know I haven't. I've
+kept it dark. But now I'm settled I want to have her to live with
+me. There's no one but us two, except the old uncle and aunt that
+brought us up. I must stick to her--and I mean to. But she's not
+like other girls. She's a queer one.'
+
+He stopped, frowning a little as the recollections of Louie rushed
+across him, seeking for words in which to draw her. And directly he
+paused, Dora, who had dropped her silks again in her sudden
+astonishment, burst into questions. How old was his sister? Was she
+in Manchester? Had she a trade? Her soul was full of a warm,
+unexpected joy, her manner was eager--receptive. He took up his
+parable and told the story of his childhood and Louie's at the
+farm. His black eye kindled as he looked past Dora into the
+past--into the bosom of the Scout. Owing partly to an imaginative
+gift, partly to his reading habit, when he was stimulated--when he
+was, as it were, talking at large, trying to present a subject as a
+whole, to make a picture of it--he rose into ways of speech quite
+different from those of his class, and different from his own
+dialect of every day. This latent capacity for fine expression was
+mostly drawn out at this time by his attempts at public speaking.
+But to-night, in his excitement, it showed in his talk, and Dora
+was bewildered. Oh, how clever he was! He talked like a book--just
+like a book. She pushed her chair back from the silks, and sat
+absorbed in the pleasure of listening, environed too by the happy
+thought that he was making a friend of her, giving her--plain,
+insignificant, humble Dora Lomax--his confidence.
+
+As for him, the more he talked the more he enjoyed talking. Never
+since he came to Manchester had he fallen into such a moment of
+unburdenment, of intimacy, or something like it, with any human
+being. He had talked to Ancrum and to John. But that was quite
+different. No man confides in a woman as he confides in a man. The
+touch of difference of sex gives charm and edge, even when, as was
+the case here, the man has no thrill whatever in his veins, and no
+thought of love-making in his head.
+
+'You must have been very fond of your sister,' Dora said at last,
+tremulously. 'You two all alone--and no mother.'
+
+Somehow the soft sentiment in her words and tone struck him
+suddenly as incongruous. His expression changed.
+
+'Oh, I don't know,' he said, with a sort of laugh, not a very
+bright one. 'Don't you imagine I was a pattern brother; I was a
+brute to her lots of times. And Louie--ah, well, you'll see for
+yourself what she's like; she's a queer customer sometimes. And now
+I'll tell you what I wanted to ask you, Miss Dora. You see, if
+Louie comes it won't do for her to have no employment, after she's
+had a trade all day; and she won't take to mine--she can't abide
+books.'
+
+And he explained to her his perplexities--the ebbing of the silk
+trade from Manchester, and so on. He might hire a loom, but Louie
+would get no work. All trades have their special channels, and keep
+to them.
+
+So it had occurred to him, if Louie was willing, would Dora take
+her as an apprentice, and teach her the church work? He would be
+quite ready to pay for the teaching; that would be only fair.
+
+'Teach her my work!' cried Dora, instinctively drawing back. 'Oh, I
+don't think I could.'
+
+He coloured, and misunderstood her. In a great labour-hive like
+Lancashire, with its large and small industries, the native ear is
+very familiar with the jealous tone of the skilled worker,
+threatened with competition in a narrow trade.
+
+'I didn't mean any offence,' he said, with a little stiffness. 'I
+don't want to take the bread out of anybody's mouth. If there isn't
+work to be had, you've only to say so, Miss Dora.'
+
+'Oh, I didn't mean that,' she cried, wounded in her turn. 'There's
+plenty of work. At the shop last week they didn't know what to do
+for hands. If she was clever at it, she'd get lots of work. But--'
+
+She laid her hand on her frame lovingly, not knowing how to explain
+herself, her gentle brows knitting in the effort of thought.
+
+Her work was so much more to her than ordinary work paid for in
+ordinary coin. Into these gorgeous altar-cloths, or these delicate
+wrappings for chalice and paten, she stitched her heart. To work at
+them was prayer. Jesus, and His Mother, and the Saints; it was with
+them she communed as her stitches flowed. She sat in a mystic, a
+heavenly world. And the silence and solitude of her work made one
+of its chief charms. And now to be asked to share it with a strange
+girl, who could not love it as she did, who would take it as hard
+business--never to be alone any more with her little black book and
+her prayers!
+
+And then she looked up, and met a young man's half-offended look,
+and a shy, proud eye, in which the nascent friendship of five
+minutes before seemed to be sinking out of sight.
+
+'Oh yes, I will,' she cried. 'Of course I will. It just sounded a
+bit strange to me at first. I've been so used to be alone always.'
+
+But he demurred now--wished stiffly to take back his proposal. He
+did not want to put upon her, and perhaps, after all, Louie would
+have her own notions.
+
+But she could not bear it, and as he retreated she pressed forward.
+Of course there was work. And it would be very good for her, it
+would stir her up to take a pupil; it was just her old-maidish
+ways--it had startled her a bit at first.
+
+And then, her reserve giving ay more and more as her emotion grew,
+she confessed herself at last completely.
+
+'You see, it's not just _work_ to me, and it's not the money,
+though I'm glad enough for that; but it's for the church; and I'd
+live on a crust, and do it for nothing, if I could!'
+
+She looked up at him--that ardent dream-life of hers leaping to the
+eyes, transforming the pale face.
+
+David sat silent and embarrassed. He did not know what to say--how
+to deal with this turn in the conversation.
+
+'Oh, I know you think I'm just foolish,' she said, sadly, taking up
+her needle. 'You always did; but I'll take your sister--indeed I
+will.'
+
+'Perhaps you'll turn her your way of thinking,' said David, with a
+little awkward laugh, looking round for his hat. 'But Louie isn't an
+easy one to drive.'
+
+'Oh, you can't drive people!' cried Dora, flushing; 'you can't, and
+you oughtn't. But if Father Russell talked to her she might like
+him--and the church. Oh, Mr. Grieve, won't you go one Sunday and
+hear him--won't you--instead of--'
+
+She did not finish her sentence, but David finished it for her:
+'Instead of going to the Hall of Science? Well, but you know, Miss
+Dora, I being what I am, I get more good out of a lecture at the
+Hall of Science than I should out of Father Russell. I should be
+quarrelling with him all the time, and wanting to answer him.'
+
+'Oh, you couldn't,' said Dora eagerly, 'he's so good, and he's a
+learned man--I'm sure he is. Mr. Foss, the curate, told me they
+think he'll be a bishop some day.'
+
+'All the better for him,' said David, unmoved. 'It don't make any
+difference to me. No, Miss Dora, don't you fret yourself about me.
+Books are my priests.'
+
+He stood over her, his hands on his sides, smiling.
+
+'Oh, no!' cried Dora, involuntarily. 'You mustn't say that. Books
+can't bring us to God.'
+
+'No more can priests,' he said, with a sudden flash of his dark
+eyes, a sudden dryness of his tone. 'If there is a God to bring us
+to--prove me that first, Miss Dora. But it's a shame to say these
+things to you--that it is--and I've been worrying you a deal too
+much about my stupid affairs. Good night. We'll talk about Father
+Russell again another time.'
+
+He ran downstairs. Dora went back to her frame, then pushed it away
+again, ran eagerly to the window, and pulled the blind aside. Down
+below in the lighted street, now emptying fast, she saw the tall
+figure emerge, saw it run down the street, and across St. Mary's
+Gate. She watched it till it disappeared; then she put her hands
+over her face, and leant against the window-frame weeping. Oh, what
+a sudden descent from a moment of pure joy! How had the jarring
+note come? They had been put wrong with each other; and perhaps,
+after all, he would be no more to her now than before. And she had
+seemed to make such a leap forward--to come so near to him.
+
+'Oh! I'll just be good to his sister,' she said to herself
+drearily, with an ache at her heart that was agony.
+
+Then she thought of him as he had sat there beside her; and
+suddenly in her pure thought there rose a vision of herself in his
+arms, her head against his broad shoulder, her hand stealing round
+his neck. She moved from the window and threw herself down in the
+darkest corner of the room, wrestling desperately with what seemed
+to her a sinful imagination. She ought not to think of him at all;
+she loathed herself. Father Russell would tell her she was wicked.
+He had no faith--he was a hardened unbeliever--and she could not
+make herself think of that at all--could not stop herself from
+wanting--_wanting_ him for her own, whatever happened.
+
+And it was so foolish too, as well as bad; for he hadn't an idea of
+falling in love with anybody--anyone could see that. And she who
+was not pretty, and not a bit clever--it was so likely he would
+take a fancy to her! Why, in a few years he would be a big man, he
+would have made a fortune, and then he could take his pick.
+
+'Oh! and Lucy--Lucy would _hate_ me.'
+
+But the thought of Lucy, instead of checking her, brought with it
+again a wild gust of jealousy. It was fiercer than before, the
+craving behind it stronger. She sat up, forcing back her tears, her
+whole frame tense and rigid. Whatever happened he would
+_never_ marry Lucy! And who could wish it? Lucy was just a
+little, vain, selfish thing, and when she found David Grieve
+wouldn't have her, she would soon forget him. The surging longing
+within refused, proudly refused, to curb itself--for Lucy's sake.
+
+Then the bell of St. Ann's slowly began to strike ten o'clock. It
+brought home to her by association one of the evening hymns in the
+little black book she was frequently accustomed to croon to herself
+at night as she put away her work:
+
+  O God who canst not change nor fail,
+  Guiding the hours as they roll by,
+  Brightening with beams the morning pale,
+  And burning in the mid-day sky!
+
+  Quench thou the fires of hate and strife,
+  The wasting fever of the heart;
+  From perils guard our feeble life,
+  And to our souls thy peace impart.
+
+The words flowed in upon her, but they brought no comfort, only a
+fresh sense of struggle and effort. Her Christian peace was gone.
+She felt herself wicked, faithless, miserable.
+
+Meanwhile, in the stormy night outside, David was running and
+leaping through the streets, flourishing his stick from side to
+side in cut and thrust with an imaginary enemy whenever the main
+thoroughfares were left behind, and he found himself in some dark
+region of warehouses, where his steps echoed, and he was king alike
+of roadway and of pavement.
+
+The wind, a stormy north-easter, had risen since the afternoon.
+David fought with it, rejoiced in it. After the little hot
+sitting-room, the stinging freshness, the rough challenge of the
+gusts, were delicious to him. He was overflowing with spirits, with
+health, with exultation.
+
+As he thought of Purcell he could hardly keep himself from shouting
+aloud. If he could only be there to see when Purcell learnt how he
+had been foiled! And trust Daddy to spread a story which would
+certainly do Purcell no good! No, in that direction he felt that he
+was probably safe from attack for a long time to come. Success
+beckoned to him; his enemy was under foot; his will and his gifts
+had the world before them.
+
+Father Russell indeed! Let Dora Lomax set him on. His young throat
+filled with contemptuous laughter. As a bookseller, _he_ knew
+what the clergy read, what they had to say for themselves. How much
+longer could it go on, this solemn folly of Christian superstition?
+'Just give us a good Education Bill, and we shall see!'
+
+Then, as he fell thinking of his talk with Dora and Lomax, he
+wished impatiently that he had been even plainer with Daddy about
+Lucy Purcell. With regard to her he felt himself caught in a
+tangled mesh of obligation. He must, somehow, return her the
+service she had done him. And then all the world would think he was
+making up to her and wanted to marry her. Meanwhile--in the midst
+of real gratitude, a strong desire to stand between her and her
+father, and much eager casting about for some means of paying her
+back--his inner mind was in reality pitilessly critical towards
+her. Her overdone primness and neatness, her fashionable frocks, of
+which she was so conscious, her horror of things and people that
+were not 'nice,' her contented ignorance and silly chattering
+ways--all these points of manner and habit were scored against her
+in his memory. She had become less congenial to him rather than
+more since he knew her first. All the same, she was a little brick,
+and he would have liked one minute to kiss her for her pluck, make
+her some lordly present, and the next--never to see her again!
+
+In reality his mind at this moment was filling with romantic images
+and ideals totally remote from anything suggested by his own
+everyday life. A few weeks before, old Barbier, his French master,
+had for the first time lent him some novels of George Sand's. David
+had carried them off, had been enchanted to find that he could now
+read them with ease and rapidity, and had plunged straightway into
+the new world thus opened to him with indescribable zest and
+passion. His Greek had been neglected, his science laid aside.
+Night after night he had been living with Valentine, with Consuelo,
+with Caroline in 'Le Marquis de Villemer.' His poetical reading of
+the winter had prepared the way for what was practically his first
+introduction to the modern literature of passion. The stimulating
+novelty and foreignness of it was stirring all his blood. George
+Sand's problems, her situations, her treatment of the great
+questions of sex, her social and religious enthusiasms--these
+things were for the moment a new gospel to this provincial
+self-taught lad, as they had been forty years before to the youth
+of 1830. Under the vitalising touch of them the man was fast
+developing out of the boy; the currents of the nature were
+setting in fresh directions. And in such a mood, and with such
+preoccupations, how was one to bear patiently with foolish,
+friendly fingers, or with uncomfortable thoughts of your own,
+pointing you to _Lucy Purcell?_ With the great marriage-night
+scene from 'Valentine' thrilling in your mind, how was it possible
+to think of the prim self-conceit, the pettish temper and mincing
+airs of that little person in Half Street without irritation?
+
+No, no! _The unknown, the unforeseen!_ The young man plunged
+through the rising storm, and through the sleety rain, which had
+begun to beat upon him, with face and eyes uplifted to the night.
+It was as though he searched the darkness for some form which, even
+as he looked, began to take vague and luminous shape there.
+
+Next morning Daddy, in his exultation, behaved himself with some
+grossness towards his enemy. About eleven o'clock he became
+restless, and began patrolling Market Place, passing every now and
+then up the steps into the narrow passage of Half Street, and so
+round by the Cathedral and home. He had no definite purpose, but
+'have a squint at Tom,' under the circumstances, he must, some way
+or other.
+
+And, sure enough, as he was coming back through Half Street on one
+of his rounds, and was within a few yards of Purcell's window, the
+bookseller came out with his face set in Daddy's direction.
+Purcell, whose countenance, so far as Daddy could see at first
+sight, was at its blackest and sourest, and whose eyes were on the
+ground, did not at once perceive his adversary, and came stern on.
+
+The moment was irresistible. Laying his thumbs in his waistcoat
+pocket, and standing so as to bar his brother-in-law's path, Daddy
+launched a few unctuous words in his smoothest voice.
+
+'Tom, me boy, thou hast imagined a device which thou wast not able
+to perform. But the Lord, Tom, hath made thee turn thy back. And
+they of thy own household, Tom, have lifted up the heel against
+thee.'
+
+Purcell, strong, dark-browed fellow that he was, wavered and
+blenched for a moment under the surprise of this audacious attack.
+Then with an oath he put out his hand, seized Daddy's thin
+shoulder, flung him violently round, and passed him.
+
+'Speak to me again in the street, you scoundrel, and I'll give you
+in charge!' he threw behind him, as he strode on just in time to
+avoid a flight of street-arabs, who had seen the scuffle from a
+distance and were bearing down eagerly upon him.
+
+Daddy went home in the highest spirits, stepping jauntily along
+like a man who has fulfilled a mission. But when he came to boast
+himself to Dora, he found to his chagrin that he had only earned a
+scolding. Dora flushed up, her soft eyes all aflame.
+
+'You've done nothing but mischief, father,' said Dora, bitterly.
+'How _could_ you say such things? You might have left Uncle
+Tom to find out for himself about Lucy. He'll be mad enough without
+your stirring him up. Now he'll forbid her to come here, or see me
+at all. I don't know what'll become of that child; and whatever
+possessed you to go aggravating him worse and worse I can't think.'
+
+Daddy blinked under this, but soon recovered himself. No one, he
+vowed, could be expected to put up for ever with Purcell's mean
+tricks. He had held his tongue for twenty-one years, and now he had
+paid back one _little_ text in exchange for the hundreds
+wherewith Purcell had been wont to break his bones for him in past
+days. As for Dora, she hadn't the spirit of a fly.
+
+'Well, I dare say I am afraid,' said Dora, despondently. 'I saw
+Uncle Tom yesterday, too, and he gave me a look made me feel cold
+down my back. I don't like anybody to hate us like that, father.
+Who knows--'
+
+A tremor ran through her. She gave her father a piteous, childish
+look. She had the timidity, the lack of self-confidence which seems
+to cling through life to those who have been at a disadvantage with
+the world in their childhood and youth. The anger of a man like
+Purcell terrified her, lay like a nightmare on a sensitive and
+introspective nature.
+
+'Pish!' said Daddy, contemptuously; 'I should like to know what harm
+he can do us, now that I've turned so d--d respectable. Though it
+is a bit hard on a man to have to keep so in order to spite his
+brother-in-law.'
+
+Dora laughed and sighed. She came up to her father's chair, put his
+hair straight, re-tied his tie, and then kissed him on the cheek.
+
+'Father, you're not getting tired of the Parlour?' she said,
+unsteadily. He evaded her downward look, and tried to shake her
+off.
+
+'Don't I slave for you from morning till night, you thankless chit,
+you? And don't you begrudge me all the little amusements which turn
+the tradesman into the man and sweeten the pill of bondage--eh, you
+poor-souled thing?'
+
+Her eyes, however, drew his after them, whether he would or no, and
+they surveyed each other--he uneasily hostile; she sad. She slowly
+shook her head, and he perfectly understood what was in her mind,
+though she did not speak. He _had_ been extremely slack at
+business lately; the month's accounts made up that morning had been
+unusually disappointing; and twice during the last ten days Dora
+had sat up till midnight to let her father in, and had tried with
+all the energy of a sinking heart to persuade herself that it was
+accident, and that he was only excited, and not drunk.
+
+Now, as she stood looking at him, suddenly all the horror of those
+long-past days came back upon her, thrown up against the peace of
+the last few years. She locked her hands round his neck with a
+vehement pathetic gesture.
+
+'Father, be good to me! don't let bad people take you away from
+me--don't, father--you're all I have--all I ever shall have.'
+
+Daddy's green eyes wavered again uncomfortably.
+
+'Stuff!' he said, irritably. 'You'll get a husband directly, and
+think no more of me than other girls do when the marrying fit takes
+'em. What are you grinning at now, I should like to know?'
+
+For she was smiling--a light tremulous smile which puzzled him.
+
+'At you, father. You'll have to keep me whether you like it or no.
+For I'm not a marrying sort.'
+
+She looked at him with a curious defiance, her lip twitching.
+
+'Oh, we know all about that!' said Daddy, impatiently, adding in a
+mincing voice, '"I will not love; if I do hang me; i' faith I will
+not." No, my pretty dear, not till the "wimpled, whining, purblind,
+wayward boy" comes this road--oh, no, not till next time! Quite so.'
+
+She let him rail, and said nothing. She sat down to her work; he
+faced round upon her suddenly, and said, frowning:
+
+'What do you mean by it, eh? You're as good-looking as anybody!'
+
+'Well, I want you to think it, father,' she said, affectionately,
+raising her eyes to his. A mother must have seen the shrinking
+sadness beneath the smile. What Daddy saw was simply a rounded
+girlish face, with soft cheeks and lips which seemed to him made
+for kissing; nothing to set the Thames on fire, perhaps, but why
+should she run herself down? It annoyed him, touched his vanity.
+
+'Oh, I dare say!' he said to her, roughly, with an affected
+brutality. 'But you'll be precious disappointed if some one else
+doesn't think so too. Don't tell me!'
+
+She bent over her frame without speaking. But her heart filled with
+bitterness, and a kind of revolt against her life.
+
+Meanwhile her conscience accused her about Lucy. Lucy must have got
+herself into trouble at home, that she was sure of. And it was
+unlike her to keep it to herself--not to come and complain.
+
+Some days--a week--passed. But Dora dared not venture herself into
+her uncle's house after Daddy's escapade, and she was, besides,
+much pressed with her work. A whole set of altar furniture for a
+new church at Blackburn had to be finished by a given day.
+
+The affairs of the Parlour troubled her, and she got up long before
+it was light to keep the books in order and to plan for the day.
+Daddy had no head for figures, and he seemed to her to be growing
+careless about expenses. Her timid, over-anxious mind conjured up
+the vision of a slowly rising tide of debt, and it haunted her all
+day. When she went to her frame she was already tired out, and yet
+there she sat over it hour after hour.
+
+Daddy was blind. But Sarah, the stout cook, who worshipped her,
+knew well enough that she was growing thin and white.
+
+'If yo doan't draw in yo'll jest do yoursel a mischief,' she said
+to her, angrily. 'Yo're nowt but a midge onyways, and a body 'll
+soon be able to see through yo.'
+
+'I shall be all right, Sarah,' Dora would say.
+
+'Aye, we'st aw on us be aw reet in our coffins,' returned the irate
+Sarah. Then, melting into affection, 'Neaw, honey, be raysonable,
+an' I'st just run round t' corner, an' cook you up a bit o' meat
+for your supper. Yo git no strength eawt i' them messin things yo
+eat. Theer's nowt but wind in em.'
+
+But not even the heterodox diet with which, every now and then,
+Dora for peace' sake allowed herself to be fed, behind Daddy's
+back, put any colour into her cheeks. She went heavily in these
+days, and the singularly young and childish look which she had kept
+till now went into gradual eclipse.
+
+David Grieve dropped in once or twice during the week to laugh and
+gossip about Purcell with Daddy. Thanks to Daddy's tongue, the
+bookseller's plot against his boy rival was already known to a
+large circle of persons, and was likely to cost him customers.
+
+Whenever she heard the young full voice below or on the stairs,
+Dora would, as it were, draw herself together--stand on her
+defence. Sometimes she asked him eagerly about his sister. Had he
+written? No; he thought he would still wait a week or two. Ah,
+well, he must let her know.
+
+And, on the whole, she was glad when he went, glad to get to bed
+and sleep. Being no sentimental heroine, she was prosaically
+thankful that she kept her sleep. Otherwise she must have fallen
+ill, and the accounts would have gone wrong.
+
+At last one evening came a pencil note from Lucy, in these terms:
+
+'You may come and see me, father says. I've been ill.--LUCY.'
+
+In a panic Dora put on her things and ran. Mary Ann, the little
+hunted maid, let her in, looking more hunted and scared than usual.
+Miss Lucy was better, she said, but she had been 'terr'ble bad.'
+No, she didn't know what it was took her. They'd got a nurse for
+her two nights, and she, Mary Ann, had been run off her legs.
+
+'Why didn't you send for me?' cried Dora, and hurried up to the
+attic. Purcell did not appear.
+
+Lucy was waiting for her, looking out eagerly from a bank of
+pillows.
+
+Dora could not restrain an exclamation which was almost a cry. She
+could not have believed that anyone could have changed so in ten
+days. Evidently the acute stage--whatever had been the illness--was
+past. There was already a look of convalescence in the white face,
+with its black-rimmed eyes and peeling lips. But the loss of flesh
+was extraordinary for so short a time. The small face was so
+thinned and blanched that the tangled masses of golden-brown hair
+in which it was framed seemed ridiculously out of proportion to it;
+the hand playing with some grapes on the counterpane was of a
+ghostly lightness.
+
+Dora was shocked almost beyond speaking. She stood holding Lucy's
+hand, and Lucy looked up at her, evidently enjoying her
+consternation, for a smile danced in her hollow eyes.
+
+'Lucy, _why_ didn't you send for me?'
+
+'Because I was so feverish at first. I was all light-headed, and
+didn't know where I was; and then I was so weak I didn't care about
+anything,' said Lucy, in a small thread of a voice.
+
+'What was it?'
+
+'Congestion of the lungs,' said the girl, with pride. 'They just
+stopped it, or you'd be laying me out now, Dora. Dr. Alford told
+father I was dreadful run-down or I'd never have taken it. I'm to
+go to Hastings. Father's got a cousin there that lets lodgings.'
+
+'But how did you get so ill, Lucy?'
+
+Lucy was silent a bit. Then she said:
+
+'Sit down close here. My voice is so bad still.'
+
+Dora sat close to her pillow, and bent over, stroking her hands
+with emotion. The fright of her entrance was still upon her.
+
+'Well, you know,' she said in a hoarse whisper, 'father found out
+about me and Mr. Grieve--I don't know how, but it was one morning.
+I was sitting in here, and he came in all white, with his eyes
+glaring. I thought he was going to kill me, and I was that
+frightened, I watched my chance, and ran out of the door and along
+into Mill Gate as fast as I could to get away from him; and then I
+thought I saw him coming after me, and I ran on across the bridge
+and up Chapel Street a long, long way. I was in a terrible fright,
+and mad with him besides. I declared to myself I'd never come back
+here. Well, it was pouring with rain, and I got wet through. Then I
+didn't know where to go, and what do you think I did? I just got
+into the Broughton tram, and rode up and down all day! I had a
+shilling or two in my pocket, and I waited and dodged a bit at
+either end, so the conductor shouldn't find out. And that was what
+did it--sitting in my wet things all day. I didn't think anything
+about dinner, I was that mad. But when it got dark, I thought of
+that girl--you know her, too--Minnie Park, that lives with her
+brother and sells fents, up Cannon Gate. And somehow I dragged up
+there--I thought I'd ask her to take me in. And what happened I
+don't rightly know. I suppose I was took with a faint before I
+could explain anything, for I was shivering and pretty bad when I
+got there. Anyway, she put me in a cab and brought me home; and I
+don't remember anything about it, for I was queer in the head very
+soon after they got me to bed. Oh, I _was_ bad! It was just a
+squeak, '--said Lucy, her voice dropping from exhaustion; but her
+eyes glittered in her pinched face with a curious triumph,
+difficult to decipher.
+
+Dora kissed her tenderly, and entreated her not to talk; she was
+sure it was bad for her. But Lucy, as usual, would not be managed.
+She held herself quite still, gathering breath and strength; then
+she began again:
+
+'If I'd died, perhaps _he'd_ have been sorry. You know who I
+mean. It was all along of him. And father 'll never forgive
+me--never. He looks quite different altogether somehow. Dora!
+you're not to tell him anything till I've got right away. I
+think--I think--I _hate_ him!'
+
+And suddenly her beautiful brown eyes opened wide and fierce.
+
+Dora hung over her, a strange, mingled passion in her look. 'You
+poor little thing!' she said slowly, with a deep emphasis,
+answering not the unreal Lucy of those last words, but the real
+one, so pitifully evident beneath.
+
+'But look here, Dora; when I'm gone away, you _may_ tell him,
+you _must_ tell him, Dora,' said the child, imperiously. 'I'd
+not have him see me now for anything. I made Mary Ann put all the
+glasses away. I don't want to remember what a fright I am. But at
+Hastings I'll soon get well; and--and remember, Dora, you
+_are_ to tell him. I'd like him to know I nearly caught my
+death that day, and that it was all along of him!'
+
+She laid her hands across each other on the sheet with a curious
+sigh of satisfaction, and was quiet for a little, while Dora held
+her hand. But it was not long before the stillness broke up in
+sudden agitation. A tremor ran through her, and she caught Dora's
+fingers. In her weakness she could not control herself, and her
+inmost trouble escaped her.
+
+'Oh, Dora, he wasn't kind to me, not a bit--when I went to tell him
+that night. Oh! I cried when I came home. I _did_ think he'd
+have taken it different.'
+
+'What did he say?' asked Dora, quietly. Her face was turned away
+from Lucy, but she still held her hand.
+
+'Oh, I don't know!' said Lucy, moving her head restlessly from side
+to side and gulping down a sob. 'I believe he was just sorry it was
+_me_ he'd got to thank. Oh, I don't know!--I don't know!--very
+likely he didn't mean it.'
+
+She waited a minute, then she began again:
+
+'Oh of course you think I'm silly; and that I'd have much more
+chance if I turned proud, and pretended I didn't care. I know some
+girls _say_ they'd never let a man know they cared for him
+first. I don't believe in 'em! But I don't care. I can't help it.
+It's my way. But, Dora, look here!'
+
+The tears gathered thick in her eyes. Dora, bending anxiously over
+her, was startled by the change of expression in her. From what
+depths of new emotion had the silly Lucy caught the sweetness which
+trembled for a moment through every line of her little trivial
+face?
+
+'You know, Dora, it was all nonsense at the beginning. I just
+wanted some one to amuse myself with and pay me attentions. But it
+isn't nonsense now. And I don't want him all for myself. Friday
+night I thought I was going to die. I don't care whether the doctor
+did or not; _I_ did. And I prayed a good deal. It was queer
+praying, I dare say. I was very light-headed, but I thanked God I
+loved him, though--though--he didn't care about me; and I thought
+if I did get well, and he were to take a fancy to me, I'd show him
+I could be as nice as other girls. I wouldn't want everything for
+myself, or spend a lot of money on dress.'
+
+She broke off for want of breath. This moral experience of hers was
+so new and strange to her that she could hardly find words in which
+to clothe it.
+
+Dora had slipped down beside her and buried her face in the bed.
+When Lucy stopped, she still knelt there in a quivering silence.
+But Lucy could not bear her to be silent--she must have sympathy.
+
+'Aren't you glad, Dora?' she said presently, when she had gathered
+strength again. 'I thought you'd be glad. You've always wanted me to
+turn religious. And--and--perhaps, when I get well and come back,
+I'll go with you to St. Damian's, Dora. I don't know what it is. I
+suppose it's caring about somebody--and being ill--makes one feel
+like this.'
+
+And, drawing herself from Dora's hold, she turned on her side, put
+both her thin hands under her cheek, and lay staring at the window
+with a look which had a certain dreariness in it.
+
+Dora at last raised herself. Lucy could not see her face. There was
+in it a sweet and solemn resolution--a new light and calm.
+
+'Dear Lucy,' she said, tremulously, laying her cheek against her
+cousin's shoulder, 'God speaks to us when we are unhappy--that was
+what you felt. He makes everything a voice to call unto Himself.'
+
+Lucy did not answer at once. Then suddenly she turned, and said
+eagerly:
+
+'Dora, did you ever ask him--did you ever find out--whether he was
+thinking about getting married? You said you would.'
+
+'He isn't, Lucy. He was vexed with father for speaking about it. I
+think he feels he must make his way first. His business takes him
+up altogether.'
+
+Lucy gave an irritable sigh, closed her eyes, and would talk no
+more. Dora stayed with her, and nursed her through the evening.
+When at last the nurse arrived who was to take charge of her
+through the night, Lucy pulled Dora down to her and said, in a
+hoarse, excitable whisper:
+
+'_Mind_ you tell him--that I nearly died--that father'll
+never be the same to me again--and it was all for him! You needn't
+say _I_ said so.'
+
+Late that night Dora stood long at her attic-window in the roof
+looking out at the April night. From a great bank of clouds to the
+east the moon was just appearing, sending her light along the windy
+streamers which, issuing from the main mass, spread like wide open
+fingers across the inner heaven. Opposite there was an old timbered
+house, one of the few relics of an earlier Manchester, which still,
+in the very centre of the modern city, thrusts out its broad eaves
+and overhanging stories beyond the line of the street. Above and
+behind it, roof beyond roof, to the western limit of sight, rose
+block after block of warehouses, vast black masses, symbols of the
+great town, its labours and its wealth; far to the right, closing
+the street, the cathedral cut the moonlit sky; and close at hand
+was an old inn, with a wide archway, under which a huge dog lay
+sleeping.
+
+Town and sky, the upper clouds and stars, the familiar streets and
+buildings below--to-night they were all changed for Dora, and it
+was another being that looked at them. In all intense cases of
+religious experience the soul lies open to 'voices'--to impressions
+which have for it the most vivid and, so to speak, physical
+reality. Jeanne d'Arc's visions were but an extreme instance of
+what humbler souls have known in their degree in all ages. The
+heavenly voices speak, and the ear actually hears. So it was with
+Dora. It seemed to her that she had been walking in a feverish
+loneliness through the valley of the shadow of death; that one like
+unto the Son of Man had drawn her thence with warning and rebuke,
+and she was now at His feet, clothed and in her right mind. Words
+were in her ear, repeated again and again--peremptory words which
+stabbed and healed at once: _'Daughter, thou shalt not covet. I
+have refused thee this gift. If it be My will to give it to
+another, what is that to thee? Follow thou Me.'_
+
+As she sank upon her knees, she thought of the confession she would
+make on Sunday--of the mysterious sanctity and sweetness of the
+single life--of the vocation of sacrifice laid upon her. There rose
+in her a kind of ecstasy of renunciation. Her love--already so
+hopeless, so starved!--was there simply that she might offer it
+up--burn it through and through with the fires of the spirit.
+
+Lucy should never know, and David should never know. Unconsciously,
+sweet soul, there was a curious element of spiritual arrogance
+mingled with this absolute surrender of the one passionate human
+desire her life was ever to wrestle with. The baptised member of
+Christ's body could not pursue the love of David Grieve, could not
+marry him as he was now, without risk and sin. But Lucy--the child
+of schism, to whom the mysteries of Church fellowship and
+sacramental grace were unknown--for her, in her present exaltation,
+Dora felt no further scruples. Lucy's love was clearly 'sent' to
+her; it was right, whether it were ultimately happy or no, because
+of the religious effect it had already had upon her.
+
+The human happiness Dora dared no longer grasp at for herself she
+yearned now to pour lavishly, quickly, into Lucy's hands. Only
+so--such is our mingled life!--could she altogether still,
+violently and by force, a sort of upward surge of the soul
+which terrified her now and then. A mystical casuistry, bred
+in her naturally simple nature by the subtle influences of a
+long-descended Christianity, combined in her with a piteous human
+instinct. When she rose from her knees she was certain that she
+would never win and marry David Grieve; she was equally certain
+that she would do all in her power to help little Lucy to win and
+marry him.
+
+So, like them of old, she pressed the spikes into her flesh, and
+found a numbing consolation in the pain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Some ten days more elapsed before Lucy was pronounced fit to travel
+south. During this time Dora saw her frequently, and the bond
+between the two girls grew much closer than before. On the one
+hand, Lucy yielded herself more than she had ever done yet to
+Dora's example and persuasion, promised to go to church and see at
+least what it was like when she got to Hastings, and let Dora
+provide her with some of her favourite High Church devotional
+books. On the other, it was understood between them that Dora would
+look after Lucy's interests, and keep her informed how the land lay
+while she was in the south, and Lucy, with the blindness of
+self-love, trusted herself to her cousin without a suspicion or a
+qualm.
+
+While she was tending Lucy, Dora never saw Purcell but twice, when
+she passed him in the little dark entry leading to the private part
+of the house, and on those occasions he did not, so far as she
+could perceive, make any answer whatever to her salutation. He was
+changed, she thought. He had always been a morose-looking man, with
+an iron jaw; but now there was a fixed venom and disquiet, as well
+as a new look of age, in the sallow face, which made it doubly
+unpleasing. She would have been sorry for his loneliness and his
+disappointment in Lucy but for the remembrance of his mean plot
+against David Grieve, and for a certain other little fact. A
+middle-aged woman, in a dowdy brown-stuff dress and black mantle,
+had begun to haunt the house. She sat with Purcell sometimes in the
+parlour downstairs, and sometimes he accompanied her out of doors.
+Mary Ann reported that she was a widow, a Mrs. Whymper, who
+belonged to the same chapel that Purcell did, and who was supposed
+by those who knew to have been making up to him for some time.
+
+'And perhaps she'll get him after all,' said the little ugly maid,
+with a grin. 'Catch me staying then, Miss Dora! It's bad enough as
+it is.'
+
+On one occasion Dora came across the widow, waiting in the little
+sitting-room. She was an angular person, with a greyish-brown
+complexion, a prominent mouth and teeth, and a generally snappish,
+alert look. After a few commonplaces, in which Mrs. Whymper was
+clearly condescending, she launched into a denunciation of Lucy's
+ill behaviour to her father, which at last roused Dora to defence.
+She waxed bold, and pointed out that Lucy might have been managed
+if her father had been a little more patient with her, had allowed
+her a few ordinary amusements, and had not insisted in forcing her
+at once, fresh from school, into ways and practices she did not
+naturally like, while she had never been trained to them by force
+of habit.
+
+'Hoity toity, Miss!' said the widow, bridling, 'young people are
+very uppish nowadays. They never seem to remember there is such a
+thing as the fifth commandment. In _my_ young days what a
+father said was law, and no questions asked; and I've seen many a
+Lancashire man take a stick to his gell for less provocation than
+this gell's given her feyther! I wonder at you, Miss Lomax, that I
+do, for backing her up. But I'm afraid from what I hear you've been
+taking up with a lot of Popish ways.'
+
+And the woman looked her up and down with an air which plainly said
+that she was on her own ground in that parlour, and might say
+exactly what she pleased there.
+
+'If I have, I don't see that it matters to you,' said Dora quietly,
+and retreated.
+
+Yes, certainly, a stepmother looked likely! Lucy in her bedroom
+upstairs knew nothing, and Dora decided to tell her nothing till
+she was stronger. But this new development made the child's future
+more uncertain than ever.
+
+On the day before her departure for Hastings, Lucy came out for a
+short walk, by way of hardening herself for the journey. She walked
+round the cathedral and up Victoria Street, and then, tired out
+with the exertion, she made her way in to Dora, to rest. Her face
+was closely hidden by a thick Shetland veil, for, in addition to
+her general pallor and emaciation, her usually clear and brilliant
+skin was roughened and blotched here and there by some effect of
+her illness; she could not bear to look at herself in the glass,
+and shrank from meeting any of her old acquaintances. It was,
+indeed, curious to watch the effect of the temporary loss of beauty
+upon her; her morbid impatience under it showed at every turn. But
+for it, Dora was convinced that she must and would have put herself
+in David Grieve's way again before leaving Manchester. As it was,
+she was still determined not to let him see her.
+
+She came in, much exhausted, and threw herself into Daddy's
+arm-chair with groans of self-pity. Did Dora think she would ever
+be strong again--ever be anything but an ugly fright? It was hard
+to have all this come upon you, just through doing a service to
+some one who didn't care.
+
+'Hasn't he heard yet that I've been ill?' she inquired petulantly.
+
+No; Dora did not think he had. Neither she nor Daddy had seen him.
+He must have been extra busy. But she would get Daddy to ask him up
+to supper directly, and tell him all about it.
+
+'And then, perhaps,' she said, looking up with a sweet, intense
+look--how little Lucy was able to decipher it!--'perhaps he may
+write a letter.'
+
+Lucy was cheered by this suggestion, and sat looking out of window
+for a while, idly watching the passers-by. But she could not let
+the one topic that absorbed her mind alone for long, and soon she
+was once more questioning Dora in close detail about David Grieve's
+sister and all that he had said about her. For, by way of obliging
+the child to realise some of the inconvenient burdens and
+obligations which were at that moment hanging round the young
+bookseller's neck, and making the very idea of matrimony ridiculous
+to him, Dora had repeated to her some of his confidences about
+himself and Louie. Lucy had not taken them very happily. Everything
+that turned up now seemed only to push her further out of sight and
+make her more insignificant. She was thirsting, with a woman's
+nascent passion and a schoolgirl's vanity, to be the centre and
+heroine of the play; and here she was reduced to the smallest and
+meanest of parts--a part that caught nobody's eye, do what she
+would.
+
+Suddenly she broke off what she was saying, and called to Dora:
+
+'_Do_ you see that pair of people, Dora? Come--come at once!
+What an extraordinary-looking girl!'
+
+Dora turned unwillingly, being absorbed in a golden halo which she
+had set herself to finish that day; then she dropped her needle,
+and pushed her stool back that she might see better. From the
+cathedral end of Market Place an elderly grey-haired man and a
+young girl were advancing along the pavement towards the Parlour.
+As they passed, the flower-sellers at the booths were turning to
+look at them, some persons in front of them were turning back, and
+a certain number of errand boys and other loungers were keeping
+pace with them, observing them. The man leant every now and then on
+a thick stick he carried, and looked uncertainly from house to
+house. He had a worn, anxious expression, and the helpless
+movements of short sight. Whenever he stopped the girl moved on
+alone, and he had to hurry after her again to catch her up. She,
+meanwhile, was perfectly conscious that she was being stared at,
+and stared in return with a haughty composure which seemed to draw
+the eyes of the passers-by after it like a magnet. She was very
+tall and slender, and her unusual height made her garish dress the
+more conspicuous. The small hat perched on her black hair was all
+bright scarlet, both the felt and the trimming; under her jacket,
+which was purposely thrown back, there was a scarlet bodice, and
+there was a broad band of scarlet round the edge of her black
+dress.
+
+Lucy could not take her eyes off her.
+
+'Did you _ever_ see anybody so handsome, Dora? But what a
+fast, horrid creature to dress like that! And just look at her; she
+won't wait for the old man, though he's calling to her--she goes on
+staring at everybody. They'll have a crowd, presently! Why, they're
+coming _here!_'
+
+For suddenly the girl stopped outside the doorway below, and
+beckoned imperiously to her companion. She said a few sharp words
+to him, and the pair upstairs felt the swing-door of the restaurant
+open and shut.
+
+Lucy, forgetting her weakness, ran eagerly to the sitting-room door
+and listened.
+
+There was a sound of raised voices below, and then the door at the
+foot of the stairs opened, and Daddy was heard shouting.
+
+'There--go along upstairs. My daughter, she'll speak to you. And
+don't you come back this way--a man can't be feeding Manchester and
+taking strangers about, all in the same twinkling of an eye, you
+know, not unless he happens to have a few spare bodies handy, which
+ain't precisely my case. My daughter 'll tell you what you want to
+know, and show you out by the private door. Dora!'
+
+Dora stood waiting rather nervously at the sitting-room door. The
+girl came up first, the old man behind her, bewildered and groping
+his way.
+
+'We're strangers here--we want somebody to show us the way. We've
+been to the book-shop in Half Street, and they sent us on here.
+They were just brutes to us at that book-shop,' said the girl, with
+a vindictive emphasis and an imperious self-possession which fairly
+paralysed Lucy and Dora. Lucy's eyes, moreover, were riveted on her
+face, on its colour, its fineness of feature, its brilliance and
+piercingness of expression. And what was the extraordinary likeness
+in it to something familiar?
+
+'Why!' said Dora, in a little cry, 'aren't you Mr. David Grieve's
+sister?'
+
+For she had traced the likeness before Lucy. 'Oh, it must be!'
+
+'Well, I am his sister, if you want to know,' said the stranger,
+looking astonished in her turn. 'He wrote to me to come up. And I
+lent the letter to uncle to read--that's his uncle--and he went and
+lost it somehow, fiddling about the fields while I was putting my
+things together. And then we couldn't think of the proper address
+there was in it--only the name of a man Purcell, in Half Street,
+that David said he'd been with for two years. So we went there to
+ask; and, _my!_--weren't they rude to us! There was an ugly
+black man there chivied us out in no time--wouldn't tell us
+anything. But as I was shutting the door the shopman whispered to
+me, "Try the Parlour--Market Place." So we came on here, you see.'
+
+And she stared about her, at the room, and at the girls, taking in
+everything with lightning rapidity--the embroidery frame, Lucy's
+veil and fashionably cut jacket, the shabby furniture, the queer
+old pictures.
+
+'Please come in,' said Dora civilly, 'and sit down. If you're
+strangers here, I'll just put on my hat and take you round. Mr.
+Grieve's a friend of ours. He's in Potter Street. You'll find him
+nicely settled by now. This is my cousin, Mr. Purcell's daughter.'
+
+And she ran upstairs, leaving Lucy to grapple with the new-comers.
+
+The two girls sat down, and eyed each other. Reuben stood patiently
+waiting.
+
+'Is the man at Half Street your father?' asked the new-comer,
+abruptly.
+
+'Yes,' said Lucy, conscious of the strangest mingling of admiration
+and dislike, as she met the girl's wonderful eyes.
+
+'Did he and Davy fall out?'
+
+'They didn't get on about Sundays,' said Lucy, unwillingly, glad of
+the sheltering veil which enabled her to hold her own against this
+masterful creature.
+
+'Is your father strict about chapel and that sort of thing?'
+
+Lucy nodded. She felt an ungracious wish to say as little as
+possible.
+
+David's sister laughed.
+
+'Davy was that way once--just for a bit--afore he ran away,
+_I_ knew he wouldn't keep it on.'
+
+Then, with a queer look over her shoulder at her uncle, she
+relapsed into silence. Her attention was drawn to Dora's frame, and
+she moved up to it, bending over it and lifting the handkerchief
+that Dora had thrown across it.
+
+'You mustn't touch it!' said Lucy, hastily, provoked, she knew not
+why, by every movement the girl made. 'It's very particular work.'
+
+'I'm used to fine things,' said the other, scornfully. 'I'm a
+silk-weaver--that's my trade--all the best brocades, drawing-room
+trains, that style of thing. If you didn't handle _them_
+carefully, you'd know it. Yes, she's doing it well,' and the
+speaker put her head down and examined the work critically. 'But it
+must go fearful slow, compared to a loom.'
+
+'She does it splendidly,' said Lucy, annoyed; 'she's getting quite
+famous for it. That's going to a great church up in London, and
+she's got more orders than she can take.'
+
+'Does she get good pay?' asked the girl eagerly.
+
+'I don't know,' replied Lucy shortly.
+
+'Because, if there's good pay,' said the other, examining the work
+again closely, 'I'd soon learn it--why I'd learn it in a week, you
+see! If I stay here I shan't get no more silk-weaving. And of
+course I'll stay. I'm just sick of the country. I'd have come up
+long ago if I'd known where to find Davy.'
+
+'I'm ready,' said Dora in a constrained voice beside her.
+
+Louie Grieve looked up at her.
+
+'Oh, you needn't look so glum!--I haven't hurt it. I'm used to good
+things, stuffs at two guineas a yard, and the like of that. What
+money do you take a week?' and she pointed to the frame.
+
+Something in the tone and manner made the question specially
+offensive. Dora pretended not to hear it.
+
+'Shall we go now?' she said, hurriedly covering her precious work
+up from those sacrilegious fingers and putting it away.
+
+'Lucy, you ought to be going home.'
+
+'Well, I will directly,' said Lucy. 'Don't you bother about me.'
+
+They all went downstairs. Lucy put up her veil, and pressed her
+face against the window, watching for them. As she saw them cross
+Market Street, she was seized with hungry longing. She wanted to be
+going with them, to talk to him herself--to let him see what she
+had gone through for him. It would be months and months, perhaps,
+before they met again. And Dora would see him--his horrid
+sister--everyone but she. He would forget all about her, and she
+would be dull and wretched at Hastings.
+
+But as she turned away in her restless pain, she caught sight of
+her changed face in the cracked looking-glass over the mantelpiece.
+Her white lips tightened. She drew down her veil, and went home.
+
+Meanwhile Dora led the way to Potter Street. Louie took little
+notice of any attempts to talk to her. She was wholly engaged in
+looking about her and at the shops. Especially was she attracted by
+the drapers' windows in St. Ann's Square, pronouncing her opinion
+loudly and freely as to their contents.
+
+Dora fell meditating. Young Grieve would have his work cut out for
+him, she thought, if this extraordinary sister were really going to
+settle with him. She was very like him--strangely like him. And yet
+in the one face there was a quality which was completely lacking in
+the other, and which seemed to make all the difference. Dora tried
+to explain what she meant to herself, and failed.
+
+'Here's Potter Street,' she said, as they turned into it. 'And
+that's his shop--that one with the stall outside. Oh, there he is!'
+
+David was in fact standing on his step talking to a customer who
+was turning over the books outside.
+
+Louie looked at him. Then she began to run. Old Grieve too, crimson
+all over, and evidently much excited, hurried on. Dora fell behind,
+her quick sympathies rising.
+
+'They won't want me interfering,' she said, turning round.
+
+'I'll just go back to my work.'
+
+Meanwhile, in David's little back room, which he had already swept
+and garnished--for after his letter of the night before, he had
+somehow expected Louie, to rush upon him by the earliest possible
+train--the meeting of these long-sundered persons took place.
+
+David saw Reuben come in with amazement.
+
+'Why, Uncle Reuben! Well, I'm real glad to see you. I didn't think
+you'd have been able to leave the farm. Well, this is my bit of a
+place, you see. What do you think of it?'
+
+And, holding his sister by the hand, the young fellow looked
+joyously at his uncle, pride in his new possessions and the
+recollection of his destitute childhood rushing upon him together
+as he spoke.
+
+'Aye, it's a fine beginning yo've made, Davy,' said the old man,
+cautiously looking round, first at the little room, with its neat
+bits of new furniture in Louie's honour, and then through the glass
+door at the shop, which was now heavily lined with books. 'Yo wor
+allus a cliver lad, Davy. A' think a'll sit down.'
+
+And Reuben, subsiding into a chair, fell forthwith into an
+abstraction, his old knotted hands trembling a little on his knees.
+
+Meanwhile David was holding Louie at arm's-length to look at her.
+He had kissed her heartily when she came in first, and now he was
+all pleasure and excitement.
+
+''Pon my word, Louie, you've grown as high as the roof! I say,
+Louie, what's become of that smart pink dress you wore at last
+"wake," and of that overlooker, with the moustaches, from New
+Mills, you walked about with all day?'
+
+She stared at him open-mouthed.
+
+'What do you mean by that?' she said, quickly.
+
+David laughed out.
+
+'And who was it gave Jim Wigson a box on the ears last fifth of
+November, in the lane just by the Dye-works, eh, Miss Louie?--and danced
+with young Redway at the Upper Mill dance, New Year's Day?--and had
+words with Mr. James at the office about her last "cut," a fortnight
+ago--eh, Louie?'
+
+'What _ever_ do you mean?' she said, half crossly, her colour
+rising. 'You've been spying on me.'
+
+She hated to be mystified. It made her feel herself in some one
+else's power; and the wild creature in her blood grew restive.
+
+'Why, I've known all about you these four years!' the lad began,
+with dancing eyes. Then suddenly his voice changed, and dropped: 'I
+say, look at Uncle Reuben!'
+
+For Reuben sat bent forward, his light blurred eyes looking out
+straight before him, with a singular yet blind intentness, as
+though, while seeing nothing round about him, they passed beyond
+the walls of the little room to some vision of their own.
+
+'I don't know whatever he came for,' began Louie, as they both
+examined him.
+
+'Uncle Reuben,' said David, going up to him and touching him on the
+shoulder, 'you look tired. You'll be wanting some dinner. I'll just
+send my man, John Dalby, round the corner for something.'
+
+And he made a step towards the door, but Reuben raised his hand.
+
+'Noa, noa, Davy! Shut that door, wiltha?'
+
+David wondered, and shut it.
+
+Then Reuben gave a long sigh, and put his hand deep into his coat
+pocket, with the quavering, uncertain movement characteristic of
+him.
+
+'Davy, my lad, a've got summat to say to tha.'
+
+And with many hitches, while the others watched him in
+astonishment, he pulled out of his pocket a canvas bag and put it
+down on an oak stool in front of him. Then he undid the string of
+it with his large awkward fingers, and pushed the stool across to
+David.
+
+'Theer's sixty pund theer, Davy--sixty pund! Yo can keawnt it--it's
+aw reet. A've saved it for yo, this four year--four year coom lasst
+Michaelmas Day. Hannah nor nobory knew owt abeawt it. But it's
+yourn--it's yor share, being t' half o' Mr. Gurney's money. Louie's
+share--that wor different; we had a reet to that, she bein a growin
+girl, and doin nowt mich for her vittles. Fro the time when yo
+should ha had it--whether for wages or for 'prenticin--an yo
+_could_ na ha it, because Hannah had set hersen agen it,--a
+saved it for tha, owt o' t' summer cattle moastly, without tellin
+nobory, so as not to mak words.'
+
+David, bewildered, had taken the bag into his hand. Louie's eyes
+were almost out of her head with curiosity and amazement. '_Mr.
+Gurney's money!_' What did he mean? It was all double-Dutch to
+them.
+
+David, with an effort, controlled himself, being now a man and a
+householder. He stood with his back against the shop door, his gaze
+fixed on Reuben.
+
+'Now, Uncle Reuben, I don't understand a bit of what you've been
+saying, and Louie don't either. Who's Mr. Gurney? and what's his
+money?'
+
+Unconsciously the young man's voice took a sharp, magisterial note.
+Reuben gave another long sigh. He was now leaning on his stick,
+staring at the floor.
+
+'Noa,--a' know yo doan't understan; a've got to tell tha--'at's t'
+worst part on 't. An I'm soa bad at tellin. Do yo mind when yor
+feyther deed, Davy?' he said suddenly, looking up.
+
+David nodded,--a red flush of presentiment spread itself over his
+face--his whole being hung on Reuben's words.
+
+'He sent for me afore he deed,' continued Reuben, slowly; 'an he
+towd me aw about his affairs. Six hunderd pund he'd got
+saved--_six-hunderd-pund!_ Aye, it wor a lot for a yoong mon
+like him, and after sich a peck o' troobles! And he towd me Mr.
+Gurney ud pay us th' interest for yor bringin-up--th' two on yo; an
+whan yo got big, Davy, I wor to tak keawnsel wi Mr. Gurney, an, if
+yo chose for t' land, yo were to ha yor money for a farm, when yo
+wor big eneuf, an if yo turned agen th' land, yo wor to be
+'prenticed to soom trade, an ha yor money when yo wanted it,--Mr.
+Gurney bein willin. An I promised him I'd deal honest wi his
+childer, an--'
+
+Reuben paused painfully. He was wrestling with his conscience, and
+groping for words about his wife. The brother and sister sat
+open-mouthed, pale with excitement, afraid of losing a single
+syllable.
+
+'An takkin it awthegither,' he said, bringing each word out with an
+effort, 'I doan't think, by t' Lord's mercy, as I've gone soa mich
+astray, though I ha been mich troobled this four year wi thowts o'
+Sandy--my brither Sandy--an wi not knowin wheer yo wor gone, Davy.
+Bit yo seem coom to an honest trade--an Louie theer ha larnt a
+trade too,--an addle't a bit money,--an she's a fine-grown lass--'
+
+He turned a slow, searching look upon her, as though he were
+pleading a cause before some unseen judge.
+
+'An theer's yor money, Davy. It's aw th' same, a'm thinkin, whether
+yo get it fro me or fro Mr. Gurney. An here--'
+
+He rose, and unbuttoning his inner coat, fumbled in the pocket of
+it till he found a letter.
+
+'An here is a letter for Mr. Gurney. If yo gie me a pen, Davy, I'll
+write in to 't yor reet address, an put it in t' post as I goo to
+t' station. I took noatice of a box as I coom along. An then--'
+
+He stood still a moment pondering, one outspread hand on the
+letter.
+
+'An then theer's nowt moor as a can remember,--an your aunt ull be
+wearyin; an it's but reet she should know now, at wonst, abeawt t'
+money a've saved this four year, an t' letter to Mr. Gurney. Yo
+understan--when yor letter came this mornin--t'mon browt it up to
+Louie abeawt eight o'clock--she towd me fust out i' th' yard--an I
+said to her, 'Doan't you tell yor aunt nowt abeawt it, an we'st meet
+at t' station.' An I made soom excuse to Hannah abeawt gooin ower
+t' Scout after soom beeasts--an--an--Louie an me coom thegither.'
+
+He passed his other hand painfully across his brow. The travail of
+expression, the moral struggle of the last twenty-four hours,
+seemed to have aged him before them.
+
+David sat looking at him in a stupefied silence. A light was
+breaking in upon him, transfiguring, combining, interpreting a
+hundred scattered remembrances of his boyhood. But Louie, the
+instant her uncle stopped, broke into a siring of questions, shrill
+and breathless, her face quite white, her eyes glittering. Reuben
+seemed hardly to hear her, and in the middle of them David said
+sharply,
+
+'Stop that, Louie, and let me talk to Uncle Reuben!'
+
+He drew the letter from under Reuben's fingers, and went on,
+steadily looking up into his uncle's face:
+
+'You'll let me read it, uncle, and I'll get you a pen directly to
+put in the address. But first will you tell us about father? You
+never did--you nor Aunt Hannah. And about mother, too?'
+
+He said the last words with difficulty, having all his life been
+pricked by a certain instinct about his mother, which had, however,
+almost nothing definite to work upon. Reuben thought a minute, then
+sat down again patiently.
+
+'Aye, a'll tell tha. Theer's nobory else can. An tha ought to know,
+though it'll mebbe be a shock to tha.'
+
+And, with his head resting against his stick, he began to tell the
+story of his brother and his brother's marriage as he remembered
+it.
+
+First came the account of Sandy's early struggles, as Sandy himself
+had described them on that visit which he had paid to the farm in
+the first days of his prosperity; then a picture of his ultimate
+success in business, as it had appeared to the dull elder brother
+dazzled by the younger's 'cliverness.'
+
+'Aye, he might ha been a great mon; he might ha coom to varra high
+things, might Sandy,' said Reuben solemnly, his voice suddenly
+rising, 'bit for th' hizzy that ruined him!'
+
+Both his hearers made an involuntary movement. But Reuben had now
+lost all count of them. He was intent on one thing, and capable
+only of one thing. They had asked him for his story, and he was
+telling it, with an immense effort of mind, recovering the past as
+best he could, and feeling some of it over again intensely.
+
+So when he came to the marriage, he told the story like one
+thinking it out to himself, with an appalling plainness of phrase.
+It was, of course, impossible for him to _explain_ Sandy's
+aberration--there were no resources in him equal to the task.
+Louise Suveret became in his account what she had always remained
+in his imagination since Sandy's employers told him what was known
+of her story--a mere witch and devil, sent for his brother's
+perdition. All his resentment against his brother's fate had passed
+into his hatred of this creature whom he had never seen. Nay, he
+even held up the picture of her hideous death before her children
+with a kind of sinister triumph. So let the ungodly and the harlot
+perish!
+
+David stood opposite to the speaker all the while, motionless, save
+for an uneasy movement here and there when Reuben's words grew more
+scripturally frank than usual. Louie's face was much more positive
+than David's in what it said. Reuben and Reuben's vehemence annoyed
+and angered her. She frowned at him from under her black brows. It
+was evident that he, rather than his story, excited her.
+
+'An we buried him aw reet an proper,' said Reuben at last, wiping
+his brow, damp with this unwonted labour of brain and tongue. 'Mr.
+Gurney he would ha it aw done handsome; and we put him in a corner
+o' Kensal Green, just as close as might be to whar they'd put her
+after th' crowner had sat on her. Yor feyther had left word, an Mr.
+Gurney would ha nowt different. But it went agen me--aye, it
+_did_--to leave him wi _her_ after aw!'
+
+And falling suddenly silent, Reuben sat wrapped in a sombre mist of
+memory.
+
+Then Louie broke out, rolling and unrolling the ribbons of her hat
+in hot fingers.
+
+'I don't believe half on't--I don't see how you could know--nor Mr.
+Gurney either.'
+
+Reuben looked round bewildered. Louie got up noisily, went to the
+window and threw it open, as though oppressed by the narrowness of
+the room.
+
+'No, I don't,' she repeated, defiantly--'I don't believe the half
+on't. But I'll find out some day.'
+
+She leaned her elbows on the sill, and, looking out into the
+squalid bit of yard, threw a bit of grit that lay on the window at
+a cat that sat sleepily blinking on the flags outside.
+
+Reuben rose heavily.
+
+'Gie me pen and ink, Davy, an let me go.'
+
+The young man brought it him without a word. Reuben put in the
+address.
+
+'Ha yo read it, Davy?'
+
+David started. In his absorption he had forgotten to read it.
+
+'I wor forced to write it i' the top sheepfold,' Reuben began to
+explain apologetically, then stopped suddenly. Several times he had
+been on the point of bringing Hannah into the conversation, and had
+always refrained. He refrained now. David read it. It was written
+in Reuben's most laborious business style, and merely requested
+that Mr. Gurney would now communicate with Sandy's son direct on
+the subject of his father's money. He had left Needham Farm, and
+was old enough to take counsel himself with Mr. Gurney in future as
+to what should be done with it.
+
+Reuben looked over David's shoulder as he read.
+
+'An Louie?' he said uncertainly, at the end, jerking his thumb
+towards her.
+
+'I'm stayin here,' said Louie peremptorily, still looking out of
+window.
+
+Reuben said nothing. Perhaps a shade of relief lightened his old
+face.
+
+When the letter was handed back to him, he sealed it and put it
+into his pocket, buttoning up his coat for departure.
+
+'Yo wor talkin abeawt dinner, Davy--or summat,' said the old man,
+courteously.' Thankee kindly. I want for nowt. I mun get home--I
+mun get home.'
+
+Louie, standing absorbed in her own excited thoughts, could hardly
+be disturbed to say good-bye to him. David, still in a dream, led
+him through the shop, where Reuben peered about him with a certain
+momentary curiosity.
+
+But at the door he said good-bye in a great hurry and ran down the
+steps, evidently impatient to be rid of his nephew.
+
+David turned and came slowly back through the little piled-up shop,
+where John, all eyes and ears, sat on a high stool in the corner,
+into the living room.
+
+As he entered it Louie sprang upon him, and seizing him with both
+hands, danced him madly round the little space of vacant boards,
+till she tripped her foot over the oak stool, and sank down on a
+chair, laughing wildly.
+
+'How much of that money am I going to have?' she demanded suddenly,
+her arms crossed over her breast, her eyes brilliant, her whole
+aspect radiant and exulting.
+
+David was standing over the fire, looking down into it, and made no
+answer. He had disengaged himself from her as soon as he could.
+
+Louie waited a while; then, with a contemptuous lip and a shrug of
+the shoulders, she got up.
+
+'What's the good of worriting about things, I'd like to know? You
+won't do 'em no good. Why don't you think about the money? My word,
+won't Aunt Hannah be mad! How am I to get my parcels from the
+station, and where am I to sleep?'
+
+'You can go and see the house,' said David, shortly. 'The lodgers
+upstairs are out, and there's the key of the attic.'
+
+He threw it to her, and she ran off. He had meant to take her in
+triumphal progress through the little house, and show her all the
+changes he had been making for her benefit and his own. But a gulf
+had yawned between them. He was relieved to see her go, and when he
+was left alone he laid his arms on the low mantelpiece and hid his
+face upon them. His mother's story, his father's fate, seemed to be
+burning into his heart.
+
+Reuben hurried home through the bleak March evening. In the train
+he could not keep himself still, fidgeting so much that his
+neighbours eyed him with suspicion, and gave him a wide berth. As
+he started to walk up to Kinder a thin, raw sleet came on. It drove
+in his face, chilling him through and through, as he climbed the
+lonely road, where the black moorland farms lay all about him, seen
+dimly through the white and drifting veil of the storm. But he was
+conscious of nothing external. His mind was absorbed by the thought
+of his meeting with Hannah, and by the excited feeling that one of
+the crises of his timid and patient life was approaching. During
+the last four years they had been very poor, in spite of Mr.
+Gurney's half-yearly cheque, partly because of the determination
+with which he had stuck to his secret saving. Hannah would think
+they were going now to be poorer still, but he meant to prove to
+her that what with Louie's departure and the restoration of their
+whole income to its natural channels, there would not be so much
+difference. He conned his figures eagerly, rehearsing what he would
+say. For the rest he walked lightly and briskly. The burden of his
+brother's children had dropped away from him, and in those strange
+inner colloquies of his he could look Sandy in the face again.
+
+Had Hannah discovered his flight, he wondered? Some one he was
+afraid, might have seen him and Louie at the station and told
+tales. He was not sure that one of the Wigsons had not been hanging
+about the station yard. And that letter of David's to Louie, which
+in his clumsy blundering way he had dropped somewhere about the
+farm buildings or the house, and had not been able to find again!
+It gave him a cold sweat to think that in his absence Hannah might
+have come upon it and drawn her own conclusions. As he followed out
+this possibility in his mind, his step quickened till it became
+almost a run.
+
+Aye, and Hannah had been ailing of late--there had been often
+'summat wrang wi her.' Well, they were both getting into years.
+Perhaps now that Louie with her sharp tongue and aggravating ways
+was gone, now that there was only him to do for, Hannah would take
+things easier.
+
+He opened the gate into the farmyard and walked up to the house
+door with a beating heart. It struck him as strange that the front
+blinds were not drawn, for it was nearly dark and the storm beat
+against the windows. There was a glimmer of fire in the room, but
+he could see nothing clearly. He turned the handle and went into
+the passage, making a clatter on purpose. But nothing stirred in
+the house, and he pushed open the kitchen door, which stood ajar,
+filled with a vague alarm.
+
+Hannah was sitting in the rocking-chair, by the fire. Beside her
+was the table partly spread with tea, which, however, had been
+untouched. At Reuben's entrance she turned her head and looked at
+him fixedly. In the dim light--a mixture of the dying fire and of
+the moonlight from outside--he could not see her plainly, but he
+felt that there was something strange, and he ran forward to her.
+
+'Hannah, are yo bad?--is there owt wrang wi yo?'
+
+Then his seeking eye made out a crumpled paper in her left hand,
+and he knew at once that it must be Davy's letter.
+
+Before he could speak again she gave him a push backward with her
+free hand, and said with an effort:
+
+'Where's t' gell?'
+
+'Louie? She's left i' Manchester. A've found Davy, Hannah.'
+
+There was a pause, after which he said, trembling:
+
+'Shall I get yo summat, Hannah?'
+
+A hoarse voice came out of the dark:
+
+'Ha doon wi yo! Yo ha been leein to me. Yo wor seen at t' station.'
+
+Reuben sat down.
+
+'Hannah,' he said, 'yo mun just listen to me.'
+
+And taking his courage in both hands, he told everything without a
+break: how he had been 'feeart' of what Sandy might say to him 'at
+th' joodgment,' how he had saved and lied, and how now he had seen
+David, had written to Mr. Gurney, and stopped the cheques for good
+and all.
+
+When he came to the letter to Mr. Gurney, Hannah sat suddenly
+upright in her chair, grasping one arm of it.
+
+'It shall mak noa difference to tha, a tell tha,' he cried hastily,
+putting up his hand, fearing he knew not what, 'nobbut a few
+shillins ony way. I'll work for tha an mak it up.'
+
+She made a sound which turned him cold with terror--a sound of
+baffled weakness, pain, vindictive passion all in one--then she
+fell helplessly to one side in her chair, and her grey head dropped
+on her shoulder.
+
+In another moment he was crying madly for help in the road outside.
+For long there was no answer--only the distant roar of the Downfall
+and the sweep of the wind. Then a labourer, on the path leading to
+the Wigsons' farm, heard and ran up.
+
+An hour later a doctor had been got hold of, and Hannah was lying
+upstairs, tended by Mrs. Wigson and Reuben.
+
+'A paralytic seizure,' said the doctor to Reuben. 'This woman says
+she's been failing for some time past. She's lived and worked hard,
+Mr. Grieve; _you_ know that. And there's been some shock.'
+
+Reuben explained incoherently. The doctor did not understand, and
+did not care, being a dull man and comparatively new to the place.
+He did what he could, said she would recover--oh, yes, she would
+recover; but, of course, she could never be the same woman again.
+Her working days were done.
+
+A servant came over from Wigsons' to sit up with Reuben, Mrs.
+Wigson being too delicate to undertake it. The girl went to lie
+down first for an hour or two in the room across the landing, and
+he was left alone in the gaunt room with his wife. Poor quailing
+soul! As he sat there in the windy darkness, hour after hour,
+open-mouthed and open-eyed, he was steeped in terror--terror of the
+future, of its forlornness, of his own feebleness, of death. His
+heart clave piteously to the unconscious woman beside him, for he
+had nothing else. It seemed to him that the Lord had indeed dealt
+hardly with him, thus to strike him down on the day of his great
+atonement!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+No news of the catastrophe at Needham Farm reached the brother and
+sister in Potter Street. The use of the pen had always been to
+Reuben one of the main torments and mysteries of life, and he had
+besides all those primitive instincts of silence and concealment
+which so often in the peasant nature accompany misfortune. His
+brain-power, moreover, was absorbed by his own calamity and by the
+changes in the routine of daily life which his wife's state brought
+upon him, so that immediately after his great effort of reparation
+towards them--an effort which had taxed the whole man physically
+and mentally--his brother's children and their affairs passed for a
+while strangely and completely from his troubled mind.
+
+Meanwhile, what a transformation he had wrought in their fortunes!
+When the shock of his parents' story had subsided in him, and that
+other shock of jarring temperaments, which the first hour of
+Louie's companionship had brought with it, had been for the time
+forgotten again in the stress of plans and practical detail, David
+felt to the full the exhilaration of his new prospects. He had
+sprung at a leap, as it seemed to him, from the condition of the
+boy-adventurer to that of the man of affairs. And as he looked back
+upon their childhood and realised that all the time, instead of
+being destitute and dependent orphans, they and their money had
+really been the mainstay of Hannah and the farm, the lad seemed to
+cast from him the long humiliation of years, to rise in stature and
+dignity. That old skinflint and hypocrite, Aunt Hannah! With the
+usual imperfect sympathy of the young he did not much realise
+Reuben's struggle. But he bore his uncle no grudge for these years'
+delay. The contrivances and hardships of his Manchester life had
+been, after all, enjoyment. Without them and the extravagant
+self-reliance they had developed in him his pride and ambition
+would have run less high. And at this moment the nerve and savour
+of existence came to him from pride and from ambition.
+
+But first of all he had to get his money. As soon as Mr. Gurney's
+answer to Reuben's letter came, David took train for London, made
+his way to the great West-End shop which had employed his father,
+and saw the partner who had taken charge of Sandy's money for so
+long. Mr. Gurney, a shrewd and pompous person, was interested in
+seeing Grieve's son, inquired what he was about, ran over the terms
+of a letter to himself, which he took out of a drawer, and then,
+with a little flourish as to his own deserts in the matter of the
+guardianship of the money--a flourish neither unnatural nor
+unkindly--handed over to the lad both the letter and a cheque on a
+London bank, took his receipt, talked a little, but with a blunted
+memory, about the lad's father, gave him a little general business
+advice, asked whether his sister was still alive, and bade him good
+morning. Both were satisfied, and the young man left the office
+with the cheque lying warm in his pocket, looking slowly and
+curiously round the shop where his father had earned it, as he
+walked away.
+
+Outside he found himself close to Trafalgar Square, and, striking
+down to the river, he went to sit on the Embankment and ponder the
+enclosures which Mr. Gurney had given him. First he took out the
+cheque, with infinite care, lest the breeze on the Embankment
+should blow it out of his hand, and spread it on his knee.
+600 pounds! As he stared at each letter and flourish his eyes
+widened anew; and when he looked up across the grey and misty river,
+the figures still danced before him, and in his exultation he
+could have shouted the news to the passers-by. Then, when the
+precious paper had been safely stowed away again, he hesitatingly
+took out the other--his father's dying memorandum on the subject of
+his children, so he had understood Mr. Gurney. It was old and brown;
+it had been written with anguish, and it could only be deciphered
+with difficulty. There had been no will properly so called. Sandy
+had placed more confidence in 'the firm' than in the law, and had
+left behind him merely the general indication of his wishes in the
+hands of the partner who had specially befriended him. The
+provisions of it were as Sandy had described them to Reuben on his
+deathbed. Especially did the father insist that there should be
+no artificial restriction of age. 'I wanted money most when I was
+nineteen, and I could have used it just as well then as I could at
+any later time.'
+
+So he might have been a rich man at least a year earlier. Well,
+much as he had loathed Purcell, he was glad, on the whole, that
+things were as they were. He had been still a great fool, he
+reflected, a year ago.
+
+Then, as to Louie, the letter ran: 'Let Davy have all the money, and
+let him manage for her. I won't divide it; he must judge. He may
+want it all, and it may be best for them both he should have it.
+He's got a good heart; I know that; he'll not rob his sister. I lay
+it on him, now I'm dying, to be patient with her, and look after
+her. She's not like other children. But it's not her fault; it was
+born in her. Let him see her married to a decent man, and then give
+her what's honestly hers. That little lad has nursed me like a
+woman since I've been ill. He was always a good lad to me, and I'd
+like him to know when he's grown up that his father loved him--'
+
+But here the poor laboured scrawl came to an end, save for a few
+incoherent strokes. David thrust it back into his pocket. His cheek
+was red; his eyes burnt; he sat for long, with his elbows on his
+knees, staring at the February river. The choking, passionate
+impulse to comfort his father he had felt so often as a child was
+there again, by association, alive and piteous.
+
+Suddenly he woke up with a start. There, to either hand, lay the
+bridges, with the moving figures atop and the hurrying river below.
+And from one of them his mother had leapt when she destroyed
+herself. In the trance of thought that followed, it was to him as
+though he felt her wild nature, her lawless blood, stirring within
+him, and realised, in a fierce, reluctant way, that he was hers as
+well as his father's. In a sense, he shared Reuben's hatred; for
+he, best of all, knew what she had made his father suffer. Yet the
+thought of her drew his restless curiosity after it. Where did she
+come from? Who were her kindred? From the south of France, Reuben
+thought. The lad's imagination travelled with difficulty and
+excitement to the far and alien land whence half his being had
+sprung. A few scraps of poetry and history recurred to him--a
+single tattered volume of 'Monte Cristo,' which he had lately
+bought with an odd lot at a sale--but nothing that suggested to his
+fancy anything like the peasant farm in the Mont Ventoux, within
+sight of Arles, where Louise Suveret's penurious childhood had been
+actually cradled.
+
+Two o'clock struck from the belfry of St. Paul's, looming there to
+his left in the great bend of the river. At the sound he shook off
+all his thoughts. Let him see something of London. He had two hours
+and a half before his train from Euston. Westminster first--a hasty
+glance; then an omnibus to St. Paul's, that he might look down upon
+the city and its rush; then north. He had a map with him, and his
+quick intelligence told him exactly how to use his time to the best
+advantage. Years afterwards he was accustomed to look back on this
+hour spent on the top of an omnibus, which was making its difficult
+way to the Bank through the crowded afternoon streets, as one of
+the strong impressions of his youth. Here was one centre of things:
+Westminster represented another; and both stood for knowledge,
+wealth, and power. The boy's hot blood rose to the challenge. His
+foot was on the ladder, and many men with less chances than he had
+risen to the top. At this moment, small Manchester tradesman that
+he was, he had the constant presentiment of a wide career.
+
+That night he let himself into his own door somewhere about nine
+o'clock. What had Louie been doing with herself all day? She was to
+have her first lesson from Dora Lomax; but she must have been dull
+since, unless Dora had befriended her.
+
+To his astonishment, as he shut the door he heard voices in
+the kitchen--Louie and _John_. John, the shy, woman-hating
+creature, who had received the news of Louie's expected advent in a
+spirit of mingled irritation and depression--who, after his first
+startled look at her as she passed through the shop, seemed to
+David to have fled the sight of her whenever it was possible!
+
+Louie was talking so fast and laughing so much that neither of them
+had heard David's latchkey, and in his surprise the brother stood
+still a moment in the dark, looking round the kitchen-door, which
+stood a little open. Louie was sitting by the fire with some yards
+of flowered cotton stuff on her knee, at which she was sewing; John
+was opposite to her on the oak stool, crouched over a box of nails,
+from which he was laboriously sorting out those of a certain size,
+apparently at her bidding, for she gave him sharp directions from
+time to time. But his toil was intermittent, for whenever her
+sallies were louder or more amusing than usual his hand paused, and
+he sat staring at her, his small eyes expanding, a sympathetic grin
+stealing over his mouth.
+
+It seemed to David that she was describing her lover of the winter;
+he caught her gesture as she illustrated her performance with Jim
+Wigson--the boxing of the amorous lout's ears in the lane by the
+Dye-works. Her beautiful curly black hair was combed to-night into
+a sort of wild halo round her brow and cheeks, and in this
+arrangement counteracted the one fault of the face--a slightly
+excessive length from forehead to chin. But the brilliance of the
+eyes, the redness of the thin lips over the small and perfect
+teeth, the flush on the olive cheek, the slender neck, the
+distinction and delicacy of every sweeping line and curve--for the
+first time even David realised, as he stood there in the dark, that
+his sister was an extraordinary beauty. Strange! Her manner and
+voice had neither natural nor acquired refinement; and yet in the
+moulding of the head and face there was a dignity and perfection--a
+touch, as it were, of the grand style--which marked her out in a
+northern crowd and riveted the northern eye. Was it the trace of
+another national character, another civilisation, longer descended,
+less mixed, more deeply graven than ours?
+
+But what was that idiot John doing here?--the young master wanted
+to know. He coughed loudly and hung up his hat and his stick, to
+let them hear that he was there. The pair in the kitchen started.
+Louie sprang up, flung down her work, and ran out to him.
+
+'Well,' said she breathlessly, 'have you got it?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+She gave a little shriek of excitement.
+
+'Show it then.'
+
+'There's nothing to show but a cheque. It's all right. Is there
+anything for supper?'
+
+'There's some bread and cheese and cold apple-pie in there,' said
+Louie, annoyed with him already; then, turning her head over her
+shoulder, 'Mr. Dalby, I'll trouble you to get them out.'
+
+With awkward alacrity John flew to do her bidding. When the lad had
+ransacked the cupboard and placed all the viands it contained on
+the table, he looked at David. That young man, with a pucker in his
+brow, was standing by the fire with his hands in his pockets,
+making short answers to Louie's sharp and numerous questions.
+
+'That's all I can find,' said John. 'Shall I run for something?'
+
+'Thanks,' said David, still frowning, and sat him down, 'that 'll
+do.'
+
+Louie made a face at John behind her brother's back. The assistant
+slowly flushed a deep red. In this young fellow, with his money
+buttoned on his breast, both he and Louie for the first time
+realised the master.
+
+'Well, good night,' he said, hesitating, 'I'm going.'
+
+David jumped up and went with him into the passage.
+
+'Look here,' he said abruptly, 'you and I have got some business to
+talk to-morrow. I'm not going to keep you slaving here for nothing
+now that I can afford to pay you.'
+
+'Are you going to turn me off?' said the other hastily.
+
+David laughed. The cloud had all cleared from his brow.
+
+'Don't be such a precious fool!' he said. 'Now be off--and seven
+sharp. I must go at it like ten horses to-morrow.'
+
+John disappeared into the night, and David went back to his sister.
+He found her looking red and excited, and sewing energetically.
+
+'Look here!' she said, lifting a threatening eye to him as he
+entered the room. 'I'm not going to be treated like a baby. If you
+don't tell me all about that money, I'll write to Mr. Gurney
+myself. It's part of it mine, and _I'll know_, so there!'
+
+'I'll tell you everything,' he said quietly, putting a hand into
+his coat pocket before he sat down to his supper again. 'There's the
+cheque--and there's our father's letter,--what Mr. Gurney gave me.
+There was no proper will--this was instead.'
+
+He pretended to eat, but in reality he watched her anxiously as she
+read it. The result was very much what he had expected. She ran
+breathlessly through it, then, with a look all flame and fury, she
+broke out--
+
+'Up _on_ my word! So you're going to take it all, and I'm to be
+beholden to you for every penny. I'd like to see myself!'
+
+'Now look here, Louie,' he said, firmly, pushing back his chair
+from the table, 'I want to explain things to you. I should like to
+tell you all about my business, and what I think of doing, and then
+you can judge for yourself. I'll not rob you or anyone.'
+
+Whereupon with a fierce gesture she caught up her work again, and
+he fell into long and earnest talk, setting his mind to the task.
+He explained to her that the arrival of this money--this
+capital--made just all the difference, that the whole of it would
+be infinitely more useful to him than the half, and that he
+proposed to employ it both for her benefit and his own. He had
+already cleared out the commission agent from the first floor, and
+moved down the lodgers--a young foreman and his wife--from the
+attics to the first-floor back. That left the two attics for
+himself and Louie, and gave him the front first-floor room, the
+best room in the house, for an extension of stock.
+
+'Why don't you turn those people out altogether?' said Louie,
+impatiently.' They pay very little, and you'll be wanting that room
+soon, very like.'
+
+'Well, I shall get it soon,' said David bluntly; 'but I can't get it
+now. Mrs. Mason's bad; she going to be confined.'
+
+'Well, I dare say she is!' cried Louie. 'That don't matter; she
+isn't confined yet.'
+
+David looked at her in amazement. Then his face hardened.
+
+'I'm not going to turn her out, I tell you,' he said, and
+immediately returned to his statement. Well, there were all sorts
+of ways in which he might employ his money. He might put up a shed
+in the back yard, and get a printing-press. He knew of a press and
+a very decent fount of type, to be had extremely cheap. John was a
+capital workman, and between them they might reprint some of the
+scarce local books and pamphlets, which were always sure of a sale.
+As to his stock, there were endless possibilities. He knew of a
+collection of rare books on early America, which belonged to a
+gentleman at Cheadle. He had been negotiating about them for some
+time. Now he would close at once; from his knowledge of the market
+the speculation was a certain one. He was also inclined to largely
+increase his stock of foreign books, especially in the technical
+and scientific direction. There was a considerable opening, he
+believed, for such books in Manchester; at any rate, he meant to
+try for it. And as soon as ever he could he should learn German.
+There was a fellow--a German clerk--who haunted the Parlour, who
+would teach him in exchange for English lessons.
+
+So, following a happy instinct, he opened to her all his mind, and
+talked to her as though they were partners in a firm. The event
+proved that he could have done nothing better. Very early in his
+exposition she began to put her wits to his, her irritation
+dropped, and he was presently astonished at the intelligence she
+showed. Every element almost in the problems discussed was
+unfamiliar to her, yet after a while a listener coming in might
+have thought that she too had been Purcell's apprentice, so nimbly
+had she gathered up the details involved, so quick she was to see
+David's points and catch his phrases. If there was no moral
+fellowship between them, judging from to-night, there bade fair to
+be a comradeship of intelligence.
+
+'There now,' he said, when he had come to the end of his budget,
+'you leave your half of the money to me. Mind, I agree it's your
+half, and I'll do the best I can with it. I'll pay you interest on
+it for two years, and I'll keep you. Then we'll see. And if you
+want to improve yourself a bit, instead of going to work at once,
+I'll pay for teachers. And look here, we'll keep good friends over
+it.'
+
+His keen eyes softened to a charming, half-melancholy smile. Louie
+took no notice; she was absorbed in meditation; and at the end of
+it, she said with a long breath--
+
+'Well, you may have it, and I'll keep an eye on the accounts. But
+you needn't think I'll sit at home "improving" myself: Not I. I'll
+do that church-work. That girl gave me a lesson this morning, and
+I'm going again to-morrow.'
+
+David received the news with satisfaction, remarking heartily that
+Dora Lomax was a real good sort, and if it weren't for her the
+Parlour and Daddy would soon be in a fix. He told the story of the
+Parlour, dwelling on Dora's virtues.
+
+'But she is a crank, though!' said Louie. 'Why, if you make free
+with her things a bit, or if you call 'em by the wrong names,
+she'll fly at you! How's anybody to know what they're meant for?'
+
+David laughed, and got up to get some books he was repairing. As he
+moved away he looked back a moment.
+
+'I say, Louie,' he began, hesitating, 'that fellow John's worked for
+me like a dozen, and has never taken a farthing from me. Don't you
+go and make a fool of him.'
+
+A flush passed over Louie's face. She lifted her hand and tucked
+away some curly ends of long hair that had fallen on her shoulders.
+
+'He's like one of Aunt Hannah's suet rolies,' she said, after a
+minute, with a gleam of her white teeth. 'Seems as if some one had
+tied him in a cloth and boiled him that shape.'
+
+Neither of them cared to go to bed. They sat up talking. David was
+mending, sorting, and pricing a number of old books he had bought
+for nothing at a country sale. He knew enough of bookbinding to do
+the repairing with much skill, showing the same neatness of finger
+in it that he had shown years ago in the carving of toy boats and
+water-wheels. Louie went on with her work, which proved to be a
+curtain for her attic. She meant to have that room nice, and she
+had been out buying a few things, whereby David understood--as
+indeed Reuben had said--that she had some savings. Moreover, with
+regard to certain odd jobs of carpentering, she had already pressed
+John into her service, which explained his lingering after hours,
+and his eagerness among the nails. As to the furniture David had
+bought for her, on which, in the intervals of his busy days, he had
+spent some time and trouble, and of which he was secretly proud,
+humble and cheap as it was--she took it for granted. He could not
+remember that she had said any 'thank you's' since she came.
+
+Still, youth and comradeship were pleasant. The den in which they
+sat was warm with light and fire, and was their own. Louie's
+exultation, too, in their change of fortune, which flashed out of
+her at every turn, was infectious, and presently his spirits rose
+with hers, and the two lost themselves in the excitement of large
+schemes and new horizons.
+
+After a time he found himself comparing notes with her as to that
+far-off crisis of his running away.
+
+'I suppose you heard somehow about Jim Wigson and me?' he asked
+her, his pulse quickening after all these years.
+
+She nodded with a little grin. He had already noticed, by the way,
+that she, while still living among the moors, had almost shaken
+herself free of the Kinder dialect, whereas it had taken quite a
+year of Manchester life to rub off his own Doric.
+
+'Well, you didn't imagine'--he went on--'I was going to stop after
+that? I could put a knife between Jim's ribs now when I think of
+it!'
+
+And, pushing his book away from him, he sat recalling that long
+past shame, his face, glowing with vindictive memory, framed in his
+hands.
+
+'I don't see, though, what you sneaked off for like that after all
+you'd promised me,' she said with energy.
+
+'No, it was hard on you,' he admitted. 'But I couldn't think of any
+other way out. I was mad with everybody, and just wanted to cut and
+run. But before I hit on that notion about Tom'(he had just been
+explaining to her in detail, not at all to her satisfaction, his
+device for getting regular news of her)'I used to spend half my
+time wondering what you'd do. I thought, perhaps, you'd run away
+too, and that would have been a kettle of fish.'
+
+'I did run away,' she said, her wild eyes sparkling--'twice.'
+
+'Jiminy!' said David with a schoolboy delight, 'let's hear!'
+
+Whereupon she took up her tale and told him a great deal that was
+still quite unknown to him. She told it in her own way with
+characteristic blindnesses and hardnesses, but the truth of it was
+this. The very day after David's departure she too had run away, in
+spite of the fact that Hannah was keeping her in something very
+like imprisonment. She supposed that David had gone to Manchester,
+and she meant to follow him there. But she had been caught begging
+the other side of Glossop by a policeman, who was a native of
+Clough End and knew all about her.
+
+'He made me come along back, but he must have got the mark on his
+wrist still where I bit him, I should think,' remarked Miss Louie,
+with a satisfaction untouched apparently by the lapse of time.
+
+The next attempt had been more serious. It was some months
+afterwards, and by this time she was in despair about David, and
+had made up her passionate mind that she would never see him again.
+But she loathed Hannah more and more, and at last, in the middle of
+a snowy February, the child determined to find her way over the
+Peak into the wild valley of the Woodlands, and so to Ashopton and
+Sheffield, in which last town she meant to go to service. But in
+the effort to cross the plateau of the Peak she very nearly lost
+her life. Long before she came in sight of the Snake Inn, on the
+Woodlands side, she sank exhausted in the snow, and, but for some
+Frimley shepherds who were out after their sheep, she would have
+drawn her last breath in that grim solitude. They carried her down
+to Frimley and dropped her at the nearest shelter, which happened
+to be Margaret Dawson's cottage.
+
+Margaret was then in the first smart of her widowhood. 'Lias was
+just dead, and she was withering physically and mentally under the
+heart-hunger of her loss. The arrival of the pallid, half-conscious
+child--David's sister, with David's eyes--for a time distracted and
+appeased her. She nursed the poor waif, and sent word to Needham
+Farm. Reuben came for the girl, and Margaret, partly out of
+compassion, partly out of a sense of her own decaying strength,
+bribed her to go back home by the promise of teaching her the
+silk-weaving.
+
+Louie learnt the trade with surprising quickness, and as she shot
+up in stature and her fingers gained in cunning and rapidity,
+Margaret became more bowed, helpless and 'fond,' until at last
+Louie did everything, brought home the weft and warp, set it up,
+worked off the 'cuts,' and took them to the warehouse in Clough End
+to be paid; while Margaret sat in the chimney corner, pining
+inwardly for 'Lias and dropping deeper day by day into the gulf of
+age. By this time of course various money arrangements had been
+made between them, superintended by Margaret's brother, a weaver in
+the same village who found it necessary to keep a very sharp eye on
+this girl-apprentice whom Margaret had picked up. Of late Louie had
+been paying Margaret rent for the loom, together with a certain
+percentage on the weekly earnings, practically for 'goodwill.' And
+on this small sum the widow had managed to live and keep her home,
+while Louie launched gloriously into new clothes, started a
+savings-bank book, and snapped her fingers for good and all at
+Hannah, who put up with her, however, in a sour silence because of
+Mr. Gurney's cheques.
+
+'And Margaret can't do _anything_ for herself now?' asked
+David. He had followed the story with eagerness. For years the
+remembrance had rankled in his mind how during his last months at
+Kinder, when 'Lias was dying, and the old pair were more in want
+than ever of the small services he had been accustomed to render
+them, he had forgotten and neglected his friends because he had
+been absorbed in the excitements of 'conversion,' so that when Tom
+Mullins had told him in general terms that his sister Louie was
+supporting both Margaret and herself, the news had soothed a
+remorse.
+
+'I should just think not!' said Louie in answer to his question.
+'She's gone most silly, and she hasn't got the right use of her
+legs either.'
+
+'Poor old thing!' said David softly, falling into a dream. He was
+thinking of Margaret in her active, happy days when she used to
+bake scones for him, or mend his clothes, or rate him for
+'worriting' 'Lias. Then wakening up he drew the book he was binding
+towards him again. 'She must have been precious glad to have you to
+do for her, Louie,' he said contentedly.
+
+'Do for her?' Louie opened her eyes. 'As if I could be worrited with
+her! I had my work to do, thank you. There was a niece used to come
+in and see to her. She used to get in my way dreadful sometimes.
+She'd have fits of thinking she could work the loom again, and I'd
+have to keep her away--regular _frighten_ her.'
+
+David started.
+
+'Who'll work the loom now?' he asked; his look and tone altering to
+match hers.
+
+'I'm sure I don't know,' said Louie, carelessly. 'Very like she'll
+not get anyone. The work's been slack a long while.'
+
+David suddenly drew back from his bookbinding.
+
+'When did you let her know, Louie--about me?' he asked quickly.
+
+'Let her know? Who was to let her know? Your letter came eight
+o'clock and our train started half-past ten. I'd just time to pitch
+my things together and that was about all.'
+
+'And you never sent, and you haven't written?'
+
+'You leave me alone,' said the girl, turning instantly sulky under
+his tone and look. 'It's nowt to you what I do.'
+
+'Why!' he said, his voice shaking, 'she'd be waiting and
+waiting--and she's got nothing else to depend on.'
+
+'There's her brother,' said Louie angrily, 'and if he won't take
+her, there's the workhouse. They'll take her there fast enough, and
+she won't know anything about it.'
+
+'The _workhouse_!' cried David, springing up, incensed past
+bearing by her callous way. 'Margaret that took you in out of the
+snow!--you said it yourself. And you--you'd not lift a finger--not
+you--you'd not even give her notice--"chuck her into the
+workhouse--that's good enough for her!" It's _vile_,--that's
+what it is!'
+
+He stood, choked by his own wrath, eyeing her fiercely--a young
+thunder god of disdain and condemnation.
+
+Louie too got up--gathering up her work round her--and gave him
+back his look with interest before she flung out of the room.
+
+'Keep a civil tongue in your head, sir, or I'll let you know,' she
+cried. 'I'll not be called over the coals by you nor nobody. I'll do
+what I _please_,--and if you don't like it you can do the
+other thing--so there--now you know!'
+
+And with a nod of the utmost provocation and defiance she banged
+the door behind her and went up to bed.
+
+David flung down the pen with which he had been lettering his books
+on the table, and, drawing a chair up to the fire, he sat moodily
+staring into the embers. So it was all to begin again--the long
+wrangle and jar of their childhood. Why had he broken silence and
+taken this burden once more upon his shoulders? He had a moment of
+passionate regret. It seemed to him more than he could bear. No
+gratitude, no kindness; and this fierce tongue!
+
+After a while he fetched pen and paper and began to write on his
+knee, while his look kindled again. He wrote to Margaret, a letter
+of boyish effusion and affection, his own conscience quickened to
+passion by Louie's lack of conscience. He had never forgotten her,
+he said, and he wished he could see her again. She must write, or
+get some one to write for her--and tell him what she was going to
+do now that Louie had left her. He had been angry with Louie for
+coming away without sending word. But what he wanted to say was
+this: if Margaret could get no one to work the loom, he, David,
+would pay her brother four shillings a week, for six months
+certain, towards her expenses if he would take her in and look
+after her. She must ask somebody to write at once and say what was
+to be done. If her brother consented to take her, David would send
+a post-office order for the first month at once. He was doing well
+in his business, and there would be no doubt about the payments.
+
+He made his proposal with a haste and impulsiveness very unlike the
+cool judgment he had so far shown in his business. It never
+occurred to him to negotiate with the brother who might be quite
+well able to maintain his sister without help. Besides he
+remembered him as a hard man of whom both Margaret and 'Lias--soft,
+sensitive creatures--were both more or less afraid. No, there
+should be no doubt about it--not a day's doubt, if he could help
+it! He could help, and he would; and if they asked him more he
+would give it. Nearly midnight! But if he ran out to the General
+Post Office it would be in time.
+
+When he had posted it and was walking home, his anger was all gone.
+But in its stead was the smart of a baffled instinct--the hunger
+for sympathy, for love, for that common everyday life of the
+affections which had never been his, while it came so easily to
+other people.
+
+In his chafing distress he felt the curb of something unknown
+before; or, rather, what had of late taken the pleasant guise of
+kinship and natural affection assumed to-night another and a
+sterner aspect, and in this strait of conduct, that sheer
+'imperative' which we carry within us made itself for the first
+time heard and realised.
+
+'I have done my duty and must abide by it. I _must_ bear with
+her and look after her.'
+
+Why?
+
+'Because my father laid it on me?'--
+
+And because there is a life within our life which urges and
+presses?--because we are 'not our own'? But this is an answer which
+implies a whole theology. And at this moment of his life David had not a
+particle or shred of theology about him. Except, indeed, that, like
+Voltaire, he was graciously inclined to think a First Cause probable.
+
+Next day this storm blew over, as storms do. Louie came down early
+and made the porridge for breakfast. When David appeared she
+carried things off with a high hand, and behaved as if nothing had
+happened; but anyone accustomed to watch her would have seen a
+certain quick nervousness in her black, wild bird's eyes. As for
+David, after a period of gruffness and silence, he passed by
+degrees into his usual manner. Louie spent the day with Dora, and
+he went off to Cheadle to conclude the purchase of that collection
+of American books he had described to Louie. But first, on his way,
+he walked proudly into Heywood's bank and opened an account there,
+receiving the congratulations of an old and talkative cashier, who
+already knew the lad and was interested in his prospects, with the
+coolness of one who takes good fortune as his right.
+
+In the afternoon he was busy in the shop--not too busy, however, to
+notice John. What ailed the lad? While he was inside, as soon as
+the door did but creak in the wind he sprang to open it, but for
+the most part he preferred to stand outside watching the stall and
+the street. When Louie appeared about five o'clock--for her hours
+with Dora were not yet regular--he forthwith became her slave. She
+set him to draw up the fire while she got the tea, and then,
+without taking any notice of David, she marched John upstairs to
+help her hang her curtains, lay her carpet, and nail up the
+coloured fashion plates and newspaper prints of royalties or
+beauties with which she was adorning the bare walls of the attic.
+
+When all her additions had been made to David's original stock;
+when the little deal dressing-table and glass had been draped in
+the cheapest of muslins over the pinkest of calicoes; when the
+flowery curtains had been tied back with blue ribbons; when the
+china vases on the mantelpiece had been filled with nodding plumes
+of dyed grasses, mostly of a rosy red; and a long glass in a
+somewhat damaged condition, but still presenting enough surface to
+enable Miss Louie to study herself therein from top to toe, had
+been propped against the wall; there was and could be nothing in
+the neighbourhood of Potter Street, so John reflected, as he
+furtively looked about him, to vie with the splendours of Miss
+Grieve's apartment. There was about it a sensuousness, a deliberate
+quest of luxury and gaiety, which a raw son of poverty could feel
+though he could not put it into words. No Manchester girl he had
+ever seen would have cared to spend her money in just this way.
+
+'Now that's real nice, Mr. Dalby, and I'm just obliged to you,'
+said Louie, with patronising emphasis, as she looked round upon his
+labours. 'I do like to get a man to do things for you--he's got some
+strength in him--not like a gell!'
+
+And she looked down at herself and at the long, thin-fingered hand
+against her dress, with affected contempt. John looked at her too,
+but turned his head away again quickly.
+
+'And yet you're pretty strong too, Miss,' he ventured.
+
+'Well, perhaps I am,' she admitted; 'and a good thing too, when you
+come to think of the rough time I had over there'--and she jerked
+her head behind her--'ever since Davy ran away from me.'
+
+'Ran away from you, Miss?'
+
+She nodded, pressing her lips together with the look of one who
+keeps a secret from the highest motives. But she brought two
+beautiful plaintive eyes to bear on John, and he at once felt sure
+that David's conduct had been totally inexcusable.
+
+Then suddenly she broke into a laugh. She was sitting on the edge
+of the bed, swinging her feet lightly backwards and forwards.
+
+'Look here!' she said, dropping her voice, and looking round at the
+door. 'Do you know a lot about Davy's affairs?--you 're a great
+friend of his, aren't you?'
+
+'I s'pose so,' said the lad, awkwardly.
+
+'Well, has he been making up to anybody that you know of?'
+
+John's invisible eyebrows stretched considerably. He was so
+astonished that he did not readily find an answer.
+
+'Why, of course, I mean,' said Louie, impatiently, 'is he _in
+love_ with anybody?'
+
+'Not that I know of, Miss.'
+
+'Well, then, there's somebody in love with _him_,' said Louie,
+maliciously; 'and some day, Mr. Dalby, if we get a chance, perhaps
+I'll tell you all about it.'
+
+The charming confidential smile she threw him so bewildered the lad
+that he hardly knew where he was.
+
+But an exasperated shout of 'John' from the stairs recalled him,
+and he rushed downstairs to help David deal with a cargo of books
+just arrived.
+
+That evening David ran up to the Parlour for half an hour, to have
+a talk with Daddy and find out what Dora thought of Louie. He had
+sent a message by Louie about Reuben's revelations, and it occurred
+to him that since Daddy had not been to look him up since, that
+incalculable person might be offended that he had not brought his
+great news in person. Besides, he had a very strong curiosity to
+know what had happened after all to Lucy Purcell, and whether
+anything had been commonly observed of Purcell's demeanour under
+the checkmate administered to him. For the past few days he had
+been wholly absorbed in his own affairs, and during the previous
+week he had seen nothing of either Daddy or Dora, except that at a
+casual meeting in the street with Daddy that worthy had described
+his attack on Purcell with a gusto worthy of his Irish extraction.
+
+He found the restaurant just shutting, and Daddy apparently on the
+wing for the 'White Horse' parlour, to judge from the relief which
+showed in Dora's worn look as she saw her father lay down his hat
+and stick again and fall 'chaffing' with David.
+
+For, with regard to David's change of position, the landlord of the
+Parlour was in a very testy frame of mind.
+
+'Six hundred pounds!' he growled, when the young fellow sitting
+cross-legged by the fire had made an end of describing to them both
+his journey to London. 'H'm, _your_ fun's over: any fool can do
+on six hundred pounds!'
+
+'Thank you, Daddy,' said the lad, with a sarcastic lip. 'As for you,
+I wonder _you_ have the face to talk! Who's coining money
+here, I should like to know?'
+
+Dora looked up with a start. Her father met her look with a certain
+hostility and an obstinate shake of his thin shoulders.
+
+'Davy, me boy, you're that consated by now, you'll not be for
+taking advice. But I'll give it you, bedad, to take or to leave!
+Never pitch your tent, sir, where you can't strike it when you want
+to! But there's where your beastly money comes in. Nobody need look
+to you now for any comprehension of the finer sentiments of man.'
+
+'What do you mean, Daddy?'
+
+'Never you mind,' said the old vagrant, staring sombrely at the
+floor--the spleen in person. 'Only I want my _freedom_, I tell
+you--and a bit of air, sometimes--and by gad I'll have 'em!'
+
+And throwing back his grey head with a jerk he fixed an angry eye
+on Dora. Dora had grown paler, but she said nothing; her fingers
+went steadily on with her work; from early morning now till late
+night neither they nor she were ever at rest. After a minute's
+silence Lomax walked to the door, flung a good-night behind him and
+disappeared.
+
+Dora hastily drew her hand across her eyes, then threaded her
+needle as though nothing had happened. But David was perplexed and
+sorry. How white and thin she looked, to be sure! That old lunatic
+must be worrying her somehow.
+
+He moved his chair nearer to Dora.
+
+'Is there anything wrong, Miss Dora?' he asked her, dropping his
+voice.
+
+She looked up with a quick gratitude, his voice and expression
+putting a new life into her.
+
+'Oh! I don't know,' she said, gently and sadly. 'Father's been very
+restless these last few weeks. I can't keep him at home. And I'm
+not always dull like this. I've done my best to cheer him up. And I
+don't think there's much amiss with the Parlour--yet--only the
+outgoings are so large every day. I'm always feeart--'
+
+She paused, and a visible tremor ran through her. David's quick eye
+understood the signs of strain and fatigue, and he felt a brotherly
+pity for her--a softer, more normal feeling than Louie had ever
+called out in him.
+
+'I say,' he said heartily, 'if there's anything I can do, you'll let
+me know, wont you?'
+
+She smiled at him, and then turned to her work again in a hurry,
+afraid of her own eyes and lips, and what they might be saying.
+
+'Oh! I dare say I fret myself too much,' she said, with the tone of
+one determined to be cheered. And, by way of protecting her own
+quivering heart, she fell upon the subject of Louie. She showed the
+brother some of Louie's first attempts--some of the stitches she
+had been learning.
+
+'She's that quick!' she said, wondering. 'In a few days I'm going to
+trust her with that,' and she pointed to a fine old piece of
+Venetian embroidery, which had to be largely repaired before it
+could be made up into an altar-cloth and presented to St. Damian's
+by a rich and devoted member of the congregation.
+
+'Does she get in your way?' the brother inquired.
+
+'N-o,' she said in a low voice, paying particular attention to a
+complicated stitch. 'She'll get used to me and the work soon. She'll
+make a first-rate hand if she's patient a bit. They'll be glad to
+take her on at the shop.'
+
+'But you'll not turn her out? You'll let her work here, alongside
+of you?' said the young man eagerly. He had just met Louie, in the
+dark, walking up Market Street with a seedy kind of gentleman, who
+he had reason to know was a bad lot. John was off his head about
+her, and no longer of much use to anybody, and in these few days
+other men, as it seemed to him, had begun to hang about. The
+difficulties of his guardianship were thickening upon him, and he
+clung to Dora's help.
+
+'No; I'll not turn her out. She may work here if she wants to,'
+said Dora, with the same slowness.
+
+And all the time she was saying to herself passionately that, if
+Louie Grieve had not been his sister, she should _never_ have
+set foot in that room again! In the two days they had been together
+Louie had outraged almost every feeling the other possessed. And
+there was a burning dread in Dora's mind that even the secret of
+her heart of hearts had been somehow discovered by the girl's
+hawk-like sense. But she had promised to help him, and she would.
+
+'You must let me know what I owe you for teaching her and
+introducing her,' said David firmly. 'Yes, you must, Miss Dora. It's
+business, and you mustn't make any bones about it. A girl doesn't
+learn a trade and get an opening found her for nothing.'
+
+'Oh no, nonsense!' she said quickly, but with decision equal to his
+own. 'I won't take anything. She don't want much teaching; she's so
+clever; she sees a thing almost before the words are out of your
+mouth. Look here, Mr. Grieve, I want to tell you about Lucy.'
+
+She looked up at him, flushing. He, too, coloured.
+
+'Well,' he said; 'that's what I wanted to ask you.'
+
+She told him the whole story of Lucy's flight from her father, of
+her illness and departure, of the probable stepmother.
+
+'Old brute!' said David between his teeth. 'I say, Miss Dora, can
+nothing be done to make him treat her decently?'
+
+His countenance glowed with indignation and disgust. Dora shook her
+head sadly.
+
+'I don't see what anyone can do; and the worst of it is she'll be
+such a long while getting over it. I've had a letter from her this
+morning, and she says the Hastings doctor declares she must stay
+there a year in the warm and not come home at all, or she'll be
+going off in a decline. I know Lucy gets nervous about herself, but
+it do seem bad.'
+
+David sat silent, lost in a medley of feelings, most of them
+unpleasant. Now that Lucy Purcell was at the other end of England,
+both her service to him and his own curmudgeon behaviour to her
+loomed doubly large.
+
+'I say, will you give me her address?' he said at last. 'I've got a
+smart book I've had bound for her. I'd like to send it her.'
+
+Dora went to the table and wrote it for him. Then he got up to go.
+
+'Upon my word, you do look tired,' he broke out. 'Can't you go to
+bed? It is hard lines.'
+
+Which last words applied to that whole situation of hers with her
+father which he was beginning dimly to discern. In his boyish
+admiration and compassion he took both her hands in his. Dora
+withdrew them quickly.
+
+'Oh, I'll pull through!' she said, simply, and he went.
+
+When she had closed the door after him she stood looking at the
+clock with her hands clasped in front of her.
+
+'How much longer will father be?' she said, sighing. 'Oh, I think I
+told him all Lucy wanted me to say; I think I did.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Three or four months passed away. During that period David had built
+up a shed in his back yard and had established a printing-press
+there, with a respectable, though not extensive, fount of
+type--bought, all of it, secondhand, and a bargain. John and
+he spent every available moment there, and during their first
+experiments would often sit up half the night working off the
+sheets of their earliest productions, in an excitement which took
+no count of fatigue. They began with reprinting some scarce local
+tracts, with which they did well. Then David diverged into a
+Radical pamphlet or two on the subject of the coming Education
+Bill, finding authors for them among the leading ministers of the
+town; and these timely wares, being freely pushed on the stall, on
+the whole paid their expenses, with a little profit to spare--the
+labour being reckoned at nothing. And now David was beginning to
+cherish the dream of a new history of Manchester, for which among
+his own collections he already possessed a great deal of fresh
+material. But that would take time and money. He must push his
+business a bit further first.
+
+That business, however, was developing quite as rapidly as the two
+pairs of arms could keep pace with it. Almost everything the young
+fellow touched succeeded. He had instinct, knowledge, a growing
+tact, and an indomitable energy, and these are the qualities which
+make, which are in themselves, success. The purchase of the
+collection at Cheadle, bearing on the early history of American
+states and towns, not only turned out well in itself, but brought
+him to the notice of a big man in London, who set the clever and
+daring beginner on several large quests both in Lancashire and
+Yorkshire by which both profited considerably. In another direction
+he was extending his stock of foreign scientific and technical
+books, especially such as bore upon the industries of Northern
+England. Old Barbier, who took a warmer and warmer interest in his
+pupil's progress, kept him constantly advised as to French books
+through old friends of his own in Paris, who were glad to do the
+exile a kindness.
+
+'But why not run over to Paris for yourself, form some connections,
+and look about you?' suggested Barbier.
+
+Why not, indeed? The young man's blood, quick with curiosity and
+adventure, under all his tradesman's exterior, leapt at the
+thought. But prudence restrained him for the present.
+
+As for German books, he was struggling with the language, and
+feeling his way besides through innumerable catalogues. How he
+found time for all the miscellaneous acquisitions of these months
+it would be difficult to say. But whether in his free times or in
+trade-hours he was hardly ever without a book or a catalogue beside
+him, save when he was working the printing press; and, although his
+youth would every now and then break out against the confinement he
+imposed upon it, and drive him either to long tramps over the moors
+on days when the spring stirred in the air, or to a spell of
+theatre-going, in which Louie greedily shared, yet, on the whole,
+his force of purpose was amazing, and the success which it brought
+with it could only be regarded as natural and inevitable. He was
+beginning to be well known to the old-established men in his own
+business, who could not but show at times some natural jealousy of
+so quick a rise. The story of his relations to Purcell spread, and
+the two were watched with malicious interest at many a book-sale,
+when the nonchalant self-reliance and prosperous look of the
+younger drove the elder man again and again into futile attempts to
+injure and circumvent him. It was noticed that never till now had
+Purcell lost his head with a rival.
+
+Nevertheless, the lad had far fewer enemies than might have been
+expected. His manner had always been radiantly self-confident; but
+there was about him a conspicuous element of quick feeling, of warm
+humanity, which grew rather than diminished with his success. He
+was frank, too, and did not try to gloss over a mistake or a
+failure. Perhaps in his lordly way he felt he could afford himself
+a few now and then, he was so much cleverer than his neighbours.
+
+Upon no one did David's development produce more effect than upon
+Mr. Ancrum. The lame, solitary minister, who only got through his
+week's self-appointed tasks at a constant expense of bodily
+torment, was dazzled and bewildered by the spectacle of so much
+vitality spent with such ease and impunity.
+
+'How many years of Manchester must one give him?' said Ancrum to
+himself one night, when he was making his way home from a reading
+of the 'Electra' with David. 'That six hundred pounds has quickened
+the pace amazingly! Ten years, perhaps. Then London, and anything
+you like. Bookselling slips into publishing, and publishing takes a
+man into another class, and within reach of a hundred new
+possibilities. Some day I shall be bragging of having taught him!
+Taught him! He'll be turning the tables on me precious soon. Caught
+me out twice to-night, and got through the tough bit of the chorus
+much better than I did. How does he do it?--and with that mountain
+of other things on his shoulders! There's one speck in the fruit,
+however, as far as I can see--Miss Louie!'
+
+From the first moment of his introduction to her, Ancrum had taken
+particular notice of David's handsome sister, who, on her side, had
+treated her old minister and teacher with a most thoroughgoing
+indifference. He saw that now, after some three months of life
+together, the brother and sister had developed separate existences,
+which touched in two points only--a common liking for Dora Lomax,
+and a common keenness for business.
+
+Here, in this matter of business, they were really at one. David
+kept nothing from her, and consulted her a good deal. She had the
+same shrewd head that he had, and as it was her money as well as
+his that was in question she was determined to know and to
+understand what he was after. Anybody who had come upon the pair on
+the nights when they made up their accounts, their dark heads
+touching under the lamp, might have gone away moralising on the
+charms of fraternal affection.
+
+And all the while David had once more tacitly given up the attempt
+either to love her or to control her. How indeed could he control
+her? He was barely two years older, and she had a will of iron. She
+made disreputable friends whom he loathed the sight of. But all he
+could do was to keep them out of the house. She led John by this
+time a dog's life. From the temptress she had become the tease and
+tyrant, and the clumsy fellow, consumed with feverish passion,
+slaved for her whenever she was near him with hardly the reward of
+a kind look or a civil word in a fortnight. David set his teeth and
+tried to recover possession of his friend. And as long as they two
+were at the press or in the shop together alone, John was often his
+old self, and would laugh out in the old way. But no sooner did
+Louie appear than he followed her about like an animal, and David
+could make no more of him. Whenever any dispute, too, arose between
+the brother and sister, he took her part, whatever it might be,
+with an acrimony which pushed David's temper hard.
+
+Yet, on the whole, so Ancrum thought, the brother showed a
+wonderful patience. He was evidently haunted by a sense of
+responsibility towards his sister, and, at the same time, both
+tormented and humiliated by his incompetence to manage or influence
+her. It was curious, too, to watch how by antagonism and by the
+constant friction of their life together, certain qualities in her
+developed certain others in him. Her callousness, for instance, did
+but nurture a sensitive humanity in him. She treated the lodgers in
+the first pair back with persistent indifference and even
+brutality, seeing that Mrs. Mason was a young, helpless creature
+approaching every day nearer to a confinement she regarded with
+terror, and that a little common kindness from the only other woman
+in the house could have softened her lot considerably. But David's
+books were stacked about in awkward and inconvenient places waiting
+for the Masons' departure, and Louie had no patience with
+them--with the wife at any rate. It once or twice occurred to David
+that if the husband, a good-looking fellow and a very hard-worked
+shopman, had had more hours at home, Louie would have tried her
+blandishments upon him.
+
+He on his side was goaded by Louie's behaviour into an unusual
+complaisance and liberality towards his tenants. Louie once
+contemptuously told him he would make a capital 'general help.' He
+was Mrs. Mason's coal-carrier and errand-boy already.
+
+In the same way Louie beat and ill-treated a half-starved
+collie--one of the short-haired black sort familiar to the shepherd
+of the north, and to David himself in his farm days--which would
+haunt the shop and kitchen. Whereupon David felt all his heart melt
+towards the squalid, unhandsome creature. He fed and cherished it;
+it slept on his bed by night and followed him by day, he all the
+while protecting it from Louie with a strong hand. And the more
+evil was the eye she cast upon the dog, who, according to her,
+possessed all the canine vices, the more David loved it, and the
+more Tim was fattened and caressed.
+
+In another direction, too, the same antagonism appeared. The
+sister's license of speech and behaviour towards the men who became
+her acquaintances provoked in the brother what often seemed to
+Ancrum--who, of course, remembered Reuben, and had heard many tales
+of old James Grieve, the lad's grandfather--a sort of Puritan
+reaction, the reaction of his race and stock against 'lewdness.'
+Louie's complete independence, however, and the distance she
+preserved between his amusements and hers, left David no other
+weapon than sarcasm, which he employed freely. His fine sensitive
+mouth took during these weeks a curve half mocking, half bitter,
+which changed the whole expression of the face.
+
+He saw, indeed, with great clearness after a month or so that
+Louie's wildness was by no means the wildness of an ignorant
+innocent, likely to slip unawares into perdition, and that, while
+she had a passionate greed for amusement and pleasure, and a blank
+absence of principle, she was still perfectly alive to the risks of
+life, and meant somehow both to enjoy herself and to steer herself
+through. But this gradual perception--that, in spite of her mode of
+killing spare time, she was not immediately likely to take any
+fatal false step, as he had imagined in his first dread--did but
+increase his inward repulsion.
+
+A state of feeling which was the more remarkable because he
+himself, in Ancrum's eyes, was at the moment in a temper of moral
+relaxation and bewilderment! His absorption in George Sand, and
+through her in all the other French Romantics whose books he could
+either find for himself or borrow from Barbier, was carrying a
+ferment of passion and imagination through all his blood. Most
+social arrangements, including marriage, seemed to have become open
+questions to him. Why, then, this tone towards Louie and her
+friends? Was it that, apart from the influence of heredity, the
+young fellow's moral perception at this time was not ethical at
+all, but aesthetic--a matter of taste, of the presence or absence
+of certain ideal and poetic elements in conduct?
+
+At any rate his friendship for old Barbier drew closer and closer,
+and Ancrum, who had begun to feel a lively affection for him, could
+see but little of him.
+
+As to Barbier, it was a significant chance which had thrown
+him across David's path. In former days this lively Frenchman
+had been a small Paris journalist, whom the _coup d'etat_ had
+struck down with his betters, and who had escaped to England
+with one suit of clothes and eight francs in his pocket. He
+reminded himself on landing of a cousin of his mother's settled
+as a clerk in Manchester, found his way northwards, and had
+now, for some seventeen years, been maintaining himself in the
+cotton capital, mainly by teaching, but partly by a number of
+small arts--ornamental calligraphy, _menu_-writing, and the
+like--too odd and various for description. He was a fanatic, a Red,
+much possessed by political hatreds which gave savour to an
+existence otherwise dull and peaceable enough. Religious beliefs
+were very scarce with him, but he had a certain literary creed, the
+creed of 1830, when he had been a scribbler in the train of Victor
+Hugo, which he did his best to put into David.
