THE CRUCIBLE

1

Of his mother’s anxious inner life during these latter weeks Oswald had known nothing. Children accept the outer semblance shown them by their elders as implicitly as they take food from their hands. When his mother sat in silence he might wonder--after a while--as to the cause of it, and marvel that she should be sad. For sorrow, bitter though it may be to childhood in the first moment, is shed like tears and as easily forgotten. Oswald remembered with a diligently nurtured sadness that his little sister was dead; that he had lost his father years before. But these things, as reasons for present grief, seemed vague and difficult to comprehend. When, after some deeper silence than usual, he looked up to see the slow tears creeping down his mother’s face, he experienced a feeling of embarrassment bordering on shame, and after gazing long enough to reassure himself that his first glance had not erred, he turned away his eyes as from some spectacle to which it was not meet he should be party. When his mother gazed into her purse and sighed, the act prompted him to recall that they were very poor, and he reflected a look appropriately mournful--not that he comprehended, save at second hand, what poorness signified; for always he had food to eat, and clothes to wear, and sometimes a whole penny in his pocket to spend. Between him and the outer world his mother intervened; its shrill blasts reached him only through the thickets of her love--stirring her solicitude above him, like the raging wind subdued to soporific faintness in the topmost branches of tall forest trees.

But he was aware, since little Beryl’s death, that a hush had fallen over life, as if each day were Sunday. Their voices had never quite regained their old brightness; and if ever Oswald broke into song upon the stairs, he checked himself at once with a sense of guilt. He was aware, too, that something secret and impalpable, something like a tissue of the finest gauze, wrapped him to his mother in a new relationship of love. He was aware that he had grown more precious to her since Beryl’s death, and though he did his utmost to dissimulate unworthy feelings, the boy in him could not ignore the proud consequences resulting from this increase in his value. Yes. He meant more to his mother; she leaned on him. She looked to him; he found her eyes upon him set in a gaze of worship and admiration ... and he experienced the tremble of pride trying prodigiously to be humble; of an elation struggling to be duly sad. And though he was sensible of the restraint imposed upon his youth by the necessity to act this graver part, and though--from time to time--his impulses broke out and traitorously betrayed him; the weeks that passed since Beryl’s death enfolded his life in a sort of sanctified and golden glamour. The supernatural softness of his mother’s voice and eyes; the religious sublimity of his own behaviour which, as a detached spectator, he took occasion to admire from time to time, marvelling at the heights of righteousness his conduct reached--without effort or conscious striving, but by a kind of natural aptitude as if he had (indeed) a genius for being good. He would say “Yes, mother,” “No, mother” and “If you please, mother” in such tones as he knew she loved to hear; and walked upstairs with a tread so considerate of the hallowed home he lived in, and of his mother’s feelings, as brought the blush of self-appraisement to his brow. He did--like most of us--the things that capture praise, and it was a joy to him to live in a world where goodness found such prompt appreciation and such ineffable reward. Nay, he even reached that pinnacle of exalted attainment where he was able to commiserate inferior humanity, and ask how men could ever stoop to sin at all, with such incentive to be virtuous.

Although Oswald possessed the quick eye and instantaneous observance of outward things that is the heritage of healthy youth, he had as yet acquired no skill at all in the art of translation from the open page of life and drawing inference from fact. Thus, the visits of the burly Councillor had (to him) meant nothing more than what, externally, they seemed to be. And when his mother disclosed at length the full significance of what the Councillor’s comings stood for, the intelligence seemed at first too vast to be packed into the small compass of his childish mind. Nor could he comprehend how it came to be that his mother wept over him in imparting the prodigious news, and clasped him to her heart, and implored him “never ... never to forget his own dear father.” But already he had arrived at the stage of understanding which accepts as fact that feminine tears mean different things at different times, and that they are not always to be taken as implying pain and grief alone, but stand sometimes for joys and prides, and feelings too remote for words, and memories which no speech can adequately represent. He was too young, as yet, to scorn his mother’s tears; he held them rather in a mute respect as emblems of a wisdom higher than his own. His youth felt vaguely conscious of its inability to read or understand them. Nor was the announcement with which they were accompanied much more comprehensible to his mind. At first the tidings spread over his intelligence and clouded his present melancholy happiness in life like a great sad cloud. But little by little, gathering reassurance from his mother’s voice, and mollified by the extra love which she pressed on his acceptance, as if it had been a tempting slice of birthday cake, he began to recover confidence. Those changes that older people stand in dread of show friendly to the heart of youth. His quick eye saw a hundred possibilities in this wonderful event disclosed to him, and his tongue--seeking after enlightenment--betrayed too clearly to his mother’s ears the eagerness within him. What? Did it mean that they were going to leave their present home? Did it mean that they were both of them to go and live at Rockery House, overlooking the Town Acres, upon the Hunmouth Road?

It hurt her, as she had foreknown it would, to find how greedily her son’s words grasped after these new possibilities in life, and she asked him with reproachful sadness in her tones: Would he be glad to leave this house ... that had been home to them for so long? The tone and the phrasing of her question were not lost upon him, and he dropped his head. No. He would not be glad. He would be sorry ... for some things.--But were they really going to leave it, all the same? Were they, mother?

Yes. They were going to leave it.

And were they going to live in Councillor Burford’s big house?

She said “Yes....” and closed her eyes.

Only one consideration shadowed his eager face with doubt.

Would Miss Burford live there too? And when his mother reassured him: “No, dear,” he drew a deep breath. Little by little his keen imagination attached itself to the project. Just as his mother did--unknown to him--though with infinitely more success, he tuned his mind to the impending change. The first stupefaction gave place to zeal, to enthusiasm, to pride. When the big Councillor called one day, and--having first enquired of Mrs. Holmroyd: “Have you got him told yet, ma’am?” and being assured she had--took Oswald by the sleeve and asked him: “Well my lad! What do you think of me for your new father?” Oswald’s bosom swelled with a vast importance. He began to experience a pride in this great new acquisition to the family prestige. Yes. He began to be proud that this big, broad man with the grey beard and the authoritative voice, and substantial square-toed, well-blacked boots, was soon to be his second father. The thought of the shop in High Gate, with the two bowed windows and the big tea canisters and the abysmal bottles of boiled sweets, coated inside with their delectable sugary bloom, and the assistants in their white aprons and uprolled sleeves--filled him with fervour. His youthful ardours, playing about the thought of it, imbued the shop with unsuspected marvels. The magic of accessibility threw it into a terrific light. He began to conceive a passion for grocery and all pertaining to it. And then, the splendid house along the Hunmouth Road, approachable through a cast-iron gate with a corrugated handle; and the impressive Mansion House where Councillor Burford walked in and out with perfect freedom, and showed his head above the moreen curtains in the Council Chamber. All these things were, in a sense, secured to him by a sudden change in the decree of providence, as inexplicable as it was welcome. His only fear began to be that providence might change its mind and cause something--as inexplicable and unexpected as what had already taken place--to bring his hopes to naught. He would wake up in the morning with an awful fear that destiny had changed direction in the night; that this radiant vision of stepfathers and groceries had been destroyed. And he would scan his mother’s face with dread to find the confirmation of his fears--asking her at length, if its testimony seemed inconclusive: “Are we ... still going to live there?” He did not know--how could he--that his obvious eagerness for the change herself so greatly dreaded, made her martyrdom the more. For she could not disclose to her son the sheer mainspring of necessity that moved her. She could not tell him that what brought such joy and interest to his thoughtless youth, was, in some sort, the crucifixion of his mother’s soul. And against his boyish pride in the acquisition of a stepfather, and his ill-concealed enthusiasm for the shop in High Gate, and all that pertained to it, she had no word to say. This act of choice was hers, not his. But it hurt her. Oh, it cut and hurt her to be the recipient of his unguarded confidences; to note the pride that got the better of his tongue; to mark his readiness to leave this home; his impatience to be associated with all that mortified her.