+
+He was a formidable-looking person, six feet in height, and broad
+in proportion, with bushy white eyebrows, and a mouth made hideous
+by two projecting teeth. In speech he hated England and all her
+ways, and was for ever yearning towards the misguided and yet
+unequalled country which had cast him out. In heart he was
+perfectly aware that England is free as not even Republican France
+is free; and he was also sufficiently alive to the fact that he had
+made himself a very tolerable niche in Manchester, and was
+pleasantly regarded there--at least, in certain circles--as an
+oracle of French opinion, a commodity which, in a great commercial
+centre, may at any time have a cash value. He could, in truth,
+have long ago revisited _la patrie_ had he had a mind, for
+governments are seldom vindictive in the case of people who can
+clearly do them no harm. This, however, was not at all his own
+honest view of the matter. In the mirror of the mind he saw himself
+perpetually draped in the pathos of exile and the dignity of
+persecution, and the phrases by which he was wont to impress this
+inward vision on the brutal English sense had become, in the course
+of years, an effective and touching habit with him.
+
+David had been Barbier's pupil in the first instance at one of the
+classes of the Mechanics' Institute. Never in Barbier's memory had
+any Manchester lad so applied himself to learn French before. And
+when the boy's knowledge of the Encyclopaedists came out, and he
+one day put the master right in class on some points connected with
+Diderot's relations to Rousseau, the ex-journalist gaped with
+astonishment, and then went home and read up his facts, half
+enraged and half enraptured. David's zeal piqued him, made him a
+better Frenchman and a better teacher than he had been for years.
+He was a vain man, and David's capacities put him on his mettle.
+
+Very soon he and the lad had become intimate. He had described to
+David the first night of _Hernani_, when he had been one of
+the long-haired band of _rapins_, who came down in their
+scores to the Theatre Francais to defend their chief, Hugo, against
+the hisses of the Philistine. The two were making coffee in
+Barbier's attic, at the top of a side street off the Oxford Road,
+when these memories seized upon the old Romantic. He took up the
+empty coffee-pot, and brandished it from side to side as though it
+had been the sword of Hernani; the miserable Academy hugging its
+Moliere and Racine fled before him; the world was once more
+regenerate, and Hugo its high priest. Passages from the different
+parts welled to his old lips; he gave the play over again--the
+scene between the lover and the husband, where the husband lays
+down the strange and sinister penalty to which the lover
+submits--the exquisite love-scene in the fifth act--and the cry of
+agonised passion with which Dona Sol defends her love against his
+executioner. All these things he declaimed, stumping up and down,
+till the terrified landlady rose out of her bed to remonstrate, and
+got the door locked in her face for her pains, and till the
+_bourgeois_ baby in the next room woke up and roared, and so
+put an abrupt end to the performance. Old Barbier sat down
+swearing, poked the fire furiously, and then, taking out a huge red
+handkerchief, wiped his brow with a trembling hand. His stiff white
+hair, parted on either temple, bristled like a high _loupie_
+over his round, black eyes, which glowed behind his spectacles. And
+meanwhile the handsome boy sat opposite, glad to laugh by way of
+reaction, but at bottom stirred by the same emotion, and ready to
+share in the same adorations.
+
+Gradually David learnt his way about this bygone world of Barbier's
+recollection. A vivid picture sprang up in him of these strange
+leaders of a strange band, these cadaverous poets and artists of
+Louis Philippe's early days, beings in love with Lord Byron and
+suicide, having Art for God, and Hugo for prophet, talking of
+were-wolves, vampires, cathedrals, sunrises, forests, passion and
+despair, hatted like brigands, cloaked after Vandyke, curled like
+Absalom, making new laws unto themselves in verse as in morals, and
+leaving all petty talk of duty or common sense to the Academy and
+the nursery.
+
+George Sand walking the Paris quays in male dress--George Sand at
+Fontainebleau roaming the midnight forest with Alfred de Musset, or
+wintering with her dying musician among the mountains of Palma;
+Gerard de Nerval, wanderer, poet, and suicide; Alfred de Musset
+flaming into verse at dead of night amid an answering and
+spendthrift blaze of wax candles; Baudelaire's blasphemies and
+eccentricities--these characters and incidents Barbier wove into
+endless highly coloured tales, to which David listened with
+perpetual relish.
+
+'_Mon Dieu_! _Mon Dieu_! What times! What memories!' the
+old Frenchman would cry at last, fairly re-transported to the world
+of his youth, and, springing up, he would run to the little
+cupboard by his bed head, where he kept a score or so of little
+paper volumes--volumes which the tradesman David soon discovered,
+from a curious study of French catalogues, to have a fast-rising
+money value--and out would come Alfred de Musset's 'Nuit de Mai,'
+or an outrageous verse from Baudelaire, or an harmonious nothing
+from Gautier. David gradually learnt to follow, to understand, to
+range all that he heard in a mental setting of his own. The France
+of his imagination indeed was a strange land! Everybody in it was
+either girding at priests like Voltaire, or dying for love like
+George Sand's Stenio.
+
+But whether the picture was true to life or no, it had a very
+strongly marked effect on the person conceiving it. Just as the
+speculative complexion of his first youth had been decided by the
+chance which brought him into daily contact with the French
+eighteenth century--for no self-taught solitary boy of quick and
+covetous mind can read Voltaire continuously without bearing the
+marks of him henceforward--so in the same way, when he passed, as
+France had done before him, from the philosophers to the Romantics,
+this constant preoccupation with the French literature of passion
+in its romantic and idealist period left deep and lasting results.
+
+The strongest of these results lay in the realm of moral and social
+sense. What struck the lad's raw mind with more and more force as
+he gathered his French books about him was the profound gulf which
+seemed to divide the average French conception of the relation
+between the sexes from the average English one. In the French
+novels he read every young man had his mistress; every married
+woman her lover. Tragedy frequently arose out of these relations,
+but that the relations must and did obtain, as a matter of course,
+was assumed. For the delightful heroes and heroines of a whole
+range of fiction, from 'Manon Lescaut' down to Murger's 'Vie de
+Boheme,' marriage did not apparently exist, even as a matter of
+argument. And as to the duties of the married woman, when she
+passed on to the canvas, the code was equally simple. The husband
+might kill his wife's lover--that was in the game; but the young
+man's right to be was as good as his own. '_No human being can
+control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for
+losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood._' So says
+the husband in George Sand's 'Jacques' when he is just about to
+fling himself down an Alpine precipice that his wife and Octave may
+have their way undisturbed. And all the time, what poetry and
+passion in the presentation of these things! Beside them the mere
+remembrance of English ignorance, prudishness, and conventionality
+would set the lad swelling, as he read, with a sense of superior
+scorn, and of wild sympathy for a world in which love and not law,
+truth and not legal fiction, were masters of human relations.
+
+Some little time after Reuben's visit to him he one day told
+Barbier the fact of his French descent. Barbier declared that he
+had always known it, had always realised something in David
+distinct from the sluggish huckstering English temper. Why, David's
+mother was from the south of France; his own family came from
+Carcassonne. No doubt the rich Gascon blood ran in both their
+veins. _Salut au compatriole!_
+
+Thenceforward there was a greater solidarity between the two than
+ever. Barbier fell into an incessant gossip of Paris--the Paris of
+Louis Philippe--reviving memories and ways of speech which had been
+long dead in him, and leaving on David's mind the impression of a
+place where life was from morning till night amusement,
+exhilaration, and seduction; where, under the bright smokeless sky,
+and amid the stateliest streets and public buildings in Europe, men
+were always witty and women always attractive.
+
+Meanwhile the course of business during the spring months and the
+rise of his trade in foreign books rapidly brought the scheme of a
+visit to France, which had been at first a mere dream and fancy,
+within the region of practical possibility, and even advantage, for
+the young bookseller. Two things he was set on. If he went he was
+determined to go under such conditions as would enable him to see
+French life--especially French artistic and student life--from the
+inside. And he saw with some clearness that he would have to take
+his sister with him.
+
+Against the latter notion Barbier protested vehemently.
+
+'What do you want to tie yourself to a petticoat for? If you take
+the girl you will have to look after her. Paris, my boy, let me
+inform you, is not the best place in the world for _la jeune
+personne;_ and the Paris _rapin_ may be an amusing scoundrel,
+but don't trust him with young women if you can help it. Leave
+Mademoiselle Louie at home, and let her mind the shop. Get
+Mademoiselle Dora or some one to stay with her, or send her to
+Mademoiselle Dora.'
+
+So said the Frenchman with sharp dictatorial emphasis. What a
+preposterous suggestion!
+
+'I can't stop her coming,' said David, quietly--'if she wants to
+come--and she'll be sure to want. Besides, I'll not leave her alone
+at home, and she'll not let me send her anywhere--you may be sure
+of that.'
+
+The Frenchman stared and stormed. David fell silent. Louie was what
+she was, and it was no use discussing her. At last Barbier, being
+after all tolerably well acquainted with the lad's relations to his
+sister, came to a sudden end of his rhetoric, and began to think
+out something practicable.
+
+That evening he wrote to a nephew of his living as an artist in the
+Quartier Montmartre. Some months before Barbier's vanity had been
+flattered by an adroit letter from this young gentleman, written,
+if the truth were known, at a moment when a pecuniary situation,
+pinched almost beyond endurance, had made it seem worth while to
+get his uncle's address out of his widowed mother. Barbier, a
+bachelor, and a man of some small savings, perfectly understood why
+he had been approached, and had been none the less extraordinarily
+glad to hear from the youth. He was a _rapin?_ well and good;
+all the great men had been _rapins_ before him. Very likely he
+had the _rapin's_ characteristic vices and distractions. All
+the world knew what the life meant for nine men out of ten. What
+was the use of preaching? Youth was youth. Clearly the old
+man--himself irreproachable--would have been disappointed not to
+find his nephew a sad dog on personal acquaintance.
+
+'Tell me, Xavier,' his letter ran, 'how to put a young friend of
+mine in the way of seeing something of Paris and Paris life, more
+than your fool of a tourist generally sees. He is a bookseller, and
+will, of course, mind his trade; but he is a young man of taste and
+intelligence besides, and moreover half French. It would be a pity
+that he should visit Paris as any _sacre_ British Philistine
+does. Advise me where to place him. He would like to see something
+of your artist's life. But mind this, young man, he brings a sister
+with him as handsome as the devil, and not much easier to manage:
+so if you do advise--no tricks--tell me of something _convenable_.'
+
+A few days later Barbier appeared in Potter Street just after David
+had put up the shutters, announcing that he had a proposal to make.
+
+David unlocked the shop-door and let him in. Barbier looked round
+with some amazement on the small stuffy place, piled to bursting by
+now with books of every kind, which only John's herculean efforts
+could keep in passable order.
+
+'Why don't you house yourself better--_hein?_' said the
+Frenchman. 'A business growing like this, and nothing but a den to
+handle it in!'
+
+'I shall be all right when I get my other room,' said David
+composedly. 'Couldn't turn out the lodger before. The woman was only
+confined last week.'
+
+And as he spoke the wailing of an infant and a skurrying of feet
+were heard upstairs.
+
+'So it seems,' said Barbier, adjusting his spectacles in
+bewilderment. '_Jesus!_ What an affair! What did you permit it
+for? Why didn't you turn her out in time?'
+
+'I would have turned myself out first,' said David. He was
+lounging, with his hands in his pockets, against the books; but
+though his attitude was nonchalant, his tone had a vibrating
+energy.
+
+'Barbier!'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'What do women suffer for like that?'
+
+The young man's eyes glowed, and his lips twitched a little, as
+though some poignant remembrance were at his heart.
+
+Barbier looked at him with some curiosity.
+
+'Ask _le bon Dieu_ and Mother Eve, my friend. It lies between
+them,' said the old scoffer, with a shrug.
+
+David looked away in silence. On his quick mind, greedy of all
+human experience, the night of Mrs. Mason's confinement, with its
+sounds of anguish penetrating through all the upper rooms of the
+thin, ill-built house, had left an ineffaceable impression of awe
+and terror. In the morning, when all was safely over, he came down
+to the kitchen to find the husband--a man some two or three years
+older than himself, and the smart foreman of an ironmongery shop in
+Deansgate--crouching over a bit of fire. The man was too much
+excited to apologise for his presence in the Grieves' room. David
+shyly asked him a question about his wife.
+
+'Oh, it's all right, the doctor says. There's the nurse with her,
+and your sister's got the baby. She'll do; but, oh, my God! it's
+awful--_it's awful!_ My poor Liz! Give me a corner here, will
+you! I'm all upset like.'
+
+David had got some food out of the cupboard, made him eat it, and
+chatted to him till the man was more himself again. But the crying
+of the new-born child overhead, together with the shaken condition
+of this clever, self-reliant young fellow, so near his own age,
+seemed for the moment to introduce the lad to new and unknown
+regions of human feeling.
+
+While these images were pursuing each other through David's mind,
+Barbier was poking among his foreign books, which lay, backs
+upwards, on the floor to one side of the counter.
+
+'Do you sell them--_hein?_' he said, looking up and pointing
+to them with his stick.
+
+'Yes. Especially the scientific books. These are an order.
+So is that batch. Napoleon III. 's "Caesar," isn't it? And
+those over there are "on spec." Oh, I could do something if
+I knew more! There's a man over at Oldham. One of the biggest
+weaving-sheds--cotton velvets--that kind of thing. He's awfully
+rich, and he's got a French library; a big one, I believe. He
+came in here yesterday. I think I could make something out
+of him; but he wants all sorts of rum things--last-century
+memoirs, out-of-the-way ones--everything about Montaigne--first
+editions--Lord knows what! I say, Barbier, I dare say he'd buy
+your books. What'll you let me have them for?'
+
+'_Diantre!_ Not for your heart's blood, my young man. It's
+like your impudence to ask. You could sell more if you knew more,
+you think? Well now listen to me.'
+
+The Frenchman sat down, adjusted his spectacles, and, taking a
+letter from his pocket, read it with deliberation.
+
+It was from the nephew, Xavier Dubois, in answer to his uncle's
+inquiries. Nothing, the writer declared, could have been more
+opportune. He himself was just off to Belgium, where a friend had
+procured him a piece of work on a new Government building. Why
+should not his uncle's friends inhabit his rooms during his
+absence? He must keep them on, and would find it very convenient,
+that being so, that some one should pay the rent. There was his
+studio, which was bare, no doubt, but quite habitable, and a little
+_cabinet de toilette_, adjoining, and shut off, containing a
+bed and all necessaries. Why should not the sister take the
+bedroom, and let the brother camp somehow in the studio? He could
+no doubt borrow a bed from some friend before they came, and with a
+large screen, which was one of the 'studio properties,' a very
+tolerable sleeping room could be improvised, and still leave a good
+deal of the studio free. He understood that his uncle's friends
+were not looking for luxury. But _le stricte necessaire_ he
+could provide.
+
+Meanwhile the Englishman and his sister would find themselves at
+once in the artists' circle, and might see as much or as little as
+they liked of artistic life. He (Dubois) could of course give them
+introductions. There was a sculptor, for instance, on the ground
+floor, a man of phenomenal genius, _joli garcon_ besides, who
+would certainly show himself _aimable_ for anybody introduced
+by Dubois; and on the floor above there was a landscape painter,
+_ancien prix de Rome_, and his wife, who would also, no doubt,
+make themselves agreeable, and to whom the brother and sister might
+go for all necessary information--Dubois would see to that. Sixty
+francs a month paid the _appartement;_ a trifle for service if
+you desired it--there was, however, no compulsion--to the
+_concierge_ would make you comfortable; and as for your food,
+the Quartier Montmartre abounded in cheap restaurants, and you
+might live as you pleased for one franc a day or twenty. He
+suggested that on the whole no better opening was likely to be
+found by two young persons of spirit, anxious to see Paris from the
+inside.
+
+'Now then,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles with an
+authoritative click, as he shut up the letter, _'decide-toi._
+Go!--and look about you for a fortnight. Improve your French; get
+to know some of the Paris bookmen; take some commissions out with
+you--buy there to the best advantage, and come back twenty per
+cent. better informed than when you set out.'
+
+He smote his hands upon his knees with energy. He had a love of
+management and contrivance; and the payment of Eugene's rent for
+him during his absence weighed with his frugal mind.
+
+David stood twisting his mouth in silence a moment, his head thrown
+back against the books.
+
+'Well, I don't see why not,' he said at last, his eyes sparkling.
+
+'And take notice, my friend,' said Barbier, tapping the open
+letter, 'the _ancien prix de Rome_ has a wife. Where wives are
+young women can go. Xavier can prepare the way, and, if you play
+your cards well, you can get Mademoiselle Louie taken off your
+hands while you go about.'
+
+David nodded. He was sitting astride on the counter, his face
+shining with the excitement he was now too much of a man to show
+with the old freedom.
+
+Suddenly there was a sound of wild voices from the inside room.
+
+'Miss Grieve! Miss Grieve! don't you take that child away. Bring it
+back, I say; I'll go to your brother, I will!'
+
+'That's Mrs. Mason's nurse,' said David, springing off the
+counter. 'What's up now?'
+
+He threw open the door into the kitchen, just as Louie swept into
+the room from the other side. She had a white bundle in her arms,
+and her face was flushed with a sly triumph. After her ran the
+stout woman who was looking after Mrs. Mason, purple with
+indignation.
+
+'Now look yo here, Mr. Grieve,' she cried at sight of David, 'I
+can't stand it, and I won't. Am I in charge of Mrs. Mason or am I
+not? Here's Miss Grieve, as soon as my back's turned, as soon as
+I've laid that blessed baby in its cot as quiet as a lamb--and it's
+been howling since three o'clock this morning, as yo know--in she
+whips, claws it out of its cradle, and is off wi' it, Lord knows
+where. Thank the Lord, Mrs. Mason's asleep! If she weren't, she'd
+have a fit. She's feart to death o' Miss Grieve. We noather on us
+know what to make on her. She's like a wild thing soomtimes--not a
+human creetur at aw--Gie me that chilt, I tell tha!'
+
+Louie vouchsafed no answer. She sat down composedly before the
+fire, and, cradling the still sleeping child on her knee, she bent
+over it examining its waxen hands and tiny feet with an eager
+curiosity. The nurse, who stood over her trembling with anger, and
+only deterred from snatching the child away by the fear of wakening
+it, might have been talking to the wall.
+
+'Now, look here, Louie, what d' you do that for?' said David,
+remonstrating; 'why can't you leave the child alone? You'll be
+putting Mrs. Mason in a taking, and that'll do her harm.'
+
+'Nowt o' t' sort,' said Louie composedly,' it 's that woman
+there'll wake her with screeching. She's asleep, and the baby's
+asleep, and I'm taking care of it. Why can't Mrs. Bury go and look
+after Mrs. Mason? She hasn't swept her room this two days, and it's
+a sight to see.'
+
+Pricked in a tender point, Mrs. Bury broke out again into a stream
+of protest and invective, only modified by her fear of waking her
+patient upstairs, and interrupted by appeals to David. But whenever
+she came near to take the baby Louie put her hands over it, and her
+wide black eyes shot out intimidating flames before which the
+aggressor invariably fell back.
+
+Attracted by the fight, Barbier had come up to look, and now stood
+by the shop-door, riveted by Louie's strange beauty. She wore the
+same black and scarlet dress in which she had made her first
+appearance in Manchester. She now never wore it out of doors, her
+quick eye having at once convinced her that it was not in the
+fashion. But the instinct which had originally led her to contrive
+it was abundantly justified whenever she still condescended to put
+it on, so startling a relief it lent to the curves of her slim
+figure, developed during the last two years of growth to all
+womanly roundness and softness, and to the dazzling colour of her
+dark head and thin face. As she sat by the fire, the white bundle
+on her knee, one pointed foot swinging in front of her, now hanging
+over the baby, and now turning her bright dangerous look and
+compressed lips on Mrs. Bury, she made a peculiar witch-like
+impression on Barbier which thrilled his old nerves agreeably. It
+was clear, he thought, that the girl wanted a husband and a family
+of her own. Otherwise why should she run off with other people's
+children? But he would be a bold man who ventured on her!
+
+David, at last seeing that Louie was in the mood to tear the babe
+asunder rather than give it up, with difficulty induced Mrs. Bury
+to leave her in possession for half an hour, promising that, as
+soon as the mother woke, the child should be given back.
+
+'If I've had enough of it,' Louie put in, as a saving clause,
+luckily just too late to be heard by the nurse, who had sulkily
+closed the door behind her, declaring that 'sich an owdacious chit
+she never saw in her born days, and niver heerd on one oather.'
+
+David and Barbier went back into the shop to talk, leaving Louie to
+her nursing. As soon as she was alone she laid back the flannel
+which lay round the child's head, and examined every inch of its
+downy poll and puckered face, her warm breath making the tiny lips
+twitch in sleep as it travelled across them. Then she lifted the
+little nightgown and looked at the pink feet nestling in their
+flannel wrapping. A glow sprang into her cheek; her great eyes
+devoured the sleeping creature. Its weakness and helplessness, its
+plasticity to anything she might choose to do with it, seemed to
+intoxicate her. She looked round her furtively, then bent and laid
+a hot covetous kiss on the small clenched hand. The child moved;
+had it been a little older it would have wakened; but Louie,
+hastily covering it up, began to rock it and sing to it.
+
+The door into the shop was ajar. As David and Barbier were hanging
+together over a map of Paris which David had hunted out of his
+stores, Barbier suddenly threw up his head with a queer look.
+
+'What's that she's singing?' he said quickly.
+
+He got up hastily, overturning his stool as he did so, and went to
+the door to listen.
+
+'I haven't heard that,' he said, with some agitation, 'since my
+father's sister used to sing it me when I was a small lad, up at
+Augoumat in the mountains near Puy!'
+
+  Sur le pont d'Avignon
+  Tout le monde y danse en rond;
+  Les beaux messieurs font comme ca,
+  Les beaux messieurs font comme ca.
+
+The words were but just distinguishable as Louie sang. They were
+clipped and mutilated as by one who no longer understood what they
+meant. But the intonation was extraordinarily French, French of the
+South, and Barbier could hardly stand still under it.
+
+'Where did you learn that?' he called to her from the door.
+
+The girl stopped and looked at him with her bright bird-like
+glance. But she made no reply.
+
+'Did your mother teach it you?' he asked, coming in.
+
+'I suppose so,' she said indifferently.
+
+'Can you talk any French--do you remember it?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'But you'd soon learn. You haven't got the English mouth, that's
+plain. Do you know your brother thinks of taking you to Paris?'
+
+She started.
+
+'He don't,' she said laconically.
+
+'Oh, don't he. Just ask him then?'
+
+Ten minutes later Louie had been put in possession of the
+situation. As David had fully expected, she took no notice whatever
+of his suggestion that after all she might not care to come. They
+might be rough quarters, he said, and queer people about; and it
+would cost a terrible deal more for two than one. Should he not ask
+Dora Lomax to take her in for a fortnight? John, of course, would
+look after the shop. He spoke under the pressure of a sudden qualm,
+knowing it would be no use; but his voice had almost a note of
+entreaty in it.
+
+'When do you want to be starting?' she asked him sharply. 'I'll not
+go to Dora's--so you needn't talk o' that. You can take the money
+out of what you'll be owing me next month.'
+
+Her nostrils dilated as the quick breath passed through them.
+Barbier was fascinated by the extraordinary animation of the face,
+and could not take his eyes off her.
+
+'Not for a fortnight,' said David reluctantly, answering her
+question. 'Barbier's letter says about the tenth of May. There's two
+country sales I must go to, and some other things to settle.'
+
+She nodded.
+
+'Well, then, I can get some things ready,' she said half to
+herself, staring across the baby into the fire.
+
+When David and Barbier were gone together 'up street,' still
+talking over their plans, Louie leapt to her feet and laid the baby
+down--carelessly, as though she no longer cared anything at all
+about it--in the old-fashioned arm-chair wherein David spent so
+many midnight vigils. Then locking her hands behind her, she paced
+up and down the narrow room with the springing gait, the impetuous
+feverish grace, of some prisoned animal. Paris! Her education was
+small, and her ignorance enormous. But in the columns of a 'lady's
+paper' she had often bought from the station bookstall at Clough
+End she had devoured nothing more eagerly than the Paris letter,
+with its luscious descriptions of 'Paris fashions,' whereby even
+Lancashire women, even Clough End mill-hands in their Sunday best,
+were darkly governed from afar. All sorts of bygone dreams recurred
+to her--rich and subtle combinations of silks, satins, laces, furs,
+imaginary glories clothing an imaginary Louie Grieve. The
+remembrance of them filled her with a greed past description, and
+she forthwith conceived Paris as a place all shops, each of them
+superior to the best in St. Ann's Square--where one might gloat
+before the windows all day.
+
+She made a spring to the door, and ran upstairs to her own room.
+There she began to pull out her dresses and scatter them about the
+floor, looking at them with a critical discontented eye.
+
+Time passed. She was standing absorbed before an old gown, planning
+out its renovation, when a howl arose from downstairs. She fled
+like a roe deer, and pounced upon the baby just in time to
+checkmate Mrs. Bury, who was at her heels.
+
+Quite regardless of the nurse's exasperation with her, first for
+leaving the child alone, half uncovered, in a chilly room, and now
+for again withholding it, Louie put the little creature against her
+neck, rocking and crooning to it. The sudden warm contact stilled
+the baby; it rubbed its head into the soft hollow thus presented to
+it, and its hungry lips sought eagerly for their natural food. The
+touch of them sent a delicious thrill through Louie; she turned her
+head round and kissed the tiny, helpless cheek with a curious
+violence; then, tired of Mrs. Bury, and anxious to get back to her
+plans, she almost threw the child to her.
+
+'There--take it! I'll soon get it again when I want to.'
+
+And she was as good as her word. The period of convalescence was to
+poor Mrs. Mason--a sickly, plaintive creature at the best of
+times--one long struggle and misery. Louie represented to her a
+sort of bird of prey, who was for ever descending on her child and
+carrying it off to unknown lairs. For neither mother nor nurse had
+Louie the smallest consideration; she despised and tyrannised over
+them both. But her hungry fondness for the baby grew with
+gratification, and there was no mastering her in the matter. Warm
+weather came, and when she reached home after her work, she managed
+by one ruse or another to get hold of the child, and on one
+occasion she disappeared with it into the street for hours. David
+was amazed by the whim, but neither he nor anyone else could
+control it. At last, Mrs. Mason was more or less hysterical all day
+long, and hardly sane when Louie was within reach. As for the
+husband, who managed to be more at home during the days of his
+wife's weakness than he had yet been since David's tenancy began,
+he complained to David and spoke his mind to Louie once or twice,
+and then, suddenly, he ceased to pay any attention to his wife's
+wails. With preternatural quickness the wife guessed the reason. A
+fresh terror seized her--terror of the girl's hateful beauty. She
+dragged herself from her bed, found a room, while Louie was at her
+work, and carried off baby and husband, leaving no address. Luckily
+for her, the impression of Louie's black eyes proved to have been a
+passing intoxication, and the poor mother breathed and lived again.
+
+Meanwhile Louie's excitement and restlessness over the Paris plan
+made her more than usually trying to Dora. During this fortnight
+she could never be counted on for work, not even when it was a
+question of finishing an important commission. She was too full of
+her various preparations. Barbier offered her for instance, a daily
+French lesson. She grasped in an instant the facilities which even
+the merest smattering of French would give her in Paris; every
+night she sat up over her phrase book, and every afternoon she cut
+her work short to go to Barbier. Her whole life seemed to be one
+flame of passionate expectation, though what exactly she expected
+it would have been hard to say.
+
+Poor Dora! She had suffered many things in much patience all these
+weeks. Louie's clear, hard mind, her sensuous temperament, her
+apparent lack of all maidenly reserve, all girlish softness, made
+her incomprehensible to one for whom life was an iridescent web of
+ideal aims and obligations. The child of grace was dragged out of
+her own austere or delicate thoughts, and made to touch, taste, and
+handle what the 'world,' as the Christian understands it, might be
+like. Like every other daughter of the people, Dora was familiar
+enough with sin and weakness--Daddy alone had made her amply
+acquainted with both at one portion or another of his career. But
+just this particular temper of Louie's, with its apparent lack both
+of passion and of moral sense, was totally new to her, and produced
+at times a stifling impression upon her, without her being able to
+explain to herself with any clearness what was the matter.
+
+Yet, in truth, it often seemed as if the lawless creature had been
+in some sort touched by Dora, as if daily contact with a being so
+gentle and so magnanimous had won even upon her. That confidence,
+for instance, which Louie had promised John, at Dora's expense, had
+never been made. When it came to the point, some touch of remorse,
+of shame, had sealed the girl's mocking lips.
+
+One little fact in particular had amazed Dora. Louie insisted, for
+a caprice, on going with her one night, in Easter week, to St.
+Damian's, and thenceforward went often. What attracted her, Dora
+puzzled herself to discover. When, however, Louie had been a
+diligent spectator, even at early services, for some weeks, Dora
+timidly urged that she might be confirmed, and that Father Russell
+would take her into his class. Louie laughed immoderately at the
+idea, but continued to go to St. Damian's all the same. Dora could
+not bear to be near her in church, but however far away she might
+place herself, she was more conscious than she liked to be of
+Louie's conspicuous figure and hat thrown out against a particular
+pillar which the girl affected. The sharp uplifted profile with its
+disdainful expression drew her eyes against their will. She was
+also constantly aware of the impression Louie made upon the crowd,
+of the way in which she was stared at and remarked upon. Whenever
+she passed in or out of the church, people turned, and the girl,
+expecting it, and totally unabashed, flashed her proud look from
+side to side.
+
+But once in her place, she was not inattentive. The dark chancel
+with its flowers and incense, the rich dresses and slow movements
+of the priests, the excitement of the processional hymns--these
+things caught her and held her. Her look was fixed and eager all
+the time. As to the clergy, Dora spoke to Father's Russell's
+sister, and some efforts were made to get hold of the new-comer.
+But none of them were at all successful. The girl slipped through
+everybody's hands. Only in the case of one of the curates, a man
+with a powerful, ugly head, and a penetrating personality, did she
+show any wavering. Dora fancied that she put herself once or twice
+in his way, that something about him attracted her, and that he
+might have influenced her. But as soon as the Paris project rose on
+the horizon, Louie thought of nothing else. Father Impey and St.
+Damian's, like everything else, were forgotten. She never went near
+the church from the evening David told her his news to the day they
+left Manchester.
+
+David ran in to say good-bye to Daddy and Dora on the night before
+they were to start. Since the Paris journey had been in the air,
+Daddy's friendliness for the young fellow had revived. He was not,
+after all, content to sit at home upon his six hundred pounds 'like
+a hatching hen,' and so far Daddy, whose interest in him had been
+for the time largely dashed by his sudden accession to fortune, was
+appeased.
+
+When David appeared Lomax was standing on the rug, with a book
+under his arm.
+
+'Well, good-bye to you, young man, good-bye to you. And here's a
+book to take with you that you may read in the train. It will stir
+you up a bit, give you an idea or two. Don't you come back too
+soon.'
+
+'Father,' remonstrated Dora, who was standing by, 'who's to look
+after his business?'
+
+'Be quiet, Dora! That book'll show him what can be made even of a
+beastly bookseller.'
+
+David took it from him, looked at the title, and laughed. He knew
+it well. It was the 'Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of
+London,' the eccentric record of a seventeenth-century dealer in
+books, who, like Daddy, had been a character and a vagrant.
+
+'Och! Don't I know it by heart?' said Daddy, with enthusiasm. 'Many
+a time it's sent me off tramping, when my poor Isabella thought
+she'd got me tied safe by the heels in the chimney corner.
+_Though_ love is strong as death, and every good man loves his
+wife as himself, _yet_--many's the score of times I've said it
+off pat to Isabella--_yet_ I cannot think of being confined in
+a narrower study than the whole world. "There's a man for you! He
+gets rid of one wife and saddles himself with another--sorrow a bit
+will he stop at home for either of them!" Finding I am for
+travelling, Valeria, to show the height of her love, is as willing
+I should see Europe as Eliza was I should see America. 'Och! give
+me the book, you divil,' cried Daddy, growing more and more
+Hibernian as his passion rose, 'and, bedad, but I'll drive it into
+you.'
+
+And, reaching over, Daddy seized it, and turned over the pages with
+a trembling hand. Dora flushed, and the tears rose into her eyes.
+She realised perfectly that this performance was levelled at her at
+least as much as at David. Daddy's mad irritability had grown of
+late with every week.
+
+'Listen to this, Davy!' cried Daddy, putting up his hand for
+silence.' "When I have crossed the Hellespont, where poor Leander
+was drowned, Greece, China, and the Holy Land are the other three
+countries I'm bound to. And perhaps when my hand is in--"'
+
+'_My hand is in!_' repeated Daddy, in an ecstasy. 'What a
+jewel of a man!'
+
+'I may step thence to the Indies, for I am a true lover of travels,
+and, when I am once mounted, care not whether I meet the sun at his
+rising or going down, provided only I may but ramble.... _He_
+is truly a scholar who is versed in the volume of the Universe, who
+doth not so much read of Nature as study Nature herself.'
+
+'Well said--well said indeed!' cried Daddy, flinging the book down
+with a wild gesture which startled them both. 'Was that the man,
+Adrian Lomax, to spend the only hours of the only life he was ever
+likely to see--his first thought in the morning, and his last
+thought at night--in tickling the stomachs of Manchester clerks?'
+
+His peaked chin and straggling locks fell forward on his breast. He
+stared sombrely at the young people before him, in an attitude
+which, as usual, was the attitude of an actor.
+
+David's natural instinct was to jeer. But a glance at Dora
+perplexed him. There was some tragedy he did not understand under
+this poor comedy.
+
+'Don't speak back,' said Dora, hurriedly, under her breath, as she
+passed him to get her frame. 'It only makes him worse.'
+
+After a few minutes' broken chat, which Daddy's mood made it
+difficult to keep up, David took his departure. Dora followed him
+downstairs.
+
+'You're going to be away a fortnight,' she said, timidly.
+
+As she spoke, she moved her head backwards and forwards against the
+wall, as though it ached, and she could not find a restful spot.
+
+'Oh, we shall be back by then, never fear!' said David, cheerfully.
+He was growing more and more sorry for her.
+
+'I should like to see foreign parts,' she said wistfully. 'Is there
+a beautiful church, a cathedral, in Paris? Oh, there are a great
+many in France, I know! I've heard the people at St. Damian's speak
+of them. I would like to see the services. But they can't be nicer
+than ours.'
+
+David smiled.
+
+'I'm afraid I can't tell you much about them, Miss Dora; they
+aren't in my line. Good-bye, and keep your heart up.'
+
+He was going, but he turned back to say quickly--
+
+'Why don't you let him go off for a bit of a tramp? It might quiet
+him.'
+
+'I would; I would,' she said eagerly; 'but I don't know what would
+come of it. We're dreadfully behindhand this month, and if he were
+to go away, people would be down on us; they'd think he wanted to
+get out of paying.'
+
+He stayed talking a bit, trying to advise her, and, in the first
+place, trying to find out how wrong things were. But she had not
+yet come to the point of disclosing her father's secrets. She
+parried his questions, showing him all the while, by look and
+voice, that she was grateful to him for asking--for caring.
+
+He went at last, and she locked the door behind him. But when that
+was done, she stood still in the dark, wringing her hands in a
+silent passion of longing--longing to be with him, outside, in the
+night, to hear his voice, to see his handsome looks again. Oh! the
+fortnight would be long. So long as he was there, within a stone's
+throw, though he did not love her, and she was sad and anxious, yet
+Manchester held her treasure, and Manchester streets had glamour,
+had charm.
+
+He walked to Piccadilly, and took a 'bus to Mortimer Street. He
+must say good-bye also to Mr. Ancrum, who had been low and ill of
+late.
+
+'So you are off, David?' said Ancrum, rousing himself from what
+seemed a melancholy brooding over books that he was in truth not
+reading. As David shook hands with him, the small fusty room, the
+pale face and crippled form awoke in the lad a sense of
+indescribable dreariness. In a flash of recoil and desire his
+thought sprang to the journey of the next day--to the May seas--the
+foreign land.
+
+'Well, good luck to you!' said the minister, altering his position
+so as to look at his visitor full, and doing it with a slowness
+which showed that all movement was an effort.' Look after your
+sister, Davy.'
+
+David had sat down at Ancrum's invitation. He said nothing in
+answer to this last remark, and Ancrum could not decipher him in
+the darkness visible of the ill-trimmed lamp.
+
+'She's been on your mind, Davy, hasn't she?' he said, gently,
+laying his blanched hand on the young man's knee.
+
+'Well, perhaps she has,' David admitted, with an odd note in his
+voice. 'She's not an easy one to manage.'
+
+'No. But you've _got_ to manage her, Davy. There's only you
+and she together. It's your task. It's set you. And you're young,
+indeed, and raw, to have that beautiful self-willed creature on
+your hands.'
+
+'Beautiful? Do you think she's that?' David tried to laugh it off.
+
+The minister nodded.
+
+'You'll find it out in Paris even more than you have here. Paris is
+a bad place, they say. So's London, for the matter of that. Davy,
+before you go, I've got one thing to say to you.'
+
+'Say away, sir.'
+
+'You know a great deal, Davy. My wits are nothing to yours. You'll
+shoot ahead of all your old friends, my boy, some day. But there's
+one thing you know nothing about--absolutely nothing--and you prate
+as if you did. Perhaps you must turn Christian before you do. I
+don't know. At least, so long as you're not a Christian you won't
+know what _we_ mean by it--what the Bible means by it. It's
+one little word, Davy--_sin_.'
+
+The minister spoke with a deep intensity, as though his whole being
+were breathed into what he said. David sat silent and embarrassed,
+opposition rising in him to what he thought ministerial assumption.
+
+'Well, I don't know what you mean,' he said, after a pause. 'One
+needn't be very old to find out that a good many people and things
+in the world are pretty bad. Only we Secularists explain it
+differently from you. We put a good deal of it down to education,
+or health, or heredity.'
+
+'Oh, I know--I know!' said the minister hastily, as though
+shrinking from the conversation he had himself evoked. 'I'm not fit
+to talk about it, Davy. I'm ill, I think! But there were those two
+things I wanted to say to you--your sister--and--'
+
+His voice dropped. He shaded his eyes and looked away from David
+into the smouldering coals.
+
+'No--no,' he resumed almost in a whisper; 'it's the
+_will_--it's the _will_. It's not anything he says, and
+Christ--_Christ's_ the only help.'
+
+Again there was a silence. David studied his old teacher
+attentively, as far as the half-light availed him. The young man
+was simply angry with a religion which could torment a soul and
+body like this. Ancrum had been 'down' in this way for a long time
+now. Was another of his black fits approaching? If so, religion was
+largely responsible for them!
+
+When at last David sighted his own door, he perceived a figure
+lounging on the steps.
+
+'I say,' he said to himself with a groan, 'it's John!'
+
+'What on earth do you want, John, at this time of night?' he
+demanded. But he knew perfectly.
+
+'Look here!' said the other thickly, 'it's all straight. You're
+coming back in a fortnight, and you'll bring her back too!'
+
+David laughed impatiently.
+
+'Do you think I shall lose her in Paris or drop her in the Channel?'
+
+'I don't know,' said Dalby, with a curiously heavy and indistinct
+utterance. 'She's very bad to me. She won't ever marry me; I know
+that. But when I think I might never see her again I'm fit to go
+and hang myself.'
+
+David began to kick the pebbles in the road.
+
+'You know what I think about it all,' he said at last, gloomily.
+'I've told you before now. She couldn't care for you if she tried.
+It isn't a ha'p'orth of good. I don't believe she'll ever care for
+anybody. Anyway, she'll marry nobody who can't give her money and
+fine clothes. There! You may put that in your pipe and smoke it,
+for it's as true as you stand there.'
+
+John turned round restlessly, laid his hands against the wall, and
+his head upon them.
+
+'Well, it don't matter,' he said slowly, after a pause. 'I'll be
+here early. Good night!'
+
+David stood and looked after him in mingled disgust and pity.
+
+'I must pack him off,' he said, 'I must.'
+
+Then he threw back his young shoulders and drew in the warm spring
+air with a long breath. Away with care and trouble! Things would
+come right--must come right. This weather was summer, and in
+forty-eight hours they would be in Paris!
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III STORM AND STRESS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The brother and sister left Manchester about midday, and spent the
+night in London at a little City hotel much frequented by
+Nonconformist ministers, which Ancrum had recommended.
+
+Then next day! How little those to whom all the widest
+opportunities of life come for the asking, can imagine such a zest,
+such a freshness of pleasure! David had hesitated long before the
+expense of the day service _via_ Calais; they could have gone
+by night third class for half the money; or they could have taken
+returns by one of the cheaper and longer routes. But the eagerness
+to make the most of every hour of time and daylight prevailed; they
+were to go by Calais and come back by Dieppe, seeing thereby as
+much as possible on the two journeys in addition to the fortnight
+in Paris. The mere novelty of going anything but third class was
+full of savour; Louie's self-conscious dignity as she settled
+herself into her corner on leaving Charing Cross caught David's
+eye; he saw himself reflected and laughed.
+
+It was a glorious day, the firstling of the summer. In the blue
+overhead the great clouds rose intensely thunderously white, and
+journeyed seaward under a light westerly wind. The railway banks,
+the copses were all primroses; every patch of water had in it the
+white and azure of the sky; the lambs were lying in the still
+scanty shadow of the elms; every garden showed its tulips and
+wallflowers, and the air, the sunlight, the vividness of each hue
+and line bore with them an intoxicating joy, especially for eyes
+still adjusted to the tones and lights of Manchester in winter.
+
+The breeze carried them merrily over a dancing sea. And once on the
+French side they spent their first hour in crossing from one side
+of their carriage to the other, pointing and calling incessantly.
+For the first time since certain rare moments in their childhood
+they were happy together and at one. Mother Earth unrolled for them
+a corner of her magic show, and they took it like children at the
+play, now shouting, now spell-bound.
+
+David had George Sand's 'Mauprat' on his knee, but he read nothing
+the whole day. Never had he used his eyes so intently, so
+passionately. Nothing escaped them, neither the detail of that
+strange and beautiful fen from which Amiens rises--a country of
+peat and peat-cutters where the green plain is diapered with
+innumerable tiny lakes edged with black heaps of turf and daintily
+set with scattered trees--nor the delicate charm of the forest
+lands about Chautilly. So much thinner and gracefuller these woods
+were than English woods! French art and skill were here already in
+the wild country. Each tree stood out as though it had been
+personally thought for; every plantation was in regular lines; each
+woody walk drove straight from point to point, following out a plan
+orderly and intricate as a spider's web.
+
+By this time Louie's fervour of curiosity and attention had very
+much abated; she grew tired and cross, and presently fell asleep.
+But, with every mile less between them and Paris, David's pulse
+beat faster, and his mind became more absorbed in the flying scene.
+He hung beside the window, thrilling with enchantment and delight,
+drinking in the soft air, the beauty of the evening clouds, the
+wonderful greens and silvers and fiery browns of the poplars. His
+mind was full of images--the deep lily-sprinkled lake wherein
+Stenio, Lelia's poet lover, plunged and died; the grandiose
+landscape of Victor Hugo; Rene sitting on the cliff-side, and
+looking farewell to the white home of his childhood;--of lines from
+'Childe Harold' and from Shelley. His mind was in a ferment of
+youth and poetry, and the France he saw was not the workaday France
+of peasant and high road and factory, but the creation of poetic
+intelligence, of ignorance and fancy.
+
+Paris came in a flash. He had realised to the full the squalid and
+ever-widening zone of London, had frittered away his expectations
+almost, in the passing it; but here the great city had hardly
+announced itself before they were in the midst of it, shot out into
+the noise, and glare, and crowd of the Nord station.
+
+They had no luggage to wait for, and David, trembling with
+excitement so that he could hardly give the necessary orders,
+shouldered the bags, got a cab and gave the address. Outside it was
+still twilight, but the lamps were lit and the Boulevard into which
+they presently turned seemed to brother and sister a blaze of
+light. The young green of the trees glittered under the gas like
+the trees of a pantomime; the kiosks threw their lights out upon
+the moving crowd; shops and cafes were all shining and alive; and
+on either hand rose the long line of stately houses, unbroken by
+any London or Manchester squalors and inequalities, towering as it
+seemed into the skies, and making for the great spectacle of life
+beneath them a setting more gay, splendid, and complete than any
+Englishman in his own borders can ever see.
+
+Louie had turned white with pleasure and excitement. All her dreams
+of gaiety and magnificence, of which the elements had been gathered
+from the illustrated papers and the Manchester theatres, were more
+than realised by these Paris gas-lights, these vast houses, these
+laughing and strolling crowds.
+
+'Look at those people having their coffee out of doors,' she cried
+to David, 'and that white and gold place behind. Goodness! what they
+must spend in gas! And just look at those two girls--look,
+quick--there, with the young man in the black moustache--they
+_are_ loud, but aren't their dresses just sweet?'
+
+She craned her neck out of window, exclaiming--now at this, now at
+that--till suddenly they passed out of the Boulevard into the
+comparative darkness of side ways. Here the height of the houses
+produced a somewhat different impression; Louie looked out none the
+less keenly, but her chatter ceased.
+
+At last the cab drew up with a clatter at the side of a
+particularly dark and narrow street, ascending somewhat sharply to
+the north-west from the point where they stopped.
+
+'Now for the _concierge_,' said David, looking round him,
+after he had paid the man.
+
+And conning Barbier's directions in his mind, he turned into the
+gateway, and made boldly for a curtained door behind which shone a
+light.
+
+The woman, who came out in answer to his knock, looked him all over
+from head to foot, while he explained himself in his best French.
+
+'_Tiens_,' she said, indifferently, to a man behind her, 'it's
+the people for No. 26--_des Anglais_--_M. Paul te l'a dit_.
+Hand me the key.'
+
+The _bonhomme_ addressed--a little, stooping, wizened
+creature, with china-blue eyes, showing widely in his withered face
+under the light of the paraffin-lamp his wife was holding--reached
+a key from a board on the wall and gave it to her.
+
+The woman again surveyed them both, the young man and the girl, and
+seemed to debate with herself whether she should take the trouble
+to be civil. Finally she said in an ungracious voice--
+
+'It's the fourth floor to the right. I must take you up, I suppose.'
+
+David thanked her, and she preceded them with the light through a
+door opposite and up some stone stairs.
+
+When they had mounted two flights, she turned abruptly on the
+landing--
+
+'You take the _appartement_ from M. Dubois?'
+
+'Yes,' said David, enchanted to find that, thanks to old Barbier's
+constant lessons, he could both understand and reply with tolerable
+ease; 'for a fortnight.'
+
+'Take care; the landlord will be descending on you; M. Dubois never
+pays; he may be turned out any day, and his things sold. Where is
+Mademoiselle going to sleep?'
+
+'But in M. Dubois' _appartement_,' said David, hoping this
+time, in his dismay, that he did _not_ understand; 'he promised
+to arrange everything.'
+
+'He has arranged nothing. Do you wish that I should provide some
+things? You can hire some furniture from me. And do you want
+service?'
+
+The woman had a grasping eye. David's frugal instincts took alarm.
+
+'_Merci_, Madame! My sister and I do not require much. We
+shall wait upon ourselves. If Madame will tell us the name of some
+restaurant near--'
+
+Instead, Madame made an angry sound and thrust the key abruptly
+into Louie's hand, David being laden with the bags.
+
+'There are two more flights,' she said roughly; 'then turn to the
+left, and go up the staircase straight in front of you--first door
+to the right. You've got eyes; you'll find the way.'
+
+'_Mais, Madame_--' cried David, bewildered by these
+directions, and trying to detain her.
+
+But she was already half-way down the flight below them,
+throwing back remarks which, to judge from their tone, were
+not complimentary.
+
+There was no help for it. Louie was dropping with fatigue, and
+beginning to be much out of temper. David with difficulty assumed a
+hopeful air, and up they went again. Leading off the next landing
+but one they found a narrow passage, and at the end of it a
+ladder-like staircase. At the top of this they came upon a corridor
+at right angles, in which the first door bore the welcome figures
+'26.'
+
+'All right,' said David; 'here we are. Now we'll just go in, and
+look about us. Then if you'll sit and rest a bit, I'll run down and
+see where we can get something to eat.'
+
+'Be quick, then--do,' said Louie. 'I'm just fit to drop.'
+
+With a beating heart he put the key into the lock of the door. It
+fitted, but he could not turn it. Both he and Louie tried in vain.
+
+'What a nuisance!' said he at last. 'I must go and fetch up that
+woman again. You sit down and wait.'
+
+As he spoke there was a sound below of quick steps, and of a voice,
+a woman's voice, humming a song.
+
+'Some one coming,' he said to Louie; 'perhaps they understand the
+lock.'
+
+They ran down to the landing below to reconnoitre. There was, of
+course, gas on the staircase, and as they hung over the iron
+railing they saw mounting towards them a young girl. She wore a
+light fawn-coloured dress and a hat covered with Parma violets.
+Hearing voices above her, she threw her head back, and stopped a
+moment. Louie's eye was caught by her hand and its tiny wrist as it
+lay on the balustrade, and by the coils and twists of her fair
+hair. David saw no details, only what seemed to him a miracle of
+grace and colour, born in an instant, out of the dark--or out of
+his own excited fancy?
+
+She came slowly up the steps, looking at them, at the tall dark
+youth and the girl beside him. Then on the top step she paused,
+instead of going past them. David took off his hat, but all the
+practical questions he had meant to ask deserted him. His French
+seemed to have flown.
+
+'You are strangers, aren't you?' she said, in a clear, high,
+somewhat imperious voice. 'What number do you want?'
+
+Her expression had a certain _hauteur_, as of one defending
+her native ground against intruders. Under the stimulus of it David
+found his tongue.
+
+'We have taken M. Paul Dubois' rooms,' he said. 'We have found his
+door, but the key the _concierge_ gave us does not fit it.'
+
+She laughed, a free, frank laugh, which had a certain wild note in
+it.
+
+'These doors have to be coaxed,' she said; 'they don't like
+foreigners. Give it me. This is my way, too.'
+
+Stepping past them, she preceded them up the narrow stairs, and was
+just about to try the key in the lock, when a sudden recollection
+seemed to flash upon her.
+
+'I know!' she said, turning upon them. '_Tenez--que je suis bete!_
+You are Dubois' English friends. He told me something, and I
+had forgotten all about it. You are going to take his rooms?'
+
+'For a week or two,' said David, irritated a little by the laughing
+malice, the sarcastic wonder of her eyes, 'while he is doing some
+work in Brussels. It seemed a convenient arrangement, but if we are
+not comfortable we shall go elsewhere. If you can open the door for
+us we shall be greatly obliged to you, Mademoiselle. But if not I
+must go down for the _concierge_. We have been travelling all
+day, and my sister is tired.'
+
+'Where did you learn such good French?' she said carelessly, at the
+same time leaning her weight against the door, and manipulating the
+key in such a way that the lock turned, and the door flew open.
+
+Behind it appeared a large dark space. The light from the gas-jet
+in the passage struck into it, but beyond a chair and a tall
+screen-like object in the middle of the floor, it seemed to David
+to be empty.
+
+'That's his _atelier_, of course,' said the unknown; 'and mine
+is next to it, at the other end. I suppose he has a cupboard to
+sleep in somewhere. Most of us have. But I don't know anything
+about Dubois. I don't like him. He is not one of my friends.'
+
+She spoke in a dry, masculine voice, which contrasted in the
+sharpest way with her youth, her dress, her dainty smallness. Then,
+all of a sudden, as her eyes travelled over the English pair
+standing bewildered on the threshold of Dubois' most uninviting
+apartment, she began to laugh again. Evidently the situation seemed
+to her extremely odd.
+
+'Did you ask the people downstairs to get anything ready for you?'
+she inquired.
+
+'No,' said David, hesitating; 'we thought we could manage for
+ourselves.'
+
+'Well--perhaps--after the first,' she said, still laughing. 'But--I
+may as well warn you--the Merichat will be very uncivil to you if
+you don't manage to pay her for something. Hadn't you better
+explore? That thing in the middle is Dubois' easel, of course.'
+
+David groped his way in, took some matches from his pocket, found a
+gas-bracket with some difficulty, and lit up. Then he and Louie
+looked round them. They saw a gaunt high room, lit on one side by a
+huge studio-window, over which various tattered blinds were drawn;
+a floor of bare boards, with a few rags of carpet here and there;
+in the middle, a table covered with painter's apparatus of
+different kinds; palettes, paints, rags, tin-pots, and, thrown down
+amongst them, some stale crusts of bread; a large easel, with a
+number of old and dirty canvases piled upon it; two chairs, one of
+them without the usual complement of legs; a few etchings and
+oil-sketches and fragments of coloured stuffs pinned against the
+wall in wild confusion; and, spread out casually behind the easel,
+an iron folding-bedstead, without either mattress or bed-clothes.
+In the middle of the floor stood a smeared kettle on a spirit-stove,
+and a few odds and ends of glass and china were on the mantelpiece,
+together with a paraffin-lamp. Every article in the room was thick
+in dust.
+
+When she had, more or less, ascertained these attractive details,
+Louie stood still in the middle of M. Dubois' apartment.
+
+'What did he tell all those lies for?' she said to David fiercely.
+For in the very last communication received from him, Dubois had
+described himself as having made all necessary preparations '_et
+pour la toilette et pour le manger._' He had also asked for the
+rent in advance, which David with some demur had paid.
+
+'Here's something,' cried David; and, turning a handle in the wall,
+he pulled a flimsy door open and disclosed what seemed a cupboard.
+The cupboard, however, contained a bed, some bedding, blankets, and
+washing arrangements; and David joyously announced his discoveries.
+Louie took no notice of him. She was tired, angry, disgusted. The
+illusion of Paris was, for the moment, all gone. She sat herself
+down on one of the two chairs, and, taking off her hat, she threw
+it from her on to the belittered table with a passionate gesture.
+
+The French girl had so far stood just outside, leaning against the
+doorway, and looking on with unabashed amusement while they made
+their inspection. Now, however, as Louie uncovered, the spectator
+at the door made a little, quick sound, and then ran forward.
+
+'_Mais, mon Dieu!_ how handsome you are!' she said with a whimsical
+eagerness, stopping short in front of Louie, and driving her little
+hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. 'What a head!--what eyes! Why
+didn't I see before? You must sit to me--you _must!_ You will, won't
+you? I will pay you anything you like! You sha'n't be dull--somebody
+shall come and amuse you. _Voyons--monsieur!_' she called imperiously.
+
+David came up. She stood with one hand on the table leaning her
+light weight backward, looking at them with all her eyes--the very
+embodiment of masterful caprice.
+
+'Both of them!' she said under her breath, '_superbe!_'
+Monsieur, look here. You and mademoiselle are tired. There is
+nothing in these rooms. Dubois is a scamp without a sou. He does no
+work, and he gambles on the Bourse. Everything he had he has sold
+by degrees. If he has gone to Brussels now to work honestly, it is
+for the first time in his life. He lives on the hope of getting
+money out of an uncle in England--that I know, for he boasts of it
+to everybody. It is just like him to play a practical joke on
+strangers. No doubt you have paid him already--_n'est-ce pas_?
+I thought as much. Well, never mind! My rooms are next door. I am
+Elise Delaunay. I work in Taranne's _atelier_. I am an artist,
+pure and simple, and I live to please myself and nobody else. But I
+have a chair or two, and the woman downstairs looks after me
+because I make it worth her while. Come with me. I will give you
+some supper, and I will lend you a rug and a pillow for that bed.
+Then to-morrow you can decide what to do.'
+
+David protested, stammering and smiling. But he had flushed a rosy
+red, and there was no real resistance in him. He explained the
+invitation to Louie, who had been looking helplessly from one to
+the other, and she at once accepted it. She understood perfectly
+that the French girl admired her; her face relaxed its frown; she
+nodded to the stranger with a sort of proud yielding, and then let
+herself be taken by the arm and led once more along the corridor.
+
+Elise Delaunay unlocked her own door.
+
+'_Bien!_' she said, putting her head in first, 'Merichat has
+earned her money. Now go in--go in!--and see if I don't give you
+some supper.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+She pushed them in, and shut the door behind them. They looked
+round them in amazement. Here was an _atelier_ precisely
+corresponding in size and outlook to Dubois'. But to their
+tired eyes the change was one from squalor to fairyland. The
+room was not in fact luxurious at all. But there was a Persian
+rug or two on the polished floor; there was a wood fire burning
+on the hearth, and close to it there was a low sofa or divan
+covered with pieces of old stuffs, and flanked by a table whereon
+stood a little meal, a roll, some cut ham, part of a flat fruit
+tart from the _patissier_ next door, a coffee pot, and a spirit
+kettle ready for lighting. There were two easels in the room;
+one was laden with sketches and photographs; the other carried
+a half-finished picture of a mosque interior in Oran--a rich
+splash of colour, making a centre for all the rest. Everywhere
+indeed, on the walls, on the floor, or standing on the chairs,
+were studies of Algeria, done with an ostentatiously bold and
+rapid hand. On the mantelpiece was a small reproduction in terra
+cotta of one of Dalou's early statues, a peasant woman in a long
+cloak straining her homely baby to her breast--true and passionate.
+Books lay about, and in a corner was a piano, open, with a
+confusion of tattered music upon it. And everywhere, as it seemed
+to Louie, were _shoes!_--the daintiest and most fantastic shoes
+imaginable--Turkish shoes, Pompadour shoes, old shoes and new
+shoes, shoes with heels and shoes without, shoes lined with fur,
+and shoes blown together, as one might think, out of cardboard
+and ribbons. The English girl's eyes fastened upon them at once.
+
+'Ah, you tink my shoes pretty,' said the hostess, speaking a few words
+of English, _'c'est mon dada, voyez-vous--ma collection!--Tenez_--I
+cannot say dat in English, Monsieur; explain to your sister. My shoes
+are my passion, next to my foot. I am not pretty, but my foot is
+ravishing. Dalou modelled it for his Siren. That turned my head. Sit
+down, Mademoiselle--we will find some plat
+es.'
+
+She pushed Louie into a corner of the divan, and then she went over
+to a cupboard standing against the wall, and beckoned to David.
+
+'Take the plates--and this potted meat. Now for the _petit
+vin_ my doctor cousin brought me last week from the family
+estate. I have stowed it away somewhere. Ah! here it is. We are
+from the Gironde--at least my mother was. My father was
+nobody--_bourgeois_ from tip to toe, though he called himself
+an artist. It was a _mesalliance_ for her when she married
+him. Oh, he led her a life!--she died when I was small, and last
+year _he_ died, eleven months ago. I did my best to cry.
+_Impossible!_ He had made Maman and me cry too much. And now I
+am perfectly alone in the world, and perfectly well-behaved.
+Monsieur Prudhomme may talk--I snap my finger at him. You will have
+your ideas, of course. No matter! If you eat my salt, you will
+hardly be able to speak ill of me.'
+
+'Mademoiselle!' cried David, inwardly cursing his shyness--a
+shyness new to him--and his complete apparent lack of anything to
+say, or the means of saying it.
+
+'Oh, don't protest!--after that journey you can't afford to waste
+your breath. Move a little, Monsieur--let me open the other door of
+the cupboard--there are some chocolates worth eating on that back
+shelf. Do you admire my _armoire?_ It is old Breton--it
+belonged to my grandmother, who was from Morbihan. She brought her
+linen in it. It is cherry wood, you see, mounted in silver. You may
+search Paris for another like it. Look at that flower work on the
+panels. It is not _banal_ at all--it has character--there is
+real design in it. Now take the chocolates, and these sardine--put
+them down over there. As for me, I make the coffee.'
+
+She ran over to the spirit lamp, and set it going; she measured out
+the coffee; then sitting down on the floor, she took the bellows
+and blew up the logs.
+
+'Tell me your name, Monsieur?' she said suddenly, looking round.
+
+David gave it in full, his own name and Louie's. Then he walked up
+to her, making an effort to be at his ease, and said something
+about their French descent. His mode of speaking was slow and
+bookish--correct, but wanting in life. After this year's devotion
+to French books, after all his compositions with Barbier, he had
+supposed himself so familiar with French! With the woman from the
+_loge_, indeed, he could have talked at large, had she been
+conversational instead of rude. But here, with this little glancing
+creature, he felt himself plunged in a perfect quagmire of
+ignorance and stupidity. When he spoke of being half French, she
+became suddenly grave, and studied him with an intent piercing
+look. 'No,' she said slowly, 'no, at bottom you are not French a bit,
+you are all English, I feel it. I should fight you--_a outrance!
+Grive_--what a strange name! It's a bird's name. You are not
+like it--you do not belong to it. But _David_!--ah, that is
+better. _Voyons_!'
+
+She sprang up, ran over to the furthest easel, and, routing about
+amongst its disorder of prints and photographs, she hit upon one,
+which she held up triumphantly.
+
+'There, Monsieur!--there is your prototype. That is David--the
+young David--scourge of the Philistine. You are bigger and broader.
+I would rather fight him than you--but it is like you, all the
+same. Take it.'
+
+And she held out to him a photograph of the Donatello David at
+Florence--the divine young hero in his shepherd's hat, fresh from
+the slaying of the oppressor.
+
+He looked at it, red and wondering, then shook his head.
+
+'What is it? Who made it, Mademoiselle?'
+
+'Donatello--oh, I never saw it. I was never in Italy, but a friend
+gave it me. It is like you, I tell you. But, what use is that? You
+are English--yes, you _are_, in spite of your mother. It is
+very well to be called David--you may be Goliath all the time!'
+
+Her tone had grown hard and dry--insulting almost. Her look sent
+him a challenge.
+
+He stared at her dumbfounded. All the self-confidence with which he
+had hitherto governed his own world had deserted him. He was like a
+tongue-tied child in her hands.
+
+She enjoyed her mastery, and his discomfiture. Her look changed and
+melted in an instant.
+
+'I am rude,' she said, 'and you can't answer me back--not yet--for a
+day or two. _Pardon_! Monsieur David--Mademoiselle--will you
+come to supper?'
+
+She put chairs and waved them to their places with the joyous
+animation of a child, waiting on them, fetching this and that, with
+the quickest, most graceful motions. She had brought from the
+_armoire_ some fine white napkins, and now she produced a
+glass or two and made her guests provide themselves with the red
+wine which neither had ever tasted before, and over which Louie
+made an involuntary face. Then she began to chatter and to
+eat--both as fast as possible--now laughing at her own English or
+at David's French, and now laying down her knife and fork that she
+might look at Louie with an intent professional look which
+contrasted oddly with the wild freedom of her talk and movements.
+
+Suddenly she took up a wineglass and held it out to David with a
+piteous childish gesture.
+
+'Fill it, Monsieur, and then drink--drink to my good luck. I wish
+for something--with my _life_--my soul; but there are people
+who hate me, who would delight to see me crushed. And it will be
+three weeks--three long long weeks, almost--before I know.'
+
+She was very pale, the tears had sprung to her eyes, and the hand
+holding the glass trembled. David flushed and frowned in the vain
+desire to understand her.
+
+'What am I to do?' he said, taking the glass mechanically, but
+making no use of it.
+
+'Drink!--drink to my success. I have two pictures, Monsieur, in the
+Salon; you know what that means? the same as your _Academie?
+Parfaitement!_ ah! you understand. One is well hung, on the
+line; the other has been shamefully treated--but _shamefully!_
+And all the world knows why. I have some enemies on the jury, and
+they delight in a mean triumph over me--a triumph which is a
+scandal. But I have friends, too--good friends--and in three weeks
+the rewards will be voted. You understand? the medals, and the
+_mentions honorables_. As for a medal--no! I am only two years
+in the _atelier;_ I am not unreasonable. But a _mention!
+_--ah! Monsieur David, if they don't give it me I shall be very
+miserable.'
+
+Her voice had gone through a whole gamut of emotion in this
+speech--pride, elation, hope, anger, offended dignity--sinking
+finally to the plaintive note of a child asking for consolation.
+
+And luckily David had followed her. His French novels had brought
+him across the Salon and the jury system; and Barbier had told him
+tales. His courage rose. He poured the wine into the glass with a
+quick, uncertain hand, and raised it to his lips.
+
+'_A la gloire de Mademoiselle!_' he cried, tossing it down
+with a gesture almost as free and vivid as her own.
+
+Her eye followed him with excitement, taking in every detail of the
+action--the masculine breadth of chest, the beauty of the dark head
+and short upper lip.
+
+'Very good--very good!' she said, clapping her small hands. 'You did
+that admirably--you improve--_n'est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?_'
+
+But Louie only stared blankly and somewhat haughtily in return. She
+was beginning to be tired of her silent _role_, and of the
+sort of subordination it implied. The French girl seemed to divine
+it, and her.
+
+'She does not like me,' she said, with a kind of wonder under her
+breath, so that David did not catch the words. 'The other is quite
+different.'
+
+Then, springing up, she searched in the pockets of her jacket for
+something--lips pursed, brows knitted, as though the quest were
+important.
+
+'Where are my cigarettes?' she demanded sharply. 'Ah! here they are.
+Mademoiselle--Monsieur.'
+
+Louie laughed rudely, pushing them back without a word. Then she
+got up, and began boldly to look about her. The shoes attracted
+her, and some Algerian scarves and burnouses that were lying on a
+distant chair. She went to turn them over.
+
+Mademoiselle Delaunay looked after her for a moment--with the same
+critical attention as before--then with a shrug she threw herself
+into a corner of the divan, drawing about her a bit of old
+embroidered stuff which lay there. It was so flung, however, as to
+leave one dainty foot in an embroidered silk stocking visible
+beyond it. The tone of the stocking was repeated in the bunch of
+violets at her neck, and the purples of the flowers told with
+charming effect against her white skin and the pale fawn colour of
+her dress and hair. David watched her with intoxication. She could
+hardly be taller than most children of fourteen, but her
+proportions were so small and delicate that her height, whatever it
+was, seemed to him the perfect height for a woman. She handled her
+cigarette with mannish airs; unless it were some old harridan in a
+collier's cottage, he had never seen a woman smoke before, and
+certainly he had never guessed it could become her so well. Not
+pretty! He was in no mood to dissect the pale irregular face with
+its subtleties of line and expression; but, as she sat there
+smoking and chatting, she was to him the realisation--the climax of
+his dream of Paris. All the lightness and grace of that dream, the
+strangeness, the thrill of it seemed to have passed into her.
+
+'Will you stay in those rooms?' she inquired, slowly blowing away
+the curls of smoke in front of her.
+
+David replied that he could not yet decide. He looked as he
+felt--in a difficulty.
+
+'Oh! _you_ will do well enough there. But your
+sister--_Tenez_! There is a family on the floor below--an
+artist and his wife. I have known them take _pensionnaires_.
+They are not the most distinguished persons in the world--_mais
+enfin_!--it is not for long. Your sister might do worse than
+board with them.'
+
+David thanked her eagerly. He would make all inquiries. He had in
+his pocket a note of introduction from Dubois to Madame Cervin, and
+another, he believed, to the gentleman on the ground floor--to M.
+Montjoie, the sculptor.
+
+'Ah! M. Montjoie!'
+
+Her brows went up, her grey eyes flashed. As for her tone it was
+half amused, half contemptuous. She began to speak, moved
+restlessly, then apparently thought better of it.
+
+'After all,' she said, in a rapid undertone, '_qu'est-ce que cela
+me fait? Allons._ Why did you come here at all, instead of to an
+hotel, for so short a time?'
+
+He explained as well as he was able.
+
+'You wanted to see something of French life, and French artists or
+writers?' she repeated slowly, 'and you come with introductions from
+Xavier Dubois! _C'est drole, ca._ Have you studied art?'
+
+He laughed.
+
+'No--except in books.'
+
+'What books?'
+
+'Novels--George Sand's.'
+
+It was her turn to laugh now.
+
+'You are really too amusing! No, Monsieur, no; you interest me.
+I have the best will in the world towards you; but I cannot ask
+Consuelos and Teverinos to meet you. _Pas possible._ I regret--'
+
+She fell into silence a moment, studying him with a merry look.
+Then she broke out again.
+
+'Are you a connoisseur in pictures, Monsieur?'
+
+He had reddened already under her _persiflage._ At this he
+grew redder still.
+
+'I have never seen any, Mademoiselle,' he said, almost piteously;
+'except once a little exhibition in Manchester.'
+
+'Nor sculpture?'
+
+'No,' he said honestly; 'nor sculpture.'
+
+It seemed to him he was being held under a microscope, so keen and
+pitiless were her laughing eyes. But she left him no time to resent
+it.
+
+'So you are a blank page, Monsieur--virgin soil--and you confess
+it. You interest me extremely. I should even like to teach you a
+little. I am the most ignorant person in the world. I know nothing
+about artists in books. _Mais je suis artiste, moi! fille
+d'artiste._ I could tell you tales--'
+
+She threw her graceful head back against the cushion behind her,
+and smiled again broadly, as though her sense of humour were
+irresistibly tickled by the situation.
+
+Then a whim seized her, and she sat up, grave and eager.
+
+'I have drawn since I was eight years old,' she said; 'would you
+like to hear about it? It is not romantic--not the least in the
+world--but it is true.'
+
+And with what seemed to his foreign ear a marvellous swiftness and
+fertility of phrase, she poured out her story. After her mother
+died she had been sent at eight years old to board at a farm near
+Rouen by her father, who seemed to have regarded his daughter now
+as plaything and model, now as an intolerable drag on the freedom
+of a vicious career. And at the farm the child's gift declared
+itself. She began with copying the illustrations, the saints and
+holy families in a breviary belonging to one of the farm servants;
+she went on to draw the lambs, the carts, the horses, the farm
+buildings, on any piece of white wood she could find littered about
+the yard, or any bit of paper saved from a parcel, till at last the
+old cure took pity upon her and gave her some chalks and a
+drawing-book. At fourteen her father, for a caprice, reclaimed her,
+and she found herself alone with him in Paris. To judge from the
+hints she threw out, her life during thee next few years had been
+of the roughest and wildest, protected only by her indomitable
+resolve to learn, to make herself an artist, come what would. 'I
+meant to be _famous_, and I mean it still!' she said, with a
+passionate emphasis which made David open his eyes. Her father
+refused to believe in her gift, and was far too self-indulgent and
+brutal to teach her. But some of his artist friends were kind to
+her, and taught her intermittently; by the help of some of them she
+got permission, although under age, to copy in the Louvre, and with
+hardly any technical knowledge worked there feverishly from morning
+to night; and at last Taranne--the great Taranne, from whose
+_atelier_ so many considerable artists had gone out to the
+conquest of the public--Taranne had seen some of her drawings,
+heard her story, and generously taken her as a pupil.
+
+Then emulation took hold of her--the fierce desire to be first in
+all the competitions of the _atelier_. David had the greatest
+difficulty in following her rapid speech, with its slang, its
+technical idioms, its extravagance and variety; but he made out
+that she had been for a long time deficient in sound training, and
+that her rivals at the _atelier_ had again and again beaten
+her easily in spite of her gift, because of her weakness in the
+grammar of her art.
+
+'And whenever they beat me I could have killed my conquerors; and
+whenever I beat them, I despised my judges and wanted to give the
+prize away. It is not my fault. _Je suis faite comme ca--voila!
+_ I am as vain as a peacock; yet when people admire anything I
+do, I think them fools--_fools!_ I am jealous and proud and
+absurd--so they all say; yet a word, a look from a real
+artist--from one of the great men who _know_--can break me,
+make me cry. _Demelez ca, Monsieur, si vous pouvez!_'
+
+She stopped, out of breath. Their eyes were on each other. The
+fascination, the absorption expressed in the Englishman's look
+startled her. She hurriedly turned away, took up her cigarette
+again, and nestled into the cushion. He vainly tried to clothe some
+of the quick comments running through his mind in adequate French,
+could find nothing but the most commonplace phrases, stammered out
+a few, and then blushed afresh. In her pity for him she took up her
+story again.
+
+After her father's sudden death, the shelter, such as it was, of
+his name and companionship was withdrawn. What was she to do? It
+turned out that she possessed a small _rente_ which had belonged to
+her mother, and which her father had never been able to squander.
+Two relations from her mother's country near Bordeaux turned up to
+claim her, a country doctor and his sister--middle-aged, devout--to
+her wild eyes at least, altogether forbidding.
+
+'They made too much of their self-sacrifice in taking me to live
+with them,' she said with her little ringing laugh. 'I said to
+them--"My good uncle and aunt, it is too much--no one could have
+the right to lay such a burden upon you. Go home and forget me. I
+am incorrigible. I am an artist. I mean to live by myself, and work
+for myself. I am sure to go to the bad--good morning." They went
+home and told the rest of my mother's people that I was insane. But
+they could not keep my money from me. It is just enough for me.
+Besides, I shall be selling soon,--certainly I shall be selling! I
+have had two or three inquiries already about one of the exhibits
+in the Salon. Now then--_talk_, Monsieur David!' and she
+emphasised the words by a little frown; 'it is your turn.'
+
+And gradually by skill and patience she made him talk, made him
+give her back some of her confidences. It seemed to amuse her
+greatly that he should be a bookseller. She knew no booksellers in
+Paris; she could assure him they were all pure _bourgeois_,
+and there was not one of them that could be likened to Donatello's
+David. Manchester she had scarcely heard of; she shook her fair
+head over it. But when he told her of his French reading, when he
+waxed eloquent about Rousseau and George Sand, then her mirth
+became uncontrollable.
+
+'You came to France to talk of Rousseau and George Sand?' she asked
+him with dancing eyes--'_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ what do you
+take us for?'
+
+This time his vanity was hurt. He asked her to tell him what she
+meant--why she laughed at him.
+
+'I will do better than that,' she said; 'I will get some friend of
+mine to take you to-morrow to "Les Trois Rats."'
+
+'What is "Les Trois Rats"?' he asked, half wounded and half
+mystified.
+
+'"Les Trois Rats," Monsieur, is an artist's cafe. It is famous, it
+is characteristic; if you are in search of local colour you must
+certainly go there. When you come back you will have some fresh
+ideas, I promise you.'
+
+He asked if ladies also went there.
+
+'Some do; I don't. Conventions mean nothing to me, as you perceive,
+or I should have a companion here to play propriety. But like you,
+perhaps, I am Romantic. I believe in the grand style. I have ideas
+as to how men should treat me. I can read Octave Feuillet. I have a
+terrible weakness for those _cavaliers_ of his. And garbage
+makes me ill. So I avoid the "Trois Rats."'
+
+She fell silent, resting her little chin on her hand. Then with a
+sudden sly smile she bent forward and looked him in the eyes.
+
+'Are you pious, Monsieur, like all the English? There is some
+religion left in your country, isn't there?'
+
+'Yes, certainly,' he admitted, 'there was a good deal.'
+
+Then, hesitating, he described his own early reading of Voltaire,
+watching its effect upon her, afraid lest here too he should say
+something fatuous, behind the time, as he seemed to have been doing
+all through.
+
+'Voltaire!'--she shrugged her little shoulders--'Voltaire to me is
+just an old _perruque_--a prating philanthropical person who talked
+about _le bon Dieu_, and wrote just what every _bourgeois_ can
+understand. If he had had his will and swept away the clergy and
+the Church, how many fine subjects we artists should have lost!'
+
+He sat helplessly staring at her. She enjoyed his perplexity a
+minute; then she returned to the charge.
+
+'Well, my credo is very short. Its first article is art--and its
+second is art--and its third is art!'
+
+Her words excited her. The delicate colour flushed into her cheek.
+She flung her head back and looked straight before her with
+half-shut eyes.
+
+'Yes--I believe in art--and expression--and colour--and _le
+vrai_. Velazquez is my God, and--and he has too many prophets to
+mention! I was devout once for three months--since then I have
+never had as much faith of the Church sort as would lie on a
+ten-sous piece. But'--with a sudden whimsical change of voice--'I
+am as credulous as a Breton fisherman, and as superstitious as a
+gipsy! Wait and see. Will you look at my pictures?'
+
+She sprang up and showed her sketches. She had been a winter in
+Algiers, and had there and in Spain taken a passion for the East,
+for its colour, its mystery, its suggestions of cruelty and
+passion. She chattered away, explaining, laughing, haranguing, and
+David followed her submissively from thing to thing, dumb with the
+interest and curiosity of this new world and language of the
+artist.
+
+Louie meanwhile, who, after the refreshment of supper, had been
+forgetting both her fatigue and the other two in the entertainment
+provided her by the shoes and the Oriental dresses, had now found a
+little inlaid coffer on a distant table, full of Algerian trinkets,
+and was examining them. Suddenly a loud crash was heard from her
+neighbourhood.
+
+Elise Delaunay stood still. Her quick speech, died on her lips. She
+made one bound forward to Louie; then, with a cry, she turned
+deathly pale, tottered, and would have fallen, but that David ran
+to her.
+
+'The glass is broken,' she said, or rather gasped; 'she has broken
+it--that old Venetian glass of Maman's. Oh! my pictures!--my pictures!
+How can I undo it? _Je suis perdue_! Oh go!--go!--_go_--both of you!
+Leave me alone! Why did I ever see you?'
+
+She was beside herself with rage and terror. She laid hold of
+Louie, who stood in sullen awkwardness and dismay, and pushed her
+to the door so suddenly and so violently that the stronger, taller
+girl yielded without an attempt at resistance. Then holding the
+door open, she beckoned imperiously to David, while the tears
+streamed down her cheeks.
+
+'Adieu, Monsieur--say nothing--there is nothing to be said--go!'
+
+He went out bewildered, and the two in their amazement walked
+mechanically to their own door.
+
+'She is mad!' said Louie, her eyes blazing, when they paused and
+looked at each other. 'She must be mad. What did she say?'
+
+'What happened?' was all he could reply.
+
+'I threw down that old glass--it wasn't my fault--I didn't see it.
+It was standing on the floor against a chair. I moved the chair
+back just a trifle, and it fell. A shabby old thing--I could have
+paid for another easily. Well, I'm not going there again to be
+treated like that.'
+
+The girl was furious. All that chafed sense of exclusion and
+slighted importance which had grown upon her during David's
+_tete-a-tete_ with their strange hostess came to violent
+expression in her resentment. She opened the door of their room,
+saying that whatever he might do she was going to bed and to sleep
+somewhere, if it was on the floor.
+
+David made a melancholy light in the squalid room, and Louie went
+about her preparations in angry silence. When she had withdrawn
+into the little cupboard-room, saying carelessly that she supposed
+he could manage with one of the bags and his great coat, he sat
+down on the edge of the bare iron bedstead, and recognised with a
+start that he was quivering all over--with fatigue, or excitement?
+His chief feeling perhaps was one of utter discomfiture, flatness,
+and humiliation.
+
+He had sat there in the dark without moving for some minutes, when
+his ear caught a low uncertain tapping at the door. His heart
+leapt. He sprang up and turned the key in an instant.
+
+There on the landing stood Elise Delaunay, her arms filled with
+what looked like a black bearskin rug, her small tremulous face and
+tear-wet eyes raised to his.
+
+'_Pardon_, Monsieur,' she said hurriedly. 'I told you I was
+superstitious--well, now you see. Will you take this rug?--one can
+sleep anywhere with it though it is so old. And has your sister
+what she wants? Can I do anything for her? No! _Alors_--I must
+talk to you about her in the morning. I have some more things in my
+head to say. _Pardon!--et bonsoir. '_
+
+She pushed the rug into his hands. He was so moved that he let it
+drop on the floor unheeding, and as she looked at him, half
+audacious, half afraid, she saw a painful struggle, as of some
+strange new birth, pass across his dark young face. They stood so a
+moment, looking at each other. Then he made a quick step forward
+with some inarticulate words. In an instant she was halfway along
+the corridor, and, turning back so that her fair hair and smiling
+eyes caught the light she held, she said to him with the queenliest
+gesture of dismissal:
+
+'_Au revoir_, Monsieur David, sleep well.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+David woke early from a restless sleep. He sprang up and dressed.
+Never had the May sun shone so brightly; never had life looked more
+alluring.
+
+In the first place he took care to profit by the hints of the night
+before. He ran down to make friends with Madame Merichat--a process
+which was accomplished without much difficulty, as soon as a franc
+or two had passed, and arrangements had been made for the passing
+of a few more. She was to take charge of the _appartement_,
+and provide them with their morning coffee and bread. And upon this
+her grim countenance cleared. She condescended to spend a quarter
+of an hour gossiping with the Englishman, and she promised to stand
+as a buffer between him and Dubois' irate landlord.
+
+'A job of work at Brussels, you say, Monsieur? _Bien_; I will
+tell the _proprietaire_. He won't believe it--Monsieur Dubois
+tells too many lies; but perhaps it will keep him quiet. He will
+think of the return--of the money in the pocket. He will bid me
+inform him the very moment Monsieur Dubois shows his nose, that he
+may descend upon him, and so you will be let alone.'
+
+He mounted the stairs again, and stood a moment looking along the
+passage with a quickening pulse. There was a sound of low singing,
+as of one crooning over some occupation. It must be she! Then she
+had recovered her trouble of the night before--her strange trouble.
+Yet he dimly remembered that in the farm-houses of the Peak also
+the breaking of a looking-glass had been held to be unlucky. And,
+of course, in interpreting the omen she had thought of her pictures
+and the jury.
+
+How could he see her again? Suddenly it occurred to him that she
+had spoken of taking a holiday since the Salon opened. A holiday
+which for her meant 'copying in the Louvre.' And where else, pray,
+does the tourist naturally go on the first morning of a visit to
+Paris?
+
+The young fellow went back into his room with a radiant face, and
+spent some minutes, as Louie had not yet appeared, in elaborating
+his toilette. The small cracked glass above the mantelpiece was not
+flattering, and David was almost for the first time anxious about
+and attentive to what he saw there. Yet, on the whole, he was
+pleased with his short serge coat and his new tie. He thought they
+gave him something of a student air, and would not disgrace even
+_her_ should she deign to be seen in his company. As he laid
+his brush down he looked at his own brown hand, and remembered hers
+with a kind of wonder--so small and white, the wrist so delicately
+rounded.
+
+When Louie emerged she was not in a good temper. She declared that
+she had hardly slept a wink; that the bed was not fit to sleep on;
+that the cupboard was alive with mice, and smelt intolerably. David
+first endeavoured to appease her with the coffee and rolls which
+had just arrived, and then he broached the plan of sending her to
+board with the Cervins, which Mademoiselle Delaunay had suggested.
+What did she think? It would cost more, perhaps, but he could
+afford it. On their way out he would deliver the two notes of
+introduction, and no doubt they could settle it directly if she
+liked.
+
+Louie yawned, put up objections, and refused to see anything in a
+promising light. Paris was horrid, and the man who had let them the
+rooms ought to be 'had up.' As for people who couldn't talk any
+English she hated the sight of them.
+
+The remark from an Englishwoman in France had its humour. But David
+did not see that point of it. He flushed hotly, and with difficulty
+held an angry tongue. However, he was possessed with an inward
+dread--the dread of the idealist who sees his pleasure as a
+beautiful whole--lest they should so quarrel as to spoil the visit
+and the new experience. Under this curb he controlled himself, and
+presently, with more _savoir vivre_ than he was conscious of,
+proposed that they should go out and see the shops.
+
+Louie, at the mere mention of shops, passed into another mood.
+After she had spent some time on dressing they sallied forth, David
+delivering his notes on the way down. Both noticed that the house
+was squalid and ill-kept, but apparently full of inhabitants. David
+surmised that they were for the most part struggling persons of
+small means and extremely various occupations. There were three
+_ateliers_ in the building, the two on their own top floor,
+and M. Montjoie's, which was apparently built out at the back on
+the ground floor. The first floor was occupied by a dressmaker, the
+_proprietaires_ best tenant, according to Madame Merichat.
+Above her was a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, with his
+wife and two or three children; above them again the Cervins, and a
+couple of commercial travellers, and so on.
+
+The street outside, in its general aspect, suggested the same
+small, hard-pressed professional life. It was narrow and dull; it
+mounted abruptly towards the hill of Montmartre, with its fort and
+cemetery, and, but for the height of the houses, which is in itself
+a dignified architectural feature, would have been no more
+inspiriting than a street in London.
+
+A few steps, however, brought them on to the Boulevard Montmartre,
+and then, taking the Rue Lafitte, they emerged upon the Boulevard
+des Italiens.
+
+Louie looked round her, to this side and that, paused for a moment,
+bewildered as it were by the general movement and gaiety of the
+scene. Then a _lingerie_ shop caught her eye, and she made for
+it. Soon the last cloud had cleared from the girl's brow. She gave
+herself with ecstasy to the shops, to the people. What jewellery,
+what dresses, what delicate cobwebs of lace and ribbon, what
+miracles of colour in the florists' windows, what suggestions of
+wealth and lavishness everywhere! Here in this world of costly
+contrivance, of an eager and inventive luxury, Louise Suveret's
+daughter felt herself at last at home. She had never set foot in it
+before; yet already it was familiar, and she was part of it.
+
+Yes, she was as well dressed as anybody, she concluded, except
+perhaps the ladies in the closed carriages whose dress could only
+be guessed at. As for good looks, there did not seem to be much of
+_them_ in Paris. She called the Frenchwomen downright plain.
+They knew how to put on their clothes; there was style about them,
+she did not deny that; but she was prepared to maintain that there
+was hardly a decent face among them.
+
+Such air, and such a sky! The trees were rushing into leaf; summer
+dresses were to be seen everywhere; the shops had swung out their
+awnings, and the day promised a summer heat still tempered by a
+fresh spring breeze. For a time David was content to lounge along,
+stopping when his companion did, lost as she was in the enchantment
+and novelty of the scene, drinking in Paris as it were at great
+gulps, saying to himself they would be at the Opera directly, then
+the Theatre-Francais, the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Place de la
+Concorde! Every book that had ever passed through his hands
+containing illustrations and descriptions of Paris he had read with
+avidity. He, too, like Louie, though in a different way, was at
+home in these streets, and hardly needed a look at the map he
+carried to find his way. Presently, when he could escape from
+Louie, he would go and explore to his heart's content, see all that
+the tourist sees, and then penetrate further, and judge for himself
+as to those sweeping and iconoclastic changes which, for its own
+tyrant's purposes, the Empire had been making in the older city. As
+he thought of the Emperor and the government his gorge rose within
+him. Barbier's talk had insensibly determined all his ideas of the
+imperial regime. How much longer would France suffer the villainous
+gang who ruled her? He began an inward declamation in the manner of
+Hugo, exciting himself as he walked--while all the time it was the
+spring of 1870 which was swelling and expanding in the veins and
+branches of the plane trees above him--May was hurrying on, and
+Worth lay three short months ahead!
+
+Then suddenly into the midst of his political musings and his
+traveller's ardour the mind thrust forward a disturbing image--the
+figure of a little fair-haired artist. He looked round impatiently.
+Louie's loiterings began to chafe him.
+
+'Come along, do,' he called to her, waking up to the time; 'we shall
+never get there.'
+
+'Where?' she demanded.
+
+'Why, to the Louvre.'
+
+'What's there to see there?'
+
+'It's a great palace. The Kings of France used to live there once.
+Now they've put pictures and statues into it. You must see it,
+Louie--everybody does. Come along.'
+
+'I'll not hurry,' she said perversely.' I don't care _that_
+about silly old pictures.'
+
+And she went back to her shop-gazing. David felt for a moment
+precisely as he had been used to feel in the old days on the Scout,
+when he had tried to civilise her on the question of books. And now
+as then he had to wrestle with her, using the kind of arguments he
+felt might have a chance with her. At last she sulkily gave way,
+and let him lead on at a quick pace. In the Rue Saint-Honore,
+indeed, she was once more almost unmanageable; but at last they
+were safely on the stairs of the Louvre, and David's brow smoothed,
+his eye shone again. He mounted the interminable steps with such
+gaiety and eagerness that Louie's attention was drawn to him.
+
+'Whatever do you go that pace for?' she said crossly. 'It's enough
+to kill anybody going up this kind of thing!'
+
+'It isn't as bad as the Downfall,' said David, laughing, 'and I've
+seen you get up that fast enough. Come, catch hold of my umbrella
+and I'll drag you up.'
+
+Louie reached the top, out of breath, turned into the first room to
+the right, and looked scornfully round her.
+
+'Well I never!' she ejaculated. 'What's the good of this?'
+
+Meanwhile David shot on ahead, beckoning to her to follow. She,
+however, would take her own pace, and walked sulkily along, looking
+at the people who were not numerous enough to please her, and only
+regaining a certain degree of serenity when she perceived that here
+as elsewhere people turned to stare after her.
+
+David meanwhile threw wondering glances at the great Veronese, at
+Raphael's archangel, at the towering Vandyke, at the 'Virgin of the
+Rocks.' But he passed them by quickly. Was she here? Could he find
+her in this wilderness of rooms? His spirits wavered between
+delicious expectancy and the fear of disappointment. The gallery
+seemed to him full of copyists young and old: beardless
+_rapins_ laughing and chatting with fresh maidens; old men
+sitting crouched on high seats with vast canvases before them; or
+women, middle-aged and plain, with knitted shawls round their
+shoulders, at work upon the radiant Greuzes and Lancrets; but that
+pale golden head--nowhere!
+
+_AT LAST_!
+
+He hurried forward, and there, in front of a Velazquez, he found
+her, in the company of two young men, who were leaning over the
+back of her chair criticising the picture on her easel.
+
+'Ah, Monsieur David!'
+
+She took up the brush she held with her teeth for a moment, and
+carelessly held him out two fingers of her right hand.
+
+'Monsieur--make a diversion--tell the truth--these gentlemen here
+have been making a fool of me.'
+
+And throwing herself back with a little laughing, coquettish
+gesture, she made room for him to look.
+
+'Ah, but I forgot; let me present you. M. Alphonse, this is an
+Englishman; he is new to Paris, and he is an acquaintance of mine.
+You are not to play any joke upon him. M. Lenain, this gentleman
+wishes to be made acquainted with art; you will undertake his
+education--you will take him to-night to "Les Trois Rats." I
+promised for you.'
+
+She threw a merry look at the elder of her two attendants, who
+ceremoniously took off his hat to David and made a polite speech,
+in which the word _enchante_ recurred. He was a dark man, with
+a short black beard, and full restless eye; some ten years older
+apparently than the other, who was a dare-devil boy of twenty.
+
+'_Allons!_ tell me what you think of my picture, M. David.'
+
+The three waited for the answer, not without malice. David looked
+at it perplexed. It was a copy of the black and white Infanta, with
+the pink rosettes, which, like everything else that France
+possesses from the hand of Velazquez, is to the French artist of
+to-day among the sacred things, the flags and battle-cries of his
+art. Its strangeness, its unlikeness to anything of the picture
+kind that his untrained provincial eyes had ever lit upon, tied his
+tongue. Yet he struggled with himself.
+
+'Mademoiselle, I cannot explain--I cannot find the words. It seems
+to me ugly. The child is not pretty nor the dress. But--'
+
+He stared at the picture, fascinated--unable to express himself,
+and blushing under the shame of his incapacity.
+
+The other three watched him curiously.
+
+'Taranne should get hold of him,' the elder artist murmured to his
+companion, with an imperceptible nod towards the Englishman. 'The
+models lately have been too common. There was a rebellion yesterday
+in the _atelier de femmes_; one and all declared the model was
+not worth drawing, and one and all left.'
+
+'Minxes!' said the other coolly, a twinkle in his wild eye.
+'Taranne will have to put his foot down. There are one or two
+demons among them; one should make them know their place.'
+
+Lenain threw back his head and laughed--a great, frank laugh, which
+broke up the ordinary discontent of the face agreeably. The
+speaker, M. Alphonse Duchatel, had been already turned out of two
+_ateliers_ for a series of the most atrocious _charges_
+on record. He was now with Taranne, on trial, the authorities
+keeping a vigilant eye on him.
+
+Meanwhile Elise, still leaning back with her eyes on her picture,
+was talking fast to David, who hung over her, absorbed. She was
+explaining to him some of the Infanta's qualities, pointing to this
+and that with her brush, talking a bright, untranslatable artist's
+language which dazzled him, filled him with an exciting medley of
+new impressions and ideas, while all the time his quick sense
+responded with a delightful warmth and eagerness to the personality
+beside him--child, prophetess, egotist, all in one--noticing each
+characteristic detail, the drooping, melancholy trick of the eyes,
+the nervous delicacy of the small hand holding the brush.
+
+'David--_David_! I'm tired of this, I tell you! I'm not going
+to stay, so I thought I'd come and tell you. Good-bye!'
+
+He turned abruptly, and saw Louie standing defiantly a few paces
+behind him.
+
+'What do you want, Louie?' he said impatiently, going up to her. It
+was no longer the same man, the same voice.
+
+'I want to go. I hate this!'
+
+'I'm not ready, and you can't go by yourself. Do you see'--(in an
+undertone)--'this is Mademoiselle Delaunay?'
+
+'That don't matter,' she said sulkily, making no movement. 'If you
+ain't going, I am.'
+
+By this time, however, Elise, as well as the two artists, had
+perceived Louie's advent. She got up from her seat with a slight
+sarcastic smile, and held out her hand.
+
+'_Bonjour_, Mademoiselle! You forgave me for dat I did last
+night? I ask your pardon--oh, _de tout mon coeur_!'
+
+Even Louie perceived that the tone was enigmatical. She gave an
+inward gulp of envy, however, excited by the cut of the French
+girl's black and white cotton. Then she dropped Elise's hand, and
+moved away.
+
+'Louie!' cried David, pursuing her in despair; 'now just wait half
+an hour, there's a good girl, while I look at a few things, and
+then afterwards I'll take you to the street where all the best
+shops are, and you can look at them as much as you like.'
+
+Louie stood irresolute.
+
+'What is it?' said Elise to him in French. 'Your sister wants to go?
+Why, you have only just come!'
+
+'She finds it dull looking at pictures,' said David, with an angry
+brow, controlling himself with difficulty. 'She must have the shops.'
+
+Elise shrugged her shoulders and, turning her head, said a few
+quick words that David did not follow to the two men behind her.
+They all laughed. The artists, however, were both much absorbed in
+Louie's appearance, and could not apparently take their eyes off
+her.
+
+'Ah!' said Elise, suddenly.
+
+She had recognised some one at a distance, to whom she nodded. Then
+she turned and looked at the English girl, laughed, and caught her
+by the wrist.
+
+'Monsieur David, here are Monsieur and Madame Oervin. Have you
+thought of sending your sister to them? If so, I will present you.
+Why not? They would amuse her. Madame Cervin would take her to all
+the shops, to the races, to the Bois. _Que sais-je_?
+
+All the while she was looking from one to the other. David's face
+cleared. He thought he saw a way out of this _impasse_.
+
+'Louie, come here a moment. I want to speak to you.'
+
+And he carried her off a few yards, while the Cervins came up and
+greeted the group round the Infanta. A powerfully built, thickset
+man, in a grey suit, who had been walking with them, fell back as
+they joined Elise Delaunay, and began to examine a Pieter de Hooghe
+with minuteness.
+
+Meanwhile David wrestled with his sister. She had much better let
+Mademoiselle Delaunay arrange with these people. Then Madame Cervin
+could take her about wherever she wanted to go. He would make a
+bargain to that effect. As for him, he must and would see
+Paris--pictures, churches, public buildings. If the Louvre bored
+her, everything would bore her, and it was impossible either that
+he should spend his time at her apron-string, flattening his nose
+against the shop-windows, or that she should go about alone. He was
+not going to have her taken for 'a bad lot,' and treated
+accordingly, he told her frankly, with an imperious tightening of
+all his young frame. He had discovered some time since that it was
+necessary to be plain with Louie.
+
+She hated to be disposed of on any occasion, except by her own will
+and initiative, and she still made difficulties for the sake of
+making them, till he grew desperate. Then, when she had pushed his
+patience to the very last point, she gave way.
+
+'You tell her she's to do as I want her,' she said, threateningly.
+'I won't stay if she doesn't. And I'll not have her paid too much.'
+
+David led her back to the rest.
+
+'My sister consents. Arrange it if you can, Mademoiselle,' he said
+imploringly to Elise.
+
+A series of quick and somewhat noisy colloquies followed, watched
+with disapproval by the _gardien_ near, who seemed to be once
+or twice on the point of interfering.
+
+Mademoiselle Delaunay opened the matter to Madame Cervin, a short,
+stout woman, with no neck, and a keen, small eye. Money was her
+daily and hourly preoccupation, and she could have kissed the hem
+of Elise Delaunay's dress in gratitude for these few francs thus
+placed in her way. It was some time now since she had lost her last
+boarder, and had not been able to obtain another. She took David
+aside, and, while her look sparkled with covetousness, explained to
+him volubly all that she would do for Louie, and for how much. And
+she could talk some English too--certainly she could. Her education
+had been _excellent_, she was thankful to say.
+
+'_Mon Dieu, qu'elle est belle!_' she wound up. 'Ah, Monsieur,
+you do very right to entrust your sister to me. A young fellow like
+you--no!--that is not _convenable_. But I--I will be a dragon.
+Make your mind quite easy. With me all will go well.'
+
+Louie stood in an impatient silence while she was being thus talked
+over, exchanging looks from time to time with the two artists, who
+had retired a little behind Mademoiselle Delaunay's easel, and from
+that distance were perfectly competent to let the bold-eyed English
+girl know what they thought of her charms.
+
+At last the bargain was concluded, and the Cervins walked away with
+Louie in charge. They were to take her to a restaurant, then show
+her the Rue Royale and the Rue de la Paix, and, finally--David
+making no demur whatever about the expense--there was to be an
+afternoon excursion through the Bois to Longchamps, where some of
+the May races were being run.
+
+As they receded, the man in grey, before the Pieter de Hooghe,
+looked up, smiled, dropped his eyeglass, and resumed his place
+beside Madame Cervin. She made a gesture of introduction, and he
+bowed across her to the young stranger.
+
+For the first time Elise perceived him. A look of annoyance and
+disgust crossed her face.
+
+'Do you see,' she said, turning to Lenain; 'there is that animal,
+Montjoie? He did well to keep his distance. What do the Cervins
+want with him?'
+
+The others shrugged their shoulders.
+
+'They say his Maenad would be magnificent if he could keep sober
+enough to finish her,' said Lenain; 'it is his last chance; he will
+go under altogether if he fails; he is almost done for already.'
+
+'And what a gift!' said Alphonse, in a lofty tone of critical
+regret. 'He should have been a second Barye. _Ah, la vie
+Parisienne--la maudite vie Parisienne_!'
+
+Again Lenain exploded.
+
+'Come and lunch, you idiot,' he said, taking the lad's arm; 'for
+whom are you posing?'
+
+But before they departed, they inquired of David in the politest
+way what they could do for him. He was a stranger to Mollie.
+Delaunay's acquaintance; they were at his service. Should they take
+him somewhere at night? David, in an effusion of gratitude,
+suggested 'Les Trois Rats.' He desired greatly to see the artist
+world, he said. Alphonse grinned. An appointment was made for eight
+o'clock, and the two friends walked off.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+David and Elise Delaunay thus found themselves left alone. She
+stood a moment irresolutely before her canvas, then sat down again,
+and took up her brushes.
+
+'I cannot thank you enough, Mademoiselle,' the young fellow began
+shyly, while the hand which held his stick trembled a little. 'We
+could never have arranged that affair for ourselves.'
+
+She coloured and bent over her canvas.
+
+'I don't know why I troubled myself,' she said, in a curious
+irritable way.' Because you are kind!' he cried, his charming smile
+breaking. 'Because you took pity on a pair of strangers, like the
+guardian angel that you are!'
+
+The effect of the foreign language on him leading him to a more set
+and literary form of expression than he would have naturally used,
+was clearly marked in the little outburst.
+
+Elise bit her lip, frowned and fidgeted, and presently looked him
+straight in the face.
+
+'Monsieur David, warn your sister that that man with the Cervins
+this morning--the man in grey, the sculptor, M. Montjoie--is a
+disreputable scoundrel that no decent woman should know.'
+
+David was taken aback.
+
+'And Madame Cervin--'
+
+Elise raised her shoulders.
+
+'I don't offer a solution,' she said; 'but I have warned you.'
+
+'Monsieur Cervin has a somewhat strange appearance,' said David,
+hesitating.
+
+And, in fact, while the negotiations had been going on there had
+stood beside the talkers a shabby, slouching figure of a man, with
+longish grizzled hair and a sleepy eye--a strange, remote creature,
+who seemed to take very little notice of what was passing before
+him. From various indications, however, in the conversation, David
+had gathered that this looker-on must be the former _prix de
+Rome_.
+
+Elise explained that Monsieur Carvin was the wreck of a genius. In
+his youth he had been the chosen pupil of Ingres and Hippolyte
+Flandrin, had won the _prix de Rome_, and after his three
+years in the Villa Medicis had come home to take up what was
+expected to be a brilliant career. Then for some mysterious reason
+he had suddenly gone under, disappeared from sight, and the waves
+of Paris had closed over him. When he reappeared he was broken in
+health, and married to a retired modiste, upon whose money he was
+living. He painted bad pictures intermittently, but spent most of
+his time in hanging about his old haunts--the Louvre, the Salon,
+the various exhibitions, and the dealers, where he was commonly
+regarded by the younger artists who were on speaking terms with him
+as a tragic old bore, with a head of his own worth painting,
+however if he could be got to sit--for an augur or a chief priest.
+
+'It was _absinthe_ that did it,' said Elise calmly, taking a
+fresh charge into her brush, and working away at the black
+trimmings of the Infanta's dress. 'Every day, about four, he
+disappears into the Boulevard. Generally, Madame Cervin drives him
+like a sheep; but when four o'clock comes she daren't interfere
+with him. If she did, he would be unmanageable altogether. So he
+takes his two hours or so, and when he comes back there is not much
+amiss with him. Sometimes he is excited, and talks quite
+brilliantly about the past--sometimes he is nervous and depressed,
+starts at a sound, and storms about the noises in the street. Then
+she hurries him off to bed, and the next morning he is quite meek
+again, and tries to paint. But his hand shakes, and he can't see.
+So he gives it up, and calls to her to put on her things. Then they
+wander about Paris, till four o'clock comes round again, and he
+gives her the slip--always with some elaborate pretence of other.
+Oh! she takes it quietly. Other vices might give her more trouble.'
+
+The tone conveyed the affectation of a complete knowledge of the
+world, which saw no reason whatever to be ashamed of itself. The
+girl was just twenty, but she had lived for years, first with a
+disreputable father, and then in a perpetual _camaraderie_,
+within the field of art, with men of all sorts and kinds. There are
+certain feminine blooms which a _milieu_ like this effaces
+with deadly rapidity.
+
+For the first time David was jarred. The idealist in him recoiled.
+His conscience, too, was roused about Louie. He had handed her
+over, it seemed, to the custody of a drunkard and his wife, who had
+immediately thrown her into the company of a man no decent woman
+ought to know. And Mademoiselle Delaunay had led him into it. The
+guardian angel speech of a few moments before rang in his ears
+uncomfortably.
+
+Moreover, whatever rebellions his young imagination might harbour,
+whatever license in his eyes the great passions might claim, he had
+maintained for months and years past a practical asceticism, which
+had left its mark. The young man who had starved so gaily on
+sixpence a day that he might read and learn, had nothing but
+impatience and disgust for the glutton and the drunkard. It was a
+kind of physical repulsion. And the woman's light indulgent tone
+seemed for a moment to divide them.
+
+Elise looked round. Why this silence in her companion?
+
+In an instant she divined him. Perhaps her own conscience was not
+easy. Why had she meddled in the young Englishman's affairs at all?
+For a whim? Out of a mere good-natured wish to rid him of his
+troublesome sister; or because his handsome looks, his _naivete_,
+and his eager admiration of herself amused and excited her, and
+she did not care to be baulked of them so soon? At any rate,
+she found refuge in an outburst of temper.
+
+'Ah!' she said, after a moment's pause and scrutiny. 'I see! You
+think I might have done better for your sister than send her to
+lodge with a drunkard--that I need not have taken so much trouble
+to give you good advice for that! You repent your little remarks
+about guardian angels! You are disappointed in me!--you distrust
+me!'
+
+She turned back to her easel and began to paint with headlong
+speed, the small hand flashing to and fro, the quick breath rising
+and falling tempestuously.
+
+He was dismayed--afraid, and he began to make excuses both for
+himself and her. It would be all right; he should be close by, and
+if there were trouble he could take his sister away.
+
+She let her brushes fall into her lap with an exclamation.
+
+'Listen!' she said to him, her eyes blazing--why, he could not for
+the life of him understand. 'There will be no trouble. What I told
+you means nothing open--or disgusting. Your sister will notice
+nothing unless you tell her. But I was candid with you--I always
+am. I told you last night that I had no scruples. You thought it
+was a woman's exaggeration; it was the literal truth! If a man
+drinks, or is vicious, so long as he doesn't hurl the furniture at
+my head, or behave himself offensively to me, what does it matter
+to me! If he drinks so that he can't paint, and he wants to paint,
+well!--then he seems to me another instance of the charming way in
+which a kind Providence has arranged this world. I am sorry for
+him, _tout bonnement_! If I could give the poor devil a hand
+out of the mud, I would; if not, well, then, no sermons! I take him
+as I find him; if he annoys me, I call in the police. But as to
+hiding my face and canting, not at all! That is your English
+way--it is the way of our _bourgeoisie._ It is not mine. I
+don't belong to the respectables--I would sooner kill myself a
+dozen times over. I can't breathe in their company. I know how to
+protect myself; none of the men I meet dare to insult me; that is
+my idiosyncrasy--everyone has his own. But I have my ideas, and
+nobody else matters a fig to me.--So now, Monsieur, if you regret
+our forced introduction of last night, let me wish you a good
+morning. It will be perfectly easy for your sister to find some
+excuse to leave the Cervins. I can give you the addresses of
+several cheap hotels where you and she will be extremely
+comfortable, and where neither I nor Monsieur Cervin will annoy
+you!'
+
+David stared at her. He had grown very pale. She, too, was white to
+the lips. The violence and passion of her speech had exhausted her;
+her hands trembled in her lap. A wave of emotion swept through him.
+Her words were insolently bitter. Why, then, this impression of
+something wounded and young and struggling--at war with itself and
+the world, proclaiming loneliness and _Sehnsucht_, while it
+flung anger and reproach?
+
+He dropped on one knee, hardly knowing what he did. Most of the
+students about had left their work for a while; no one was in sight
+but a _gardien_, whose back was turned to them, and a young
+man in the remote distance. He picked up a brush she had let fall,
+pressed it into her reluctant hand, and laid his forehead against
+the hand for an instant.
+
+'You misunderstand me,' he said, with a broken, breathless
+utterance. 'You are quite wrong--quite mistaken. There are not such
+thoughts in me as you think. The world matters nothing to me,
+either. I am alone, too; I have always been alone. You meant
+everything that was heavenly and kind--you must have meant it. I am
+a stupid idiot! But I could be your friend--if you would permit it.'
+
+He spoke with an extraordinary timidity and slowness. He forgot all
+his scruples, all pride--everything. As he knelt there, so close to
+her delicate slimness, to the curls on her white neck, to the
+quivering lips and great, defiant eyes, she seemed to him once more
+a being of another clay from himself--beyond any criticism his
+audacity could form. He dared hardly touch her, and in his heart
+there swelled the first irrevocable wave of young passion. She
+raised her hand impetuously and began to paint again. But suddenly
+a tear dropped on to her knee. She brushed it away, and her wild
+smile broke.
+
+'Bah!' she said, 'what a scene, what a pair of children! What was it
+all about? I vow I haven't an idea. You are an excellent
+_farceur._ Monsieur David! One can see well that you have read
+George Sand.'
+
+He sat down on a little three-legged stool she had brought with
+her, and held her box open on his knee. In a minute or two they
+were talking as though nothing had happened. She was giving him a
+fresh lecture on Velazquez, and he had resumed his role of pupil
+and listener. But their eyes avoided each other, and once when, in
+taking a tube from the box he held, her fingers brushed against his
+hand, she flushed involuntarily and moved her chair a foot further
+away.
+
+'Who is that?' she asked, suddenly looking round the corner of her
+canvas. '_Mon Dieu!_ M. Regnault! How does he come here? They
+told me he was at Granada.'
+
+She sat transfixed, a joyous excitement illuminating every feature.
+And there, a few yards from them, examining the Rembrandt 'Supper
+at Emmaus' with a minute and absorbed attention, was the young man
+he had noticed in the distance a few minutes before. As Elise
+spoke, the new-comer apparently heard his name, and turned. He put
+up his eyeglass, smiled, and took off his hat.
+
+'Mademoiselle Delaunay! I find you where I left you, at the feet of
+the master! Always at work! You are indefatigable. Taranne tells me
+great things of you. "Ah," he says, "if the men would work like the
+women!" I assure you, he makes us smart for it. May I look?
+Good--very good! a great improvement on last year--stronger, more
+knowledge in it. That hand wants study--but you will soon put it
+right. Ah, Velazquez! That a man should be great, one can bear
+that, but so great! It is an offence to the rest of us mortals. But
+one cannot realise him out of Madrid. I often sigh for the months I
+spent copying in the Museo. There is a repose of soul in copying a
+great master--don't you find it? One rests from one's own efforts
+awhile--the spirit of the master descends into yours, gently,
+profoundly.'
+
+He stood beside her, smiling kindly, his hat and gloves in his
+hands, perfectly dressed, an air of the great world about his look
+and bearing which differentiated him wholly from all other persons
+whom David had yet seen in Paris. In physique, too, he was totally
+unlike the ordinary Parisian type. He was a young athlete,
+vigorous, robust, broad-shouldered, tanned by sun and wind. Only
+his blue eye--so subtle, melancholy, passionate--revealed the
+artist and the thinker.
+
+Elise was evidently transported by his notice of her. She talked to
+him eagerly of his pictures in the Salon, especially of a certain
+'Salome,' which, as David presently gathered, was the sensation of
+the year. She raved about the qualities of it--the words colour,
+poignancy, force recurring in the quick phrases.
+
+'No one talks of your _success_ now, Monsieur. It is another
+word. _C'est la gloire elle-meme qui vous parle a l'oreille!_'
+
+As she let fall the most characteristic of all French nouns, a
+slight tremor passed across the young man's face. But the look
+which succeeded it was one of melancholy; the blue eyes took a
+steely hardness.
+
+'Perhaps a lying spirit, Mademoiselle. And what matter, so long as
+everything one does disappoints oneself? What a tyrant is
+art!--insatiable, adorable! You know it. We serve our king on our knees,
+and he deals us the most miserly gifts.'
+
+'It is the service itself repays,' she said, eagerly, her chest
+heaving.
+
+'True!--most true! But what a struggle always!--no rest--no
+content. And there is no other way. One must seek, grope,
+toil--then produce rapidly--in a flash--throw what you have done
+behind you--and so on to the next problem, and the next. There is
+no end to it--there never can be. But you hardly came here this
+morning, I imagine, Mademoiselle, to hear me prate! I wish you good
+day and good-bye. I came over for a look at the Salon, but
+to-morrow I go back to Spain. I can't breathe now for long away
+from my sun and my South! Adieu, Mademoiselle. I am told your
+prospects, when the voting comes on, are excellent. May the gods
+inspire the jury!'
+
+He bowed, smiled, and passed on, carrying his lion-head and kingly
+presence down the gallery, which had now filled up again, and
+where, so David noticed, person after person turned as he came near
+with the same flash of recognition and pleasure he had seen upon
+Elise's face. A wild jealousy of the young conqueror invaded the
+English lad.
+
+'Who is he?' he asked.
+
+Elise, womanlike, divined him in a moment. She gave him a sidelong
+glance and went back to her painting.
+
+'That,' she said quietly, 'is Henri Regnault. Ah, you know nothing
+of our painters. I can't make you understand. For me he is a young
+god--there is a halo round his head. He has grasped his fame--the
+fame we poor creatures are all thirsting for. It began last year
+with the Prim--General Prim on horseback--oh, magnificent!--a
+passion!--an energy! This year it is the "Salome." About--
+Gautier--all the world--have lost their heads over it. If
+you go to see it at the Salon, you will have to wait your turn.
+Crowds go every day for nothing else. Of course there are murmurs.
+They say the study of Fortuny has done him harm. Nonsense! People
+discuss him because he is becoming a master--no one discusses the
+nonentities. _They_ have no enemies. Then he is sculptor,
+musician, athlete--well-born besides--all the world is his friend.
+But with it all so simple--_bon camarade_ even for poor
+scrawlers like me. _Je l'adore!_'
+
+'So it seems,' said David.
+
+The girl smiled over her painting. But after a bit she looked up
+with a seriousness, nay, a bitterness, in her siren's face, which
+astonished him.
+
+'It is not amusing to take you in--you are too ignorant. What do
+you suppose Henri Regnault matters to me? His world is as far above
+mine as Velazquez' art is above my art. But how can a foreigner
+understand our shades and grades? Nothing but _success_, but
+_la gloire_, could ever lift me into his world. Then indeed I
+should be everybody's equal, and it would matter to nobody that I
+had been a Bohemian and a _declassee_.
+
+She gave a little sigh of excitement, and threw her head back to
+look at her picture, David watched her.
+
+'I thought,' he said ironically, 'that a few minutes ago you were
+all for Bohemia. I did not suspect these social ambitions.'
+
+'All women have them--all artists deny them,' she said, recklessly.
+'There, explain me as you like, Monsieur David. But don't read my
+riddle too soon, or I shall bore you. Allow me to ask you a
+question.'
+
+She laid down her brushes and looked at him with the utmost
+gravity. His heart beat--he bent forward.
+
+'Are you ever hungry, Monsieur David?'
+
+He sprang up, half enraged, half ashamed.
+
+'Where can we get some food?'
+
+'That is my affair,' she said, putting up her brushes. 'Be humble,
+Monsieur, and take a lesson in Paris.'
+
+And out they went together, he beside himself with the delight of
+accompanying her, and proudly carrying her box and satchel. How her
+little feet slipped in and out of her pretty dress--how, as they
+stood on the top of the great flight of stairs leading down into
+the court of the Louvre, the wind from outside blew back the curls
+from her brow, and ruffled the violets in her hat, the black lace
+about her tiny throat. It was an enchantment to follow and to serve
+her. She led him through the Tuileries Gardens and the Place de la
+Concorde to the Champs-Elysees. The fountains leapt in the sun; the
+river blazed between the great white buildings of its banks; to the
+left was the gilded dome of the Invalides, and the mass of the
+Corps Legislatif, while in front of them rose the long ascent to
+the Arc de l'Etoile set in vivid green on either hand. Everywhere
+was space, glitter, magnificence. The gaiety of Paris entered into
+the Englishman, and took possession.
+
+Presently, as they wandered up the Champs-Elysees, they passed a
+great building to the left. Elise stopped and clasped her hands in
+front of her with a little nervous, spasmodic gesture.
+
+'That,' she said, 'is the Salon. My fate lies there. When we have
+had some food, I will take you in to see.'
+
+She led him a little further up the Avenue, then took him aside
+through cunningly devised labyrinths of green till they came upon a
+little cafe restaurant among the trees, where people sat under an
+awning, and the wind drove the spray of a little fountain hither
+and thither among the bushes. It was gay, foreign, romantic, unlike
+anything David had ever seen in his northern world. He sat down,
+with Barbier's stories running in his head. Mademoiselle Delaunay
+was George Sand--independent, gifted, on the road to fame like that
+great _declassee_ of old; and he was her friend and comrade, a
+humble soldier, a camp follower, in the great army of letters.
+
+Their meal was of the lightest. This descent on the Champs-Elysees
+had been a freak on Elise's part, who wished to do nothing so
+_banal_ as take her companion to the Palais Royal. But the
+restaurant she had chosen, though of a much humbler kind than those
+which the rich tourist commonly associates with this part of Paris,
+was still a good deal more expensive than she had rashly supposed.