If only her resources had permitted it, she would have striven to keep the evil indefinitely at bay. But she perceived with something akin to desperation, that her slender store was trickling to its end--with that illusory acceleration which marks the passing of the last grains of sand through the neck of the hourglass. If she delayed the inevitable day too long, its evil would be but the more. Not as a pauper, surely, could her pride consent to be the wife of Mr. Burford. All her self-respect recoiled from the necessity to disclose her straitened circumstances to him, or undergo--perforce--the degradation of his aid. And so, when the Councillor attacked the subject of their marriage in a more practical vein, saying to Mrs. Holmroyd: “Now ma’am. Surely I’ve given you time enough to think things over and get your mind prepared. Don’t you think we might be settling our plans and getting things in motion? When people of our age decides upon a step like this, there’s no call for long delays. At our time of life long engagements seem ridic’lous, and exposes us to folks’s laughter. I propose ma’am, that we should push our plans forward without delay, and get comfortably settled.”

... So when the Councillor spoke thus, standing in his overcoat on Mrs. Holmroyd’s hearthrug, with his broad shoulders to the grate, and his square felt hat, brim uppermost, upon the table, she could only tremble with an inward spasm of alarm, and keep silence for fear the spoken word might injure prudence and betray her into the power of her own weakness.

“Well ma’am?” the Councillor urged her. “Don’t you see the force of my argument? Don’t you think, so long as we’ve made up our minds to get married, that it’ll be wiser for us both to waste no time, but get the whole business over and done with, and settle down comfortable? Life won’t last for ever, ma’am, for either of us. There’s nothing in the world to wait for, that I can see. Me and you’ll be older; that’s all.”

It was the last of her resistance. She took no further stand against his wish. After all, her pride had enjoyed the poor comfort of submitting to his persuasions; it had been spared the pressure of necessity. The only time she asked for now was just such time as might be necessary to wind off the skein of the Spring Bank Gardens life and free herself from the obligations of her present home. As for the furniture....

“Why, you won’t need that now, ma’am,” the Councillor decided, passing his practical, business eye over the effects displayed to view, in one comprehensive and depreciatory glance that made Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart beat faster.

“Not need it?” she stammered weakly, not daring for very shame to champion what his eyes and voice had so emphatically disparaged.

“There’s as much furniture as ever you’ll want, and as good (I venture to say) up yonder, ma’am. You won’t want to encumber yourself with a lot of old rubbish--even if there was room for it at the other end. But there isn’t.”

She looked and listened with a face of white dismay, but the Councillor was too preoccupied with his task of bland dispraisement to note the havoc wrought within his listener’s feelings. “I should pack it all off to the sale-room, ma’am, and be done with it. Not that it will fetch a deal--is that there table mahogany?--but it will be out of the road. You’ve not much upstairs in the bedroom way, ma’am, I believe? I’ve never been myself; I’m only going by what I understood Annie to say after she’d paid you a call one afternoon.”

Against such masculine authority she dared not pit herself. She said after a pause, in a voice directed obviously to his better feelings,--a voice of veiled imploration:

“These things are of old association. For me ... they have a sentimental value.”

“Aye, ma’am, sentiment!” the Councillor concurred, in an indulgent tone which made her a present of the quality for what it was worth, whilst showing his practical contempt of it. “But we can’t live on sentiment, ma’am. That’s what I find in my business, at all events. Customers doesn’t come to me for sentiment. They come to me for Value--and unless they get it they’ll go elsewhere. What’s sentiment when you look at things sensible? It’s only a hindrance ma’am, if you let it interfere with practical affairs. There’s individuals in the Council Chamber, and as many more outside it, that talks sentiment to hide their lack of common sense. ‘Don’t remove such and such a pump,’ they say. ‘It’s stood there since I was a lad.’ ‘Aye,’ says I, ‘and what use is it now that every house has water laid on to its kitchen? I’ll wager not a bucketful’s been drawn by anybody this past two years. Folks has grown a deal too proud to be seen fetching _their_ water from a pump in public. They’ll only condescend, nowadays, to go out to fetch beer.’ Take my advice ma’am, and don’t give way to sentiment. It doesn’t pay.”

She protested: “Oh, Mr. Burford.... You do not surely mean all you say. This pianoforte ... I used to practise on it as a girl. My mother....” She could say no more, for many memories choked the source of speech, and she turned away her head to hide the tears.

“Why ma’am,” said the Councillor, embarrassed by this unexpected sequel to a harangue whose delivery had impressed him not a little, as serving to give his future wife a hint of the eloquent common-sense her husband-elect was able to disseminate upon occasion. “I wasn’t referring to the piano, particular. I was speaking general, you understand. So far as the piano goes”.... He bent on it an eye of judicial condescension,” ... I won’t say but what we can’t find room for that.”

She plucked up courage to thank him. “Indeed, I hope so. I should be most grateful ...” and linked the table quickly to the favour granted, and some of the pictures, and the mirror....

“To be sure ... to be sure,” the Councillor accorded. “We can find a place for a few old odds and ends, on which you set particular store. But ...” he crimped his brow and turned it about the four walls of the room as if to suggest the difficulty of the task she set him. “I hope you’ll be reasonable, ma’am, and bring no more than what there’s room for. Such things as carpets and window curtains and slates and schoolbooks would be best got rid of. They’d only be lumber where they’re going to.” This she did not contest. Its material truth was too patent to be argued. And yet, for her, even the humblest objects that had once formed part of her home; nay, had formed the outer portion of her very self (as to Mrs. Holmroyd it seemed), had a value almost individual. They were,--so she had sometimes phrased it to her inner ear, “the soul’s anchorage”; something by which in hours of grief and moments of adversity she could stabilize the violent fluctuations of self and feel unchanged by reason of the companionship of things long known. To enter this strange man’s house with no reminders of the old life left, was to break association with the past. He forfeited nothing. His home, his shop, his daily round--all the familiar extensions of himself remained unchanged. He gained a wife; he gave up nothing of environment. She, on the contrary, must needs lose all, or most, and find what comfort she could amid surroundings strange and storyless. Little by little (so she felt) her life was being outstripped. That part of it in which her dearest thoughts resided was being put off like a skin. Soon she would acquire a fresh integument showing nothing of the old pattern.

Slowly she would begin to take on the character of her new surroundings; assume the hue; absorb into her inmost self the tincture of the strange life entered. Nay! “God forbid!” her conscience cried out loud within her. Through all, in spite of all, must she cling with passionate allegiance to that earlier self with all its sacred memories and obligations. That was the nature of the reverie into which her thoughts dipped swiftly, with the swiftness of a swallow on the wing, as she stood in the little Spring Bank Gardens parlour confronting her future husband. Some of his words in her abstraction she failed to hear, but she returned to consciousness of his voice. He was asking her to “call round to-morrow, ma’am, and take a look at the house. It’s time you did. I venture to think there’s not much you’ll find--or seek--to alter. But you’re going to be mistress, and it’s only right you should have a voice in things. I’ll tell you quite straightforward that I’m a man that doesn’t care for a bit more change than there’s any reason for. The house has suited me well enough for twenty years--and I believe I know you well enough by this time, ma’am, to think it will suit _you_. With all her faults Annie was a good housekeeper. She overdid it, we all know. She’s been spring-cleaning ever since I let her know that things was settled betwixt us. She says she’s not going to have you come into the place and cry shame on her, and you shan’t be able to throw the dust of the house after her when she’s gone. She won’t be there to-morrow, ma’am. That’s why I should like you to call then, if quite convenient. She’ll be going to stay with her Aunt Matilda after awhile.”

“ ... Yes. I’ll tell you quite straightforward that I’m a man that doesn’t care for a bit more change than there’s any reason for.” The phrase sank deep into her consciousness. She, the woman, was being asked to change her name, her home, her habits, everything. He, the man of business, who had no use for sentiment, was yet bound tight enough to institutions by a something not more rational than sentiment, albeit of a tempered hardness and dignified with a sterner name. Through his marked desire to gratify and please her, his deference to her feelings, his obvious care to misrepresent himself to her in nothing, but to take his stand on the uncompromising pedestal of common-sense--she yet divined more clearly, the closer she approached to it, the narrow nature of the life awaiting her.

2

To nobody in Daneborough did Mrs. Holmroyd shrink from making the disclosure of her impending marriage more than to Elizabeth. She shirked it so effectually in fact, that Elizabeth spared her all initiative by bringing the news to her own door, where--on entering--she flung dramatic hands to heaven, and cried with the emotional fervour that agitated her withered frame on the slightest occasion:

“Oh missus! And you never told me!”

For Elizabeth it was a fresh evidence of the world’s conspiracy against her. Mrs. Holmroyd had withheld the news on purpose. This deliberate secrecy was but part of a design.

“You’ve finished with me’m!” the old woman declared. “Now you’ve gotten Joe Burford, and will be Mayoress one of these fine days, you don’t intend to have nothing more to do with me. You’ll be same as Miss Burford. You’ll be overproud to have me about the place, for fear I might tell the servants I’d a chance of being Joe Burford’s mother if I’d liked.”

Elizabeth’s shaft--wildly though she sped it--struck the target if it did not pierce its centre. Her awareness of this painful convergence of their two destinies in the Burford circle had troubled Mrs. Holmroyd deeper than she dared admit. What Elizabeth’s undaunted independence had declined, her own extremity had accepted. She was oppressed with the humiliating sense of stooping to fallen crusts, rendered unsavoury by association. And she felt no easier in spirit when Elizabeth, harping on a theme dear to her heart, exclaimed:

“Aye’m! I ought to ha’ took him when I’d chance. Lots o’ folks has told me so. If I had ’a’ done I should be living in yon fine house now, with other women charring for me.” She praised Mrs. Holmroyd’s wisdom, that would have been a lesson to her (she said) ‘nobbut it had come fifty year before.’ “I thought then’m, that I should be able to work for ever. Who wanted old Joe Burford i’ them days, wi’ his mucky aud appron and muffin basket? I was a deal keener to be free to earn my own meat wi’ my own hands. But if I could ’a’ seen then what I see now. Hands doesn’t last for ever, nor eyes’m. Nor friends!” she added with a terrible gesture of despair. “Nay’m! Friends is the first things a body loses. No matter how hard you work, nor what you do for them’m, they’ve finished with you moment you begin to fail.”

But her first energies of despair, dying down beneath Mrs. Holmroyd’s gentle assurance of faith, welled into the customary tears, contrite and supplicative. She hadn’t meant it. She’d spoke too hasty. “Don’t _you_ be angry with me’m,” she begged, “and turn again me for what I’ve just said. It’s true of anybody but you. You’d never act like other people, I know.” And her tremulous ambition besought but one boon of Mrs. Holmroyd’s clemency. “Let me come and work for you when you get yonder!” she supplicated. “Aye, do’m! You’ll only keep one servant. You’ll want someone to come on Mondays to wash. I’d rather come and wash for you,” she cried, “than anybody in Daneborough.” And her triumph was terrible to see when Mrs. Holmroyd--touched by the dread spectacle of old age warring, single handed, against the world--gave the necessary sanction. “Aye! I knew it! I knew it!” Elizabeth declaimed, in a voice of such passionate conviction as made the globe ring on the little chandelier; for she stood in the passage just beyond the parlour door. “I knew _you’d_ stand by me. I knew you wouldn’t throw me aside like Her! Oh’m! I’d give all I’ve got to see her face when I tell her what you’ve promised, and let her know I shall be charring up yonder long after she’s gone.”

“ ... Make mischief’m?” she protested, in response to Mrs. Holmroyd’s shocked admonition. “_Me_’m?” she emphasized reproachfully. “I’d scorn to do such a thing. It’s not my way’m. But I shall be forced to tell her when she asks me. For she’ll ask me’m. I know she will. It wouldn’t be her if she didn’t.”

And on the next occasion of her working for Mrs. Holmroyd she brought the tidings of a terrible encounter with the Councillor’s daughter. The big black shawl in which Elizabeth stood enveloped tossed like a thing alive, diabolically agitated by the emotions underneath it. She had told Miss Burford.... Ah! she had told Miss Burford things to make the heart of any widow turn cold. “Mrs. Holmroyd is a lady ...” she had told her. “Which you never were and never will be.” “Mrs. Holmroyd knows my value a hundred times better than what you do. She’s begged me to work for her. Yes. I’m to get the place fit for her to come to. Mrs. Holmroyd says (this). Mrs. Holmroyd says (that).” All the indignation long pent up within Elizabeth’s bosom had been given (so it seemed) additional authority by being passed through Mrs. Holmroyd’s lips. Mrs. Holmroyd constituted the mouthpiece of all that Elizabeth’s triumphant anger had to say.

“Oh! if you could ’a’ seen her face then’m!” she cried, her triumph blind to the altered countenance confronting her. “If you could ’a’ seen colour she turned. Red and green--and at last as white as yon tablecloth. Oh, it would ’a’ done you good’m.”

Remonstrance with such uplifted passion was vain. Mrs. Holmroyd could only bow her head to the storm let loose upon her outraged feelings. All this, her impotent distress divined, was part of the harvest of her reaping; part of her judgment.

Now what in these days of encounter with such compromising realities had become of the Great Ideal?

Little indeed, it has to be confessed. Like some frail lantern striving in a gale, so many gusts and blasts had blown upon it that at times its flame looked to be perilously overset, if not extinguished quite. For no man cares to recall his better motives when he acts deliberately according to his worst, and a feeling akin to shame had deterred Mrs. Holmroyd from dwelling on the Great Ideal--being all too conscious of the doubtful nature of the road on which she travelled now to reach it. But the details of Elizabeth’s encounter; the judicial sentence passed by Mr. Burford upon her scanty furniture, and Oswald’s over-eager acceptance of all the terms and conditions of the new life, awakened her to a sense of danger imminent and real. The Great Ideal must be revived; the smouldering lamp relit. She had been thinking (so her reproaches ran) too much about herself during these recent days to pay true heed to the welfare of her son. She had dwelt too utterly on the sacrifice which her motherhood must make; too little on the glorious object of it. That she must forfeit many of her own most deeply held ideals meant nothing, if she could succeed in keeping true to the one ideal of Duty. Surely all other ideals were--or ought to be--subordinate to this. They were all comprised within this one strict law. Duty was the more than half of love; the more than half of faith; the more than half of charity; the more than half of everything that made life livable and justified it to itself. For everything that love might do, duty might do. Less brightly, to be sure, but not less thoroughly. Nay, was it not the very frame and skeleton of love; the hard, strong staff that love itself must use to lean on, and that--in love’s hands--put forth its blossoms and flowered like a living shrub? Let her sacrifice be complete and noble, not grudged and mean. Of what avail was prayer, so long as her poor material self resisted all that prayer besought?