+She opened her eyes gravely at the charges; abused herself
+extravagantly for a lack of _savoir vivre_; and both with one
+accord declared it was too hot to eat. But upon such eggs and such
+green peas as they did allow themselves--a _portion_ of each,
+scrupulously shared--David at any rate, in his traveller's ardour,
+was prepared to live to the end of the chapter.
+
+Afterwards, over the coffee and the cigarettes, Elise taking her
+part in both, they lingered for one of those hours which make the
+glamour of youth. Confidences flowed fast between them. His French
+grew suppler and more docile, answered more truly to the
+individuality behind it. He told her of his bringing up, of his
+wandering with the sheep on the mountains, of his reading among the
+heather, of 'Lias and his visions, of Hannah's cruelties and
+Louie's tempers--that same idyll of peasant life to which Dora had
+listened months before. But how differently told! Each different
+listener changes the tale, readjusts the tone. But here also the
+tale pleased. Elise, for all her leanings towards new schools in
+art, had the Romantic's imagination and the Romantic's relish for
+things foreign and unaccustomed. The English boy and his story
+seemed to her both charming and original. Her artist's eye followed
+the lines of the ruffled black head and noted the red-brown of the
+skin. She felt a wish to draw him--a wish which had entirely
+vanished in the case of Louie.
+
+'Your sister has taken a dislike to me,' she said to him once,
+coolly. 'And as for me, I am afraid of her. Ah! and she broke my
+glass!'
+
+She shivered, and a look of anxiety and depression invaded her
+small face. He guessed that she was thinking of her pictures, and
+began timidly to speak to her about them. When they returned to the
+world of art, his fluency left him; he felt crushed beneath the
+weight of his own ignorance and her accomplishment.
+
+'Come and see them!' she said, springing up. 'I am tired of my
+Infanta. Let her be awhile. Come to the Salon, and I will show you
+"Salome." Or are you sick of pictures? What do you want to see?
+_Ca m'est egal_. I can always go back to my work.'
+
+She spoke with a cavalier lightness which teased and piqued him.
+
+'I wish to go where you go,' he said flushing, 'to see what you see.'
+
+She shook her little head.
+
+'No compliments, Monsieur David. We are serious persons, you and I.
+Well, then, for a couple of hours, _soyons camarades!_'
+
+Of those hours, which prolonged themselves indefinitely, David's
+after remembrance was somewhat crowded and indistinct. He could
+never indeed think of Regnault's picture without a shudder, so
+poignant was the impression it made upon him under the stimulus of
+Elise's nervous and passionate comments. It represented the
+daughter of Herodias resting after the dance, with the dish upon
+her knee which was to receive the head of the saint. Her mass of
+black hair--the first strong impression of the picture--stood out
+against the pale background, and framed the smiling sensual face,
+broadly and powerfully made, like the rest of the body, and knowing
+neither thought nor qualm. The colour was a bewilderment of
+scarlets and purples, of yellow and rose-colour, of turtle-greys
+and dazzling flesh-tints--bathed the whole of it in the searching
+light of the East. The strangeness, the science of it, its
+extraordinary brilliance and energy, combined with its total lack
+of all emotion, all pity, took indelible hold of the English lad's
+untrained provincial sense. He dreamt of it for nights afterwards.
+
+For the rest--what whirl and confusion! He followed Elise through
+suffocating rooms, filled with the liveliest crowd he had ever
+seen. She was constantly greeted, surrounded, carried off to look
+at this and that. Her friends and acquaintances, indeed, whether
+men or women, seemed all to treat her in much the same way. There
+was complete, and often noisy, freedom of address and discussion
+between them. She called all the men by their surnames, and she was
+on half mocking, half caressing terms with the women, who seemed to
+David to be generally art students, of all ages and aspects. But
+nobody took any liberties with her. She had her place, and that one
+of some predominance. Clearly she had already the privileges of an
+eccentric, and a certain cool ascendency of temperament. Her little
+figure fluttered hither and thither, gathering a train, then
+shaking it off again. Sometimes and her friends, finding the heat
+intolerable, and wanting space for talk, would overflow into the
+great central hall, with its cool palms and statues; and there David
+would listen to torrents of French artistic theory, anecdote, and
+_blague_, till his head whirled, and French cleverness--conveyed
+to him in what, to the foreigner, is the most exquisite and the
+most tantalising of all tongues--seemed to him superhuman.
+
+As to what he saw, after 'Salome,' he remembered vividly only three
+pictures--Elise Delaunay's two--a portrait and a workshop
+interior--before which he stood, lost in naive wonder at her
+talent; and the head of a woman, with a thin pale face,
+reddish-brown hair, and a look of pantherish grace and force, which
+he was told was the portrait of an actress at the Odeon who was
+making the world stare--Mademoiselle Bernhardt. For the rest he had
+the vague, distracting impression of a new world--of nude horrors
+and barbarities of all sorts--of things licentious or cruel, which
+yet, apparently, were all of as much value in the artist's eye, and
+to be discussed with as much calm or eagerness, as their
+neighbours. One moment he loathed what he saw, and threw himself
+upon his companion, with the half-coherent protests of an English
+idealism, of which she scarcely understood a word; the next he lost
+himself in some landscape which had torn the very heart out of an
+exquisite mood of nature, or in some scene of peasant life--so true
+and living that the scents of the fields and the cries of the
+animals were once more about him, and he lived his childhood over
+again.
+
+Perhaps the main idea which the experience left with him was one of
+a goading and intoxicating _freedom_. His country lay in the
+background of his mind as the symbol of all dull convention and
+respectability. He was in the land of intelligence, where nothing
+is prejudged, and all experiments are open.
+
+When they came out, it was to get an ice in the shade, and then to
+wander to and fro, watching the passers-by--the young men playing a
+strange game with disks under the trees--the nurses and
+children--the ladies in the carriages--and talking, with a quick,
+perpetual advance towards intimacy, towards emotion. More and more
+there grew upon her the charm of a certain rich poetic intelligence
+there was in him, stirring beneath his rawness and ignorance,
+struggling through the fetters of language; and in response, as the
+evening wore on, she threw off her professional airs, and sank the
+egotist out of sight. She became simpler, more childish; her
+variable, fanciful youth answered to the magnetism of his.
+
+At last he said to her, as they stood by the Arc de l'Etoile,
+looking down towards Paris:
+
+'The sun is just going down--this day has been the happiest of my
+life!'
+
+The low intensity of the tone startled her. Then she had a movement
+of caprice, of superstition.
+
+'_Alors--assez_! Monsieur David, stay where you are. Not
+another step!--_Adieu!_'
+
+Astonished and dismayed, he turned involuntarily. But, in the crowd
+of people passing through the Arch, she had slipped from him, and
+he had lost her beyond recovery. Moreover, her tone was
+peremptory--he dared not pursue and anger her.
+
+Minutes passed while he stood, spell--and trance-bound, in the
+shadow of the Arch. Then, with the long and labouring breath, the
+sudden fatigue of one who has leapt in a day from one plane of life
+to another--in whom a passionate and continuous heat of feeling has
+for the time burnt up the nervous power--he moved on eastwards,
+down the Champs-Elysees. The sunset was behind him, and the trees
+threw long shadows across his path. Shade and sun spaces alike
+seemed to him full of happy crowds. The beautiful city laughed and
+murmured round him. Nature and man alike bore witness with his own
+rash heart that all is divinely well with the world--let the
+cynics and the mourners say what they will. His hour had come,
+and without a hesitation or a dread he rushed upon it. Passion
+and youth--ignorance and desire--have never met in madder or
+more reckless dreams than those which filled the mind of David
+Grieve as he wandered blindly home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+As David climbed the garret stairs to his room, the thought of
+Louie flashed across his mind for the first time since the morning.
+He opened the door and looked round. Yes; all her things were gone.
+She had taken up her abode with the Cervins.
+
+A certain anxiety and discomfort seized him; before going out to
+the Boulevard to snatch some food in preparation for his evening at
+the 'Trois Rats' he descended to the landing below and rang the
+Cervins' bell.
+
+A charwoman, dirty and tired with much cleaning, opened to him.
+
+No, Madame was not at home. No one was at home, and the dinner was
+spoiling. Had they not been seen all day? Certainly. They had come
+in about six o'clock _avec une jeune personne_ and M. Montjoie.
+She thought it probable that they were all at that moment down
+below, in the studio of M. Montjoie.
+
+David already knew his way thither, and was soon standing outside
+the high black door with the pane of glass above it to which Madame
+Merichat had originally directed him. While he waited for an answer
+to his ring he looked about him. He was in a sort of yard which was
+almost entirely filled up by the sculptor's studio, a long
+structure lighted at one end as it seemed from the roof, and at the
+other by the usual north window. At the end of the yard rose a huge
+many-storied building which seemed to be a factory of some sort.
+David's Lancashire eye distinguished machinery through the
+monotonous windows, and the figures of the operatives; it took note
+also of the fact that the rooms were lit up and work still going on
+at seven o'clock. All around were the ugly backs of tall houses,
+every window flung open to this May heat. The scene was squalid and
+_triste_ save for the greenish blue of the evening sky, and
+the flight of a few pigeons round the roof of the factory.
+
+A man in a blouse came at last, and led the way in when David asked
+for Madame Cervin. They passed through the inner studio full of a
+confusion of clay models and casts to which the dust of months gave
+the look and relief of bronze.
+
+Then the further door opened, and he saw beyond a larger and
+emptier room; sculptor's work of different kinds, and in various
+stages on either side; casts, and charcoal studies on the walls,
+and some dozen people scattered in groups over the floor, all
+looking towards an object on which the fading light from the upper
+part of the large window at the end was concentrated.
+
+What was that figure on its pedestal, that white image which lived
+and breathed? _Louie?_
+
+The brother stood amazed beside the door, staring while the man in
+the blouse retreated, and the persons in the room were too much
+occupied with the spectacle before them to notice the new-comer's
+arrival.
+
+Louie stood upon a low pedestal, which apparently revolved with the
+model, for as David entered, Montjoie, the man in the grey suit,
+with the square, massive head, who had joined the party in the
+Louvre, ran forward and moved it round slightly. She was in Greek
+dress, and some yards away from her was the clay study--a maenad
+with vine wreath, tambourine, thyrsus, and floating hair--for which
+she was posing.
+
+Even David was dazzled by the image thus thrown out before him.
+With her own dress Louie Grieve seemed to have laid aside for the
+moment whatever common or provincial elements there might be in her
+strange and startling beauty. Clothed in the clinging folds of the
+Greek chiton; neck, arms, and feet bare; the rounded forms of the
+limbs showing under the soft stuff; the face almost in profile,
+leaning to the shoulder, as though the delicate ear were listening
+for the steps of the wine god; a wreath of vine leaves round the
+black hair which fell in curly masses about her, sharpening and
+framing the rosy whiteness of the cheek and neck; one hand lightly
+turned back behind her, showing the palm, the other holding a
+torch; one foot poised on tiptoe, and the whole body lightly bent
+forward, as though for instant motion:--in this dress and this
+attitude, worn and sustained with extraordinary intelligence and
+audacity, the wild hybrid creature had risen, as it were, for the
+first time, to the full capacity of her endowment--had eclipsed and
+yet revealed herself.
+
+The brother stood speechless, looking from the half-completed study
+to his sister. How had they made her understand?--where had she got
+the dress? And such a dress! To the young fellow, who in his
+peasant and tradesman experience had never even seen a woman in the
+ordinary low dress of society, it seemed incredible, outrageous.
+And to put it on for the purpose of posing as a model in a room
+full of strange men--Madame Cervin was the only woman present--his
+cheek burnt for his sister; and for the moment indignation and
+bewilderment held him paralysed.
+
+In front of him a little way, but totally unaware of the stranger's
+entrance, were two men whispering and laughing together. One held a
+piece of paper on a book, and was making a hurried sketch of Louie.
+Every now and then he drew the attention of his companion to some
+of the points of the model. David caught a careless phrase or two,
+and understood just enough of their student's slang to suspect a
+good deal worse than was actually said.
+
+Meanwhile Montjoie was standing against an iron pillar, studying
+intently every detail of Louie's pose, both hands arched over his
+eyes.
+
+'_Peste!_ did one ever see so many points combined?' he threw back to
+a couple of men behind him. 'Too thin--the arms might be better--and
+the hands a _little_ common. But for the _ensemble--mon Dieu!_ we
+should make Carpeaux's _atelier_ look alive--_hein?_'
+
+'Take care!' laughed a man who was leaning against a cast a few
+feet away, and smoking vigorously. 'She likes it, she has never done
+it before, but she likes it. Suppose Carpeaux gets hold of her. You
+may repent showing her, if you want to keep her to yourself.'
+
+'Ah, that right knee wants throwing forward a trifle,' said
+Montjoie in a preoccupied tone, and going up to Louie, he spoke a
+few words of bad English.
+
+'Allow me, mademoiselle--put your hand on me--_ainsi_--vile I
+change dis pretty foot.'
+
+Louie looked down bewildered, then at the other men about her, with
+her great eyes, half exultant, half inquiring. She understood
+hardly anything of their French. One of them laughed, and, running
+to the clay Maenad, stooped down and touched the knee and ankle, to
+show her what was meant. Louie instinctively put her hand on
+Montjoie's shoulder to steady herself, and he proceeded to move the
+bare sandalled foot.
+
+One of the men near him made a remark which David caught. He
+suddenly strode forward.
+
+'Sir! Have the goodness to tell me how you wish my sister to stand,
+and I will explain to her. She is not your model!'
+
+The sculptor looked up startled. Everybody stared at the intruder,
+at the dark English boy, standing with a threatening eye, and
+trembling with anger, beside his sister. Then Madame Cervin,
+clasping her little fat hands with an exclamation of dismay, rushed
+up to the group, while Louie leapt down from her pedestal and went
+to David.
+
+'What are you interfering for?' she said, pushing Madame Cervin
+aside and looking him full in the eyes, her own blazing, her chest
+heaving.
+
+'You are disgracing yourself,' he said to her with the same
+intensity, fast and low, under his breath, so as to be heard only
+by her. 'How can you expose yourself as a model to these men whom
+you never saw before? Let them find their own models; they are a
+pack of brutes!'
+
+But even as he spoke he shrank before the concentrated wrath of her
+face.
+
+'I will make you pay for it!' she said. 'I will teach you to
+domineer.'
+
+Then she turned to Madame Cervin.
+
+'Come and take it off, please!' she said imperiously. 'It's no good
+while he is here.'
+
+As she crossed the room with her free wild step, her white
+draperies floating, Montjoie, who had been standing pulling at his
+moustaches, and studying the brother from under his heavy brows,
+joined her, and, stooping, said two or three smiling words in her
+ear. She looked up, tossed her head and laughed--a laugh half
+reckless, half _farouche;_ two or three of the other men
+hurried after them, and presently they made a knot in the further
+room, Louie calmly waiting for Madame Cervin, and sitting on the
+pedestal of a bronze group, her beautiful head and white shoulders
+thrown out against the metal. Montjoie's artist friends--of the
+kind which haunt a man whose _moeurs_ are gradually bringing
+his talent to ruin--stood round her, smoking and talking and
+staring at the English girl between whiles. The arrogance with
+which she bore their notice excited them, but they could not talk
+to her, for she did not understand them. Only Montjoie had a few
+words of English. Occasionally Louie bent forward and looked
+disdainfully through the door. When would David be done prating?
+
+For he, in fact, was grappling with Madame Cervin, who was showing
+great adroitness. This was what had happened according to her.
+Monsieur Montjoie--a man of astonishing talent, an artist
+altogether superior--was in trouble about his statue--could not
+find a model to suit him--was in despair. It seemed that he had
+heard of mademoiselle's beauty from England, in some way, before
+she arrived. Then in the studio he had shown her the Greek dress.
+
+'--There were some words between them--some compliments,
+Monsieur, I suppose--and your sister said she would pose for
+him. I opposed myself. I knew well that mademoiselle was a
+young person _tout-a-fait comme il faut_, that monsieur her
+brother might object to her making herself a model for M.
+Montjoie. _Mais, mon Dieu!_' and the ex-modiste shrugged her
+round shoulders--'mademoiselle has a will of her own.'
+
+Then she hinted that in an hour's acquaintance mademoiselle had
+already shown herself extremely difficult to manage--monsieur would
+probably understand that. As for her, she had done everything
+possible. She had taken mademoiselle upstairs and dressed her with
+her own hands--she had been her maid and companion throughout. She
+could do no more. Mademoiselle would go her own way.
+
+'Who were all these men?' David inquired, still hot and frowning.
+
+Madame Cervin rose on tiptoe and poured a series of voluble
+biographies into his ear. According to her everybody present was a
+person of distinction; was at any rate an artist, and a man of
+talent. But let monsieur decide. If he was dissatisfied, let him
+take his sister away. She had been distressed, insulted, by his
+behaviour. Mademoiselle's box had been not yet unpacked. Let him
+say the word and it should be taken upstairs again.
+
+And she drew away from him, bridling, striking an attitude of
+outraged dignity beside her husband, who had stood behind her in a
+slouching abstracted silence during the whole scene--so far as her
+dwarf stature and vulgar little moon-face permitted.
+
+'We are strangers here, Madame,' cried David. 'I asked you to take
+care of my sister, and I find her like this, before a crowd of men
+neither she nor I have ever seen before!'
+
+Madame Cervin swept her hand grandiloquently round.
+
+'Monsieur has his remedy! Let him take his sister.'
+
+He stood silent in a helpless and obvious perplexity. What, saddle
+himself afresh after these intoxicating hours of liberty and
+happiness? Fetter and embarrass every moment? Shut himself out from
+freedom--from _her_?
+
+Besides, already his first instinctive rage was disappearing. In
+the confusion of this new world he could no longer tell whether he
+was right or ridiculous. Had he been playing the Philistine,
+mistaking a mere artistic convention for an outrage? And Louie was
+so likely to submit to his admonitions!
+
+Madame Cervin watched him with a triumphant eye. When he began to
+stammer out what was in effect an apology, she improved the
+opportunity, threw off her suave manners, and let him understand
+with a certain plain brutality that she had taken Louie's measure.
+She would do her best to keep the girl in order--it was lucky for
+him that he had fallen upon anybody so entirely respectable as
+herself and her husband--but she would use her own judgment; and if
+monsieur made scenes, she would just turn out her boarder, and
+leave him to manage as he could.
+
+She had the whip-hand, and she knew it. He tried to appease her,
+then discovered that he must go, and went with a hanging head.
+
+Louie took no notice of him nor he of her, as he passed through the
+inner studio, but Montjoie came forward to meet the English lad,
+bending his great head and shoulders with a half-ironic politeness.
+Monsieur Grieve he feared had mistaken the homage rendered by
+himself and his friends to his sister's beauty for an act of
+disrespect--let him be reassured! Such beauty was its own defence.
+No doubt monsieur did not understand artistic usage. He, Montjoie,
+made allowance for the fact, otherwise the young man's behaviour
+towards himself and his friends would have required explanation.
+
+The two stood together at the door--David proudly crimson, seeking
+in vain for phrases that would not come--Montjoie cool and
+malicious, his battered weather-beaten face traversed by little
+smiles. Louie was looking on with scornful amusement, and the group
+of artists round her could hardly control their mirth.
+
+He shut the door behind him with the feeling of one who has cut a
+ridiculous figure and beaten a mean retreat. Then, as he neared the
+bottom of the stairs, he gave himself a great shake, with the
+gesture of one violently throwing off a weight. Let those who
+thought that he ought to control Louie, and could control her, come
+and see for themselves! He had done what he thought was for the
+best--his quick inner sense carefully refrained from attaching any
+blame whatever to Mademoiselle Delaunay--and now Louie must go her
+own gait, and he would go his. He had said his say--and she should
+not spoil this hoarded, this long-looked-for pleasure. As he passed
+into the street, on his way to the Boulevard for some food, his
+walk and bearing had in them a stern and passionate energy.
+
+He had to hurry back for his appointment with Mademoiselle
+Delaunay's friends of the morning. As he turned into the Rue
+Chantal he passed a flower-stall aglow with roses from the south
+and sweet with narcissus and mignonette. An idea struck him, and he
+stopped, a happy smile softening away the still lingering tension
+of the face. For a few sous he bought a bunch of yellow-eyed
+narcissus and stepped gaily home with them. He had hardly time to
+put them in water and to notice that Madame Merichat had made
+Dubois' squalid abode look much more habitable than before, when
+there was a knock at the door and his two guides stood outside.
+
+They carried him off at once. David found more of a tongue than he
+had been master of in the morning, and the three talked incessantly
+as they wound in and out of the streets which cover the face of the
+hill of Montmartre, ascending gradually towards the place they were
+in search of. David had heard something of the history of the two
+from Elise Delaunay. Alphonse was a lad of nineteen brimming over
+with wild fun and mischief, and perpetually in disgrace with all
+possible authorities; the possessor nevertheless of a certain
+delicate and subtle fancy which came out in the impressionist
+landscapes--many of them touched with a wild melancholy as
+inexplicable probably to himself as to other people--which he
+painted in all his spare moments. The tall black-bearded Lenain was
+older, had been for years in Taranne's _atelier_, was an
+excellent draughtsman, and was now just beginning seriously upon
+the painting of large pictures for exhibition. In his thin long
+face there was a pinched and anxious look, as though in the
+artist's inmost mind there lay hidden the presentiment of failure.
+
+They talked freely enough of Elise Delaunay, David alternately
+wincing and craving for more. What a clever little devil it was!
+She was burning herself away with ambition and work; Taranne
+flattered her a good deal; it was absolutely necessary, otherwise
+she would be for killing herself two or three times a week. Oh! she
+might get her _mention_ at the Salon. The young Solons sitting
+in judgment on her thought on the whole she deserved it; two of her
+exhibits were not bad; but there was another girl in the
+_atelier_, Mademoiselle Breal, who had more interest in high
+places. However, Taranne would do what he could; he had always made
+a favourite of the little Elise; and only he could manage her when
+she was in one of her impracticable fits.
+
+Then Alphonse put the Englishman through a catechism, and at the
+end of it they both advised him not to trouble his head about
+George Sand. That was all dead and done with, and Balzac not much
+less. He might be great, Balzac, but who could be at the trouble
+of reading him nowadays? Lenain, who was literary, named to him
+with enthusiasm Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' and the brothers
+Goncourt. As for Alphonse, who was capable, however, of occasional
+excursions into poetry, and could quote Musset and Hugo, the
+_feuilletons_ in the 'Gaulois' or the 'Figaro' seemed, on the
+whole, to provide him with as much fiction as he desired. He was
+emphatically of opinion that the artist wants no books; a little
+poetry, perhaps, did no harm; but literature in painting was the
+very devil. Then perceiving that between them they had puzzled
+their man, Alphonse would have proceeded to 'cram' him in the most
+approved style, but that Lenain interposed, and a certain cooling
+of the Englishman's bright eye made success look unpromising.
+Finally the wild fellow clapped David on the back and assured him
+that 'Les Trois Rats' would astonish him. 'Ah! here we are.'
+
+As he spoke they turned a corner, and a blaze of light burst upon
+them, coming from what seemed to be a gap in the street face, a
+house whereof the two lower stories were wall--and windowless,
+though not in the manner of the ordinary cafe, seeing that the open
+parts were raised somewhat above the pavement.
+
+'The patron saint!' said Alphonse, stopping with a grin and
+pointing. Following the finger with his eye David caught a
+fantastic sign swinging above him: a thin iron crescent, and
+sitting up between its two tips a lean black rat, its sharp nose in
+the air, its tail curled round its iron perch, while two other
+creatures of the same kind crept about him, the one clinging to the
+lower tip of the crescent, the other peering down from the top on
+the king-rat in the middle. Below the sign, and heavily framed by
+the dark overhanging eave, the room within was clearly visible from
+the street. From the background of its black oak walls and
+furniture emerged figures, lights, pictures, above all an imposing
+_cheminee_ advancing far into the floor, a high, fantastic
+structure also of black oak like the panelling of the room, but
+overrun with chains of black rats, carved and combined with a wild
+_diablerie_, and lit by numerous lights in branching ironwork.
+The dim grotesque shapes of the pictures, the gesticulating,
+shouting crowd in front of them, the mediaevalism of the room and
+of that strange sign dangling outside: these things took the
+English lad's excited fancy and he pressed his way in behind his
+companions. He forgot what they had been telling him; his pulse
+beat to the old romantic tune; poets, artists, talkers--here he was
+to find them.
+
+David's two companions exchanged greetings on all sides, laughing
+and shouting like the rest. With difficulty they found a table in a
+remote corner, and, sitting down, ordered coffee.
+
+'Alphonse! _mon cher!_'
+
+A young man sitting at the next table turned round upon them,
+slapped Alphonse on the shoulder, and stared hard at David. He had
+fine black eyes in a bronzed face, a silky black beard, and long
+hair _a la lion_, that is to say, thrown to one side of the
+head in a loose mane-like mass.
+
+'I have just come from the Salon. Not bad--Regnault? _Hein?_'
+
+'_Non--il arrivera, celui-la_,' said the other calmly.
+
+'As for the other things from the Villa Medici fellows,' said the
+first speaker, throwing his arm round the back of his chair, and
+twisting it round so as to front them, 'they make me sick. I should
+hardly do my fire the injustice of lighting it with some of them.'
+
+'All the same,' replied Alphonse stoutly, 'that Campagna scene of D.
+'s is well done.'
+
+'Literature, _mon cher_! literature!' cried the unknown, 'and
+what the deuce do we want with literature in painting?'
+
+He brought his fist down violently on the table.
+
+'_Connu_,' said Alphonse scornfully. 'Don't excite yourself.
+But the story in D. 's picture doesn't matter a halfpenny. Who cares
+what the figures are doing? It's the brush work and the values I
+look to. How did he get all that relief--that brilliance? No
+sunshine--no local colour--and the thing glows like a Rembrandt!'
+
+The boy's mad blue eyes took a curious light, as though some inner
+enthusiasm had stirred.
+
+'_Peuh_! we all know you, Alphonse. Say what you like, you
+want something else in a picture than painting. That'll damn you,
+and make your fortune some day, I warn you. Now _I_ have got a
+picture on the easel that will make the _bourgeois_ skip.'
+
+And the speaker passed a large tremulous hand through his waves of
+hair, his lip also quivering with the nervousness of a man
+overworked and overdone.
+
+'You'll not send it to the Salon, I imagine,' said another man
+beside him, dryly. He was fair, small and clean-shaven, wore
+spectacles, and had the look of a clerk or man of business.
+
+'Yes, I shall,' cried the other violently--his name was
+Dumesnil--'I'll fling it at their heads. That's all our school can
+do--make a scandal.'
+
+'Well, that has even been known to make money,' said the other,
+fingering his watch-chain with a disagreeable little smile.
+
+'Money!' shouted Dumesnil, and swinging round to his own table
+again he poured out hot denunciations of the money-grabbing
+reptiles of to-day who shelter themselves behind the sacred name of
+art. Meanwhile the man at whom it was all levelled sipped his
+coffee quietly and took no notice.
+
+'Ah, a song!' cried Alphonse. 'Lenain, _vois-tu_? It's that
+little devil Perinot. He's been painting churches down near
+Toulouse, his own country. Saints by the dozen, like this,' and
+Alphonse drooped his eyes and crossed his limp hands, taking off
+the frescoed mediaeval saint for an instant, as only the Parisian
+_gamin_ can do such things. 'You should see him with a _cure_.
+However, the _cures_ don't follow him here, more's the pity.
+Ah! _tres bien--tres bien_!'
+
+These plaudits were called out by some passages on the guitar with
+which the singer was prefacing his song. His chair had been mounted
+on to a table, so that all the world could see and hear. A hush of
+delighted attention penetrated the room; and outside, in the street,
+David could see dark forms gathering on the pavement.
+
+The singer was a young man, undersized and slightly deformed, with
+close-cut hair, and a large face, droll, pliant and ugly as a
+gutta-percha mask. Before he opened his lips the audience laughed.
+
+David listened with all his ears, feeling through every fibre the
+piquant strangeness of the scene--alive with the foreigner's
+curiosity, and with youth's pleasure in mere novelty. And what
+clever fellows, what dash, what _camaraderie!_ That old
+imaginative drawing towards France and the French was becoming
+something eagerly personal, combative almost,--and in the
+background of his mind throughout was the vibrating memory of the
+day just past--the passionate sense of a new life.
+
+The song was tumultuously successful. The whole crowded
+_salle_, while it was going on, was one sea of upturned faces,
+and it was accompanied at intervals by thunders of applause, given
+out by means of sticks, spoons, fists, or anything else that might
+come handy. It recounted the adventures of an artist and his model.
+As it proceeded, a slow crimson rose into the English lad's cheek,
+overspread his forehead and neck. He sat staring at the singer, or
+looking round at the absorbed attention and delight of his
+companions. By the end of it David, his face propped on his hands,
+was trying nervously to decipher the names and devices cut in the
+wood of the table on which he leant. His whole being was in a surge
+of physical loathing--the revulsion of feeling was bewildering and
+complete. So this was what Frenchmen thought of women, what they
+could say of them, when the mask was off, and they were at their
+ease. The witty brutality, the naked coarseness of the thing
+scourged the boy's shrinking sense. Freedom, passion--yes! but
+_this!_ In his wild recoil he stood again under the Arc de
+Triomphe watching her figure disappear. Ah! pardon! That he should
+be listening at all seemed to a conscience, an imagination
+quickened by first love, to be an outrage to women, to love, to
+her!
+
+_Yet_--how amusing it was! how irresistible, as the first
+shock subsided, was the impression of sparkling verse, of an
+astonishing mimetic gift in the singer! Towards the end he had just
+made up his mind to go on the first pretext, when he found himself,
+to his own disgust, shaking with laughter.
+
+He recovered himself after a while, resolved to stay it out, and
+betrayed nothing. The comments made by his two companions on the
+song--consisting mainly of illustrative anecdote--were worthy of
+the occasion. David sat, however, without flinching, his black eyes
+hardening, laughing at intervals.
+
+Presently the room rose _en bloc_, and there was a move
+towards the staircase.
+
+'The manager, M. Edmond, has come,' explained Alphonse; 'they are
+going upstairs to the concert-room. They will have a recitation
+perhaps,--_ombres chinoises,_--music. Come and look at the
+drawings before we go.'
+
+And he took his charge round the walls, which were papered with
+drawings and sketches, laughing and explaining. The drawings were
+done, in the main, according to him, by the artists on the staffs
+of two illustrated papers which had their headquarters at the
+'Trois Rats.' David was especially seized by the innumerable sheets
+of animal sketches--series in which some episode of animal life was
+carried through from its beginning to a close, sometimes humorous,
+but more often tragic. In a certain number of them there was a free
+imagination, an irony, a pity, which linked them together, marked
+them as the conceptions of one brain. Alphonse pointed to them as
+the work of a clever fellow, lately dead, who had been launched and
+supported by the 'Trois Rats' and its frequenters. One series in
+particular, representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a
+glass of absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium
+tremens, had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous,
+half pathetic fancy, which held David's eye riveted.
+
+As for the ballet-girl, she was everywhere, with her sisters, the
+model and the _grisette_. And the artistic ability shown in
+the treatment of her had nowhere been hampered by any Philistine
+scruple in behalf of decency.
+
+Upstairs there was the same mixed experience. David found himself
+in a corner with his two acquaintances, and four or five others, a
+couple of journalists, a musician and a sculptor. The conversation
+ranged from art to religion, from religion to style, from style to
+women, and all with a perpetual recurrence either to the pictures
+and successes of the Salon, or to the _liaisons_ of well-known
+artists.
+
+'Why do none of us fellows in the press pluck up courage and tell
+H. what we really think about those Homeric _machines_ of his
+which he turns out year after year?' said a journalist, who was
+smoking beside him, an older man than the rest of them. 'I have a
+hundred things I want to say--but H. is popular--I like him
+himself--and I haven't the nerve. But what the devil do we want
+with the Greeks--they painted their world--let us paint ours!
+Besides, it is an absurdity. I thought as I was looking at H. 's
+things this morning of what Preault used to say of Pradier: "_Il
+partait tous les matins pour la Grece et arrivait tous les soirs
+Rue de Breda._" "Pose your goddesses as you please--they are
+_grisettes_ all the same."'
+
+'All very well for you critics,' growled a man smoking a long pipe
+beside him; 'but the artist must live, and the _bourgeois_ will
+have subjects. He won't have anything to do with your "notes"--and
+"impressions"--and "arrangements." When you present him with the
+view, served hot, from your four-pair back--he buttons up his
+pockets and abuses you. He wants his stories and his sentiment. And
+where the deuce is the sentiment to be got? I should be greatly
+obliged to anyone who would point me to a little of the commodity.
+The Greeks are already ridiculous,--and as for religion--'
+
+The speaker threw back his head and laughed silently.
+
+'Ah! I agree with you,' said the other emphatically; 'the religious
+pictures this year are really too bad. Christianity is going too
+fast--for the artist.'
+
+'And the sceptics are becoming bores,' cried the painter; 'they take
+themselves too seriously. It is, after all, only another dogmatism.
+One should believe in nothing--not even in one's doubts.'
+
+'Yes,' replied the journalist, knocking out his pipe, with a
+sardonic little smile--'strange fact! One may swim in free thought
+and remain as _banal_ as a bishop all the time.'
+
+'I say,' shouted a fair-haired youth opposite, 'who has seen C. 's
+Holy Family? Who knows where he got his Madonna?'
+
+Nobody knew, and the speaker had the felicity of imparting an
+entirely fresh scandal to attentive ears. The mixture in the story
+of certain brutalities of modern manners with names and things
+still touching or sacred for the mass of mankind had the old
+Voltairean flavour. But somehow, presented in this form and at this
+moment, David no longer found it attractive. He sat nursing his
+knee, his dark brows drawn together, studying the story-teller,
+whose florid Norman complexion and blue eyes were already seared by
+a vicious experience.
+
+The tale, however, was interrupted and silenced by the first notes
+of a piano. The room was now full, and a young actor from the
+Gymnase company was about to give a musical sketch. The subject of
+it was 'St. Francis and Santa Clara.'
+
+This performance was perhaps more wittily broad than anything which
+had gone before. The audience was excessively amused by it. It was
+indeed the triumph of the evening, and nothing could exceed the
+grace and point of the little speech in which M. Edmond, the
+manager of the cafe, thanked the accomplished singer afterwards.
+
+While it was going on, David, always with that poignant, shrinking
+thought of Elise at his heart, looked round to see if there were
+any women present. Yes, there were three. Two were young,
+outrageously dressed, with sickly pretty tired faces. The third was
+a woman in middle life, with short hair parted at the side, and a
+strong, masculine air. Her dress was as nearly as possible that of
+a man, and she was smoking vigorously. The rough _bonhomie_ of
+her expression and her professional air reminded David once more of
+George Sand. An artist, he supposed, or a writer.
+
+Suddenly, towards the end of the sketch, he became conscious of a
+tall figure behind the singer, a man standing with his hat in his
+hand, as though he had just come in, and were just going away. His
+fine head was thrown back, his look was calm, David thought
+disdainful. Bending forward he recognised M. Regnault, the hero of
+the morning.
+
+Regnault had come in unperceived while the dramatic piece was
+going on; but it was no sooner over than he was discovered,
+and the whole _salle_ rose to do him honour. The generosity, the
+extravagance of the ovation offered to the young painter by this
+hundred or two of artists and men of letters were very striking to
+the foreign eye. David found himself thrilling and applauding with
+the rest. The room had passed in an instant from cynicism to
+sentiment. A moment ago it had been trampling to mud the tenderest
+feeling of the past; it was now eagerly alive with the feeling of
+the present.
+
+The new-comer protested that he had only dropped in, being in the
+neighbourhood, and must not stay. He was charming to them all,
+asked after this man's picture and that man's statue, talked a
+little about the studio he was organising at Tangiers, and then,
+shaking hands right and left, made his way through the crowd.
+
+As he passed David, his quick eye caught the stranger and he
+paused.
+
+'Were you not in the Louvre this morning with Mademoiselle
+Delaunay?' he asked, lowering his voice a little; 'you are a
+stranger?'
+
+'Yes, an Englishman,' David stammered, taken by surprise.
+Regnault's look swept over the youth's face, kindling in an instant
+with the artist's delight in beautiful line and tint.
+
+'Are you going now?'
+
+'Yes,' said David hurriedly. 'It must be late?'
+
+'Midnight, past. May I walk with you?'
+
+David, overwhelmed, made some hurried excuses to his two
+companions, and found himself pushing his way to the door, an
+unnoticed figure in the tumult of Regnault's exit.
+
+When they got into the street outside, Regnault walked fast
+southwards for a minute or so without speaking. Then he stopped
+abruptly, with the gesture of one shaking off a weight.
+
+'Pah! this Paris chokes me.'
+
+Then, walking on again, he said, half-coherently, and to himself:
+
+'So vile,--so small,--so foul! And there are such great things in
+the world. _Beasts!--pigs!_--and yet so generous, so struggling,
+such a hard fight for it. So gifted,--many of them! What are you
+here for?'
+
+And he turned round suddenly upon his companion. David, touched and
+captured he knew not how by the largeness and spell of the man's
+presence, conquered his shyness and explained himself as
+intelligibly as he could:
+
+An English bookseller, making his way in trade, yet drawn to France
+by love for her literature and her past, and by a blood-tie which
+seemed to have in it mystery and pain, for it could hardly be
+spoken of--the curious little story took the artist's fancy.
+Regnault did his best to draw out more of it, helped the young
+fellow with his French, tried to get at his impressions, and
+clearly enjoyed the experience to which his seeking artist's sense
+had led him.
+
+'What a night!' he said at last, drawing a full draught of the May
+into his great chest. 'Stop and look down those streets in the
+moonlight. What surfaces,--what gradations,--what a beauty of
+multiplied lines, though it is only a piece of vulgar Haussmann!
+Indoors I can't breathe--but out of doors and at night this Paris
+of ours,--ah! she is still beautiful--_beautiful_! Now one has
+shaken the dust of that place off, one can feel it. What did you
+think of it?--tell me.'
+
+He stooped and looked into his companion's face. David was tall and
+lithe, but Regnault was at least half a head taller and broader in
+proportion.
+
+David walked along for a minute without answering. He too, and even
+more keenly than Regnault, was conscious of escape and relief. A
+force which had, as it were, taken life and feeling by the throat
+had relaxed its grip. He disengaged himself with mingled loathing
+and joy. But in his shyness he did not know how to express himself,
+fearing, too, to wound the Frenchman. At last he said slowly:
+
+'I never saw so many clever people together in my life.'
+
+The words were bald, but Regnault perfectly understood what was
+meant by them, as well as by the troubled consciousness of the
+black eyes raised to his. He laughed--shortly and bitterly.
+
+'No, we don't lack brains, we French. All the same I tell you, in
+the whole of that room there are about half-a-dozen people,--oh,
+not so many!--not nearly so many!--who will ever make a mark, even
+for their own generation, who will ever strike anything out of
+nature that is worth having--wrestle with her to any purpose. Why?
+Because they have every sort of capacity--every sort of
+cleverness--and _no character_!'
+
+David walked beside him in silence. He thought suddenly of
+Regnault's own picture--its strange cruelty and force, its
+craftsman's brilliance. And the recollection puzzled him.
+
+Regnault, however, had spoken with passion, and as though out of
+the fulness of some sore and long-familiar pondering.
+
+'You never saw anything like that in England,' he resumed quickly.
+
+David hesitated.
+
+'No, I never did. But I am a provincial, and I have seen nothing at
+all. Perhaps in London--'
+
+'No, you would see nothing like it in London,' said Regnault
+decidedly. 'Bah! it is not that you are more virtuous than we are.
+Who believes such folly? But your vice is grosser, stupider. Lucky
+for you! You don't sacrifice to it the best young brain of the
+nation, as we are perpetually doing. Ah, _mon Dieu_!' he broke
+out in a kind of despair, 'this enigma of art!--of the artist! One
+flounders and blunders along. I have been floundering and
+blundering with the rest,--playing tricks--following this man and
+that--till suddenly--a door opens--and one sees the real world
+through for the first time!'
+
+He stood still in his excitement, a smile of the most exquisite
+quality and sweetness dawning on his strong young face.
+
+'And then,' he went on, beginning to walk again, and talking much
+more to the night than to his companion, 'one learns that the secret
+of life lies in _feeling_--in the heart, not in the head. And
+no more limits than before!--all is still open, divinely open.
+Range the whole world--see everything, learn everything--till at
+the end of years and years you may perhaps be found worthy to be
+called an artist! But let art have her ends, all the while, shining
+beyond the means she is toiling through--her ends of beauty or of
+power. To spend herself on the mere photography of the vile and the
+hideous! what waste--what sacrilege!'
+
+They had reached the Place de la Concorde, which lay bathed in
+moonlight, the silver fountains plashing, the trees in the
+Champs-Elysees throwing their sharp yet delicate shadows on the
+intense whiteness of the ground, the buildings far away rising
+softly into the softest purest blue. Regnault stopped and looked
+round him with enchantment. As for David, he had no eyes save for
+his companion. His face was full of a quick responsive emotion.
+After an experience which had besmirched every ideal and bemocked
+every faith, the young Frenchman's talk had carried the lad once
+more into the full tide of poetry and romance. 'The secret of life
+lies in _feeling_, in the heart, not the head'--ah, _that_ he
+understood! He tried to express his assent, his homage to the
+speaker; but neither he nor the artist understood very clearly
+what he was saying. Presently Regnault said in another tone:
+
+'And they are such good fellows, many of them. Starving often--but
+nothing to propitiate the _bourgeois_, nothing to compromise
+the "dignity of art." A man will paint to please himself all day,
+paint, on a crust, something that won't and can't sell, that the
+world in fact would be mad to buy; then in the evening he will put
+his canvas to the wall, and paint sleeve-links or china to live.
+And so generous to each other: they will give each other all they
+have--food, clothes, money, knowledge. That man who gave that
+abominable thing about St. Francis--I know him, he has a little
+apartment near the Quai St.-Michel, and an invalid mother. He is a
+perfect angel to her. I could take off my hat to him whenever I
+think of it.'
+
+His voice dropped again. Regnault was pacing along across the
+Place, his arms behind him, David at his side. When he resumed, it
+was once more in a tone of despondency.
+
+'There is an ideal; but so twisted, so corrupted! What is wanted
+is not less intelligence but _more_--more knowledge, more
+experience--something beyond this fevering, brutalising Paris,
+which is all these men know. They have got the poison of the
+Boulevards in their blood, and it dulls their eye and hand. They
+want scattering to the wilderness; they want the wave of life to
+come and lift them past the mud they are dabbling in, with its
+hideous wrecks and _debris_, out and away to the great sea, to
+the infinite beyond of experience and feeling! you, too, feel with
+me?--you, too, see it like that? Ah! when one has seen and felt
+Italy--the East,--the South--lived heart to heart with a wild
+nature, or with the great embodied thought of the past,--lived at
+large, among great things, great sights, great emotions, then there
+comes purification! There is no other way out--no, none!'
+
+So for another hour Regnault led the English boy up and down and
+along the quays, talking in the frankest openest way to this
+acquaintance of a night. It was as though he were wrestling his own
+way through his own life-problem. Very often David could hardly
+follow. The joys, the passions, the temptations of the artist,
+struggling with the life of thought and aspiration, the craving to
+know everything, to feel everything, at war with the hunger for a
+moral unity and a stainless self-respect--there was all this in his
+troubled, discursive talk, and there was besides the magic touch of
+genius, youth, and poetry.
+
+'Well, this is strange!' he said at last, stopping at a point
+between the Louvre on the one hand and the Institute on the other,
+the moonlit river lying between.--' My friends come to me at Rome
+or at Tangiers, and they complain of me, "Regnault, you have grown
+morose, no one can get a word out of you"--and they go away
+wounded--I have seen it often. And it was always true. For months I
+have had no words. I have been in the dark, wrestling with my art
+and with this goading, torturing world, which the artist with his
+puny forces has somehow to tame and render. Then--the other
+day--ah! well, no matter!--but the dark broke, and there was light!
+and when I saw your face, your stranger's face, in that crowd
+to-night, listening to those things, it drew me. I wanted to say my
+say. I don't make excuses. Very likely we shall never meet
+again--but for this hour we have been friends. Good night!--good
+night! Look,--the dawn is coming!'
+
+And he pointed to where, behind the towers of Notre-Dame, the first
+whiteness of the coming day was rising into the starry blue.
+
+They shook hands.
+
+'You go back to England soon?'
+
+'In a--a--week or two.'
+
+'Only believe this--we have things better worth seeing than "Les
+Trois Rats"--things that represent us better. That is what the
+foreigner is always doing; he spends his time in wondering at our
+monkey tricks; there is no nation can do them so well as we; and
+the great France--the undying France!--disappears in a splutter of
+_blague_!'
+
+He leant over the parapet, forgetting his companion, his eyes fixed
+on the great cathedral, on the slender shaft of the Sainte
+Chapelle, on the sky filling with light.
+
+Then suddenly he turned round, laid a quick hand on his companion's
+shoulder.
+
+'If you ever feel inclined to write to me, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
+will find me. Adieu.'
+
+And drawing his coat round him in the chilliness of the dawn, he
+walked off quickly across the bridge.
+
+David also hurried away, speeding along the deserted pavements till
+again he was in his own dark street. The dawn was growing from its
+first moment of mysterious beauty into a grey disillusioning light.
+But he felt no reaction. He crept up the squalid stairs to his
+room. It was heavy with the scent of the narcissus.
+
+He took them, and stole along the passage to Elise's door. There
+were three steps outside it. He sat down on the lowest, putting his
+flowers beside him. There was something awful to him even in this
+nearness; he dare not have gone higher.
+
+He sat there for long--his heart beating, beating. Every part of
+his French experience so far, whether by sympathy or recoil, had
+helped to bring him to this intoxication of sense and soul.
+Regnault had spoken of the 'great things' of life. Had he too come
+to understand them--thus?
+
+At last he left his flowers there, kissing the step on which they
+were laid, and which her foot must touch. He could hardly sleep;
+the slight fragrance which clung to the old bearskin in which he
+wrapt himself helped to keep him restless; it was the faint
+heliotrope scent he had noticed in her room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+'He loves me--he does really! Poor boy!'
+
+The speaker was Elise Delaunay. She was sitting alone on the divan
+in her _atelier_, trying on a pair of old Pompadour shoes,
+with large faded rosettes and pink heels, which she had that moment
+routed out of a broker's shop in the Rue de Seine, on her way back
+from the Luxembourg with David. They made her feet look
+enchantingly small, and she was holding back her skirts that she
+might get a good look at them.
+
+Her conviction of David's passion did not for some time lessen her
+interest in the shoes, but at last she kicked them off, and flung
+herself back on the divan, to think out the situation a little.
+
+Yes, the English youth's adoration could no longer be ignored. It
+had become evident, even to her own acquaintances and comrades in
+the various galleries she was now haunting in this bye-time of the
+artistic year. Whenever she and he appeared together now, there
+were sly looks and smiles.
+
+The scandal of it did not affect her in the least. She belonged to
+Bohemia, so apparently did he. She had been perfectly honest till
+now; but she had never let any convention stand in her way. All her
+conceptions of the relations between men and women were of an
+extremely free kind. Her mother's blood in her accounted both for a
+certain coldness and a certain personal refinement which both
+divided and protected her from a great many of her acquaintance,
+but through her father she had been acquainted for years with the
+type of life and _menage_ which prevails among a certain
+section of the French artist class, and if the occasion were but
+strong enough she had no instincts inherited or acquired which
+would stand in the way of the gratification of passion.
+
+On the contrary, her reasoned opinions so far as she had any
+were all in favour of _l'union libre_--that curious type of
+association which held the artist Theodore Rousseau for life to the
+woman who passed as his wife, and which obtains to a remarkable
+extent, with all those accompaniments of permanence, fidelity, and
+mutual service, which are commonly held to belong only to
+_l'union legale_, in one or two strata of French society. She
+was capable of sentiment; she had hidden veins of womanish
+weakness; but at the same time the little creature's prevailing
+temper was one of remarkable coolness and audacity. She judged for
+herself; she had read for herself, observed for herself. Such a
+temper had hitherto preserved her from adventures; but, upon
+occasion, it might as easily land her in one. She was at once a
+daughter of art and a daughter of the people, with a cross strain
+of gentle breeding and intellectual versatility thrown in, which
+made her more interesting and more individual than the rest of her
+class.
+
+'We are a pair of Romantics out of date, you and I,' she had said
+once to David, half mocking, half in earnest, and the phrase fitted
+the relation and position of the pair very nearly. In spite of the
+enormous difference of their habits and training they had at bottom
+similar tastes--the same capacity for the excitements of art and
+imagination, the same shrinking from the coarse and ugly sides of
+the life amid which they moved, the same cravings for novelty and
+experience.
+
+David went no more to the 'Trois Rats,' and when, in obedience to
+Lenain's recommendation, he had bought and begun to read a novel of
+the Goncourts, he threw it from him in a disgust beyond expression.
+_Her_ talk, meanwhile, was in some respects of the freest; she
+would discuss subjects impossible to the English girl of the same
+class; she asked very few questions as to the people she mixed
+with; and he was, by now, perfectly acquainted with her view, that
+on the whole marriage was for the _bourgeois_, and had few
+attractions for people who were capable of penetrating deeper into
+the rich growths of life. But there was no _personal_ taint or
+license in what she said; and she herself could be always happily
+divided from her topics. Their Bohemia was canopied with illusions,
+but the illusions on the whole were those of poetry.
+
+Were all David's illusions hers, however? _Love!_ She thought
+of it, half laughing, as she lay on the divan. She knew nothing
+about it--she was for _art_. Yet what a brow, what eyes, what
+a gait--like a young Achilles!
+
+She sprang up to look at a sketch of him, dashed off the day
+before, which was on the easel. Yes, it was like. There was the
+quick ardent air, the southern colour, the clustering black hair,
+the young parting of the lips. The invitation of the eyes was
+irresistible--she smiled into them--the little pale face flushing.
+
+But at the same moment her attention was caught by a sketch pinned
+against the wall just behind the easel.
+
+'Ah! my cousin, my good cousin!' she said, with a little mocking
+twist of the mouth; 'how strange that you have not been here all
+this time--never once! There was something said, I remember, about
+a visit to Bordeaux about now. Ah! well--_tant mieux_--for you
+would be rather jealous, my cousin!'
+
+Then she sat down with her hands on her knees, very serious. How
+long since they met? A week. How long till the temporary closing of
+the Salon and the voting of the rewards? A fortnight. Well, should
+it go on till then? Yes or no? As soon as she knew her fate--or at
+any rate if she got her _mention_--she would go back to work.
+She had two subjects in her mind; she would work at home, and
+Taranne had promised to come and advise her. Then she would have no
+time for handsome English boys. But till then?
+
+She took an anemone from a bunch David had brought her, and began
+to pluck off the petals, alternating 'yes' and 'no.' The last petal
+fell to 'yes.'
+
+'I should have done just the same if it had been "no,"' she said,
+laughing. '_Allons_, he amuses me, and I do him no harm. When
+I go back to work he can do his business. He has done none yet. He
+will forget me and make some money.'
+
+She paced up and down the studio thinking again. She was conscious
+of some remorse for her part in sending the Englishman's sister to
+the Cervins. The matter had never been mentioned again between her
+and David; yet she knew instinctively that he was often ill at
+ease. The girl was perpetually in Montjoie's studio, and surrounded
+in public places by a crew of his friends. Madame Cervin was
+constantly in attendance no doubt, but if it came to a struggle she
+would have no power with the English girl, whose obstinacy was in
+proportion to her ignorance.
+
+Elise had herself once stopped Madame Cervin on the stairs, and
+said some frank things of the sculptor, in order to quiet an
+uncomfortable conscience.
+
+'Ah! you do not like Monsieur Montjoie?' said the other, looking
+hard at her.
+
+Elise coloured, then she recovered herself.
+
+'All the world knows that Monsieur Montjoie has no scruples,
+madame,' she cried angrily. 'You know it yourself. It is a shame.
+That girl understands nothing.'
+
+Madame Cervin laughed.
+
+'Certainly she understands everything that she pleases,
+mademoiselle. But if there is any anxiety, let her brother come and
+look after her. He can take her where she wants to go. I should be
+glad indeed. I am as tired as a dog. Since she came it is one
+_tapage_ from morning till night.'
+
+And Elise retired, discomfited before those small malicious eyes.
+Since David's adoration for the girl artist in No. 27 had become
+more or less public property, Madame Cervin, who had seen from the
+beginning that Louie was a burden on her brother, had decidedly the
+best of the situation.
+
+'Has she lent Montjoie money?'
+
+Elise meditated. The little _bourgeoise_ had a curious
+weakness for posing as the patron of the various artists in the
+house. 'Very possible! and she looks on the Maenad as the only way
+of getting it back? She would sell her soul for a napoleon--I
+always knew that. _Canaille_, all of them!'
+
+And the meditation ended in the impatient conclusion that neither
+she nor the brother had any responsibility. After all, any decent
+girl, French or English, could soon see for herself what manner of
+man was Jules Montjoie! And now for the 'private view' of a certain
+artistic club to which she had promised to take her English
+acquaintance. All the members of the club were young--of the new
+rebellious school of '_plein air_'--the afternoon promised to
+be amusing.
+
+So the companionship of these two went on, and David passed from
+one golden day to another. How she lectured him, the little, vain,
+imperious thing; and how meek he was with her, how different from
+his Manchester self! The woman's cleverness filled the field. The
+man, wholly preoccupied with other things, did not care to produce
+himself, and in the first ardour of his new devotion kept all the
+self-assertive elements of his own nature in the background, caring
+for nothing but to watch her eyes as she talked, to have her voice
+in his ears, to keep her happy and content in his company.
+
+Yet she was not taken in. With other people he must be proud,
+argumentative, self-willed--that she was sure of; but her
+conviction only made her realise her power over him with the more
+pleasure. His naive respect for her own fragmentary knowledge, his
+unbounded admiration for her talent, his quick sympathy for all she
+did and was, these things, little by little, tended to excite, to
+preoccupy her.
+
+Especially was she bent upon his artistic education. She carried
+him hither and thither, to the Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Salon,
+insisting with a feverish eloquence and invention that he should
+worship all that she worshipped--no matter if he did not
+understand!--let him worship all the same--till he had learnt his
+new alphabet with a smiling docility, and caught her very tricks of
+phrase. Especially were they haunters of the sculptures in the
+Louvre, where, because of the difficulty of it, she piqued herself
+most especially on knowledge, and could convict him most
+triumphantly of a barbarian ignorance. Up and down they wandered,
+and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or
+Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the
+Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him,
+perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and
+through with a voluble enjoyment.
+
+Then from these lingerings amid a world charged at every point with
+the elements of passion and feeling, they would turn into the open
+air, into the May sunshine, which seemed to David's northern eyes
+so lavish and inexhaustible, carrying with it inevitably the
+kindness of the gods! They would sit out of doors either in the
+greenwood paths of the Bois, where he could lie at her feet, and
+see nothing but her face and the thick young wood all round them,
+or in some corner of the Champs-Elysees, or the sun-beaten Quai de
+la Conference, where the hurrying life of the town brushed past
+them incessantly, yet without disturbing for a moment their
+absorption in or entertainment of each other.
+
+Yet all through she maintained her mastery of the situation. She
+was a riddle to him often, poor boy! One moment she would lend
+herself in bewildering unexpected ways to his passion, the next she
+would allow him hardly the privileges of the barest acquaintance,
+hardly the carrying of her cloak, the touch of her hand. But she
+had no qualms. It was but to last another fortnight; the friendship
+soothed and beguiled for her these days of excited waiting; and a
+woman, when she is an artist and a Romantic, may at least sit,
+smoke, and chat with whomsoever she likes, provided it be a time of
+holiday, and she is not betraying her art.
+
+Meanwhile the real vulgarity of her nature--its insatiable vanity,
+its reckless ambition--was masked from David mainly by the very
+jealousy and terror which her artist's life soon produced in him.
+He saw no sign of other lovers; she had many acquaintances but no
+intimates; and the sketch in her room had been carelessly explained
+to him as the portrait of her cousin. But the _atelier_, and
+the rivalries it represented:--after three days with her he had
+learnt that what had seemed to him the extravagance, the pose of
+her first talk with him, was in truth the earnest, the reality of
+her existence. She told him that since she was a tiny child she had
+dreamed of _fame_--dreamed of people turning in the streets
+when she passed--of a glory that should lift her above all the
+commonplaces of existence, and all the disadvantages of her own
+start in life.
+
+'I am neither beautiful, nor rich, nor well-born; but if I have
+talent, what matter? Everyone will be at my feet. And if I have no
+talent--_grand Dieu!_--what is there left for me but to kill
+myself?'
+
+And she would clasp her hands round her knees, and look at him with
+fierce, drawn brows, as though defying him to say a single syllable
+in favour of any meaner compromise with fate.
+
+This fever of the artist and the _concurrent_--in a woman
+above all--how it bewildered him! He soon understood enough of it,
+however, to be desperately jealous of it, to realise something of
+the preliminary bar it placed between any lover and the girl's
+heart and life.
+
+Above all was he jealous of her teachers. Taranne clearly could
+beat her down with a word, reduce her to tears with an unfavourable
+criticism; then he had but to hold up a finger, to say,
+'Mademoiselle, you have worked well this week, your drawing shows
+improvement, I have hopes of you,' to bring her to his feet with
+delight and gratitude. It was a _monstrous_ power, this power
+of the master with his pupil! How could women submit to it?
+
+Yet his lover's instincts led him safely through many perils. He
+was infinitely complaisant towards all her artistic talk, all her
+gossip of the _atelier_. It seemed to him--but then his
+apprehension of this strange new world was naturally a somewhat
+confused one--that Elise was not normally on terms with any of her
+fellow students.
+
+'If I don't get my _mention_,' she would say passionately, 'I
+tell you again it will be intrigue; it will be those creatures in
+the _atelier_ who want to get rid of me--to finish with me.
+Ah! I will _crush_ them all yet. And I have been good to them
+all--every one--I vow I have--even to that animal of a Breal, who
+is always robbing me of my place at the _concours_, and taking
+mean advantages. _Miserables!_'
+
+And the tears would stand in her angry eyes; her whole delicate
+frame would throb with fierce feeling.
+
+Gradually he learnt how to deal with these fits, even when they
+chilled him with a dread, a conviction he dared not analyse. He
+would so soothe and listen to her, so ply her with the praises of
+her gift, which came floated to him on the talk of those
+acquaintances of hers to whom she had introduced him, that her most
+deep-rooted irritations would give way for a time. The woman would
+reappear; she would yield to the charm of his admiring eyes, his
+stammered flatteries; her whole mood would break up, dissolve into
+eager softness, and she would fall into a childish plaintiveness,
+saying wild generous things even of her rivals, now there seemed to
+be no one under heaven to take their part, and at last, even,
+letting her little hand fall into those eager brown ones which lay
+in wait for it, letting it linger there--forgotten.
+
+Especially was she touched in his favour by the way in which
+Regnault had singled him out. After he had given her the history of
+that midnight walk, he saw clearly that he had risen to a higher
+plane in her esteem. She had no heroes exactly; but she had certain
+artistic passions, certain romantic fancies, which seemed to touch
+deep fibres in her. Her admiration for Regnault was one of these;
+but David soon understood that he had no cause whatever to be
+jealous of it. It was a matter purely of the mind and the
+imagination.
+
+So the days passed--the hot lengthening days. Sometimes in the long
+afternoons they pushed far afield into the neighbourhood of Paris.
+The green wooded hills of Sevres and St. Cloud, the blue curves and
+reaches of the Seine, the flashing lights and figures, the
+pleasures of companionship, self-revelation, independence--the day
+was soon lost in these quick impressions, and at night they would
+come back in a fragrant moonlight, descending from their train into
+the noise and glitter of the streets, only to draw closer
+together--for surely on these crowded pavements David might claim
+her little arm in his for safety's sake--till at last they stood in
+the dark passage between his door and hers, and she would suddenly
+pelt him with a flower, spring up her small stairway, and lock her
+door behind her, before, in his emotion, he could find his voice or
+a farewell. Then he would make his way into his own den, and sit
+there in the dark, lost in a thronging host of thoughts and
+memories,--feeling life one vibrating delight.
+
+At last one morning he awoke to the fact that only four days more
+remained before the date on which, according to their original
+plan, they were to go back to Manchester. He laughed aloud when the
+recollection first crossed his mind; then, having a moment to
+himself, he sat down and scrawled a few hasty words to John.
+Business detained him yet a while--would detain him a few
+weeks--let John manage as he pleased, his employer trusted
+everything to him--and money was enclosed. Then he wrote another
+hurried note to the bank where he had placed his six hundred
+pounds. Let them send him twenty pounds at once, in Bank of England
+notes. He felt himself a young king as he gave the order--king of
+this mean world and of its dross. All his business projects had
+vanished from his mind. He could barely have recalled them if he
+had tried. During the first days of his acquaintance with Elise he
+had spent a few spare hours in turning over the boxes on the quays,
+in talks with booksellers in the Rue de Seine or the Rue de Lille,
+in preliminary inquiries respecting some commissions he had
+undertaken. But now, every hour, every thought were hers. What did
+money matter, in the name of Heaven? Yet when his twenty pounds
+came, he changed his notes and pocketed his napoleons with a vast
+satisfaction. For they meant power, they meant opportunity; every
+one should be paid away against so many hours by her side, at her
+feet.
+
+Meanwhile day after day he had reminded himself of Louie, and day
+after day he had forgotten her again, absolutely, altogether. Once
+or twice he met her on the stairs, started, remembered, and tried
+to question her as to what she was doing. But she was still angry
+with him for his interference on the day of the pose; and he could
+get very little out of her. Let him only leave her alone; she was
+not a school-child to be meddled with; that he would find out. As
+to Madame Cervin, she was a little fool, and her meanness in money
+matters was disgraceful; but she, Louie, could put up with her. One
+of these meetings took place on the day of his letters to the bank
+and to John. Louie asked him abruptly when he thought of returning.
+He flushed deeply, stammered, said he was inclined to stay longer,
+but of course she could be sent home. An escort could be found for
+her. She stared at him; then suddenly her black eyes sparkled, and
+she laughed so that the sound echoed up the dark stairs. David
+hotly inquired what she meant; but she ran up still laughing
+loudly, and he was left to digest her scornful amusement as best he
+could.
+
+Not long after he found the Cervins' door open as he passed, and in
+the passage saw a group of people, mostly men; Montjoie in front,
+just lighting a cigar; Louie's black hat in the background. David
+hurried past; he loathed the sculptor's battered look, his insolent
+eye, his slow ambiguous manner; he still burnt with the anger and
+humiliation of his ineffectual descent on the man's domain. But
+Madame Cervin, catching sight of him from the back of the party,
+pursued him panting and breathless to his own door. Would monsieur
+please attend to her; he was so hard to get hold of; never, in
+fact, at home! Would he settle her little bill, and give her
+more money for current expenses? Mademoiselle Louie required to
+be kept amused--_mon Dieu!_--from morning to night! She had no
+objection, provided it were made worth her while. And how much
+longer did monsieur think of remaining in Paris?
+
+David answered recklessly that he did not know, paid her bill for
+Louie's board and extras without looking at it, and gave her a
+napoleon in hand, wherewith she departed, her covetous eyes aglow,
+her mouth full of excited civilities.
+
+She even hesitated a moment at the door and then came back to
+assure him that she was really all discretion with regard to his
+sister; no doubt monsieur had heard some unpleasant stories, for
+instance, of M. Montjoie; she could understand perfectly, that
+coming from such a quarter, they had affected monsieur's mind; but
+he would see that she could not make a sudden quarrel with one of
+her husband's old friends; Mademoiselle Louie (who was already her
+_cherie_) had taken a fancy to pose for this statue; it was
+surely better to indulge her than to rouse her self-will, but she
+could assure monsieur that she had looked after her as though it
+had been her own daughter.
+
+David stood impatiently listening. In a few minutes he was to be
+with Elise at the corner of the Rue Lafitte. Of course it was all
+right!--and if it were not, he could not mend it. The woman was
+vulgar and grasping, but what reason was there to think anything
+else that was evil of her? Probably she had put up with Louie more
+easily than a woman of a higher type would have done. At any rate
+she was doing her best, and what more could be asked of him than he
+had done? Louie behaved outrageously in Manchester; he could not
+help it, either there or here. He had interfered again and again,
+and had always been a fool for his pains. Let her choose for
+herself. A number of old and long-hidden exasperations seemed now
+to emerge whenever he thought of his sister.
+
+Five minutes later he was in the Rue Lafitte.
+
+It was Elise's caprice that they should always meet in this way,
+out of doors; at the corner of their own street; on the steps of
+the Madeleine; beneath the Vendome Column; in front of a particular
+bonbon shop; or beside the third tree from the Place de la Concorde
+in the northern alley of the Tuileries Gardens. He had been only
+once inside her studio since the first evening of their
+acquaintance.
+
+His mind was full of excitement, for the Salon had been closed
+since the day before; and the awards of the jury would be
+informally known, at least in some cases, by the evening. Elise's
+excitement since the critical hours began had been pitiful to see.
+As he stood waiting he gave his whole heart to her and her
+ambitions, flinging away from him with a passionate impatience
+every other interest, every other thought.
+
+When she came she looked tired and white. 'I can't go to galleries,
+and I can't paint,' she said, shortly. 'What shall we do?'
+
+Her little black hat was drawn forward, but through the dainty veil
+he could see the red spot on either cheek. Her hands were pushed
+deep into the pockets of her light grey jacket, recalling the
+energetic attitude in which she had stood over Louie on the
+occasion of their first meeting. He guessed at once that she had
+not slept, and that she was beside herself with anxiety. How to
+manage her?--how to console her? He felt himself so young and raw;
+yet already his passion had awakened in him a hundred new and
+delicate perceptions.
+
+'Look at the weather!' he said to her. 'Come out of town! let us
+make for the Gare St. Lazare, and spend the day at St. Germain.'
+
+She hesitated.
+
+'Taranne will write to me directly he knows--directly! He might
+write any time this evening. No, no!--I can't go! I must be on the
+spot.'
+
+'He can't write _before_ the evening. You said yourself before
+seven nothing could be known. We will get back in ample time, I
+swear.'
+
+They were standing in the shade of a shop awning, and he was
+looking down at her, eagerly, persuasively. She had a debate with
+herself, then with a despairing gesture of the hands, she turned
+abruptly--
+
+'Well then--to the station!'
+
+When they had started, she lay back in the empty carriage he had
+found for her, and shut her eyes. The air was oppressive, for the
+day before had been showery, and the heat this morning was a damp
+heat which relaxed the whole being. But before the train moved, she
+felt a current of coolness, and hastily looking up she saw that
+David had possessed himself of the cheap fan which had been lying
+on her lap, and was fanning her with his gaze fixed upon her, a
+gaze which haunted her as her eyelids fell again.
+
+Suddenly she fell into an inward perplexity, an inward impatience
+on the subject of her companion, and her relation to him. It had
+been all very well till yesterday! But now the artistic and
+professional situation had become so strained, so intense, she
+could hardly give him a thought. His presence there, and its tacit
+demands upon her, tried her nerves. Her mind was full of a hundred
+_miseres d'atelier_, of imaginary enemies and intrigues; one
+minute she was all hope, the next all fear; and she turned sick
+when she thought of Taranne's letter.
+
+What had she been entangling herself for? she whose whole life and
+soul belonged to art and ambition! This comradeship, begun as a
+caprice, an adventure, was becoming too serious. It must end!--end
+probably to-day, as she had all along determined. Then, as she
+framed the thought, she became conscious of a shrinking, a
+difficulty, which enraged and frightened her.
+
+She sat up abruptly and threw back her veil.
+
+David made a little exclamation as he dropped the fan.
+
+'Yes!' she said, looking at him with a little frown, 'yes--what did
+you say?'
+
+Then she saw that his whole face was working with emotion.
+
+'I wish you would have stayed like that,' he said, in a voice which
+trembled.
+
+'Why?'
+
+'Because--because it was so sweet!'
+
+She gave a little start, and a sudden red sprang into her cheek.
+
+His heart leapt. He had never seen her blush for any word of his
+before.
+
+'I prefer the air itself,' she said, bending forward and looking
+away from him out of the open window at the villas they were
+passing.
+
+Yet, all the while, as the country houses succeeded each other and
+her eyes followed them, she saw not their fragrant, flowery
+gardens, but the dark face and tall young form opposite. He was
+handsomer even than when she had seen him first--handsomer far than
+her portrait of him. Was it the daily commerce with new forms of
+art and intelligence which Paris and her companionship had brought
+him?--or simply the added care which a man in love instinctively
+takes of the little details of his dress and social conduct?--which
+had given him this look of greater maturity, greater distinction?
+Her heart fluttered a little--then she fell back on the thought of
+Taranne's letter.
+
+They emerged from the station at St. Germain into a fierce blaze of
+sun, which burned on the square red mass of the old chateau, and
+threw a blinding glare on the white roads.
+
+'Quick! for the trees!' she said, and they both hurried over the
+open space which lay between them and the superb chestnut grove
+which borders the famous terrace. Once there all was well, and they
+could wander from alley to alley in a green shade, the white
+blossom-spikes shining in the sun overhead, and to their right the
+blue and purple plain, with the Seine winding and dimpling, the
+river polders with their cattle, and far away the dim heights of
+Montmartre just emerging behind the great mass of Mont Valerien,
+which blocked the way to Paris. Such lights and shades, such spring
+leaves, such dancing airs!
+
+Elise drew a long breath, slipped off her jacket which he made a
+joy of carrying, and loosened the black lace at her throat which
+fell so prettily over the little pink cotton underneath.
+
+Then she looked at her companion unsteadily. There was excitement
+in this light wind, this summer sun. Her great resolve to 'end it'
+began to look less clear to her. Nay, she stood still and smiled up
+into his face, a very siren of provocation and wild charm--the wind
+blowing a loose lock about her eyes.
+
+'Is this better than England--than your Manchester?' she asked him
+scornfully, and he--traitor!--flinging out of his mind all the
+bounties of an English May, all his memories of the whitethorn and
+waving fern and foaming streams set in the deep purple breast of
+the Scout--vowed to her that nowhere else could there be spring or
+beauty or sunshine, but only here in France and at St. Germain.
+
+At this she smiled and blushed--no woman could have helped the
+blush. In truth, his will, steadily bent on one end, while hers was
+distracted by half a dozen different impulses, was beginning to
+affect her in a troubling, paralysing way. For all her parade of a
+mature and cynical enlightenment, she was just twenty; it was such
+a May day as never was; and when once she had let herself relax
+towards him again, the inward ache of jealous ambition made this
+passionate worship beside her, irrelevant as it was, all the more
+soothing, all the more luring.
+
+Still she felt that something must be done to stem the tide, and
+again she fell back upon luncheon. They had bought some provisions
+on their way to the station in Paris. He might subsist on scenery
+and aesthetics if he pleased--as for her, she was a common person
+with common needs, and must eat.
+
+'Oh, not here!' he cried, 'why, this is all in public. Look at the
+nursemaids, and the boys playing, and the carriages on the terrace.
+Come on a little farther. You remember that open place with the
+thorns and the stream?--there we should be in peace.'
+
+She did not know that she wanted to be in peace; but she gave way.
+
+So they wandered on past the chestnuts into the tangled depths of
+the old forest. A path sunk in brambles and fern took them through
+beech wood to the little clearing David had in his mind. A tiny
+stream much choked by grass and last year's leaves ran along one
+side of it. A fallen log made a seat, and the beech trees spread
+their new green fans overhead, or flung them out to right and left
+around the little space, and for some distance in front, till the
+green sprays and the straight grey stems were lost on all sides in
+a brownish pinkish mist which betrayed a girdle of oaks not yet
+conquered by the summer.
+
+She took her seat on the log, and he flung himself beside her. Out
+came the stores in his pockets, and once more they made themselves
+childishly merry over a scanty meal, which left them still hungry.
+
+Then for an hour or two they sat lounging and chattering in the
+warm shade, while the gentle wind brought them every spring scent,
+every twitter of the birds, every swaying murmur of the forest.
+David lay on his back against the log, his eyes now plunging into
+the forest, now watching the curls of smoke from his pipe mounting
+against the background of green, or the moist fleecy clouds which
+seemed to be actually tangled in the tree-tops, now fixed as long
+as they dared on his companion's face. She was not beautiful? Let
+her say it! For she had the softest mouth which drooped like a
+child with a grievance when she was silent, and melted into the
+subtlest curves when she talked. She had, as a rule, no colour, but
+her clear paleness, as contrasted with the waves of her light-gold
+hair, seemed to him an exquisite beauty. The eyebrows had an
+oriental trick of mounting at the corners, but the effect, taken
+with the droop of the mouth, was to give the face in repose a
+certain charming look of delicate and plaintive surprise. Above all
+it was her smallness which entranced him; her feet and hands, her
+tiny waist, the _finesse_ of her dress and movements. All the
+women he had ever seen, Lucy and Dora among them, served at this
+moment only to make a foil in his mind for this little Parisian
+beside him.
+
+How she talked this afternoon! In her quick reaction towards him
+she was after all more the woman than she had ever been. She
+chattered of her forlorn childhood, of her mother's woes and her
+father's iniquities, using the frankest language about these last;
+then of herself and her troubles. He listened and laughed; his look
+as she poured herself out to him was in itself a caress. Moreover,
+unconsciously to both, their relation had changed somewhat. The
+edge of his first ignorance and shyness had rubbed off. He was no
+longer a mere slave at her feet. Rather a new and sweet equality
+seemed at last after all these days to have arisen between them; a
+bond more simple, more natural. Every now and then he caught his
+breath under the sense of a coming crisis; meanwhile the May day
+was a dream of joy, and life an intoxication.
+
+But he controlled himself long, being indeed in desperate fear of
+breaking the spell which held her to him this heavenly afternoon.
+The hours slipped by; the air grew stiller and sultrier. Presently,
+just as the sun was sinking into the western wood, a woman,
+carrying a bundle and with a couple of children, crossed the glade.
+One child was on her arm; the other, whimpering with heat and
+fatigue, dragged wearily behind her, a dead weight on its mother's
+skirts. The woman looked worn out, and was scolding the crying
+child in a thin exasperated voice. When she came to the stream, she
+put down her bundle, and finding a seat by the water, she threw
+back her cotton bonnet and began to wipe her brow, with long
+breaths which were very near to groans. Then the child on her lap
+set up a shout of hunger, while the child behind her began to cry
+louder than before. The woman hastily raised the baby, unfastened
+her dress, and gave it the breast, so stifling its cries; then,
+first slapping the other child with angry vehemence, she groped in
+the bundle for a piece of sausage roll, and by dint of alternately
+shaking the culprit and stuffing the food into its poor open mouth,
+succeeded in reducing it to a chewing and sobbing silence. The
+mother herself was clearly at the last gasp, and when at length the
+children were quiet, as she turned her harshly outlined head so as
+to see who the other occupants of the glade might be, her look had
+in it the dull hostility of the hunted creature whose powers of
+self-defence are almost gone.
+
+But she could not rest long. After ten minutes, at longest, she
+dragged herself up from the grass with another groan, and they all
+disappeared into the trees, one of the children crying again--a
+pitiable trio.
+
+Elise had watched the group closely, and the sight seemed in some
+unexplained way to chill and irritate the girl.
+
+'There is one of the drudges that men make,' she said bitterly,
+looking after the woman.
+
+'Men?' he demurred; 'I suspect the husband is a drudge too.'
+
+'Not he!' she cried. 'At least he has liberty, choice, comrades. He
+is not battered out of all pleasure, all individuality, that other
+human beings may have their way and be cooked for, and this
+wretched human race may last. The woman is always the victim, say
+what you like. But for _some_ of us at least there is a way
+out!'
+
+She looked at him defiantly.
+
+A tremor swept through him under the suddenness of this jarring
+note. Then a delicious boldness did away with the tremor. He met
+her eyes straight.
+
+'Yes--_love_ can always find it,' he said under his
+breath--'or make it.'
+
+She wavered an instant, then she made a rally.
+
+'I know nothing about that,' she said scornfully; 'I was thinking of
+art. _Art_ breaks all chains, or accepts none. The woman that
+has art is free, and she alone; for she has scaled the men's heaven
+and stolen their sacred fire.'
+
+She clasped her hands tightly on her knee; her face was full of
+aggression.
+
+David sat looking at her, trying to smile, but his heart sank
+within him.
+
+He threw away his pipe, and laid his hand down against the log, not
+far from her, trying to smile, but his heart sank within him.
+
+He threw away his pipe and laid his head down against the log, not
+far from her, drawing his hat over his eyes. So they sat in silence
+a little while, till he looked up and said, in a bright beseeching
+tone:
+
+'Finish me that scene in _Hernani!_'
+
+The day before, after a _matinee_ of _Andromaque_ at the
+Theatre-Francais, in a moment of rebellion and reaction against
+all things classical, they had both thrown themselves upon
+_Hernani_. She had read it aloud to him in a green corner of
+the Bois, having a faculty that way, and bidding him take it as a
+French lesson. He took it, of course, as a lesson in nothing but
+the art of making wild speeches to the woman one loves.
+
+But now she demurred.
+
+'It is not here.'
+
+He produced it out of his pocket.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+'I am not in the vein.'
+
+'You said last week you were not in the vein,' he said, laughing
+tremulously, 'and you read me that scene from _Ruy Blas_, so
+that when we went to see Sarah Bernhardt in the evening I was
+disappointed!'
+
+She smiled, not being able to help it, for all flattery was sweet
+to her.
+
+'We must catch our train. I would never speak to you again if we
+were late!'
+
+He held up his watch to her.
+
+'An hour--it is, at the most, half an hour's walk.'
+
+'Ah, _mon Dieu!_' she cried, clasping her hands. 'It is all
+over, the vote is given. Perhaps Taranne is writing to me now, at
+this moment!'
+
+'Read--read! and forget it half an hour more.'
+
+She caught up the book in a frenzy, and began to read, first
+carelessly and with unintelligible haste; but before a page was
+over, the artist had recaptured her, she had slackened, she had
+begun to interpret.
+
+It was the scene in the third act where Hernani the outlaw, who has
+himself bidden his love, Dona Sol, marry her kinsman the old Duke,
+rather than link her fortunes to those of a ruined chief of
+banditti, comes in upon the marriage he has sanctioned, nay
+commanded. The bridegroom's wedding gifts are there on the table.
+He and Dona Sol are alone.
+
+The scene begins with a speech of bitter irony from Hernani. His
+friends have been defeated and dispersed. He is alone in the world;
+a price is on his head; his lot is more black and hopeless than
+before. Yet his heart is bursting within him. He had bidden her,
+indeed, but how could she have obeyed! Traitress! false love! false
+heart!
+
+He takes up the jewels one by one.
+
+'_This necklace is brave work,--and the bracelet is rare--though
+not so rare as the woman who beneath a brow so pure can bear about
+with her a heart so vile! And what in exchange? A little love?
+Bah!--a mere trifle!... Great God! that one can betray like
+this--and feel no shame--and live!_'
+
+For answer, Dona Sol goes proudly up to the wedding casket and,
+with a gesture matching his own, takes out the dagger from its
+lowest depth. 'You stop halfway!' she says to him calmly, and he
+understands. In an instant he is at her feet, tortured with remorse
+and passion, and the magical love scene of the act develops. What
+ingenuity of tenderness, yet what truth!
+
+'She has pardoned me, and loves me! Ah, who will make it possible
+that I too, after such words, should love Hernani and forgive him?
+Tears!--thou weepest, and again it is my fault! And who will punish
+me? for thou wilt but forgive again! Ah, my friends are dead!--and
+it is a madman speaks to thee. Forgive! I would fain love--I know
+not how. And yet, what deeper love could there be than this? Oh!
+Weep not, but die with me! If I had but a world, and could give it
+to thee!'
+
+The voice of the reader quivered. A hand came upon the book and
+caught her hand. She looked up and found herself face to face with
+David, kneeling beside her. They stared at each other. Then he
+said, half choked:
+
+'I can't bear it any more! I love you with all my heart--oh, you
+know--you know I do!'
+
+She was stupefied for a moment, and then with a sudden gesture she
+drew herself away, and pushed him from her.
+
+'Leave me alone--leave me free--this moment!' she said
+passionately.
+
+'Why do you persecute and pursue me? What right have you? I have
+been kind to you, and you lay shares for me. I will have nothing
+more to do with you. Let me go home, and let us part.'
+
+She got up, and with feverish haste tied her veil over her hat. He
+had fallen with his arms across the log, and his face hidden upon
+them. She paused irresolutely. 'Monsieur David!'
+
+He made no answer.
+
+She bent down and touched him.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'No, no!--go!' he said thickly. She bit her lip. The breath under
+her little lace tippet rose and fell with furious haste. Then she
+sat down beside him, and with her hands clasped on her knee began
+to please with him in tremulous light tones, as though they were a
+pair of children. Why was he so foolish? Why had he tried to spoil
+their beautiful afternoon? She must go. The train would not wait
+for them. But he must come too. He must. After a little he rose
+without a word, gathered up the book and her wrap, and off they set
+along the forest path.
+
+She stole a glance at him. It seemed to her that he walked as if he
+did not know where he was or who was beside him. Her heart smote
+her. When they were deep in a hazel thicket, she stole out a small
+impulsive hand, and slipped it into his, which hung beside him. He
+started. Presently she felt a slight pressure, but it relaxed
+instantly, and she took back her hand, feeling ashamed of herself,
+and aggrieved besides. She shot on in front of him and he followed.
+
+So they walked through the chestnuts and across the white road to
+the station in the red glow of the evening sun. He followed her
+into the railway carriage, did her every little service with
+perfect gentleness; then when they started he took the opposite
+corner, and turning away from her, stared, with eyes that evidently
+saw nothing, at the villas beside the line, at the children in the
+streets, at the boats on the dazzling river.
+
+She in her corner tried to be angry, to harden her heart, to
+possess herself only with the thought of Taranne's letter. But the
+evening was not as the morning. That dark teasing figure at the
+other end, outlined against the light of the window, intruded, took
+up a share in her reverie she resented but could not prevent nay,
+presently absorbed it altogether. Absurd! she had had love made to
+her before, and had known how to deal with it. The artist must have
+comrades, and the comrades may play false; well, then the artist
+must take care of herself.
+
+She had done no harm; she was not to blame; she had let him know
+from the beginning that she only lived for art. What folly, and
+what treacherous, inconsiderate folly, it had all been!
+
+So she lashed herself up. But her look stole incessantly to that
+opposite corner, and every now and then she felt her lips trembling
+and her eyes growing hot in a way which annoyed her.
+
+When they reached Paris she said to him imperiously as he helped
+her out of the carriage, 'A cab, please!'
+
+He found one for her, and would have closed the door upon her.
+
+'No, come in!' she said to him with the same accent.
+
+His look in return was like a blow to her, there was such an
+inarticulate misery in it. But he got in, and they drove on in
+silence.
+
+When they reached the Rue Chantal she sprang out, snatched her key
+from the concierge, and ran up the stairs. But when she reached the
+point on that top passage where their ways diverged, she stopped
+and looked back for him.
+
+'Come and see my letter,' she said to him, hesitating.
+
+He stood quite still, his arms hanging beside him, and drew a long
+breath that stabbed her.
+
+'I think not.'
+
+And he turned away to his own door.
+
+But she ran back to him and laid her hand on his arm. Her eyes were
+full of tears.
+
+'Please, Monsieur David. We were good friends this morning. Be now
+and always my good friend!'
+
+He shook his head again, but he let himself be led by her. Still
+holding him--torn between her quick remorse and her eagerness for
+Taranne's letter, she unlocked her door. One dart for the table.
+Yes! there it lay. She took it up; then her face blanched suddenly,
+and she came piteously up to David, who was standing just inside
+the closed door.
+
+'Wish me luck, Monsieur David, wish me luck, as you did before!'
+
+But he was silent, and she tore open the letter. '_Dieu!--mon
+Dieu!_'
+
+It was a sound of ecstasy. Then she flung down the letter, and
+running up to David, she caught his arm again with both hands.
+
+'_Triomphe! Triomphe!_ I have got my _mention_, and the
+picture they skied is to be brought down to the line, and Taranne
+says I have done better than any other pupil of his of the same
+standing--that I have an extraordinary gift--that I must succeed,
+all the world says so--and two other members of the jury send me
+their compliments. Ah! Monsieur David'--in a tone of reproach--'be
+kind--be nice--congratulate me.'
+
+And she drew back an arm's-length that she might look at him, her
+own face overflowing with exultant colour and life. Then she
+approached again, her mood changing.
+
+'It is too _detestable_ of you to stand there like a statue!
+ah! that it is! For I never deceived you, no, never. I said to
+you the first night--there is nothing else for me in the world
+but art--nothing! Do you hear? This falling in love spoils
+everything--_everything!_ Be friends with me. You will be
+going back to England soon. Perhaps--perhaps'--her voice
+faltered--'I will take a week's more holiday--Taranne says I ought.
+But then I must go to work--and we will part friends--always
+friends--and respect and understand each other all our lives,
+_n'est-ce pas!_'
+
+'Oh! let me go!' cried David fiercely, his loud strained voice
+startling them both, and flinging her hand away from him, he made
+for the door. But impulsively she threw herself against it,
+dismayed to find herself so near crying, and shaken with emotion
+from head to foot.
+
+They stood absorbed in each other; she with her hands behind her on
+the door, and her hat tumbling back from her masses of loosened
+hair. And as she gazed she was fascinated; for there was a grand
+look about him in his misery--a look which was strange to her, and
+which was in fact the emergence of his rugged and Puritan race. But
+whatever it was it seized her, as all aspects of his personal
+beauty had done from the beginning. She held out her little white
+hands to him appealing.
+
+'No! no!' he said roughly, trying to put her away,'
+_never--never_--friends! You may kill me--you shan't make a
+child of me any more. Oh! my God!' It was a cry of agony. 'A man
+can't go about with a girl in this way, if--if she is like you, and
+not--' His voice broke--he lost the thread of what he was saying,
+and drew his hand across his eyes before he broke out again.
+'What--you thought I was just a raw cub, to be played with. Oh, I
+am too dull, I suppose, to understand! But I have grown under your
+hands anyway. I don't know myself--I should do you or myself a
+mischief if this went on, Let me go--and go home to-night!'
+
+And again he made a threatening step forward. But when he came
+close to her he broke down.
+
+'I would have worked for you so,' he said thickly. 'For your sake I
+would have given up my country. I would have made myself French
+altogether. It should have been marriage or no marriage as you
+pleased. You should have been free to go or stay. Only I would have
+laid myself down for you to walk over. I have some money. I would
+have settled here. I would have protected you. It is not right for
+a woman to be alone--anyone so young and so pretty. I thought you
+understood--that you must understand--that your heart was melting
+to me. I should have done your work no harm--I should have been
+your slave--you know that. That _cursed, cursed_ art!'
+
+He spoke with a low intense emphasis; then turning away he buried
+his face in his hands.
+
+'David!'
+
+He looked up startled. She was stepping towards him, a smile of
+ineffable charm floating as it were upon her tears.
+
+'I don't know what is the matter with me!' she said tremulously.
+'There is trouble in it, I know.' It is the broken glass coming
+true. _Mais, Voyons! c'est plus fort que moi!_ Do you care so
+much--would it break your heart--would you let me work--and never,
+_never_ get in the way? Would you be content that art should
+come first and you second? I can promise you no more than that--not
+one little inch! _Would_ you be content? Say!'
+
+He ran to her with a cry. She let him put his arms round her, and a
+shiver of excitement ran through her.
+
+'What does it mean?' she said breathlessly. 'One is so strong one
+moment--and the next--like this! Oh, why did you ever come?'
+
+Then she burst into tears, hiding her eyes upon his breast.
+
+'Oh! I have been so much alone! but I have got a heart somewhere
+all the same. If you will have it, you must take the consequences.'
+
+Awed by the mingling of his silence with that painful throbbing
+beneath her cheek, she looked up. He stooped--and their young faces
+met.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+During the three weeks which had ended for David and Elise in this
+scene of passion, Louie had been deliberately going her own way,
+managing even in this unfamiliar _milieu_ to extract from it
+almost all the excitement or amusement it was capable of yielding
+her. All the morning she dragged Madame Cervin about the Paris
+streets: in the afternoon she would sometimes pose for Montjoie,
+and sometimes not; he had to bring her bonbons and theatre tickets
+to bribe her, and learn new English wherewith to flatter her. Then
+in the evenings she made the Cervins take her to theatres and
+various entertainments more or less reputable, for which of course
+David paid. It seemed to Madame Cervin, as she sat staring beside
+them, that her laughs never fell in with the laughs of other
+people. But whether she understood or no, it amused her, and go she
+would.
+
+A looker-on might have found the relations between Madame Cervin
+and her boarder puzzling at first sight. In reality they
+represented a compromise between considerations of finance and
+considerations of morals--as the wife of the _ancien prix de
+Rome_ understood these last. For the ex-modiste was by no means
+without her virtues or her scruples. She had ugly manners and ideas
+on many points, but she had lived a decent life at any rate since
+her marriage with a man for whom she had an incomprehensible
+affection, heavily as he burdened and exploited her; and though she
+took all company pretty much as it came, she had a much keener
+sense now than in her youth of the practical advantages of good
+behaviour to a woman, and of the general reasonableness of the
+_bourgeois_ point of view with regard to marriage and the
+family. Her youth had been stormy; her middle age tended to a
+certain conservative philosophy of common sense, and to the
+development of a rough and ready conscience.
+
+Especially was she conscious of the difficulties of virtue. When
+Elise Delaunay, for instance, was being scandalously handled by the
+talkers in her stuffy _salon_, Madame Cervin sat silent. Not
+only had she her own reasons for being grateful to the little
+artist, but with the memory of her own long-past adventures behind
+her she was capable by now of a secret admiration for an
+unprotected and struggling girl who had hitherto held her head
+high, worked hard, and avoided lovers.
+
+So that when the artist's wife undertook the charge of the
+good-looking English girl she had done it honestly, up to her
+lights, and she had fulfilled it honestly. She had in fact hardly
+let Louie Grieve out of her sight since her boarder was handed over
+to her.
+
+These facts, however, represent only one side of the situation.
+Madame Cervin was now respectable. She had relinquished years
+before the _chasse_ for personal excitement; she had replaced
+it by 'the _chasse_ of the five-franc piece.' She loved her
+money passionately; but at the same time she loved power, gossip,
+and small flatteries. They distracted her, these last, from the
+depressing spectacle of her husband's gradual and inevitable decay.
+So that her life represented a balance between these various
+instincts. For some time past she had gathered about her a train of
+small artists, whom she mothered and patronised, and whose wild
+talk and pecuniary straits diversified the monotony of her own
+childless middle age. Montjoie, whose undoubted talent imposed upon
+a woman governed during all her later life by the traditions and
+the admirations of the artist world, had some time before
+established a hold upon her, partly dependent on a certain
+magnetism in the man, partly, as Elise had suspected, upon money
+relations. For the grasping little _bourgeoise_ who would
+haggle for a morning over half a franc, and keep a lynx-eyed watch
+over the woman who came to do the weekly cleaning, lest the
+miserable creature should appropriate a crust or a cold potato, had
+a weak side for her artist friends who flattered and amused her.
+She would lend to them now and then out of her hoards; she had lent
+to Montjoie in the winter when, after months of wild dissipation,
+he was in dire straits and almost starving.
+
+But having lent, the thought of her jeopardised money would throw
+her into agonies, and she would scheme perpetually to get it back.
+Like all the rest of Montjoie's creditors she was hanging on the
+Maenad, which promised indeed to be the _chef--d'oeuvre_ of an
+indisputable talent, could that talent only be kept to work. When
+the sculptor--whose curiosity had been originally roused by certain
+phrases of Barbier's in his preliminary letters to his nephew,
+phrases embellished by Dubois' habitual _fanfaronnade_--had
+first beheld the English girl, he had temporarily thrown up his
+work and was lounging about Paris in moody despair, to Madame
+Cervin's infinite disgust. But at sight of Louie his artist's zeal
+rekindled. Her wild nature, her half-human eye, the traces of Greek
+form in the dark features--these things fired and excited him.
+
+'Get me that girl to sit,' he had said to Madame Cervin, 'and the
+Maenad will be sold in six weeks!'
+
+And Madame Cervin, fully determined on the one hand that Montjoie
+should finish his statue and pay his debts, and on the other that
+the English girl should come to no harm from a man of notorious
+character, had first led up to the sittings, and then superintended
+them with the utmost vigilance. She meant no harm--the brother was
+a fool for his pains--but Montjoie should have his sitter. So she
+sat there, dragon-like, hour after hour, knitting away with her
+little fat hands, while Louie posed, and Montjoie worked; and
+groups of the sculptor's friends came in and out, providing the
+audience which excited the ambition of the man and the vanity of
+the girl.
+
+So the days passed. At last there came a morning when Louie came
+out early from the Cervins' door, shut it behind her, and ran up
+the ladder-like stairs which led to David's room.
+
+'David!'
+
+Her voice was pitched in no amiable key, as she violently shook the
+handle of the door. But, call and shake as she might, there was no
+answer, and after a while she paused, feeling a certain
+bewilderment.
+
+'It is ridiculous! He can't be out; it isn't half-past eight. It's
+just his tiresomeness.'
+
+And she made another and still more vehement attempt, all to no
+purpose. Not a sound was to be heard from the room within. But as
+she was again standing irresolute, she heard a footstep behind her
+on the narrow stairs, and looking round saw the _concierge_,
+Madame Merichat. The woman's thin and sallow face--the face of a
+born pessimist--had a certain sinister flutter in it.
+
+She held out a letter to the astonished Louie, saying at the same
+time with a disagreeable smile:
+
+'What is the use of knocking the house down when there is no one
+there?'
+
+'Where is he?' cried Louie, not understanding her, and looking at
+the letter with stupefaction.
+
+The woman put it into her hand.
+
+'No one came back last night,' she said with a shrug. 'Neither
+monsieur nor mademoiselle; and this morning I receive orders to
+send letters to "Barbizon, pres Fontainebleau."'
+
+Louie tore open her letter. It was from David, and dated Barbizon.
+He would be there, it said, for nearly a month. If she could wait
+with Madame Cervin till he himself could take her home, well and
+good. But if that were disagreeable to her, let her communicate
+with him 'chez Madame Pyat, Barbizon, Fontainebleau,' and he would
+write to Dora Lomax at once, and make arrangements for her to lodge
+there, till he returned to Manchester. Some one could easily be
+found to look after her on the homeward journey if Madame Cervin
+took her to the train. Meanwhile he enclosed the money for two
+weeks' _pension_ and twenty francs for pocket money.
+
+No other person was mentioned in the letter, and the writer offered
+neither explanation nor excuses.
+
+Louie crushed the sheet in her hand, with an exclamation, her
+cheeks flaming.
+
+'So they are amusing themselves at Fontainebleau?' inquired Madame
+Merichat, who had been leaning against the wall, twisting her apron
+and studying the English girl with her hard, malicious eyes. 'Oh! I
+don't complain; there was a letter for me too. Monsieur has paid
+all. But I regret for mademoiselle--if mademoiselle is surprised.'
+
+She spoke to deaf ears.
+
+Louie pushed past her, flew downstairs, and rang the Cervins' bell
+violently. Madame Cervin herself opened the door, and the girl
+threw herself upon her, dragged her into the _salon_, and then
+said with the look and tone of a fury:
+
+'Read that!'
+
+She held out the crumbled letter. Madame Cervin adjusted her
+spectacles with shaking hands.
+
+'But it is in English!' she cried in despair.
+
+Louie could not have beaten her for not understanding. But, herself
+trembling with excitement, she was forced to bring all the French
+words she knew to bear, and between them, somehow, piecemeal,
+Madame Cervin was brought to a vague understanding of the letter.
+
+'Gone to Fontainebleau!' she cried, subsiding on to the sofa. 'But
+why, with whom?'
+
+'Why, with that girl, that _creature--can't_ you understand?'
+said Louie, pacing up and down.
+
+'Ah, I will go and find out all about that!' said Madame Cervin,
+and hastily exchanging the blue cotton apron and jacket she wore in
+the mornings in the privacy of her own apartment for her walking
+dress, she whisked out to make inquiries.
+
+Louie was left behind, striding from end to end of the little
+_salon_, brows knit, every feature and limb tense with excitement.
+As the meaning of her discovery grew plainer to her, as she
+realised what had happened, and what the bearing of it must be
+on herself and her own position, the tumult within her rose and
+rose. After that day in the Louvre her native shrewdness had of
+course very soon informed her of David's infatuation for the little
+artist. And when it became plain, not only to her, but to all Elise
+Delaunay's acquaintance, there was much laughter and gossip on the
+subject in the Cervins' apartment. It was soon discovered that
+Louie had taken a dislike, which, perhaps, from the beginning had
+been an intuitive jealousy, to Elise, and had, moreover, no
+inconvenient sensitiveness on her brother's account, which need
+prevent the discussion of his love affairs in her presence. So the
+discussion went freely on, and Louie only regretted that, do what
+she would to improve herself in French, she understood so little of
+it. But the tone towards Elise among Montjoie's set, especially
+from Montjoie himself, was clearly contemptuous and hostile; and
+Louie instinctively enjoyed the mud which she felt sure was being
+thrown.
+
+Yet, incredible as it may seem, with all this knowledge on her
+part, all this amusement at her brother's expense, all this
+blackening of Elise's character, the possibility of such an event
+as had actually occurred had never entered the sister's
+calculations.
+
+And the reason lay in the profound impression which one side of his
+character had made upon her during the five months they had been
+together. A complete stranger to the ferment of the lad's
+imagination, she had been a constant and chafed spectator of his
+daily life. The strong self-restraint of it had been one of the
+main barriers between them. She knew that she was always jarring
+upon him, and that he was always blaming her recklessness and
+self-indulgence. She hated his Spartan ways--his teetotalism, the
+small store he set by any personal comfort or luxury, his powers of
+long-continued work, his indifference to the pleasures and
+amusements of his age, so far as Manchester could provide them.
+They were a reflection upon her, and many a gibe she had flung out
+at him about them. But all the same these ways of his had left a
+mark upon her; they had rooted a certain conception of him in her
+mind. She knew perfectly well that Dora Lomax was in love with him,
+and what did he care? 'Not a ha'porth!' She had never seen him turn
+his head for any girl; and when he had shown himself sarcastic on
+the subject of her companions, she had cast about in vain for
+materials wherewith to retort.
+
+And _now_! That he should fall in love with this French
+girl--that was natural enough; it had amused and pleased her to see
+him lose his head and make a fool of himself like other people; but
+that he should run away with her after a fortnight, without
+apparently a word of marrying her--leaving his sister in the
+lurch--
+
+'_Hypocrite_!'
+
+She clenched her hands as she walked. What was really surging in
+her was that feeling of _ownership_ with regard to David which
+had played so large a part in their childhood, even when she had
+teased and plagued him most. She might worry and defy him; but no
+sooner did another woman appropriate him, threaten to terminate for
+good that hold of his sister upon him which had been so lately
+renewed, than she was flooded with jealous rage. David had escaped
+her--he was hers no longer--he was Elise Delaunay's! Nothing that
+she did could scandalise or make him angry any more. He had sent
+her money and washed his hands of her. As to his escorting her back
+to England in two or three weeks, that was just a lie! A man who
+takes such a plunge does not emerge so soon or so easily. No, she
+would have to go back by herself, leaving him to his intrigue. The
+very calmness and secretiveness of his letter was an insult. 'Mind
+your own business, little girl--go home to work--and be good!
+'--that was what it seemed to say to her. She set her teeth over it
+in her wild anger and pride.
+
+At the same moment the outer door opened and Madame Cervin came
+bustling back again, bursting with news and indignation.
+
+Oh, there was no doubt at all about it, they had gone off together!
+Madame Merichat had seen them come downstairs about noon the day
+before. He was carrying a black bag and a couple of parcels. She
+also was laden; and about halfway down the street, Madame Merichat,
+watching from her window, had seen them hail a cab, get into it,
+and drive away, the cab turning to the right when they reached the
+Boulevard.
+
+Madame Cervin's wrath was loud, and stimulated moreover by personal
+alarm. One moment, remembering the scene in Montjoie's studio, she
+cried out, like the sister, on the brother's hypocrisy; the next
+she reminded her boarder that there was two weeks' _pension_
+owing.
+
+Louie smiled scornfully, drew out the notes from David's letter and
+flung them on the table. Then Madame Cervin softened, and took
+occasion to remember that condolence with the sister was at least
+as appropriate to the situation as abuse of the brother. She
+attempted some consolation, nay, even some caresses, but Louie very
+soon shook her off.
+
+'Don't talk to me! don't kiss me!' she said impatiently.
+
+And she swept out of the room, went to her own, and locked the
+door. Then she threw herself face downwards on her bed, and
+remained there for some time hardly moving. But with every minute
+that passed, as it seemed, the inward smart grew sharper. She had
+been hardly conscious of it, at first, this smart, in her rage and
+pride, but it was there.
+
+At last she could bear it quietly no longer. She sprang up and
+looked about her. There, just inside the open press which held her
+wardrobe, were some soft white folds of stuff. Her eye gleamed: she
+ran to the cupboard and took out the Maenad's dress. During the
+last few days she had somewhat tired of the sittings--she had at
+any rate been capricious and tiresome about them; and Montjoie, who
+was more in earnest about this statue than he had been about any
+work for years, was at his wit's end, first to control his own
+temper, and next so to lure or drive his strange sitter as to
+manage her without offending her.
+
+But to-day the dress recalled David--promised distraction and
+retaliation. She slipped off her tight gingham with hasty fingers,
+and in a few seconds she was transformed. The light folds floated
+about her as she walked impetuously up and down, studying every
+movement in the glass, intoxicated by the polished clearness and
+whiteness of her own neck and shoulders, the curves of her own
+grace and youth. Many a night, even after a long sitting, had she
+locked her door, made the gas flare, and sat absorbed before her
+mirror in this guise, throwing herself into one attitude after
+another, naively regretting that sculpture took so long, and that
+Montjoie could not fix them all. The ecstasy of self-worship in
+which the whole process issued was but the fruition of that
+childish habit which had wrought with childish things for the same
+end--with a couple of rushlights, an old sheet and primroses from
+the brook.
+
+Her black abundant hair was still curled about her head. Well, she
+could pull it down in the studio--now for a wrap--and then no
+noise! She would slip downstairs so that madame should know nothing
+about it. She was tired of that woman always at her elbow. Let her
+go marketing and leave other people in peace.
+
+But before she threw on her wrap she stood still a moment, her
+nostril quivering, expanding, one hand on her hip, the other
+swinging her Maenad's tambourine. She knew very little of this
+sculptor-man--she did not understand him; but he interested, to
+some extent overawed, her. He had poured out upon her the coarsest
+flatteries, yet she realised that he had not made love to her.
+Perhaps Madame Cervin had been in the way. Well, now for a
+surprise and a _tete-a-tete_! A dare-devil look--her mother's
+look--sprang into her eyes.
+
+She opened the door, and listened. No one in the little passage,
+only a distant sound of rapid talking, which suggested to the girl
+that madame was at that moment enjoying the discussion of her
+boarder's affairs with monsieur, who was still in bed. She hurried
+on a waterproof which covered her almost from top to toe. Then,
+holding up her draperies, she stole out, and on to the public
+stairs.
+
+They were deserted, and running down them she turned to the right
+at the bottom and soon found herself at the high studio door.
+
+As she raised her hand to the bell she flushed with passion.
+
+'I'll let him see whether I'll go home whining to Dora, while he's
+amusing himself,' she said under her breath.
+
+The door was opened to her by Montjoie himself, in his working
+blouse, a cigarette in his mouth. His hands and dress were daubed
+with clay, and he had the brutal look of a man in the blackest of
+tempers. But no sooner did he perceive Louie Grieve's stately
+figure in the passage than his expression changed.
+
+'You--you here! and for a sitting?'
+
+She nodded, smiling. Her look had an excitement which he perceived
+at once. His eye travelled to the white drapery and the beautiful
+bare arm emerging from the cloak; then he looked behind her for
+Madame Cervin.
+
+No one--except this Maenad in a waterproof. Montjoie threw away his
+cigarette.
+
+'_Entrez, entrez, mademoiselle!_' he said, bowing low to her.
+'When the heavens are blackest, then they open. I was in a mind to
+wring the Maenad's neck three minutes ago. Come and save your
+portrait!'
+
+He led her in through the ante-room into the large outer studio.
+There stood the Maenad on her revolving stand, and there was the
+raised platform for the model. A heap of clay was to one side, and
+water was dripping from the statue on to the floor. The studio
+light had a clear evenness; and, after the heat outside, the
+coolness of the great bare room was refreshing.
+
+They stood and looked at the statue together, Louie still in her
+cloak. Montjoie pointed out to her that he was at work on the
+shoulders and the left arm, and was driven mad by the difficulties
+of the pose. '_Tonnerre de Dieu!_ when I heard you knock, I
+felt like a murderer; I rushed out to let fly at someone. And there
+was my Maenad on the mat!--all by herself, too, without that little
+piece of ugliness from upstairs behind her. I little thought this
+day--this cursed day--was to turn out so. I thought you were tired
+of the poor sculptor--that you had deserted him for good and all.
+Ah! _deesse--je vous salue_!'
+
+He drew back from her, scanning her from head to foot, a new tone
+in his voice, a new boldness in his deep-set eyes--eyes which were
+already old. Louie stood instinctively shrinking, yet smiling,
+understanding something of what he said, guessing more.
+
+There was a bull-necked strength about the man, with his dark,
+square, weather-beaten head, and black eyebrows, which made her
+afraid, in spite of the smooth and deprecating manner in which he
+generally spoke to women. But her fear of him was not unpleasant to
+her. She liked him; she would have liked above all to quarrel with
+him; she felt that he was her match, He stepped forward, touched
+her arm, and took a tone of command.
+
+'Quick, mademoiselle, with that cloak!'
+
+She mounted the steps, threw off her cloak, and fell into her
+attitude without an instant's hesitation. Montjoie, putting his
+hands over his eyes to look at her, exclaimed under his breath.
+
+It was perfectly true that, libertine as he was, he had so far felt
+no inclination whatever to make love to the English girl. Nor was
+the effect merely the result of Madame Cervin's vigilance.
+Personally, for all her extraordinary beauty, his new model left
+him cold. Originally he had been a man of the most complex artistic
+instincts, the most delicate and varied perceptions. They and his
+craftsman's skill were all foundering now in a sea of evil living.
+But occasionally they were active still, and they had served him
+for the instant detection of that common egotistical paste of which
+Louie Grieve was made. He would have liked to chain her to his
+model's platform, to make her the slave of his fevered degenerating
+art. But she had no thrill for him. While he was working from her
+his mind was often running on some little _grisette_ or other,
+who had not half Louie Grieve's physical perfection, but who had
+charm, provocation, wit--all that makes the natural heritage of the
+French woman, of whatever class. At the same time it had been an
+irritation and an absurdity to him that, under Madame Cervin's eye,
+he had been compelled to treat her with the ceremonies due to
+_une jeune fille honnete._ For he had at once detected the
+girl's reckless temper. From what social stratum did she come--she
+and the brother? In her, at least, there was some wild blood! When
+he sounded Madame Cervin, however, she, with her incurable habit of
+vain mendacity, had only put her lodger in a light which Montjoie
+felt certain was a false one.
+
+But this morning! Never had she been so superb, so inspiring! All
+the vindictive passion, all the rage with David that was surging
+within her, did but give the more daring and decision to her
+attitude, and a wilder power to her look. Moreover, the boldness of
+her unaccompanied visit to him provoked and challenged him. He
+looked at her irresolutely; then with an effort he turned to his
+statue and fell to work. The touch of the clay, the reaction from
+past despondency prevailed; before half an hour was over he was
+more enamoured of his task than he had ever yet been, and more
+fiercely bent on success. Insensibly as the time passed, his tone
+with her became more and more short, brusque, imperious. Once or
+twice he made some rough alteration in the pose, with the
+overbearing haste of a man who can hardly bear to leave the work
+under his hands even for an instant. When he first assumed this
+manner Louie opened her great eyes. Then it seemed to please her.
+She felt no regret whatever for the smooth voice; the more
+dictatorial he became the better she liked it, and the more
+submissive she was.
+
+This went on for about a couple of hours--an orgie of work on his
+side, of excited persistence on hers. Her rival in the clay grew in
+life and daring under her eyes, rousing in her, whenever she was
+allowed to rest a minute and look, a new intoxication with herself.
+They hardly talked. He was too much absorbed in what he was doing;
+and she also was either bent upon her task, or choked by wild gusts
+of jealous and revengeful thought. Every now and then as she stood
+there, in her attitude of eager listening, the wall of the studio
+would fade before her eyes, and she would see nothing but a
+torturing vision of David at Fontainebleau, wrapt up in 'that
+creature,' and only remembering his sister to rejoice that he had
+shaken her off. _Ah_! How could she sufficiently avenge
+herself! how could she throw all his canting counsels to the winds
+with most emphasis and effect!
+
+At last a curious thing happened. Was it mere nervous reaction
+after such a strain of will and passion, or was it the sudden
+emergence of something in the sister which was also common to
+the brother--a certain tragic susceptibility, the capacity for
+a wild melancholy? For, in an instant, while she was thinking
+vaguely of Madame Cervin and her money affairs, _despair_ seized
+her--shuddering, measureless despair--rushing in upon her, and
+sweeping away everything else before it. She tottered under it,
+fighting down the clutch of it as long as she could. It had no
+words, it was like a physical agony. All that was clear to her for
+one lurid moment was that she would like to kill herself.
+
+The studio swam before her, and she dropped into the chair behind
+her.
+
+Montjoie gave a protesting cry.
+
+'Twenty minutes more!--_Courage_!'
+
+Then, as she made no answer, he went up to her and put a violent
+hand on her shoulder--beside himself.
+
+'You _shall_ not be tired, I tell you. Look up! look at me!'
+
+Under the stimulus of his master's tone she slowly recovered
+herself--her great black eyes lifted. He gazed into them steadily;
+his voice sank.
+
+'You belong to me,' he said with breathless rapidity. 'Do you
+understand? What is the matter with you? What are those tears?'
+
+A cry of nature broke from her.
+
+'My brother has left me--with that girl!'
+
+She breathed out the words into the ears of the man stooping
+towards her. His great brow lifted--he gave a little laugh. Then
+eagerly, triumphantly, he seized her again by the arms. '_A la
+bonne heure_! Then it is plainer still. You belong to me and I
+to you. In that statue we live and die together. Another hour, and
+it will be a masterpiece. Come! one more!'
+
+She drank in his tone of mad excitement as though it were wine, and
+it revived her. The strange grip upon her heart relaxed; the
+nightmare was dashed aside. Her colour came back, and, pushing him
+proudly away from her, she resumed her pose without a word.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+'Do you know, sir, that that good woman has brought in the soup for
+the second time? I can see her fidgeting about the table through
+the window. If we go on like this, she will depart and leave us to
+wait on ourselves. Then see if you get any soup out of _me_.'
+
+David, for all answer, put his arm close round the speaker. She
+threw herself back against him, smiling into his face. But neither
+could see the other, for it was nearly dark, and through the acacia
+trees above them the stars glimmered in the warm sky. To their
+left, across a small grass-plat, was a tiny thatched house buried
+under a great vine which embowered it all from top to base, and
+overhung by trees which drooped on to the roof, and swept the
+windows with their branches. Through a lower window, opening on to
+the gravel path, could be seen a small bare room, with a paper of
+coarse brown and blue pattern, brightly illuminated by a paraffin
+lamp, which also threw a square of light far out into the garden.
+The lamp stood on a table which was spread for a meal, and a stout
+woman, in a white cap and blue cotton apron, could be seen moving
+beside it.
+
+'Come in!' said Elise, springing to her feet, and laying a
+compelling hand on her companion. 'Get it over! The moon is waiting
+for us out there!'
+
+And she pointed to where, beyond the roofs of the neighbouring
+houses, rose the dark fringe of trees which marked the edge of the
+forest.
+
+They went in, hand in hand, and sat opposite each other at the
+little rickety table, while the peasant woman from whom they had
+taken the house waited upon them. The day before, after looking at
+the _auberge_, and finding it full of artists come down to
+look for spring subjects in the forest, they had wandered on
+searching for something less public, more poetical. And they had
+stumbled upon this tiny overgrown house in its tangled garden. The
+woman to whom it belonged had let it for the season, but till the
+beginning of her 'let' there was a month; and, after much
+persuasion, she had consented to allow the strangers to hire it and
+her services as _bonne_, by the week, for a sum more congruous
+with the old and primitive days of Barbizon than with the later
+claims of the little place to fashion and fame. As the lovers stood
+together in the _salon_, exclaiming with delight at its bare
+floor, its low ceiling, its old bureau, its hard sofa with the
+Empire legs, and the dilapidated sphinxes on the arms, the
+owner of the house looked them up and down, from the door, with
+comprehending eyes. Barbizon had known adventures like this before!
+
+But she might think what she liked; it mattered nothing to her
+lodgers. To 'a pair of romantics out of date,' the queer overgrown
+place she owned was perfection, and they took possession of it in a
+dream of excitement and joy. From the top loft, still bare and
+echoing, where the highly respectable summer tenants were to put up
+the cots of their children, to the outside den which served for a
+kitchen, whence a wooden ladder led to a recess among the rafters,
+occupied by Madame Pyat as a bedroom; from the masses of Virginia
+creeper on the thatched roof to the thicket of acacias and roses on
+the front grass-plat, and the high flowery wall which shut them off
+from the curious eyes of the street, it was all, in the lovers'
+feeling, the predestined setting for such an idyll as theirs.
+
+And if this was so in the hot mornings and afternoons, how much
+more in the heavenly evenings and nights, when the forest lay
+whispering and murmuring under the moonlight, and they, wandering
+together arm in arm under the gaunt and twisted oaks of the Bas
+Breau, or among the limestone blocks which strew the heights of
+this strange woodland, felt themselves part of the world about
+them, dissolved into its quivering harmonious life, shades among
+its shadows!
+
+On this particular evening, after the hurried and homely meal,
+David brought Elise's large black hat, and the lace scarf which
+had bewitched him at St. Germain--oh, the joy of handling such
+things in this familiar, sacrilegious way!--and they strolled
+out into the long uneven street beyond their garden wall, on
+their way to the forest. The old inn to the left was in a clatter.
+Two _diligences_ had just arrived, and the horses were drooping
+and panting at the door. A maidservant was lighting guests across
+the belittered courtyard with a flaring candle. There was a red
+glimpse of the kitchen with its brass and copper pans, and on the
+bench outside the gateway sat a silent trio of artists, who had
+worked well and dined abundantly, and were now enjoying their last
+smoke before the sleep, to which they were already nodding, should
+overtake them. The two lovers stepped quickly past, making with all
+haste for that leafy mystery beyond cleft by the retreating
+whiteness of the Fontainebleau road--into which the village melted
+on either side.
+
+Such moonlight! All the tones of the street, its white and greys,
+the reddish brown of the roofs, were to be discerned under it; and
+outside in the forest it was a phantasmagoria, an intoxication. The
+little paths they were soon threading, paths strewn with limestone
+dust, wound like white threads among the rocks and through the
+blackness of the firs. They climbed them hand in hand, and soon
+they were on a height looking over a great hollow of the forest to
+the plain beyond, as it were a vast cup overflowing with moonlight
+and melting into a silver sky. The width of the heavens, the dim
+immensity of the earth, drove them close together in a delicious
+silence. The girl put the warmth of her lover's arm between her and
+the overpowering greatness of a too august nature. The man, on the
+other hand, rising in this to that higher stature which was truly
+his, felt himself carried out into nature on the wave of his own
+boundless emotion. That cold Deism he had held so loosely broke
+into passion. The humblest phrases of worship, of entreaty, swept
+across the brain.
+
+'Could one ever have guessed,' he asked her, his words stumbling
+and broken, 'that such happiness was possible?'
+
+She shook her head, smiling at him.
+
+'Yes, certainly!--if one has read poems and novels. Nothing to me
+is ever _more_ than I expect,--generally less.'
+
+Then she broke off hesitating, and hid her face against his breast.
+A pang smote him. He cried out in the old commonplaces that he was
+not worthy, that she must tire of him, that there was nothing in
+him to hold, to satisfy her.
+
+'And three weeks ago,' she said, interrupting him, 'we had never
+heard each other's names. Strange--life is strange! Well, now,' and
+she quickly drew herself away from him, and holding him by both
+hands lightly swung his arms backwards and forwards, 'this can't
+last for ever, you know. In the first place--we shall die.' and
+throwing herself back, she pulled against him childishly, a spray
+of ivy he had wound round her hat drooping with fantastic shadows
+over her face and neck.
+
+'Do you know what you are like?' he asked her, evading what she had
+said, while his eyes devoured her.
+
+'No!'
+
+'You are like that picture in the Louvre,--Da Vinci's St. John,
+that you say should be a Bacchus.'
+
+'Which means that you find me a queer,--heathenish,--sort of
+creature?' she said, still laughing and swaying. 'So I am. Take
+care! Well now, a truce to love-making! I am tired of being meek
+and charming--this night excites me. Come and see the oaks in the
+Bas Breau.'
+
+And running down the rocky path before them she led him in and out
+through twisted leafy ways, till at last they stood among the
+blasted giants of the forest, the oaks of the Bas Breau. In the
+emboldening daylight, David, with certain English wood scenes in
+his mind, would swear the famous trees of Fontainebleau had neither
+size nor age to speak of. But at night they laid their avenging
+spell upon him. They stood so finely on the broken ground, each of
+them with a kingly space about him; there was so wild a fantasy in
+their gnarled and broken limbs; and under the night their scanty
+crowns of leaf, from which the sap was yearly ebbing, had so lofty
+a remoteness.
+
+They found a rocky seat in front of a certain leafless monster,
+which had been struck by lightning in a winter storm years before,
+and rent from top to bottom. The bare trunk with its torn branches
+yawning stood out against the rest, a black and melancholy shape,
+preaching desolation. But Elise studied it coolly.
+
+'I know that tree by heart,' she declared. 'Corot, Rousseau,
+Diaz--it has served them all. I could draw it with my eyes shut.'
+
+Then with the mention of drawing she began to twist her fingers
+restlessly.
+
+'I wonder what the _concours_ was to-day,' she said. 'Now that
+I am away that Breal girl will carry off everything. There will be
+no bearing her--she was never second till I came.'
+
+David took a very scornful view of this contingency. 'When you
+go back you will beat them all again; let them have their few
+weeks' respite! You told me yesterday you had forgotten the
+_atelier_.'
+
+'Did I?' she said with a strange little sigh. 'It wasn't true--I
+haven't.'
+
+With a sudden whim she pulled off his broad hat and threw it down.
+Reaching forward she took his head between her hands, and arranged
+his black curls about his brow in a way to suit her. Then, still
+holding him, she drew back with her head on one side to look at
+him. The moon above them, now at its full zenith of brightness,
+threw the whole massive face into strong relief, and her own look
+melted into delight.
+
+'There is no model in Paris,' she declared, 'with so fine a head.'
+Then with another sigh she dropped her hold, and propping her chin
+on her hands, she stared straight before her in silence.
+
+'Do you imagine you are _the first?_' she asked him presently,
+with a queer abruptness.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'You told me so,' he said, at last, his voice quivering; 'don't
+deceive me--there is no fun in it--I believe it all!'
+
+She laughed, and did not answer for a moment. He put out his
+covetous arms and would have drawn her to him, but she withdrew
+herself.
+
+'What did I tell you? I don't remember. In the first place there
+was a cousin--there is always a cousin!'
+
+He stared at her, his face flushing, and asked her slowly what she
+meant.
+
+'You have seen his portrait in my room,' she said coolly.
+
+He racked his brains.
+
+'Oh! that portrait on the wall,' he burst out at last, in vain
+trying for a tone as self-possessed as her own,' that man with a
+short beard?'
+
+She nodded.
+
+'Oh, he is not bad at all, my cousin. He is the son of that uncle
+and aunt I told you of. Only while they were rusting in the
+Gironde, he was at Paris learning to be a doctor, and enlarging his
+mind by coming to see me every week. When they came up to town to
+put in a claim to me, _they_ thought me a lump of wickedness,
+as I told you; I made their hair stand on end. But Guillaume knew a
+good deal more about me; and _he_ was not scandalised at all;
+oh dear, no. He used to come every Saturday and sit in a corner
+while I painted--a long lanky creature, rather good looking, but
+with spectacles--he has ruined his eyes with reading. Oh, he would
+have married me any day, and let his relations shriek as they
+please; so don't suppose, Monsieur David, that I have had no
+chances of respectability, or that my life began with you!' She
+threw him a curious look.
+
+'Why do you talk about him?' cried David, beside himself. 'What is
+your cousin to either of us?'
+
+'I shall talk of what I like,' she said wilfully, clasping her
+hands round her knees with the gesture of an obstinate child.
+
+David stared away into the black shadow of the oaks, marvelling at
+himself? at the strength of that sudden smart within him, that
+half-frenzied restlessness and dread which some of her lightest
+sayings had the power to awaken in him.
+
+Then he repented him, and turning, bent his head over the little
+hands and kissed them passionately. She did not move or speak. He
+came close to her, trying to decipher her face in the moonlight.
+For the first time since that night in the studio there was a film
+of sudden tears in the wide grey eyes. He caught her in his arms
+and demanded why.
+
+'You quarrel with me and dictate to me,' she cried, wrestling with
+herself, choked by some inexplicable emotion, 'when I have given you
+everything? when I am alone in the world with you? at your mercy? I
+who have been so proud, have held my head so high!'
+
+He bent over her, pouring into her ear all the words that passion
+could find or forge. Her sudden attack upon him, poor fellow,
+seemed to him neither unjust nor extravagant. She _had_ given
+him everything, and who and what was he that she should have thrown
+him so much as a look!
+
+Gradually her mysterious irritation died away. The gentleness of
+the summer night, the serenity of the moonlight, the sea-like
+murmur of the forest, these things sank little by little into their
+hearts, and in the calm they made, youth and love spoke again,
+siren voices, with the old magic. And when at last they loitered
+home, they moved in a trance of feeling which wanted no words. The
+moon dropped slowly into the western trees; midnight chimes came to
+them from the villages which ring the forest; and a playing wind
+sprang up about them, cooling the girl's hot cheeks, and freshening
+the verdurous ways through which they passed.
+
+But in the years which came after, whenever David allowed his mind
+to dwell for a short shuddering instant on these days at
+Fontainebleau, it often occurred to him to wonder whether during
+their wild dream he had ever for one hour been truly happy. At the
+height of their passion had there been any of that exquisite give
+and take between them which may mark the simplest love of the
+rudest lovers, but which is in its essence moral, a thing not of
+the senses but of the soul? There is nothing else which is vital to
+love. Without it passion dies into space like the flaming corona of
+the sun. With it, the humblest hearts may 'bear it out even to the
+edge of doom.'
+
+There can be no question that after the storm of feeling,
+excitement, pity, which had swept her into his arms, he gained upon
+her vagrant fancy for a time day by day. Seen close, his social
+simplicity, his delicately tempered youth had the effect of great
+refinement. He had in him much of the peasant nature, but so
+modified by fine perception and wide-ranging emotion, that what had
+been coarseness in his ancestors was in him only a certain rich
+savour and fulness of being. His mere sympathetic, sensitive
+instinct had developed in him all the essentials of good manners,
+and books, poetry, observation had done the rest.
+
+So that in the little matters of daily contact he touched and
+charmed her unexpectedly. He threw no veil whatever over his
+tradesman's circumstances, and enjoyed trying to make her
+understand what had been the conditions and prospects of his
+Manchester life. He had always, indeed, conceived his bookseller's
+profession with a certain dignity; and he was secretly proud, with
+a natural conceit, of the efforts and ability which had brought him
+so rapidly to the front. How oddly the Manchester names and facts
+sounded in the forest air! She would sit with her little head on
+one side listening; but privately he suspected that she understood
+very little of it; that she accepted him and his resources very
+much in the vague with the _insouciance_ of Bohemia.
+
+He himself, however, was by no means without plans for the
+future. In the first flush of his triumphant passion he had
+won from her the promise of a month alone with him, in or near
+Fontainebleau--her own suggestion--after which she was to go back
+in earnest to her painting, and he was to return to Manchester and
+make arrangements for their future life together. Louie must be
+provided for, and after that his ideas about himself were already
+tolerably clear. In one of his free intervals, during his first
+days in Paris, he had had a long conversation one evening with the
+owner of an important bookshop on the Quai St.-Michel. The man
+badly wanted an English clerk with English connections. David made
+certain of the opening, should he choose to apply for it. And if
+not there, then somewhere else. With the consciousness of capital,
+experience, and brains, to justify him, he had no fears. Meanwhile,
+John should keep on the Manchester shop, and he, David, would go
+over two or three times a year to stock-take and make up accounts.
+John was as honest as the day, and had already learnt much.
+
+But although his old self had so far reasserted itself; although
+the contriving activity of the brain was all still there, ready to
+be brought to bear on this new life when it was wanted; Elise could
+never mistake him, or the true character of this crisis of his
+youth. The self-surrender of passion had transformed, developed him
+to an amazing extent, and it found its natural language. As she
+grew deeper and deeper into the boy's heart, and as the cloud of
+diffidence which had enwrapped him since he came to Paris gave way,
+so that even in this brilliant France he ventured at last to
+express his feelings and ideas, the poet and thinker in him grew
+before her eyes. She felt a new consideration, a new intellectual
+respect for him.
+
+But above all his tenderness, his womanish consideration and
+sweetness amazed her. She had been hotly wooed now and then, but
+with no one, not even 'the cousin,' had she ever been on terms of
+real intimacy. And for the rest she had lived a rough-and-tumble,
+independent life, defending herself first of all against the big
+boys of the farm, then against her father, or her comrades in the
+_atelier_, or her Bohemian suitors. The ingenuity of service
+David showed in shielding and waiting upon her bewildered her--had,
+for a time, a profound effect upon her.
+
+And yet!--all the while--what jars and terrors from the very
+beginning! He seemed often to be groping in the dark with her.
+Whole tracts of her thought and experience were mysteries to him,
+and grew but little plainer with their new relation. Little as he
+knew or would have admitted it, the gulf of nationality yawned deep
+between them. And those artistic ambitions of hers--as soon as they
+re-emerged on the other side of the first intoxication of
+passion--they were as much of a jealousy and a dread to him as
+before. His soul was as alive as it had ever been to the threat and
+peril of them.
+
+Their relation itself, too--to her, perhaps, secretly a
+guarantee--was to him a perpetual restlessness. _L'union
+libre_ as the French artist understands it was not in his social
+tradition, whatever might be his literary assimilation of French
+ideas. He might passionately adopt and defend it, because it was
+her will; none the less was he, at the bottom of his heart, both
+ashamed and afraid because of it. From the very beginning he had
+let her know that she had only to say the word and he was ready to
+marry her instantly. But she put him aside with an impatient wave
+of her little hand, a nervous, defiant look in her grey eyes. Yet
+one day, when in the little village shop of Barbizon, a woman
+standing beside Elise at the counter looked her insolently over
+from head to foot, and took no notice of a question addressed to
+her on the subject of one of the forest routes, the girl felt and
+unexpected pang of resentment and shame.
+
+One afternoon, in a lonely part of the forest, she strained her
+foot by treading on a loose stone among the rocks. Tired with long
+rambling and jarred by the shock she sank down, looking white and
+ready to cry. Pain generally crushed and demoralized her. She was
+capable, indeed, of setting the body at defiance on occasion; but,
+as a rule, she had no physical fortitude, and did not pretend to
+it.
+
+David was much perplexed. So far as he knew, they were not near any
+of the huts which are dotted over the forest and provide the
+tourist with _consommations_ and carved articles. There was no
+water wherewith to revive her or to bandage the foot, for
+Fontainebleau has no streams. All he could do was to carry her. And
+this he did, with the utmost skill, and with a leaping thrill of
+tenderness which made itself felt by the little elfish creature in
+the clasp of his arms, and in the happy leaning of his dark cheek
+to hers, as she held him round the neck.
+
+'Paul and Virginia!' she said to him, laughing. "_He bore her in
+his arms!_"--all heroes do it--in reality, most women would
+break the hero's back. 'Confess _I_ am even lighter than you
+thought!'
+
+'As light as Venus' doves,' he swore to her. 'Bid me carry you to
+Paris and see.'
+
+'Paris!' At the mention of it she fell silent, and the corners of
+her mouth drooped into gravity. But he strode happily on,
+perceiving nothing.
+
+Then when they got home, she limping through the village, he put on
+the airs of a surgeon, ran across to the grocer, who kept a tiny
+_pharmacie_ in one corner of his miscellaneous shop, and
+conferred with him to such effect that the injured limb was soon
+lotioned and bandaged in a manner which made David inordinately
+proud of himself. Once, as he was examining his handiwork, it
+occurred to him that it was Mr. Ancrum who had taught him to use
+his fingers neatly. _Mr. Ancrum!_ At the thought of his name
+the young man felt an inward shrinking, as though from contact with
+a cold and alien order of things. How hard to realise, indeed, that
+the same world contained Manchester with its factories and chapels,
+and this perfumed forest, this little overgrown house!
+
+Afterwards, as he sat beside her, reading, as quiet as a mouse, so
+that she might sleep if the tumble-down Empire sofa did but woo her
+that way, she suddenly put up her arm and drew him down to her.
+
+'Who taught you all this--this tenderness?' she said to him, in a
+curious wistful tone, as though her question were the outcome of a
+long reverie. 'Was it your mother?'
+
+David started. He had never spoken to her or to anyone of his
+mother, and he could not bring himself to do so now.
+
+'My mother died when I was five years old,' he said reluctantly.
+'Why don't you go to sleep, little restless thing? Is the bandage
+right?'
+
+'Quite. I can imagine,' she said presently in a low tone, letting
+him go, 'I can imagine one might grow so dependent on all this
+cherishing, so horribly dependent!'
+
+'Well, and why not?' he said, taking up her hand and kissing it.
+'What are we made for, but to be your bondslaves?'
+
+She drew her hand away, and let it fall beside her with an
+impatient sigh. The poor boy looked at her with frightened eyes.
+Then some quick instinct came to the rescue, and his expression
+changed completely.
+
+'I have thought it all out,' he began, speaking with a brisk,
+business-like air, 'what I shall do at Manchester, and when I get
+back here.'
+
+And he hung over her, chattering and laughing about his plans. What
+did she say to a garret and a studio somewhere near the Quai
+St.-Michel, in the Quartier Latin, rooms whence they might catch a
+glimpse of the Seine and Notre-Dame, where she would be within easy
+reach of Taranne's studio, and the Luxembourg, and the Ecole des
+Beaux-Arts, and the Louvre rooms where after their day's work they
+might meet, shut out the world and let in heaven--a home consecrate
+at once to art and love?
+
+The quick bright words flowed without a check; his eye shone as
+though it caught the light of the future. But she lay turned away
+from him, silent, till at last she stopped him with a restless
+gesture.
+
+'Don't--don't talk like that! As soon as one dares to reckon on
+Him--_le bon Dieu_ strikes--just to let one know one's place.
+And don't drive me mad about my art! You saw me try to draw this
+morning; you might be quiet about it, I think, _par pitie!_ If
+I ever had any talent--which is not likely, or I should have had
+some notices of my pictures by this time--it is all dead and done
+for.'
+
+And turning quite away from him, she buried her face in the
+cushion.
+
+'Look here,' he said to her, smiling and stooping, 'shall I tell you
+something? I forgot it till now.'
+
+She shook her head, but he went on:
+
+You remember this morning while I was waiting for you, I went into
+the inn to ask about the way to the Gorges d'Affremont. I had your
+painting things with me. I didn't know whether you wanted them or
+not, and I laid them down on the table in the _cour_, while I
+went in to speak to madame. Well, when I came out, there were a
+couple of artists there, those men who have been here all the time
+painting, and they had undone the strap and were looking at the
+sketch--you know, that bit of beechwood with the rain coming on. I
+rushed at them. But they only grinned, and one of them, the young
+man with the fair moustache, sent you his compliments. You must
+have, he said, "very remarkable dispositions indeed." Perhaps I
+looked as if I knew that before! Whose pupil were you? I told him,
+and he said I was to tell you to stick to Taranne. You were one of
+the _peintres de temperament_, and it was they especially who
+must learn their grammar, and learn it from the classics; and the
+other man, the old bear who never speaks to anybody, nodded and
+looked at the sketch again, and said it was "amusing--not bad at
+all," and you might make something of it for the next Salon.'
+
+Cunning David! By this time Elise had her arm round his neck, and
+was devouring his face with her keen eyes. Everything was shaken
+off--the pain of her foot, melancholy, fatigue--and all the
+horizons of the soul were bright again. She had a new idea!--what
+if she were to combine his portrait with the beechwood sketch, and
+make something large and important of it? He had the head of a
+poet--the forest was in its most poetical moment. Why not pose him
+at the foot of the great beech to the left, give him a book
+dropping from his hand, and call it 'Reverie'?
+
+For the rest of the day she talked or sketched incessantly. She
+would hardly be persuaded to give her bandaged foot the afternoon's
+rest, and by eight o'clock next morning they were off to the
+forest, she limping along with a stick.
+
+Two or three days of perfect bliss followed. The picture promised
+excellently. Elise was in the most hopeful mood, alert and merry as
+a bird. And when they were driven home by hunger, the work still
+went on. For they had turned their top attic into a studio, and
+here as long as the light lasted she toiled on, wrestling with the
+head and the difficulties of the figure. But she was determined to
+make it substantially a picture _en plein air_. Her mind was
+full of all the daring conceptions and ideals which were then
+emerging in art, as in literature, from the decline of Romanticism.
+The passion for light, for truth, was, she declared, penetrating,
+and revolutionising the whole artistic world. Delacroix had a
+studio to the south; she also would 'bedare the sun.'
+
+At the end of the third day she threw herself on him in a passion
+of gratitude and delight, lifting her soft mouth to be kissed.
+
+'_Embrasse-moi! Embrasse-moi! Blague a part,--je commence a me
+sentir artiste!_'
+
+And they wandered about their little garden till past midnight,
+hand close in hand. She could talk of nothing but her picture, and
+he, feeling himself doubly necessary and delightful to her,
+overflowed with happiness and praise.
+
+But next day things went less well. She was torn, overcome by the
+difficulties of her task. Working now in the forest, now at home,
+the lights and values had suffered. The general tone had neither an
+indoor nor an outdoor truth. She must repaint certain parts, work
+only out of doors. Then all the torments of the outdoor painter
+began: wind, which put her in a nervous fever, and rain, which,
+after the long spell of fine weather, began to come down on them,
+and drive them into shelter.
+
+Soon she was in despair. She had been too ambitious. The landscape
+should have been the principal thing, the figure only indicated, a
+suggestion in the middle distance. She had carried it too far; it
+fought with its surroundings; the picture had no unity, no repose.
+Oh, for some advice! How could one pull such a thing through
+without help? In three minutes Taranne would tell her what was
+wrong.
+
+In twenty-four hours more she had fretted herself ill. The picture
+was there in the corner, turned to the wall; he could only just
+prevent her from driving her palette-knife through it. And she
+was sitting on the edge of the sofa, silent, a book on her
+knee, her hands hanging beside her, and her feverish eyes
+wandering--wandering round the room, if only they might escape from
+David, might avoid seeing him--or so he believed. Horrible! It was
+borne in upon him that in this moment of despair he was little more
+to her than the witness, the occasion, of her discomfiture.
+
+Oh! his heart was sore. But he could do nothing. Caresses,
+encouragements, reproaches, were alike useless. For some time she
+would make no further attempts at drawing; nor would she be wooed
+and comforted. She held him passively at arm's length, and he could
+make nothing of her. It was the middle of their third week; still
+almost the half left of this month she had promised him. And
+already it was clear to him that he and love had lost their first
+hold, and that she was consumed with the unspoken wish to go back
+to Paris, and the _atelier_. Ah, no!--_no!_ With a fierce
+yet dumb tenacity he held her to her bargain. Those weeks were his;
+they represented his only hope for the future; she _should_
+not have them back.
+
+But he, too, fell into melancholy and silence, and on the afternoon
+when this change in him first showed itself she was, for a time,
+touched, ashamed. A few pale smiles returned for him, and in the
+evening, as he was sitting by the open window, a newspaper on his
+knee, staring into vacancy, she came up to him, knelt beside him,
+and drew his half-reluctant arm about her. Neither said anything,
+but gradually her presence there, on his breast, thrilled through
+all his veins, filled his heart to bursting. The paper slid away;
+he put both arms about her, and bowed his head on hers. She put up
+her small hand, and felt the tears on his cheek. Then a still
+stronger repentance woke up in her.
+
+'_Pauvre enfant!_' she said, pushing herself away from him,
+and tremulously drying his eyes. 'Poor Monsieur David--I make you
+very unhappy! But I warned you--oh, I _warned_ you! What evil
+star made you fall in love with me?'
+
+In answer he found such plaintive and passionate things to say to
+her that she was fairly melted, and in the end there was an
+effusion on both sides, which seemed to bring back their golden
+hours. But at bottom, David's sensitive instinct, do what he would
+to silence it, told him, in truth, that all was changed. He was no
+longer the happy and triumphant lover. He was the beggar, living
+upon her alms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Next morning David went across to the village shop to buy some
+daily necessaries, and found a few newspapers lying on the counter.
+He bought a _Debats_, seeing that there was a long critique of
+the Salon in it, and hurried home with it to Elise. She tore it
+open and rushed through the article, putting him aside that he
+might not look over her. Her face blanched as she read, and at the
+end she flung the paper from her, and tottering to a chair sat
+there motionless, staring straight before her. David, beside
+himself with alarm, and finding caresses of no avail, took up the
+paper from the floor.
+
+'Let it alone!' she said to him with a sudden imperious gesture.
+'There is a whole paragraph about Breal--her fortune is made. _La
+voila lancee--arrivee!_ And of me, not a line, not a mention!
+Three or four pupils of Taranne--all beginners--but _my_
+name--nowhere! Ah, but no--it is too much!'
+
+Her little foot beat the ground, a hurricane was rising within her.
+
+David tried to laugh the matter off. 'The man who wrote the wretched
+thing had been hurried--was an idiot, clearly, and what did one
+man's opinion matter, even if it were paid for at so much a column?'
+
+'_Mais, tais-toi, donc!_' she cried at last, turning upon him in a
+fury. '_Can't_ you see that everything for an artist--especially a
+woman--depends on the _protections_ she gets at the beginning?
+How can a girl--helpless--without friends--make her way by herself?
+Some one must hold out a hand, and for me it seems there is no
+one--no one!'
+
+The outburst seemed to his common sense to imply the most grotesque
+oblivion of her success in the Salon, of Taranne's kindness--the
+most grotesque sensitiveness to a few casual lines of print. But it
+wrung his heart to see her agitation, her pale face, the
+handkerchief she was twisting to shreds in her restless hands. He
+came to plead with her--his passion lending him eloquence. Let her
+but trust herself and her gift. She had the praise of those she
+revered to go upon. How should the carelessness of a single critic
+affect her? _Imbeciles!_--they would be all with her, at her
+feet, some day. Let her despise them then and now! But his
+extravagances only made her impatient.
+
+'Nonsense!' she said, drawing her hand away from him; 'I am not made
+of such superfine stuff--I never pretended to be! Do you think I
+should be content to be an unknown genius? _Never!_--I must
+have my fame counted out to me in good current coin, that all the
+world may hear and see. It may be vulgar--I don't care! it is so.
+_Ah, mon Dieu!_' and she began to pace the room with wild
+steps, 'and it is my fault--my fault! If I were there on the spot, I
+should be remembered--they would have to reckon with me--I could
+keep my claim in sight. But I have thrown away everything--wasted
+everything--_everything!_'
+
+He stood with his back to the window, motionless, his hand on
+the table, stooping a little forward, looking at her with a
+passion of reproach and misery; it only angered her; she lost all
+self-control, and in one mad moment she avenged on his poor heart
+all the wounds and vexations of her vanity. _Why_ had he ever
+persuaded her? _Why_ had he brought her away and hung a fresh
+burden on her life which she could never bear? Why had he done her
+this irreparable injury--taken all simplicity and directness of aim
+from her--weakened her energies at their source? Her only
+_milieu_ was art, and he had made her desert it; her only
+power was the painter's power, and it was crippled, the fresh
+spring of it was gone. It was because she felt on her the weight of
+a responsibility, and a claim she was not made for. She was not
+made for love--for love at least as he understood it. And he had
+her word, and would hold her to it. It was madness for both of
+them. It was stifling--killing her!
+
+Then she sank on a chair, in a passion of desperate tears.
+Suddenly, as she sat there, she heard a movement, and looking up
+she saw David at the door. He turned upon her for an instant, with
+a dignity so tragic, so true, and yet so young, that she was
+perforce touched, arrested. She held out a trembling hand, made a
+little cry. But he closed the door softly, and was gone. She half
+raised herself, then fell back again.
+
+'If he had beaten me,' she said to herself with a strange smile, 'I
+could have loved him. _Mais!_'
+
+She was all day alone. When he came back it was already evening;
+the stars shone in the June sky, but the sunset light was still in
+the street and on the upper windows of the little house. As he
+opened the garden gate and shut it behind him, he saw the gleam of
+a lamp behind the acacia, and a light figure beside it. He stood a
+moment wrestling with himself, for he was wearied out, and felt as
+if he could bear no more. Then he moved slowly on.
+
+Elise was sitting beside the lamp, her head bent over something
+dark upon her lap. She had not heard the gate open, and she did not
+hear his steps upon the grass. He came closer, and saw, to his
+amazement, that she was busy with a coat of his--an old coat, in
+the sleeve of which he had torn a great rent the day before, while
+he was dragging her and himself through some underwood in the
+forest. She--who loathed all womanly arts, who had often boasted to
+him that she hardly knew how to use a needle!
+
+In moving nearer, he brushed against the shrubs, and she heard him.
+She turned her head, smiling. In the mingled light she looked like
+a little white ghost, she was so pale and her eyes so heavy. When
+she saw him, she raised her finger with a childish, aggrieved air,
+and put it to her lips, rubbing it softly against them.
+
+'It does prick so!' she said plaintively.
+
+He came to sit beside her, his chest heaving.
+
+'Why do you do that--for me?'
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and worked on without speaking.
+Presently she laid down her needle and surveyed him.
+
+'Where have you been all day? Have you eaten nothing, poor friend?'
+
+He tried to remember.
+
+'I think not; I have been in the forest.'
+
+A little quiver ran over her face; she pulled at her needle
+violently and broke the thread.
+
+'Finished!' she said, throwing down the coat and springing up.
+'Don't tell your tailor who did it! I am for perfection in all
+things--_abas l'amateur!_ Come in, it is supper-time past. I
+will go and hurry Madame Pyat. _Tu dois avoir une faim de
+loup_.'
+
+He shook his head, smiling sadly.
+
+'I tell you, you are hungry, you shall be hungry!' she cried,
+suddenly flinging her arm round his neck, and nestling her fair
+head against his shoulder. Her voice was half a sob.
+
+'Oh, so I am!--so I am!' he said, with a wild emphasis, and would
+have caught her to him. But she slipped away and ran before him to
+the house, turning at the window with the sweetest, frankest
+gesture to bid him follow.
+
+They passed the evening close together, she on a stool leaning
+against his knee, he reading aloud Alfred de Musset's _Nuit de
+Mai_. At one moment she was all absorbed in the verse, carried
+away by it; great battle-cry that it is! calling the artist from
+the miseries of his own petty fate to the lordship of life and
+nature as a whole; the next she had snatched the book out of his
+hands and was correcting his accent, bidding him speak after her,
+put his lips so. Never had she been so charming. It was the coaxing
+charm of the softened child that cannot show its penitence enough.
+Every now and then she fell to pouting because she could not move
+him to gaiety. But in reality his sad and passive gentleness, the
+mask of feelings which would otherwise have been altogether beyond
+his control, served him with her better than any gaiety could have
+done.
+
+_Gaiety!_ it seemed to him his heart was broken.
+
+At night, after a troubled sleep, he suddenly woke, and sprang up
+in an agony. _Gone!_ was she gone already? For that was what
+her sweet ways meant. Ah, he had known it all along!
+
+Where was she? His wild eyes for a second or two saw nothing but
+the landscape of his desolate dream. Then gradually the familiar
+forms of the room emerged from the gloom, and there--against the
+further wall--she lay, so still, so white, so gracious! Her
+childish arm, bare to the elbow, was thrown round her head, her
+soft waves of hair made a confusion on the pillow. After her long
+day of emotion she was sleeping profoundly. Whatever cruel secret
+her heart might hold, she was there still, his yet, for a few hours
+and days. He was persuaded in his own mind that her penitence had
+been the mere fruit of a compromise with herself, their month had
+still eight days to run, then--_adieu!_ Art and liberty should
+reclaim their own. Meanwhile why torment the poor boy, who must any
+way take it hardly?
+
+He lay there for long, raised upon his arm, his haggard look fixed
+on the sleeping form which by-and-by the dawn illuminated. His life
+was concentrated in that form, that light breath. He thought with
+repulsion and loathing of all that had befallen him before he saw
+her--with anguish and terror of those days and nights to come when
+he should have lost her. For in the deep stillness of the rising
+day there fell on him the strangest certainty of this loss. That
+gift of tragic prescience which was in his blood had stirred in
+him--he knew his fate. Perhaps the gift itself was but the fruit of
+a rare power of self-vision, self-appraisement. He saw and cursed
+his own timid and ignorant youth. How could he ever have hoped to
+hold a creature of such complex needs and passions? In the pale
+dawn he sounded the very depths of self-contempt.
+
+But when the day was up and Elise was chattering and flitting about
+the house as usual without a word of discord or parting, how was it
+possible to avoid reaction, the re-birth of hope? She talked of
+painting again, and that alone, after these long days of sullen
+alienation from her art, was enough to bring the brightness back to
+their little _menage_ and to dull that strange second sight of
+David's. He helped her to set her palette, to choose a new canvas;
+he packed her charcoals, he beguiled some cold meat and bread out
+of Madame, and then before the heat they set out together for the
+Bas Breau.
+
+Just as they started he searched his pockets for a knife of hers
+which was missing, and thrusting his hand into a breast pocket
+which he seldom used, he brought out some papers at which he stared
+in bewilderment.
+
+Then a shock went through him; for there was Mr. Gurney's letter,
+the letter in which the cheque for 600 _pounds_ had been enclosed,
+and there was also that faded scrap of Sandy's writing which
+contained the father's last injunction to his son. As he held the
+papers he remembered--what he had forgotten for weeks--that on the
+morning of his leaving Manchester he had put them carefully into
+this breast pocket, not liking to leave things so interesting to
+him behind him, out of his reach. Never had he given a thought to
+them since! He looked down at them, half ashamed, and his eye
+caught the words:--'_I lay it on him now I'm dying to look after
+her. She's not like other children; she'll want it. Let him see her
+married to a decent man, and give her what's honestly hers. I trust
+it to him. That little lad_--' and then came the fold of the
+sheet.
+
+'I have found the knife,' cried Elise from the gate. 'Be quick!'
+
+He pushed the papers back and joined her. The day was already hot,
+and they hurried along the burning street into the shade of the
+forest. Once in the Bas Breau Elise was not long in finding a
+subject, fell upon a promising one indeed almost at once, and was
+soon at work. This time there were to be no figures, unless indeed
+it might be a dim pair of woodcutters in the middle distance, and
+the whole picture was to be an impressionist dream of early summer,
+finished entirely out of doors, as rapidly and cleanly as possible.
+David lay on the ground under the blasted oak and watched her, as
+she sat on her camp-stool, bending forward, looking now up, now
+down, using her charcoal in bold energetic strokes, her lip
+compressed, her brow knit over some point of composition. The
+little figure in its pink cotton was so daintily pretty, so full of
+interest and wilful charm, it might well have filled a lover's eye
+and chained his thoughts. But David was restless and at times
+absent.
+
+'Tell me what you know of that man Montjoie?' he asked her at last,
+abruptly. 'I know you disliked him.'
+
+She paused, astonished.
+
+'Why do you ask? Dislike--I _detest and despise_ him. I told
+you so.'
+
+'But what do you know of him?' he persisted.
+
+'No good!' she said quickly, going back to her work. Then a light
+broke upon her, and she turned on her stool, her two hands on her
+knees.
+
+'_Tiens!_--you are thinking of your sister. You have had news
+of her?'
+
+A conscious half-remorseful look rose into her face.
+
+'No, I have had no news. I ought to have had a letter. I wrote, you
+remember, that first day here. Perhaps Louie has gone home already,'
+he said, with constraint. 'Tell me anyway what you know.'
+
+'Oh, he!--well, there is only one word for him--he is a
+_brute_ I' said Elise, drawing vigorously, her colour rising.
+'Any woman will tell you that. Oh, he has plenty of talent,--he
+might be anything. Carpeaux took him up at one time, got him
+commissions. Five or six years ago there was quite a noise about
+him for two or three Salons. Then people began to drop him. I
+believe he was the most mean, ungrateful animal towards those who
+had been kind to him. He drinks besides--he is over head and ears
+in debt, always wanting money, borrowing here and there, then
+locking his door for weeks, making believe to be out of town--only
+going out at night. As for his ways with women'--she shrugged her
+shoulders--'Was your sister still sitting to him when we left, or
+was it at an end? Hasn't your sister been sitting to him for his
+statue?'
+
+She paused again and studied him with her shrewd, bright eyes.
+
+He coloured angrily.
+
+'I believe so--I tried to stop it--it was no use.'
+
+She laughed out.
+
+'No--I imagine she does what she wants to do. Well, we all do,
+_mon ami!_ After all'--and she shrugged her shoulders again--
+'I suppose she can do what I did?'
+
+''What _you_ did!'
+
+She went on drawing in sharp deliberate strokes; her breath came
+fast.
+
+'He met me on the stairs one night--it was just after I had taken
+the _atelier_. I knew no one in the house--I was quite defenceless
+there. He insulted me--I had a little walking-stick in my hand,
+my cousin had given me--I struck him with it across the face twice,
+three times--if you look close you will see the mark. You may
+imagine he tells fine stories of me when he gets the chance.
+_Oh! je m'en fiche!_'
+
+The scorn of the last gesture was unmeasured.
+
+'_Canaille!_' said David, between his teeth. 'If you had told
+me this!'
+
+Her expression changed and softened.
+
+'You asked me no questions after that quarrel we had in the Louvre,'
+she said, excusing herself. 'You will understand it is not a
+reminiscence one is exactly proud of; I did speak to Madame Cervin
+once--'
+
+David said nothing, but sat staring before him into the far vistas
+of the wood. It seemed strange that so great a smart and fear as
+had possessed him since yesterday, should allow of any lesser smart
+within or near it. Yet that scrap of tremulous writing weighed
+heavy. _Where_ was Louie; why had she not written? So far he
+had turned impatiently away from the thought of her, reiterating
+that he had done his best, that she had chosen her own path. Now in
+this fragrant quiet of the forest the quick vision of some
+irretrievable wreck presented itself to him; he thought of Mr.
+Ancrum--of John--and a cold shudder ran through him. In it spoke
+the conscience of a lifetime.
+
+Elise meanwhile laid aside her charcoal, began to dash in some
+paint, drew back presently to look at it from a distance, and then,
+glancing aside, suddenly threw down her brushes, and ran up to
+David.
+
+She sat down beside him, and with a coaxing, childish gesture, drew
+his arm about her.
+
+'_Tu me fais pitie, mon ami!_' she said, looking up into his
+face. 'Is it your sister? Go and find her--I will wait for you.'
+
+He turned upon her, his black eyes all passion, his lips struggling
+with speech.
+
+'My place is here,' he said. 'My life is here!'
+
+Then, as she was silent, not knowing in her agitation what to say,
+he broke out:
+
+'What was in your mind yesterday, Elise? what is there to-day?
+There is something--something I _will_ know.'
+
+She was frightened by his look. Never did fear and grief speak more
+plainly from a human face. The great deep within had broken up.
+
+'I was sorry,' she said, trembling, 'sorry to have hurt you. I
+wanted to make up.'
+
+He flung her hand away from him with an impatient gesture.
+
+'There was more than that!' he said violently; 'will you be like all
+the rest--betray me without a sign?'
+
+'David!'
+
+She bit her lip proudly. Then the tears welled up into her grey
+eyes, and she looked round at him--hesitated--began and stopped
+again--then broke into irrevocable confession.
+
+'David!--Monsieur David!--how can it go on? _Voyons_--I said
+to myself yesterday--I am torturing him and myself--I cannot make
+him happy--it is not in me--not in my destiny. It must end--it
+must,--it _must_, for both our sakes. But then first,--first--'
+
+'Be quiet!' he said, laying an iron hand on her arm. 'I knew it all.'
+
+And he turned away from her, covering his face.
+
+This time she made no attempt to caress him. She clasped her hands
+round her knees and remained quite still, gazing--yet seeing
+nothing--into the green depths which five minutes before had been
+to her a torturing ecstasy of colour and light. The tears which had
+been gathering fell, the delicate lip quivered.
+
+Struck by her silence at last, he looked up--watched her a
+moment--then he dragged himself up to her and knelt beside her.
+
+'Have I made you so miserable?' he said, under his breath.
+
+'It is--it is--the irreparableness of it all,' she answered, half
+sobbing. 'No undoing it ever, and how a woman glides into it, how
+lightly, knowing so little!--thinking herself so wise! And if she
+has deceived herself, if she is not made for love, if she has given
+herself for so little--for an illusion--for a dream that breaks and
+must break--how dare the _man_ reproach her, after all?'
+
+She raised her burning eyes to him. The resentment in them seemed
+to be more than individual, it was the resentment of the woman, of
+her sex.
+
+She stabbed him to the heart by what she said--by what she left
+unsaid. He took her little cold hand, put it to his lips--tried to
+speak.
+
+'Don't,' she said, drawing it away and hiding her face on her
+knees. 'Don't say anything. It is not you, it is God and Nature that
+I accuse.'
+
+Strange, bitter word!--word of revolt! He lay on his face beside
+her for many minutes afterwards, tasting the bitterness of it,
+revolving those other words she had said--_'an illusion--a dream
+that breaks--must break.'_ Then he made a last effort. He came
+close to her, laid his arm timidly round her shoulders, bent his
+cheek to hers.
+
+'Elise, listen to me a little. You say the debt is on my side--that
+is true--true--a thousand times true! I only ask you, _implore_ you,
+to let me pay it. Let it be as you please--on what terms you
+please--servant or lover. All I pray for is to pay that debt,
+with my life, my heart.'
+
+She shook her head softly, her face still hidden.
+
+'When I am with you,' she said, as though the words were wrung out
+of her, 'I must be a woman. You agitate me, you divide my mind, and
+my force goes. There are both capacities in me, and one destroys
+the other. And I want--I _want_ my art!'
+
+She threw back her head with a superb gesture. But he did not
+flinch.
+
+'You shall have it,' he said passionately, 'have it abundantly. Do
+you think I want to keep you for ever loitering here? Do you think
+I don't know what ambition and will mean? that I am only fit for
+kissing?'
+
+He stopped almost with a smile, thinking of that harsh struggle to
+know and to have, in which his youth had been so far consumed night
+and day. Then words rushed upon him again, and he went on with a
+growing power and freedom.
+
+'I never looked at a woman till I saw you!--never had a whim, a
+caprice. I have eaten my heart out with the struggle first for
+bread, then for knowledge. But when you came across me, then the
+world was all made new, and I became a new creature, your creature.'
+
+He touched her face with a quick, tender hand, laid it against his
+breast, and spoke so, bending piteously down to her, within reach
+of her quivering mouth, her moist eyes:--
+
+'Tell me this, Elise--answer me this! How can there be great art, great
+knowledge, only from the brain,--without passion, without experience?
+You and I have been _living_ what Musset, what Hugo, what Shakespeare
+wrote,' and he struck the little volume of Musset beside him. 'Is not
+that worth a summer month? not worth the artist's while? But it is
+nearly gone. You can't wonder that I count the moments of it like a
+miser! I have had a _hard_ life, and this has transfigured it. Whatever
+happens now in time or eternity, this month is to the good--for me and
+for you, Elise!--yes, for you, too! But when it is over,--see if I hold
+you back! We will work together--climb--wrestle, together. And on what
+terms you please,--mind that,--only dictate them. I deny your
+"illusion," your "dream that breaks." You _have_ been happy! I dare to
+tell you so. But part now,--shirk our common destiny,--and you will
+indeed have given all for nothing, while I--'
+
+His voice sank. She shook her head again, but as she drew herself
+gently away she was stabbed by the haggardness of the countenance,
+the pleading pathos of the eyes. His gust of speech had shaken her
+too--revealed new points in him. She bent forward quickly and laid
+her soft lips to his, for one light swift moment.
+
+'Poor boy!' she murmured, 'poor poet!'
+
+'Ah, that was enough!' he said, the colour flooding his cheeks.'
+That healed--that made all good. Will you hide nothing from me,
+Elise--will you promise?'
+
+'Anything,' she said with a curious accent, 'anything--if you will
+but let me paint.'
+
+He sprang up, and put her things in order for her. They stood
+looking at the sketch, neither seeing much of it.
+
+'I must have some more cobalt,' she said wearily, 'Look, my tube is
+nearly done.'
+
+Yes, that was certain. He must get some more for her. Where could
+it be got? No nearer than Fontainebleau, alas! where there was a
+shop which provided all the artists of the neighbourhood. He was
+eagerly ready to go--it would take him no time.
+
+'It will take you between two and three hours, sir, in this heat.
+But oh, I am so tired, I will just creep into the fern there while
+you are away, and go to sleep. Give me that book and that shawl.'
+
+He made a place for her between the spurs of a great oak-root,
+tearing the brambles away. She nestled into it, with a sigh of
+satisfaction. 'Divine! Take your food--I want nothing but the air
+and sleep. _Adieu, adieu!_'
+
+He stood gazing down upon her, his face all tender lingering and
+remorse. How white she was, how fragile, how shaken by this storm
+of feeling he had forced upon her! How could he leave her?
+
+But she waved him away impatiently, and he went at last, going
+first back to the village to fetch his purse which was not in his
+pocket.
+
+As he came out of their little garden gate, turning again towards
+the forest which he must cross in order to get to Fontainebleau, he
+became aware of a group of men standing in front of the inn. Two of
+them were the landscape artists already slightly known to him, who
+saluted him as he came near. The other was a tall fine-looking man,
+with longish grizzled hair, a dark commanding eye, the rosette of
+the Legion of Honour at his buttonhole, and a general look of
+irritable power. He wore a wide straw hat and holland overcoat, and
+beside him on the bench lay some artist's paraphernalia.
+
+All three eyed David as he passed, and he was no sooner a few yards
+away than they were looking after him and talking, the new-comer
+asking questions, the others replying.
+
+'Oh, it is she!' said the stranger impatiently, throwing away his
+cigar. 'Auguste's description leaves me no doubt of it, and the
+woman at the house in the Rue Chantal where I had the caprice to
+inquire one day, when she had been three weeks away, told me they
+were here. It is annoying. Something might have been made of her.
+Now it is finished. A handsome lad all the same!--of a rare type.
+_Non!--je me suis trompe--en devenant femme, elle n'a pas cesse
+d'etre artiste!_'
+
+The others laughed. Then they all took up their various equipments,
+and strolled off smoking to the forest. The man from Paris was
+engaged upon a large historical canvas representing an incident
+in the life of Diane de Poitiers. The incident had Diane's forest
+for a setting, but his trees did not satisfy him, he had come down
+to make a few fresh studies on the spot.
+
+David walked his four miles to Fontainebleau, bought his cobalt,
+and set his face homewards about three o'clock. When he was halfway
+home, he turned aside into a tangle of young beech wood, parted the
+branches, and found a shady corner where he could rest and think.
+The sun was very hot, the high road was scorched by it. But it was
+not heat or fatigue that had made him pause.
+
+So far he had walked in a tumult of conflicting ideas, emotions,
+terrors, torn now by this memory, now by that--his mind traversed
+by one project after another. But now that he was so near to
+meeting her again, though he pined for her, he suddenly and
+pitifully felt the need for some greater firmness of mind and will.
+Let him pause and think! Where _was_ he with her?--what were
+his real, tangible hopes and fears? Life and death depended for him
+on these days--these few vanishing days. And he was like one of the
+last year's leaves before him, whirled helpless and will-less in
+the dust-storm of the road!
+
+He had sat there an unnoticed time when the sound of some heavy
+carriage approaching roused him. From his green covert he could see
+all that passed, and instinctively he looked up. It was the
+Barbizon _diligence_ going in to meet the five o'clock train
+at Fontainebleau, a train which in these lengthening days very
+often brought guests to the inn. The _correspondance_ had been
+only begun during the last week, and to the dwellers at Barbizon
+the afternoon _diligence_ had still the interest of novelty.
+With the perception of habit David noticed that there was no one
+outside; but though the rough blinds were most of them drawn down
+he thought he perceived some one inside--a lady. Strange that
+anyone should prefer the stifling _interieur_ who could mount
+beside the driver with a parasol!
+
+The omnibus clattered past, and with the renewal of the woodland
+silence his mind plunged heavily once more into the agonised
+balancing of hope and fear. But in the end he sprang up with a
+renewed alertness of eye and step.
+
+_Despair?_ Impossible!--so long as one had one's love still in
+one's arms--could still plead one's cause, hand to hand, lip to
+lip. He strode homewards--running sometimes--the phrases of a new
+and richer eloquence crowding to his lips.
+
+About a mile from Barbizon, the path to the Bas Breau diverges to
+the right. He sped along it, leaping the brambles in his path. Soon
+he was on the edge of the great avenue itself, looking across it
+for that spot of colour among the green made by her light dress.
+
+But there was no dress, and as he came up to the tree where he had
+left her, he saw to his stupefaction that there was no one
+there--nothing, no sign of her but the bracken and brambles he had
+beaten down for her some three hours before, and the trodden grass
+where her easel had been. Something showed on the ground. He
+stooped and noticed the empty cobalt-tube of the morning.
+
+Of course she had grown tired of waiting and had gone home. But a
+great terror seized him. He turned and ran along the path they had
+traversed in the morning making for the road; past the inn which
+seemed to have been struck to sleep by the sun, past Millet's
+studio on the left, to the little overgrown door in the brick wall.
+
+No one in the garden, no one in the little _salon_, no one upstairs;
+Madame Pyat was away for the day, nursing a daughter-in-law. In all
+the house and garden there was not a sound or sign of life but the
+cat asleep on the stone step of the kitchen, and the bees humming
+in the acacias.
+
+'Elise!' he called, inside and out, knowing already, poor fellow,
+in his wild despair that there could be no answer--that all was
+over.
+
+But there was an answer. Elise was no untaught heroine. She played
+her part through. There was her letter, propped up against the gilt
+clock on the sham marble _cheminee_.
+
+He found it and tore it open.
+
+'You will curse me, but after a time you will forgive. I
+_could_ not go on. Taranne found me in the forest, just half
+an hour after you left me. I looked up and saw him coming across
+the grass. He did not see me at first, he was looking about for a
+subject. I would have escaped, but there was no way. Then at last
+he saw me. He did not attack me, he did not persuade me, he only
+took for granted it was all over,--my Art! I must know best, of
+course; but he was sorry, for I had a gift. Had I seen the notice
+of my portrait in the "Temps," or the little mention in the "Figaro"?
+Oh, yes, Breal had been very successful, and deserved to be. It
+was a brave soul, devoted to art, and art had rewarded her.
+
+'Then I showed him my sketch, trembling--to stop his talk--every
+word he said stabbed me. And he shrugged his shoulders quickly;
+then, as though recollecting himself, he put on a civil face all in
+a moment, and paid me compliments. To an amateur he is always
+civil. I was all white and shaking by this time. He turned to go
+away, and then I broke down. I burst into tears--I said I was
+coming back to the _atelier_--what did he mean by taking such
+a cruel, such an insolent tone with me? He would not be moved from
+his polite manner. He said he was glad to hear it; mademoiselle
+would be welcome; but just as though we were complete strangers.
+_He_ who has befriended me, and taught me, and scolded me
+since I was fourteen! I could not bear it. I caught him by the arm.
+I told him he _should_ tell me all he thought. Had I really
+talent?--a future?
+
+'Then he broke out in a torrent--he made me afraid of him--yet I
+adored him! He said I had more talent than any other pupil he had
+ever had; that I had been his hope and interest for six years; that
+he had taught me for nothing--befriended me--worked for me, behind
+the scenes, at the Salon; and all because he knew that I must rise,
+must win myself a name, that when I had got the necessary technique
+I should make one of the poetical impressionist painters, who are
+in the movement, who sway the public taste. But I must give
+_all_ myself--my days and nights--my thoughts, and brain, and
+nerves. Other people might have adventures and paint the better.
+Not I,--I was too highly strung--for me it was ruin. _"C'est un
+maitre sevire--l'Art,_" he said, looking like a god. "_Avec
+celui-la on ne transige pas. Ah! Dieu, je le connais, moi!_" I
+don't know what he meant; but there has been a tragedy in his life;
+all the world knows that.
+
+'Then suddenly he took another tone, called me _pauvre
+enfant_, and apologised. Why should I be disturbed? I had chosen
+for my own happiness, no doubt. What was fame or the high steeps of
+art compared even with an _amour de jeunesse?_ He had seen
+you, he said,--_une tete superbe--des epaules de lion!_ I was
+a woman; a young handsome lover was worth more to me, naturally,
+than the drudgeries of art. A few years hence, when the pulse was
+calmer, it might have been all very well. Well! I must forgive him;
+he was my old friend. Then he wrung my hand, and left me.
+
+'Oh, David, David, I must go! I _must._ My life is imprisoned
+here with you--it beats its bars. Why did I ever let you persuade
+me--move me? And I should let you do it again. When you are there I
+am weak. I am no cruel adventuress, I can't look at you and torture
+you. But what I feel for you is not love--no, no, it is not, poor
+boy! Who was it said "A love which can be tamed is no love"? But in
+three days--a week--mine had grown tame--it had no fears left. I am
+older than you, not in years, _mais dans l'ame_--there is what
+parts us.
+
+'Oh! I must go--and you must not try to find me. I shall be quite
+safe, but with people you know nothing about. I shall write to
+Madame Pyat for my things. You need have no trouble.
+
+'Very likely I shall pass you on the way, for if I hurry I can
+catch the _diligence_. But you will not see me. Oh, David, I
+put my arms round you! I press my face against you. I ask you to
+forgive me, to forget me, to work out your own life as I work out
+mine. It will soon be a dream--this little house--these summer
+days! I have kissed the chair you sat in last night, the book you
+read to me. _C'est deja fini! Adieu! adieu!'_
+
+He sat for long in a sort of stupor. Then that maddening thought
+seized him, stung him into life, that she had actually passed him,
+that he had seen her, not knowing. That little indistinct figure in
+the _interieur_, that was she.
+
+He sprang up, in a blind anguish. Pursuit! the _diligence_ was
+slow, the trains doubtful, he might overtake her yet. He dashed
+into the street, and into the Fontainebleau road. After he had run
+nearly a mile, he plunged into a path which he believed was a short
+cut. It led through a young and dense oak wood. He rushed on,
+seeing nothing, bruising himself and stumbling. At last a
+projecting branch struck him violently on the temple. He staggered,
+put up a feeble hand, sank on the grass against a trunk, and
+fainted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+It was between five and six o'clock in the morning. In the
+Tuileries Gardens flowers, grass, and trees were drenched in dew,
+the great shadow of the Palace spread grey and cool over terraces
+and slopes, while beyond the young sun had already shaken off all
+cumbering mists, and was pouring from a cloudless sky over the
+river with its barges and swimming-baths, over the bridges and the
+quays, and the vast courts and facades of the Louvre. Yet among the
+trees the air was still exquisitely fresh, the sun still a friend
+to be welcomed. The light morning wind swept the open, deserted
+spaces of the Gardens, playing merrily with the dust, the leaves,
+the fountains. Meanwhile on all sides the stir of the city was
+beginning, mounting slowly and steadily like a swelling tone.
+
+On a bench under one of the trees in the Champs-Elysees sat a young
+man asleep. He had thrown himself against the back of the bench,
+his cheek resting on the iron, one hand on his knee. It was David
+Grieve; the lad's look showed that his misery was still with him,
+even in sleep.
+
+He was dreaming, letting fall here and there a troubled and
+disconnected word. In his dream he was far from Paris--walking
+after his sheep among the heathery slopes of the Scout, climbing
+towards the grey smithy among the old mill-stones, watching the Red
+Brook slide by over its long, shallow steps of orange grit, and the
+Downfall oozing and trickling among its tumbled blocks. Who was
+that hanging so high above the ravine on that treacherous stone
+that rocked with the least touch? Louie--mad girl!--come back. Ah!
+too late--the stone rocks, falls; he leaps from block to block,
+only to see the light dress disappear into the stony gulf below. He
+cries--struggles--wakes.
+
+He sat up, wrestling with himself, trying to clear his torpid
+brain. Where was he? His dream-self was still roaming the Scout;
+his outer eye was bewildered by these alleys, these orange-trees,
+these statues--that distant arch.
+
+Then the hideous, undefined cloud that was on him took shape. Elise
+had left him. And Louie, too, was gone--he knew not where, save
+that it was to ruin. When he had arrived the night before at the
+house in the Rue Chantal, Madame Merichat could tell him nothing of
+Mademoiselle Delaunay, who had not been heard of. Then he asked,
+his voice dying in his throat before the woman's hard and cynical
+stare--the stare of one who found the chief savour of life in the
+misfortunes of her kind--he asked for his sister and the Cervins.
+The Cervins were staying at Sevres with relations, and were
+expected home again in a day or two; Mademoiselle Louie?--well,
+Mademoiselle Louie was not with them. Had she gone back to
+England? _Mais non!_ A trunk of hers was still in the Cervins'
+vestibule. Did Madame Merichat know anything about her? the lad
+asked, forcing himself to it, his blanched face turned away. Then
+the woman shrugged her shoulders and spoke out.
+
+If he really must know, she thought there was no doubt at all
+that where Monsieur Montjoie was, Mademoiselle Louie was too.
+Monsieur Montjoie had paid the arrears of his rent to the
+_proprietaire_, somehow or other, and had then made a midnight
+flitting of it so as to escape other creditors who were tired of
+waiting for his statue to be finished. He had got a furniture van
+there at night, and he and the driver and her husband between them
+had packed most of the things from the studio, and M. Montjoie had
+gone off in the van about one o'clock in the morning. But of course
+she did not know his address! she said so half-a-dozen times a day
+to the persons who called, and it was as true as gospel. Why,
+indeed, should M. Montjoie let her or anyone else know, that he
+could help? He had gone into hiding to keep honest people out of
+their money--that was what it meant.
+
+Well, and the same evening Mademoiselle Louie also disappeared.
+Madame Cervin had been in a great way, but she and mademoiselle had
+already quarrelled violently, and madame declared that she had no
+fault in the matter and that no one could be held responsible for
+the doings of such a minx. She believed that madame had written to
+monsieur. Monsieur had never received it? Ah, well, that was not
+surprising! No one could ever read madame's writing, though it made
+her temper very bad to tell her so.
+
+Could he have Madame Cervin's address? Certainly. She wrote it out
+for him. As to his old room?--no, he could not go back to it.
+
+Monsieur Dubois had lately come back, with some money apparently,
+for he had paid his _loyer_ just as the landlord was going to
+turn him out. But he was not at home.
+
+Then she looked her questioner up and down, with a cool, inhuman
+curiosity working in her small eyes. So M'selle Elise had thrown
+him over already? That was sharp work! As for the rest of her news,
+her pessimism was interested in observing his demeanour under it.
+Certainly he did not seem to take it gaily; but what else did he
+expect with his sister?--'_Je vous demande_!'
+
+The young man dropped his head and went out, shrinking together
+into the darkness. She called her husband to the door, and the two
+peered after him into the lamp-lit street, dissecting him, his
+mistress, and his sister with knifelike tongues.
+
+David went away and walked up and down the streets, the quays, the
+bridges, hour after hour, feeling no fatigue, till suddenly, just
+as the dawn was coming on, he sank heavily on to the seat in the
+Champs-Elysees. The slip with Madame Cervin's address on it dropped
+unheeded from his relaxing hand. His nervous strength was gone, and
+he had to sit and bear his anguish without the relief of frenzied
+motion.
+
+Now, after his hour's sleep, he was somewhat revived, ready to
+start again--to search again; but where? whither? _Somewhere_
+in this vast, sun-wrapped Paris was Elise, waking, perhaps, at this
+moment and thinking of him with a smile and a tear. He _would_
+find her, come what would; he could not live without her!
+
+Then into his wild passion of loss and desire there slipped again
+that cold, creeping thought of Louie--ruined, body and soul--ruined
+in this base and dangerous Paris, while he still carried in his
+breast that little scrap of scrawled paper! And why? Because he had
+flung her to the wolves without a thought, that he and Elise might
+travel to their goal unchecked. '_My God_!'
+
+The sense of some one near him made him look up. He saw a girl
+stopping near the seat whom in his frenzy he for an instant took
+for Louie. There was the same bold, defiant carriage, the same
+black hair and eyes. He half rose, with a cry.
+
+The girl gave a quick, coarse laugh. She had been hurrying across
+the Avenue towards the nearest bridge when she saw him; now she
+came up to him with a hideous jest. David saw her face full, caught
+the ghastly suggestions of it--its vice, its look of mortal illness
+wrecking and blurring the cheap prettiness it had once possessed,
+and beneath all else the fierceness of the hunted creature. His
+whole being rose in repulsion; he waved her away, and she went,
+still laughing. But his guilty mind went with her, making of her
+infamy the prophecy and foretaste of another's.
+
+He hurried on again, and again had to rest for faintness' sake,
+while the furies returned upon him. It seemed as though every
+passer-by were there only to scourge and torture him; or, rather,
+out of the moving spectacle of human life which began to flow past
+him with constantly increasing fulness, that strange selective
+poet-sense of his chose out the figures and incidents which bore
+upon his own story and worked into his own drama, passing by the
+rest. A group of persons presently attracted him who had just come
+apparently from the Rive Gauche, and were making for the Rue
+Royale. They consisted of a man, a woman, and a child. The child
+was a tiny creature in a preposterous feathered hat as large as
+itself. It had just been put down to walk by its father, and was
+dragging contentedly at its mother's hand, sucking a crust. The man
+had a bag of tools on his shoulder and was clearly an artisan going
+to work. His wife's face was turned to him and they were talking
+fast, lingering a little in the sunshine like people who had a few
+minutes to spare and were enjoying them. The man had the blanched,
+unwholesome look of the city workman who lives a sedentary life in
+foul air, and was, moreover, undersized and noways attractive, save
+perhaps for the keen amused eyes with which he was listening to his
+wife's chatter. The great bell of Notre-Dame chimed in the
+distance. The man straightened himself at once, adjusted his bag of
+tools, and hurried off, nodding to his wife.
+
+She looked after him a minute, then turned and came slowly along
+the alley towards the bench where David sat, idly watching her. The
+heat was growing steadily, the child was heavy on her hand, and she
+was again clearly on the way to motherhood. The seat invited her,
+and she came up to it.
+
+She sat down, panting, and eyed her neighbour askance, detecting at
+once how handsome he was, and how unshorn and haggard. Before he
+knew where he was, or how it had begun, they were talking. She had
+no shyness of any sort, and, as it seemed to him, a motherly,
+half-contemptuous indulgence for his sex, as such, which fitted
+oddly with her young looks. Very soon she was asking him the most
+direct questions, which he had to parry as best he could. She made
+out at once that he was a foreigner and in the book trade, and then
+she let him know by a passing expression or two that naturally she
+understood why he was lounging there in that plight at that hour in
+the morning. He had been keeping gay company, of course, and had
+but just emerged from some nocturnal orgie or other. And then she
+shrugged her strong shoulders with a light, pitiful air, as though
+marvelling once more for the thousandth time over the stupidity of
+men who would commit these idiocies, would waste their money and
+health in them, say what women would.
+
+Presently he discovered that she was giving him advice of different
+kinds, counselling him above all to find a good wife who would work
+and save his wages for him. A decent marriage was in truth an
+economy, though young men would never believe it.
+
+David could only stare at her in return for her counsels. The
+difference between his place at that moment in the human comedy and
+hers was too great to be explained; it called only for silence or a
+stammering commonplace or two. Yet for a few moments the
+neighbourhood of her and her child was pleasant to him. She had a
+good comely head, which was bare under the sun, a little shawl
+crossed upon her ample bust, and a market-basket on her arm. The
+child was playing in the fine gravel at her feet, pausing every now
+and then to study her mother's eye with a furtive gravity, while
+the hat fell back and made a still more fantastic combination than
+before with the pensive little face.
+
+Presently, tired of her play, she came to stand by her mother's
+knee, laying her head against it.
+
+'_Mon petit ange! que tu es gentille!_' said the mother in a
+low, rapid voice, pressing her hand on the child's cheek. Then,
+turning back to David, she chattered on about the profit and loss
+of married life. All that she said was steeped in prose--in the
+prose especially of sous and francs; she talked of rents, of the
+price of food, of the state of wages in her husband's trade. Yet
+every here and there came an exquisite word, a flash. It seemed
+that she had been very ill with her first child. She did not mince
+matters much even with this young man, and David gathered that she
+had not only been near dying, but that her illness had made a moral
+epoch in her life. She was laid by for three months; work was slack
+for her husband; her own earnings, for she was a skilled
+embroideress working for a great linen-shop in the Rue Vivienne,
+were no longer forthcoming. Would her husband put up with it, with
+the worries of the baby, and the _menage_, and the sick wife,
+and that sharp pinch of want into the bargain, from which during
+two years she had completely protected him?
+
+'I cried one day,' she said simply; 'I said to him, "You're just
+sick of it, ain't you? Well, I'm going to die. Go and shift for
+yourself, and take the baby to the _Enfants Trouves. Alors--_"'
+
+She paused, her homely face gently lit up from within. 'He is not a
+man of words--Jules. He told me to be quiet, called me _petite
+sotte_. "Haven't you slaved for two years?" he said. "Well,
+then, lie still, can't you?--_faut bien que chacun prenne son
+tour!_"'
+
+She broke off, smiling and shaking her head. Then glancing round
+upon her companion again, she resumed her motherly sermon. That was
+the good of being married; that there was some one to share the bad
+times with, as well as the good.
+
+'But perhaps,' she inquired briskly, 'you don't believe in being
+married? You are for _l'union libre?_'
+
+She spoke like one touching on a long familiar question--as much a
+question indeed of daily life and of her class as those other
+matters of wages and food she had been discussing.
+
+A slow and painful red mounted into the Englishman's cheek.
+
+'I don't know,' he said stupidly. 'And you?'
+
+'No, no!' she said emphatically, twice, nodding her head. 'Oh, I was
+brought up that way. My father was a Red--an Anarchist--a great man
+among them; he died last year. He said that liberty was everything.
+It made him mad when any of his friends accepted _l'union
+legale_--for him it was a treason. He never married my mother,
+though he was faithful to her all his life. But for me--' she
+paused, shaking her head slowly. 'Well, I had an elder sister--that
+says everything. _Faut pas en parler;_ it makes melancholy,
+and one must keep up one's spirits when one is like this. It is
+three years since she died; she was my father's favourite. When
+they buried her--she died in the hospital--I sat down and thought a
+little. It was abominable what she had suffered, and I said to
+myself, "Why?"'
+
+The child swayed backward against her knee, so absorbed was it in
+its thumb and the sky, and would have fallen but that she caught it
+with her housewife's hand, being throughout mindful of its
+slightest movement.
+
+'"Why?" I said. She was a good creature--a bit foolish perhaps,
+but she would have worked the shoes off her feet to please anybody.
+And they had treated her--but like a dog! It bursts one's heart to
+think of it, and I said to myself,--_le mariage c'est la
+justice!_ it is nothing but that. It is not what the priests
+say--oh! not at all. But it strikes me like that--_c'est la
+justice_; it is nothing but that!'
+
+And she looked at him with the bright fixed eyes of one whose
+thoughts are beyond their own expressing. He interrupted her,
+wondering at the harsh rapidity of his own voice. 'But if it is the
+woman who will be free?--who will have no bond?'
+
+Her expression changed, became shrewd, inquisitive, personal.
+
+'Well, then!' she said with a shrug, and paused. 'It is because one
+is ignorant, you see, or one is bad--_on peut toujours etre une
+coquine!_ And one forgets--one thinks one can be always young,
+and love is all pleasure--and it is not true! one get old--and
+there is the child--and one may die of it.'
+
+She spoke with the utmost simplicity, yet with a certain intensity.
+Evidently she had a natural pride in her philosophy of life, as
+though in a possession of one's own earning and elaborating. She
+had probably expressed it often before in much the same terms, and
+with the same verbal hitches and gaps.
+
+The young fellow beside her rose hastily, and bade her good morning.
+She looked mildly surprised at such an abrupt departure, but she
+was not offended.
+
+'Good day, citizen,' she said, nodding to him. 'I disturb you?'
+
+He muttered something and strode away.
+
+How much time had that wasted of his irrevocable day that was to
+set him on Elise's track once more! The first post had been
+delivered by this time. Elise must either return to her studio or
+remove her possessions; anyhow, sooner or later the Merichats must
+have information. And if they were forbidden to speak, well, then
+they must be bribed.
+
+That made him think of money, and in a sudden panic he turned aside
+into a small street and examined his pockets. Nearly four napoleons
+left, after allowing for his debt to Madame Pyat, which must be
+payed that day. Even in his sick, stunned state of the evening
+before, when he was at last staggering on again, after his fall, to
+the Fontainebleau station, he had remembered to stop a Barbizon man
+whom he came across and give him a pencilled message for the
+deserted madame. He had sent her the Tue Chantal address, there
+would be a letter from her this morning. And he must put her on the
+watch, too--Elise could not escape him long.
+
+But he must have more money. He looked out for a stationer's shop,
+went in and wrote a letter to John, which he posted at the next
+post-office.
+
+It was an incoherent scrawl, telling the lad to change the cheque
+he enclosed in Bank of England notes and send them to the Rue
+Chantal, care of Madame Merichat. He was not to expect him back
+just yet, and was to say to any friend who might inquire that he
+was still detained.
+
+That letter, with the momentary contact it involved with his
+Manchester life, brought down upon him again the thought of Louie.
+But this time he flung it from him with a fierce impatience. His
+brain, indeed, was incapable of dealing with it. Remorse? rescue?
+there would be time enough for that by-and-by. Meanwhile--to find
+Elise!
+
+And for a week he spent the energies of every thought and every
+moment on this mad pursuit. Of these days of nightmare he could
+afterwards remember but a few detached incidents here and there. He
+recollected patrols up and down the Rue Chantal; talks with Madame
+Merichat; the gleam in her eyes as he slipped his profitless bribes
+into her hand; visits to Taranne's _atelier_, where the
+_concierge_ at last grew suspicious and reported the matter
+within; and finally an interview with the artist himself, from
+which the English youth emerged no nearer to his end than before,
+and crushed under the humiliation of the great man's advice. He
+could vaguely recall the long pacings of the Louvre; the fixed
+scrutiny of face after face; vain chases; ignominious retreats; and
+all the wretched stages of that slow descent into a bottomless
+despair! At last there was a letter--the long-expected letter to
+Madame Merichat, directing the removal of Mademoiselle Delaunay's
+possessions from the Rue Chantal. It was written by a certain M.
+Pimodan, who did not give his address, but who declared himself
+authorised by Mademoiselle Delaunay to remove her effects, and
+named a day when he would himself superintend the process and
+produce his credentials. David passed the time after the arrival of
+this letter in a state of excitement which left him hardly master
+of his actions. He had a room at the top of a wretched little hotel
+close to the Nord station, but he hardly ate or slept. The noises
+of Paris were agony to him night and day; he lived in a perpetual
+nausea of mind and body, hardly able at times to distinguish
+between the images of the brain and the impressions coming from
+without.
+
+Before the day came, a note was brought to him from the Rue
+Chantal. It was from M. Pimodan, and requested an interview.
+
+'I should be glad to see you on Mademoiselle Delaunay's behalf.
+Will you meet me in the Garden of the Luxembourg in front of the
+central pavilion, at three o'clock to-morrow?
+
+'GUSTAVE PIMODAN.'
+
+Before the hour came David was already pacing up and down the
+blazing gravel in front of the Palace. When M. Pimodan came the
+Englishman in an instant recognised the cousin--the lanky fellow
+with the spectacles, who had injured his eyes by reading.
+
+As soon as he had established this identification--and the two men
+had hardly exchanged half-a-dozen sentences before the flashing
+inward argument was complete--a feeling of enmity arose in his
+mind, so intense that he could hardly keep himself still, could
+hardly bring his attention to bear on what he or his companion was
+saying. He had been brought so low that, with anyone else, he must
+have broken into appeals and entreaties. With this man--No!
+
+As for M. Pimodan, the first sight of the young Englishman had
+apparently wrought in him also some degree of nervous shock; for
+the hand which held his cane fidgeted as he walked. He had the air
+of a person, too, who had lately gone through mental struggle; the
+red rims of the eyes under their large spectacles might be due
+either to chronic weakness or to recent sleeplessness.
+
+But however these things might be, he took a perfectly mild tone,
+in which David's sick and irritable sense instantly detected the
+note of various offensive superiorities--the superiority of class
+and the superiority of age to begin with. He said in the first
+place that he was Mademoiselle Delaunay's relative, and that she
+had commissioned him to act for her in this very delicate matter.
+She was well aware--had been aware from the first day--that she was
+watched, and that M. Grieve was moving heaven and earth to discover
+her whereabouts. She did not, however, intend to be discovered; let
+him take that for granted. In her view all was over--their relation
+was irrevocably at an end. She wished now to devote herself wholly
+and entirely to her art, without disturbance or distraction from
+any other quarter whatever. Might he, under these circumstances,
+give M. Grieve the advice of a man of the world, and counsel him to
+regard the matter in the same light?
+
+David walked blindly on, playing with his watch-chain. In the name
+of God whom and what was this fellow talking about? At the end of
+ten minutes' discourse on M. Pimodan's part, and of a few rare
+monosyllables on his own, he said, straightening his young figure
+with a nervous tremor:
+
+'What you say is perfectly useless--I shall find her.'
+
+Then a sudden angry light leapt into the cousin's eyes.
+
+'You will _not_ find her!' he said, drawing a sharp breath. 'It
+shows how little you know her, after all--compared with--those
+who--No matter! Oh, you can persecute and annoy her! No one doubts
+that. You can stand between her and all that she now cares to live
+for--her art. But you can do nothing else; and you will not be
+allowed to do that long, for she is not alone, as you seem to
+think. She will be protected. There are resources, and we shall
+employ them!'
+
+The cousin had gone beyond his commission. David guessed as much.
+He did not believe that Elise had set this man on to threaten him.
+What a fool! But he merely said with a sarcastic dryness,
+endeavouring the while to steady his parched lips and his eyelids
+swollen with weariness.
+
+'_A la bonne heure!_--employ them. Well, sir, you know, I
+believe, where Mademoiselle Delaunay is. I wish to know. You will
+not inform me. I therefore pursue my own way, and it is useless for
+me to detain you any longer.'
+
+'Know where she is!' cried the other, a triumphant flash passing
+across his sallow student's face; 'I have but just parted from her.'
+
+But he stopped. As a physician, he was accustomed to notice the
+changes of physiognomy. Instinctively he put some feet of distance
+between himself and his companion. Was it agony or rage he saw?
+
+But David recovered himself by a strong effort.
+
+'Go and tell her, then, that I shall find her,' he said with a
+shaking voice. 'I have many things to say to her yet.'
+
+'Absurd!' cried the other angrily. 'Very well, sir, we know what to
+expect. It only remains for us to take measures accordingly.'
+
+And drawing himself up he walked quickly away, looking back every
+now and then to see whether he were followed or no.
+
+'Supposing I did track him,' thought David vaguely, 'what would he
+do? Summon one of the various _gardiens_ in sight?'
+
+He had, however, no such intention. What could it have ended in but
+a street scuffle? Patience! and he would find Elise for himself in
+spite of that prater.
+
+Meanwhile he descended the terrace, and threw himself, worn out,
+upon the first seat, to collect his thoughts again.
+
+Oh, this summer beauty:--this festal moment of the great city!
+Palace and Garden lay under the full June sun. The clipped trees on
+the terraces, statues, alleys, and groves slept in the luminous
+dancing air. All the normal stir and movement of the Garden seemed
+to have passed to-day into the leaping and intermingling curves of
+the fountains; the few figures passing and repassing hardly
+disturbed the general impression of heat and solitude.
+
+For hours David sat there, head down, his eyes on the gravel, his
+hands tightly clasped between his knees. When he rose at last it
+was to hurry down the Rue de Seine and take the nearest bridge and
+street northwards to the Quartier Montmartre. He had been dreaming
+too long! and yet so great by now was his confusion of mind that he
+was no nearer a fresh plan of operations than when the cousin left
+him.
+
+When he arrived at Madame Merichat's _loge_ it was to find
+that no new development had occurred. Elise's possessions were
+still untouched; neither she nor M. Pimodan had given any further
+sign. The _concierge_, however, gave him a letter which had
+just arrived for him. Seeing that it bore the Manchester postmark,
+he thrust it into his pocket unread.
+
+When he entered the evil-smelling passage of his hotel, a
+_garcon_ emerged from the restaurant, dived into the _salle
+de lecture_, and came out with an envelope, which he gave to the
+Englishman. It had been left by a messenger five minutes before
+monsieur arrived. David took it, a singing in his ears; mounted to
+the first landing, where the gas burnt at midday, and read it.
+
+'Gustave tells me you would not listen to him. Do you want to make me
+curse our meeting? Be a man and leave me to myself! While I know that
+you are on the watch I shall keep away from Paris--_voila, tout_. I
+shall eat my heart out,--I shall begin to hate you,--you will have
+chosen it so. Only understand this: I will _never_ see you again, for
+both our sakes, if I can help it. Believe what I say--believe that what
+parts us is a fate stronger than either of us, and go! Oh! you men talk
+of love--and at bottom you are all selfish and cruel. Do you want to
+break me more than I am already broken? Set me free!--will you kill both
+my youth and my art together?'
+
+He carefully refolded the letter and put it into its envelope. Then
+he turned and went downstairs again towards the street. But the
+same frowsy waiter who had given him his letter was on the watch
+for him. In the morning monsieur had commanded some dinner. Would
+he take it now?
+
+The man's tone was sulky. David understood that he was not
+considered a profitable customer of the hotel--that, considering
+his queer ways, late hours, and small spendings, they would
+probably be glad to be rid of him. With a curious submission and
+shrinking he followed the man into the stifling restaurant and sat
+down at one of the tables.
+
+Here some food was brought to him, which he tried to eat. But in
+the midst of it he was seized with so great a loathing, that he
+suddenly rose, so violently as to upset a plate of bread beside
+him, and make a waiter spring forward to save the table itself. He
+pushed his way to the glass-door into the street, totally
+unconscious of the stir his behaviour was causing among the stout
+women in bonnets and the red-faced men with napkins tucked under
+their chins who were dining near, fumbled at the handle, and
+tottered out.
+
+'_Quel animal!_' said the enraged _dame du comptoir_,
+who had noticed the incident. 'Marie!'--this to the sickly girl who
+sat near with the books in front of her, 'enter that plate, and
+charge it high. To-morrow I shall raise the price of his room. One
+must really finish with him. _C'est un fou!_'
+
+Meanwhile David, revived somewhat by the air, was already in the
+Boulevard, making for Opera and the Rue Royale. It was not yet
+seven, the Salon would be still open. The distances seemed to
+him interminable--the length of the Rue Royale, the expanse
+of the Place de la Concorde, the gay and crowded ways of the
+Champs-Elysee. But at last he was mounting the stairs and battling
+through the rooms at the top. He looked first at the larger picture
+which had gained her _mention honorable_. It was a study of
+factory girls at their work, unequal, impatient, but full of a warm
+inventive talent--full of _her_. He knew its history--the
+small difficulties and triumphs of it, the adventures she had gone
+through on behalf of it--by heart. That fair-haired girl in the
+corner was studied from herself; the tint of the hair, the curve of
+the cheek were exact. He strained his eyes to look, searching for
+this detail and that. His heart said farewell--that was the last,
+the nearest he should ever come to her on this earth! Next year?
+Ah, he would give much to see her pictures of next year, with these
+new perceptions she had created in him.
+
+He stood a minute before the other picture, the portrait--a study
+from one of her comrades in the _atelier_--and then he wound
+his way again through the thronged and suffocating rooms, and out
+into the evening.
+
+The excessive heat of the last few days was about to end in storm.
+A wide tempestuous heaven lay beyond the Arc de Triomphe; the red
+light struck down the great avenue and into the faces of those
+stepping westwards. The deep shade under the full-leafed trees--how
+thinly green they were still against the sky that day when she
+vanished from him beside the arch and their love began!--was full
+of loungers and of playing children; the carriages passed and
+repassed in the light. So it had been, the enchanting never-ending
+drama, before this spectator entered--so it would be when he had
+departed.
+
+He turned southwards and found himself presently on the Quai de la
+Conference, hanging over the river in a quiet spot where few people
+passed.
+
+His frenzy of will was gone, and his last hope with it. Elise had
+conquered. Her letter had brought him face to face with those
+realities which, during this week of madness, he had simply refused
+to see. He could pit himself against her no longer. When it came to
+the point he had not the nerve to enter upon a degrading and
+ignoble conflict, in which all that was to be won was her hatred or
+her fear. That, indeed, would be the last and worst ruin, for it
+would be the ruin, not of happiness or of hope, but of love itself,
+and memory.
+
+He took out her letter and re-read it. Then he searched for some of
+the writing materials he had bought when he had written his last
+letter to Manchester, and, spreading a sheet on the parapet of the
+river wall, he wrote:
+
+'Be content. I think now--I am sure--that we shall never meet
+again. From this moment you will be troubled with me no more. Only
+I tell you for the last time that you have done ill--irrevocably
+ill. For what you have slain in yourself and me is not love or
+happiness, but _life_ itself--the life of life!'
+
+Foolish, incoherent words, as they seemed to him, but he could find
+no better. Confusedly and darkly they expressed the cry, the inmost
+conviction of his being. He could come no nearer at any rate to
+that desolation at the heart of him.
+
+But now what next? Manchester?--the resumption and expansion of his
+bookseller's life--the renewal of his old friendships--the pursuit
+of money and of knowledge?
+
+No. That is all done. The paralysis of will is complete. He cannot
+drive himself home, back to the old paths. The disgust with life
+has sunk too deep--the physical and moral collapse of which he is
+conscious has gone too far.
+
+_'Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of
+this death?'_
+
+There, deep in the fibre of memory lie these words, and others like
+them--the typical words of a religion which is still in some sense
+the ineradicable warp of his nature, as it had been for generations
+of his forefathers. His individual resources of speech, as it were,
+have been overpassed; he falls back upon the inherited, the
+traditional resources of his race.
+
+He looked up. A last gleam was on the Invalides--on the topmost
+roof of the Corps Legislatif; otherwise the opposite bank was
+already grey, the river lay in shade. But the upper air was still
+aglow with the wide flame and splendour of the sunset; and beneath,
+on the bridges and the water and the buildings, how clear and
+gracious was the twilight!
+
+_'Who shall deliver me?' 'Deliver thyself!'_ One instant, and
+the intolerable pressure on this shrinking point of consciousness
+can be lightened, this hunger for sleep appeased! Nothing else is
+possible--no future is even conceivable. His life in flowering has
+exhausted and undone itself, so spendthrift has been the process.
+
+So he took his resolve. Then, already calmed, he hung over the
+river, thinking, reviewing the past.
+
+Six weeks--six weeks only!--yet nothing in his life before matters
+or counts by comparison. For this mood of deadly fatigue the
+remembrance of all the intellectual joys and conquests of the last
+few years has no savour whatever. Strange that the development of
+one relation of life--the relation of passion--should have been
+able so to absorb and squander the power of living! His fighting,
+enduring capacity, compared with that of other men, must be small
+indeed. He thinks of himself as a coward and a weakling. But
+neither the facts of the present nor the face of the future are
+altered thereby.
+
+_The relation of sex_--in its different phases--as he sees the
+world at this moment, there is no other reality. The vile and
+hideous phase of it has been present to him from the first moment
+of his arrival in these Paris streets. He thinks of the pictures
+and songs at the 'Trois Rats' from which in the first delicacy and
+flush of passion he had shrunk with so deep a loathing; of the
+photographs and engravings in the shops and the books on the
+stalls; of some of those pictures he had passed, a few minutes
+before, in the Salon; of that girl's face in the Tuileries Gardens.
+The animal, the beast in human nature, never has it been so present
+to him before; for he has understood and realised it while loathing
+it, has been admitted by his own passion to those regions of human
+feeling where all that is most foul and all that is most beautiful
+are generated alike from the elemental forces of life. And because
+he had loved Elise so finely and yet so humanly, with a boy's
+freshness and a man's energy, this animalism of the great city had
+been to him a perpetual nightmare and horror. His whole heart had
+gone into Regnault's cry--into Regnault's protest. For his own
+enchanted island had seemed to him often in the days of his wooing
+to be but floating on the surface of a ghastly sea, whence emerged
+all conceivable shapes of ruin, mockery, terror, and disease. It
+was because of the tremulous adoration which filled him from the
+beginning that the vice of Paris had struck him in this tragical
+way. At another time it might have been indifferent to him, might
+even have engulfed him.
+
+But he!--he had known the best of passion! He laid his head down on
+the wall, and lived Barbizon over again--day after day, night after
+night. Now for the first time there is a pause in the urging
+madness of his despair. All the pulses of his being slacken; he
+draws back as it were from his own fate, surveys it as a whole,
+separates himself from it. The various scenes of it succeed each
+other in memory, set always--incomparably set--in the spring green
+of the forest, or under a charmed moonlight, or amid the flowery
+detail of a closed garden. Her little figure flashes before
+him--he sees her gesture, her smile; he hears his own voice
+and hers; recalls the struggle to express, the poverty of words,
+the thrill of silence, and that perpetual and exquisite recurrence
+to the interpreting images of poetry and art. But no poet had
+imagined better, had divined more than they in those earliest
+hours had _lived_! So he had told her, so he insisted now with
+a desperate faith.
+
+But, poor soul! even as he insists, the agony within rises, breaks
+up, overwhelms the picture. He lives again through the jars and
+frets of those few burning days, the growing mistrust of them, the
+sense of jealous terror and insecurity--and then through the
+anguish of desertion and loss. He writhes again under the wrenching
+apart of their half-fused lives--under this intolerable ache of his
+own wound.
+
+_This_ the best of passion! Why his whole soul is still
+athirst and ahungered. Not a single craving of it has been
+satisfied. What is killing him is the sense of a thwarted gift, a
+baffled faculty--the faculty of self-spending, self-surrender.
+This, the best?
+
+Then the mind fell into a whirlwind of half-articulate debate, from
+the darkness of which emerged two scenes--fragments--set clear in a
+passing light of memory.
+
+That workman and his wife standing together before the day's
+toil--the woman's contented smile as her look clung to the mean
+departing figure.
+
+And far, far back in his boyish life--Margaret sitting beside 'Lias
+in the damp autumn dawn, spending on his dying weakness that
+exquisite, ineffable passion of tenderness, of pity.
+
+Ah! from the very beginning he had been in love with loving. He
+drew the labouring breath of one who has staked his all for some
+long-coveted gain, and lost.
+
+Well!--Mr. Ancrum may be right--the English Puritan may be
+right--'sin' and 'law' may have after all some of those mysterious
+meanings his young analysis had impetuously denied them--he and
+Elise may have been only dashing themselves against the hard facts
+of the world's order, while they seemed to be transcending the
+common lot and spurning the common ways. What matter now! A certain
+impatient defiance rises in his stricken soul. He has made
+shipwreck of this one poor opportunity of life--confessed! now let
+the God behind it punish, if God there be. _'The rest is silence.
+'_ With Elise in his arms, he had grasped at immortality. Now a
+stubborn, everlasting 'Nay' possesses him. There is nothing beyond.
+
+He gathered up his letter, folded it, and put it into the
+breast--pocket of his coat. But in doing so his fingers touched
+once more the ragged edges of a bit of frayed paper.
+
+_Louie!_
+
+Through all these half-sane days and nights he had never once
+thought of his sister. She had passed out of his life--she had
+played no part even in the nightmares of his dreams.
+
+But now!--while that intense denial of any reality in the universe
+beyond and behind this masque of life and things was still
+vibrating through his deepest being, it was as though a hand gently
+drew aside a curtain, and there grew clear before him, slowly
+effacing from his eyes the whole grandiose spectacle of buildings,
+sky, and river, that scene of the past which had worked so potently
+both in his childish sense and in Reuben's maturer conscience--the
+bare room, the iron bed, the dying man, one child within his arm,
+the other a frightened baby beside him.
+
+It was frightfully clear, clearer than it had ever been in
+any normal state of brain, and as his mind lingered on it,
+unconsciously shaping, deepening its own creation, the weird
+impression grew that the helpless figure amid the bedclothes rose
+on its elbow, opened its cavernous eyes, and looked at him face to
+face, at the son whose childish heart had beat against his father's
+to the last. The boy's tortured soul quailed afresh before the
+curse his own remorse called into those eyes.
+
+He hung over the water pleading with the phantom--defending
+himself. Every now and then he found that he was speaking aloud;
+then he would look round with a quick, piteous terror to see
+whether he had been heard or no, the parched lips beginning to move
+again almost before his fear was soothed.
+
+All his past returned upon him, with its obligations, its fetters
+of conscience and kinship, so slowly forged, so often resisted and
+forgotten, and yet so strong. The moment marked the first passing
+away of the philtre, but it brought no recovery with it.
+
+_'My God! my God! I tried, father--I tried. But she is lost,
+lost--as I am!'_
+
+Then a thought found entrance and developed. He walked up and down
+the quay, wrestling it out, returning slowly and with enormous
+difficulty, because of his physical state, to some of the normal
+estimates and relations of life.
+
+At last he dragged himself off towards his hotel. He must have some
+sleep, or how could these hours that yet remained be lived
+through--his scheme carried out?
+
+On the way he went into a shop still open on the boulevard. When he
+came out he thrust his purchase into his pocket, buttoned his coat
+over it, and pursued his way northwards with a brisker step.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Two days afterwards David stood at the door of a house in the
+outskirts of the Auteuil district of Paris. The street had a
+half-finished, miscellaneous air; new buildings of the villa type
+were mixed up with old and dingy houses standing in gardens, which
+had been evidently overtaken by the advancing stream of Paris,
+having once enjoyed a considerable amount of country air and space.
+
+It was at the garden gate of one of these older houses that David
+rang, looking about him the while at the mean irregular street and
+the ill-kept side-walks with their heaps of cinders and refuse.
+
+A powerfully built woman appeared, scowling, in answer to the bell.
+At first she flatly refused the new-comer admission. But David was
+prepared. He set to work to convince her that he was not a Paris
+creditor, and, further, that he was well aware M. Montjoie was not
+at home, since he had passed him on the other side of the road,
+apparently hurrying to the railway station, only a few minutes
+before. He desired simply to see madame. At this the woman's
+expression changed somewhat. She showed, however, no immediate
+signs of letting him in, being clearly chosen and paid to be a
+watch-dog. Then David brusquely put his hand in his pocket. Somehow
+he must get this harridan out of the way at once! The same terror
+was upon him that had been upon him now for many days and
+nights--of losing command of himself, of being no more able to do
+what he had to do.
+
+The creature studied him, put out a greedy palm, developed a smile
+still more repellent than her brutality, and let him in.
+
+He found himself in a small, neglected garden; in front of him, to
+the right, a wretched, weather-stained house, bearing every mark of
+poverty and dilapidation, while to the left there stretched out
+from the house a long glass structure, also in miserable
+condition--a sculptor's studio, as he guessed.
+
+His guide led him to the studio-door. Madame was there a few
+minutes ago. As they approached, David stopped.
+
+'I will knock. You may go back to the house. I am madame's brother.'
+
+She looked at him once more, reluctant. Then, in the clearer light
+of the garden, the likeness of the face to one she already knew
+struck her with amazement; she turned and went off, muttering.
+
+David knocked at the door; there was a movement within, and it was
+cautiously opened.
+
+'_Monsieur est sorti._--You!'
+
+The brother and sister were face to face.
+
+David closed the door behind him, and Louie retreated slowly, her
+hands behind her, her tall figure drawing itself up, her face
+setting into a frowning scorn.
+
+'_You!_--what are you here for? We have done with each other!'
+
+For answer David went up to a stove which was feebly burning in the
+damp, cheerless place, put down his hat and stick, and bent over
+it, stretching out his hands to the warmth. A chair was beside it,
+and on the chair some scattered bits of silk and velvet, out of
+which Louie was apparently fashioning a hat.
+
+She stood still, observing him. She was in a loose dress of some
+silky Oriental material, and on her black hair she wore a red
+close-fitting cap with a fringe of golden coins dropping lightly
+and richly round her superb head and face.
+
+'What is the matter with you?' she asked him grimly, after a
+minute's silence.' She has left you--that's plain!'
+
+The young man involuntarily threw back his head as though he had
+been struck, and a vivid colour rushed into his cheek. But he
+answered quickly:
+
+'We need not discuss my affairs. I did not come here to speak of
+them. They are beyond mending. I came to see--before I go--whether
+there is anything I can do to help you.'
+
+'Much obliged to you!' she cried, flinging herself down on the edge
+of a rough board platform, whereon stood a fresh and vigorous
+clay-study, for which she had just been posing, to judge from her
+dress. Beyond was the Maenad. And in the distance loomed a great
+block of marble, upon which masons had been working that afternoon.
+
+'I am _greatly_ obliged to you!' she repeated mockingly,
+taking the crouching attitude of an animal ready to attack. 'You are
+a pattern brother.'
+
+Her glowing looks expressed the enmity and contempt she was at the
+moment too excited to put into words.
+
+David drew his hand across his eyes with a long breath. How was he
+to get through it, this task of his, with this swollen, aching
+brain and these trembling limbs? Louie _must_ let him speak;
+he bitterly felt his physical impotence to wrestle with her.
+
+He went up to her slowly and sat down beside her. She drew away
+from him with a violent movement. But he laid his hand upon her
+knee--a shaking hand which his impatient will tried in vain to
+steady.
+
+'Louie, look at me!' he commanded.
+
+She did so unwillingly, but the proud repulsion of her lip did not
+relax.
+
+'Well, I dare say you look pretty bad. Whose fault is it? everybody
+else but you knew what the creature was worth. Ask anybody!'
+
+The lad's frame straightened and steadied. He took his hand from
+her knee.
+
+'Say that kind of thing again,' he said calmly, 'and I walk straight
+out of that door, and you set eyes on me for the last time. That
+would be what you want, I dare say. All I wish to point out is,
+that you would be a great fool. I have not come here to-day to waste
+words, but to propose something to your advantage--your
+money-advantage,' he repeated deliberately, looking round the
+dismal building with its ill-mended gaps and rents, and its
+complete lack of the properties and appliances to which the
+humblest modern artist pretends. 'To judge from what I heard in
+Paris, and what I see, money is scarce here.'
+
+His piteous sudden wish to soften her, to win a kind word from her,
+from anyone, had passed away. He was beginning to take command of
+her as in the old days.
+
+'Well, maybe we are hard up,' she admitted slowly. 'People are such
+brutes and won't wait, and a sculptor has to pay out for a lot of
+things before he can make anything at all. But that statue will put
+it all right,' and she pointed behind her to the Maenad. 'It's
+me--it's the one you tried to put a stopper on.'
+
+She looked at him darkly defiant. She was leaning back on one arm,
+her foot beating with the trick familiar to her. For reckless and
+evil splendour the figure was unsurpassable.
+
+'When he sells that,' she went on, seeing that he did not answer,
+'and he will sell it in a jiffy--it is the best he's ever
+done--there'll be heaps of money.'
+
+David smiled.
+
+'For a week perhaps. Then, if I understand this business aright--I
+have been doing my best, you perceive, to get information, and M.
+Montjoie seems to be better known than one supposed to half
+Paris--the game will begin again.'
+
+'Never you mind,' she broke in, breathing quickly. 'Give me my
+money--the money that belongs to me--and let me alone.'
+
+'On one condition,' he said quietly. 'That money, as you remember,
+is in my hands and at my disposal.'
+
+'Ah! I supposed you would try to grab it!' she cried.
+
+Even he was astonished at her violence--her insolence. The demon in
+her had never been so plain, the woman never so effaced. His heart
+dropped within him like lead, and his whole being shrank from her.
+
+'Listen to me!' he said, seizing her strongly by the hand, while a
+light of wrath leapt into his changed and bloodshot eyes. 'This man
+will desert you; in a year's time he will have tired of you;
+what'll you do then?'
+
+'Manage for myself, thank you! without any canting interference
+from you. I have had enough of that.'
+
+'And fall again,' he said, releasing her, and speaking with a
+deliberate intensity; 'fall again--from infamy to infamy!'
+
+She sprang up.
+
+'Mind yourself!' she cried.
+
+Miserable moment! As he looked at her he felt that that weapon of
+his old influence with her which, poor as it was, he had relied on
+in the last resort all his life, had broken in his hand. His own
+act had robbed it of all virtue. That pang of 'irreparableness'
+which had smitten Elise smote him now. All was undone--all was
+done!
+
+He buried his face in his hands an instant. When he lifted it
+again, she was standing with her arms folded across her chest,
+leaning against an iron shaft which supported part of the roof.
+
+'You had better go!' she said, still in a white heat. 'Why you ever
+came I don't know. If you won't give me that money, I shall get it
+somehow.'
+
+Suddenly, as she spoke, everything--the situation, the subject of
+their talk, the past--seemed to be wiped out of David's brain. He
+stared round him helplessly. Why were they there--what had
+happened?
+
+This blankness lasted a certain number of seconds. Then it passed
+away, and he painfully recovered his identity. But the experience
+was not new to him--it would recur--let him be quick.
+
+This time a happier instinct served him. He, too, rose and went up
+to her.
+
+'We are a pair of fools,' he said to her, half bitterly, half
+gently; 'we reproach and revile each other, and all the time I am
+come to give you not only what is yours, but all--all I have--that
+it may stand between you and--and worse ruin.'
+
+'Ruin!' she said, throwing back her head and catching at the word;
+'speak for yourself! If I am Montjoie's mistress, Elise Delaunay
+was yours. Don't preach. It won't go down.'
+
+'I have no intention of preaching--don't alarm yourself,' he
+replied quietly, this time controlling himself without difficulty.'
+
+'I have only this to say. On the day when you become Montjoie's
+wife, all our father's money--all the six hundred pounds Mr. Gurney
+paid over to me in January, shall be paid to you.'
+
+She started, caught her breath, tried to brazen it out.
+
+'What is this idiocy for?' she asked coldly. 'What does marrying
+matter to you?'
+
+He sank down again on the chair by the stove, being, indeed, unable
+to stand.
+
+'Perhaps I can't tell you,' he said, after a pause, shading his
+face from her with his hand; 'perhaps I could not make plain to
+myself what I feel. But this I know--that this man with whom you
+are living here is a man for whom nobody has a good word. I want to
+give you a hold over him. But first--stop a moment, '--he dropped
+his hand and looked up eagerly, 'will you leave him--leave him at
+once? I could arrange that.'
+
+'Make your mind easy,' she said shortly; 'he suits me--I stay. I
+went with him, well, because I was dull--and because I wanted to
+make you smart for it, if you're keen to know!--but if you think I
+am anxious to go home, to be cried over by Dora and lectured by
+you, you're vastly mistaken. I can manage him! I have my hold on
+him--he knows very well what I am worth to him.'
+
+She threw her head back superbly against the iron shaft, putting
+one arm round it and resting her hot cheek against it as though for
+coolness.
+
+'Why should we argue?' he said sharply--after a wretched silence.
+'I didn't come for that. If you won't leave him I have only this to
+say. On the day he marries you, if the evidence of the marriage is
+satisfactory to an English lawyer I have discovered in Paris and
+whose address I will give you, six hundred pounds will be paid over
+to you. It is there now, in the lawyer's hands. If not, I go home,
+and the law does not compel me to hand you over one farthing.'
+
+She was silent, and began to pace up and down.
+
+'Montjoie despises marriage,' she said presently.
+
+'Try whether he despises money too,' said David, and could not for
+the life of him keep the sarcastic note out of his voice.
+
+She bit her lip.
+
+'And when, if it is done, must this precious thing be settled?'
+
+'If your marriage does not take place within a month, Mr.
+O'Kelly--I will leave you his address,' he put his hand into his
+pocket--'has orders to return the money--'
+
+'To whom?' she inquired, struck by his sudden break.
+
+'To me, of course,' he said slowly. 'Is it perfectly plain? do you
+understand? Now, then, listen. I have inquired what the law is--you
+will have to be married both at the mairie and by the chaplain at
+the British embassy.'
+
+She stopped suddenly in her walk and confronted him.
+
+'If I am married at all,' she said abruptly, 'I shall be married as
+a Catholic.'
+
+'A Catholic!' David stared at her. She enjoyed his astonishment.
+
+'Oh, I have had that in my mind for a long time,' she said
+scornfully. 'There is a priest at that church with the steps, you
+know, near that cemetery place on the hill, who is very much
+interested in me indeed. He speaks English. I used to go to
+confession. Madame Cervin told me all about it, and how to do it; I
+did it exact! Oh, if I am to be married, that will make it plain
+sailing enough. It was awkward--while--'
+
+She broke off and sat down again beside him, pondering and smiling
+as he had seen her do in Manchester, when she had the prospect of a
+new dress or some amusement that excited her.
+
+'How have you been able to think about such things?' he asked her,
+marvelling.
+
+'Think about them! What was the good of that? It's the churches I like,
+and the priests. Now there _is_ something to see in the Paris churches,
+like the Madeleine--worth a dozen St. Damian's,--you may tell Dora that.
+The flowers and the dresses and the music--they _are_ something like.
+And the priests--'
+
+She smiled again, little meditative smiles, as though she were
+recalling her experiences.
+
+'Well, I don't know that there's much about them,' she said at
+last; 'they're queer, and they're awfully clever, and they want to
+manage you, of course.'
+
+She stopped, quite unable to express herself any more fully. But it
+was evident that the traditional relation of the Catholic priest to
+his penitent had been to her a subject of curiosity and
+excitement--that she would gladly know more of it.
+
+David could hardly believe his ears. He sat lost at first in the
+pure surprise of it, in the sense of Louie's unlikeness to any
+other human creature he had ever seen. Then a gleam of satisfaction
+arose. He had heard of the hold on women possessed by the Catholic
+Church, and maintained by her marvellous, and on the whole
+admirable, system of direction. For himself, he would have no
+priests of whatever Church. But his mind harboured none of the
+common Protestant rules and shibboleths. In God's name, let the
+priests get hold of this sister of his:--if they could--when he--
+
+'Marry this man, then!' he said to her at last, breaking the silence
+abruptly,' and square it with the Church, if you want to.'
+
+'Oh, indeed!' she said mockingly. 'So you have nothing to say
+against my turning Catholic? I should like to see Uncle Reuben's
+face.'
+
+Her voice had the exultant mischief of a child. It was evident that
+her spirits were rising, that her mood towards her brother was
+becoming more amiable.
+
+'Nothing,' he said dryly, replying to her question.
+
+Then he got up and looked for his hat. She watched him askance.
+'What are you going for? I could get you some tea. _He_ won't
+be in for hours.'
+
+'I have said what I had to say. These'--taking a paper from his
+pocket and laying it down, 'are all the directions, legal and other,
+that concern you, as to the marriage. I drew them up this morning,
+with Mr. O'Kelly. I have given you his address. You can communicate
+with him at any time.'
+
+'I can write to you, I suppose?'
+
+'Better write to him,' he said quietly, 'he has instructions. He
+seemed to me a good sort.'
+
+'Where are you going?'
+
+'Back to Paris, and then--home.'
+
+She placed herself in his way, so that the sunny light of the late
+afternoon, coming mostly from behind her, left her face in shadow.
+
+'What'll you do without that money?' she asked abruptly.
+
+He paused, getting together his answer with difficulty.
+
+'I have the stock, and there is something left of the sixty pounds
+Uncle Reuben brought. I shall do.'
+
+'He'll muddle it all,' she said roughly. 'What's the good?'
+
+And she folded her arms across her with the recklessness of one
+quite ready and eager, if need be, to fight her own battle, with
+her own weapons, in her own way.
+
+'Get Mr. O'Kelly to keep it, if you can persuade him, and draw it
+by degrees. I'd have made a trust of it, if it had been enough; but
+it isn't. Twenty-four pounds a year: that's all you'd get, if we
+tied up the capital.'
+
+She laughed. Evidently her acquaintance with Montjoie had enlarged
+her notions of money, which were precise and acute enough before.
+
+'He spends that in a supper when he's in cash. I'll be curious to
+see whether, all in a lump, it'll be enough to make him marry me.
+Still, he is precious hard up: he don't stir out till dark, he's so
+afraid of meeting people.'
+
+'That's my hope,' said David heavily, hardly knowing what he said.
+'Good-bye.'
+
+'Hope!' she re-echoed bitterly. 'What d'you want to tie me to him
+for, for good and all?'
+
+And, turning away from him, she stared, frowning, through the dingy
+glass door in to the darkening garden. In her mind there was once
+more that strange uprising swell of reaction--of hatred of herself
+and life.
+
+Why, indeed? David could not have answered her question. He only
+knew that there was a blind instinct in him driving him to this, as
+the best that remained open--the only _ainde_ possible for
+what had been so vilely done by himself, by her, and by the man who
+had worked out her fall for a mere vicious whim. There was no word
+in any mouth, it seemed to him, of his being in love with her.
+
+There were all sorts of whirling thoughts in his mind--fragments
+cast up by the waves of desolate experience he had been passing
+through--inarticulate cries of warning, judgment, pain. But he
+could put nothing into words.
+
+'Good-bye, Louie!'
+
+She turned and stood looking at him.
+
+'What made you get ill?' she inquired, eyeing him.
+
+His thirsty heart drank in the change of tone.
+
+'I don't sleep,' he said hurriedly. 'It's the noise. The Nord
+station is never quiet. Well, mind you've got to bring that off.
+Keep the papers safe. Good-bye, for a long time'.
+
+'I can come over when I want?' she said half sullenly.
+
+'Yes,' he assented, 'but you won't want.'
+
+He drew her by the hand with a solemn tremulous feeling, and kissed
+her on the cheek. He would have liked to give her their father's
+dying letter. It was there, in his coat-pocket. But he shrank from
+the emotion of it. No, he must go. He had done all he could.
+
+She opened the door for him, and took him to the garden-gate in
+silence.
+
+'When I'm married,' she said shortly, 'if ever I am--Lord knows!--you
+can tell Uncle Reuben and Dora?'
+
+'Yes. Good-bye.'
+
+The gate closed behind him. He went away, hurrying towards the
+Auteuil station.
+
+When he landed again in the Paris streets, he stood irresolute.
+
+'One more look,' he said to himself, 'one more.'
+
+And he turned down the Rue Chantal. There was the familiar archway,
+and the light shining behind the porter's door. Was her room
+already stripped and bare, or was the broken glass--poor dumb
+prophet!--still there, against the wall?
+
+He wandered on through the lamp-lit city and the crowded pavements.
+Elise--the wraith of her--went with him, hand in hand, ghost with
+ghost, amid this multitude of men. Sometimes, breaking from this
+dream-companionship, he would wake with terror to the perception of
+his true, his utter loneliness. He was not made to be alone, and
+the thought that nowhere in this great Paris was there a single
+human being to whose friendly eye or hand he might turn him in his
+need, swept across him from time to time, contracting the heart.
+Dora--Mr. Ancrum--if they knew, they would be sorry.
+
+Then again indifference and blankness came upon him, and he could
+only move feebly on, seeing everything in a blur and mist. After
+these long days and nights of sleeplessness, semi-starvation, and
+terrible excitement, every nerve was sick, every organ out of gear.
+The lights of the Tuileries, the stately pile of the Louvre, under
+a gray driving sky.--There would be rain soon--ah, there it came!
+the great drops hissing along the pavement. He pushed on to the
+river, careless of the storm, soothed, indeed, by the cool dashes
+of rain in his face and eyes.
+
+The Place de la Concorde seemed to him as day, so brilliant
+was the glare of its lamps. To the right, the fairyland of the
+Champs-Elysees, the trees tossing under the sudden blast; in front,
+the black trench of the river. On, on--let him see it all--gather
+it all into his accusing heart and brain, and then at a stroke blot
+out the inward and the outward vision, and 'cease upon the midnight
+with no pain'!
+
+He walked till he could walk no more; then he sank on a dark seat
+on the Quai Saint-Michel, cursing himself. Had he no nerve left for
+the last act--was that what this delay, this fooling meant? Coward!
+
+But not here! not in these streets--this publicity! Back--to this
+little noisome room. There lock the door, and make an end!
+
+On the way northward, at the command of a sudden caprice, he sat
+outside a blazing cafe on the Boulevard and ordered absinthe, which
+he had never tasted. While he waited he looked round on the painted
+women, on the men escorting them, on the loungers with their
+newspapers and cigars, the shouting, supercilious waiters. But all
+the little odious details of the scene escaped him; he felt only
+the touchingness of his human comradeship, the yearning of a common
+life, bruised and wounded but still alive within him.
+
+Then he drank the stuff they gave him, loathed it, paid and
+staggered on. When he reached his hotel he crept upstairs, dreading
+to meet any of the harsh-faced people who frowned as he passed
+them. He had done abject things these last three days to conciliate
+them--tipped the waiter, ordered food, not that he might eat it but
+that he might pay for it, bowed to the landlady--all to save the
+shrinking of his sore and quivering nerves. In vain! It seemed to
+him that since that last look from Elise as she nestled into the
+fern, there had been no kindness for him in human eyes--save,
+perhaps, from that woman with the child.
+
+As he dragged himself up to his fourth floor, the stimulant he had
+taken began to work upon his starved senses. The key was in his
+door, he turned it and fell into his room, while the door, with the
+key still in it, swung to behind him. Guiding himself by the
+furniture, he reached the only chair the room possessed--an
+arm-chair of the commonest and cheapest hotel sort, which, because
+of the uncertainty of its legs, the _femme de chambre_ had
+propped up against the bed. He sat down in it and his head fell
+back on the counterpane. There was much to do. He had to write to
+John about the sale of his stock and the payment of his debts. He
+had to put his father's letter into an envelope for Louie, to send
+all the papers and letters he had on him and a last message to Mr.
+Ancrum, and then to post these letters, so that nothing private
+might fall into the hands of the French police, who would, of
+course, open his bag.
+
+While these thoughts were rising in him, a cloud came over the
+brain, bringing with it, as it seemed, the first moment of ease
+which had been his during this awful fortnight. Before he yielded
+himself to it he thrust his hand into his coat-pocket with a sudden
+vague anxiety to feel what was there. But even as he withdrew his
+fingers they relaxed; a black object came with them, and fell
+unheeded, first on his knee, then on to a coat lying on the floor
+between him and the window.
+
+A quarter of an hour afterwards there was a stir and voices on the
+landing outside. Some one knocked at the door of No. 139. No
+answer. 'The key is in the door. _Ouvrez donc!_' cried the
+waiter, as he ran downstairs again to the restaurant, which was
+still crowded. The visitor opened the door and peeped in. Some
+quick words broke from him. He rushed in and up to the bed. But
+directly the heavy feverish breathing of the figure in the chair
+caught his ear his look of sudden horror relaxed, and he fell back,
+looking at the sleeping youth.
+
+It was a piteous sight he saw! Exhaustion, helplessness, sorrow,
+physical injury, and moral defeat, were written in every line of
+the poor drawn face and shrunken form. The brow was furrowed, the
+breathing hard, the mouth dry and bloodless. Upon the mind of the
+new-comer, possessed as it was with the image of what David Grieve
+had been two short months before, the effect of the spectacle was
+presently overwhelming.
+
+He fell on his knees beside the sleeper. But as he did so, he
+noticed the black thing on the floor, stooped to it, and took it
+up. That it should be a loaded revolver seemed to him at that
+moment the most natural thing in the world, little used as he
+personally was to such possessions. He looked at it carefully, took
+out the two cartridges it contained, put them into one pocket and
+the revolver into the other.
+
+Then he laid his arm round the lad's neck.
+
+'David!'
+
+The young man woke directly and sat up, shaking with terror and
+excitement. He pushed his visitor from him, looking at him with
+defiance. Then he slipped his hand inside his coat and sprang up
+with a cry.
+
+'David!--dear boy--dear fellow!'
+
+The voice penetrated the lad's ear. He caught his visitor and
+dragged him forward to the light. It fell on the twisted face and
+wet eyes of Mr. Ancrum. So startling was the vision, so poignant
+were the associations which it set vibrating, that David stood
+staring and trembling, struck dumb.
+
+'Oh, my poor lad! my poor lad! John wanted me to come yesterday,
+and I delayed. I was a selfish wretch. Now I will take you home.'
+
+David fell again upon his chair, too feeble to speak, too feeble
+even to weep, the little remaining colour ebbing from his cheeks.
+The minister used all his strength, and laid him on the bed. Then
+he rang and made even the callous and haughty madame, who was
+presently summoned, listen to and obey him while he sent for brandy
+and a doctor, and let the air of the night into the stifling room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+In two or three days the English doctor who was attending David
+strongly advised Mr. Ancrum to get his charge home. The fierce
+strain his youth had sustained acting through the nervous system
+had disordered almost every bodily function, and the collapse which
+followed Mr. Ancrum's appearance was severe. He would lie in his
+bed motionless and speechless, volunteered no confidence, and
+showed hardly any rallying power.
+
+'Get him out of this furnace and that doghole of a room,' said the
+doctor. 'He has come to grief here somehow--that's plain. You won't
+make anything of him till you move him.'
+
+When the lad was at last stretched on the deck of a Channel steamer
+speeding to the English coast, and the sea breeze had brought a
+faint touch of returning colour to his cheek, he asked the question
+he had never yet had the physical energy to ask.
+
+'Why did you come, and how did you find me?'
+
+Then it appeared that the old cashier at Heywood's bank, who had
+taken a friendly interest in the young bookseller since the opening
+of his account, had dropped a private word to John in the course of
+conversation, which had alarmed that youth not a little. His own
+last scrawl from David had puzzled and disquieted him, and he
+straightway marched off to Mr. Ancrum to consult. Whereupon the
+minister wrote cautiously and affectionately to David asking for
+some prompt and full explanation of things for his friends' sake.
+The letter was, as we know, never opened, and therefore never
+answered. Whereupon John's jealous misery on Louie's account and
+Mr. Ancrum's love for David had so worked that the minister had
+broken in upon his scanty savings and started for Paris at a few
+hours' notice. Once in the Rue Chantal he had come easily on
+David's track.
+
+Naturally he had inquired after Louie as soon as David was in a
+condition to be questioned at all. The young man hesitated a
+moment, then he said resolutely, 'She is married,' and would say no
+more. Mr. Ancrum pressed the matter a little, but his patient
+merely shook his head, and the sight of him as he lay there on the
+pillow was soon enough to silence the minister.
+
+On the evening before they left Paris he called for a telegraph
+form, wrote a message and paid the reply, but Mr. Ancrum saw
+nothing of either. When the reply arrived David crushed it in his
+hand with a strange look, half bitterness, half relief, and flung
+it behind a piece of furniture standing near.
+
+Now, on the cool, wind-swept deck, he seemed more inclined to talk
+than he had been yet. He asked questions about John and the
+Lomaxes--he even inquired after Lucy, as to whom the minister who
+had lately improved an acquaintance with Dora and her father, begun
+through David, could only answer vaguely that he believed she was
+still in the south. But he volunteered nothing about his own
+affairs or the cause of the state in which Mr. Ancrum had found
+him.
+
+Every now and then, indeed, as they stood together at the side of
+the vessel, David leaning heavily against it, his words would fail
+him altogether, and he would be left staring stupidly, the great
+black eyes widening, the lower lip falling--over the shifting
+brilliance of the sea.
+
+Ancrum was almost sure too that in the darkness of their last night
+in Paris there had been, hour after hour, a sound of hard and
+stifled weeping, mingled with the noises from the street and from
+the station; and to-day the youth in the face was more quenched
+than ever, in spite of the signs of reviving health. There had been
+a woman in the case, of course: Louie might have misbehaved
+herself; but after all the world is so made that no sister can make
+a brother suffer as David had evidently suffered--and then there
+was the revolver! About this last, after one or two restless
+movements of search, which Mr. Ancrum interpreted, David had never
+asked, and the minister, timid man of peace that he was, had resold
+it before leaving.
+
+Well, it was a problem, and it must be left to time. Meanwhile Mr.
+Ancrum was certainly astonished that _any_ love affair should
+have had such a destructive volcanic power with the lad. For it was
+no mere raw and sensuous nature, no idle and morbid brain. One
+would have thought that so many different aptitudes and capacities
+would have kept each other in check.
+
+As they neared Manchester, David grew plainly restless and ill at
+ease. He looked out sharply for the name of each succeeding town,
+half turning afterwards, as though to speak to his companion; but
+it was not till they were within ten minutes of the Central Station
+that he said--
+
+'John will want to know about Louie. She is married,--as I told
+you,--to a French sculptor. I have handed over to her all my
+father's money--that is why I drew it out.'
+
+Mr. Ancrum edged up closer to him--all ears--waiting for more. But
+there was nothing more.
+
+'And you are satisfied?' he said at last.
+
+David nodded and looked out of window intently.
+
+'What is the man's name?'
+
+David either did not or would not hear, and Mr. Ancrum let him
+alone. But the news was startling. So the boy had stripped himself,
+and must begin the world again as before! What had that minx been
+after?
+
+Manchester again. David looked out eagerly from the cab, his hand
+trembling on his knee, beads of perspiration on his face.
+
+They turned up the narrow street, and there in the distance to the
+right was the stall and the shop, and a figure on the steps. Mr.
+Ancrum had sent a card before them, and John was on the watch.
+
+The instant the cab stopped, and before the driver could dismount,
+John had opened the door. Putting his head in he peered at the pair
+inside, and at the opposite seat, with his small short-sighted
+eyes.
+
+'Where is she?' he said hoarsely, barring the way.
+
+Mr. Ancrum looked at his companion. David had shrunk back into the
+corner, with a white hangdog look, and said nothing. The minister
+interposed.
+
+'David will tell you all,' he said gently. 'First help me in with
+him, and the bags. He is a sick man.'
+
+With a huge effort John controlled himself, and they got inside.
+Then he shut the shop door and put his back against it.