... So the lantern was relit, and Oswald--not without some wonder and perplexity and vague disquiet--felt once more upon his shoulder the burden of the Great Ideal. For already, in his boyish mind, he had been disposed to give up his earlier pact, and every obligation contained in it, as readily as he renounced his present home--in joyous exchange for the brighter future beckoning him, and shining before his sight like a brand new penny. Already, indeed, he had completed his preparation to exchange the old Best of Fathers for the new. And his aspirations, tired of running errands in quest of a vague and indefinable Ideal had relapsed comfortably upon ambitions nearer home. The double-fronted shop in the High Gate to his readjusted vision offered all that the most ambitious spirit could desire. And to have a broad town councillor for Father, and to live in a house standing behind railings and a rockery on the Hunmouth Road, seemed in themselves attainments so lofty that it damped his ardour to be told these things spelled not finality of greatness; that they affected him personally not at all, and that still his spirit must press forward to its unknown destination, leaving these splendours far behind. But with the quick duplicity of youth he hid from his mother’s searching look all the more incriminating evidences of his culpability. Through his momentarily flagging underlip, and the tremour of his eyelids beneath a gaze more searching than his guilty eye could bear, Mrs. Holmroyd divined something of the boy’s trouble, flinching under the burden reimposed. But he possessed the fickleness of mind that is one of the most touching attributes of youth; the prompt reaction to fresh needs and appetites aroused; so putting aside obediently the bright new playthings of his fancy which were his hourly solace now, he took up--at his mother’s wish--the thumbed and tattered and neglected primer of ideals, and studied diligently at her knee the book he had believed and hoped for ever laid aside. And to earn the praise which is so precious to the young, he acted the part which he knew by experience that his mother most desired to see him play.

“ ... And shall I go to the Grammar School, now, mother?” he asked, and she answered--after just a moment’s hesitation--“Yes, dear.”

It was perhaps less dazzling, this Grammar School, to an imagination that had once fed on the immoderate delights of flour bins and humbug bottles and candied fruits and sugar scoops. But he tried his loyal hardest to make the best of the Ideal; stimulated his pride once more with thoughts of grammar-schools and mortarboards, and sought to puff up his stature to the dimensions of the great things expected of him, keeping nevertheless the closest watch upon occasion, like some obedient dog that knows itself forbidden to solicit food at table, and yet builds terrific hopes on the beseechful moisture of its muzzle and the supplicative brightness of its eyes. Who knows!... Who knows.... So thought this little boy within himself. Even hopes come true at times.

3

And now they were arrived at the last weeks of uncertainty and expectation. They were come, indeed, so close to the inevitable that Mrs. Holmroyd’s misery out-grew all wish or effort to prolong itself against the evil hour, and was possessed only of that last desire of the truly wretched--to drain their cup and drown anticipation in reality. Yet despite this fact, so many tasks and duties called upon her time that--in her rare moments of leisure, when the true self could escape from the network of necessities--she even reproached her conduct with indifference, saying: “I do not feel things as I should. Surely, there are a hundred claims upon my sadness, and yet I never heed them. Can it be that I am become hardened; that my feelings have lost their finer edge?” Curiously enough, her apprehensions that had, at one time, filled all the future with dismay, were resolved now into a single dread of the marriage ceremony. She dreaded the ordeal of strange eyes; the moment of publicity that should expose her to the scrutiny of a carnal world,--repeating to herself, as though the invocation were a prayer: “Oh, if it were only over!” The years that were to follow seemed as naught by comparison with those few brief moments of publicity; that narrow, bitter portal of experience through which she would be constrained to pass.

Almost every day the Councillor’s broad and well-blacked boots traversed the Spring Bank pavement, and after a prefatory knock his large hand pushed open Mrs. Holmroyd’s door. The subject of the marriage ceremony offered a theme of close deliberation between them.

“We don’t want no unnecessary fuss, ma’am,” the Councillor had told his future wife. “Neither of us. In our case it’s not called for. We’re not going into marriage with any silly, nonsensical ideas, and our heads stuck up in the clouds, as if we was young people. We’re walking into it in a reasonable manner, and it would be a mistake in my humble opinion to make more of that business than what it is. Something plain and simple, ma’am, would suit me--and I venture to think you’re of the same way of thinking.”

The Councillor’s “venture to think” had all the force of a behest. He used it, as Mrs. Holmroyd had by this time come to be aware, as an imperative expression of his will, and she had already assumed that secret attitude of mind which sought its refuge in submission. And though she more than shared the Councillor’s desire for simplicity, the need of it hurt her none the less. All the dignities and decencies of what by right should go to constitute the act of marriage seemed lacking. They could no longer stand before the sight of God and man with that uplifting pride in the rightness of their mutual choice, and faith in one another. Not--as on that first, ineffable occasion--could she move towards the altar steps, sustained by love undoubting and undimmed. That love, she knew despairingly, had been given once for all. Such bridal veil as now alone she might rightly wear was the thick veil wrapped about her feelings, to keep the inner eyes from seeing the truth too clearly. For her and him--she realized with pain--the solemnities of marriage were a mockery. And yet, something in her nature cried out for, and seemed as if it could not dispense with, these very solemnities which reproached and mocked her spirit with the blessed food of which it lacked the power to partake. To his suggestion of being married at the Register Office, “very quiet, ma’am,” Mrs. Holmroyd did indeed offer an emphatic opposition. Where questions of common-sense were in debate she yielded to his wish nine times out of ten without a word,--just as she might have laid her submissive hand upon his offered arm. But the higher spiritual altitudes had come to be acknowledged tacitly as hers. Here, in a region of the judgment compromising no pounds, shillings and pence, the Councillor gave way to her with a great air of condescension and magnanimity. The mere sight of Mrs. Holmroyd’s shocked face had been sufficient to make him instantly withdraw his suggestion.

“I see it doesn’t exactly meet with your approval, ma’am,” he said. “And I’ve no desire to force you, nor nobody, against their feelings. The Register Office would be nice and quiet, and I’m well known to the Registrar, who’d do anything to make things comfortable for us both. There’d be no sightseers let in to stare out of idle curiosity at business that doesn’t concern them. But I see you don’t like the idea ma’am, and so we’ll drop it. I’m willing to meet your wishes in the matter. If you don’t care for the register office, how would _my_ place of Worship suit you?”

He referred now to the stark, stone chapel in Friar’s Gate, built after the pattern of a child’s house with freestone blocks in place of wooden bricks, and the alternative (it transpired) suited Mrs. Holmroyd no better. Already she had made it clear to Mr. Burford that their marriage must be understood to cost her no part of those religious observances to which, from childhood, she had been used, and to which both by conviction and deep association she was indissolubly bound, and the Councillor had said at once: “To be sure, ma’am. To be sure. I’ve nothing to say against that. It’s sound and reasonable, and stands to common-sense. I should be sorry to interfere with anybody’s religious views.... I suppose, ma’am,” he added; “you don’t mean to imply that you’d entertain any objection to accompany me now and again to _my_ place of worship? I venture to think you won’t consider that an unreasonable thing for a man to ask of his wife. I give you credit for not being bigoted, ma’am.”

And she had said--though not without misgiving, knowing too well the dangers of compromise in spiritual affairs: “Certainly, Mr. Burford. I should have no objection ... to going with you occasionally to Friar’s Gate.”

“People would look for it, ma’am,” he told her with a voice that had manifestly gained in courage from her assurance. “They’d expect to see us worship together after we was married. I don’t necessarily mean as a reg’lar thing. But as frequent as can be arranged agreeable to us both. As far as I’m concerned,” he said with great toleration, “I flatter myself I’m a broad-minded man in most things, or I shouldn’t have the confidence of the burgesses of the West Ward to represent them at the Council table. And I shouldn’t object to sit beside you at your place of worship, ma’am, on special occasions and so forth.”