+
+'Tell me where she is,' he repeated shortly.
+
+'She is married,' David said in a low voice, but looking up from
+the chair on which he had sunk.' By now--she is married. I heard by
+telegram last night that all was arranged for to-day.'
+
+The lad opposite made a sharp, inarticulate sound which startled
+the minister's ear. Then clutching the handle of the door, he
+resumed sharply--
+
+'Who has she married?'
+
+The assumption of the right to question was arrogance
+itself--strange in the dumb, retiring creature whom the minister
+had hitherto known only as David's slave and shadow!
+
+'A French sculptor,' said David steadily, but propping his head and
+hand against the counter, so as to avoid John's stare--'a man
+called Montjoie. I was a brute--I neglected her. She got into his
+hands. Then I sent for all my money to bribe him to marry her. And
+he has.'
+
+'You--you _blackguard!_' cried John.
+
+David straightened instinctively under the blow, and his eyes met
+John's for one fierce moment. Then Mr. Ancrum thought he would have
+fainted. The minister took rough hold of John by the shoulders.
+
+'If you can't stay and hold your tongue,' he said, 'you must go. He
+is worn out with the journey, and I shall get him to bed. Here's
+some money: suppose you run to the house round the corner, in
+Prince's Street; ask if they've got some strong soup, and, if they
+have, hurry back with it. Come--look sharp. And--one moment--you've
+been sleeping here, I suppose? Well, I shall take your room for a
+bit, if that'll suit you. This fellow'll have to be looked after.'
+
+The little lame creature spoke like one who meant to have his way.
+John took the coin, hesitated, and stumbled out.
+
+For days afterwards there was silence between him and David, except
+for business directions. He avoided being in the shop with his
+employer, and would stand for hours on the step, ostensibly
+watching the stall, but in reality doing no business that he could
+help. Whenever Mr. Ancrum caught sight of him he was leaning
+against the wall, his hat slouched over his eyes, his hands in his
+pockets, utterly inert and listless, more like a log than a human
+being. Still he was no less stout, lumpish, and pink-faced than
+before. His fate might have all the tragic quality; nature had none
+the less inexorably endowed him with the externals of farce.
+
+Meanwhile David dragged himself from his bed to the shop and set to
+work to pick up dropped threads. The customers, who had been
+formerly interested in him, discovered his return, and came in to
+inquire why he had been so long away, or, in the case of one or
+two, whether he had executed certain commissions in Paris. The
+explanation of illness, however, circulated from the first moment
+by Mr. Ancrum, and perforce adopted--though with an inward rage and
+rebellion--by David himself, was amply sufficient to cover his
+omissions and inattentions, and to ease his resumption of his old
+place. His appearance indeed was still ghastly. The skin of the
+face had the tightened, transparent look of weakness; the eyes,
+reddened and sunk, showed but little of their old splendour between
+the blue circles beneath and the heavy brows above; even the hair
+seemed to have lost its boyish curl, and fell in harsh, troublesome
+waves over the forehead, whence its owner was perpetually and
+impatiently thrusting it back. All the bony structure of the face
+had been emphasised at the expense of its young grace and bloom,
+and the new indications of moustache and beard did but add to its
+striking and painful black and white. And the whole impression of
+change was completed by the melancholy aloofness, the shrinking
+distrust with which eyes once overflowing with the frankness and
+eagerness of one of the most accessible of human souls now looked
+out upon the world.
+
+'Was it fever?' said a young Owens College professor who had taken
+a lively interest from the beginning in the clever lad's venture.
+'Upon my word! you do look pulled down. Paris may be the first city
+in the world--it is an insanitary hole all the same. So you never
+found time to inquire after those Moliere editions for me?'
+
+David racked his brains. What was it he had been asked to do? He
+remembered half an hour's talk on one of those early days with a
+bookseller on the Quai Voltaire--was it about this commission? He
+could not recall.
+
+'No, sir,' he said, stammering and flushing. 'I believe I did ask
+somewhere, but I can't remember.'
+
+'It's very natural, very natural,' said the professor kindly.
+'Never mind. I'll send you the particulars again, and you can keep
+your eyes open for me. And, look here, take your business easy for
+a while. You'll get on--you're sure to get on--if you only recover
+your health.'
+
+David opened the door for him in silence.
+
+The reawakening of his old life in him was strange and slow. When
+he first found himself back among his books and catalogues, his
+ledgers and business memoranda, he was bewildered and impatient.
+What did these elaborate notes, with their cabalistic signs and
+abbreviations--whether as to the needs of customers, or the
+whereabouts of books, or the history of prices--mean or matter? He
+was like a man who has lost a sense. Then the pressure of certain
+debts which should have been met out of the money in the bank first
+put some life into him. He looked into his financial situation and
+found it grave, though not desperate. All hope of a large and easy
+expansion of business was, of course, gone. The loss of his capital
+had reduced him to the daily shifts and small laborious
+accumulations with which he had begun. But this factor in his state
+was morally of more profit to him at the moment than any other.
+With such homely medicines nature and life can often do most for
+us.
+
+Such was Ancrum's belief, and in consequence he showed a very
+remarkable wisdom during these early days of David's return.
+
+'As far as I can judge, there has been a bad shake to the heart in
+more senses than one,' had been the dry remark of the Paris doctor;
+'and as for nervous system, it's a mercy he's got any left. Take
+care of him, but for Heaven's sake don't make an invalid of
+him--that would be the finish.'
+
+So that Ancrum offered no fussy opposition to the resumption of the
+young man's daily work, though at first it produced a constant
+battle with exhaustion and depression. But never day or night did
+the minister forget his charge. He saw that he ate and drank; he
+enforced a few common sense remedies for the nervous ills which the
+moral convulsion had left behind it, ills which the lad in his
+irritable humiliation would fain have hidden even from him; above
+all he knew how to say a word which kept Dora and Daddy and other
+friends away for a time, and how to stand between David and that
+choked and miserable John.
+
+He had the strength of mind also to press for no confidence and to
+expect no thanks. He had little fear of any further attempts at
+suicide, though he would have found it difficult perhaps to explain
+why. But instinctively he felt that for all practical purposes
+David had been mad when he found him, and that he was mad no
+longer. He was wretched, and only a fraction of his mind was in
+Manchester and in his business--that was plain. But, in however
+imperfect a way, he was again master of himself; and the minister
+bided his time, putting his ultimate trust in one of the finest
+mental and physical constitutions he had ever known.
+
+In about ten days David took up his hat one afternoon and, for the
+first time, ventured into the streets. On his return he was walking
+down Potter Street in a storm of wind and rain, when he ran against
+some one who was holding an umbrella right in front of her and
+battling with the weather. In his recoil he saw that it was Dora.
+
+Dora too looked up, a sudden radiant pleasure in her face
+overflowing her soft eyes and lips.
+
+'Oh, Mr. Grieve! And are you really better?'
+
+'Yes,' he said briefly. 'May I walk with you a bit?'
+
+'Oh no!--I don't believe you ought to be out in such weather. I'll
+just come the length of the street with you.'
+
+And she turned and walked with him, chattering fast, and of course,
+from the point of view of an omniscience which could not have been
+hers, foolishly. Had he liked Paris?--what he saw of it at least
+before he had been ill?--and how long had he been ill? Why had he
+not let Mr. Ancrum or some one know sooner? And would he tell her
+more about Louie? She heard that she was married, but there was so
+much she, Dora, wanted to hear.
+
+To his first scanty answers she paid in truth but small heed, for
+the joy of seeing him again was soon effaced by the painful
+impression of his altered aspect. The more she looked at him, the
+more her heart went out to him; her whole being became an effusion
+of pity and tenderness, and her simplest words, maidenly and
+self-restrained as she was, were in fact charged with something
+electric, ineffable. His suffering, his neighbourhood, her own
+sympathy--she was taken up, overwhelmed by these general
+impressions. Inferences, details escaped her.
+
+But as she touched on the matter of Louie, and they were now at his
+own steps, he said to her hurriedly--
+
+'Walk a little further, and I'll tell you. John's in there.'
+
+She opened her eyes, not understanding, and then demurred a little
+on the ground of his health and the rain.
+
+'Oh, I'm all right,' he said impatiently. 'Look here, will you walk
+to Chetham's Library? There'll be a quiet place there, in the
+reading room--sure to be--where we can talk.'
+
+She assented, and very soon they were mounting the black oak stairs
+leading to this old corner of Manchester. At the top of the stairs
+they saw in the distance, at the end of the passage on to which
+open the readers' studies, each with its lining of folios and its
+oaken lattice, a librarian, who nodded to David, and took a look at
+Dora. Further on they stumbled over a small boy from the charity
+school who wished to lionise them over the whole building. But when
+he had been routed, they found the beautiful panelled and painted
+reading-room quite empty, and took possession of it in peace. David
+led the way to an oriel window he had become familiar with in the
+off-times of his first years at Manchester, and they seated
+themselves there with a low sloping desk between them, looking out
+on the wide rain-swept yard outside, the buildings of the
+grammar-school, and the black mass of the cathedral.
+
+Manchester had never been more truly Manchester than on this dark
+July afternoon, with its low shapeless clouds, its darkness, wind,
+and pelting rain. David, staring out through the lozenge panes at
+the familiar gloom beyond, was suddenly carried by repulsion into
+the midst of a vision which was an agony--of a spring forest cut by
+threadlike paths; of a shadeless sun; of a white city steeped in
+charm, in gaiety.
+
+Dora watched him timidly, new perceptions and alarms dawning in
+her.
+
+'You were going to tell me about Louie,' she said.
+
+He returned to himself, and abruptly turned with his back to the
+window, so that he saw the outer world no more.
+
+'You heard that she was married?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'She has married a brute. It was partly my fault. I wanted to be
+rid of her; she got in my way. This man was in the same house; I
+left her to herself, and partly, I believe, to spite me, she went
+off with him. Then at the last when she wouldn't leave him I made
+her marry him. I bribed him to marry her. And he did. I had just
+enough money to make it worth his while. But he will ill-treat her;
+and she won't stay with him. She will go from bad to worse.'
+
+Dora drew back, with her hand on the desk, staring at him with
+incredulous horror.
+
+'But you were ill?' she stammered.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'Never mind my being ill. I wanted you to know, because you were
+good to her, and I'm not going to be a hypocrite to you. Nobody
+else need know anything but that she's married, which is true. If
+I'd looked after her it mightn't have happened--perhaps. But I
+didn't look after her--I couldn't.'
+
+His face, propped in his hands, was hidden from her. She was in a
+whirl of excitement and tragic impression--understanding something,
+divining more.
+
+'Louie was always so self-willed,' she said trembling.
+
+'Aye. That don't make it any better. You remember all I told you
+about her before? You know we didn't get on; she wasn't nice to me,
+and I didn't suit her, I suppose. But all this year, I don't know
+why, she's been on my mind from morning till night; I've always
+felt sure, somehow, that she would come to harm; and the worrying
+oneself about her--well! it has seemed _to grow into one's very
+bones_. '--He threw out the last words after a pause, in which he
+had seemed to search for some phrase wherewith to fit the energy of
+his feeling. 'I took her to Paris to keep her out of mischief. I had
+much rather have gone alone; but she would not ask you to take her
+in, and I couldn't leave her with John. Well, then, she got in my
+way--I told you--and I let her go to the dogs. There--it's
+done--_done!_'
+
+He turned on his seat, one hand drumming the desk, while his eyes
+fixed themselves apparently on the portrait of Sir Humphry Chetham
+over the carved mantelpiece. His manner was hard and rapid; neither
+voice nor expression had any of the simplicity or directness of
+remorse.
+
+Dora remained silent looking at him; her slender hands were pressed
+tight against either cheek; the tears rose slowly till they filled
+her grey eyes.
+
+'It is very sad,' she said in a low voice.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+'Yes--it's sad. So are most things in this world, perhaps. All
+natural wants seem just to lead us to misery sooner or later. And
+who gave them to us--who put us here--with no choice but just to go
+on blundering from one muddle into another?'
+
+Their eyes met. It was as though he had remembered her religion,
+and could not, in his bitterness, refrain from an indirect fling at
+it.
+
+As for her, what he said was strange and repellent to her. But her
+forlorn passion, so long trampled on, cried within her; her pure
+heart was one prayer, one exquisite throb of pain and pity.
+
+'Did some one deceive you?' she asked, so low that the words seemed
+just breathed into the air.
+
+'No,--I deceived myself.'
+
+Then as he looked at her an impulse of confession crossed his mind.
+Sympathy, sincerity, womanly sweetness, these things he had always
+associated with Dora Lomax. Instinctively he had chosen her for a
+friend long ago as soon as their first foolish spars were over.
+
+But the impulse passed away. He thought of her severity, her
+religion, her middle-class canons and judgments, which perhaps were
+all the stricter because of Daddy's laxities. What common ground
+between her and his passion, between her and Elise? No! if he must
+speak--if, in the end, he proved too weak to forbear wholly from
+speech--let it be to ears more practised, and more human!
+
+So he choked back his words, and Dora felt instinctively that he
+would tell her no more. Her consciousness of this was a mingled
+humiliation and relief; it wounded her to feel that she had so
+little command of him; yet she dreaded what he might say. Paris was
+a wicked place--so the world reported. Her imagination, sensitive,
+Christianised, ascetic, shrank from what he might have done.
+Perhaps the woman shrank too. Instead, she threw herself upon the
+thought, the bliss, that he was there again beside her, restored,
+rescued from the gulf, if gulf there had been.
+
+He went back to the subject of Louie, and told her as much as a
+girl of Dora's kind could be told of what he himself knew of
+Louie's husband. In the course of his two days' search for them,
+which had included an interview with Madame Cervin, he had become
+tolerably well acquainted with Montjoie's public character and
+career. Incidentally parts of the story of Louie's behaviour came
+in, and for one who knew her as Dora did, her madness and
+wilfulness emerged, could be guessed at, little as the brother
+intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse
+himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on
+by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself
+for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora
+perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she
+forgave him--for she knew not what!--became his champion. There was
+a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming
+ill in all he said which wrung her heart. And how blanched he was
+by that unknown misery! How should she not pity, not forgive? It
+was the impotence of her own feeling to express itself that swelled
+her throat. And poor Lucy, too--ah! poor Lucy.
+
+Suddenly, as he was speaking, he noticed his companion more
+closely, the shabbiness of the little black hat and jacket, the new
+lines round the eyes and mouth.
+
+'_You_ have not been well,' he said abruptly.' How has your
+father been going on?'
+
+She started and tried to answer quietly. But her nerves had been
+shaken by their talk, and by that inward play of emotion which had
+gone on out of his sight. Quite unexpectedly she broke down, and
+covering her eyes with one hand, began to sob gently.
+
+'I can't do anything with him now, poor father,' she said, when she
+could control herself. 'He won't listen to me at all. The debts are
+beginning to be dreadful, and the business is going down fast. I
+don't know what we shall do. And it all makes him worse--drives him
+to drink.'
+
+David thought a minute, lifted out of himself for the first time.
+
+'Shall I come to-night to see him?'
+
+'Oh do!' she said eagerly; 'come about nine o'clock. I will tell
+him--perhaps that will keep him in.'
+
+Then she went into more details than she had yet done; named the
+creditors who were pressing; told how her church-work, though she
+worked herself blind night and day, could do but little for them;
+how both the restaurant and the reading-room were emptying, and she
+could now get no servants to stay, but Sarah, because of her
+father's temper.
+
+It seemed to him as he listened that the story, with its sickened
+hope and on-coming fate, was all in some strange way familiar; it
+or something like it was to have been expected; for him the strange
+and jarring thing now would have been to find a happy person. He
+was in that young morbid state when the mind hangs its own cloud
+over the universe.
+
+But Dora got up to go, tying on her veil with shaking hands. She
+was so humbly grateful to him that he was sorry for her--that he
+could spare a thought from his own griefs for her.
+
+As they went down the dark stairs together, he asked after Lucy.
+She was now staying with some relations at Wakely, a cotton town in
+the valley of the Irwell, Dora said; but she would probably go back
+to Hastings for the winter. It was now settled that she and her
+father could not get on; and the stepmother that was to
+be--Purcell, however, was taking his time--as determined not to be
+bothered with her.
+
+David listened with a certain discomfort. 'It was what she did for
+me,' he thought, 'that set him against her for good and all. Old
+brute!'
+
+Aloud he said: 'I wrote to her, you know, and sent her that book.
+She did write me a queer letter back--it was all dashes and
+splashes--about the street-preachings on the beach, and a blind man
+who sang hymns. I can't remember why she hated him so particularly!'
+
+She answered his faint smile. Lucy was a child for both of them.
+Then he took her to the door of the Parlour, noticing, as he parted
+from her, how dingy and neglected the place looked.
+
+Afterwards--directly he had left her--the weight of his pain which
+had been lightened for an hour descended upon him again, shutting
+the doors of the senses, leaving him alone within, face to face
+with the little figure which haunted him day and night. During the
+days since his return from Paris the faculty of projective
+imagination, which had endowed his childhood with a second world,
+and peopled it with the incidents and creatures of his books, had
+grown to an abnormal strength. Behind the stage on which he was now
+painfully gathering together the fragments of his old life, it
+created for him another, where, amid scenes richly set and lit with
+perpetual summer, he lived with Elise, walked with her, watched
+her, lay at her feet, quarrelled with her, forgave her. His drama
+did not depend on memory alone, or rather it was memory passing
+into creation. Within its bounds he was himself and not himself;
+his part was loftier than any he had ever played in reality; his
+eloquence was no longer tongue-tied--it flowed and penetrated. His
+love might be cruel, but he was on her level, nay, her master; he
+could reproach, wrestle with, command her; and at the end evoke the
+pardoning flight into each other's arms--confession--rapture.
+
+Till suddenly, poor fool! a little bolt shot from the bow
+of memory--the image of a _diligence_ rattling along a white
+road--or of black rain-beaten quays, with their lines of
+wavering lamps--or of a hideous upper room with blue rep
+furniture where one could neither move nor breathe--would
+strike his dream to fragments, and as it fell to ruins within
+him, his whole being would become one tumult of inarticulate
+cries--delirium--anguish--with which the self at the heart of
+all seemed to be wrestling for life.
+
+It was so to-day after he left Dora. First the vision, the
+enchantment--then the agony, the sob of desolation which could
+hardly be kept down. He saw nothing in the streets. He walked on
+past the Exchange, where an unusual crowd was gathered, elbowing
+his way through it mechanically, but not in truth knowing that it
+was there.
+
+When he reached the shop he ran past John, who was reading a
+newspaper, up to his room and locked the door.
+
+About an hour afterwards Mr. Ancrum came in, all excitement, a
+batch of papers under his arm.
+
+'It is going to be war, John! _War_--I tell you! and such a
+war. They'll be beaten, those braggarts, if there's justice in
+heaven. The streets are all full; I could hardly get here;
+everybody talking of how it will affect Manchester. Time enough to
+think about that! What a set of selfish beasts we all are! Where's
+David?'
+
+'Come in an hour ago!' said John sullenly; 'he went upstairs.'
+
+'Ah, he will have heard--the placards are all over the place.'
+
+The minister went upstairs and knocked at David's door.
+
+'David!'
+
+'All right,' said a voice from inside.
+
+'David, what do you think of the news?'
+
+'What news?' after a pause.
+
+'Why, the war, man! Haven't you seen the evening paper?'
+
+No answer. The minister stood listening at the door. Then a tender
+look dawned in his odd grey face.
+
+'David, look here, I'll push you the paper under the door. You're
+tired, I suppose--done yourself up with your walk?'
+
+'I'll be down to supper,' said the voice from inside, shortly.
+'Will you push in the paper?'
+
+The minister descended, and sat by himself in the kitchen thinking.
+He was a wiser man now than when he had gone out, and not only as
+to that reply of the King of Prussia to the French ultimatum on the
+subject of the Hohenzollern candidature.
+
+For he had met Barbier in the street. How to keep the voluble
+Frenchman from bombarding David in his shattered state had been one
+of Mr. Ancrum's most anxious occupations since his return. It had
+been done, but it had been difficult. For to whom did David owe his
+first reports of Paris if not to the old comrade who had sent him
+there, found him a lodging, and taught him to speak French so as
+not to disgrace himself and his country? However, Ancrum had found
+means to intercept Barbier's first visit, and had checkmated his
+attempts ever since. As a natural result, Barbier was extremely
+irritable. Illness--stuff! The lad had been getting into
+scrapes--that he would swear.
+
+On this occasion, when Ancrum stumbled across him, he found
+Barbier, at first bubbling over with the war news; torn different
+ways; now abusing the Emperor for a cochon and a _fou_,
+prophesying unlimited disaster for France, and sneering at the
+ranting crowds on the boulevards; the next moment spouting the same
+anti-Prussian madness with which his whole unfortunate country was
+at the moment infected. In the midst of his gallop of talk,
+however, the old man suddenly stopped, took off his hat, and
+running one excited hand through his bristling tufts of grey hair
+pointed to Ancrum with the other.
+
+'_Halte la_!' he said, 'I know what your young rascal has been
+after. I know, and I'll be bound you don't. Trust a lover for
+hoodwinking a priest. Come along here.'
+
+And putting his arm through Ancrum's, he swept him away, repeating,
+as they walked, the substance of a letter from his precious nephew,
+in which the Barbizon episode as it appeared to the inhabitants of
+No. 7 Rue Chantal and to the students of Taranne's _atelier de
+femmes_ was related, with every embellishment of witticism and
+_blague_ that the imagination of a French _rapin_ could
+suggest. Mademoiselle Delaunay was not yet restored, according to
+the writer, to the _atelier_ which she adorned. '_On criait
+au scandale_,' mainly because she was such a clever little
+animal, and the others envied and hated her. She had removed to a
+studio near the Luxembourg, and Taranne was said to be teaching her
+privately. Meanwhile Dubois requested his dear uncle to supply him
+with information as to _l'autre;_ it would be gratefully
+received by an appreciative circle. As for _la soeur de
+l'autre_, the dear uncle no doubt knew that she had migrated
+to the studio of Monsieur Montjoie, an artist whose little
+affairs in the _genre_ had already, before her advent, attained
+a high degree of interest and variety. On a review of all the
+circumstances, the dear uncle would perhaps pardon the writer if he
+were less disposed than before to accept those estimable views of
+the superiority of the English _morale_ to the French, which
+had been so ably impressed upon him during his visit to Manchester.
+
+For after a very short stay at Brussels the nephew had boldly and
+suddenly pushed over to England, and had spent a fortnight in
+Barbier's lodgings reconnoitering his uncle. As to the uncle,
+Xavier had struck him, on closer inspection, as one of the most
+dissolute young reprobates he had ever beheld. He had preached to
+him like a father, holding up to him the image of his own absent
+favourite, David Grieve, as a brilliant illustration of what could
+be achieved even in this wicked world by morals and capacity. And
+in the intervals he had supplied the creature with money and amused
+himself with his _gaminerie_ from morning till night. On their
+parting the uncle had with great frankness confessed to the nephew
+the general opinion he had formed of his character; all the same
+they were now embarked on a tolerably frequent correspondence; and
+Dubois' ultimate chance of obtaining his uncle's savings, on the
+_chasse_ of which he had come to England, would have seemed to
+the cool observer by no means small.
+
+'But now, look here,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles to
+wipe away the 'merry tear' which dimmed them, after the
+recapitulation of Xavier's last letter, 'no more nonsense! I come
+and have it out with that young man. I sent him to Paris, and I'll
+know what he did there. _He's_ not made of burnt sugar. Of
+course he's broken his heart--we all do. Serve him right.'
+
+'It's easy to laugh,' said Ancrum dryly, 'only these young fellows
+have sometimes an uncomfortable way of vindicating their dignity by
+shooting themselves.'
+
+Barbier started and looked interrogative.
+
+'Now suppose you listen to me,' said the minister.
+
+And the two men resumed their patrol of Albert Square while Ancrum
+described his rescue of David. The story was simply told but
+impressive. Barbier whistled, stared, and surrendered. Nay, he went
+to the other extreme. He loved the absurd, but he loved the
+romantic more. An hour before, David's adventures had been to him a
+subject of comic opera. As Ancrum talked, they took on 'the grand
+style,' and at the end he could no more have taken liberties with
+his old pupil than with the hero of the _Nuit de Mai._ He
+became excited, sympathetic, declamatory, tore open old sores, and
+Mr. Ancrum had great difficulty in getting rid of him.
+
+So now the minister was sitting at home meditating. Through the
+atmosphere of mockery with which Dubois had invested the story he
+saw the outlines of it with some clearness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+In the midst of his meditations, however, the minister did not
+forget to send John out for David's supper, and when David
+appeared, white, haggard, and exhausted, it was to find himself
+thought for with a care like a woman's. The lad, being sick and
+irritable, showed more resentment than gratitude; pushed away his
+food, looking sombrely the while at the dry bread and tea which
+formed the minister's invariable evening meal as though to ask when
+he was to be allowed his rational freedom again to eat or fast as
+he pleased. He scarcely answered Ancrum's remarks about the war,
+and finally he got up heavily, saying he was going out.
+
+'You ought to be in your bed,' said Ancrum, protesting almost for
+the first time, 'and it's there you will be--tied by the leg--if you
+don't take a decent care of yourself.'
+
+David took no notice and went. He dragged himself to the German
+Athenaeum, of which he had become a member in the first flush of
+his inheritance. There were the telegrams from Paris, and an eager
+crowd reading and discussing them. As he pushed his way in at last
+and read, the whole scene rose before him as though he were
+there--the summer boulevards with their trees and kiosks, the
+moving crowds, the shouts, the 'Marseillaise'--the blind infectious
+madness of it all. And one short fortnight ago, what man in Europe
+could have guessed that such a day was already on the knees of the
+gods?
+
+Afterwards, on the way to the Parlour, he talked to Elise about
+it,--placing her on the boulevards with the rest, and himself beside her
+to guard her from the throng. Hour by hour, this morbid gift of his,
+though it tortured him, provided an outlet for passion, saved him from
+numbness and despair.
+
+When he got to Dora's sitting-room he found Daddy sitting there,
+smoking sombrely over the empty grate. He had expected a flood of
+questions, and had steeled himself to meet them. Nothing of the
+sort. The old man took very little notice of him and his travels.
+Considering the petulant advice with which Daddy had sent him off,
+David was astonished and, in the end, piqued. He recovered the
+tongue which he had lost for Ancrum, and was presently discussing
+the war like anybody else. Reminiscences of the talk amid which he
+had lived during those Paris weeks came back to them; and he
+repeated some of them which bore on the present action of Napoleon
+III and his ministry, with a touch of returning fluency. He was, in
+fact, playing for Daddy's attention.
+
+Daddy watched him silently with a wild and furtive eye. At last,
+looking round to see whether Dora was there, and finding that she
+had gone out, he laid a lean long hand on David's knee.
+
+'That'll do, Davy. Davy, why were you all that time away?'
+
+The young man drew himself up suddenly, brought back to realities
+from this first brief moment of something like forgetfulness. He
+tried for his common excuse of illness; but it stuck in his throat.
+
+'I can't tell you, Daddy,' he said at last, slowly. 'I might tell
+you lies, but I won't. It concerns myself alone.'
+
+Daddy still bent forward, his peaked wizard's face peering at his
+companion.
+
+'You've been in trouble, Davy?'
+
+'Yes, Daddy. But if you ask me questions I shall go.'
+
+He spoke with a sudden fierce resolution.
+
+Daddy paid no attention. He threw himself back in his chair with a
+long breath.
+
+'Bedad, and I knew it, Davy! But sorrow a bit o' pity will you get
+out o' me, my boy--sorrow a bit!'
+
+He lay staring at his companion with a glittering hostile look.
+
+'By the powers!' he said presently, 'to be a gossoon of twenty again
+and throubled about a woman!'
+
+David sprang up.
+
+'Well, Daddy, I'll bid you good night! I wanted to hear something
+about your own affairs, which don't seem to be flourishing. But
+I'll wait till Miss Dora's at home.'
+
+'Sit down, sit down again!' cried Lomax angrily, catching him by
+the arm. 'I'll not meddle with you. Yes, we're in a bad way, a
+deuced bad way, if you listen to Dora. If it weren't for her I'd
+have walked myself off long ago and let the devil take the
+creditors.'
+
+David sat down and tried to get at the truth. But Daddy turned
+restive, and now invited the traveller's talk he had before
+repelled. He fell into his own recollections of the Paris streets
+in '48, and his vanity enjoyed showing this slip of a fellow that
+old Lomax was well acquainted with France and French politics
+before he was born.
+
+Presently Dora came in, saw that her father had been beguiled into
+foregoing his usual nocturnal amusements, and looked soft gratitude
+at David. But as for him, he had never realised so vividly the
+queer aloofness and slipperiness of Daddy's nature, nor the
+miserable insecurity of Dora's life. Such men were not meant to
+have women depending on them.
+
+He went downstairs pondering what could be done for the old
+vagabond. Drink had indeed made ravages since he had seen him last.
+For Dora's sake the young man recalled with eagerness some
+statements and suggestions in a French treatise on 'L'Alcoolisme'
+he chanced to have been turning over among his foreign scientific
+stock. Dora, no doubt, had invoked the parson; he would endeavour
+to bring in the doctor. And there was a young one, a frequenter of
+the stall in Birmingham Street, not as yet overburdened with
+practice, who occurred to him as clever and likely to help.
+
+Nor did he forget his purpose. The very next morning he got hold of
+the young man in question. Out came the French book, which
+contained the record of a famous Frenchman's experiments, and the
+two hung over it together in David's little back room, till the
+doctor's views of booksellers and their probable minds were
+somewhat enlarged, and David felt something of the old intellectual
+glow which these scientific problems of mind and matter had
+awakened in him during the winter. Then he walked his physician off
+to Daddy during the dinner hour and boldly introduced him as a
+friend. The young doctor, having been forewarned, treated the
+situation admirably, took up a jaunty and jesting tone, and,
+finally, putting morals entirely aside, invited Daddy to consider
+himself as a scientific case, and deal with himself as such for the
+benefit of knowledge.
+
+Daddy was feeling ill and depressed; David struck him as an
+'impudent varmint,' and the doctor as little better; but the lad's
+solicitude nevertheless flattered the old featherbrain, and in the
+end he fell into a burst of grandiloquent and self-excusing
+confidence. The doctor played him; prescribed; and when he and
+David left together it really seemed as though the old man from
+sheer curiosity about and interest in his own symptoms would
+probably make an attempt to follow the advice given him.
+
+Dora came in while the three were still joking and discussing. Her
+face clouded as she listened, and when David and the doctor left
+she gave them a cool and shrinking good bye which puzzled David.
+
+Daddy, however, after a little while, mended considerably,
+developed an enthusiasm for his self-appointed doctor, and, what
+was still better, a strong excitement about his own affairs. When
+it came to the stage of a loan for the meeting of the more pressing
+liabilities, of fresh and ingenious efforts to attract customers,
+and of a certain gleam of returning prosperity, David's concern for
+his old friend very much dropped again. His former vivid interest
+in the human scene and the actors in it, as such, was not yet
+recovered; in these weeks weariness and lassitude overtook each
+reviving impulse and faculty in turn.
+
+He was becoming more and more absorbed, too, by the news from
+France. Its first effect upon him was one of irritable repulsion.
+Barbier and Hugo had taught him to loathe the Empire; and had not
+he and she read _Les Chatiments_ together, and mocked the
+Emperor's carriage as it passed them in the streets? The French
+telegrams in the English papers, with their accounts of the
+vapouring populace, the wild rhetoric in the Chamber, and the
+general outburst of _fanfaronnade_, seemed to make the French
+nation one with the Empire in its worst aspects, and, as we can all
+remember, set English teeth on edge. David devoured the papers day
+by day, and his antagonism grew, partly because, in spite of that
+strong gravitation of his mind towards things expansive, emotional,
+and rhetorical, the essential paste of him was not French but
+English--but mostly because of other and stronger reasons of which
+he was hardly conscious. During that fortnight of his agony in
+Paris all that sympathetic bond between the great city and himself
+which had been the source of so much pleasure and excitement to him
+during his early days with Elise had broken down. The glamour of
+happiness torn away, he had seen, beneath the Paris of his dream, a
+greedy brutal Paris from which his sick senses shrank in fear and
+loathing. The grace, the spell, was gone--he was alone and
+miserable!--and amid the gaiety, the materialism, the selfish vice
+of the place he had moved for days, an alien and an enemy, the love
+within him turning to hate.
+
+So now his mortal pain revenged itself. They would be beaten--this
+depraved and enervated people!--and his feverish heart rejoiced.
+But Elise? His lips quivered. What did the war matter to her except
+so far as its inconveniences were concerned? What had _la
+patrie_ any more than _l'amour_ to do with art? He put the
+question to her in his wild evening walks. It angered him that as
+the weeks swept on, and the great thunderbolts began to
+fall--Wissembourg, Forbach, Worth--his imagination would sometimes
+show her to him agitated and in tears. No pity for him! why this
+sorrow for France? Absurd! let her go paint while the world loved
+and fought. In '48, while monarchy and republic were wrestling it
+out in the streets of Paris, was not the landscape painter
+Chintreuil quietly sketching all the time just outside one of the
+gates of the city? There was the artist for you.
+
+Meanwhile the growing excitement of the war, heightened and
+poisoned by this reaction of his personality, combined with his
+painful efforts to recover his business to make him for a time more
+pale and gaunt than ever. Ancrum remonstrated in vain. He would go
+his way.
+
+One evening--it was the day after Worth--he was striding blindly up
+the Oxford Road when he ran against a man at the corner of a side
+street. It was Barbier, coming out for the last news.
+
+Barbier started, swore, caught him by the arm, then fell back in
+amazement.
+
+'_C'est toi? bon Dieu!_'
+
+David, who had hitherto avoided his old companion with the utmost
+ingenuity, began hurriedly to inquire whether he was going to look
+at the evening's telegram.
+
+'Yes--no--what matter? You can tell me. David, my lad, Ancrum told
+me you had been ill, but--'
+
+The old man slipped his arm through that of the youth and looked at
+him fixedly. His own face was all furrowed and drawn, the eyes red.
+
+'_Oui; tu es change_,' he said at last with a sudden
+quivering breath, almost a sob, 'like everything,--like the world!'
+
+And hanging down his head he drew the lad on, down the little
+street, towards his lodging.
+
+'Come in! I'll ask no questions. Oh, come in! I have the French
+papers; for three hours I have been reading them alone. Come in or
+I shall go mad!'
+
+And they discussed the war, the political prospect, and Barbier's
+French letters till nearly midnight. All the exile's nationality
+had revived, and so lost was he in weeping over France he had
+scarcely breath left wherewith to curse the Empire. In the presence
+of a grief so true, so poignant, wherein all the man's little
+tricks and absurdities had for the moment melted out of sight,
+David's own seared and bitter feeling could find no voice. He said
+not a word that could jar on his old friend. And Barbier, like a
+child, took his sympathy for granted and abused the 'heartless
+hypocritical' English press to him with a will.
+
+The days rushed on. David read the English papers in town, then
+walked up late to Barbier's lodgings to read a French batch and
+talk. Gravelotte was over, the siege was approaching. In that
+strange inner life of his, David with Elise beside him looked on at
+the crashing trees in the Bois de Boulogne, at the long lines of
+carts laden with household stuff and fugitives from the _zone
+militaire_ flocking into Paris, at the soldiers and horses
+camping in the Tuileries Gardens, at the distant smoke-clouds amid
+the woods of Issy and Meudon, as village after village flamed to
+ruins.
+
+One night--it was a day or two after Sedan--in a corner of the
+Constitutionnel, he found a little paragraph:--
+
+'M. Henri Regnault and M. Clairin, leaving their studio at Tangiers to
+the care of the French Consul, have returned to Paris to offer
+themselves for military service, from which, as holder of the _prix de
+Rome_, M. Regnault is legally exempt. To praise such an act would be to
+insult its authors. France--our bleeding France!--does but take stern
+note that her sons are faithful.'
+
+David threw the paper down, made an excuse to Barbier, and went
+out. He could not talk to Barbier, to whom everything must be
+explained from the beginning, and his heart was full. He wandered
+out towards Fallowfield under a moon which gave beauty and magic
+even to these low, begrimed streets, these jarring, incongruous
+buildings, thinking of Regnault and that unforgotten night beside
+the Seine. The young artist's passage through the Louvre, the
+towering of his great head above the crowd in the 'Trois Rats,' and
+that outburst under the moonlight--everything, every tone, every
+detail, returned upon him.
+
+'_The great France--the undying France--_'
+
+And now for France--ah!--David divined the eagerness, the passion,
+with which it had been done. He was nearer to the artist than he
+had been two months before--nearer to all great and tragic things.
+His recognition of the fact had in it the start of a strange joy.
+
+So moved was he, and in such complex ways, that as he thought of
+Regnault with that realising imagination which was his gift, the
+whole set of his feeling towards France and the war wavered and
+changed. The animosity, the drop of personal gall in his heart,
+disappeared, conjured by Regnault's look, by Regnault's act. The
+one heroic figure he had seen in France began now to stand to him
+for the nation. He walked home doing penance in his heart,
+passionately renewing the old love, the old homage, in this awful
+presence of a stricken people at bay.
+
+And Elise came to him, in the moonlight, leaning upon him, with
+soft, approving eyes--
+
+Ah! where was she--where--in this whirlwind of the national fate?
+where was her frail life hidden? was she still in this Paris, so
+soon to be 'begirt with armies'?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Four days later Barbier sent a note to Ancrum: 'Come and see me this
+afternoon at six o'clock. Say nothing to Grieve.'
+
+A couple of hours afterwards Ancrum came slowly home to Birmingham
+Street, where he was still lodging. David had just put up the
+shop-shutters, John had departed, and his employer was about to
+retire to supper and his books in the back kitchen.
+
+Ancrum went in and stood with his back to the fire which John had
+just made for the kettle and the minister's tea, when David came in
+with an armful of books and shut the door behind him. Ancrum let
+him put down his cargo, and then walked up to him.
+
+'David,' he said, laying his hand with a timid gesture on the
+other's shoulder, 'Barbier has had some letters from Paris
+to-day--the last he will get probably--and among them a letter from
+his nephew.'
+
+David started, turned sharp round, shaking off the hand.
+
+'It contains some news which Barbier thinks you ought to know.
+Mademoiselle Elise Delaunay has married suddenly--married her
+cousin, Mr. Pimodan, a young doctor.'
+
+The shock blanched every atom of colour from David's face. He tried
+wildly to control himself, to brave it out with a desperate 'Why
+not?' But speech failed him. He walked over to the mantelpiece and
+leant against it. The room swam with him, and the only impression
+of which for a moment or two he was conscious was that of the
+cheerful singing of the kettle.
+
+'She would not leave Paris,' said Ancrum in a low voice, standing
+beside him. 'People tried to persuade her--nothing would induce her.
+Then this young man, who is said to have been in love with her for
+years, urged her to marry him--to accept his protection really, in
+view of all that might come. Dubois thinks she refused several
+times, but anyway two days ago they were married, civilly, with
+only the legal witnesses.'
+
+David moved about the various things on the mantelpiece with
+restless fingers. Then he straightened himself.
+
+'Is that all?' he asked, looking at the minister.
+
+'All,' said Ancrum, who had, of course, no intention of repeating
+any of Dubois' playful embroideries on the facts. 'You will be glad,
+won't you, that she should have some one to protect her in such a
+strait?'--he added, after a minute's pause, his eyes on the fire.
+
+'Yes,' said the other after a moment. 'Thank you. Won't you have
+your tea?'
+
+Mr. Ancrum swallowed his emotion, and they sat down to table in
+silence. David played with some food, took one thing up after
+another, laid it down, and at last sprang up and seized his hat.
+
+'Going out again?' asked the minister, trembling, he knew not why.
+
+The lad muttered something. Instinctively the little lame fellow,
+who was closest to the door, rushed to it and threw himself against
+it.
+
+'David, don't--don't go out alone--let me go with you!'
+
+'I want to go out alone,' said David, his lips shaking. 'Why do you
+interfere with me?'
+
+'Because--' and the short figure drew itself up, the minister's
+voice took a stern deep note, 'because when a man has once
+contemplated the sin of self-murder, those about him have no right
+to behave as though he were still like other innocent and happy
+people!'
+
+David stood silent a moment, every limb trembling. Then his mouth
+set, and he made a step forward, one arm raised.
+
+'Oh, yes!' cried Ancrum, 'you may fling me out of the way. My
+weakness and deformity are no match for you. Do, if you have the
+heart! Do you think I don't know that I rescued you from
+despair--that I drew you out of the very jaws of death? Do you
+think I don't guess that the news I have just given you wither the
+heart in your breast? You imagine, I suppose, that because I am
+deformed and a Sunday-school teacher, because I think something of
+religion, and can't read your French books, I cannot enter into
+what a _man_ is and feels. Try me! When you were a little boy
+in my class, _my_ life was already crushed in me--my tragedy
+was over. I have come close to passion and to sin; I'm not afraid
+of yours! You are alive here to-night, David Grieve, because I went
+to look for you on the mountains--lost sheep that you were--and
+found you, by God's mercy. You never thanked me--I knew you
+couldn't. Instead of your thanks I demand your confidence,
+here--now. Break down this silence between us. Tell me what you
+have done to bring your life to this pass. You have no father--I
+speak in his place and I _deserve_ that you should trust and
+listen to me!'
+
+David looked at him with amazement--at the worn misshapen head
+thrown haughtily back--at the arms folded across the chest. Then
+his pride gave way, and that intolerable smart within could no
+longer hide itself. His soul melted within him; tears began to
+rain over his cheeks. He tottered to the fire and sat down,
+instinctively spreading his hands to the blaze, that word 'father'
+echoing in his ears; and by midnight Mr. Ancrum knew all the story,
+or as much of it as man could to tell to man.
+
+From this night of confession and of storm there emerged at least
+one result--the beginnings of a true and profitable bond between
+David and Ancrum. Hitherto there had been expenditure of interest
+and affection on the minister's side, and a certain responsiveness
+and friendly susceptibility on David's; but no true understanding
+and contact, mind with mind. But in these agitated hours of such
+talk as belongs only to the rare crises of life, not only did
+Ancrum gain an insight into David's inmost nature, with all its
+rich, unripe store of feelings and powers, deeper than any he had
+possessed before, but David, breaking through the crusts of
+association, getting beyond and beneath the Sunday-school teacher
+and minister, came for the first time upon the real man in his
+friend, apart from trappings--cast off the old sense of pupilage,
+and found a brother instead of a monitor.
+
+There came a moment when Ancrum, laying his hand on David's knee,
+told his own story in a few bare sentences, each of them, as it
+were, lightning on a dark background, revealing some few things
+with a ghastly plainness, only to let silence and mystery close
+again upon the whole. And there came another moment when the little
+minister, carried out of himself, fell into incoherent sentences,
+full of obscurity, yet often full of beauty, in which for the first
+time David came near to the living voice of religion speaking in
+its purest, intensest note. Christ was the burden of it all; the
+religion of pain, sacrifice, immortality; the religion of chastity
+and self-repression.
+
+'Life goes from test to test, David; it's like any other
+business--the more you know the more's put on you. And this test of
+the man with the woman--there's no other cuts so deep. Aye, it
+parts the sheep from the goats. A man's failed in it--lost his
+footing--rolled into hell, before he knows where he is. "On this
+stone if a man fall"--I often put those words to it--there's all
+meanings in Scripture. Yes, you've stumbled, David--stumbled badly,
+but not more. There's mercy in it! You must rise again--you can.
+Accept yourself; accept the sin even; bear with yourself and go
+forward. That's what the Church says. Nothing can be undone, but
+break your pride, do penance, and all can be forgiven.
+
+'But you don't admit the sin? A man has a right to the satisfaction
+of his own instincts. You asked a free consent and got it. What is
+law but a convention for miserable people who don't know how to
+love? Who was injured?
+
+'David, that's the question of a fool. Were you and she the first
+man and woman in the world that ever loved? That's always the way;
+each man imagines the matter is still for his deciding, and he can
+no more decide it than he can tamper with the fact that fire burns
+or water drowns. All these centuries the human animal has fought
+with the human soul. And step by step the soul has registered her
+victories. She has won them only by feeling for the law and finding
+it--uncovering, bringing into light, the firm rocks beneath her
+feet. And on these rocks she rears her landmarks--marriage, the
+family, the State, the Church. Neglect them, and you sink into the
+quagmire from which the soul of the race has been for generations
+struggling to save you. Dispute them! overthrow them--yes, if you
+can! You have about as much chance with them as you have with the
+other facts and laws amid which you live--physical or chemical or
+biological.
+
+'I speak after the manner of men. If I were to speak after the
+manner of a Christian, I should say other things. I should ask how
+a man _dare_ pluck from the Lord's hand, for his own wild and
+reckless use, a soul and body for which He died; how he, the Lord's
+bondsman, _dare_ steal his joy, carrying it off by himself
+into the wilderness, like an animal his prey, instead of asking
+it at the hands, and under the blessing, of his Master; how he
+_dare_--a man under orders, and member of the Lord's body--forget
+the whole in his greed for the one--eternity in his thirst for
+the present.'
+
+'But no matter. Christ is nothing to you, nor Scripture, nor the
+Church--'
+
+The minister broke off abruptly, his lined face working with
+emotion and prayer. David said nothing. In this stage of the
+conversation--the stage, as it were, of judgment and estimate--he
+could take no part. The time for it with him had not yet come. He
+had exhausted all his force in the attempt to explain himself--an
+attempt which began in fragmentary question and answer, and ended
+on his part in the rush of a confidence, an 'Apologia,'
+representing, in truth, that first reflex action of the mind upon
+experience, whence healing and spiritual growth were ultimately to
+issue. But for the moment he could carry the process no farther. He
+sat crouched over the flickering fire, saying nothing, letting
+Ancrum soliloquise as he pleased. His mind surged to and fro,
+indeed, as Ancrum talked between the poles of repulsion and
+response. His nature was not as Ancrum's, and every now and then
+the quick critical intellect flashed through his misery, detecting
+an assumption, probing an hypothesis. But in general his
+_feeling_ gave way more and more. That moral sensitiveness in
+him which in its special nature was a special inheritance, the
+outcome of a long individualist development under the conditions of
+English Protestantism, made him from the first the natural prey of
+Ancrum's spiritual passion. As soon as a true contact between them
+was set up, David began to feel the religious temper and life in
+Ancrum draw him like a magnet. Not the forms of the thing, but the
+thing itself. In it, or something like it, as he listened, his
+heart suspected, for the first time, the only possible refuge from
+the agony of passion, the only possible escape from this fever of
+desire, jealousy, and love, in which he was consumed.
+
+At the end he let Ancrum lead him up to bed and give him the
+bromide the Paris doctor had prescribed. When Ancrum softly put his
+head in, half an hour later, he was heavily asleep. Ancrum's face
+gleamed; he stole into the room carrying a rug and a pillow; and
+when David woke in the morning it was to see the twisted form of
+the little minister stretched still and soldierlike beside him on
+the floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+From that waking David rose and went about his work another man. As
+he moved about in the shop or in the streets, he was conscious of a
+gulf between his present self and his self of yesterday, which he
+could hardly explain. Simply the whole atmosphere and temperature
+of the soul was other, was different. He could have almost supposed
+that some process had gone on within him during the unconsciousness
+of sleep, of which he was now feeling the results; which had
+carried him on, without his knowing it, to a point in the highroad
+of life, far removed from that point where he had stood when his
+talk with Ancrum began. That world of enervating illusion, that
+'kind of ghastly dreaminess, 'as John Sterling called it, in which
+since his return he had lived with Elise, was gone, he knew not
+how--swept away like a cloud from the brain, a mist from the eyes.
+The sense of catastrophe, of things irrevocable and irreparable,
+the premature ageing of the whole man, remained-only the fever and
+the restlessness were past. Memory, indeed, was not affected. In
+some sort the scenes of his French experience would be throughout
+his life a permanent element in consciousness; but the persons
+concerned in them were dead-creatures of the past. He himself had
+been painfully re-born, and Pimodan's wife had no present personal
+existence for him. He turned himself deliberately to his old life,
+and took up the interests of it again one by one, but, as he soon
+discovered, with an insight, a power, a comprehension which had
+never yet been his. A moral and spiritual life destined to a rich
+development practically began for him with this winter--this awful
+winter of the agony of France.
+
+His thoughts were often occupied now with Louie, but in a saner
+way. He could no longer, without morbidness, take on himself the
+whole responsibility of her miserable marriage. Human beings after
+all are what they make themselves. But the sense of his own share
+in it, and the perception of what her future life was likely to be,
+made him steadily accept beforehand the claims upon him which she
+was sure to press.
+
+He had written to her early in September, when the siege was
+imminent, offering her money to bring her to England, and the
+protection of his roof during the rest of the war. And by a still
+later post than that which brought the news of Elise's marriage
+arrived a scrawl from Louie, written from a country town near
+Toulouse, whither she and Montjoie had retreated--apparently the
+sculptor's native place.
+
+The letter was full of complaints--complaints of the war, which was
+being mismanaged by a set of rogues and fools who deserved
+stringing to the nearest tree; complaints of her husband, who was a
+good-for-nothing brute; and complaints of her own health. She was
+expecting her confinement in the spring; if she got through
+it--which was not likely, considering the way in which she was
+treated--she should please herself about staying with such a man.
+_He_ should not keep her for a day if she wanted to go.
+Meanwhile David might send her any money he could spare. There was
+not much of the six hundred left--_that_ she could tell him;
+and she could not even screw enough for baby-clothes out of her
+husband. Very likely there would not be enough to pay for a nurse
+when her time came. Well, then she would be out of it--and a good
+job too.
+
+She wished to be remembered to Dora; and Dora was especially to be
+told again that she needn't suppose St. Damian's was a patch on the
+real Catholic churches, because it wasn't. She--Louie--had been at
+the Midnight Mass in Toulouse Cathedral on Christmas Eve. That was
+something like. And down in the crypt they had a 'Bethlehem'--the
+sweetest thing you ever saw. There were the shepherds, and the wise
+men, and the angels--dolls, of course, but their dresses were
+splendid, and the little Jesus was dressed in white satin,
+embroidered with gold--_old_ embroidery, tell Dora.
+
+To this David had replied at once, sending money he could ill
+spare, and telling her to keep him informed of her whereabouts.
+
+But the months passed on, and no more news arrived. He wrote again
+_via_ Bordeaux, but with no result, and could only wait
+patiently till that eagle's grip, in which all French life was
+stifled, should be loosened.
+
+Meanwhile his relation to another human being, whose life had been
+affected by the French episode, passed into a fresh phase. Two days
+after the news of Elise's marriage had reached him, he and John had
+just shut up the shop, and the young master was hanging over the
+counter under the gas, heavily conning a not very satisfactory
+business account.
+
+John came in, took his hat and stick from a corner, and threw David
+a gruff 'good night.'
+
+Something in the tone struck David's sore nerves like a blow. He
+turned abruptly--
+
+'Look here, John! I can't stand this kind of thing much longer.
+Hadn't we better part? You've learnt a lot here, and I'll see you
+get a good place. You--you rub it in too long!'
+
+John stood still, his big rough hands beginning to shake, his pink
+cheeks turning a painful crimson.
+
+'You--you never said a word to me!' he flung out at last,
+incoherently, resentfully.
+
+'Said a word to you? What do you mean? I told you the truth, and I
+would have told you more, if you hadn't turned against me as though
+I had been the devil himself. Do you suppose you are the only
+person who came to grief because of that French time? _Good God!_'
+
+The last words came out with a low exasperation. The young man
+leant against the counter, looking at his assistant with bitter,
+indignant eyes.
+
+John first shrank from them, then his own were drawn to meet them.
+Even his slow perceptions, thus challenged, realised something of
+the truth. He gave way--as David might have made him give way long
+before, if his own misery had not made him painfully avoid any
+fresh shock of speech.
+
+'Well!' said John, slowly, with a mighty effort; 'I'll not lay it
+agen you any more. I'll say that. But if you want to get rid of me,
+you can. Only you'll be put to 't wi' t' printing.'
+
+The two young fellows surveyed each other. Then suddenly David
+said, pushing him to the door:
+
+'You're a great ass, John--get out, and good night to you.'
+
+But next day the atmosphere was cleared, and, with inexpressible
+relief on both sides, the two fell back into the old brotherly
+relation. Poor John! He kept an old photograph of Louie in a drawer
+at his lodging, and, when he came home to bed, would alternately
+weep over and denounce it. But, all the same, his interest in
+David's printing ventures was growing keener and keener, and
+whenever business had been particularly exciting during the day,
+the performance with the photograph was curtailed or omitted at
+night. Let no scorn, however, be thought, on that account, of the
+true passion!--which had thriven on unkindness, and did but yield
+to the slow mastery of time.
+
+The war thundered on. To Manchester, and to the cotton and silk
+industries of Lancashire generally, the tragedy of France meant on
+the whole a vast boom in trade. So many French rivals crippled--so
+much ground set free for English enterprise to capture--and,
+meanwhile, high profits for a certain number at least of Manchester
+and Macclesfield merchants, and brisk wages for the Lancashire
+operatives, especially for the silk-weavers. This, with of course
+certain drawbacks and exceptions, was the aspect under which the
+war mainly presented itself to Lancashire. Meanwhile, amid these
+teeming Manchester streets with their clattering lurries and
+overflowing warehouses, there was at least one Englishman who took
+the war hardly, in whom the spectacle of its wreck and struggle
+roused a feeling which was all moral, human, disinterested.
+
+What was Regnault doing? David kept a watch on the newspapers, of
+which the Free Library offered him an ample store; but there was no
+mention of him in the English press that he could discover, and
+Barbier, of course, got nothing now from Paris.
+
+Christmas was over. The last month of the siege, that hideous
+January of frost and fire, rushed past, with its alternations of
+famine within and futile battle without--Europe looking on appalled
+at this starved and shivering Paris, into which the shells were
+raining. At last--the 27th!--the capitulation! All was over; the
+German was master in Europe, and France lay at the feet of her
+conqueror.
+
+Out to all parts streamed the letters which had been so long
+delayed. Barbier and David, walking together one bitter evening
+towards Barbier's lodgings, silent, with hanging heads, met the
+postman on Barbier's steps, who held out a packet. The Frenchman
+took it with a cry; the two rushed upstairs and fell upon the
+letters and papers it contained.
+
+There--while Barbier sat beside him, groaning over the conditions
+of peace, over the enthronement of the Emperor-King at Versailles,
+within sight of the statue of Louis Quatorze, now cursing '_ces
+imbeciles du gouvernement!_' and now wiping the tears from his
+old cheeks with a trembling hand--David read the news of the fight
+of Buzenval, and the death of Regnault.
+
+It seemed to him that he had always foreseen it--that from the very
+beginning Regnault's image in his thought had been haloed with a
+light of tragedy and storm--a light of death. His eyes devoured the
+long memorial article in which a friend of Regnault's had given the
+details of his last months of life. Barbier, absorbed in his own
+grief, heard not a sound from the corner where his companion sat
+crouched beneath the gas.
+
+Everything--the death and the manner of it--was to him, as it were,
+in the natural order--fitting, right, such as might have been
+expected. His heart swelled to bursting as he read, but his eyes
+were dry.
+
+This, briefly, was the story which he read.
+
+Henri Regnault re-entered Paris at the beginning of September. By
+the beginning of October he was on active service, stationed now at
+Asnieres, now at Colombes. In October or November he became engaged
+to a young girl, with whom he had been for long devotedly in
+love--ah! David thought of that sudden smile--the 'open door'!
+Their passion, cherished under the wings of war, did but give
+courage and heroism to both. Yet he loved most humanly! One
+night, in an interval of duty, on leaving the house where his
+_fiancee_ lived, he found the shells of the bombardment falling
+fast in the street outside. He could not make up his mind to
+go--might not ruin befall the dear house with its inmates at any
+moment? So he wandered up and down outside for hours in the bitter
+night, watching, amid the rattle of the shells and the terrified
+cries of women and children from the houses on either side.
+At last, worn out and frozen with cold, but still unable to
+leave the spot, he knocked softly at the door he had left. The
+_concierge_ came. 'Let me lie down awhile on your floor. Tell
+no one.' Then, appeased by this regained nearness to her, and by
+the sense that no danger could strike the one without warning the
+other, he wrapped himself in his soldier's cloak and fell asleep.
+
+In November he painted his last three water-colours--visions of the
+East, painted for her, and as flower-bright as possible, 'because
+flowers were scarce' in the doomed city.
+
+December came. Regnault spent Christmas night at the advanced post
+of Colombes. His captain wished to make him an officer. 'Thanks, my
+captain,' said the young fellow of twenty-three; 'but if you have a
+good soldier in me, why exchange him for an indifferent officer? My
+example will be of more use to you than my commission.' Meanwhile
+the days and nights were passed in Arctic cold. Men were frozen to
+death round about him; his painter's hand was frostbitten. 'Oh! I
+can speak with authority on cold!' he wrote to his _fiancee_;
+'this morning at least I know what it is to spend the night on the
+hard earth exposed to a glacial wind. Enough! _Je me rechaufferai
+a votre foyer_. I love you--I love my country--that sustains.
+Adieu!'
+
+On the 17th, after a few days in Paris spent with her and some old
+friends, he was again ordered to the front. On Thursday the fight
+at Buzenval began with a brilliant success; in the middle of the
+day his _fiancee_ still had news of him, brought by a servant.
+Night fell. The battle was hottest in a wood adjoining the park of
+Buzenval. Regnault and his painter-comrade Clairin were side by
+side. Suddenly the retreat was sounded, and the same instant
+Clairin missed his friend. He sought him with frenzy amid the trees
+in the darkening wood, called to him, peered into the faces of the
+dying--no answer! Ah! he must have been swept backwards by the rush
+of the retreat--Clairin will find him again.
+
+Three days later the lost was found--one among two hundred corpses
+of National Guards carted into Pere Lachaise. Clairin, mad with
+grief, held his friend in his arms--held, kissed the beautiful
+head, now bruised and stained past even _her_ knowing, with
+its bullet-wound in the temple.
+
+On his breast was found a medal with a silver tear hanging from it.
+She who had long worn it as a symbol of bereavement, in memory of
+dear ones lost to her, had given it to him in her first joy. 'I will
+reclaim it,' she had said, smiling, 'the first time you make me
+weep!' It was all that was brought back to her--all except a
+scrawled paper found in his pocket, containing some hurried and
+almost illegible words, written perhaps beside his outpost fire.
+
+'We have lost many men--we must remake
+them--_better_--_stronger_. The lesson should profit us.
+No more lingering amid facile pleasures! Who dare now live for
+himself alone? It has been for too long the custom with us to
+believe in nothing but enjoyment and all bad passions. We have
+prided ourselves on despising everything good and worthy. No more
+of such contempt!'
+
+Then--so the story ended--four days later, on the very day of the
+capitulation of Paris, Regnault was carried to his last rest. A
+figure in widow's dress walked behind. And to many standing by,
+amid the muffled roll of the drums and the wailing of the music, it
+was as though France herself went down to burial with her son.
+
+David got up gently and went across to Barbier, who was sitting
+with his letters and papers before him, staring and stupefied, the
+lower jaw falling, in a trance of grief.
+
+The young man put down the newspaper he had been reading in front
+of the old man.
+
+'Read that some time; it will give you something to be proud of. I
+told you I knew him--he was kind to me.'
+
+Barbier nodded, not understanding, and sought for his spectacles
+with shaking fingers. David quietly went out.
+
+He walked home in a state of exaltation like a man still environed
+with the emotion of great poetry or great music. He said very
+little about Regnault in the days that followed to Ancrum or
+Barbier, even to Dora, with whom every week his friendship was
+deepening. But the memory of the dead man, as it slowly shaped
+itself in his brooding mind, became with him a permanent and
+fruitful element of thought. Very likely the Regnault whom he
+revered, whose name was henceforth a sacred thing to him, was only
+part as it were of the real Regnault. He saw the French artist with
+an Englishman's eyes--interpreted him in English ways--the ways,
+moreover, of a consciousness self-taught and provincial, however
+gifted and flexible. Only one or two aspects, no doubt, of that
+rich, self-tormented nature, reared amid the most complex movements
+of European intelligence, were really plain to him. And those
+aspects were specially brought home to him by his own mental
+condition. No matter. Broadly, essentially, he understood.
+
+But thenceforward, just as Elise Delaunay had stood to him in the
+beginning for French art and life, and that ferment in himself
+which answered to them, so now in her place stood Regnault with
+those stern words upon his young and dying lips--'We have lost many
+men--we must remake them--better! Henceforward let no one dare live
+unto himself.' The Englishman took them into his heart, that
+ethical fibre in him, which was at last roused and dominant,
+vibrating, responding. And as the poignant images of death and
+battle faded he saw his hero always as he had seen him last--young,
+radiant, vigorous, pointing to the dawn behind Notre-Dame.
+
+All life looked differently to David this winter. He saw the
+Manchester streets and those who lived in them with other
+perceptions. His old political debating interests, indeed, were
+comparatively slack; but persons--men and women, and their
+stories--for these he was instinctively on the watch. His eye
+noticed the faces he passed as it had never yet done--divined in
+them suffering, or vice, or sickness. All that he saw at this
+moment he saw tragically. The doors set open about him were still,
+as Keats, himself hurried to his end by an experience of passion,
+once expressed it, 'all dark,' and leading to darkness. There were
+times when Dora's faith and Ancrum's mysticism drew him
+irresistibly; other times when they were almost as repulsive to him
+as they had ever been, because they sounded to him like the formula
+of people setting out to explain the world 'with a light heart,' as
+Ollivier had gone to war.
+
+But whether or no it could be explained, this world, he could not
+now help putting out his hand to meddle with and mend it; his mind
+fed on its incidents and conditions. The mill-girls standing on the
+Ancoats pavements; the drunken lurryman tottering out from the
+public-house to his lurry under the biting sleet of February; the
+ragged barefoot boys and girls swarming and festering in the slums;
+the young men struggling all about him for subsistence and
+success--these for the first time became realities to him, entered
+into that pondering of 'whence and whither' to which he had been
+always destined, and whereon he was now consciously started.
+
+And as the months went on, his attention was once more painfully
+caught and held by Dora's troubles and Daddy's infirmities. For
+Daddy's improvement was short-lived. A bad relapse came in
+November; things again went downhill fast; the loan contracted in
+the summer had to be met, and under the pressure of it Daddy only
+became more helpless and disreputable week by week. And now, when
+Doctor Mildmay went to see him, Daddy, crouching over the fire,
+pretended to be deaf, and 'soft' besides. Nothing could be got out
+of him except certain grim hints that his house was his own till he
+was turned out of it. 'Looks pretty bad this time,' said the doctor
+to David once as he came out discomfited. 'After all, there's not
+much hope when the craving returns on a man of his age, especially
+after some years' interval.'
+
+Daddy would sometimes talk frankly enough to David. At such times
+his language took an exasperating Shakespearean turn. He was
+abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques--as a man much
+buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets of life. Purcell
+stood generally for 'the enemy;' and to Purcell his half-mad fancy
+attributed most of his misfortunes. It was Purcell who had
+undermined his business, taken away his character, and driven him
+back to drink. David did not believe much of it, and told him so.
+Then, roused to wrath, the young man would speak his mind plainly
+as to Dora's sufferings and Dora's future. But to very little
+purpose.
+
+'Aye, you're right--you're right enough,' said the old man to him
+on one of these occasions, with a wild, sinister look. 'Cordelia'll
+hang for 't. If you want to do her any good, you must turn old Lear
+out--send him packing, back to the desert where he was before.
+There's elbow-room there!'
+
+David looked up startled. The thin bronzed face had a restless
+flutter in it. Before he could reply Daddy had laid a hand on his
+shoulder.
+
+'Davy, why don't you drink?'
+
+'What do you mean?' said the young man, flushing.
+
+'Davy, you've been as close as wax; but Daddy can see a thing or
+two when he chooses. Ah, you should drink, my lad. Let people
+prate--why shouldn't a man please himself? It's not the beastly
+liquor--that's the worst part of it--it's the _dreams,_ my
+lad, "the dreams that come." They say ether does the business
+cheapest. A teaspoonful--and you can be alternately in Paradise and
+the gutter four times a day. But the fools here don't know how to
+mix it.'
+
+As he spoke the door opened, and there stood Dora on the threshold.
+She had just come back from a Lenten service; her little worn
+prayer-book was in her hand. She stood trembling, looking at them
+both--at David's tight, indignant lips--at her father's excitement.
+
+Daddy's eye fell on her prayer-book, and David, looking up, saw a
+quick cloud of distaste, aversion, pass over his weird face.
+
+She put out some supper, and pressed David to stay. He did so in
+the vain hope of keeping Daddy at home. But the old vagrant was too
+clever for both of them. When David at last got up to go, Daddy
+accompanied him downstairs, and stood in the doorway looking up
+Market Place till David had disappeared in the darkness. Then with
+a soft and cunning hand he drew the door to behind him, and stood a
+moment lifting his face to the rack of moonlit cloud scudding
+across the top of the houses opposite. As he did so, he drew a long
+breath, with the gesture of one to whom the wild airs of that upper
+sky, the rush of its driving wind, were stimulus and delight. Then
+he put down his head and stole off to the right, towards the old
+White Inn in Hanging Ditch, while Dora was still listening in
+misery for his return step upon the stairs.
+
+A week later Dora, not knowing how the restaurant could be kept
+going any longer, and foreseeing utter bankruptcy and ruin as soon
+as the shutters should be up, took her courage in both hands,
+swallowed all pride, and walked up to Half Street to beg help of
+Purcell. After all he was her mother's brother. In spite of that
+long feud between him and Daddy, he would surely, for his own
+credit's sake, help them to escape a public scandal. For all his
+rodomontade, Daddy had never done him any real harm that she could
+remember.
+
+So she opened the shop door in Half Street, quaking at the sound of
+the bell she set in motion, and went in.
+
+Twenty minutes afterwards she came out again, looking from side to
+side like a hunted creature, her veil drawn close over her face.
+She fled on through Market Place, across Market Street and St.
+Ann's Square, and through the tall dark warehouse streets
+beyond--drawn blindly towards Potter Street and her only friend.
+
+David was putting out some books on the stall when he looked up and
+saw her. Perceiving that she was weeping and breathless, he asked
+her into the back room, while John kept guard in the shop.
+
+There she leant against the mantelpiece, shaking from head to foot,
+and wiping away her tears. He soon gathered that she had been to
+Purcell, and that Purcell had dismissed her appeal with every
+circumstance of cold and brutal insult. The sooner her father was
+in the workhouse or the lunatic asylum, and she in some nunnery or
+other, the sooner each would be in their right place. He was a
+vagabond, and she a Papist--let them go where they belonged. He was
+not going to spend a farthing of his hard-earned money to help
+either of them to impose any further on the world. And then he let
+fall a word or two which showed her that he had probably been at
+the bottom of some merciless pressure lately applied to them by one
+or two of their chief creditors. The bookseller's hour was come,
+and he was looking on at the hewing of his Agag with the joy of the
+righteous. So might the Lord avenge him of all his enemies.
+
+Dora could hardly give an account of it. The naked revelation of
+Purcell's hate, of so hard and vindictive a soul, had worked upon
+her like some physical horror. She had often suspected the truth,
+but now that it was past doubting, the moral shock was terrible to
+this tender mystical creature, whose heart by day and night lived a
+hidden life with the Crucified and with His saints. Oh, how could
+he, how could anyone, be so cruel? her father getting an old man!
+and she, who had never quarrelled with him--who had nursed Lucy! So
+she wailed, gradually recovering her poor shaken soul--calming it,
+indeed, all the while out of sight, with quick piteous words of
+prayer and submission.
+
+David stood by, pale with rage and sympathy. But what could he do?
+He was himself in the midst of a hard struggle, and had neither
+money nor credit available. They parted at last, with the
+understanding that he was to go and consult Ancrum, and that she
+was to go to her friends at St. Damian's.
+
+Till now poor Dora had carefully refrained from bringing her
+private woes into relation with her life in and through St.
+Damian's. Within that enchanted circle, she was another being with
+another existence. There she had never asked anything for herself,
+except the pardon and help of God, before His altar, and through
+His priests. Rather she had given--given all that she had--her
+time, such as she could spare from Daddy and her work, to the
+Sunday-school and the sick; her hard-won savings on her clothes,
+and on the extra work, for which she would often sit up night after
+night when Daddy believed her asleep, to the poor and to the
+services of the Church. There she had a position, almost an
+authority of her own--the authority which comes of self-spending.
+But now this innocent pride must be humbled. For the sake of her
+father, and of those to whom they owed money they could not pay,
+she must go and ask--beg instead of giving. All she wanted was
+time. Her embroidery work was now better paid than ever. If the
+restaurant were closed she could do more of it. In the end she
+believed she could pay everybody. But she must have time. Yes, she
+would go to Father Vernon that night! He would understand, even if
+he could not help her.
+
+Alas! Next morning David was just going out to dinner, when a
+message was brought him from Market Place. He started off thither
+at a run, and found a white and gasping Dora wandering restlessly
+up and down the upper room; while Sarah, the old Lancashire cook,
+very red and very tearful, followed her about trying to administer
+consolation. Daddy had disappeared. After coming in about eleven
+the night before and going noisily to his room--no doubt for the
+purpose of deluding Dora--he must have stolen down again and made
+off without being either seen or heard by anybody. Even the
+policeman on duty in Market Place had noticed nothing. He had taken
+what was practically the only money left them in the world--about
+twenty pounds--from Dora's cashbox, and some clothes, packing these
+last in a knapsack which still remained to him from the foreign
+tramps of years before.
+
+The efforts made by Dora, David, and Ancrum, whom David called in
+to help, to track the fugitive, were quite useless. Daddy had
+probably disguised himself, for he had all the tricks of the
+adventurer, and could 'make up' in former days so as to deceive
+even his own wife.
+
+Strange outbreak of a secret ineradicable instinct! He had been
+Dora's for twenty years. But life with her at Leicester, and during
+their first years at Manchester, had thriven too evenly, and in the
+end the old wanderer had felt his blood prick within him, and the
+mania of his youth revive. His business had grown hateful to him;
+it was probably the comparative monotony of success which had first
+reawakened the travel-hunger--then restlessness, conflict, leading
+to drink, and, finally, escape.
+
+'He will come back, you know,' said Dora one night, sharply, to
+David. 'He served my mother so many times. But he always came back.'
+
+They were sitting together in the shuttered and dismantled
+restaurant. There was to be a sale on the premises on the morrow,
+and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of
+the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from
+upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who
+had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was
+realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still
+leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had
+met the creditors for her. There had been a composition, and she
+had insisted upon working off to the best of her power whatever sum
+might remain after the possession and goodwill had been sold. She
+could live on a crust, and she was sure of continuous work both for
+the great church-furniture shop in Manchester which had hitherto
+employed her and also for the newly established School of Art
+Needlework at Kensington. As an embroideress there were few more
+delicately trained eyes and defter hands than hers in England.
+
+When she spoke of her father's coming back, David was seized with
+pity. She could not sit down in these days when her work was out of
+her hands. Perpetual movement seemed her only relief. The face,
+that seemed so featureless but was so expressive, had lost its
+sweet, shining look; the mouth had the pucker of pain; and she had
+piteous startled ways quite unlike her usual soft serenity.
+
+'Oh, yes, he will come back--some time,' he said, to comfort her.
+
+'I don't doubt that--never. But I wonder how he could go like
+that--how he had the heart! I did think he cared for me. I wasn't
+ever nasty to him--at least, I don't remember. Perhaps he thought I
+was. But only we two--and always together--since mother died!'
+
+She began to tidy some of the lots, to tie some of the bundles of
+odds and ends together more securely--talking all the while in a
+broken way. She was evidently bewildered and at sea. If she could
+have remembered any misconduct of her own, it seemed to David, it
+would have been a relief to her. Her faith taught her that love was
+all-powerful--but it had availed her nothing!
+
+The sale came; and the goodwill of the Parlour was sold to a man
+who was to make a solid success of what with Daddy had been a
+half-crazy experiment.
+
+Dora went to live in Ancoats, that teeming, squalid quarter which
+lies but a stone's-throw from the principal thoroughfares and
+buildings of Manchester, and in its varieties of manufacturing life
+and population presents types which are all its own. Here are the
+cotton operatives who work the small proportion of mills still
+remaining within the bounds of Manchester--the spinners, minders,
+reelers, reed-makers, and the rest; here are the calico-printers
+and dyers, the warehousemen and lurrymen; and here too are the
+sellers of 'fents,' and all the other thousand and one small trades
+and occupations which live on and by the poor. The quarter has one
+broad thoroughfare or lung, which on a sunny day is gay, sightly,
+and alive; then to north and south diverge the innumerable low
+red-brick streets where the poor live and work; which have none,
+however, of the trim uniformity which belongs to the workers'
+quarters of the factory towns pure and simple. Manchester in its
+worst streets is more squalid, more haphazard, more nakedly poor
+even than London. Yet, for all that, Manchester is a city with a
+common life, which London is not. The native Lancashire element,
+lost as it is beneath many supervening strata, is still there and
+powerful; and there are strong well-defined characteristic
+interests and occupations which bind the whole together.
+
+Here Dora settled with a St. Damian's girl friend, a shirt-maker.
+They lived over a sweetshop, in two tiny rooms, in a street even
+more miscellaneous and half-baked than its neighbours. Outside was
+ugliness; inside, unremitting labour. But Dora soon made herself
+almost happy. By various tender shifts she had saved out of the
+wreck in Market Place Daddy's bits of engravings and foreign
+curiosities, his Swiss carvings and shells, his skins and stuffed
+birds; very moth-eaten and melancholy these last, but still safe.
+There, too, was his chair; it stood beside the fire; he had but to
+come back to it. Many a time in the week did she suddenly rise that
+she might go to the door and listen; or crane her head out of
+window, agitated by a figure, a sound, as her mother had done
+before her.
+
+Then her religious life was free to expand as it had never been
+yet. Very soon, in Passion Week, she and her friend had gathered a
+prayer-meeting of girls, hands from the mill at the end of the
+street. They came for twenty minutes in the dinner-hour,
+delicate-faced comely creatures many of them, with their shawls
+over their heads: Dora prayed and sang with them, a soft tremulous
+passion in every word and gesture. They thought her a saint--began
+to tell her their woes and their sins. In the evenings and on
+Sunday she lived in the coloured and scented church, with its
+plaintive music, its luminous altar, its suggestions both of a
+great encompassing church order of undefined antiquity and infinite
+future, and of a practical system full of support for individual
+weakness and guidance for the individual will. The beauty of the
+ceremonial appealed to those instincts in her which found other
+expression in her glowing embroideries; and towards the church
+order, with its symbols, observances, mysteries, the now solitary
+girl felt a more passionate adoration, a more profound humility,
+than ever before. Nothing too much could be asked of her. During
+Lent, but for the counsels of Father Russell himself, a shrewd man,
+well aware that St. Damian's represented the one Anglican oasis in
+an incorrigibly moderate Manchester, even her serviceable and
+elastic strength would have given way, so hard she was to that poor
+'sister the body,' which so many patient ages have gone to perfect
+and adjust.
+
+Half of the romance, the poetry of her life, lay here; the other
+half in her constant expectation of her father, and in the visits
+of David Grieve. Once a week at least David mounted to the little
+room where the two girls sat working; sometimes now, oh joy! he
+went to church with her; sometimes he made her come out to Eccles,
+or Cheadle, or the Irwell valley for a walk. She used various
+maidenly arts and self-restraints to prevent scandal. At home she
+never saw him alone, and she now never went to Potter Street.
+Still, out of doors they were often alone. There was no
+concealment, and the persons who took notice assumed that they were
+keeping company and going to be married. When such things were said
+to Dora she met them with a sweet and quiet denial, at first
+blushing, then with no change at all of look or manner.
+
+Yet the girl who lived with her knew that the first sound of
+David's rap on the door below sent a tremor through the figure
+beside her, that the slight hand would go up instinctively to the
+coiled hair, straightening and pinning, and that the smiling,
+listening, sometimes disputing Dora who talked with David Grieve
+was quite different from the dreamy and ascetic Dora who sat beside
+her all day.
+
+Why did David go? As a matter of fact, with every month of this
+winter and spring, Dora's friendship became more necessary to him.
+All the brotherly feeling he would once so willingly have spent on
+Louie, he now spent on Dora. She became in truth a sister to him.
+He talked to her as he would have done to Louie had she been like
+Dora. No other relationship ever entered his mind; and he believed
+that he was perfectly understood and met in the same way.
+
+Both often spoke of Lucy, towards whom David in this new and graver
+temper felt both kindly and gratefully. She, poor child, wrote to
+Dora from time to time letters full of complaints of her father and
+of his tyranny in keeping her away from Manchester. He indeed
+seemed to have taken a morbid dislike to his daughter, and what
+company he wanted he got from the widow, whom yet he had never made
+up his mind to marry. Lucy chafed and rebelled against the
+perpetual obstacles he placed in the way of her returning home, but
+he threatened to make her earn her own living if she disobeyed him,
+and in the end she always submitted. She poured herself out
+bitterly, however, to Dora, and Dora was helplessly sorry for her,
+feeling that her idle wandering life with the various aunts and
+cousins she boarded with was excessively bad for her--seeing that
+Lucy was not of the stuff to fashion new duties or charities for
+herself out of new relations--and that the small, vain, and yet
+affectionate nature ran an evil chance of ultimate barrenness and
+sourness.
+
+But what could she do? In every letter there was some mention of
+David Grieve or request for news about him. About the visit to
+Paris Dora had written discreetly, telling only what she knew, and
+nothing of what she guessed. In reality, as the winter passed on,
+Dora watched him more and more closely, waiting for the time when
+that French mystery, whatever it was, should have ceased to
+overshadow him, and she might once more scheme for Lucy. He must
+marry--that she knew!--whatever he might think. Anyone could see
+that, with the returning spring, in spite of her friendship and
+Ancrum's, he felt his loneliness almost intolerable. It was clear,
+too, as his manhood advanced, that he was naturally drawn to women,
+naturally dependent on them. In spite of his great intelligence, to
+her so formidable and mysterious, Dora had soon recognised, as
+Elise had done, the eager, clinging, confiding temper of his youth.
+And beneath the transformation of passion and grief it was still
+there--to be felt moving often like a wounded thing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+It was a showery April evening. But as it was also a Saturday,
+Manchester took no heed at all of the weather. The streets were
+thronged. All the markets were ablaze with light, and full of
+buyers. In Market Place, Dora's old home, the covered glass booths
+beside the pavement brought the magic of the spring into the very
+heart of the black and swarming town, for they were a fragrant show
+of daffodils, hyacinths, primroses, and palms. Their lights shone
+out into the rainy mist of the air, on the glistening pavements,
+and on the faces of the cheerful chattering crowd, to which the
+shawled heads so common among the women gave the characteristic
+Lancashire touch. Above rose the dark tower of the Exchange; on one
+side was the Parlour, still dedicated to the kindly diet of
+corn--and fruit-eating men, but repainted, and launched on a fresh
+career of success by Daddy's successor; on the other, the gabled
+and bulging mass of the old Fishing-tackle House, with a lively
+fish and oyster traffic surging in the little alleys on either side
+of it.
+
+Market Street, too, was thronged. In the great cheap shop at the
+head of it, aflame with lights from top to base, you could see the
+buyers story after story, swarming like bees in a glass hive.
+Farther on in the wide space of the Infirmary square, the omnibuses
+gathered, and a detachment of redcoats just returned from
+rifle-practice on the moors crowded the pavement outside the
+hospital, amid an admiring escort of the youth of Manchester, while
+their band played lustily.
+
+But especially in Peter Street, the street of the great public
+halls and principal theatres, was Manchester alive and busy.
+Nilsson was singing at the 'Royal,' and the rich folk were setting
+down there in their broughams and landaus. But in the great Free
+Trade Hall there was a performance of 'Judas Maccabeus' given by
+the Manchester Philharmonic Society, and the vast place, filled
+from end to end with shilling and two-shilling seats, was crowded
+with the 'people.' It was a purely local scene, unlike anything of
+the same kind in London, or any other capital. The performers on
+the platform were well known to Manchester, unknown elsewhere;
+Manchester took them at once critically and affectionately,
+remembering their past, looking forward to their future; the
+Society was one of which the town was proud; the conductor was a
+character, and popular; and half the audience at least was composed
+of the relations and friends of the chorus. Most people had a
+'Susan,' an 'Alice,' or a 'William' making signs to them at
+intervals from the orchestra; and when anything went particularly
+well, and the applause was loud, the friends of Susan or Alice
+beamed with a proprietary pride.
+
+Looking down upon this friendly cheerful throng sat David Grieve,
+high up in the balcony. It had been his wont of late to frequent
+these cheap concerts, where as a rule, owing to the greater musical
+sensitiveness of the English North as compared with the South, the
+music is singularly good. During the past winter, indeed, music
+might almost be said to have become part of his life. He had no
+true musical gift, but in the paralysis of many of his natural
+modes of expression which had overtaken him music supplied a need.
+In it he at least, and at this moment, found a voice and an emotion
+not too personal or poignant. He lost himself in it, and was
+soothed.
+
+Towards the beginning of the last part he suddenly with a start
+recognised Lucy Purcell in the body of the hall. She was sitting
+with friends whom he did not know, staring straight before her. He
+bent forward and looked at her carefully. In a minute or two he
+decided that she was looking tired, cross, and unhappy, and that
+she was not attending to the music at all.
+
+So at last her father had let her come home. As to her looks, to be
+daughter to Purcell was to be sure of disagreeable living; and
+perhaps her future stepmother had been helping Purcell to annoy
+her.
+
+Poor little thing! David felt a strong wish to speak to her after
+the performance. Meanwhile he tried to attract her attention, but
+in vain. It seemed to him that she looked right along the bench on
+which he sat; but there was no flash in her face; it remained as
+tired and frowning as before.
+
+He ran downstairs before the end of the last chorus, and placed
+himself near the door by which he felt sure she would come out. He
+was just in time. She and her party also came out early before the
+rush. There was a sudden crowd of people in the doorway, and then
+he heard a little cry. Lucy stood before him, flushed, pulling at
+her glove, and saying something incoherent. But before he could
+understand she had turned back to the two women who accompanied her
+and spoken to them quickly; the elder replied, with a sour look at
+David; the younger laughed behind her muff. Lucy turned away
+wilfully, and at that instant the crowd from within, surging
+outwards, swept them away from her, and she and David found
+themselves together.
+
+'Come down those steps there to the right,' she said peremptorily.
+'They are going the other way.'
+
+By this time David himself was red. She hurried him into the
+street, however, and then he saw that she was breathing hard, and
+that her hands were clasped together as though she were trying to
+restrain herself.
+
+'Oh, I am so unhappy!' she burst out, 'so unhappy! And it was all,
+you know, to begin with, because of you, Mr. Grieve! But oh! I
+forgot you'd been ill--you look so different!'
+
+She paused suddenly, while over her face there passed an expression
+half startled, half shrinking, as of one who speaks familiarly, as
+he supposes, to an old friend and finds a stranger. She could not
+take her eyes off him. What was this new dignity, this indefinable
+change of manner?
+
+'I am not different,' he said hastily, 'not in the least. So your
+father has never forgiven you the kindness you did me? I don't know
+what to say, Miss Lucy. I'm both sorry and ashamed.'
+
+'Forgiven it!--no, nor ever will,' she said shortly, walking on,
+and forgetting everything but her woes. 'Oh, do listen! Come up
+Oxford Street. I must tell some one, or I shall die! I must see
+Dora. Father's forbidden me to go, and I haven't had a moment to
+myself yet. She hasn't written to me since she left the Parlour,
+and no one'll tell me where she is. And that _odious_ woman!
+Oh, she is an abominable wretch! She wants to claim all my
+things--all the bits of things that were mother's, and I have
+always counted mine. She won't let me take any of them away. And
+she's stolen a necklace of mine--yes, Mr. Grieve, _stolen_ it.
+I don't care _that_ about it--not in itself; but to have your
+things taken out of your drawers without "_With_ your leave"
+or "_By_ your leave"!--She's made father worse than ever. I
+thought he had found her out, but he is actually going to marry her
+in July, and they won't let me live at home unless I make a solemn
+promise to "perform my religious duties" and behave properly to the
+chapel people. And I never will, not if I starve for it--nasty,
+canting, crawling, backbiting things! Then father says I can live
+away, and he'll make me an allowance. And what do you think he'll
+allow me?'
+
+She faced round upon him with curving lip and eyes aflame. David
+averred truly that he could not guess.
+
+'Thirty--pounds--a--year!' she said with vicious emphasis.
+'There--would you believe it? If you put a dirty little chit of a
+nurse-girl on board wages, it would come to more than that. And he
+just bought three houses in Millgate, and as rich as anything! Oh,
+it's shameful, I call it, _shameful!_'
+
+She put her handkerchief to her eyes. Then she quickly withdrew it
+again and turned to him, remembering how his first aspect had
+surprised her. In the glare of some shops they were passing David
+could see her perfectly, and she him. Certainly, in the year which
+had elapsed since they had met she had ripened, or rather softened,
+into a prettier girl. Whether it was the milder Southern climate in
+which she had been living, or the result of physical weakness left
+by her attack of illness in the preceding spring, at any rate her
+bloom was more delicate, the lines of her small, pronounced face
+more finished and melting. As for her, now that she had paused a
+moment in her flow of complaint, she was busy puzzling out the
+change in him. David became vaguely conscious of it, and tried to
+set her off again.
+
+'But you'd rather live away,' he said, 'when they treat you like
+that? You'd rather be independent, I should think? I would!'
+
+'Oh, catch me living with that woman!' she cried passionately.'
+She's no better than a thief, a common thief. I don't care who
+hears me. And _made up!_ Oh, its shocking! It seems to me
+there's nothing I can talk about at home now--whether it's getting
+old--or teeth--or hair--I'm always supposed to be "passing
+remarks." And I wouldn't mind if it was my Hastings cousins I had
+to live with. But they can't have me any more, and now I'm at
+Wakely with the Astons.'
+
+'The Aston's?' David echoed. Like most people of small training and
+intelligence, Lucy instinctively supposed that whatever was
+familiar to her was familiar to other people.
+
+'Oh, don't you know? It's father's sister who married a
+mill-overseer at Wakely. And they're very kind to me. Only they're
+_dreadfully_ pious too--not like father--I don't mean that.
+And, you see--it's Robert!'
+
+'Who's Robert?' asked David amused by her blush, and admiring the
+trim lightness of her figure and walk.
+
+'Robert's the eldest son. He's a reedmaker. He's got enough to
+marry on--at least he thinks so.'
+
+'And he wants to marry you?'
+
+She nodded. Then she looked at him, laughing, her naturally bright
+eyes sparkling through the tears still wet in them.
+
+'Father's a Baptist, you know--that's bad enough--but Robert's
+a _Particular_ Baptist. I asked him what it meant once when
+he was pestering me to marry him. "Well, you see," he said,
+"a man must _show_ that his heart's changed--we don't take
+in everybody like--we want to be _sure_ they're real _converted_."
+I don't believe it does mean that--father says it doesn't.
+Anyway I asked him whether if I married him he'd want me to be
+a Particular Baptist too. And he said, very slow and solemn,
+that of course he should look for religious fellowship in his
+wife, but that he didn't want to hurry me. I laughed till I
+cried at the thought of _me_ going to that hideous chapel of
+his, dressed like his married sister. But sometimes, I declare, I
+think he'll make me do what he wants--he's got a way with him. He
+sticks to a thing as tight as wax, and I don't care what becomes of
+me sometimes.'
+
+She pouted despondently, but her quick eye stole to her companion's
+face.
+
+'Oh, no, you won't marry Robert, Miss Lucy,' said David cheerfully.
+'You've had a will of your own ever since I've known you. But what
+are you at home for now?'
+
+'Why, I told you--to pack up my things. But I can't find half of
+them; she--she's walked off with them. Oh, I'm going off again as
+soon as possible--I can't stand it. But I must see Dora. Father
+says I shan't visit Papists. But I'll watch my chance. I'll get
+there to-morrow--see if I don't! Tell me what she's doing, Mr.
+Grieve.'
+
+David told her all he knew. Lucy's comments were very
+characteristic. She was equally hard on Daddy's ill-behaviour and
+Dora's religion, with a little self-satisfied hardness that would
+have provoked David but for its childish _naivete_. Many of
+the things that she said of Dora, however, showed real feeling,
+real affection.
+
+'She _is_ good,' she wound up at last with a long sigh.
+
+'Yes, she's the best woman I ever saw,' said David slowly; 'she's
+beautiful, she's a saint.'
+
+Lucy looked up quickly--her dismayed eyes fastened on him--then
+they fell again, and her expression became suddenly piteous and
+humble.
+
+'You're still getting on well, aren't you?' she said timidly. 'You
+were glad not to be turned out, weren't you?'
+
+Somehow, for the life of her, she could not at that moment help
+reminding him of her claim upon him. He admitted it very readily,
+told her broadly how he was doing and what new connections he was
+making. It was pleasant to tell her, pleasant to speak to this
+changing rose-leaf face with its eager curiosity and attention.
+
+'And you were ill when you were abroad?--so Dora said. Father, of
+course, made unkind remarks--you may be sure of that!--_He_'ll
+set stories about when he doesn't like anybody. I didn't believe a
+word.'
+
+'It don't matter,' said David hotly, but he flushed. His desire to
+wring Purcell's neck was getting inconveniently strong.
+
+'No, not a bit,' she declared. Then she suddenly broke into
+laughter. 'Oh, Mr. Grieve, how many assistants do you think father's
+had since you left?'
+
+And she chatted on about these individuals, describing a series of
+dolts, their achievements and personalities, with a great deal of
+girlish fun. Her companion enjoyed her little humours and egotisms,
+enjoyed the walk and her companionship. After the strain of the
+day, a day spent either in the toil of a developing business or
+under a difficult pressure of thought, this light girl's voice
+brought a gay, relaxed note into life. The spring was in the air,
+and his youth stirred again in that cavern where grief had buried
+it.
+
+'Oh, _dear_, I must go home,' she said at last regretfully,
+startled by a striking clock. 'Father'll be just mad. Of course,
+he'll hear all about my meeting you--I don't care. I'm not going to
+be parted from all my friends to please him, particularly now he's
+turned me out for good--from Dora and--'
+
+'From you,' she would have said, but she became suddenly conscious
+and her voice failed.
+
+'No, indeed! And your friends won't forget you, Miss Lucy. You'll
+go and see Dora to-morrow?'
+
+'Yes, if I can give them the slip at home.'
+
+There was a pause, and then he said--
+
+'And will you allow me to visit you at Wakely some Sunday? I know
+those moors well.'
+
+She reddened all over with delight. There was something in the
+little stiffness of the request which gave it importance.
+
+'I wish you would; it's not far,' she stammered. 'Aunt Miriam would
+be glad to see you.'
+
+They walked back rapidly along Mosley Street and into Market Place.
+There she stopped and shyly asked him to leave her. Almost all the
+Saturday-night crowd had disappeared from the streets. It was
+really late, and she became suddenly conscious that this walk of
+hers might reasonably be regarded at home as a somewhat bold
+proceeding.
+
+'I wish you'd let me see you right home,' he said, detaining her
+hand in his.
+
+'Oh, no, no--I shall catch it enough as it is. Oh, they'll let me
+in! Will it be next Sunday, Mr. Grieve?'
+
+'No, the Sunday after. Can I do anything for you?'
+
+He came closer to her, seeming to envelope her in his tall,
+protecting presence. It was impossible for him to ignore her
+girlish flutter, her evident joy in having seen and talked to him
+again, in spite of her dread of her father. Nor did he wish to
+ignore them. They were unexpectedly sweet to him, and he surprised
+himself.
+
+'Oh no, nothing,--but it's very good of you to say so,' she said
+impulsively; '_very_. Good night again.'
+
+And instinctively she put out another small hand, which also he
+took, so holding her prisoner a moment.
+
+'Look here,' he said, 'I'll just slip down that side of the Close
+and wait till I see you get safe in. Good night; I _am_ glad I
+saw you!'
+
+She ran away in a blind whirl of happiness up the steps into the
+passage of Half Street. He slipped down to the left and waited,
+looking through the railings across the corner of the Close, his
+eyes fixed on that upper window, where he had so often sat,
+parleying alternately with the cathedral and Voltaire.
+
+Lucy rang, the door opened, there were loud sounds within, but she
+was admitted; it closed behind her.
+
+David was soon in his back room, kindling a lamp and a bit of fire
+to read by. But when it was done he sat bent forward over the
+blaze, till the cathedral clock chimed the small hours, thinking.
+
+She was so unformed and childish, that poor little thing!--surely a
+man could make what he would of her. She would give him affection
+and duty; the core of the nature was sound, and her little humours
+would bring life into a house.
+
+He had but to put out his hand--that was plain enough. And why not?
+Was any humbler draught to be for ever put aside, because the best
+wine had been poured to waste?
+
+Then the rebellions of an unquenched romance, an untamed heart,
+beset him. Surging waves of bitterness and pain, the after-swell of
+that tempest in which his youth had so nearly foundered, seemed to
+bear him away to seas of desolation.
+
+After all that had happened, the greed for personal joy he every
+now and then detected in himself surprised and angered him by its
+strength. The truth was that in whole tracts of his nature he was
+still a boy, still young beyond his years, and it was the conflict
+in him between youth's hot immaturity and a man's baffling
+experience which made the pain of his life.
+
+He meant to go to Wakely on the next Sunday but one--that he was
+certain of--but as to what he was to do and say when he got there
+he was perhaps culpably uncertain. But in his weakness and
+_sehnsucht_ he dwelt upon the thought of Lucy more and more.
+
+Then Dora--foolish saint!--came upon the scene.
+
+Lucy found her way to the street in Ancoats where Dora lived, the
+morning after her talk with David, and the two cousins spent an
+agitated hour together. Lucy could hardly find time to ask Dora
+about her sorrows, so occupied was she in recounting all her own
+adventures. She was to go back to Wakely that very afternoon.
+Purcell had been absolutely unapproachable since the cousin who had
+escorted Lucy to the Free Trade Hall the night before had in her
+own defence revealed the secret of that young lady's behaviour.
+Pack and go she should! He wouldn't have such a hussy another night
+under his roof. Let them do with her as could.
+
+'I thought he would have beaten me this morning,' Lucy candidly
+confessed. There was a red spot on each cheek, and she was
+evidently glorying in martyrdom. 'He looked like a devil--a real
+devil. Why can't he be fond of me, and let me alone, like other
+girls' fathers? I believe he _is_ fond of me somehow, but he
+wants to break my spirit--'
+
+She tossed her head significantly.
+
+'Lucy, you know you ought to give in when you can,' said the
+perplexed Dora, with rebuke in her voice.
+
+'Oh, nonsense!' said Lucy. 'You can't--it's ridiculous. Well,
+he'll quarrel with that woman some day--I'm sure _she's_ his
+match--and then maybe he'll want me back. But perhaps he won't
+get me.'
+
+Dora looked up with a curious expression, half smiling, half
+wistful. She had already heard all the story of the walk.
+
+'O Dora!' cried the child, laying down her head on the table
+beneath her cousin's eyes, 'Dora, I do believe he's beginning to
+care. You see he _asked_ to come to Wakely. I didn't ask him.
+Oh, if it all comes to nothing again, I shall break my heart!'
+
+Dora smoothed the fine brown hair, and said affectionate things,
+but vaguely, as if she was not quite certain what to say.
+
+'He does look quite different, somehow,' continued Lucy. 'Why do you
+think he was so long away over there, Dora? Father says nasty
+things about it--says he fell into bad company and lost his money.'
+
+'I don't know how uncle Purcell can know,' said Dora indignantly.
+'He's always thinking the worst of people. He was ill, for Mr.
+Ancrum told me, and he's the only person that _does_ know. And
+anyone can see he isn't strong yet.'
+
+'Oh, and he is so handsome!' sighed Lucy, 'handsomer than ever.
+There isn't a man in Manchester to touch him.'
+
+Dora laughed out and called her a 'little silly.' But, as privately
+in her heart of hearts she was of the same opinion, her reproof had
+not much force.
+
+When Lucy left, Dora put away her work, and, lifting a flushed
+face, walked to the window and stood there looking out. A pale
+April sun was shining on the brewery opposite, and touched the dark
+waters of the canal under the bridge to the left. The roofs of the
+squalid houses abutting on the brewery were wet with rain. Through
+a gap she could see a laundress's back-yard mainly filled with
+drying clothes, but boasting besides a couple of pink flowering
+currants just out, and holding their own for a few brief days
+against the smuts of Manchester. Here and there a man out of work
+lounged, pipe in mouth, at his open door, silently absorbing the
+sunshine and the cheerfulness of the moist blue over the
+house-tops. There was a new sweetness and tenderness in the spring
+air--or were they in Dora's soul?
+
+She leant her head against the window, and remained there with her
+hands clasped before her for some little time--for her, a most
+unusual idleness.
+
+Yes, Lucy was very obstinate. Dora had never thought she would have
+the courage to fight her father in this way. And selfish, too. She
+had spoken only once of Daddy, and that in a way to make the
+daughter wince. But she was so young--such a child!--and would be
+ruined if she were left to this casual life, and people who didn't
+understand her. A husband to take care of her, and children--they
+would be the making of her.
+
+And he! Dora's eyes filled with tears. All this winter the change
+in him, the silent evidences of a shock all the more tragic to her
+because of its mystery, had given him a kind of sacredness in her
+eyes. She fell thinking, besides, of the times lately he had been
+to church with her. Ah, she was glad he had heard that sermon, that
+beautiful sermon of Canon Welby's in Passion Week! He had said
+nothing about it, but she knew it had been meant for clever,
+educated men--men like him. The church, indeed, had been full of
+men--her neighbours had told her that several of the gentlemen from
+Owens College had been there.
+
+That evening David knocked at the door below about half-past eight.
+Dora got up quickly and went across to her room-fellow, a
+dark-faced stooping girl, who took her shirt-maker's slavery
+without a murmur, and loved Dora.
+
+'Would you mind, Mary?' she said timidly. 'I want to speak to Mr.
+Grieve.'
+
+The girl looked up, understood, stopped her machine, and, hastily
+gathering some pieces together that wanted buttonholes, went off
+into the little inner room and shut the door.
+
+Dora knelt and with restless hands put the bit of fire together.
+She had just thrown a handkerchief over her canaries. On the frame
+a piece of her work, a fine altar-cloth gleaming with golds,
+purples, and pale pinks, stood uncovered. The deal table, the white
+walls on which hung Daddy's old prints, the bare floor with its
+strip of carpet, were all spotlessly clean. The tea had been put
+away. Daddy's vacant chair stood in its place.
+
+When David came in he found her sitting pensively on a little
+wooden stool by the fire. Generally he gossipped while the two
+girls worked busily away--sometimes he read to them. To-night as he
+sat down he felt something impending.
+
+Dora talked of Lucy's visit. They agreed as to the folly and
+brutality of Purcell's treatment of her, and laughed together over
+the marauding stepmother.
+
+Then there was a pause. Dora broke it. She was sitting upright on
+the stool, looking straight into his face.
+
+'Will you not be cross if I say something?' she asked, catching her
+breath. 'It's not my business.'
+
+'Say it, please.' But he reddened instantly.
+
+'Lucy's--Lucy's--got a fancy for you,' she said tremulously,
+shrinking from her own words. 'Perhaps it's a shame to say it--oh,
+it may be! You haven't told me anything, and she's given me no
+leave. But she's had it a long time.'
+
+'I don't know why you say so,' he replied half sombrely.
+
+His flush had died away, but his hand shook on his knee.
+
+'Oh, yes, you do,' she cried; 'you must know. Lucy can't keep even
+her own secrets. But she's got such a warm heart! I'm sure she has.
+If a man would take her and be kind to her, she'd make him happy.'
+
+She stopped, looking at him intently.
+
+Then suddenly she burst out, laying her hand on the arm of his
+chair--Daddy's chair:
+
+'Don't be angry; you've been like a brother to me.'
+
+He took her hand and pressed it, reassuring her.
+
+'But how can I make her happy?' he said, with his head on his hand.
+'I don't want to be a fool and deny what you say, for the sake of
+denying it. But--'
+
+His voice sank into silence. Then, as she did not speak, he looked
+up at her. She was sitting, since he had released her, with her
+arms locked behind her, frowning in her intensity of thought, her
+last energy of sacrifice.
+
+'You would make her happy,' she said slowly, 'and she'd be a loving
+wife. She's flighty is Lucy, but there's nothing bad in her.'
+
+Both were silent for another minute, then, by a natural reaction,
+both looked at each other and laughed.
+
+'I'm making rather free with you, I'm bound to admit that,' she
+said, with a merry shamefaced expression, which brought out the
+youth in her face.
+
+'Well, give me time, Miss Dora. If--if anything did come of it, I
+should have to let Purcell know, and there'd be flat war. You've
+thought of that?'
+
+Certainly, Dora had thought of it. They might have to wait, and
+Purcell would probably refuse to give or leave Lucy any money. All
+the better, according to David. Nothing would ever induce him to
+take a farthing of his ex-master's hoards.
+
+But here, by a common instinct, they stopped planning, and David
+resolutely turned the conversation. When they parted, however, Dora
+was secretly eager and hopeful. It was curious how little the
+father's rights weighed with so scrupulous a soul. Whether it was
+his behaviour to her father which had roused an unconscious
+hardness even in her gentle nature, or whether it was the subtle
+influence of his Dissent, as compared with the nascent dispositions
+she seemed to see in David--anyway, Dora's conscience was silent;
+she was entirely absorbed in her own act, and in the prospects of
+the other two.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+When David reached home that night he found a French letter
+awaiting him. It was from Louie, still dated from the country town
+near Toulouse, and announced the birth of her child--a daughter.
+The letter was scrawled apparently from her bed, and contained some
+passionate, abusive remarks about her husband, half finished, and
+hardly intelligible. She peremptorily called on David to send her
+some money at once. Her husband was a sot, and unfaithful to her.
+Even now with his first child, he had taken advantage of her being
+laid up to make love to other women. All the town cried shame on
+him. The priest visited her frequently, and was all on her side.
+
+Then at the end she wrote a hasty description of the child. Its
+eyes were like his, David's, but it would have much handsomer
+eyelashes. It was by far the best-looking child in the place, and
+because everybody remarked on its likeness to her, she believed
+Montjoie had taken a dislike to it. She didn't care, but it made
+him look ridiculous. Why didn't he do some work, instead of letting
+her and her child live like pigs? He could get some, if his dirty
+pride would let him. It wasn't to be supposed, with this disgusting
+Commune going on in Paris, and everybody nearly ruined, that anyone
+would want statues--they had never even sold the Maenad--but
+somebody had wanted him to do a monument, cheap, the other day for
+a brother who had been killed in the war; and he wouldn't. He was
+too fine. That was like him all over.
+
+It was as though he could hear her flinging out the reckless
+sentences. But he thought there were signs that she was pleased
+with the baby--and he suddenly remembered her tyrannous passion for
+the Mason child.
+
+As to the money, he looked carefully into his accounts. For the
+last six months he had been gathering every possible saving
+together with a view to the History of Manchester, which he and
+John had planned to begin printing in the coming autumn. It went
+against him sorely to take from such a hoard for the purpose of
+helping Jules Montjoie to an idler and easier existence. The fate
+of his six hundred pounds burnt deep into a mind which at bottom
+was well furnished with all the old Yorkshire and Scotch frugality.
+
+However, he sent his sister money, and he gave up in thought that
+fortnight's walking tour in the Lakes he had planned for his
+holiday. He must just stay at home and see to business.
+
+Then next morning, as it happened, he woke up with a sudden hunger
+for the country--a vision before his eyes of the wide bosom of the
+Scout, of fresh airs and hurrying waters, of the sheep among the
+heather. His night had been restless; the whole of life seemed to
+be again in debate--Lucy's figure, Dora's talk, chased and
+tormented him. Away to the April moorland! He sprang out of bed
+determined to take the first train to Clough End. He had not been
+out of Manchester for months, and it was luckily a Saturday. Here
+was this letter of Louie's too--he owed the news to Uncle Reuben.
+Since Reuben's visit to Manchester, a year before, there had been
+no communication between him and them. Six years! How would the
+farm--how would Aunt Hannah look? There was a drawing in him this
+morning towards the past, towards even the harsh forms and memories
+of it, such as often marks a time of emotion and crisis, the moment
+before a man takes a half-reluctant step towards a doubtful future.
+
+But as he journeyed towards the Derbyshire border, he was not in
+truth thinking of Dora's counsels or of Lucy Purcell at all. Every
+now and then he lost himself in the mere intoxication of the
+spring, in the charm of the factory valleys, just flushing into
+green, through which the train was speeding. But in general his
+attention was held by the book in his hand. His time for reading
+had been much curtailed of late by the toils of his business. He
+caught covetously at every spare hour.
+
+The book was Bishop Berkeley's 'Dialogues.'
+
+With what a medley of thoughts and interests had he been concerned
+during the last four or five months! His old tastes and passions
+had revived as we have seen, but unequally, with morbid gaps and
+exceptions. In these days he had hardly opened a poet or a
+novelist. His whole being shrank from them, as though it had been
+one wound, and the books which had been to him the passionate
+friends of his most golden hours, which had moulded in him, as it
+were, the soul wherewith he had loved Elise, looked to him now like
+enemies as he passed them quickly by upon the shelves.
+
+But some of his old studies--German, Greek, science
+especially--were the saving of him. Among some foreign books, for
+instance, which he had ordered for a customer he came upon a copy
+of some scientific essays by Littre. Among them was a survey of the
+state of astronomical knowledge written somewhere about 1835, with
+all the luminous charm which the great Positivist had at command.
+David was captured by it, by the flight of the scientific
+imagination through time and space, amid suns, planets and nebulae,
+the beginnings and the wrecks of worlds. When he laid it down with
+a sigh of pleasure, Ancrum, who was sitting opposite, looked up.
+
+'You like your book, Davy?'
+
+'Yes,' said the other slowly, staring out of the twilight window at
+the gloom which passes for sky in Manchester. Then with another
+long breath,--'It makes you a new heaven and a new earth!'
+
+A similar impression, only even richer and more detailed, had been
+left upon him by a volume of Huxley's 'Lay Sermons.' The world of
+natural fact in its overpowering wealth and mystery was thus given
+back to him, as it were, under another aspect than that torturing
+intoxicating aspect of art--one that fortified and calmed. All his
+scientific curiosities which had been so long laid to sleep
+revived. His first returning joy came from a sense of the
+inexhaustibleness and infinity of nature.
+
+But very soon this renewed interest in science began to have the
+bearing and to issue in the mental activities which, all unknown to
+himself, had been from the beginning in his destiny. He could not
+now read it for itself alone. That new ethical and spiritual
+susceptibility, into which agony and loss had become slowly
+transformed, dominated and absorbed all else. For some time, beside
+his scientific books, there lay others from a class not hitherto
+very congenial to him, that which contains the great examples in
+our day, outside the poets, of the poetical or imaginative
+treatment of ethics--Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin. At an age when most
+young minds of intelligence amongst us are first seized by these
+English masters, he had been wandering in French paths. 'Sartor
+Resartus,' Emerson's 'Essays,' 'The Seven Lamps,' came to him now
+with an indescribable freshness and force. Nay, a too great force!
+We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet
+lived enough to realise all they tell us. When David, wandering at
+night with Teufels-drockh through heaven and hell, felt at last the
+hard sobs rising in his throat, he suddenly put the book and others
+akin to it away from him. As with the poets so here. He must turn
+to something less eloquent--to paths of thought where truth shone
+with a drier and a calmer light.
+
+But still the same problems! Since his Eden gates had closed
+upon him, he had been in the outer desert where man has
+wandered from the beginning, threatened with all the familiar
+phantoms, illusions, mist-voices of human thought. What
+was consciousness--knowledge--law? Was there any law--any
+knowledge--any _I?_
+
+Naturally he had long ceased to find any final sustenance or
+pleasure in the Secularist literature, which had once convinced him
+so easily. Secularism up to a certain point, it began to seem to
+him, was a commonplace; beyond that point, a contradiction. If the
+race should ever take the counsel of the Secularists, or of that
+larger Positivist thought, of which English secularism is the
+popular reflection, the human intellect would be a poorer
+instrument with a narrower swing. So much was plain to him. For
+nothing can be more certain than that some of the finest powers and
+noblest work of the human mind have been developed by the struggle
+to know what the Secularist declares is neither knowable nor worth
+knowing.
+
+Yet the histories of philosophy which he began to turn over were in
+truth no more fruitful to him than the talk of the _Reasoner._
+They stimulated his powers of apprehension and analysis; and the
+great march of human debate from century to century touched his
+imagination. But in these summaries of the philosophical field his
+inmost life appropriated nothing. Once by a sort of reaction he
+fell upon Hume again, pining for the old intellectual clearness of
+impression, though it were a clearness of limit and negation. But
+he had hardly begun the 'Treatise' or the 'Essays' before his soul
+rose against them, crying for he knew not what, only that it was
+for nothing they could give.
+
+Then by chance a little Life of Berkeley, and upon it an old
+edition of the works, fell into his hands. As he was turning over
+the leaves, the 'Alciphron' so struck him that he turned to the
+first page of the first volume, and evening after evening read the
+whole through with a devouring energy that never flagged. When it
+was over he was a different being. The mind had crystallised
+afresh.
+
+It was his first serious grapple with the fundamental problems of
+knowledge. And, to a nature which had been so tossed and bruised in
+the great unregarding tide of things, which had felt itself the
+mere chattel of a callous universe, of no account or dignity either
+to gods or men, what strange exaltation there was in the general
+_suggestion_ of Berkeley's thought! The mind, the source of
+all that is; the impressions on the senses, merely the speech of
+the Eternal Mind to ours, a Visual Language, whereof man's
+understanding is perpetually advancing, which has been indeed
+contrived for his education; man, naturally immortal, king of
+himself and of the senses, inalienably one--if he would but open
+his eyes and see--with all that is Divine, true, eternal: the soul
+that had been crushed by grief and self-contempt revived at the
+mere touch of these vast possibilities like a trampled plant. Not
+that it absorbed them yet, made them its own; but they made a
+healing stimulating atmosphere in which it seemed once more
+possible for it to grow into a true manhood. The spiritual
+hypothesis of things was for the first time presented in such a way
+as to take imaginative hold without exciting or harrowing the
+feelings; he saw the world reversed, in a pure light of thought, as
+Berkeley saw it, and all the horizon of things fell back.
+
+Now--on this April afternoon--as the neighbourhood of Manchester
+was left behind, as the long woodclad valleys and unpolluted
+streams began to prophesy of Derbyshire and the Peak, David, his
+face pressed against the window, fell into a dream with Berkeley
+and with nature. Oh for knowledge! for verification! He began dimly
+and passionately to see before him a life devoted to thought--a
+life in which science after science should become the docile
+instrument of a mind still pressing on and on into the shadowy
+realm, till, in Berkeley's language, the darkness part, and it
+'recover the lost region of light'!
+
+But in the very midst of this overwhelming vision he said suddenly
+to himself:
+
+'There is another way--another answer--Dora's way and Ancrum's.'
+
+Aye, the way of faith, which asks for no length of years in which
+to win the goal, which is there at once--in the beat of a
+wing--safe on the breast of God! He thought of it as he had seen it
+illustrated in his friend and in Dora, with the mixture of
+attraction and repulsion which, in this connection, was now more or
+less habitual to him. The more he saw of Dora, the more he
+wondered--at her goodness and her ignorance. Her positive dislike
+to, and alienation from knowledge was amazing. At the first
+indication of certain currents of thought he could see her soul
+shrivelling and shrinking like a green leaf near flame. As he had
+gradually realised, she had with some difficulty forgiven him the
+attempt to cure Daddy's drinking through a doctor; that anyone
+should think sin could be reached by medicine--it was in effect to
+throw doubt on the necessity of God's grace! And she could not bear
+that he should give her information from the books he read about
+the Bible or early Christianity. His detached, though never
+hostile, tone was clearly intolerable to her. She could not and
+would not suffer it, would take any means of escaping it.
+
+Then that Passion-week sermon she had taken him to hear; which had
+so moved her, with which she had so sweetly and persistently
+assumed his sympathy! The preacher had been a High Church Canon
+with a considerable reputation for eloquence. The one o'clock
+service had been crowded with business and professional men. David
+had never witnessed a more tempting opportunity. But how hollow and
+empty the whole result! What foolish sentimental emphasis, what
+unreality, what contempt for knowledge, yet what a show of it!--an
+elegant worthless jumble of Gibbon, Horace, St. Augustine, Wesley,
+Newman and Mill, mixed with the cheap picturesque--with moonlight
+on the Campagna, and sunset on Niagara--and leading, by the loosest
+rhetoric, to the most confident conclusions. He had the taste of it
+in his mouth still. Fresh from the wrestle of mind into which
+Berkeley had led him, he fell into a new and young indignation with
+sermon and preacher.
+
+Yet, all the same, if you asked how man could best _live_,
+apart from thinking, how the soul could put its foot on the
+brute--where would Dora stand then? What if the true key to life
+lay not in knowledge, but in _will_? What if knowledge in the
+true sense was ultimately impossible to man, and if Christianity
+not only offered, but could give him the one thing truly
+needful--his own will, regenerate?
+
+But with the first sight of the Clough End streets these high
+debates were shaken from the mind.
+
+He ran up the Kinder road, with its villanous paving of cobbles and
+coal dust, its mills to the right, down below in the hollow,
+skirting the course of the river, and its rows of workmen's homes
+to the left, climbing the hill--in a tremor of excitement. Six
+years! Would anyone recognize him? Ah! there was Jerry's 'public,'
+an evil-looking weather-stained hole; but another name swung on the
+sign; poor Jerry!--was he, too, gone the way of orthodox and
+sceptic alike? And here was the Foundry--David could hardly prevent
+himself from marching into the yard littered with mysterious odds
+and ends of old iron which had been the treasure house of his
+childhood. But no Tom--and no familiar face anywhere.
+
+Yes!--there was the shoemaker's cottage, where the prayer-meeting
+had been, and there, on the threshold, looking at the approaching
+figure, stood the shoemaker's wife, the strange woman with the
+mystical eyes. David greeted her as he came near. She stared at him
+from under a bony hand put up against the sun, but did not
+apparently recognise him; he, seized with sudden shyness, quickened
+his pace, and was soon out of her sight.
+
+In a minute or two he was at the Dye-works, which mark the limit of
+the town, and the opening of the valley road. Every breath now was
+delight. The steep wooded hills to the left, the red-brown shoulder
+of the Scout in front, were still wrapt in torn and floating shreds
+of mist. But the sun was everywhere--above in the slowly triumphing
+blue, in the mist itself, and below, on the river and the fields.
+The great wood climbing to his left was all embroidered on the
+brown with palms and catkins, or broken with patches of greening
+larch, which had a faintly luminous relief amid the rest. And the
+dash of the river--and the scents of the fields! He leapt the wall
+of the lane, and ran down to the water's edge, watching a dipper
+among the stones in a passion of pleasure which had no words.
+
+Then up and on again, through the rough uneven lane, higher and
+higher into the breast of the Scout. What if he met Jim Wigson on
+the way? What if Aunt Hannah, still unreconciled, turned him from
+the door? No matter! Rancour and grief have no hold on mortals
+walking in such an April world--in such an exquisite and sunlit
+beauty. On! let thought and nature be enough! Why complicate and
+cumber life with relations that do but give a foothold to pain, and
+offer less than they threaten?
+
+There is smoke rising from Wigson's, and figures moving in the
+yard. Caution!--keep close under the wall. And here at last is
+Needham farm, at the top of its own steep pitch, with the sycamore
+trees in the lane beside it, the Red Brook sweeping round it to the
+right, the rough gate below, the purple Scout mist-wreathed behind.
+There are cows lowing in the yard, a horse grazes in the front
+field; through the little garden gate a gleam of sun strikes on the
+struggling crocuses and daffodils which come up year after year, no
+man heeding them; there is a clucking of hens, a hurry of water, a
+flood of song from a lark poised above the field. The blue smoke
+rises into the misty air; the sun and the spring caress the rugged
+lonely place.
+
+With a beating heart David opened the gate into the field, walked
+round the little garden, let himself into the yard, and with a
+hasty glance at the windows mounted the steps and knocked.
+
+No answer. He knocked again. Surely Aunt Hannah must be about
+somewhere. Eleven o'clock; how quiet the house was!
+
+This time there was a clatter of a chair on a flagged floor inside,
+and a person with a slow laboured step came and opened.
+
+It was Reuben. He adjusted his spectacles with difficulty, and
+stared at the intruder.
+
+'Uncle Reuben!--I thought it was such a fine day, I'd just run over
+and see the old place, and bring you some news,' said David,
+smiling and holding out his hand.
+
+Reuben took it, stupefied. 'Davy,' he said, trembling. Then with a
+sudden movement he whipped the door to behind him, and shut it
+close.
+
+'Whist!' he said, putting his old finger to his lip. 'T' servant's
+just settlin her i' t' kitchen. She's noa ready yet--she's been
+terr'ble bad th' neet. Coom yo here.' And he descended the steps
+with infinite care, and led David to the wood-shed.
+
+'Is Aunt Hannah ill?' asked David, astonished.
+
+Reuben leant against the wall of the shed, and took off his
+spectacles, as though to wipe them with his old and shaking hands.
+Then David saw a sort of convulsion pass across his ungainly face.
+
+'Aye,' he said, looking down, 'aye, she's broken is Hannah. Yo didna
+knaw?'
+
+'I've heard nothing.'
+
+Reuben recounted the facts. Since her stroke of last spring, and
+the partial recovery which had followed upon it, there had been
+little apparent change, except perhaps in the direction of slowly
+increasing weakness. She was a wreck, and likely to remain so.
+Hardly anybody but Reuben could understand her now, and she rarely
+let him out of her sight. He could not get time to attend to the
+farm, was obliged to leave things to the hired man, and was in
+trouble often about his affairs.
+
+'Bit yo see, she hasna t' reet use of her speach,' he said,
+excusing himself humbly to this handsome city nephew. 'An' she conno
+gie ower snipin aw at onst. 'Twudna be human natur'. An't' gell's
+worritin' an' I mun tell her what t' missis says.'
+
+David asked if he might see her, or should he just turn back to the
+town? Reuben protested, his hospitality and family feeling aroused,
+his poor mind torn with conflicting motives.
+
+'I believe she'd fratch if she didna see tha,' he said at last.
+'A'll just goo ben, and ask.'
+
+He went in, and David remained in the wood-shed, staring out at the
+familiar scene, at Louie's window, at the steps where he and she
+had fed the fowls together.
+
+The door opened again, and Reuben reappeared on the steps, agitated
+and beckoning.
+
+David went in, stepping softly, holding his blue cloth cap in his
+hand. In another instant he stood beside the old cushioned seat in
+the kitchen, looking down at Hannah.
+
+This Hannah! this his childhood's enemy! this shawled and shrunken
+figure with the white parchment face and lantern cheeks!
+
+He stooped to her and said something about why he had come. Reuben
+listened wondering.
+
+'Louie's married and got a babby--dosto hear, Hannah? And he--t'
+lad--did yo iver see sich a yan for growin?'
+
+He wished to be mildly jocular. Hannah's face did not move. She had
+just touched her nephew with her cold wasted hand. Now she beckoned
+to him to sit down at her right. He did so, and then for the first
+time he could believe that Hannah, the old Hannah, was there beside
+them. For as she slowly studied his dress, the Inverness cape then
+as now a favourite garb in Manchester, the hand holding the cap,
+refined since she saw it last by commerce with books and pens
+rather than hurdles and sheep, the broad shoulders, the dark head,
+her eye for the first time met his, full, and a weird thrill went
+through him. For that eye--dulled, and wavering--was still Hannah.
+The old hate was in it, the old grudge, all that had been at least
+for him and Louie the inmost and characteristic soul of their
+tyrant. He knew in an instant that she had in her mind the money of
+which he and his sister had robbed her, and beyond that the
+offences of their childhood, the infamy of their mother. If she
+could, she would have hurled them all upon him. As it was, she was
+silent, but that brooding eye, like a smouldering spark in her
+blanched face, spoke for her.
+
+Reuben tried to talk. But a weight lay on him and David. The gaunt
+head in the coarse white nightcap turned now to one, now to the
+other, pursued them phantom-like. Presently he insisted that his
+nephew must dine, avoiding Hannah's look. David would much rather
+have gone without; but Reuben, affecting joviality, called the
+servant, and some food was brought. No attempt was made to include
+Hannah in the meal. David supposed that it was now necessary to
+feed her.
+
+Reuben talked disjointedly of the neighbours and his stock, and
+asked a few questions, without listening to the answers, about
+David's affairs, and Louie's marriage. In Hannah's presence his
+poor dull wits were not his own; he could in truth think of nothing
+but her.
+
+After the meal, however, when a draught of ale had put some heart
+in him, he got up with an air of resolution.
+
+'I mun goo and see what that felly's been doin' wi' th'
+Huddersfield beeasts,' he said; 'wilta coom wi' me, Davy? Mary!'
+
+He called the little maid. Hannah suddenly said something
+incoherent which David could not understand. Reuben affected not to
+hear.
+
+'Mary, gie your mistress her dinner, like a good gell. An' keep t'
+house-door open, soa 'at she can knock wi' t' stick if she wants
+owt.'
+
+He stood before her restless and ashamed, afraid to look at her.
+Then he suddenly stooped and kissed her on the forehead. David felt
+a lump in his throat. As he took leave of her the spell, as it
+were, of Reuben's piteous affection came upon him. He saw nothing
+but a dying and emaciated woman, and taking her hand in his, he
+said some kind natural words.
+
+The hand dropped from his like a stone. As he stood at the door
+behind Reuben, the servant came forward with a plate of something
+which she put down inside the fender. As she did so, she awkwardly
+upset the fire-irons, which fell with a crash. Hannah started
+upright in her chair, with a rush of half-articulate words,
+grasping fiercely for her stick with glaring eyes. The servant, a
+wild moorland lass, fled terrified, and at the 'house' door turned
+and made a face at David.
+
+Outside Reuben slowly mastered himself, and woke up to some real
+interest in Louie's doings. David told him her story frankly, so
+far as it could be separated from his own, and, pressed by Reuben's
+questions, even revealed at last the matter of the six hundred
+pounds. Reuben could not get over it. Sandy's "six hunderd pund"
+which he had earned with the sweat of his brow, all handed over to
+that minx Louie, and wasted by her and a rascally French husband in
+a few months--it was more than he could bear.
+
+'Aye, aye, marryin's varra weel,' he said impatiently. 'A grant tha
+it's a great sin coomin thegither without marryin. But Sandy's six
+hunderd pund! Noa, I conno abide sich wark.'
+
+And he fell into sombre silence, out of which David could hardly
+rouse him. Except that he said once, 'And we that had kep' it so
+long. I'd better never ha gien it tha.' And clearly that was the
+bitter thought in his mind. The sacrifice that had taxed all his
+moral power, and, as he believed, brought physical ruin on Hannah,
+had been for nothing, or worse than nothing. Neither he nor David
+nor anyone was the better for it.
+
+'I must go over the shoulder to Frimley,' said David at last. They
+had made a half-hearted inspection of the stock in the home fields,
+and were now passing through the gate on to the moor. 'I must see
+Margaret Dawson again before I take the train back.'
+
+Reuben looked astonished and shook his head as though he did not
+remember anything about Margaret Dawson. He walked on beside his
+nephew for a while in silence. The Red Brook was leaping and
+dancing beside them, the mountain ashes were just bursting into
+leaf, the old smithy was ahead of them on the heathery slope, and
+to their left the Downfall, full and white, thundered over its
+yellow rocks.
+
+But they had hardly crossed the Red Brook to mount the peak beyond
+when Reuben drew up.
+
+'Noa'--he said restlessly--'noa. I mun goo back. T' gell's flighty
+and theer's aw maks o' mischief i' yoong things.' He stood and held
+his nephew by the hand, looking at him long and wistfully. As he
+did so a calmer expression stole for an instant into the poor
+troubled eyes.
+
+'Very like a'st not see tha again, Davie. We niver know, Livin's
+hard soomtimes--soa's deein, folks say. I'm often freet'nt of
+deein'--but I should na be. Theer's noan so mich peace here, and we
+_knaw_ that wi' the Lord theer's peace.'
+
+He gave a long sigh--all his character was in it--so tortured was
+it and hesitating.
+
+They parted, and the young man climbed the hill, looking back often
+to watch the bent figure on the lower path. The spell had somehow
+vanished from the sunshine, the thrill from the moorland air. Life
+was once more cruel, implacable.
+
+He walked fast to Frimley, and made for the cottage of Margaret's
+brother. He remembered its position of old.
+
+A woman was washing in the 'house' or outer kitchen. She received
+him graciously. The weekly money which in one way or another he had
+never failed to pay since he first undertook it, had made him well
+known to her and her husband. With a temper quite unlike that of
+the characteristic northerner, she showed no squeamishness at all
+about the matter. If it hadn't been for his help, they would just
+have sent Margaret to the workhouse, she said bluntly; for they had
+many mouths to feed, and couldn't have burdened themselves with an
+extra one. She was quite 'silly' and often troublesome.
+
+'Is she here?' David asked.
+
+'Aye, if yo goo ben, yo'll find her,' said the woman, carelessly
+pointing to an inner door. 'I conno ha her in here washin days, nor
+the children noather.'
+
+David opened the door pointed out to him. He found himself in a
+rough weaving shed almost filled by a large hand-loom, with its
+forest of woodwork rising to the ceiling, its rolls of perforated
+pattern-paper, its great cylinders below, and many-coloured
+shuttles to either hand. But to-day it stood idle, the weaver was
+not at work. The room was stuffy but cold, and inexpressibly gloomy
+in this silence of the loom.
+
+Where was Margaret? After a minute's search, there, beyond the
+loom, sitting by a fireless grate, was a little figure in a bedgown
+and nightcap, poking with a stick amid the embers, and as it seemed
+crooning to itself.
+
+David made his way up to her, inexpressibly moved.
+
+'Margaret!'
+
+She did not know him in the least. She had a starved-looking cat on
+her lap, which she was huddling against her breast. The face had
+fallen away almost to nothing, so small and thin it was. She was
+dirty and unkempt. Her still brown hair, once so daintily neat,
+straggled out beneath her torn cap; her print bed-gown was pinned
+across her, her linsey skirt was in holes; everywhere the same tale
+of age neglected and unloved.
+
+When David first stood before her she drew back with a terrified
+look, still clutching the cat tightly. But, as he smiled at her,
+with the tears in his eyes, speaking her name tenderly, her
+frightened look relaxed, and she remained staring at him with the
+shrinking furtive expression of a quite young child.
+
+He knelt down beside her.
+
+'Margaret, dear Margaret--don't you know me?'
+
+She did not answer, but her wrinkled eyes, still blue and vaguely
+sweet, wavered under his, and it seemed to him that every now and
+then a shiver of cold ran through her old and frail body. He went
+on gently, trying to recall her wandering senses. In vain. In the
+middle she interrupted him with a piteous lip.
+
+'They promised me a ribbon for't,' she said, complainingly, in a
+hoarse, bronchitic voice, pointing to the animal she held, and to
+its lean neck adorned with a collar of plaited string, on which
+apparently she had just been busy, to judge from the odds and ends
+of string lying about.
+
+At the same moment David became aware of a couple of children
+craning their heads round the corner of the loom to look, a loutish
+boy about eleven, and a girl rather younger. At sight of them,
+Margaret raised a cry of distress and alarm, with that helpless
+indefinable note in the voice which shows that personality, in the
+true sense, is no longer there.
+
+'Go away!' David commanded.
+
+The children did not stir, but grinned. He made a threatening
+movement. Then the boy, as quick as lightning, put his tongue out
+at Margaret, and caught hold of his sister, and they clattered off,
+their mother in the next room scolding them out into the street
+again.
+
+And this the end of a creature all sacrifice, a life all affection!
+
+He took her shivering hand in his.
+
+'Margaret, listen to me. You shall be better looked after. I will
+see to that. No one shall be unkind to you any more. If they won't
+do it here, my--my--wife shall take care of you!'
+
+He lifted her hand and kissed it, putting all the pity and bitter
+indignation of his heart into the action. Margaret, seeing his
+emotion, whimpered too; otherwise she was impassive.
+
+He left her, went into the next room, and had a long energetic talk
+with Margaret's sister-in-law. The woman, half ashamed, half
+recalcitrant, in the end promised amendment. What business it was
+of his she could not imagine; but the small weekly addition which
+he offered to make to Margaret's payments, while it showed him a
+greater fool than before, made it impossible to put his meddling
+aside. She promised that Margaret should be brought into the warm,
+that she should have better clothes, and that the children should
+be kept from plaguing her.
+
+Then he departed, and mounting the moor again, spent an hour or two
+wandering among the boggy fissures of the top, or sitting on the
+high edges of the heather, looking down over the dark and craggy
+splendour of the hill immediately around and beneath him, on and
+away through innumerable paling shades of distance to the blue
+Welsh border. His speculative fervour was all gone. Reuben, Hannah,
+Margaret, these figures of suffering and pain had brought him close
+to earth again. The longing for a human hand in his, for a home,
+wife, children to spend himself upon, to put at least for a while
+between him and this unconquerable 'something which infects the
+world,' became in this long afternoon a physical pain not to be
+resisted. He thought more and more steadily of Lucy, schooling
+himself, idealising her.
+
+It was the Sunday before Whitsunday. David was standing outside a
+trim six-roomed house in the upper part of the little Lancashire
+town of Wakely, waiting for Lucy Purcell.
+
+She came at last, flushed and discomposed, pulling the door hastily
+to behind her.
+
+They walked on a short distance, talking disconnectedly of the
+weather, the mud, and the way on to the moor, till she said
+suddenly:
+
+'I wish people wouldn't be so good and so troublesome!'
+
+'Did Robert wish to keep you at home?' inquired David, laughing.
+
+'Well, he didn't want me to come out with--anybody but him,' she
+said, flushing. 'And it's so bad, because one can't be cross. I
+don't know how it is, but they're just the best people here that
+ever walked!'
+
+She looked up at him seriously, an unusual energy in her slight
+face.
+
+'What!--a town of saints?' asked David, mocking. It was so
+difficult to take Lucy seriously.
+
+She tossed her head and insisted.
+
+Talking very fast, and not very consecutively, she gave him an
+account, so far as she was able, of the life lived in this little
+town, a typical Lancashire town of the smaller and more homogeneous
+kind. All the people worked in two large spinning mills, or in a
+few smaller factories representing dependent industries, such as
+reed-making. Their work was pleasant to them. Lucy complained, with
+the natural resentment of the idle who see their place in the world
+jeopardised by the superfluous energy of the workers, that she
+could never get the mill girls to say that the mill hours were too
+long. The heat tried them, made appetites delicate, and lung
+mischief common. But the only thing which really troubled them was
+'half-time.' Socially everybody knew everybody. They were
+passionately interested in each other's lives and in the town's
+affairs. And their religion, of a strong Protestant type expressed
+in various forms of Dissent, formed an ideal bond which kept the
+little society together, and made an authority which all
+acknowledged, an atmosphere in which all moved.
+
+The picture she drew was, in truth, the picture of one of those
+social facts on which perhaps the future of England depends. She
+drew it girlishly, quite unconscious of its large bearings,
+gossiping about this person and that, with a free expenditure of
+very dogmatic opinion on the habits and ways which were not hers.
+But, on the whole, the picture emerged, and David had never liked
+her talk so well. The little self-centred thing had somehow been
+made to wonder and admire; which is much for all of us.
+
+And she, meanwhile, was instantly sensible that she was in a happy
+vein, that she pleased. Her eyes danced under her pretty spring
+hat. How proud she was to walk with him--that he had come all this
+way to see her! As she shyly glanced him up and down, she would
+have liked the village street to be full of gazers, and was almost
+loth to leave the public way for the loneliness of the moor. What
+other girl in Wakely had the prospect of such a young man to take
+her out? Oh! would he ever, ever 'ask her'--would he even come
+again?
+
+At last, after a steep and muddy climb, through uninviting back
+ways, they were out upon the moor. An apology for a moor in David's
+eyes! For the hills which surround the valley of the Irwell, in
+which Wakely lies, are, for the most part, green and rolling
+ground, heatherless and cragless. Still, from the top they looked
+over a wide and wind-blown scene, the bolder moors of Rochdale
+behind them, and in front the long green basin in which the Irwell
+rises. Along the valley bottoms lay the mills, with their
+surrounding rows of small stone houses. Up on the backs of the
+moors crouched the old farms, which have watched the mills come,
+and will perhaps see them go; and here and there a grim-looking
+colliery marked a fold of the hill. The landscape on a spring day
+has a bracing bareness, which is not without exhilaration. The wind
+blows freshly, the sun lies broadly on the hills. England, on the
+whole at her busiest and best, spreads before you.
+
+They were still on the top when it occurred to them that they had a
+long walk in prospect--for they talked of getting to the source of
+the Irwell--and that it was dinner-time. So they sat down under one
+of the mortarless stone walls which streak the moors, and David
+brought out the meal that was in his pockets. They ate with
+laughter and chat. Pigeons passed overhead, going and coming from
+an old farm about a hundred yards away; the sky above them had a
+lark for voice singing his loudest; and in the next field a peewit
+was wheeling and crying. The few trees in sight were struggling
+fast into leaf. Nature even in this cold north was gay to-day and
+young.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of their meal, by a natural caprice and
+reaction of the mind, as David sat looking down on slate roofs and
+bare winding valley, across the pale, rain-beaten grass of the
+moor, all the northern English detail vanished from his eyes. For
+one suffocating instant he saw nothing but a great picture gallery,
+its dimly storied walls and polished floor receding into the
+distance. In front Velazquez' 'Infanta,' and before it a figure
+bent over a canvas. Every line and tint stood out. He heard the
+light varying voice, caught the complex grace of the woman, the
+strenuous effort of the artist.
+
+Enough! He closed his eyes for one bitter instant; then raised them
+again to England and to Lucy.
+
+There under the wall, while they were still lingering in the sun,
+he asked Lucy Purcell to be his wife. And Lucy, hardly believing
+her own foolish ears, and in a whirl of bliss and exultation past
+expression, nevertheless put on a few maidenly airs and graces,
+coquetted a little, would not be kissed all at once, talked of her
+father and the war that must be faced, and finally surrendered,
+held up her scarlet cheek for her lord's caress, and then sat
+speechless, hand in hand with him.
+
+But Nature had its way. They rambled on, crossing the stone stiles
+which link the bare green fields on the side of the moor. When a
+stile appeared, Lucy would send him on in front, so that she might
+mount decorously, and then descend trembling upon his hand.
+
+Presently they came to a spot where the path crossed a little
+streamlet, and then climbed a few rough steps in a steep bank, and
+so across a stile at the top.
+
+David ran up, leapt the stile, and waited. But he had time to study
+the distant course of their walk, as well as the burnt and
+lime-strewn grass about him, for no Lucy appeared. He leant over
+the wall, and to his amazement saw her sitting on one of the stone
+steps below, crying.
+
+He was beside her in an instant. But he could not loosen the hands
+clasped over her eyes.
+
+'Oh, why did you do it?--why did you do it? I'm not good enough--I
+never shall be good enough!'
+
+For the first time since their formal kiss he put his arms round
+her. And as she, at last forced to look up, found herself close to
+the face which, in its dark refinement and power, seemed to her
+to-day so far, so wildly above her deserts, she saw it all
+quivering and changed. Never had little Lucy risen to such a
+moment; never again, perhaps, could she so rise. But in that
+instant of passionate humility she had dropped healing and life
+into a human heart.
+
+Yet, was it Lucy he kissed?--Lucy he gathered in his arms? Or was
+it not rather Love itself?--the love he had sought, had missed, but
+must still seek--and seek?
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV MATURITY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+'Daddy!' said a little voice.
+
+The owner of it, a child of four, had pushed open a glass door, and
+was craning his curly head through it towards a garden that lay
+beyond.
+
+'Yes, you rascal, what do you want now?'
+
+'Daddy, come here!'
+
+The voice had a certain quick stealthiness, through which, however,
+a little tremor of apprehension might be detected.
+
+David Grieve, who was smoking and reading in the garden, came up to
+where his small son stood, and surveyed him.
+
+'Sandy, you've been getting into mischief.'
+
+The child laid hold of his father, dragged him into the little
+hall, and towards the dining-room door. Arrived there, he stopped,
+put a finger to his lip, and laid his head plaintively on one side.
+
+'Zere's an _aw_ ful sight in zere, Daddy.'
+
+'You monkey, what have you been up to?'
+
+David opened the door. Sandy first hung back, then, in a sudden
+enthusiasm, ran in, and pointed a thumb pink with much sucking at
+the still uncleared dinner-table, which David and the child's
+mother had left half an hour before.
+
+'Zere's a pie!' he said, exultantly.
+
+And a pie there was. First, all the salt-cellars had been upset
+into the middle of the table, then the bits of bread left beside
+the plates had been crumbled in, then--the joys of wickedness
+growing--the mustard-pot had been emptied over the heap, some
+bananas had been stuck unsteadily here and there to give it
+feature, and finally, in a last orgie of crime, a cruet of vinegar
+had been discharged on the whole, and the brown streams were now
+meandering across the clean tablecloth.
+
+'Sandy, you little wretch!' cried his father, 'don't you know that
+you have been told again and again not to touch the things on the
+table? Hold out your hand!'
+
+Sandy held out a small paw, whimpered beforehand, but never ceased
+all the time to watch his father with eyes which seemed to be
+quietly on the watch for experiences.
+
+David administered two smart pats, then rang the bell for the
+housemaid. Sandy stationed himself on the rug opposite his father,
+and looked at his reddened hand, considering.
+
+'I don't seem to mind much, Daddy!' he said at last, looking up.
+
+'No, sir. Daddy'll have to try and find something that you
+_will_ mind.'
+
+The tone was severe, and David did his best to frown. In reality
+his eyes, under the frown, devoured his small son, and he had some
+difficulty in restraining himself from kissing the hand he had just
+slapped.
+
+When the housemaid entered, however, she showed a temper which
+would clearly have slapped Master Sandy without the smallest
+compunction.
+
+The little fellow stood and listened to her laments and
+denunciations with the same grave considering eyes, slipped his
+hand inside his father's for protection, watched, like one
+enchained, the gradual demolition of the pie, and when it was all
+gone, and the tablecloth removed, he gave a long sigh of relief.
+
+'Say you're sorry, sir, to Jane, for giving her so much extra
+trouble,' commanded his father.
+
+'I'm soddy, Jane,' said the child, nodding to her; 'but it was a
+p--_wecious_ pie, wasn't it?'
+
+The mixture of humour and candour in his baby eye was irresistible.
+Even Jane laughed, and David took him up and swung him on to his
+shoulder.
+
+'Come out, young man, into the garden, where I can keep an eye on
+you. Oh! by the way, are you all right again?'
+
+This inquiry was uttered as they reached the garden seat, and David
+perched the child on his knee.
+
+'Yes, I'm _bet_--ter,' said the child slowly, evidently
+unwilling to relinquish the dignity of illness all in a moment.
+
+'Well, what was the matter with you that you gave poor mammy such a
+bad night?'
+
+The child was silent a moment, pondering how to express himself.
+
+'I was--I was a little sick outside, and a little _feelish_
+inside'--he wavered on the difficult word. 'Mammy said I had the
+wrong dinner yesterday at Aunt Dora's. Zere was plums--_lots_
+o' plums!' said the child, clasping his hands on his knee, and
+hunching himself up in a sudden ecstasy.
+
+'Well, don't go and have the wrong dinner again at Aunt Dora's. I
+must tell her to give you nothing but rice pudding.'
+
+'Zen I shan't go zere any more,' said the child with determination.
+
+'What, you love plums more than Aunt Dora?'
+
+'No--o,' said Sandy dubiously, 'but plums is good!'
+
+And, with a sigh of reminiscence, he threw himself back in his
+father's arm, being, in fact, tired after his bad night and the
+further excitement of the 'pie.' The thumb slipped into the pink
+mouth, and with the other hand the child began dreamily to pull at
+one of his fair curls. The attitude meant going to sleep, and David
+had, in fact, hardly settled him, and drawn a light overcoat which
+lay near over his small legs, before the fringed eyelids sank.
+
+David held him tenderly, delighting in the weight, the warmth, the
+soft even breath of his sleeping son. He managed somehow to relight
+his pipe, and then sat on, dreamily content, enjoying the warm
+September sunshine, and letting the book he had brought out lie
+unopened.
+
+The garden in which he sat was an oblong piece of ground, with a
+central grass plat and some starved and meagre borders on either
+hand. The gravel in the paths had blackened, so had the leaves of
+the privets and the lilacs, so also had the red-brick walls of the
+low homely house closing up the other end of the garden. Seventy
+years ago this house had stood pleasantly amid fields on the
+northern side of Manchester; its shrubs had been luxuriant, its
+roses unstained. Now on every side new houses in oblong gardens had
+sprung up, and the hideous smoke plague of Manchester had descended
+on the whole district, withering and destroying.
+
+Yet David had a great affection for his house, and it deserved it.
+It had been built in the days when there was more elbow-room in the
+world than now. The three sitting-rooms on the ground floor opened
+sociably into each other, and were pleasantly spacious, and the one
+story of bedrooms above contained, at any rate in the eyes of the
+tenants of the house, a surprising amount of accommodation. When
+all was said, however, it remained, no doubt, a very modest
+dwelling, at a rent of somewhere about ninety pounds a year; but as
+David sat contemplating it this afternoon, there rose in him again
+the astonishment with which he had first entered upon it,
+astonishment that he, David Grieve, should ever have been able to
+attain to it.
+
+'Sandy! come here directly! Where are you, sir?'
+
+David heard the voice calling in the hall, and raised his own.
+
+'Lucy! all right!--he's here.'
+
+The glass door opened, and Lucy came out. She was very smartly
+arrayed in a new blue dress which she had donned since dinner; yet
+her looks were cross and tired.
+
+'Oh, David, how stupid! Why isn't the child dressed? Just look what
+an object! I sent Lizzie for him ten minutes ago, and she couldn't
+find him.'
+
+'Then Lizzie has even less brains than I supposed,' said David
+composedly, 'seeing that she had only to look out of a back window.
+What are you going to do with him?'
+
+'Take him out with me, of course. There are the Watsons of
+Fallowfield, they pestered me to bring him, and they're at home
+Saturdays. And aren't you coming too?'
+
+'Madam, you are unreasonable!' said David, smiling, and putting
+down his pipe he laid an affectionate hand on his wife's arm. 'I
+went careering about the world with you last Saturday and the
+Saturday before, and this week end I must take for reading. There
+is an Oxford man who has been writing me infuriated letters this
+week because I won't let him know whether we will take up his
+pamphlet or no. I must get that read, and a good many other things,
+before to-morrow night.'
+
+'Oh, I know!' said Lucy, pettishly. 'There's always something in the
+way of what I want. Soon I shan't see anything of you at all; it
+will be all business, and yet not a penny more to spend! Well,
+then, give me Sandy.'
+
+David hesitated.
+
+'Do you think you'll take him?' he said, bending over the little
+fellow. 'He doesn't look a bit himself to-day. It's those abominable
+plums of Dora's!'
+
+He spoke with fierceness, as though Dora had been the veriest
+criminal.
+
+'Well, but what nonsense!' cried Lucy; 'they don't upset other
+children. I can't think what's wrong with him.'
+
+'He isn't like other children; he's of a finer make,' said David,
+laughing at his own folly, but more than half sincere in it all the
+same.
+
+Lucy laughed too, and was appeased. She bent down to look at him,
+confessed that he was pale, and that she had better not take him
+lest there should be catastrophes.
+
+'Well, then, I must go alone,' she said, turning away
+discontentedly. 'I don't know what's the good of it. Nobody cares to
+see me without him or you.'
+
+The last sentence came out with a sudden energy, and as she looked
+back towards him he saw that her cheek was flushed.
+
+'What, in that new gown?' he said, smiling, and looked her up and
+down approvingly.
+
+Her expression brightened.
+
+'Do you like it?' she said, more graciously.
+
+'Very much. You look as young as when I first teased you! Come here
+and let me give you a "nip for new."'
+
+She came docilely. He pretended to pinch the thin wrist she held
+out to him, and then, stooping, lightly kissed it.
+
+'Now go and enjoy yourself,' he said, 'and I'll take care of Sandy.
+Don't tire yourself. Take a cab when you want one.'
+
+She was moving away when a thought struck her.
+
+'What are you going to say to Lord Driffield?'
+
+A cloud crossed David's look. 'Well, what am I to say to him? You
+don't really want to go, Lucy?'
+
+In an instant the angry look came back.
+
+'Oh, very well!' she cried. 'If you're ashamed of me, and don't care
+to take me about with you, just say it, that's all!'
+
+'As if I wanted to go myself!' he remonstrated. 'Why, I should be
+bored to death; so would you. I don't believe there would be a
+person in the house whom either of us would ever have seen before,
+except Lord Driffield. And I can see Lord Driffield, and his books
+too, in much more comfortable ways than by going to stay with him.'
+
+Lucy stood silent a moment, trying to contain herself, then she
+broke out:
+
+'That is just like you!' she said in a low bitter voice; 'you won't take
+any chance of getting on. It's always the way. People say to me that
+you're so clever--that you're thought so much of in Manchester, you
+might be anything you like. And what's the good?--that's what I think!
+If you do earn more money you won't let us live any differently. It's
+always, can't we do without this? and can't we do without that? And as
+to knowing people, you won't take any trouble at all! Why can't we get
+on, and make new friends, and be--be--as good as anybody? other people
+do. I believe you think I should disgrace myself--I should put my knife
+in my mouth, or something, if you took me to Lord Driffield's. I can
+behave myself _perfectly_, thank you.'
+
+And Lucy looked at her husband in a perfect storm of temper and
+resentment. Her prettiness had lost much of its first bloom; the
+cheek-bones, always too high, were now more prominent than in first
+youth, and the whole face had a restless thinness which robbed it
+of charm, save at certain rare moments of unusual moral or physical
+well-being. David, meeting his wife's sparkling eyes, felt a pang
+compounded of many mixed compunctions and misgivings.
+
+'Look here, Lucy!' he said, laying down his pipe, and stretching
+out his free hand to her, 'don't say those things. They hurt me, and
+you don't mean them. Come and sit down a moment, and let's make up
+our minds about Lord Driffield.'
+
+Unwillingly she let herself be drawn down beside him on the garden
+bench. These quarrels and reproaches were becoming a necessity and
+a pleasure to her. David felt, with a secret dread, that the habit
+of them had been growing upon her.
+
+'I haven't done so very badly for you, have I?' he said
+affectionately, as she sat down, taking her two gloved hands in his
+one.
+
+Lucy vehemently drew them away.
+
+'Oh, if you mean to say,' she cried, her eyes flaming, 'that I had
+no money, and ought just to be thankful for what I can get, just
+_say it_, that's all.'
+
+This time David flushed.
+
+'I think, perhaps, you'd better go and pay your calls,' he said,
+after a minute; 'we can talk about this letter some other time.'
+
+Lucy sat silent her chest heaving. As soon as ever in these little
+scenes between them he began to show resentment, she began to give
+way.
+
+'I didn't mean that,' she said, uncertainly, in a low voice looking
+ready to cry.
+
+'Well, then, suppose you don't say it,' replied David, after a
+pause. 'If you'll try and believe it, Lucy, I don't want to go to
+Lord Driffield's simply and solely because I am sure we should
+neither of us enjoy it. Lady Driffield is a stuck-up sort of
+person, who only cares about her own set and relations. We should
+be patronised, we should find it difficult to be ourselves--there
+would be no profit for anybody. Lord Driffield would be too busy to
+look after us; besides, he has more power anywhere than in his own
+house.'
+
+'No one could patronise you,' said Lucy, firing up again.
+
+'I don't know,' said David, with a smile and a stretch; 'I'm shy--on
+other people's domains. If they'd come here I should know how to
+deal with them.'
+
+Lucy was silent for a while, twisting her mouth discontentedly.
+David observed her. Suddenly he held out his hand to her again,
+relenting.
+
+'Do you really want to go so much, Lucy?'
+
+'Of course I do,' she said, pouting, in a quick injured tone.
+'It's--it's a chance, and I want to see what it's like; and I
+should hardly have to buy anything new, unless it's a new bonnet,
+and I can make that myself.'
+
+David sat considering.
+
+'Well!' he said at last, trying to stifle his sigh, 'I don't mind.
+I'll write and accept.'
+
+Lucy's eye gleamed. She edged closer to her husband.
+
+'You won't mind very much? It's only two nights. Isn't Sandy
+cramping your arm?'
+
+'Oh, we shall get through, I dare say. No--the boy's all right. I
+_say_'--with a groan--'shall I have to get a new dress suit?'
+
+'Yes, of _course_,' said Lucy, with indignant eagerness.
+
+'Well, then, if you don't go off, and let me earn some money, we
+shall be in the Bankruptcy Court. Good-bye! I shall take the boy
+into the study, and cover him up while I work.'
+
+Lucy stood before him an instant, then stooped and kissed him on
+the forehead. She would have liked to say a penitent word or two,
+but there was still something hard and hot in her heart which
+prevented her. Yet her husband, as he sat there, seemed to her the
+handsomest and most desirable of men.
+
+David nodded to her kindly, and sat watching her slim straight
+figure as she tripped away from him across the garden and
+disappeared into the house. Then he bent over Sandy and raised him
+in his arms.
+
+'Don't wake, Sandy!' he said softly, as the little man half opened
+his eyes--'Daddy's going to put you to bye in the study.'
+
+And he carried him in, the child breathing heavily against his
+shoulder, and deposited his bundle on an old horsehair sofa in the
+corner of his own room, turning the little face away from the
+light, and wrapping up the bare legs.
+
+Then he sat down to his work. The room in which he sat was made for
+work. It was walled with plain deal bookcases, which were filled
+from floor to ceiling, largely with foreign books, as the paper
+covers testified.
+
+For the rest, anyone looking round would have noticed a spacious
+writing-table in the window, a large and battered armchair beside
+the fire, a photograph of Lucy over the mantelpiece, oddly flanked
+by an engraving of Goethe and the head of the German historian
+Ranke, a folding cane chair which was generally used by Lucy
+whenever she visited the room, and the horsehair sofa, whereon
+Sandy was now sleeping amid a surrounding litter of books and
+papers which only just left room for his small person. If there
+were other chairs and tables, they were covered deep in literature
+of one kind or another, and did not count. The large window looked
+on the garden, and the room opened at the back into the
+drawing-room, and at one side into the dining-room. On the rug
+slept the short-haired black collie, whom David had once protected
+from Louie's dislike--old, blind, and decrepit, but still beloved,
+especially by Sandy, and still capable of barking a toothless
+defiance at the outer world.
+
+It was a room to charm a student's eyes, especially on this
+September afternoon with its veiled and sleepy sun stealing in from
+the garden, and David fell into his chair, refilled his pipe, and
+stretched out his hand for a batch of manuscript which lay on his
+table, with an unconscious sigh of satisfaction.
+
+The manuscript represented a pamphlet on certain trade questions
+by a young Oxford economist. For the firm of Grieve & Co., of
+Manchester, had made itself widely known for some five years past
+to the intelligence of northern England by its large and increasing
+trade in pamphlets of a political, social, or economical kind. They
+supplied mechanics' institutes, political associations, and
+workmen's clubs; nay, more, they had a system of hawkers of their
+own, which bade fair to extend largely. To be taken up by Grieve &
+Co. was already an object to young politicians, inventors, or
+social reformers, who might wish for one reason or another to bring
+their names or their ideas before the working-class of the North.
+And Grieve & Co. meant David, sitting smoking and reading in his
+armchair.
+
+He gave the production now in his hands some careful reading for
+half an hour or more, then he suddenly threw it down.
+
+'Stuff and nonsense!' he said to himself. 'The man has got the facts
+about those Oldham mills wrong somehow, I'm certain of it. Where's
+that letter I had last week?' and, jumping up, he took a bunch of
+keys out of his pocket and opened a drawer in his writing-table.
+The drawer contained mostly bundles of letters, and to the right
+hand a number of loose ones recently received, and not yet sorted
+or tied. He looked through these, found what he wanted, and was
+about to close the drawer when his attention was caught by a thick
+black note-book lying towards the back of it. He took it out,
+reminded by it of something he had meant to do, and carried it off
+with the Oldham letter to his chair. Once settled there again, he
+turned himself to the confutation of his pamphleteer. But not for
+long. The black book on his knee exercised a disturbing influence;
+his under-mind began to occupy itself with it, and at last the
+Oldham letter was hastily put down, and, taking out a pocket pen,
+David, with a smile at his own delinquency, opened the black book,
+turned over many closely written pages, and settled down to write
+another.
+
+The black book was his journal. He had kept it intermittently since
+his marriage, rather as a journal of thought than as a journal of
+events, and he had to add to it to-day some criticisms of a recent
+book by Renan which had been simmering in his mind for a week or
+two. Still it contained a certain number of records of events, and,
+taken generally, its entries formed an epitome of everything of
+most import--practical, moral, or intellectual--which had entered
+into David Grieve's life during the eight years since his marriage.
+
+For instance:--
+
+'_April_ 10, 1876.--Our son was born this morning between
+three and four o'clock, after more than three years of marriage,
+when both of us had begun to despair a little. Now that he is come,
+I am decidedly interested in him, but the paternal relation hardly
+begins at birth, as the mother's does. The father, who has suffered
+nothing, cannot shut his eyes to the physical ugliness and
+weakness, the clash of pain and effort, in which the future man
+begins; the mother, who has suffered everything, seems by a
+special spell of nature to feel nothing after the birth but the
+mystery and wonder of the _new creature_, the life born from her
+life--flesh of her flesh--breath of her breath. Else why is
+Lucy--who bears pain hardly, and had looked forward much less
+eagerly to the child, I think, than I had--so proud and content
+just to lie with the hungry creature beside her? while I am half
+inclined to say, What! so little for so much?--and to spend so full
+an energy in resenting the pains of maternity as an unmeaning blot
+on the scheme of things, that I have none left for a more genial
+emotion. Altogether, I am disappointed in myself as a father. I
+seem to have no imagination, and at present I would rather touch a
+loaded torpedo than my son.'
+
+'_April 30_.--Lucy wishes to have the child christened at St.
+Damian's, and, though it goes against me, I have made no objection.
+And if she wishes it I shall go. It is not a question of one's own
+personal consistency or sincerity. The new individuality seems to
+me to have a claim in the matter, which I have no business to
+override because I happen to think in this way or that. My son when
+he grows up may be an ardent Christian. Then, if I had failed to
+comply with the national religious requirement, and had let him go
+unbaptized, because of my own beliefs or non-beliefs, he might, I
+think, rightly reproach me: "I was helpless, and you took
+advantage."
+
+'Education is different. The duty of the parent to hand on what is
+best and truest in his own mind to the child is clear. Besides,
+the child goes on to carry what has been taught him into the
+open _agora_ of the world's thought, and may there test its
+value as he pleases. But the omission, in a sense irreparable,
+of a definite and customary act like baptism from a child's
+existence, when hereafter the omission may cause him a pang quite
+disproportionate to any likes or dislikes of mine in the matter,
+appears to me unjust.
+
+'I talk as if Lucy were not concerned!--or Dora! In reality I shall
+do as Lucy wills. Only they must not misunderstand me for the
+future. If my son lives, his father will not hide his heart from
+him.
+
+'I notice for the first time that Lucy is anxious and troubled
+about _her_ father. She would like now to be friends, and she
+took care that the news of the child's birth should be conveyed to
+him at once through a common acquaintance. But he has taken no
+notice. In some natures the seeds of affection seem to fall only on
+the sand and rock of the heart, where because they have "no depth
+of earth they wither away;" while the seeds of hatred find the rich
+and good ground, where they spring and grow a hundred-fold.'
+
+'_December_ 8, 1877.--I have just been watching Sandy on the
+rug between the two dogs--Tim, and the most adorable black and tan
+_dachshund_ that Lord Driffield has just given me. Sandy had a
+bit of biscuit, and was teasing his friends--first thrusting it
+under their noses, and then, just as they were preparing to gulp,
+drawing it back with a squeal of joy. The child's evident mastery
+and sense of humour, the grave puzzled faces of the dogs, delighted
+me. Then a whim seized me. I knelt down on the rug, and asked him
+to give me some. He held out the biscuit and laid it against my
+lips; I saw his eye waver; there was a gleam of mischief--the
+biscuit was half snatched away, and I felt absurdly chagrined. But
+in an instant the little face melted into the sweetest, keenest
+smile, and he almost choked me in his eagerness to thrust the
+biscuit down my throat. "Poor Daddy! Daddy _so_ hungry."
+
+'I recall with difficulty that I once thought him ugly and
+unattractive, poor little worm! On the contrary, it is quite clear
+that, whatever he may be when he grows up--I don't altogether trust
+his nose and mouth--for a child he is a beauty! His great brown
+eyes--so dark and noticeable beneath the fair hair in the little
+apple-blossom face--let you into the very heart of him. It is by no
+means a heart of unmixed goodness. There is a curious aloofness in
+his look sometimes, as of some pure intelligence beholding good and
+evil with the same even speculative mind. But this strange mood
+breaks up so humanly! he has such wiles--such soft wet kisses! such
+a little flute of a voice when he wants to coax or propitiate you!'
+
+'_March_ 1878.--My printing business has been growing very
+largely lately. I have now worked out my profit-sharing scheme with
+some minuteness, and yesterday the men, John, and I had a
+conference. In part, my plan is copied from that of the "Maison
+Leclaire," but I have worked a good deal of my own into it. Our
+English experience of this form of industrial partnership has been
+on the whole unfavourable; but, after a period of lassitude,
+experiments are beginning to revive. The great rock ahead lies in
+one's relation to the trade unions--one must remember that.
+
+'To the practised eye the men to-day showed signs of accepting it
+with cordiality, but the north-country man is before all things
+cautious, and I dare say a stranger would have thought them cool
+and suspicious. We meet again next week.
+
+'I must explain the thing to Lucy--it is her right. She may resent
+it vehemently, as she did my refusal, in the autumn, to take
+advantage of that London opening. It will, of course, restrict our
+income just as it was beginning to expand quickly. I have left
+myself adequate superintendence wages, a bonus on these wages
+calculated in the same way as that of the men, a fixed percentage
+on the capital already employed in the business and a nominal
+thirty per cent, of the profits. But I can see plainly that however
+the business extends, we--she and I--shall never "make our fortune"
+out of it. For beyond the fifty per cent, of the profits to be
+employed in bonuses on wages, and the twenty per cent, set aside
+for the benefit and pension society, my thirty per cent, must
+provide me with what I want for various purposes connected with the
+well-being of the workers, and for the widening of our operations
+on the publishing side, in a more or less propagandist spirit.
+
+'My bookselling business proper is, of course, at present outside
+the scheme, and I do not see very well how anything of the kind can
+be applied to it. This will be a comfort to Lucy; and just now the
+trade both in old and foreign books is prosperous and brings me in
+large returns. But I cannot disguise from myself that the other
+experiment is likely to absorb more and more of my energies
+in the future. I have from sixty to eighty men now in the
+printing-office--a good set, take them altogether. They have been
+gradually learning to understand me and my projects. The story of
+what Leclaire was able to do for the lives and characters of his
+men is wonderful!
+
+'My poor little wife! I try to explain these things to her, but she
+thinks that I am merely making mad experiments with money, teaching
+workmen to be "uppish" and setting employers against me. When in my
+turn I do my best to get at what she means by "getting on," I find
+it comes to a bigger house, more servants, a carriage, dinner
+parties, and, generally, a move to London, bringing with it a
+totally new circle of acquaintance who need never know exactly what
+she or I rose from. She does not put all this into words, but I
+think I have given it accurately.
+
+'And I should yield a great deal more than I do if I had any
+conviction that these things, when got, would make her happy. But
+every increase in our scale of living since we began has seemed
+rather to make her restless, and fill her with cravings which yet
+she can never satisfy. In reality she lives by her affections, as
+most women do. One day she wants to lose sight of everyone who knew
+her as Purcell's daughter, or me as Purcell's assistant; the next
+she is fretting to be reconciled to her father. In the same way,
+she thinks I am hard about money; she sees no attraction in the
+things which fill me with enthusiasm; but at the same time, if I
+were dragged into a life where I was morally starved and
+discontented, she would suffer too. No, I must steer through--judge
+for her and myself--and make life as pleasant to her in little ways
+as it can be made.
+
+'Ah! the gospel of "getting on"--it fills me with a kind of rage.
+There is an essential truth in it, no doubt, and if I had not been
+carried away by it at one time, I should have far less power over
+circumstances than I now have. But to square the whole of this
+mysterious complex life to it--to drop into the grave at last,
+having missed, because of it, all that sheds dignity and poetry on
+the human lot, all that makes it worth while or sane to hope in a
+destiny for man diviner and more lasting than appears--horrible!
+
+'Yet Lucy may rightly complain of me. I get dreamy--I
+procrastinate. And it is unjust to expect that her ideal of social
+pleasure should be the same as mine. I ought to--and I will--make
+more effort to please her.'
+
+'_July_ 1878.--I am in Paris again. Yesterday afternoon I
+wandered about looking at those wrecks of the Commune which yet
+remain. The new Hotel de Ville is rising, but the Tuileries still
+stands charred and ruined against the sky, an object lesson for
+Belleville. I walked up to the Arc de l'Etoile, and coming back I
+strolled into a little leafy open-air restaurant for a cup of
+coffee. Suddenly I recognised the place--the fountain--a largo
+quicksilver ball--a little wooden pavilion festooned with coloured
+lamps. It was as though eight years were wiped away.
+
+'I could not stay there. But the shock soon subsided. There is
+something bewildering, de-personalising, in the difference between
+one stage of life and another. In certain moods I feel scarcely a
+thread of identity between my present self and myself of eight
+years ago.
+
+'This morning I have seen Louie, after an interval of three years.
+Montjoie keeps out of my way, and, as a matter of fact, I have
+never set eyes on him since I passed him close to the Auteuil
+station in July 1870. From Louie's account, he is now a confirmed
+drunkard, and can hardly ever be got to do any serious work. Yet
+she brought me a clay study of their little girl which he threw off
+in a lucid interval two or three months ago, surely as good as
+anybody or anything, astonishingly delicate and true. Just now,
+apparently, he has a bad fit on, and but for my allowance to her
+she tells me they would be all but destitute. It is remarkable to
+see how she has taken possession of this money and with what
+shrewdness she manages it. I suspect her of certain small Bourse
+speculations--she has all the financial slang on the tip of her
+tongue--but if so, they succeed. For she keeps herself and the
+child, scornfully allows him so much for his pocket in the week,
+and even, as I judge from the consideration she enjoys in the
+church she frequents, finds money for her own Catholic purposes.
+
+'Louie a fervent Catholic and an affectionate mother! The mixture
+of old and new in her--the fresh habits of growth imposed on the
+original plant--startle me at every turn. Her Catholicism, which
+resolves itself, perhaps, into the cult of a particular church and
+of two or three admirable and sagacious priests, seems to me one
+long intrigue of a comparatively harmless kind. It provides her
+with enemies, allies, plots, battles, and surprises. It ministers,
+too, to her love of colour and magnificence--a love which implies
+an artistic sense, and would have been utilised young if she had
+belonged to an artistic family.
+
+'But just as I am adapting myself to the new Louie the old
+reappears! She was talking to me yesterday of her exertions at
+Easter for the Easter decorations, and describing to me in
+superlatives the final splendour of the results, and the
+compliments which had been paid her by one or two of the clergy,
+when the name of a lady who seems to have been connected with the
+church longer than Louie has, and is evidently her rival in various
+matters of pious service and charitable organisation, came to her
+lips. Instantly her face flamed, and the denunciation she launched
+was quite in the old Clough End and Manchester vein. I was to
+understand that this person was a mean, designing, worthless
+creature, a hideous object besides, and "made up," and as to her
+endeavours to ingratiate herself with Father this and Father that,
+the worst motives were hinted at.
+
+'Another little incident struck me more painfully still. Her
+devotion to the little Cecile is astonishing. She is miserable when
+the child has a finger-ache, and seems to spend most of her time in
+dressing and showing her off. Yet I suspect she is often irritable
+and passionate even with Cecile; the child has a shrinking quiet
+way with her which is not natural. And to-day, when she was in the
+middle of cataloguing Montjoie's enormities, and I was trying to
+restrain her, remembering that Cecile was looking at a book on the
+other side of the room, she suddenly called to the child
+imperiously:
+
+'"Cecile! come here and tell your uncle what your father is!"
+
+'And, to my horror, the little creature walked across to us, and,
+as though she were saying a lesson, began to _debiter_ a set
+speech about her father's crimes and her mother's wrongs,
+containing the wildest abuse of her father, and prompted throughout
+by the excited and scarlet Louie. I tried to stop it; but Louie
+only pushed me away. The child rose to her part, became perfectly
+white, declaimed with a shrill fury, indescribably repulsive, and
+at the end sank into a chair, hardly able to stand. Then Louie
+covered her with kisses, made me get wine for her, and held her
+cradled in her arms till it was time for them to go.
+
+'On the way downstairs, when Cecile was in front of us, I spoke my
+mind about this performance in the strongest way. But Louie only
+laughed at me. "It shall be quite plain that she is _mine_ and
+not his! I don't run away from him; I keep him from dying on the
+streets like a dog; but his child and everyone else shall know what
+he is."
+
+'It is a tigress passion. Poor little child!--a thin, brown,
+large-eyed creature, with rather old, affected manners, and a small
+clinging hand.'
+
+'_July_ 4 _th_.--Father Lenoir, Louie's director, has
+just been to call upon me; Louie insisted on my going to a festival
+service at St. Eulalie this morning, and introduced me to him--an
+elderly, courteous, noble-faced priest of a fine type. He was
+discreet, of course, and made me feel the enormous difference that
+exists between an outsider and a member of the one flock. But I
+gathered that the people among whom she is now thrown perfectly
+understand Louie. By means of the subtle and powerful discipline of
+the Church, a discipline which has absorbed the practical wisdom of
+generations, they have established a hold upon her. And they work
+on her also through the child. But he gave me to understand that
+there had been crises; that the opportunities for and temptations
+to dissolute living which beset Montjoie's wife were endless; and
+it was a marvel that under such circumstances a being so wild had
+yet kept straight.
+
+'I shook him warmly by the hand at parting, and thanked him from my
+heart. He somewhat resented my thanks, I thought. They imported,
+perhaps, a personal element into what he regards as a matter of
+pure ecclesiastical practice and duty.'
+
+'_December_ 25 _th_, 1878.--Lucy is still asleep; the
+rest of the house is just stirring. I am in my study looking out on
+the snowy garden and the frosted trees, which are as yet fair and
+white, though in a few hours the breath of Manchester will have
+polluted them.
+
+'Last night I went with Lucy and Dora to the midnight service at
+St. Damian's. It pleased them that I went; and I thought the
+service, with its bells, its resonant _Adeste fideles_, and
+its white flowers, singularly beautiful and touching. And yet, in
+truth, I was only happy in it because I was so far removed from it;
+because the legend of Bethlehem and the mythology of the Trinity
+are no longer matters of particular interest or debate with me;
+because after a period of three-fourths assent, followed by one
+lasting over years of critical analysis and controversial reading,
+I have passed of late into a conception of Christianity far more
+positive, fruitful, and human than I have yet held. I would fain
+believe it the Christianity of the future. But the individual must
+beware lest he wrap his personal thinking in phrases too large for
+it.
+
+'Yet, at least, one may say that it is a conception which has been
+gaining more and more hold on the minds of those who during the
+present century have thought most deeply, and laboured most
+disinterestedly in the field of Christian antiquity--who have
+sought with most learning and with fewest hindrances from
+circumstance to understand Christianity, whether as a history or as
+a philosophy.
+
+'I have read much German during the past year, and of late a book
+reviewing the whole course of religious thought in Germany since
+Schleiermacher, with a mixture of exhaustive information and
+brilliant style most unusual in a German, has absorbed all my spare
+hours. Such a movement!--such a wealth of collective labour and
+individual genius thrown into it--producing offshoots and echoes
+throughout the world, transforming opinion with the slow
+inevitableness which belongs to all science, possessing already a
+great past and sure of a great future.
+
+'In the face of it, our orthodox public, the contented ignorance of
+our clergy, the solemn assurance of our religious press--what
+curious and amazing phenomena! Yet probably the two worlds have
+their analogues in every religion; and what the individual has to
+learn in these days at once of outward debate and of unifying
+social aspiration, is "to dissent no longer with the heat of a
+narrow antipathy, but with the quiet of a large sympathy."'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+A few days after Lord Driffield's warm invitation to Mr. and Mrs.
+David Grieve to spend an October Saturday-to-Monday at Benet's Park
+had been accepted, Lucy was sitting in the September dusk putting
+some frills into Sandy's Sunday coat, when the door opened and Dora
+walked in.
+
+'You do look done!' said Lucy, as she held up her cheek to her
+cousin's salutation. 'What have you been about?'
+
+'They kept me late at the shop, for a Saturday,' said Dora, with a
+sigh of fatigue, 'and since then I've been decorating. It's the
+Dedication Festival to-morrow.'
+
+'Well, the festivals don't do _you_ any good,' said Lucy,
+emphatically; 'they always tire you to death. When you do get to
+church, I don't believe you can enjoy anything. Why don't you let
+other people have a turn now, after all these years? There's Miss
+Barham, and Charlotte Corfield, and Mrs. Willan--they'd all do a
+great deal more if you didn't do so much. I know that.'
+
+Lucy's cool bright eye meant, indeed, that she had heard some
+remarks made of late with regard to Dora's position at St. Damian's
+somewhat unfavourable to her cousin. It was said that she was
+jealous of co-operation or interference on the part of new members
+of the congregation in the various tasks she had been accustomed
+for years past to lay upon herself in connection with the church.
+She was universally held to be extraordinarily good; but both in
+the large shop, where she was now forewoman, and at St. Damian's,
+people were rather afraid of her, and inclined to head oppositions
+to her. A certain severity had grown upon her; she was more
+self-confident, though it was a self-confidence grounded always on
+the authority of the Church; and some parts of the nature which at
+twenty had been still soft and plastic were now tending to
+rigidity.
+
+At Lucy's words she flushed a little.
+
+'How can they know as well as I what has to be done?' she said with
+energy. 'The chancel screen is _beautiful_, Lucy--all yellow
+fern and heather. You must go to-morrow, and take Sandy.'
+
+As she spoke she threw off her waterproof and unloosed the strings
+of her black bonnet. Her dark serge dress with its white turn-down
+collar and armlets--worn these last for the sake of her embroidery
+work--gave her a dedicated conventual look. She was paler than of
+old; the eyes, though beautiful and luminous, were no longer young,
+and lines were fast deepening in the cheeks and chin, with their
+round childish moulding. What had been _naivete_ and tremulous
+sweetness at twenty, was now conscious strength and patience. The
+countenance had been fashioned--and fashioned nobly--by life; but
+the tool had cut deep, and had not spared the first grace of the
+woman in developing the saint. The hands especially, the long thin
+hands defaced by the labour of years, which met yours in a grasp so
+full of purpose and feeling, told a story and symbolised a
+character.
+
+'David won't come,' said Lucy, in answer to Dora's last remark; 'he
+hardly ever goes anywhere now unless he hears of some one going to
+preach that he thinks he'll like.'
+
+'No--I know,' said Dora. A shade came over her face. The attitude
+of David Grieve towards religion during the last four or five years
+represented to her the deep disappointment of certain eager hopes,
+perhaps one might almost call them ambitions, of her missionary
+youth. The disappointment had brought a certain bitterness with it,
+though for long years she had been sister and closest friend to
+both David and his wife. And it had made her doubly sensitive with
+regard to Lucy, whom she had herself brought over from the Baptist
+communion to the Church, and Sandy, who was her godchild.
+
+After a pause, she hesitatingly brought a small paper book out of
+the handbag she carried.
+
+'I brought you this, Lucy. Father Russell sent it you. He thinks it
+the best beginning book you can have. He always gives it in the
+parish; and if the mothers will only use it, it makes it so much
+easier to teach the children when they come to Sunday school.'
+
+Lucy took it doubtfully. It was called 'The Mother's Catechism;'
+and, opening it, she saw that it contained a series of questions
+and answers, as between a mother and a child.
+
+'I don't think Sandy would understand it,' she said, slowly, as she
+turned it over.
+
+'Oh yes, he would!' said Dora, eagerly. 'Why, he's nearly five,
+Lucy. It's really time you began to teach him something--unless you
+want him to grow up a little heathen!'
+
+The last words had a note of indignation. Lucy took no notice. She
+was still turning over the book.
+
+'And I don't think David will like it,' she said, still more slowly
+than before.
+
+Dora flushed.
+
+'He can't want to keep Sandy from being taught any religion at all!
+It wouldn't be fair to you--or to the child. And if he won't do it,
+if he isn't certain enough about what he thinks, how can he mind
+your doing it?'
+
+'I don't know,' said Lucy, and paused. 'I sometimes think,' she went
+on, with more energy, 'that David will be quite different some day
+from what he has been. I'm sure he'll want to teach Sandy.'
+
+'He's got nothing to teach him!' cried Dora. Then she added in
+another voice--a voice of wounded feeling--'If he was to be brought
+up an atheist, I don't think David ought to have asked me to be
+godmother.'
+
+'He shan't be brought up an atheist,' exclaimed Lucy startled.
+Then, feeling the subject too much for her--for it provoked in her
+a mingled train of memories which she had not words enough to
+express--she turned back to her work, leaving the book on the table
+and the discussion pending.
+
+'David's dreadfully late,' she said, discontentedly, looking at the
+clock.
+
+'Where is he?'
+
+'Down in Ancoats, I expect. He told me he had a committee there
+to-day after work, about those houses he's going to pull down. He's
+got Mr. Buller and Mr. Haycraft--and'--Lucy named some half-dozen
+more rich and well-known men--'to help him, and they're going to
+pull down one of the worst bits of James Street, David says, and
+build up new houses for working people. He's wild about it. Oh, I
+know we'll have no money at all left soon!' cried Lucy indignantly,
+with a shrug of her small shoulders.
+
+Dora smiled at what seemed to her a childish petulance.
+
+'Why, I'm sure you've got everything very nice, Lucy, and all you
+want.'
+
+'No, indeed, I _haven't_ got all I want,' said Lucy, looking
+up and frowning; 'I never shall, neither. I want David to be--to
+be--like everybody else. He might be a rich man to-morrow if he
+wouldn't have such ideas. He doesn't think a bit about me and
+Sandy. I told you what would happen when he made that division
+between the bookselling and the printing, and took up with
+those ideas about the men. I knew he'd come not to care about
+the bookselling. And I was _perfectly_ right! There's that
+printing-office getting bigger and bigger, and crowds of men
+waiting to be taken on, and such a lot of business doing as never
+was. And are we a bit the richer? Not a penny--or hardly. It's
+sickening to hear the way people talk about him! Why, they say the
+last election wouldn't have been nearly so good for the Liberals
+all about the North if it hadn't been for the things he's always
+publishing and the two papers he started last year. He might be a
+member of Parliament any day, and he wouldn't be a member of
+Parliament--not he! He told me he didn't care twopence about it.
+No, he doesn't care for anything but just taking _our_ money
+and giving it to other people--there! You may say what you like,
+but it's true.'
+
+The wilful energy with which Lucy spoke the last words transformed
+the small face--brought out the harder lines on it.
+
+'Well, I never know what it is that _you_ want exactly,' said
+Dora. 'I don't think you do yourself.'
+
+Lucy stitched silently, her thin red lips pressed together. She
+knew perfectly well what she wanted, only she was ashamed to
+confess it to the religious and ascetic Dora. Her ideal of living
+was filled in with images and desires abundantly derived from
+Manchester life, where every day she saw people grow rich rapidly,
+and rise as a matter of course into that upper region of gentility,
+carriages, servants, wines, and grouse-moors, whither, ever since
+it had become plain to her that David could, if he chose, easily
+place her there, it had been her constant craving to go. Other
+people came to be gentlefolks and lord it over the land--why not
+they? It made her mad, as she had said to Dora, to see _their_
+money--their very own money--chucked away to other people, and they
+getting no good of it, and remaining mere working booksellers and
+printers as before.
+
+'Why don't you go and help him?' said Dora suddenly. 'Perhaps if
+you were to go right in and see what he's doing, you wouldn't mind
+it so much. You might get to like it. He doesn't want to keep
+everything to himself--he wants to share with those that need. If
+there were a good many others like that, perhaps there'd be fewer
+awful things happening down at Ancoats.'
+
+A sigh rose to her lips. Her beautiful eyes grew sad.
+
+'Well, I did try once or twice,' said Lucy, pettishly, 'but I've
+always told you that sort of thing isn't in my line. Of course I
+understand about giving away, and all that. But he'll hardly let
+you give away at all! He says it's pauperising the people. And the
+things he wants me to do--I never seem to do 'em right, and I can't
+get to care a bit about them.'
+
+The tone in her voice betrayed a past experience which had been in
+some way trying and discouraging to a fine natural vanity.
+
+Dora did not answer. She played absently with the little book on
+the table.
+
+'Oh! but he's going to let us accept the invitation to Benet's
+Park--I didn't tell you that,' said Lucy suddenly, her face
+clearing.
+
+Dora was startled.
+
+'Why, I thought you told me he wouldn't go?'
+
+'So I did. But--well, I let out!' said Lucy, colouring.
+
+He's changed his mind. But I'm rather in a fright, Dora, though I
+don't tell him. Think of that big house and all those servants--I'm
+more frightened of _them_ than of anybody! I say, _do_ you think
+my new dresses'll do? You'll come up and look at them, won't you?
+Not that you're much use about dresses.'
+
+Dora was profoundly interested and somewhat bewildered. That her
+little cousin Lucy, Purcell's daughter and Daddy's niece, should be
+going to stay as an invited guest in a castle, with an earl and
+countess, was very amazing. Was it because the Radicals had got the
+upper hand so much at the election? She could not understand it,
+but some of her old girlishness, her old interest in small womanish
+trifles, came back upon her, and she discussed the details of what
+Lucy might expect so eagerly that Lucy was quite delighted with
+her.
+
+In the middle of their talk a step was heard in the hall.
+
+'Ah, there he is!' said Lucy; 'now we'll ring for supper, and I'll
+go and get ready.'
+
+Dora sat alone for a few minutes, and then David came in.
+
+'Ah! Dora, this is nice. Lucy says you will stay to supper. We get
+so busy, you and I, we see each other much too seldom.'
+
+He spoke in his most cordial, brotherly tone, and, standing on the
+rug with his back to the fire, he looked down upon her with evident
+pleasure.
+
+As for her, though the throb of her young passion had been so soon
+and so sternly silenced, it was still happiness to her to be in the
+same room with David Grieve, and any unusual kindness from him, or
+a long talk with him, would often send her back to her little room
+in Ancoats stored with a cheerful warmth of soul which helped her
+through many days. For of late years she had been more liable than
+of old to fits of fretting--fretting about her father, about her
+own sins and other people's, about the little worries of her
+Sunday-school class, or the little rubs of church work. The
+contact with a nature so large and stimulating, though sometimes
+it angered and depressed her through the influence of religious
+considerations, was yet on the whole of infinite service to her, of
+more service than she knew.
+
+'Have you forgiven me for upsetting Sandy?' she asked him, with a
+smile.
+
+'I'm on the way to it. I left him just now prancing about Lucy's
+bed, and making an abominable noise. She told him to be quiet,
+whereupon he indignantly informed her that he was "a dwagon hunting
+wats." So I imagine he hasn't had "the wrong dinner" to-day.'
+
+They both laughed.
+
+'And you have been in Ancoats?'
+
+'Yes,' said David, tossing back his black hair with an animated
+gesture, and thrusting his hands into his pockets. 'Yes--we are
+getting on. We have got the whole of that worst James Street court
+into our hands. We shall begin pulling down directly, and the plans
+for the new buildings are almost ready. And we have told all the
+old tenants that they shall have a prior claim on the new rooms if
+they choose to come back. Some will; for a good many others of
+course we shall be too respectable, though I am set on keeping the
+plans as simple and the rents as low as possible.'
+
+Dora sat looking at him with somewhat perplexed eyes.
+
+Her Christianity had been originally of the older High Church type,
+wherein the ideal of personal holiness had not yet been fused with
+the ideal of social service. The care of the poor and needy was, of
+course, indispensable to the Christian life; but she thought first
+and most of bringing them to church, and to the blessing and
+efficacy of the sacraments; then of giving them money when they
+were sick, and assuring to them the Church's benediction in dying.
+The modern fuss about overcrowded houses and insanitary
+conditions--the attack on bricks and mortar--the preaching of
+temperance, education, thrift--these things often seemed to
+Christian people of Dora's type and day, if they spoke their true
+minds, to be tinged with atheism and secularism. They were jealous
+all the time for something better. They instinctively felt that the
+preeminence of certain ideas, most dear to them, was threatened by
+this absorption in the detail of the mere human life.
+
+Something of this it was that passed vaguely through Dora's mind as
+she sat listening to David's further talk about his Ancoats scheme;
+and at last, influenced, perhaps, by a half-conscious realisation
+of her demur--it was only that--he let it drop.
+
+'What is that book?' he said, his quick eye detecting the little
+paper-covered volume on Lucy's table. And, stepping forward, he
+took it up.
+
+Dora unexpectedly found her voice a little husky as she replied,
+and had to clear her throat.
+
+'It is a book I brought for Lucy. Sandy is a baptized Christian,
+David. Lucy wants to teach him, so I brought her this little
+Catechism, which Father Russell recommends.'
+
+David turned the book over in silence. He read a passage concerning
+the Virgin Mary; another, in which the child asked about the number
+and names of the Archangels, gave a detailed answer; another in
+which Dissenters were handled with an acrimony which contrasted
+with a general tone of sweetness and unction.
+
+David laid it down on the mantelpiece.
+
+'No, Dora, I can't have Sandy taught out of this.'
+
+He spoke with dignity, but with an endeavour to make his tone as
+gentle as possible.
+
+Dora was silent a moment; then she broke out:
+
+'What will you teach him, then? Is he to be a Christian at all?'
+
+'In a sense, yes; with all my heart, yes! so far, at least, as his
+father has any share in the matter.'
+
+'And is his mother to have no voice?' Dora went on with growing
+bitterness and hurry. 'And as for me--why did you let me be his
+godmother? I take it seriously, and I may do nothing.'
+
+'You may do everything,' he said, sitting down beside her, 'except
+teach him extreme matter of this kind, which, because I am what I
+am, will make a critic of the child before his time. I am not a
+bigot, Dora! I shall not interfere with Lucy; she would not teach
+him in this way. She talks to him; and she instinctively feels for
+me, and what she says comes softly and vaguely to him. It is
+different with things like this, set down in black and white, and
+to be learnt by heart. You must remember that half of it seems to
+me false history, and some of it false morals.'
+
+He looked at her anxiously. The jarring note was hateful to him. He
+had always taken for granted that Lucy was under Dora's influence
+religiously--had perhaps made it an excuse for a gradual withdrawal
+of his inmost mind from his wife, which in reality rested on quite
+other reasons. But his heart was full of dreams about his son. He
+could not let Dora have her way there.
+
+'Oh, how different it is,' cried Dora, in a low, intense voice,
+twining her hands together, 'from what I once thought!'
+
+'No!' he said, vehemently, 'there is no real difference between you
+and me--there never can be; teach Sandy to be good and to love you!
+That's what I should like!'
+
+His eyes were full of emotion, but he smiled. Dora, however, could
+not respond. The inner tension was too strong. She turned away, and
+began fidgeting with Lucy's workbag.
+
+Then a small voice and a preparatory turmoil were heard outside.
+
+'Auntie Dora! Auntie Dora!' cried Sandy, rushing in with a hop,
+skip, and a jump, and flourishing a picture-book, 'look at zese
+pickers! Dat's a buffalo--most es _tror_ nary animal, the
+buffalo!'
+
+'Come here, rascal!' called his father, and the child ran up to
+him. David knelt to look at the picture, but the little fellow
+suddenly dropped it and his interest in it, in a way habitual to
+him, twined one arm round his father's neck, laid his cheek against
+David's, crossed one foot over the other, and, thumb in mouth,
+looked Dora up and down with his large, observant eyes.
+
+Dora, melted, wooed him to come to her. Her adoration of him was
+almost on a level with David's. Sandy took a minute to think
+whether he should leave his father. Then he climbed her knee, and
+patronised her on the subject of buffaloes and giraffes--'I tan't
+'splain everything to you, Auntie Dora; you'll now when you're
+older'--till Lucy and supper came together. And supper was
+brightened both by Lucy's secret content in the prospect of the
+Benet's Park visit and by the child's humours. When Dora said good
+night to her host, their manner to each other had its usual
+fraternal quality. Nevertheless, the woman carried away with her
+both resentment and distress.
+
+About a fortnight later David and Lucy started one fine October
+afternoon for Benet's Park. The cab was crowded with Lucy's
+luggage, and David, in new clothes to please his wife, felt
+himself, as the cab door closed upon them, a trapped and miserable
+man.
+
+What had possessed Lord Driffield to send that unlucky note? For
+Lord Driffield himself David had a grateful and real affection.
+Ever since that whimsical scholar had first taken kindly notice of
+the boy-tradesman, there had been a growing friendship between the
+two; and of late years Lord Driffield's interest in David's
+development and career had become particularly warm and cordial. He
+had himself largely contributed to the subtler sides of that
+development, had helped to refine the ambitions and raise the
+standards of the growing intellect; his advice, owing to his
+lifelong commerce with and large possession of books, had often
+been of great practical use to the young man; his library had for
+years been at David's service, both for reference and borrowing;
+and he had supplied his favourite with customers and introductions
+in a large percentage of the University towns both at home and
+abroad, a social _milieu_ where Lord Driffield was more at
+home and better appreciated than in any other. The small delicately
+featured man, whose distinguished face, with its abundant waves of
+silky hair--once ruddy, now a goldenish white--presided so oddly
+over an incorrigible shabbiness of dress, had become a familiar
+figure in David's life. Their friendship, of course, was limited to
+a very definite region of thought and relation; but they
+corresponded freely, when they were apart, on matters of
+literature, bibliography, sometimes of politics; and no sooner was
+the Earl at Benet's Park than David had constant calls from him in
+his office at the back of the now spacious and important
+establishment in Prince's Street.
+
+But Lord Driffield, as we know, had managed his mind better than
+his marriage, and his _savoir vivre_ was no match for his
+learning. He bore his spouse and his country-gentleman life
+patiently enough in general; but every now and then he fell into
+exasperation. His wife flooded him too persistently, perhaps, with
+cousins and grandees of the duller sort, whose ideas seemed to him
+as raw as their rent-rolls were large--till he rebelled. Then he
+would have _his_ friends; selecting them more or less at
+random from up and down the ranks of literature and science, till
+Lady Driffield raised her eyebrows, invited a certain number of her
+own set to keep her in countenance, and made up her mind to endure.
+At the end of the ordeal Lord Driffield generally made the rueful
+reflection that it had not gone off well. But he felt the better
+and digested the better for the self-assertion of it, and it was
+periodically renewed.
+
+David and Lucy Grieve had been asked in some such moment of
+domestic annoyance. The Earl had seen 'Grieve's wife' twice, and
+hastily remembered that she seemed 'a presentable little person.'
+He was constitutionally indifferent to and contemptuous of women.
+But he imagined that it would please David to bring his wife; and
+he was perhaps tolerably certain, since no one, be he rake or
+savant, possesses an historical name and domain without knowing it,
+that it would please the bookseller's wife to be invited.
+
+David suspected a good deal of this, for he knew his man pretty
+well. As he sat opposite to Lucy in the railway carriage--
+first-class, since she felt it incongruous to go in anything
+else--he recalled certain luncheons at Benet's Park, when
+he had been doing a bit of work in the library during the family
+sojourn. Certainly Lucy did not realise at all how formidable these
+aristocratic women could be!
+
+And his pride--at bottom the workman's pride--was made
+uncomfortable by his wife's _newness_. New hat, new dress, new
+gloves! Himself too! It annoyed him that Lady Driffield should be
+so plainly informed that great pains had been taken for her. He
+felt irritable and out of gear. Being neither self-conscious nor
+awkward, he became both for the moment, out of sympathy with Lucy.
+
+Yet Lucy was supremely happy as they sped along to Stalybridge.
+Suppose her father heard of it! She could no doubt insure his
+knowing; but it might set his back up still more, make him more mad
+than before with her and David. Eight years and more since he had
+spoken to her, and the other day, when he had seen her coming in
+Deansgate, he had crossed to the other side of the street!--Were
+those sleeves of her evening dress quite right? They were not
+caught down, she thought, quite in the right place. No doubt there
+would be time before dinner to put in a stitch. And she did hope
+that pleat from the neck would look all right. It was peculiar, but
+Miss Helby had assured her it was much worn. Would there be many
+titled people, she wondered, and would all the ladies wear
+diamonds? She thought disconsolately of the little black enamelled
+locket and the Roman pearls, which were all the adornments she
+possessed.
+
+After a short journey they alighted at their station as the dusk
+was beginning.
+
+'Are you for Benet's Park, m'm?' said the porter to Lucy. 'All
+right!--the carriage is just outside.'
+
+Lucy held herself an inch taller, and waited for David to come back
+from the van with their two new portmanteaus.
+
+Meanwhile she noticed two other groups of people, whose bags and
+rugs were being appropriated by a couple of powdered footmen--a
+husband and wife, and a tall military-looking man accompanied by
+two ladies. The two ladies belonged to the height of fashion--of
+that Lucy was certain, as she stole an intimidated glance at the
+cut of their tailor-made gowns and the costliness of the fur cloak
+which one of them carried. As for the other lady, could she also be
+on her way to Benet's Park--with this uncouth figure, this mannish
+height and breadth, this complete lack of waist, these large arms
+and hands, and the over-ample garments and hat, of green cashmere
+slashed with yellow, in which she was marvellously arrayed? Yet she
+seemed entirely at her ease, which was more than Lucy was, and her
+little dark husband was already talking with the tall ladies.
+
+David, having captured the luggage, was accosted by one of the
+footmen, who then came up to Lucy and took her bag. She and David
+followed in his wake, and found themselves mingling with the other
+five persons, who were clearly to be their fellow-guests.
+
+As they stood outside the station door, the elder of the two ladies
+turned and ran a scrutinising eye over Lucy and the person in sage
+green following her; then she said rapidly to the gentleman with
+her:
+
+'Now, remember Mathilde can't go outside, and I prefer to have her
+with me.'
+
+'Well I suppose there'll be room in the omnibus,' said he, shortly.
+'I shall go in the dog-cart and get a smoke. By George! those are
+good horses of Driffield's! And they are not the pair I sent him
+over from Ireland in the autumn either.'
+
+He went down the steps, patted and examined the horses, and threw a
+word or two to the coachman. Lucy, palpitating with excitement and
+alarm, felt a corresponding awe of the person who could venture
+such familiarities even with the servants and live-stock of Benet's
+Park.
+
+The servant let down the steps of the smart omnibus with its
+impatient steeds. The two tall ladies got in.
+
+'Mathilde!' called the elder.
+
+A little maid, dressed in black, and carrying a large dressing-bag,
+hurried down the steps before the remaining guests, and was helped
+in by the footman. The lady in sage green smiled at her husband--a
+sleepy, humorous smile. Then she stepped in, the footman touching
+his hat to her as though he knew her.
+
+'Any maid, m'm?' said the man to Lucy, as she was following.
+
+'No--oh _no!_' said Lucy, stumbling in. 'Give me my bag,
+please.'
+
+The man gave it to her, and timidly looking round her she settled
+herself in the smallest space and the remotest corner she could.
+
+When the carriage rolled off, the lady in green looked out of
+window for a while at the dark flying fields and woods, over which
+the stars were beginning to come out.
+
+'Are you a stranger in these parts, or do you know Benet's Park
+already?' she said presently to Lucy, who was next her, in a
+pleasant, nonchalant way.
+
+'I have never been here before,' said Lucy, dreading somehow the
+sound of her own voice; 'but my husband is well acquainted with the
+family.'
+
+She was pleased with her own phrase, and began to recover herself.
+The lady said no more, however, but leant back and apparently went
+to sleep. The tall ladies presently did the same. Lucy's depression
+returned as the silence lasted. She supposed that it was
+aristocratic not to talk to people till you had been introduced to
+them. She hoped she would be introduced when they reached Benet's
+Park. Otherwise it would be awkward staying in the same house.
+
+Then she fell into a dream, imagining herself with a maid--ordering
+her about deliciously--saying to the handsome footman, 'My maid has
+my wraps'--and then with the next jolt of the carriage waking up to
+the humdrum and unwelcome reality. And David might be as rich as
+anybody! Familiar resentments and cravings stirred in her, and her
+drive became even less of a pleasure than before. As for David, he
+spent the whole of it in lively conversation with the small dark
+man, beside the window.
+
+The carriage paused a moment. Then great gates were swung back and
+in they sped, the horses stepping out smartly now that they were
+within scent of home. There was a darkness as of thick and lofty
+trees, then dim opening stretches of park; lastly a huge house,
+mirage-like in the distance, with rows of lighted windows, a
+crackling of crisp gravel, the sound of the drag, and a pomp of
+opening doors.
+
+'Shall I take your bag, Madam?' said a magnificent person, bending
+towards Lucy, as, clinging to her possession, she followed the lady
+in green into the outer hall.
+
+'Oh no, thank you! at least, shall I find it again?' said the
+frightened Lucy, looking in front of her at the vast hall, with its
+tall lamps and statues and innumerable doors.
+
+'It shall be sent upstairs for you, Madam,' said the magnificent
+person gravely, and, as Lucy thought, severely.
+
+She submitted, and looked round for David. Oh, where was he?
+
+'This is a fine hall, isn't it?' said the lady in green beside her.
+'Bad period--but good of its kind. What on earth do they spoil it
+for with those shocking modern portraits?'
+
+Such assurance--combined with such garments--in such a house--it
+was nothing short of a miracle!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+'Now, Lavinia, do be kind to young Mrs. Grieve. She is evidently as
+shy as she can be.'
+
+So spoke Lord Driffield, with some annoyance in his voice, as he
+looked into his wife's room after dressing for dinner.
+
+'I suppose she can amuse herself like other people,' said Lady
+Driffield. She was standing by the fire warming a satin-shoed foot.
+'I have told Williams to leave all the houses open to-morrow. And
+there's church, and the pictures. The Danbys and the rest of us are
+going over to Lady Herbart's for tea.'
+
+A cloud came over Lord Driffield's face. He made some impatient
+exclamation, which was muffled by his white beard and moustache,
+and walked back to his own room.
+
+Meanwhile Lucy, in another corridor of the great house, was
+standing before a long glass, looking herself up and down in a
+tumult of excitement and anxiety.
+
+She had just passed through a formidable hour! In a great gallery,
+with polished floor, and hung with portraits of ancestral
+Driffields, the party from the station had found Lady Driffield,
+with five or six other people, who seemed to be already staying in
+the house. Though the butler had preceded them, no names but those
+of Lady Venetia Danby and Miss Danby had been announced; and when
+Lady Driffield, a tall effective-looking woman with a cold eye and
+an expressionless voice, said a short 'How do you do?' and extended
+a few fingers to David and his wife, no names were mentioned, and
+Lucy felt a sudden depressing conviction that no names were needed.
+To the mistress of the house they were just two nonentities, to
+whom she was to give bed and board for two nights to gratify her
+husband's whims; whether their insignificant name happened to be
+Grieve, or Tompkins, or Johnson, mattered nothing.
+
+So Lucy had sat down in a subdued state of mind, and was handed tea
+by a servant, while the Danbys--Colonel Danby, after his smoke in
+the dog-cart, following close on the heels of his wife and
+daughter--mixed with the group round the tea-table, and much
+chatter, combined with a free use of Christian names, liberal
+petting of Lady Driffield's Pomeranian, and an account by Miss
+Danby of an accident to herself in the hunting-field, filled up a
+half-hour which to one person, at least, had the qualities of a
+nightmare. David was talking to the lady in green--to whom, by the
+way, Lady Driffield had been distinctly civil. Once he came over to
+relieve Lucy from a waterproof which was on her knee, and to get
+her some bread and butter. But otherwise no one took any notice of
+her, and she fell into a nervous terror lest she should upset her
+cup, or drop her teaspoon, or scatter her crumbs on the floor.
+
+Then at last Lord Driffield, who had been absent on some country
+business, which his soul loathed, had come in, and with the
+cordiality, nay, affection of his greeting to David, and the
+kindness of his notice of herself, little Lucy's spirits had risen
+at a bound. She felt instinctively that a protector had arrived,
+and even the formidable procession upstairs in the wake of Lady
+Driffield, when the moment at last arrived for showing the guests
+to their rooms, had passed off safely, Lucy throwing out an
+agitated 'Thank you!' when Lady Driffield had even gone so far as
+to open a door with her own bediamonded hand, which had Mrs.
+Grieve's plebeian appellations written in full upon the card
+attached to it.
+
+And now? Was the dress nice? Would it do? Unluckily, since Lucy's
+rise in the social scale which had marked the last few years, the
+sureness of her original taste in dress had somewhat deserted her.
+Her natural instinct was for trimness and closeness; but of late
+her ideals had been somewhat confused by a new and more important
+dressmaker with 'aesthetic' notions, who had been recommended to
+her by the good-natured and artistic wife of one of the College
+professors. Under the guidance of this expert, she had chosen a
+'Watteau _sacque_' from a fashion-plate, not quite daring,
+little tradesman's daughter as she felt herself at bottom, to
+venture on the undisguised low neck and short sleeves of ordinary
+fashionable dress.
+
+She said fretfully to herself that she could see nothing in this
+vast room. More and more candles did she light with a trembling
+hand, trusting devoutly that no one would come in and discover her
+with such an extravagant illumination. Then she tried each of the
+two long glasses of the room in turn. Her courage mounted. It
+_was_ pretty. The terra-cotta shade was _exquisite,_ and
+_no_ one could tell that the satin was cotton-backed. The
+flowing sleeves and the pleat from the shoulder gave her dignity,
+she was certain; and she had done her hair beautifully. She wished
+David would come in and see! But his room was across a little
+landing, which, indeed, seemed to be all their own, for it was shut
+off from the passage they had entered from by an outer door. There
+was, however, more than one door opening on to the landing, and
+Lucy was so much afraid of her surroundings that she preferred to
+wait till he came.
+
+Meanwhile--what a bedroom! Why, it was more gorgeous than any
+drawing-room she had ever entered. Every article of furniture was
+of old marqueterie, adapted to modern uses, the appointments of the
+writing-table were of solid silver--Lucy had eagerly ascertained
+the fact by looking at the 'marks'--and as for the _towels_,
+she simply could not have imagined that such things were made! Her
+little soul was in a whirl of envy, admiration, pride. What tales
+she would have to tell Dora when they got home!
+
+'Are you ready?' said David, opening the door. 'I believe I hear
+people going downstairs.'
+
+He came in arrayed in the new dress suit which became him as well
+as anything else; for he had a natural dignity which absorbed and
+surmounted any novelty of circumstance or setting, and was purely a
+matter of character, depending upon a mind familiar with large
+interests and launched towards ideal aims. He might be silent,
+melancholy, impracticable, but never meanly self-conscious. It had
+rarely occurred to anyone to pity or condescend to David Grieve.
+
+Lucy looked at him with uneasy pride. Then she glanced back at her
+own reflection in the glass.
+
+'What do you think of it?' she asked him, eagerly.
+
+'Magnificent!' said David, with all the sincerity of
+ignorance--wishing, moreover, to make his wife pleased with
+herself. 'But oughtn't you to have gloves instead of those things?'
+
+He pointed doubtfully to the mittens on her arms.
+
+'Oh, David, don't say that!' cried Lucy, in despair. 'Miss Helby
+said these were the right things. It's to be like an old picture,
+don't you understand? And I haven't got any gloves but those I came
+in. Oh, don't be so disagreeable!'
+
+She looked ready to cry. Poor David hastened to declare that Miss
+Helby must be right, and that it was all very nice. Then they blew
+out the candles and ventured forth.
+
+'Lord Driffield says that Canon Aylwin is coming,' said David,
+examining some Hollar engravings on the wall of the staircase as
+they descended, 'and the Dean of Bradford, who is staying with him.
+I shall be glad to see Canon Aylwin.'
+
+His face took a pleased meditative look. He was thinking of Canon
+Aylwin's last volume of essays--of their fine scholarship, their
+delicate, unique qualities of style. As for Lucy, it seemed to her
+that all the principalities and powers of this world were somehow
+arraying themselves against her in that terrible drawing-room they
+were so soon to enter. She set her teeth, held up her head, and on
+they went.
+
+Presently they found themselves approaching a glass door, which
+opened into the central hall. Beyond it was a crowd of figures and
+a buzz of talk, and at the door stood a tall person in black with
+white gloves, holding a silver tray, from which he presented David
+with a button-hole. Then, with a manner at once suave and
+impersonal, he held open the door, and the husband and wife passed
+through.
+
+'Ah, my dear Grieve,' said Lord Driffield, laying his hand on
+David's shoulder, 'come here and be introduced to Canon Aylwin. I am
+delighted to have caught him for you.'
+
+So David was swept away to the other side of the room, and Lucy was
+left forlorn and stranded. It seemed to her an immense party; there
+were at least eight or ten fresh faces beyond those she had seen
+already. And just as she was looking for a seat into which she
+might slip and hide herself, Lady Venetia Danby, who was standing
+near, playing with a huge feather fan and talking to a handsome
+young man, turned around by chance and, seeing the figure in the
+bright-coloured 'Watteau _sacque_,' involuntarily put up her
+eyeglass to look at it. Instantly Lucy, conscious of the eyeglass,
+and looking hurriedly round on the people near, was certain that
+the pleat from the shoulder and the mittens were irretrievably
+wrong and conspicuous, and that she had betrayed herself at once by
+her dress as an ignoramus and an outsider. Worst of all, the lady
+in green was in a _sacque_ too!--a shapeless yellow thing of
+the most untutored and detestable make. Mittens also! drawn
+laboriously over the hands and arms of an Amazon. Lucy glanced at
+Miss Danby beside her, then at a beautiful woman in pale pink
+across the room--at their slim waists, the careless _aplomb_
+and grace with which the costly stuffs and gleaming jewels were
+worn, and the white necks displayed--and sank into a chair
+trembling and miserable. That the only person to keep her in
+countenance should be that particular person--that they two should
+thus fall into a class together, by themselves, cut off from all
+the rest--it was too much! Then, by a quick reaction, some of her
+natural obstinacy returned upon her. She held herself erect, and
+looked steadily round the room.
+
+'Mr. Edwardes--Mrs. Grieve,' said Lady Driffield's impassive voice,
+speaking, as it seemed to Lucy, from a great height, as the tall
+figure swept past her to introductions more important.
+
+A young man bowed to Lucy, looked at her for a moment, then,
+pulling his fair moustache, turned away to speak to Miss Danby,
+who, in the absence of more stimulating suitors for her smiles, was
+graciously pleased to bestow a few of them on Lord Driffield's new
+agent.
+
+'Whom are we waiting for?' said Miss Danby, looking round her, and
+slightly glancing at Lucy.
+
+'Only the Dean, I believe,' said Mr. Edwardes, with a smile. 'I
+never knew Dean Manley less than half an hour late in _this_
+house.'
+
+A cold shiver ran through Lucy. Then they--she and David--had been
+all but the last, had all but kept the whole of this portentous
+gathering waiting for them.
+
+In the midst of her new tremor the glass doors were again thrown
+open, and in walked the Dean--a short, plain man, with a mirthful
+eye, a substantial person, and legs which became his knee-breeches.
+
+'Thirty-five minutes, Dean!' said the handsome youth, who had been
+talking to Lady Venetia, as he held up his watch.
+
+'It is a remarkable fact, Reggie,' said the Dean, laying his hand
+on the lad's shoulder, 'that your watch has gained persistently ever
+since I was first acquainted with you. Ah, well, keep it ahead, my
+boy. A diplomatist must be egged on somehow.'
+
+'I thought the one condition of success in that trade was the
+patience to do nothing,' said a charming voice. 'Don't interfere
+with Reggie's prospects, Dean.'
+
+'Has he got any?' said the Dean, maliciously. 'My dear Mrs.
+Wellesdon, you are a "sight for sair een."'
+
+And he pressed the new-comer's hand between both his own, surveying
+her the while with a fatherly affection and admiration.
+
+Lucy looked up, a curious envy at her heart. She saw the beautiful
+lady in pink, who had come across the room to greet the Dean.
+_Was_ she beautiful? Lucy hurriedly asked herself. Perhaps
+not, in point of feature, but she held her head so nobly, her
+colour was so subtle and lovely, her eye so speaking, and her mouth
+so sweet, she carried about with her a preeminence so natural and
+human, that beauty was in truth the only word that fitted her. Now,
+as the Dean passed on from her to some one else, she glanced down
+at the little figure in terra-cotta satin, and, with a kindly
+diffident expression, she sat down and began to talk to Lucy.
+Marcia Wellesdon was a sorceress, and could win whatever hearts she
+pleased. In a few moments she so soothed Lucy's nervousness that
+she even beguiled from her some bright and natural talk about the
+journey and the house, and Lucy was rapidly beginning to be happy,
+when the signal for dinner was given, and a general move began.
+
+At dinner Mr. Edwardes bestowed his conversation for a decent space
+of time--say, during the soup and fish--upon Mrs. Grieve. Lucy,
+once more ill at ease, tried eagerly to propitiate him by asking
+innumerable questions about the family, and the pictures, and the
+estate, it being at once evident that he had an intimate knowledge
+of all three. But as the family, the pictures, and the estate were
+always with him, so to speak, made, indeed, a burden which his
+shoulders had some difficulty in carrying, the attractions of this
+vein of talk palled on the young agent--who was himself a scion of
+good family, with his own social ambitions--before long. He decided
+that Mrs. Grieve was pure middle-class, not at all accustomed to
+dine in halls of pride, and much agitated by her surroundings. The
+type did not interest him. She seemed to be asking him to help her
+out of the mire, and as one does not go into society to be
+benevolent but to be amused, by the time the first _entree_
+was well in he had edged his chair round, and was in animated talk
+with pretty little Lady Alice Findlay, the daughter of the
+hook-nosed Lord-Lieutenant of the county, who was seated at Lady
+Driffield's right hand. Lucy noticed the immediate difference in
+tone, the easy variety of topic, compared with her own sense of
+difficulty, and her heart swelled with bitterness.
+
+Then, to her horror, she saw that, from inattention and ignorance
+of what might be expected, she had allowed the servants to
+fill every single wineglass of the four standing at her
+right--positively every one. Sherry, claret, hock, champagne--she
+was provided with them all. She cast a hurried and guilty eye round
+the table. Save for champagne, each lady's glasses stood
+immaculately empty, and when Lucy came back to her own collection
+she could bear it no longer.
+
+'Mr. Edwardes!' she said hastily, leaning over towards him.
+
+The young man turned abruptly. 'Yes,' he said, looking at her in
+some surprise.
+
+'Oh, Mr. Edwardes! can you ask some one to take these wineglasses
+away? I didn't want any, and it looks so--so--dreadful!'
+
+The agent thought that Mrs. Grieve was going to cry. As for
+himself, his eye twinkled, and he had great difficulty to restrain
+a burst of laughter. He called a footman near, and Lucy was soon
+relieved of her fourfold incubus.
+
+'Oh, but you must save the champagne!' he said, and, bending his
+chair backward, he was about to recall the man, Lucy stopped him.
+
+'Don't--don't, _please_, Mr. Edwardes!' she said, in an agony.
+
+He lifted his eyebrows good-humouredly, and desisted. Then he asked
+her if he should give her some water, and when that was done the
+episode apparently seemed to him closed, for he turned away again,
+and looked out for fresh opportunities with Lady Alice. Lucy,
+meanwhile, was left feeling herself even more unsuccessful and more
+out of place than before, and ready to sink with vexation. And how
+well David was getting on! There he was, between Mrs. Shepton and
+the beautiful lady in pink, and he and Mrs. Wellesdon were deep in
+conversation, his dark head bent gravely towards her, his face
+melting every now and then into laughter or crossed by some vivid
+light of assent and pleasure. Lucy's look travelled over the table,
+the orchids with which it was covered, the lights, the plate, then
+to the Vandykes behind the guests, and the great mirrors in
+between--came back to the table, and passed from face to face, till
+again it rested upon David. The conviction of her husband's
+handsome looks and natural adequacy to this or any world, with
+which her survey ended, brought with it a strange mixture of
+feelings--half pleasure, half bitterness.
+
+'Are you from this part of the world, may I ask?' said a voice at
+her elbow.
+
+She turned, and saw Colonel Danby, who was tired of devoting
+himself to the wife of a neighbouring Master of Hounds--a lady with
+white hair and white eyelashes, always apparently on the point of
+sleep, even at the liveliest dinner-table--and was now inclined to
+see what this little provincial might be made of.
+
+'Oh, yes! we are from Manchester,' said Lucy, straightening
+herself, and preparing to do her best. 'We live in Manchester--at
+least, of course, not _in_ Manchester. No one could do that.'
+
+It was but three years since she had ceased to do it, but new
+habits of speech grow apace when it is a matter of social prestige.
+She was terribly afraid lest anybody should now think of them as
+persons who lived over their shop.
+
+'Ah!--suppose not,' said Colonel Danby, carelessly. 'Land in
+Manchester, they tell me now, is almost as costly as it is in
+London.'
+
+Whereat Lucy went off at score, delighted to make Manchester
+important and to produce her own information. She had an aptitude
+for business gossip, and she chatted eagerly about the price that
+So-and-So had paid for their new warehouses, and the sum which
+report said the Corporation was going to spend on a fine new
+street.
+
+'And of course many people don't like it. There's always grumbling
+about the rates. But they should have public spirit, shouldn't
+they? Are you acquainted with Manchester?' she added, more timidly.
+
+All this time Colonel Danby had been listening with half an ear,
+and was much more assiduously trying to make up his mind whether
+the little _bourgeoise_ was pretty at all. She had rather a
+fine pair of eyes--he supposed she had made that dress in her own
+back parlour.
+
+'Manchester? I--oh, I have spent a night at the Queen's Hotel now
+and then,' said the Colonel, with a yawn. 'What do you do there? Do
+you amuse yourself--eh?'
+
+His smile was not pleasant. He had a florid face, with bad lines
+round the eyes and a tyrannous mouth. His physical make had been
+magnificent, but reckless living had brought on the penalties of
+gout before their time.
+
+Lucy was intimidated by the mixture of familiarity and patronage in
+the tone.
+
+'Oh, yes,' she said, hurriedly; 'we get all the best companies from
+the London theatres, and there are _very_ good concerts.'
+
+'And that kind of thing amuses you?' said the Colonel, still
+examining her with the same cool, fixed glance.
+
+'I like music very much,' stammered Lucy, and then fell silent.
+
+'Do you know all these people here?'
+
+'Oh, dear, no!' she cried, feeling the very question malevolent. 'I
+don't know any of them. My husband wishes to lead a very retired
+life,' she added, bridling a little, by way of undoing the effect
+of her admissions.
+
+'And _you_ don't wish it?'
+
+The disagreeable eyes smiled again.
+
+'Oh! I don't know,' said Lucy.
+
+Colonel Danby reflected that whatever his companion might be, she
+was not amusing.
+
+'Have you noticed the gentleman opposite?' he inquired, stifling
+another yawn.
+
+Lucy timidly looked across.
+
+'It is--it is the Dean of Bradford, isn't it?'
+
+'Yes; it's a comfort, isn't it, when one can know a man by his
+clothes! Do you see what his deanship has had for dinner?'
+
+Lucy ventured another look, and saw that the Dean had in front of
+him a plate of biscuits and a glass of water, and that the
+condition of his knives and forks showed him to have hitherto
+subsisted on this fare alone.
+
+'Is he so very--so very religious?' she said, wondering.
+
+'A-saint in gaiters? Well, I don't know. Probably the saint has
+dined at one. Do you feel any inclination to be a saint, Mrs.
+Grieve?'
+
+Lucy could neither meet nor parry the banter of his look. She only
+blushed.
+
+'I wouldn't attempt it, if I were you,' he said, laughing. 'Those
+pretty brown eyes weren't meant for it.'
+
+Lucy suddenly felt as though she had been struck, so free and
+cavalier was the tone. Her cheek took a deeper crimson, and she
+looked helplessly across at David.
+
+'Little fool!' thought the Colonel. 'But she has certainly some
+points.'
+
+At that moment Lady Driffield gave the signal, and, with a
+half-ironical bow to his companion, Colonel Danby rose, picked up
+her handkerchief for her, and drew his chair aside to let her pass.
+
+Presently Lucy was sitting in a corner of the magnificent green
+drawing-room, to which Lady Driffield had carelessly led the way.
+In her vague humiliation and unhappiness, she craved that some one
+should come and talk to her and be kind to her--even Mrs. Shepton,
+who had addressed a few pleasant remarks to her on their way from
+the dining-room. But Mrs. Shepton was absorbed by Lady Driffield,
+who sat down beside her, and took some trouble to talk. 'Then why
+not to me?' was Lucy's instinctive thought. For she realised that
+she and Mrs. Shepton were socially not far apart. Yet Lady
+Driffield had so far addressed about six words to Mrs. David
+Grieve, while she was now bending her aristocratic neck to listen
+to Mrs. Shepton, who was talking entirely at her ease, with her arm
+round the back of a neighbouring chair, and, as it seemed to Lucy,
+about politics.
+
+The rest of the ladies, with the exception of the Master of Hounds'
+wife, who sat in a chair by the fire and dozed, were all either old
+friends or relations, and they gathered in a group on the Aubusson
+rug in front of the fire, chatting merrily about their common
+kindred, the visits they had paid, or were to pay, the fate of
+their fathers and brothers in the recent election, 'the Duke's'
+terrible embarrassments, or 'Sir Alfred's' yachting party to
+Norway, of which little Lady Alice gave a sparkling account.
+
+In her chair on the outskirts of the talkers, Lucy sat painfully
+turning over the leaves of a costly collection of autographs, which
+lay on the table near her. Sometimes she tried to interest herself
+in the splendid room, with its hangings of pale flowered silk, its
+glass cases, full of historical relics, miniatures, and precious
+things, representing the long and brilliant past of the house of
+Driffield, the Sir Joshuas and Romneys, which repeated on the walls
+the grace and physical perfection of some of the living women
+below. But she had too few associations with anything she saw to
+care for it, and, indeed, her mind was too wholly given to her own
+vague, but overmastering sense of isolation and defeat. If it were
+only bedtime!
+
+Mrs. Wellesdon glanced at the solitary figure from time to time,
+but Lady Alice had her arm round 'Marcia's' waist, and kept close
+hold of her favourite cousin. At last, however, Mrs. Wellesdon drew
+the young girl with her to the side of Lucy's chair, and, sitting
+down by the stranger, they both tried to entertain her, and to show
+her some of the things in the room.
+
+Lucy brightened up at once, and thought them both the most
+beautiful and fascinating of human beings. But her good fortune was
+soon over, alas! for the gentlemen came in, and the social elements
+were once more redistributed. 'Reggie', the young diplomatist,
+freshly returned from Berlin, laid hold of his sister Marcia, and
+his cousin Lady Alice, and carried them off for a family gossip
+into a corner of the room, whence peals of young laughter were soon
+to be heard from him and Lady Alice.
+
+Mr. Edwardes and Colonel Danby passed Mrs. Grieve by, in quest of
+metal more attractive; Lord Driffield, the Dean, Canon Aylwin, and
+David stood absorbed in conversation; while Lady Driffield
+transferred her attentions to Mr. Shepton, and the husband of the
+lady by the fire walked up to her, insisting, somewhat crossly, on
+waking her. Lucy was once more left alone.
+
+'Lavinia, haven't we done our duty to this apartment?' cried Lord
+Driffield, impatiently; 'it always puts me on stilts. The library is
+ten times more comfortable. I propose an adjournment.'
+
+Lady Driffield shrugged her shoulders, and assented. So the whole
+party, Lucy timidly attaching herself to Mrs. Shepton, moved slowly
+through a long suite of beautiful rooms, till they reached the
+great cedar-fitted library, which was Lord Driffield's paradise.
+Here was every book to be desired of the scholar to make him wise,
+and every chair to make him comfortable. Lord Driffield went to one
+of the bookcases, and took a vellum-bound book, found a passage in
+it, and showed it to David Grieve. Canon Aylwin and the Dean
+pressed in to look, and they all fell back into the recess of a
+great oriel, talking earnestly.
+
+The others passed on into a conservatory beyond the library, where
+was a billard-table, and many nooks for conversation amid the
+cunning labyrinths of flowers.
+
+Lucy sank into a cane chair, close to a towering mass of arum
+lilies, and looked back into the library. Nobody in the
+conservatory had any thought for her. They were absorbed in each
+other, and a merry game of pyramids had been already organised. So
+Lucy watched her husband wistfully.
+
+What a beautiful face was that of Canon Aylwin, with whom he was
+talking! She could not take her eyes from its long, thin outlines,
+the apostolic white hair, the eager eyes and quivering mouth,
+contrasting with the patient courtesy of manner. Yet in her present
+soreness and heat, the saintly charm of the old man's figure did
+somehow but depress her the more.
+
+A little after ten it became evident that _nothing_ could keep
+the lady with the white eyelashes out of bed any longer, so the
+billiard-room party broke up, and, with a few gentlemen in
+attendance, the ladies streamed into the hall, and possessed
+themselves of bedroom candlesticks. The great house seemed to be
+alive with talk and laughter as they strolled upstairs, the girls
+making dressing-gown appointments in each other's rooms for a
+quarter of an hour later.
+
+When Lucy reached her own door she stopped awkwardly. Lady
+Driffield walked on, talking to Marcia Wellesdon. But Marcia looked
+back:
+
+'Good night, Mrs. Grieve.'
+
+She returned, and pressed Lucy's hand kindly. 'I am afraid you must
+be tired,' she said; 'you look so.'
+
+Lady Driffield also shook hands, but, with constitutional
+_gaucherie_, she did not second Mrs. Wellesdon's remark; she
+stood by silent and stiff.
+
+'Oh, no, thank you,' said Lucy, hurriedly, 'I am quite well.'
+
+When she had disappeared, the other two walked on.
+
+'What a stupid little thing!' said Lady Driffield. 'The husband may
+be interesting--Driffield says he is--but I defy anybody to get
+anything out of the wife.'
+
+It occurred to Marcia that nobody had been very anxious to make the
+attempt. But she only said aloud:
+
+'I'm sure she is very shy. What a pity she wears that kind of
+dress! She might be quite pretty in something else.'
+
+Meanwhile Lucy, after shutting the outer door of their little suite
+behind her, was overtaken as she opened that leading to her own
+room by a sudden gust of wind coming from a back staircase emerging
+on to their private passage, which she had not noticed before. The
+candle was blown out, and she entered the room in complete
+darkness. She groped for the matches, and found the little stand;
+but there were none there. She must have used the last in the
+making of her great illumination before dinner. After much
+hesitation, she at last summoned up courage to ring the bell,
+groping her way to it by the help of the light in the passage.
+
+For a long time no one came. Lucy, standing near her own door,
+seemed to hear two sounds--the angry beating of her own heart, and
+a murmur of far-off talk and jollity, conveyed to her up the
+mysterious staircase, which apparently led to some of the servants'
+quarters.
+
+Fully five minutes passed; then steps were heard approaching, and a
+housemaid appeared. Lucy timidly asked for fresh matches. The girl
+said 'Yes, ma'am,' in an off-hand way, looked at Lucy with a
+somewhat hostile eye, and vanished.
+
+The minutes passed, but no matches were forthcoming. The whirlpool
+of the lower regions, where the fun was growing uproarious, seemed
+to have engulfed the messenger. At last Lucy was fain to undress by
+the help of a glimmer of light from her door left ajar, and after
+many stumbles and fumblings at last crept, tired and wounded, into
+bed. This finale seemed to her of a piece with all the rest.
+
+As she lay there in the dark, incident after incident of her
+luckless evening coming back upon her, her heart grew hungry for
+David. Nay, her craving for him mounted to jealousy and passion.
+After all, though he did get on so much better in grand houses than
+she did, though they were all kind to him and despised her, he was
+_hers_, her very own, and no one should take him from her.
+Beautiful Mrs. Wellesdon might talk to him and make friends with
+him, but he did not belong to any of them, but to _her_, Lucy.
+She pined for the sound of his step--thought of throwing herself
+into his arms, and seeking consolation there for the pains of an
+habitual self-importance crushed beyond bearing.
+
+But when that step was actually heard outside, her mind veered
+in an instant. She had made him come; he would think she had
+disgraced him; he had probably noticed nothing, for a certain
+absent-mindedness in society had grown upon him of late years. No,
+she would hold her peace.
+
+So when David, stepping softly and shading his candle, came in, and
+called 'Lucy' under his breath to see whether she might be awake,
+Lucy pretended to be sound asleep. He waited a minute, and then
+went out to change his coat and go down to the smoking-room.
+
+Poor little Lucy! As she lay there in the dark, the tears
+dropping slowly on her embroidered pillow, the issue of all her
+mortification was a new and troubled consciousness about her
+husband. Why this difference between them? How was it that he
+commanded from all who knew him either a warm sympathy or an
+involuntary respect, while she--
+
+She had gathered from some scraps of the talk round him which had
+reached her that it was just those sides of his life--those
+quixotic ideal sides--which were an offence and annoyance to her
+that touched other people's imagination, opened their hearts. And
+she had worried and teased him all these years! Not since the
+beginning. For, looking back, she could well remember the days when
+it was still an intoxication that he should have married her, when
+she was at once in awe of him and foolishly, proudly, happy. But
+there had come a year when David's profits from his business had
+amounted to over 2, 000 pounds, and when, thanks to a large loan
+pressed upon him by his Unitarian landlord, Mr. Doyle, he had taken
+the new premises in Prince's Street. And from that moment Lucy's
+horizon had changed, her ambitions had hardened and narrowed; she
+had begun to be impatient with her husband, first, that he could
+not make her rich faster, then, after their Tantalus gleam of
+wealth, that he would put mysterious and provoking obstacles in
+the way of their getting rich at all.
+
+She meant to keep awake--to wait for him. But she began to think of
+Sandy. _He_ would be glad to see his 'mummy' again! In fancy
+she pressed his cheek against her own burning one. He and David
+were still alive--still hers--it was all right somehow. Consolation
+began to steal upon her, and in ten minutes she was asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+When David came in later, he took advantage of Lucy's sleep to sit
+up awhile in his own room. He was excited, and any strong
+impression, in the practical loneliness of his deepest life, always
+now produced the impulse to write.
+
+'_Midnight_.--Lucy is asleep. I hope she has been happy and
+they have been kind to her. I saw Mrs. Wellesdon talking to her
+after dinner. She must have liked that. But _at_ dinner she
+seemed to be sitting silent a good deal.
+
+'What a strange spectacle is this country-house life to anyone
+bringing to it a fresh and unaccustomed eye! "After all," said Mrs.
+Wellesdon, "you must admit that the best of anything is worth
+keeping. And in these country-houses, with all their drawbacks, you
+do from time to time get the best of social intercourse, a phase of
+social life as gay, complex, and highly finished as it can possibly
+be made."
+
+'Certainly this applies to me to-night. When have I enjoyed any
+social pleasure so much as my talk with her at dinner? When have I
+been conscious of such stimulus, such exhilaration, as the
+evening's discussion produced in me? In the one case, Mrs.
+Wellesdon taught me what general conversation might be how nimble,
+delicate, and pleasure-giving; in the other, there was the joy of
+the intellectual wrestle, mingled with a glad respect for one's
+opponents. Perhaps nowhere, except on some such ground and in
+some such circumstances as these, could a debate so earnest
+have taken quite so wholesome a tone, so wide a range. We were
+equals--debaters, not controversialists--friends, not rivals--in
+the quest for truth.
+
+'Yet what drawbacks! This army of servants--which might be an army
+of slaves without a single manly right, so mute, impassive, and
+highly trained it is--the breeding of a tyrannous temper in the
+men, of a certain contempt for facts and actuality even in the best
+of the women. Mrs. Wellesdon poured out her social aspirations to
+me. How naive and fanciful they were! They do her credit, but they
+will hardly do anyone else much good. And it is evident that they
+mark her out in her own circle, that they have brought her easily
+admiration and respect, so that she has never been led to test
+them, as any one, with the same social interest, living closer to
+the average realities and griefs of life, must have been led to
+test them.
+
+'The culture, too, of these aristocratic women, when they
+are cultured, is so curious. Quite unconsciously and innocently
+it takes itself for much more than it is, merely by contrast with
+the _milieu_--the _milieu_ of material luxury and complication--in
+which it moves.
+
+'But I am ungrateful. What a social power in the best sense such a
+woman might become--a woman so sensitively endowed, so nobly
+planned!'
+
+David dropped his pen awhile. In the silence of the great house, a
+silence broken only by the breathings of a rainy autumn wind
+through the trees outside, his thought took that picture-making
+intensity which was its peculiar gift. Images of what had been
+in his own life, and what might have been--the dream of passion
+which had so deeply marked and modified his manhood--Elise, seen
+in the clearer light of his richer experience--his married
+years--the place of the woman in the common life--on these his mind
+brooded, one by one, till gradually the solemn consciousness of
+opportunities for ever missed, of failure, of limitation, evoked
+another, as solemn, but sweeter and more touching, of human lives
+irrevocably dependent on his, of the pathetic unalterable claim of
+marriage, the poverty and hopelessness of all self-seeking, the
+essential wealth, rich and making rich, of all self-spending. As he
+thought of his wife and son a deep tenderness flooded the man's
+whole nature. With a long sigh, it was as though he took them both
+in his arms, adjusting his strength patiently and gladly to the
+familiar weight.
+
+Then, by a natural reaction, feeling, to escape itself, passed into
+speculative reminiscence and meditation of a wholly different kind.
+
+'Our discussion to-night arose from an attack--if anyone so gentle
+can be said to attack--made upon me by Canon Aylwin, on the subject
+of those "Tracts on the New Testament"--tracts of mine, of which we
+have published three, while I have two or three more half done in
+my writing-table drawer. He said, with a certain nervous decision,
+that he did not wish to discuss the main question, but he would
+like to ask me, Could anyone be so sure of supposed critical and
+historical fact as to be clear that he was right in proclaiming it,
+when the proclamation of it meant the inevitable disturbance in his
+fellow-men of conceptions whereon their moral life depended? It was
+certain that he could destroy; it was most uncertain, even to
+himself, whether he could do anything else, with the best
+intentions; and, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, ought not
+the certainty of doing a moral mischief to outweigh, with any just
+and kindly mind, the much feebler and less solid certainty he may
+imagine himself to have attained with regard to certain matters of
+history and criticism?
+
+'It was the old question of the rights of "heresy," the function of
+the individual in the long history of thought. We fell into sides:
+Lord Driffield and I against the Dean and Canon Aylwin. The Dean
+did not, indeed, contribute much. He sat with his square powerful
+head bent forward, throwing in a shrewd comment here and there,
+mainly on the logical course of the argument. But when we came to
+the main question, as we inevitably did, he withdrew altogether,
+though he listened.
+
+'"No," he said, "no. I am not competent. It has not been my line
+in life. I have found more than enough to tax my strength in the
+practical administration of the goods of Christ. All such questions
+I leave, and must leave, to experts, such experts as"--and he
+mentioned the names of some of the leading scholars of the
+English Church--"or as my friend here", and he laid his hand
+affectionately on Canon Aylwin's knee.
+
+'Strange! He leaves to experts such questions as those of the
+independence, authenticity, and trustworthiness of the Gospel
+records; of the culture and idiosyncrasies of the first two
+centuries as tending to throw light on those records; of the
+earliest growth of dogma, as, thanks mainly to German labour, it
+may now be exhibited within the New Testament itself. In a Church
+of private judgment, he takes all this at second hand, after having
+vowed at his ordination "to be diligent in such studies as help to
+the knowledge of the Scriptures"!
+
+'Yet a better, a more God-fearing, a more sincere, and, within
+certain lines, a more acute man than Dean Manley it would certainly
+be difficult to find at the present time within the English Church.
+It is an illustration of the dualism in which so many minds tend to
+live, divided between two worlds, two standards, two wholly
+different modes of thought--the one applied to religion even in its
+intellectual aspect, the other applied to all the rest of
+existence. Yet--is truth divided?
+
+'To return to Canon Aylwin. I could only meet his reproach, which
+he had a special right to make, for he has taken the kindliest
+interest in some of the earlier series of our "Workmen's Tracts,"
+by going back to some extent to first principles. I endeavoured to
+argue the matter on ground more or less common to us both. If both
+knowledge and morality have only become possible for man by the
+perpetual action of a Divine spirit on his since the dawn of
+conscious life; if this action has taken effect in human history,
+as, broadly speaking, the Canon would admit, through a free and
+constant struggle of opposites, whether in the realm of interest or
+the realm of opinion; and if this struggle, perpetually reconciled,
+perpetually renewed, is the divinely ordered condition, nay, if you
+will, the sacred task of human life,--how can the Christian, who
+clings, above all men, to the victory of the Divine in the human,
+who, moreover, in the course of his history has affronted and
+resisted all possible "authorities" but that of conscience--how
+can he lawfully resent the fullest and largest freedom of speech,
+employed disinterestedly and in good faith, on the part of his
+brother man? The truth must win; and it is only through the free
+life of the spirit that she has hitherto prevailed. So much, at
+least, the English Churchman must hold.
+
+It comes to this: must there be no movement of thought because the
+individual who lives by custom and convention may at least
+temporarily suffer? Yet the risks of the individual throughout
+nature--so far we were agreed--are the correlative of his freedom
+and responsibility.
+
+'"Ah, well," said the dear old man at last, with a change of
+expression which went to my heart, so wistful and spiritual it was,
+"perhaps I have been faithless; perhaps the Christian minister
+would do better to trust the Lord with His own. But before we leave
+the subject, let me say, once for all, that I have read all your
+tracts, and weighed most carefully all that they contain. The
+matter of them bears on what for me has been the study of many
+years, and all I can say is that I regard your methods of reasoning
+as unsound, and your conclusions as wholly false. I have been a
+literary man from my youth as well as a theologian, and I
+completely dissent from your literary judgments. I believe that if
+you had not been already possessed by a hostile philosophy--which
+will allow no space for miracle and revelation--you would not have
+arrived at them. I am old and you are young. Let me bear my
+testimony while there is time. I have taken a great interest in you
+and your work."
+
+'He spoke with the most exquisite courtesy and simplicity, his look
+was dignified and heavenly. I felt like kneeling to ask his
+blessing, even though he could only give it in the shape of a
+prayer for my enlightenment.