He did not tell her, to be sure, that in the course of his private cogitations he had come to see in the approaching marriage a favourable opportunity to cultivate a closer contact with the Established Church. Up to the present he had been held fixed to his place of nonconformity by the force of circumstances. Nothing in his life of inflexible routine between the house, the business and the Council Chamber, had offered the least excuse for any loosening of the rivets that bound him (to all outward seeming) to the Wesleyan belief. And yet, apart from the strength of its external hold upon him, the rigid compactness of its observances into which from boyhood he had been wedged and mortared like one of the stones of the chapel’s self, the Councillor’s religious opinions were less dogmatic than the uncompromising attitude with which, in public, he subscribed to them might have led outsiders to believe. He had, at least, mixed with too many men and too many opinions in the Council Chamber and Mayor’s Parlour to be indifferent to the material advantages attaching to church membership. Theologically considered, the Councillor’s opinions on any aspect of religion were negligible; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he had kept faithful to his first fold for the same reason that many husbands remain constant to their wives--that is to say, for lack of the requisite encouragement to infidelity. But neither he nor Miss Burford was unaware of the stigma of inferiority under which their own particular religious body laboured in the eyes of social Daneborough. The knowledge rankled deep in both their bosoms, though the Councillor had wit to case his resentments in a breast of masonry, and show to the world a four-square front that seemed impervious to slights or envy. Miss Burford’s resentment of the superior pretentions of church-going Daneborough was, on the contrary, alert and acrid. To collide by accident with the fashionable stream of worshippers from St. Gyles’s was to bring instant defiance to her head, and sharpness to her nose and scorn to her eye. She affected to despise church-going as a mere outlet for pretentiousness and display. People only went to church, according to Miss Burford, to show themselves off and try and make the world believe them of more social importance than they were. “I suppose she thinks herself Somebody!” had been one of her contemptuous pronouncements on Mrs. Holmroyd, “because she goes to Church! I declare I haven’t patience with such people. They haven’t any religion at all; their worship is nothing but show.”

Despite her breach with her father, she took care to keep in constant touch with him, for--though she had a daughter’s injury to vindicate, she had also a woman’s curiosity to satisfy; and there were many points about this monstrous marriage which her indignation burned to know. Despite her vehement protestation to the contrary she had deigned to accept temporary shelter with her brother and his wife in their narrow-chested raw brick villa forming one of a terrace off the Hunmouth Road, so recently come into existence that its nether end was still a sandpit and depository of builder’s debris, the whole area being impregnated with the odour of mortar and unseasoned wood. Here a bedroom was being slowly prepared for her under her personal supervision, and to all acquaintances she spoke of herself as being already driven from her home. She still slept, however, under her father’s roof, and whilst professing to take no further part in the direction of the house, but saying in regard to all matters referred for her judgment: “Don’t ask _me_. I don’t count for anything any longer. I’m Nobody!” claiming to be, in point of authority, the inferior of her father’s servant, whom (saying she never troubled, interfered with, or corrected now) she nevertheless found ample opportunity to interfere with and reprehend a great deal.

She had prophesied to more than one of her acquaintances--all of whom were quite willing to insinuate sympathy with Miss Burford’s cause for the confidential rewards that such ephemeral allegiance brought them--she had prophesied: “Mark my words! I would never be a bit surprised if the marriage was actually to take place in Church. She’s capable of Anything. And as for my father....” To him, putting the aspersion adroitly into the mouth of the world, she said, choosing her opportunity:

“A nice idea! Causing people to talk about you as they do, and saying the wedding is going to take place in Church!”

“Well,” said the Councillor after awhile, in a tone between repudiation and contempt. “And what if it is?”

“What if it is!” Miss Burford expostulated, roused by the triumph of conviction. “Do you mean to say you’re actually going to let that woman drag you where she pleases, just to gratify her pride and vanity?” She drew in the breath of indignation through her tightened nose. “You that’s worshipped Wesleyan all your life.”

“Is that to say,” her father asked deliberately, “that there’s no other places of worship but what’s Wesleyan?”

“Ah!” she cried, with a light of terrible comprehension breaking out upon her face. “So that’s it, is it! That’s what she’s brought you to. If I didn’t think so! You’ll be going to church with her on Sundays before long, like the rest of them. That’s what you’ll be doing.”

Her prediction, made in that acrimonious key, was not unwelcome to the Councillor. She had flung the gauntlet down to him in anger, and by a little diplomatic show of resentment he might with better credit pick it up and charge the consequences to her.

“Well? And suppose I do?” he said. “You’ll only have yourself to blame, Annie. It’ll be you that’s driven me, not her. I don’t know what sort of Christianity you call yours, but if it’s the sort of Christianity one gets by attending chapel ... I venture to think I shan’t get a deal more harm by going to church.... There’s one thing, though,” he added. “Whether a man goes to church or chapel, he doesn’t need to ask permission of his daughter, nor of nobody. Wherever I go to I shall go to please myself.”

“Do you call That religion?” his daughter challenged him severely, at a blind end for an answer. “Is religion pleasing oneself I’d like to know?”

“Why, so far as you’re concerned,” her father answered imperturbably, “it’s neither pleasing oneself nor nobody, Annie. It’s being as ill-tempered as you can, and trying to make everybody else the same. There’s not more real religion in your nature than would cover a threepenny bit, and it doesn’t become you to talk about other folks’ religion, whatever sort it is, so I’m telling you, Annie, and I’m your Father.”

All things considered he was by no means dissatisfied with this encounter.

“Well, she knows now,” he complimented himself. “She can’t say I haven’t told her.”

And the more he thought over the episode the better pleased he was with the turn his policy had given to it.

“As a member of the Corporation I’ve got to be broad-minded and reasonable. There’s more places of worship in this town than one, and more feelings to consider than mine or hers. It’s only natural for a man to pay his wife the compliment of attending her place of worship, so long as she’s willing to do the same by him. I venture to think there’s nobody of common sense can quarrel with it.”

And in pondering the idea he found increasing satisfaction with this propitious opportunity to plant one foot in the established faith, and come to handshakes with the Clergy.

“The worst of nonconformist bodies,” he told himself for his instruction, “is their bigotry. They’re that narrow. Folks that’s too closely connected with their own sects and sees no good outside them, gets warped. Annie’s warped. Her friends is warped. I can see it now. I’ve been inclined to get a bit warped myself, and to look on churchgoers as if they wasn’t hardly Christians. Well, I’m glad to say I’ve seen the error I was making before it’s got too late. I don’t want to meet a better Christian than my future wife. She’d be a credit to any Body or place of Worship. And if the clergy calls upon Us there’s nobody will know better how to receive them. That I _do_ know. And I venture to think they’ll get no better treatment in any parishioner’s house than what they will in mine.” In such wise he held forth to his inward ear, formulating the phrases with self-importance, and listening to them with appreciative pride. And the more he delved into the subject the more sanction he was gratified to find for his contemplated movement to the Church. “I live in St. Saviour’s parish,” he reminded himself. “The church isn’t more than a stone’s throw from my own front door. It is common-sense to leave one’s wife at the porch on a wet morning and then trudge another half mile under a dripping umbrella to Friar’s Gate, as though my wife’s worship wasn’t good enough for me?”

“And beside ...” he continued to himself, and to the other listeners in his imagination, “ ... after a man’s been married in a place of worship, it has associations that he’s got to consider.” Unconsciously he adapted Mrs. Holmroyd’s terminology and point of view to his own more practical necessity.

“If I can go to church for _my_ convenience, it’s only right and fair to go again for _theirs_. I gave Friar’s Gate its turn when I was married the first time, because my wife worshipped there the same as me. But it’s not to be supposed that a man’s bound for ever by what he does once. It isn’t business. Customers doesn’t tie themselves to me; they go where it suits them, and religion stands to be the same. I’ve customers from all the leading bodies, and it’s no bad thing to show oneself well disposed. Church can do a lot for a man when it wants. A church-warden in a place of worship like St. Gyles’s or St. Saviour’s has a lot of influence, and is very much looked up to. By all classes.”