+
+'But now, alone with conscience, alone with God, how does the
+matter stand? The challenge of such a life and conviction as Canon
+Aylwin's is a searching one. It bids one look deep into one's self,
+it calls one to truth and soberness. What I seem to see is that he
+and I both approach Christianity with a prepossession, with, as he
+says, "a philosophy." His is a prepossession in favour of a system
+of interference from without, by Divine or maleficent powers, for
+their own ends, with the ordinary sequences of nature--which once
+covered, one may say, the whole field of human thought and shaped
+the whole horizon of humanity. From the beginning of history this
+prepossession--which may be regarded in all its phases as an
+expression of man's natural impatience to form a working hypothesis
+of things--has struggled with the "impulse to know." And slowly,
+irrevocably, from age to age--the impulse to know has beaten back
+the impulse to imagine, has confined the prepossession of faith
+within narrower and narrower limits, till at last it is even
+preparing to deny it the guidance of religion, which it has so long
+claimed. For the impulse of science, justified by the long wrestle
+of centuries, is becoming itself religious,--and there is a new awe
+rising on the brow of Knowledge.
+
+'_My_ prepossession--but let the personal pronoun be merely
+understood as attaching me to that band of thinkers, "of all
+countries, nations, and languages," whose pupil and creature I
+am--is simply that of science, of the organised knowledge of the
+race. It is drawn from the whole of experience, it governs without
+dispute every department of thought, and without it, in fact,
+neither Canon Aylwin nor I could think at all.
+
+'Moreover, I humbly believe that I desire the same spiritual goods
+as he: holiness, the knowledge of God, the hope of immortality. But
+while for him these things are bound up with the maintenance of the
+older prepossession, for me there is no such connection at all.
+
+'And again, I seem to see that when this intellect of his, so keen,
+so richly stored, approaches the special ground of Christian
+thought, it changes in quality. It becomes wholly subordinate to
+the affections, to the influences of education and habitual
+surroundings. Talk to him of Dante, of the influence of the
+barbarian invasions on the culture and development of Europe, of
+the Oxford movement, you will find in him an historical sense, a
+delicate accuracy of perception, a luminous variety of statement,
+which carry you with him into the very heart of the truth. But
+discuss with him the critical habits and capacity of those earliest
+Christian writers, on whose testimony so much of the Christian
+canon depends--ask him to separate the strata of material in the
+New Testament, according to their relative historical and ethical
+value, under the laws which he would himself apply to any other
+literature in the world--invite him to exclude this as legendary
+and that as accretion, to distinguish between the original kernel
+and that which the fancy or the theology of the earliest hearers
+inevitably added--and you will feel that a complete change has come
+over the mind. However subtle and precise his arguments may
+outwardly look, they are at bottom the arguments of affection, of
+the special pleader. He has fenced off the first century from the
+rest of knowledge; has invented for all its products alike special
+_criteria_ and a special perspective. He cannot handle the New
+Testament in the spirit of science, for he approaches it on his
+knees. The imaginative habit of a lifetime has decided for him; and
+you ask of him what is impossible.
+
+'"An end must come to scepticism somewhere!" he once said in the
+course of our talk. "Faith must take her leap--you know as well as
+I!--if there is to be faith at all."
+
+'Yes, but _where_--at what point? Is the clergyman who talks
+with sincere distress about infidel views of Scripture and preaches
+against them, while at the same time he could not possibly give an
+intelligible account of the problem of the Synoptic Gospels as it
+now presents itself to the best knowledge, or an outline of the
+case pressed by science for more than half a century with
+increasing force and success against the historical character of
+St. John's Gospel--is he justified in making his ignorance the
+leaping-point?
+
+'Yet the upshot of all our talk is that I am restless and
+oppressed.
+
+'... I sit and think of these nine years since Berkeley and sorrow
+first laid hold of me. Berkeley rooted in me the conception of mind
+as the independent antecedent of all experience, and none of the
+scientific materialism, which so troubles Ancrum that he will
+ultimately take refuge from it in Catholicism, affects me. But the
+ethical inadequacy of Berkeley became very soon plain to me. I
+remember I was going one day through one of the worst slums of
+Ancoats, when a passage in his examination of the origin of evil
+occurred to me:
+
+'"But we should further consider that the very blemishes and
+defects of nature are not without their use, in that _they make
+an agreeable sort of variety_, and augment the beauty of the
+rest of creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the
+brighter and more enlightened parts."
+
+'I had just done my best to save a little timit scarecrow of a
+child, aged about six, from the blows of its brutal father, who had
+already given it a black eye--my heart blazed within me,--and from
+that moment Berkeley had no spell for me.
+
+'Then came that moment when, after my marriage, haunted as I was by
+the perpetual oppression of Manchester's pain and poverty, the
+Christian mythology, the Christian theory with all its varied and
+beautiful flowerings in human life, had for a time an attraction
+for me so strong that Dora naturally hoped everything, and I felt
+myself becoming day by day more of an orthodox Christian. What
+checked the tendency I can hardly now remember in detail. It was a
+converging influence of books and life--no doubt largely helped,
+with regard to the details of Christian belief, by the pressure of
+the German historical movement, as I became more and more fully
+acquainted with it.
+
+'At any rate, St. Damian's gradually came to mean nothing to me,
+though I kept, and keep still, a close working friendship with most
+of the people there. But I am thankful for that Christian phase. It
+enabled me to realise as nothing else could the strength of the
+Christian case.
+
+'And since then it has been a long and weary journey through many
+paths of knowledge and philosophy, till of late years the new
+English phase of Kantian and Hegelian thought, which has been
+spreading in our universities, and which is the outlet of men who
+can neither hand themselves over to authority, like Newman, nor to
+a mere patient nescience in the sphere of metaphysics, like Herbert
+Spencer, has come to me with an ever-increasing power of healing
+and edification.
+
+'That the spiritual principle in nature and man exists and governs;
+that mind cannot be explained out of anything but itself; that the
+human consciousness derives from a universal consciousness, and is
+thereby capable both of knowledge and of goodness; that the
+phenomena and history of conscience are the highest revelation of
+God; that we are called to co-operation in a divine work, and in
+spite of pain and sin may find ground for an infinite trust,
+covering the riddle of the individual lot, in the history and
+character of that work in man, so far as it has gone--these things
+are deeper and deeper realities to me. They govern my life; they
+give me peace; they breathe me hope.
+
+'But the last glow, the certainties, the _vision_, of faith!
+Ah! me, I believe that He is there, yet my heart gropes in
+darkness. All that is personality, holiness, compassion in us, must
+be in Him intensified beyond all thought. Yet I have no familiarity
+of prayer. I cannot use the religious language which should be mine
+without a sense of unreality. My heart is athirst.
+
+'And can religion possibly _depend_ upon a long process of
+thought? How few can think their way to Him--perhaps none, indeed,
+by the logical intellect alone. He reveals himself to the simple.
+_Speak to me, to me also, O my Father!_'
+
+Sunday morning broke fresh and golden after a wet night. Lucy lay
+still in the early dawn, thinking of the day that had to be faced,
+feeling more cheerful, however, with the refreshment of sleep, and
+inclined to hope that she might have got over the worst, and that
+better things might be in store for her.
+
+So that when David said to her, 'You poor little person, did they
+eat you up last night--Lady Driffield and her set?' she only
+answered evasively that Mrs. Wellesdon had been nice, but that Lady
+Driffield had very bad manners, and she was sure everybody thought
+so.
+
+To which David heartily assented. Then Lucy put her question:
+
+'Did you think, when you looked at me last night at dinner, that
+I--that I looked nice?' she said, flushing, yet driven on by an
+inward smart.
+
+'Of course I did!' David declared. 'Perhaps you should hold yourself
+up a little more. The women here are so astonishingly straight and
+tall, like young poplars.'
+
+'Mrs. Wellesdon especially,' Lucy reflected, with a pang.
+
+'But you thought I--had done my hair nicely?' she said desperately.
+
+'Very! And it was the prettiest hair there!' he said, smoothing
+back the golden brown curls from her temple.
+
+His compliment so delighted her that she dressed and prepared to
+descend to breakfast with a light heart. She was not often now so
+happily susceptible to a word of praise from him; she was more
+exacting than she had once been, but since her acquaintance with
+Lady Driffield she had been brought low!
+
+And her evil fortune returned upon her, alas, at breakfast, and
+throughout the day. Breakfast, indeed, seemed to her a more
+formidable meal than any. For people straggled in, and the ultimate
+arrangement of the table seemed entirely to depend upon the
+personal attractiveness of individuals, upon whether they annexed
+or repelled new-comers. Lucy found herself at one time alone and
+shivering in the close neighbourhood of Lady Driffield, who was
+intrenched behind the tea-urn, and after giving her guest a finger,
+had, Lucy believed, spoken once to her, expressing a desire for
+scones. The meal itself, with its elaborate cakes and meats and
+fruits, intimidated Lucy even more than the dinner had done. The
+breach between it and any small housekeeping was more complete. She
+felt that she was eating like a schoolgirl; she devoured her toast
+dry, out of sheer inability to ask for butter; and, sitting for the
+most part isolated in the unpopular--that is to say, the Lady
+Driffield--quarter of the table, went generally half-starved.
+
+As for David, he, with Lord Driffield, Mrs. Wellesdon, Lady Alice,
+Reggie, and Mrs. Shepton for company at the other end, had on the
+whole an excellent time. There was, however, one uncomfortable
+moment of friction between him and Colonel Danby, who had strolled
+in last of all, with the vicious look of a man who has not had the
+good night to which he considered himself entitled, and must
+somehow wreak it on the world.
+
+Just before he entered, Lady Driffield, looking round to see that
+the servants had departed, had languidly started the question:
+'Does one talk to one's maid? Do you, Marcia, talk to your maid?
+How can anyone ever find anything to say to one's maid?'
+
+The topic proved unexpectedly interesting. Both Marcia Wellesdon
+and Lady Alice declared that their maids were their bosom friends.
+Lady Driffield shrugged her shoulders, then looked at Mrs. Grieve,
+who had sat silent, opened her mouth to speak, recollected herself,
+and said nothing. At that moment Colonel Danby entered.
+
+'I say, Danby!' called the young attache, Marcia's brother, 'do you
+talk to your valet?'
+
+'Talk to my valet!' said the Colonel, putting up his eyeglass to
+look at the dishes on the side table--he spoke with suavity, but
+there was an ominous pucker in the brow--'what should I do that
+for? I don't pay the fellow for his conversation, I presume, but to
+button my boots, and precious badly he does it too. I don't even
+know what his elegant surname is. "Thomas," or "James," or "William"
+is enough peg for me to hang my orders on. I generally christen
+them fresh when they come to me.'
+
+Little Lady Alice looked indignant. Lucy caught her husband's face,
+and saw it suddenly pale, as it easily did under a quick emotion.
+He was thinking of the valet he had seen at the station standing by
+the Danbys' luggage--a dark, anxious-looking man, whose likeness to
+one of the compositors in his own office--a young fellow for whom
+he had a particular friendship--had attracted his notice.
+
+'Why do you suppose he puts up with you--your servant?' he said,
+bending across to Colonel Danby. He smiled a little, but his eyes
+betrayed him.
+
+'Puts up with me!' Colonel Danby lifted his brows, regarding David
+with an indescribable air of insolent surprise. 'Because I make it
+worth his while in pounds, shillings, and pence; that's all.'
+
+And he put down his pheasant _salmi_ with a clatter, while his
+wife handed him bread and other propitiations.
+
+'Probably because he has a mother or sister,' said David, slowly.'
+We trust a good deal to the patience of our "masters."'
+
+The Colonel stopped his wife's attentions with an angry hand. But
+just as he was about to launch a reply more congruous with his gout
+and his contempt for 'Driffield's low-life friends' than with the
+amenities of ordinary society, and while Lady Venetia was slowly
+and severely studying David through her eyeglass, Lord Driffield
+threw himself into the breach with a nervous story of some
+favourite 'man' of his own, and the storm blew over.
+
+Lady Driffield, indeed, who herself disliked Colonel Danby, as one
+overbearing person dislikes another, and only invited him because
+Lady Venetia was her cousin and an old friend, was rather pleased
+with David's outbreak. After breakfast she graciously asked him if
+she should show him the picture gallery.
+
+But David was still seething with wrath, and looked at Vandeveldes
+and De Hoochs and Rembrandts with a distracted eye. Once, indeed,
+in a little alcove of the gallery hung with English portraits, he
+woke to a start of interest.
+
+'Imagine that that should be Gray!' he said, pointing to a
+picture--well known to him through engraving--of a little man in a
+bob wig, with a turned-up nose and a button chin, and a general air
+of eager servility. '_Gray_,--one of our greatest poets!' He
+stood wondering, feeling it impossible to fit the dignity of Gray's
+verse to the insignificance of Gray's outer man.
+
+'Oh, Gray--a great poet, you think? I don't agree with you. I have
+always thought the "Night Thoughts" very dull,' said Lady
+Driffield, sweeping along to the next picture, in a sublime
+unconsciousness. David smiled--a flash of mirth that cleared his
+whole look--and was himself again. Moreover he was soon taken
+possession of by Lord Driffield, and the two disappeared for a
+happy morning spent between the library and the woods.
+
+Meanwhile Lucy went to church, and had the bliss of feeling that
+she made one too many in the omnibus, and that, squeeze herself as
+small as she might, she was still crushing Miss Danby's new
+dress--a fact of which both mother and daughter were clearly aware.
+Looking back upon it, Lucy could not remember that for her there
+had been any conversation going or coming; but it is quite possible
+that her memory of Benet's Park was even more pronounced than in
+reality.
+
+David and Lord Driffield came in when lunch was half over, and
+afterwards there was a general strolling into the garden.
+
+'Are you all right?' said David to his wife, taking her arm
+affectionately.
+
+'Oh yes, thank you,' she said hurriedly, perceiving that Reggio
+Calvert was coming up to her. 'I'm all right. Don't take my arm,
+David. It looks so odd.'
+
+And she turned delightedly to talk to the young diplomatist, who
+had the kindliness and charm of his race, and devoted himself to
+her very prettily for a while, though they had great difficulty in
+finding topics, and he was coming finally to the end of his
+resources when Lady Driffield announced that 'the carriage would be
+round in half an hour.'
+
+'Goodness gracious! then I must write some letters first,' he said,
+with the importance of the budding ambassador, and ran into the
+house.
+
+The others seemed to melt away--David and Canon Aylwin strolling
+off together--and soon Lucy found herself alone. She sat down in a
+seat round which curved a yew hedge, and whence there was a
+somewhat wide view over a bare, hilly country, with suggestions
+everywhere of factory life in the hollows, till on the southwest it
+rose and melted into the Derbyshire moors. Autumn--late autumn--was
+on all the reddening woods and in the cool sunshine; but there was
+a bright border of sunflowers and dahlias near, which no frost had
+yet touched, and the gaiety both of the flowers and of the clear
+blue distance forbade as yet any thought of winter.
+
+Lucy's absent and discontented eye saw neither flowers nor
+distance; but it was perforce arrested before long by the figure of
+Mrs. Shepton, who came round the corner of the yew hedge.
+
+'Have they gone?' said that lady.
+
+'Who?' said Lucy, startled. 'I heard a carriage drive off just now,
+I think.'
+
+'Ah! then they _are_ gone. Lady Driffield has carried off all
+her friends--except Mrs. Wellesdon, who, I believe, is lying down
+with a headache--to tea at Sir Wilfrid Herbart's. You see the house
+there'--and she pointed to a dim, white patch among woods, about
+five miles off. 'It is not very civil of a hostess, perhaps, to
+leave her guests in this way. But Lady Driffield is Lady Driffield.'
+
+Mrs. Shepton laughed, and threw back the flapping green gauze veil
+with which she generally shrouded a freckled and serviceable
+complexion, in no particular danger, one would have thought, of
+spoiling.
+
+Lucy instinctively looked round to see how near they were to the
+house, and whether there were any windows open.
+
+'It must be very difficult, I should think, to be--to be friends
+with Lady Driffield.'
+
+She looked up at Mrs. Shepton with the childish air of one both
+hungry for gossip and conscious of the naughtiness of it.
+
+Mrs. Shepton laughed again. She had never seen anyone behave worse,
+she reflected, than Lady Driffield to this little Manchester
+person, who might be uninteresting, but was quite inoffensive.
+
+'Friends! I should think so. An armed neutrality is all that pays
+with Lady Driffield. I have been here many times, and I can now
+keep her in order perfectly. You see, Lady Driffield has a brother
+whom she happens to be fond of--everybody has some soft place--and
+this brother is a Liberal member down in our West Riding part of
+the world. And my husband is the editor of a paper that possesses a
+great deal of political influence in the brother's constituency. We
+have backed him up through this election. He is not a bad fellow at
+all, though about as much of a Liberal at heart as this hedge,' and
+Mrs. Shepton struck it lightly with the parasol she carried. 'My
+husband thinks we got him in--by the skin of his teeth. So Lady
+Driffield asks us periodically, and behaves herself, more or less.
+My husband likes Lord Driffield. So do I; and an occasional descent
+upon country houses amuses me. It especially entertains me to make
+Lady Driffield talk politics.'
+
+'She must be very Conservative,' said Lucy, heartily. Conservatism
+stood in her mind for the selfish exclusiveness of big people. Her
+father had always been a bitter Radical.
+
+'Oh dear no--not at all! Lady Driffield believes herself an
+advanced Liberal; that is the comedy of it. _Liberals!_' cried
+Mrs. Shepton, with a sudden bitterness, which transformed the
+broad, plain, sleepy face. 'I should like to set her to work for a
+year in one of those mills down there. She might have some politics
+worth having by the end of it.'
+
+Lucy looked at her in amazement. Why, the mill people were very
+happy--most of them.
+
+'Ah well!' said Mrs. Shepton, recovering herself, 'what we have to
+do--we intelligent middle class--for the next generation or two, is
+to _drive_ these aristocrats. Then it will be seen what is to
+be done with them finally. Well, Mrs. Grieve, we must amuse
+ourselves. _Au revoir!_ My husband has some writing to do, and
+I must go and help him.'
+
+She waved her hand and disappeared, sweeping her green and yellow
+skirts behind her with an air as though Benet's Park were already a
+seminary for the correction of the great.
+
+Lucy sat on pondering till she felt dull and cold, and decided to
+go in. On finding her way back she passed round a side of the house
+which she had not yet seen. It was the oldest part of the building,
+and the windows, which were mullioned and narrow, and at some
+height from the ground, looked out upon a small bowling-green,
+closely walled in from the rest of the gardens and the park by a
+thick screen of trees. She lingered along the path looking at a few
+late roses which were still blooming in this sheltered spot against
+the wall of the house, when she was startled by the sound of her
+own name, and, looking up, she saw that there was an open window
+above her. The temptation was too great. She held her breath and
+listened.
+
+'Lord Driffield says he married her when he was quite young, that
+accounts for it.' Was not the voice Lady Alice's? 'But it is a pity
+that she is not more equal to him. I never saw a more striking
+face, did you? Yet Lord Driffield says he is not as good-looking as
+he promised to be as a boy. I wish we had been there last night
+after dinner, Marcia! They say he gave Colonel Danby such a
+dressing about some workmen's question. Colonel Danby was laying
+down the law about strikes in his usual way--he _is_ an odious
+creature!--and wishing that the Government would just send an
+infantry regiment into the middle of the Yorkshire miners that are
+on strike now, when Mr. Grieve fired up. And everybody backed him.
+Reggie told me it was splendid; he never saw a better shindy. It is
+a pity about her. Everybody says he might have a great career if he
+pleased. And she can't be any companion to him.--Now, Marcia, you
+know your head _is_ better, so don't say it isn't! Why, I have
+used a whole bottle of eau de Cologne on you.'
+
+So chattered pretty, kindly Lady Alice, sitting with her back to
+the window beside Marcia Wellesdon. Lucy stood still a moment,
+could not hear what Mrs. Wellesdon said languidly in answer, then
+crept on, her lip quivering.
+
+From then till long after the dark had fallen she was quite alone.
+David, coming back from a long walk, and tea at the agent's house
+on the further edge of the estate, found his wife lying on her bed,
+and the stars beginning to look in upon her through the unshuttered
+windows.
+
+'Why, Lucy! aren't you well, dear?' he said, hurrying up to her.
+
+'Oh yes, very well, thank you' she said, in a constrained voice.
+'My head aches rather.'
+
+'Who has been looking after you?' he said, instantly reproaching
+himself for the enjoyment of his own afternoon.
+
+'I have been here since three o'clock.'
+
+'And nobody gave you any tea?' he asked, flushing.
+
+'No, I went down, but there was nobody in the drawing-room. I
+suppose the footman thought nobody was in.'
+
+'Where was Lady Driffield?'
+
+'Oh! she and most of them went out to tea--to a house a good way
+off.'
+
+Lucy's tone was dreariness itself. David sat still, his breath
+coming quickly. Then suddenly Lucy turned round and drew him down
+to her passionately.
+
+'When can we get home? Is there an early train?'
+
+Then David understood. He took her in his arms, and she broke down
+and cried, sobbing out a catalogue of griefs that was only half
+coherent. But he saw at once that she had been neglected and
+slighted, nay more, that she had been somehow wounded to the quick.
+His clasped hand trembled on his knee. This was hospitality! He had
+gauged Lady Driffield well.
+
+'An early train?' he said, with frowning decision. 'Yes, of course.
+There is to be an eight o'clock breakfast for those who want to get
+off. We shall be home by a little after nine. Cheer up, darling. I
+will look after you to-night--and think of Sandy to-morrow!'
+
+He laid his cheek tenderly against hers, full of a passion of
+resentment and pity. As for her, the feeling with which she clung
+to him was more like the feeling she had first shown him on the
+Wakely moors, than anything she had known since.
+
+'Sandy! why don't you say good morning, sir?' said David next
+morning, standing on the threshold of his own study, with Lucy just
+behind. His face was beaming with the pleasures of home.
+
+Sandy, who was lying curled up in David's arm-chair, looked
+sleepily at his parents. His thumb was tightly wedged in his mouth,
+and with the other he held pressed against him a hideous rag doll,
+which had been presented to him in his cradle.
+
+'Jane's asleep,' he said, just removing his thumb for the purpose,
+and then putting it back again.
+
+'Heartless villain!' said David, taking possession of both him and
+Jane. 'And do you mean to say you aren't glad to see Daddy and
+Mammy?'
+
+'Zes--but Sandy's _so_ fond of childwen,' said Sandy, cuddling
+Jane up complacently, and subsiding into his father's arms.
+
+Husband and wife laughed into each other's eyes. Then Lucy knelt
+down to tie the child's shoe, and David, first kissing the boy,
+bent forward and laid another kiss on the mother's hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+'An exciting post,' said David to Lucy one morning as she entered
+the dining-room for breakfast. 'Louie proposes to bring her little
+girl over to see us, and Ancrum will be home to-night!'
+
+'Louie!' repeated Mrs. Grieve, standing still in her amazement.
+'What do you mean?'
+
+It was certainly unexpected. David had not heard from Louie for
+more than six months; his remittances to her, however, were at all
+times so casually acknowledged that he had taken no particular
+notice; and he and she had not met for two years and more--since
+that visit to Paris, in fact, recorded in his journal.
+
+'It is quite true,' said David; 'it seems to be one of her sudden
+schemes. I don't see any particular reason for it. She says she
+must "put matters before" me, and that Cecile wants a change. I
+don't see that a change to Manchester in February is likely to help
+the poor child much. No, it must mean more money. We must make up
+our minds to that,' said David with a little sad smile, looking at
+his wife.
+
+'David! I don't see that you're called to do it at all!' cried
+Lucy. 'Why, you've done much more for her than anybody else would
+have done! What they do with the money I can't think--dreadful
+people!'
+
+She began to pour out the tea with vehemence and an angry lip. She
+had always in her mind that vision of Louie, as she had seen her
+for the first and only time in her life, marching up Market Place
+in the 'loud' hat and the black and scarlet dress, stared at and
+staring. Nor had she ever lost her earliest impression of strong
+dislike which had come upon her immediately afterwards, when Louie
+and Reuben had mounted to Dora's sitting-room, and she, Lucy, had
+angrily told the quick-fingered, bold-eyed girl who claimed to be
+David Grieve's sister not to touch Dora's work. Nay, every year
+since had but intensified it, especially since their income had
+ceased to expand rapidly, and the drain of the Montjoies' allowance
+had been more plainly felt. She might have begun to feel a little
+ashamed of herself that she was able to give her husband so little
+sympathy in his determination to share his gains with his
+co-workers. She was quite clear that she was right in resenting the
+wasting of his money on such worthless people as the Montjoies. It
+was disgusting that they should sponge upon them so--and with
+hardly a 'thank you' all the time. Oh dear, no!--Louie took
+everything as her right, and had once abused David through four
+pages because his cheque had been two days late.
+
+David received his wife's remarks in a meditative silence. He
+devoted himself a while to Sandy, who was eating porridge at his
+right hand, and tended with great regularity to bestow on his
+pinafore what was meant for his mouth. At last he said, pushing the
+letter over to Lucy:
+
+'You had better read it, Lucy. She talks of coming next week.'
+
+Lucy read it with mounting wrath. It was the outcome of a fit of
+characteristic violence. Louie declared that she could stand her
+life no longer; that she was coming over to put things before
+David; and if he couldn't help her, she and her child would just go
+out and beg. She understood from an old Manchester acquaintance
+whom she had met in the Rue de Rivoli about Christmas-time that
+David was doing very well with his business. She wished him joy of
+it. If he was prosperous, it was more than she was. Nobody ever
+seemed to trouble their heads about her.
+
+'Well, I never!' said Lucy, positively choked. 'Why, it's not much
+more than a month since you sent her that last cheque. And now I
+know you'll be saying you can't afford yourself a new great-coat.
+It's disgraceful! They'll suck you dry, those kind of people, if
+you let them.'
+
+She had taken no pains so far to curb her language for the sake of
+her husband's feelings. But as she gave vent to the last acid
+phrase she felt a sudden compunction. For David was looking
+straight before him into vacancy, with a painful intensity in the
+eyes, and a curious droop and contraction of the mouth. Why did he
+so often worry himself about Louie? _He_ had done all he
+could, anyway.
+
+She got up and went over to him with his tea. He woke up from his
+absorption and thanked her.
+
+'Is it right?'
+
+'Just right!' he said, tasting it. 'All the same, Lucy, it would be
+really nice of you to be kind to her and poor little Cecile. It
+won't be easy for either of us having Louie here.'
+
+He began to cut up his bread with sudden haste, then, pausing
+again, he went on in a low voice. 'But if one leaves a task like
+that undone it makes a sore spot, a fester in the mind.'
+
+She went back to the place in silence.
+
+'What day is it to be?' she said presently. Certainly they both
+looked dejected.
+
+'The 16th, isn't it? I wonder who the Manchester acquaintance was.
+He must have given a rose-coloured account. We aren't so rich as
+all that, are we, wife?'
+
+He glanced at her with a charming half-apprehensive smile, which
+made his face young again. Lucy looked ready to cry.
+
+'I know you'll get out of buying that coat,' she said with energy,
+as though referring to an already familiar topic of discussion
+between them.
+
+'No, I won't,' said David cheerfully. 'I'll buy it before Louie
+comes, if that will please you. Oh, we shall do, dear! I've had a
+real good turn at the shop this last month. Things will look better
+this quarter's end, you'll see.'
+
+'Why, I thought you'd been so busy in the printing office,' she
+said, a good deal cheered, however, by his remark.
+
+'So we have. But John's a brick, and doesn't care how much he does.
+And the number of men who take a personal interest in the house,
+who do their utmost to forward work, and to prevent waste and
+scamping, is growing fast. When once we get the apprentices' school
+into full working order, we shall see.'
+
+David gave himself a great stretch; and then, thrusting his hands
+deep into his pockets, stood by the fire enjoying it and his dreams
+together.
+
+'Has it begun?' said Lucy. Her tone was not particularly cordial;
+but anyone who knew them well would perhaps have reflected that six
+months before he would have neither made his remark, nor she have
+asked her question.
+
+'Yes--what?' he said with a start. 'Oh, the school! It has begun
+tentatively. Six of our best men give in rotation two hours a day
+to it at the time when work and the machines are slackest. And we
+have one or two teachers from outside. Twenty-three boys have
+entered. I have begun to pay them a penny a day for attendance.'
+
+His face lit up with merriment as though he anticipated her
+remonstrance.
+
+'David, how foolish! If you coax them like that they won't care a
+bit about it.'
+
+'Well, the experiment has been tried by a great French firm,' he
+said, 'and it did well. It is really a slight addition to wages, and
+pays the firm in the end. You should see the little fellows hustle
+up for their money. I pay it them every month.'
+
+'And it all comes out of _your_ pocket--that, of course, I
+needn't ask,' said Lucy. But her sarcasm was not bitter, and she
+had a motherly eye the while to the way in which Sandy was stuffing
+himself with his bread and jam.
+
+'Well,' he said, laughing and making no attempt to excuse himself,
+'but I tell you, madam, you will do better this year. I positively
+must make some money out of the shop for you and myself too. So I
+have been going at it like twenty horses, and we've sent out a
+splendid catalogue.'
+
+'Oh, I say, David!' said Lucy, dismayed, 'you're not going to take
+the shop-money too to spend on the printing?'
+
+'I won't take anything that will leave you denuded,' he said
+affectionately; 'and whenever I want anything I'll tell you all
+about it--if you like.'
+
+He looked at her significantly. She did not answer for a minute,
+then she said:
+
+'Don't you want me to give those boys a treat some time?'
+
+'Yes, when the weather gets more decent, if it ever does. We must
+give them a day on the moors--take them to Clough End perhaps. Oh,
+look here!' he exclaimed with a sudden change of tone, 'let us ask
+Uncle Reuben to come and spend the day to see Louie!'
+
+'Why, he won't leave _her_,' said Lucy.
+
+'Who? Aunt Hannah? Oh yes, he will. It's wonderful what she can do
+now. I saw her in November, you remember, when I went to see
+Margaret. It's a resurrection. Poor Uncle Reuben!'
+
+'What do you mean?' said Lucy, startled.
+
+'Well,' said David slowly, with a half tender, half humorous twist
+of the lip, 'he can't understand it. He prayed so many years, and it
+made no difference. Then came a new doctor, and with electricity
+and rubbing it was all done. Oh yes, Uncle Reuben would like to see
+Louie. And I want to show him that boy there!'
+
+He nodded at Sandy, who sat staring open-mouthed and open-eyed at
+his parents, a large piece of bread and jam slipping slowly down
+his throat.
+
+'David, you're silly,' said Lucy. But she went to stand by him at
+the fire, and slipped her hand inside his arm. 'I suppose she and
+Cecile had better have the front room,' she went on slowly.
+
+'Yes, that would be the most cheerful.'
+
+Then they were silent a little, he leaning his head lightly against
+hers.
+
+'Well, I must go,' he said, rousing himself; 'I shall just catch the
+train. Send a line to Ancrum, there's a dear, to say I will go and
+see him to-night. Four months! I am afraid he has been very bad.'
+
+Lucy stood by the fire a little, lost in many contradictory
+feelings. There was in her a strange sense as of some long strain
+slowly giving way, the quiet melting of some old hardness. Ever
+since that autumn time when, after their return from Benet's Park,
+her husband's chivalry and delicacy of feeling had given back to
+her the self-respect and healed the self-love which had been so
+rudely hurt, there had been a certain readjustment of Lucy's nature
+going on below the little commonplaces and vanities and affections
+of her life which she herself would never have been able to
+explain. It implied the gradual abandonment of certain ambitions,
+the relinquishment bit by bit of an arid and fruitless effort.
+
+She would stand and sigh sometimes--long, regretful sighs like a
+child--for she knew not what. But David would have his way, and it
+was no good; and she loved him and Sandy.
+
+But she owed no love to Louie Montjoie! It was a relief to her
+now--an escape from an invading sweetness of which her little heart
+was almost afraid--to sit down and plan how she would protect David
+from that grasping woman and her unspeakable husband.
+
+'David, my dear fellow!' said Ancrum's weak voice. He rose with
+difficulty from his seat by the fire. The room was the same little
+lodging-house sitting-room in Mortimer Road, where David years
+before had poured out his boyish account of himself. Neither
+chiffonnier, nor pictures, nor antimacassars had changed at all;
+the bustling landlady was still loud and vigorous. But Ancrum
+was a shadow.
+
+'You are better?' David said, holding his hand in both his.
+
+'Oh yes, better for a time. Not for long, thank God!'
+
+David looked at him with painful emotion. Several times during
+these eight years had he seen Ancrum emerge from these mysterious
+crises of his, a broken and shattered man, whom only the force of a
+superhuman will could drag back to life and work. But he had never
+yet seen him so beaten down, so bloodless, so emaciated as this.
+Lung mischief had declared itself more than a year before this
+date, and had clearly made progress during this last attack of
+melancholia. He thought to himself that his old friend could not
+have long to live.
+
+'Has Williams been to see you?' he asked, naming a doctor whom
+Ancrum had long known and trusted.
+
+'Oh yes! He can do nothing. He tells me to give in and go to the
+south. But there is a little work left in me still. I wanted my
+boys. I grew to pine for my boys--up there.'
+
+'Up there' meant that house in Scotland where lived the friends
+bound to him by such tragic memories of help asked and rendered in
+a man's worst extremity, that he could never speak of them when he
+was living his ordinary life in Manchester, passionately as he
+loved them.
+
+They chatted a little about the boys, some of whom David had been
+keeping an eye on. Five or six of them, indeed, were in his
+printing-office, and learning in the apprentices' school he had
+just started.
+
+But in the middle of their talk, with a sudden change of look,
+Ancrum stooped forward and laid his hand on David's.
+
+'A little more, Davy--I have just to get a _little_ worse--and
+_she_ will come to me.'
+
+David was not sure that he understood. Ancrum had only spoken of
+his wife once since the night when, led on by sympathy and emotion,
+he had met David's young confession by the story of his own fate.
+She was still teaching at Glasgow so far as David knew, where she
+was liked and respected.
+
+'Yes, Davy--when I have come to the end of my tether--when I can do no
+more but die--I shall call--and she will come. It has so far killed us
+to be together--more than a few hours in the year. But when life is all
+over for me--she will be kind--and I shall be able to forget it all. Oh,
+the hours I have sat here thinking--thinking--and _gnashing my teeth!_
+My boys think me a kind, gentle, harmless creature, Davy. They little
+know the passions I have carried within me--passions of hate and
+bitterness--outcries against God and man. But there has been One with me
+through the storms'--his voice sank--'aye! and I have gone to Him again
+and again with the old cry--_Master!--Master!--carest Thou not that we
+perish?_'
+
+His drawn grey face worked and he mastered himself with difficulty.
+David held his hand firm and close in a silence which carried with it a
+love and sympathy not to be expressed.
+
+'Let me just say this to you, Davy,' Ancrum went on presently,
+'before we shut the door on this kind of talk--for when a man has
+got a few things to do and very little strength to do 'em with, he
+must not waste himself. You may hear any day that I have been
+received into the Catholic Church, or you may only hear it when I
+am dying. One way or the other, you _will_ hear it. It has
+been strange to go about all these years among my Unitarian and
+dissenting friends and to know that this would be the inevitable
+end of it. I have struggled alone for peace and certainty. I cannot
+get them for myself. There is an august, an inconceivable
+possibility which makes my heart stand still when I think of it,
+that the Catholic Church may verily have them to give, as she says
+she has. I am weak--I shall submit--I shall throw myself upon her
+breast at last.'
+
+'But why not now,' said David, tenderly, 'if it would give you
+comfort?'
+
+Ancrum did not answer at once; he sat rubbing his hands restlessly
+over the fire.
+
+'I don't know--I don't know,' he said at last. 'I have told you what
+the end will be, Davy. But the will still flutters--flutters--in my
+poor breast, like a caged thing.'
+
+Then that beautiful half-wild smile of his lit up the face.
+
+'Bear with me, you strong man! What have you been doing with
+yourself? How many more courts have you been pulling down? And how
+much more of poor Madam Lucy's money have you been throwing out of
+window?'
+
+He took up his old tone, half bantering, half affectionate, and
+teased David out of the history of the last six months. While he
+sat listening he reflected once more, as he had so often reflected,
+upon the difference between the reality of David Grieve's life as
+it was and his, Ancrum's, former imaginations of what it would be.
+A rapid rise to wealth and a new social status, removal to London,
+a great public career, a personality, and an influence conspicuous
+in the eyes of England--all these things he had once dreamed of as
+belonging to the natural order of David's development. What he had
+actually witnessed had been the struggle of a hidden life to
+realise certain ideal aims under conditions of familiar difficulty
+and limitation, the dying down of that initial brilliance and
+passion to succeed, into a wrestle of conscience as sensitive as it
+was profound, as tenacious as it was scrupulous. He had watched an
+unsatisfactory marriage, had realised the silent resolve of the
+north-countryman to stand by his own people, of the man sprung from
+the poor to cling to the poor: he had become familiar with the
+veins of melancholy by which both character and life were crossed.
+That glittering prince of circumstance as he had once foreseen him,
+was still enshrined in memory and fancy; but the real man was knit
+to the cripple's inmost heart.
+
+Another observer, perhaps, might have wondered at Ancrum's sense of
+difference and disillusion. For David after all had made a mark. As
+he sat talking to Ancrum of the new buildings behind the
+printing-office where he now employed from two to three hundred
+men, of the ups and downs of his profit-sharing experiences, of
+this apprentices' school for the sons of members of the 'house,'
+imitated from one of the same kind founded by a great French
+printing firm, and the object just now of a passionate energy of
+work on David's part--or as he diverged into the history of an
+important trade dispute in Manchester, where he had been appointed
+arbitrator by the unanimous voice of both sides--as he told these
+things, it was not doubtful even for Ancrum that his power and
+consideration were spreading in his own town.
+
+But, substantially, Ancrum was right. Hard labour and natural gift
+had secured their harvest; but that vivid personal element in
+success which captivates and excites the bystander seemed, in
+David's case, to have been replaced by something austere, which
+pointed attention and sympathy rather to the man's work than to
+himself. When he was young there had been intoxication for such a
+spectator as Ancrum in the magical rapidity and ease with which he
+seized opportunity and beat down difficulty. Now that he was
+mature, he was but one patient toiler the more at the eternal
+puzzles of our humanity.
+
+Ancrum let him talk awhile. He had always felt a certain interest
+in David's schemes, though they were not of a quality and sort with
+which a mind like his naturally concerned itself. But his interest
+now could not hold out so long as once it could.
+
+'Ah, that will do--that will do, dear fellow!' he said,
+interrupting and touching David's hand with apologetic affection.
+'I seem to feel your pulse beating 150 to the minute, and it tires
+me so I can't bear myself. Gossip to me. How is Sandy?'
+
+David laughed, and had as usual a new batch of 'Sandiana' to
+produce. Then he talked of Louie's coming and of the invitation
+which had been sent to Reuben Grieve.
+
+'I shall come and sit in a corner and look at _her_,' said
+Ancrum, nodding at Louie's name. 'What sort of a life has she been
+leading all these years? Neither you nor I can much imagine. But
+what beauty it used to be! How will John stand seeing her again?'
+
+David smiled, but did not think it would affect John very greatly.
+He was absorbed in the business of Grieve & Co., and no less round,
+roseate, and trusty than he had always been.
+
+'Well, good night--good night!' said Ancrum, and seemed to be
+looking at the clock uneasily. 'Come again, Davy, and I dare say I
+shall struggle up to you.'
+
+At that moment the door opened, and, in spite of a hasty shout from
+Ancrum, which she did not or would not understand, Mrs. Elsley, his
+landlady, came into the room, bearing his supper. She put down the
+tray, seemed to invite David's attention to it by her indignant
+look, and flounced out again like one bursting with forbidden
+speech.
+
+'Ancrum, this is absurd!' cried David, pointing to the tea and
+morsel of dry bread which were to provide this shrunken invalid
+with his evening meal. 'You _can't_ live on this stuff now, you
+know--you want something more tempting and more nourishing. Do be
+rational!'
+
+Ancrum sprang up, hobbled with unusual alacrity across the room,
+and, laying hold of David, made a feint of ejecting his visitor.
+
+'You get along and leave me to my wittles!' he said with the smile
+of a schoolboy; 'I don't spy on you when you're at your meals.'
+
+David crossed his arms.
+
+'I shall have to send Lucy down every morning to housekeep with
+Mrs. Elsley,' he said firmly.
+
+'Now, David, hold your tongue! I couldn't eat anything else if I
+tried. And there are two boys down with typhoid in Friar's
+Yard--drat 'em!--and scarcely a rag on 'em: don't you understand?
+And besides, David, if _she_ comes, I shall want a pound or
+two, you see?'
+
+He did not look at his visitor's face nor let his own be seen. He
+simply pushed David through the door and shut it.
+
+'Sandy, they're just come!' cried Lucy in some excitement, hugging
+the child to her by way of a last pleasant experience before the
+advent of her sister-in-law. Then she put the child down on the
+sofa and went out to meet the new-comers.
+
+Sandy sucked a meditative thumb, putting his face to the window,
+and surveyed the arrival which was going on in the front garden.
+There was a great deal of noise and talking; the lady in the grey
+cloak was scolding the cabman, and 'Daddy' was taking her bags and
+parcels from her, and trying to make her come in. On the steps
+stood a little girl looking frightened and tired. Sandy twisted his
+head round and studied her carefully. But he showed no signs of
+running out to meet her. She might be nice, or she might be nasty.
+Sandy had a cautious philosophical way with him towards novelties.
+He remained perfectly still with his cheek pressed against the
+glass.
+
+The door opened. In came Louie, with Lucy looking already flushed
+and angry behind her, and David, last of all, holding Cecile by the
+hand.
+
+Louie was in the midst of denunciations of the cabman, who had,
+according to her, absorbed into his system, or handed over to an
+accomplice on the way, a bandbox which had _certainly_ been
+put in at St. Pancras, and which contained Cecile's best hat. She
+was red and furious, and David felt himself as much attacked as the
+cabman, for to the best of his ability he had transferred them and
+their packages, at the Midland station, from the train to the cab.
+
+In the midst of her tirade, however, she suddenly stopped short and
+looked round the room she had just entered--Lucy's low comfortable
+sitting-room, with David's books overflowing into every nook and
+corner, the tea-table spread, and the big fire which Lucy had been
+nervously feeding during her time of waiting for the travellers.
+
+'Well, you've got a fire, anyway,' she said, brusquely. 'I thought
+you'd have a bigger house than this by now.'
+
+'Oh, thank you, it's quite big enough!' cried Lucy, going to the
+tea-table and holding herself very straight. '_Quite_ big
+enough for anything _we_ want! Will you take your tea?'
+
+Louie threw herself into an armchair and looked about her.
+
+'Where's the little boy?' she inquired.
+
+'I'm here,' said a small solemn voice from behind the sofa, 'but I'm
+not _your_ boy.'
+
+And Sandy, discovered with his back to the window, replaced the
+thumb which he had removed to make the remark, and went on staring
+with portentous gravity at the new-comers. Cecile had nervously
+disengaged herself from David and was standing by her mother.
+
+'Why, he's small for his age!' exclaimed Louie; 'I'm sure he's small
+for his age. Why, he's nearly five!'
+
+'Come here, Sandy,' said David, 'and let your aunt and cousin look
+at you.'
+
+Sandy reluctantly sidled across the room so as to keep as far as
+possible from his aunt and cousin, and fastened on his father's
+hand. He and the little girl looked at one another.
+
+'Go and kiss her,' said David.
+
+Sandy most unwillingly allowed himself to be put forward. Cecile
+with a little patronising woman-of-the-world air stooped and kissed
+him first on one cheek and then on the other. Louie only looked at
+him. Her black eyes--no less marvellous than of yore, although now
+the brilliancy of them owed something to art as well as nature, as
+Lucy at once perceived--stared him up and down, taking stock
+minutely.
+
+'He's well made,' she said grudgingly, 'and his colour isn't bad.
+Cecile, take your hat off.'
+
+The child obeyed, and the mother with hasty fingers pulled her hair
+forward here, and put it back there. 'Look at the thickness of it,'
+she said, proudly pointing it out to David. 'They'd have given me
+two guineas for it in the Rue de la Paix the other day. Why didn't
+that child have your hair, I wonder?' she added, nodding towards
+Sandy.
+
+'Because he preferred his mother's, I suppose,' said David, smiling
+at Lucy, and wondering through his discomfort what Sandy could
+possibly be doing with his coat-tail. He seemed to be elaborately
+scrubbing his face with it.
+
+'What are you doing with my coat, villain?' he said, lifting his
+son in his arms.
+
+Sandy found his father's ear, and with infinite precaution
+whispered vindictively into it:
+
+'I've wiped _them_ kisses off anyhow.'
+
+David suppressed him, and devoted himself to the travellers and
+their tea.
+
+Every now and then he took a quiet look at his sister. Louie was in
+some ways more beautiful than ever. She carried herself
+magnificently, and as she sat at the tea-table--restless
+always--she fell unconsciously into one fine attitude after
+another, no doubt because of her long practice as a sculptor's
+model. All the girl's awkwardness had disappeared; she had the
+insolent ease which goes with tried and conscious power. But with
+the angularity and thinness of first youth had gone also that wild
+and startling radiance which Montjoie had caught and fixed in the
+Maenad statue--the one enduring work of a ruined talent, now to be
+found in the Luxembourg by anyone who cares to look for it. Her
+beauty was less original; it had taken throughout the second-rate
+Parisian stamp; she had the townswoman's pallor, as compared with
+the moorland red and white of her youth; and round the eyes and
+mouth in a full daylight were already to be seen the lines which
+grave the history of passionate and selfish living.
+
+But if her beauty was less original, it was infinitely more
+finished. Lucy beside her stumbled among the cups, and grew more
+and more self-conscious; she had felt much the same at Benet's Park
+beside Lady Venetia Danby; only here there was a strong personal
+animosity and disapproval fighting with the disagreeable sense of
+being outshone.
+
+She left almost all the talk to her husband, and employed herself
+in looking after Cecile. David, who had left his work with
+difficulty to meet his sister, did his best to keep her going on
+indifferent subjects, wondering the while what it was that she had
+come all this way to say to him, and perfectly aware that her sharp
+eyes were in every place, taking a depreciatory inventory of his
+property, his household, and his circumstances.
+
+Suddenly Louie said something to Cecile in violent French. It was
+to the effect that she was to hold herself up and not stoop like an
+idiot.
+
+The child, who was shyly eating her tea, flushed all over, and drew
+herself up with painful alacrity. Louie went on with a loud account
+of the civility shown her by some gentlemen on the Paris boat and
+on the journey from Dover. In the middle of it she stopped short,
+her eye flamed, she bent forward with the rapidity of a cat that
+springs, and slapped Cecile smartly on the right cheek.
+
+'I was watching you!' she cried. 'Are you never going to obey me--do
+you think I am going to drag a hunchback about with me?'
+
+Both David and Lucy started forward. Cecile dropped her bread and
+butter and began to cry in a loud, shrill voice, hitting out
+meanwhile at her mother with her tiny hands in a frenzy of rage and
+fear. Sandy, frightened out of his wits, set up a loud howl also,
+till his mother caught him up and carried him away.
+
+'Louie, the child is tired out!' said David, trying to quiet Cecile
+and dry her tears. 'What was that for?'
+
+Louie's chest heaved.
+
+'Because she won't do what I tell her,' she said fiercely. 'What am
+I to do with her when she grows up? Who'll ever look at her twice?'
+
+She scowled at the child who had taken refuge on David's knee, then
+with a sudden change of expression she held out her arms, and said
+imperiously:
+
+'Give her to me.'
+
+David relinquished her, and the mother took the little trembling
+creature on her knee.
+
+'Be quiet then,' she said to her roughly, always in French, 'I
+didn't hurt you. There! _Veux-tu du gateau_?'
+
+She cut some with eager fingers and held it to Cecile's lips. The
+child turned away, silently refusing it, the tears rolling down her
+cheeks. The mother devoured her with eyes of remorse and adoration,
+while her face was still red with anger.
+
+'_Dis-moi_, you don't feel anything?' she said, kissing her
+hungrily. 'Are you tired? Shall I carry you upstairs and put you on
+the bed to rest?'
+
+And she did carry her up, not allowing David to touch her. When
+they were at last safe in their own room, David came down to his
+study and threw himself into his chair in the dark with a groan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Louie and her child entered the sitting-room together when the bell
+rang for supper-tea. Louie had put on a high red silk dress of a
+brilliant, almost scarlet, tone, which showed her arms from the
+elbows and was very slightly clouded here and there with black;
+Cecile crept beside her, a little pale shadow, in a white muslin
+frock, adorned, however, as Lucy's vigilant eyes immediately
+perceived, with some very dainty and expensive embroidery. The
+mother's dress reminded her of that in which she first saw Louie
+Grieve; so did her splendid and reckless carriage; so did the wild
+play of her black eyes, always on the watch for opportunities of
+explosion and offence. How did they get their dresses? Who paid for
+them? And now they had come over to beg for more! Lucy could hardly
+keep a civil tongue in her head at all, as her sister-in-law swept
+round the room making strong and, to the mistress of the house,
+cutting remarks on the difference between 'Manchester dirt' and
+the brightness and cleanliness of Paris. Why, she lorded it over
+them as though the place belonged to her! 'And she is just a
+pauper--living on what we give her!' thought Lucy to herself with
+exasperation.
+
+After supper, at which Louie behaved with the same indefinable
+insolence--whether as regarded the food or the china, or the shaky
+moderator lamp, a relic from David's earliest bachelor days, which
+only he could coax into satisfactory burning--Lucy made the move,
+and said to her with cold constraint:
+
+'Will you come into the drawing-room?--David has a pipe in the
+study after dinner.'
+
+'I want to speak to David,' said Louie, pushing back her chair with
+noisy decision. 'I'll go with him. He can smoke as much as he
+likes--I'm used to it.'
+
+'Well, then, come into my study,' said David, trying to speak
+cheerfully. 'Lucy will look after Cecile.'
+
+To Louie's evident triumph Cecile made difficulties about going
+with her aunt, but was at last persuaded by the prospect of seeing
+Sandy in bed. She had already shown signs in her curious frightened
+way of a considerable interest in Sandy.
+
+Then David led the way to the study. He put his sister into his
+armchair and stood pipe in hand beside her, looking down upon her.
+In his heart there was the passionate self-accusing sense that he
+could not feel pity, or affection, or remorse for the past when she
+was there; every look and word roused in him the old irritation,
+the old wish to master her, he had known so often in his youth. Yet
+he drew himself together, striving to do his best.
+
+Well, now, look here,' said Louie defiantly, 'I want some money.'
+
+'So I supposed,' he said quietly, lighting his pipe.
+
+Louie reddened.
+
+'Well, and if I do want it,' she said, breathing quickly, 'I've a
+right to want it. You chose to waste all that money--all my
+money--on that marrying business, and you must take the
+consequence. I look upon it this way--you promised to put my money
+into your trade and give me a fair share of your profits. Then you
+chucked it away--you made me spend it all, and now, of course, I'm
+to have nothing to say to your profits. Oh dear, no! It's a trifle
+that I'm a pauper and you're rolling in money compared to me
+anyway. Oh! it doesn't matter nothing to nobody--not at all! All
+the same you couldn't have made the start you did--not those few
+months I was with you--without my money. Why can't you confess it,
+I want to know--and behave more handsome to me now--instead of
+leaving me in that state that I haven't a franc to bless myself
+with!'
+
+She threw herself back in her chair, with one arm flung behind her
+head. David stared at her tongue-tied for a while by sheer
+amazement.
+
+'I gave you everything I had,' he said, at last, with a slow
+distinctness,' all your money, and all my own too. When I came back
+here, I had my new stock, it is true, but it was much of it unpaid
+for. My first struggle was to get my neck out of debt.'
+
+He paused, shrinking with a kind of sick repulsion from the memory
+of that bygone year of shattered nerves and anguished effort.
+Deliberately he let thought and speech of it drop. Louie was the
+last person in the world to whom he could talk of it.
+
+'I built up my business again,' he resumed, 'by degrees. Mr. Doyle
+lent me money--it was on that capital I first began to thrive. From
+the very beginning, even in the very year when I handed over to you
+all our father's money--I sent you more. And every year since--you
+know as well as I do--'
+
+But again he looked away and paused. Once more he felt himself on a
+wrong tack. What was the use of laying out, so to speak, all that
+he had done in the sight of these angry eyes? Besides, a certain
+high pride restrained him.
+
+Louie looked a trifle disconcerted, and her flush deepened. Her
+audacious attempt to put him in the wrong and provide herself with
+a grievance could not be carried on. She took refuge in passion.
+
+'Oh, I dare say you think you've done a precious lot!' she said,
+sitting straight up and locking her hands round her knee, while the
+whole frame of her stiffened and quivered. 'I suppose you think
+other people would think so too. _I_ don't care! It don't
+matter to me. You're the only belonging I've got--who else was
+there for me to look to? Oh, it is all very fine! All I know is, I
+can't stand my life any more! If you can't do anything, I'll just
+pack up my traps and go. _Somebody_'ll have to make it easier
+for me, that's all! Last week--I was out of the house--he found out
+where I kept my money, he broke the lock open, and when I got home
+there was nothing. _Nothing_, I tell you!' Her voice rose to a
+shrillness that made David look to see that the door between them
+and Lucy was securely closed. 'And I'd promised a whole lot of
+things to the church for Easter, and Cecile and I haven't got a rag
+between us; and as for the rent, the landlord may whistle for it!
+Oh! the beast!' she said, between her teeth, while the fierce tears
+stood in her eyes.
+
+Lucy--any woman of normal shrewdness, putting two and two
+together--would have allowed these complaints about half their
+claimed weight. Upon David--unconsciously inclined to measure all
+emotion by his own standard--they produced an immediate and deep
+impression.
+
+'You poor thing!' he murmured, as he stood looking down upon her.
+
+She tossed her head, as though resenting his compassion.
+
+'Yes, I'm about tired of it! I thought I'd come over and tell you
+that. Now you know,--and if you hear things you don't like, don't
+blame me, that's all!'
+
+Her great eyes blazed into his. He understood her. Her child--the
+priests--had, so far, restrained her. Now--what strange mixture of
+shameless impulse--curiosity, greed, reckless despair--had driven
+her here that she might threaten him thus!
+
+'Ah, I dare say you think I've had a gay life of it over there with
+your money,' she went on, not allowing him to speak. '_My God!_'
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, with a scornful laugh, while the
+tempest gathered within her.
+
+'Don't I know perfectly that for years I have been one of the most
+beautiful women in Paris! Ask the men who have painted me for the
+Salon--ask that brute who might have made a fortune out of me if he
+hadn't been the sot he is! And what have I got by it? What do other
+women who are not a tenth part as good-looking as I am get by it? A
+comfortable life, anyway! _Eh bien! essayons!--nous aussi._'
+
+The look she flung at him choked the words on his lips.
+
+'When I think of these ten years,' she cried, 'I just wonder at
+myself. There,--what you think about it I don't know, and I don't
+care. I might have had a good time, and I've had a _devil's_
+time. And, upon my word, I think I'll make a change!'
+
+In her wild excitement she sprang up and began to pace the narrow
+room.
+
+David watched her, fighting with himself, and with that inbred
+antipathy of temperament which seemed to paralyse both will and
+judgment. Was the secret of it that in their profound unlikeness
+they were yet so much alike?
+
+Then he went up to her and made her sit down again.
+
+'Let me have a word now,' he said quietly, though his hand as it
+gripped hers had a force of which he was unconscious. 'You say you
+wonder at yourself. Well, I can tell you this: other people have
+wondered too! When I left you in Paris ten years ago, I tell you
+frankly, I had no hopes. I said to myself--don't rage at me!--with
+that way of looking at things, and with such a husband, what chance
+is there? And for some years now, Louie, I confess to you, I have
+been simply humbled and amazed to see what--what'--his voice sank
+and shook--'_love--and the fear of God_--can do. It has been
+hard to be miserable and poor--I know that--but you have cared for
+Cecile, and you have feared to shut yourself out from good people
+who spoke to you in God's name. Don't do yourself injustice.
+Believe in yourself. Look back upon these years and be thankful.
+With all their miseries they have been a kind of victory! Will you
+throw them away _now_? But your child is growing up and will
+understand. And there are hands to help--mine, always--always.'
+
+He held out his to her, smiling. He could not have analysed his own
+impulse--this strange impulse which had led him to bless instead of
+cursing. But its effect upon Louie was startling. She had looked
+for, perhaps in her fighting mood she had ardently desired, an
+outburst of condemnation, against which her mad pleasure in the
+sound of her own woes and hatreds might once more spend itself. And
+instead of blaming and reproaching he had--
+
+She stared at him. Then with a sudden giving way, which was a matter
+partly of nerves and partly of surprise, she let her two arms fall
+upon the edge of the chair, and dropping her head upon them, burst
+out into wild sobbing.
+
+His own eyes were wet. He soothed her hurriedly and incoherently,
+told her he would spare her all the money he could; that he and
+Lucy would do their best, but that she must not suppose they were
+very rich. He did not regard all his money as his own.
+
+He went on to explain to her something of his business position.
+Her sobbing slackened and ceased. And presently, his mood changing
+instinctively with hers, he became more vague and cautious in
+statement; his tone veered back towards that which he was
+accustomed to use to her. For, once her burst of passion over, he
+felt immediately that she was once more criticising everything that
+he said and did in her own interest.
+
+'Oh, I know you've become a regular Communist,' she said sullenly
+at last, drying her eyes in haste.' Well, I tell you, I must have a
+hundred pounds. I can't do with a penny less than that.'
+
+He tried to get out of her for what precise purposes she wanted it,
+and whether her husband had stolen from her the whole of the
+quarter's allowance he had just sent her. She answered evasively;
+he felt that she was telling him falsehoods; and once more his
+heart grew dry within him.
+
+'Well,' he said at last with a certain decision, 'I will do it if I
+can, and I think I can do it. But, Louie, understand that I have
+got Lucy and the child to think for, that I am not alone.'
+
+'I should think she had got more than she could expect!' cried
+Louie, putting her hair straight with trembling hands.
+
+His cheek flushed at the sneer, but before he could reply she said
+abruptly:
+
+'Have you ever told her about Paris?'
+
+'No,' he said, with equal abruptness, his mouth taking a stern
+line, 'and unless I am forced to do so I never shall. That you
+understand, I know, for I spoke to you about it in Paris. My past
+died for me when I asked Lucy to be my wife. I do not ask you to
+remember this. I take it for granted.'
+
+'I saw that woman the other day,' said Louie with a strange smile,
+as she sat staring into the fire.
+
+He started, but he did not reply. He went to straighten some papers
+on his table. It seemed to him that he did not want her to say a
+word more, and yet he listened for it.
+
+'I remember they used to call her pretty,' said Louie, a hateful
+scorn shining in her still reddened eyes. 'She is just a little
+frump now--nobody would ever look at her twice. They say her
+husband leads her a life. He poisoned himself at an operation and
+has gone half crippled. She has to keep them both. She doesn't give
+herself the airs she used to, anyway.'
+
+David could bear it no longer.
+
+'I think you had better go and take Cecile to bed,' he said
+peremptorily. 'I heard it strike nine a few minutes ago. I will go
+and talk business to Lucy.'
+
+She went with a careless air. As he saw her shut the door his heart
+felt once more dead and heavy. A few minutes before there had been
+the flutter of a divine presence between them. Now he felt nothing
+but the iron grip of character and life. And that little picture
+which her last words had left upon the mind--it carried with it a
+shock and dreariness he could only escape by hard work, that best
+medicine of the soul. He went out early next morning to his
+printing-office, spent himself passionately upon a day of
+difficulties, and came back refreshed.
+
+For the rest, he talked to Lucy, and with great difficulty
+persuaded her in the matter of the hundred pounds. Lucy's
+indignation may be taken for granted, and the angry proofs she
+heaped on David that Louie was an extravagant story-telling hussy,
+who spent everything she could get on dress and personal luxury.
+
+'Why, her dressing-table is like a perfumer's shop!' she cried in
+her wrath; 'what she does with all the messes I can't imagine--makes
+herself beautiful, I suppose! Why should we pay for it all? And I
+tell you she has got a necklace of real pearls. I know they are
+real, for she told Lizzie'(Lizzie was the boy's nurse)'that she
+always took them about with her to keep them safe out of her
+husband's clutches--just imagine her talking to the girl like that!
+When will you be able to give _me_ real pearls, and where do
+you suppose she got them?'
+
+David preferred not to inquire. What could he do, he asked himself
+in despair--what even could he know, unless Louie chose that he
+should know it? But she, on the contrary, carefully avoided the
+least recurrence to the threats of her first talk with him.
+
+Ultimately, however, he brought his wife round, and Louie was
+informed that she could have her hundred pounds, which should be
+paid her on the day of her departure, but that nothing more, beyond
+her allowance, could or should be given her during the current
+year.
+
+She took the promise very coolly, but certainly made herself more
+agreeable after it was given. She dressed up Cecile and set her
+dancing in the evenings, weird dances of a Spanish type,
+alternating between languor and a sort of 'possession,' which had
+been taught the child by a moustached violinist from Madrid, who
+admired her mother and paid Louie a fantastic and stormy homage
+through her child. She also condescended to take an interest in
+Lucy's wardrobe. The mingled temper and avidity with which Lucy
+received her advances may be imagined. It made her mad to have it
+constantly implied that her gowns and bonnets would not be worn by
+a maid-of-all-work in Paris. At the same time, when Louie's fingers
+had been busy with them it was as plain to her as to anyone else
+that they became her twice as well as they had before. So she
+submitted to be pinned and pulled about and tried on, keeping as
+much as possible on her dignity all the time, and reddening with
+fresh wrath each time that Louie made it plain to her that she
+thought her sister-in-law a provincial little fool, and was only
+troubling herself about her to pass the time.
+
+Dora, of course, came up to see Louie, and Louie was much more
+communicative to her than to either Lucy or David. She told stories
+of her husband which made Dora's hair stand on end; but she boasted
+in great detail of her friendships with certain Legitimist ladies
+of the bluest blood, with one of whom she had just held a
+_quete_ for some Catholic object on the stairs of the Salon.
+'I was in blue and pink with a little silver,' she said, looking
+quickly behind her to see that Lucy was not listening. 'And Cecile
+was a fairy, with spangled wings--the sweetest thing you ever saw.
+We were both in the illustrated papers the week after, but as
+nobody took any notice of Madame de C--she has behaved like a
+washerwoman to me ever since. As if I could help her complexion or
+her age!'
+
+But above all did she boast herself against Dora in Church matters.
+She would go to St. Damian's on Sunday, triumphantly announcing
+that she should have to confess it as a sin when she got home, and
+afterwards, when Dora, as her custom was, came out to early dinner
+with the Grieves, Louie could not contain herself on the subject of
+the dresses, the processions, the decorations, the flowers, and
+ceremonial trappings in general, with which _she_ might, if
+she liked, regale herself either at Ste. Eulalie or the Madeleine,
+in comparison with the wretched show offered by St. Damian's. Dora,
+after an early service and much Sunday-school, sat looking pale and
+weary under the scornful information poured out upon her. She was
+outraged by Louie's tone; yet she was stung by her contempt. Once
+her gentleness was roused to speech, and she endeavoured to give
+some of the reasons for rejecting the usurped authority of the
+'Bishop of Rome,' in which she had been drilled at different times.
+But she floundered and came to grief. Her adversary laughed at her,
+and in the intervals of rating Cecile for having inked her dress,
+flaunted some shrill controversy which left them all staring. Louie
+vindicating, the claims of the Holy See with much unction and an
+appropriate diction! It seemed to David, as he listened, that the
+irony of life could hardly be carried further.
+
+On the following day, David, not without a certain consciousness,
+said to John Dalby, his faithful helper through many years, and of
+late his partner:
+
+'My sister is up at our place, John, with her little girl. Lucy
+would be very glad if you would go in this evening to see them.'
+
+John, who was already aware of the advent of Madame Montjoie,
+accepted the invitation and went. Louie received him with a manner
+half mocking--half patronising--and made no effort whatever to be
+agreeable to him. She was preoccupied; and the stout, shy man in
+his new suit only bored her. As for him, he sat and watched her;
+his small, amazed eyes took in her ways with Cecile, alternately
+boastful and tyrannical; her airs towards Lucy; her complete
+indifference to her brother's life and interests. When he got up to
+go, he took leave of her with all the old timid _gaucherie_.
+But if, when he entered the room, there had been anything left in
+his mind of the old dream, he was a wholly free man when he
+recrossed the threshold. He walked home thinking much of a small
+solicitor's daughter, who worshipped at the Congregational chapel
+he himself attended. He had been at David Grieve's side all these
+years; he loved him probably more than he would now love any woman;
+he devoted himself with ardour to the printing and selling of the
+various heretical works and newspapers published by Grieve & Co.;
+and yet for some long time past he had been--and was likely to
+remain--a man of strong religious convictions, of a common
+Evangelical type.
+
+The second week of Louie's stay was a much greater trial than the
+first to all concerned. She grew tired of dressing and patronising
+Lucy; her sharp eyes and tongue found out all her sister-in-law's
+weak points; the two children were a fruitful source of jarring and
+jealousy between the mothers; and by the end of the week their
+relation was so much strained, and David had so much difficulty in
+keeping the peace, that he could only pine for the Monday morning
+which was to see Louie's departure. Meanwhile nothing occurred to
+give him back his momentary hold upon her. She took great care not
+to be alone with him. It was as though she felt the presence of a
+new force in him, and would give it no chance of affecting her in
+mysterious and incalculable ways.
+
+On the Saturday before her last Sunday, Reuben Grieve arrived in
+Manchester--with his wife. His nephew's letter and invitation had
+thrown the old man into a great flutter. Ultimately his curiosity
+as to David's home and child--David himself he had seen several
+times since the marriage--and the desire, which the more prosperous
+state of his own circumstances allowed him to feel, to see what
+Louie might be like after all these years--decided him to go. And
+when he told Hannah of his intended journey, he found, to his
+amazement, that she was minded to go too. 'If yo'll tell me when yo
+gan me a jaunt last, I'll be obliged to yo!' she said sourly, and
+he at once felt himself a selfish brute that he should have thought
+of taking the little pleasure without her.
+
+When they were seated in the railway-carriage, he broke out in a
+sudden excitement:
+
+'Wal, I never thowt, Hannah, to see yo do thissens naw moor!'
+
+'Aye, yo wor allus yan to mak t' warst o' things,' she said to him,
+as she slowly settled herself in her corner.
+
+Nevertheless, Reuben's feeling was amply justified. It had been a
+resurrection. The clever young doctor, brimful of new methods, who
+had brought her round, had arrived just in time to stop the process
+of physical deterioration before it had gone too far; and the
+recovery of power both on the paralysed side and in general health
+had been marvellous. She walked with a stick, and was an old and
+blanched woman before her time. But her indomitable spirit was once
+more provided with its necessary means of expression. She was at
+least as rude as ever, and it was as clear as anything can be in
+the case of a woman who has never learnt to smile, that her visit
+to Manchester--the first for ten years--was an excitement and
+satisfaction to her.
+
+David met them at the station; but Reuben persisted in going to an
+old-fashioned eating-house in the centre of the city, where he had
+been accustomed to stay on the occasion of his rare visits to
+Manchester, in spite of his nephew's repeated offers of
+hospitality.
+
+'Noa, Davy, noa,' he said, 'yo're a gen'leman now, and yo conno' be
+moidered wi' oos. We'st coom and see yo--thank yo kindly,--bit
+we'st do for oursels i' th' sleepin' way.'
+
+To which Hannah gave a grim and energetic assent.
+
+When Louie had been told of their expected arrival she opened her
+black eyes to their very widest extent.
+
+'Well, you'd better keep Aunt Hannah and me out of each other's
+way,' she remarked. 'I shall let her have it, you'll see. I'm bound
+to.' A remark that David did his best to forget, seeing that the
+encounter was now past averting.
+
+When on Sunday afternoon the door of the Grieves's sitting-room
+opened to admit Hannah and Reuben Grieve, Louie was lying half
+asleep in an armchair by the fire, Cecile and Sandy were playing
+with bricks in the middle of the floor, and Dora and Lucy were
+chatting on the sofa.
+
+Lucy, who had seen Reuben before, but had never set eyes on Hannah,
+sprang up ill at ease and awkward, but genuinely anxious to behave
+nicely to her husband's relations.
+
+'Won't you take a chair? I'll go and call David. He's in the next
+room. This is Miss Lomax. Louie!'
+
+Startled by the somewhat sharp call, Louie sat up and rubbed her
+eyes.
+
+Hannah, resting on her stick, was standing in the middle of
+the floor. At sight of the familiar tyrannous face, grown
+parchment-white in place of its old grey hue--of the tall gaunt
+figure robed in the Sunday garb of rusty black which Louie
+perfectly remembered, and surmounted by the old head-gear--the
+stiff frizzled curls held in place by two small combs on the
+temples, the black bandeau across the front of the head, and the
+towering bonnet--Louie suddenly flushed and rose.
+
+'How do you do?' she said in a cool off-hand way, holding out her
+hand, which Hannah's black cotton glove barely touched. 'Well, Uncle
+Reuben, do you think I'm grown? I have had about time to, anyway,
+since you saw me. That's my little girl.'
+
+With a patronising smile she pushed forward Cecile. The
+short-sighted tremulous Reuben, staring uncomfortably about him at
+the town splendours in which 'Davy' lived, had to have the child's
+hand put into his by Dora before he could pull himself together
+enough to respond.
+
+'I'm glad to see tha, my little dear.' he said, awkwardly dropping
+his hat and umbrella as he stooped to salute her. 'I'm sure yo're
+varra kind, miss'--This was said apologetically to Dora, who had
+picked up his belongings and put them on a chair. 'Wal, Louie, she
+doan't feature her mither mich, as I can see.'
+
+He looked hurriedly at his wife for confirmation. Hannah, who had
+seated herself on the highest and plainest chair she could find,
+stared the child up and down, and then slowly removed her eyes,
+saying nothing. Instantly her manner woke the old rage in Louie,
+who was observing her excitedly.
+
+'Come here to me, Cecile. I'd be sorry, anyway, if you were like
+what your mother was at your age. You'd be a poor, ill-treated,
+half-starved little wretch if you were!'
+
+Hannah started, but not unpleasantly. Her grim mouth curved with a
+sort of satisfaction. It was many years since she had enjoyed those
+opportunities for battle which Louie's tempers had once so freely
+afforded her.
+
+'She's nobbut a midge,' she remarked audibly to Dora, who had just
+tried to propitiate her by a footstool. 'The chilt looks as thoo
+she'd been fed on spiders or frogs, or summat o' that soart.'
+
+At this moment David came in, just in time to prevent another
+explosion from Louie. He was genuinely glad to see his guests; his
+feeling of kinship was much stronger now than it ever had been in
+his youth; and in these years of independent, and on the whole
+happy, living he had had time to forget even Hannah's enormities.
+
+'Well, have you got a comfortable inn?' he asked Reuben presently,
+when some preliminaries were over.
+
+'I thank yo kindly, Davy,' said Reuben cautiously, 'we're meeterly
+weel sarved; bit yo conno look for mich fro teawn folk.'
+
+'What are yo allus so mealy-mouthed for?' said his wife
+indignantly. 'Why conno yo say reet out 'at it's a pleeace not fit
+for ony decent dog to put his head in, an' an ill-mannert
+daggle-tail of a woman to keep it, as I'd like to sweep out wi th'
+bits of a morning, an' leave her on th' muck-heap wheer she
+belongs?'
+
+David laughed. To an ear long accustomed to the monotony of town
+civilities there was a not unwelcome savour of the moors even in
+these brutalities of Hannah's.
+
+'Sandy, where are you?' he said, looking round. 'Have you had a look
+at him, Aunt Hannah?'
+
+Sandy, who was sitting in the midst of his bricks sucking his thumb
+patiently till Cecile should be given back to him by her mother,
+and these invaders should be somehow dispersed, looked up and gave
+his father a sleepy and significant nod, as much as to say, 'Leave
+me alone, and turn these people out.'
+
+But David lifted him up, and carried him off for exhibition. Hannah
+looked at him, as he lay lazily back on his father's arm; his fair
+curls straying over David's coat, his cheek flushed by the heat.
+'Aye, he's a gradely little chap,' she said, more graciously it
+seemed to David than he ever remembered to have heard Hannah Grieve
+speak before. His paternal vanity was instantly delighted.
+
+'Sit up, Sandy, and tell your great-uncle and aunt about the fine
+games you've been having with your cousin.'
+
+But Sandy was lost in quite other reflections. He looked out upon
+Hannah and Reuben with grave filmy eyes, as though from a vast
+distance, and said absently:
+
+'Daddy!'
+
+'Yes, Sandy, speak up.'
+
+'Daddy, when everybody in the world was babies, who put 'em to bed?'
+
+The child spoke as usual with a slow flute-like articulation, so
+that every word could be heard. Reuben and Hannah turned and looked
+at each other.
+
+'Lord alive!' cried Hannah 'whativer put sich notions into th'
+chilt's yed?'
+
+David, with a happy twinkle in his eye, held up a hand for silence.
+
+'I don't know, Sandy; give it up.'
+
+Sandy considered a second or two, then said, with the sigh of one
+who relinquishes speculation in favor of the conventional solution:
+
+'I s'pose God did.'
+
+His tone was dejected, as though he would gladly have come to
+another conclusion if he could.
+
+'Reuben,' said Hannah with severity, 'hand me that sugar-stick.'
+
+Reuben groped in his pockets for the barley-sugar, which, in spite
+of Hannah's scoffs, he had bought in Market Street the evening
+before, 'for t' childer.' He watched his wife in gaping astonishment
+as he saw her approaching Sandy, with blandishments which, rough
+and clumsy as they were, had nevertheless the effect of beguiling
+that young man on to the lap where barley-sugar was to be had.
+Hannah fed him triumphantly, making loud remarks on his beauty and
+cleverness.
+
+Meanwhile Louie stood on the other side of the fire, holding Cecile
+close against her, with a tight defiant grip--her lip twitching
+contemptuously. David, always sensitively alive to her presence and
+her moods, insisted in the midst of Sandy's feast that Cecile
+should have her share. Sandy held out the barley-sugar, following
+it with wistful eyes. Louie beat down Cecile's grasping hand. 'You
+shan't spoil your tea--you'll be sick with that stuff!' she said
+imperiously. Hannah turned, and brought a slow venomous scrutiny to
+bear upon her niece--on the slim tall figure in the elegant
+Parisian dress, the daintily curled and frizzled head, the wild
+angry eyes. Then she withdrew her glance, contented. Louie's
+evident jealousy appeased her. She had come to Manchester with one
+fixed determination--not to be 'talked foine to by that hizzy.'
+
+At this juncture tea made its appearance, Lucy having some time ago
+given up the sit-down tea in the dining-room, which was the natural
+custom of her class, as not genteel. She seated herself nervously
+to pour it out. Hannah had at the very beginning put her down 'as a
+middlin' soart o' person,' and vouchsafed her very little notice.
+
+'Auntie Dora! auntie Dora!' cried Sandy, escaping from Hannah's
+knee, 'I'm coming to sit by zoo.'
+
+And as soon as he had got comfortably into her pocket, he pulled
+her head down and whispered to her, his thoughts running as before
+in the theological groove, 'Auntie Dora, God made me--and God made
+Cecile--_did_ God make that one?'
+
+And he nodded across at Hannah, huddling himself together meanwhile
+in a paroxysm of glee and mischief. He was excited by the
+flatteries he had been receiving, and Dora, thankful to see that
+Hannah had heard nothing, could only quiet him by copious supplies
+of bread and butter.
+
+David wooed Cecile to sit on a stool beside him, and things went
+smoothly for a time, though Hannah made it clearly evident that
+this was not the kind of tea she had expected, and that she 'didn't
+howd wi' new-fangled ways o' takkin' your vittles.' Reuben did his
+best to cover and neutralise her remarks by gossip to David about
+the farm and the valley. 'Eh--it's been nobbut _raggy_ weather
+up o' the moors this winter, Davy, an' a great lot o' sheep lost.
+Nobbut twothrey o' mine, I thank th' Lord.' But in the midst of a
+most unflattering account of the later morals and development of
+the Wigson family, Reuben stopped dead short, with a stare at the
+door.
+
+'Wal, aa niver!--theer's Mr. Ancrum hissel,--I do uphowd yo!'
+
+And the old man rose with effusion, his queer eyes and face beaming
+and blinking with a light of affectionate memory, for Ancrum stood
+in the doorway, smiling a mute inquiry at Lucy as to whether he
+might come in. David sprang up to bring him into the circle. Hannah
+held out an ungracious hand. Never, all these years, had she
+forgiven the ex-minister those representations he had once made on
+the subject of David's 'prenticing.
+
+Then the new-comer sat down by Reuben cheerily, parrying the
+farmer's concern about his altered looks, and watching Louie, who
+had thrown him a careless word in answer to his greeting. Dora, who
+had come to know him well, and to feel much of the affectionate
+reverence for him that David did, in spite of some bewilderment as
+to his religious position, went round presently to talk to him, and
+Sandy as it happened was left on his stool for a minute or two
+forgotten. He asked his mother plaintively for cake, and she did
+not hear him. Meanwhile Cecile had cake, and he followed her eating
+of it with resentful eyes.
+
+'Come here, Cecile,' said David, 'and hold the cake while I cut it;
+there's a useful child.'
+
+He handed a piece to Reuben, and then put the next into Cecile's
+hand.
+
+'Ready for some more, little woman?'
+
+Cecile in a furtive squirrel-like way seized the piece and was
+retiring with it, when Sandy, beside himself, jumped from his
+stool, rushed at his cousin and beat her wildly with his small
+fists.
+
+'Yo're a geedy thing--a geedy 'gustin' thing!' he cried, sobbing
+partly because he wanted the cake, still more because, after his
+exaltation on Hannah's knee, he had been so unaccountably
+neglected. To see Cecile battening on a second piece while he was
+denied a first was more than could be borne.
+
+'You little viper, you!' exclaimed Louie, and springing up, she
+swept across to Sandy, and boxed his ears smartly, just as she was
+accustomed to box Cecile's, whenever the fancy took her.
+
+The child raised a piercing cry, and David caught him up.
+
+'Give him to me, David, give him to me,' cried Lucy, who had almost
+upset the tea-table in her rush to her child. 'I'll see whether that
+sister of yours shall beat and abuse my boy in my own house! Oh,
+she may beat her own child as much as she pleases, she does it all
+day long! If she were a poor person she would be had up.'
+
+Her face glowed with passion. The exasperation of many days spoke
+in her outburst. David, himself trembling with anger, in vain tried
+to quiet her and Sandy.
+
+'Ay, I reckon she maks it hot wark for them 'at ha to live wi her,'
+said Hannah audibly, looking round on the scene with a certain
+enjoyment which contrasted with the panic and distress of the rest.
+
+Louie, who was holding Cecile--also in tears--in her arms, swept
+her fierce, contemptuous gaze from Lucy to her ancient enemy.
+
+'You must be putting in _your_ word, must you?--you old toad,
+you--you that robbed us of our money till your own husband was
+ashamed of you!'
+
+And, totally regardless of the presence of Dora and Ancrum, and of
+the efforts made to silence her by Dora or by the flushed and
+unhappy Reuben, she descended on her foe. She flung charge after
+charge in Hannah's face, showing the minutest and most vindictive
+memory for all the sordid miseries of her childhood; and then when
+her passion had spent itself on her aunt, she returned to Lucy,
+exulting in the sobs and the excitement she had produced. In vain
+did David try either to silence her or to take Lucy away. Nothing
+but violence could have stopped the sister's tongue; his wife,
+under a sort of fascination of terror and rage, would not move.
+Flinging all thoughts of her dependence on David--of the money she
+had come to ask--of her leave-taking on the morrow--to the winds,
+Louie revenged herself amply for her week's unnatural self-control,
+and gave full rein to a mad propensity which had been gradually
+roused and spurred to ungovernable force by the trivial incidents
+of the afternoon. She made mock of Lucy's personal vanity; she
+sneered at her attempts to ape her betters, shrilly declaring that
+no one would ever take her for anything else than what she was, the
+daughter of a vulgar cheese-paring old hypocrite; and, finally, she
+attacked Sandy as a nasty, greedy, abominable little monkey, not
+fit to associate with her child, and badly in want of the stick.
+
+Then slowly she retreated to the door out of breath, the wild
+lightnings of her eyes flashing on them still. David was holding
+the hysterical Lucy, while Dora was trying to quiet Sandy.
+Otherwise a profound silence had fallen on them all, a silence
+which seemed but to kindle Louie's fury the more.
+
+'Ah, you think you've got him in your power, him and his money, you
+little white-livered cat!' she cried, standing in the doorway, and
+fixing Lucy with a look beneath which her sister-in-law quailed,
+and hid her face on David's arm. 'You think you'll stop him giving
+it to them that have a right to look to him? Perhaps you'd better
+look out; perhaps there are people who know more about him than
+you. Do you think he would ever have looked at you, you little
+powsement, if he hadn't been taken on the rebound?'
+
+She gave a mad laugh as she flung out the old Derbyshire word of
+abuse, and stood defying them, David and all. David strode forward
+and shut the door upon her. Then he went tenderly up to his wife,
+and took her and Sandy into the library.
+
+The sound of Cecile's wails could be heard in the distance. The
+frightened Reuben turned and looked at his wife. She had grown
+paler even than before, but her eyes were all alive.
+
+'A racklesome, natterin' creetur as ivir I seed,' she said calmly;
+'I allus telt tha, Reuben Grieve, what hoo'd coom to. It's bred in
+her--that's yan thing to be hodden i' mind. But I'll shift her in
+double quick-sticks if she ever cooms meddlin' i' _my_ house,
+Reuben Grieve--soa yo know.'
+
+'She oughtn't to stay here,' said Ancrum in a quick undertone to
+Dora; 'she might do that mother and child a mischief.'
+
+Dora sat absorbed in her pity for David, in her passionate sympathy
+for this home that was as her own.
+
+'She is going to-morrow, thank God!' she said with a long breath;
+'oh, what an awful woman!'
+
+Ancrum looked at her with a little sad smile.
+
+'Whom are you sorry for?' he asked. 'Those two in there?' and he
+nodded towards the library. 'Think again, Miss Dora. There is one
+face that will haunt me whenever I think of this--the face of that
+French child.'
+
+All the afternoon visitors dispersed. The hours passed. Lucy, worn
+out, had gone to bed with a crying which seemed to have in it some
+new and heavy element she would not speak of, even to David. The
+evening meal came, and there was no sign or sound from that room
+upstairs where Louie had locked herself in.
+
+David stood by the fire in the dining-room, his lips sternly set.
+He had despatched a servant to Louie's door with an offer to send
+up food for her and Cecile. But the girl had got no answer. Was he
+bound to go--bound to bring about the possible renewal of a
+degrading scene?
+
+At this moment Lizzie, the little nurse, tapped at the door.
+
+'If you please, sir--'
+
+'Yes. Anything wrong with Master Sandy?'
+
+David went to the door in a tremor. 'He won't go to sleep, sir. He
+wants you, and I'm afraid he'll disturb mistress again.'
+
+David ran upstairs.
+
+'Sandy, what do you want?'
+
+Sandy was crying violently, far down under the bedclothes. When
+David drew him out, he was found to be grasping a piece of
+crumbling cake, sticky with tears.
+
+'It's Cecile's cake,' he sobbed into his father's ear. 'I want to
+give it her.'
+
+And in fact, after his onslaught upon her, Cecile had dropped the
+offending cake, which he had instantly picked up the moment before
+Louie struck him. He had held it tight gripped ever since, and
+repentance was busy in his small heart.
+
+David thought a moment.
+
+'Come with me, Sandy,' he said at last, and, wrapping up the child
+in an old shawl that hung near, he carried him off to Louie's door.
+'Louie!' he called, after his knock, in a low voice, for he was
+uncomfortably aware that his household was on the watch for
+developments.
+
+For a while there was no answer. Sandy, absorbed in the interest of
+the situation, clung close to his father and stopped crying.
+
+At last Louie suddenly flung the door wide open.
+
+'What do you want?' she said defiantly, with the gesture and
+bearing of a tragic actress. She was, however, deadly white, and
+David, looking past her, saw that Cecile was lying wide awake in
+her little bed.
+
+'Sandy wants to give Cecile her cake,' he said quietly, 'and to
+tell her that he is sorry for striking her.'
+
+He carried his boy up to Cecile. A smile flashed over the child's
+worn face. She held out her little arms. David, infinitely touched,
+laid down Sandy, and the children crooned together on the same
+pillow, he trying to stuff the cake into Cecile's mouth, she gently
+refusing.
+
+'She's ill,' said Louie abruptly, 'she's feverish--I want a
+doctor.'
+
+'We can get one directly,' he said. 'Will you come down and have
+some food? Lucy has gone to bed. If Lizzie comes and sits by the
+children, perhaps they will go to sleep. I can carry Sandy back
+later.'
+
+Louie paused irresolutely. Then she went up to the bed, knelt down
+by it, and took Cecile in her arms.
+
+'You can take him away,' she said, pointing to Sandy. 'I will put
+her to sleep. Don't you send me anything to eat. I want a doctor.
+And if you won't order a fly for me at twenty minutes to nine
+to-morrow, I will go out myself, that's all.'
+
+'Louie!' he cried, holding out his hand to her in despair, 'why will
+you treat us in this way--what have we done to you?'
+
+'Never you mind,' she said sullenly, gathering the child to her and
+confronting him with steady eyes. There was a certain magnificence
+in their wide unconscious despair--in this one fierce passion.
+
+She and Lucy did not meet again. In the morning David paid her her
+hundred pounds, and took her and Cecile to the station, a doctor
+having seen the child the night before, and prescribed medicine,
+which had given her a quiet night. Louie barely thanked him for the
+money. She was almost silent and still very pale.
+
+Just before they parted, the thought of the tyranny of such a
+nature, of the life to which she was going back, wrung the
+brother's heart. The outrage of the day before dropped from his
+mind as of no account, effaced by sterner realities.
+
+'Write to me, Louie!' he said to her just as the train was moving
+off; 'I could always come if there was trouble--or Dora.'
+
+She did not answer, and her hand dropped from his. But he
+remembered afterwards that her eyes were fixed upon him, as long as
+the train was in sight, and the picture of her dark possessed look
+will be with him to the end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+It was a warm April Sunday. Lucy and Dora were pacing up and down
+in the garden, and Lucy was talking in a quick, low voice.
+
+'Oh! there was something, Dora. You know as well as I do there was
+something. That awful woman didn't say that for nothing. I suppose
+he'd tell me if I asked him.'
+
+'Then why don't you ask him?' said Dora, with a little frown.
+
+Lucy gathered a sprig of budding lilac, and restlessly stripped off
+its young green.
+
+'It isn't very pleasant,' she said at last, slowly. 'I dare say it's
+silly to expect your husband never to have looked at anybody
+else--'
+
+She paused again, unable to explain herself. Dora glanced at her,
+and was somewhat struck by her thin and worn appearance. She had
+often, moreover, seemed to her cousin to be fretting during these
+last weeks. Not that there was much difference in her ways with
+David and Sandy. But her small vanities, prejudices, and passions
+were certainly less apparent of late; she ordered her two servants
+about less; she was less interested in her clothes, less eager for
+social amusement. It was as though something clouding and dulling
+had passed over a personality which was naturally restless and
+vivacious.
+
+Yet it was only to-day, in the course of some conversation about
+Louie, of whom nothing had been heard since her departure, that
+Lucy had for the first time broken silence on the subject of those
+insolent words of her sister-in-law, which Ancrum and Dora had
+listened to with painful shock, while to Reuben and Hannah,
+pre-occupied with their own long-matured ideas of Louie, they had
+been the mere froth of a venomous tongue.
+
+'Why didn't you ask him about it at first--just after?' Dora
+resumed.
+
+'I didn't want to,' said Lucy, after a minute, and then would say
+no more. But she walked along, thinking, unhappily, of the moment
+when David had taken her into the library to be out of the sound of
+Louie's rage; of her angry desire to ask him questions, checked by
+a childish fear she could not analyse, as to what the answers might
+be; of his troubled, stormy face; and of the tender ways by which
+he tried to calm and comfort her. It had seemed to her that once or
+twice he had been on the point of saying something grave and
+unusual, but in the end he had refrained. Louie had gone away;
+their everyday life had begun again; he had been very full, in the
+intervals of his hard daily business, of the rebuilding of the
+James Street court, and of the apprentices' school; and, led by a
+variety of impulses--by a sense of jeopardised possession and a
+conscience speaking with new emphasis and authority--she had taken
+care that he should talk to her about both; she had haunted him in
+the library, and her presence there, once the signal of antagonism
+and dispute, had ceased to have any such meaning for him. Her
+sympathy was not very intelligent, and there was at times a
+childish note of sulkiness and reluctance in it; she was extremely
+ready to say, 'I told you so,' if anything went wrong; but,
+nevertheless, there was a tacit renunciation at the root of her new
+manner to him which he perfectly understood, and rewarded in his
+own ardent, affectionate way.
+
+As she sauntered along in this pale gleam of sun, now drinking in
+the soft April wind, now stooping to look at the few clumps of
+crocuses and daffodils which were pushing through the blackened
+earth, Lucy had once more a vague sense that her life this
+spring--this past year--had been hard. It was like the feeling of
+one who first realises the intensity of some long effort or
+struggle in looking back upon it. Her little life had been breathed
+into by a divine breath, and growth, expansion, had brought a pain
+and discontent she had never known before.
+
+Dora meanwhile had her own thoughts. She was lost in memories of
+that first talk of hers with David Grieve after his return from
+Paris, with the marks of his fierce, mysterious grief fresh upon
+him; then, pursuing her recollection of him through the years, she
+came to a point of feeling where she said, with sudden energy,
+throwing her arm round Lucy, and taking up the thread of their
+conversation:--
+
+'I wouldn't let what Louie said worry you a bit, Lucy. Of course,
+she wanted to make mischief; but you know, and I know, what sort of
+a man David has been since you and he were married. That'll be
+enough for you, I should think.'
+
+Lucy flushed. She had once possessed very little reticence, and had
+been quite ready to talk her husband over, any day and all day,
+with Dora. But now, though she would begin in the old way, there
+soon came a point when something tied her tongue.
+
+This time she attacked the lilac-bushes again with a restless hand.
+
+'Why, I thought you were shocked at his opinions,' she said,
+proudly.
+
+Dora sighed. Her conscience had not waited for Lucy's remark to
+make her aware of the constant perplexity between authority and
+natural feeling into which David's ideals were perpetually throwing
+her.
+
+'They make one very sad,' she said, looking away. 'But we must
+believe that God, who sees everything, judges as we cannot do.'
+
+Lucy fired up at once. It annoyed her to have Dora making spiritual
+allowance for David in this way.
+
+'I don't believe God wants anything but that people should be good,'
+she said. 'I am sure there are lots of things like that in the New
+Testament.'
+
+Dora shook her head slowly. '"He that hath not the Son, hath not
+life,"' she said under her breath, a sudden passion leaping to her
+eye.
+
+Lucy looked at her indignantly. 'I don't agree with you,
+Dora--there! And it all depends on what things mean.'
+
+'The meaning is quite plain,' said Dora, with rigid persistence. 'O
+Lucy, don't be led away. I missed you at early service this
+morning.'
+
+The look she threw her cousin melted into a pathetic and heavenly
+reproach.
+
+'Well, I know,' said Lucy, ungraciously, 'I was tired. I don't know
+what's wrong with me these last weeks; I can't get up in the
+morning.'
+
+Dora only looked grieved. Lucy understood that her plea seemed to
+her cousin too trivial and sinful to be noticed.
+
+'Oh! I dare say I'd go,' she said in her own mind, defiantly, 'if
+_he_ went.'
+
+Aloud, she said:--
+
+'Dora, just look at this cheek of mine; I can't think what
+the swelling is.'
+
+And she turned her right cheek to Dora, pointing to a lump, not
+discoloured, but rather large, above the cheek-bone. Dora stopped,
+and looked at it carefully.
+
+'Yes, I had noticed it,' she said. 'It is odd. Can't you account for
+it in any way?'
+
+'No. It's been coming some little while. David says I must ask Dr.
+Mildmay about it. I don't think I shall. It'll go away. Oh! there
+they are.'
+
+As she spoke, David and Sandy, who had been out for a Sunday walk
+together, appeared on the steps of the garden-door. David waved his
+hat to his wife, an example immediately followed by Sandy, who
+twisted his Scotch cap madly, and then set off running to her.
+
+Lucy looked at them both with a sudden softening and brightening
+which gave her charm. David came up to her, ran his arm through
+hers, and began to give her a laughing account of Sandy's
+behaviour. The April wind had flushed him, tumbled his black hair,
+and called up spring lights in the eyes, which had been somewhat
+dimmed by overmuch sedentary work and a too small allowance of
+sleep. His plenitude of virile energy, the glow of health and power
+which hung round him this afternoon, did but make Lucy seem more
+languid and faded as she hung upon him, smiling at his stories of
+their walk and of Sandy's antics.
+
+He broke off in the middle, and looked at her anxiously.
+
+'She isn't the thing, is she, Dora? I believe she wants a change.'
+
+'Oh! thank you!' cried Lucy, ironically--'with all Sandy's spring
+things and my own to look to, and some new shirts to get for you,
+and the spring cleaning to see to. Much obliged to you.'
+
+'All those things, madam,' said David, patting her hand, 'wouldn't
+matter twopence, if it should please your lord and master to order
+you off. And if this fine weather goes on, you'll have to take
+advantage of it. By the way, I met Mildmay, and asked him to come
+in and see you.'
+
+Lucy reddened.
+
+'Why, there's nothing,' she said, pettishly. 'This'll go away
+directly.' Instinctively she put up her hand to her cheek.
+
+'Oh! Mildmay won't worry you,' said David; 'he'll tell you what's
+wrong at once. You know you like him.'
+
+'Well, I must go,' said Dora.
+
+They understood that she had a mill-girls' Bible class at half-past
+five, and an evening service an hour later, so they did not press
+her to stay. Lucy kissed her, and Sandy escorted her halfway to the
+garden-door, giving her a breathless and magniloquent account of
+the 'hy'nas and kangawoos' she might expect to find congregated in
+the Merton Road outside. Dora, who was somewhat distressed by his
+powers of imaginative fiction, would not 'play up' as his father
+did, and he left her half-way to run back to David, who was always
+ready to turn road and back garden into 'Africa country' at a
+moment's notice, and people it to order with savages, elephants,
+boomerangs, kangaroos, and all other possible or impossible things
+that Sandy might chance to want.
+
+Dora, looking back from the garden, saw them all three in a group
+together--Sandy tugging at his mother's skirts, and shouting at the
+top of his voice; David's curly black head bent over his wife, who
+was gathering her brown shawl round her throat, as though the light
+wind chilled her. But there was no chill in her look. That, for the
+moment, as she swayed between husband and child, had in it the
+qualities of the April sun--a brightness and promise all the more
+radiant by comparison with the winter or the cloud from which it
+had emerged.
+
+Dora went home as quickly as tramcar and fast walking could take
+her. She still lived in the same Ancoats rooms with her
+shirt-making friend, who had kept company, poor thing! for four
+years with a young man, and had then given him up with anguish
+because he was not 'the sort of man she'd been taking him for,'
+though no one but Dora had ever known what qualities or practices,
+intolerable to a pure mind, the sad phrase covered. Dora might long
+ago have moved to more comfortable rooms and a better quarter of
+the town had she been so minded, for her wages as an admirable
+forewoman and an exceptionally skilled hand were high; but she
+passionately preferred to be near St. Damian's and amongst her
+'girls.' Also, there was the thought that by staying in the place
+whither she had originally moved she would be more easily
+discoverable if ever,--ay, if _ever_--Daddy should come back
+to her. She was certain that he was still alive; and great as the
+probabilities on the other side became with every passing year, few
+people had the heart to insist upon them in the face of her
+sensitive faith, whereof the bravery was so close akin to tears.
+
+Only once in all these years had there been a trace of Daddy.
+Through a silk-merchant acquaintance of his, having relations with
+Lyons and other foreign centres, David had once come across a
+rumour which had seemed to promise a clue. He had himself gone
+across to Lyons at once, and had done all he could. But the clue
+broke in his hand, and the tanned, long-faced lunatic from
+Manchester, whereof report had spoken, could be only doubtfully
+identified with a man who bore no likeness at all to Daddy.
+
+Dora's expectation and hope had been stirred to their depths, and
+she bore her disappointment hardly. But she did not therefore cease
+to hope. Instinctively on this Sunday night, when she reached home,
+she put Daddy's chair, which had been pushed aside, in its right
+place by the fire, and she tenderly propped up a stuffed bird,
+originally shot by Daddy in the Vosges, and now vilely overtaken by
+Manchester moths. Then she set round chairs and books for her
+girls.
+
+Soon they came trooping up the stairs, in their neat Sunday
+dresses, so sharply distinguished from the mill-gear of the week,
+and she spent with them a moving and mystical hour. She was
+expounding to them a little handbook of 'The Blessed Sacrament,'
+and her explanations wound up with a close appeal to each one of
+them to make more use of the means of grace, to surrender
+themselves more fully to the awful and unspeakable mystery by which
+the Lord gave them His very flesh to eat, His very blood to drink,
+so fashioning within them, Communion after Communion, the immortal
+and incorruptible body which should be theirs in the Resurrection.
+
+She spoke in a low, vibrating voice, somewhat monotonous in tone;
+her eyes shone with strange light under her round, prominent brow;
+all that she said of the joys of frequent Communion, of the mortal
+perils of unworthy participation, of treating the heavenly food
+lightly--coming to it, that is, unfasting and unprepared--of the
+need especially of Lenten self-denial, of giving up 'what each one
+of you likes best, so far as you can,' in preparation for the great
+Easter Eucharist--came evidently from the depths of her own intense
+conviction. Her girls listened to her with answering excitement and
+awe; one of them she had saved from drink, all of them had been her
+Sunday-school children for years, and many of them possessed, under
+the Lancashire exterior, the deep-lying poetry and emotion of the
+North.
+
+When she dismissed them she hurried off to church, to sit once more
+dissolved in feeling, aspiration, penitence; to feel the thrill of
+the organ, the pathos of the bare altar, and the Lenten hymns.
+
+After the service she had two or three things to settle with one of
+the curates and with some of her co-helpers in the good works of
+the congregation, so that when she reached home she was late and
+tired out. Her fellow-lodger was spending the Sunday with friends;
+there was no one to talk to her at her supper; and after supper she
+fell, sitting by the fire, into a mood of some flatness and
+reaction. She tried to read a religious book, but the religious
+nerve could respond no more, and other interests, save those of her
+daily occupations, she had none.
+
+In Daddy's neighbourhood, what with his travels, his whims, and his
+quotations, there had been always something to stir the daughter's
+mind, even if it were only to reprobation. But since he had left
+her the circle of her thoughts had steadily and irrevocably
+narrowed. All secular knowledge, especially the reading of other
+than religious books, had become gradually and painfully
+identified, for her, with those sinister influences which made
+David Grieve an 'unbeliever,' and so many of the best Manchester
+workmen 'atheists.'
+
+So now, in her physical and moral slackness, she sat and thought
+with some bitterness of a 'young woman' who had recently entered
+the shop which employed her, and, by dint of a clever tongue, was
+gaining the ear of the authorities, to the disturbance of some of
+Dora's cherished methods of distributing and organising the work.
+They might have trusted her more after all these years; but nobody
+appreciated her; she counted for nothing.
+
+Then her mind wandered on to the familiar grievances of Sandy's
+religious teaching and Lucy's gradual defection from St. Damian's.
+She must make more efforts with Lucy, even if it angered David. She
+looked back on what she had done to bring about the marriage, and
+lashed herself into a morbid sense of responsibility.
+
+But her missionary projects were no more cheering to her than her
+thoughts about the shop and her work, and she felt an intense sense
+of relief when she heard the step of her room-mate, Mary Styles,
+upon the stairs. She made Mary go into every little incident of her
+day; she was insatiable for gossip--a very rare mood for her--and
+could not be chattered to enough.
+
+And all through she leant her head against her father's chair,
+recalling Lucy on her husband's arm, and the child at her skirts,
+with the pathetic inarticulate longing which makes the tragedy of
+the single life. She could have loved so well, and no one had ever
+wished to make her his wife; the wound of it bled sometimes in her
+inmost heart.
+
+Meanwhile, on this same April Sunday, Lucy, after Sandy was safe in
+bed, brought down some needlework to do beside David while he read.
+It was not very long since she had induced herself to make so great
+a breach in the Sunday habits of her youth. As soon as David's
+ideals began to tease her out of thought and sympathy, his freedoms
+also began to affect her. She was no longer so much chilled by his
+strictness, or so much shocked by his laxity.
+
+David had spoken of a busy evening. In reality, a lazy fit overtook
+him. He sat smoking, and turning over the pages of Eckermann's
+'Conversations with Goethe.'
+
+'What are you reading?' said Lucy at last, struck by his face of
+enjoyment. 'Why do you like it so much?'
+
+'Because there is no one else in the world who hits the right nail
+on the head so often as Goethe,' he said, throwing himself back
+with a stretch of pleasure. 'So wide a brain--so acute and sane a
+temper!'
+
+Lucy looked a little lost, as she generally did when David made
+literary remarks to her. But she did not drop the subject.
+
+'You said something to Professor Madgwick the other day about a
+line of Goethe you used to like so when you were a boy. What did it
+mean?'
+
+She flushed, as though she were venturing on something which would
+make her ridiculous.
+
+'A line of Goethe?' repeated David, pondering. 'Oh! I know. Yes, it
+was a line from Goethe's novel of "Werther." When I was young and
+foolish--when you and I were first acquainted, in fact, and you
+used to scold me for going to the Hall of Science!--I often said
+this line to myself over and over. I didn't know much German, but
+the swing of it carried me away.'
+
+And, with a deep voice and rhythmic accent, he repeated:'
+_Handwerker trugen ihn; kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet_.'
+
+'What does it mean?' said Lucy.
+
+'Well, it comes at the end of the story. The hero commits suicide
+for love, and Goethe says that at his burial, on the night after
+his death, "labouring men bore him; no priest went with him."'
+
+He bent forward, clasping his hands tightly, with the half smiling,
+half dreamy look of one who recalls a bygone thrill of feeling,
+partly in sympathy, partly in irony.
+
+'Then he wasn't a Christian?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Do you still
+hate priests so much, David?'
+
+'It doesn't look like it, does it, madam,' he said, laughing, 'when
+you think of all my clergymen friends?'
+
+And, in fact, as Lucy's mind pondered his answer, she easily
+remembered the readiness with which any of the clergy at St.
+Damian's would ask his help in sending away a sick child, or giving
+a man a fresh start in life, or setting the necessary authorities
+to work in the case of some moral or sanitary scandal. She thought
+also of various Dissenting ministers who called on him and
+corresponded with him; of his reverent affection for Canon Aylwin,
+for Ancrum.
+
+'Well, anyway, you care about the labouring men,' she went on
+persistently. 'I suppose you're what father used to call a "canting
+Socialist"?'
+
+'No,' said David, quietly--'no, I'm not a Socialist, except'--and
+he smiled--'in the sense in which some one said the other day, "we
+are all Socialists now."'
+
+'Well, what does it mean?' said Lucy, threading another needle, and
+feeling a certain excitement in this prolonged mental effort.
+
+David tried to explain to her the common Socialist ideal in simple
+terms--the hope of a millennium, when all the instruments of
+production shall be owned by the State, and when the surplus profit
+produced by labour, over and above the maintenance of the worker
+and the general cost of production, will go, not to the capitalist,
+the individual rich man, but to the whole community of workers;
+when everybody will be made to work, and as little advantage as
+possible will be allowed to one worker above another.
+
+'I think it's absurd!' said Lucy, up in arms at once for all the
+superiorities she loved. 'What nonsense! Why, they can't ever do it!'
+
+'Well, it's about that!' said David, smiling at her. 'Still,
+no doubt it _could_ be done, if it ought to be done. But
+Socialism, as a system, seems to _me_, at any rate, to strike
+down and weaken the most precious thing in the world, that on which
+the whole of civilised life and progress rests--the spring of will
+and conscience in the individual. Socialism as a spirit, as an
+influence, is as old as organised thought--and from the beginning
+it has forced us to think of the many when otherwise we should be
+sunk in thinking of the one. But, as a modern dogmatism, it is like
+other dogmatisms. The new truth of the future will emerge from it
+as a bud from its sheath, taking here and leaving there.' He sat
+looking into the fire, forgetting his wife a little.
+
+'Well, any way, I'm sure you and I won't have anything to do with
+it,' said Lucy positively. 'I don't a bit believe Lady Driffield
+will have to work in the mills, though Mrs. Shepton did say it
+would do her good. I shouldn't mind something, perhaps, which would
+make her and Colonel Danby less uppish.'
+
+She drew her needle in and out with vindictive energy.
+
+'Well, I don't see much prospect of uppish people dying out of the
+world,' said David, throwing himself back in his chair; 'until--'
+
+He paused.
+
+'Until what?' inquired Lucy.
+
+'Well, of course,' he said after a minute, in a low voice, 'we must
+always hold that the world is tending to be better, that the Divine
+Life in it will somehow realise itself, that pride will become
+gentleness, and selfishness love. But the better life cannot be
+imposed from without--it must grow from within.'
+
+Lucy pondered a moment.
+
+'Then is it--is it because you think working-men _better_ than
+other people that you are so much more interested in them? Because
+you are, you know.'
+
+'Oh dear no!' he said, smiling at her from under the hand which shaded
+his eyes; 'they have their own crying faults and follies. But--so many
+of them lack the first elementary conditions which make the better life
+possible--that is what tugs at one's heart and fills one's mind! How can
+_we_--we who have gained for ourselves health and comfort and
+knowledge--how can we stand by patiently and see our brother diseased
+and miserable and ignorant?--how can we bear our luxuries, so long as a
+child is growing up in savagery whom we might have taught,--or a man is
+poisoning himself with drink whom we might have saved,--or a woman is
+dropping from sorrow and overwork whom we might have cherished and
+helped? We are not our own--we are parts of the whole. Generations of
+workers have toiled for us in the past. And are we, in return, to carry
+our wretched bone off to our own miserable corner!--sharing and giving
+nothing? Woe to us if we do! Upon such comes indeed the "second
+death,"--the separation final and irretrievable, as far, at any rate, as
+this world is concerned, between us and the life of God!'
+
+Lucy had dropped her work. She sat staring at him--at the shining
+eyes, at the hand against the brow which shook a little, at the
+paleness which went so readily in him with any expression of deep
+emotion. Never had he so spoken to her before; never, all these
+years. In general no one shrank more than he from 'high phrases;'
+no one was more anxious than he to give all philanthropic talk a
+shrewd business-like aspect, which might prevent questions as to
+what lay beneath.
+
+Her heart fluttered a little.
+
+'David!' she broke out, 'what is it you believe? You know Dora
+thinks you believe nothing.'
+
+'Does she?' he said, with evident shrinking. 'No, I don't think she
+does.'
+
+Lucy instinctively moved her chair closer to him, and laid her head
+against his knee.
+
+'Yes, she does. But I don't mind about that. I just wish you'd tell
+me why you believe in God, when you won't go to church, and when
+you think Jesus was just--just a man.'
+
+She drew her breath quickly. She was making a first voyage of
+discovery in her husband's deepest mind, and she was astonished at
+her own venturesomeness.
+
+He put out a hand and touched her hair.
+
+'I can't read Nature and life any other way,' he said at last,
+after a silence. 'There seems to me something in myself, and in
+other human beings, which is beyond Nature--which, instead of being
+made by Nature, is the condition of our knowing there is a Nature
+at all. This something--reason, consciousness, soul, call it what
+you will--unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world
+reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of
+a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of
+sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal
+life--"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!--whence, if there
+is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. And so, in
+its most perfect work, it carries us to God--it bids us claim our
+sonship--it gives us hope of immortality!'
+
+His voice had the vibrating intensity of prayer. Lucy hardly
+understood what he said at all, but the tears came into her eyes as
+she sat hiding them against his knee.
+
+'But what makes you think God is good--that He cares anything about
+us?' she said softly.
+
+'Well--I look back on human life, and I ask what reason--which is
+the Divine Life communicated to us, striving to fulfil itself in
+us--has done, what light it throws upon its "great Original." And
+then I see that it has gradually expressed itself in law, in
+knowledge, in love; that it has gradually learnt, under the
+pressure of something which is itself and not itself, that to be
+gained life must be lost; that beauty, truth, love, are the
+realities which abide. Goodness has slowly proved itself in the
+world,--is every day proving itself,--like a light broadening in
+darkness!--to be that to which reason tends, in which it realises
+itself. And, if so, goodness here, imperfect and struggling as we
+see it always, must be the mere shadow and hint of that goodness
+which is in God!--and the utmost we can conceive of human
+tenderness, holiness, truth, though it tell us all we know, can yet
+suggest to us only the minutest fraction of what must be the Divine
+tenderness,--holiness,--truth.'
+
+There was a silence.
+
+'But this,' he added after a bit, 'is not to be proved by argument,
+though argument is necessary and inevitable, the mind being what it is.
+It can only be proved by living,--by taking it into our hearts,--by
+every little victory we gain over the evil self.'
+
+The fire burnt quietly beside them. Everything was still in the house.
+Nothing stirred but their own hearts.
+
+At last Lucy looked up quickly.
+
+'I am glad,' she said with a kind of sob--'glad you think God loves
+us, and, if Sandy and I were to die, you would find us again.'
+
+Instead of answering, he bent forward quickly and kissed her. She
+gave a little shrinking movement.
+
+'Oh! that poor cheek!' he said remorsefully; 'did I touch it? I hope
+Dr. Mildmay won't forget to-morrow.'
+
+'Oh! never mind about it,' she said, half impatiently. 'David!'
+
+Her little thin face twitched and trembled. He was puzzled by her
+sudden change of expression, her agitation.
+
+'David!--you know--you know what Louie said. I want you to tell me
+whether she--she meant anything.'
+
+He gave a little start, then he understood perfectly.
+
+'My dear wife,' he said, laying his hand on hers, which were
+crossed on his knee.
+
+She waited breathlessly.
+
+'You shall know all there is to know,' he said at last, with an
+effort. 'I thought perhaps you would have questioned me directly
+after that scene, and I would have told you; but as you did not, I
+could not bring myself to begin. What Louie said had to do with
+things that happened a year before I asked you to be my wife. When
+I spoke to you, they were dead and gone. The girl herself--was
+married. It was her story as well as my own, and it seemed to
+concern no one else in the world--not even you, dear. So I thought
+then, any way. Since, I have often wondered whether I was right.'
+
+'Was it when you were in Paris?' she asked sharply.
+
+He gave a sign of assent.
+
+'I thought so!' she cried, drawing her breath. 'I always said there
+was more than being ill. I said so to Dora. Well, tell me--tell me
+at once! What was she like? Was she young, and good-looking?'
+
+He could not help smiling at her--there was something so childish
+in her jealous curiosity.
+
+'Let me tell you in order,' he said, 'and then we will both put it
+out of sight--at least, till I see Louie again.'
+
+His heavy sigh puzzled her. But her strained and eager eyes
+summoned him to begin.
+
+He told her everything, with singular simplicity and frankness. To
+Lucy it was indeed a critical and searching moment! No wife,
+whatever stuff she may be made of, can listen to such a story for
+the first time, from the husband she loves and respects, without
+passing thereafter into a new state of consciousness towards him.
+Sometimes she could hardly realise at all that it applied to David,
+this tale of passion he was putting, with averted face, into these
+short and sharp sentences. That conception of him which the daily
+life of eight years, with its growing self-surrender, its expanding
+spiritual force, had graven on her mind, clashed so oddly with all
+that he was saying! A certain desolate feeling, too large and deep
+in all its issues to be harboured long in her slight nature, came
+over her now and then. She had been so near to him all these years,
+and had yet known nothing. It was the separateness of the
+individual lot--that awful and mysterious chasm which divides even
+lover from lover--which touched her here and there like a cold
+hand, from which she shrank.
+
+She grew a little cold and pale when he spoke of his weeks of
+despair, of the death from which Ancrum had rescued him. But any
+ordinary prudish word of blame, even for his silence towards her,
+never occurred to her. Once she asked him a wistful question:--
+
+'You and she thought that marrying didn't matter at all when people
+loved each other--that nobody had a right to interfere? Do you
+think that now, David?'
+
+'No,' he said, with deep emphasis. 'No.--I have come to think the
+most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, to be better
+worth having than what people call an "ideal passion,"--if the
+ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those
+fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such
+infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its
+own weakness. I did not know it,--but, so far as in me lay, I was
+betraying and injuring that society which has given me all I have.'
+
+She sat silent. 'The most disappointing marriage.' An echo from that
+overheard talk at Benet's Park floated through her mind. She
+winced, and shrank, even as she realised his perfect innocence of
+any such reference.
+
+Then, with eagerness, she threw herself into innumerable questions
+about Elise--her looks, her motives, the details of what she said
+and did. Beneath the satisfaction of her curiosity, of course,
+there was all the time a pang--a pang not to be silenced. In her
+flights of idle fancy she had often suspected something not unlike
+the truth, basing her conjecture on the mystery which had always
+hung round that Paris visit, partly on the world's general
+experience of what happened to handsome young men. For, in her
+heart of hearts, had there not lurked all the time a wonder which
+was partly self-judgment? Had David, with such a temperament, never
+been more deeply moved than she knew herself to have moved him?
+More than once a secret inarticulate suspicion of this kind had
+crossed her. The poorest and shallowest soul may have these flashes
+of sad insight, under the kindling of its affections.
+
+But now she knew, and the difference was vast. After she had asked
+all her questions, and delivered a vehement protest against the
+tenacity of his self-reproach with regard to Louie--for what decent
+girl need go wrong unless she has a mind to?--she laid her head
+down again on David's knee.
+
+'I don't think she cared much about you--I'm sure she couldn't
+have,' she said slowly, finding a certain pleasure in the words.
+
+David did not answer. He was sunk in memory. How far away lay that
+world of art and the artist from this dusty, practical life in
+which he was now immersed! At no time had he been really akin to
+it. The only art to which he was naturally susceptible was the art
+of oratory and poetry. Elise had created in him an artificial
+taste, which had died with his passion. Yet now, as his quickened
+mind lingered in the past, he felt a certain wide philosophic
+regret for the complete divorce which had come about between him
+and so rich a section of human experience.
+
+He was roused from his reverie, which would have reassured her,
+could she have followed it, more than any direct speech, by a
+movement from Lucy. Dropping the hand which had once more stolen
+over his brow, he saw her looking at him with wide, wet eyes.
+
+'David!'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Come here! close to me!'
+
+He moved forward, and laid his arm round her shoulders, as she sat
+in her low chair beside him.
+
+'What is it, dear? I have been keeping you up too late.'
+
+She lifted a hand, and brought his face near to hers.
+
+'David, I am a stupid little thing--but I do understand more than I
+did, and I would never, _never_ desert you for anything,--for
+any sorrow or trouble in the world!'
+
+The mixture of yearning, pain, triumphant affection in her tone,
+cannot be rendered in words.
+
+His whole heart melted to her. As he held her to his breast, the
+hour they had just passed through took for both of them a sacred
+meaning and importance. Youth was going--their talk had not been
+the talk of youth. Was true love just beginning?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+'_My God! My God!_'
+
+The cry was David's. He had reeled back against the table in his
+study, his hand upon an open book, his face turned to Doctor
+Mildmay, who was standing by the fireplace.