And thus arguing the whole theological position, and balancing its pros and contras, he felt more than satisfied that Mrs. Holmroyd was a churchwoman, and that he had so handsomely acceded to her wishes. For the Mayor of this important Borough, close parochial relationship with the established faith would not fail to be a valuable asset; it would tend to magnify the importance of his office; give him a status not vouchsafed to mere dissenters, and commend him by his toleration and notable broad-mindedness to those more influential circles whence--despite the robe and chair and chain of office--true mayoral glory cometh. As he said to himself:

“I think I can venture to congratulate myself that things has turned out just as they have done. I’ve no anxieties about the step I’m going to take. Unless I’m very much mistaken, she’ll be a great comfort and a great help to a public man like me. She’ll be just the sort of wife a man in my position ought to have!”

And each time passing the church that was to exercise such fatal influence upon his future, he cast a new and almost proprietorial look upon its grey stones, parapet and tapering spire, as if the sacred edifice had been a prospective branch of his High Gate business, shortly to be opened to the public.

“If only Annie had been sensible and took what’s happened in the right way,” he ruminated more than once, regretfully, in gazing at St. Saviour’s as he walked to business, “we might perhaps have done the thing a bit more public. It isn’t _every_ day a Town Councillor gets married.”

He indulged himself, however, to this luxurious regret without entertaining the least misconception as to the possibility of obviating the thing deplored. Annie being what she was (he told himself) any attempt at a wedding on the grand scale--even if Mrs. Holmroyd had been willing--might only end in unpleasantness and failure. And Councillor Burford was certainly too good a man of business to risk unnecessary expenditure for a benefit so problematical. No, no, (said he with resolution) let them take up their married life very simple and quiet first of all, and go cautious in all things until they found their feet and saw exactly where they stood. If this wedding was proclaimed too loud and open, there’d be many folks expect to be invited to it whose acquaintance (said the Councillor to himself) he wasn’t so particular anxious to encourage. Such a function would have a tendency to emphasize his social circle and fix him in it; and he saw no reason to be fixed in _any_ circle, or bind himself to friends that wasn’t (strictly speaking) such particular friends of his after all. This was an age of progress, and with such a wife as he’d had the foresight and good fortune to provide for himself, he wouldn’t venture to say _what_ his social circle in the ancient “Borrow” might ultimately be.

“If any woman can help a man to get what his public and private capacity entitles him to,” said he; “it’s Her. So long as she’ll row in the same boat--and I have confidence she will--there’s no telling where we shall end before we’ve finished. Other men’s done it, and I venture to think I’ve got as much practical common-sense as them.”

4

It was a significant morning for Councillor Burford when he passed St. Saviour’s on his way to worship at the Friar’s Gate Chapel, and told himself with satisfaction as he scrutinized the weathered fabric:

“Well! They’ll have something to talk about this morning. I’d give a good deal to be sat in there, so as no one could see me, and study their faces. I daresay there’s one or two won’t be unprepared for it--but there’s others will be took by surprise.”

He was referring to the banns of course, which were to be published that morning for the first time of asking; a fact responsible for Mrs. Holmroyd’s absence from church.

She shared in nowise her future husband’s curiosity to hear the proclamation read, or to note its effect upon the assembled congregation. The mere thought of such publicity was so painful that she felt she would not dare to worship in the church again until the marriage was accomplished, and she had come to working terms with fact. She stayed at home instead, striving to evade the publicity of her own thoughts, and keeping far removed from the window lest any passer-by should catch a sight of her. She knew that the Councillor would be sure to ask her on the morrow with complacence:

“Well, ma’am! And how did things go off with you in church on Sunday?” and she would be at trouble how to answer him, for fear--in the effort to save two sets of feelings--she might wound both.

... But if she hid herself at home, and Councillor Burford curbed a wandering curiosity in chapel, asking himself from time to time: “Well! Is it over by now? Has it been made public yet?”--Oswald, in his place in the dim chancel beneath the conglomeration of stained glass, heard the portentous announcement and turned his ear to drink in every word, suffused with pride to know himself the very son of the Widow of This Parish (as the violent elbow of his neighbour in the choirstalls notified) and to be the future stepson of the Joseph Henry Burford who owned the big villa on the Hunmouth Road, and part of the Mansion House, and would some day be Mayor of Daneborough and go to church and public functions with a gold chain round his neck. And he--through whose consciousness these glorious reflections ran like the sands through the waist of an egg-timer, imparting delicious shivers of consequence and urgency--he, the thinker, was Oswald Holmroyd, who had had the best of fathers, and was foredestined to the best of futures. Ah! it was a supreme, immense, prodigious moment, in which the very roof of imagination shook and lifted like the church itself when the sixty-four feet pedals stirred its pulses, and the Rate Collector lifted his nose to heaven and said: “Sublime!”

The newly married couple were agreed to have no honeymoon in the accepted sense of the word. To Mrs. Holmroyd the thought of such an expedition for the purpose of enjoying the dead fruits of this second marriage, filled her with inexplicable wretchedness. She would have suffered anything rather than protracted leisure in which to taste, beneath the artificial flavourings of joy and happiness, the bitterness of truth. For her part, she said, she would prefer to enter upon their new and actual life with the least loss of time, and the Councillor--who was never a very happy man away from business and the engrossments of the Council Chamber; and who had himself opened the subject to Mrs. Holmroyd by hinting a fear that he would not be able to offer her much in the way of a honeymoon (ma’am) at this season of the year--applauded sentiments so agreeable to his own, with the heartiness that recognized a difficulty removed. Still, since convention almost demanded that a newly married couple--even of their maturity--should retire from public observation to practice the first intimacies of the wedded state, it was decided that they should spend a few days at Spathorpe, for the sake of propriety. “I shall have to be back at business on the Friday, ma’am,” the Councillor decided. “That and Saturday’s my busy days, and there’s a lot of new proposals that needs my attention in the Council Chamber. I can’t very well be spared just now.”

The disposal of Oswald during this brief period offered some difficulty, and Mrs. Holmroyd had indeed cited her son as one of the considerations disinclining her to leave home. The suggestion, to be sure, was very gently made, and she laid no insuperable stress upon it, but the Councillor showed more decision in ruling out this feature of her argument than she relished.

“What, ma’am!” he said. “Why ... that boy of yours is big enough to look after himself by this time, I should hope, without no need for his mother to do it for him. He can’t always expect to have hold of your apron strings. When I was not much more than his age, I’d begun to earn my living in earnest. Livings _had_ to be earned in them days. You’ve got to think about yourself _some_ time, ma’am; you’ve got every bit as much right to be considered as him.”

He spoke with the comfortable candour that seemed to have only her interest at heart, and sought to let her understand that his wife-to-be constituted, now and hereafter, the speaker’s charge and care. But the homily blew like a chill wind across her heart, and caused presentiments to shiver faintly as if they had been wet leaves. It was just such a speech as, uttered earlier, might have weighed heavily against the speaker on her oscillating beam of sentiment, but until this moment the Councillor’s interest in Oswald had seemed the perfect reflection of her own, and her hopes--looking everywhere for comfort--had presumed too much upon the semblance. He had taken Oswald by the sleeve; pinched the lobe of the boy’s ear between a solid thumb and forefinger; greeted him with a face and voice indicative of satisfaction, and had passed judgment upon the boy’s intelligence and natural abilities in terse but favourable phrases that caused his mother’s heart to swell.

“He’s a smart enough lad, ma’am. He ought to do something ... _some_ day.”

Until now the Councillor had appeared to hold Mrs. Holmroyd and her son in an equable regard, as if she and he were one and indivisible. But this hint of separation, as though their interests no longer were in common, but stood within sight of the parting of the roads--this hint disturbed her and made her voice and courage fail.

“We can surely find somebody to look after him,” the Councillor said. He was referring still to Oswald and the question of the boy’s disposal during their absence. “Why ... I daresay my son would have been agreeable to take charge of him for the few days we’re likely to be gone--if it hadn’t been for Annie stopping with them. One couldn’t reasonably expect him to have ’em both. Is there no neighbour of yours, ma’am, who’d be disposed to take him in? It’ll be ... let’s see; it’ll only be four days at the outside, and it’ll learn him to be independent and look after himself.”

Once upon a time she would have been courageous enough to tell him that her son’s happiness was dearer to her than her own, and that she would consent to leave him nowhere, and in no hands, where that happiness was not likely to be secured. But already the influence of this stronger sex began to fall prophetically across her mind like an encroaching shadow, effacing more and more of her woman’s power to will and strive. The hope in her mind; the hope she had half determined to reveal, yet dared not, was that Oswald might be privileged to occupy the little bedroom awaiting him in their new home. It hurt and disappointed her that no proposal to this effect fell from the Councillor’s lips, but no idea seemed farther from his thoughts, and she could not broach the topic to a mind so blankly unprepared for it. Had their positions been reversed, and this son were his--not hers--her lips would have teemed with considerations for his sake, but the Councillor’s lips lent her no help. She said, with the meekness that confessed a hope renounced:

“I will see what can be arranged.”

And before the evening fell she had made arrangements to board Oswald with the next-door neighbour. Now that her trusted staff of hope had failed her, she clung almost prayerfully to the alternative hope that the Rencils might divine her difficulty once again, and come at the eleventh hour to her aid with an offer to take charge of Oswald as on that previous, scarcely less melancholy occasion. And Oswald indulged the hope too, filled with rekindled ambition to taste afresh the wonders, splendours and soul-stirring kindnesses of the Organist’s house; to look out of the lofty big bowed window upon the world below; right down the Hill Gate to the Mansion House, and to know himself admitted into the very sanctuary of the Organist’s home life; a sharer in all its merriments, delights and glories. But no such second proffer came. Only--one evening--there arrived at the house in Spring Bank Gardens a fellow-chorister of Oswald’s who had been given this journey by Mr. Rencil as an agreeable alternative to scale practice--two pupils (it seemed) having collided at the same hour, each being dismissed on a separate errand in order to make way for the other. He knocked, after hesitation, at the door, and said “Hello!” to Oswald who opened it, asking, with a parcel in one hand and a letter in the other: “Is this where you live?” Oswald answered in the affirmative, and was revolving in his own mind how, with dignity, he might impart the information that he lived here only for the present, and would be moving shortly to more commodious premises on the Hunmouth Road, when the fellow-chorister pushed the letter and the parcel into his keeping with the remark: “Here! Take hold of these, then, and give ’em to her. Mr. Rencil sent ’em. With his compliments, I was to say. I wish I hadn’t gone for my lesson to-night. I very nearly didn’t. I should ’a been playing Reliev-O now.” With which he took his leave at a run, leaping each alternate step and thumping each alternate door with his doubled fist as he sped noisily down Spring Bank Gardens. Oswald, divining something of consequence in this unusual combination of letter and package, bore them excitedly to his mother, crying as he ran: “Mother! Mother.... From Mr. Rencil.” His exclamations and the sight of what he held brought the blood to her face in a swift tide that was half of joy and half of pain. Tears rose instinctively to her eyes for an emotion already apprehended, and her fingers trembled as they tore open the envelope addressed to her in Mrs. Rencil’s writing.

“Dear Mrs. Holmroyd,” (the brief note ran, diffusing round about her as she read the faint, sweet perfume associated in her recollection with the Organist’s wife). “ ... My husband and I ask your acceptance of the accompanying small present as a token of our very kind regard, and of our joint good wishes for your happiness in the new life, upon which--we understand--you will so soon be entering. We thought that the little book-slide might be useful. I remember your saying how pleased you were with mine. My husband did all the woodwork, and I am responsible for the lining and the tiny silk bookmarker. We hope they will serve to remind you of us both, and bear testimony to our very kind remembrance of you.

“Once again, dear Mrs. Holmroyd, wishing you every happiness in the new life, which--we are both agreed--nobody better deserves.

“Ever sincerely yours,

“Ethel Rencil.”

That was the letter, though she could scarcely read the wording for the tears that stood in her eyes; and Oswald eagerly awaiting exclamations of astonishment and rapture, constrained by this unexpected change in her, dropped his gaze and turned embarrassed to the window. The letter, caressing her with its tender perfume, as if it had been a soft hand, or a hushed, kind voice, touched her to the heart. For awhile she could only stand silent, wrapped in this atmosphere of human sympathy and kindness; suffering a gratitude so deep, so tremulous, so poignant, as to be almost a pain. And yet, a pain of such sweet sorrow as to satisfy the deepmost necessity of her soul. Pain like this, sadness like this, aching gratitude like this.... Oh! they were nearer to heaven than mere happiness. In those brief moments life itself seemed little; love was all. A wondrous sense of the infinite possessed her; a sense of the eternal curtain of compassion drawn between kindred souls and darkness.

“How can I ever thank them!” she said at last. “Dear friends.... Dear friends!” She pressed the letter for a moment to her lips and replaced it in its envelope with fingers that expressed reverence. She had never looked for such a gift from them. It roused who knows what hopes in her. She clung to their unlooked-for act of friendship as the drowning cling to a hand, seeking the comfort and assurance of it long after it has saved them. If she had but hearkened to the impulses that surged within her she would have gone without delay to bear her gratitude in person, whilst yet an intoxication of thankfulness warmed her heart and lent words to her lips. But reason prevailed with her. She read afresh the letter whose first perusal had so flushed and gratified her. And again she read it, and as she read the earlier glamour seemed to fall away from the written page like the glow from an evening sky when the sun sinks west-ward apace; and where the splendour and promise and loveliness of friendship had once been, now was only the drear, chill light of disillusionment. Clearly could she read the words at length, with eyes undimmed. Their loveliness had lain in her own tears; her own emotions, long pent up, had only used this page of scented friendliness as a vent for their outflowing. Word by word she pulled the periods to pieces as if they had been petals, trying to wrest from them the secret of their creation. “A token of our kind regard” (she read). “ ... We hope that they will serve to remind you of us both....” “Our very kind remembrances....” “Every happiness in the new life--which nobody better deserves....” Yes. These sentences exhaled a delicate and fragile friendliness, but of the future ... not one word. They were phrases of sweet finality, laid like precious flowers upon a grave; tributes to the past, and to the happiness gone with it. This letter, this book-slide were dedicated to their dead, or dying, friendship. With the Mrs. Councillor Burford of the new life to which, so tenderly, their wishes wafted her, they had naught to do. Slowly, from that first great exaltation, she sank despondently upon her loneliness, as the sick do who rise ecstatic from their pillows to clasp an empty and dissolving vision.

She was wrong (of course); emotions, overstrained, misled her. The balance of her judgment was not fine enough to register exact distinctions. And yet, she was not so wrong; she had come very near to truth, in missing it. Mrs. Rencil’s note concealed much labour in its folds. Three imperfect drafts had gone to the making of it, and its final form owed not a little to her husband’s aid.

“Help me, Arthur,” she had begged him. “It is an occasion on which I feel that I would like to say so much.... And yet....” Her eyes sought those of her husband, to solicit his understanding without the use of words.

“I know,” he acquiesced.

“It is so difficult,” she confided, “when one’s sympathies are so deeply involved. I don’t want to say anything injudicious. But I don’t want to say too little. How will this do, Arthur? Listen,” She read it to him, and bit by bit between them the note that Mrs. Holmroyd finally received was written.