+
+'Of course, I can't be sure,' said the doctor hastily, almost
+guiltily. 'You must not take it upon my authority alone. Try and
+throw it off your mind. Take your wife up to town to see Selby or
+Paget, and if I am wrong I shall be too thankful! And, above all,
+don't frighten her. Take care--she will be down again directly.'
+
+'You say,' said David, thickly, 'that if it were what you suspect,
+operation would be difficult. Yes, I see there is something of the
+sort here.'
+
+He turned, shaking all over, to the book beside him, which was a
+medical treatise he had just taken down from his scientific
+bookcase.
+
+'It would be certainly difficult,' said the doctor, frowning, his
+lower lip pushed forward in a stress of thought, 'but it would have
+to be attempted. Only, on the temporal bone it will be a puzzle to
+go deep enough.'
+
+David's eye ran along the page beside him. 'Sarcoma, which was
+originally regarded with far less terror than cancer (carcinoma),
+is now generally held by doctors to be more malignant and more
+deadly. There is much less pain, but surgery can do less, and death
+is in most cases infinitely more rapid.'
+
+'Hush!' said the doctor, with short decision, 'I hear her coming
+down again. Let me speak.'
+
+Lucy, who had run upstairs to quiet a yell of crying from Sandy
+immediately after Doctor Mildmay had finished his examination of
+her swollen cheek, opened the door as he spoke. She was slightly
+flushed, and her eyes were more wide open and restless than usual.
+David was apparently bending over a drawer which he had opened on
+the farther side of his writing-table. The doctor's face was
+entirely as usual.
+
+'Well now, Mrs. Grieve,' he said cheerily, 'we have been
+agreeing--your husband and I--that it will be best for you to go up
+to London and have that cheek looked at by one of the crack
+surgeons. They will give you the best advice as to what to do with
+it. It is not a common ailment, and we are very fine fellows down
+here, but of course we can't get the experience, in a particular
+line of cases, of one of the first-rate surgical specialists. Do
+you think you could go to-morrow? I could make an appointment for
+you by telegraph to-day.'
+
+Lucy gave a little unsteady, affected laugh.
+
+'I don't see how I can go all in a moment like that,' she said. 'It
+doesn't matter! Why don't you give me something for it, and it will
+go away.'
+
+'Oh! but it does matter,' said the doctor, firmly. 'Lumps like that
+are serious things, and mustn't be trifled with.'
+
+'But what will they want to do to it?' said Lucy nervously. She was
+standing with one long, thin hand resting lightly on the back of a
+chair, looking from David, whose face and figure were blurred to
+her by the dazzle of afternoon light coming in through the window,
+to Doctor Mildmay.
+
+The doctor cleared his throat.
+
+'They would only want to do what was best for you in every way,' he
+said; 'you may be sure of that. Could you be very brave if they
+advised you that it ought to be removed?'
+
+She gave a little shriek.
+
+'What! you mean cut it out--cut it away!' she cried, shaking, and
+looking at him with the frowning anger of a child. 'Why, it would
+leave an ugly mark, a hideous mark!'
+
+'No, it wouldn't. The mark would disfigure you much less than the
+swelling. They would take care to draw the skin together again
+neatly, and you could easily arrange your hair a little. But you
+ought to get a first-rate opinion.'
+
+'What is it? what do you call it?' said Lucy, irritably. 'I can't
+think why you make such a fuss.'
+
+'Well, it might be various things,' he said evasively. 'Any way, you
+take my advice, and have it seen to. I can telegraph as I go from
+here.'
+
+'I could take you up to-morrow,' said David, coming forward in
+answer to the disturbed look she threw him. Now that her flush had
+faded, how pale and drooping she was in the strong light! 'It would
+be better, dear, to do what Doctor Mildmay recommends. And you
+never mind a day in London, you know.'
+
+Did she detect any difference in the voice? She moved up to him,
+and he put his arm round her.
+
+'Must I?' she said, helplessly; 'it's such a bore, to-morrow
+particularly. I had promised to take Sandy out to tea.'
+
+'Well, let that young man go without a treat for once,' said the
+doctor, laughing. 'He has a deal too many, anyway. Very well, that's
+settled. I will telegraph as I go to the train. Just come here a
+moment, Grieve.'
+
+The two went out together. When David returned, any one who had
+happened to be in the hall would have seen that he could hardly
+open the sitting-room door, so fumbling were his movements. As he
+passed through the room to reach the study he caught sight of his
+own face in a glass, and stopping, with clenched hands, pulled
+himself together by the effort of his whole being.
+
+When he opened the study-door, Lucy was hunting about his table in
+a quick, impatient way.
+
+'I can't think where you keep your india-rubber rings, David. I want
+to put one round a parcel for Dora.'
+
+He found one for her. Then she stood by the fire, as the
+sunset-light faded into dusk, and poured out to him a story of
+domestic grievances. Sarah, their cook, wished to leave and be
+married--it was very unexpected and very inconsiderate, and Lucy
+did not believe the young man was steady; and how on earth was she
+to find another cook? It was enough to drive one wild, the
+difficulty of getting cooks in Manchester.
+
+For nearly an hour, till the supper-bell rang, she stood there,
+with her foot on the fender, chattering in a somewhat sharp, shrill
+way. Not one word would she say, or let him say, of London or the
+doctor's visit.
+
+After supper, as they went back into the study, David looked for
+the railway-guide. 'The 10. 15 will do,' he said. 'Mildmay has made
+the appointment for three. We can just get up in time.'
+
+'It is great nonsense!' said Lucy, pouting. 'The question is, can we
+get back? I must get back. I don't want to leave Sandy for the
+night. He's got a cold.'
+
+It seemed to David that something clutched at his breath and voice.
+Was it he or some one else that said:--
+
+'That will be too tiring, dear. We shall have to stay the night.'
+
+'No, I must get back,' said Lucy, obstinately.
+
+Afterwards she brought her work as usual, and he professed to smoke
+and read. But the evening passed, for him, beneath his outward
+quiet, in a hideous whirl of images and sensations, which
+ultimately wore itself out, and led to a mood of dulness and
+numbness. Every now and then, as he sat there, with the fire
+crackling, and the familiar walls and books about him, he felt
+himself sinking, as it were, in a sudden abyss of horror; then,
+again, the scene of the afternoon seemed to him absurd, and he
+despised his own panic. He dwelt upon everything the doctor had
+said about the rarity, the exceptional nature of such an illness.
+Well, what is rare does not happen--not to oneself--that was what
+he seemed to be clinging to at last.
+
+When Lucy went up to bed, he followed her in about a quarter of an
+hour.
+
+'Why, you are early!' she said, opening her eyes.
+
+'I am tired,' he said. 'There was a great press of work to-day. I
+want a long night.'
+
+In reality, he could not bear her out of his sight. Hour after hour
+he tossed restlessly, beside her quiet sleep, till the spring
+morning broke.
+
+They left Manchester next morning in a bitter east wind. As she
+passed through the hall to the cab, Lucy left a little note for
+Dora on the table, with instructions that it should be posted.
+
+'I want her to come and see him at his bedtime,' she said, 'for of
+course we can't get back for that.'
+
+David said nothing. When they got to the station, he dared not even
+propose to her the extra comfort of first class, lest he should
+intensify the alarm he perfectly well divined under her offhand,
+flighty manner.
+
+By three o'clock they were in the waiting-room of the famous doctor
+they had come to see. Lucy looked round her nervously as they
+entered, with quick, dilating nostrils, and across David there
+swept a sudden choking memory of the trapped and fluttering birds
+he had sometimes seen in his boyhood struggling beneath a
+birdcatcher's net on the moors.
+
+As the appointment was at an unusual time, they were not kept
+waiting very long by the great man. He received them with a sort of
+kindly distance, made his examination very quickly, and asked her a
+number of general questions, entering the answers in his large
+patients' book.
+
+Then he leant back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Lucy over
+his spectacles.
+
+'Well,' he said at last, with a perfectly cheerful and businesslike
+voice, 'I am quite clear there is only one thing to be done, Mrs.
+Grieve. You must have that growth removed.'
+
+Lucy flushed.
+
+'I want you to give me something to take it away,' she said, half
+sullenly, half defiantly. She was sitting very erect, in a little
+tight-fitting black jacket, with her small black hat and veil on
+her knee.
+
+'No, I am sorry to say nothing can be done in that way. If you were
+my daughter or sister, I should say to you, have that lump removed
+without a day's, an hour's unnecessary delay. These growths are not
+to be trifled with.'
+
+He spoke with a mild yet penetrating observance of her. A number of
+reflections were passing rapidly through his mind. The operation
+was a most unpromising one, but it was clearly the surgeon's duty
+to try it. The chances were that it would prolong life which was
+now speedily and directly threatened, owing to the proximity of the
+growth to certain vital points.
+
+'When could you do it?' said David, so hoarsely that he had to
+repeat his question. He was standing with his arm on the
+mantelpiece, looking down on the surgeon and his wife.
+
+The great man lifted his eyebrows, and looked at his
+engagement-book attentively.
+
+'I _could_ do it to-morrow,' he said at last; 'and the sooner,
+the better. Have you got lodgings? or can I help you? And--'
+
+Then he stopped, and looked at Lucy. 'Let me settle things with your
+husband, Mrs. Grieve,' he said, with a kindly smile. 'You look tired
+after your journey. You will find a fire and some newspapers in the
+waiting-room.'
+
+And, with a suavity not to be gainsaid, he ushered her himself
+across the hall, and shut the waiting-room door upon her. Then he
+came back to David.
+
+A little while after a bell rang, and the man-servant who answered
+it presently took some brandy into the consulting-room. Lucy
+meanwhile sat, in a dazed way, looking out of window at the square
+garden, where the lilacs were already in full leaf in spite of the
+east wind.
+
+When her husband and the doctor came in she sprang up, looking
+partly awkward, partly resentful. Why had they been discussing it
+all without her?
+
+'Well, Mrs. Grieve,' said the doctor, 'your husband is just going to
+take you on to see the lodgings I recommend. By good luck they are
+just vacant. Then, if you like them, you know, you can settle in at
+once.'
+
+'But I haven't brought anything for the night,' cried Lucy in an
+injured voice, looking at David.
+
+'We will telegraph to Dora, darling,' he said, taking up her bag
+and umbrella from the table; 'but now we mustn't keep Mr. Selby. He
+has to go out.'
+
+'How long will it take?' interrupted Lucy, addressing the surgeon.
+'Can I get back next day?'
+
+'Oh no! you will have to be four or five days in town. But don't
+alarm yourself, Mrs. Grieve. You won't know anything at all about
+the operation itself; your husband will look after you, and then a
+little patience--and hope for the best. Now I really must be off.
+Good-bye to you--good-bye to you.'
+
+And he hurried off, leaving them to find their own cab. When they
+got in, Lucy said, passionately:--
+
+'I want to go back, David. I want Sandy. I won't go to these
+lodgings.'
+
+Then courage came to him. He took her hand.
+
+'Dear, dear wife--for my sake--for Sandy's!'
+
+She stared at him--at his white face.
+
+'Shall I die?' she cried, with the same passionate tone.
+
+'No, no, no!' he said, kissing the quivering hand, and seeing no
+one but her in the world, though they were driving through the
+crowd of Regent Street. 'But we must do everything Mr. Selby said.
+That hateful thing must be taken away--it is so near--think for
+yourself!--to the eye and the brain; and it might go downwards to
+the throat. You will be brave, won't you? We will look after you
+so--Dora and I.'
+
+Lucy sank back in the cab, with a sudden collapse of nerve and
+spirit. David hung over her, comforting her, one moment promising
+her that in a few days she should have Sandy again, and be quite
+well; the next, checked and turned to stone by the memory of the
+terrible possibilities freely revealed to him in his private talk
+with Mr. Selby, and by the sense that he might be soothing the
+present only to make the future more awful.
+
+'David! she is in such fearful pain! The nurse says she must have
+more morphia. They didn't give her enough. Will you run to Mr.
+Selby's house? You won't find him, of course--he is on his
+round--but his assistant, who was with him here just now, went back
+there. Run for him at once.'
+
+It was Dora who spoke, as she closed the folding-doors of the inner
+room where Lucy lay. David, who was crouching over the fire in the
+sitting-room, whither the nurse had banished him for a while, after
+the operation, sprang up, and disappeared in an instant. Those
+faint, distant sounds of anguish which had been in his ear for half
+an hour or more, ever since the doctors had departed, declaring
+that everything was satisfactorily over, had been more than his
+manhood could bear.
+
+He returned in an incredibly short space of time with a young
+surgeon, who at once administered another injection of morphia.
+
+'A highly sensitive patient,' he said to David, 'and the nerves
+have, no doubt, been badly cut. But she will do now.'
+
+And, indeed, the moaning had ceased. She lay with closed eyes--so
+small a creature in the wide bed--her head and face swathed in
+bandages. But the breathing was growing even and soft. She was once
+more unconscious.
+
+The doctor touched David's hand and went, after a word with the
+nurse.
+
+'Won't you go into the next room, sir, and have your tea? Mrs.
+Grieve is sure to sleep now,' said the nurse to him in her
+compassion.
+
+He shook his head, and sat down near the foot of the bed. The nurse
+went into the dressing-room a moment to speak to Dora, who was
+doing some unpacking there, and he was left alone with his wife.
+
+The sounds of the street came into the silent room, and every now
+and then he had a start of agony, thinking that she was moving
+again--that she was in pain again. But no, she slept; her breath
+came gently through the childish parted lips, and the dim
+light--for the nurse had drawn the curtains on the lengthening
+April day--hid her pallor and the ghastliness of the dressings.
+
+Forty-eight hours ago, and they were in the garden with Sandy! And
+now life seemed to have passed for ever into this half-light of
+misery. Everything had dropped away from him--the interests of his
+business, his books, his social projects. He and she were shut out
+from the living world. Would she ever rise from that bed
+again--ever look at him with the old look?
+
+He sat on there, hour after hour, till Dora coaxed him into the
+sitting-room for a while, and tried to make him take some food. But
+he could not touch it, and how the sudden gas which the servant lit
+glared on his sunken eyes! He waited on his companion mechanically,
+then sat, with his head on his hand, listening for the sound of the
+doctors' steps.
+
+When they came, they hardly disturbed their patient. She moaned at
+being touched; but everything was right, and the violent pain which
+had unexpectedly followed the operation was not likely to recur.
+
+'And what a blessing that she took the chloroform so well, with
+hardly any after-effects!' said Mr. Selby cheerily, drawing on his
+gloves in the sitting-room. 'Well, Mr. Grieve, you have got a good
+nurse, and can leave your wife to her with perfect peace of mind.
+You must sleep, or you will knock up; let me give you a sleeping
+draught.'
+
+'Oh! I shall sleep,' said David, impatiently. 'You considered the
+operation successful--completely successful?'
+
+The surgeon looked gravely into the fire.
+
+'I shall know more in a week or so,' he said. 'I have never
+disguised from you, Mr. Grieve, how serious and difficult the case
+was. Still, we have done what was right--we can but wait for the
+issue.'
+
+An hour later Dora looked into the sitting-room, and said softly:--
+
+'She would like to see you, David.'
+
+He went in, holding his breath. There was a night-light in the room,
+and her face was lying in deep shadow.
+
+He knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand.
+
+'My darling!' he said--and his voice was quite firm and
+steady--'are you easier now?'
+
+'Yes,' she said faintly. 'Where are you going to sleep?'
+
+'In a room just beyond Dora's room. She could make me hear in a
+moment if you wanted me.'
+
+Then, as he looked closer, he saw that about her head was thrown
+the broad white lace scarf she had worn round her neck on the
+journey up. And as he bent to her, she suddenly opened her languid
+eyes, and gazed at him full. For the moment it was as though she
+were given back to him.
+
+'I made Dora put it on,' she said feebly, moving her hand towards
+the lace. 'Does it hide all those nasty bandages?'
+
+'Yes. I can't see them at all.'
+
+'Is it pretty?'
+
+The little gleam of a smile nearly broke down his self-command.
+
+'Very,' he said, with a quivering lip.
+
+She closed her eyes again.
+
+'Oh! I hope Lizzie will look after Sandy,' she said after a while,
+with a long sigh.
+
+Not a word now of wilfulness, of self-assertion! After the
+sullenness and revolt of the day before, which had lasted
+intermittently almost up to the coming of the doctors, nothing
+could be more speaking, more pathetic, than this helpless
+acquiescence.
+
+'I mustn't stay with you,' he said. 'You ought to be going to sleep
+again. Nurse will give you something if you can't.'
+
+'I'm quite comfortable,' she said, sleepily. 'There isn't any pain.'
+
+And she seemed to pass quickly and easily into sleep as he sat
+looking at her.
+
+An hour or two later, Dora, who could not sleep from the effects of
+fatigue and emotion, was lying in her uncomfortable stretcher-bed,
+thinking with a sort of incredulity of all that had passed since
+David's telegram had reached her the day before, or puzzling
+herself to know how her employers could possibly spare her for
+another three or four days' holiday, when she was startled by some
+recurrent sounds from the room beyond her own. David was sleeping
+there, and Dora, with her woman's quickness, had at once perceived
+that the partition between them was very thin, and had been as
+still as a mouse in going to bed.
+
+The sound alarmed her, though she could not make it out.
+Instinctively she put her ear to the wall. After a minute or two
+she hastily moved away, and hiding her head under the bedclothes,
+fell to soft crying and praying.
+
+For it was the deep rending sound of suppressed weeping, the
+weeping of a strong man who believes himself alone with his grief
+and with God. That she should have heard it at all filled her with
+a sort of shame.
+
+Things, however, looked much brighter on the following morning. The
+wound caused by the operation was naturally sore and stiff, and the
+dressing was painful; but when the doctor's visit was over, and
+Lucy was lying in the halo of her white scarf on her fresh pillows,
+in a room which Dora and the nurse had made daintily neat and
+straight, her own cheerfulness was astonishing. She made Dora go
+out and get her some patterns for Sandy's summer suits, and when
+they came she lay turning them over from time to time, or weakly
+twisting first one and then another round her finger. She was, of
+course, perpetually anxious to know when she would be well, and
+whether the scar would be very bad; but on the whole she was a
+docile and promising patient, and she even began to see some gleams
+of virtue in Mr. Selby, for whom at first she had taken the
+strongest dislike.
+
+Meanwhile, David, haunted always by a horrible knowledge which was
+hid from her, could get nothing decided for the future out of the
+doctors.
+
+'We must wait,' said Mr. Selby; 'for the present all is healing
+well, but I wish we could get up her general strength. It must have
+been running down badly of late.'
+
+Whereupon David was left reproaching himself for blindness
+and neglect, the real truth being that, with any one of Lucy's
+thin elastic frame and restless temperament, a good deal of
+health-degeneration may go on without its becoming conspicuous.
+
+A few days passed. Dora was forced to go back to work; but as she
+was to take up her quarters at the Merton Road house, and to write
+long accounts of Sandy to his mother every day, Lucy saw her depart
+with considerable equanimity. Dora left her patient on the sofa, a
+white and ghostly figure, but already talking eagerly of returning
+to Manchester in a week. When she heard the cab roll off, Lucy lay
+back on her cushions and counted the minutes till David should come
+in from the British Museum, whither, because of her improvement, he
+had gone to clear up one or two bibliographical points. She
+caressed the thought of being left alone with him, except for the
+nurse--left to that tender and special care he was bestowing on her
+so richly, and through which she seemed to hold and know him
+afresh.
+
+When he came in she reproached him for being late, and both enjoyed
+and scouted his pleas in answer.
+
+'Well, I don't care,' she said obstinately; 'I wanted you.'
+
+Then she heaved a long sigh.
+
+'David, I made nurse let me look at the horrid place this morning.
+I shall always be a fright--it's no good.'
+
+But he knew her well enough to perceive that she was not really
+very downcast, and that she had already devised ways and means of
+hiding the mark as much as possible.
+
+'It doesn't hurt or trouble you at all?' he asked her anxiously.
+
+'No, of course not,' she said impatiently. 'It's getting well. Do
+ask nurse to bring me my tea.'
+
+The nurse brought it, and she and David spoiled their invalid with
+small attentions.
+
+'It's nice being waited on,' said Lucy when it was over, settling
+herself to rest with a little sigh of sensuous satisfaction.
+
+Another week passed, and all seemed to be doing well, though Mr.
+Selby would say nothing as yet of allowing her to move. Then came a
+night when she was restless; and in the morning the wound troubled
+her, and she was extremely irritable and depressed. The moment the
+nurse gave him the news at his door in the early morning, David's
+face changed. He dressed, and went off for Mr. Selby, who came at
+once.
+
+'Yes,' he said gravely, after his visit, as he shut the
+folding-doors of Lucy's room behind him--'yes, I am sorry to say
+there is a return. Now the question is, what to do.'
+
+He came and stood by the fireplace, legs apart, head down, debating
+with himself. David, haggard and unshorn, watched him helplessly.
+
+'We could operate again,' he said thoughtfully, 'but it would cut
+her about terribly. And I can't disguise from you, Mr. Grieve'--as
+he raised his head and caught sight of his companion his tone
+softened insensibly--'that, in my opinion, it would be all but
+useless. I more than suspect, from my observation to-day, that
+there are already secondary growths in the lung. Probably they have
+been there for some time.'
+
+There was a silence.
+
+'Then we can do nothing,' said David.
+
+'Nothing effectual, alas!' said the doctor, slowly. 'Palliatives, of
+course, we can use, of many kinds. But there will not be much pain.'
+
+'Will it be long?'
+
+David was standing with his back to the doctor, looking out of
+window, and Mr. Selby only just heard the words.
+
+'I fear it will be a rapid case,' he said reluctantly. 'This return
+is rapid, and there are many indications this morning I don't like.
+But don't wish it prolonged, my dear sir!--have courage for her and
+yourself.'
+
+The words were not mere platitudes--the soul of a good man looked
+from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the directions he
+had left with the nurse, and promised to come again in the evening.
+Then he grasped David's hand, and would have gone away quickly. But
+David, following him mechanically to the door, suddenly recollected
+himself.
+
+'Could we move her?' he asked; 'she may crave to get home, or to
+some warm place.'
+
+'Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. 'With an
+invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk about it
+when I come again to-night.'
+
+'A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went downstairs,
+'and, thank heaven! a rare one. Strange and mysterious thing it is,
+with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor thing! poor thing!
+and yesterday she was so cheerful--she would tell me all about her
+boy.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The history of the weeks that followed shall be partly told in
+David's own words, gathered from those odds-and-ends of paper, old
+envelopes, the half-sheets of letters, on which he would write
+sometimes in those hours when he was necessarily apart from Lucy,
+thrusting them on his return between the leaves of his locked
+journal, clinging to them as the only possible record of his wife's
+ebbing life, yet passionately avoiding the sight of them when they
+were once written.
+
+'RYDAL, AMBLESIDE: _May 5th_--We arrived this afternoon. The
+day has been glorious. The mountains round the head of the lake, as
+we drove along it at a foot's pace that the carriage might not
+shake her, stood out in the sun; the light wind drove the
+cloud-shadows across their blues and purples; the water was a sheet
+of light; the larches were all out, though other trees are late;
+and every breath was perfume.
+
+'But she was too weary to look at it; and before we had gone two
+miles, it seemed to me that I could think of nothing but the
+hateful length of the drive, and the ups and downs of the road.
+
+'When we arrived, she would walk into the cottage, and before
+nurse or I realised what she was doing, she went straight through
+the little passage which runs from front to back, out into the
+garden. She stood a moment--in her shawls, with the little white
+hood she has devised for herself drawn close round her head and
+face--looking at the river with its rocks and foaming water, at the
+shoulder of Nab Scar above the trees, at the stone house with the
+red blinds opposite.
+
+'"It looks just the same," she said, and the tears rolled down her
+cheeks.
+
+'We brought her in--nurse and I--and when she had been put
+comfortably on the low couch I had sent from London beforehand, and
+had taken some food, she was a little cheered. She made us draw her
+to the window of the little back sitting-room, and she lay looking
+out till it was almost dark. But as I foresaw, the pain of coming
+is more than equal to any pleasure there may be.
+
+'Yet she would come. During those last days in London, when she
+would hardly speak to us, when she lay in the dark in that awful
+room all day, and every attempt to feed her or comfort her made her
+angry, I could not, for a long time, get her to say what she wished
+about moving, except that she would not go back to Manchester.
+
+'Her hand-glass could not be kept from her, and one morning she
+cried bitterly when she saw that she could no longer so arrange her
+laces as to completely hide the disfigurement of the right side of
+the face.
+
+'"No! I will _never_ go back to Merton Road!" she cried,
+throwing down the glass; "no one shall see me!"
+
+'But at night, after I hoped she was asleep, she sent nurse to say
+that she wanted to go to--_Rydal!_--to the same cottage by the
+Rotha we had stayed at on our honeymoon. Nurse said she could--she
+could have an invalid-carriage from door to door. Would I write for
+the rooms at once? And Sandy could join us there.
+
+'So, after nine years, we are here again. The house is empty. We
+have our old rooms. Nothing is changed in the valley. After she was
+asleep, I went out along the river, keeping to a tiny path on the
+steep right bank till I reached a wooden bridge, and then through a
+green bit, fragrant with fast-springing grass and flowers, to that
+point beside the lake I remember so well. I left her there one day,
+sitting, and dabbling in the water, while I ran up Loughrigg. She
+was nineteen. How she tripped over the hills!
+
+'To-night there was a faint moon. The air was cold, but quite
+still, and the reflections, both of the islands and of Nab Scar,
+seemed to sink into unfathomed depths of shadowy water. Loughrigg
+rose boldly to my left against the night sky; I could see the
+rifle-butts and the soft blackness of the great larch-plantation on
+the side of Silver How.
+
+'There, to my right, was the tower of the little church, whitish
+against the woods, and close beside it, amid the trees, I felt the
+presence of Wordsworth's house, though I could not see it.
+
+'O Poet! who wrote for me, not knowing--oh, heavenly valley!--you
+have but one voice; it haunts my ears:--
+
+    _'Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
+     The bowers where Lucy played;
+     And thine, too, is the last green field
+     That Lucy's eyes surveyed._'
+
+'_May 10th_.--She never speaks of dying, and I dare not
+speak of it. But sometimes she is like a soul wandering in terror
+through a place of phantoms. Her eyes grow large and strained, she
+pushes me away from her. And she often wakes at night, sinking in
+black gulfs of fear, from which I cannot save her.
+
+'Oh, my God! my heart is torn, my life is sickened with pity! Give
+me some power to comfort--take from me this impotence, this
+numbness. She, so little practised in suffering, so much of
+a child still, called to bear this _monstrous_ thing. Savage,
+incredible Nature! But behind Nature there is God--
+
+'To-night she asked me to pray with her--asked it with reproach.
+"You never say good things to me now!" And I could not explain
+myself.
+
+'It was in this way. When Dora was with her, she used to read and
+pray with her. I would not have interfered for the world. When Dora
+left, I thought she would use the little manual of prayers for the
+sick that Dora had left behind; the nurse, who is a religious
+woman, and reads to her a good deal, would have read this whenever
+she wished. One night I offered to read it to her myself, but she
+would not let me. And for the rest--in spite of our last talk--I
+was so afraid of jarring her, of weakening any thought that might
+have sustained her. 'But to-night she asked me, and for the first
+time since our earliest married life I took her hand and prayed.
+Afterwards she lay still, till suddenly her lip began to quiver.
+'"I wasn't ever so very bad. I did love you and Sandy, and I did help
+that girl,--you know--that Dora knew, who went wrong. And I am so
+ill--SO ill!"'
+
+'MAY 20TH.--A fortnight has passed. Sandy and his nurse are lodging
+at a house on the hill; every morning he comes down here, and I
+take him for a walk. He was very puzzled and grave at first when he
+saw her, but now he has grown used to her look, and he plays
+merrily about among the moss-grown rocks beside the river, while
+she lies in the slung couch, to which nurse and I carry her on a
+little stretcher, watching him. 'There was a bright hour this
+morning. We are in the midst of a spell of dry and beautiful
+weather, such as often visits this rainy country in the early
+summer, before any visitors come. The rhododendrons and azaleas are
+coming out in the gardens under Loughrigg--some little copses here
+and there are sheets of blue--and the green is rushing over the
+valley. We had put her among the rocks under a sycamore-tree--a
+singularly beautiful tree, with two straight stems dividing its
+rounded masses of young leaf. There were two wagtails perching on
+the stones in the river, and swinging their long tails; and the
+light flickered through the trees on to the water foaming round the
+stones or slipping in brown cool sheets between them. There was a
+hawthorn-tree in bloom near by; in the garden of the house opposite
+a woman was hanging out some clothes to dry; the Grasmere coach
+passed with a clatter, and Sandy with the two children from the
+lodgings ran out to the bridge to look at it. 'Yes, she had a moment
+of enjoyment! I bind the thought of it to my heart. Lizzie was
+sitting sewing near the edge of the river, that she might look
+after Sandy. He was told not to climb on to the stones in the
+current of the stream, but as he was bent on catching the vain,
+provoking wagtails who strutted about on them, the prohibition was
+unendurable. As soon as Lizzie's head was bent over her work, he
+would clamber in and out till he reached some quite forbidden rock;
+and then, looking back with dancing eyes and the tip of his little
+tongue showing between his white teeth, he would say, "Go on with
+your work, Nana, DARLING!"--And his mother's look never left him
+all the time. 'Once he had been digging with his little spade among
+the fine grey gravel silted up here and there among the hollows of
+the rocks. He had been digging with great energy, and for May the
+air was hot. Lizzie looked up and said to him, "Sandy, it's time
+for me to take you to bed"--that is, for his midday sleep. "Yes,"
+he said, with a languid air, sitting down on a stone with his spade
+between his knees--"yes, I think I'd better come to bed. My heart
+is very dreary."
+
+'What do you mean?'
+
+'My heart is very dreary--dreary means tired, you know.'
+
+'Oh, indeed!--where is your heart?'
+
+'Here,' he said, laying his hand lackadaisically on the
+small of his back.
+
+'And then she smiled, for the first time for so many, many days! I
+came to sit by her; she left her hand in mine; and after the child
+was gone the morning slipped by peacefully, with only the sound of
+the river and the wheels of a few passing carts to break the
+silence.
+
+'In the afternoon she asked me if I should not have to go back to
+Manchester. How could all those men and those big printing-rooms
+get on without me? I told her that John reported to me every other
+day; that a batch of our best men had sent word to me, through him,
+that everything was going well, and I was not to worry; that there
+had been a strike of some importance among the Manchester
+compositors, but that our men had not joined.
+
+'She listened to it all, and then she shut her eyes and said:--
+
+'"I'm glad you did that about the men. I don't understand quite--but
+I'm glad."
+
+'... You can see nothing of her face now in its white draperies
+but the small, pointed chin and nose; and then the eyes, with their
+circles of pain, the high centre of the brow, and a wave or two of
+her pretty hair tangled in the lace edge of the hood.
+
+'"_My darling,--my darling! God have mercy upon us!_"'
+
+'_June 2nd.--"For the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this
+commandment._" How profoundly must he who spoke the things
+reported in this passage have conceived of marriage! _For the
+hardness of your hearts._ Himself governed wholly by the inward
+voice, unmoved by the mere external authority of the great Mosaic
+name, he handles the law presented to him with a sort of sad irony.
+
+The words imply the presence in him of a slowly formed and
+passionately held ideal. Neither sin, nor suffering, nor death can
+nor ought to destroy the marriage bond, once created. It is not
+there for our pleasure, nor for its mere natural object,--but to
+form the soul.
+
+'The world has marched since that day, in law--still more, as it
+supposes, in sentiment. But are we yet able to bear such a saying?
+
+'... Then compare with these words the magnificent outburst in
+which, a little earlier, he sweeps from his path his mother and his
+brethren. There are plentiful signs--take the "corban" passage, for
+instance, still more, the details of the Prodigal Son--of the same
+deep and tender thinking as we find in the most authentic sayings
+about marriage applied to the parental and brotherly relation. But
+he himself, realising, as it would seem, with peculiar poignancy,
+the sacredness of marriage and the claim of the family, is yet
+alone, and must be alone to the end. The fabric of the Kingdom
+rises before him; his soul burns in the fire of his message; and
+the lost sheep call.
+
+'She has been fairly at ease this afternoon, and I have been lying
+on the grass by the lake, pondering these things. The narrative of
+Mark, full as it is already of legendary accretion, brings one so
+close to him; the living breath and tone are in one's ears.'
+
+'_June 4th_.--These last two days she is much worse. The
+local trouble is stationary; but there must be developments we know
+nothing of elsewhere. For she perishes every day before our
+eyes--we cannot give her sleep--there is such malaise, emaciation,
+weariness.
+
+'She is wonderfully patient. It seems to me, looking back, that a
+few days ago came a change. I cannot remember any words that marked
+it, but it is as though--without our knowing it--her eyes had
+turned themselves irrevocably from us and from life, to the hills
+of death. Yet--strange!--she takes more notice of those about her.
+
+Yesterday she showed an interest just like her old self in the
+children's going to a little fete at Ambleside. She would have them
+all in--Sandy and the landlady's two little girls--to look at them
+when they were dressed.--What strikes me with awe is that she has
+no more tears, though she says every now and then the most touching
+things--things that pierce to the very marrow.
+
+'She told me to-day that she wished to see her father. I have
+written to him this evening.'
+
+'_June 6th_.--Purcell has been here a few hours, and has gone
+back to-night. She received him with perfect calmness, though they
+have not spoken to each other for ten years. He came in with his
+erect, military port and heavy tread, looking little older, though
+his hair is gray. But he blenched at sight of her.
+
+'"You must kiss me on the forehead," she said to him feebly, "but,
+please, very gently."
+
+'So he kissed her, and sat down. He cleared his throat often, and
+did not know what to say. But she asked him, by degrees, about some
+of her mother's relations whom she had not seen for long, then
+about himself and his health. The ice thawed, but the talk was
+difficult. Towards the end he inquired of her--and, I think, with
+genuine feeling--whether she had "sought salvation." She said
+faintly, "No;" and he, looking shocked and shaken, bade her, with
+very much of his old voice and manner, and all the old phraseology,
+"lay hold of the merits of Jesus."
+
+'Towards the end of his exhortations she interrupted him.
+
+'"You must see Sandy, and you must kiss me again. I wasn't a good
+daughter. But, oh! why wouldn't you make friends with me and David?
+I tried--you remember I tried?"
+
+'"I am ready to forgive all the past," he said, drawing himself
+up: "I can say no more."
+
+'"Well, kiss me!" she said, in a melancholy whisper. And he kissed
+her again.
+
+'Then I would not let him exhaust her any more, or take any set
+farewell. I hurried him away as though for tea, and nurse and I
+pronounced against his seeing her again.
+
+'On our walk to the coach he broke out once more, and implored me,
+with much unction and some dignity, not to let my infidel opinions
+stand in the way, but to summon some godly man to see and talk with
+her. I said that a neighbouring clergyman had been several times to
+see her, since, as he probably knew, she had been a Churchwoman for
+years. In my inward frenzy I seemed to be hurling all sorts of wild
+sayings at his head; but I don't believe they came to speech, for I
+know at the end we parted with the civility of strangers. I
+promised to send him news. What amazed me was his endless curiosity
+about the details of her illness. He would have the whole history
+of the operation, and all the medical opinion she could remember
+from the nurse. And on our walk he renewed the subject; but I could
+bear it no more.
+
+'Oh, my God! what does it matter to me _why_ she is dying?'
+
+'Then, when I got home, I found her rather excited, and she
+whispered to me: "He asked me if I had sought salvation, and
+I said No. I didn't seek it, David; but it comes--when you are
+here." Then her chest heaved, but with that strange instinct of
+self-preservation she would not say a word more, nor would she let
+me weep. She asked me to hold her hands in mine, and so she slept a
+little.
+
+'Dora writes that in a fortnight more she can get a holiday of a
+week or two. Will she be in time?
+
+'It is two months to-day since we went to London.'
+
+On one of the last days in June Dora arrived. It seemed to her that
+Lucy could have but a few days to live. Working both outwardly and
+inwardly, the terrible disease had all but done its work. She had
+nearly lost the power of swallowing, and lived mainly on the
+morphia injections which were regularly administered to her. But at
+intervals she spoke a good deal, and quite clearly.
+
+And Dora had not been six hours with her before a curious thing
+happened. The relation which, ever since their meeting as girls,
+had prevailed between her and Lucy, seemed to be suddenly reversed.
+She was no longer the teacher and sustainer; in the little dying
+creature there was now a remote and heavenly power; it could not be
+described, but Dora yielded with tears to the awe and sovereignty
+of it.
+
+She saw with some plainness, however, that it depended on the
+relation between the husband and wife. Since she had been with them
+last, it had been touched--this relation--by a Divine alchemy. The
+self in both seemed to have dropped away. The two lives were no
+longer two, but one--he cherishing, she leaning.
+
+The night she came she pressed Lucy to take the Holy Communion.
+Lucy assented, and the Communion was administered, with David
+kneeling beside her pillow. But afterwards Lucy was troubled, and
+when Dora proposed at night to read and pray with her, she said
+faintly, 'No; David does.' And thenceforward, though she was all
+gentleness, Dora did not find it very easy to get religious speech
+with her, and went often--poor Dora!--sadly, and in fear.
+
+Dora had been in the house five days, when new trouble followed on
+the old. David one morning received a letter from Louie, forwarded
+from Manchester, and when Dora followed him into the garden with a
+message, she found him walking about distracted.
+
+'Read it!' he said.
+
+The letter was but a few scrawled lines:--
+
+'Cecile has got diphtheria. Our doctor says so, but he is a devil. I
+must have another--the best--and there is no money. If she dies,
+you will never see me again, I swear. I dare say you will think it
+a good job, but now you know.'
+
+The writing was hardly legible, and the paper had been twisted and
+crumpled by the haste of the writer.
+
+'What is to be done?' said David, in pale despair. 'Can I leave this
+house one hour?--one minute?'
+
+Then a sudden thought struck him. He looked at Dora with a flash of
+appeal.
+
+'Dora, you have been our friend always, and you have been good to
+Louie. Will you go? I need not say all shall be made easy. I could
+get John to take you over. He has been several times to Paris for
+me this last five years, and would be a help.'
+
+That was indeed a struggle for Dora! Her heart clung to these
+people she loved, and the devote in her yearned for those last
+opportunities with the dying, on the hope of which she still fed
+herself. To go from this deathbed, to that fierce mother, in those
+horrible surroundings!
+
+But just as she had taught Louie in the old days because David
+Grieve asked her, so now she went, in the end, because he asked
+her.
+
+She was to be away six days at least. But the doctor thought it
+possible she might return to find Lucy alive. David made every
+possible arrangement--telegraphed to Louie that she was coming; and
+to John directing him to meet her at Warrington and take her on;
+wrote out the times of her journey; the address of a pension in the
+Avenue Friedland, kept by an English lady, to which he happened to
+be able to direct her; and the name of the English lawyer in Paris
+who had advised him at the time of Louie's marriage, had done
+various things for him since, and would, he knew, be a friend in
+need.
+
+Twelve hours after the arrival of Louie's letter, Dora tore herself
+from Lucy. 'Don't say good-bye,' said David, his face working, and
+to spare him and Lucy she went as though she were just going across
+the road for the night. David saw her--a white and silent
+traveller--into the car that was to take her on the first stage of
+a journey which, apart from everything else, alarmed her provincial
+imagination. David's gratitude threw her into a mist of tears as
+she drove off. Surely, of all the self-devoted acts of Dora's life,
+this mission and this leave-taking were not the least!
+
+Lucy heard the wheels roll away. A stony, momentary sense of
+desolation came over her as this one more strand was cut. But David
+came in, and the locked lips relaxed. It had been necessary to tell
+her the reason of Dora's departure. And in the course of the long
+June evening David gathered from the motion of her face that she
+wished to speak to him. He bent down to her, and she murmured:--
+
+'Tell Louie I wished I'd been kinder--I pray God will let her keep
+Cecile.... She must come to Manchester again when I'm gone.'
+
+The night-watch was divided between David and the nurse. At five
+o'clock in the summer morning--brilliant once more after storm and
+rain--he injected morphia into the poor wasted arm, and she took a
+few drops of brandy. Then, after a while, she seemed to sleep; and
+he, stretched on a sofa beside her, and confident of waking at the
+slightest sound, fell into a light doze.
+
+Lucy woke when the sun was high, rather more than an hour later.
+Her eyes were teased by a chink in the curtain; she hardly knew
+what it was, but her dying sense shrank, and she vaguely thought of
+calling David. But as she lay, propped up, she looked down on him,
+and she saw his pale, sunken face, with the momentary softening of
+rest upon it. And there wandered through her mind fragments of his
+sayings to her in that last evening of theirs together in the
+Manchester house,--especially, '_It can only be proved by
+living--by every victory over the evil self_.' In its mortal
+fatigue her memory soon lost hold of words and ideas; but she had
+the strength not to wake him.
+
+Then as she lay in what seemed to her this scorching light--in
+reality it was one little ray which had evaded the thick curtains--
+a flood of joy seemed to pour into her soul. 'I shall not live
+beyond to-day,' she thought, 'but I know now I shall see him again.'
+
+When at last she made a faint movement, and he woke at once, he saw
+that the end was very near. He thought of Dora in Paris with a
+pang, but there was no help for it. Through that day he never
+stirred from her side in the darkened room, and she sank fast. She
+spoke only one connected sentence--to say with great difficulty,
+'Dying is long--but--_not_--painful.' The words woke in him a
+strange echo; they had been among the last words of 'Lias, his
+childhood's friend. But she breathed one or two names--the landlady
+of the lodging-house, and the servants, especially the nurse.
+
+They came in on tiptoe and kissed her. She had already thanked each
+one.
+
+Sandy was just going to bed, when David carried him in to her. One
+of her last conscious looks was for him. He was in his nightgown,
+with bare feet, holding his father tight round the neck, and
+whimpering. They bent down to her, and he kissed her on the cheek,
+as David told him, 'very softly.' Then he cried to go away from this
+still, grey mother. David gave him to the nurse and came back.
+
+The day passed, and the night began. The doctor in his evening
+visit said it would be a marvel if she saw the morrow. David sat
+beside the bed, his head bowed on the hand he held; the nurse was
+in the farther corner. His whole life and hers passed before him;
+and in his mind there hovered perpetually the image of the potter
+and the wheel. He and she--the Hand so unfaltering, so divine had
+bound them there, through resistance and anguish unspeakable. And
+now, for him there was only a sense of absolute surrender and
+submission, which in this hour of agony and exaltation rose
+steadily into the ecstasy--ay, the _vision_ of faith! In the
+pitying love which had absorbed his being he had known that 'best'
+at last whereat his craving youth had grasped; and losing himself
+wholly had found his God.
+
+And for her, had not her weak life become one flame of love--a cup
+of the Holy Grail, beating and pulsing with the Divine Life?
+
+The dawn came. She pulled restlessly at her white wrapper--seemed
+to be in pain--whispered something of 'a weight.' Then the last
+change came over her. She opened her eyes--but they saw no longer.
+Nature ceased to resist, and the soul had long since yielded
+itself. With a meekness and piteousness of look not to be told,
+never to be forgotten, Lucy Grieve passed away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The very day after Lucy had been carried to her last rest in that
+most poetic of all graveyards which bends its grassy shape to the
+encircling Rotha and holds in trust the ashes of Wordsworth, David
+Grieve started for Paris.
+
+He had that morning received a telegram from Dora: 'Louie
+disappeared. Have no clue. Can you come?' Two days before, the news
+of Cecile's death from diphtheria had reached him in a letter from
+poor Dora, rendered almost inarticulate by her grief for Lucy and
+bitter regret for her own absence from her cousin's deathbed,
+mingling with her pity for Louie's unfortunate child and her dread
+and panic with regard to Louie herself.
+
+But so long as that white form lay shrouded in the cottage upper
+room, he could not move--and he could scarcely feel. The telegram
+broke in upon a sort of lethargy which had held him ever since
+Lucy's last breath. He started at once. On the way he spent two
+hours at Manchester. On the table in his study there still lay the
+medical book he had taken down from his scientific shelf on the
+night of Dr. Mildmay's visit; in Lucy's room her dresses hung as
+she had left them on the doors; a red woollen cap she had been
+knitting for Sandy was thrown down half finished on the
+dressing-table. Of the hour he spent in that room, putting away
+some of the little personal possessions, still warm as it were from
+her touch, let no more be said.
+
+When he reached Paris he inquired for Dora at the _pension_ in
+the Avenue Friedland, to which he had sent her. John, who had also
+written to him, and was still in Paris, was staying, he knew, at an
+hotel on the Quai Voltaire. But he went to Dora first.
+
+Dora, however, was not at home. She had left for him the full
+address of the house in the Paris _banlieue_ where she had
+found Louie, and full directions as to how to reach it. He took one
+of the open cabs and drove thither in the blazing July sun.
+
+An interminable drive!--the whole length of the Avenue de la
+Grande-Armee and the Avenue de Neuilly, past the Seine and the Rond
+Pont de Courbevoie, until at last turning to the left into the wide
+and villainously paved road that leads to Rueil, Bougival, and St.
+Germain, the driver and David between them with difficulty
+discovered a side street which answered to the name Dora had
+several times given.
+
+They had reached one of the most squalid parts of the western
+_banlieue_. Houses half built and deserted in the middle,
+perhaps by some bankrupt builder; small traders, bakers,
+_charcutiers_, fried-fish sellers, lodged in structures
+of lath and plaster, just run up and already crumbling;
+_cabarets_ of the roughest and meanest kind, adorned with
+high-sounding devices,--David mechanically noticed one which had
+blazoned on its stained and peeling front, _A la renaissance du
+Phenix_;--heaps of rubbish and garbage with sickly children
+playing among them; here and there some small, ill-smelling
+factory; a few melancholy shrubs in new-made gardens, drooping and
+festering under a cruel sun in a scorched and unclean soil:--the
+place repelled and outraged every sense. Was it here that little
+Cecile had passed from a life of pain to a death of torture?
+
+He rang at a sinister and all but windowless house, which he was
+able to identify from Dora's directions. John opened to him, and in
+a little room to the right, which looked on to a rank bit of
+neglected garden, he found Dora. A woman, with a scowling brow and
+greedy mouth, disappeared into the back premises as he entered.
+
+Dora and he clasped hands. Then the sight of his face broke down
+even her long-practised self-control, and she laid her head down on
+the table and sobbed. But he showed little emotion; while John,
+standing shyly on the other side of the room, and the weeping Dora
+could hardly find words to tell their own story, so overwhelmed
+were they by those indelible signs upon him of all that he had gone
+through.
+
+He asked them rapidly a number of questions.
+
+In the first place Dora explained that she and John were engaged in
+putting together whatever poor possessions the house contained of a
+personal kind, that they might not either be seized for debt, or
+fall into the claws of the old _bonne_, a woman of the lowest
+type, who had already plundered all she could. As to the wretched
+husband, very little information was forthcoming. John believed
+that he had been removed to the hospital in a state of alcoholic
+paralysis the very week that Cecile was taken ill; at any rate he
+had made no sign.
+
+The rest of the story which Dora had to tell may be supplemented by
+a few details which were either unknown to his informants, or
+remained unknown to David.
+
+Louie, on her return to Paris with David's hundred pounds, had
+promptly staked the greater part of it in certain Bourse
+speculations. She was quite as sorely in need of money as she had
+professed to be while in Manchester, but for more reasons than one,
+as David had uncomfortably suspected. Not only did her husband
+strip her of anything he could lay hands on, but a certain
+fair-haired Alsatian artist a good deal younger than herself had
+for some months been preying upon her. What his hold upon her
+precisely was, Father Lenoir, her director, when David went to see
+him, either could not or--because the matter was covered by the
+confessional seal--would not say. The artist, Brenart by name, was
+a handsome youth, with a droll facile tongue, and a recklessness of
+temper matching her own. He became first known to her as one of her
+husband's drinking companions, then, dazzled by the wife's mad
+beauty, he began to haunt the handsome Madame Montjoie, as many
+other persons had haunted her before him,--with no particular
+results except to increase the arrogant self-complacency with which
+Louie bore herself among her Catholic friends.
+
+In the first year of his passion, Brenart came into a small
+inheritance, much of which he spent on jewellery and other presents
+for his idol. She accepted them without scruple, and his hopes
+naturally rose high. But in a few months he ran through his money,
+his drinking habits, under Montjoie's lead, grew upon him, and he
+fell rapidly into a state of degradation which would have made it
+very easy for Louie to shake him off, had she been so minded.
+
+But by this time he had, no doubt, a curious spell for her. He
+was a person of considerable gifts, an etcher of fantastic
+promise, a clever musician, and the owner of a humorous _carillon_
+of talk, to quote M. Renan's word, which made life in his
+neighbourhood perpetually amusing for those, at any rate, who took
+the grossness of its themes as a matter of course. Louie found on
+the one hand that she could not do without him, in her miserable
+existence; on the other that if he was not to starve she must keep
+him. His misfortunes revealed the fact that there was neither
+chivalry nor delicacy in him; and he learnt to live upon her with
+surprising quickness, and on the most romantic pretexts.
+
+So she made her pilgrimage to Manchester for money, and then she
+played with her money to make it more, on the Bourse. But clever as
+she was, luck was against her, and she lost. Her losses made her
+desperate. So too did the behaviour of her husband, who robbed her
+whenever he could, and spent most of his time on the pavements of
+Paris, dragging himself from one low drinking-shop to another, only
+coming home to cheat her out of fresh supplies, and goad his wife
+to hideous scenes of quarrel and violence, which frightened the
+life out of Cecile. Brenart, whom she could no longer subsidise,
+kept aloof, for mixed reasons of his own. And the landlord, not to
+be trifled with any longer, gave them summary notice of eviction.
+
+While she was in these straits, Father Lenoir, who even during
+these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised a
+certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon,
+being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found a
+wild-eyed haggard woman in a half-dismantled apartment, whom, for
+the first time, he could not affect by any of those arts of
+persuasion or rebuke, in which his long experience as a guide of
+souls had trained him. She would tell him nothing either about her
+plans, or her husband; she did not respond to his skilful and
+reproachful comments upon her failure to give them assistance in a
+recent great function at Ste. Eulalie; nor was she moved by the
+tone of solemn and fatherly exhortation into which he gradually
+passed. He left her, fearing the worst.
+
+On the following morning she fled to the wretched house on the
+outskirts of Paris where Dora had found her. She went thither to
+escape from her husband; to avoid the landlord's pursuit; to cut
+herself adrift from the clergy of Ste. Eulalie, and to concert with
+Brenart a new plan of life. But Brenart failed to meet her there,
+and, a very few days after the flight, Cecile, already worn to a
+shadow, sickened with diphtheria. Either the seeds were already in
+her when they left Paris, or she was poisoned by the half-finished
+drainage and general insanitary state of the quarter to which they
+had removed.
+
+From the moment the child took to her bed, Louie fell into the
+blackest despair. She had often ill-used her daughter during these
+last months; the trembling child, always in the house, had again
+and again been made the scapegoat of her mother's miseries; but she
+no sooner threatened to die than Louie threw everything else in the
+world aside and was madly determined she should live.
+
+She got a doctor, of an inferior sort, from the neighbourhood, and
+when he seemed to her to bungle, and the child got no better, she
+drove him out of the house with contumely. Then she herself tried
+to caustic Cecile's throat, or she applied some of the old-wives'
+remedies, suggested by the low servant she had taken. The result
+was that the poor little victim was brought to the edge of the
+grave, and Louie, reduced to abjectness, went and humbled herself
+to the doctor and brought him back. This time he told her bluntly
+that the child was dying and nothing could save her. Then, in her
+extremity, she telegraphed to David. Her brother had written to her
+twice since the beginning of Lucy's illness; but when she sent her
+telegram, all remembrance of her sister-in-law had vanished from
+Louie's mind--Lucy might never have existed; and whether she was
+alive or dead mattered nothing.
+
+When Dora came, she found the child speechless, and near the end.
+Tracheotomy had been performed, but its failure was already clear.
+It seemed a question of hours. John went off post-haste for a
+famous doctor. The great man came, agreed with the local
+practitioner that nothing more could be done, and that death was
+imminent. Louie, beside herself, first turned and rent him, and
+then fell in a dead faint beside Cecile's bed. While the nurse,
+whom John had also brought from Paris, was tending both mother and
+daughter, Dora sent John--who in these years had acquired a certain
+smattering of foreign languages under the pressure of printing-room
+needs and David's counsel--to inquire for and fetch a priest. She
+was in an agony lest the child should die without the sacraments of
+her Church.
+
+The priest came--a young man of a heavy peasant type--bearing the
+Host. Never did Dora forget that scene--the emaciated child gasping
+her life away, the strange people, dimly seen amid the wreaths of
+incense, who seemed to her to have flocked in from the street in
+the wake of the priest, to look--the sacred words and gestures in
+the midst, which, because of the quick unintelligible Latin, she
+could only follow as a mystery of ineffable and saving power, the
+same, so she believed, for Anglican and Catholic--and by the
+bedside the sullen erect form of the mother, who could not be
+induced to take any part whatever in the ceremony.
+
+But when it was all over, and the little procession which had
+brought the Host was forming once more, Louie thrust Dora and the
+nurse violently away from the bed, and bent her ear down to
+Cecile's mouth. She gave a wild and hideous cry; then drawing
+herself to her full height, with a tragic magnificence of movement
+she stretched out one shaking hand over the poor little wasted
+body, while with the other she pointed to the priest in his white
+officiating dress.
+
+'Go out of this house!--go this _instant_! Who brought you in?
+Not I! I tell you,--last night'--she flung the phrases out in
+fierce gasps--' I gave God the chance. I said to Him, Make Cecile
+well, and I'll behave myself--I'll listen to Father Lenoir. Much
+good I've got by it all this time!--but I will. I'll live on a
+crust, and I'll give all I can skin and scrape to those people at
+Ste. Eulalie. If not--then I'll go to the devil--_to the devil!_
+Do you hear? I swore that.'
+
+Her voice sank to a hoarse whisper; she bent down, still keeping
+everyone at bay and at a distance from her dead child,--though Dora
+ran to her--her head turned over her shoulder, her glowing eyes of
+hatred fixed upon the priest.
+
+'She is mad!' he said to himself, receding quickly, lest the sacred
+burden he bore should suffer any indignity.
+
+At that moment she fell heavily on her knees beside the bed
+insensible, her dark head lying on Cecile's arm. Dora, in a pale
+trance of terror, closed little Cecile's weary eyes, the nurse
+cleared the room, and they laid Louie on her bed.
+
+When she revived, she crawled to the place where Cecile lay in her
+white grave-dress strewn with flowers, and again put everyone away,
+locking herself in with the body. But the rules of interment in the
+case of infectious diseases are strict in France; the authorities
+concerned intervened; and after scenes of indescribable misery and
+violence, the little corpse was carried away, and, thanks to Dora's
+and John's care, received tender and reverent burial.
+
+The mother was too exhausted to resist any more. When Dora came
+back from the funeral, the nurse told her that Madame Montjoie,
+after having refused all meat or drink for two days, had roused
+herself from what seemed the state of stupor in which the departure
+of the funeral procession had left her, had asked for brandy, which
+had been given her, and had then, of her own accord, swallowed a
+couple of opium pills, which the doctor had so far vainly
+prescribed for her, and was now heavily asleep.
+
+Dora went to her own bed, too tired to stand, yet inexpressibly
+relieved. Her bed was a heap of wraps contrived for her by the
+nurse on the floor of the lower room--a bare den, reeking of damp,
+which called itself the _salon_. But she had never rested
+anywhere with such helpless thankfulness. For some hours at least,
+agony and conflict were still, and she had a moment in which to
+weep for Lucy, the news of whose death had now lain for two days a
+dragging weight at her heart. Hateful memory!--she had forced her
+way in to Louie with the letter, thinking in her innocence that the
+knowledge of the brother's bereavement must touch the sister, or at
+least momentarily divert her attention: and Louie had dashed it
+down with the inconceivable words,--Dora's cheek burnt with anguish
+and shame, as she tried to put them out of her mind for ever,--
+
+'Very well. Now, then, you can marry him! You know you've always
+wanted to!'
+
+But at last that biting voice was hushed; there was not a sound in
+the house; the summer night descended gently on the wretched
+street, and in the midst of anxious discussion with herself as to
+how she and John were to get Louie to England, she fell asleep.
+
+When Dora awoke, Louie was not in the house. After a few hours of
+opium-sleep, she must have noiselessly put together all her
+valuables and money, a few trifles belonging to Cecile, and a small
+parcel of clothes, and have then slipped out through the garden
+door, and into a back lane or track, which would ultimately lead
+her down to the bank of the river. None of the three other persons
+sleeping in the house--Dora, the nurse, the old _bonne_, had
+heard a sound.
+
+When John arrived in the morning, his practical common sense
+suggested a number of measures for Louie's pursuit, or for the
+discovery of her fate, should she have made away with herself, as
+he more than suspected--measures which were immediately taken by
+himself, or by the lawyer, Mr. O'Kelly.
+
+Everything had so far been in vain. No trace of the
+fugitive--living or dead--could be found.
+
+David, sitting with his arms on the deal table in the lower room,
+and his face in his hands, listened in almost absolute silence to
+the main facts of the story. When he looked up, it was to say,
+'Have you been to Father Lenoir?'
+
+No. Neither Dora nor John knew anything of Father Lenoir.
+
+David went off at once. The good priest was deeply touched and
+overcome by the story, but not astonished. He first told David of
+the existence of Brenart, and search was instantly made for the
+artist. He, too, was missing, but the police, whose cordial
+assistance David, by the help of Lord Driffield's important friends
+in Paris, was able to secure, were confident of immediate
+discovery. Day after day passed, however; innumerable false clues
+were started; but at the end of some weeks Louie's fate was much of
+a secret as ever.
+
+Dora and John had, of course, gone back to England directly after
+David's arrival; and he now felt that his child and his work called
+him. He returned home towards the middle of August, leaving the
+search for his sister in Mr. O'Kelly's hands.
+
+For five months David remained doggedly at his work in Prince's
+Street. John watched him silently from day to day, showing him a
+quiet devotion which sometimes brought his old comrade's hand upon
+his shoulder in a quick touch of gratitude, or a flash to eyes
+heavy with broken sleep. The winter was a bad one for trade; the
+profits made by Grieve & Co., even on much business, were but
+small; and in the consultative council of employes which David had
+established the chairman constantly showed a dreaminess or an
+irritability in difficult circumstances which in earlier days would
+have cost him influence and success. But the men, who knew him
+well, looked at each other askance, and either spoke their minds or
+bore with him as seemed best. They were well aware that while wages
+everywhere else had been cut down, theirs were undiminished; that
+the profits from the second-hand book trade which remained
+nominally outside the profit-sharing partnership were practically
+all spent in furthering the social ends of it; and that the master,
+in his desolate house, with his two maid-servants, one of them his
+boy's nurse, lived as modestly as any of them, yet with help always
+to spare for the sick and the unfortunate. To a man they remained
+loyal to the firm and the scheme; but among even the best of them
+there was a curious difference of opinion as to David and his ways.
+They profited by them, and they would see him through; but there
+was an uncomfortable feeling that, if such ideas were to spread,
+they might cut both ways and interfere too much with the easy
+living which the artisan likes and desires as much as any other
+man.
+
+Meanwhile, those who have followed the history of David Grieve with
+any sympathy will not find it difficult to believe that this autumn
+and winter were with him a time of intense mental anguish and
+depression. The shock and tragedy of Louie's disappearance
+following on the prolonged nervous exhaustion caused by Lucy's
+struggle for life had brought him into a state similar to that in
+which his first young grief had left him; only with this
+difference, that the nature being now deeper and richer was but the
+more capable of suffering. The passion of religious faith which had
+carried him through Lucy's death had dwindled by natural reaction;
+he believed, but none the less he walked in darkness. The cruelty
+of his wife's fate, meditated upon through lonely and restless
+nights, tortured beyond bearing a soul made for pity; and every now
+and then wild fits of remorse for his original share in Louie's
+sins and misfortunes would descend upon him, and leave no access to
+reason.
+
+His boy, his work, and his books, these were ultimately his
+protections from himself. Sandy climbed about him, or got into
+mischief with salutary frequency. The child slept beside his father
+at night, and in the evenings was always either watching for him at
+the gate or standing thumb in mouth with his face pressed against
+the window, and his bright eye scanning the dusk.
+
+For the rest, after a first period of utter numbness and
+languor, David was once more able to read, and he read with
+voracity--science, philosophy, belles lettres. Two subjects,
+however, held his deepest mind all through, whatever might be added
+to them--the study of ethics, in their bearing upon religious
+conceptions, and the study of Christian origins. His thoughts
+about them found occasional outlet, either in his talks with
+Ancrum--whose love soothed him, and whose mind, with all its
+weaknesses and its strong Catholic drift, he had long found to be
+infinitely freer and more hospitable in the matter of ideas than
+the average Anglican mind--or in his journal.
+
+A few last extracts from the journal may be given. It should be
+remembered that the southern element in him made such a mode of
+expression more easy and natural to him than it ever can be to most
+Englishmen.
+
+'_November 2nd_.--It seems to me that last night was the
+first night since she died that I have not dreamt of her. As a
+rule, I am always with her in sleep, and for that reason I am the
+more covetous of the sleep which comes to me so hardly. It is a
+second life. Yet before her illness, during our married life, I
+hardly knew what it was to dream.
+
+'Two nights ago I thought I was standing beside her. She was lying
+on the long couch under the sycamore tree whither we used to carry
+her. At first, everything was wholly lifelike and familiar. Sandy
+was somewhere near. She had the grey camel's hair shawl over her
+shoulders, which I remember so well, and the white frilled cap
+drawn loosely together under her chin, over bandages and dressings,
+as usual. She asked me to fetch something for her from the house,
+and I went, full of joy. There seemed to be a strange mixed sense
+at the bottom of my heart that I had somehow lost her and found her
+again.
+
+'When I came back, nurse was there, and everything was changed.
+Nurse looked at me with meaning, startled eyes, as much as to say,
+"Look closely, it is not as you think." And as I went up to her,
+lying still and even smiling on her couch, there was an
+imperceptible raising of her little white hand as though to keep me
+off. Then in a flash I saw that it was not my living Lucy; that it
+could only be her spirit. I felt an awful sense of separation and
+yet of yearning; sitting down on one of the mossy stones beside
+her, I wept bitterly, and so woke, bathed in tears.
+
+'... It has often seemed to me lately that certain elements in the
+Resurrection stories may be originally traced to such experiences
+as these. I am irresistibly drawn to believe that the strange and
+mystic scene beside the lake, in the appendix chapter to the Gospel
+of St. John, arose in some such way. There is the same mixture of
+elements--of the familiar with the ghostly, the trivial with the
+passionate and exalted--which my own consciousness has so often
+trembled under in these last visionary months.
+
+The well-known lake, the old scene of fishers and fishing-boats,
+and on the shore the mysterious figure of the Master, the same, yet
+not the same, the little, vivid, dream-like details of the fire of
+coals, the broiled fish, and bread, the awe and longing of the
+disciples--it is borne in upon me with extraordinary conviction
+that the whole of it sprang, to begin with, from the dream of grief
+and exhaustion. Then, in an age which attached a peculiar and
+mystical importance to dreams, the beautiful thrilling fancy passed
+from mouth to mouth, became almost immediately history instead of
+dream,--just as here and there a parable misunderstood has taken
+the garb of an event,--was after a while added to and made more
+precise in the interest of apologetics, or of doctrine, or of the
+simple love of elaboration, and so at last found a final
+resting-place as an epilogue to the fourth Gospel.'
+
+'NOVEMBER 4TH.--To-night I have dared to read again Browning's
+"Rabbi ben Ezra." For months I have not been able to read it, or
+think of it, though for days and weeks towards the end of her life
+it seemed to be graven on my heart.
+
+                   Look not thou down, but up!
+                   To uses of a cup,
+       The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal
+                   The new wine's foaming glow,
+                   The Master's lips a-glow!
+
+Thou heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?
+
+'Let me think again, my God, of that astonishing ripening of her
+last days!--of all her little acts of love and gratitude towards
+me, towards her nurse, towards the people in the house, who had
+helped to tend her--of her marvellous submission, when once the
+black cloud of the fear of death, and the agony of parting from
+life had left her.
+
+'And such facts alone in the world's economy are to have no
+meaning, point no-whither? I could as soon believe it as that, in
+the physical universe, the powers of the magnet, or the flash of
+the lightning, are isolated and meaningless--tell us nothing and
+lead nowhere.
+
+_'November 10th._--In the old days--there is a passage of the
+kind in an earlier part of this journal--I was constantly troubled,
+and not for myself only, but for others, the poor and unlearned
+especially, who, as it seemed to me, would lose most in the
+crumbling of the Christian mythology--as to the intellectual
+difficulties of the approach to God. All this philosophical travail
+of two thousand years--and so many doubts and darknesses! A
+world athirst for preaching, and nothing simple or clear to
+preach--when once the miracle-child of Bethlehem had been
+dispossessed. And _now_ it is daylight-plain to me that in the
+simplest act of loving self-surrender there is the germ of all
+faith, the essence of all lasting religion. Quicken human service,
+purify and strengthen human love, and have no fear but that the
+conscience will find its God! For all the time this quickening
+and this purification are His work in thee. Around thee are the
+institutions, the ideals, the knowledge and beliefs, ethical or
+intellectual, in which that work, that life, have been so far
+fragmentarily and partially realised. Submit thyself and press
+forward. Thou knowest well what it means to be _better:_ more
+pure, more loving, more self-denying. And in thy struggle to be all
+these, God cometh to thee and abides.... _But the greatest of
+these is love!_'
+
+_'November 20th._--To-day I have finished the last of my New
+Testament tracts, the last at any rate for a time. While Ancrum
+lives I have resolved to suspend them. They trouble him deeply; and
+I, who owe him so much, will not voluntarily add to his burden. His
+wife is with him, a somewhat heavy, dark-faced woman, with a
+slumbrous eye, which may, however, be capable of kindling. They
+have left Mortimer Street, and have gone to live in a little house
+on the road to Cheadle. He seems perfectly happy, and though the
+doctor is discouraging, I at least can see no change for the worse.
+She sits by him and reads or works, without much talking, but is
+all the time attentive to his lightest movement. Friends send them
+flowers which brighten the little house, his "boys" visit him in
+the evenings, he is properly fed, and altogether I am more happy
+about him than I have been for long. It required considerable
+courage, this move, on her part; for there are a certain number of
+people still left who knew Ancrum at college, and remember the
+story; and those who believed him a bachelor are of course
+scandalised and wondering. But the talk, whatever it is, does not
+seem to molest them much. He offered to leave Manchester, but she
+would not let him. "What would he do away from you and his boys?"
+she said to me. There is a heroism in it all the same.
+
+'... So my New Testament work may rest a while.--During these
+autumn weeks, it has helped me through some terrible hours.
+
+'When I look back over the mass of patient labour which has
+accumulated during the present century round the founder of
+Christianity and the origins of his society--when I compare the
+text-books of the day with the text-books of sixty years ago--I no
+longer wonder at the empty and ignorant arrogance with which the
+French eighteenth century treated the whole subject. The first
+stone of the modern building had not been laid when Voltaire wrote,
+unless perhaps in the Wolfenbuttel fragments. He knew, in truth,
+no more than the Jesuits, much less in fact than the better men
+among them.
+
+'... It has been like the unravelling of a piece of fine and
+ancient needlework--and so discovering the secrets of its make and
+craftsmanship. A few loose ends were first followed up; then
+gradually the whole tissue has been involved, till at last the
+nature and quality of each thread, the purpose and the skill of
+each stitch, are becoming plain, and what was mystery rises into
+knowledge.
+
+'... But how close and fine a web!--and how difficult and patient
+the process by which Christian reality has to be grasped! There is
+no short cut--one must toil.
+
+'But after one has toiled, what are the rewards? Truth first--which
+is an end in itself and not a means to anything beyond. Then--the
+great figure of Christianity given back to you--with something at
+least of the first magic, the first "natural truth" of look and
+tone. Through and beyond dogmatic overlay, and Messianic theory and
+wonder-loving addition, to recover, at least fragmentarily, the
+actual voice, the first meaning, which is also the eternal meaning,
+of Jesus--Paul--"John"!
+
+'Finally--a conception of Christianity in which you discern once
+more its lasting validity and significance--its imperishable place
+in human life. It becomes simply that preaching of the Kingdom
+of God which belongs to and affects you--you, the modern
+European--just as Greek philosophy, Stoic or Cynic, was that
+preaching of it which belonged to and affected Epictetus.'
+
+'November 24th.--Mr. O'Kelly writes to me to-day his usual hopeless
+report. No news! I do not even know whether she is alive, and I can
+do nothing--absolutely nothing.
+
+'Yes--let me correct myself, there is some news of an event which,
+if we could find her, might simplify matters a little. Montjoie is
+dead in hospital--at the age of thirty-six--
+
+'Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament? As
+I look back on the whole course of my relation to Louie, I am
+conscious only of a sickening sense of utter failure. Our father
+left her to me, and I have not been able to hold her back
+from--nay, I have helped to plunge her into the most obvious and
+commonplace ruin. Yet I am always asking myself, if it were to do
+again, could I do any better? Has any other force developed in me
+which would make it possible for me _now_ to break through the
+barriers between her nature and mine, to love her sincerely, asking
+for nothing again, to help her to a saner and happier life?
+
+'If sometimes I dream that so it is, it is to _her_ I owe
+it--to _her_ whom I carry on my bosom, and whose hand did
+once, or so it seemed, unlock to me the gates of God. _Lucy! my
+Lucy!_
+
+'... All my past life becomes sometimes intolerable to me. I can
+see nothing in it that is not tarnished and flecked with black
+stains of egotism, pride, hardness, moral indolence.
+
+'And the only reparation possible, "Be ye transformed by the
+renewing of your minds," at which my fainting heart sinks.
+
+'Sometimes I find much comfort in the saying of a lonely thinker,
+"Let us humbly accept from God even our own nature; not that we are
+called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us
+accept _ourselves_ in spite of the evil and the disease."
+
+    _'Que vivre est difficile--O mon coeur fatigue!'_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+By the end of December David Grieve was near breaking down.
+
+Dr. Mildmay insisted brusquely on his going away.
+
+'As far as I can see you will live to be an old man,' he said, 'but
+if you go on like this, it will be with shattered powers. You are
+driving yourself to death, yet at the present moment you have no
+natural driving force. It is all artificial, a matter of will. Do,
+for heaven's sake, get away from these skies and these streets, and
+leave all work and all social reforms behind. The first business of
+the citizen--prate as you like!--is to keep his nerves and his
+digestion in going order.'
+
+David laughed and yielded. The advice, in fact, corresponded to an
+inward thirst, and had, moreover, a coincidence to back it. In one
+of the Manchester papers two or three mornings before he had seen
+the advertisement of a farm to let, which had set vibrating all his
+passion for and memory of the moorland. It was a farm about half a
+mile from Needham Farm, on one of the lower slopes of Kinder Low.
+It had belonged to a peasant owner, lately dead. The heirs wished
+to sell, but failing a purchaser were willing to let on a short
+lease.
+
+It was but a small grazing farm, and the rent was low. David went
+to the agent, took it at once, and in a few days, to the amazement
+of Reuben and Hannah, to whom he wrote only the night before he
+arrived, he and Sandy, and a servant, were established with a
+minimum of furniture, but a sufficiency of blankets and coals, in
+two or three rooms of the little grey-walled house.
+
+'Well, it caps me, it do!' Hannah said to herself, in her
+astonishment as she stood on her own doorstep the day after the
+arrival, and watched the figures of David and Sandy disappearing
+along the light crisp snow of the nearer fields in the direction of
+the Red Brook and the sheep-fold. They had looked in to ask for
+Reuben, and had gone in pursuit of him.
+
+What on earth should make a man in the possession of his natural
+senses leave a warm town-house in January, and come to camp in 'owd
+Ben's' farm, was, indeed, past Hannah's divination. In reality, no
+sudden resolve could have been happier. Sandy was a hardy little
+fellow, and with the first breath of the moorland wind David felt a
+load, which had been growing too heavy to bear, lifting from his
+breast. His youth, his manhood, reasserted themselves. The bracing
+clearness of what seemed to be the setting-in of a long frost put a
+new life into him; winter's 'bright and intricate device' of
+ice-fringed stream, of rimy grass, of snow-clad moor, of steel-blue
+skies, filled him once more with natural joy, carried him out of
+himself. He could not keep himself indoors; he went about with
+Reuben or the shepherd, after the sheep; he fed the cattle at
+Needham Farm, and brought his old knowledge to bear on the rearing
+of a sickly calf; he watched for the grouse, or he carried his
+pockets full of bread for the few blackbirds or moor-pippits that
+cheered his walks into the fissured solitudes of the great Peak
+plateau, walks which no one to whom every inch of the ground was
+not familiar dared have ventured, seeing how misleading and
+treacherous even light snow-drifts may become in the black bog-land
+of these high and lonely moors; or he toiled up the side of the
+Scout with Sandy on his back, that he might put the boy on one of
+the boulders beside the top of the Downfall, and, holding him fast,
+bid him look down at the great icicles which marked its steep and
+waterless bed, gleaming in the short-lived sun.
+
+The moral surroundings, too, of the change were cheering. There,
+over the brow, in the comfortable little cottage, where he had
+long since placed her, with a woman to look after her, was
+Margaret--quite childish and out of her mind, but happy and well
+cared for. He and Sandy would trudge over from time to time to see
+her, he carrying the boy in a plaid slung round his shoulders when
+the snow was deep. Once Sandy went to Frimley with the Needham Farm
+shepherd, and when David came to fetch him he found the boy and
+Margaret playing cat's-cradle together by the fire, and the
+eagerness in Sandy's pursed lips, and on the ethereally blanched
+and shrunken face of Margaret, brought the tears to David's eyes,
+as he stood smiling and looking on. But she did not suffer; for
+memory was gone; only the gentle 'imperishable child' remained.
+
+And at Needham Farm he had never known the atmosphere so still.
+Reuben was singularly cheerful and placid. Whether by the mere
+physical weakening of years, or by some slow softening of the soul,
+Hannah and her ways were no longer the daily scourge and perplexity
+to her husband they had once been. She was a harsh and tyrannous
+woman still, but not now openly viperish or cruel. With the
+disappearance of old temptations, the character had, to some
+extent, righted itself. Her sins of avarice and oppression towards
+Sandy's orphans had raised no Nemesis that could be traced, either
+within or without. It is doubtful whether she ever knew what
+self-reproach might mean; in word, at any rate, she was to the end
+as loudly confident as at the first. Nevertheless it might
+certainly be said that at sixty she was a better and more tolerable
+human being than she had been at fifty.
+
+'Aye, if yo do but live long enoof, yo get past t' bad bits o' t'
+road,' Reuben said one night, with a long breath, to David, and
+then checked himself, brought up either by a look at his nephew's
+mourning dress, or by a recollection of what David had told him of
+Louie the night before.
+
+It troubled Reuben indeed, something in the old fashion, that his
+wife would show no concern whatever for Louie when he repeated to
+her the details of that disappearance whereof so far he and she had
+known only the bare fact.
+
+'Aye, I thowt she'd bin and married soom mak o' rabblement,'
+remarked Hannah. 'Yo doant suppose ony decent mon ud put up wi her.
+What Davy wants wi lookin for her I doant know. He'll be hard-set
+when he's fand her, I should think.'
+
+She was equally impervious and sarcastic with regard to David's
+social efforts. Her sharp tongue exercised itself on the 'poor way'
+in which he seemed to live, and when Reuben repeated to her, with
+some bewilderment, the facts which she had egged him on to get out
+of David, her scorn knew no bounds.
+
+'Weel, it's like t' Bible after aw, Hannah,' said Reuben, perplexed
+and remonstrating; 'theer's things, yo'll remember, abeawt gien t'
+coat off your back, an sellin aw a mon has, an th' loike, 'at fairly
+beats me soomtimes.'
+
+'Oh--go long wi yo!' said Hannah in high wrath. 'He an his loike'll
+mak a halliblash of us aw soon, wi their silly faddle, an pamperin
+o' workin men, wha never wor an never will be noa better nor they
+should be. But--thank the Lord--_I_'ll not be theer to see.'
+
+And after this communication she found it very difficult to treat
+David civilly.
+
+But to David's son--to Sandy--Hannah Grieve capitulated, for the
+first and only time in her life.
+
+On the second and third day after his arrival, Sandy came over with
+the servant to ask Hannah's help in some small matter of the new
+household. As they neared the farm door, Tim, the aged Tim, who was
+slouching behind, was suddenly set upon by a new and ill-tempered
+collie of Reuben's, who threatened very soon to shake the life out
+of his poor toothless victim. But Sandy, who had a stick, rushed at
+him, his cheeks and eyes glowing with passion.
+
+'Get away! you great big dog, you! and leave my middle-sized dog
+alone!'
+
+And he belaboured and pulled at the collie, without a thought of
+fear, till the farm-man and Hannah came and separated the
+combatants,--stalking into the farm kitchen afterwards in a
+speechless rage at the cowardly injustice which had been done to
+Tim. As he sat in the big rocking-chair, fiercely cuddling Tim and
+sucking his thumb, his stormy breath subsiding by degrees, Hannah
+thought him, as she confessed to the only female friend she
+possessed in the world, 'the pluckiest and bonniest little grig i'
+th' coontry side.'
+
+Thenceforward, so far as her queer temper would allow, she became
+his nurse and slave, and David, with all the memorials of his own
+hard childhood about him, could not believe his eyes, when he found
+Sandy established day after day in the Needham Farm kitchen,
+sucking his thumb in a corner of the settle, and ordering Hannah
+about with the airs of a three-tailed bashaw. She stuffed him with
+hot girdle-cakes; she provided for him a store of 'humbugs,' the
+indigenous sweet of the district, which she made and baked with her
+own hands, and had not made before for forty years; she took him
+about with her, 'rootin,' as she expressed it, after the hens and
+pigs and the calves; till, Sandy's exactions growing with her
+compliance, the common fate of tyrants overtook him. He one day
+asked too much and his slave rebelled. David saw him come in one
+afternoon, and found him a minute or two after viciously biting the
+blind-cord in the parlour, in a black temper. When his father
+inquired what was the matter, Sandy broke out in a sudden wail of
+tears.
+
+'Why _can't_ she be a Kangawoo when I want her to?'
+
+Whereupon David, with the picture of Hannah's grim figure, cap and
+all, before his mind's eye, went into the first fit of side-shaking
+laughter that had befallen him for many and many a month.
+
+On a certain gusty afternoon towards the middle of February, David
+was standing alone beside the old smithy. The frost, after a
+temporary thaw, had set in again, there had been tolerably heavy
+snow the night before, and it was evident from the shifting of the
+wind and the look of the clouds that were coming up from the
+north-east over the Scout that another fall was impending. But the
+day had been fine, and the sun, setting over the Cheshire hills,
+threw a flood of pale rose into the white bosom of the Scout and on
+the heavy clouds piling themselves above it. It was a moment of
+exquisite beauty and wildness. The sunlit snow gleamed against the
+stormy sky; the icicles lining the steep channel of the Downfall
+shone jagged and rough between the white and smoothly rounded banks
+of moor, or the snow-wreathed shapes of the grit boulders; to his
+left was the murmur of the Red Brook creeping between its frozen
+banks; while close beside him about twenty of the moor sheep were
+huddling against the southern wall of the smithy in prescience of
+the coming storm. Almost within reach of his stick was the pan of
+his childish joy, the water left in it by the December rains frozen
+hard and white; and in the crevice of the wall he had just
+discovered the mouldering remains of a toy-boat.
+
+He stood and looked out over the wide winter world, rejoicing in
+its austerity, its solemn beauty. Physically he was conscious of
+recovered health; and in the mind also there was a new energy of
+life and work. Nature seemed to say to him, "Do but keep thy heart
+open to me, and I have a myriad aspects and moods wherewith to
+interest and gladden and teach thee to the end;" while, as his eye
+wandered to the point where Manchester lay hidden on the horizon,
+the world of men, of knowledge, of duty, summoned him back to it
+with much of the old magic and power in the call. His grief, his
+love, no man should take from him; but he must play his part.
+
+Yes--he and Sandy must go home--and soon. Yet even as he so
+decided, the love of the familiar scene, its freedom, its
+loneliness, its unstainedness, rose high within him. He stood lost
+in a trance of memory. Here he and Louie had listened to 'Lias';
+there, far away amid the boulders of the Downfall, they had waited
+for the witch; among those snow-laden bushes yonder Louie had
+hidden when she played Jenny Crum for the discomfiture of the
+prayer-meeting; and it was on the slope at his feet that she had
+pushed the butter-scotch into his mouth, the one and only sign of
+affection she had ever given him, that he could remember, in all
+their forlorn childhood.
+
+As these things rose before him, the moor, the wind, the rising
+voice of the storm became to him so many channels, whereby the
+bitter memory of his sister rushed upon him and took possession.
+Everything spoke of her, suggested her. Then with inexorable force
+his visualising gift carried him on past her childhood to the
+scenes of her miserable marriage; and as he thought of her child's
+death, the desolation and madness of her flight, the mystery of her
+fate, his soul was flooded once more for the hundredth time with
+anguish and horror. Here in this place, where their childish lives
+had been so closely intertwined, he could not resign himself for
+ever to ignorance, to silence; his whole being went out in protest,
+in passionate remorseful desire.
+
+The wind was beginning to blow fiercely; the rosy glow was gone;
+darkness was already falling. Wild gusts swept from time to time
+round the white amphitheatre of moor and crag; the ghostly sounds
+of night and storm were on the hills. Suddenly it was to him as
+though he heard his name called from a great distance--breathed
+shrilly and lingeringly along the face of the Scout.
+
+'_David_!'
+
+It was Louie's voice. The illusion was so strong that, as he raised
+his hand to his ear, turning towards the Downfall, whence the sound
+seemed to come, he trembled from head to foot.
+
+'_David!_'
+
+Was it the call of some distant boy or shepherd? He could not tell,
+could not collect himself. He sank down on one of the grit-boulders
+by the snow-wreathed door of the smithy and sat there long,
+heedless of the storm and cold, his mind working, a sudden purpose
+rising and unfolding, with a mysterious rapidity and excitement.
+
+Early on the following morning he made his way down through the
+deep snow to the station, having first asked Hannah to take charge
+of Sandy for a day or two; and by the night mail he left London for
+Paris.
+
+It was not till he walked into Mr. O'Kelly's office, on the ground
+floor of a house in the Rue d'Assas, at about eleven o'clock on the
+next day, that he was conscious of any reaction. Then for a
+bewildered instant he wondered why he had come, and what he was to
+say.
+
+But to his amazement the lawyer rose at once, throwing up his hands
+with the gesture of one who notes some singular and unexpected
+stroke of good fortune.
+
+'This is _most_ extraordinary, Mr. Grieve! I have not yet
+signed the letter on my desk--there it is!--summoning you to Paris.
+We have discovered Madame Montjoie! As constantly happens, we have
+been pursuing inquiries in all sorts of difficult and remote
+quarters, and she is here--at our doors, living for some weeks
+past, at any rate, without any disguise, at _Barbizon_, of all
+places in the world! Barbizon _pres_ Fontainebleau. You know
+it?'
+
+David sat down.
+
+'Yes,' he said, after an instant. 'I know it. Is he--is that man
+Brenart there?'
+
+'Certainly. He has taken a miserable studio, and is making, or
+pretending to make, some winter studies of the forest. I hear that
+Madame Montjoie looks ill and worn; the neighbours say the
+_menage_ is a very uncomfortable one, and not likely to last
+long. I wish I had better news for you, Mr. Grieve.'
+
+And the lawyer, remembering the handsome hollow-eyed boy of twenty
+who had first asked his help, studied with irrepressible curiosity
+the man's noble storm-beaten look and fast grizzling hair, as David
+sat before him with his head bent and his hat in his hands.
+
+They talked a while longer, and then David said, rising:
+
+'Can I get over there to-night? The snow will be deep in the
+forest.'
+
+'I imagine they will keep that main road to Barbizon open in some
+fashion,' said the lawyer. 'You may find a sledge. Let me know how
+you speed and whether I can assist you. But, I fear, '--he shrugged
+his shoulders--'in the end this wild life _gets into the
+blood_. I have seen it so often.'
+
+He spoke with the freedom and knowledge of one who had observed
+Louie Montjoie with some closeness for eleven years. David said
+nothing in answer; but at the door he turned to ask a question.
+
+'You can't tell me anything of the habits of this man--this
+Brenart?'
+
+'Stop!' said the lawyer, after a moment's thought; 'I remember this
+detail--my agent told me that M. Brenart was engaged in some work
+for "D--et Cie"'--he named a great picture-dealing firm on the
+Boulevard St. Germain, famous for their illustrated books and
+_editions de luxe_.--'He did not hear what it was, but--ah! I
+remember,--it has taken him occasionally to Paris, or so he says,
+and it has been these absences which have led to some of the worst
+scenes between him and your sister. I suppose she put a jealous
+woman's interpretation on them. You want to see her alone?--when
+this man is out of the way? I have an idea: take my card and your
+own to this person--' he wrote out an address--'he is one of the
+junior partners in "D--et Cie"; I know him, and I got his firm
+the sale of a famous picture. He will do me a good turn. Ask him
+what the work is that M. Brenart is doing, and when he expects him
+next in Paris. It is possible you may get some useful information.'
+
+David took the card and walked at once to the Boulevard St.
+Germain, which was close by. He was civilly received by the man to
+whom O'Kelly had sent him, and learned from him that Brenart was
+doing for the firm a series of etchings illustrating the forest in
+winter, and intended to make part of a great book on Fontainebleau
+and the Barbizon school. They were expecting the last batch from
+him, were indeed desperately impatient for them. But he was a
+difficult fellow to deal with--an exceedingly clever artist, but
+totally untrustworthy. In his last letter to them he had spoken of
+bringing the final instalment to them, and returning some corrected
+proofs by February 16--'to-morrow, I see,' said the speaker,
+glancing at an almanac on his office table. 'Well, we may get them,
+and we mayn't. If we don't, we shall have to take strong measures.
+And now, Monsieur, I think I have told you all I can tell you of
+our relations to M. Brenart.'
+
+David bowed and took his leave. He made his way through the great
+shop with its picture-covered walls and its floors dotted with
+stands on which lay exposed the new etchings and engravings of
+the season. In front of him a lady in black was also making her
+way to the door and the street. No one was attending her, and
+instinctively he hurried forward to open the heavy glass door for
+her. As he did so a sudden sharp presentiment shot through him. The
+door swung to behind them, and he found himself in the covered
+entrance of the shop face to face with Elise Delaunay.
+
+The meeting was so startling that neither could disguise the shock
+of it. He took off his hat mechanically; she grew white and leant
+against the glass window.
+
+'You!--how can it be you?' she said in a quick whisper, then
+recovering herself--'Monsieur Grieve, old associations are painful,
+and I am neither strong--nor--nor stoical. Which way are you
+walking?'
+
+'Towards the Rue de Seine,' he said, thrown into a bewildering mist
+of memory by her gesture, the crisp agitated decision of her
+manner. 'And you?'
+
+'I also. We will walk a hundred yards together. What are you in
+Paris for?'
+
+'I am here on some business of my sister's,' he said evasively.
+
+She raised her eyes, and looked at him long and sharply. He, on his
+side, saw, with painful agitation, that her youth was gone, but not
+her grace, not her singular and wiltful charm. The little face
+under her black hat was lined and sallow, and she was startlingly
+thin. The mouth had lost its colour, and gained instead the hard
+shrewdness of a woman left to battle with the world and poverty
+alone; but the eyes had their old plaintive trick; the dead gold of
+the hair, the rings and curls of it against the white temples, were
+still as beautiful as they had ever been; and the light form moved
+beside him with the same quick floating gait.
+
+'You have grown much older,' she said abruptly. 'You look as if you
+had suffered--but what of that?--_C'est comme tout le monde_.'
+
+She withdrew her look a moment, with a little bitter gesture, then
+she resumed, drawn on by a curiosity and emotion she could not
+control.
+
+'Are you married?'
+
+'Yes, but my wife is dead.'
+
+She gave a start; the first part of the answer had not prepared her
+for the second.
+
+'_Ah, mon Dieu!_' she said, 'always grief--_always_! Is
+it long?'
+
+'Eight months. I have a boy. And you?--I heard sad news of you
+once--the only time.'
+
+'You might well,' she said, with a half-ironical accent, driving
+the point of her umbrella restlessly into the crevices of the
+stones, as they slowly crossed a paved street. 'My husband is only a
+cripple, confined to his chair,--I am no longer an artist but an
+artisan,--I have not painted a _picture_ for years,--but what
+I paint sells for a trifle, and there is soup in the pot--of a
+sort. For the rest I spend my life in making _tisane_, in
+lifting weights too heavy for me, and bargaining for things to eat.'
+
+'But--you are not unhappy!' he said to her boldly, with a change of
+tone.
+
+She stopped, struck by the indescribable note in his voice. They
+had turned into a side street, whither she had unconsciously led
+him. She stood with her eyes on the ground, then she lifted them
+once more, and there was in them a faint beautiful gleam, which
+transformed the withered and sharpened face.
+
+'You are quite right,' she said, 'if he will only live. He depends
+on me for everything. It is like a child, but it consoles. Adieu!'
+
+That night David found himself in the little _auberge_ at
+Barbizon. He had discovered a sledge to take him across the forest,
+and he and his driver had pushed their way under a sky of lead and
+through whirling clouds of fresh sleet past the central beechwood,
+where the great boles stood straight and bare amid fantastic masses
+of drift; through the rock and fir region, where all was white, and
+the trees drooped under their wintry load; and beneath withered and
+leaning oaks, throwing gaunt limbs here and there from out the
+softening effacing mantle of the snow. Night fell when the journey
+was half over, and as the lights of the sledge flashed from side to
+side into these lonely fastnesses of cold, how was it possible to
+believe that summer and joy had ever tabernacled here?
+
+He was received at the inn, as his driver had brought him--with
+astonishment. But Barbizon has been long accustomed, beyond most
+places in France, to the eccentricities of the English and American
+visitor; and being a home of artists, it understands the hunt for
+"impressions," and easily puts up with the unexpected. Before a
+couple of hours were over, David was installed in a freezing room,
+and was being discussed in the kitchen, where his arrival produced
+a certain animation, as the usual English madman in quest of a
+sensation, and no doubt ready to pay for it.
+
+There were, however, three other guests in the inn, as he found,
+when he descended for dinner. They were all artists--young, noisy,
+_bons camarades_, and of a rough and humble social type. To
+them the winter at Barbizon was as attractive as anywhere else.
+Life at the inn was cheap, and free; they had the digestion of
+ostriches, eating anything that was put before them, and drinking
+oceans of red wine at ten sous a litre; on bad days they smoked,
+fed, worked at their pictures or played coarse practical jokes on
+each other and the people of the inn; in fine weather there was
+always the forest to be exploited, and the chance of some happy and
+profitable inspiration.
+
+They stared at David a good deal during the _biftek_, the black
+pudding which seemed to be a staple dish of the establishment,
+and the _omelette aux fines herbes_, which the landlord's wife
+had added in honour of the stranger. One of them, behind the
+shelter of his glasses, drew the outline of the Englishman's
+head and face on the table-cloth, and showed it to his neighbour.
+
+'Poetical, grand style, _hein_?'
+
+The other nodded carelessly. '_Pourtant--l'hiver lui plait_,'
+he hummed under his breath, having some lines of Hugo's, which he
+had chosen as a motto for a picture, running in his head.
+
+After dinner everybody gathered round the great fire, which
+the servant had piled with logs, while the flames, and the
+wreaths of smoke from the four pipes alternately revealed and
+concealed the rough sketches of all sorts--landscape, portrait,
+_genre_--legacies of bygone visitors, wherewith the walls of
+the _salle a manger_ were covered. David sat in his corner
+smoking, ready enough to give an account of his journey across the
+forest, and to speak when he was spoken to.
+
+As soon as the strangeness of the new-comer had a little worn off,
+the three young fellows plunged into a flood of amusing gossip
+about the storm and the blocking of the roads, the scarcity of food
+in Barbizon, the place in general, and its inhabitants. David fell
+silent after a while, stiffening under a presentiment which was
+soon realised. He heard his sister's wretched lot discussed with
+shouts of laughter--the chances of Brenart's escape from the
+mistress he had already wearied of and deceived--the perils of 'la
+Montjoie's' jealousy. _'Il veut bien se debarrasser d'elle--mais
+on ne plaisante pas avec une tigresse_!' said one of the
+speakers. So long as there was information to be got which might
+serve him he sat motionless, withdrawn into the dark, forcing
+himself to listen. When the talk became mere scurrility and noise,
+he rose and went out.
+
+He passed through the courtyard of the inn, and turned down the
+village street. The storm had gone down, and there were a few stars
+amid the breaking clouds. Here and there a light shone from the low
+houses on either hand; the snow, roughly shovelled from the foot
+pavements, lay piled in heaps along the roadway, the white roofs
+shone dimly against the wild sky. He passed Madame Pyat's
+_maisonnette_, pausing a moment to look over the wall. Not a
+sign of life in the dark building, and, between him and it, great
+drifts of snow choking up and burying the garden. A little further
+on, as he knew, lay the goal of his quest. He easily made out the
+house from Mr. O'Kelly's descriptions, and he lingered a minute, on
+the footway, under an overhanging roof to look at it. It was just a
+labourer's cottage standing back a little from the street, and to
+one side rose a high wooden addition which he guessed to be the
+studio. Through the torn blind came the light of a lamp, and as he
+stood there, himself invisible in his patch of darkness, he heard
+voices--an altercation, a woman's high shrill note.
+
+Then he crept back to the inn vibrating through all his being to
+the shame of those young fellows' talk, the incredible difficulty
+of the whole enterprise. Could he possibly make any impression upon
+her whatever? What was done was done; and it would be a crime on
+his part to jeopardise in the smallest degree the wholesome
+brightness of Sandy's childhood by any rash proposals which it
+might be wholly beyond his power to carry out.
+
+He carried up a basket of logs to his room, made them blaze, and
+crouched over them till far into the night. But in the end the
+doubt and trouble of his mind subsided; his purpose grew clear
+again. 'It was my own voice that spoke to me on the moor,' he
+thought, 'the voice of my own best life.'
+
+About eight o'clock, with the first light of the morning, he was
+roused by bustle and noise under his window. He got up, and,
+looking out, saw two sledges standing before the inn, in the cold
+grey light. Men were busy harnessing a couple of horses to each,
+and there were a few figures, muffled in great coats and carrying
+bags and wraps, standing about.
+
+'They are going over to Fontainebleau station,' he thought; 'if that
+man keeps his appointment in Paris to-day, he will go with them.'
+
+As the words passed through his mind, a figure came striding
+up from the lower end of the street, a young fair-haired man,
+in a heavy coat lined with sheepskin. His delicately made
+face--naturally merry and _bon enfant_--was flushed and
+scowling. He climbed into one of the sledges, complained of the
+lateness of the start, swore at the ostler, who made him take
+another seat on the plea that the one he had chosen was engaged,
+and finally subsided into a moody silence, pulling at his
+moustache, and staring out over the snow, till at last the signal
+was given, and the sledges flew off on the Fontainebleau road,
+under a shower of snowballs which a group of shivering bright-eyed
+urchins on their way to school threw after them, as soon as the
+great whips were at a safe distance.
+
+David dressed and descended.
+
+'Who was that fair-haired gentleman in the first sledge?' he
+casually asked of the landlord who was bringing some smoking hot
+coffee into the _salle a manger_.
+
+'That was a M. Brenart, monsieur,' said the landlord, cheerfully,
+absorbed all the while in the laying of his table. '_C'est un
+drole de corps, M. Brenart_. I don't take to him much myself;
+and as for madame--_qui n'est pas madame!_'
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, saw that there were no fresh rolls, and
+departed with concern to fetch them.
+
+David ate and drank. He would give her an hour yet.
+
+When his watch told him that the time was come, he went out slowly,
+inquiring on the way if there would be any means of getting to
+Paris later in the day. Yes, the landlord thought a conveyance of
+some sort could be managed--if monsieur would pay for it!
+
+A few minutes later David knocked at the door of Brenart's house.
+He could get no answer at all, and at last he tried the latch. It
+yielded to his hand, and he went in.
+
+There was no one in the bare kitchen, but there were the remains of
+a fire, and of a meal. Both the crockery on the table and a few
+rough chairs and stools the room contained struck him as being in
+great disorder. There were two doors at the back. One led into a
+back room which was empty, the other down a few steps into a
+garden. He descended the steps and saw the long wooden erection of
+the studio stretching to his left. There was a door in the centre
+of its principal wall, which was ajar. He went up to it and softly
+pushed it open. There, at the further end, huddled over an iron
+stove, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaken with
+fierce sobs, was Louie.
+
+He closed the door behind him, and at the sound she turned,
+hastily. When she saw who it was she gave a cry, and, sinking back
+on her low canvas chair, she lay staring at him, and speechless.
+Her eyes were red with weeping; her beauty was a wreck; and in face
+of the despair which breathed from her, and from her miserable
+surroundings, all doubt, all repulsion, all condemnation fled from
+the brother's heart. The iron in his soul melted. He ran up to her,
+and, kneeling beside her, he put his arms round her, as he had
+never done in his life.
+
+'Oh you poor thing--you poor thing!' he cried, scarcely knowing
+what he said. He took her worn, tear-stained face, and, laying it
+on his shoulder, he kissed her, breathing incoherent words of pity
+and consolation.
+
+She submitted a while, helpless with shock and amazement, and still
+shaken with the tempest of her own passion. But there came a moment
+when she pushed him away and tried desperately to recover herself.
+
+'I don't know what you want--you're not going to have anything to
+do with me now--you can't. Let me alone--it will be over soon--one
+way or the other.'
+
+And she sat upright, one hand clenched on her knees, her frowning
+brows drawn together, and the tears falling in spite of her intense
+effort to drive them back.
+
+He found a painter's stool, and sat down by her, pale and
+determined. He told her the history of his search; he implored her
+to be guided by him, to let him take her home to England and
+Manchester, where her story was unknown, save to Dora and John. He
+would make a home for her near his own; he would try to comfort her
+for the loss of her child; they would understand each other better,
+and the past should be buried.
+
+Louie looked at him askance. Every now and then she ceased to
+listen to him at all; while, under the kindling of her own
+thoughts, her wild eyes flamed into fresh rage and agony.
+
+'Don't!--leave me alone!' she broke out at last, springing up. 'I don't
+want your help, I don't want you; I only want _him_,--and I will have
+him, or we shall kill each other.'
+
+She paced to and fro, her hands clasped on her breast, her white
+face setting into a ghastly calm. David gazed at her with horror.
+This was another note! one which in all their experience of each
+other he had never heard on her lips before. _She loved this
+man_!--this mean wretch, who had lived upon her and betrayed
+her, and, having got from her all she had to give, was probably
+just about to cast her off into the abyss which yawns for such
+women as Louie. He had thought of her flight to him before as the
+frenzy of a nature which must have distraction at any cost from the
+unfamiliar and intolerable weight of natural grief.
+
+But this!--one moment it cut the roots from hope, the next it
+nerved him to more vigorous action.
+
+'You cannot have him,' he said, steadily and sternly. 'I have
+listened to the talk here for your sake--he is already on the point
+of deserting you--everyone else in this place knows that he is
+tired of you--that he is unfaithful to you.'
+
+She dropped into her chair with a groan. Even her energies were
+spent--she was all but fainting--and her miserable heart knew, with
+more certainty than David himself did, that all he said was true.
+
+Her unexpected weakness, the collapse of her strained nerves,
+filled him with fresh hopes. He came close to her again and
+pleaded, by the memory of her child, of their father--that she
+would yield, and go away with him at once.
+
+'What should I do'--she broke in passionately, her sense of
+opposition of absurdity reviving her, 'when I get to your hateful
+Manchester? Go to church and say my prayers! And you? In a week or
+two, I tell you, you would be sick of having soiled your hands with
+such _mud_ as I am.'
+
+She threw herself back in her chair with a superb gesture, and
+folded her arms, looking him defiance.
+
+'Try me,' he said quietly, while his lip trembled. 'I am not as I
+was, Louie. There are things one can only learn by going
+down--down--into the depths of sorrow. The night before Lucy
+died--she could hardly speak--she sent you a message: "I wish I had
+been kinder--ask her to come to Manchester when I am gone." I have
+not seen her die--not seen her whole life turn to love--through
+such unspeakable suffering--for nothing. Oh Louie--when we submit
+ourselves to God--when we ask for His life--and give up our
+own--then, and then only, there is peace--and strength. We
+ourselves are nothing--creatures of passion--miserable--weak--but
+in Him and through Him--'
+
+His voice broke. He took her cold hand and pressed it tenderly. She
+trembled in spite of herself, and closed her eyes.
+
+'_Don't_--I know all about that--why did the child die? There
+is no God--nothing. It's just talk. I told Him what I'd do--I vowed
+I'd go to the bad, for good and all--and I have. There--let me
+alone!'
+
+But he only held her hand tighter.
+
+'No I--never! Your trouble was awful--it might well drive you
+mad. But others have suffered, Louie--no less--and yet have
+believed--have hoped. It is not beyond our power--for it has been
+done again and again!--by the most weak, the most miserable. Oh!
+think of that--tear yourself first from the evil life--and you,
+too, will know what it is to be consoled--to be strengthened. The
+mere effort to come with me--I promise it you!--will bring you
+healing and comfort. We make for ourselves the promise of eternal
+life, by turning to the good. Then the hope of recovering our dear
+ones--which was nothing to us before--rises and roots itself in our
+heart. Come with me,--conquer yourself,--let us begin to love each
+other truly, give me comfort and yourself--and you will bear to
+think again of Cecile and of God--there will be calm and peace
+beyond this pain.'
+
+His eyes shone upon her through a mist. She said no more for a
+while. She lay exhausted and silent, the tears streaming once more
+down her haggard cheeks.
+
+Then, thinking she had consented, he began to speak of arrangements
+for the journey--of the possibility of getting across the forest.
+
+Instantly her passion returned. She sprang up and put him away from
+her.
+
+'It is ridiculous, I tell you--_ridiculous!_ How can I decide
+in such an instant? You must go away and leave me to think.'
+
+'No,' he said firmly, 'my only chance is to stay with you.'
+
+She walked up and down, saying wild incoherent things to herself
+under her breath. She wore the red dress she had worn at
+Manchester--now a torn and shabby rag--and over it, because of the
+cold, a long black cloak, a relic of better days. Her splendid
+hair, uncombed and dishevelled, hung almost loose round her head
+and neck; and the emaciation of face and figure made her height and
+slenderness more abnormal than ever as she swept tempestuously to
+and fro.
+
+At last she paused in front of him.
+
+'Well, I dare say I'll go with you,' she said, with the old
+reckless note. 'That fiend thinks he has me in his power for good,
+he amuses himself with threats of leaving _me_--perhaps I'll
+turn the tables.... But you must go--go for an hour. You can
+find out about a carriage. There will be an old woman here
+presently for the house-work. I'll get her to help me pack. You'll
+only be in the way.'
+
+'You'll be ready for me in an hour?' he said, rising reluctantly.
+
+'Well, it don't look, does it, as if there was much to pack in this
+hole!' she said with one of her wild laughs.
+
+He looked round for the first time and saw a long bare studio,
+containing a table covered with etcher's apparatus and some blocks
+for wood engraving. There was besides an easel, and a picture upon
+it, with a pretentious historical subject just blocked in, a tall
+oak chair and stool of antique pattern, and in one corner a stand
+of miscellaneous arms such as many artists affect--an old flintlock
+gun or two, some Moorish or Spanish rapiers and daggers. The north
+window was half blocked by snow, and the atmosphere of the place,
+in spite of the stove, was freezing.
+
+He moved to the door, loth, most loth, to go, yet well aware, by
+long experience, of the danger of crossing her temper or her whims.
+After all, it would take him some time to make his arrangements
+with the landlord, and he would be back to the moment.
+
+She watched him intently with her poor red eyes. She herself opened
+the door for him, and to his amazement put a sudden hand on his
+arm, and kissed him--roughly, vehemently, with lips that burnt.
+
+'Oh, you fool!' she said, 'you fool!'
+
+'What do you mean?' he said, stopping. 'I believe I _am_ a
+fool, Louie, to leave you for a moment.'
+
+'Nonsense! You are a fool to want to take me to Manchester, and I
+am a fool to think of going. There:--if I had never been born!--oh!
+go, for God's sake, go! and come back in an hour. I _must_
+have some time, I tell you--' and she gave a passionate stamp--'to
+think a bit, and put my things together.'
+
+She pushed him out, and shut the door. With a great effort he
+mastered himself and went.
+
+He made all arrangements for the two-horse sledge that was to take
+them to Fontainebleau. He called for his bill, and paid it. Then he
+hung about the entrance to the forest, looking with an unseeing eye
+at the tricks which the snow had been playing with the trees, at
+the gleams which a pale and struggling sun was shedding over the
+white world--till his watch told him it was time.
+
+He walked briskly back to the cottage, opened the outer door, was
+astonished to hear neither voice nor movement, to see nothing of
+the charwoman Louie had spoken of--rushed to the studio and
+entered.
+
+She sat in the tall chair, her hands dropping over the arms, her
+head hanging forward. The cold snow-light shone on her open and
+glazing eyes--on the red and black of her dress, on the life-stream
+dripping among the folds, on the sharp curved Algerian dagger at
+her feet. She was quite dead. Even in the midst of his words of
+hope, the thought of self-destruction--of her mother--had come upon
+her and absorbed her. That capacity for sudden intolerable despair
+which she had inherited, rose to its full height when she had
+driven David from her--guided her mad steps, her unshrinking hand.
+
+He knelt by her--called for help, laid his ear to her heart, her
+lips. Then the awfulness of the shock, and of his self-reproach,
+the crumbling of all his hopes, became too much to bear.
+Consciousness left him, and when the woman of whom Louie had spoken
+did actually come in, a few minutes later, she found the brother
+lying against the sister's knee, his arms outstretched across her,
+while the dead Louie, with fixed and frowning brows, sat staring
+beyond him into eternity--a figure of wild fate--freed at last and
+for ever from that fierce burden of herself.
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+_Alas!--Alas!_
+
+--But to part from David Grieve under the impression of this scene
+of wreck and moral defeat would be to misread and misjudge a life,
+destined, notwithstanding the stress of exceptional suffering it
+was called upon at one time to pass through, to singularly rich and
+fruitful issues. Time, kind inevitable Time, dulled the paralysing
+horror of his sister's death, and softened the memory of all that
+long torture of publicity, legal investigation, and the like, which
+had followed it. The natural healing 'in widest commonalty spread,'
+which flows from affection, nature, and the direction of the mind
+to high and liberating aims, came to him also as the months and
+years passed. His wife's death, his sister's tragedy, left indeed
+indelible marks; but, though scarred and changed, he was in the end
+neither crippled nor unhappy. The moral experience of life had
+built up in him a faith which endured, and the pangs of his own
+pity did but bring him at last to rest the more surely on a pity
+beyond man's. During the nights of semi-delirium which followed the
+scene at Barbizon, John, who watched him, heard him repeat again
+and again words which seemed to have a talismanic power over his
+restlessness. 'Neither do I condemn thee. Come, and sin no more.'
+They were fragments dropped from what was clearly a nightmare of
+anguish and struggle; but they testified to a set of character,
+they threw light on the hopes and convictions which ultimately
+repossessed themselves of the sound man.
+
+Two years passed. It was Christmas Eve. The firm of Grieve & Co. in
+Prince's Street was shut for the holiday, and David Grieve, a mile
+or two away, was sitting over his study fire with a book. He closed
+it presently, and sat thinking.
+
+There was a knock at his door. When he opened it he found Dora
+outside. It was Dora, in the quasi-sister's garb she had assumed of
+late--serge skirt, long black cloak, and bonnet tied with white
+muslin strings under the throat. In her parish visiting among the
+worst slums of Ancoats, she had found such a dress useful.
+
+'I brought Sandy's present,' she said, looking round her
+cautiously. 'Is his stocking hung up?'
+
+'No! or the rascal would never go to sleep to-night. He is nearly
+wild about his presents as it is. Give it to me. It shall go into
+my drawer, and I will arrange everything when I go to bed
+to-night.'
+
+He looked at the puzzle-map she had brought with a childish
+pleasure, and between them they locked it away carefully in a
+drawer of the writing-table.
+
+'Do sit down and get warm,' he said to her, pushing forward a
+chair.
+
+'Oh no! I must go back to the church. We shall be decorating till
+late to-night. But I had to be in Broughton, so I brought this on
+my way home.'
+
+Then Sandy and I will escort you, if you will have us. He made me
+promise to take him to see the shops. I suppose Market Street is a
+sight.'
+
+He went outside to shout to Sandy, who was having his tea, to get
+ready, and then came back to Dora. She was standing by the fire
+looking at an engagement tablet filled with entries, on the
+mantelpiece.
+
+'Father Russell says they have been asking you again to stand for
+Parliament,' she said timidly, as he came in.
+
+'Yes, there is a sudden vacancy. Old Jacob Cherritt is dead.'
+
+'And you won't?'
+
+He shook his head.
+
+'No,' he said, after a pause. 'I am not their man; they would be
+altogether disappointed in me.'
+
+She understood the sad reverie of the face, and said no more.
+
+No. For new friends, new surroundings, efforts of another type, his
+power was now irrevocably gone; he shrank more than ever from the
+egotisms of competition. But within the old lines he had recovered
+an abundant energy. Among his workmen; amid the details now
+fortunate, now untoward of his labours for the solution of certain
+problems of industrial ethics; in the working of the remarkable
+pamphlet scheme dealing with social and religious fact, which was
+fast making his name famous in the ears of the England which thinks
+and labours; and in the self-devoted help of the unhappy,--he was
+developing more and more the idealist's qualities, and here and
+there--inevitably--the idealist's mistakes. His face, as middle
+life was beginning to shape it--with its subtle and sensitive
+beauty--was at once the index of his strength and his limitations.
+
+He and Dora stood talking a while about certain public schemes that
+were in progress for the bettering of Ancoats. Then he said with
+sudden emphasis:
+
+_'Ah!_ if one could but jump a hundred years and see what
+England will be like! But these northern towns, and this northern
+life, on the whole fill one with hope. There is a strong social
+spirit and strong individualities to work on.'
+
+Dora was silent. From her Churchwoman's point of view the prospect
+was not so bright.
+
+'Well, people seem to think that co-operation is going to do
+everything,' she said vaguely.
+
+'We all cry our own nostrums,' he said, laughing; 'what co-operation
+has done up here in the north is wonderful! It has been the making
+of thousands. But the world is not going to give itself over wholly
+to committees. There will be room enough for the one-man-power at
+any rate for generations to come. What we want is leaders; but
+leaders who will feel themselves "members of one body," instruments
+of one social order.'
+
+They stood together a minute in silence; then he went out to the
+stairs and called: 'Sandy, you monkey, come along!'
+
+Sandy came shouting and leaping downstairs, as lithe and handsome
+as ever, and as much of a compound of the elf and the philosopher.
+
+'I _know_ Auntie Dora's brought me a present,' he said,
+looking up into her face,--'but father's locked it up!'
+
+David chased him out of doors with contumely, and they all took the
+tram to Victoria Street.
+
+Once there, Sandy was in the seventh heaven. The shops were ablaze
+with lights, and gay with every Christmas joy; the pavements were
+crowded with a buying and gaping throng. He pulled at his father's
+hand, exclaiming here and pointing there, till David, dragged
+hither and thither, had caught some of the boy's mirth and
+pleasure.
+
+But Dora walked apart. Her heart was a little heavy and dull, her
+face weary. In reality, though David's deep and tender gratitude
+and friendship towards her could not express themselves too richly,
+she felt, as the years went on, more and more divided from him and
+Sandy. She was horrified at the things which David published, or
+said in public; she had long dropped any talk with the child on all
+those subjects which she cared for most. Young as he was, the boy
+showed a marvellous understanding in some ways of his father's
+mind, and there were moments when she felt a strange and dumb
+irritation towards them both.
+
+Christmas too, in spite of her Christian fervour, had always its
+sadness for her. It reminded her of her father, and of the
+loneliness of her personal life.
+
+'How father would have liked all this crowd!' she said once to
+David as they passed into Market Street.
+
+David assented with instant sympathy, and they talked a little of
+the vanished wanderer as they walked along, she with a yearning
+passion which touched him profoundly.
+
+He and Sandy escorted her up the Ancoats High Street, and at last
+they turned into her own road. Instantly Dora perceived a little
+crowd round her door, and, as soon as she was seen, a waving of
+hands, and a Babel of voices.
+
+'What is it?' she cried, paling, and began to run.
+
+David and Sandy followed. She had already flown upstairs; but the
+shawled mill-girls, round the door, flushed with excitement,
+shouted their news into his ear.
+
+'It's her feyther, sir, as ha coom back after aw these years--an
+he's sittin by the fire quite nat'ral like, Mary Styles says--and
+they put him in a mad-house in furrin parts, they did--an his
+hair's quite white--an oh! sir, yo mun just goo up an look.'
+
+Pushed by eager hands, and still holding Sandy, David, though half
+unwilling, climbed the narrow stairs.
+
+The door was half open. And there, in his old chair, sat Daddy, his
+snow-white hair falling on his shoulders, a childish excitement and
+delight on his blanched face. Dora was kneeling at his feet, her
+head on his knees, sobbing.
+
+David took Sandy up in his arms.
+
+'Be quiet, Sandy; don't say a word.'
+
+And he carried him downstairs again, and into the midst of the
+eager crowd.
+
+'I think,' he said, addressing them, 'I would go home if I were
+you--if you love her.'
+
+They looked at his shining eyes and twitching lips, and understood.
+
+'Aye, sir, aye, sir, yo're abeawt reet--we'st not trouble her, sir.'
+
+He carried his boy home, Sandy raining questions in a tumult of
+excitement. Then when the child was put to bed he sat on in his
+lonely study, stirred to his sensitive depths by the thought of
+Dora's long waiting and sad sudden joy--by the realisation of the
+Christmas crowds and merriment--by the sharp memory of his own
+dead. Towards midnight, when all was still, he opened the locked
+drawer which held for him the few things which symbolised and
+summed up his past--a portrait of Lucy, by the river under the
+trees, taken by a travelling photographer, not more than six weeks
+before her death--a little collection of pictures of Sandy from
+babyhood onwards--Louie's breviary--his father's dying letter--a
+book which had belonged to Ancrum, his vanished friend. But though
+he took thence his wife's picture, communing awhile, in a passion
+of yearning, with its weary plaintive eyes, he did not allow
+himself to sink for long into the languor of memory and grief. He
+knew the perils of his own nature, and there was in him a stern
+sense of the difficulty of living aright, and the awfulness of the
+claim made by God and man on the strength and will of the
+individual. It seemed to him that he had been 'taught of God'
+through natural affection, through repentance, through sorrow,
+through the constant energies of the intellect. Never had the
+Divine voice been clearer to him, or the Divine Fatherhood more
+real. Freely he had received--but only that he might freely give.
+On this Christmas night he renewed every past vow of the soul, and
+in so doing rose once more into that state and temper which is
+man's pledge and earnest of immortality--since already, here and
+now, it is the eternal life begun.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The History of David Grieve, by Mrs. Humphry Ward
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