“Do you think it sounds quite ... genuine?” the writer asked. “As if it had been written in a spirit of real friendship? Or does it read a little bit stilted and constrained? Poor thing! I do wish she had been marrying somebody worthy of her; somebody one could really like, and take an interest in. The whole thing is too sad. I feel as if I were losing a dear friend--just at the moment when I had come to know how deeply fond I am of her. I fear we shall see very little of her now. What, Arthur?” Mr. Rencil had not spoken. He had only gazed out of the window through the strong lenses liquifying his brown eyes, as though--through his wife’s voice--he listened to heaven’s annunciation of the first notes of a new anthem.

“I’m afraid not,” he said.

“And I felt,” his wife continued, studying the sheet of writing paper in her hand, “that Mrs. Holmroyd was just the sort of friend I had been wanting. A real, close friend, Arthur, that I could have placed all my confidence in.”

“Have you no husband, Ethel?” he asked of her, with his sudden winsome smile.

“You know I have,” she said. “But I mean someone of my own sex, whose friendship I might have enjoyed without jealousy. With so many women, Arthur, friendship seems only a pretext for spitefulness; it is like the cream on sour milk. The only way some women can enjoy friendship between themselves is by being unfriendly towards others. Mrs. Holmroyd was a curious exception. I never heard her utter one single unkind word. More than once ... her sweetness has been so irresistible that I have almost had it on my tongue to propose that we should call each other by our Christian names.” She sighed. “Perhaps it is well that I never did. It might only have made things more difficult. What a nuisance all these silly social distinctions are!” she said, as though to disclaim a personal responsibility. “One feels so powerless. Why mayn’t we be friends with _any_body, just for friendship’s sake? However ... I suppose we can’t. It isn’t possible. So long as Mrs. Holmroyd remained just her own dear self--with no relations or acquaintances to consider--it was one thing. But as Mrs. Burford ... it _does_ become so awkward. One has one’s other friends to think of. And the Burfords are all strong Wesleyans,” she added. “Such narrow, unsociable, joyless people. They don’t understand music, Arthur, and they look with disapproval on anything but money. You get no pupils from _them_.”

“Still ...” the Organist remarked at last. “I suppose that Councillor Burford will be Mayor, some day.”

“Yes. I suppose he will,” Mrs. Rencil said, and she picked up the letter from the writing table. “Let me read it to you once more, Arthur, and hear how it sounds.”

But Mrs. Holmroyd had no husband to appeal to; only her own, uncertain self. And doubtful now of all emotion likely to mislead her, she waited till her heart was cold enough to write with prudence. Even the mere transcribing of her gratefulness brought back a glow of mild unreason that she found hard to restrain, but at last the letter was completed.

“Dear Mrs. Rencil,” (she wrote)

“How can I possibly find words to thank you and your husband for your good wishes, and for the lovely present which you have sent me? Such an unlooked-for token of your kind remembrance has touched me deeply, and I can scarcely say how much I value the gift, for its own sake and yours, and for the sake of the many happy memories which it will serve constantly to recall.

“Be assured I am not likely to forget all the kindness and sympathy which I have received so abundantly at your hands, and I shall never cease to look back upon this chapter of my life with a gratitude deeper than I know how to express.

“Most faithfully yours,

“Margaret Hester Holmroyd.”

Studiously she had avoided the least allusion to the future; the least appeal to a friendship from which, in heart, she felt herself cut off--albeit, kindled by the gratitude that she tried so discreetly to reveal, she yearned to throw herself upon its mercy and crave such crumbs as, in her altered state, it might still be disposed to give to her. And Mrs. Rencil, touched though she was with the writer’s gratitude, did not fail to note the air of sad finality; the tone of mourning for friendship and kindness of the past. She showed the note to her husband, underlining its significance for him with a finger as he read, and thus--on each side--motives were sought and countered, and doubts multiplied, and a thin, fine web of mutual uncertainty spun its divisive veil between them.

5

These last days were days of unutterable wretchedness for Mrs. Holmroyd. She had not conceived how terrible, to her, would be the liquidation of their little home. When the hour arrived at last for its dismemberment, and Elizabeth appeared in her black shawl as the embodiment of destruction--it seemed to her as if they slew some living thing. These tables, chairs, carpets, curtains--even the meagre fragments of linoleum--possessed for Mrs. Holmroyd a life and sanctity of their own. They were not pieces of dissociated furniture, but vital elements of corporate existence; each dependent on the other; each necessary to the other; essential to the home they stood for. And now, to separate them all by violence, was like the tearing out of tongues. This home, that once had been, and now so shortly would be no more,--it cried to her with a penetrating voice; she could not bear it. Worst of all was the ruthless fervour that Elizabeth brought to her task. Nay! It was not fervour; it was ferocity. The old woman’s very youth came back to her, regalvanized by this golden opportunity to indulge the long frustrated passions of her life. The hand that seized and tugged, the arms that lifted, were remorseless. Lost in the rapture of her work she heard no voices crying to her heart for mercy from this ravished home, as Mrs. Holmroyd did. Like a hawk, too, she hovered over the doomed house, scenting prey and plunder. Her predatory instincts were aroused; there was nothing so out-worn and perished but that it protested still some value in her eyes. She begrudged the meanest victory to the dustcart. To strips of ragged oilcloth--confessing their full wretchedness now that they were torn from their surroundings--old curtains, broken blind-cords ... she attached her hopes with terrible solicitude, demanding of Mrs. Holmroyd: “What’s to be done with this’m?” with an anxious voice, and an eye unable to conceal the sharpened intensity of its longings. Nor did she once suspect, nor did Mrs. Holmroyd divulge to her, the sickness of the latter’s heart at being spectator of this dread and violent defunction.

Not till now, when all the happiness and sorrow embalmed in the tranquil atmosphere of her little home were being dispersed for ever, did she quite realize how much it had meant to her; how great a portion of her life was wrapt in it. One strip of evening sunlight no broader than her hand, when it lay golden on the bedroom wall, smote her like a smile on the features of the dying. This bedroom, so often the repository of her earnest prayers, in its hour of despoliation assumed a serenity, a peace, a loveliness greater than her soul could bear. Thus, and thus, had the setting sun laid his finger on the wall when Beryl was alive, and Beryl’s voice and smile, something of Beryl’s very self were wrought into the tissue of this house. Oh! How could she leave it!

But the fury of Elizabeth abated not. With her brimming pails and scrubbing brushes, her bars of mottled soap, and sopping floor-cloths, she moved voraciously about her work, diffusing a relentless enthusiasm that offered sentiment no quarter, whilst her pile of household spoils accumulated in its special corner in the kitchen. Hard to suffer though Elizabeth’s distinctive fury might be, she was--at least--a merciful alternative to the horrors of the salesroom and the brutality of the auctioneer’s hammer. As each doomed piece of furniture made its last, mute supplication to Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart, she said: “I cannot! No, I cannot! Sold, it shall never be.” And its sentence was commuted into charity; let it be slain by gift, but not by barter. “Would you like to have this, Elizabeth?”

“Oh, mum!...”

“I know that _you_ would take care of it.”

Aye! That she would. Be very sure she would’m. It should be stood here’m, or it should be stood there’m, in her little house--where Mrs. Holmroyd might be free to call and see it, any time she chose. “For don’t think I shall part with it’m. Don’t think I shall ever take it ... _you_ know where. Nay. Not me’m! I think too much about it, and You.”

Tears of thankfulness, like holy water, Elizabeth shed upon each gift in turn, and through the blessedness of giving, Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart escaped the direr penalties of sacrifice. Her home was being not altogether broken into fragments; not altogether scattered to the four winds. Somewhere, in unstrange hands, some part of it would still preserve its ancient atmosphere of love. For of Elizabeth’s fidelity to her new charge Mrs. Holmroyd never entertained a doubt.

“I shall look after them,” she cried, “until I die’m. I shall be as careful of them as if they was yours. Oh’m! Nobbut I’d had these last year, I could have let splendid for the Race Week.”